Month: December 2015

Southern California Gas Company had been trying to plug a massive natural gas leak for more than two months, and now we have some new perspective on the scale of the leak. The non-profit organization Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has released an infrared aerial video showing the plume created by the normally-invisible methane seeping out of the former oil well in the hills north of Los Angeles. The video puts in sharp relief the gravity of the situation caused by the rupture, which was discovered on October 23 and has been estimated to be releasing tens of thousands of kilograms of methane into the air every hour.

The leak at SoCal Gas’ Aliso Canyon site is northwest of Los Angeles and just adjacent to the Porter Ranch community. Although the Los Angeles County Department of Health and SoCal Gas have assured residents that the leak poses no harm to human health, the highly-flammable, odorless gas has been treated with chemicals to give it a “rotten-eggs” smell, which can cause headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds. Because of this, SoCal Gas has relocated families in Porter Ranch to motels and offered to reimburse them for household air purifiers, per an agreement with Los Angeles officials.

The most concerning result of the leak, however, is that methane is a potent greenhouse gas, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). It is many time more harmful than CO₂  with respect to climate change in the near-term. CARB estimated in November that the Aliso Canyon leak has released methane approximately equivalent to one-quarter of California’s normal methane emissions.

Credit card users could have their PINs stolen, and merchants could have their bank accounts pillaged, in a set of attacks demonstrated by researchers Karsten Nohl and Fabian Bräunlein at the Chaos Computing Club security conference.

Much research has been done into the chips found on credit cards and the readers and number pads used with these cards, but Nohl decided to take a different approach, looking instead at the communications protocols used by those card readers. There are two that are significant; the first, ZVT, is used between point of sale systems and the card readers. The second, Poseidon, is used between the card reader and the merchant's bank. Nohl found that both had important flaws.

The ZVT protocol was originally designed for serial port connections, but nowadays is used over Ethernet, both wired and wireless. The protocol has no authentication, meaning that if an attacker can put themselves on the same network, they can act as a man-in-the-middle between the point-of-sale system and the card reader. The attacker can then read the magnetic stripe data from the card, and can also request a PIN.

Enlarge / New Caledonian crow uses a tool to grab insects deep inside a piece of wood.

Though we've long known that crows use tools to get food (and occasionally to amuse themselves), scientists have lacked definitive evidence. Which is why two intrepid researchers invented the crow tailcam, to record the inventiveness of these birds in the wild.

UK researchers Jolyon Troscianko and Christian Metz had observed crows making tools in the wild, as had some of their colleagues. But none of them ever caught this amazing feat of intelligence on video. A couple of years ago, Metz co-authored a paper about how crows make hooked tools, carefully fashioning them out of branches, in order to get at hard-to-reach grubs inside a piece of wood. But he was quick to point out that those feats of tool-making were done in captivity—where animals often develop a penchant for tool-making that they wouldn't have in the wild. In a paper out last week from Biology Letters, however, Troscianko and Metz describe how they finally caught wild crows making their hooked tools on video.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they put cameras on the crows' butts. More precisely, they used biodegradable rubber to attach tiny cameras to the birds' two strongest tail feathers, giving the researchers a below-the-belly view of the crow's activities. Because crows often lower their heads to foot level to eat and make tools, this was also an excellent vantage point to capture tool-making in action.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, which causes gonorrhea. (credit: NIAID)

A highly antibiotic-resistant variety of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the germ behind gonorrhea, is quickly spreading and may soon become unbeatable, according to Sally Davies, chief medical officer of England, and Chief Pharmaceutical Officer Keith Ridge.

In a letter to the nation’s general practitioners and pharmacies, the pair urged doctors to use the strongest pharmaceutical weapons available to combat the health threat.

"Gonorrhoea has rapidly acquired resistance to new antibiotics, leaving few alternatives to the current recommendations,” the letter stated. "It is therefore extremely important that suboptimal treatment does not occur."

Some of this could be yours if you enter our sweepstakes!

Back in 2012, my first year at Ars, I was extremely gratified to help raise $28,700 in donations in the first-ever charity drive I organized for the site, a total that surpassed every other annual charity haul we brought in since 2007. That record has stood for the last two years, which brought in about $23,500 and $25,000 in charity drive donations, respectively. Not bad totals, by any means, but not as satisfying as that record-breaking 2012.

Readers: this year I want to knock that record on its butt. And we are so close to doing it.

As of this writing, Ars readers have donated a total of $27,450.66 to Child’s Play and the EFF through this year’s Charity Drive sweepstakes. That’s already better than either of the last two years and just over $1,000 away from besting our all-time record.

The new Google Glass model. It can fold!

11 more images in gallery

The pictures show a Google Glass unit with the FCCID "A4R­-GG1" that looks a lot like the existing Glass design. The biggest change seems to be that the device can now fold up, just like a regular pair of glasses, which will make it much easier to store when you aren't wearing it. The Glass prism looks longer than the first version of the device, which presumably offers a larger picture.

In general, the case looks smoother and rounder than the previous version of Google Glass. The "Glass" part also seems to be completely independent of the glasses that hold it on your face—the FCC never shows a wearable version with a second side.