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Broken DNA Must Find Right Partners Quickly Amid Repairs

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Just as square dance partners join hands at a particular point in the music, so broken pieces of DNA in our cells reunite as they are repaired. Precisely and quickly, these DNA pieces identify each other and tether together. A tumor-suppressor gene called ATM choreographs this fast-paced, but reliable, reassembly operation.

Space Camp

Julio 24, 2008 - 10:00pm

This summer in Philadelphia, weird science isn't limited to the Mütter Museum: the Wood Street Gallery's exhibit "Out of This World" currently showcases artists who tinker with strange new ways to experience the cosmos. Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt's soothing interactive installation Orbiter lets viewers lie down on the ground and look up at a video approximation of the night sky, limned with faint concentric rings. By pointing their fingers at the ceiling, participants create new "stars" that circulate and generate looping tones. Jean-Pierre Aubé's Titan and beyond the infinite (2007) uses data recorded in 2005 by the Huygens probe from one of Saturn's moons to create 2001-inspired slit-scan video trip-outs; the show also includes a video version of his VLF.Natural Radio (2000-Ongoing) project, which uses the sounds of naturally-produced electromagnetic signals, a phenomenon increasingly blotted out by human-made telecommunications. Geekier frequencies can be heard in Maria Antelman's taH pagh taHbe (2006), a video composed of still images of NASA hanger interiors set to a Klingon translation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (no doubt using the preferred Klingon Language Institute version as her source.) Rounding out the astronomical theme, Gail Wight's Blow Out (2006) consists of forty-four photos of different smashed test tubes, white constellations of glass shards against black backgrounds, each looking like unique, exploding galaxies. - Ed Halter

Image: Jean-Pierre Aube, Titan and beyond the infinite, 2007

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org/home.html#currentshow

Gas-Free Horizon--An Update on Plug-In Cars [EarthTalk]

Julio 24, 2008 - 1:30pm

Dear EarthTalk: Should we expect to see “plug-in” hybrid cars anytime soon? I’ve been hearing they are on the horizon but I wonder if that means in one year or 10.-- Bill A., Stratford, CT

[More]

Facing the Freshwater Crisis [Scientific American Magazine]

Julio 23, 2008 - 1:05pm

A friend of mine lives in a middle-class neighborhood of New Delhi, one of the richest cities in India. Although the area gets a fair amount of rain every year, he wakes in the morning to the blare of a megaphone announcing that freshwater will be available only for the next hour. He rushes to fill the bathtub and other receptacles to last the day. New Delhi’s endemic shortfalls occur largely because water managers decided some years back to divert large amounts from upstream rivers and reservoirs to irrigate crops.

My son, who lives in arid Phoenix, arises to the low, schussing sounds of sprinklers watering verdant suburban lawns and golf courses. Although Phoenix sits amid the Sonoran Desert, he enjoys a virtually unlimited water supply. Politicians there have allowed irrigation water to be shifted away from farming operations to cities and suburbs, while permitting recycled wastewater to be employed for landscaping and other nonpotable applications.

[More]

Caribbean Assassin Decimates Local Fish

Julio 23, 2008 - 10:35am
A life spent swimming in the Caribbean sounds ideal. But good luck convincing the resident fish. Already confronted by overfishing, coral bleaching, and increasing amounts of sediment, nitrates, and acid, they have one more enemy to add to this list: lion

Memory Impairment Associated With Sound Processing Disorder

Julio 23, 2008 - 6:00am
Mild memory impairment may be associated with central auditory processing dysfunction, or difficulty hearing in complex situations with competing noise, such as hearing a single conversation amid several other conversations, according to a new article.

