NASA's strike on moon worked, mission official says

NASA said Friday's rocket and satellite strike on the moon was a success, kicking up enough dust for scientists to determine whether or not there is water on the moon. An artist's rendering shows the LCROSS spacecraft, left, separating from its Centaur rocket. "We have the data we need to actually address the questions we set out to address," said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission. It will be awhile before all the data from the satellite can be analyzed to determine if there is water on the moon, according to LCROSS project manager Dan Andrews. Andrews said that "the spacecraft performed beautifully."NASA crashed the rocket and a satellite into the moon's surface on Friday morning in a $79 million mission. NASA televised live images of the LCROSS as it crashed into a crater near the moon's south pole. Watch as NASA reacts to "successful" crash »

Minutes before its impact, the satellite guided a rocket into the Cabeus crater in an effort to kick up enough dust to help the LCROSS find whether there is any water in the moon's soil. Don't Miss The Centaur upper-stage rocket impacted the moon shortly after 7:30 a.m. ET, and the satellite followed it four minutes later. The LCROSS carried spectrometers, near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer to help NASA scientists analyze the resulting plumes of dust -- more than 250 metric tons' worth -- for water vapor. But immediate NASA images of the crash produced no sign of the plumes, which were expected to rise six kilometers from the moon's surface, said John Marmie, LCROSS deputy project manager. "Everyone was like, 'What's happening here?' " Marmie said. "But that doesn't mean we don't have good data there." Observatories on Earth did confirm they saw plumes after the crashes, Marmie said. Watch as a mission official explains the importance of finding water »

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the impacts. Meanwhile, hundreds of telescopes on Earth focused on the moon, hoping to catch a glimpse of two plumes. The Cabeus crater lies in permanent shadow, making observations inside the crater difficult. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who watched at a public event at the Newseum in Washington, noted the great interest in the NASA mission. "We had families ... literally coming in off the street" to watch, Garver said on NASA TV. NASA had encouraged amateur astronomers to join the watch parties.

"We expect the debris plumes to be visible through midsized backyard telescopes -- 10 inches and larger," said Brian Day at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, before the strike. Day is an amateur astronomer who is leading education and public outreach for the LCROSS mission. Ames -- which led the mission -- hosted an all-night event featuring music and food before the broadcast of NASA's live transmission of the lunar impact. Other science observatories and amateur astronomy clubs across the country hosted similar events. Watch CNN's Jeanne Moos ask if lunacy is behind the moon "bombing" »

"The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater's rim to be seen from Earth," Day said. Data from previous space missions have revealed trace amounts of water in lunar soil. The LCROSS mission seeks a definitive answer to the question of how much water is present. NASA has said it believes water on the moon could be a valuable resource in the agency's quest to explore the solar system. LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 18.

Phishing attack targets Hotmail

Reports suggest Windows Live Hotmail accounts have been hacked

Thousands of accounts on web-based e-mail system Hotmail have been compromised in a phishing attack, software giant Microsoft has confirmed.

BBC News has seen a list of more than 10,000 e-mail accounts, predominantly originating from Europe, and passwords which were posted online. Microsoft said it had launched an investigation. Phishing involves using fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank accounts or login names. "We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were acquired illegally and exposed on a website," said a Microsoft spokesperson.

"Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers."

Quick change

Graham Cluley, consultant at security firm Sophos, told BBC News the published list may just be a subset of a longer list of compromised accounts. "We still don't know the scale of the problem," he told BBC News. Technology blog neowin.net was the first to publish details of the attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1 October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code. Although the details have since been removed, BBC News and Neowin has seen a list of 10,028 names beginning with the letters A and B. BBC News has confirmed that the accounts are genuine and predominantly originate in Europe. The list included details of Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail accounts with email addresses ending hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com. Mr Cluley advised Hotmail users to change their password as soon as possible.

"I'd also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it," he said. Around 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, he added. Hotmail is currently the largest web-based e-mail service.

Robot fish could prevent crashes

The robots use lasers to measure the distance between each oth

Robots that mimic the behaviour of fish have been developed by Japanese car firm Nissan, who believe the technique can be used in crash avoidance systems.

