In the shadow of the recent Office of Personnel Management break-in it likely comes as little surprise to many that the federal government needs to pick up its security game in a big way.This challenge is perhaps reflected best in report this week by watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office that shows despite years of recommendations and billions of dollars spent, most federal agencies remain frighteningly weak when it comes to cybersecurity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With NASA spotting water flows on Mars this week, excitement abounds as to what might be the next big thing for astrobiologsts and space scientists in general.Interestingly a congressional hearing entitled “Astrobiology and the Search for Life Beyond Earth in the Next Decade” was on tap this week to take a look at what some key issues are as NASA and other space organization look toward the future.+More on Network World: NASA touts real technologies highlighted in imminent 'The Martian' flick+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NASA said today that liquid water flows intermittently on Mars– a significant finding in the decades-long search for life and for possible human use on future trips to the red planet.The water flow evidence was spotted by researchers from Georgia Tech employing NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) – a 4,800lb spacecraft that has been taking pictures and measurements of Mars since 2006. In this case, using an imaging spectrometer researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious dark streaks are seen on the red planet in dozens of locations.+More on Network World: NASA touts real technologies highlighted in imminent 'The Martian' flick+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers are working with a process that turns old tires – and there are some 300,000 tossed yearly – into electrodes for supercapacitors that would be used on the grid or in cars and other electronics applications.+More on Network World: Real Jobs for Real Robots+
The technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University produces carbon composite papers through a process described like this: “the researchers soaked crumbs of irregularly shaped tire rubber in concentrated sulfuric acid. They then washed the rubber and put it into a tubular furnace under a flowing nitrogen gas atmosphere. They gradually increased the temperature from 400 degrees Celsius to 1,100 degrees. After several additional steps, including mixing the material with potassium hydroxide and additional baking and washing with deionized water and oven drying, researchers have a material they could mix with polyaniline, an electrically conductive polymer, until they have a finished product.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers are working with a process that turns old tires – and there are some 300,000 tossed yearly – into electrodes for supercapacitors that would be used on the grid or in cars and other electronics applications.+More on Network World: Real Jobs for Real Robots+
The technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University produces carbon composite papers through a process described like this: “the researchers soaked crumbs of irregularly shaped tire rubber in concentrated sulfuric acid. They then washed the rubber and put it into a tubular furnace under a flowing nitrogen gas atmosphere. They gradually increased the temperature from 400 degrees Celsius to 1,100 degrees. After several additional steps, including mixing the material with potassium hydroxide and additional baking and washing with deionized water and oven drying, researchers have a material they could mix with polyaniline, an electrically conductive polymer, until they have a finished product.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Real Jobs for Real RobotsImage by REUTERS/Issei KatoIt’s quite possible someday soon that robots may deliver food to your table in a restaurant or gather up your laundry and bring it to the laundry room – that is if some of the machines featured in this slideshow make it out of the research labs and into the real world. Here we take a look at 18 robots that are already functioning in a variety of real life jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It seems like it might be about 10 years too late to the party but come October 1, the Central Intelligence Agency will ad a new directorate that will focus on all things cyber and digital espionage.The CIA’s Deputy Director David Cohen to a Cornell University audience last week that once the new Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI) is up and running “it will be at the center of the Agency’s effort to inject digital solutions into every aspect of our work. It will be responsible for accelerating the integration of our digital and cyber capabilities across all our mission areas—human intelligence collection, all-source analysis, open source intelligence, and covert action.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
17 Real Big Sci/Tech projectsImage by NASASome science/technology is big news like the discovery of a new gene – but sometimes its just big, like the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo era. Here we take a look at pictures of some recent BIG science and technology topics like a cool new wind turbine, a black hole discovery and more. Have fun:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
e-wasteImage by REUTERS/Tyrone SiuReuters recently took a look at what the town of Guiyu in China, which is commonly known, as one of the world's largest electronic waste dump sites. A particularly polluted place as you might imagine, Guiyu exists to salvage bits of valuable metals such as gold, copper and aluminum mostly from hard drives, mobile phones, computer screens and computers from around the world though sources have changed: China now produces 6.1 million metric tons of e-waste a year second only to the US with 7.2 million tons , according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving forward with a program that will launch and recover volleys of small unmanned aircraft from one or more existing large airplanes such as B-52s, B-1s or C-130s.The Gremlins program has as a goal to launch groups of drones or gremlins from large aircraft such as bombers or transport aircraft, as well as from fighters and other small, fixed-wing platforms while those planes are out of range of adversary defenses. When the gremlins complete their mission, a C-130 transport aircraft would retrieve them in the air and carry them home, where ground crews would prepare them for their next use within 24 hours, DARPA said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI this week said an e-mail scam that tricks businesses into paying invoices from what looks like established partners is growing exponentially.The FBI last year even gave the scam its own name -- business e-mail compromise (BEC) – which is a variant of the timeworn “man-in-the-middle” scam and usually involves chief technology officers, chief financial officers, or comptrollers, receiving an e-mail via their business accounts purportedly from a vendor requesting a wire transfer to a designated bank account, the FBI said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI this week said an e-mail scam that tricks businesses into paying invoices from what looks like established partners is growing exponentially.The FBI last year even gave the scam its own name -- business e-mail compromise (BEC) – which is a variant of the timeworn “man-in-the-middle” scam and usually involves chief technology officers, chief financial officers, or comptrollers, receiving an e-mail via their business accounts purportedly from a vendor requesting a wire transfer to a designated bank account, the FBI said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
