100 Million Year old Data Card!

Data card of million years

Researchers claim to have developed a new water proof storage device that can endure extreme temperatures and hostile conditions like fires and tsunami 'forever' without degrading.

Japanese multinational conglomerate Hitachi has unveiled the chip, which it claims is resistant to many chemicals and unaffected by radio waves, can be exposed directly to high temperature flames and heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius for at least two hours without being damaged.

The chip is also waterproof, meaning it could survive natural calamities, such as fires and tsunami, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

"The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven't necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones," Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii said.

"The possibility of losing information may actually have increased,' he said, noting the life of digital media currently available - CDs and hard drives - is limited to a few decades or a century," he said.

The company's new technology stores data in binary form by creating dots inside a thin sheet of quartz glass, which can be read with an ordinary optical microscope.

Provided a computer with the know-how to understand that binary is available - simple enough to programme, no matter how advanced computers become - the data will always be readable.

"We believe data will survive unless this hard glass is broken," said senior researcher Takao Watanabe.

The material currently has four layers of dots, which can hold 40 megabytes per square inch, approximately the density on a music CD, researchers said, adding they believe including more layers should not be a problem.

The company has not decided when to put the chip to practical use but researchers said they could start with storage services for government agencies, museums and religious organisations.

Water in Mars?

A rocky outcrop on Mars has sent a shot of excitement through the scientific community with the evidence it provides of an ancient riverbed -- Martian "water transport" -- according to NASA.

NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back pictures of a section of the Martian surface called Link, an outcrop of rocks whose surface is not coated in the ruddy dust of Mars but is exposed and clean, the space agency says. 

As the Los Angeles Times' Science Now reported Thursday, the combination of sandy rock and large pebbles tells a story of an ancient river, with rocks that traveled far, bumping into -- and smoothing -- one another out.  It was water, not wind, that created that rocky scenario on Mars, scientists said.

Water flow in Mars

Link, says NASA, shows rock formed by water deposits, made up of smaller, rounded rocks cemented together. "Water transport is the only process capable of producing the rounded shapes of clasts [gravel fragments] this size," according to NASA. 

As of Thursday, Curiosity was 2 to 4 miles from a triangular network of channels, an alluvial fan. Another indicator of ancient water activity on Mars, the slope looks as though flowing water may have spread material downward.

Like other formations in this portion of Mars, by the way, Link gets its name from a noted rock formation in Canada.

In an earlier interview with The Times, Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada explained that the landing site and Glenelg -- the formation where Curiosity is headed -- were named prior to the rover's landing.

"Both our landing site and Glenelg are within the Yellowknife quadrangle, named for the Canadian city that is the jumping-off point for expeditions that study the oldest rocks in North America," he said. "Glenelg and other features within Yellowknife on Mars are named for the geologically famous rock outcrops around the Yellowknife area on Earth."

4D Clock Up for tick tock

Scientists have proposed to build the first ever 4D space-time crystal clock that they claim will keep accurate time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe.

This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space, scientists said.

Researcher Xiang Zhang from Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research, and his group, have come up with an experimental design to build a crystal that is discrete both in space and time— a space-time crystal

However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal.

With such a 4-D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles.

A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances, scientists said.

Scientists from the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has proposed the experimental design of a space-time crystal based on an electric-field ion trap and the Coulomb repulsion of particles that carry the same electrical charge.

The concept of a crystal that has discrete order in time was proposed earlier this year by Frank Wilczek, the Nobel-prize winning physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While Wilczek mathematically proved that a time crystal can exist, how to physically realize such a time crystal was unclear.

Do You know why Facebook trying to Delete over 5M account?

Facebook

A majority of employers and recruiters are now using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, search engines and criminal records to learn the truth about job seekers. 

A survey conducted by Australia-based software firm Nuage Software showed over half of human resource managers surveyed ran a Google search on candidates, 74 per cent checked LinkedIn, 23 per cent Facebook and three per cent Twitter. 

