The first results from NASA’s Year in Space brothers are in, and show glimpses of how stressful a trip to Mars could be for the human body.
The Astronaut Scott Kelly captivated minds when he departed Earth in March 2015, bound for a yearlong stay at the International Space Station. Part of the excitement surrounded an experiment with his twin brother Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who stayed on Terra Firma. At this week’s NASA Human Research Program workshop, researchers revealed that the trip created contrasts in their genes’ regular activities.
The data show that the Kelly twins had noticeable differences in gene expression signatures. Gene expression is how information from a gene is copied and used to support cell functions, like producing insulin. But, like a wobbly Xerox machine, the number of copies or the rate of copying can be altered by environmental changes. Shifts in gene expression, for instance, can occur when people change diet or sleep patterns. Scott’s genes showed a much larger change in expression than normal, which makes sense. Going from Earth to space may just be the biggest environmental shift of them all.
Other results showed that DNA methylation decreased in Scott and increased in Mark. Think of DNA methylation like putting a spoiler on a fast car: it’s still a car, but it drives a little differently. This “spoiler” is made of hydrogen and carbon and can change how your genes express themselves. On a broad level, methylation can influence bodily processes such as neural development, aging and carcinogenesis.
Genomic data was taken before, during and after Scott Kelly launched to the ISS aboard a Soyuz rocket in Mar. 2015. He returned in 2016, after spending 340 consecutive days in outer space. A future mission to Mars would take at least 9 months, but a round trip would be 500 days.
Scott’s gene expression and DNA methylation fell back to their pre-flight status shortly after he returned from the space station. What this means exactly is still unclear, but scientists are eager to learn more.
“The greatest importance of the study is to show that we can do it,” says Johns Hopkins geneticist Andrew Feinberg, who was part of the team that performed the study. “I don’t think people realized it would be so easy to do genomics on astronauts in space.”
The results were announced on Jan. 26, and more are due to be released in the coming months. But it’s unclear if all the data will be published. In addition to the sheer amount of information created by the experiment, the twins negotiated rights to examine the information before publication, in case it contains anything sensitive. If it’s too sensitive, the data will remain confidential.
“We’re working with a small number of highly identifiable people here,” said John Charles, the head of NASA’s human research program.
The researchers’ next challenge is discerning which of the recorded changes were related to the rigors of space travel and which ones were not.
A new kind of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) which offers users the chance to tailor their own code and ransom demands has been discovered in the Dark Web.
The zdnet Reports Ransomware is an escalating problem for cybersecurity researchers and the general public alike. This particular kind of malicious code has evolved beyond spying, surveillance, or browser redirection and can be far more damaging -- as many forms of ransomware encrypt your system and demand a ransom payment in return for restoring access.
It is estimated that ransomware cost upwards of $1 billion in damages over 2016 alone.
However, it is not just singular kinds of ransomware around the wild which are at fault -- it is the emergence of ransomware-as-a-service platforms which give half-baked cyberattackers the chance to use someone else's ransomware creations in return for subscription payments.
This week, independent security researcher Xylit0l discovered that the Satan malware, part of the Gen:Trojan.Heur2.FU family, has been launched to the public as part of a RaaS platform.
According to a security advisory on PC Risk, once a system has been infected with Satan through phishing campaigns or malicious links, the malware encrypts files and tacks on the .stn extension before placing an HTML file on the desktop of compromised systems which instructs victims on their next steps.
The Satan HTML file contains a ransom demand claiming that the system's files are encrypted and restoring them are impossible -- which researchers say is sadly true at this stage as the malware uses RSA-2048 and AES-256 cryptography -- and so paying up is their only option if they want their files back.
The ransom note then guides victims to install the Tor browser, which is a requirement to reach web domains which are not indexed by typical search engines. Victims are then given the .onion link to Satan's payment page. There, they have to pay up in Bitcoin in return for keys to decrypt files, but the amount depends entirely on the RaaS user's specifications.
While some ransomware developers either fail to put a decryption method into their creations at all or leave the required keys in a place where researchers can rip them out and create decryption tools based off them, the Satan creators store the private keys on a remote server and no free decryption tool is available.
To use the Satan RaaS platform, users must sign up for an account with the malware's domain, hosted in the Dark Web. Users must then connect a Bitcoin wallet to their account and specify a cost for decryption. It is also possible for users to specify a time frame before the fee increases.