Spying on the Spies [Slide Show] [Features]

Julio 22, 2008 - 5:30pm

The digital revolution has forced law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor threats such as cyber attacks and stolen computer data using technology that makes most Cold War–era equipment look like it was made from spare parts in someone's garage. But lest these once-innovative tools be forgotten, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Countermeasures Directorate today unveiled a public exhibit, entitled "Listening In: Electronic Eavesdropping in the Cold War Era," honoring spy gear used by (and against) the U.S. from the dawn to the end of the Cold War. [More]

Memory Problems Tied to Sound Processing Disorder

Julio 22, 2008 - 3:25pm
Inability to filter out background noise may be indicator of mild impairment, study says

A city locked out of its own data network

Julio 22, 2008 - 1:37pm

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

It sounds like a plot from Hollywood: A team of techies is busily trying to crack passwords to get access to parts of San Francisco’s computer network. They are doing so at the direction of city officials, who have discovered that they are locked out of parts of their new multimillion-dollar system.

But for the City by the Bay, it’s a story line they didn’t see coming.

Local officials charge that one of their own employees, a network administrator named Terry Childs, gave himself exclusive access to key switches on the network. After they discovered the problem, Mr. Childs was interrogated by the police, but unlike the disgruntled programmers in the movie “Office Space,” he apparently hasn’t been fazed by the threat of prison. Authorities say he first gave police bogus passwords and now sits in jail refusing to divulge his abracadabras.

Childs pleaded not guilty last Thursday to four felony counts of computer network tampering. His lawyer declared it all a big misunderstanding and called the $5 million bail inappropriate. But San Francisco officials aren’t sure what Childs has done behind password locks, and they worry he might have created back channels into city data.

So-called “malicious insiders” are surprisingly common, and they tend to be more harmful – and difficult to thwart – than outside hackers, say experts. Despite the threat, one recent study found that organizations are growing more lax in guarding against them.

“Most of the security solutions [deployed] are outward facing, focusing on the moat and the turrets, not determining if the threat can come from inside” the castle walls, says Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert formerly with the World Bank Treasury and now with Core Security Technologies in Boston.

Roughly a quarter of computer system attacks are inside jobs, according to the past two years of the E-Crime Watch Survey from CSO Magazine and the US Secret Service. Their most recent report in 2007 found steep drops over the previous year in the percentage of organizations taking common protective measures:

•Background checks on employees and contractors dropped from 73 to 57 percent.
•Employee monitoring went from 59 to 42 percent.
•Employee security training plummeted from 68 to 38 percent.

The report defines an insider as a current or former employee, services provider, or contractor. Outside technology vendors and partners who are given insider access constitute a fast-growing source of attacks, according to a new four-year study conducted by Verizon.

Ironically, San Francisco began building its network three years ago out of a desire to be less reliant on outside systems, says Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. Childs was a key developer on the project.

The network, called FiberWAN, currently encompasses 60 percent of the city’s internal and external business sprawling over 60 departments.

The lockout hasn’t disrupted city services, yet: Officials can still send e-mails across departments, and residents can still pay taxes and parking tickets online. But it has created no-go areas on the system where officials aren’t sure if sensitive data – such as e-mails and payroll records – have been compromised.

“We had control of the house,” Mr. Vinson says by way of analogy, “but there were certain rooms inside the house where we didn’t know what was going on and did not have access.” His team is trying to identify and access all the locked “rooms.”

The exclusive privileges that officials say Childs gave himself were discovered, Vinson says, after the city hired a security chief and she began upgrading security protocols. Prosecutors have said Childs locked out other administrators after a confrontation with the security head.

Vinson estimates the costs of the restoration work will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nearly half of computer security breaches take weeks to mitigate, according to the Verizon report, with 14 percent taking months. Detection times are worse, with 63 percent of attacks going unnoticed for months. In 70 percent of cases, it’s a third party who notices first.

There’s no simple way to profile malicious insiders, says Mark Maybury, executive director of the IT division at the MITRE Corp., a nonprofit research-and-development group outside Boston. He has researched hundreds of insider cases with the aim of developing computerized sensors to detect them.

“Just as insiders are highly heterogeneous in their demographics, so too are they highly heterogeneous in their behaviors. Therefore, you can’t detect all insiders with one sensor,” Dr. Maybury says.