The tiny robots, called Eporo, can move in a fleet without bumping into their travelling companions. It is the second time the firm has looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration for its designs. Last year, the manufacturer unveiled its BR23C robot, which was modelled on the behaviour of bumblebees.The bee also displays anti-collision behaviour but tends to fly solo.

The new three-wheeled robot, which will be shown off at Japanese design fair Ceatec on 6 October, is designed to travel in a group of up to seven vehicles. Each uses a laser range-finder to measure the distance between obstacle. The data is constantly shared between peers via radio, allowing the group to travel as a "shoal" without bumping into each other. The technique allows the cars to travel side-by-side or quickly switch direction as a group. "We, in a motorised world, have a lot to learn from the behaviour of a school of fish in terms of each fish's degree of freedom and safety," said Toshiyuki Andou, principal engineer of the project.

DNA sequencing in a holey new way

DNA molecules will be held in place by tiny voltages within the nanohole

IBM will announce on Tuesday how it intends to hold DNA molecules in tiny holes in silicon in an effort to decode their genetic secrets letter by letter.

Their microelectronic approach solves one of two long-standing problems in "nanopore" DNA sequencing: how to stop it flying through too quickly. The aim is to speed up DNA sequencing in a push toward personalised medicine. IBM's chief executive Sam Palmisano will announce the plans to the Medical Innovation Summit in the US on Tuesday. While sequencing the genomes of humans and animals has become relatively routine in a laboratory setting, the ability to quickly and cheaply sequence genomes of individuals remains out of reach. That widely available genetic information will help bring about the era of "personalised medicine" - in which preventative or therapeutic approaches can be tailored to individuals based on their specific genetic makeup.

All-electronic

"There have been a number of attempts to sequence DNA much faster than it was sequenced when the first human genome was announced," said Gustavo Stolovitzky, a computational biologist from IBM.

Individual genetic information will lead to more directed therapi

"All of them use some complicated sample preparation - chopping the DNA, amplifying, reverse transcribing - and some sophisticated and labour-intensive optics," Dr Stolovitzky told BBC News. "All this makes sequencing faster, but still slower and more expensive than it needs to be before it could be used for personalised medicine." Instead, Dr. Stolovitzky and colleagues are pursuing a method involving silicon peppered with holes just three billionths of a metre across - 20,000 times thinner than a human hair and just wide enough for one strand of DNA to pass through. Researchers have been looking into using such nanopores for a number of years - mimicking the proteins in cell membranes that perform the same trick - because using a semiconductor offers significant advantages over biochemical and optical techniques.

"DNA nanopore sequencing continues to be one of the great candidates to do fast and cheap DNA sequencing without sample preparation or sophisticated optics, using only electronics to fetch the signal out," Dr Stolovitzky said. Moreover, the approach could be done in a "massively parallel" way - that is, with hundreds or thousands of DNA strands passing through an array of holes on a single chip.

Trap stack

The idea is conceptually simple but devilishly difficult to carry out. Because DNA naturally carries a net electric charge, simply applying a voltage across the two sides of the chip drives the DNA strands through the holes. However, the DNA tends to pass through too quickly to decode the identities of the individual nucleotides - letters of the genetic code - as they pass. More than that, until they can study DNA strands moving at a more carefully controlled pace, researchers cannot develop the techniques to query the precise nucleotide they have trapped in place.

The Blue Gene supercomputer simulated the nanopores' every atom

The IBM team have now hit on the idea of a chip composed of a stack of layers, each of which can hold a precisely-controlled voltage in a thin layer inside the nanopore. These smaller voltages trap the negatively charged chemical groups called phosphates that separate individual nucleotides. By cycling this internal voltage, the DNA strand can be made to advance one nucleotide at a time. The team has used IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate the process in order to ensure it would work, and the team has built prototypes of the trapping nanopore. Tuesday's announcement marks the beginning of the testing and refinement stages of the process.

What remains is to investigate the means to identify the individual nucleotides trapped inside the nanopores, which is likely to rest on measuring some electrical or electronic property of each as it passes. Stas Polonsky, another IBM researcher working on the project, remains convinced that with the benefit of a trapping mechanism, this last problem is tractable.

"As a company we have a lot of expertise with electrical measurements," he said. "We have nanopores plus the whole arsenal of microelectronics - we can integrate all these ultrasensitive circuits right on a chip, which will boost the sensitivity for measurements tremendously."