Europa as the Abode of Life
Posted on | October 19, 2009
We can practically smell the life from here:
The global ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth’s oceans combined. New research suggests that there may be plenty of oxygen available in that ocean to support life, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.
The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa’s ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.
Therefore a key question has been whether enough oxygen reaches the ocean to support the oxygen-based metabolic process that is most familiar to us. An answer comes from considering the young age of Europa’s surface. Its geology and the paucity of impact craters suggests that the top of the ice is continually reformed such that the current surface is only about 50 million years old, roughly 1% of the age of the solar system.
Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona has considered three generic resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface; opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below; and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxidizers at the surface, he finds that the delivery rate into the ocean is so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth’s oceans in only a few million years. Greenberg presented his findings at the 41st meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences now under way in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Botnet
Posted on | September 29, 2009
Half of the Fortune 100 are infected?
Since its discovery in May of 2009 we’ve identified Mariposa activity in tens of thousands of unique corporate networks. Over 70 variants have been identified with varying degrees of security and purpose, including code injection into known processes, email address harvesting, and additional malware downloads. The purpose behind so many variants may only be functionality differences or efforts at avoiding AV detection, but it does not reveal the number of controllers or the exact motivation behind the overall threat.
Believed to stem from the butterfly bot kit, formerly sold at bfsecurity.net, this botnet is successfully spreading across thousands of corporate networks, just as it was designed to do. From the bfsecurity.net site, butterflybot is a
“Security tool designed to stealthy run on winnt based systems (win2k to winvista) and to stealthy and efficiently spread with 3 spreaders, which were specially designed and improved compared to already known public methods.[sic]” The three spreaders are MSN, USB, and P2P. Listed P2P networks were “ares, bearshare, imesh, shareaza, kazaa, dcplusplus, emule, emuleplus, limewire.[sic]”
Other methods may now be in place for propagation as well as capabilities for the bf botkit, but the original add-on features included Firefox and IE password harvesting, and TCP/UDP flooding. NetBIOS worm propagation and email address harvesting also appear to have become common additions.
A Legacy of Failure
Posted on | September 14, 2009
The Census results are in, and once again highlight the sheer magnitude of the economic disaster that was the Bush presidency:
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.
The Census’ final report card on Bush’s record presents an intriguing backdrop to today’s economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama’s combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush’s two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.
Economists would cite many reasons why presidential terms are an imperfect frame for tracking economic trends. The business cycle doesn’t always follow the electoral cycle. A president’s economic record is heavily influenced by factors out of his control. Timing matters and so does good fortune.
But few would argue that national economic policy is irrelevant to economic outcomes. And rightly or wrongly, voters still judge presidents and their parties largely by the economy’s performance during their watch. In that assessment, few measures do more than the Census data to answer the threshold question of whether a president left the day to day economic conditions of average Americans better than he found it.
If that’s the test, today’s report shows that Bush flunked on every relevant dimension-and not just because of the severe downturn that began last year….
And if the Dems don’t get off their well-fed behinds, they can share this legacy.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Posted on | September 8, 2009
Two different European groups are reporting the detection of the elusive magnetic monopole:
Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Paul Dirac said it must be possible to separate the north and south poles of a magnet to give them a separate existence. But despite decades of searching moon dust, the debris from particle collisions and cosmic radiation for traces of a monopole, not one has been found.
Spin ice is a kind of crystalline material with essentially the same atomic arrangements as water ice. Last year, researchers demonstrated that certain states of spin ice would create monopoles that rove about the crystal. The monopoles would be seen as disturbances moving through the spins of atoms within the crystal.
Now two separate groups claim to have seen just that.
Tom Fennell and his colleagues at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble, France, fired a beam of neutrons at a spin ice crystal to investigate how the crystals affected the neutrons’ energy. They chilled the crystal to near-zero Kelvin – almost as cold as it is theoretically possible to get. The results implied that when the temperature of the crystal rose to around 1 kelvin magnetic monopoles were being formed within it.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Morris of the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy in Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues watched how neutrons scattered off a spin ice crystal in a changing magnetic field. The magnetisation of the particles within the crystals fell into alignment along trails through the crystal, suggesting that the magnetic field was pulling the monopoles apart. These trails are known as “Dirac strings”, because Dirac predicted that cosmic monopoles would have just such a connection between them.
Gratuitous Video Feed
Posted on | September 2, 2009
Antoine Dufour & Tommy Gauthier: “Mellow Deep Art”
But There Was No One to Scream
Posted on | September 2, 2009
Good point. Somewhere between infinite and near-zero density lay the very early universe.
Now, we know we’d be able to hear sound in an atmosphere as sparse as Mars’ (which is about 10 grams per cubic meter), and we know we can hear sound through more dense media as well, such as water and rock. If we extrapolate the Universe back until it was as least as dense as Mars’ atmosphere, this means that for about the first day after the big bang, the Universe is dense enough that sound audible to humans can travel through it….
Now, we know we’d be able to hear sound in an atmosphere as sparse as Mars’ (which is about 10 grams per cubic meter), and we know we can hear sound through more dense media as well, such as water and rock. If we extrapolate the Universe back until it was as least as dense as Mars’ atmosphere, this means that for about the first day after the big bang, the Universe is dense enough that sound audible to humans can travel through it.
But wouldn’t inflationary Dopplering have rendered all that noise subsonic?
Gratuitous Video Feed
Posted on | August 27, 2009
Andy Lubershane: “Why We Need Government-Run, Universal, Socialized Health Insurance”
Gratuitous Video Feed
Posted on | August 18, 2009
Don Schiff: “Riding off the Rails”
Shakespearean Daily Diss (Pubic Edition)
Posted on | August 18, 2009
“They have a plentiful lack of wit.” —Hamlet, 2.2.356-57
Gratuitous Video Veed
Posted on | August 17, 2009
Bob Culbertson: “Little Wing”
