To know the taste of a specific food item, you have to put it in your mouth. To know how durable an item is, you need to subject it to a battery of tests and then compute its MTBF. As industry moves from traditional devices to using more modern, connected devices and systems that are always on, security is seen as a major obsession.

People need to know how secure their network is against external attacks. However, just as an arch can withstand a good amount of external load, but crumbles easily against an internally applied pressure, so can networks. Some of the biggest security threats faced by networks unwittingly comes from people on the inside and not from those who are outside the network.

Companies employ a Certified Ethical Hacker to hack into their networks in an attempt to expose security weaknesses that they might have overlooked while securing their network. A company may have several external infrastructures – VPN access points, email servers, domain name servers, web servers, perimeter firewalls and other applications – accessible publicly from the internet. Typically, this is where the Certified Ethical Hacker starts his work.

The hacker has several tools to help him in his task. They include password crackers, keystroke loggers, eavesdropping, denial-of-service, sniffers and remote controls. In fact, hackers usually employ powerful digital tools akin to an expert lock-picker’s toolkit and they use these to attack the firewall systems.

Most companies take great care to make their networks impenetrable against external attacks. Therefore, it is no surprise to hackers if they are unable to get in. However, these same companies often overlook insider threats. Hackers can expose these vulnerabilities, especially, people working on the inside. This depends on a very simple fact – most people’s response is highly predictable when they are placed in a particular situation.

For example, consider what someone will do with an unclaimed innocent-looking USB flash drive lying on the toilet paper holder in the company’s washroom. That’s right, 90% of those finding the USB key will want to know what it contains and plug it into their computer to find out!

Now, a hacker may have knowingly planted a computer program on the flash drive that would auto-run and execute a remote connection to his computer as soon as someone operated the drive. That would give the hacker instant access to the company’s network. The program would take the computer owner’s encrypted credentials and pass them to the company’s own server, thus mimicking a normal and real login.

Once the hacker is able to log into the network of the company, he can unleash any amount of mayhem. He can extract usernames and passwords, open and interact with any file on the compromised system and even take screenshots of current activities on the desktop of the user.

The Certified Ethical Hacker will report his findings to the company management about how easy or difficult he found it to hack into the company’s network. This highlights the fact that security is not just about the protection of the firewall of the network. Even when there are no disgruntled employees, internal threats can be real.

At some point in our daily lives, almost all of us have heard of superconductors. These materials conduct electricity very well – with almost zero resistance. In comparison with normal wires carrying electricity, superconductors – because they offer no resistance – are almost loss-free. The caveat – superconductors need to be cooled to very low temperatures, making them almost impossible to operate at regular operating temperatures.

However, the situation may be about to change. Argonne National Laboratory has been researching on superconductors. Lately, scientists there have discovered that iron arsenics, a special class of superconductors, have a unique phase that has remained undiscovered so far. Using iron arsenics as a superconductor material may make it possible to harness the capabilities of energy efficient power transmission and use it in addition for a wide range of other technologies as well.

Electricity conduction is dependent on electrons, atoms and their interactions. Superconductivity occurs when these atoms and electrons behave in a special way, mostly at very low temperatures also called cryogenic temperatures.

The new discovery is about a magnetic phase of the electrons and atom interaction. This has offered significant implications over our understanding of unconventional superconductivity.

The new material is BAFe2As2 and scientists have doped 24% of the barium sites on the material with sodium. When neutrons are diffracted from a polycrystalline sample of the doped material, three different diffraction peaks are observed. These peaks vary with temperature as the magnetic and atomic structures change. In the graph, the structures are shown on the right, the blue balls represent the iron atoms and the red arrows show the direction of their magnetic moments.

Although superconductors allow electric current to flow without any resistance, they are not used for power transmission lines because they require to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures to operate efficiently. In comparison, copper wires operate at normal ambient temperatures and since they have resistance, are not loss-free. The recently discovered specific range of unconventional superconductors may soon offer better prospects.

Researchers at Argonne are trying to figure out how the new unconventional superconductor works. This knowledge might help to raise the temperature at which superconductors work, paving the way for harnessing their power for a wider range of new technologies.

In conventional metals carrying current, electrons bounce off atoms, thereby producing heat. In conventional superconductors, electrons – instead of repelling each other – pair off by binding together. This distorts the surrounding atoms, helping each other to travel through the metal. In the new type of superconductors also, the main process is still electron pair formation, but it is yet to be discovered what binds them together.

Normally superconductors have to be coaxed into allowing free flow of electricity. Although iron arsenide is normally magnetic, addition of sodium suppresses the magnetic behavior. As the material is cooled, it turns superconductive at roughly below -400 degree F, the transition temperature. Where, at room temperatures, iron atoms form a square lattice with a four-fold symmetry, at the transition temperature, this distorts to a rectangular lattice and a two-fold symmetry.

However, close to the onset of superconductivity, the new material demonstrates a phase where it returns to its four-fold symmetry. This is the phase intriguing the researchers.

At the National Graphene Institute, University of Manchester, researchers are trying to reduce the size and weight of batteries. For this, they are experimenting with graphene, as this will also increase the lifespan of the batteries. However, before they can start building lighter batteries, they need to understand how graphene interacts with the other chemical components within the battery, especially the electrolytes.

The new project has attracted considerable attention and many commercial partners are involved. They include Morgan Advanced Materials, Sharp and Rolls-Royce. All of them are interested in the future applications of graphene. The research project and applications has attracted over 30 companies from around the world.

Among the many experiments that researchers are conducting, one is to analyze the chemical interaction that takes place between graphene and lithium ions. The quest is to find out how quickly electrons move across graphene, the magnitude of capacitance and the amount of electrical energy that a graphene surface can hold.

The project is also focusing on super-capacitors, especially graphene based, as these tend to have high power densities and longer cycles of life compared to batteries, although their energy storage capacities are lower. However, the advantage they have is they can complement batteries and form an integrated storage solution.

For example, electric cars could use a combination of graphene batteries and super-capacitors to lighten up their load. Typically, batteries for electric cars weigh 200kg or as much as three passengers. If the weight of batteries were to be reduced, it would boost the efficiency of the vehicle and increase its driving range. Electric cares typically have a limitation of 100km, and this is a hindrance to their widespread use.

Increasing the distance the cars travel between charge points will definitely improve their popularity. However, it is still not very clear how the batteries will be able to stand up to the rigors and strains of daily driving. Like all other vehicles, electrical cars too are not driven smoothly; as drivers accelerate, the power demand on the batteries peaks. That stresses the battery and may be a potential cause for limiting its lifespan.

For testing the batteries, researchers will be subjecting prototype graphene batteries and super-capacitor combination to real world stresses that will mimic the profiles presented by different driving conditions. They will even test the batteries under driving in extreme conditions. Batteries are notorious underperformers in cold conditions; therefore, weather chamber tests will be rigorous. That will be instrumental in\ bringing out the weaknesses in the combinations.

The best part is that graphene based storage is useful not only in transport, but in the case of renewable energy sources as well. Usually, wind and solar energy are reliable, but there are times when the wind drops or clouds eclipse the sun. High capacity electrical storage will help to store electricity during periods of low generation.

Manchester is going to be home to a system consisting of a converter system and a grid-scale battery. This will be used for testing possibilities for large-scale electrical storage.