Word: randomed
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...social networking, having sex - on one machine at home. We're becoming a society of shut-ins. We deprive ourselves of exercise, even if it's just a stroll around the mall, until we're the shape of those blobby people in WALL?E. And we deny ourselves the random epiphanies of human contact...
...turns out that even during the relatively peaceful eras between global calamities, during what is known as background extinction, whole families of species can disappear, pushed out of existence together. And it's not random. According to a new study published in the August 7 issue of Science, vulnerability to extinction runs in families, meaning that some groups of species have a higher likelihood of becoming extinct than others. "It turns out that some branches of the tree of life are more extinction-prone than others," says Kaustuv Roy, a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego. "Those...
...clams went extinct together at a rate that was more often than expected by blind chance - generally those groups of species were confined to a fairly small geographic area. "Extinctions tend to be clustered, which means the effects tend to be worse than what you might expect from random," says Roy. "That's true for mass extinctions as well - they end up culling the most vulnerable lineages, leaving the more resistant ones." (See pictures of the 10 species on the brink...
This matters because if extinction were truly random, we'd have a much richer evolutionary history, because at least some representatives of all living things would make it to the present. But because extinction tends to be clumped around certain lineages, when extinction occurs we lose whole groups of species. "The long-term consequences are therefore much worse for biodiversity," says...
...When the hackers are ready to launch the assault, the master computer awakens its zombie army, and the attack begins. Because DDoS utilizes multiple computers from multiple locations - and because hackers may use their network for only a single attack - there's no way to protect against a seemingly random array of computers suddenly going rogue. Once the attack begins, websites can try to trace the sudden flood of traffic back to the source computer and filter it out, but even that's a complex process. Internet service providers say they're rarely able to identify the master computer behind...