Cyberattackers are then able to download malicious executable files, ready to infect victim PCs.
The Satan platform contains a number of other features including fee payment records, transaction tracking, Satan version releases, and dropper creation. Users can also create "notes" related to their victims, learn about how to set up gateway proxies, and are given instructions on how to test their malware on a physical machine.
Lastly, Satan's creators warn users not to upload their malware to VirusTotal or other online scanners -- as doing so will give white-hat researchers the code sample required to update and protect Windows machines from the threat.
Users can also translate their malware into different languages.
In exchange, developers automatically gain 30 percent of revenues generated by cyberattackers using the RaaS in their campaigns.
"Now, the most important part: the bitcoin paid by the victim will be credited to your account," the Satan sign-up page says. "We will keep a 30 percent fee of the income, so, if you specified a 1 BTC ransom, you will get 0.7 BTC and we will get 0.3 BTC. The fee will become lower depending on the number of infections and payments you have."
While the threat level of the Satan malware is high as there are no free decryption services available, thankfully, recorded infection and exposure rates are low.
In August, researchers revealed that the creators of Cerber ransomware were cashing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month after opening up the malware as a ransomware-as-a-service platform.
Daredevil hackers are on the internet implementing a high tech phishing campaign against Netflix users, hacking into their credit cards, says FireEye, a cybersecurity firm watching the hackers.
According to FireEye, hackers are sending an email to Netflix users to upgrade their membership. When the user clicks on the link, they’re redirected to the Netflix login page (phishing page), where the user logs in with their username and password. This is then managed by the hackers, redirecting the user to another page to fill out profile information, including payment details.
After filling in the details on the phishing page, the hacker then redirects the user to the official Netflix website.
While the researcher believed that the hackers are no longer active with this phishing scam, and that users might be safe; the researchers still believe caution is needed, and the user needs to be aware of these phishing scams.
There are various ways that hackers hack into a user account to steal money or credit card details. Netflix users should exercise caution when filling out such details.
This article (Hackers Using Phishing to Steal Credit Cards on Netflix) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
A massive death planet is about to hit our planet, killing us all. This is according to the British prominent author David Meade.Somebody is saying that if you are sticking to your New Year’s resolutions, you should have a second thought – 2017 is rumored to not end while thisyear.
The anonhq.com Reports . A massive death planet is about to hit our planet, killing us all. This is according to the British prominent author, David Meade. By profession, Meade is a research scientist.
His background in research and experimental design has enabled him to develop a unique and powerful approach to Pinewood Derby racing. Apart from this professional activity, Meade also enjoys astronomy and designing rockets.
Meade goes on to say that the global elite (the 1%) are very aware of this impending doom, and are preparing themselves for the disaster, already having built bunkers, hoping to use them to survive the collision.
Meade also believes the public is being kept in the dark deliberately, so that a mass panic situation is avoided. He talks about the increase in earthquakes and heat waves in recent times as a sign to his impending doom forecast.
“Storm systems are multiplying both in type, intensity and size. Sinkholes and cracks are appearing in the earth’s crust. Heat waves are getting stronger and are lasting longer. Earthquakes have dramatically increased both in number and intensity,” says Meade.
Meade gives a detailed description on how the unknown planet would collide with ours. He says on September 23, 2017, the moon will appear under the feet of the Constellation Virgo. At the same time, the Sun will also appear to precisely clothe Virgo. Only this one that occurs in 2017 constitutes a ‘birthing.’ This is when planets traverse within the legs of Virgo. Jupiter is birthed on 9-9-17, according to him.
The next event following this process is Planet X (the unknown planet) fully eclipsing the Sun and covering the whole Earth. A full moon in shadow would occur on the next full moon date – Thursday, October 5, 2017. This would signify the End of the Age. Planet Earth would be destroyed along with humanity, except those who get the opportunity to enter the bunkers.
Coincidentally, Meade is not the only person predicting that the Earth will be destroyed soon. The American entrepreneur, Robert Vicino also holds similar belief; although Vicino is unable to give a specific date of when the destruction is likely to occur, he believes it’s just around the corner.
Vicino is the founder of the Vivos Group, a Californian-based company that proposes to build hardened underground shelters designed to withstand future disasters and life-extinction catastrophes. Currently, Vivos has completed the construction of a 10,000-square-foot (0.093 ha) bunker in the state of Indiana. Others are still under construction in other states. Even as of April 2012, Vicino revealed his company had approximately 25,000 subscribers, of whom 1,000 had bought shares entitling them to space in the bunkers. This of course confirms Meade’s assertion that some people believe that planet Earth’s days are numbered.
