Month: October 2020

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The malware known as Emotet has emerged as “one of the most prevalent ongoing threats” as it increasingly targets state and local governments and infects them with other malware, the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday.

Emotet was first identified in 2014 as a relatively simple trojan for stealing banking account credentials. Within a year or two, it had reinvented itself as a formidable downloader or dropper that, after infecting a PC, installed other malware. The Trickbot banking trojan and the Ryuk ransomware are two of the more common follow-ons. Over the past month, Emotet has successfully burrowed into Quebec’s Department of Justice and increased its onslaught on governments in France, Japan, and New Zealand. It has also targeted the Democratic National Committee.

Not to be left out, US state and local governments are also receiving unwanted attention, according to the CISA, short for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Einstein—the agency’s intrusion-detection system for collecting, analyzing, and sharing security information across the federal civilian departments and agencies—has in recent weeks noticed a big uptick, too. In an advisory issued on Tuesday, officials wrote:

Enlarge / Image of the night sky above Paranal, Chile, on July 21, 2007, showing the galactic center of the Milky Way. The laser creates a guide-star for the telescope. (credit: European Southern Observatory/Y. Beletsky)

The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity." He shares it with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."

Penrose, the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, will receive half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (more than US$1.1 million) prize money. He helped solidify the theoretical foundation for black hole physics in the 1960s by providing the seminal mathematical proof that black holes were a direct consequence of general relativity.

Genzel is acting director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, while Ghez is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. They will each receive one-quarter of the prize money. Genzel and Ghez each lead astronomy groups that have mapped the orbits of stars closest to the center of our Milky Way—a region known as Sagittarius A*—giving us the best evidence to date that there is a supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center. That work was aided immeasurably by the development of advanced adaptive optics tools to counter the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere.

Enlarge / Supporters of President Donald Trump wearing "QAnon" T-shirts wait in line before a campaign rally at Freedom Hall on October 1, 2018, in Johnson City, Tennessee. (credit: Getty Images | Sean Rayford )

Facebook is banning the QAnon conspiracy-theorist group, expanding on a policy that previously led to the removal of over 1,500 QAnon-related pages and groups.

Starting in mid-August, Facebook removed QAnon pages and groups that contained discussions of potential violence. Today, Facebook said, "We believe these efforts need to be strengthened when addressing QAnon," and the company strengthened the ban so that it applies regardless of whether the pages and groups discuss violence.

Facebook wrote:

Enlarge (credit: Agrilife Today / Flickr)

“Peak oil” is a familiar phrase that refers to the point when oil production ceases its steady upward climb and begins to decline. It has its roots in a mathematical curve proposed by geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, which he applied to total US production.

That same curve has been used to describe the depletion of groundwater in regions where water is replenished much too slowly for heavy use to be sustainable. In the United States, that famously includes the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the croplands of the High Plains region.

Hubbert’s curve is fairly simple, rising and falling symmetrically on either side of the peak. More specific forecasts of “peak water” require a bit more sophistication. To capture that complexity while keeping things simple enough to easily generate a big-picture view, a new study led by Assaad Mrad at Duke University actually used some math that's similar to another familiar relationship: the predator-prey interactions of the food chain.

Enlarge / Scientists doing what they do best. (credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the results of a series of polls that explored how the publics of 20 different countries view science. While the Pew has the advantage of over a decade of data in some countries and large survey populations, it suffered a bit in terms of timing. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed science to the forefront of the news and policy discussions, and it gave everyone a personal interest in staying abreast of the latest medical advice.

If anything were likely to change the public's views of science, the pandemic would seem to be it. And the Pew polled a bit too early to find out.

But the Pew isn't the only organization that does this sort of polling. Back in 2018, 3M (a company that hires lots of scientists and engineers) started started sharing the results of its own international surveys of public attitudes towards science. And, by this year, the surveys had been running long enough to detect a general drop in trust toward science and scientists—at least prior to the pandemic. In response to COVID-19, however, 3M went back and did a second set of surveys and found that the trend was completely reversed, with trust in science showing a sudden rise.

Enlarge / A Florida man wears a sticker indicating that he registered to vote. (credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Florida's secretary of state has extended the deadline for voter registration to 7pm today. Registration officially closed last night at midnight, but problems with the state's website prevented some Floridians from completing their registration in time.

Laurel Lee, the Florida secretary of state appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, announced the change after noon on Tuesday, giving voters who missed the previous deadline less than seven hours to try again.

Voting rights advocates sued Lee on Tuesday morning, arguing that the website problems had deprived Floridians of their right to vote. They pointed out that Florida's voter registration website has a history of crashing under heavy loads.