Thousands of Chrysler vehicles can be hacked into from any computer connected to the internet, cutting out breaks, steering and transmission, according to two security experts and hackers who spend the last year creating a Uconnect hack.
Recently, a 2014 Jeep Cherokee was tested out by WIRED editor Andy Greenberg, who let the hackers attack his vehicle from the comfort of their couch as he proceeded down the highway.
Charlie Miller, security engineer at Twitter and Chris Valasek, director of vehicle safety research at Idactiv, triggered Greenberg’s PTSD by cranking the volume of the music and level of the fan in the vehicle, then activating the parking brake as the journalist drove down a busy highway.
So far, the hack has only been tested on the 2014 Jeep, but the team says that all late-model Chryslers equipped with Uconnect software are vulnerable.
According to Greenberg, who followed up on the security issue, Chrysler has since released a software update for the Uconnect issue. Chrysler posted a notice to its website informing its customers about a “software update to improve vehicle electronic security.”
For late-model Chryslers with Uconnect, owners are advised to update their software by entering their VIN number on Chryslers website, download the update to a USB, connect the USB to the vehicle, and answer the vehicle’s prompt, “Yes,” the owner confirms he wants to update the software.
This update is also a free service for anyone who brings their Chrysler into a dealership.
The age of homemade flying guns is upon us, as a Connecticut teenager demonstrated Tuesday, posting a YouTube video of a semi-automatic handgun strapped to a homemade helicopter drone, firing shots in the forest.
The Federal Aviation Administration is currently investigating 18-year-old Austin Haughwout from Clinton, Connecticut, who may have violated FAA regulations, which prohibit reckless operation of a model aircraft.
The teen created the multirotor last week, according to his father, who said it was done with the help of a Central Connecticut State University professor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCchlgezatc
This is not the first time Haughwout has made news with a drone. Last year the teen flew a drone near a woman at a beach, and the woman, Andrea Mears of Westbrook, Connecticut, was later charged for assaulting the teen. The video posted by Haughwout shows Mears physically assaulting him while calling him a pervert.
Are your rugrats babysat by the TV? Dr. Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal, who just completed an extensive study of the long-term effects of toddler TV viewing, says they might suffer for it later.
“Basically, too much time in front of the telly creates a time-debt for other enriching activities,” Pagani told The Speaker. “In early childhood children need live interaction to help their brains develop and to maximize their emotional intelligence. It is like IQ, we are born with a potential, but need interactions with people and objects in the environment to fully develop it. More television time means less time for play and less time in active social exchanges of ideas and information.”
In their most recent research, Pagani and her team surveyed the experience of almost 2,000 Canadian children and their parents, and found that kids were likely to be bullied in sixth grade an extra 11% for every 53 minutes of daily TV viewing at 29 months of age.
Not only were kids more likely to be bullied, but early television viewing was also found to be associated with deficits in problem solving ability, emotional control, peer play competence, social contact ability, and eye-contact — which is important for friendship and self-affirmation in relationships.
Dr. Linda Pagani
“Watching the telly is not an effortful activity, and thus it fosters lifestyle habits that are less energetic and there is less of a tolerance for more demanding interactions on a social level. It also does not hone shared eye contact, for which we are wired at birth. Therefore, less effortful interactions mean less activities that foster and reinforce shared eye contact. Eye contact is the most powerful mode of information exchange apart from talking and one reinforces the other.”
So how should a child’s day be broken up? Pagani referred to the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a professional association dedicated to the health and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults. Half of the 24 hours of their day should be spent sleeping, eating, and tending to hygiene, according to the AAP, which leaves 12 hours to fill. Of those 12 hours children should get no more than 1 to 2 hours of television per day. She pointed out, though, that the recommendations relate particularly to quality TV viewing time.
“Assuming the content is of quality not more than two hours per day for over age 2,” Pagani advised, “and try to favor other pastimes that involve interaction between the child and others, and add some creative play to that too.”
Pagani had a simple suggestion for busy parents who wanted to mitigate the negative effects of occupying their toddlers with television: “Lots of social interaction.”
Pagani also offered some broader context for understanding the role of television in the lives of children:
“Television is effortless — is this the kind of natural habit we want our children to develop? The brain is like a muscle and social, cognitive, and motor sedentariness (effortlessness) is detrimental to its architecture.
