Microsoft failed to shore up defenses that could have limited SolarWinds hack: U.S. senator

By Joseph Menn

© Reuters/Sergio Flores FILE PHOTO: Exterior view of SolarWinds headquarters in Austin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp's failure to fix known problems with its cloud software facilitated the massive SolarWinds hack that compromised at least nine federal government agencies, according to security experts and the office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden.

A vulnerability first publicly revealed by researchers in 2017 allows hackers to fake the identity of authorized employees to gain access to customers' cloud services. The technique was one of many used in the SolarWinds hack.

Wyden, who has faulted tech companies on security and privacy issues as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, blasted Microsoft for not doing more to prevent forged identities or warn customers about it.

“The federal government spends billions on Microsoft software,” Wyden told Reuters ahead of a SolarWinds hearing on Friday in the House of Representatives.

“It should be cautious about spending any more before we find out why the company didn't warn the government about the hacking technique that the Russians used, which Microsoft had known about since at least 2017,” he said.

Microsoft President Brad Smith will testify on Friday before the House committee investigating the SolarWinds hacks.

U.S. officials have blamed Russia for the massive intelligence operation that penetrated SolarWinds, which makes software to manage networks, as well as Microsoft and others, to steal data from multiple governments and about 100 companies. Russia denies responsibility.

Microsoft disputed Wyden's conclusions, telling Reuters that the design of its identity services was not at fault.

In a response to Wyden's written questions on Feb. 10, a Microsoft lobbyist said the identity trick, known as Golden SAML, “had never been used in an actual attack” and “was not prioritized by the intelligence community as a risk, nor was it flagged by civilian agencies.”

But in a public advisory after the SolarWinds hack, on Dec. 17, the National Security Agency called for closer monitoring of identity services, noting, “This SAML forgery technique has been known and used by cyber actors since at least 2017.”

In response to additional questions from Wyden this week, Microsoft acknowledged its programs were not set up to detect the theft of identity tools for granting cloud access.

Trey Herr, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said the failure showed cloud security risks should be a higher priority.

The hackers’ sophisticated abuse of identities “exposes a concerning weakness in how cloud computing giants invest in security, perhaps failing to adequately mitigate the risk of high impact, low probability failures in systems at the root of their security model,” Herr said.

In congressional testimony on Tuesday, Microsoft's Smith said that only about 15% of the victims in the Solar Winds campaign were hurt via Golden SAML. Even in those cases the hackers had to have already gained access to systems before deploying the method.

But Wyden's staff said one of those victims was the U.S. Treasury, which lost emails from dozens of officials.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; editing by Jonathan Weber and Howard Goller)

These four new hacking groups are targeting critical infrastructure, warns security company
Danny Palmer 

© Getty Images/iStockphoto

Four high voltage electric tower pylons contrasting against a brightly glowing evening sunset.

© Provided by ZDNet
Ransomware: Why industrial networks make an appealing target for cyber extortion
Watch Now

More hacking groups than ever before are targeting industrial environments as cyber attackers attempt to infiltrate the networks of companies providing vital services, including electric power, water, oil and gas, and manufacturing.

Threats include cyber-criminal groups looking to steal information or encrypt systems with ransomware, as well as nation-state-backed hacking operations attempting to determine the potential disruption they could cause with cyberattacks against operational technology (OT).

More on privacy
Microsoft to apply California's privacy law for all US users
Mind-reading technology: The security and privacy threats ahead
How to replace each Google service with a more privacy-friendly alternative
Cyber security 101: Protect your privacy from hackers, spies, and the government

According to cybersecurity researchers at Dragos, four new hacking groups targeting industrial systems have been detected over the past year – and there's an increased amount of investment from cyber attackers targeting industry and industrial control systems.

SEE: Security Awareness and Training policy (TechRepublic Premium)

The four new groups identified over the course of the past year – named by researchers as Stibnite, Talonite, Kamacite, and Vanadinite – come in addition to 11 previously identified hacking groups targeting industrial control systems.

Some of these new groups have very specific targets – for example, Stibnite focuses on wind turbine companies that generate electric power in Azerbaijan, while Talonite almost exclusively focuses on attempting to gain access to electricity providers in the US.

The remainder of the new hacking groups are more generalised in their targeting; Kamacite – which Dragos links to the Sandworm group – has targeted industrial operations of energy companies across North America and Europe.

