Hate daylight saving time? You may have a point, researchers say

For most Americans, daylight saving time means only one thing: losing an hour's sleep. So what is the point?

This is actually a reasonable question, according to a growing body of scientific research.

Daylight saving time is the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour during summer months so that daylight lasts longer into evening. Most of North America and Europe follows the custom, while the majority of countries elsewhere do not.

When clocks in almost all of the United States spring forward by an hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, it will likely prompt an increase in heart attacks and strokes, cause more car accidents and reduce worker productivity, according to studies. It will also fail to cut the nation's energy bill, contrary to what the experts once believed.

In December, a psychology journal published results showing that federal judges handed out sentences that were on average 5 percent longer the day after daylight saving time began than those given out one week before or after.

Disruptions, even minor ones, to human beings' sleep patterns can have outsized effects, according to researchers.

"Our study suggests that sudden, even small changes in sleep could have detrimental effects," Amneet Sandhu of the University of Colorado told Reuters in 2014 after his study of Michigan hospital data showed a 25 percent jump in heart attacks on the Monday after daylight saving time began.

Daylight saving time, which runs until the fall, was widely adopted during World War Two as an energy-saving measure. The rationale was that a later sunset meant people would spend fewer hours using lights inside their homes in the evening.

But studies have generally failed to show significant energy savings associated with the shift.

Plenty of people expressed frustration on social media on Saturday, as the prospect of losing an hour's sleep loomed large.

"Daylight Savings Time seems like a communist plot to get us all confused and tired and thinking the government wants to help us," wrote Twitter user Michael Farris Jr.

Abolishing daylight saving time – or conversely, extending it year-round – would require a law passed by U.S. Congress. States are allowed to opt out of daylight saving time, but all states are required to follow standard time from November to March.

Legislators in some states have tried unsuccessfully to pass laws abandoning daylight saving time, but Arizona and Hawaii are the only states that do not reset their clocks twice a year. For everyone else, Sunday morning will come just a little bit earlier than usual.

Source: Reuters

River in tiny country of Andorra dyed bright green during investigation

Inhabitants of the microstate of Andorra on the mountainous Spanish-French borders spent much of Thursday perturbed as the color of one of their rivers turned emerald green.

The government of Andorra said in a statement that the Valira river had been stained on purpose with a harmless dye as part of an investigation into how the source of a regional spring was contaminated a year ago, leading to the closure of a bottling plant.

Source: EFE

Indian sungazers keep up family tradition for four generations leftright 14/14leftright

In the early morning darkness, Devendran P. walks up a hill to a solar observatory in India's southern hill town of Kodaikanal, trudging the same path his father and grandfather walked in a century-old family tradition of studying the sun.

Once inside, he pulls a rope to open shutters in the dome and positions a six-inch telescope used since 1899 to photograph the sun and preserve a daily record of its activity.

"The sun, like stars, has a lifetime of 10 billion years," Devendran told Reuters during a recent visit to the observatory in India's southern state of Tamil Nadu.

"If you want to know about any small changes, you need to have a large amount of data."

The observatory run by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics has a key role in providing a continuous stream of data on the sun and its influence on Earth and surrounding space, said R. Ramesh, a professor at the institute.

"Some of the discoveries made, based on data obtained in the Kodaikanal observatory, are so fundamental to solar physics that they vastly improved techniques used at observatories even today," Ramesh said.

The Evershed effect of gas motion in sunspots, discovered in 1909 by the then director of the observatory, John Evershed, is one such example, he added.

In the observatory library, shelves stretch to the ceiling, packed with volumes of handwritten records and thousands of film plates of the sun. Authorities have launched a project to digitize and preserve the data collected over the past century.

Devendran's grandfather, Parthasarty, joined the observatory in 1900, a year after it relocated from Madras, the state capital, to Kodaikanal, situated more than 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) above sea level, offering ideal weather to study the sun.

Like his father and grandfather, Devendran has no formal education in astronomy. His interest was piqued during a visit to the observatory when he was a child.

