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23/10/2015

NTP Flaw in Linux, Mac, and BSD OS distros can be used to compromise encryption

Hackers could have manipulated the NTP Protocol flaws to damage encryption, jam bitcoin trades

Eight security vulnerabilities have been discovered by Cisco researchers in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) used by Linux, Mac, and BSD OS distributions. Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a networking protocol for clock synchronization between computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. In operation since before 1985, NTP is one of the oldest Internet protocols in current use. NTP was originally designed by David L. Mills of the University of Delaware, who still oversees its development.

http://www.techworm.net/2015/10/ntp-flaw-linux-mac-bsd-os-distros-compromise-encryption.html

Hackers could have manipulated the NTP Protocol flaws to damage encryption, jam bitcoin trades

23/10/2015

Russia: new nuclear tech titan

According to recently published research from the World Nuclear Association (WNA), Russia is now a global leader in fast neutron reactor technology, with exports of nuclear goods and services described as "a major Russian policy and economic objective".

The report highlights the dramatic efficiency increase in Russian nuclear generation since the mid-'90s and concludes that Russia is moving steadily forward with plans to develop new reactor technology and expand the role of nuclear energy both at home and abroad. Having signed deals with a number of countries, including Finland, Egypt and Jordan, over 20 plants are confirmed or planned for export construction, and global demand is tipped to rise; Russia is fast shaping up to be the new titan in world nuclear technology.

Russian expertise

State-owned Rosatom says that Russia's nuclear industry amounts to over 400 companies and more than 255,000 employees working across the fuel cycle, power generation and R&D sectors, 34 operating power facilities with an installed capacity of 25.2GW, and the only nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet in the world.

"Rosatom has one highly significant advantage - its the only company in the world which can provide the industry's complete range of products."
A succession of initiatives from Vladimir Putin has helped establish the continued development of this industry as a top national priority, both as a means to ensure future domestic energy security and as a key economic sector in its own right, with international projects forming a big focus area for growth. All of the thousands of reactor-years of experience gained since Obninsk - including the safety lessons learnt in the wake of the disaster at Chernobyl - have been effectively packaged to create a unique selling point for Russian expertise on foreign markets. While many critics felt that Fukushima would finally herald the demise of nuclear power, it seems that quite the reverse has turned out to be true. With its appeal now fast growing, particularly in Asia, Russia has been wooing prospective clients with a range of tempting incentives.

http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurerussia-new-nuclear-tech-titan-4647211/

Sixty-one years on from giving the world its first-ever nuclear power plant, Russia is once again at the forefront of atomic energy. Dr Gareth Evans finds out how the country is shaping up to be the new titan in world nuclear technology.

23/10/2015

Siemens secures turbine supply order for 2.5GW combined-cycle plant in Qatar

German technology giant Siemens has received a turbine supply order from Samsung C&T for a 2.5GW combined-cycle power generating facility in Qatar.

Under the terms of the contract, Siemens will deliver six SGT5-4000F gas turbines, four SST5-4000 steam turbines and ten SGen5-1200A-series generators for the power plant.

The facility is being developed as a part of a complex that also houses an integrated seawater desalination unit.

It is under development by Samsung C&T, along with its consortium partner Hitachi Zosen, in the Umm al Houl Economic Zone in the south of the country.

"In addition to accounting for around 25% of Qatar's installed power generating capacity, the plant will also deliver up to 136 million imperial gallons of potable water a day."
Siemens Power and Gas Division gas turbines and generators business unit CEO Theo Maas said: "This order is yet another indicator of the strong confidence that Middle Eastern countries have in Siemens' technology.

"Thanks to our close collaboration with Samsung C&T right from the very start, this order also reinforces our excellent partnership with our partner and the customer."

http://www.power-technology.com/news/newssiemens-secures-turbine-supply-order-for-25gw-combined-cycle-plant-in-qatar-4699740

23/10/2015

Dead Star Demolishes Planet – Offering A Glimpse Into How The Earth Could End Its Days

Astronomers have made the first direct discovery of a white dwarf star being orbited by a disintegrating minor planet that will ultimately collide into it. The observation, made by the Kepler space telescope, offers a glimpse into what could happen to the Earth in a few billion years as the Sun, like most stars, becomes a white dwarf.

