American Particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann died on 24 May, aged 89.He was one of the founders of modern particle physics. Gell-Mann was born in 1929 in New York City and spend most of his work life at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
In 1969 Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his ground breaking work on particle physics and for the discovery of “quarks”.
WhatsApp one of the most popular messaging app has a major problem. Which hackers used to remotely install surveillance software on phones and other devices with a single miscall. Monday 13 May 2019 WhatsApp advice their 1.5 billion users to update their apps as a safely measure.
Facebook – which owns the WhatsApp issued a explanation on Monday “A buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack allowed remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number”
If you have the following version, then you need to update your WhatsApp-
WhatsApp for Android prior to v2.19.134
WhatsApp Business for Android prior to v2.19.44
WhatsApp for iOS prior to v2.19.51
WhatsApp Business for iOS prior to v2.19.51
WhatsApp for Windows Phone prior to v2.18.348
WhatsApp for Tizen prior to v2.18.15
FCC gives approval to SapceX to Sell Wireless High-Speed Home Internet from Space. Wireless internet signal broadcasting from satellite is nothing new. Problem with the current solution – those satellites are in higher orbit, slower speed and has data-cap.
SpaceX has a solution – they will launch 4,425 satellites in much lower orbit than the current Wireless internet system.
SapceX’s satellites will be able to provide faster internet signal.They will cover rural areas (where high speed fiber network is not available) and underdeveloped countries.
One of the biggest advantage of this will be for the people working in areas disaster zone. With his new satellite system they will be able to use high speed internet. SapceX has already tested the system with fewer satellites.
WiFi Finder (headquartered in China) is an app that locate and provide credentials for public wifi hotspots to it’s users. This week thousands of this app’s users find out that their information has been exposed online Information includes their home network names (SSID), precise geolocation, ‘plaintext’ passwords and other data.
When the users install the app – they also provide their home network information and it all stored in app’s database. But the app has no mechanism to differentiate between public hot spots and home networks. Now the app’s database has been exposed – which puts thousands of it’s user at risk. As most the users are not aware of this – which makes them an easy target for the cyber criminal. A cloud host company called DigitalOcean has already took the database offline. But damage has already been done.
The team at the University of California, San Francisco have developed a brain implant that can read people’s minds and turn their thoughts to speech.They are calling it “exhilarating” technology. Electrode are implanted in the brain. It picks up the electrical signals that maneuver the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw. Then the algorithm analyze these movement. It then simulate how those result would form different sound in mouth and throat.
At this point – this is in very early stage. But in time – it will be perfect. This is break through technology. In near future individuals with speech impairments will regain the ability to freely speak their minds and reconnect with the world around them.
It measures 40 billion km across ! This massive black hole is three million times the size of the Earth. And 500 million trillion km away. But scientist ware able to capture the whole thing in one frame.Yes astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole.
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10 April 2019, the images of the black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. It’s a network of eight linked telescopes. But Katie Bouman 29-year-old computer scientist was behind the impossible.Dr.Bouman’s algorithm rendered the collected image and construct the final image. She has been working on this project for the last three years.
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Different telescope took images from different section.But the black is self larger than the size of our entire Solar System.So Dr. Bouman and others developed a series of algorithms that converted telescopic data into one whole image.Image was published on 10 April 2019. This picture give us the opportunity see the an actual blackhole, which is “unseeable” to the naked eye.
A baby was born on Tuesday April 9, 2019 through an experimental form of IVF in Greece.The procedure uses an egg from the mother, sperm from the father and another egg from a donor woman.The baby will carry a tiny amount of genetic makeup from the donor woman as mitochondria have their own DNA. Mother and baby both are in good health.
Nearly every cell of the body has mitochondria that convert food into use-able energy.But there is also speculation (claim has not been tested) mitochondria may have a role in a successful pregnancy too.The patient had endured four unsuccessful cycles of IVF.
President of the Institute, Dr Panagiotis Psathas said:”We are very proud to announce an international innovation in assisted reproduction, and we are now in a position to make it possible for women with multiple IVF failures or rare mitochondrial genetic diseases to have a healthy child.