Meanwhile, Vanadinite conducts operations against energy, manufacturing and transport across North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, with a focus on information gathering and ICS compromise.

The discovery of four additional hacking operations targeting industrial systems does represent a cause for concern – but their discovery also indicates that there's increasing visibility of threats to industrial systems. These threats might have been missed in previous years.

"The more visibility we build in the OT space, the greater understanding of its threat landscape and the adversaries active there we can identify," Sergio Caltagirone, vice president of threat intelligence at Dragos, told ZDNet.

"OT network attacks requires a different approach than traditional IT security. IT incidents see high frequency, relatively low-impact incidents and effects when compared to OT attacks that are lower frequency, but have potentially very high impacts and effects".

However, according to the research paper, visibility remains an issue for industrial networks, with 90% of organisations examined by Dragos not having a full grasp of their own OT network, something that could help cyber attackers remain undetected.

In many cases, hackers are able to combine this lack of visibility with the ability to hide in plain sight by abusing legitimate login credentials to help move around the network.

Often, campaigns targeting industrial systems involve phishing attacks or the exploitation of remote services, allowing the attackers to use real accounts to perform malicious activity while helping to avoid being detected as suspicious.

"The lack of visibility raises risks significantly because it allows adversaries freedom to conduct operations unimpeded, time to understand the victim environment to locate their objectives, achieve their desired effects and satisfy the intent for conducting a compromise," said Caltagirone.

This activity could have physical effects away from a network environment, as recently demonstrated when a malicious hacker was able to modify the chemical properties of drinking water after compromising the network of the water treatment facility for the city of Oldsmar, Florida.

There's also examples where cyber attackers have gained access to electrical power grids to the extent that they were able to shut down power.

SEE: Phishing: These are the most common techniques used to attack your PC

However, there are cybersecurity procedures that industrial organisations can undertake in order to boost visibility of their own networks and help protect systems from cyber intrusions.

These include identifying which assets exercise control over critical operations and prioritizing security in order to help make them more difficult for attackers to gain access to – and setting up procedures that make attacks easier to identify.

Organisations should also attempt to apply network segmentation, separating operational technology from information technology, so that in the event of attackers compromising the IT network, it's not simple for them to move laterally to OT controls on the same network.

Login credentials should also be properly secured via the use of multi-factor authentication, while organisations should attempt to avoid the use of default login credentials to help provide additional barriers to remote attackers.
MORE ON CYBERSECURITY

GREEN CAPITALI$M

Maersk says it will launch a carbon neutral vessel by 2023, seven years ahead of schedule

PUBLISHED WED, FEB 17 2021
Anmar Frangoul

KEY POINTS

Maersk says its carbon neutral vessel will be powered by e-methanol or bio-methanol.

If required, it will still be able to run on standard very low sulphur fuel oil.


The container ship Maersk Murcia sits moored in the port of Gothenburg,

 Sweden, on August 24, 2020.
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND | AFP | Getty Images

Shipping giant Maersk said Wednesday it would launch a carbon-neutral vessel by 2023, seven years ahead of schedule, as it attempts to reduce its environmental footprint and hit a target of net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050.

According to the Danish firm, the largest container shipping company in the world, the vessel will be powered by either carbon neutral e-methanol or sustainable bio-methanol, although it will still be able to run on standard very low sulphur fuel oil (VLSFO) if required.

In simple terms, “carbon neutral” means that CO2 emissions are offset by an equal amount of CO2 removal. If something is carbon negative, it means that more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere than emitted.

Looking forward, all new vessels owned by Maersk will be able to run on carbon neutral fuels, with the company stating it will “install dual fuel engines on future newbuildings.” The word “newbuilding” refers to a ship that has recently been built or is under construction.

The environmental footprint of shipping is significant. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2019 international shipping — a crucial cog in the world’s economy — was responsible for approximately 2% of “global energy-related CO2 emissions.”

Speaking to CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” on Wednesday morning, Maersk’s head of decarbonization explained how several things had “gone in the right direction” when it came to accelerating the development of the methanol-fueled vessel.

“We have learned a lot as a company about the opportunities that are there, technology has developed,” Morten Bo Christiansen said.

“And, last but not least, our customers are clearly expecting this from us, they need us to support them in decarbonizing their supply chains.”

Asked how his company would source enough carbon neutral fuels to meet its future needs, Christiansen stated that it was a “chicken and egg situation.”

