Saturday 15 June 2019

Small cluster of neurons is off-on switch for mouse songs

Researchers at Duke University have isolated a cluster of neurons in a mouse's brain that are crucial to making the squeaky, ultrasonic 'songs' a male mouse produces when courting a potential mate.

* This article was originally published here

NOAA: 279 dolphins dead on Gulf Coast, triple usual number

At least 279 dolphins have stranded across much of the U.S. Gulf Coast since Feb. 1, triple the usual number, and about 98 percent of them have died, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.

* This article was originally published here

Flickering sky islands generate andean biodiversity

A new video shows how climate change connected and disconnected Andean "sky islands" during the past million years. The innovative mathematical model used to make the video was based on fossil pollen records and shows how the entire páramo habitat shifted. The model can predict climate change effects in mountainous regions around the world, according to an international team of scientists including authors from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama (STRI).

* This article was originally published here

Maestro: a new attack that orchestrates malicious flows with BGP

Researchers at the University of Tennessee have recently identified the Maestro attack, a new link flooding attack (LFA) that leverages plane traffic control engineering techniques to concentrate botnet-sourced distributed denial of service (DDos) flows on transit links. In their paper, recently published on arXiv, the researchers outlined this type attack, tried to understand its scope and presented effective mitigations for network operators who wish to insulate themselves from it.

* This article was originally published here