Bluefin-21 is in the water after being craned over the side of Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield to begin using its side-scan sonar in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on April 14.Image: Leut Kelli Lunt/Getty Images If wreckage from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is ever discovered, an underwater drone could very well be the first thing to spot it. The Bluefin-21 was contracted by the U.S. Navy to dive into the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia and scan the ocean floor for pieces of the plane that went missing on March 8 with 239 people onboard. The drone was forced to resurface on April 16 due to a technical issue, according to a press release provided to Mashable by the Joint Agency Coordination Center, a search organization the Australian government created to help find the missing Malaysia airliner. Officials downloaded the drone’s memory once it was above water but, so far, Bluefin-21 has turned up nothing significant. Built by Bluefin Robotics but owned and operated by Phoenix International, this autonomous underwater vehicle takes instructions from a ship’s radio before diving up to around 2.8 miles underwater. The remains of flight MH370 might be much farther down, but at that depth Bluefin-21 can blast the ocean floor with a sonar beam. Data picked up from the sonar will be delivered once the drone resurfaces. Jim Gibson, General Manager of Phoenix International, told Mashable that if Bluefin-21 finds what might be a debris field, someone will switch out the vehicle’s sonar instruments with photo-taking equipment and send it back down to see if the clutter comes from the Malaysia Airlines plane. Bluefin-21 scans from side-to-side, and can spend about 16 hours at the bottom before coming up to re-juice. The ability to swap equipment is key to why this particular drone wound up searching for flight MH370. “It’s easily transported, unlike a lot of the other AUVs that are one piece,” Gibson said. “You can’t disassemble them, you need a special launch and recovery system to get them in and out of the water and everything else, and they’re quite heavy.” The ’21’ refers to the drone’s 21-inch diameter, according to the Bluefin Robotics website. It’s a little over 16 feet long and weighs around 1,650 pounds when it’s not in the water. Once it hits its lowest depth, the vehicle travels about three nautical miles per hour and can scan about 15 square miles of ocean floor per day. It stores all that information into its four gigabytes of memory. Despite the technical hiccup early on April 16, Bluefin-21 was redeployed later that day. Read more: http://mashable.com/2014/04/16/underwater-drone-mh370/
Is foreign money infiltrating American politics through insecure online donations to Barack Obama? That’s one question pondered in a report published Monday but quickly denied by the Obama campaign. The study was conducted by the Government Accountability Institute, a research group run by conservative author, strategist and researcher Peter Schweizer. An 109-page examination of “fraudulent and foreign online campaign contributions,” it points out three ways in which the Obama campaign may be receiving foreign funds, which is illegal. First, the report, titled “America the Vulnerable,” claims the Obama campaign “lacks the industry-standard level of credit card security for donations,” but “uses it for merchandise purchases” on the campaign store. Donors on the official Obama site don’t need to include their credit card security number, the three- or four-digit code found on every card. The Obama campaign previously claimed it doesn’t need that code — called the CVV — because “they are able to vet contributions on the back end using sophisticated techniques that it doesn’t disclose,” claims the report (the Obama campaign since said it uses an Address Verification System to verify credit cards). Second, the report highlights Obama.com, a domain that’s not owned by the Obama campaign but points to a campaign donation page. According to the GAI, a majority of traffic to that site has come from abroad: “In 2008, Obama.com was purchased by an Obama fundraiser living in Shanghai, China, whose business is heavily dependent on relationships with Chinese state-run television and other state-owned entities. According to industry leading web analytics site Markosweb, an anonymously registered redirect site (Obama.com) features 68% foreign traffic. Starting in December 2011, the site was linked to a specific donation page on the official BarackObama.com campaign website for ten months. The page loaded a tracking number, 634930, into a space on the website labeled “who encouraged you to make this donation.” That tracking number is embedded in the source code for Obama.com and is associated with the Obama Victory Fund. In early September 2012, the page began redirecting to the standard Obama Victory Fund donation page.” The GAI report also noted several occasions where foreigners have received Obama donation pitches, but doesn’t confirm those foreigners were actually able to donate. GAI’s report also examines the Romney campaign, stating the following: “About 11.9% of the Romney campaign’s Internet traffic comes from foreign sources. Examining over 100,000 backlinks on the Internet that link to the Romney campaign’s webpage, approximately 12.8% of those are from foreign sources, including foreign language news sites and blogs.” However, the report isn’t as accusatory toward the Romney campaign as it is of the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign’s response? A Monday afternoon blog post explaining that the campaign screens for foreign IP addresses and requires a copy of a valid passport from a contributor identified as valid but donating from abroad. It also dismisses the GAI as having a right-wing agenda and claims the campaign “does not accept donations from foreign nationals or any other ineligible individual.” “OFA has […]