“There’s a lot of projects on the drawing board but not a lot of willing off-takers,” he said. “With this, we are trying to actually make a statement that we want to get this ball rolling, we want to get started on producing these fuels and actually putting them in the market so that the market can scale.”

Maersk, he explained, was in dialogue with several partners with regards to this issue, although it was not yet ready to name who it was dealing with.

“But definitely … this will be the big challenge: to get sufficient supplies of properly carbon neutral fuels,” he added.

Christiansen went on to state that Maersk’s customers would “get access to a product that represents a concept that is properly scalable.”

“It also means that they will get a feel for how much extra cost this will add,” he said.

Noting that while the company was not yet certain with regards to price points, Christiansen added: “What we do know is that, when we look at the end consumer products, so a pair of sneakers or a flat screen TV, then … the impact on those products would be measured in cents rather than dollars.”

“So from that perspective, it would seem like something that can actually be absorbed, and hopefully scale the decarbonization of our customers’ supply chains.”

GREEN CAPITALI$M

Sweden will soon be home to a major steel factory powered by the 'world's largest green hydrogen plant'

Anmar Frangoul CNBC

2/25/2021

Established in 2020, H2 Green Steel will focus on steel made using a "fossil-free manufacturing process."

The firm says steel production will begin in 2024 and be based in the north of Sweden

.

© Provided by CNBC

A Swedish firm backed by investors including Spotify founder Daniel Ek plans to build a steel production facility in the north of the country that will be powered by what it describes as "the world's largest green hydrogen plant."

H2 Green Steel, which was established in 2020, will focus on steel made using a "fossil-free manufacturing process" and look to supply European manufacturers with its end product.

In an announcement earlier this week the company — which will be headed up by Henrik Henriksson, the current CEO of Scania — said steel production would start in 2024 and be based in Sweden's Norrbotten region. By 2030, the aim is for the business to have the capacity to produce 5 million tons of steel per year.

"The climate crisis is the biggest challenge of our time," Henriksson said in a statement issued Tuesday.

"And given … steel's impact on other industries' sustainable development, a rapid change of the steel industry is extremely important," he added.




According to the International Energy Agency, the iron and steel sector is responsible for 2.6 gigatonnes of direct carbon dioxide emissions each year, a figure that, in 2019, was greater than direct emissions from sectors such as cement and chemicals.

It adds that the steel sector is "the largest industrial consumer of coal, which provides around 75% of its energy demand."

The size of H2 Green Steel's hydrogen plant will be around 800 megawatts, with its end product replacing coal and coke in the steel manufacturing process.

Hydrogen can be produced in a number of ways. One includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in the process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then it's termed "green" or "renewable" hydrogen.

The company's biggest shareholder is investment firm Vargas, a co-founder of battery maker Northvolt. H2 Green Steel is currently wrapping up series A equity financing of 50 million euros (around $61.1 million). Investors include Scania, EIT InnoEnergy, and Spotify founder Daniel Ek.

For the initial phase of the project, total financing will come to roughly 2.5 billion euros. The firm's financial advisors are Societe Generale, KfW IPEX-Bank and Morgan Stanley.

Steel production is one of many industrial processes ripe for improvement when it comes to emissions and other metrics related to sustainability.

Aluminum manufacturing is another. German automaker BMW recently said it had started to source and use aluminum that has been produced using solar energy, for example.

BMW will now use aluminum that’s been made with solar power

PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 2 2021
Anmar Frangoul

KEY POINTS

BMW describes deal as “an important milestone” in its goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from its supply network.

Aminum production process will come from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, south of Dubai.

Workers photographed walking past a section of solar panels at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai on March 20, 2017.
STRINGER | AFP | Getty Images

BMW said Tuesday it had started to source and use aluminum that has been produced using solar energy, a move the German carmaker described as “an important milestone” in its goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions from its supply network.

A “triple-digit million-euro contract” will see Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), an industrial firm based in the United Arab Emirates, provide BMW with 43,000 metric tons of aluminum this year.

BMW said EGA was the first business in the world to utilize solar electricity for commercial aluminum production.

The solar power used in the metal’s production process will come from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, a vast development located in desert south of Dubai. The aluminum will then be processed and turned into car parts at the light metal foundry of BMW’s plant in Landshut, Germany.

The “solar aluminium” sourced from the UAE will account for almost half of the yearly requirements of the Landshut foundry, according to BMW.