He became a fulltime sunwatcher in 1986 and says the six-inch (15-cm) telescope has never failed his family.

"It has never required any major overhaul, or change of parts, because we all take care of it," he said.

More than three decades of observation has made him feel close to the sun, despite its distance of more than 149 million kms (93 million miles) from Earth. It's a feeling enhanced by the devout family's worship of the Hindu sun god Surya, he said.

"I feel more religious than other people, as I can see that there is a universal power which is controlling everything," he said.

His 23-year-old son, Rajesh, expects to carry on the family tradition, but with one difference. He has a master's degree in physics.

"I get amazed by what my father does here," said Rajesh. "I think observing the Sun is in my blood."

Source: Reuters

Scientists discover massive undersea landslide on Great Barrier Reef

A scientific team has discovered the remnants of a massive undersea landslide on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of northeastern Australia, which occurred more than 300,000 years ago, academic sources said Wednesday.

The remains of the landslide, known as the Gloria Knolls Slide and 30 times the volume of the iconic Uluru rock, are located 75 kilometers off the coast of Innisfail, on the north coast of Queensland.

Source: EFE

Your oldest ancestor was really weird and had a big mouth

Don't take this the wrong way, but your oldest ancestor was not exactly a beauty.

Scientists on Monday said a tiny marine creature from China that wriggled in the seabed mud about 540 million years ago may be the earliest-known animal in the lengthy evolutionary path that eventually led to humans. It was a weird-looking beastie with a bag-like body and, for its size, a really big mouth.

University of Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris noted that humans, who appeared a relatively recent 200,000 years ago, have a series of "evolutionarily deeper ancestors" than monkeys and apes. That point is exemplified by the unique-looking creature called Saccorhytus, whose name means wrinkled sack.

"And is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?" Conway Morris asked.

Saccorhytus, measuring about four-hundredths of an inch (1 millimeter), appears to be the most primitive member of the broad animal group called deuterostomes.

This group includes vertebrates - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals including people - as well as animals called echinoderms including starfish and sea urchins and obscure creatures called hemichordates including acorn worms.

Saccorhytus lived during the Cambrian Period, a time of exceptional evolutionary experimentation. The primitive biological traits possessed by Saccorhytus helped pave the way for the various deuterostomes including vertebrates. Fish, the vanguard of the vertebrates, appeared roughly 10 to 15 million years after Saccorhytus.

"Saccorhytus now gives us remarkable insights into the very first stages of the evolution of a group that led to the fish, and ultimately, to us," paleontologist Degan Shu of China's Northwest University said in a statement provided by the University of Cambridge.

Fossils of about 40 Saccorhytus individuals, including a few superbly preserved specimens, were unearthed in Shaanxi Province in central China and look like miniscule black grains.

Saccorhytus probably lived between individual grains of sediment on the bottom of a shallow sea.

With its large mouth, it probably ate by simply engulfing food particles or smaller creatures whole. The researchers found no evidence that it had an anus, meaning that its waste material may have been expelled out of the mouth. Conway Morris said that process "from our perspective sounds rather unappealing."

It also boasted small conical structures on its body, which was covered with a thin, flexible skin. These structures may have allowed water it swallowed to escape, possibly the evolutionary forerunner of fish gills.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

Source: Reuters

Paralyzed patients communicate thoughts via brain-computer interface

"The striking results overturn my own theory that people with complete locked-in syndrome are not capable of communication," said Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at Switzerland's Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering, who co-led the study.

The trial, published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday, involved four patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - a progressive motor neuron disease that destroys the part of the nervous system responsible for movement.

The researchers asked personal questions with known answers, such as: "Your husband's name is Joachim?", and open questions that needed yes or no answers, such as "Are you happy?".

The BCI technique used technologies called near-infrared spectroscopy and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure blood oxygenation and electrical activity in the brain.

