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Domain: skynews.com.au
Stories and comments across the archive that link to skynews.com.au.
Stories · 4
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Stephen Hawking Will Travel To Space (skynews.com.au)
Professor Stephen Hawking says he is planning to travel into space on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. From a report: The physicist and cosmologist, 75, said he had not expected to have the opportunity to experience space but that the Virgin boss had offered him a seat. Discussing the meaning of happiness on Good Morning Britain, he said: "My three children have brought me great joy. And I can tell you what will make me happy, to travel in space. I thought no one would take me but Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic, and I said yes immediately." -
Australian Icebreaker Tries To Get Through To Stranded Antarctic Research Ship
The shipload of researchers and tourists stuck in the Antarctic ice are still stuck. A Chinese icebreaker, the Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, has gotten tantalizingly close but was hampered by "unusually thick ice." Now, an Australian vessel, the Aurora Australis, will attempt to rescue the 74 people aboard the MV Akademik Shokalskiy. -
Twitter Based "Ted" System Warns of Earthquakes Earlier
hypnosec writes "A Twitter-based system managed to detect the earthquake off the Philippines before any other advanced spotting systems being used by Seismologists. The U.S. Geological Survey uses the micro-blogging site to quickly gather information about earthquakes around the globe through the use of a system — Twitter Earthquake Detection (TED) — which beat out USGS's own sensors on Friday when it came to detecting a 7.6 magnitude earthquake off the Philippine coast. The TED system gathers earthquake related messages (Tweets) in real time from Twitter. The system takes into consideration various parameters like place, time, keywords, and photographs of affected places where tremors have been detected. Online information posted by people — Tweets, in this case — can be picked up faster by researchers, compared to scientific alerts that may take up to 20 minutes." -
Researchers Develop Algorithm To Trace Malware, Epidemics, More
hypnosec writes "Want to trace the source of a virus that has infected your computer? Researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in Switzerland have the answer. The scientists have devised software capable of tracing computer viruses back to their source. Beyond computer viruses, the software can also trace terror suspects, rumor-mongering and even infectious diseases back to their source. Pedro Pinto, one of the researchers, explained that the algorithm works by going through information in a reverse direction back to the original source. He said, 'Using our method, we can find the source of all kinds of things circulating in a network just by "listening" to a limited number of members of that network.' The team tested their software on a known data maze to check if their research actually pinpoints the individuals behind the 9/11 attacks and they were able to pin-point three suspects, out of which one was the mastermind behind the attacks."