Space Shuttle Atlantis to New Home Ready to Roll Photo Credit: NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis Starts Its Early-Morning Trek Photo Credit: NASA Atlantis Rolls to Final Home Photo Credit: NASA Watching the Space Shuttle Go By Space shuttle workers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, watch as the space shuttle Atlantis is transported on a 10-mile journey to the Kennedy Visitor Complex Photo Credit: NASA Ariel View of Space Shuttle Atlantis Rolls to Its New Home Photo Credit: NASA Saying Goodbye Space shuttle team members carry a “We Made History Atlantis” banner as the spacecraft moves out of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its 10-mile trip to the Kennedy Visitor Complex where it will be put on public display. Photo Credit: NASA Atlantis Rolls to Final Home: Underside View Photo Credit: NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis’s New Home Ariel view of the Kennedy Space Center visitor complexPhoto Credit: NASA A Long Journey Photo Credit: NASA Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/11/02/shuttle-atlantis-new-home/
An armed man looks at charred debris at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near the village of Hrabove, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, July 20, 2014. Image: Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press As fighting continues in eastern Ukraine, the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 remains in jeopardy as pro-Russian rebels are still in control of the area. The U.N. Security Council will vote Monday on a resolution demanding international access to the Ukraine plane crash site and a cease-fire around the area. Russia, however, is reluctant to approve it. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said his country, which proposed the resolution, would view a Russian veto of the resolution “very badly,” adding that “no reasonable person” could object to its wording. “This is still an absolutely shambolic situation. It does look more like a garden clean-up than a forensic investigation,” he told reporters. “Given the almost certain culpability of the Russian-backed rebels in the downing of the aircraft, having these people in control of the site is a little like leaving criminals in control of a crime scene,” Abbott added. The resolution calls for pro-Russia separatists to allow access to the site of the downed Malaysia Airlines passenger jet carrying 298 people, including 37 Australian citizens and residents. It asks for the full cooperation of all countries in the region, including Russia. Despite international pressure for a cease-fire in Donetsk, the clashes continued between the separatists and Ukrainian forces on Monday with echoes of rocket fire and burning throughout the area. Factory burning in #Donetsk. Echoes of Grad rocket fire all around. Residents leaving en masse from area. pic.twitter.com/GVYvz56GSe — Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) July 21, 2014 Video footage below shows army tanks rolling through the city streets as Ukrainian forces launched an assault against the rebels. The United States has presented what it called “powerful” evidence that the rebels, who have been in control of the areas for months, shot down the plane with a Russian surface-to-air missile and training. Other governments have stopped short of accusing Russia of actually causing the crash. However, Russian officials have blamed Ukraine’s government for creating the situation and atmosphere in which the plane was downed. Security Council diplomats held consultations late Sunday until past midnight to work out key differences between Australia and Russia. The diplomats emerged cautiously optimistic that a resolution would be approved, but Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin would not guarantee it, saying the draft “does not accurately reflect the need for an impartial, international investigation.” The resolution also demands that armed groups who control the crash site do not disturb debris, belongings or victims’ remains — a particularly big concern after cleanup activities this weekend. The rebels on Sunday loaded an unknown number of decaying bodies from the crash site onto three train cars in Torez, Ukraine, a mining town 10 miles south of where the jetliner is believed to have been shot down. A day earlier, Ukraine’s emergency service workers said they had removed 196 bodies of the […]
