The Truth About 2012 Doomsday Hype

By Benjamin Radford

2012 is coming very soon. The movie, that is — the disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich depicting global catastrophe of Biblical proportions. The year itself is of course a few dozen months away, and there is growing interest, excitement, and concern for both events.

The film “2012,” which opens Nov. 13, takes place, rather obviously, in the year 2012, though it could have been set in 1995 or 2013. The movie’s disasters have no particular link to that year, it’s just when the Earth happens to start burping earthquakes and farting fire. 2012 made a perfect promotional hook for the film, because the ancient Mayans predicted that the world would end that year, if not specifically on December 21, 2012.

That’s one story, anyway.

Whether or not 2012 will bring cataclysmic volcanism or a great flood, it has undeniably brought a flood of books. New Age and doomsday authors have been cranking out 2012-themed books at an amazing pace over the past few years; there are literally thousands of such titles in print, with more on the way.

While many authors and 2012 “experts” are playing up the doomsday scenario, others believe that the year will bring not disaster but a new era of global harmony (as in what did not happen with the so-called Harmonic Convergence in 1987). It seems that anyone with access to a keyboard and an opinion on 2012 (or prophecy in general) is trying to cash in. (It will be interesting to see how many of those books will be for sale on Amazon.com for one cent on Jan. 1, 2013.)

Mayan myth

In fact, the link between global catastrophe and Mayan calendar-based prophecy is largely fiction. Ads for “2012″ begin with the phrase, “The Mayans warned us,” though of course the Mayans did not “warn” anyone — they simply had a calendar system that happens to “end” in 2012, much as the way the Gregorian calendar on my office wall “ends” on Dec. 31.

The Mayans never said the world would end that year, and modern Mayans have shown irritation with how their culture has been co-opted into pop culture notions and Hollywood blockbuster film promotions.

John Major Jenkins, a Maya scholar and author of “The 2012 Story,” notes that “when the 2012 bug started to bite the mainstream press and many more books started to appear, authors and the media were pulling the 2012 topic in predictably weird directions.”

The 2012 link to the Maya is not a hoax; their calendar does in fact conclude in that year. Just what that means — if anything — is the question.

Of course, the Mayans were only one of dozens of major civilizations, and there is no particular reason to assume that the Mayan calendar is any more cosmically significant or valid than any of hundreds of other calendar systems used throughout history.

Appealing mysticism

So why this focus on the Mayans?

Part of the reason the New Age crowd has embraced the Mayan calendar (instead of, say, the Hindu calendar) is that the Mayans fit perfectly into their ideas about the ancient wisdom of the “noble savage.” Belief that ancient civilizations (such as the Mayans and Egyptians) were far more advanced than often claimed permeates New Age thought, and the idea that Mayan mystics somehow knew of the world’s end millennia ago is very appealing.

There have also been several outright hoaxes connected to 2012, most notably the claim that Nibiru, a non-existent planet supposedly discovered by the ancient Sumerians, will encounter Earth in 2012 and cause havoc, including a reversal of the geomagnetic poles.

NASA has been accused of covering up the existence of Nibiru, presumably to prevent mass panic (a theme that also appears in the film). Doomsdays come and go, but conspiracy theories are forever.

• 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions
• Video: 2012 Cataclysm or Ancient Myth?
• Doomsday News & Information

Benjamin Radford is managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. His books, films, and other projects can be found on his website. His Bad Science column appears regularly on LiveScience.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/091105-2021-doomsday.html

Can scientists make a space elevator?

This concept image from NASA shows what a space elevator and transfer station could look like.

By Doug Gross, CNN

“The question Artsutanov asked himself had the childlike brilliance of true genius. A merely clever man could never have thought of it — or would have dismissed it instantly as absurd. If the laws of celestial mechanics make it possible for an object to stay fixed in the sky, might it not be possible to lower a cable down to the surface, and so to establish an elevator system linking earth to space?” — Arthur C. Clarke, 1979, “The Fountains of Paradise”

(CNN) — It sounds like science fiction. And it was.

