Daily Archives: October 27, 2022

NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Captures Images of Earth and Moon in 1 frame

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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image (which has been cropped) of the Earth on Oct 15, 2022, as a part of an instrument calibration sequence at a distance of 380,000 miles (620,000 km). The upper left of the image includes a view of Hadar, Ethiopia, home to the 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil for which the spacecraft was named.

Lucy is the first mission to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, an ancient population of asteroid “fossils” that orbit around the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. To reach these distant asteroids, the Lucy spacecraft’s trajectory includes three Earth gravity assists to boost it on its journey to these enigmatic asteroids.

The image was taken with Lucy’s Terminal Tracking Camera (T2CAM) system, a pair of identical cameras that are responsible for tracking the asteroids during Lucy’s high-speed encounters. The T2CAM system was designed, built and tested by Malin Space Science Systems; Lockheed Martin Integrated the T2CAMs onto the Lucy spacecraft and operates them.

Credits: NASA/Goddard/SwRI

A mostly black image with Earth visible near the right edge, and the Moon faintly visible at the left edge. Both are grayscale.

On October 13, 2022, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 890,000 miles (1.4 million km). The image was taken as part of an instrument calibration sequence as the spacecraft approached Earth for its first of three Earth gravity assists. These Earth flybys provide Lucy with the speed required to reach the Trojan asteroids — small bodies that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. On its 12 year journey, Lucy will fly by a record breaking number of asteroids and survey their diversity, looking for clues to better understand the formation of the solar system.

The image was taken with Lucy’s Terminal Tracking Camera (T2CAM) system, a pair of identical cameras that are responsible for tracking the asteroids during Lucy’s high speed encounters. The T2CAM system was designed, built and tested by Malin Space Science Systems; Lockheed Martin Integrated the T2CAMs onto the Lucy spacecraft and operates them.

Source: NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Captures Images of Earth, Moon Ahead of Gravity | NASA

Revolutionary technique to generate hydrogen more efficiently from water

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A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have made a serendipitous scientific discovery that could potentially revolutionize the way water is broken down to release hydrogen gas—an element crucial to many industrial processes.

The team, led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr. Wang Xiaopeng and Dr. Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE), found that light can trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used extensively in , where water is broken down into and oxygen. The result is a more energy-efficient method of obtaining hydrogen.

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“We discovered that the redox center for electro-catalytic reaction is switched between metal and oxygen, triggered by light,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “This largely improves the water electrolysis efficiency.”

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an accidental power trip of the ceiling lights in his laboratory almost three years ago allowed them to observe something that the global scientific community has not yet managed to do.

Back then, the ceiling lights in Assoc. Prof. Xue’s research lab were usually turned on for 24 hours. One night in 2019, the lights went off due to a power trip. When the researchers returned the next day, they found that the performance of a nickel oxyhydroxide-based material in the water electrolysis experiment, which had continued in the dark, had fallen drastically.

“This drop in performance, nobody has ever noticed it before, because no one has ever done the experiment in the dark,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “Also, the literature says that such a material shouldn’t be sensitive to light; light should not have any effect on its properties.”

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With their findings, the team is now working on designing a new way to improve to generate hydrogen. Assoc. Prof. Xue is suggesting making the cells containing water to be transparent, so as to introduce light into the water splitting process.

“This should require less energy in the electrolysis process, and it should be much easier using ,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “More hydrogen can be produced in a shorter amount of time, with less energy consumed.”

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More information: Xiaopeng Wang et al, Pivotal role of reversible NiO6 geometric conversion in oxygen evolution, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05296-7

Source: Revolutionary technique to generate hydrogen more efficiently from water

Thomson Reuters leaked at least 3TB of sensitive data – yes, open elasticsearch instances

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The Cybernews research team found that Thomson Reuters left at least three of its databases accessible for anyone to look at. One of the open instances, the 3TB public-facing ElasticSearch database, contains a trove of sensitive, up-to-date information from across the company’s platforms. The company recognized the issue and fixed it immediately.

