Scientific

When Will I Get My Death Ray?

Epileptic Attack
So an attack on Epilepsy patients is being pinned on Anonymous members.

Or people posing as them.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz's 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts. She'd lingered too long on the pages trying to determine who was responsible.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

When this Anonymous group started I said there'd be trouble with group discipline. How can you possibly keep people on topic, or avoid copycat groups posing as you, if you have no organizational structure? It's madness! Did they think the Scientologists wouldn't just pose as Anon people?

I don't know if this is the work of actual Anonymous people, posers, or people looking to slander them. It hardly matters at this point. When they set up their little internet conglom, they doomed themselves to precisely this kind of irrelevance, one way or another.

Source: Wired

Truly Epic Fail
Bush's moonbase to Mars plans continue to crash on the hard rocks of reality.

Cosmic rays are so dangerous and so poorly understood that people are unlikely to get to Mars or even back to the moon until better ways are found to protect astronauts, experts said on Monday.

And NASA is not properly funding the right experiments to find out how, the National Research Council committee said.

"One of the big issues is they have really cut funding for biology issues," retired space shuttle astronaut James van Hoften, who chaired the committee, said in a telephone interview.

"It is tough on them when they don't have any new money coming in. They are using old data," he added -- including research done on survivors of the nuclear bombings of Japan during World War Two.

"Given today's knowledge and today's understanding of radiation protection, to put someone out in that type of environment would violate the current requirements that NASA has."

The committee of experts agreed that NASA'S existing radiation safety standards can protect astronauts and they urged the U.S. space agency to keep them in place.

The Earth's bulk, atmosphere and magnetic field protect life from the solar radiation and the cosmic rays that travel through space. Astronauts have just a thin layer of shielding.

Van Hoften knows from personal experience.

"My introduction to space radiation came first-hand as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. 'What the heck was that?' I blurted out after seeing what looked like a white laser passing quickly through my eyes," van Hoften wrote in the introduction to the report.

"'Oh, that's just cosmic rays,' said Pinky Nelson, my spacewalking partner and space physicist. The thought of extremely high-energy particles originating from a distant cosmic event passing easily through the space shuttle and subsequently through my head made me think that this cannot be all that healthy. The truth of the matter is that it is not."

NOWHERE TO HIDE

The cosmic rays include galactic cosmic radiation or GCR and solar particles.

"You can put on very thick walls and they just won't protect you from that," van Hoften said. "The younger you are the worse it is," he added, because as with many types of radiation, it can take years for the damage to cause disease.

"It might be OK if you just send a bunch of old guys like me," he laughed.

Any mission to Mars using current technology would take three years, van Hoften said. That long in space would subject astronauts to too much radiation .

"It hasn't really gotten the airing that it needs. In the committee we stewed over this for a long time before we said anything," he added.

There is simply no way to shield people with current technology for a trip as long as the one to Mars. They would all end up dead. It's a suicide mission.

The moon of course you can do, because it's a couple days away. It's still a big risk; the wrong solar flare and everyone dies.

But if the only point of going back to the moon is to build a base (deep underground on the mooon to block radiation since the moon has no magnetic field) that will take you to Mars, and you can't go to Mars... what was the point again?

Source: ABC News

Opaque
A new technique has been created to scan insects trapped in opaque amber and create three dimensional scans, then models, of the creatures.

It is like a magic trick - at first there is nothing and then it appears: a tiny insect unseen by any eye for 100 million years.

We are with Paul Tafforeau who is scrolling through images on his computer.

His pictures have been produced by a colossal X-ray machine that can illuminate the insides of small lumps of clouded amber (fossil tree resin).

As he plays with the settings, what starts out as grey nothingness suddenly becomes the unmistakable outline of a "wee beastie".

Who knows? This little creature could once have buzzed a dinosaur. It's certainly the right age.

Tafforeau is a palaeontologist. But whilst others of his profession will be in the dirt with a rock hammer and trowel, you'll find him at the end of one of the most remarkable "cameras" in the world.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure.

...


"Micro-tomography is based on radiography but instead of a single picture, we are taking pictures during rotation of the sample," explains Dr Tafforeau.

"For a complete rotation, we will take more than 1,000 radiographs - and from all these radiographs, we can reconstruct virtual slices; and after using a 3D processing tool, we 'extract' the specimen from the amber."

...

But here's the really neat part. All that electronic information can be fed to a 3D plastic printer to make a physical model. A bug that in reality is less than a millimetre long and hidden inside a resin block then becomes a 30cm-long facsimile you can hold in your hand.

Instant prehistoric toys!

That is amazingly neat. I love 3D printers. Someday I shall own one, oh yes.

Source: BBC News

Smoke Gene
More promising genomic research.

Three independent studies released Wednesday have identified a tiny variation in the human genome that make some people more vulnerable to lung cancer than others.

While they all finger the same culprit, however, the studies disagree on whether the genetic glitch -- shared by 50 percent of the population -- increases the risk of cancer by itself, or only in people who smoke.

Basically all three studies agree this gene variant makes you much more likely to die of lung cancer, but they disagree as to why.

One suggests that it makes smokers heavier smokers; one suggests that it makes smokers more susceptible to cancer; one suggests that anyone with the disease is more likely to get lung cancer.

Regardless, not a good gene to have.

Source: Raw Story

Eww
Kind of gross.