Now, 30 years after “2001″ author Arthur C. Clarke wrote about an elevator that rises into outer space, serious research is happening all over the world in an effort to make the far-fetched-sounding idea a reality.

The benefits of a fully realized elevator would make carrying people and goods into space cheaper, easier and safer than with rocket launches, proponents say, opening up a host of possibilities.

Restaurants and hotels for space tourists. Wind turbines that provide energy by spinning 24 hours a day. A cheaper, easier and more environmentally friendly way to launch rockets.

Scientists envision all of the above — possibly within our lifetimes.

“Space elevator-related research is valid, but there are hurdles to overcome,” said David Smitherman, a space architect at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.

This week in the Mojave Desert, three teams of engineers are competing for $2 million offered up by NASA for anyone who can build a prototype of an elevator able to crawl up a kilometer-high tether while hauling a heavy payload.

“We haven’t had any winners yet, but we truly do expect to have at least one winner, probably more [this year],” said Ted Semon, spokesman for The Spaceward Foundation, which has run the competition for the past several years.

Most models for an elevator into space involve attaching a cable from a satellite, space station or other counterweight to a base on Earth’s surface.

Scientists say inertia would keep the cable tight enough to allow an elevator to climb it.

The inspiration for researchers to pursue a space elevator started, as many scientific advances have, in the fantastical world of science fiction.

In Clarke’s 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” he writes about a scientist battling technological, political and ethical difficulties involved in creating a space elevator.

In the years that followed, Clarke, who died last year, remained an outspoken advocate for researching and funding the elevator.

Others are now carrying the torch.

“Space elevator research is important because it is a way to build a bridge to space instead of ferrying everything by rocket,” said Smitherman, who has conducted research and published findings on the effort.

“Look at the cost and efficiency of a bridge versus a ferry on Earth and then look at the cost and inefficiency of the rocket ferries we use today and you will see why so many people are looking for a ‘bridge’ solution like the space elevator.”

Microsoft is among the sponsors an annual space elevator conference, and teams in Japan and Russia are among those working to turn the theory into reality — even if they all admit they have a long way to go.

Even the most avid proponents of the research admit there are big hurdles that need to be overcome.

The first, scientists say, is that there’s currently not a viable material strong enough to make the cables that will support heavy loads of passengers or cargo into orbit. According to NASA research, the space elevator cable would need to be about 22,000 miles long. That’s how far away a satellite must be to maintain orbit above a fixed spot on the Earth’s equator.

“Right now, if you use the strongest material in the world, the weight of the tether would be so much that it would actually snap,” said Semon, a retired software engineer. He said the super-light material would probably need to be about 25 times stronger than what’s now commercially available.

In a separate competition, his group offers a prize to any team that can build a tether that’s at least twice as strong as what’s currently on the market.

Another issue, scientists say, is how to keep the cable, or the elevator itself, from getting clobbered by meteorites or space junk floating around in space. Some suggest a massive cleanup of Earth’s near orbit would be required.

And then there’s the cost. Estimates are as high as $20 billion for a working system that would stretch into orbit.

Many think it would be private enterprise, not a government, that would spring for the earliest versions of the elevator.

Professor Brendan Quine and his team at York University in Toronto, Canada, think they have the answers to at least some of those problems.

They’ve built a three-story high prototype of an elevator tower that would rise roughly 13 miles (20 kilometers) — high enough to escape most of the earth’s atmosphere.

“At 20 kilometers, you still have gravity; you’re not in orbit,” Quine said. “But for a tourist, you can see basically the same things an astronaut sees — the blackness of space, the horizon of the Earth.”

In the stratosphere, the tower also could potentially be used to launch rockets, he said. The most expensive and energy-sucking part of any space launch now is blasting from the ground out of the atmosphere.

Constructed from Kevlar, the free-standing structure would use pneumatically inflated sections pressurized with a lightweight gas, such as hydrogen or helium, to actively stabilize itself and allow for flexibility. A series of platforms or pods, supported by the elevator, would be used to launch payloads into Earth’s orbit.