Thomson Reuters provides customers with products such as the business-to-business media tool Reuters Connect, legal research service and database Westlaw, the tax automation system ONESOURCE, online research suite of editorial and source materials Checkpoint, and other tools.

The size of the open database the team discovered corresponds with the company using ElasticSearch, a data storage favored by enterprises dealing with extensive, constantly updated volumes of data.

  • Media giant with $6.35 billion in revenue left at least three of its databases open
  • At least 3TB of sensitive data exposed including Thomson Reuters plaintext passwords to third-party servers
  • The data company collects is a treasure trove for threat actors, likely worth millions of dollars on underground criminal forums
  • The company has immediately fixed the issue, and started notifying their customers
  • Thomson Reuters downplayed the issue, saying it affects only a “small subset of Thomson Reuters Global Trade customers”
  • The dataset was open for several days – malicious bots are capable of discovering instances within mere hours
  • Threat actors could use the leak for attacks, from social engineering attacks to ransomware

The naming of ElasticSearch indices inside the Thomson Reuters server suggests that the open instance was used as a logging server to collect vast amounts of data gathered through user-client interaction. In other words, the company collected and exposed thousands of gigabytes of data that Cybernews researchers believe would be worth millions of dollars on underground criminal forums because of the potential access it could give to other systems.

Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters claims that out of three misconfigured servers the team informed the company about, two were designed to be publicly accessible. The third server was a non-production server meant for “application logs from the pre-production/implementation environment.”

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For example, the open dataset held access credentials to third-party servers. The details were held in plaintext format, visible to anyone crawling through the open instance.

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The team also found the open instance to contain login and password reset logs. While these don’t expose either old or new passwords, the logs show the account holder’s email address, and the exact time the password change query was sent can be seen.

Another piece of sensitive information includes SQL (structured query language) logs that show what information Thomson Reuters clients were looking for. The records also include what information the query brought back.

That includes documents with corporate and legal information about specific businesses or individuals. For instance, an employee of a company based in the US was looking for information about an organization in Russia using Thomson Reuters services, only to find out that its board members were under US sanctions over their role in the invasion of Ukraine.

The team has also discovered that the open database included an internal screening of other platforms such as YouTube, Thomson Reuters clients’ access logs, and connection strings to other databases. The exposure of connection strings is particularly dangerous because the company’s internal network elements are exposed, enabling threat actors’ lateral movement and pivoting through Reuter Thomson’s internal systems.

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The team contacted Thomson Reuters upon discovering the leaking database, and the company took down the open instance immediately.

“Upon notification we immediately investigated the findings provided by Cybernews regarding the three potentially misconfigured servers,” a Thomson Reuters representative told Cybernews.

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Source: Thomson Reuters leaked at least 3TB of sensitive data | Cybernews

Scientists discover material that can be made like a plastic but conducts like a metal

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Scientists with the University of Chicago have discovered a way to create a material that can be made like a plastic, but conducts electricity more like a metal.

The research, published Oct. 26 in Nature, shows how to make a kind of material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well.

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fundamentally, both of these organic and traditional metallic conductors share a common characteristic. They are made up of straight, closely packed rows of atoms or molecules. This means that electrons can easily flow through the material, much like cars on a highway. In fact, scientists thought a material had to have these straight, orderly rows in order to conduct electricity efficiently.

Then Xie began experimenting with some materials discovered years ago, but largely ignored. He strung nickel atoms like pearls into a string of of molecular beads made of carbon and sulfur, and began testing.

To the scientists’ astonishment, the material easily and strongly conducted electricity. What’s more, it was very stable. “We heated it, chilled it, exposed it to air and humidity, and even dripped acid and base on it, and nothing happened,” said Xie. That is enormously helpful for a device that has to function in the real world.

But to the scientists, the most striking thing was that the molecular structure of the material was disordered. “From a fundamental picture, that should not be able to be a metal,” said Anderson. “There isn’t a solid theory to explain this.”