Sydney Brenner was one of the giants of science.Born in 1927 immigrated to South Africa. He taught himself to read from the newspapers,used as tablecloths at dinner time.
He made big contributions to the understanding of DNA.His work help others to understand role played by the molecule RNA. Which carry the “code of life”. He also worked with Francis Crick, François Jacob, Linus Pauling and James Watson.This great mind passed away 5th of April, 2019.
Sydney Brenner received Nobel Prize in 2002 for his contribution in the field of molecular and developmental biology.
Two astronaut Christina Koch and Anne McClain ware about to making history. But unfortunately it was not their day. Astronauts had been scheduled to step outside the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday to install batteries.
Then they realize they both needed a medium-size spacesuit and only one was ready for use. Astronaut Anne McClain who trained in both medium- and large-size spacesuits. But after actual spacewalk, she realize medium-size suit fitted best for her.
So with new plan Christina Koch will use the mid size suite and go for the spacewalk another male astronaut Nick Hague instead. Anne McClain used that same suite last week for another spacewalk. Nasa has two medium-size hard upper torsos on the ISS but only one of them has been properly configured for a spacewalk.
19 March 2019 one Norwegian aluminum firm name Hydro became the latest victim of cyber attack. As a safety measure digital systems at the firm’s smelting plants has been turned off. Firm inform in a press briefing – that the IT systems in most business areas are impacted and they are still running their investigation about the attack.
A local source reported that the cyber-attack was caused by a relatively new form of ransomware known as LockerGoga, but the plant’s official did not comment on this.
For now the plant had to switched to manual operations. Hydro is also getting help from Norway’s state cyber-security agency to resolve this issue.
Osaka metro’s network had to temporarily put their foreign language site offline – after an unusual problem on 19 March 2019. The website’s user notice the English translation was not correct. As a result “Sakai Muscle” and “Osaka Metro” became the Japanese hashtags trend.
Some of the errors are-
“Sakaisuji” translated as “Sakai muscle”.
“Dobutsuen-mae” translated as “Before the Zoo”.
“Daikokucho” translated as “Powerhouse Town”.
“Taishibashi-Imaichi” translated as “Prince Bridge Now City”.
“Tengachaya” translated as “World Teahouse”.
Microsoft translation program is use to translate metro’s all non-Japanese pages.
To be on the safe side the Chinese, Korean and Thai language website also has been taken offline to avoid confusion.In the mean time as a temporary solution visitors to the English language page are automatically redirected to the main Japanese site.
Facebook, Instagram were down for almost 14 Hours starting on late March 13 and ended 14 March. According to Facebook’s status page – the outage started on Wednesday (Eastern Time) 11am. The outage impact it’s user from posting or login in to Facebook. But Facebook confirmed – that it was not a DDoS attack.It was actually a server configuration change that started the problem.
The whole time Facebook and Instagram ware updating their users with latest information through Twitter.
What is DDoS Attack ?
DDoS OR Distributed Denial of Service is a cyber-attack. It targets websites and online services.The attacker overwhelm the target (websites OR online services) with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate. As a result the intended users of the website/online-services cannot access them properly.
July 2018 Uganda’s finance minister David Bahati imposed tax on daily internet uses. His action take affects more than 60 online platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. To use those sites, peoples or Uganda are expected to pay a tax of 200 Ugandan shillings a day. His original reason was to tackle the online “idle talk” and raise revenue for the government.
Now the latest data shows – the internet subscriptions to such sites and services fell by more than 2.5 million and internet based business are suffering.
Stem cell transplant cures a man from AIDS virus. The report was published online by the “Nature”. The patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2003 and he was taking HIV control drugs. Then he developed Hodgkin lymphoma (type of cancer). in 2016 he had a stem cell transplant to cure his cancer.
He was lucky – as his doctor found donor who has a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to HIV (only 1 per cent of people descended from northern Europe have inherited this mutation from both parents. And they are immune to most HIV). After that he stop taking the HIV control drug and after 18 months of transfer there is no trace of the virus.
This is a dangerous procedure and have failed in other patients. Timothy Ray Brown of USA was the first successful patients who was treated with this therapy. He also known as the “Berlin patient,”