Long admired for their active and cooperative community behavior, some types of ants also wear a gardening hat. Nurturing underground fungus gardens, these ants have a win-win relationship that provides food for both ants and fungi. If we humans understand it better, it may just help us out, too.
As headlines focus on melting glaciers and rising water levels caused by global warming, climate change is quietly taking its toll on the nearly invisible occupants of this planet, the microbes.
We've worked hard to reduce the flow of toxic chemicals into our waterways, which means no more DDT and other bad actors to pollute or destroy wildlife and our health. But one observation has been plaguing scientists for decades: Why are large quantities of one toxic chemical still found in the world's oceans?
Breastfeeding is the ultimate in farm-to-table dining. It is sustenance prepared just for the baby and delivered with a very personal touch. Along with bonding, breastfeeding provides powerful protection to infants and young children in the form of beneficial bacteria, hormones, vitamins, protein, sugar, and antibodies manufactured on site to support infant health.
The evolution of our infection-fighting systems may have something to teach modern scientists. That's what a group from the University of Granada in Spain found when they studied a protein that's been around for over four billion years. Their work, by senior author José Sánchez-Ruiz and colleagues in the Department of Physical Chemistry, was published in the journal Cell Reports.
The ability of one microbe to adapt is giving it a whole new career as a sexually transmitted disease. Usually content with the back of the throat and nose of those who carry it, the dangerous pathogen Neisseria meningitidis has adapted to cause an illness that looks a lot like gonorrhea.
Antibiotics used to prevent diseases in livestock are creating a world of hurt for humans and the soil we depend on for food. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a global health issue. The overuse, underuse, and poor use of these life-saving drugs is rapidly removing them as a treatment option for serious infections in humans—plus bacteria are naturally adaptive.
The squiggly guys in this article's cover image are Propionibacterium acnes. These bacteria live in low-oxygen conditions at the base of hair follicles all over your body. They mind their own business, eating cellular debris and sebum, the oily stuff secreted by sebaceous glands that help keep things moisturized. Everybody has P. acnes bacteria—which are commonly blamed for causing acne—but researchers took a bigger view and discovered P. acnes may also play a part in keeping your skin clear.
A virtual design and construction services firm has built an augmented reality application that uses the Microsoft HoloLens to improve the efficiency of quality control on construction sites.
Using extreme time-lapse microscopy, scientists watched a virus take over a bacteria to create a cell that looked and functioned more like a plant or animal cell. True story.
A gold-medal winning entry into the iGEM synthetic biology competition could change the way we look at Esherichia coli, the bacteria better known as E. coli.
Transmitted by ticks, Lyme disease is a serious infection that is probably headed your way. A recent study confirms the pathogen that causes Lyme disease is now established in nine national parks in the East, including Acadia and Shenandoah National Parks.
If you love sitting poolside with a slice of watermelon, then I've got a real treat for you. Picture yourself cooling off with a slice of juicy watermelon topped with fresh ingredients like soft cheeses, herbs, and fresh summer fruits. Watermelon pizza is a wondrous thing—a creative take on the classic watermelon salad, only pizza-fied!
In my last tutorial, I talked about creating a virus inside of a Word Document in the scenario of a mass-mailer attack. In this post, however, I'm going to be covering creating a fake image or screenshot with a meterpreter backdoor hidden inside to be used in a similar scenario. Step 1: Creating the Virus
Remote Desktop gives you access to your Windows 8 PC or device from wherever you are to run your applications and access your files remotely.
Fromage blanc cheese is something every cook should experience in the kitchen. To consider yourself a real chef, you need to grab the cheesecloth and dip your hands in the cow's milk, because making cheese is a culinary experience like no other.
Facebook is an awesome free online resource that is connected to billions of people around the world. These days, you won't meet many people who do not have a Facebook account. As a real estate agent, you can take advantage of social networking to promote your business and share your listings. By posting on Facebook and creating a page for your business, you gain free advertising to thousands of local buyers. Check out this tutorial and learn how to start uploading videos to Facebook to promo...
Karen Solomon shows how to make bacon. You need 2 1/2 to 3 pounds of pork belly with no skin or bone. Rinse the belly with water and pat really dry. Mix ingredients for cure which includes 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses, 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, 2 tablespoons kosher salt and 1 teaspoon curing salt. Curing salt may be obtained at local butcher shop or online at Sausage Maker. Curing salt helps preserve the color of the bacon and ensures no spoilage. Mix ingredients un...
HippyUrban teaches viewers how to make inexpensive tortilla chips from scratch! First you will need to buy some MasaMix at your local Spanish market! It really is just corn flour. First, you need two cups of corn flour, 1 quarter teaspoon of salt and 1 quarter cup of water. Mix this up and add a tablespoon of water at a time to get it just right. Divide this in three and roll the dough on parchment paper. You want it to be thin and as thin as pie crust. With thicker chips, they can hold the s...
Check out this informative video tutorial from Apple on how to do more with the Sidebar in the Mac OS X Finder. Learn about the Sidebar devices, the Sidebar shared, the Sidebar places, and the Sidebar search for. Mac OS X. It's what makes a Mac a Mac.
