Science/Tech/History Smorgastbord

Oh wow: AI snooping programs can just listen in to your keyboard as you type on it -- when you're at a public place like an airport or coffee shop, at least -- and use softwear to figure out what keys you're typing based on the different sounds different keys make. I guess this is due to their different placement on the keyboard -- like a "G" would sound like it's in the middle of the keyboard, and an "A" would sound like it's at the edge.

They can also just snoop over a Zoom call.

One upon a time we thought the worst things that could happen during a Zoom conference were accidentally leaving the microphone on while cursing out your cat, hearing someone snoring during your stellar summation of your latest project, or standing up to run to the kitchen while forgetting you have no pants on.

However, a team of British researchers reported last week that hackers sitting nearby in a coffee shop can pick up and identify keystrokes over a Zoom call.

It is the latest variation of lifting data based on physical properties of the target devices. Side channel attacks can listen to keystrokes from keyboards, ATMs or smartphones; detect vibrations emitted by various computer components that have their own acoustic signatures; discern electromagnetic signals from a screen or even the vibrations of a lightbulb in the same room as a digital device, all of which can be captured and analyzed to decrypt sensitive information.

Researchers Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini and Marhyam Mehrnezhad said their latest work shows that the latest technologies in audio and video, coupled with machine learning, "present a greater threat to keyboards than ever."

Using a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, researchers from Durham University in England recorded keyboard typing sounds and then ran them through an algorithm that achieved an extremely high rate of accuracy identifying the keystrokes.

Recordings made with the iPhone displayed a 95% degree of accuracy. Sounds captured through a Zoom conference call had an accuracy rate of 93%.

The researchers noted the ease with which they were able to decipher conversations and their concerns about security.

"Our results prove the practicality of these side channel attacks via off-the-shelf equipment and algorithms," they said in a paper on the project. "The ubiquity of keyboard acoustic emanations makes them not only a readily available attack vector, but also prompts victims to underestimate [and therefore not try to hide] their output."

This is neat: the secret of the incredible durability, and self-healing property, of Roman concrete -- the stuff that made the empire -- may have been discovered.

Historians and archeologists have always wondered why Roman concrete had unmixed clasts of quicklime embedded in the stuff. Romans were so good at making the stuff, why did they leave obviously-unmixed blobs of quicklime in their building material? Wouldn't that weaken the material?

Maybe not -- maybe it strengthened it.

Roman concrete is famously "self-healing" when cracked. And apparently when one of these cracks meets an unmixed clast of lime, the lime is part of the self-healing, crack-sealing process. It mixes with water that inevitable gets into the crack and starts leaching material out of the sides of the crack, forming fresh concrete to fill the crack.

The ancient Romans were master builders and engineers, perhaps most famously represented by the still-functional aqueducts. And those architectural marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable material that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.

Even today, one of their structures -- the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old -- holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.

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The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete. The presence of these chunks had previously been attributed to poor mixing or materials, but that did not make sense to materials scientist Admir Masic of MIT.

"The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me," Masic said in a January 2023 statement.

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The lime clasts give the concrete remarkable self-healing abilities.

When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further.

Very neat!

An archeologist says he's found the lost city of Sodom, and it's right where we thought it would be: Eight inches up David French's own wretched pit of sin, his blown-out windsock of a busted-out slack-toned assh*le.

No but really it's in Jordan or something.

An archaeologist who claims to have located the city of Sodom says the location matches the biblical description and that the on-site physical evidence -- includeing "glazed" pottery -- supports his case.

Steven Collins, Dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, told Joel. C Rosenberg in a new episode of the Rosenberg Report that his team uncovered pottery from the mid-Bronze Age at a site in Jordan that appeared it was melted by "flash heat," thus matching the biblical account that says God destroyed Sodom with sulfur and fire.

Digging in the soil, Collins said, "as soon as we get a few centimeters into that [Bronze Age] matrix, this piece of pottery, the shoulder of a storage jar, is facing up at us. And it looks like it's glazed."

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The archaeological site, known as Tall el-Hammam, is located in modern-day Jordan.

Collins referenced a 2022 paper in the journal Nature in which 21 scholars and researchers said they had uncovered evidence of a "highly unusual catastrophic event" -- potentially a meteor -- that left a "charcoal-rich destruction layer" and melted object roughly 4,000 years ago in Tall el-Hammam.

The paper posited that Tall el-Hammam was "wiped out in the blink of an eye," Collins said.

A chimp-like species with brains one third the size of humans, and which pre-date humans by thousands of years, buried their dead and even placed symbols like triangles and hastag-like glyphs above the graves.

