Saturn’s tiny, icy moon Enceladus has recently been visited by NASA’s Cassini orbiter on several very close approaches – once coming within a mere 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the surface. Scientists are learning a great deal about this curious little moon. Only about 500 kilometers wide (310 miles), it is very active, emitting internal heat, churning its surface, and – through cryovolcanism – ejecting masses of microscopic ice particles into Saturnian orbit. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for over 4 years now, and has provided some amazing views of tiny Enceladus, some collected here. Another close flyby is scheduled for Halloween, October 31st. (26 photos total)
Daily Archives: October 28, 2008
Smells Like … a Keyboard
Compromising your keyboard by sniffing the EM radiation signature.
We found 4 different ways (including the Kuhn attack) to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of our 4 attacks.
Neal Stephenson did this in Cryptonomicon. Of course, fictional events are trumped by actual results.
Going Beyond Schrödinger
Erwin may or may not have killed a cat. (His wife’s cat) But he didn’t humiliate it.
What’s cuter than a platonic solid? A cat dressed up as a platonic solid for Halloween!
It's About Time: More NPR Physics Discussions
A Light Take On The Gravity-Time Relationship
Brian Greene explains the link between gravity and time.
Greene has written a short (less than 40 cardboard pages) new picture book called Icarus at the Edge of Time. It tells the story of a young boy who slips off in a space ship and cruises over to a black hole, only to discover that he’s made a terrible mistake: He forgot one of Einstein’s fundamental observations, which is that time is not the same for everybody everywhere.
[…]
Einstein’s theories posit that as one gets closer to a center of gravity, time will “slow down.” So if you spend the rest of your life closer to the Earth’s center of gravity on 34th Street while I spend the rest of my life at the top of the Empire State Building, time for you will tick a teeny, teeny bit more slowly than time for me.
Einstein meant this not poetically, but literally. If you and I each had a watch, ticking off hundred-billionths of seconds, the watch on your wrist down below on the street would tick fewer times than the watch I was wearing up in the sky. It wouldn’t be a big difference — a few billionths of a second over 20 years — but it would be a real difference. If we decided after several decades to meet and compare watches, we’d see that they would literally differ, that time for the two of us had indeed ticked differently.
via Physics Buzz