Check out this informative video tutorial from Apple on how to use the basics of the Mac OS X Finder. Learn about the Finder basics, the Sidebar, view buttons, and Quick Look. Mac OS X. It's what makes a Mac a Mac.
Want to hack a LAN? Well, hacking local area networks is easier than you'd think. And by watching a few short videos, you can become a master hacker, something every techie wants to achieve. And what's the best way to hack a LAN? Ettercap, a password sniffing program.
Attacks against databases have become one of the most popular and lucrative activities for hackers recently. New data breaches seem to be popping up every week, but even with all of that attention, databases continue to be a prime target. All of these attacks have to start somewhere, and we'll be exploring a variety of methods to gather information on PostgreSQL databases with Metasploit.
We're glued to the news now more than ever, but our "free press" isn't necessarily free of charge. Cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC are locked behind expensive cable TV packages and cord-cutting streaming subscriptions such as Sling TV and Hulu + Live TV. Luckily, there are plenty of alternatives to get your TV news fix, free of any payment, account, or commitment.
With many office workers in the US being asked to work from home if their job allows, Magic Leap's customary updates for the Lumin OS and Lumin SDK brings some help to keep distributed workforces connected.
A lot of time can be wasted performing trivial tasks over and over again, and it's especially true when it comes to hacking and penetration testing. Trying different shells to own a target, and testing out privilege escalation commands afterward, can eat up a lot of time. Fortunately, there is a tool called One-Lin3r that can quickly generate shells, privesc commands, and more.
No operating system is stricken with as many vulnerabilities as Windows, and it's often a race to release the latest patches to fix things. From an attacker's point of view, knowing which patches are present on a Windows machine can make or break successful exploitation. Today, we will be covering three methods of patch enumeration, using Metasploit, WMIC, and Windows Exploit Suggester.
Windows 10 passwords stored as NTLM hashes can be dumped and exfiltrated to an attacker's system in seconds. The hashes can be very easily brute-forced and cracked to reveal the passwords in plaintext using a combination of tools, including Mimikatz, ProcDump, John the Ripper, and Hashcat.
Giving up your Wi-Fi password can be giving up more control than you think. Because of the way Chromecast and other IoT devices communicate, anyone on the same Wi-Fi network as your device can often make it do whatever they want. With a script called "Cast All the Things," we can hijack a Chromecast to play nearly any kind of media with a single command in terminal.
Popping a shell is often the main goal of a hacker, and it can be exciting when executed properly, but sometimes they do have their limitations. Metasploit's Meterpreter probably needs no introduction, but this powerful, dynamic payload can offer a leg up over normal shells. To prove it, we'll show how to take a normal command shell and elevate it to a Meterpreter session.
While hackers have taken advantage of numerous vulnerabilities in Adobe's products to deliver payloads to Windows users via PDF files, a malicious PDF file can also wreak havoc on a Mac that's using the default Preview app. So think twice before double-clicking a PDF open on your MacBook — it might just be a Trojan with a rootkit inside.
With over 1 billion downloads on the Play Store alone, Google Maps has become a staple for those traveling. Its popularity is the result of Google consistently improving its accuracy and adding new functionality. And this was only achieved with help of you — specifically, your data.
Local port forwarding is good when you want to use SSH to pivot into a non-routable network. But if you want to access services on a network when you can't configure port-forwarding on a router and don't have VPN access to the network, remote port forwarding is the way to go.
Over the years, the internet has become a dangerous place. As its popularity has increased, it has attracted more hackers looking to make a quick buck. However, as our dependency on the web grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to sever all ties. This means we have to protect one of our weakest points, the password.
Whether you're new to Android or you just haven't kept up on the app scene lately, we hand-picked over one hundred essential apps that are all designed to improve your experience. From custom launchers and icon packs to weather apps and file explorers, there's something for everyone in this list.
OpenVAS is a powerful vulnerability assessment tool. Forked from Nessus after Nessus became a proprietary product, OpenVAS stepped in to fill the niche. OpenVAS really shines for information gathering in large networks where manual scanning to establish a foothold can be time-consuming. OpenVAS is also helpful for administrators who need to identify potential security issues on a network.
SSH local forwarding is a must for covering your tracks and getting out there to do your work. Also called SSH tunneling, this process will put one or more steps between your machine and the machine you're working on, for security and other purposes. It can be a bit daunting for newbies to get down, and that's where Punchabunch comes in.
Responding to the rapid emergence of dangerous pathogens around the world, a new initiative to prevent or contain pandemics was announced in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday. If you ever worried that a highly contagious pathogen could take down your community, or the country, this news is for you.
To much of the United States, Zika seems like a tropical disease that causes horrible problems in other countries but is nothing to be worried about stateside. It may make you rethink your beach vacation abroad, but not much more than that. However, if you live in Florida or Texas, the possibility of getting a Zika infection where you live is real — and local outbreaks are more and more a possibility.
It's been little over a month since the official release of LG's latest flagship phone, the LG V20. Despite a few minor hiccups, the V20 has been attracting attention from all over for being an amazing phone. But like with most Android phones, there's no better feeling than rooting and taking complete ownership of it.