The study, published in Nature, also adds to a growing number of studies reporting that dwarf stars can have atmospheres polluted with heavy elements – in some cases the constituents of water. Knowing that planets can be the source of such contamination gives weight to a hypothesis that says water on Earth was deposited by rocky bodies from distant regions in our solar system.

Strange Pollution

Most stars, including our Sun, will become white dwarfs as they die – before going out as a black dwarf or supernova – when they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. Our standard model for white dwarfs would predict white dwarfs to have no elements heavier than helium in the atmosphere, but a growing number of measurements of white dwarf atmospheres show the presence of heavier elements such as oxygen, magnesium, silicon and iron. This is surprising because the star’s strong surface gravity is expected to cause heavy elements to sink quickly to the centre – leaving simple atmospheres of hydrogen and helium.

One explanation for this atmospheric pollution is that rocky bodies with similar properties to those in our solar system collide with a white dwarf and replenish its atmosphere with new heavy elements, including water. However, until now, there was no direct evidence that such rocky bodies exist or could fall onto a white dwarf.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/dead-star-demolishes-planet-offering-glimpse-how-earth-could-end-its-days

Astronomers have made the first direct discovery of a white dwarf star being orbited by a disintegrating minor planet that will ultimately collide into it. The observation, made by the Kepler space telescope, offers a glimpse into what could happen to the Earth in a few billion years as the Sun, lik…

23/10/2015

New Horizons Reveals The Mystery Of Kerberos

NASA just released the images we’ve all been waiting for – our first look at Pluto’s fifth moon Kerberos. New Horizons passed within 396,100 kilometers (245,600 miles) of Kerberos, capturing images of Pluto’s tiny moon just seven hours before its closest approach. The newly released image is a combination of four separate images captured by the spacecraft’s LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and was deconvoluted to reduce pixelation and reveal Kerberos in unprecedented detail.

So far, Pluto has been full of surprises, and the new pictures prove that Pluto has many more tricks up its sleeve. Kerberos may look like nothing more than a pixelated blob, but researchers can tell a lot from these images. Due to Kerberos’ diminutive size – a mere 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) by 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) – we are not going to get as detailed images as we see with Nix, but we can expect exciting science data.

Prior to the Pluto encounter, scientists used Hubble images to “weigh” the tiny moon and measured its gravitational influence on its neighboring moons. The science team determined the force was surprisingly strong with Kerberos, as the moon had a strong influence over its neighbors, indicating it was relatively large and massive. The moon appeared very faint in Hubble images, suggesting it had a dark charcoal-like surface. However, the new images tell a very different story. “Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us,” New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a press release.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/new-horizons-reveals-mystery-kerberos

NASA just released the images we’ve all been waiting for – our first look at Pluto’s fifth moon Kerberos. New Horizons passed within 396,100 kilometers (245,600 miles) of Kerberos, capturing images of Pluto’s tiny moon just seven hours before its closest approach. The newly released image is a combi…

23/10/2015

Astronomers Spot A Star Being Ripped Apart By A Black Hole

A team of astronomers has observed stellar debris being flung around a black hole in a (relatively) nearby galaxy. These types of events are called tidal disruptions, and the one reported in this study is the closest detected in the last 10 years.

The galaxy, named PGC 043234, is a small elliptical galaxy about 295 million light-years from the Milky Way. The scientists witnessed the consequences of a star passing too close to a central black hole within PGC 043234; the strong gravitational forces around the black hole shredded the star apart, sucking most of the material beyond the event horizon (the point of no return around a black hole) while flinging some of it outwards into a wider orbit around the black hole.

The tidal disruption was first observed in optical light by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), then quickly followed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer and the ESA's XMM-Newton satellite.

Materials around black holes tend to have a strong X-ray signature. As the stellar material falls towards the black hole, it forms an “accretion disk”; the acceleration and the friction within the disk, due to the immense gravitational pull, is enough to generate a substantial amount of X-rays. The accretion disk can reach temperatures of 10 million degrees, according to some studies.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-saw-star-ripped-apart-black-hole

A team of astronomers has observed stellar debris being flung around a black hole in a (relatively) nearby galaxy. These types of events are called tidal disruptions, and the one reported in this study is the closest detected in the last 10 years.

22/10/2015

Don't Miss The Orionid Meteor Shower Tomorrow Night

Get the coffee on and the deck chairs out – the Orionid meteor shower will be at its peak this week.

