152234735
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phalse phace writes:
Scientists at Purdue University have just created the whitest paint in the world. The scientists say that the paint is so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning.
The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.
Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings.
Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate – also used in photo paper and cosmetics – and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint, scientists at Purdue said.
109814940
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RockDoctor writes:
Yet another provocative paper emerges onto Arxiv from Harvard's Lingam and Loeb.
Today they estimate the volume of space occupied by habitable zones (regions where liquid water is stable) in brown dwarf not-quite stars. They find that it could be orders of magnitude greater than the volume in the atmospheres of Earth-size planets.
Brown dwarfs are masses of gas which are too small to sustain nuclear fusion (so, they're not stars), but can have a brief period of fusion of deuterium or lithium shortly after formation (so they're not planets ; the boundary size is under debate). After this burst of energy, they slowly cool, for billions of years. This leads to a large volume of the star's outer body — or atmosphere — with potentially attractive temperature and pressure. If the brown dwarf is orbiting with a larger star, there may be enough light to allow photosynthesis. Supply of chemicals is uncertain, but not impossible.
While this paper is speculative, the prospects for detecting such life by spectroscopy are plausible with observational instruments being designed at the moment.
Previous work on abiogenesis and the origin(s) of life has speculated that life could persist in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, using comparable pressure-temperature arguments. In this respect, the proposal is more conventional.
107970832
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schwit1 writes:
Amazon and Google came out swinging against this Illinois bill saying a company is not allowed to remotely turn on a microphone without the owner’s permission.
107140666
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darth_borehd writes:
Robot (or more accurately, drone) tanks will always have a human "in the loop" just like the drone plane program, according to the U.S. Army. The new robot tanks, officially called the Multi Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT), will use the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS). The Department of Defense assures every one that they will adhere to “ethical standards.”
106735344
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chiefcrash writes:
Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published an assessment on Tuesday with the results of testing with several popular password managers, including LastPass and KeePass. The team said that each password management solution "failed to provide the security to safeguard a user's passwords as advertised" and "fundamental flaws" were found that "exposed the data they are designed to protect."
106570328
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McGruber writes:
The Washington Post has an amusing story about phone scammer Keniel A. Thomas, who made the mistake of calling William H. Webster. Thomas told 90-year-old Webster that he had won $72 million and a new Mercedes Benz in the Mega Millions lottery, but that he needed to send $50,000 in taxes and fees to get his money. Thomas also told Webster he’d done his research on the top winner. “You’re a great man,” the scammer cajoled. “You was a judge, you was an attorney, you was a basketball player, you were in the U.S. Navy, homeland security. I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife.”
Thomas's research didn’t turn up everything. He didn’t learn that the man he was calling was the former director of the FBI and the CIA, the only person ever to hold both jobs. And he didn’t know that Webster would call him back the next day with the FBI listening in.
Thomas was arrested in late 2017, after he landed in New York on a flight from Jamaica. He pleaded guilty in October and faced a prison term of 33 to 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But with Webster and his wife in the courtroom, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Friday added another 2½ years to Thomas’s sentence, giving him nearly six years to serve. Howell said that the scam qualified as “organized criminal activity” and that Thomas posed “a threat to a family member of the victim.
104128734
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Artem Tashkinov writes:
Sergey Zelenyuk, a security engineer from Russia, has published a VirtualBox exploit which allows a root user in the guest operating system to gain complete control over the host operating system by utilizing bugs in the data link layer of the default E1000 network interface adapter which makes this vulnerability critical for everyone who uses virtualization to run untrusted code. Currently there's no statement from Oracle, fix or a CVE entry available because the researcher is highly dissatisfied with the state of security research and bug-bounty programs which often do not work as intended: he mentions the fact that, companies often take too much time to analyze the issues they get notified about, they don't have formal rewards ranges for the found vulnerabilities, and the rewards to be paid are not enough to cover the time and effort spent on researching them.
103638220
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OneHundredAndTen writes:
A new article in Nature reports a new, extremely precise measurement of the electric dipole moment of the electron. The conclusion is that, within the margin of error of the measurement, the electron remains a perfect sphere. Which implies that supersymmetric theories keep running out of corners to hide, that another nail is driven into their coffin, and that string theory looks less and less compelling.
103246390
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XxtraLarGe writes:
Here's one almost nobody saw coming. FTA:It’s expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation’s electricity. The US Department of Energy expects wind turbine capacity to more than quadruple again by 2050.
