Lurking 8,000 light years from Earth is a black hole 12 times more massive than our sun. It's been peacefully sleeping for 26 years.
But on June 15, it woke up.
Now, scientists around the world are using highly sophisticated instruments to learn as much as they can about this mysterious beast of nature before the black hole returns to its slumber, which will be soon.
Black holes are very dense, massive objects in space that have an immensely powerful gravitational field that traps anything and everything that comes too close, including light. But on occasion they'll spit out material as well as suck it in.
On June 15, one of NASA's satellites picked up a torrent of x-rays all coming from a single source: the black hole.
"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black hole eruptions are quite rare," said Neil Gehrels, the principal investigator for Swift, the NASA satellite that first identified the eruption in a NASA press release. "So when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays."
A deadly companionThis black hole is just one half of a two-body system called V404 Cygni. Its partner is a star slightly smaller than our sun, and it's been nourishing the black hole for at least 77 years. The x-rays that astronomers observed on June 15 were the heated guts from the companion star that had spiraled into the mouth of the black hole.
When black holes in binary systems, like V404 Cygni, feed, they do so by gravitationally attracting a single thread of gas from the star. The black hole is 12 times more massive than its companion and therefore has a much stronger gravitational grip which slowly pulls gas from the star as the star orbits around it, like in the animation below:
As the gas gets pulled in, it orbits around the black hole, forming a disc. The closer the gas gets to the black hole, the stronger gravitational force it feels and so the faster it moves, heating up to searing-hot temperatures. When the gas reaches temperatures of more than 1.7 million degrees Fahrenheit, it emits a jet of high-energy particles, which satellites like NASA's Swift instrument then detect — albeit 8,000 years later because of the time it takes -- For more information read the original article here.
Apple's much anticipated music streaming service, simply called Apple Music, is set for an official release on Tuesday morning.
Apple Music live streaming Beats 1 radio station will also begin airing.
To use Apple Music, iPhone and iPad users will need to download and install a new iOS update, iOS 8.4, which will become available on Tuesday morning.
It's clear that Apple Music and iOS 8.4 are releasing Tuesday morning, but it's unclear at the time writing at exactly what time either will be released.
However, Ian Rogers of Beats Music recently tweeted that the iOS update will be available at 8 a.m. Pacific/11 a.m. Eastern. He wrote that Beats 1 will go live an hour later.
SEE ALSO: Meet Julie Adenuga — the British DJ who is heading up Apple's new global radio station Beats 1
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In just a few short decades, owning a car could be a lot like owning a horse — mostly for hobbyists and really unnecessary for transportation purposes.
Technologies such as self-driving cars paired with transportation networks such as Uber will pretty much kill the need to own a car in 25 to 30 years, Jamais Cascio, a futurist and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, told Business Insider.
And that will completely change how we think about cars.
"It is going to be a more cultural shift even more than a technological shift because we have this romantic culture around cars and we are going to look back at that in the same kind of wistful way that we looked back at the relationship people had with horses," Cascio said.
"You will probably have school girls with all kinds of model cars around the room instead of model horses. You will have people who really enjoy personally owned cars, but for the same reason people own horses today. It's not a utility; it's something that is a romantic hobby."
While it may be hard to think of parting with your car right now, the truth is, trading ownership for a service model may actually make more sense in the long-term.
Cascio argues that the traditional car model will become more or less obsolete because self-driving cars are simply more efficient. People will not own cars because it makes more sense for them to use a network of self-driving cars that will show up on demand when needed.
"It may not be the vehicle that brought to you where you are and you may not be in that vehicle later in the day, but transportation is a service that is almost without notice," he said. "It's individualized without being individually owned. It's individual without being personal. It's no more individual than a sidewalk. Or no more personal than a sidewalk. It's just a tool."
In just 15 years, by 2030, the self-driving car market is expected to reach a whopping $87 billion, according to a recent report by Lux Research. That helps explain why, in addition to the tech giants Google and Uber, just about every car manufacturer is working on the technology.
While only a handful of states have passed laws addressing autonomous vehicles on the road, more -- For more information read the original article here.
A new system from MIT's CSAIL, or Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, does something incredible to fix buggy software: It borrows healthy code from other applications–and then fixes the bug without ever accessing the original source code.
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It looks like the US government may finally be taking a proactive step with cybersecurity.
The White House has poached Google employee Peiter Zatko, who just announced that he is moving from Google to a nebulous new post with the federal government.
He announced the new job with this tweet:
Goodbye Google ATAP, it was a blast.The White House asked if I would kindly create a #CyberUL, so here goes!
— .mudge (@dotMudge) June 29, 2015What's of note is the "#CyberUL" admission. UL, explains Re/code, stands for Underwriters Laboratories, an old company that's existed for more than 100 years that performs safety tests for products. It seems Zatko will be creating a program for the federal government that does safety checks but for cyber products.
Re/code writes:
The concept of establishing a UL-like agency that would evaluate software and hardware products for their security capabilities has been discussed in computer security circles for years. It was first proposed in 1999 by L0pht Heavy Industries, a hacker think tank based in Cambridge, Mass., of which Zatko was a member.So, if Zatko's new position is being interpreted correctly, the federal government is now trying to be proactive about the security safeguards of the digital infrastructure it onboards.
This couldn't come at a more critical time. Week after week new revelations surface about probable federal data breaches. While the government claims it is trying to fix any security gaps it has, the problem likely rests in its reactive nature of security vulnerabilities.
A CyberUT would hopefully create a culture that actively pre-checked for security vulnerabilities.
Zatko has a long history of internet security. He worked at the Department of Defence's research arm DARPA. He was also part of a slew of organizations that tried to bring digital security issues to the forefront as early the the '90s.
If things are as they appear, he's getting a real chance to change the cybersecurity culture at a federal level.
We tried to reach out to Zatko to learn more about the new project. We'll update if we hear more.
SEE ALSO: A research company discovered the login credentials from 47 government agencies just sitting in plain sight on the internet
SEE ALSO: Federal employees are mistaking official government emails for phishing scams after the -- For more information read the original article here.
Trust us, you really don't need a camera with a built-in telescope. But in the right hands, the insane 83x optical zoom on the new Nikon P900 is mindblowing.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
Over the past few years, there has been skyrocketing growth in the use of social media to get the word out during emergency situations. From fires to disease outbreaks to police shootings, more and more people turn to Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites to get the latest updates on incidents from reliable sources and "friends."
Earlier this year, Emergency Management magazine ran a story titled: Can You Make Disaster Information Go Viral? In that piece, new efforts were highlighted to improve the reliability of emergency communications using social media during man-made and natural disasters.
I applaud these social media efforts, and this emergency management communications trend has been a very good thing up to this point. But dark clouds are on the horizon. And soon, maybe you'll need to hold-off on that retweet.
Why? This game-changing story from The New York Times shows how highly coordinated disinformation campaigns can spell big problems for emergency communications in the future.
No, I'm not talking about some bystander who got a few facts wrong about a car accident.
The NYT article describes pros who set out to convince you to act with detailed misinformation. Here's an excerpt:
On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. ...
On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta.
This is a really big deal folks, and not just for emergency management teams. No doubt, there has always been false or misleading information online, but this deliberate attempt to deceive and misdirect people in crisis situations is taking matters to an entirely new level. Mistakes can and will be made in every communication effort, but actively broadcasting detailed instructions that could intentionally result in harm is another matter.
But before I explain why I am concerned, I urge you to go back and read (or at least skim) the NY Times article -- For more information read the original article here.