The Orionid meteor shower is an event that happens around this time every year when Earth crosses paths with a debris stream from the Halley’s Comet. This year, the peak of activity is expected to be just before sunrise on Thursday 22 October, when Earth travels through the densest part of this debris stream. However, there should be activity throughout the night of Wednesday 21 October.

“The Orionids will probably show weaker activity than usual this year,” said Bill Cooke of the NASA Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, in a statement. However, he added that we should expect to see about 12 meteors per hour. The dark sky won’t just be, hopefully, full of meteors – the night will also be an awesome opportunity to see Jupiter, Venus, the “Dog Star” Sirius and constellations such as Orion, Gemini, and Ta**us.

Despite their poetically named alias, meteors are not actually “shooting stars.” The Orionid meteors are pieces of debris left behind by Halley’s Comet which have slammed into our atmosphere at about 66 kilometers (41 miles) per second. Halley’s Comet is a comet visible from Earth every 75-76 years, which was last seen in 1986 and won't be seen again until 2061.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/annual-orionid-meteor-shower-will-hit-skies-wednesday-night

Get the coffee on and the deck chairs out – the Orionid meteor shower will be at its peak this week.

22/10/2015

Enormous Asteroid Discovered Last Week Will Whizz Past Earth On Halloween

Two asteroids will pass by Earth this Halloween. The first is 2009 FD, a peculiarly dark asteroid, which will make its closest approach on October 29. The second, 2015 TB145, will fly-by on Halloween. The two asteroids won't be visible to the naked eye, even at their closest approach. The astronomical events have been announced in NASA's Goldstone Radar Observation Plan.

2009 FD will approach within 6,194,000 km of Earth, about 16.3 times further away than the Moon. The asteroid was discovered in February 2009, a month before its closest recorded approach to Earth on March 27, 2009, at a distance of 624,100 km. 2015 TB145 will pass about 500,000 km from Earth, just beyond the lunar orbit.

2009 FD has been tracked by several instruments since its discovery. It was first estimated to be 130 meters in size by NASA’s Near Earth Program. A better estimate for its size came from NASA’s NEOWISE, which gave a value of 470 meters, although this is considered an upper limit.

2015 TB145 was discovered just over a week ago by the Pan-STARRS I telescope in Hawaii, and it has an estimated size of 320 meters. The passing of 2015 TB145 will be the closest approach by something this large until asteroid August 2027, when 1999 AN10 will pass within one lunar distance (380,000 km). NASA has given these objects a value of 1 on the Torino Scale, which is the value assigned to non-dangerous asteroids.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/halloween-asteroids-are-not-scaring-us

Two asteroids will pass by Earth this Halloween. The first is 2009 FD, a peculiarly dark asteroid, which will make its closest approach on October 29. The second, 2015 TB145, will fly-by on Halloween. The two asteroids won't be visible to the naked eye, even at their closest approach. The astronomic…

22/10/2015

Rare Double Star System Seen In Final Death Throes Before It Explodes

An incredible stellar system has been found where two stars are so close that their surfaces are overlapping. It is the hottest and most massive double star system ever seen, and provides a rare glimpse into what is believed to be a relatively brief cosmic event.

The system is known as VFTS 352, found 160,000 light-years away in the Tarantula Nebula by the European South Observatory's Very Large Telescope. Both of the stars are nearly identical in size, with a combined mass 57 times greater than the Sun, meaning one is not sucking material from the other – rather, they are likely sharing 30% of their material. This has led to a “bridge” forming between their two connected surfaces.

The two stars, classed as O-type stars that shine blue-white, have surface temperatures of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius (72,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and complete an orbit of each other in just one Earth day. Double systems like this may be the main source of certain elements such as oxygen in the universe.

Their centers are separated by a mere 12 million kilometers (7.5 million miles), and the intense tidal forces (the gravitational pull of one star on the other) are thought to be mixing the material in their interiors. “The VFTS 352 is the best case yet found for a hot and massive double star that may show this kind of internal mixing,” said lead author Leonardo Almeida from the University of São Paulo, Brazil in a statement. “As such it’s a fascinating and important discovery.”

http://www.iflscience.com/space/rare-double-star-system-seen-final-death-throes-it-explodes

An incredible stellar system has been found where two stars are so close that their surfaces are overlapping. It is the hottest and most massive double star system ever seen, and provides a rare glimpse into what is believed to be a relatively brief cosmic event.