Quine acknowledged that the prototype is just a first step toward realizing the elevator and that several more prototypes are needed to fine-tune details.

He estimated that the cost of the basic tower would be about $2 billion — the equivalent of a massive skyscraper in places like New York — and that the technology to build it could be ready in less than 10 years.

He said a more advanced — and expensive — elevator tower could be built to go higher into the stratosphere.

But for the purposes of actually ferrying everyday people into space, 20 kilometers makes the most sense, Quine said.

“The tower might be economically viable if you’re able to transport 1,000 people a day to the to of it for about $1,000 a ticket,” he said. “At the top, you’d probably want amenities — hotels, restaurants. It could be a very pleasant experience, in contrast to zero gravity, which makes many people sick.”

For now, advocates of making the elevator a reality say they’ll keep at it. They’ll continue reminding themselves that they wouldn’t be the first to turn what started as an outlandish idea into good science.

“Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction,” Clarke once said. “They may be summed up by the phrases: One, it’s completely impossible. Two, it’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. Three, I said it was a good idea all along.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/11/05/space.elevator/

A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor

Pump it up: This low-power neural amplifier collects electrical signals from nerves and minimizes the electrical noise.  Credit: Brian Otis, University of Washington

A tiny radio chip implanted in a moth harvests power and senses neural activity.

By Kate Greene

Thanks to the shrinking size of electronics, researchers have been exploring increasingly sophisticated implantable devices, paving the way for new prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces. But a big challenge has been how to deliver power to electronic components embedded within the body.

Now electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Other wireless medical devices, such as cochlea or retinal implants, rely on inductive coupling, which means the power source needs to be centimeters away. The new sensor platform, called NeuralWISP, draws power from a radio source up to a meter away.

The device contains a microprocessor powered by a commercial radio-frequency reader that doubles as a data-collection device. The same equipment is used to power and read information from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. In experiments, the researchers used the new device to sense central nervous system activity in a moth in order to study its locomotion.

There have been some advances in reducing the size of neural implants recently, but the majority of implantable devices are still relatively cumbersome. These devices typically require multiple components–such as a clock for timing operations and an antenna for communication and power-harvesting–that are quite large compared to the transistors on the microcontroller, says Brian Otis, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington and lead researcher on NeuralWISP.

“You can have millions of transistors on a chip less that’s less than a cubic millimeter in volume, but the problem is with the extra parts,” says Otis. “Our goal is to shrink everything onto a single chip and reduce the power consumption of these components so that the chip can be wirelessly powered.”

The NeuralWISP is a collection of smaller, more low-power components, such as a specialized signal amplifier, on a circuit board just over two centimeters long. A future version will integrate all components onto a single chip that’s one millimeter by two millimeters in size. The circuitry converts usable power from the reader–roughly 430 microwatts–to a voltage that can turn on the microcontroller. This microcontroller, in turn, controls the sensor and its timer, and runs instructions that allow data to be sent back to the reader.

Article Continues – http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23878/?a=f

Spraying on Skin Cells to Heal Burns

Spray-on skin: In a unique treatment for second-degree burns, surgeons harvest a small number of skin cells through a skin biopsy, suspend them in solution, and then spray the resulting mixture onto a burn wound. Once in place, skin stem cells, called basal cells, proliferate to create a new layer of skin.   Credit: ReCell

A new technique in burn treatment provides an alternative to skin grafts in the operating room.

By Lauren Gravitz

Traditionally, treatment for severe second-degree burns consists of adding insult to injury: cutting a swath of skin from another site on the same patient in order to graft it over the burn. The process works, but causes more pain for the burn victim and doubles the area in need of healing. Now a relatively new technology has the potential to heal burns in a way that’s much less invasive than skin grafts. With just a small skin biopsy and a ready-made kit, surgeons can create a suspension of the skin’s basal cells–the stem cells of the epidermis–and spray the solution directly onto the burn with results comparable to those from skin grafts.

