Alien planet 11 times Bigger than Jupiter found in bizarre, Massive orbit

An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star.
The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The existence of such a massive and distantly orbiting planet raises new questions about how these bizarre worlds are formed, the researchers said.
"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," study lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona's department of astronomy, said in a statement.

In the most commonly accepted theories of planet formation, it is thought that planets that orbit close to their parent star, such as Earth, began as small, asteroid-type bodies that clumped together in the primordial disk of gas and dust around the burgeoning star. Yet, this process operates too slowly to explain how giant planets form far away from their star, the researcher said.

'The planet is only 13 million years old, and is still glowing from the heat of its formation.'

- Researchers with the University of Arizona's department of astronomy

Alternative hypotheses have suggested that distant giant planets may form in ways similar to mini binary star systems, Bailey said.
"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," she explained.
In the HD 106906 system, the star and planet may have collapsed independently, but the materials that clumped together to form the planet were insufficient for it to grow large enough to ignite into a new star, Bailey said.
But, there are still problems with this scenario. For one, difference between the masses of two stars in a binary system is typically no more than a ratio of 10 to 1.
"In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1," Bailey said. "This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories — just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star."
Researchers are also keen to study the new planet, because leftover material from when the planet and star formed can still be detected.
"Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models," Bailey said. "Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question."
"The planet HD 106906 b is only 13 million years old, and is still glowing from the residual heat from its formation," the researchers said. By comparison, Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, which makes it roughly 350 times older than the newfound exoplanet.
The planet was found using a thermal infrared camera mounted on the Magellan telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm their discovery.

The study, which has been accepted for publication in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could lead to a better understanding of distantly orbiting exoplanets.
"Every new directly detected planet pushes our understanding of how and where planets can form," study co-investigator Tiffany Meshkat, a graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Discoveries like HD 106906 b provide us with a deeper understanding of the diversity of other planetary systems."

The largest volcano in the world was hiding under the waters of the Pacific

It's a bit as if we discovered the elephant after all listed species of ants ... At a time when the satellite scan each point of the Earth, at a time when Google Maps zooms in your garden, there is something paradoxical about announce the discovery of what is - for now - the largest volcano world. Yet this is what has happened, Thursday, September 5, by means of publication in the journal  Nature Geoscience .  As explained in US-Japanese team who is the author, there is a good reason not to be identified geological structure such that at the beginning of the third millennium: off for a long time, the "monster",  as well as the researchers describe it, hiding under the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

We must throw some 1500 km east of Japan and dive 2000 meters deep to see the top of Shatsky Rise. It is, in the language of geophysics, an oceanic plate and can be described as a chain of underwater about 900 km long mountain. Shatsky Rise is composed of three main massifs, Tamu, Ori and Shirshov. The first is by far the largest and the oldest. Coring showed that dated back to 145 million years. His name Tamu may seem exotic, but it is actually an acronym for the Texas A & M University, who led several campaigns about her and where William Sager work, the first author of the study published by  Nature Geoscience.

Tamu is a species of large, rounded oblong tray with enough gentle slopes, 450 km wide and 650 long. The cores that were conducted say that it is composed of volcanic rocks, huge flows of low viscosity basalt. Until now, it was believed that this huge bulge was due to the juxtaposition of the merger of several neighboring volcanoes each other. This kind of phenomenon is quite common and has for example led to the island of Hawaii, consisting of five volcanoes, or, closer to home, Iceland. But William Sager and his colleagues had another idea. The information provided by cores are limited, they switched to another method of exploration, the seismic method, commonly used by the oil industry in search of new deposits . They had the chance to participate in two research cruises over Shatsky Rise, in 2010 and 2012, during which they "sounded" massive underwater explosions through by air guns.

The analysis of waves reflected by the rock has to ultrasound Tamu Massif and realize that it was obviously not a conglomerate of volcanoes. Instead, all the lava seemed well come from the top of the range, implying a magmatic and one fireplace.One volcano then, and gigantic. Covering an area of over 300 000 km 2 , equivalent to the size of a country like Italy or Poland, Tamu almost on a par with the giant of the solar system what the Martian volcano Olympus Mons. If it had landed in France, he would go to Paris to Montpellier and the mouth of the Gironde to the Swiss border.That said, there is a big difference between Tamu and Olympus Mons: if both are "shield volcanoes", the first difficulty reaching 4 km high, while its Martian counterpart, much curved, exceeds 20 km! Although William Sager do not despair of being able to find even larger than the Tamu, it is unlikely that the height of Olympus Mons is never exceeded.