The deal announced Tuesday is part of a wider “long-term” strategy to source aluminum produced from renewables, which BMW says could save roughly 2.5 million metric tons of CO2 by the year 2030.

Shift to electric

BMW’s move comes as the firm — and other major car companies — attempts to ramp up its electric vehicle offering and challenge Elon Musk’s Tesla.

While electric vehicles have an advantage over diesel or gasoline when it comes to tailpipe emissions, there are clear challenges related to their manufacture.

In its announcement Tuesday, BMW acknowledged this: “The trend towards e-mobility means that a much larger percentage of a vehicle’s lifecycle CO2 emissions now comes from upstream added value in the supplier network,” it said.

“In an electrified vehicle, CO2 emissions from the use phase are much lower, but producing battery cells or aluminium is very energy-intensive,” it added. 

Aluminum is seen as being particularly important going forward because, as BMW noted, its lightweight properties enable it to partially offset the heavy weight of batteries.

Using renewables to ‘green’ supply chains

The news of BMW’s plan to source aluminum produced using solar power comes a day after it was announced a turbine production plant owned by energy giant Vestas would be powered using an environmentally friendly source of gas.

In a statement Monday Earth Capital said its portfolio company, Black Dog Biogas, would send power to the Vestas factory, which manufactures blades for offshore wind turbines. Both sites are located on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of the U.K..

The Black Dog plant is able to provide enough power to meet roughly 80% of the Vestas factory’s requirements.

Ghost particle travels 750 million light-years, ends up buried under the Antarctic ice

For the first time ever, scientists have received mysteriously delayed signals from two supermassive black holes that snacked on stars in their vicinity. 

© Provided by Live Science an image of a tidal disruption event occurring when a black hole feasts on a star

In the first case, a black hole weighing as much as 30 million suns located in a galaxy approximately 750 million light-years away gobbled up a star that passed too close to its edge. Light from the event was spotted in April 2019, but six months later a telescope in Antarctica captured an extremely high-energy and ghostly particle — a neutrino — that was apparently burped out during the feast.

A second incident involved a supermassive black hole with around 1 million times the sun's mass in a galaxy about 700 million light-years away. Observatories spied it lunching on a star in August 2015 and then going quiet before a sudden burst of radio waves emerged in February 2016 and then again, almost four years later, in July 2019.

Related: 10 huge black hole findings from 2020

Both occurrences involve what's known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), where a supermassive black hole shreds a star to pieces using its colossal gravitational pull — essentially an extreme version of how the moon's gravitational pull raises tides on the Earth. Such cosmic events are still not well understood and these two new findings should greatly help astronomers unlock their inner workings.

"Every time we detect a new TDE, there can always be something exciting and unexpected associated with it," Jane Dai, who studies high-energy astrophysics at the University of Hong Kong, told Live Science. "So there is a lot of new physics that can be done," added Dai, who was not involved in either finding.

Researchers classify tidal disruption events as "transient" phenomena, since they typically flare over the course of a few days and then dim again. What exactly is creating the light in such cases is still not entirely clear, Assaf Horesh, an astronomer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and co-author on two papers about the new events, told Live Science.

As the supermassive black hole tears apart its stellar meal, the star becomes "spaghettified" into a long thin stream. This torrent of material wraps around the black hole and is thought to produce a jet of energy as it circles like water going down a drain, though other models predict that some of the former star might explode outward and interact with surrounding gas and dust, generating the flare, Horesh said.

Given the extreme environment surrounding the black hole, particles can become greatly accelerated in processes akin to atom smashers like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are tiny specks roughly 500,000 times lighter than an electron and, being neutral (having no charge), don't interact with much as they fly through the cosmos.

This allowed a single neutrino to travel outward from the first TDE and head toward Earth, eventually appearing in a square-kilometer-size instrument known as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory buried in the Antarctic ice. Researchers labeled the detection IC191001A and calculated that it had nearly 1 quadrillion electronvolts of energy, making it among the most powerful neutrinos IceCube has ever seen, according to one of the new papers, which was published Feb. 22 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

While physicists have predicted that neutrinos are produced in tidal disruption events, astronomers have never tied a neutrino back to a particular TDE, making this a spectacular first. As to why it arrived six months after the event itself, "I have no clue," said Horesh.

A similar mystery surrounds the second study he led, also in Nature Astronomy . In that case, optical light — the kind our eyes see — was seen to flare from a snacking black hole and then fade away, as per usual for these phenomena.