The cell spray is intended to treat severe second-degree burns, in which the top two layers of skin are damaged but the subcutaneous tissue is left intact. Third-degree burns, which are more severe, still require a skin graft. The spray, already approved for use in some countries, has garnered interest from the United States Army, whose Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine is funding a trial, slated to begin before the end of this year, of more than 100 patients.

The technology, developed by Australian surgeon Fiona Wood, relies on cells, such as skin progenitor cells and the color-imparting melanocytes, that are most concentrated at the junction between the skin’s top two layers. With a small step-by-step kit dubbed ReCell, surgeons can harvest, process and apply these cells to treat a burn as large as 10.5 square feet. The kit, marketed by Avita Medical, a United Kingdom-based regenerative-medicine company, is a tiny, self-contained lab about the size and shape of a large sunglasses case.

After removing a small swatch of skin near the burn site (the closer the biopsy, the better for precise matching of color and texture), the surgeon places it in the kit’s tiny incubator along with an enzyme solution. The enzyme loosens the critical cells at the skin’s dermal-epidermal junction, and the surgeon harvests them by scraping them off the epidermal and dermal layers and suspending them in solution. The resulting mixture is then sprayed onto the wound, repopulating the burn site with basal cells from the biopsy site.

“Currently, treating any burn that requires a skin graft is the same technology we were routinely using 30 years ago,” says James Holmes, a surgeon and the medical director of the Burn Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Current practice with larger burns requires grafts from donor skin that are anywhere from one-quarter to the complete size of the burn area. ReCell requires only as much as four square centimeters. “This allows you to take a very small skin biopsy and process it at the table there in the operating room using a fully prepackaged device,” Holmes says. “You’re able to cover an area that’s 80 times the size of your biopsy.”

Holmes is the lead investigator on an upcoming multicenter trial that will compare skin grafts and ReCell. Patients in the trial will act as their own controls: If a burn victim has a second-degree burn severe enough for surgeons to deem treatable by skin graft, half of the burn will be treated that way, while the other half will be treated with the cell spray.

Article Continues - http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23876/

Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough

Liquid salt: This image shows ionic liquids (the blue globules) in a beaker of mineral oil.   Credit: John Wilkes

A government-funded start-up claims it can make ionic liquid energy storage feasible.

By Tyler Hamilton

A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that dramatically outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, and now it has the funding it needs to prove it.

The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded a $5.13-million research grant to Scottsdale, AZ-based Fluidic Energy toward development of a metal-air battery that relies on ionic liquids, instead of an aqueous solution, as its electrolyte.

The company aims to build a Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery that has up to 11 times the energy density of the top lithium-ion technologies for less than one-third the cost. Cody Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, says the use of ionic liquids overcomes many of the problems that have held back metal-air batteries in the past. “I’m not claiming we have it yet, but if we do succeed, it really does change the way we think about storage,” says Friesen, who was named one of Technology Review’s top innovators under 35 in 2009.

Metal-air batteries, such as those that use a zincanode, typically rely on water-based electrolytes. Oxygen from ambient air is drawn in through a porous “air” electrode (-cathode) and produces hydroxyl ions on contact with the electrolyte. These ions reach the anode and begin to oxidize the zinc–a reaction that produces current through the release of electrons.

But like any aqueous solution, the water in the electrolyte can evaporate, causing the batteries to prematurely fail. Water also has a relatively low electrochemical window, meaning it will begin to decompose when the cell exceeds 1.23 volts. These were two problems researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy began tackling about 25 years ago. In the early 1980s they experimented with ionic liquids–salts that are a liquid at room temperature, and which often can remain a liquid in sub-zero temperatures or above the boiling point of water.

“They’re wonder fluids. They’re remarkable,” says John Wilkes, an ionic liquids expert who heads the academy’s chemistry department. “If you look at these liquids in a bottle, they look like water, except they’re viscous. They’re not volatile, they don’t evaporate, they’re physically stable and they conduct electricity fairly well.”