If we put aside the race a little futile to record, the study is interesting in that it shows that the Martian giant has at least one counterpart on Earth. A building such as Tamu also a challenge to researchers who must explain how it was possible to combine in one place as magma in a relatively short time, since the construction of Shatsky Rise (2.5 million kilometers cubes) was done in a few million years. Beyond these scientific considerations, one can also question the ultimately superficial knowledge we have of our own planet. Indeed, only a few days, we discover in quick immense canyon 750 km long and 800 meters deep under the Greenland icecap and the largest volcano in the world. Earth, we are you hiding other elephants?

Japan’s Levitating Train Hits 310 MPH in Trials

                                                                         

It’s currently the world’s longest and fastest stretch of maglev train, reaching speeds as high as 310 mph in a demonstration last week. But Japan’s L-Zero only lives on 15 miles of test track, and we’re still more than a decade away from completion.

After five years of trials, plus some starts and stops, Central Japan Railway Co. is finally starting construction on a maglev line between Nagoya and Tokyo, a 177-mile trip that will be cut from 95 minutes on today’s high-speed trains to just 40 minutes with maglev by 2027. To put that kind of speed in perspective, Amtrak’s Acela takes about 3 hours and 40 minutes to go about 210 miles. A trip from Boston to New York on maglev would take under an hour.

By 2045, JR Central hopes to extend the line to Osaka, which will cut the number of passengers on the frequent flights between the two cities. When built, the maglev will join an airport line in Shanghai and a low-speed train in Nagoya, among other rail systems that use magnets to float rail cars above a track to reduce friction and increase stability.

While Japan’s maglev promises to be an impressive technical feat, there’s some worry that Japan’s population won’t be big enough to sustain it. The Nagoya extension alone is expected to cost anywhere from $52 billion to as much as $90 billion, ¹ thanks to the difficulty of tunneling through cities and mountains to make a straight track.

According to Bloomberg, there’s a good chance that the construction will face significant delays. If demographic trends continue, that means Japan’s population may fall low enough to significantly reduce demand for the train once it’s built.

Luckily, JR Central is a hugely profitable company with a history of high profits from its current bullet trains. Last fiscal year, the company had a cash flow of $2.95 billion dollars. Along with loans and bonds, that money can easily pay for a major infrastructure project.

That kind of confidence was on display as journalists, railway executives and other VIPs rode the test track. Even though it beat a world speed record and accelerated to more than four times highway speed limits, those on board were merely pleased — not necessarily impressed.

“Compared with the bullet train, there was a slightly noticeable feeling of speed,” Transport Minister Akihiro Ohta told Bloomberg.

US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:

• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".

• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs.

• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods."

• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".

• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

                                                          

The agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence gathering.

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet." Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at "defeating network security and privacy".

"For the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies," stated a 2010 GCHQ document. "Vast amounts of encrypted internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

An internal agency memo noted that among British analysts shown a presentation on the NSA's progress: "Those not already briefed were gobsmacked!"

The breakthrough, which was not described in detail in the documents, meant the intelligence agencies were able to monitor "large amounts" of data flowing through the world's fibre-optic cables and break its encryption, despite assurances from internet company executives that this data was beyond the reach of government.

The key component of the NSA's battle against encryption, its collaboration with technology companies, is detailed in the US intelligence community's top-secret 2013 budget request under the heading "Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling".

                                                   

Funding for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous NSA documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint enabling has topped $800m. The program "actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs", the document states. None of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these details are guarded by still higher levels of classification.

Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".

"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."

The document sets out in clear terms the program's broad aims, including making commercial encryption software "more tractable" to NSA attacks by "shaping" the worldwide marketplace and continuing efforts to break into the encryption used by the next generation of 4G phones.

Among the specific accomplishments for 2013, the NSA expects the program to obtain access to "data flowing through a hub for a major communications provider" and to a "major internet peer-to-peer voice and text communications system".

Technology companies maintain that they work with the intelligence agencies only when legally compelled to do so. The Guardian has previously reported that Microsoft co-operated with the NSA to circumvent encryption on the Outlook.com email and chat services. The company insisted that it was obliged to comply with "existing or future lawful demands" when designing its products.

The documents show that the agency has already achieved another of the goals laid out in the budget request: to influence the international standards upon which encryption systems rely.

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

"Eventually, NSA became the sole editor," the document states.

The NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart, Edgehill, is named after the first major engagement of the English civil war, more than 200 years earlier.

A classification guide for NSA employees and contractors on Bullrun outlines in broad terms its goals.

"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.

The document also shows that the NSA's Commercial Solutions Center, ostensibly the body through which technology companies can have their security products assessed and presented to prospective government buyers, has another, more clandestine role.

It is used by the NSA to "to leverage sensitive, co-operative relationships with specific industry partners" to insert vulnerabilities into security products. Operatives were warned that this information must be kept top secret "at a minimum".

A more general NSA classification guide reveals more detail on the agency's deep partnerships with industry, and its ability to modify products. It cautions analysts that two facts must remain top secret: that NSA makes modifications to commercial encryption software and devices "to make them exploitable", and that NSA "obtains cryptographic details of commercial cryptographic information security systems through industry relationships".

The agencies have not yet cracked all encryption technologies, however, the documents suggest. Snowden appeared to confirm this during a live Q&A with Guardian readers in June. "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.

The documents are scattered with warnings over the importance of maintaining absolute secrecy around decryption capabilities.

                                                           

Strict guidelines were laid down at the GCHQ complex in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on how to discuss projects relating to decryption. Analysts were instructed: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods underpinning Bullrun." This informaton was so closely guarded, according to one document, that even those with access to aspects of the program were warned: "There will be no 'need to know'."

The agencies were supposed to be "selective in which contractors are given exposure to this information", but it was ultimately seen by Snowden, one of 850,000 people in the US with top-secret clearance.A 2009 GCHQ document spells out the significant potential consequences of any leaks, including "damage to industry relationships".

"Loss of confidence in our ability to adhere to confidentiality agreements would lead to loss of access to proprietary information that can save time when developing new capability," intelligence workers were told. Somewhat less important to GCHQ was the public's trust which was marked as a moderate risk, the document stated.

"Some exploitable products are used by the general public; some exploitable weaknesses are well known eg possibility of recovering poorly chosen passwords," it said. "Knowledge that GCHQ exploits these products and the scale of our capability would raise public awareness generating unwelcome publicity for us and our political masters."

The decryption effort is particularly important to GCHQ. Its strategic advantage from its Tempora program – direct taps on transatlantic fibre-optic cables of major telecommunications corporations – was in danger of eroding as more and more big internet companies encrypted their traffic, responding to customer demands for guaranteed privacy.

Without attention, the 2010 GCHQ document warned, the UK's "Sigint utility will degrade as information flows changes, new applications are developed (and deployed) at pace and widespread encryption becomes more commonplace." Documents show that Edgehill's initial aim was to decode the encrypted traffic certified by three major (unnamed) internet companies and 30 types of Virtual Private Network (VPN) – used by businesses to provide secure remote access to their systems. By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.

Another program, codenamed Cheesy Name, was aimed at singling out encryption keys, known as 'certificates', that might be vulnerable to being cracked by GCHQ supercomputers.

Analysts on the Edgehill project were working on ways into the networks of major webmail providers as part of the decryption project. A quarterly update from 2012 notes the project's team "continue to work on understanding" the big four communication providers, named in the document as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, adding "work has predominantly been focused this quarter on Google due to new access opportunities being developed".

To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence" refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents.

This GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry."

"This enables GCHQ to tackle some of its most challenging targets," the report said. The efforts made by the NSA and GCHQ against encryption technologies may have negative consequences for all internet users, experts warn.

"Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure product."

This was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell, a former prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.

"[An] encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door is far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of communications confidentiality than a system that never has access to the unencrypted communications of its users," she states.

Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.

Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch: rumour round-up

Samsung has stirred up a lot of excitement for its upcoming smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, and analysts and consumers will be watching tonight's launch event with interest, as the firm follows Google into the market for wearable devices.

Fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, connected watches and even Internet-enabled clothing are expected to become big business for companies looking to add wearable devices to their smartphone portfolios over the next few years. Research firm IHS predicts that shipments of wearable devices could reach 9.4 million units by 2016.

Samsung’s rumored smartwatch, much like Google’s Glass headset, is said to be deeply integrated with users’s smartphones, providing a second screen for notifications and quick compositions, so that users don’t have to reach for their pockets or handbags.

The watch is expected to come with a 2.5-inch, 320 x 320 OLED display, which Lee Young Hee – the company's executive vice president – confirmed last week will not be flexible, contrary to earlier speculation.

