Enricofermi

Astronomers have discovered the first Trojan asteroid sharing the orbit of Uranus, and believe 2011 QF99 is part of a larger-than-expected population of transient objects temporarily trapped by the gravitational pull of the solar system's giant planets.

In a recent survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents, a majority of respondents (62 percent) said they feel America should take steps to address climate change. More than three out of four survey respondents (77 percent) said the United States should use more renewable energy sources, and of those, most believe that this change should begin immediately.

Qaher-313 Not real. Khouz News How do rogue states compete with a superpower? Photoshop, apparently.

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Doctoring photographs is a great April Fools' Day prank, but for some dictatorships it's a way of life.

In modern times, the best government photoshop jobs have been Iranian and North Korean. (No, Iran, you can't just copy-paste extra missiles into a photo.) Here are six of the most ridiculously fake images from the past few years.

Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new device specifically aimed at the gaming market. According to unnamed developer sources speaking to PocketGamer, Apple has been talking about its plans with third-party developers during the Game Developers Conference this week, hinting that a dedicated game controller is on the way.

The site claims Apple might announce such a device as soon as April, a month that is loosely rumored for another Apple media event. This time of year would traditionally be reserved for iPad announcements, but Apple's decision to update the full-sized iPad (and introduce the iPad mini) last October has thrown predictions off-schedule. That said, the as-yet-unannounced April event might well be yet another iPad reveal, but PocketGamer believes Apple plans to shift its focus to gaming for the upcoming event.

There are reasons to be skeptical of this one—PocketGamer claims Apple booked a conference room at GDC under a pseudonym and has been holding secret meetings with developers to talk about the game controller. This seems unlikely given Apple's heavy focus on secrecy even among its own employees, but not entirely impossible—Apple does occasionally bring in third parties to co-brainstorm at its Cupertino campus.

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Automatic systems that analyse gestures and facial expressions may soon be helping psychologists pick up the easily missed symptoms of depression (full text available to subscribers)

What explains the incredible variety of life on Earth? It seems obvious. Evolution, of course! But perhaps not the evolution most people grew up with. Some ecologists say the theory needs an update: They've proposed a new dynamic driving the emergence of new species, one that doesn't require adaptations or the fittest's survival.

Pratibha Gai, winner of a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science award, reveals how her molecular film-making lets us control chemical reactions better

Digg revealed details about a forthcoming RSS reader in a blog post today. The service will perform much like Google Reader in that it will aggregate content from various feeds, but Digg said it also hopes to “add value to the sources of information” by integrating services like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, reddit, and LinkedIn. The ultimate goal is to make all of these items easier to peruse and organize in an online reader. “We likely won’t get everything we want into [version one], but we believe it’s worth exploring,” wrote Digg.

The post also outlined how the company had long planned to build something like Reader, but it didn't actively pursue the idea until Google told the world about Reader's “imminent shutdown." Digg softly announced its own RSS intentions in a blog post last week, and an overwhelming number of responses encouraged the company's decision to push forward with the plan.

Digg said that although the project will be a huge undertaking for its small team, it’s confident it can ship a veritable replacement for Reader. Digg will work with its users to ensure that the product is up to their standards, and it invited those who are interested to join a mailing list as development begins. The company is also explicitly seeking developers who “want to lend a hand.”

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After publishing an especially challenging quantum mechanics article, it's not uncommon to hear some of our readers complain that their head hurts. Presumably, they mean that the article gave them a (metaphorical) headache. But it is actually possible that challenging your brain does a bit of physical damage to the nerve cells of the brain. Researchers are reporting that, following situations where the brain is active, you might find signs of DNA damage within the cells there. The damage is normally restored quickly, but they hypothesize that the inability to repair it quickly enough may underlie some neurological diseases.

This research clearly started out as an attempt to understand Alzheimer's disease. The authors were working with mice that were genetically modified to mimic some of the mutations associated with early-onset forms of the disease in humans. As part of their testing, the team (based at UCSF) looked for signs of DNA damage in the brains of these animals. They generally found that the indications of damage went up when the brains of mice were active—specifically, after they were given a new environment to explore.

That might seem interesting on its own, but the surprise came when they looked at their control mice, which weren't at elevated risk of brain disorders. These mice also showed signs of DNA damage (although at slightly lower levels than the Alzheimer's-prone mice).

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Prepare to enter the shadowy world of Tinfoil Tuesday. This week, an extraterrestrial bodyguard protects the president, according to conspiracy theorists. But the White House dismisses the allegations and says it's too costly.

The US Treasury will insist that virtual currencies comply with anti-money-laundering laws just as Bitcoin hits a record high of $70

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Being exposed to arguments between parents is associated with the way babies' brains process emotional tone of voice, according to a new study. Infants were found to respond to an angry tone of voice, even when they're asleep.

What is it about the extra chromosome inherited in Down syndrome -- chromosome 21 -- that alters brain and body development? Researchers have new evidence that points to the protein SNX27. SNX27 is inhibited by a molecule encoded on chromosome 21. The study shows that SNX27 is reduced in human Down syndrome brains. Restoring SNX27 in Down syndrome mice improves cognitive function and behavior.

ODESSA, TX—In the midst of yet another embarrassing clean-up, local woman Melissa Crosby, 43, told reporters Thursday that her old refrigerator has completely lost the ability to control when it releases water.

CERN researchers confirm that they have finally identified the elusive Higgs Boson particle and destroyed it forever.

The new Thumbs & Ammo blog started as a joke amongst friends in England, but when it hit the internet it quickly became a viral hit. Contributors photoshop guns out of famous movie stills, replacing the weapons with a thumbs up.

Beekeepers and environmental activists are suing the US Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ban neonicotinoid insecticides

Scientists have shown that a single nanowire can concentrate the sunlight up to 15 times of the normal sun light intensity. The results are surprising and the potential for developing a new type of highly efficient solar cells is great.

A female great tits' (Parus major) appearance is shown to signal healthy attributes in offspring in a new paper. The black stripe across her breast and white patches on her cheeks correlate to a chick’s weight at two weeks and immune strength respectively -- though the former seems to signal a genetic benefit and the latter can affect an ‘adopted’ chick’s health, suggesting nurture is involved.

Aurich Lawson

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was approaching entry-level "script kiddie stuff." This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking conceptually—I can't hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I'm the very definition of a "script kiddie," someone who needs the simplified and automated tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn't manage if left to his own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once logged into port 25 of our school's unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly placed to test that assertion.

It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and the resources of the Internet, successfully:

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Daisy Morris, Dinosaur Hunter via BBC 4-year-old Daisy Morris found some bones while strolling on the beach--a few years later, she now has a pterosaur named after her.

A few years ago, while strolling down a beach on the Isle of Wight (a small island in the English Channel), 4-year-old Daisy Morris stumbled on something unusual. She'd always been interested in dinosaurs, and had started hunting for fossils a year earlier with her mother. But this looked a bit different--blackened bones sticking out of the sand that didn't look quite familiar.

She took them to an archaeologist who discovered that the bones were fossils from the early Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, and that they belonged to a previously undiscovered creature. Four years later, the study was published in PLoS One, explaining that the bones came from a small species of pterosaur, a flying dinosaur, which has been named in Daisy's honor: Vectidraco daisymorrisae.

Pterosaurs have been found before on the Isle of Wight; in fact, the Isle is one of the richest dinosaur sites in all of Europe. You can even see dinosaur footprints at one part of the beach at low tide. So it's not too surprising that after Daisy's discovery, researchers dug a bit further and managed to come out with almost a full skeleton of the 12-foot-long flying 'saur, which will be displayed at the National History Museum.

[via BBC]