Fifty rivers in the Philippines have been destroyed because people are using them to dump their rubbish, leaving some ecologically dead, an official said Wednesday.

Of the country's 421 major rivers and 20 large river basins, 50 are "highly degraded because of man's abuse and neglect," Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Joselito Atienza said in a statement.

"History tells us that rivers have played an important role in the country's economic growth. Yet, we have disregarded this and continue to dirty our rivers and lakes by turning them into giant septic tanks and trash bins," he added.

One of the ecologically dead rivers is the Pasig which bisects Manila. The government has been relocating thousands of squatters from its banks, but those who remain "continue to throw their domestic waste into the river," he said.

Atienza said 53 percent of the pollution in Philippine rivers is due to domestic waste.

Oh well, not like anyone needed those rivers.

Geez. I'm not trying to pick on the developing world here, but.. ewww.

Source: Raw Story

Sun-Nami
NASA has captured video of a solar tsunami, which is much like the ones on Earth only far, far more exciting.

In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.

Last year's solar tsunami, which took place on 19 May 2007, lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds about 20 minutes after the initial blast.

Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.

...

Stereo's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments monitor the Sun at four wavelengths, which allowed astronomers to see how the wave moved through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.

"We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere," said Dr Gallagher.

The researchers even saw the pressure wave bouncing off irregular regions of the Sun’s atmosphere, generating reflections or diffraction patterns - exactly as tsunamis have been observed to do on Earth when they crash against land.

Nice special effects.

Source: BBC News

Tiny?
The smallest black hole known has been found.

NASA scientists have identified the smallest, lightest black hole yet found.


The new lightweight record-holder weighs in at about 3.8 times the mass of our sun and is only 15 miles (24 kilometers) in diameter.


"This black hole is really pushing the limits," said study team leader Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."

It's almost four times the mass of our sun, but for a Black Hole, it's tiny.

This is why that idiot who wants to block the Large Hadron Collider being turned on is so silly. Black holes have to be utterly huge to survive more than an exceedingly brief time. This is the smallest one ever found in nature. A black hole the size of an atom would be gone almost instantaneously. It's nothing to worry about.

Source: Space.com

Vidiots
I don't know what's with videogame bashing but it really is tiresome.

Kotaku has, first, some excerpts of an angry crank writing in the Times Online.

I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them.

First of all, smack and teenage pregnancy?

Smack I can almost see, but how is 'teenage pregnancy' a recreational activity?

Secondly, I seem to recall some crank who thought that it was best to judge activities where possible from experience. I wonder who that was...

In the first two chapters, Mill aims to precisely define what utilitarianism claims — in terms of the general moral principles that it uses to judge concrete actions, and in terms of the sort of evidence that is supposed to be given for those principles. In so doing, he hopes to do away with some common misunderstandings of utilitarianism, as well as defend it against philosophical criticisms, most notably Kant. In the first chapter, Mill distinguishes two broad schools of ethical theory: those whose principles are defended by appeals to intuition and those whose principles are defended by appeals to experience; and he identifies utilitarianism as one of the empirical theories of ethics. In the second chapter, he then formulates a single ethical principle, from which he says all utilitarian ethical principles are derived:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Most importantly, it is not the agent’s own greatest happiness that matters, “but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” (ch2) Utilitarianism therefore can only attain its goal of greater happiness by cultivating the nobleness of individuals so that all can benefit from the honor of others. In fact, notes Mill, Utilitarianism is actually a "standard of morality" which uses happiness of the greater number of people as its ultimate goal.

Knowledge and education are fundamental to Mill's concept of the Greater Happiness, and in his famous words, “it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” (260) Mill touts the importance of being well brought up and knowledgeably curious about the world, and understanding higher pleasures such as art and music, than to be uneducated and complacent. One need not be personally satisfied with his or her life to be able to contribute to the "total sum happiness" of a society.

Oh, right. It was John Stuart Mill.

Silly me. Well, me and all of modern society, being based on Utilitarianism and all.

Seriously though, videogames are a medium, not a message. There are trash books, trash paintings, and Cthulhu knows, bad tv shows. There are also great books, paintings, tv, etc. Pushing aside an entire form of expression as broad as videogames showcases only one's own ignorance.

I mean, seriously. You have everything from Grand Theft Auto III (each of which is an interesting take on gangster culture and movies, from Goodfellas to the Sopranos to Training Day) to Spore and Second Life, which are about as cerebral and non-violent as a seminar on Expressionist Painting.

Only a lot more fun. Well, Spore probably is. Second Life... feh.

Then we have Barack Obama, who seems to buy into the idea that tv and videogames and, well, indoor activities are bad for you.

In a race for the Democratic nomination, Obama hasn't made any passionate speeches about video games with the fervor he has addressed health care, the war in Iraq or Hillary Clinton, but he has continued making jabs at games with little concern. In a recent speech at Wilkes Hall in Pennsylvania, he urged the public, "...turn off the television, turn off the video games..." in a similar rhetoric to just last February when he urged the public, "...parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children..."

How about people teach their kids to think for themselves and find their own entertainment?

Honestly. This from a guy who hung out with slumlords. Maybe he'd have been better off staying inside and playing a round of Street Fighter.

Source: Kotaku (crank)
Kotaku (obama)
Wikipedia (Mill's Utilitarianism)