Horesh and his co-authors decided to conduct follow-up studies using the Karl Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico, which detects radio waves. They saw nothing coming from the black hole for months and then, suddenly, six months after the initial event, a bright radio flare. Even stranger, VLA data collected almost four years later showed another curious burst of radio energy.

"Someone can make up a story for why we saw something six months later," Horesh said. "There is nothing to explain why it should flare up, decay and then flare up again. It's really interesting."

He points to the need for new models that can explain these delayed signals. His team speculates that part of the jet of energy is coming out at an odd angle, producing a flaring pattern that is sometimes seen and sometimes not as the accretion disk spins. Another possibility is that the stellar remains are driving shock waves that move slowly through material surrounding the black hole, which produce energetic emissions at later times, though no one really knows.

But given that these incidents now seem to last longer than originally suspected, Horesh is looking forward to being able to detect more tidal disruption events that could yield insights into their nature.

Dai, too, is excited about the prospect of opening up ways to study the mysteries of TDEs. "These events are ideal laboratories to learn about black holes," she said, giving researchers important clues about how material accretes around them and produces jets and flares.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is expected to begin collecting data this year, could theoretically see hundreds of new TDEs, she added; and other upcoming space-based instruments from Europe and China should add to this bounty.

"The future for the field is very bright," she said.

Originally published on Live Science.

How Deep-Sea Fiber Optic Cables Could ‘Transform’ Our Detection of Earthquakes
Isaac Schultz 

2/25/2021

Many miles off the western coast of the Americas, an undersea cable connects Los Angeles, California to Valparaiso, Chile. Stretched end-to-end, it’s equal to four-fifths of the Earth’s diameter. The cable is fiber optic; it’s a lifeline for data transmitted between the two continents. But according to new research, the cable could easily serve a dual function: mitigating the disastrous impacts of earthquakes and tsunamis

© Photo: ANDER GILLENEA/AFP via Getty Images (Getty Images) 

Laying an undersea cable in Spain, one of the 600,000-plus miles of fiber optic submarine cables.

The results come from an interdisciplinary collaboration between geophysicists and network engineers who looked at disturbances in the polarization of light being transmitted through the cables. A patent has been filed in connection with the team’s paper on the subject, published on Wednesday in the journal Science.

“There are scientific and societal implications here,” said Zhongwen Zhan, the lead author of the new paper and a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, in a video call. “Most of our geophysical sensors for detecting earthquakes and studying what the interior of the Earth looks like are on land, but a lot of the most important geological processes are happening in the ocean. We’re leveraging pre-existing cables in the ocean for a relatively scalable way of detecting earthquakes. We think in the future we can use these for earthquake and tsunami early warnings.”

In the relentlessly online world in which we live, where movies filmed a century ago can be streamed at the touch of a button and you can speak face to face with someone on the other side of the planet, fiber optic cables carry a brunt of that informational load. Such undersea cables as Google’s “Curie” cable are constantly transmitting huge amounts of data at breakneck speeds to keep the world connected.

Inevitable imperfections in the cables means that the light’s polarization varies as data travels through them in either direction. Other disturbances, like temperature fluctuation and human activity can further mess with the polarization of the cables. But in the deep sea, temperatures are relatively constant, and there are rarely humans. That means that when a seismic wave undulates through the environment or a large ocean upswell passes through, it’s noticeably detectable in how it warps the undersea cable.

Since seismological research at the bottom of the sea is time-consuming and expensive, reading fluctuations in the polarization of such deep-sea cables is an inexpensive, expedient alternative, the study authors argue. There are plenty of submarine cables to read such data from. While the Curie cable measures about four-fifths of the Earth’s diameter, the total submarine cable network could circle the planet 20 times. Among a half century of other geophysical events the team recorded, the Curie cable detected the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Oaxaca, Mexico, last June.

© Photo: PATRICIA CASTELLANOS/AFP via Getty Images

The research team was able to “hear” the June 2020 earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the Curie cable’s vibration.

When the team first recognized a perturbation in the cable signal and were able to line it up with an earthquake, “it was not expected at all,” Zhan said. “No one had ever detected an earthquake by looking at a telecommunications signal itself.”