According to tech firm Nuage's managing director David Wilson, some employers are asking to view Facebook and Twitter profiles at interviews in order to avoid privacy concerns, Perth Now reports. 

"The internet has a very long memory. An ill-advised or impulsive post can be rapidly replicated across many sites and be impossible to take back," the report quoted Wilson, as saying 

"People really do enjoy the freedom of expression on social media, but it is worth considering the cumulative effect of their postings," he added. 

According to the report, Australia's National Crime Check managing director Martin Lazarevic said the variety of employers getting police checks on applicants had grown rapidly in the past six months, and as many as one in ten checks were catching people out. 

NASA to examine Pyramid in Mars..

Mars Pyramid

Curiosity's robotic arm is set to get its first workout. It's been tasked with examining a football-sized rock whose odd pyramidal shape caught the eyes of NASA scientists--and fueled the imagination of earthlings everywhere who are perhaps a tad too eager for the rover to find evidence of intelligent life on the Red Planet.

"The target rock looks like a miniature Great Pyramid of Giza, with one face artisans neglected to maintain," noted The Christian Science Monitor. "It is not something you would expect to see on the surface of Mars," wrote the Daily Mail.

Turns out there is a straightforward explanation for the rock. Project scientist John Grotzinger told The Independent that the pyramid rock shape is not uncommon on Mars. Wind erosion probably did the carving.

So the Jake Matijevic -- the name given to the rock, after a NASA engineer who died on Aug. 20 -- is probably just a rock.

"Our general consensus view is that these are pieces of impact ejecta from an impact somewhere else, maybe outside of Gale Crater [where the rover landed], that throws a rock on to the plains, and it just goes on to sit here for a long period of time," he said to The Independent. "It weathers more slowly than the stuff that's around it. So, that means it's probably a harder rock."

Curiosity's arm sports a spectrometer for reading a target's chemical composition and a lens for close-up imaging.

Now! Call Your Loved One's from Mt.Everest

Standing atop the mighty Everest can be an exhilarating experience, but imagine being able to make video calls from the base station of Mount Everest. Reports confirm that a Chinese company has installed its station at a base camp that is at a height of 5200 metres. 

A Call from Mt.Everest 

 Reports quoted Zhuo Feng, General Manager with the branch as saying that the signal from the station at the base camp can reach as high as 6,500 metres. He went on to add that several tourists complain of being unable to make phone calls while at the base camp. "Now they can call their friends here and show them the picturesque landscape of Mount Qomolangma, the local name for Mt Everest,” he added.

A statement issued by the mobile operator’s Tibetan branch read, “A just-finished week-long trial of the No 2 China Mobile 3G base station at the camp has found to be working well, providing a stable network service”. 

As per Zhou, there are no plans yet to move the base station to a higher altitude, because of pressure from environmentalists. Interestingly, he went on to add that the mobile network has been spread across 90 percent of the areas, along the route linking Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, and the base camp. The base camp is known to be often used as a place to rest for climbers preparing for ascent or descent of the 8,848-meter-high Mountain.

An attempt to study the effects of climatic change on Mt. Everest gained popularity recently. A webcam, developed by a Germany-based surveillance firm, Mobotix had been set up at Kalapathhar, a base camp close to Mt Everest, which stands at an altitude of 5,675 meters. The webcam is powered by solar energy, and operates during the day. The camera began operations last year, and can withstand temperatures as harsh as minus 30 degrees. The live images sent in by the webcam will be wirelessly transmitted to Ev-K2-CNR Pyramid Laboratory, which will then be studied by scientists from Italy, who are running the entire project. 

Just this morning, we reported about state-run operator, BSNL together with SIS Infosystems launching telephones with video calling capabilities, in what is a much wider attempt to replace several of the existing Public Call Offices with public Video Call Offices. 

In his statement to reporters, BSNL Chairman and MD, R K Upadhyay affirmed that using the telephones with video calling capabilities, BSNL will set up public Video Calling Offices (VCOs), where users will be able to make voice calls to any phone and video calls to any other IP (Internet-based) phone. 

