Yesterday it was almost evening in Europe when ESA received the first signal from the spacecraft Rosetta. It confirmed that it regularly awakened after spending about two and a half years in hibernation. The testing phase started to ensure that all of its instruments are functioning properly. Rosetta is now en route to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
A few days ago, Proofpoint, an American company that offers a variety of Internet related services including some related to security, revealed that it discovered what may be the first cyberattack carried out by exploiting the so-called Internet of Things. According to Proofpoint, over 750,000 phishing and spam e-mails were sent not by normal computers but by smart appliances such as TV-sets and refrigerators.
A team of paleontologists led by Professor Neil Shubin from the University of Chicago published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” the results of a research on Tiktaalik roseae. It’s a species that lived during the Devonian period, about 375 million years ago, which is a transitional form between fish and legged animals. This research highlights the adaptation of the hind fins of this animal, showing that it had already started in fish.
NASA has officially invited people from all over the world to register their names in the “Messages to Bennu” program. All those names will be recorded on a microchip that will travel aboard the OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, which is expected to start its mission in September 2016 for the asteroid 101955 Bennu to collect a sample to bring back to Earth.
