A spectacular nitrogen isotope anomaly in Bencubbin

Results of isotopic measurements on an unusual stony-iron meteorite named Bencubbin, which was found in Western Australia in 1930, are reported. Nitrogen from both the metallic and stony parts of the Bencubbin meteorite was analyzed, and in both materials large excesses of (15)N were found, resulting in values of the (14)N/(15)N abundance ratios as low as 137. That is, (15)N is enriched in Bencubbin by about a factor of two relative to terrestrial nitrogen. This is the largest (15)N enrichment of any known natural material. The effect is so large that chemical processes are probably inadequate to account for it. Nuclear processes which may be responsible for the anomalous isotope abundance are discussed

Honware: A Virtual Honeypot Framework for Capturing CPE and IoT Zero Days

Existing solutions are ineffective in detecting zero day exploits targeting Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We present honware, a high-interaction honeypot framework which can emulate a wide range of devices without any access to the manufacturers' hardware. Honware automatically processes a standard firmware image (as is commonly provided for updates), customises the filesystem and runs the system with a special pre-built Linux kernel. It then logs attacker traffic and records which of their actions led to a compromise. We provide an extensive evaluation and show that our framework improves upon existing emulation strategies which are limited in their scalability, and that it is significantly better both in providing network functionality and in emulating the devices' firmware applications - a crucial aspect as vulnerabilities are frequently exploited by attackers in front-end functionalities such as web interfaces. Honware's design precludes most honeypot fingerprinting attacks, and as its performance is comparable to that of real devices, fingerprinting with timing attacks can be made far from trivial. We provide four case studies in which we demonstrate that honware is capable of rapid deployment to capture the exact details of attacks along with malware samples. In particular we identified a previously unknown attack in which the default DNS for an ipTIME N604R wireless router was changed. We believe that honware is a major contribution towards re-balancing the economics of attackers and defenders by reducing the period in which attackers can exploit zero days at Internet scale

Bitter harvest: Systematically fingerprinting low- and medium-interaction honeypots at internet scale

The current generation of low- and medium interaction honeypots uses off-the-shelf libraries to provide the transport layer. We show that this architecture is fatally flawed because the protocols are implemented subtly differently from the systems being impersonated. We present a generic technique for systematically fingerprinting low- and medium interaction honeypots at Internet scale with just one packet and an ERR (Equal Error Rate) of 0.0183. We conduct Internet-wide scans and identify 7,605 honeypot instances across nine different honeypot implementations for the most important network protocols SSH, Telnet, and HTTP. For SSH honeypots we also determined their patch level and find that they are poorly maintained -- 27% of the honeypots have not been updated within the last 31 months and only 39% incorporate improvements from 7 months ago. We believe our findings to be a 'class break' in that trivial patches cannot address the issue

SPIRAL Phase A: A Prototype Integral Field Spectrograph for the AAT

We present details of a prototype fiber feed for use on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) that uses a dedicated fiber-fed medium/high resolution (R > 10000) visible-band spectrograph to give integral field spectroscopy (IFS) of an extended object. A focal reducer couples light from the telescope to the close-packed lenslet array and fiber feed, allowing the spectrograph be used on other telescopes with the change of a single lens. By considering the properties of the fibers in the design of the spectrograph, an efficient design can be realised, and we present the first scientific results of a prototype spectrograph using a fiber feed with 37 spatial elements, namely the detection of Lithium confirming a brown dwarf candidate and IFS of the supernova remnant SN1987A.Comment: 41 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables; accepted by PAS

Stress-Induced Cocaine Seeking Requires a Beta-2 Adrenergic Receptor-Regulated Pathway from the Ventral Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis That Regulates CRF Actions in the Ventral Tegmental Area