Researchers have uncovered evidence that members of a mysterious archaic human species buried their dead and carved symbols on cave walls long before the earliest evidence of burials by modern humans.

The brains belonging to the extinct species, known as Homo naledi, were around one-third the size of a modern human brain.

The revelations could change the understanding of human evolution, because until now such behaviors only have been associated with larger-brained Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

The findings are detailed in three studies that have been accepted for publication in the journal eLife, and preprints of the papers are available on BioRxiv.
MM8345_141103_01218.jpg Johannesburg, South Africa, 2014.

Fossils belonging to Homo naledi were first discovered in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa during excavations in 2013....

Now, the research team has discovered the remains of Homo naledi adults and children that were laid to rest in the fetal position within cave depressions and covered with soil. The burials are older than any known Homo sapiens burials by at least 100,000 years.

During the work to identify the cave burials, the scientists also found a number of symbols engraved on the cave walls, which are estimated to be between 241,000 and 335,000 years old, but they want to continue their testing for more precise dating.

The symbols include deeply carved hashtag-like cross-hatchings and other geometric shapes. Similar symbols found in other caves were carved by early Homo sapiens 80,000 years ago and Neanderthals 60,000 years ago and were thought to have been used as a way to record and share information.

"These recent findings suggest intentional burials, the use of symbols, and meaning-making activities by Homo naledi. It seems an inevitable conclusion that in combination they indicate that this small-brained species of ancient human relatives was performing complex practices related to death," said Berger, lead author on two of the studies and coauthor on the third, in a statement. "That would mean not only are humans not unique in the development of symbolic practices, but may not have even invented such behaviors."

Astronomers are searching for Planet X.

They think the Trans-Neptunian Objects, all the thousands and thousands of little Plutos and smaller planetoids that buzz around in a big shell past Neptune's orbits, are behaving oddly. Their irregular orbits suggest they're being disturbed by a large gravity source out beyond Pluto that we haven't spotted yet. This is the hypothetical Planet X they're looking for.

Note that this method of discovering a planet based on detecting an irregularity in its orbit has been successful before: This interesting youtube documentary notes that, in the 18th century, irregularities in the orbit of Uranus prompted an "arrogant French astronomer" to propose that there was a big planet beyond Uranus, and sure enough, within a few years, Neptune was discovered.

The same trick was used by the same arrogant French astronomer to explain the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit by proposing another small plant inside of Mercury's orbit that we had not yet seen -- a planet he called "Vulcan." (Which would go on to leave a mark in the memory of Gene Roddenberry.)

That time, his method predicted a planet that didn't exist. It would take Einstein's relativistic corrections to Newtonian planetary mechanics to explain the irregularities in Mercury's orbit.

Still, the technique has a 50/50 success rate, and astronomers are looking for a small dark planet way, way out in the Solar System.

There's a good reason astronomers spend many hundreds of hours trying to locate a ninth planet, aka " Planet Nine" or "Planet X". And that's because the Solar System as we know it doesn't really make sense without it.

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When we look at really distant objects, such as dwarf planets beyond Pluto, we find their orbits are a little unexpected. They move on very large elliptical (oval-shaped) orbits, are grouped together, and exist on an incline compared to the rest of the Solar System.

When astronomers use a computer to model what gravitational forces are needed for these objects to move like this, they find that a planet at least ten times the mass of Earth would have been required to cause this.

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Based on the computer models, we think Planet Nine is at least 20 times farther away from the Sun than Neptune. We try to detect it by looking for sunlight it can reflect -- just like how the Moon shines from reflected sunlight at night.

However, because Planet Nine sits so far away from the Sun, we expect it to be very faint and difficult to spot for even the best telescopes on Earth. Also, we can't just look for it at any time of the year.

We only have small windows of nights where the conditions must be just right. Specifically, we have to wait for a night with no Moon, and on which the location we're observing from is facing the right part of the sky.

All the base pairs in Earth DNA and RNA have been found in meteorites.

Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications.

These "nucleobases" -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of all life on Earth. Whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or instead formed in a warm soup of earthly chemistry is still not known (SN: 9/24/20). But the discovery adds to evidence that suggests life's precursors originally came from space, the researchers say.

Scientists have detected bits of adenine, guanine and other organic compounds in meteorites since the 1960s (SN: 8/10/11, SN: 12/4/20). Researchers have also seen hints of uracil, but cytosine and thymine remained elusive, until now.

"We've completed the set of all the bases found in DNA and RNA and life on Earth, and they're present in meteorites," says astrochemist Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

posted by Ace at 07:15 PM

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