The device will run Google's Android operating system and will be powered by a dual core 1.5GHz Samsung Exynos 4412 processor. It will come pre-loaded with Samsung Voice – Samsung’s equivalent of Apple’s Siri. It will also have an integrated camera, which some reports suggest will offer 4 megapixels with 720p video recording capability.

The Galaxy Gear watch is expected to have 10 hours of battery life, meaning it would need to be charged every day. It will also come with speakers integrated into the clasp, built-in NFC, and a Bluetooth connection, allowing it to sync with other mobile devices, according to AmongTech.





Leaked images of a fairly bulky prototype Galaxy Gear smartwatch appeared on the VentureBeat website earlier this week, re-affirming many of the previously rumoured specifications. However, some commentators pointed out that the final version may look different.
A source familiar with the product told The Telegraph that the smartwatch would be pushed as a companion to the Galaxy Note 3 'phablet', which will also be launched later today.

Microsoft to buy Nokia phones unit

Nokia chief Elop, a former Microsoft executive, will return as Microsoft's board ponders a successor to current CEO Steve Ballmer, who will depart sometime in the next 12 months after initiating a reorganization intended to transform the software company into a devices and services group in the mould of Apple Inc.
The sale of Nokia's phone business marks the exit of a 150-year-old company that once dominated the global cellphone market and remains one of Europe's premier technology brands, even though Apple and Samsung Electronics' ascendancy all but reduced it to irrelevancy in Asia and North America in recent years.
"For a lot of us Finns, including myself, Nokia phones are part of what we grew up with. Many first reactions to the deal will be emotional," said Alexander Stubb, Finland's minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade, on his Twitter account.
The sale price of the phone business, at about one-quarter of its sales last year, represented a "fire sale level," according to analyst Tero Kuittinen at consultancy Alekstra, although others disagreed on pricing.
"What should be paid for declining business, where market share has been constantly lost and profitability has been poor?" said Hannu Rauhala, an analyst at Pohjola Bank. "It is difficult to say if it's cheap or expensive."
Nokia - reduced to its networks business, navigation offerings and patent portfolio after the sale - is still the world's No. 2 mobile phone maker behind Samsung, but it is not in the top five in the more lucrative and faster-growing smartphone market.
Sales of Nokia's Lumia series have helped the market share of Windows Phones in the global smartphone market climb to 3.3 percent, according to consultancy Gartner, overtaking ailing BlackBerry Ltd for the first time this year. Still, Google Inc's Android and Apple's iOS system make up 90 percent of the market.
Canadian Elop, hired from Microsoft in 2010, has been cited among the frontrunners to take over from Ballmer, criticized for missing the mobile revolution, kicking off Microsoft's foray into the market with the tepid-selling Surface tablet only in 2012.
Buying Nokia's gadget business thrusts Microsoft deeper into the hotly contested market, despite some investors urging the company to stick to its core strengths of business software and services.
LOWER MARGIN
Activist fund manager ValueAct Capital Management, which has been offered a board seat, is among those concerned with Ballmer's leadership and his attempts to plough headlong into the lower-margin, highly competitive mobile devices arena. The San Francisco-based fund, which manages about $12 billion for clients, owns 0.8 percent of Microsoft's shares.
Others applauded Ballmer's aggressive gambit.
"Microsoft cannot walk away from smartphones and the hope that other vendors will support Windows Phone is fading fast. So buying Nokia comes at the right time," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner.
"In today's market it is clear that a vertical integration is the way forward for a company to succeed. How else could Microsoft achieve this?"
As part of Microsoft, Elop will head an expanded Devices unit. Julie Larson-Green, who in July was promoted to head a new Devices and Studios business in Ballmer's reorganization, will report to Elop when the deal is closed.
Analysts say Elop's bold bet in 2011 to adopt Microsoft's untested Windows Phone software has yet to pay off.
"It's a bold step into the future — a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies," Ballmer said in a statement.
"Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft's share and profits in phones and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services."
Nokia said in a statement it expected that, apart from Elop, senior executives Jo Harlow, Juha Putkiranta, Timo Toikkanen, and Chris Weber would transfer to Microsoft when the deal is concluded. It did not say what roles they would take there.
Nokia board chairman Risto Siilasmaa would take over CEO duties while the Finnish firm looked for a new CEO, it said.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, subject to approval by Nokia shareholders and regulators.
(Reporting by Terhi Kinnunen, Jussi Rosendahl and Bill Rigby; Editing by Alex Richardson and David Holmes)