Senate Panel: 80 Percent of Cyber Attacks Preventable

From Threat Level:

If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring, about 80 percent of commonly known cyber attacks could be prevented, a Senate committee heard Tuesday.

The remark was made by Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s information assurance director, who added that simply adhering to already known best practices would sufficiently raise the security bar so that attackers would have to take more risks to breach a network, “thereby raising [their] risk of detection.”

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My Comment: There is a lot of meat in this story .... read it all.

Robots Perform Shakespeare

From Autopia:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st Century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.

Beyond being a cool thing to do, researchers saw bringing ‘bots to the Bard as a chance to introduce robots to the public and see how people interact with them. Their findings could influence how robots are designed and how they’re used in search and rescue operations.

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The Race To Build A 1000 mph Car

From New Scientist:

Strapped into a custom built seat, Andy Green prepares for the ride of his life. The pancake-flat desert stretches out for miles ahead. The computer indicates all systems are normal. He eases off the brakes and puts his foot down on the throttle. The jet engine roars into life. In precisely 42.5 seconds he'll be travelling 1000 mph. In a car.

"It's almost impossible to tell the difference between going supersonic in a car and in an aircraft," says Green. He is the only person on Earth who can say that from personal experience. Green was a fighter pilot for the UK Royal Air Force for 20 years, and he is also the fastest man on wheels. In 1997, driving a vehicle called ThrustSSC, he set the world land speed record of 763 miles per hour, becoming the first and only person to break the sound barrier in a car (761 mph under standard conditions). Now, together with the Bloodhound SSC design team, he's attempting to do it all over again, and then some.

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Liquid Cooling Bags For Data Centers Could Trim Cost and Carbon By 90 Percent

The Iceotope Water-Cooling Component After the individual bags of coolant pull heat away from the individual server components, a water transfer system moves heat out of the data center, possibly for use in heating offices during cold weather. Iceotope

From Popular Science:

Server farms are undeniably awesome in that they store huge pools of data, enable such modern phenomena as cloud computing and Web-hosted email, and most importantly, make the Internet as it stands today possible. The downside: data centers get very, very hot. Cooling huge banks of servers doesn't just cost a lot, it eats up a lot of energy, and that generally means fossil fuels. UK-based Iceotope hopes to cut those costs by about 93 percent by wrapping servers in liquid coolant.

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Women 'Should Bare 40 Per Cent Of Their Bodies To Attract Men'

Liz Hurley wearing her famous 'safety pin' dress Photo: REX

From The Telegraph:

Women should wear clothes that bare 40 per cent of their flesh to maximise their chances of attracting men, new scientific research indicates.

Striking the right balance between revealing too much and being too conservative in how much skin is on show has long been a dilemma for women when choosing the right outfit for a night out.

However, a study by experts at the University of Leeds has come to the rescue by calculating the exact proportion of the body that should be exposed for optimum allure.

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Email Could Be 'Extinct Within A Decade' As Teens Turn To Twitter-Style Messaging

Photo: Email took 20 years to develop but may disappear within a decade, experts believe

From The Daily Mail:

Email could be extinct within a decade as millions of teenagers ditch it as their main form of communication, say researchers.

Youngsters have been shown to favour social networking sites and instant messaging instead.

The report found the electronic form of contact is already becoming 'grey mail' with the most devoted users being pensioners, followed by middle-aged Britons.

Although inboxes are still filling up daily all over the world, experts believe emails are dying out because they are too slow, too inconvenient and simply not fashionable any more.

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PICTURES: The Hunt for Lost WWII 'Samurai Subs'

In this image, the I-401 submarine is shown. The I-401 aircraft-carrying submarine could travel one and a half times around the world without refueling. (Wild Life Productions, National Geographic Channel)

From ABC News:

National Geographic Channel Program Documents Undersea Search for Japanese Super-Submarines.

With more time, military experts say, a fleet of revolutionary Japanese super-submarines could have changed the course of World War II.

Some were designed to launch bombers on kamikaze missions against New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Panama Canal. Others were thought to be twice as fast any other submarine used in the war.

None had the chance to execute their stealth missions against the U.S. mainland or critical targets in the Pacific during the war.

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CSN Editor: For background information, see History of Submarine Aircraft Carriers -- New Wars

What Would Shackleton's Whisky Taste Like?

From the BBC:

After a century buried in the Antarctic ice, a rare batch of whisky that belonged to the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton is to be recovered. So what might it taste like?

It's been on the rocks for the last 100 years, buried under two feet of Antarctic ice. Now the two cases of "Rare Old" brand Mackinlay and Co whisky are to be retrieved.

A team of New Zealand explorers heading out in January has been asked by Whyte & Mackay, the company that now owns Mackinlay and Co, to get a sample of the drink. The crates were left behind by Sir Ernest Shackleton when he abandoned his mission to the South Pole in 1909.

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My Comment: I will now formally volunteer to be a taster for any whiskey that is retrieved.

Space Shuttle Has Docked With The Space Station

Shuttle Docks With Space Station -- BBC

The space shuttle Atlantis has successfully docked with the International Space Station, according to Nasa officials.

The shuttle blasted off on Monday with six astronauts on an 11-day voyage to deliver new equipment to the station.

The docking was manually completed by commander Charlie Hobaugh as the two spacecraft travelled towards each other at 17,000 miles an hour.

The astronauts' arrival will be met with a traditional welcoming ceremony.

