Science

At the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 Jens Ohlig, Lars Weiler, and Nick Farr proposed a daunting task: to land a hacker on the Moon by 2034. The plan calls for three separate phases:

Among some computer geeks, it’s the Hacker Way: A loose model for rapidly solving problems through intense, inexpensive jam sessions among software programmers and web designers, with little planning and total freedom.

Mark Zuckerberg used the term to describe how his collaborators and employees refined Facebook with thousands of small improvements and turned it from a dorm-room project into a $100-billion corporate giant.

A group of researchers has created the first community-run biology laboratory in New York City.

The lab is an effort to provide a home for amateur scientists, as well as professionals looking for a space away from academia and business.

The co-founder of Genspace says it is "crucial that this lab exists" in order to foster creativity in the sciences. The BBC's Matt Danzico visited the Brooklyn facility, which originally opened in late 2010, at a building home to a range of professionals ranging from designers to pastry chefs.

A technology in the works might soon allow you to unlock your hard drive by simply touching your keyboard. Your unique heartbeat, emitted through your fingertip, would be your password.

Chun-Liang Lin and his team at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan translated a human heartbeat into an encryption key using an electrocardiograph reading from an individual's palm. Their unique series of thump-thumpa generated a secret key.

A Harvard professor has invented and unleashed the AeroShot, an inhalable form of caffeine, complete with B vitamins. A blast of it costs about three bucks, and is available in convenience stores in Massachusetts and New York, and from online sources like the AeroShots Shop, with free shipping within the USA, no less!

I’d be willing to bet that there isn’t one of you out there who hasn’t violated some basic work/life principles at least once in your career. I can say with certainty that at various times, I have committed some cardinal sins when it comes to getting burned out. Looking back on my career from a slightly different viewpoint these days, I can see where I went wrong. And fortunately, I can learn from those mistakes so that I’ll remain happy, healthy, and productive (in that order) throughout the remainder of my career.

Solar flares emitted by the sun on the morning of Jan. 23 concerned airlines enough to reroute its Polar route flights but may improve aurora borealis activity in Alaska.

Delta airlines announced that it had rerouted flights from China to the U.S. that traverse the North Pole making  direct fuel saving flights over the arctic. While there is no danger to passengers the airline reported that it changed routes primarily due to the possibility of radio interference from the solar flares.

If the future is heading toward "cloud computing," where most of your data lives on someone else's server, can you trust the cloud to keep a secret? Researchers say they've found a way to guarantee that your information will be secure in the cloud, using quantum entanglement.

The development team behind the SP Toolkit (spt) has released version 0.41, "Dartfish", of its open source phishing toolkit. The software allows network administrators to test their users' credulity in realistic scenarios. spt (simple phishing toolkit) provides the same functionality as a real phishing tool but is used to raise users' awareness of their own gullibility.

January's GQ has a fascinating piece on a fellow who turned up in our crime coverage the past couple years: Luis Mijangos, the so-called "sextortion" hacker out of Santa Ana sentenced Sept. 1 to six years in prison for cyber-terrorism.

The 32-year-old undocumented immigrant hacked into dozens of computers to obtain personal data--and in some cases demanded sexually explicit videos from females lest he email their boyfriends the lie that the women willingly sent him risque images he actually obtained on the sly.