The ventral bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (vBNST) has been implicated in stress-induced cocaine use. Here we demonstrate that, in the vBNST, corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is expressed in neurons that innervate the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a site where the CRF receptor antagonist antalarmin prevents the reinstatement of cocaine seeking by a stressor, intermittent footshock, following intravenous self-administration in rats. The vBNST receives dense noradrenergic innervation and expresses β adrenergic receptors (ARs). Footshock-induced reinstatement was prevented by bilateral intra-vBNST injection of the β-2 AR antagonist, ICI-118,551, but not the β-1 AR antagonist, betaxolol. Moreover, bilateral intra-vBNST injection of the β-2 AR agonist, clenbuterol, but not the β-1 agonist, dobutamine, reinstated cocaine seeking, suggesting that activation of vBNST β-2 AR is both necessary for stress-induced reinstatement and sufficient to induce cocaine seeking. The contribution of a β-2 AR-regulated vBNST-to-VTA pathway that releases CRF was investigated using a disconnection approach. Injection of ICI-118,551 into the vBNST in one hemisphere and antalarmin into the VTA of the contralateral hemisphere prevented footshock-induced reinstatement, whereas ipsilateral manipulations failed to attenuate stress-induced cocaine seeking, suggesting that β-2 AR regulate vBNST efferents that release CRF into the VTA, activating CRF receptors, and promoting cocaine use. Last, reinstatement by clenbuterol delivered bilaterally into the vBNST was prevented by bilateral vBNST pretreatment with antalarmin, indicating that β-2 AR-mediated actions in the vBNST also require local CRF receptor activation. Understanding the processes through which stress induces cocaine seeking should guide the development of new treatments for addiction

Integral throat entrance development, qualification and production for the Antares 3 nozzle

Although design analyses of a G-90 graphite integral throat entrance for the Antares 3 solid rocket motor nozzle indicated acceptable margins of safety, the nozzle throat insert suffered a thermostructural failure during the first development firing. Subsequent re-analysis using properties measured on material from the same billet as the nozzle throat insert showed negative margins. Carbon-carbon was investigated and found to result in large positive margins of safety. The G-90 graphite was replaced by SAI fast processed 4-D material which uses Hercules HM 10000 fiber as the reinforcement. Its construction allows powder filling of the interstices after preform fabrication which accelerates the densification process. Allied 15V coal tar pitch is then used to complete densification. The properties were extensively characterized on this material and six nozzles were subjected to demonstration, development and qualification firings

Variable-Speed-of-Light Cosmology and Second Law of Thermodynamics

We examine whether the cosmologies with varying speed of light (VSL) are compatible with the second law of thermodynamics. We find that the VSL cosmology with varying fundamental constant is severely constrained by the second law of thermodynamics, whereas the bimetric cosmological models are less constrained.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX, Revised version with minor corrections to appear in Phys. Rev.

Homothetic Wyman Spacetimes

The time-dependent, spherically symmetric, Wyman sector of the Unified Field Theory is shown to be equivalent to a self-gravitating scalar field with a positive-definite, repulsive self-interaction potential. A homothetic symmetry is imposed on the fundamental tensor, and the resulting autonomous system is numerically integrated. Near the critical point (between the collapsing and non-collapsing spacetimes) the system displays an approximately periodic alternation between collapsing and dispersive epochs.Comment: 15 pages with 6 figures; requires amsart, amssymb, amsmath, graphicx; formatted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Combined color indexes and photometric structure of galaxies NGC 834 and NGC 1134

We present the results of BVRI photometry of two galaxies with active star formation: NGC 834 and NGC 1134. Combined color index Q_{BVI} was used to investigate the photometrical structure of the galaxies. Index Q_{BVI} is not affected by internal extinction and is sensitive to the presence of blue stars. Ring-like region with active star formation at 15" from the center reveals itself in the Q_{BVI} map of NGC 834. Three-arm spiral structure is well-seen on the Q_{BVI} map of NGC 1134. We propose to use the combined indexes Q_{BVI} and similarly defined indices as a tracers of Star Formation activity and structure of dusty galaxies.Comment: 3 pages, 4 embedded figures, LaTeX2e, using the EslabStyle.cls file, presented as a poster in the 33rd ESLAB Symp. "Star formation from the small to the large scale", Noordwijk, The Netherlands, 2-5 November 1999, (F. Favata, A.A. Kaas & A. Wilson eds, ESA SP-445