At this point, however, not much sensor software is commercially available, he says. Still, basic security protocols and simple attentiveness are crucial preventative measures, say experts.

Vinson’s department does conduct backups, he says. And there are fail-safe systems and disaster recovery plans – but they were designed with natural disasters in mind. “If an earthquake happened, we all have instructions about what to do. But we don’t have instructions for what to do when it’s one of your own employees,” says Vinson.

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

A city locked out of its own data network

Julio 22, 2008 - 1:37pm

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

It sounds like a plot from Hollywood: A team of techies is busily trying to crack passwords to get access to parts of San Francisco’s computer network. They are doing so at the direction of city officials, who have discovered that they are locked out of parts of their new multimillion-dollar system.

But for the City by the Bay, it’s a story line they didn’t see coming.

Local officials charge that one of their own employees, a network administrator named Terry Childs, gave himself exclusive access to key switches on the network. After they discovered the problem, Mr. Childs was interrogated by the police, but unlike the disgruntled programmers in the movie “Office Space,” he apparently hasn’t been fazed by the threat of prison. Authorities say he first gave police bogus passwords and now sits in jail refusing to divulge his abracadabras.

Childs pleaded not guilty last Thursday to four felony counts of computer network tampering. His lawyer declared it all a big misunderstanding and called the $5 million bail inappropriate. But San Francisco officials aren’t sure what Childs has done behind password locks, and they worry he might have created back channels into city data.

So-called “malicious insiders” are surprisingly common, and they tend to be more harmful – and difficult to thwart – than outside hackers, say experts. Despite the threat, one recent study found that organizations are growing more lax in guarding against them.

“Most of the security solutions [deployed] are outward facing, focusing on the moat and the turrets, not determining if the threat can come from inside” the castle walls, says Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert formerly with the World Bank Treasury and now with Core Security Technologies in Boston.

Roughly a quarter of computer system attacks are inside jobs, according to the past two years of the E-Crime Watch Survey from CSO Magazine and the US Secret Service. Their most recent report in 2007 found steep drops over the previous year in the percentage of organizations taking common protective measures:

•Background checks on employees and contractors dropped from 73 to 57 percent.
•Employee monitoring went from 59 to 42 percent.
•Employee security training plummeted from 68 to 38 percent.

The report defines an insider as a current or former employee, services provider, or contractor. Outside technology vendors and partners who are given insider access constitute a fast-growing source of attacks, according to a new four-year study conducted by Verizon.

Ironically, San Francisco began building its network three years ago out of a desire to be less reliant on outside systems, says Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. Childs was a key developer on the project.

The network, called FiberWAN, currently encompasses 60 percent of the city’s internal and external business sprawling over 60 departments.

The lockout hasn’t disrupted city services, yet: Officials can still send e-mails across departments, and residents can still pay taxes and parking tickets online. But it has created no-go areas on the system where officials aren’t sure if sensitive data – such as e-mails and payroll records – have been compromised.

“We had control of the house,” Mr. Vinson says by way of analogy, “but there were certain rooms inside the house where we didn’t know what was going on and did not have access.” His team is trying to identify and access all the locked “rooms.”

The exclusive privileges that officials say Childs gave himself were discovered, Vinson says, after the city hired a security chief and she began upgrading security protocols. Prosecutors have said Childs locked out other administrators after a confrontation with the security head.

Vinson estimates the costs of the restoration work will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nearly half of computer security breaches take weeks to mitigate, according to the Verizon report, with 14 percent taking months. Detection times are worse, with 63 percent of attacks going unnoticed for months. In 70 percent of cases, it’s a third party who notices first.

There’s no simple way to profile malicious insiders, says Mark Maybury, executive director of the IT division at the MITRE Corp., a nonprofit research-and-development group outside Boston. He has researched hundreds of insider cases with the aim of developing computerized sensors to detect them.

“Just as insiders are highly heterogeneous in their demographics, so too are they highly heterogeneous in their behaviors. Therefore, you can’t detect all insiders with one sensor,” Dr. Maybury says.

