Flickr user: eutrophication&hypoxia

Researchers have developed a method to produce ammonia starting only with air and water. Not only is it more energy efficient than the century-old Haber-Bosch process that’s currently in use, but it’s also greener.

The ability to mass produce Ammonia—made up of three parts hydrogen and one part nitrogen (or NH3)—has had a momentous impact on society. Without the ready availability of this chemical, it is estimated that as many as a third of us won't be alive. This is because its main use is in fertilizer production, which has helped improve crop yields and sustain a large population.

Developed in 1909, the Haber-Bosch process—often cited as the most important invention of the 20th century—involves heating nitrogen and hydrogen gas at very high temperature and pressure in presence of an iron catalyst. The presence of the catalyst, which doesn't take part in the reaction but lowers its energy threshold, is vital. Haber-Bosch was used to produce about 140 million tons of ammonia in 2012, but it consumes nearly two percent of the world's energy supply.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

user3150201 asks:

Most Java applications don't look the same as C/C++ applications. Swing might have been designed on purpose to have a distinctive look. SWT for example tried to look native and doesn't completely succeed.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

In the vexing pursuit of passwords that are both easy to remember and hard to crack, many people embed clues into their login credentials, choosing for instance, "playstationplaystationdec2014" to safeguard a recently created gaming account or "L0an@ w0rk!" for an IT administrative account at a financial services company. Now, a whitehat hacker is capitalizing on the habit with a tool that automates the process of launching highly targeted cracking attacks.

Dubbed WordHound, the freely available tool scours press releases, white papers, and Twitter accounts belonging to companies or sites that have recently suffered security breaches. The software then generates a list of commonly found words or phrases that attackers can use when trying to convert cryptographic hashes from compromised password databases into the corresponding plaintext passcodes. The tool, devised by security consultant Matthew Marx, was unveiled Wednesday at Passwords 14 conference in Las Vegas.

"People are influenced greatly by their environment when choosing a password," Marx, who works for consultancy MWR Info Security, told Ars. "It could be a work environment, their personal life, or the sport teams they like. I wanted to create a tool that leveraged this human vulnerability."

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Megan Geuss

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});RENO, NV—On an uncharacteristically rainy day in western Nevada, a small tour bus of journalists rumbled past security gates at the Ormat Steamboat Complex in Washoe County. We were there to learn about geothermal power, a renewable energy resource produced by transferring heat from underground rocks up to power plants.

Most people think of Iceland when they think of geothermal power. On that island, approximately 90 percent of homes are heated by geothermal energy. But some 12 gigawatts of geothermal power are generated worldwide, and the US is one of the largest producers of it, generating nearly 3.4 gigawatts in 2013.

Ormat’s Steamboat Complex is within the Reno city limits, and it’s made up of seven smaller plants that collectively generate 78 megawatts of power. A typical coal-fired power plant can generate around 660 megawatts of power, so Ormat’s 78 megawatts are not a lot by comparison. But when compared to other renewables, geothermal has some advantages.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A near-production model of TrackingPoint's AR 556, the 5.56mm NATO precision guided firearm. Lee Hutchinson

Since first running into TrackingPoint at CES 2013, we’ve kept tabs on the Austin-based company and its Linux-powered rifles, which it collectively calls "Precision Guided Firearms," or PGFs. We got to spend a few hours on the range with TrackingPoint’s first round of near-production bolt-action weapons last March, when my photojournalist buddy Steven Michael nailed a target at 1,008 yards—about 0.91 kilometers—on his first try, in spite of never having fired a rifle before.

But big, heavy, bolt-action rifles were only the beginning, with the underlying idea being that the company would scale its weapons both up and also down in size. And, last month, we day tripped back out to the Best of the West range just outside of Austin in Liberty Hill to lay hands on TrackingPoint’s newest set of PGFs, the TP AR 556 and TP AR 762. Unlike the big XS-series long rifles we fired last time, these newest PGFs are semiautomatic carbines—the type of weapon that the media usually (and incorrectly) refers to as "assault rifles."

But the smaller form factor wasn’t the only thing that TrackingPoint had on tap for our demo that day. Last trip out, the highlight was hitting targets at 1,000 yards; this time, we’d be aiming at targets a bit closer in… but aiming through a tiny wearable screen while looking backward, over the shoulder.

Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A rendering of ISEE-3. NASA

A vintage NASA satellite will fly past our moon Sunday before embarking on a unique citizen science mission.

The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) will have the closest view of the moon at 11:16am PDT. Members of the rebooted mission partnered with Google to create a website where they will host a video hangout beginning at 10:30am PDT.

