We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

I sit here gob-smacked, pondering the implications of incorporating chips made by, if not an enemy than certainly a fierce competitor into key systems that “defend” millions of people.

Update 2012-05-29: Scientific American has picked up this story here.

if you’ve been injected with succinylcholine (also known as suxamethonium chloride or simple ‘sux’) you’re most likely in a hospital,undergoing intubation with accompanying respiratory support.

Unless, of course, you’re being mind-controlled by aliens, as in my 1999 novel Splitting. The aliens apply sux to one’s mind in order to suck away what you think you know and replace it with what they want you to know. Here’s the first sentence from Splitting (you’ll find a longer excerpt here), pretty much, to my mind, verbalizing the effects of a shot of the above mentioned sux:

The rush from the injection while supplies last kicks me in the chest, a chill metal gasp fleeing custody, a lightning of Tartars hording down my medulla oblongata.

I’m not trying to be coy, or whatever, when I say I’d never heard of a drug called sux before coming across a link to the above JAYFKM post on Boing Boing. Proving, therefore, that the world is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think.

40,000 year old flute from the site of Geißenklösterle made from bird bones. The University of Tübingen

Scientists researching a human settlement in southern Germany have discovered some bone flutes they think are some 40,000 years old. LiveScience writer Jennifer Welsh writes on Discovery:

Early modern humans could have spent their evenings sitting around the fire, playing bone flutes and singing songs 40,000 years ago, newly discovered ancient musical instruments indicate. The bone flutes push back the date researchers think human creativity evolved.

• The flutes are the earliest record of technological and artistic innovations characteristic of the Aurignacian period.
• The Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe.
• Neanderthals as well as modern humans may have lived in this area around the same time.

“These results are consistent with a hypothesis we made several years ago that the Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago,” study researcher Nick Conard, of Tübingen University, said in a statement. “Geißenklösterle is one of several caves in the region that has produced important examples of personal ornaments, figurative art, mythical imagery and musical instruments. The new dates prove the great antiquity of the Aurignacian in Swabia.”

The Sun Came Out. Highly recommended by Smart Energy.

The Sun Came Out: 7 Worlds Collide Again

How do 20 musicians who’ve never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family.

Ask everyone to bring a song. “We need songs,” Finn would’ve pointed out. “We’re recording an album.”

But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn’t matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows.

Don’t want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it.

Because we’re not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away.

Neil Finn wails at a 7 Worlds Collide show.

This exact scenario didn’t happen just once, but twice. The first 7 Worlds Collide collaboration was in 2001. Seven years later, 7 Worlds Collide Again brought together Finn and his various offspring with Jonny Marr (The Smiths’ guitarist), Lisa Germano Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien and drummer Phil Selway, Sebastian Steinberg of Soul Coughing, and all of Wilco. Throw in a handful of New Zealand’s top singer/songwriters and you do indeed have a chance of making a sizable donation to Oxfam.

The decision to “record” the studio process — meaning “shoot,” as director Simon Mark-Brown points out — wasn’t made until a few days before the musicians started arriving from the frozen north. We’re fortunate to have this document of the creative process and of people getting along, egos aside, to make good music.

4 stars out of a possible 5.

Actors: Neil Finn, Eddie Vedder, Lisa Germano, Phil Selway, Johnny Marr
Director: Simon Mark-Brown
Studio: Cinema Libre Studio
DVD release: 10 April 2012
Runtime: 84 minutes (1 disc)
Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen
DVD Features: Concert documentary

The El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico is a tropical rainforest where a strain of the microbe Enterobacter lignolyticus was found that can tolerate an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass for microbial-based biofuel production. (Credit: Photo by Kristen DeAngelis)

In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified a tropical rainforest microbe that can endure relatively high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. The researchers have also determined how the microbe is able to do this, a discovery that holds broad implications beyond the production of advanced biofuels.

“Our findings represent an important first step in understanding the mechanisms of ionic liquid resistance in bacteria and provide a basis for engineering ionic liquid tolerance into strains of fuel-producing microbes for a more efficient biofuel production process,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and one of the senior investigators for this research.

Adds Michael Thelen, the principal investigator and a member of JBEI’s Deconstruction Division, “Our study also demonstrates that vigorous efforts to discover and analyze the unique properties of microorganisms can provide an important basis for understanding microbial stress and adaptation responses to anthropogenic chemicals used in industry.”

Thelen is the corresponding author and Simmons a co-author of a paper reporting the results of this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Other co-authors are Jane Khudyakov, Patrik D’haeseleer, Sharon Borglin, Kristen DeAngelis, Hannah Wooa, Erika Lindquist and Terry Hazen.

The burning of fossil fuels releases nearly 9 billion metric tons of excess carbon into the atmosphere each year. Meanwhile the global demand for gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels continues to rise. Clean, green and renewable fuels that won’t add excess carbon to the atmosphere are sorely needed. Among the best candidates are advanced biofuels synthesized from the cellulosic biomass in non-food plants. Such fuels could displace petroleum-based fuels on a gallon-for-gallon basis and be incorporated into today’s vehicles and infrastructures with no impact on performance.

To this end, researchers at JBEI have already engineered a strain of E. coli bacteria to digest the cellulosic biomass of switchgrass, a perennial grass that thrives on land not suitable for food crops, and convert its sugars into biofuel replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. A key to this success was the pretreatment of the switchgrass with an ionic liquid to dissolve it.