During the team’s observations, they were able to recognize 20 earthquakes and 30 ocean swells. Importantly, the team is not yet able to detect the epicenter of any seismic events—the cables merely pick up the disturbance—but Zhan said that down the road, it could be possible to triangulate earthquake epicenters by looking at disturbed polarizations across different cables.

Inside the Plan to Prepare the Pacific Northwest for a Catastrophic Earthquake

“I think this is going to transform the way we observe the oceans as seismologists,” William Wilcock, a seismologist at the University of Washington who is unaffiliated with the new paper, said in a phone call. Wilcock recently authored a Perspectives article in Science on the work by Zhan’s team. “In my area, there’s a big concern about the Cascadia subduction zone offshore, and there’s been a lot of thought about how to develop infrastructure offshore to improve our monitoring of that. To do that with dedicated systems is hundreds of millions of dollars. But to be able to potentially use commercial cables to do at least some of that is an enormous boon to actually moving forward.”

Whether the method of listening to the Earth is adopted by the telecommunications industry by and large remains to be seen. What’s certain is that this team has shown we can listen to light, using the byproduct of your playing Call of Duty or sending family photos to spy on the planet’s seismic activity, perhaps better preparing us for whatever small one or very, very big one will come next.

Slime mold can store and preserve memory without brain, scientists say

Margarita Maltceva 

The ability to preserve and restore memory gives living organisms more advantages for obtaining food and avoiding hazardous environments. Scientists usually attribute such skills to multicellular organisms with a nervous system. But a recent discovery by scientists in Germany revealed that a single-celled organism could also possess and retrieve memory.     

© Provided by National Post Physarum polycephalum, slime mold that mostly inhabits on moist dung, soil and wood, uses its tubular network to detect food and store memory about its location.

Researchers Mirna Kramar and Karen Alim released a new study that suggests that Physarum polycephalum, the slime mold that lives on moist dung, soil and wood, “weaves memories of food encounters” into its body and uses those memories to make future decisions.

“Given the simplicity of this living network, the ability of Physarum to form memories is intriguing,” Alim, a biological physics professor at the Technical University of Munch, wrote in a news release.

“It is remarkable that the organism relies on such a simple mechanism and yet controls it in such a fine-tuned manner.”

© Bjoern Kscheschinski Slime mold was given the title ‘intelligent’ as it can solve complex tasks, like finding the shortest path from a maze.

For many decades, Physarum polycephalum has been sparking interest in the scientific world.

According to science educator Ward’s Natural Science , the mold, which moves and consumes solid food particles like other amoebas, eats bacteria, fungal spores and other decomposing organic matter. It slides towards its food, envelops it and releases ferments to digest the nutrients. When the food is digested, Physarum dumps the waste particles and moves away.

Its body contains a single cell and consists of interconnected tubes that create a complex network, ScienceDaily reported. This cell may spread for several centimetres or even meters.

Physarum polycephalum can also solve complex tasks, including finding the shortest path through the maze, according to ScienceDaily. This skill gave the mold title “intelligent” and prompted researchers to examine its memory.

Researchers have monitored Physarum’s migration and feeding processes to identify the decision-making abilities on the most elementary levels of life. They observed different imprints of the food source on thicker and thinner tubes of the mold’s network after it feeds.

“Given P. polycephalum’s highly dynamic network reorganization, the persistence of this imprint sparked the idea that the network architecture itself could serve as memory of the past,” Alim said, as quoted by the news release.

© Bilderfest Karen Alim, professor at Technical University Munich, observes Physarum polycephalum in her laboratory.

In order to better understand how the mold stores its memories, the scientists had to explain the mechanisms that form that imprint.

As a part of the experiment, they merged microscopic observations of the mold’s tubular network with theoretical modelling. They discovered that when Physarum detects food, it releases a chemical that goes from the location where the food was spotted throughout the network, softening the tubes. It makes the entire organism redirect its movements towards the food.

“The gradual softening is where the existing imprints of previous food sources come into play and where information is stored and retrieved,” said Kramar, a biological physics researcher at Max-Planck Institute, as quoted by the news release. “Past feeding events are embedded in the hierarchy of tube diameters, specifically in the arrangement of thick and thin tubes in the network.”

“For the softening chemical that is now transported, the thick tubes in the network act as highways in traffic networks, enabling quick transport across the whole organism,” she added. “Previous encounters imprinted in the network architecture thus weigh into the decision about the future direction of migration.”

Alim said that the results of the experiment play an important role in understanding the manner of this ancient organism.

