Good News

New York City’s IT infrastructure is enormous. 330,000 employees, 8.6 million residents, hundreds of web applications for things like street plowing, and the popular NYC dot gov site provide an ample attack surface for cybercriminals. In response, the city government has created the New York City Cyber Command. The NYC3 has built a secure data pipeline for cybersecurity experts that allows for alerts, visualization, and analysis. Using open source tools that are built to be blisteringly fast, the pipeline enables analysts to easily and quickly make decisions about the safety of its infrastructure and, more importantly, it’s millions of residents and visitors. ZDNet

NASA has completed a new study that indicates interplanetary travel should not negatively affect the human body. Dubbed, the Twins Study, NASA sent astronaut Scott Kelly into space to live aboard the International Space Station for 340 days while keeping his twin brother Mark on Earth as a control subject. NASA compared the twins on a molecular level to come to these conclusions and believes that it is physically possible for humans to safely make trips to and from Mars, which could take up to three years. Most of the DNA measurements taken of the two brothers returned to normal when Scott returned to Earth. Scientists will continue studying the effects of space on the human body, but did note that specific portions of Scott Kelly’s DNA, related to immune response and DNA repair, did not return to normal. TechCrunch | NASA

Unless you live in a blackhole, you’ve probably seen the news about the first ever picture of a super massive blackhole. Supercomputers, eight telescopes on five continents, hundreds of researchers, and 5 petabytes of data across more than half a ton of hard drives. But how did we get this image from 55 million light years away? Community. Experts worked for years to photograph and compile the data from all those different telescopes. As you can imagine, storing all that picture data was a monumental task. 5 petabytes is 1,000 terabytes. You can fit about 300 high definition movies into 1 petabyte. That means all that data that makes up the blackhole picture fit in the same space as 1,500 HD feature-length movies. Now we have a group of data storage experts managing and safely storing that data. Then we need programmers to piece the data together from all those telescopes and all that data. Thanks to all these talented and wonderful people working together we can see what a blackhole looks like to better understand the universe we live in. How cool is that? The Verge

That’s it for this week in tech news that matters to you. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, please share what you found interesting in a post on your social media by linking to Raytec dot co slash listen. That’s r-a-y-t-e-c dot c-o slash listen. That will always link directly to the current episode’s show notes along with a podcast player. I really appreciate anyone who’s willing to share my podcast.

Links to source articles and other noteworthy news are in the show notes. Articles in this week’s extracurricular reading include an article from Wired about how to build algorithms to support rather than exploiting children online, how the Weather Channel is using mixed reality to show the damage climate change can cause, how to detect hidden cameras in hotel rooms, and so much more. The show notes have links to each of the podcast apps I’m listed on and links to my social media. If you have any information, updates, or constructive criticism, feel free to reach out via social media.

Thanks for listening and have a great week!