“Unlike the starch sugars in grains, the complex polysaccharides in cellulosic biomass are semicrystalline and deeply embedded within a tough woody material called lignin,” Simmons says. “Lignin can be removed and cellulose crystallinity can be reduced if the biomass is pretreated with ionic liquids, environmentally benign organic salts often used as green chemistry substitutes for volatile organic solvents.”

Current strategies for processing cellulosic biomass into biofuels involve multiple production steps in which the bulk of ionic liquids used to pretreat biomass can be washed out before the microbes are added. However, to cut production costs, a “one pot” strategy in which processing steps take place in a single vat would be highly desirable. This strategy requires microbes that can tolerate and grow in ionic liquids used to pretreat cellulosic biomass.

In search of such microbes, a team of JBEI researchers led by microbiologist and PNAS paper co-author Kristen DeAngelis ventured into the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, a tropical rain forest where microbial communities have demonstrated exceptionally high rates of biomass decomposition, and a tolerance to high osmotic pressures of the sort generated by exposure to ionic liquids. They returned with a prime candidate in the SCF1 strain of Enterobacter lignolyticus.

“We first determined that the SCF1 strain of Enterobacter lignolyticus grows in the presence of the ionic liquid [C2mim]Cl at concentrations comparable to the concentrations that remain in the cellulose after pretreatment and recovery,” Thelen says. “Next, through a combination of phenotypic growth assays, phospholipid fatty acid analysis, and RNA sequencing technologies, we investigated the mechanisms by which SCF1 tolerates this ionic liquid.”

Working in collaboration with researchers at DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, another multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, Thelen and Simmons and their JBEI colleagues developed a preliminary model of ionic liquid tolerance for SCF1.

“Our model suggests that SCF1 bacteria resist the toxic effect of the [C2mim]Cl ionic liquid by altering the permeability of their cell membrane and pumping the toxic chemical out of the cell before damage occurs,” Thelen says. “These detoxifying mechanisms are known to be involved in bacterial responses to stress, but not in a coordinated manner as we have shown for the response of SCF1 to ionic liquid.”

Thelen says the information gained from this study will be used at JBEI to help engineer new fuel-producing microbes that can tolerate ionic liquid pretreatments. Beyond biofuels, the techniques developed in this study should also be applicable to the screening of microbial responses to other chemical compounds, such as antibiotics.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Blake Simmons, in addition to his JBEI appointment, is also a scientist with the Sandia National Laboratories. Michael Thelen, in addition to his JBEI appointment, is also a scientist with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

via Rainforest microbe can handle ionic liquids: New find could help reduce biofuel production costs.

Having large tracts of natural habitat surrounding fields increase ladybug populations and help farmers reduce insecticide use. (Credit: G.L. Kohuth)

Ladybugs and other predatory insects eat crop pests, saving farmers an estimated $4.6 billion a year on insecticides. Non-crop plants provide these predatory insects with food and shelter, helping them to survive and thrive in areas where they are needed. In an attempt to increase benefits from predatory insects, researchers have often planted strips of flowers along the edges of crop fields.

However, natural habitats also provide vital food and shelter resources and may be more important for pest control, said Megan Woltz, MSU doctoral student and co-author of the study that appears in the current issue of Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

“Creating predator-attracting habitats next to crops is only a partial solution,” said Woltz, who co-authored the study with MSU entomologists Doug Landis and Rufus Isaacs. “Ladybugs and many other pest-eating insects travel long distances throughout the growing season, sometimes flying or crawling over many miles as they search for food and shelter. So we also have to consider what resources are available to these predators at larger scales.”

Ladybugs are heralded as a natural, effective killer of soybean aphids, the most-destructive soybean pest in the northern United States. To determine the best way to attract ladybugs to soybean fields, researchers planted buckwheat strips next to soybean fields and also examined the amount of natural habitat within 1.5 miles of the fields.

“Ladybugs loved our buckwheat strips,” Woltz said. “We always found way more ladybugs in the buckwheat than are usually in field edges. Unfortunately, all of the ladybugs in the buckwheat did little to change their populations in the soybean fields.”

Ultimately, natural habitat proved to be more important. The amount of grasslands and forests within 1.5 miles of the soybean fields determined how many ladybugs ended up in the field, she added.

Such large areas typically encompass multiple farms, suggesting that rural neighbors may need to work together. In other studies, landscapes with at least 20 percent of non-crop habitat showed good pest control. Providing some habitat on every farm and the properties that surround them would add up to a lot of habitat at the landscape scale — the scale that matters to ladybugs.

via Increasing predator-friendly land can help farmers reduce costs.

Image from bagitmovie.wordpress.com

A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.

At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

Such an increase, documented for the first time in a marine invertebrate (animal without a backbone) in the open ocean, may have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs.

“This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it’s having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate,” said Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, lead author of the study and chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a UC Ship Funds-supported voyage. “We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic.”

The new study follows a report published last year by Scripps researchers in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series showing that nine percent of the fish collected during SEAPLEX contained plastic waste in their stomachs. That study estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year.

The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.

In April, researchers with the Instituto Oceanográfico in Brazil published a report that eggs of Halobates micans, another species of sea skater, were found on many plastic bits in the South Atlantic off Brazil.

“Plastic only became widespread in late ’40s and early ’50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we’ve seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic,” said Goldstein. “Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better.”

via Plastic trash altering ocean habitats, Scripps study shows.