“Our previous research has shown that excessive televiewing has a long-term negative influence on children’s bio-psycho-social well-being,” Pagani told us, referring to a wealth of past research she and her team had completed, “therefore the AAP guidelines which discourage any viewing prior to age 2 and not more than two hours beyond age 2 are there to favor conditions for brain development and (intellectual, social, and physical) non-sedentary lifestyle habits.”
In a recently completed study, scientists at New York University Langone Medical Center’s department of population health have concluded that marijuana is not a gateway drug for teens.
Looking at high school seniors over the course of 11 years — seniors who had reported using marijuana in the past 12 months — the researchers found that although many teens did use other drugs, evidence showed that this was not due to using marijuana first.
“Most teens who use marijuana don’t progress to use of other drugs, and we believe this is evidenced in part by the fact that nearly two-thirds of these marijuana-using teens did not report use of any of the other illicit drugs we examined,” said lead author Joseph Palamar.
“The majority of adults in the U.S. have at least tried marijuana, and we know the majority has never gone on to use another drug, yet we tend to treat all drug use as pathological,” he added.
So what does cause teens to use drugs?
Two significant causes found by the study were boredom and a desire to expand consciousness.
Almost one-third of the teens in the study cited boredom as the reason they used drugs. This group was 43 percent more likely to use cocaine and 56 percent more likely to try a hallucinogen other than LSD.
Around one-fifth reported a desire to achieve insight or understanding. These teens were 51 percent more likely to try a hallucinogen other than LSD.
The drug-experimenter group actually had a decreased risk of using any of the other eight drugs asked about in the study.
But boredom and the quest for greater understanding don’t explain all drug users, the researchers stated, and Palamar stressed the importance of finding out the real reasons people use mind-altering substances.
Marcia Lee Taylor, president and CEO of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, agreed. “No matter what drug we’re talking about, motivations are really important,” she said. “We need to understand what is motivating a teen to use if we want to know how to prevent it.”
“Science has consistently shown that environmental factors, such as ready access to other illicit substances, and personal traits, such as a propensity toward risk-seeking behavior, are associated with the decision to move from marijuana to other illicit substances,” commented Paul Armentano, deputy director of the pro-marijuana group NORML. “But marijuana’s drug chemistry likely does not play a significant role, if any role, in this decision.”
A battle between the giant humanoid robots of America and Japan is in the works, as MegaBot USA’s challenge to Japan’s Kuratas Mecha has been formally accepted.
Kuratas, the only giant humanoid robot manufacturer besides MegaBot, is set to meet the US bot suit sometime next year. Both bots will be equipped with paintball guns and will be piloted by teams made up of engineers of the rivaling nations.
“SUIDOBASHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES! MegaBots, Inc. challenges you to a duel!” the US team told Kuratas from its YouTube channel (video below). “You have a giant robot, we have a giant robot — we have a duty to the science fiction lovers of this world to fight them to the death.
“Prepare yourselves, and name the battlefield. In one year, we fight.”
Kuratas thanked the American team for their challenge, and specified a desire to engage in hand-to-hand battle: “But you know, we really need… MELEE COMBAT! If we’re gonna win this, I want them to punch them to scrap and knock them down them down to do it.”
Do you know the reason swimmers get red, irritated eyes? It’s not the chlorine itself.
It’s due to the reaction of chlorine mixing with urine, according to Thomas Lachocki, PhD, CEO of the National Swimming Pool Foundation.
And according to Michele Hlavsa, RN, MPH, chief of the Center for Disease Control’s Healthy Swimming Program, the average person brings to the pool:
Billions of skin microbes
One or two soda cans’ worth of sweat
One cup of pee
0.14 grams of poop
And kids can carry even greater amounts of germ-laden matter. They can bring up to 1 grams of feces into a pool.
“If 1,000 kids go to a waterpark, then 10,000 grams — or 22 pounds — of poop will potentially rinse off of their bodies into the water,” noted Hlavsa.
Chlorine, the disinfectant that is busy cleaning the pool of all this filth, is sore pressed to really deal with germs as well, such as E. coli, norovirus and legionella, which can lead to sickness if even small amounts are swallowed.
