Not Your Grandpa's Pipe: "Firefly" Portable Vape Is A Hot New Hit

Maybe you've seen them glowing and vapor-blowing in a bar, concert, or smoking section near you.  Vaporizers and e-cigarettes are firing up the former tobacco-buying market with what by many accounts is a safer, smoother smoke than conventional cigs.  Between the gear and the flavored "juice" options, there is technology for every type of inhalation experience.

Yet, the "juice" or chemical concentrates have raised concerns from some who want to know precisely what they are puffing.  Does the future still have room for smokers who scorch plant matter?  Enter the Firefly:  a stylish, compact, efficient means of torching tobacco (or other leaves of your choice.)

According to gizmodo.com, the Firefly vaporizer is a portable convection piece with an easily-loaded bowl chamber beneath a magnetic face.  A high-tech heating unit warms your leaves just enough to release their precious chemicals (but not enough to make them combust, allowing you to bypass the inhalation of any burned byproducts.)

The Firefly is powered by a lithium-ion battery that is good for fifty hits on a 45-minute charge.  Pressing the power button immediately heats the material in the chamber, which has a glass viewing port on top to allow for visibility of all that sweet vape.  The heat maxes out at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, so you never need to worry you're actually burning the bowl (there's boring, old-school pipes for that.)

For $270, you too can hit it up.  We've come a long way from the corncob configurations.  There are some habits even the future can't kill...technology just makes them safer and more satisfying.

Add some convection to your smoking selection.
(Image courtesy businessinsider.com.)

Space Station Sunday: Spacewalk This Way

Good afternoon, space fans!  As usual, a host of interesting activities were underway this week, 260 miles above the Earth.

The supertyphoon Vongfong, which viciously attacked Japan this week, stood out starkly from the standpoint of the ISS.  According to rt.com, Vongfong (which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm) was serious enough to warrant evacuations after German astronaut Alexander Gerst's overhead photos of it hit Twitter.  US astronaut Reid Wiseman also commented on the phenomena, telling his Twitter followers, "I’ve seen many {storms} from here, but none like this."

According to NASA.gov, Tuesday's spacewalk (or "EVA" - extravehicular activity) was executed excellently by astronauts Wiseman and Gerst.  They completed a 6 hour, 13 minute EVA to accomplish the relocation of a failed cooling pump, the integration of a new power source for the station's mobile platform for exterior machinery, and the repair of a light source for one of the station's exterior cameras (the light will be worked on inside the station and replaced during an upcoming spacewalk.)  Gerst used the Canadarm, an extending robotic arm on the exterior of the station, to ride to his worksite.  The astronauts were so successful and efficient in their mission that they had a few extra minutes to score some cool pictures.  All objectives for this EVA were met to satisfaction.

Astronaut Gerst, hanging out with the Canadarm outside the ISS.  The module to the upper left is a SpaceX Dragon.

Wiseman gets to rally for round two this Wednesday, when he and fellow US astronaut Butch Wilmore will be floating out to replace the repaired television camera light, and also to replace a sequential shunt unit that is critical for powering the station. In the meantime, Wiseman and Wilmore have been working on the Cardio Ox experiment, which uses ultrasound to assess cardiovascular benefits and hindrances in low gravity. These discoveries may aid heart and artery research (particularly regarding stress and atherosclerosis) on earth, as well as for future spaceflight.

A third spacewalk, this time manned by two Russian cosmonauts, is slated for October 22nd. Cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Max Suraev will head out to photograph the Russian side of the space station and jettison obsolete space gear.

Holding down the space-fort, cosmonaut Elena Serova monitored air quality in the ISS using the Matryoshka experiment, which assesses radiation impact on the inside of the station via a mannequin equipped with human tissue simulators.  Despite high energy neutrons and other forms of radiation bombarding the station, the astronauts are still within the acceptable dosage of radiation tolerance.

Speaking of things swooping through the sky, if you ever wondered whether a shooting star just might be the space station, there's an easy way to find out!  You can learn all the details at NASA's Spot The Station website, and follow or submit amazing space station-spotter images at #SpotTheStation.  Everything from long-exposure shots to silhouettes showcase the ISS in all of its orbiting glory.

So until next week, keep your eyes on our guys in the skies...then watch this space!

(Sun)spot the station?
(Image info.)

All Ears: New "Smart Earrings" Indicate Your Bio-stats

Earrings are not just for ornamentation anymore.  Thanks to a new invention called the Ear-O-Smart, your earlobes will be able to feed information to your brain lobes.

According to earosmart.com, the jewelry-esque devices can monitor your heart rate, calorie burn, and overall activity level.  The dime-sized multifaceted white earrings interact with your smart phone to casually keep you posted about your fitness stats throughout the day.

The device, which is currently seeking funding on kickstarter, promises to help you "make healthy choices" thanks to its feedback.  Could a line of intelligent jewelry be fancy in the future?

It's only a matter of time before you can plug into your brain via gauged plugs.
(Image courtesy piercingtime.com.)

Thync Before You Act: New Wearable Device To Assess And Regulate Mental States

If you thought putting on your headphones and turning up some good tunes was the best way to improve your mood for the day, you might be interested in the latest cutting-edge, life-lifting wearable technology.

According to iamwire.com, the new device "Thync" has received $17 million in funding and is set to launch next year.  It is a wearable device which focuses on certain neural pathways to improve various elements of the user's perception.  Neurosignaling algorithms generate responses in the brain that improve one's focus, energy, and even calmness.

