HackingTheUniverse

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Researchers at the Huygens Laboratory in Leiden University in the Netherlands have demonstrated that at a very thin level of thickness, NbN (niobiumnitride) can absorb nearly 100% of light. The ideal substance for photovoltaic solar energy conversion is something that absorbs almost all radiation and is thin enough to collect electrical energy efficiently. [...]

Netcat is a very simple tool that can accomplish some fairly sophisticated tasks. At its most simple, netcat makes connections to or from both TCP and UDP ports. It can be used to connect to some service that is listening for a connection or it can be set as a listener waiting for [...]

Willow Garage Personal Robot 2 (PR2) has successfully passed a benchmark test that included not just navigating around an office space and plugging itself into power outlets, but also negotiating some planned obstacles.
Milestone 2 Reached! Now You Can Watch It
This particular run had our PR2 alpha robot navigate through eight doors, and plug its power [...]

Isaac Asimov formulated his famous three rules of robotics in order to give the robots in his science fiction stories a credible operating basis and the means for interesting plot twists based on apparent contradictions within the rules and how they might be resolved. The rules were as follows:

A robot may not injure a human [...]

Space vehicles that are designed primarily for space travel alone will be unlike craft that are designed for navigating in an atmosphere. There is no need to consider aerodynamics in space or stress related to strong gravitational fields. Instead, they need to have strong hull integrity and if they are designed to rotate [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered [...]

Scaffolds made of biodegradable materials have been used to help regrow body tissues from a few “seed” cells that are placed in the scaffold. As the cells reproduce, the scaffold degrades and eventually the new tissue displaces the scaffold. Now scientists are using rapid prototyping techniques to make more precise scaffolds in three [...]

The SASER (sonic laser) is not a new idea and several have been built in recent years. But these always operated in gigahertz frequency ranges and below. Now a tetrahertz frequency SASER has been built by scientists from Nottingham University in the UK and the Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in the Ukraine.
While [...]

How much does it cost cybercriminals to obtain access to a hacked computer? Why do it yourself when you can buy one for a nickel? Often, one group of cybercriminals specialize in the act of penetrating systems and installing backdoors. Then they sell access to the systems to other cybercriminals who want [...]

The intersection between cyber-crime and organized crime has received attention for several years. As the financial returns available from cyber-crime have simultaneously increased in potential and visibility, the cyber-criminals have become more organized and more closely linked to conventional organized crime. Organized crime in various forms has discovered the usefulness of encryption and [...]