Friesen, whose Arizona State research team has spent the past few years experimenting with various ionic liquids, says a metal-air battery using an ionic liquid as its electrolyte not only functions significantly longer–because drying out is no longer a problem–but it also gets a big boost in energy density. “These liquids have electrochemical stability windows of up to five volts, so it allows you to go to much more energy-dense metals than zinc.” He says his research team will target energy densities of at least 900 watt-hours per kilogram and up to 1,600 watt-hours per kilogram in the DOE-funded project.

The problem with ionic liquids is that they’re still made in small quantities, making them expensive compared to many other solvents used to dissolve salts. “But some people are making ionic liquids now out of things that are already known and produced in high quantities, like detergents,” says Wilkes.

Article Continues – http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23877/?a=f

Forecasting Financial Crashes: The Ultimate Experiment Begins

If a new technique for predicting crashes really works, a bold new experiment will measure how well.

Is it really possible to predict the end of financial bubbles? Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich thinks so and has set up the Financial Crisis Observatory at ETH to study the idea.

We’ve looked at his extraordinary predictions before. Earlier this year, he identified a bubble in the Shanghai Composite Index and much to this blog’s surprise, forecast its end with remarkable accuracy.

But as many people pointed out, the problem with this kind of forecast is that it is difficult interpret the results. Does it really back Sornette’s hypothesis that crashes are predictable? How do we know that he doesn’t make these predictions on a regular basis and only publicise the ones that come true? Or perhaps he modifies them as the due date gets closer so that they always seem to be right (as weather forecasters do). It’s even possible that his predictions influence the markets: perhaps they trigger crashes.

Sornette himself is only too well aware of these problems and so has designed an experiment to properly test two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that financial (and other) bubbles can be diagnosed in real-time before they end. And the second is that the termination of financial (and other) bubbles can be bracketed using probabilistic forecasts, with a reliability better than chance.

The experiment–he calls it the Financial Bubble Experiment–consists of Sornette and his team monitoring world markets and coming up with predictions about the forthcoming end of bubbles in the way they have been doing in recent years. But instead of publishing these predictions, Sornette intends to seal them in an electronic envelope held by a trusted third party, in this case, the physics arXiv.

The arXiv time stamps each prediction so that there is no dispute over when it was made and ensures that it cannot be changed.

Every six months, Sornette says he will open the envelopes and publish his predictions so that anyone can see how successful he has been.

That’s a brave step forward but one that he has little choice over, if his ideas are to be broadly accepted.

To start off with, he has made three forecasts which he’s posted to the arXiv. On 1 May 2010, he will unseal them and we’ll be waiting.

Exciting stuff.

 

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0911.0454: The Financial Bubble Experiment: Advanced Diagnostics and Forecasts of Bubble Terminations

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24358/

Record labels keep blaming P2P, but it’s a hard sell

The IFPI is blasting a recent study showing that P2P users buy more music, but an EU Commissioner and a UK Parliamentary body both blame music labels for “much of the problem” with current P2P usage levels. The major labels couldn’t disagree more.

By Nate Anderson

In response to a new survey suggesting that P2P file-swapping might not be harming music sales, music’s international trade group IFPI today put out a statement. “The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales,” IFPI asserts. “This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread.”

In other words, P2P file-sharing is the main cause of the revenue decline and the (very real) job losses in the recorded music business. It’s a strong assertion, but it’s not necessarily accepted outside the music industry. And we’re not talking about the usual copyrighters, or groups like EFF, or Pirate Party backers; complaints about P2P have failed to convince even people like the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.

Back in September 2009, Reding made a speech in which she put equal blame for the problem on Big Content, so terrified of piracy and lack of control that many companies refuse to give customers what they want.

“It is necessary to penalise those who are breaking the law,” she said, “but are there really enough attractive and consumer-friendly legal offers on the market? Does our present legal system for Intellectual Property Rights really live up to the expectations of the Internet generation? Have we considered all alternative options to repression? Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing Internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers.”