"The machine records the blood flow... and calculates how (it) changes during "yes" and during "no", and the computer develops an idea, a pattern," Birbaumer told Reuters.

"And after a while, we know what the patient is thinking, when he thinks "yes", or when he thinks "no", and from that we calculate the answer."

The "known" questions elicited correct responses seven times out of 10, and the question "Are you happy?" resulted in a consistent yes response from the four people, repeated over weeks of questioning.

John Donoghue, director of the Wyss Center, welcomed the work as "a crucial first step in the challenge to regain movement" for completely locked-in patients.

He said his team now plans to build on these results to develop the technology further and eventually aim for it to be available to people with paralysis resulting from ALS, stroke, or spinal cord injury.

Source: Reuters

Virtual reality 'could help treat vertigo'

People with the condition suffer from dizziness and nausea and often cite places with repetitive visual patterns, such as supermarkets, as the trigger.

A team of psychologists is working to develop virtual environments to help with diagnosis and rehabilitation.

The scientists believe the approach has "real potential".

Dr Georgina Powell, of the School of Psychology, said: "We don't know very much about what causes visual vertigo at the moment.

"There also are not many effective rehabilitation therapies available, so the aim of our project is to try and understand those two things."

She said vertigo can be extremely debilitating, adding: "It can mean that a patient can't leave their house because they feel so sick and nauseous every time they walk around in their visual environment.

"They can't work, they just can't function."

The team said one of the most striking observations they had made about sufferers was the variation between what sparks their symptoms.

"All the patients are very different and some environments might trigger symptoms for some patients whilst other environments might trigger symptoms for others," Dr Powell said.

"So by using virtual reality (VR) we can have vast flexibility over the different types of environments that we can show to patients and we can find out what their individual triggers might be and then tailor specific rehabilitation therapies."

'We have a bucket ready'

Visual vertigo is often referred to as "supermarket syndrome" because large shops, with their cluttered shelves and repetitive aisles, can act as a catalyst to attacks.

"Other environments include walking by the side of a river, where you have motion one side of you but not on the other," Dr Powell said.

"Generally they can only handle so much of the virtual reality images at one time - we have a bucket ready," She added.

"But we give them lots of breaks and lots of water and monitor how they are feeling."

Source: BBC

Astronomers detect enormous luminous halos around distant galaxies

An international astronomy team discovered brilliant gas clouds around distant quasars, the European Southern Observatory said Wednesday.

Quasars, the most luminous and active objects in the universe, are active galaxies which contain supermassive black holes that consume stars, gas and other materials, causing huge amounts of radiation to be emitted.

Source: EFE

Blast from the past: comet may have hit Earth 56 million years ago

Droplets of glass dug up in New Jersey and from the Atlantic seabed indicate a comet or some other extraterrestrial object may have smacked Earth 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs.

Scientists said on Thursday the collision may have triggered a particularly warm, ice-free period on Earth when important mammalian groups, including the primate lineage that led to humans, appeared for the first time.

The findings, published in the journal Science, marked the latest evidence of the profound influence that past impacts by celestial bodies have had on life on Earth.

The tiny spherical bits of dark glass, called microtektites, represent strong evidence of a collision with a comet or asteroid, the researchers said. They form when a space rock hits Earth's surface and vaporizes the spot where it lands, ejecting into the air bits of molten rock that solidify into glass.

The microtektites were excavated from a geological layer marking the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago from three sites in southern New Jersey (Millville, Wilson Lake and Medford) and an underwater site east of Florida.

That coincided with the beginning of a warming event, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, associated with an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It lasted more than 100,000 years and drove up global temperatures about 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit (5-8 degrees Celsius).

The impact of an asteroid about six miles wide (10 km) off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 10 million years earlier killed off many marine and terrestrial creatures including the dinosaurs and enabled mammals to gain supremacy.

No such mass extinction was associated with the event 56 million years ago, although many single-celled ocean-bottom creatures disappeared. During the warming period, primates and two mammal groups -- one that includes deer, antelope, sheep and goats and another that includes horses and rhinos -- first appear in the fossil record.