“There is no doubt about it is coming. It is going to be epic, right out of the Bible. If you survive and you are injured, burned from radiation, you are going to survive off the land, on the streets, with the rats and with the other people – that is called hell on earth,” says Vicino.
Conspiracy theorists have predicted many times in the past that an unknown planet beyond Neptune – called Nibiru (Planet X) – is going to destroy Earth. Of course, these predictions have failed. But adherents to this theory won’t stop; they’re still expecting it to happen.
In December 2015, it was widely expected among these theorists that Earth would be destroyed. Prior to December 2015, it was predicted in 2012 that the unknown planet would smash into Earth to coincide with the Mayan apocalypse. Before this prediction also, Nancy Lieder, an American website writer who claims to have an alien implant in her brain, predicted in 2003 that a planet would destroy Earth.
However, NASA has consistently dismissed these wild claims that a planet is on course to destroy Earth. According to NASA, Nibiru and other stories about unknown planets are all a hoax.
The agency believes there is no factual basis for these claims, saying if Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, making it visible, by now, to the naked eye.
echaria Sitchin, a Soviet-born American writer, first wrote about Nibiru in his widely publicized book ‘The 12th Planet,’ in 1976. Sitchin claimed in the book that Nibiru was inhabited by a race of ‘ancient aliens’ – the Annunaki – who had created the human race.
The book was purchased by thousands, and is still relevant to many people throughout the United States and other parts of the world.
“This really is the first ironclad association of a fast radio burst with another astronomical source, so it’s a pretty huge result,” said Duncan Lorimer, an astronomer at West Virginia University who reported the first detection of a fast radio burst (FRB) in 2007.
FRBs are extremely brief pulses of radio waves, flaring with the power of about 500 million suns. Scientists have recorded just 18 of these signals, but studies suggest there could be as many as 10,000 a day. Their unpredictability makes them difficult to spot, and they appear to come from all over the sky.
Understanding these bursts may open up a new field in astronomy, added Lorimer, who was not involved in the new reports. Because they travel so far to reach Earth, FRBs could be a tool for studying the mostly empty space between galaxies and mapping the distribution of matter across the universe. But first astronomers have to figure out what exactly they are.
“I am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,” said Cornell astronomer Shami Chatterjee, the lead author of the new Nature paper.
Many scientists think the bursts are emitted by distant neutron stars, the super-dense embers of exploded suns. But some believe they must originate in our own galaxy. Still more suggest that FRBs could be caused by cataclysms like a supernova or a collision of two stars. This last theory was compelling because most FRB detections were one-off events — astronomers never spotted more than one flare from a single source.
In spring, researchers looking at archival data from Arecibo Observatory — one of the largest radio telescopes in the world — found evidence that bursts were repeatedly coming from the same spot in the sky. Each one carried the telltale signature of an FRB: the high frequency radio waves arrived first, followed by successively lower frequencies, which get stretched out and slowed down as they travel across space. The signal, called FRB 121102, was definitely repeating, and it certainly traveled a long way to reach Earth.
But where did it come from? To answer that question, Chatterjee and his colleagues turned to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a network of 27 radio telescopes spread over a 20-mile-wide area in the high grassland of New Mexico (Jodie Foster works there in the movie “Contact”). Each of the telescopes making up the VLA has a smaller diameter than the one at Arecibo, meaning they don’t take in very much of the sky. But combining the data from all 27 gives a very high-resolution glimpse of one small swatch of space — exactly what Chatterjee needed.
He applied for 10 hours of telescope time, thinking that would be plenty to catch FRB 121102 flaring. But he saw nothing. He applied for 40 more hours. Nothing again.
Finally, he asked for 40 more hours at the VLA, scheduled to coincide with 40 hours of time at Arecibo. During a trial run, the team caught its first flash from FRB 121102. Then it got eight more.
“Nine pulses captured with two telescopes — now we have enormous resolution,” Chatterjee said. “We’ve pinpointed a speck, to a 10th of an arcsecond [a unit of angular measurement] . . . where the burst is coming from.”
Next, scientists at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii trained their optical telescope on the speck nailed down by Chatterjee. Their scan of the sky revealed that FRB 121102’s source is 2.5 billion light years away, within a very faint dwarf galaxy with about 1 percent of the mass of the Milky Way.