The website, which launched on Friday, will play a greater role in the future as a source to view data from the ISEE-3 as it orbits the sun.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Jon Richards, SETI Institute

The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array survived a massive Northern California wildfire this week that briefly disrupted its search for life in space.

"Yes, we are up and running again," said the observatory's senior software engineer, Jon Richards, in a Saturday e-mail to Ars.

Power was disrupted Tuesday and the facility's 42 antennas got too hot and had to be powered down to cool off before resuming operation Friday. The observatory almost went up in smoke after the Eiler fire jumped a highway days ago and came within a mile of the antennas.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

An anonymous author who claims to be the hacker who penetrated controversial UK-based Gamma Group International and aired 40 gigabytes of its dirty laundry has published a how-to guide for other hacktivists.

"I'm not writing this to brag about what an 31337 h4x0r I am and what m4d sk1llz it took to 0wn Gamma," wrote the author, who rightly cautions that the unauthorized access of other people's networks is illegal. "I'm writing this to demystify hacking, to show how simple it is, and to hopefully inform and inspire you to go out and hack shit. If you have no experience with programming or hacking, some of the text below might look like a foreign language. Check the resources section at the end to help you get started."

The do-it-yourself guide explains how hackers can map entryways into a target's network, scan for vulnerable services and exploit any that are found. It also lists some of the most common methods hackers use to keep their IP addresses and other digital fingerprints off their attacks. Among other things, the how-to suggests installing Whonix inside a hidden encrypted volume created by TrueCrypt and carrying out all operations from there. It also counsels against using Tor and instead using hacked servers. Again, this is illegal.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sean Gallagher

LAS VEGAS—Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy public-key encryption, has some experience when it comes to the politics of crypto. During the “crypto wars” of the 1990s, Zimmermann fought to convince the US government to stop classifying PGP as a “munition” and shut down the Clipper Chip program—an effort to create a government-mandated encryption processor that would have given the NSA a back door into all encrypted electronic communication. Now Zimmermann and the company he co-founded are working to convince telecommunications companies—mostly overseas—that it’s time to end their nearly century-long cozy relationship with governments.

Zimmermann compared telephone companies’ thinking with the long-held belief that tomatoes were toxic until it was demonstrated they weren’t. “For a long time, for a hundred years, phone companies around the world have created a culture around themselves that is very cooperative with governments in invading people’s privacy. And these phone companies tend to think that there’s no other way—that they can’t break from this culture, that the tomatoes are poisonous," he said.

A call for crypto

Back in 2005, Zimmermann, Alan Johnston, and Jon Callas began work on an encryption protocol for voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls, dubbed ZRTP, as part of his Zfone project. In 2011, ZRTP became an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC, and it has been published as open source under a BSD license. It’s also the basis of the voice service for Silent Circle, the end-to-end encrypted voice service Zimmermann co-founded with former Navy SEAL Mark Janke. Silent Circle, which Ars tested on the Blackphone in June, is a ZRTP-based voice and ephemeral messaging service that generates session-specific keys between users to encrypt from end to end. The call is tunneled over a Transport Layer Security-encrypted connection through Silent Circle’s servers in Canada and Switzerland. ZRTP and the Silent Circle calls don’t rely on PGP or any other public key infrastructure, so there’s no keys to hand over under a FISA order or law enforcement warrant.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

YouTube

New York authorities have subpoenaed Twitter to unmask who's behind a parody account that tweeted responsibility for last month's Brooklyn Bridge caper.

The New York Police Department awoke July 22 with egg on its face when two giant American flags atop two locked 276-foot towers were stolen from one of the Big Apple's most heavily guarded landmarks and were replaced with bleached-out Old Glories.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Spry Fox

When the game designers at Spry Fox named their latest puzzle game after Robert Frost’s most famous poem, we didn’t expect much depth or inspiration from the source material. Frankly, Frost’s The Road Not Taken, while sweet and lyrical, hides little under the surface to work with, particularly from a gaming perspective. Pick between one of two roads? Even text adventures gave players the choice of north, south, east, or west.

Thankfully, the game’s title is misleading, at least at first blush. Road Not Taken’s hand-drawn world and puzzly play rarely boil down to obvious, binary choices. The game revolves around a really refreshing spin on the well-trodden “match three” puzzle genre (which is to be expected from the designers who pulled off a similar, stellar feat in 2010’s Triple Town).