The researchers said they have not found the location of an impact crater linked to the collision. They said geological evidence suggested the object was a comet.

"We can't really say where it was, or how big, at this point," said geochemist Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who led the study.

While the findings are not proof that the impact caused the warming period, they are "a rather dramatic finding in support of an impact trigger" for the climate changes, said planetary scientist Dennis Kent of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University.

Source: Reuters

Spiders can 'tune' webs for good vibrations, researchers say

Spiders can control the tension and stiffness of their webs to optimize their sensory powers, helping them locate and identify prey as well as partners, according to researchers at Oxford University.

Much in same way that notes travel along a plucked guitar string, spider silk transmits vibrations in different frequencies, sending information back to the spider.

"Spiders use vibrations not only from prey which is caught in their web, where obviously it's important that they know ...where it is and what it might be," researcher Beth Mortimer told Reuters.

"But vibrations are also important in courtship ... A lot of males will actually generate a very specific kind of musical pattern which the females can use to determine not only that they're a male but they're the right species and whether she might want to mate with them as well."

Spiders can also use the information to assess their web's condition, she said.

As part of a study published last month in collaboration with the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, researchers in Oxford took a web from the garden cross spider - Araneus diadematus - and sent measured pulses into its silk strands.

They used a laser to measure vibrations propagating through the web, showing how the waiting spider altered wave amplitude by changing tension and silk stiffness.

"They're able to very closely change the tension of their webs... This means they have a mechanism for directly controlling both the tension and the stiffness of their silk fibers," Mortimer said.

"(These mechanisms) allow them effectively to tune their web's properties so that they can control how sensory information is getting to them in the middle of the web."

Mortimer plans to conduct similar tests with more exotic species, including golden orb-weaver spiders.

Source: Reuters

Three chemists win Nobel Prize for their miniscule molecular machinery

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to French, British and Dutch scientists, announced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.

Jean-Pierre Savage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa won the award for their research into the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Source: EFE

Japanese scientist wins Nobel medicine prize for work on 'self-eating' cell mechanism

Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine for ground-breaking experiments with yeast which exposed a key mechanism in the body's defenses where cells degrade and recycle their components.

Understanding the science behind the process, called "autophagy" or "self-eating", has led to a better understanding of diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's and type 2 diabetes, the prize committee said in its statement on Monday.

"Ohsumi's discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content," it said.

The Physiology or Medicine prize, the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year, is worth 8 million Swedish crowns ($933,000).

Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009. He told Kyodo News agency he was "extremely honored" to get the prize.

In a separate interview with broadcaster NHK, he said he had "always wanted to do something that other people wouldn’t do".

"I thought the breakdown (of cells) would be interesting, and that was my start," he said.

Ohsumi's work - carried out in the 1990s and described by commentators as "paradigm-shifting" and "pioneering" - included locating the genes that regulate autophagy. This is important for medicine because it helps show why errors in these genes can contribute to a range of diseases.

David Rubinsztein, deputy director of Cambridge University's Institute for Medical Research, said Ohsumi had provided scientists around the world with "critical tools" to help them understand how disrupted autophagy can contribute to illnesses including infectious diseases, cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.

Chister Hoog, a professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, told Reuters the work helped explain crucial processes in human development, from growing up, to aging to succumbing to disease.

"In the very early stages (of a human’s development) your organs and your whole body is constantly being made over again – you are growing. So you need to get rid of the old stuff and generate new structures," he said.

"When you undergo aging, you have structures that have to be taken away and this – autophagy – is the principle that gets rid of them.

"If you affect this system – the genes and proteins involved in autophagy – you no longer can take care of the waste, and once it accumulates you will get some type of disease."

This year, the Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel medicine prize, has been immersed in a scandal over the hiring of a controversial surgeon. The Swedish government dismissed several members of the board in September.

Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel. ($1 = 8.5776 Swedish crowns)

Source: Reuters

Rosetta space probe lands on comet, completing mission

The Rosetta probe successfully descended on a comet's surface following an intentional collision to complete its mission, the European Space Agency announced on Friday.

The Rosetta space probe transmitted its last information up until its crash onto the surface of the 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko comet at approximately 11 am GMT.

Source: EFE

Baby with DNA from 3 people opens doors to new treatments

The birth of a baby with genetic material from three people "is a watershed" opening doors to new treatments for various diseases, said Dr. Alejandro Chavez, the director of the center that undertook the procedure.

In an interview with EFE at the New Hope Fertility Center in Mexico City, Chavez said that the event, as reported on Sept. 27 in Britain's New Scientist magazine, was the result of an international effort.

Source: EFE

Moonlight sonata: fish's nocturnal 'singing' secrets revealed

In one of the marvels of nature, males of a fish species called the plainfin midshipman that dwells in Pacific coastal waters from Alaska to Baja California court females during breeding season using a nocturnal "love song" with an otherworldly sound.

Scientists have wondered what makes these fish sing only at night. A study published on Thursday provides the answer.

Laboratory experiments showed that the fish's vocalization, a low-frequency hum like a foghorn, is controlled by a light-driven internal clock and the hormone melatonin, known to govern sleep and wake cycles, researchers said.

"They are among the vocal champions of the marine environment along with whales and dolphins," said Cornell University professor of neurobiology and behavior Andrew Bass. "The production and hearing of vocal signals plays a central role in their social interactions and reproductive behavior."

The plainfin midshipman, up to 15 inches (38 cm) long, generally has an olive-brown color. Its name comes from rows of bioluminescent organs on its underside that reminded early observers of the buttons on a midshipman's uniform.

Males migrate during the late spring and summer from deep offshore sites into shallow intertidal waters, where they build nests beneath rocky shelters.

Throughout the night, they produce hums by vibrating a gas-filled bladder within their abdomen to attract females to their nests to spawn. One hum can last almost two hours. Neighboring males often hum together in a chorus.

Ni Feng, who led the study in Bass' lab at Cornell and now is a Yale University postdoctoral researcher, said the study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved wild-caught fish kept in rooms where lighting could be controlled.

In constant darkness, the fish hummed pretty much on schedule, thanks to their internal clock, or circadian rhythm.

In constant brightness, a condition that lowers melatonin production, humming was suppressed. When kept in constant light but given a melatonin-like substitute, they continued to hum, though at random times of the day.

Melatonin keeps day-active birds quiet at night and helps humans fall asleep but has the reverse effect in the midshipman fish.

People have not always known what to make of the midshipman's humming.

"In the early 1980s, a mysterious sound caused concern for houseboat residents of Sausalito Bay, California, who suspected the source might be the pumps of a nearby sewage plant, an underwater power line, some secret experiment by the Navy or maybe even extraterrestrials," Bass said.

"It turned out their houseboats were merely resonating with the 'love songs' of male midshipman fish."

Source: Reuters

Peru's first Earth observation satellite launched into orbit

Peru's first Earth observation satellite has been launched into orbit aboard the European rocket Vega from a space station in French Guiana.

The submetric (0.7-meter resolution) observation satellite was launched at 8:43 p.m. local time Thursday (0143 GMT Friday) from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou and its progress was observed from the National Satellite Imagery Operations Center, or CNOIS, in Pucusana, a resort south of Lima.

The Peruvian Defense Ministry provided live footage of the launch.

Defense Minister Mariano Gonzalez said at the CNOIS that "the launch of PeruSAT-1 is a milestone because for the first time it will provide us with technology capacity" for 10 years.

"PeruSAT-1 is the region's most powerful submetric observation satellite in its category," he added.

The 400-kilogram (881-pound) device will travel at a speed of seven kilometers (4.3 miles) per second and orbit Earth at an altitude of 694 kilometers (431 miles) with an image swath width of 14.5 kilometers (9 miles).

PeruSAT-1 was purchased by former President Ollanta Humala's 2011-2016 administration and is considered the most sophisticated observation satellite in Latin America with the ability to capture images of objects with dimensions of less than 1 meter (39 inches).

Peruvian authorities say the satellite will provide multiple benefits in the areas of security, national defense, productive activities and disaster prevention.

The satellite was built in France by Airbus Defence and Space in partnership with the National Commission for Aerospace Research and Development, or Conida, Peru's space agency.

PeruSAT-1 is part of the Submetric Satellite System, which under a 2014 government-to-government agreement with France also encompasses construction of the CNOIS, a technology-transfer program and access by Peru to images captured by other French satellites.

CNOIS' operations chief, Edgar Guevara, told local media that the cost of building the satellite and launching it into orbit was 150 million euros ($168.6 million).

PeruSAT-1 bears Conida's logo and a pair of messages: "Kausachum Peru" ("Long Live Peru!" in the Quechua language) and "this represents the dreams, labor and success of Peruvians working on and developing Peru's space capabilities."

Source: EFE

China has launched its second space lab

China just took another step in the space race with the launch of its second laboratory Tiangong-2 late Thursday, a major step further in the plan to establish a permanent space station by 2022.

As expected, the Tiangong-2, which translates to Heavenly Palace in Mandarin, was successfully launched at 10.04pm local time Thursday (14.04 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, some 1,600 km from Beijing.

Source: EFE

Scientists decipher color of 'super cute' bristly dinosaur

Scientists guided by small structures preserved in fossilized skin have deciphered the color and camouflage pattern of a little dinosaur with a parrot-like beak and bristles on its tail that roamed thick forests in China about 120 million years ago.

Psittacosaurus was mainly brown but with a paler underside of the tail and belly, a pattern called countershading that may have helped the 5-foot-long (1.5-meter) bipedal plant-eater go unnoticed by hungry predators, the scientists said on Thursday.

It also had a heavily pigmented face and hind legs that were striped on the inside and reticulated and spotted on the outside.

The color pattern suggested Psittacosaurus (pronounced sit-TAK-ah-sawr-us) lived in a forest environment with diffuse light from a dense canopy of trees, the researchers said. They created a life-sized, full-color, three-dimensional model based on their findings.

"Our model suggests it was super, super cute. I think they would have made fantastic pets. They look a bit like E.T.," said molecular paleobiologist Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol in Britain, referring to the friendly alien in the 1982 film "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."

Psittacosaurus, meaning "parrot lizard," is one of the most thoroughly studied dinosaurs, with hundreds of individual fossils. It was roughly the size of a Labrador retriever, and probably was a common meal for Cretaceous Period predators like the 30-foot-long (9 meters) T. rex cousin Yutyrannus.

"It was eaten by a lot of other animals," Vinther said, and must have quickly evolved optimal color patterns for camouflage.

Psittacosaurus is the third dinosaur to have its color deduced using fossilized organelles called melanosomes that synthesize and store the pigment melanin in vertebrate animals and are present in hair, feathers and skin. It also was the first time researchers were able to hypothesize the environment a dinosaur inhabited based on its coloration.

Psittacosaurus, an early member of the horned-dinosaur group that includes the massive Triceratops, had a short face and a strong beak to eat plants, and boasted bristly long filaments above the tail.

Countershading is a pattern that serves to conceal shadows on an animal, making it appear more flat optically and less conspicuous, Vinther said.

"It is everywhere. We see it in the sea, on land and in flying birds," Vinther said. "Examples could be penguins, puffins, dolphins, mackerel, deer, foxes, antelopes. You name it. It's ubiquitous."

The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Source: Reuters

Sophisticated hackers 'aim to put net out of action'

In a blogpost, security guru Bruce Schneier said "precisely calibrated" attacks on key net firms had been seen for over a year.

The attacks sought weaknesses in the defences of organisations that oversaw critical parts of the net, he said.

He said his "first guess" was that either China or Russia was behind the series of attacks.

Responding to his comments, one security firm said the range of attacks he described was "the new normal" for many organisations.

The hackers used well-known distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to probe defences, wrote Mr Schneier.

'Worrying pattern'

These attacks typically seek to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with data. They are often used by extortionists who threaten to cripple a site via DDoS unless its owners pay a fee.

Mr Schneier said the DDoS attacks observed against core net firms had a different character. To begin with they were "significantly larger" and lasted longer than most such attacks.

They were also more sophisticated because the amount of data being directed at victims was slowly turned up.

Often, he said, the peak data rate of one series of attacks would be the starting point for the next wave.

The attackers also sought to find out what digital defences firms could muster by employing several different types of DDoS attack.

"It's as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure," he said.

Other attacks on the net's addressing system had also been seen that, together with the DDoS probes, revealed a worrying pattern, he said.

"Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical internet services," he wrote.

Mr Schneier did not reveal which firms had been hit in the attacks as the victims had shared information with him under a guarantee of anonymity.

Information gathered on DDoS attacks by net giant Verisign lent weight to Mr Schneier's conclusions. In the latest edition of a regularly issued report, it said it had seen DDoS attacks become "more frequent, persistent and complex".

Arbor Networks, which helps defend firms against DDoS attacks, said they had been growing in "frequency, volume, and sophistication" for many years.

Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at Arbor, said it was "manifestly untrue" that only state-sponsored hackers could mount the most sophisticated and sizeable attacks.

The constant hum of DDoS attacks that swept the net on a daily basis were kicked off by many different actors, he said.

"Some are nation-state actors, some are affiliated with nation-states at arm's length, many are non-state ideological actors, and many are commercially driven criminal actors," said Mr Dobbins.

"Irrespective of the identities and motivations of DDoS threat actors, successful defence is demonstrably possible against even the largest and most sophisticated DDoS attacks."

Source: BBC

NASA asteroid probe may find clues to origins of life on Earth

A U.S. space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dispatch the robot explorer Osiris-Rex on a seven-year mission.

United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.

Osiris-Rex is headed to a 1,640-foot (500-meter) wide asteroid named Bennu, which circles the sun in roughly the same orbit as Earth. Scientists estimate there is a one-in-800 chance that Bennu might actually hit Earth 166 years from now.

Heating from the sun gently pushes the asteroid, and charting its path is among the goals of the $1 billion mission. The U.S. space agency also hopes Osiris-Rex will demonstrate the advanced imaging and mapping techniques needed for future science missions and for upcoming commercial asteroid-mining expeditions.

Osiris-Rex is expected to reach Bennu in August 2018 and begin a two-year study of its physical features and chemical composition. The solar-powered spacecraft will then fly to Bennu's surface and extend a robot arm to collect at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of what scientists hope will be carbon-rich material.

"We're going to asteroid Bennu because it's a time capsule from the earliest stages of solar system formation, back when our planetary system was spread across as dust grains in a swirling cloud around our growing protostar," lead researcher Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona told a prelaunch news conference on Tuesday.

Inside the developing solar system, small rocky bodies were beginning to form, many of them studded with water ice and organic materials, which are key compounds that may have made Earth habitable or even given life its start, Lauretta said.

If all goes as planned, the capsule containing samples from Bennu will be jettisoned from the returning Osiris-Rex spacecraft on Sept. 24, 2023, for a parachute descent and landing at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range.

Osiris-Rex is the latest in a series of missions to asteroids that began with the 1991 flyby of asteroid Gaspra by NASA's Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft. Japan's Hayabusa 1 probe managed to return a few tiny grains of asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010, the first asteroid sample return mission. A follow-on mission, Hayabusa 2, is underway.

The Osiris-Rex launch was set for between 7:05 p.m. and 9:05 p.m. on Thursday (2305 to 0105 GMT on Friday).

Source: Reuters