Month: August 2016

Screen capture of video showing a Russian spacecraft approaching the Jovian moon Ganymede. (credit: Roscosmos)

After years of pressure from Congress and the scientific community, NASA has finally begun formal mission planning to send both an orbiter, possibly launching as early as 2023, and a follow-up lander mission to the Jovian moon Europa. But the US space agency may not be alone in sending probes Jupiter's moons. Russia now says it is going to Ganymede.

In a promotional video uploaded to YouTube, engineers from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, discuss a proposed orbiter and lander mission to the largest moon in the solar system. Specific dates are not discussed for this "Laplace-P" concept, but the Russians have previously targeted a launch date of 2023, and the video suggests a launch could come in the next decade. Although the commentary is in Russian, the video appears to suggest that Ganymede may be as good (or better) candidate for life than Europa. Both moons are believed to have large subsurface oceans, but NASA scientists generally believe that Europa's large ocean, which is relatively near the surface and has a rich internal heat source, is likely more conducive to life.

Despite the video, it is not clear how "real" the Laplace-P mission actually is. For example, Russia has talked repeatedly about building a permanent lunar base in the 2030s, but the country hasn't made much progress toward that goal. Moreover, the Russian agency's planetary exploration program has somewhat been in state of a shambles in recent decades.

A report by Reuters suggests that the FBI was aware of a possibly Russian-sponsored intrusion into the network of the Democratic National Committee as early as last fall. But investigators from the FBI only initially told DNC staff that they should be on the lookout for strange activity on their network—and the feds didn't mention a potential state-sponsored attack until they informed the Clinton campaign in March about a phishing campaign.

Unnamed DNC staffers told Reuters' Mark Hosenball and John Walcott that the FBI had been investigating a potential intrusion into the DNC's network since the fall of 2015. After the initial warning to look for anything suspicious, DNC IT staff checked network logs and scanned files, finding nothing suspicious. When asked to provide more information to help identify a problem, the FBI "declined to provide it," according to the Reuters report.

It was not until March that the DNC IT team realized the severity of the intrusion of their systems, though Reuters did not report what triggered their realization. At about the same time, the FBI reportedly warned the Clinton campaign of the attempted attacks, according to a Yahoo News report. Spear-phishing attacks were detected in March and April against the DNC and the presidential campaign organization of Hillary Clinton by the security company SecureWorks, as Ars has previously reported.

Enlarge / A demo planned for Wednesday will show how an ad hosted on nytimes.com could attack other HTTPS-protected sites. (credit: Vanhoef, Van Goethem)

The HTTPS cryptographic scheme protecting millions of websites is vulnerable to a newly revived attack that exposes encrypted e-mail addresses, social security numbers, and other sensitive data even when attackers don't have the ability to monitor a targeted end user's Internet connection.

The exploit is notable because it doesn't require a man-in-the-middle position. Instead, an end user need only encounter an innocuous-looking JavaScript file hidden in an Web advertisement or hosted directly on a webpage. The malicious code can then query a variety of pages protected by the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols and measure the precise file sizes of the encrypted data they transmit. As its name suggests, the HEIST technique—short for HTTP Encrypted Information can be Stolen Through TCP-Windows—works by exploiting the way HTTPS responses are delivered over the transmission control protocol, one of the Internet's most basic building blocks.

Once attackers know the size of an encrypted response, they are free to use one of two previously devised exploits to ferret out the plaintext contained inside it. Both the BREACH and the CRIME exploits are able to decrypt payloads by manipulating the file compression that sites use to make pages load more quickly. HEIST will be demonstrated for the first time on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

(credit: Laura Bittner)

In the past, we’ve covered attempts by some political groups (or politicians) to access climate scientists’ e-mails. The idea is generally to trawl through them for anything that can be used to bolster the claim that climate science is somehow fraudulent—hypothetically vindicating those who have refused to acknowledge the scientific consensus for decades.

A long-time target of these activists has been researcher Michael Mann, whose work on tree ring climate records resulted in “the hockey stick,” a graph of the last millennium of climate history that shows rapid warming at the end of a gradual cooling trend. Although that record has been extended and replicated many times now, some still believe Mann must have somehow distorted the data to produce the appearance of sudden warming. As a result, Mann has been involved in court cases for years over demands for his e-mails from a conservative advocacy group and then Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. More recently, Mann has been involved in a countersuit against those who publicly accused him of fraud.

Well, having failed to get access to Mann’s e-mails through the Virginia courts, the same opposition group (now called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute) decided to go after one of Mann’s colleagues since he worked in a different state. The University of Arizona rebuffed a very broad 2011 Freedom of Information Act request for the e-mails of Malcolm Hughes, part of the “hockey stick” team, and James Overpeck, a coordinating lead author of the 2007 IPCC report’s chapter on paleoclimate.

A cartoon representing neurotransmitters crossing a synapse. (credit: University of Connecticut)

Neurons communicate by sending chemical signals called neurotransmitters across synapses, specialized connections between two individual cells. This communication requires a delicate and intricate molecular architecture. A recent paper published in Nature has now shown that the structure of this intercellular space is more complicated than previously thought, and it probably helps boost the efficiency of the signaling.

The authors of this paper imaged three proteins found in the cell that start the signaling process. (Generically called presynaptic proteins, the ones looked at here are RIM1, RIM2, Munc13, and bassoon.) Each of these proteins was specifically tagged, and the authors plotted the density of their distribution across the active zones of the synapse.

The team then developed an algorithm that allowed it to identify small clusters of proteins based on their local density. These nanoclusters were more likely to be located near the center of each synapse than near the synaptic edges. This wasn’t true of all the proteins, but at least two were tightly restricted and a third less so (bassoon was almost uniform throughout the synapse).