At this point, however, not much sensor software is commercially available, he says. Still, basic security protocols and simple attentiveness are crucial preventative measures, say experts.

Vinson’s department does conduct backups, he says. And there are fail-safe systems and disaster recovery plans – but they were designed with natural disasters in mind. “If an earthquake happened, we all have instructions about what to do. But we don’t have instructions for what to do when it’s one of your own employees,” says Vinson.

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

Ultrasonic Frogs Tune Their Ears to Different Frequencies

Julio 22, 2008 - 9:19am
The Odorrana tormota frog opens and closes tubes in its ears when listening and calling at night. In this movie, the researchers shined a light under the frog's jaw to illuminate the inside of the mouth. The small circles of light on the side of the frog'

Scientists to discuss climate risk posed by wetlands destruction

Julio 19, 2008 - 9:04pm
Moves around the world to drain marshes and other wetlands to make space for farming could be hastening climate change, scientists gathering in Brazil from Monday will be hearing.

Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus [60-Second Science Blog]

Julio 18, 2008 - 8:42am

Next time you're at a loud singles bar, thank a fish for inspiration. Here's why: When a male midshipman fish [above] eyes a competitor swimming too close, he chases off the interloper with an audible grunt. To attract a mate, he hums loudly for hours on end [see video below]. Now these cries have attracted researchers seeking to figure out whether noisy animals, from fish to mammals, have a common ancestor that gave them the ability to vocalize. Researchers studied the larvae of three closely related species of bony fish--the midshipman fish, Gulf toadfish and oyster toadfish--that make sounds by squeezing their swim bladders up to 200 times per second. They report in Science that the parts of the brain and spinal cord that control the rhythm of those muscles develop in a pattern similar to that of other vocalizing animals, which suggests a common origin. Of course, the instruments being played by these brain cells--swim bladders in fish; the larynx in mammals--probably evolved independently. Think of that next time you're listening to a tall fishing story.

[More]

Snow Wave

Julio 17, 2008 - 10:00pm

Despite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter

Image: Huutajat, The Screaming Men, 2003 (Still image from video, 76 min., Directed by Mika Ronkainen) Courtesy the artist Photo by Matthew Septimus.

http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/324/102/

Loud Music Can Make You Drink More, In Less Time, In A Bar

Julio 17, 2008 - 10:00pm
Commercial venues are very aware of the effects that the environment -- in this case, music -- can have on in-store traffic flow, sales volumes, product choices and consumer time spent in the immediate vicinity. A study of the effects of music levels on drinking in a bar setting has found that loud music leads to more drinking in less time.

ITunes Allows Radiologists To Save, Sort And Search Personal Learning Files

Julio 17, 2008 - 10:00pm
iTunes has the ability to manage and organize PDF files just as easily as music files, allowing radiologists to better organize their personal files of articles and images, according to a recent study.

[NEWS FOCUS] ACOUSTICS '08: Listening to Distant Ice Crack

Julio 17, 2008 - 3:31pm
At the Acoustics '08 meeting, scientists described using acoustic instruments designed to detect nuclear explosions to listen to the crumbling of the Antarctic ice shelf.

Author: John Bohannon

Singing for Sex: Even Toadfish Do It

Julio 17, 2008 - 1:30pm
To attract mates, male toadfish make up for their homeliness with a song.

Grunting fish yield vocal clues

Julio 17, 2008 - 12:10pm
The behaviour of a grunting fish helps scientists to date the origins of vocal sounds to about 400 million years ago.

When Fish Talk, Scientists Listen

Julio 17, 2008 - 9:00am
(PhysOrg.com) -- A male midshipman, a close relative of the toadfish, doesn't need good looks to attract a mate - just a nice voice. After building a nest for his potential partner, he calls to nearby females by contracting his swim bladder, the air-filled sac fish use to maintain buoyancy. The sound he makes is not a song or a whistle, but a hum; more reminiscent of a long-winded foghorn than a ballad. Female midshipman find it very alluring, and they only approach a male's nest if he makes this call.