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Comment Siderurgy (Score 2) 119

Doesn't the greek word for iron mean something like "came from the sky"? I've once thought about why the modern iron industry is often called siderurgy, and came across a few references for the use of iron from meteorites, as early technology wasn't sufficient to extract it from the ore.
Space

Submission + - Town Turns Off the Lights to See the Stars

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Stargazing skies all over the world all over the world are disappearing, as the sky above New York City is Class 9 on the Bortle ranking and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. But some places are making an effort to preserve their skywatching heritage as Exmoor National Park was granted International Dark-Sky Reserve status in November and people in the Exmoor town of Dulverton were challenged to switch off their lights as part of the BBC's Stargazing Live, demonstrating that you don't need special equipment to see the stars more clearly, if you have a decent pair of binoculars. "The whole idea is to show that even a small town, which is still quite dark, can give off quite a lot of light," says astronomer Mark Thompson. The event in Dulverton gained a lot of support from local residents and businesses. "It needed a bit of organization to get everyone to say yes," says town mayor Chris Nelder. "We want people to just enjoy the night sky, to treasure the fact we have them and to look after them," adds Claire O'Connor from Exmoor National Park Authority."
Australia

Submission + - Ultimate Christmas Lights (vimeo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Most computerised Christmas Lights displays have in the 10s or 100s of channels. For our first-ever display, we decided to go all out and we built a 1,110 channel display using custom hardware and software running on Linux. Since it's now after Christmas, we have synchronised the lights to The Black Eyed Peas — I Gotta Feeling.

Submission + - Anonymous Attackers Not So Untraceable (thinq.co.uk)

Stoobalou writes: Researchers at the University of Twente are warning that the LOIC DDoS tool used by Anonymous is easily traceable.

The tool of choice in the ongoing pro-WikiLeaks DDoS attacks by digital vigilante group Anonymous may leave its users open to prosecution, failing as it does to adequately protect their identity.

That's the claim of the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems Group at the University of Twente, which recently released a report into the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, or LOIC, distributed denial of service tool favoured by Anonymous for attacking corporate websites by which it feels aggrieved.

In the report, the researchers claim that "even though the group behind the attacks claims to be anonymous, the tools they provide do not offer any security services, such as anonymisation. As a consequence, a hacktivist that volunteers to take part in such attacks, can be traced back easily" — and that means a possible prosecution under local computer crime laws.

Science

Submission + - LHC prepares marathon Higgs hunt (nature.com) 1

gbrumfiel writes: Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are preparing to run the collider until the end of 2012 in the hopes of finding the Higgs particle, part of the mechanism that endows other particles with mass. The machine was originally supposed to stop in 2011 for a year long upgrade, but scientists now think they can find the Higgs if they run for longer. “If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments waiting for data, there is no way we could get home at night without having slashed tyres on our cars," says Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director for research and computing.

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