Running a feed reader is an interesting business. One of the more interesting problems I have seen is this "DoS" from Google's WebSub Hub.
This is a graph of WebSub pings for a single feed, The Chromium Blog. This blog appears to be powered by Blogger.
This isn't a ton of traffic, the peaks hover around one request every 10s. However, it adds up when the bursts run for days.
The number of entries in the ping varies and is bimodal. It is usually around 20 (Blogger appears to keep 25 items in the feed) but often 1 or 2. Occasionally it is somewhere in the middle. In general WebSub hubs will remove already-delivered entries from the feed. However, in this case all the items are previously seen. (Maybe they ar e modified? I don't have metrics for this yet.)
Most of the bursts start because a new entry is posted. Some bursts start with no clear trigger. I have yet to see a post that doesn't have a burst associated. These bursts then continue until the WebSub subscription expires.
FeedMail is subs...
Most chemical research is based around making molecules that improve human health, or the environment, or energy and electronics - among other things.
But sometimes, chemists want to make molecules that are simply geometrically interesting. Creating these molecules is a technical challenge - but it can lead to breakthroughs in all the other fields. When soccerball-shaped "Buckyballs", for instance, were turned into carbon nanotubes, the discovery sparked a revolution in materials science.
Now a team of Japanese chemists have made a molecule shaped like a Mobius strip. The molecule is a round belt of carbon atoms, linked to each other in hexagon shapes (like graphite) - and called a carbon nanobelt. The researchers have figured out how to make the belt with a twist, so that it only has one surface.
"The Mobius carbon nanobelt was a dream molecule in the scientific community after we reported the first chemical synthesis of a carbon nanobelt - an ultra-short carbon nanotube - i...
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It's surprisingly hard to do an awesome story in which the culmination is a messy democracy.
Today's News:
Monitoring plant biodiversity from space using satellite data will soon be feasible, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications.
New ways to accurately and efficiently monitor biodiversity are increasingly important to support efforts to protect and restore ecosystems affected by climate change and other threats. Many current biodiversity monitoring techniques require sending humans out into an environment to collect samples and data, making monitoring expensive and labour-intensive.
A team led by Anna Schweiger from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Etienne Laliberte from the University of Montreal, Canada, has demonstrated that a key measure of plant biodiversity can be gleaned by analysing data collected by Earth observation satellites. Their dataset was drawn from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which collects standardised biodiversity and Earth observation data from around the United States.
"With our study, we ho...
Shortly after making its most dramatic observation to date, NASA's InSight Mars lander appears to be on its last legs.
The new observation was a magnitude 5.0 marsquake that occurred on May 4, nearly an entire order of magnitude more powerful than the largest one previously observed, which was magnitude 4.2.
That's important, because InSight's primary task is to use seismic waves from such quakes to probe the Martian interior, all the way to the core, and the bigger the quake, the better.
"So, even as we are getting close to the end of our mission, Mars is giving us great things to see and add to the data record," the mission's principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, said at a recent press conference.
The reason the mission appears to be coming to the end, added InSight's...
Physicists estimate that the Big Bang was around 13.8 billion years ago. Not long after the Big Bang, massive clouds of mostly hydrogen gas known as Damped Lyman-a systems (DLAs) slowly began condensing into the first stars. Large enough groups of stars and other matter would coalesce to form galaxies.
DLAs act as galactic nurseries and can be observed today. In research just published by an international team in Nature, the results of a new method for detecting DLAs are presented. The technique involves a novel instrument and a little help from the universe itself in the form of a funky consequence of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
The existing method for observing DLA clouds uses quasars as a stand in for a kind of cosmic "backlight". Quasars are supermassive black holes that emit gamma radiation. As the radiation spat out by the quasar passes through DLAs before reaching Earth, some of the gamma rays are absorbed in the dense atomic gas that makes up the DLA, leavin...
Whether you're joining the grand tradition of the democracy sausage on election day, or chucking a couple of bucks to the local scout group outside a hardware store, the sausage (or veggie equivalent) and white bread partnership of a sausage sizzle is hard to resist.
But what's actually in a sausage? What's allowed to call itself a sausage? And does pricking them while barbecuing really make them healthier - or does it just make them taste worse?
What about the bread the sausage sits in? How does it stay fresh for so long - is there any real food in it at all? (Yes.)
We're going to do what you're never supposed to do: see how the sausage is made.
What's in a sausage?
Lots of people are concerned about ambiguous meat of any description - but Australia has some of the strictest food regulations in the world. Food Standards Australia and New Zealand has rules about what's allowed to call itself a sausage.
A sausage must be at least 50% meat - or 500 grams per kilogram, ...