Any high school-aged coders with a love for space and NASA out there? Read on. Zero Robotics, a robotics programming competition set up through MIT, is entering its fourth year — and there’s still a day left to register. Here’s how it works: Students can sign up in teams for free on the website. Over the course of the semester, they compete head-to-head with other teams in writing programs — sort of situational, scenario-based challenges. Gradually, the challenges get more difficult. Then, after several phases, finalists are selected to compete in running code for the International Space Station (ISS) — which is broadcast live by an astronaut on board the ISS. Since 2009, the competition has allowed participants to compete in a series of coding challenges through an online platform. “There’s a whole ranking system that tells them how well they’re doing as they’re going through it,” said Jake Katz, co-founder of the competition and research assistant in the Space Stations laboratory at MIT. “And throughout the course of the season, the game gets slightly more complex. They start out in two dimensions and then they will soon, around Oct. 5, be going into 3-D competition — then we add some additional challenges towards the end.” The original kick off for this year’s competition was on Sept. 8. But, Katz said, there’s still a day left to register. “There have been people participating so far, and are already off and running with it, but it’s still possible to join in and make a submission for the first phase,” he said. “We have 75 teams so far, and that’s just from the U.S.” There are an additional 43 teams from 19 other countries, he said. The competition is sponsored by NASA, DARPA, TopCoder, Aurora Flight Sciences, CASIS and MIT. TopCoder, a programming company, designed the platform the games are played on. “In 2009, when we started, we had just two teams competing against each other,” Katz said. “Just two years later, we had about 100 teams from all over sign up.” Check out the promotional video below: What kind of code would you write to run on board the ISS? Let us know in the comments. Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/09/26/zero-robotics-mit/
A report from University of Chicago paleontologist Paul C. Sereno identifies a new species of “dwarf herbivore” dinosaur: the Pegomastax africanus. The Pegomastax, which dates from around 200 million years ago, was dug up in a red rock slab by scientists working in South Africa in the early 1960s. Less than two feet in length and probably weighing less than the average house cat, it had a short, parrot-shaped beak and a pair of fangs. This has led some scientists to speculate that Pegomastax may have eaten some meat, though Sereno thinks the sharp canines were probably used for defense. It may have looked something like a “nimble two-legged porcupine,” according to Sereno. But perhaps the most interesting part is that Sereno identified the specimen as a new species almost 30 years ago: My eyes popped, as it was clear this was a distinct species… I’m embarrassed to say how many years ago that was—1983. But I was an enterprising graduate student then at the American Museum of Natural History. All the while since then, I wondered if anyone else might spot the creature hiding among the lab drawers. Sweet beans, paleontologists! What else have you not gotten around to discovering? If there’s proof of the Abominable Snowman just lying in a drawer somewhere, we’re going to be very angry. “I am No Man” Doesn’t Cut It: The Story of Eowyn Why All Those Sexist Complaints About The New Ghostbusters Movie Are Garbage Study Says Binge-Watching Is For Lonely & Depressed People & Those Who Lack Self-Control The Pirate Bay Has Returned To the Land Of the Living After Two Months This article originally published at The Mary Sue here Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/new-mini-dinosaur-discovered/
John McAfee, the founder of anti-virus security firm McAfee who is currently detained as a murder suspect, is now blogging from a jail cell in Guatemala. McAfee was arrested on Wednesday night after illegally entering Guatemala from Belize. He has been on the run since last month to evade police in Belize who consider him a person of interest in relation to the murder of his neighbor. He recently started a blog called The Hinterland, which details his experience hiding from police, and is currently blogging from a computer given to him by police. “I am in jail in Guatemala. Vastly superior to Belize jails,” McAfee wrote. “I asked for a computer and one magically appeared. The coffee is also excellent.” He has been responding to reader comments and calls the people he has met at the jail “nice” and “sympathetic.” “I am using the computer of one of the wardens, or whatever title is used here,” he wrote in another post titled “Can’t Sleep.” “He is a sweet man and a gentleman. The world is heavilly populated with gentle people. He makes me coffee and tells tender stories about his life. He is a good companion. I believe I could spend weeks in the desert with him as a sole companion without once becoming irritated.” McAfee said his future is unknown as of now: “Only time will tell what will happen. No one has a crystal ball. However, I would be truly shocked if I did not conduct the press conference tomorrow as I had originally planned.” McAfee has hardly been out of the public eye while dodging police. In addition to blogging, he has been featured in video clips posted by Vice. In fact, the magazine has uploaded a video of McAfee getting detailed in Guatemala to YouTube. McAfee tells readers to “stay tuned” and “blogging from a jail cell might be a groundbreaking activity.” He also asked: “Anybody have friends in the State Department?” McAfee founded the anti-virus software company by the same name in the late 1980s. He retired in 1994. Photo via Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/12/06/mcafee-blog-jail-guatemala/
