Gizmorama - December 3, 2012

Good Morning,

Here's something scary to think about - a distant sun is secretly devouring its planet. WHAT?!

Learn about this frightening story and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- New technique takes on email spammers --*
MONTREAL - Canadian computer scientists say they're working on a system to fight unwanted emails as spammers resort to high-tech attempts to fool automatic filters. Spam email hawking miracle pills and targeting the gullible with tales of offshore bank accounts containing untold fortunes used to be mostly text-based but spammers have turned to using images embedded in the email to outwit existing spam filtering programs. Researchers at Concordia University in Montreal say a new statistical framework for spam filtering can quickly and efficiently block unwanted messages. "The majority of previous research has focused on the textual content of spam emails, ignoring visual content found in multimedia content, such as images," doctoral candidate Ola Amayri said. "By considering patterns from text and images simultaneously, we've been able to propose a new method for filtering out spam," she said. New spam messages often employ sophisticated tricks such as deliberately obscuring text, combining words with symbols and using groups of the same images with different backgrounds and colors that might contain random text. "Spammers keep adapting their methods so that they can trick the spam filters," Amayri said. Traditional spam filters are powerless to stop such messages because they normally focus on either text or images but rarely both, she said. "Our new method for spam filtering is able to adapt to the dynamic nature of spam emails and accurately handle spammers' tricks by carefully identifying informative patterns, which are automatically extracted from both text and images content of spam emails."


*-- Boston said riddled with natural gas leaks --*
BOSTON - Boston's aging natural-gas pipeline system is rife with more than 3,000 leaks, some of which could pose explosion risks, researchers say. A study by researchers at Boston University and Duke University found 3,356 separate natural gas leaks under the streets of Boston, a release from Boston University said Tuesday. "While our study was not intended to assess explosion risks, we came across six locations in Boston where gas concentrations exceeded the threshold above which explosions can occur," BU earth and environment Professor Nathan Phillips said. In addition to the explosion hazard, the researchers said, natural gas also poses a major environmental threat because methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that degrades air quality. The leaks were distributed evenly across Boston neighborhoods and were associated with old cast-iron underground pipes, they said. "Repairing these leaks will improve air quality, increase consumer health and safety, and save money," Duke researcher Robert B. Jackson said. The researchers said their study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, could guide policymakers and utilities as they work to replace and repair leaking natural gas pipeline infrastructure.


*-- Distant sun secretly devouring its planet --*
LONDON - A distant planet is being devoured by its own sun with the cataclysmic event taking place invisibly behind a veil absorbing all light, British astronomers say. Researchers with Britain's Wide Angle Search for Planets consortium first discovered the planet WASP-12 b in 2008, orbiting extremely close to its parent star, Britain's Open University reported Tuesday. The distance between the star and planet is so small that a superheated gas cloud has been boiled off the planet, some of which is feeding the star while some escapes into space, creating a veil or shroud that makes observation difficult by blocking many wavelengths of light. Astronomers said a structure like this had never before been observed around a star. "It's as though a veil has been drawn over the planet's demise," the Open University's Carole Haswell said. The new observations were made with the Hubble Space Telescope using near-ultraviolet light.

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