“People believe that the water is sterile because it’s a pool with chlorine in it, but the reality is as soon as you stick a human body in water, it’s no longer sterile. There are bacteria and germs that can get in the water,” said Lachocki.
The CDC recommends maintaining chlorine levels at around 1.0 and 3.0 parts per million, and testing pool’s chlorine levels regularly. They also recommend showering before swimming, avoiding getting water in your mouth, checking diapers every hour, and refraining from reliving yourself in the pool.
New rheological research has created fluid viscosity in which the viscous resistance to shear disappears. Researchers at University Paris-Sud in France employed swimming bacteria and organized them to push past the dissipative effects of viscous loss to create a “superfluidlike” suspension.
The collectively organized “pusher swimmers” may be harvested to power tiny mechanical devices such as microfluid pumps, the researchers believe.
Paris-Sud’s Hector Lopez and his team studied fluid-bacteria mixtures, measuring their viscosity within a container that applied shear stress with a rotating outer wall.
They found that the use of swimming E. coli bacteria reduced the viscosity for low to moderate stress values. But when the team energized the E. coli with extra nutrients — “doping” them, as the researchers referred to it — the E. coli’s heightened swimming activity created below-zero viscosity similar to the viscosity of superfluids like liquid helium.
The secret to this swimming success is in the organization of organisms that force fluid to flow out from their tails. When their efforts are aligned collectively, their bulk “push” contributes to the velocity gradient of their liquid environment.
The report, “Turning Bacteria Suspensions into Superfluids,” was completed by Dr. Héctor Matías López, Jérémie Gachelin, Carine Douarche, Harold Auradou, and Eric Clément and published in Physical Review Letters.
Large amounts of antimatter have been detected in the midst of thunderclouds, according to University of New Hampshire physicists who have been working on the problem for several years. The original observation of positron signatures — six years ago when Dr. Joseph Dwyer accidentally flew through several thunderclouds in a research plane – caused the scientists such skepticism that they refrained from publishing their findings.
“Thunderstorms are very strange places that we have only begun to explore,” lead researcher Dwyer, who is also a professor and head of the University of New Hampshire’s Physics and Space Sciences program, told The Speaker.
Dr. Joseph Dwyer
“The signatures of the positrons were very clear in the data. However, because the observations were so strange, we were hoping that further observations or modeling would give us some insight into what was going on. Eventually, we gave up and decided we needed to publish the observations, even though we couldn’t explain them.“
Familiar to most people, intense electric fields are created within thunder clouds, which producing lighting, but the clouds also create less well-known phenomena such as positrons, a form of antimatter.
Antimatter – composed of antiparticles – is a very rare material because it is annihilated as soon as it encounters the particles of matter.
“Of course thunderstorms are made up mostly of normal stuff, e.g. water and ice,” explained Dwyer. “Occasionally they can make more exotic particles such as positrons. We are not certain how they manage to do this.”
Dwyer’s data shows that thunderclouds produce antimatter, as well as the Y-rays — highly energetic photons — he was studying when he flew his Gulfstream V jet through a group of thunderstorms in 2009.
The pilots of the plane were aiming for what they mistakenly thought was the Georgia coast. When they entered what was actually a line of thunderstorms, the plane rolled back and plunged downwards.
“I was in the back with the instrument,” said Dwyer. “For most of it, I had my eyes closed. When I did look, it was cloud and I couldn’t see very far.”
During the ordeal, the particle detector fitted to the plane picked up Y-ray spikes at an energy of 511 kiloelectronvolts. The energy level is that of the annihilation of antimatter particles.
“These were large enhancements that appeared to happen without the things that we would normally expect to occur, such as gamma rays,” commented Dwyer. “This makes is very hard to explain where the positrons came from.
“The positrons and gamma rays that we recorded make up a very small part of the storm. There are some models, however, that suggest that they may sometimes get numerous enough to discharge the cloud like lightning.”
The team continues to search for answers in fresh data collection. Scientists are sending balloons into storms to collect data. Additionally, the US National Science Foundation is planning to send an anti-tank tough A-10 Warthog into such storms.