Shannon Maureen Conley, the teenager who plead guilty to aiding the Islamic State, is pictured on the far left. Video: YouTube, TomoNews US A woman from Colorado pleaded guilty on Wednesday to providing material support to the Islamic State — months after she told the FBI she wanted to be a terrorist. Shannon Maureen Conley, who is 19 and a certified nurse’s aid, was accused of providing material support to at least one person who is allegedly a member of the Islamic State. Now the teenager from Arvada faces up to five years in prison and a potential $250,000 fine, though she won’t be sentenced until Jan. 23. In the meantime, The Denver Post reports Conley has agreed to provide information about her conspirators. U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore has ordered her to undergo a personality and psychological exam. Conley had planned to move to Syria and marry a 32-year-old Islamic State fighter from Tunisia who told her that he was battling with the Islamic State and that the extremist group needed nurses. But the FBI had kept close tabs on her ever since Conley started to spend time wandering around a local church, taking notes on everything but the sermons. The pastor notified the FBI, who told Conley her intentions were illegal. Conley was displeased with the church interrupting her plotting; she told the FBI that “if they think I’m a terrorist, I’ll give them something to think I am.” The FBI kept tabs on Conley, who had converted to Islam, and arrested her in April before she could get on a flight to Germany en route to Turkey’s Syrian border. Upon searching her home, agents found video lectures given by Islamist radicals as well as bullets and targets that showed she had spent time improving her accuracy with a gun. Here are the full details of Conley’s plea agreement: Shannon Conley Plea Agreement Read more: http://mashable.com/2014/09/10/american-teen-guilty-aiding-islamic-state/
Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist anti-Putin punk rock band, issued a new single on Friday as three of its members were sentenced to two years in jail for “hooliganism.” The song, entitled Putin Lights the Fires, was released by The Guardian. You can listen to the new song, along with a video montage of the band, below. Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/08/17/pussy-riot-song/
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, the country’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino announced Thursday. However, the question remains how he will get out of the country’s embassy in London without trouble from officials, who have said they plan to stop his exit. Assange is hoping to avoid being sent to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault. He fears the country will then turn him over to the U.S. Among the first to break the news on Twitter was @BBCBreaking. Julian #Assange says being granted asylum by Ecuador is a “significant victory” bbc.in/OkGFDz #Wikileaks — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) August 16, 2012 The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office quickly shared their reaction to the government of Ecuador’s decision on Twitter. We are disappointed by the statement from Ecuador’s Foreign Minister that #Ecuador has offered political asylum to Julian #Assange. — Foreign Office (FCO) (@foreignoffice) August 16, 2012 According to the BBC, the UK may be able to revoke diplomatic protection from an embassy under domestic law. However, WikiLeaks has labeled that as impossible under international law. UK Diplomatic & Consular Premises Act 1987 may allow diplomatic immunity of an embassy on British soil to be revoked – BBC’s @stuartdhughes — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) August 15, 2012 Which is of course just spin. The UK is under a binding obligation to recognize asylum, the rights of refugees and its other UN agreements. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 16, 2012 WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson told the Agence France-Press on Thursday that she hopes “that the UK authorities are sensible enough not to enter the embassy without permission, which would risk upsetting diplomatic relations all over the world.” Sweden’s government has told the Ecuadorian ambassador to its country that the asylum decision is “unacceptable,” per the Associated Press: BREAKING: Sweden summons Ecuador’s ambassador, calls Assange asylum decision “unacceptable” — The Associated Press (@AP) August 16, 2012 UK-based Citizen journalist James Albury has uploaded video of earlier demonstrations outside Ecuador’s embassy in London. According to Albury, Ecuadorian nationals were protesting the possible intrusion of British law enforcement into Ecuador’s sovereign territory. Your browser does not support iframes. Assange first requested asylum from Ecuador June 19 and has resided at the country’s London embassy ever since. This story initially cited @AntDeRosa as one of the first tweeters, but has been edited. Alex Fitzpatrick contributed to this report. Julian Assange: His History and Story Julian Assange Julian Assange, 40, is an Australian-born political activist and journalist known for his controversial website WikiLeaks, which has published leaked documents that allege government and corporate misconduct. Assange fell into his career path after he was a hacker-activist in his early days. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Exposing the Government From publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya to toxic waste dumping in Côte d’Ivoire, Assange has long sought to bring controversial concepts to the forefront. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, […]
