Big Bang survey mission completed
PARIS, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- An instrument aboard a European Space Agency orbiting telescope has completed its survey of the faintest remnant of light from the Big Bang, researchers said.
The High Frequency Instrument on ESA's Planck mission finally ran out of coolant necessary to keep it chilled enough to detect microwaves from the Big Bang and cold dust throughout the universe, ESA officials said.
"Planck has been a wonderful mission; spacecraft and instruments have been performing outstandingly well, creating a treasure trove of scientific data for us to work with," Planck project scientist Jan Tauber said in an ESA release Monday.
Launched in May 2009, the spacecraft was intended to complete two whole surveys of the sky, but continued to operate perfectly for 30 months, twice the expected time, and completed five full-sky surveys, researchers said.
While some results from Planck will be announced next month, the first results on the complete Big Bang and very early Universe surveys will not come for another year, scientists said.
Detailed and painstaking analysis of the data will be required to remove all of foreground emission noise and tease out the faintest, most subtle information in the remnant signals, they said.
The results are widely anticipated because there are still many different, competing ideas about what happened during the Big Bang.
"Planck's data will kill off whole families of models; we just don't know which ones yet," principle HFI investigator Jean-Loup Puget of the Universite Paris Sud in Orsay, France, said.
Gaming sites for children are virus target
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Hackers are increasingly using child-focused gaming Web sites to spread malware and data-stealing programs, a European anti-virus company says.
Czech anti-virus firm Avast says it detected virus activity at more than 60 sites with the words "game" or "arcade" in their title in the 30 days ending last Thursday.
The sites were hit with Javascript infections, redirectors and potentially unwanted software, Avast said.
The gaming sites are being targeted because young children are often less ware than adults of what they click on when visiting such sites, company officials said.
"These are sites with mini-games, including flash applications and simple online apps -- one example is software that allows girls to dress and change the clothes of characters," Ondrej Vlcek, the firm's chief technical officer, told the BBC.
Avast said "exploit packs" that are sold online meant the hackers responsible might not have needed advanced coding skills.
"This report highlights the need for children and young people to be made aware of the potential security risks associated with free online gaming sites," said Joanne Bryce of the cyberspace research unit at the University of Central Lancashire.
Rare monkey photographed in Myanmar
YANGON, Myanmar, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Myanmar snub-nosed monkeys, previously only known from one dead specimen, have been photographed living in the wild for the first time, conservationists say.
The animal was photographed by a camera trap operated by a joint team from Fauna & Flora International, Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association, and People Resources and Conservation Foundation.
The camera, triggered by infrared sensors, was located in the mountains of Burma's northerly Kachin state bordering China, NewScientist.com reported.
"We were very surprised to get these pictures," Saw Soe Aung, a field biologist who set the camera traps, said. "It was exciting to see that some of the females were carrying babies -- a new generation of our rarest primate."
The snub-nosed monkey, Rhinopithecus strykeri, was first described scientifically from a dead specimen collected by a local hunter in 2010.
Conservationists said hunting and habitat loss mean the species will likely be classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The population of the monkeys is thought to be less than 300 individuals, they said.
Tomb of ancient Egyptian singer found
CAIRO, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Archaeologists excavating in Egypt say they've uncovered the tomb of an ancient singer in the country's Valley of the Kings.
A team of researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland said they came across the tomb by chance.
An inscription on the tomb containing a coffin with an intact mummy says the singer was Nehmes Bastet, a temple singer during Egypt's 22nd Dynasty, between approximately 945 and 712 B.C.
The coffin was opened Monday to reveal the "nicely wrapped" mummy of the woman, researcher Susanne Bickel told the BBC.
Egyptian archaeologists said the tomb was one of the very few in the Valley of the Kings that have not been looted at some point.
The wooden coffin was painted black and decorated with hieroglyphic texts, Egyptian news site Ahram reported.