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More News On the Space Shuttle Mission

Shuttle Atlantis arrives at space station -- Reuters
Shuttle docks at space station, looks 'beautiful' -- AP
Space Shuttle Atlantis Docks at ISS -- Voice of America
FACTBOX: The mission of space shuttle Atlantis -- Reuters
NASA: With Atlantis docked, work begins today -- Computer World
NASA seeks new emblem for shuttle program -- MSNBC

'Vampire Star': Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified

The expanding shell around V445 Puppis. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 17, 2009) — Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a "vampire star," which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion's matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object.

It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy.

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No Surprise: Coed Dorms Fuel Sex and Drinking

From Live Science:

It's no secret to students that coed dorms are more fun than same-sex dorms. But they can also fuel very unhealthy behavior that might otherwise be moderated.

A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they're also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.

Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed.

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Neuron Chamber Mimics Brain

From Wired:

The Neuron Chamber, on display at San Francisco's Exploratorium, is an interactive, electro-kinetic sculpture representing the form and function of neurons in the brain.

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Heart Disease Was Rife Among Affluent Ancient Egyptians

X-rays of ancient Egyptian mummies hint that modern lifestyles may not be entirely to blame for heart disease. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

From The Guardian:

X-rays of mummies reveal atherosclerosis, suggesting there may be more to heart disease than bad diet and smoking.

Heart disease plagued human society long before fry-ups and cigarettes came along, researchers say. The upper classes of ancient Egypt were riddled with cardiovascular disease that dramatically raised their risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Doctors made the discovery after taking hospital X-ray scans of 20 Egyptian mummies that date back more than 3,500 years.

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Female Sexual Dysfunction: Myth or Malady?

Ian Hooton / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

There was a time when Wendy and her husband had sex three times a week. But for the past six years, the purple negligee that Wendy used to entice her husband has been stuffed in the back of a drawer. And now, instead of getting hot and bothered by her husband's advances, Wendy is simply bothered. "All of a sudden I didn't have any desire. There's just nothing there anymore," says Wendy, who requested that her last name not be published.

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Why Web Widgets Will Invade Your TV

Image: Beware, the web widgets are coming. Rob Dunlavey

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Web widgets bring Internet perks to the biggest screen in most people’s homes.

The Internet revolution may finally be televised.

Innocuous little software applications, popularly known as “widgets,” may turn out to be the back door to your TV screen that Internet companies have been waiting for.

For more than a decade, businesses have been trying to make the Internet available on the largest screen in most homes. In 1996, Time Warner offered WebTV, which failed to find an audience and folded. Even today, projects like Hewlett Packard’s MediaSmart (2006) and Apple TV (2007) have yet to win over large numbers of viewers, hampered by complicated setups or limited programming choices.

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Innovation: The Dizzying Ambition Of Wolfram Alpha

From New Scientist:

When the search engine Wolfram Alpha launched earlier this year, the interest was huge. Enticed by a well-oiled publicity machine, web users swamped the site and its servers were overwhelmed. Then everything went quiet – so quiet that it was easy to imagine that Alpha would follow countless Google wannabes to the great search engine directory in the sky.

That was to reckon without Stephen Wolfram, a physicist famous for creating and selling the mathematics software Mathematica and for his pioneering but controversial work on cellular automata.

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Google, Bing Continue Gains At Yahoo's Expense

From CNET:

Yahoo continues to lose share in the search market, as Google and Microsoft pick up the difference.

Comscore's measurement of the U.S. search market in October shows that Google--as usual--still dominates the search landscape. It now watches 65.4 percent of all searches pass through its servers, up 0.5 market share points from September of this year.

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The Top 8 Dinosaur Discoveries of 2009

(Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

Paleontologists have had a good year, bringing a slew of new dinosaurs to the books. We pored through the many finds to bring you the best horned, bird-footed, feathered and, of course, ferocious new dinosaurs unveiled this year.

In science, it's exceedingly rare when the naked eye usurps modern technology—powerful telescopes offer humans unprecedented views of celestial phenomena, surgeons can send tiny cameras inside your intestinal tract and even iPhone apps can spot public restrooms before you can. However, for the paleontologists who routinely discover new dinosaurs, a good set of eyes, geological know-how and a little luck remain the best tools.

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Spanish Scientists Mod Optical Mouse Into Counterfeit Coin Detector

Counterfeit Coin Detector Tresanchez et al., via EurekAlert

From Popular Science:

Counterfeiting is as old as money itself, with the history of currency including a millennia-long arms race between mints and the forgers that copy them. While governments have finally crafted paper money so intricate that counterfeiting isn't a major problem, detecting counterfeit coins remains a challenge. Now, Spanish scientists have modified a regular optical computer mouse to create a cheap and easy device for sniffing out phony Euro coins.

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Ancient Weapons Dug Up by Archaeologists in England

Over 5000 worked flints came from one small area, including flint cores used for tool creation, blades, flakes and 'debitage' (small chips from tool-working), and scrapers, piercers and microlith tools with the latter being used in composite arrowheads. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Leicester)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 17, 2009) — Staff at the University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) have been excited by the results from a recently excavated major Prehistoric site at Asfordby, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. The Mesolithic site may date from as early as 9000 BC, by which time hunter-gatherers had reoccupied the region after the last ice age. These hunters crossed the land bridge from the continental mainland -- 'Britain' was only to become an island several thousand years later.

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