Xie, Anderson, and their lab worked with other scientists around the university to try to understand how the material can conduct electricity. After tests, simulations, and theoretical work, they think that the material forms layers, like sheets in a lasagna. Even if the sheets rotate sideways, no longer forming a neat lasagna stack, electrons can still move horizontally or vertically—as long as the pieces touch.

The end result is unprecedented for a conductive material. “It’s almost like conductive Play-Doh—you can smush it into place and it conducts ,” Anderson said.

The scientists are excited because the discovery suggests a fundamentally new design principle for electronics technology. Conductors are so important that virtually any new development opens up new lines for technology, they explained.

One of the material’s attractive characteristics is new options for processing. For example, metals usually have to be melted in order to be made into the right shape for a chip or device, which limits what you can make with them, since other components of the device have to be able to withstand the heat needed to process these materials.

The new material has no such restriction because it can be made at room temperatures. It can also be used where the need for a device or pieces of the device to withstand heat, acid or alkalinity, or humidity has previously limited engineers’ options to develop new technology.

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More information: John Anderson, Intrinsic glassy-metallic transport in an amorphous coordination polymer, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05261-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05261-4

Source: Scientists discover material that can be made like a plastic but conducts like a metal

Australia’s Medibank says data of 4 mln customers accessed by hacker

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Medibank Private Ltd (MPL.AX), Australia’s biggest health insurer, said on Wednesday a cyber hack had compromised data of all of its of its nearly 4 million customers, as it warned of a A$25 million to A$35 million ($16 million to $22.3 million) hit to first-half earnings.

It said on Wednesday that all personal and significant amounts of health claims data of all its customers were compromised in the breach reported this month, a day after it warned the number of customers affected would grow. read more

Shares in the company fell more than 14%, its biggest one-day slide since listing in 2014.

Medibank, which covers one-sixth of Australians, said the estimated cost did not include further potential remediation or regulatory expenses.

“Our investigation has now established that this criminal has accessed all our private health insurance customers’ personal data and significant amounts of their health claims data,” chief executive David Koczkar said in a statement. “I apologise unreservedly to our customers. This is a terrible crime – this is a crime designed to cause maximum harm to the most vulnerable members of our community.”

The company reiterated that its IT systems had not been encrypted by ransomware to date and that it would continue to monitor for any further suspicious activity.

“Everywhere we have identified a breach, it is now closed,” John Goodall, Medibank’s top technology executive, told an analyst call on Wednesday.

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Source: Australia’s Medibank says data of 4 mln customers accessed by hacker | Reuters

Swarming bees generate so much electricity they may potentially change the weather

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The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.

Insects’ tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while they forage — either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (honeybees can flap their wings more than 230 times a second) or from landing onto electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these tiny charges were previously assumed to be on a small scale. Now, a new study, published Oct. 24 in the journal iScience, shows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.

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To test whether honeybees produce sizable changes in the electric field of our atmosphere, the researchers placed an electric field monitor and a camera near the site of several honeybee colonies. In the 3 minutes that the insects flooded into the air, the researchers found that the potential gradient above the hives increased to 100 volts per meter. In other swarming events, the scientists measured the effect as high as 1,000 volts per meter, making the charge density of a large honeybee swarm roughly six times greater than electrified dust storms and eight times greater than a stormcloud.

The scientists also found that denser insect clouds meant bigger electrical fields — an observation that enabled them to model other swarming insects such as locusts and butterflies.

Locusts often swarm to “biblical scales,” the scientists said, creating thick clouds 460 square miles (1,191 square kilometers) in size and packing up to 80 million locusts into less than half a square mile (1.3 square km). The researchers’ model predicted that swarming locusts’ effect on the atmospheric electric field was staggering, generating densities of electric charge similar to those made by thunderstorms.

The researchers say it’s unlikely the insects are producing storms themselves, but even when potential gradients don’t meet the conditions to make lightning, they can still have other effects on the weather. Electric fields in the atmosphere can ionize particles of dust and pollutants, changing their movement in unpredictable ways. As dust can scatter sunlight, knowing how it moves and where it settles is important to understanding a region’s climate.

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Source: Swarming bees may potentially change the weather, new study suggests | Live Science