Creative New

China blocks U.S. from cyber warfare

Via washingtontimes

China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make Beijing’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

The secure operating system, known as Kylin, was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings that provided new details on how China’s government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.

“We are in the early stages of a cyber arms race and need to respond accordingly,” said Kevin G. Coleman, a private security specialist who advises the government on cybersecurity. He discussed Kylin during a hearing of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 30.

The deployment of Kylin is significant, Mr. Coleman said, because the system has “hardened” key Chinese servers. U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp.

“This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows,” he said.

The secure operating system was disclosed as computer hackers in China – some of them sponsored by the communist government and military – are engaged in aggressive attacks against the United States, said officials and experts who disclosed new details of what was described as a growing war in cyberspace.

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Via ACS\’ Crystal Growth & Design

The scientific community paid little attention to a visionary paper, in which Szent-Györgyi predicted that crystalline interfacial water layers would play a fundamental role in biology and evolution. It was 1971, and the proof of the existence of crystalline interfacial water layers at room temperature was virtually lacking in the literature. Recently, we provided experimental evidence for their existence on hydrogenated nanocrystalline diamond at room temperature. Crystallinity resulted from a decrease in conductance in response to an increase in humidity, associated with a decrease in the order of the interfacial water molecules implicated in proton conductivity. The correlation between conductance and humidity is not exclusive to synthetic diamond: It prevails on hydrogenated natural diamonds. Hydrogenation in nature is plausible: Volcanoes emit various hot gases including hydrogen. The capacity of interfacial water layers to impose order was exposed in the process of formation of supercubane carbon nanocrystals. It is important that the order imposed to molecules landing on hydrogenated diamond is more durable and superior to that realizable on any other origin of life platform, for instance, graphite. Hydrogenated diamond advances to the best of all possible origin of life platforms.

Andrei P. Sommer,*† Dan Zhu,† and Hans-Joerg Fecht†‡

Institute of Micro and Nanomaterials, University of Ulm, 89081 Ulm, Germany, and Institute for Nanotechnology, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany

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Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces

Via music.princeton.edu

Western musicians traditionally classify pitch sequences by disregarding the effects of five musical transformations: octave shift, permutation, transposition, inversion, and cardinality change. We model this process mathematically, showing that it produces 32 equivalence relations on chords, 243 equivalence relations on chord sequences, and 32 families of geometrical quotient spaces, in which both chords and chord sequences are represented. This model reveals connections between music-theoretical concepts, yields new analytical tools, unifies existing geometrical representations, and suggests a way to understand similarity between chord types.

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Via technology.newscientist.com

Next time you are lost in an unfamiliar city, console yourself with the knowledge that the layout of its roads are probably much the same as in any other.

French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.

Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Alessandro Flammini of Indiana University, US, analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Venice.

They found that cities’ road patterns have a lot in common mathematically, as well as looking similar to the eye.

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