Since the time Apps were invented to be downloaded onto a smartphone there has always been a very real possibility that an app could hack your phone and gain personal information. This is why making sure that an app was programmed by a trustworthy site was of paramount importance.

Now a set of computer scientists at the University of California – Riverside have demonstrated that even a trusted app could end up compromising your smart phone. The researchers revealed a flaw in operating systems such as Android, iOS, and Windows which could allow a hacker to gain personal information from your smart phone if you have downloaded the apps for gmail, CHASE Bank and H&R Block.

The researchers were able to hack into these apps with a success rate between 82 to 92%. Surprisingly Amazon app was the most difficult to hack with a success rate of 48%. The science project began because the researchers felt that there was an unparallelled security risk thanks to the many apps that were being developed by so many different developers the world over

Having proved that any app can be hacked the researchers are now working on reducing the risk that apps provide to a smartphone. Anything that makes the smart phone date more difficult to hack will be well worth waiting for.

As a delivery drone takes off from a location to go make a drop at another predetermined location it must make a number of decisions along the way. The Markov Decision Process or MDP consists of the planning that an autonomous vehicle’s course often involves.  This sequential decision-making framework is also called the Tree of Possibilities.

Just like a tree can branch out along each node into a multiple number of branches, the decisions made by the drone will help it move sequentially from its starting to its ending point. Each action can result in a number of more possibilities. The drone can compute the different number of routes it can take to reach a location even before it takes to the air.

Then it can compute the most optimal route based on another set of variables such as distance, time, and climatic conditions. The final route it decides to fly can also be changed mid flight in case it encounters problems. There is literally a huge number of choices that the drone needs to keep making from the time it takes off till the time it returns.

It is the computer programmer’s job to ensure that the algorithm that he writes will take into account all these variables and allow the drone to reach the right decision each time. As you can well imagine, this is not an easy science project.

The health of a drone may not have been something scientists paid much attention to earlier, but with Amazon having declared that they are going to start using drones to deliver packages, this has come to the forefront. A drone on a short leg 30 minute mission to deliver a package may not need to worry too much about its health, but what about a longer distance delivery.

When a drone needs to fly out for a long distance it should be able to monitor its systems and check in case there is a problem with aspect. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with an algorithm that allows drones to do their own health check up on the way.

The number of things that can go wrong with a drone delivery are large. The safety of the drone, the correct address to make delivery at, the climatic conditions like rain and heavy winds, so many variables come into play. It is not possible for a drone to deal with a situation as it arises on the fly.

Serious amount of research goes into the programing of an algorithm that can help the drone cope with any emergency that may arise. It will be interesting to see if these experimental drone deliveries will actually match expectations or will they be yet another failed science project.

The fact that the sun’s outer atmosphere is hotter than its actual surface has puzzled scientists for a while now. The sun’s visible surface is called the photosphere. The photosphere is some 6,000 Kelvins in temperature. The outer atmosphere or the corona should be cooler. However the corona regularly reaches temperatures which are 300 times hotter than the photosphere.

A number of theories have been put forward, but researchers feel that the actual reason has now been uncovered. This reason is the Nanoflares! Nanoflares are a constant peppering of impulsive bursts of heating which occur on the sun, none of which can be individually detected.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took pictures of the Sun in the month of April which showed Solar Nanoflares in the form of bright loops. These are the phenomenon that cause the sun’s surface to stay cooler than the sun’s atmosphere.  These pictures are from the EUNIS mission which was launched to study the particularly active parts of the sun.

While researchers are not giving up on other theories altogether, this set of photographic evidence has certainly given the nanoflare theory a major boost. It will be interesting to see what else the EUNIS mission manages to uncover for NASA scientists to study during this science project.

Surgeries are nothing to look forward to. Most people dread them and with good reason. One additional problem after surgery is a Surgical Site Infection or SSI. The good news is that if you take antiseptic showers with chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) 24 to 48 hours before admission you reduce the risk of SSIs considerably.

The bad news is that most patients, while wanting to comply with these instructions from their surgeons, usually end up forgetting to take these showers. This naturally results in a much higher rate of SSIs than necessary. So the American College of Surgeons wondered how they could get more patients to remember to take these showers prior to surgery.

They conducted a science experiment with Charles E. Edmiston, PhD, professor of surgery and hospital epidemiologist, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee as the head. A group of 80 people were divided up into sections and some were sent no reminders while others got reminders in the form of email, voice mail and text messages to take the CHG showers.

Close to 66% of the people who got the reminders ended up taking the showers which was a significantly higher number than the other group who did not get reminders. Also 80% of the people preferred the reminder to come in text message form. So based on this science experiment, perhaps surgeons all over the world should now consider texting their patients about taking the CHG showers a couple of days before the surgery to reduce SSIs.