“We envision potential applications of our findings in designing smart materials and building soft robots that navigate through complex environments,” she added.

Scientists created this seaweed to save the planet
Mariya Abdulkaf 

A new seaweed-based supplement could reduce a potent greenhouse gas released in burps — sheep burps, that is.

Diana Zlotnikov is a farmer in New York with plenty of burping sheep who release methane as a byproduct of their digestion system. Methane is a gas that has 28 times the warming capacity of carbon dioxide. Farming can produce a ton of CO2 and methane gas — two of the largest threats in greenhouse gases. Together they make up nearly 50 percent of all emissions and threaten the climate of our planet.

Five years ago, Diana started her farm with regenerative agriculture principles in mind — she implemented practices that would not only reduce the carbon footprint of her livestock but would help negate it. Diana has designed her farm to act as a carbon sink that can pull carbon from the atmosphere and trap it in the soil.

But reducing the methane gas coming from her sheep was a much more difficult problem. Based on some research, she tried a mixture of feeds (garlic, legumes, alfalfa), but nothing worked.

One day her daughter Nicole, a sophomore in high school, came home from school in a researching frenzy. She had recently learned how methane gas was contributing to global warming and was determined to find a way to reduce the methane emissions caused by their farm. She came across asparagopsis taxiformis, a type of red seaweed, as an effective solution. It is not yet commercially available, but there are some people trying to change that.

Chemist and entrepreneur Alexia Akbay is one of them. Her company, Symbrosia, produces a red seaweed-based supplement that could reduce livestock methane production dramatically, but what will it take to get it to small farmers like Diana and Nicole? Check out the video above to see how Alexia and her team are domesticating a new seaweed species to tackle climate change — one sheep at a time.

Canadian Dairy farmers lobby asks members to stop using palm oil in feed after 'buttergate'

A dairy producers' lobbying group is asking farmers to consider alternatives to palm supplements in livestock feed pending the results of an investigation launched in response to consumers' concerns about perceived changes to the consistency of butter.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

In a statement Thursday, The Dairy Farmers of Canada said academics and industry experts will soon convene to examine the use of palm oil and its derivatives to boost cows' diets, while maintaining that the common practice doesn't raise health or safety concerns.

The inquiry comes in response to anecdotal reports that butter has gotten harder, but some experts question whether spreadability is a widespread issue.

Quebec Dairy Producers released a statement Wednesday calling on farmers to stop supplementing cattle feed with palm-based products as part of a broader look into the use of these ingredients in human food.

The association also raised concerns about the environmental impacts of palm oil production.

Alberta Milk said it's also encouraging dairy farmers in the province to find alternative feed supplements. "Canadian dairy are going to do better," chair Stuart Boeve said in a statement Thursday.

The provincial groups expressed support for the Dairy Farmers of Canada's working committee, which will set out to assess the issue based on scientific literature and feedback from consumers.

"It is essential that decisions be made on a factual basis and that science guide our sector," Dairy Farmers of Canada said.

"Notwithstanding this announcement, we stress that all milk produced in Canada is as safe as always to consume and is subject to Canada's robust health and safety standards."

At the centre of the churning controversy, which some have dubbed "buttergate," is Calgary food writer Julie Van Rosendaal, whose investigation into the issue has garnered international media attention.

Van Rosendaal said her deep dive into the dairy sector began in her own kitchen, when she noticed that it seemed to be taking longer for her butter to soften.

She took to social media to see if other bakers were having similar struggles, and was flooded with responses from users who had also detected a change in texture.

"The fact that it was people across Canada, the fact that it kept coming up throughout the season, indicated to me that it wasn't just me," Van Rosendaal said by phone.

"A lot of people are asking this question, 'What's up with butter?'"

After consulting with experts, Van Rosendaal homed in on a possible explanation for why the spread seemed to be stiffer.

Her theory, which she laid out in an article for the Globe and Mail, posits that dairy producers have increased use of palm supplements in cattle feed to keep up with demand for butter amid a pandemic-fuelled baking craze.

For about two decades, famers have added palmitic acid, a saturated fat found in palm oil, to dairy rations to boost milk production and fat content. This can affect the makeup of milk fat to increase the melting point of butter, according to researchers, which would make it harder to spread.

Van Rosendaal said it's hard to find exact figures on the prevalence of palm supplements in cow feed, but industry stakeholders she spoke to say their use is common.