Disturbance is a condition depended on by the species indigenous to coastal dunes, according to Washington University researchers who just completed a study putting numbers to claims that the restoration of such conditions is necessary for the variety and vibrancy of the West Coast’s dune life.
“Disturbance is actually a good thing in many ecosystems – in some places disturbance is supposed to be there and it’s actually required for the survival of important community members,” Dr. Eleanor Pardini, assistant director of environmental studies at St. Louis’s Washington University, told The Speaker.
Dr. Eleanor Pardini
“Some ecosystems are adapted to experience frequent disturbance, such as regular flooding along a river, or hurricanes and tidal changes in wetlands, or wind and wave action on dunes. These ecosystems can provide valuable ecosystem services, such as absorbing storm surge or absorbing storm water or high water during floods. If the early successional species actually need the disturbance to thrive, and if the communities need both early and late successional species to be diverse and intact, and we value these ecosystems for their function, then there is a compelling reason to restore historic disturbance regimes.”
Such a restoration of disturbance is what is necessary for the vitality of certain coastal dune species, according to recent research completed by Pardini and colleagues Kyle Vickstrom and Dr. Tiffany Knight. The research provides numbers that demonstrate the necessity of disturbance for germination of Tidestrom’s lupine and beach layia, which, Pardini noted, play a role in the ecosystem of the dunes.
“Coastal dunes are dynamic places,” explained Pardini. “They move in response to wind and wave action. The wind action creates undulating dune topography with ridges atop the dunes and low-lying areas between dunes. Some of these low-lying swales or slacks can collect water and host aquatic communities.”
The life that thrives in such areas thrives in a naturally disturbed environment, she continued.
Tidestrom’s lupine
“In ecological terms, a disturbance is a relatively discrete event that changes the physical environment and disrupts the community or ecosystem in some way,” stated Pardini. “Disturbances include things like hurricanes, floods, wind storms, fire, or grazing by elk, bison, or cattle, or in the case of dunes, frequent wind and wave action. Disturbance events often remove some vegetation, and open up space, light, or resources. This is what we call ‘early successional habitat’ Some species do particularly well in these environments – maybe they are good dispersers that can arrive to an area and utilize resources, or they germinate well in the low competition environment.”
The recent study measured plant germination on coastal areas at which European beachgrass had been introduced in the 1880s in order to hold the sand in place. The success of the project led to a beachfront that mounted higher and steeper, and which prevented sand from moving inland, but which aversely affected the species that had been habiting the dunes.
“In the case of the dunes at Point Reyes, federally endangered plant species like Tidestrom’s lupine and beach layia thrive in early successional habitat. Threatened western snowy plovers nests in open sandy areas at the front of the dunes near the beach. They can’t nest or forage in high foredunes where sand is locked into place by introduced grasses.
Western snowy plover
She directed us toward the National Park Service’s ongoing project to restore the original habitat of the dunes at Point Reyes.
“Restoration of the historic disturbance regime is accomplished by removing introduced grasses, which can be done with a combination of mechanical removal, herbicide, fire, and hand-pulling, depending on the location. Different methods are chosen for different areas based on the local and adjacent plant and animal communities, soil substrates, and community concerns.”
Some microbe species produce nutrients that are consumed by neighboring species, which in turn share nutrients that they produce, but a mystery of this relationship has puzzled scientists: Why do some of the shared molecules have chemical units that seemingly have the sole function of slowing the diffusion of nutrients to neighboring microbes? A team of researchers from Boston University thinks they may have found the answer in a consideration of cooperation in game theory.
“The diffusion of small molecules could have a profound effect on microbial population dynamics,” Boston University’s Rajita Menon told The Speaker. “The main effect of this diffusion is the reduction of the effective strength of natural selection, which can lead to the loss of mutualism.”
Rajita Menon
“We provide a theory for the phenomena observed in recent experiments that could potentially explain why cooperatively growing microbes modulate the diffusivities of secreted nutrients.”
When microbes produce shared nutrients at a small diffusion rate, they are brought close together to intermix, and this cooperation is stable over time. But, Menon and her adviser and follow researcher Dr. Kirill Korolev believe, as a species releases nutrients into its environment at a greater rate, mixing decreases.
This is because neighboring organisms can benefit from the diffusion even at significant distances from the producing organisms, and this means that the producing organisms lose their neighborhood benefits.