The discovery allows researchers to rule out some proposed explanations for FRBs. They can’t be cataclysmic, since their source needs to survive whatever causes them in order to repeat, and they definitely don’t originate within our galaxy.
Observations from the European VLBI network — an array of telescopes spread all over the globe — offered an even more precise snapshot of the FRBs’ origin point, which seems to coincide with another, more persistent source of radio waves. Those signals resemble the radio emissions that come from supermassive black holes. But those types of black holes are typically found only in bright galaxies — not small faint ones like that identified by the astronomers at Gemini.
Another possible explanation involves active galactic nuclei (bright compact regions at the centers of galaxies) emitting jets that vaporize blobs of plasma.
Chatterjee said he’s inclined to believe FRBs are pulses emitted by magnetars — neutron stars with an especially strong magnetic field. These stars are already known to emit high-energy radiation, like gamma rays and X-rays. It would be unusual for a magnetar to flare as brightly as an FRB suggests it must. But Chatterjee said that blobs of plasma surrounding the star could act as a lens, coalescing in just the right manner to focus the light toward Earth.
“It’s not a slam-dunk explanation,” Chatterjee said, noting that scientists usually are drawn to the simplest possible interpretations of their results. But for now, he thinks it’s the most compelling theory.
It remains to be seen whether FRB 121102 — the only one that is known to repeat — is representative of all other fast radio bursts. Astronomers wonder whether there are two classes of FRB, some that repeat and some that come from cataclysms that can only happen once.
All this uncertainty has hobbled previous attempts to identify a source of FRBs. One researcher at Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope spent months trying to track down what she thought were strange signals related to FRBs — only to discover they were actually blasts from the microwave oven in the lab kitchen.
In February, an international team of astronomers announced in Nature that they’d traced one of the flashes back to a galaxy 6 billion light years from Earth based on an “afterglow” they saw emanating from the host galaxy. But that identification quickly fell apart when other researchers observed that the glow persisted long after the bursts came and went; two months later they reported that the purported burst was actually a flickering black hole. During those same two months, the researchers looking at Arecibo data announced that FRB 121102 was repeating — a discovery that shifted the field of FRB research under astronomers’ feet.
That’s how science works — it’s surprising, sometimes silly and almost always messy, especially when it involves phenomena researchers don’t fully understand.
Heino Falcke, an astronomer at Radboud University-Nijmegen in the Netherlands, invoked past missteps in his analysis of the new study for Nature: “As good detectives, we should avoid adopting newly emerging dogmas too soon, even when we think we have caught the suspect red-handed,” he wrote. “FRBs are nimble fugitives and are not necessarily all alike.”
Lorimer suggested that clarity might come from adopting Chatterjee’s “sit and stare method” — taking a telescope, pointing it at a known FRB source, and waiting to detect another pulse. This is no simple task; there are a limited number of radio telescopes in the world and an inexhaustible list of possible uses for them. On top of that, two of the U.S.’s top radio telescopes, Arecibo and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, are facing funding woes and could be shut down. But new instruments are about to come online, including China’s Tianyan (“eye of heaven”) telescope, whose 500-meter dish makes it the largest in the world.
But if astronomers can figure out where FRBs come from and why, they may start to use the signals to probe other mysteries.
“This phenomenon is so well tuned to explore the universe,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, an astronomer at West Virginia University and co-author of the new study. Their dispersion — the fact that high-frequency wavelengths arrive slightly before lower frequencies — can inform astronomers about the matter they encountered during their journey to Earth. The signals might even provide ways of testing Einstein’s theory of relativity, because they cross so much of the universe over such long spans of cosmological time.
“This detection has really broken open the gates of a new realm of science and discovery,” Burke-Spolaor said.
While Bitcoin still remains the most valued and widely used cryptocurrency, other types of cryptocurrency emerged last year, including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Monero, and Dash.
You’re off to a good start this year if you’ve invested in the financial commodity world of Bitcoin, as they have reached their highest prices in the last 3 years. Equally surprising though, is their fluctuating price – we can’t forget that only a few short months ago, the price of Bitcoin fell sharply.
In Nov. 2013, the Bitcoin digital web-based commodity had risen to $1,110. This was the first time the financial commodity had experienced such a high on the BPI (Bitstamp Price Index).
