Curio Cabinet / Daily Curio

Could hackers cause a widespread power outage in the U.S.? For years, cybersecurity experts inside utility companies have dismissed that kind of threat as only possible in science fiction novels. But thanks to an accidentally leaked PowerPoint presentation from the security firm Dragos, it looks like the experts have changed their minds. Dragos has apparently detected Xenotime—a sophisticated hacker group responsible for almost taking down the Saudia Arabian oil refinery Petro Rabigh in a 2017 cyberattack—sniffing around the networks of dozens of U.S. power grid operators. So far, Xenotime appears to just be "scanning" the power grid networks, looking for vulnerabilities. But the fact they have turned their attention to U.S. infrastructure is alarming enough. Their attack in Saudi Arabia only failed because they appeared to accidentally trigger an emergency shutdown of the plant. This was after they had already gained access to the refinery's industrial control system and knocked out all of their safety systems. It was likely a precursor to then overstressing equipment, possibly causing a massive leak or explosion. It's not clear why Xenotime has shifted its sights to the U.S. power grid, but the organization has been traced back to a Moscow research institute, the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics. If these people are indeed from Russia, it's a sign they could be in cahoots with another Russian cyber terrorist group known as Palmetto Fusion or Dragonfly 2.0. They cyberattacked the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016, causing blackouts for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Yikes! All of this talk of cyberattacks is making me kind of miss the good ol' days when viruses just wiped out our hard disks!
 

Hurricane season is here again. Given that there have been so many devastating hurricanes in the past decade—likely getting more destructive thanks to global warming, according to most climatologists—there are renewed calls for scientists to try and change the weather. Known as "storm modification," the idea isn't new. Scientists and the U.S. government have been trying to defuse the power of hurricanes for decades, starting with Project Cirrus. The initial concept was to collapse the wall of clouds circling around the eye of the hurricane by "seeding" them with dry ice crystals. A single plane dropped 180 pounds of dry ice into Hurricane King as it traveled up the southeast coast in 1947. The pilot immediately noticed the cloud's trajectory slowing down. But a few minutes later, the hurricane turned around and headed back inland over Georgia, causing massive devastation. The public blamed the U-turn on Project Cirrus even though the experts didn't think it was related. That's why it took 14 years for the second attempt, named Project Stormfury. This time the team used silver iodide (AgI) instead of dry ice, in an attempt to cause more ice crystals to form, making the eyewall wider. In theory, this would conserve angular momentum, slowing the wind speeds. In 1961, Hurricane Easter was seeded with AgI and it appeared to weaken. In 1963, Hurricane Beulah was seeded and also diminished. But when the scientists tried increasing the doses of AgI with Hurricane Debbie (1969) and Hurricane Ginger (1971), there appeared to be no weakening of those storms. Eventually, funding was cut for the seeding programs. More recent ideas have included: towing an iceberg into the eye of a hurricane to choke off its supply of warm water; a mobile fleet of pipes that would suck cold water from the bottom of the ocean up into the storm; dumping carbon dust into the storm to weigh it down; and blowing hurricanes up with nuclear bombs. This last idea is proposed so frequently to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that they have a dedicated page on their website explaining why this isn't a good idea. Surely there are some better ideas out there?

Would you pay $35,000 per night to sleep in cramped quarters, where the meals are reconstituted, and you have to go to the bathroom in a bag? On the plus side, it includes unlimited low-speed internet and zero gravity. In a new plan announced last Friday, NASA is hoping that sounds like a good offer. The Trump Administration has announced an end to federal funding for the International Space Station by 2024. So NASA is handling tough economic times the way many Americans are these days: by putting their place up on Airbnb. Technically, you will have to reserve your spot through third-party companies to be approved by NASA. But there will no longer be any need to show educational or socially responsible reasons for hopping a ride to the space station. And for-profit research is now allowed. Private "astronauts" would be trained and medically cleared by third-party companies and allowed to stay on the station for up to 30 days. But don't think it will only cost $35K per night to go to space. That's the price NASA is charging the third parties, which only covers a fraction of its million-dollar-per-night cost to keep things running. The third parties are likely to mark the price up into the tens of millions per trip when you include the transportation. Some estimates are as high as $60 million for a month-long stay. A word to the wise: if you decide to book the ISS via Airbnb watch out for their draconian cancellation policies!
 

Image credit & copyright: NASA/Roscosmos
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this buggy favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Talk about being a survivor. The Arctic woolly bear moth (Gynaephora groenlandica) can live up to 20 years—one of the longest known lifespans for an insect—in the Arctic. To be fair, it spends its life frozen and inactive, except for one month each summer. How it manages to survive the Arctic winters has interested scientists for decades. Here's how. It stays a caterpillar for its first 14 years. During that time the insect is able to survive temperatures as low as -70°C. In the month of June, the caterpillar takes in as much heat as possible to push its body temperature to 25°C above the actual temperature. Then, before the short summer begins to fade, the caterpillar finds a hibernation spot along a northwest-southeast axis and builds a protective cocoon. There it prepares to freeze itself for the rest of the year. As the evening temperature begins to drop, the caterpillar allows its blood, stomach contents, and cell fluid to freeze. It survives its frozen state by breaking down all of its mitochondria, which dramatically lowers its metabolic rate and coats its cells with glycerol. The glycerol acts just like antifreeze. When June comes around, it gets its month of activity in and then freezes all over again. Amazing! And it's not the only member of the animal kingdom that can survive freezing. So can the Alaskan wood frog, the Greenland shark, and the tiny eight-legged Water Bear—which has been able to survive laboratory temperatures down to -459° F, one degree above absolute zero. Brr!

