Despite a cool, cloudy summer, the ice levels in the Arctic have shrunk enough to tie with the second-lowest Arctic sea ice minimum, recorded in 2007. "Historically such weather conditions slow down the summer ice loss, but we still got down to essentially a tie for second lowest on the satellite record," reports US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) director Mark Serreze.
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The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, is advising computer users to protect themselves from having potential hackers spy on them using their webcams, by simply putting a piece of tape over the lens.
Comey says that this is standard procedure in government offices, and that it would be prudent for normal citizens to follow the same practice. He began covering the camera on his personal computer after seeing the issue covered in the news. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also known to cover his webcam up, too.
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It turns out that Tabby’s Star — the star that has been hypothesized to have an alien megastructure around it — is not alone when it comes to wild fluctuations in its light output. Astronomers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have found yet another star that experiences its own drops in brightness, although this one may offer a clue as to why it appears to periodically flicker out.
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The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program is currently investigating a high-energy signal burst that originated from a star 95 light years away, in the constellation Hercules. SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak cautions that this is unlikely to be an artificial signal, as there are a number of natural phenomena that could also have produced the signal.
The signal was recorded by Russian astronomers at the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya. Unfortunately, the signal was recorded on May 15, 2015, nearly a year and a half ago, a delay that severely hampers verification of the other signal from other telescopes. Nonetheless, SETI will be listening to the star on the off chance that there might be a repeat of the signal.
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