Although the 2013 rise is a notable milestone in the Bitcoin world, on Jan. 1, 2017, the financial commodity rose up to break the previous barrier, reaching $1,150 each. Bitcoin are much like the stock market – you constantly have to check them. While there are several hundred websites that provide real-time currency values for Bitcoin, Google is equally good for a quick viewing.
The fascinating aspect about the Bitcoin is that the revolutionary virtual/digital currency doesn’t have any type of central authority. Instead, this currency relies upon thousands upon thousands of computers from across the world to validate transactions, as well as to add new currency into the system.
Bitcoin is the world’s first and most famous cryptocurrency, and is developed around a Blockchain. Blockchains are a complex cryptographic protocol used to connect networks worldwide to oversee and verify which of the Bitcoin has been spent and by whom.
What makes this commodity so majestic within the world of hackers and digital terrorists, is that trying to identify a specific individual spending this currency is extremely difficult. This is due to the anonymity of the Bitcoin’s nature.
This digital cryptocurrency is known for its extreme volatility, however something as basic as the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox Exchange being hacked, only sent the price of Bitcoin dwindling down to a mere $400 in a matter of weeks.
Reuters concluded that most of the Bitcoin trading is performed in China. Since the turn of 2017, more than 5 million Bitcoin has been traded, and nearly 38 billion in Yen had been traded as well, reported Cryptocoin.
While Bitcoin still remains the most valued and widely used cryptocurrency, other types of cryptocurrency emerged last year, including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Monero, and Dash.
With the capability to get rid of at least 10 disabled satellites and rocket stages during a single mission that could last up to 6 months, the space cleaning spacecraft would run at least 20 cleaning missions during its 10-year lifespan and eliminate up to 200 defunct satellites.
There are more than 20,000 pieces of space junk ranging from the size of an apple to the size of a bus (such as old engine parts, old rockets, and abandoned satellites) currently trapped in Earth’s orbit.
NASA says they travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. While there are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger, there are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked.
Currently however, the Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced it is developing a spacecraft that would clean circumterrestrial space of disabled communication satellites and upper-stage rockets currently cluttering up the geostationary orbit (which goes along the equator, 36,000 meters above the sea level).
To further reduce space junk floating around the Earth’s orbit, Roscosmos is investing nearly 11 billion rubles (about $300 million) to implement the space garbage cleaning project, codenamed “Liquidator,” which is part of the draft Federal Space Program for 2016-2025.
Oleg Gorshkov, general director of TsNIIMASH (Roscosmos’ rocket and spacecraft scientific center), noted:
“The spacecraft is equipped with ion engines on opposite sides. The satellite approaches a defunct spacecraft and activates the engines on opposite sides. The cleaning spacecraft remains in place while “shooting” a stream from one of the engines to displace the defunct object from orbit. The latter will thus lose its speed and go off orbit. With the engine power of about 5 kW, the time to displace a target satellite will take up to 15 days, depending on the weight and dimensions. “
With a weight of about four tons and the capability to get rid of at least 10 disabled satellites and rocket stages during a single mission that could last up to 6 months, the space cleaning spacecraft would run at least 20 cleaning missions during its 10-year lifespan, which means the Liquidator will eliminate up to 200 defunct satellites that obstruct new space vehicles and communication satellites. Alexander Danilyuk, first deputy general director of TsNIIMash, explained:
“The space cleaner would have two options: either to lift the collected spacecraft and their fragments to a higher level where they would not be an impediment, or to de-orbit them and dump into the so-called spaceship cemetery off the Christmas Island in the Pacific. It is easier to lift the spacecraft to a higher orbit. It is possible to approach and seize the spacecraft, push them into a different orbit and proceed to the next task.”
“We have applied for a patent so that every satellite with an orbit of less than 500 kilometers is equipped with an elementary inflatable device for rapid evacuation from orbit whenever that is necessary. Once this ‘bubble’ device is deployed, it should become solid so that even depressurization does not alter its form. We can do that. The ‘bubble’ will sizably enlarge the satellite’s cross section to boost the braking effect of the residual atmosphere.
“According to estimates, the material for creating a bubble of two meters in diameter will initially occupy about 1.5 cubic decimeters. The device will be activated either by radio from the Earth or upon a failure of satellite systems. The device will cut the period of satellite removal from orbit, say from a 500-kilometer circular orbit, eight times to 1.5-2 years.”