When two species share nutrients, the researchers found, the species that diffuses nutrients more slowly dominates the relationship. It can even force its neighbor towards extinction.
Biologists have used standard game theory to try to understand why some microbes produce biomolecules that have the sole purpose of slowing diffusion of nutrients to neighboring molecules, but until now the theory has not brought satisfactory answers. Menon and Korolev, however, state that the model can still be used if we consider that greater sharing of metabolites reduces cooperation strength, causing a nonequilibrium phase transition toward species extinction.
Relation of species coexistence and nutrient diffusion in microbes (Figure from the report)
“Traditional game theory considers pair-wise microbe to microbe interactions under the assumption that microbes interact only with their closest neighbors,” Menon told us. “However, unlike human societies or bee colonies, microbial communities rarely rely on direct contact. Instead, microbes primarily communicate through a many to many exchange of diffusible molecules. Our theory describes how nutrient diffusion renormalizes the strength of selection and influences the spatial distribution of species. We are able to integrate the complex effects of nutrient diffusion in our model while retaining the essential simplicity and accessibility of game theory. “
“Simple models of cooperation in microbial ecosystems have not been able to take nutrient diffusion into account, while more complicated models that try to do so are difficult to analyze and test. Our work was motivated by this gap in understanding that could be potentially important to maintaining cooperation in microbial colonies. The results of our study indicate that fast-diffusing nutrients weaken mutualism.”
There is, the researchers conclude, a critical level of nutrient sharing the creates stable cooperation over time.
“It is… harder to establish mutualism than we would expect from models that neglect nutrient diffusion,” Menon stated. “Further, species can gain a fitness advantage by producing faster or slower diffusing nutrients in a natural environment. They have an incentive to actively control the diffusion constants of their nutrients.”
According to new research by UCI scientists, fetus’, babies’ and children’s brains need the types of fatty acids found in fish to develop. Dietary deficiencies in this area actually limits brain growth, Susana Cohen-Cory, professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California-Irvine’s School of Biological Sciences and lead researcher on the study, found.
The study represents proof for the first time of how n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids cause changes in the molecules of a developing brain. Constraints caused by deficiency of these nutrients result in limited growth of neurons and connecting synapses because docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is required neural and synaptic development, is based on fatty acids.
The team used African clawed frogs. The frogs were an excellent model, according to the researchers, because the embryos develop outside of the mother and are translucent, so the development of neurons and synapses can be observed in the intact, living embryos.
The team found that when they cut off the fatty acids to female frogs, the healthy growth of the central nervous system of their tadpole offspring was inhibited — poorly developed neurons and limited numbers of synapses resulted.
When the researchers returned the fatty acids to the next generation of mother frogs, neuronal and synaptic development returned to normal for the third generation.
The foods that have n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids include salmon, mackerel, trout, sardines, herring and other oily fish — which are the richest source of this nutrient. They can also be found in eggs and meat. Other foods, such as nuts, whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables and nuts also have the fatty acids, but much less. Oily fish contain 10 to 100 times more dietary DHA than the non-meat options.
Additionally, DHA is present in breast milk. It is also an ingredient in baby formulas and is a supplement for premature babies.
The outbreak of HIV in southern Indiana’s Scott County has affected 130 people, according to the region’s health officials, bringing the number up by 24 since last week. One hundred twenty cases are now confirmed in addition to 10 preliminary positives.
“We have seen a significant increase in the number of HIV cases reported this week, but we believe that is because we have been able to offer more testing with the help of additional staff from the CDC,” State Health Commissioner Jerome Adams said.
“This sharp increase in the number of HIV-positive cases demonstrates just how critical it is that we are able to locate and test people who have been exposed so that they can avoid spreading it to others and get medical treatment.”
Health authorities have identified the cause of the outbreak in drug users sharing needles.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working in the region at the reuest of the Indiana State Department to help local authorities investigate the outbreak. The CDC is providing help testing and contacting people who potentially have been exposed to the disease.
The Scott County Health Department this week began a mobile needle exchange. The new service, as well as the “One-Stop Shop” created by executive order last month, will compliment the Scott County’s needle exchange program.
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