"Butter isn't something that you really look at the ingredients on, because it is an ingredient," Van Rosendaal said.

"I think people are always surprised to learn about how the food system works ... and how consumer demand affects how our food is produced and made."

Alejandro Marangoni, a food science professor at University of Guelph, said in the absence of solid data, he's skeptical of claims about a sector-wide stiffening of butter.

"You have a sensationalist statement that is completely based on zero data, just some feelings," Marangoni said. "And now the dairy industry is launching an investigation, for what? It might not be true."

Marangoni, who researches fats in food, said it wouldn't take much effort to see if "buttergate" stands up to scientific scrutiny. All one would need to do is take samples of butter, measure their hardness and see if it correlates to palmitic acid content.

In recent statements, the Dairy Farmers of Canada said industry data suggests that the proportion of palmitic acid in milk fat has been within the range of expected variations over the past year.

The group also notes that palmitic acid is naturally the most abundant type of saturated fat in butter, and feeding supplements have a very limited impact on the composition of milk fat.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said palm oil is an approved ingredient for livestock feeds, and the practice has also been adopted in countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

David Christensen, a professor emeritus of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan, said if the consistency of butter has changed, the use of palm supplements could be a contributing factor.

But he said there's too much uncertainty to rule out other possible explanations, such as new processing methods that can affect the formation of fat crystals in butter.

Christensen said of the 75 million metric tonnes of palm oil produced annually, 90 per cent is used by the food industry. But the availability of palm oil is limited, he said, resulting in a recent shortage in the feed industry.

The World Health Organization says research on the health impacts of palm oil consumption in foods are mixed, but some studies have linked the ingredient to increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

An Associated Press investigation last year linked the palm oil industry in Malaysia and Indonesia to abuses including child labor, outright slavery and allegations of rape. Companies have also faced criticism over land grabs, the destruction of rainforests and the killing of endangered species.

— with files from the Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 25, 2021.

Adina Bresge, The Canadian Press

Logging delay agreement for B.C. old-growth tree stand helps endangered spotted owls


An agreement to delay logging in an old-growth stand of British Columbia forest has given a one-year reprieve to one of Canada's most endangered species.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Governments now have to come up with a permanent way to protect the vanishing spotted owl and other endangered species in the province, said Kegan Pepper-Smith of Ecojustice, which has been pushing the federal government on the issue.

"We need to reimagine an approach that protects (species) and their habitat with legally enforceable measures."

Just a tiny handful of spotted owls remains. Estimates suggest there are three left in the wild, with one breeding pair in the forests around Spuzzum in south-central B.C.

On Thursday, B.C., the federal government and the Spuzzum First Nation announced a deal to hold off logging that watershed for a year while the governments continue working on a recovery plan for the owls.

It's part of a larger deal the two governments are developing to help the province preserve biodiversity.

"These first pilot projects will strengthen habitat protection for the threatened species which depend on it, such as the spotted owl, and help build a systemic approach to protection of biodiversity,” B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman said in a release.

Federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the so-called Nature Plan will help the two jurisdictions co-operate on preserving species before their situation becomes as desperate as the spotted owl's.

"Often the federal government gets drawn into these conversations because the decline in the species has become so dramatic it's under threat of extinction," he said. "Those are always tough conversations.

"With this agreement, what we're saying is let's try and get out in front of some of these things."

Wilkinson said the plan could become a model of how the federal government works with other provinces.

B.C. has a captive breeding program that now has 28 spotted owls whose offspring will be released into protected habitats.

Pepper-Smith called the deal encouraging, but said both Ottawa and the province have a long way to go before the medium-sized, dark brown owl is fully protected.

"(Critical) habitat has never been identified," he said. "How can they say they've protected habitat if they've never appropriately defined it?"

Wilkinson said that habitat will be identified by the end of the deferral.

"What we hope to do is update and complete a recovery strategy that will also delineate what we're going to do in terms of long-term protection in critical habitat."

B.C. claims there are about 281,000 hectares of protected spotted owl habitat. Pepper-Smith disputes that, saying much of that land is subject to logging.

Ecojustice would also like to see progress on the Nature Plan. Pepper-Smith points out that B.C. has more endangered species than any other province.

Thursday's announcement is a good start, he said.

"There's some hopeful language. There's discussion of pilot projects and funding and moving forward on a pan-Canadian approach to transforming species at risk protection and conservation."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 25, 2021.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press