But there’s a point to the game’s name. As players get a feel for RNT’s pace—with randomly generated puzzles, a constant flow of new things to interact with, and heavily ramping difficulty—they slowly come to grips with the game’s very difficult core. Not in terms of how hard or clever the game is, mind you, but the fact that this is a puzzle game about death, disappointment, and family. Spry Fox treats that somber quality with elegance and simplicity, meaning the game is a wonder to play, but rarely do puzzle games (Tetris, Candy Crush) include death as a major feature. RNT stands out because of how it embraces that design choice, a fact that really makes all the difference.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Up with a balloon, down with an aerobrake. NASA's Martian robots have used the planet's thin atmosphere to their advantage while landing, slowing down through a combination of aerobraking and parachutes. But the space agency hopes to put larger hardware on the red planet's surface—eventually followed by manned exploration. Those missions will require correspondingly larger braking hardware.

As part of its technology development program, NASA's testing a system called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Rather than a solid shield, the LDSD has a rim of inflatable material that greatly enhances its braking capabilities when fully deployed. In addition, the system includes a large parachute that's able to be deployed at supersonic speeds.

In June, NASA launched what you could call a "falling saucer." Carried aloft by a balloon, then rocketed further into the stratosphere, the payload tested the deployment of both the inflatable heat shield and the parachute during the ensuing free-fall.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Shutterstock

Ever since the Apollo 11 headed to the Moon in late 1969, astronauts have complained of sleep deprivation. Now a study has shed light on the extent of the sleep deprivation and fatigue suffered by those who travel into space.

In accordance with official NASA flight schedules, astronauts are ordered to get 8.5 hours of sleep every night. But after tracking the sleep patterns of 85 crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and space shuttles, researchers have discovered that astronauts on shuttle missions sleep for under six hours per night on average and just over six on ISS missions.

Crew members on modern space missions sleep in quiet, darkened chambers, and three quarters of astronauts take sedatives—yet the problem still prevails. It was not only that astronauts failed to get the required amount of sleep, however. In the three-month pre-flight training period, sleep was also found to be significantly disturbed. During this time crew began to build up a long-term sleep deficiency, averaging less than 6.5 hours while in training.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

On Friday afternoon, a US district judge for the Northern District of California rejected a settlement proposed by four major tech companies—Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe—in a class-action lawsuit over improper hiring practices. The four companies were accused of conspiring to keep each others' employees from being poached, thus limiting their employees' potential salaries and stunting job opportunities.

A group of employees sued the four companies for this practice back in 2011, and in April of this year, the companies agreed to settle the case and pay back $324.5 million to more than 60,000 workers that ended up in the class. Today, however, US District Judge Lucy Koh said the settlement amount was not enough and "falls below the range of reasonableness."

The case has been followed closely, not least because a number of private e-mail exchanges between the heads of these major companies had been made public. With the earlier promise of a jury trial, it looked for a time like even more salient details would come to light. In April, The New York Times found one e-mail in which Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wrote to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, "If you hire a single one of these people, that means war.” In other court documents, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Jobs that a Google recruiter who had solicited an Apple employee would be fired.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Images from August 15 at three different wavelengths, and one image from August 29 showing the third eruption. Imke de Pater and Katherine de Kleer, UC Berkeley

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, so it’s not a shock that astronomers captured several eruptions while their telescopes were trained on the satellite. However, the three eruptions were uncommonly massive (among the 10 largest seen there) and occurred within the span of a couple of weeks—eruptions of this class are only thought to occur every other year, on average. Researchers may be able to glean enough from these images to help us get to the bottom of a couple of Ionian mysteries.

Io’s prodigious volcanic output is the result of tidal heating—gravitational squeezing as a result of its slightly oblong orbit around Jupiter, along with some tugs by fellow Jovian moons. Though Io is roughly the same size as Earth’s own Moon, the flow of heat from its core toward its surface is roughly 30 times greater than that of Earth. As a result, there’s usually at least one active volcano whenever astronomers observe Io. In fact, a huge lava lake some 200 kilometers across, called Loki Patera, is usually visible to infrared telescopes. On thirteen occasions between 1978 and 2006, unusually large eruptions called outbursts were observed. Three more have now been added to that number.

Jupiter’s magnetic field holds a curious torus (or ring donut if you’re hungry) of plasma believed to originate from Io’s volcanism. A new Japanese space telescope, launched in September, had been scheduled to spend some time studying that plasma torus, and so several ground-based telescopes had begun monitoring Io’s volcanic activity in August. On August 15, a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii recorded two bright infrared spots in the far south of Io, which hasn’t been known for this kind of activity.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google Play One week after President Obama signed a phone-unlocking bill into law, T-Mobile has responded by becoming the first American carrier to launch its own unlocking app. Modestly titled Device Unlock, the app debuted on Friday in the Google Play store, though it comes with one major limitation: It only unlocks the Samsung Galaxy Avant, a lower-specced offering that launched in late July exclusively on T-Mobile.