Innovation stagnation

“A vote of no-confidence in existing business models.” It’s a common criticism, and one advanced by all sorts of people who aren’t out to destroy copyright or sink major music labels.

Take the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group in the UK Parliament, which solicited mountains of comments from groups on all sides of the issue, and concluded in its final report (PDF) this fall that “much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.”

Plenty of musicians now agree. Greg Kot, a Chicago journalist and the host of NPR’s “Sound Opinions” radio show, collected a wide range of such sentiments for his recent book Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.

Kot quotes Peter Jenner, the first manager of 60s psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd, saying, “The flagrant spread of ‘Internet piracy’ in developed countries is a reflection of the failure of the industry as a whole to develop an appropriate copyright responds to the distribution and remuneration options made possible by the new technologies.”

Kot’s own take on what happened to the music labels is that they took the wrong approach to file-sharing. “The industry responded not with a vigorous new ideas, but with strong-arm tactics and threats,” he writes. “It served fans not with digital innovation but lawsuits—more than 20,000 in the span of four years, in an attempt to intimidate consumers away from file sharing.”

Even music’s top executives now recognize the dire lack of innovation in their businesses. Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner, said in 2007, “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection, and file sharing was exploding. And of course, we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inversely went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find. And as a result, of course, consumers won.”

Steve Knopper, in his excellent book Appetite for Self-destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, quotes Mac McCaughan, founder of Merge Records (early home to bands like Arcade Fire).

“I’ve always felt like major labels claiming downloading for their declining sales is just somewhat wishful thinking,” he said. “It’s like a scapegoat—they wish it was that and not ‘they’ve been putting out terrible records for a long time’… People who are our hardcore fans like music and want to support the artists and labels that put out records they like. We’re all in the music business, but it’s like we’re two different businesses.”

The single resurgent?

But if P2P isn’t the main driver of lost revenue, where’s that revenue going? After all, major label music income is way down, and up to 50,000 people may have been laid off during this decade.

Knopper offers a simple explanation: labels used the CD era to basically eliminate the single and push the album. In addition, the new-at-the-time digital format encouraged many consumers to re-purchase albums that they had previously owned only in analog.

When the digital download era arrived, labels had grown fat on this business model and were not prepared to nurture “album bands.” Instead, the relentless obsession on creating “hits” in order to move albums, which worked so well in the CD era, proved disastrous in the age of iTunes. Individual digital downloads brought the single back to life in a big way, and moving a 99¢ single couldn’t come close to generating the same profit as a $14 CD, even with the costs of packaging eliminated.

And as for repurchasing albums, CDs were already digital, and typically featured better sound than that available through compressed downloads online.

Knopper quotes Robert Pittman, the cofounder of MTV. “Stealing music is not killing music,” said Pittman. “When I talk to people in the music business, most of them will admit that the problem is they’re selling songs and not albums. I mean, you do the math.”

Copyright lawyers like William Patry agree. In his new book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, Patry takes up the theme: “The problems in the Copyright Wars are not caused by technologies or by consumers acting badly, and they cannot therefore be solved by laws, and certainly not by more draconian laws. The problems—such as the decline in sales of CDs and DVDs—are the result of the copyright industries’ many and considerable failures to focus on satisfying consumers’ desires as opposed to stifling those desires out of a woefully misguided view that copyright equals control and that control equals profits.”

None of this is to say that file-sharing has no effect on music sales; while some studies have seen a positive impact due to greater music exposure, other studies suggest that revenue (at least for music labels) declines. But it seems unlikely to be the music industry’s chief problem, as numerous innovative (and profitable) bands have shown in the last few years.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/record-labels-keep-blaming-p2p-but-its-a-hard-sell.ars

New tool seeks to block rootkits by protecting their targets

Rootkits often replace functions provided by an operating system’s kernel in order to infect a machine and obscure their presence. A paper describes a way of blocking rootkits by gathering all these functions in one place in memory, then locking down the memory.

By John Timmer

In recent years, malware authors have developed increasingly sophisticated rootkits that burrow into the operating system itself, modifying basic filesystem and process management code in a way that ensures they are essentially invisible to anyone using the machine: no files visible, no processes apparent. While some progress has been made in detecting when a rootkit has compromised a system, preemptively blocking an attack has remained challenging, since the malware relies on important system functions. A team of computer scientists have now described a tool, called Hook Safe, that uses virtualization to preempt rootkits by moving and protecting the kernel functions that they target.

Rootkits burrow their way into an operating system’s kernel using a process called hooking.  The services provided by a kernel—file system and hardware access, memory management, etc.—are accessible through callable functions. The kernel keeps track of where the functions reside in memory using pointers, which contain the address in memory of the function. Hooking involves replacing a legitimate function pointer with one provided by malware. So, for example, the malware might replace (or hook) a file system function with one that behaves perfectly normally except when it comes to the areas of the filesystem where the malware lives; in that case, it returns information that suggests the files aren’t there. Any software that uses the kernel for filesystem access will never know the rootkit is present.

Obviously, the simplest way of blocking a rootkit would be to prohibit this process by marking kernel memory as read-only. But there are two problems with this approach. For starters, the ability to perform a kernel hook has many legitimate uses, such as when a new input device hooks into the portions of the kernel that handle mouse or keyboard input. The other problem is that the function pointers are scattered around the kernel’s memory footprint, and are sometimes created and destroyed as the kernel creates new objects, like networking sockets. Locking the entire kernel down as read-only would cripple the operating system.

(The authors call this problem the “protection granularity gap.” It’s possible to lock down a page of memory that contains function pointers but, in doing so, you invariably lock down some dynamic data, which causes problems. There is currently no technology that provides a fine enough granularity to lock down the parts of a memory page that contain the pointers.)

The authors tackle these two problems separately. To identify legitimate kernel hooks, the authors run a clean version of the operating system (in this case, Ubuntu 8.04) under a modified version of the QEMU emulator. Their modified version of QEMU tracks all the kernel hooks that take place in the course of normal operations, and generates a unique signature for each of them. That allows this activity to be recognized and allowed during normal operations.

They solve the granularity gap by creating a shadow copy of every kernel hook they’ve identified, all collected in contiguous memory pages that can be marked as read only and protected by a custom version of the Xen hypervisor. Their original location in the kernel gets replaced by a jump statement, that shifts execution to what they call a trampoline, which bounces execution to the safe shadow copy, and then returns it to the original execution point. The variable-sized x86 instructions make this a bit more challenging than it might otherwise be, but the authors manage to compensate.

If the hook is used simply to execute the function, everything should take place as normal. If it’s used to replace the hook, the protected memory page invokes the Xen hypervisor. Their modified version checks the signature of the action, comparing it against the list generated when the kernel ran under QEMU. If the activity is recognized, it’s allowed to go forward. If not, the shadow copy of kernel hooks is kept unmodified.

The authors solved a number of other potential problems in their paper. For example, they block writing to hardware registers, and limit Direct Memory Access transfers to kernel space. Hooks in dynamically allocated kernel objects are tracked using a modified version of the kernel’s memory allocator. The fact that the system only becomes active after the kernel is loaded into memory is solved by identifying a few key kernel globals, and walking the memory tree below them.

How does it all work? The authors tested a variety of Linux rootkits, and found that all of them failed on a system protected by Hook Safe, some being unable to infect the target machine, the rest remaining visible to a user after infection. For a variety of typical processes, the overhead of the system was negligible. The worst performance occurred when unzipping a file or using the Apache webserver under heavy load. Both of these require the allocation of lots of memory within the kernel, which invoked some of the authors’ code in addition to the normal allocation routines. Still, the worst case was only a six percent performance hit.

