Posts Tagged ‘UCSD’
Lost samples from origin of life researcher shed new light
Stanley Miller gained fame with his 1953 experiment showing the synthesis of organic compounds thought to be important in setting the origin of life in motion. Five years later, he produced samples from a similar experiment, shelved them and, as far as friends and colleagues know, never returned to them in his lifetime.
50 years later, Jeffrey Bada, Miller’s former student and a current Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego professor of marine chemistry, discovered the samples in Miller’s laboratory material and made a discovery that represents a potential breakthrough in the search for the processes that created Earth’s first life forms…
“Much to our surprise the yield of amino acids is a lot richer than any experiment (Miller) had ever conducted,” said Bada.
The new findings support the case that volcanoes – a major source of atmospheric hydrogen sulfide today – accompanied by lightning converted simple gases into a wide array of amino acids, which are were in turn available for assembly into early proteins…
“Unbeknownst to him, he’d already done it in 1958,” said Bada.
The Bada lab is gearing up to repeat Miller’s classic experiments later this year. With modern equipment including a miniaturized microwave spark apparatus, experiments that took the elder researcher weeks to carry out could be completed in a day, Bada said.
Delightful find, research that panicked True Believers hits the news once again.
Not that this will appear on the front page of your newspaper, tomorrow. Or TV news. But, it did in 1953.
Could your car be an evil force? Or your toaster, for that matter?
Which kind of robot will be the first to arise and smite us? A study called Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile suggests we keep an eye on the family car…
Unlike the mindless jalopies of the past, it points out, “Today’s automobile is no mere mechanical device, but contains a myriad of computers.”
This myriad has powers to do good things for us humans, as well as bad things to us. Already, in some cases, the microchip hordes quietly, beneficently take control from the driver. The Lexus LS460 luxury sedan can automatically parallel-park itself. Many General Motors cars will soon have what the study calls “integration with Twitter”…
Limiting themselves to the here and now (“we concern ourselves solely with the vulnerabilities in today’s commercially available automobiles”), they tell, in professionally dull, let’s-remember-we’re-engineers fashion, how they conducted an experimental reign of terror…
The study focuses on automobiles. But indirectly, it forsees the day when our very toasters and teapots might turn against us. There is little publicly available research about the threat of hijackable household appliances.
In 1996, security experts based partly at the Rand Corporation wrote a report called Information Terrorism: Can You Trust Your Toaster?
No doubt Karl Rove still has a copy.
OTOH – I admit to have occasional concerns about my satellite TV DVR. I’ve been up in the middle of the night and witnessed strange patterns flashing in the assorted lights on the front control panel.
Grayheads watch more TV than younger people – enjoy it less
ESPN plans on the World Cup starting the spin for 3D TV
We usually scold our children and teenagers for watching too much TV. It turns out that their grandmas and grandpas spend even more of their time watching TV, and it is not good for them either, according to researchers…
In a study published online in advance of publication…UCSD researchers examined television use in a large, nationally representative sample that was collected by the Center for Health and Well Being at Princeton University. Using an innovative, diary-like assessment strategy called the Day Reconstruction Method, study participants were asked to measure how they spent their time and describe their experience of everyday activities.
“We found that older people spent a great deal more time watching TV than younger people did, yet they enjoyed the experience less,” said first author Colin A. Depp, PhD…“What the study underscored is that alternatives to television as entertainment are needed, especially in older adults…”
The authors were surprised to find that older adults experienced TV watching as less enjoyable than younger people. “It is reasonable to expect that older adults may enjoy TV more than younger ones do, because they have fewer demands on their time. Prior studies also suggest they may use TV to regulate negative emotions,” said co-author Dilip V, Jeste, MD…
“Yet, our study indicates that older adults report lower levels of positive emotion while watching TV when compared to other activities – which is not the case in younger adults.”
The researchers concluded that increasing public awareness of alternatives to TV watching and reducing barriers to alternative activities that are more socially and physically engaging could reduce TV use in older people and diminish the potential for associated negative health effects.
I fit the profile for more TV watching since I retired. The extra is sports and movies.
Accessibility to movies has increased with the addition of high definition quality. My favorite sport – proper football – has three channels dedicated to the task on DirecTV with ESPN adding more every season.
I think I balance much of the viewing time with dedicated walking, tightly scheduled exercise. I try.
My first reaction to the article only concerned the paucity of content for a proper news junkie like me. Since CNN disappeared into the maw of Time-Warner, there is damned little of interest or accuracy or need to watch TV news. DirecTV and their peers still lack the courage to open viewership to worldly sources like BBC World or AlJazeera English.
Do I enjoy it less? Well, it pisses me off more. The content that is.
Spammers cash in on narrow margins – is “stupid” in decline?
Phony spam site used by researchers
By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer. The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of dollars in profit every year.
It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.
For their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study.
They created several so-called “proxy bots” that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail.
The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.
The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations. “Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers.
Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate (.pdf) that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 a day or $3.5m per year.
This suggests to me that it should be possible to cripple the zombie networks these creeps use to disseminate their crap. Couldn’t you send out a patch which effectively disabled the bot function?