A 45-second video calling session at a VCO will cost a user Rs 3, which is inclusive of the 30 percent commission for the franchise owner. Upadhyay was further quoted as saying, “There will be no need to use computers for making video calls for user of these video phones.”

US government A Cyber Crooks: This report Says!

As the U.S. government defends our interests and technology in the escalating global cyberwar, could it inadvertently be handing cyberweapons to criminals? 

Cyber Crooks

Last week, security firm Kaspersky hinted that such a nightmare situation may have taken one step closer to reality. Kaspersky revealed that a sophisticated program had been used to record instant messaging and social networking logins and bank account information and passwords -- including targets such as Citibank and PayPal accounts -- on some 2,500 infected PCs. 

It may have been based on the Stuxnet cyberweapon widely attributed to the U.S.

This program, dubbed Gauss, raised alarms for its financial focus: Rather than trying to disrupt nuclear lab equipment or steal cruise missile plans it seemed devised for monetary gain, the very goal of cybercriminals worldwide.

"There's no doubt in our mind that the authors [of Gauss] needed to have access to that [Stuxnet] source code to create this malware," Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, told FoxNews.com. "Therefore, we're convinced this is coming from the same factory which created Stuxnet."

"The only alternative is that the source code has been leaked or stolen, which is an extremely scary scenario."

'We're convinced this is from the same factory which created Stuxnet. The only alternative is an extremely scary scenario.'

- Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab

Millions of dollars were invested in viruses like Stuxnet, which was designed by the United States and Israel, according to The New York Times, to infiltrate and then disrupt Iran's nuclear program. If that cutting-edge, expensive software fell into the wrong hands, and hackers were able to reverse engineer the program, then banks, brokerages, and businesses all over the planet could be vulnerable. 

Unfortunately, once a program like Stuxnet or its derivative Flame is released on the Web, it is then "in the wild," meaning that a determined crook -- or other espionage agency -- could get his hands on it and turn it into his own weapon of choice.

Contrast this situation to the days of the Cold War, when a foreign power would have to physically steal a fighter jet, James Bond-style, to uncover an enemy's secret technology. Today, simply releasing a spy program on the Net could mean that one is essentially handing over the blueprints to your country's latest cyberstealth technology.

That possibility is "scary" because of the level of sophistication of this espionage software. For example, Flame can not only record every keystroke on a computer but also grab screen images and turn on a microphone, eavesdropping on conversations in the room or during an online call. 

Programs like Flame are also difficult to trace and difficult to detect because they contain multiple self-destruct mechanisms like a modern-day "Mission Impossible" tape recording. There's also the challenge of determining exactly who created it or what information the program is seeking because portions of the software are encrypted to such a degree that Kaspersky Lab has been unable to crack it.

"Malware overall is an arms race," noted Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at Zscaler, pointing out that the techniques used by Flame and other programs "will certainly be studied and adapted by other malware authors that may well be involved in cybercrime."

The extreme efforts taken by the software to conceal Gauss' source mean it's difficult to say who's responsible -- cybercrooks or cyberspies -- but this very feature also is a potential silver lining: If security researchers can't crack its encryption, then it's unlikely that any hackers can copy the software. (Kaspersky is now petitioning other researchers to help it crack Gauss.)

There is at least one reason to think that Gauss is the work of government espionage and not crooks looking to skim millions from bank accounts. Most of the infected computers -- but by no means all -- were in the Middle East and most of the targeted banks were in Lebanon. Some of those banks have been accused of laundering money for drug smugglers and terrorists. 

Whoever developed the software may have simply been looking for terrorists, following Deep Throat's advice to "Follow the money." 

Terrorist networks tend to trade information via SMS and funnel money through online banks. Tracing the flow of money could lead a government to a terrorist's physical location and reveal networks of operatives.

Unfortunately, the malware genie may already be out of the bottle. It's been demonstrated time and again that just about any encryption scheme can be broken -- given the proper amount of effort and computing resources. So it may only be a matter of time until criminals -- or other governments -- have their hands on espionage-grade software. 

If they don't already.