The biggest potential problem here, which is recognized by the authors, is that their database of acceptable hooks will end up being incomplete. This is already a problem in the lab, but could be a nightmare in the real world, where software updates and new drivers may appear on a monthly basis. Still, it’s easy to envision systems that update the profile of legitimate hooks as part of a software update process, or provides users with the opportunity to approve changes.

A paper describing Hook Safe will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/11/new-tool-seeks-to-block-rootkits-by-protecting-their-targets.ars

Cat in Iowa Catches Swine Flu

Officials Say Male Cat in Iowa is First to Catch H1N1
By LAUREN COX

An unidentified male cat in Iowa is believed to be the first in the nation diagnosed with the H1N1 virus, sparking concerns that pets may transmit the swine flu or that frightened pet owners may abandon their cats in droves.

The 13-year-old, mixed-breed cat showed the symptoms of lethargy, sneezing and coughing typical to sick cats. He was brought last week to Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center at Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, where it was confirmed he had the H1N1 virus.

Veterinarians refused to release his identity and would not divulge the coat color or any other identifying characteristics to protect client-veterinarian privacy. One veterinarian who treated the cat, Brett Sponseller, said two people in the cat’s Iowa home had flu-like symptoms before he became ill.

Officials at the Iowa Department of Public Health released the unnamed cat’s diagnosis Wednesday.

“In this particular instance, the cat was treated for its dehydration with fluid therapy and also treated with antibiotics upon the results of testing,” said Albert Jergens, professor of internal medicine at Iowa State University.

“The cat has been on therapy now for approximately seven days,” he said. “I think the prognosis on this cat for a full recovery is excellent.”

This is the first known transmission of influenza from a person to a cat, an expert at the Centers for Disease and Control told ABC News senior medical editor Dr. Richard Besser.

The expert, Dr. Carolyn Bridges, who is the associate director of Science in Influenza at the CDC in Atlanta, said flu viruses tend to stick to one species or another but the case of the Iowa cat shows the ability of the flu to cross species.

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In light of the news, some veterinarians are worried about the well-being of other cats across the nation; whether the cats contract the H1N1 virus.

“This could be a thing that just fizzles out but it also has the potential for huge impact,” said Tony Johnson, a clinical assistant professor at the Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine. “We have these little fuzzy things living in our house that could be vectors for nasty diseases.”

Johnson isn’t so worried that cats will spread the flu to humans: “Most influenza viruses are not going to kill you,” he said.

Rather, he worries cat owners might abandon their animals at the first sign of a sniffle.

“I think that’s what’s going to wig people out,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to see the shelters filled with cats and dogs tomorrow.”

Veterinarians have long heard of the flu jumping from animals to humans, and some cases of pets to humans. But it’s uncommon for a flu virus to jump from a human to a cat.

Article Continues – http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/iowa-cat-catches-swine-flu/story?id=8999295

EPA testing green pavement to clean rainwater runoff

by Jeremy Korzeniewski

Green pavement? What’s so exciting about that? If I wanted to test out some green pavement, all I’d need to do is make a run to the local Home Depot, pick up a can of green paint and dump it outside my driveway, right? Well, that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here, of course. But just what is “green pavement” anyway?

In this case, the pavement in question has been designed to suck up the nasty pollutants from vehicles and fertilizers from rainwater runoff. Here’s what EPA Acting Regional Administrator George Pavlou has to say on the subject:

Runoff from parking lots and driveways is a significant source of water pollution in the United States and puts undo stress on our water infrastructure, especially in densely-populated urban areas.

There are literally millions of parking lots all over the United States and the rest of the world, and many of those are concentrated in densely-populated urban areas. What can we do about all that potential water pollution? That’s exactly what the EPA is working to figure out. Over the next ten years, the EPA will be testing various porous pavement materials in its parking lots along with plants that are good at filtering and absorbing parking lot pollutants.

[Source: Wired | Photo: China Photos/Getty Images]

Filed under: Etc.

http://green.autoblog.com/2009/11/05/epa-testing-green-pavement-to-clean-rainwater-runoff/