Samir Kaul, a partner at Thync's start-up financers, Khosla Ventures, explained, “We back the talented team at Thync because we see a revolutionary convergence at the intersection of neuroscience and consumer technology."

Other wearable emotion-detectors/mind-readers such as Emotiv's "Neuro-Headset" are also at the forefront of this revolution. In 2015, it is estimated that some 300 million wearables will be in the hands and brains of consumers.

It's your coffee, Ritalin, and Vicodin, all in one handy zap to your brainframe!

Don't Mess With Texas's Ebola-Killing Robot

It's like the Terminator...for the Ebola virus.

In light of the United States appearance of Africa's Least Wanted menace, a robot that can kill the Ebola virus using UV light has hit the market.  As reported by wtsp.com, the robot known as "Little Moe" sanitizes possible outbreak locations by blasting UV light to fuse and thus destroy the virus's DNA.  A xenon bulb flashes at 1.5 times per second - enough to clean a whole hospital room in five minutes, or to scrub an Ebola-tainted surface in two minutes.

The robot, developed by the Texas company Xenex, is now a feature of 250 hospitals nationwide.  Dr. Mark Stibich, who works with Xenex, explained, "...What our customers have seen and reported in the medical literature is reduction in these infections in the rate of up to 50 percent."

Shine on, Little Moe.

It also serves as party lighting for your "I Survived Ebola" celebration bash...if you make it.

Grazing In The Nanograss Is A Gas: New "Nanopillars" To Improve Solar Cells

Sometimes when science takes a page from nature, great ideas abound.  Such is the case with the new "nanograss" design, which improves the energy-gathering capabilities of solar panels.

According to neomatica.com, researchers used the concept of blades of grass to expound on collecting available solar power.  When blades of grass grow, their surface area is multiplied by their height, and their vertical growing pattern makes it easy to have a large number of blades in a small area.  This makes for an accrued larger surface area that can absorb (and, in turn, convert) more sunlight when the design is applied to solar panels.

The new "nanograss" is created from nano-crystalline material with photovoltaic capacity.  On the atomic scale, at billionths of a meter tall, the cell stacks or "nanopillars" appear similar to a neatly-trimmed lawn of grass.  Each blade is a column of semiconductor p-n junctions which react with 32% more efficiency than traditional thin-film photovoltaic cells.

Professor Briseno of UMass Amherst, the lead author of the study, claims, “This work is a major advancement in the field of organic solar cells because we have developed what the field considers the ‘Holy Grail’ architecture for harvesting light and converting it to electricity.”

The biggest challenge of the project was to enable the molecules to stack vertically so that their electrons could flow as needed, bearing charge in only one direction. The substrate grapheme was found to be the solution that allowed the molecules to stack properly, bringing the idea to actualization. The results may soon be used in batteries and transistors as well as solar cells.

Of course, nano-pranks were quick to follow on the nano-lawn.
(Image courtesy umass.edu.)

Hack Lab Intro: How to Set up a Home Hacking and Security Testing Lab

Introduction

This series of articles comprises an introductory tutorial on how to set up a home lab to experiment with common hacking and information security testing tools. Our setup will  allow us to explore the sorts of computer and network vulnerabilities that can be encountered on the internet, and to test the security of our own home computer network and networked devices, all from within an isolated and secure working environment. The series is geared toward individuals who have little or no prior experience with virtualization software or common hacking and security testing tools, but are interested in exploring network and computer security.

Over the course of the tutorial series, we will create two separate network configurations. The first will be a completely virtual environment populated by two virtual guest systems running inside a single host computer. This requires nothing more than an internet connection for the necessary downloads, and a computer with relatively modest RAM and disk resources.

The second configuration will be an everyday local area network of the sort that can be found in many homes, but which is isolated from the internet and where we can strictly control and monitor all network traffic. This setup is slightly more involved in terms of hardware than the first, requiring also a spare router.

Our monitoring and attack system in both configurations will be an instance of a Kali Linux virtual machine running inside an installation of the VirtualBox software package on our primary computer. Kali is a Linux operating system distribution intended for security testing and digital forensics.

In the first completely virtual network environment, our victim will be an instance of  Metasploitable2, a virtual machine that exhibits vulnerabilities that can be found on  everyday computer systems and software configurations. As noted at Offensive Security, "Metasploitable is an intentionally vulnerable Linux virtual machine. This VM can be used to conduct security training, test security tools, and practice common penetration testing techniques."

In the second network configuration, we will use the Kali Linux virtual machine to compromise an everyday local area network router of the sort that can be found on many home networks, in order to demonstrate just how easy it can be to steal login credentials  passed from another computer on the network.

The tutorial is broken down into four parts:

• Part 1 covers the installation of VirtualBox and provides a walk through of a full installation of a Kali virtual machine on your primary lab computer. Along the way, we'll take a short detour on how to quickly run live Kali sessions without a full installation of the machine.

• Part 2 demonstrates one way to begin exploring your existing home network with Kali Linux, and test whether you can successfully identify all the devices that are connected to it.

• Part 3 covers the installation of the Metasploitable virtual machine and the configuration of a completely virtual internal network environment inside VirtualBox. We'll then place the Kali VM on this network and offer tips and resources on how to probe the victim machine for vulnerabilities by exploiting the tools that are provided by Kali.

• Part 4 provides details on setting up our second network configuration, which models an everyday home local area network. With the attack machine, we'll conduct a simple man-in-the-middle attack against the network's router, and demonstrate a serious security vulnerability by stealing login credentials sent to it from the victim machine, in this case, the host computer.