Lifeboat Foundation

A group of “ethical hackers” has obtained access to sensitive systems and proprietary online data hosted by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the US after accessing multiple unsecured entry points in late April and early May. The group – Sakura Samurai – discovered configuration data for the lab’s NoVa experiment and more than 4500 “tickets” for tracking internal projects.

The Sakura Samurai team has previous experience probing the vulnerabilities of scientific and educational organizations, which hold critical information that if leaked could put those institutions at risk. “Fermilab was no different,” Sakura Samurai leader Robert Willis told Physics World. “Oversharing can be very dangerous, especially when it’s sharing credentials that could enable a malicious actor to take over a server with the potential to move across their network to access items that the organization wouldn’t even think of being vulnerable.”

Circa 2020

Astronomers have found one of the largest structures in the known universe—a “wall” of galaxies that’s at least 1.4 billion light-years long. And given how close it is to us, it’s remarkable that we haven’t seen it before now.

What happened: An international team of scientists reported the discovery of the South Pole Wall in a paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. The structure is basically a curtain that stretches across the southern border of the universe (from the perspective of Earth) and consists of thousands of galaxies, along with huge amounts of gas and dust.

Continue reading “Astronomers found a giant ‘wall’ of galaxies hiding in plain sight” »

GMG and the University of Queensland presented a graphene aluminum-ion cell that charges faster than Li-ion batteries. It also requires no cooling.

The tech giant says its “dermatology assist” tool can recognise 288 different skin ailments.

www.iBiology.org.

Dr. Kate Adamala describes what synthetic cells are and how they can teach us the fundamental principles of life.

Continue reading “Kate Adamala (U of M) 1: Synthetic Cells: Building Life to Understand It” »

China is only the 2nd nation to successfully soft-land on Mars.

China has released the first photographs taken by its Zhurong rover, which touched down on Mars late on Friday (May 14) as part of the country’s Tianwen-1 mission.

Register for free to the 2021 Space Renaissance Congress.

June 26 — 30 virtual on zoom+attendify+youtube.

https://2021.spacerenaissance.space/index.php/registration/

Splunk today announced it plans to acquire security software company TruStar for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will add TruStar’s cloud-native, cyber intelligence-sharing capabilities and automated processes to Splunk’s growing cybersecurity portfolio.

“TruStar will help us get even better at predictive threat assessments by strengthening our threat intelligence framework. This acquisition will allow customers to autonomously and seamlessly enrich their (security operation center) workflows with threat intelligence data feeds from heterogeneous sources,” Splunk president and CEO Doug Merritt told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

The pending deal is in line with Splunk’s philosophy that “security is a data problem,” he said. The announcement marks a return to M&A activity for Splunk and the massive $1.05 billion deal for SignalFX in 2019. The company also made four cloud-related acquisitions in 2020.

An international research team analyzed a database of more than 1000 supernova explosions and found that models for the expansion of the Universe best match the data when a new time dependent variation is introduced. If proven correct with future, higher-quality data from the Subaru Telescope and other observatories, these results could indicate still unknown physics working on the cosmic scale.

Edwin Hubble’s observations over 90 years ago showing the expansion of the Universe remain a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. But when you get into the details of calculating how fast the Universe was expanding at different times in its history, scientists have difficulty getting theoretical models to match observations.

To solve this problem, a team led by Maria Dainotti (Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI in Japan and an affiliated scientist at the Space Science Institute in the U.S.A.) analyzed a catalog of 1048 supernovae which exploded at different times in the history of the Universe. The team found that the theoretical models can be made to match the observations if one of the constants used in the equations, appropriately called the Hubble constant, is allowed to vary with time.