A Chinese study published last month has an interesting proposal for how to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere: use it for fracking. Hydraulic fracking is the controversial technique of injecting massive amounts of pressurized water into shale formations to access underground deposits of natural gas. The technique has single-handedly halved the cost of extracting natural gas; and by some estimates, will make the U.S. nearly energy independent for the next century. But fracking has some serious downsides. First, it wastes huge amounts of water, which isn't even an option in arid regions. Second, the process pollutes groundwater with foaming agents, sand, and added chemicals. Third, the sudden abundance of cheaper gas has slowed the development of clean energy sources and instead encourages yet more burning of fossil fuels. The Chinese researchers think they may have found a new form of fracking which addresses these issues. They tried using liquified CO2 instead of water, and found that it created more complex networks of fractures which resulted in more gas being extracted. More interestingly, the scientists suggest it would be an excellent way to dispose of CO2 captured from the atmosphere. Known as a "carbon sink," capturing and storing global-warming forms of carbon underground is one theory of how humans can combat climate change. The researchers still have a few problems to resolve, though. For one, only 30 to 50 percent of the CO2 remains underground—the rest seeps back into the atmosphere. Also, it's using CO2 to produce fossil fuels, which when burned produce—yep, you guessed it—more climate-warming CO2. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any sustainable solution to our climate issues probably shouldn't include burning more fossil fuels!
 

Image credit & copyright: Shutterstock / Victor Tangermann
 

If you're like me, it's been a rough allergy season. It seems every year is worse than the last. An article we came across recently in Scientific American might explain it. Written a few years ago by horticulturist Thomas Ogren, it describes a series of historical events which have slowly turned our cities into allergy hellscapes. Ogren believes the trend began in 1949, when the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture began recommending that cities only plant male trees on their streets "to avoid the nuisance from the seed." While cities slowly began following this suggestion, they still favored elm trees which are lush, non-allergenic, and hermaphroditic. But things changed in the late sixties, when a bark beetle infected with Dutch elm disease hitched a ride on a shipment of logs from Britain. It quickly began decimating America's elm population. By 1989, an estimated 75 percent of all elm trees were dead.
 

City planners rushed to re-forest their city streets with ornamental plants, shrubs, and non-indigenous trees which included over 100 new varieties of maple. All of which were male, so as to avoid a mess of seeds on the streets. But they created an enormous amount of pollen. When these trees reach maturity—which happens 20 to 30 years after planting—they produce enough pollen each season to fertilize the thousands of flowers of a mature female tree. But since there are no female trees to sop up the pollen, instead it covers our cars, porches, and mucous membranes. Ogren points out that planners could have avoided this entire problem if they had just planted only female trees: without any males around, female trees don't produce seeds. Ogren decries this "botanical sexism" as a scourge on our cities that must be corrected before none of us can breathe. Some cities have begun monitoring the "Ogren Plant Allergy Scale" for new plantings; but Ogren's goal is to get all American cities to change their allergy-producing ways using his scale. Sounds a little ambitious, but hey, it's nothing to sneeze at!
 

Image credit & copyright: Jermey Gilchrist
 

Here's a tale straight out of Indiana Jones or Captain America. In 2013, a mysterious uranium cube appeared on the doorstep of the University of Maryland. Measuring two inches across and weighing five pounds, the meticulously hand-carved artifact came with a note attached: "Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger." The aforementioned reactor refers to Nazi Germany's failed attempt to harness nuclear power as a weapon, like the U.S. inevitably did in 1945. Intrigued, physicists Timothy Koeth and Miriam Hiebert set out to discover how the cube came to their university. Their findings were captivating, if not a bit anxiety-inducing. It turns out that the Germans crafted 600 identical uranium cubes. Scientists including Werner Heisenberg, the winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics, chained the cubes together with aircraft cables to create a gigantic radioactive chandelier that was lowered into a pool of heavy water. This reactor, named B-VIII, was quietly constructed beneath a castle in the hamlet of Haigerloch in southwest Germany. In April 1945, near the end of WWII, a crack team of Allied soldiers and scientists snuck behind enemy lines to raid B-VIII. They found some of the cubes buried in a field; but Heisenberg had slipped away that night on a bicycle with the rest in tow. Allied officials initially believed that B-VIII failed to produce a nuclear reaction because the Germans couldn't manufacture enough uranium cubes. In actuality, there were 400 additional cubes at a German research station competing against the B-VIII. Which means the Nazis had everything they needed to make an atomic bomb, had they worked as a team. As for the cube that arrived at the University of Maryland, Koeth and Hiebert speculate that it came from Robert Nininger, a property manager for the Manhattan Project whose name almost matches the note. But it's a mystery how it got there. And many of the other cubes remain unaccounted for. Some sold on the black market to the Soviet Union. As for the others? I guess we should all keep our eyes peeled at garage sales.
 

Image credit & copyright: John T. Consoli/University of Maryland