But a new study by a pair of Harvard researchers finds that a high amount of wind power could mean more climate warming, at least regionally and in the immediate decades ahead. The paper raises serious questions about just how much the United States or other nations should look to wind power to clean up electricity systems.
91754667
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gollum123 writes:
From Vox : “Google is a digital truth serum,” Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies, told me in a recent interview. “People tell Google things that they don't tell to possibly anybody else, things they might not tell to family members, friends, anonymous surveys, or doctors.” Stephens-Davidowitz was working on a PhD in economics at Harvard when he became obsessed with Google Trends, a tool that tracks how frequently searches are made in a given area over a given time period. As a barometer of our national consciousness, Google is as accurate (and predictive) as it gets. In 2016, when the Republican primaries were just beginning, most pundits and pollsters did not believe Trump could win. After all, he had insulted veterans, women, minorities, and countless other constituencies. But Stephens-Davidowitz saw clues in his Google research that suggested Trump was far more serious than many supposed. Searches containing racist epithets and jokes were spiking across the country during Trump’s primary run, and not merely in the South but in upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, rural Illinois, West Virginia, and industrial Michigan.
90611079
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BrianFagioli writes:
Today, Microsoft announces a new Gmail experience for Windows 10. While only available for Windows Insiders as of today, it uses the same concept as the Outlook mobile app, but for the Mail & Calendar apps. Microsoft will provide you with an arguably improved experience as long as you are OK with storing all of your Gmail messages in Microsoft's cloud — yikes. What types of features will the new experience offer? Things such as tracking packages, getting updated on your favorite sports teams, and a focused inbox.
"To power these new features, we'll ask your permission to sync a copy of your email, calendar and contacts to the Microsoft Cloud. This will allow new features to light up, and changes to update back and forth with Gmail–such as creation, edit or deletion of emails, calendar events and contacts. But your experience in Gmail.com or apps from Google will not change in any way."
90397943
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dooode writes:
As you would have read, United just had another Nazi moment, where they had to "re-allocate" a customer using some (not so gentle) force. The social web seems to have been taken by a storm by this incident. But suddenly people are noticing their tweets are being deleted, some of them merely status questions. Does twitter make money (read bribes) to delete negative tweets? What do you feel about it?
88076337
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chicksdaddy writes:
With functional, quantum computers on the (distant?) horizon, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is asking the public for help (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/12/nist-asks-public-help-future-proof-electronic-information) heading off what it calls “a looming threat to information security:” powerful quantum computers capable of breaking even the strongest encryption codes used to protect the privacy of digital information, The Security Ledger reports.
In a statement Tuesday, NIST asked the public to submit ideas for “post-quantum cryptography” algorithms that will be “less susceptible to a quantum computer’s attack.” NIST formally announced its quest in a publication on The Federal Register. (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/20/2016-30615/announcing-request-for-nominations-for-public-key-post-quantum-cryptographic-algorithms)
Dustin Moody, a mathematician at NIST said the Institute's main focus is developing new public key cryptography algorithms, which are used today to protect both stored and transmitted information.
“We’re looking to replace three NIST cryptographic standards and guidelines that would be the most vulnerable to quantum computers,” Moody said. They are FIPS 186-4, NIST SP 800-56A and NIST SP 800-56B.
Researchers have until November, 2017 to submit their ideas. After the deadline, NIST will review the submissions. Proposals that meet the “post-quantum crypto” standards (http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/post-quantum-crypto/minimum-accept-reqs.html) set up by NIST will be invited to present their algorithms at an open workshop in early 2018.
87659929
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schwit1 writes:
Criminals can work out the card number, expiry date and security code for a Visa debit or credit card in as little as six seconds using guesswork, researchers have found.
Fraudsters use a so-called Distributed Guessing Attack to get around security features put in place to stop online fraud, and this may have been the method used in the recent Tesco Bank hack.
According to a study published in the academic journal IEEE Security & Privacy, that meant fraudsters could use computers to systematically fire different variations of security data at hundreds of websites simultaneously.
Within seconds, by a process of elimination, the criminals could verify the correct card number, expiry date and the three-digit security number on the back of the card.
Mohammed Ali, a PhD student at the university's School of Computing Science, said: "This sort of attack exploits two weaknesses that on their own are not too severe but, when used together, present a serious risk to the whole payment system.Link to Original Source