FTC
The Federal Trade Commission will in January hold a wide-ranging conference on security and privacy issues lead by all manner of whitehat security researchers and academics, industry representatives, consumer advocates.The FTC’s PrivacyCon will include brief privacy and security research presentations, along with expert panel discussions on the latest privacy and security challenges facing consumers. Whitehat researchers and academics will discuss the latest security vulnerabilities, explain how they can be exploited to harm consumers, and highlight research affecting consumer privacy and data security. During panel discussions, participants will discuss the research presentations and the latest policy initiatives to address consumer privacy and security, develop suggestions for further collaboration between researchers and policymakers, and highlight steps that companies and consumers can and should take to protect themselves and their data, the FTC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The development of an automated system that can help take care of flying an aircraft -- even perhaps helping pilots overcome in-flight system failures got another big boost this week when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Aurora Flight Sciences $15.3 million to move development of the software into a second phase.DARPA says the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System or ALIAS program, which was announced in 2014 envisions a tailorable, drop-in, removable software kit that allows the addition of high levels of automation into existing aircraft. “Specifically, ALIAS intends to control sufficient features to enable management of all flight activities, including failure of aircraft systems, and permit an operator to act as a monitor with the ability to intervene, allowing the operator to focus on higher level mission objectives,” DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will next month detail a new program they hope will ratchet-up the way the military, public and private enterprise protect their networks from distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks.+More on network World: DARPA wants to toughen-up WAN edge networking, security+The need for such new defenses is obvious: The number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in first quarter of 2015 more than doubled the number of attacks in Q1 of 2014 and attack sites are growing more dangerous, and more capable of launching attacks in excess of 100 Gbps, according to a recent Akamai Technologies State of the Internet Security report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DARPA
If you were designing state-of-the-art optical or imaging systems from a clean slate, how would you such technologies?That seems to be the main question behind a Request For Information issued recently by the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The upcoming movie about a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars in the 2030s features a number of technologies NASA says are currently under development.NASA said the book and the movie, “The Martian,” merges fictional and factual chronicles about Mars, building upon the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and moving it into a future where NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to the red planet to live and explore.+More on Network World: 15 reasons why Mars is one hot, hot, hot planet+Indeed, as Matt Damon, who plays the central character Mark Watney in the movie says: “I have to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows” to basically stretch a couple months worth of food and supplies into four years becomes a modern day MacGyver in a spacesuit and uses some amazing technologies to try to survive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The upcoming movie about a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars in the 2030s features a number of technologies NASA says are currently under development.NASA said the book and the movie, “The Martian,” merges fictional and factual chronicles about Mars, building upon the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and moving it into a future where NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to the red planet to live and explore.+More on Network World: 15 reasons why Mars is one hot, hot, hot planet+Indeed, as Matt Damon, who plays the central character Mark Watney in the movie says: “I have to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows” to basically stretch a couple months worth of food and supplies into four years becomes a modern day MacGyver in a spacesuit and uses some amazing technologies to try to survive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DARPA
DARPA’s Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program aims to make it easier, faster and cheaper to design custom circuits akin to this one, which was specially designed to provide a range of voltages and currents for testing an infrared sensor device that had been a candidate for an orbiting telescope.
Heavyweight 3D imagery and complex unmanned aircraft systems are just two applications that beg for the low power, high performance custom integrated circuits the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking to build.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DARPA
DARPA’s Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program aims to make it easier, faster and cheaper to design custom circuits akin to this one, which was specially designed to provide a range of voltages and currents for testing an infrared sensor device that had been a candidate for an orbiting telescope.
Heavyweight 3D imagery and complex unmanned aircraft systems are just two applications that beg for the low power, high performance custom integrated circuits the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking to build.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Michael Cooney