Spetember 14, 2011

Good Morning,

Technology breeds new and exciting means to accomplish all sorts of things. But with technological convenience comes technological problems. WiFi breaching is examined in the second article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Material could detect nuke 'suitcase bomb'

EVANSTON, Ill. - New materials to detect radiation may lead to a handheld device for detecting nuclear weapons or materials such as a "bomb in a suitcase," U.S. researchers say. "The terrorist attacks of 9/11 heightened interest in this area of security, but the problem remains a real challenge," Northwestern University chemistry Professor Mercouri G. Kanatzidis said in a release issued by the school Monday. "We have designed promising semiconductor materials that, once optimized, could be a fast, effective and inexpensive method for detecting dangerous materials such as plutonium and uranium." The researchers developed new semiconductor materials from heavy elements that, when struck by gamma rays from a suspect material, emit electrons. Because every element has a particular spectrum, the signal of the detected electron emissions identifies the suspect material. One hurdle for the researchers is that most heavy metals have a lot of mobile electrons, so electrons excited by gamma radiation are hard to detect. "It's like having a bucket of water and adding one drop -- the change is negligible," Kanatzidis explained. "We needed a heavy element material without a lot of electrons. This doesn't exist naturally so we had to design a new material." They developed two new semiconductor materials, cesium-mercury-sulfide and cesium-mercury-selenide. "Our materials are very promising and competitive," Kanatzidis said. "With further development, they should outperform existing hard radiation detector materials."


Study looks at WiFi attacks, responses

RALEIGH, N.C. - U.S. researchers say they can measure how seriously differing types of attacks would disrupt a WiFi network -- a step toward improved security technologies. WiFi networks, allowing computer users to access the Internet via radio signals, are commonplace in both large businesses and at local coffee shops, and are becoming more and more important for both business and personal communication, researchers at North Carolina State University said in a release Monday. The researchers examined two WiFi attack types -- persistent attacks, in which the attack persists non-stop until it can be identified and disabled, and intermittent attacks, which block access on a periodic basis, making them harder to identify and stop. They developed a measure called an "order gain" to compare the impact of the attack strategies in various scenarios. For example, if an attacker has an 80 percent chance of accessing the network, and other users have the other 20 percent, the order gain would be 4. A WiFi network can only serve a single computer at a time, and normally functions by rapidly cycling through requests from multiple computers. Therefore, attacks work by giving the attacker greater access to the network, which effectively blocks other users. "If we want to design effective countermeasures," Wenye Wang, N.C. State professor of electrical and computer engineering, said, "we have to target the attacks that can cause the most disruption. "It's impossible to prevent every conceivable attack." Countermeasures should focus on continuous attacks that target networks with large numbers of users, because that scenario represents the largest order gain, the researchers said.


Ancient toothy predator fish discovered

PHILADELPHIA - A species of predatory fish that lived in the oceans 375 million years ago has been identified from a fossil discovered in Canada, researchers said. Scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia say the creature prowled the waterway of ancient North America during the Devonian Period, before animals with backbones existed on land. The Devonian, from 415 million to 360 million years ago, is often referred to as the Age of Fishes because of the rich variety of aquatic forms that populated the ancient seas, lagoons and streams, an academy release said Monday. The fish, named Laccognathus embryi, probably grew to about 5 or 6 feet long and had a wide head with small eyes and strong jaws lined with large piercing teeth, researchers said. "I wouldn't want to be wading or swimming in waters where this animal lurked," academy researcher Edward "Ted" Daeschler said. "Clearly these Late Devonian ecosystems were vicious places, and Laccognathus filled the niche of a large, bottom-dwelling, sit-and-wait predator with a powerful bite." The fossil was discovered on Ellesmere Island in the remote Nunavut Territory of Arctic Canada.


Violent climate observed on distant planet

TORONTO - Canadian astronomers say they've detected evidence of violent weather on a distant world, possibly a storm bigger than any detected on any other planet. University of Toronto scientists conducting a survey of nearby brown dwarfs -- objects with mass between that of dwarf stars and giant planets -- used an infrared camera on a telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to capture repeated images of a brown dwarf dubbed 2MASS 2139 over several hours, observing the largest variations of brightness ever seen on a cool brown dwarf, a university release said Monday. "The best explanation is that brighter and darker patches of its atmosphere are coming into our view as the brown dwarf spins on its axis," researcher Jacqueline Radigan said while presenting the study results at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The brightness variations changed over weeks and months, the researchers said, suggesting that cloud patterns in its atmosphere are evolving with time. "We might be looking at a gigantic storm raging on this brown dwarf, perhaps a grander version of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter in our own solar system, or we may be seeing the hotter, deeper layers of its atmosphere through big holes in the cloud deck," study co-author Ray Jayawardhana said.

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