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Submission + - Scientists to drill into 'ground zero' of the impact that killed the dinosaurs (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the 180-kilometer-wide crater rim, scientists hope to settle ideas about how such “peak rings,” hallmarks of the largest impact craters, take shape.

Submission + - BMW to Compete with Google to Build the Software for Self-driving Cars

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Google is about to get some serious competition in the self-driving car race from no other than BMW, one of the most important names in the car industry. Speaking to Reuters, BMW’s Head of Research and Development, Klaus Frohlich, said the following while present at the Geneva auto show.

“For me it is a core competence to have the most intelligent car. Our task is to preserve our business model without surrendering it to an internet player. Otherwise we will end up as the Foxconn for a company like Apple, delivering only the metal bodies for them.”

BMW believes its competitors in the future will include internet taxi service Uber and sales website Truecar. As the company is approaching its 100th birthday, the company is now on a quest to build the “ultimate driving machine”. The company is ‘preparing for a world in which its customers will be mere passengers, and the cars will do the driving themselves’. This, obviously, puts the company in direct competition against Google.

Submission + - Hacking a professional drone

Submitted by ricardinho
ricardinho writes: Research done at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, shows that paying thousands of dollars for a professional drone does not guarantee that the device will be hack proof. These professional drones are commonly used across various industries to perform daily critical operations, such as surveillance and recon missions by law enforcement authorities. During his research, student Nils Rodday discovered that a professional drone could be compromised in multiple ways. One of these attack vectors investigated by the student is much more sophisticated than those used to compromise recreational drones that cost few hundreds of dollars and are not expected to be strongly secured. By reverse engineering the drone’s operation and firmware, the student found ways to obtain key information that is used to validate the communication on the telemetry link between the drone and its remote controllers. This allowed for a Man-in-the-Middle attack in which the hacker could take full control of the attacked drone from a distance of up to 2 km. Manufacturers of professional drones are blindly trusting XBee chips for the communication between devices. These chips however are not meant to be used in sensitive devices and this flaw can compromise any sort of operation that the drones are deployed for. In addition, the solution is not simple since a firmware update patch cannot be simply released, but manufacturers have to actually recall the devices for in-house upgrades. Perhaps even more surprising is the cost of the described attack: 40 dollars is enough for an attacker to take full control of a 30,000 dollars drone. Nils will explain and demonstrate his hacking into a professional drone during talks at RSA conference,/a> in San Francisco and Black Hat Asia in Singapore.

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