JERUSALEM -- A weekend cyberattack campaign targeting Israeli government websites failed to cause serious disruption, officials said Sunday. The attacks followed warnings in the name of the hacking group Anonymous that it was launching a massive attack.Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the government's National Cyber Bureau, said hackers had mostly failed to shut down key sites. "So far it is as was ex...

Orbital Sciences Corp. raised the first fully integrated Antares rocket on its Virginia launch pad on Saturday, setting the stage for its maiden flight to orbit later this month. A successful test launch would mark a giant leap toward using the Antares and Orbital's Cygnus cargo capsule to resupply the International Space Station.If the current schedule holds, Virginia-based Orbital would become t...

Addressing a packed auditorium at Austin’s South by Southwest festival last March, Bre Pettis, keynote speaker and co-founder of MakerBot, one of the leaders in desktop 3-D printers, described the increased interest and affordability of his company’s product as heralding the “the next Industrial Revolution.”"Revolution" is often used even when the result doesn't match the definition — a complete ...

NASA has selected two new space missions for launch in 2017: a satellite that can scan the entire sky for exoplanets and a space station experiment that can monitor cosmic X-ray emissions. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) won out at the end of a selection process that took more than two years."With these missions we will le...

NASA's accelerated vision for exploration calls for moving a near-Earth asteroid even nearer to Earth, sending out astronauts to bring back samples within a decade, and then shifting the focus to Mars, a senior Obama administration official told NBC News on Saturday.The official said the mission would "accomplish the president's challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more co...

Apple's iMessage feature may be impossible for the U.S. government to spy on — and that seems to have at least one law-enforcement agency worried. "Text messages sent via iMessages between Apple products (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and iMac) are not captured," the Drug Enforcement Administration said in a recent unclassified memo addressed to other law-enforcement agencies and obtained by CNET. ...

Financial brinksmanship in the Eastern Mediterranean seems an unlikely way for an obscure yet infamous virtual currency to become a household word, but that's what happened with the bitcoin. Over the last few weeks, bank turmoil in Cyprus and a frenzy of attention from the media have propelled the "crypto-currency" from the darkest corners of the Internet to the front page. But is this phenomenon ...

By Mike WallSpace.comNASA will likely get $100 million next year to jump-start an audacious program to drag an asteroid into orbit around the moon for research and exploration purposes, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., says.The $100 million will probably be part of President Barack Obama's federal budget request for 2014, which is expected to be released next week, Nelson said. The money is intended...

Humanitarian work is essential to helping impoverished or otherwise stricken areas, but very often dangerous for the actual aid workers. A new cell-powered smart bracelet for people at risk would enable a quick response to an attack or kidnapping.The "Natalia Project" bracelets were proposed after the 2009 kidnapping and murder of an aid worker in Chechnya, after whom the device was named — and th...

By Becky OskinLiveScienceFrom lakes and grasslands with hippos and giraffes to a vast desert, North Africa's sudden geographical transformation 5,000 years ago was one of the planet's most dramatic climate shifts.The transformation took place nearly simultaneously across the continent's northern half, a new study finds. The results will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Earth and Planetar...

It's much easier to spend your Internet time watching funny cat videos than to actually do something productive, but the educational stuff is out there. Take Scribd, for instance: a virtual library of free content that ranges from book previews to science journal articles to official government documents. If you're one of the estimated 50 million Scribd users, life isn't all highbrow art maga...

By Mike WallSpace.comThe hundreds of volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io aren't where they're supposed to be, scientists say.Io's major volcanic activity is concentrated 30 to 60 degrees farther east than models of its internal heat profile predict, a recent study reports, suggesting that the exotic, volcanic Jupiter moon Io is even more mysterious than researchers had previously thought."The unexpecte...

A lawsuit charging that well-known Internet data measuring firm comScore uses surreptitious ways to gather data was given class-action status by a federal judge this week.The suit, filed by two men, one from California, the other from Illinois, was originally filed in 2011 in federal court in Chicago, with allegations that the firm has violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored...

Following speculation that Microsoft’s hotly rumored next-generation console might feature an "always-online" requirement for its customers, one Microsoft executive has taken to the Internet in an attempt to make his case for this controversial sort of digital rights management (DRM). Or, rather, Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Orth told always-online’s detractors that they should just "d...

"Minecraft," the independent video game marvel that allows players to build their own worlds out of Lego-like 3D blocks, is a game about endless expansion. Gamers can create buildings, characters, and stories seemingly out of thing air (with the help of a console, of course), and even host their own servers to better manage virtual environments between them and their friends. Turns out, "Minecraft...

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience "It's really something that stays in the mind of people as a clear trace, and it's even more clear than a real memory," said Vanessa Charland-Verville, a neuropsychologist in the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege in Belgium. She, along with colleagues, detailed the study online March 27 in the journal PLOS ONE. Roughly 5 percent of the general populatio...

By Marc LallanillaLiveScienceIt's big, it's hairy and it's venomous.The newest spider to give arachnophobes the willies, a tarantula named Poecilotheria rajaei has been discovered on the island nation of Sri Lanka.With a leg span of 8 inches (20 centimeters) and enough venom to kill mice, lizards, small birds and snakes, according to Sky News, the crawler is covered in subtle markings of gray, pin...

By Marc LallanillaLiveScienceIt's big, it's hairy and it's venomous.The newest spider to give arachnophobes the willies, a tarantula named Poecilotheria rajaei has been discovered on the island nation of Sri Lanka.With a leg span of 8 inches (20 centimeters) and enough venom to kill mice, lizards, small birds and snakes, according to Sky News, the crawler is covered in subtle markings of gray, pin...

By Stephanie PappasLiveScienceHappy birthday, curse of Tutankhamun. The rumor that some mysterious force set out to kill the team who opened the tomb of the boy pharaoh turned 90 Friday.On April 5, 1923, Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon, the 57-year-old financial backer of the Tutankhamun search who opened the tomb along with Egyptologist Howard Carter, died of an infected mosquito bite he'd slashed op...

By Douglas MainLiveScienceAntarctic warming has been a boon for one large colony of Adélie penguins, a finding that's surprising scientists.A recent study found that over the last 60 years, a colony of the birds on Beaufort Island in the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, increased by 84 percent, from 35,000 breeding pairs to 64,000 breeding pairs. This increase has come as glaciers have retreated fr...