The app offers two unlock options for Avant owners: temporary, for the sake of international GSM use, or permanent. Choosing either option sends a SIM unlock request to T-Mobile, as opposed to automatically unlocking. A glance at T-Mobile's unlock FAQ, which appears unchanged since before last week's bill was signed into law, clarifies that requested phones won't unlock unless they've been paid in full and haven't been reported stolen, among other requirements.

As such, the app merely streamlines a process that T-Mobile had already put into place well before a deadline of February 2015. Confusingly, Google Play advertises the app as compatible with any T-Mobile phone in a user's account, despite the app's current Avant-only status, which leads us to believe it will eventually support other T-Mobile handsets (seeing as it does little more than report a user's phone information to the unlock department). Until that changes, the app will probably continue to be bombed with the kinds of negative reviews it's already receiving from non-Avant users.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Seth Kroll, Wyss Institute

As if a brain-like processing chip weren't bad enough news for us humans, this week's edition of Science also describes a robot that, after being laid out as a flat sheet, can fold itself into the appropriate shape to take its on-board electronics for a walk.

Why would we possibly want self-assembling, flat-packed electronics of this kind? The authors of the Science paper, who are part of a Harvard/MIT collaboration, offer two reasons. First, it's much easier to assemble something as a planar surface. With the right layers in place, it's simple to cut them into the appropriate shapes and then embed the electronics where they're needed, since there's no awkward internal spaces to deal with. The second reason is that it's easy to transport things when they're shaped like a sheet. Since the devices can assemble themselves, they can be shipped to any destination and used without any hassle or high-level technical knowledge.

Of course, having a good idea and actually knowing how to create a self-assembling device are two different things. Fortunately, the ability to construct elaborate three-dimensional items from a flat sheet is a solved problem, thanks to origami. Software like Origamizer can even determine how to cut and fold a sheet in order to produce a specified three-dimensional structure.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gamma group customer logs found in the leaked trove that was posted online by hackers. Gerald Rich/ProPublica

Software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appear to be located in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain, according to a leaked trove of documents analyzed by ProPublica.

It's not clear whether the surveillance was conducted by governments or private entities. Customer e-mail addresses in the collection appeared to belong to a German surveillance company, an independent consultant in Dubai, the Bosnian and Hungarian Intelligence services, a Dutch law enforcement officer, and the Qatari government.

The leaked files—which were posted online by hackers—are the latest in a series of revelations about how state actors including repressive regimes have used Gamma's software to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activist groups.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Warner Bros.

According to a report from TV Wise, Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski will shortly begin work on a rebooted big-screen version of his 1990s sci-fi TV series. Straczynski made the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con last week.

Babylon 5’s pilot episode originally aired in 1993, with the series beginning its regular run almost a year later as a foundational component of the now-defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network. The show lacked the production budget of its contemporary rival Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (which allegedly lifted some or all of its core concepts directly from Straczynski’s original—and rejected—Babylon 5 pitch meeting with Paramount). Still, it attracted enough of an audience to accomplish a noteworthy feat: Babylon 5 became the only non-Star Trek science fiction show on American television to reach its series completion without being cancelled. Not until 2004’s Battlestar Galactica reboot would another non-Star Trek show earn the same distinction.

After Babylon 5 ended in 1998, Straczynski (usually referred to simply by his initials, "JMS") tried multiple times to bring a B5 movie to theaters. The most recent attempt in 2004 came the closest, with a completed script and some preproduction work underway, but without financial backing from Warner Bros. the project had to be abandoned.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy, has signed the letter condemning Amazon, even though she does not publish with Hachette.

Authors affected by Amazon's contract dispute with publisher Hachette have started to band together against the online retailer, reported The New York Times on Thursday. More than 900 authors have signed a letter condemning Amazon for "using writers as hostages in its negotiations," referring to Amazon's choices to keep low stock of certain Hachette titles and taking weeks to ship them as the two companies battle over e-book prices.

The effort was spearheaded by 58-year-old Douglas Preston, a writer whose thrillers have been published by Hachette. Preston reports to the Times that Amazon has contacted him repeatedly, trying to get him to stop his campaign against the company and to see its side of the argument, but Preston will not be silenced.

Amazon has uncharacteristically tried to defend itself with forum posts over the last few weeks. First, the Books team stated that its decision to keep low Hachette stock is barely affecting its business, then it followed that up with a math-based argument for mandating that Hachette charge a lower cover price overall.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments