Month: August 2017

Enlarge / FAD, the key ingredient to making this system work. The bit that absorbs blue light is on the right. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It's pretty easy to grow vast quantities of microbes. It's a lot harder to convert those microbes into something useful. For example, we've engineered algae that, when starved for nitrogen, will put most of their stored energy into fats. Fats are chemically similar to hydrocarbons, so this is potentially useful for making biofuel. But "similar" isn't really good enough; you still need to process the fats before they can be used as a fuel.

But some researchers may have figured out a way to get biology to convert fats directly to hydrocarbons using nothing more than sunlight. They've identified an enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of fats to long hydrocarbons, which could be used as fuel with no further modification.

Fat vs. fuel

Gasoline is a mixture of different hydrocarbons, which are molecules that contain only hydrogen and carbon. The simplest hydrocarbons are linear chains, with a backbone of carbon atoms where each carbon is linked to, at most, two others (with two or three hydrogen atoms also linked to each carbon). The chemical processing done in refineries ensures that gasoline mostly contains branched hydrocarbons, wherein some carbon atoms are linked to three or four other carbons.

Enlarge / Instagram app on smartphone (credit: Santeri Viinamäki)

One or more hackers have been stealing celebrities' e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information by exploiting a bug on Instagram's servers, the company said Thursday.

Researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab said they recently spotted hackers in an underground forum trading unnamed celebrities' personal details. In an e-mail, a Kaspersky Lab representative said the researchers privately reported a data-leaking bug to Instagram. The Kaspersky Lab researchers went on to say that exploiting the bug was "quite labor intensive" because each attack had to be done manually rather than by using an automated script to bypass mathematical calculations Instagram performs to prevent abuse.

To exploit the bug, according to Kaspersky Lab, attackers used the outdated Instagram mobile app—specifically version 8.5.1, which was released last year—to select the password-reset option. To capture the request, the attackers sent it to a Web proxy rather than the real Instagram servers. The attackers then modified the captured request to substitute the username sent to the Web proxy with the username of targeted celebrities. The Instagram server would then send a JSON-formatted response that included the target's personal information. While the hackers used the outdated app to exploit the bug, the attack worked against all Instagram users, regardless of the app version they used.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. (credit: JD Lasica)

Eight years ago, Google was on top of the world. People across the political spectrum saw the search giant as a symbol of high-tech innovation. During the just-completed 2008 presidential campaign cycle, candidates as diverse as Ron Paul, John McCain, and Barack Obama had all made pilgrimages to Google's Mountain View headquarters to burnish their reputations for tech savvy.

Even better, Google soon had a close relationship to the newly elected president, Barack Obama. "Google was riding high on the fact that Eric Schmidt was campaigning for Obama," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and a longtime Google critic. "There was a lot of attention paid in the press to the fact that Googlers were starting to work in the White House."

With so many Googlers in government, Google had an outsized influence on policymaking during the Obama years. But today, Google is in a different situation. Most obviously, Schmidt worked hard to get Hillary Clinton elected president, and Clinton lost.