Last year, researchers at Indiana University's Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy Facility (cryoEM) acquired a powerful new microscope capable of electron cryomicroscopy, a method of analyzing the structure of proteins at really low temperatures. However, the process often damages samples so researchers have to use a large number to ensure accurate results. This in turn means multiple images from hundreds of thousands of protein particles which then need to be made into composite images, requiring thousands of hours of compute time. So the analysis, movement, and management of all these image files quickly became an IT headache almost as soon as they flipped the on switch
The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today’s Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic—I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs—evolved into today’s routers, and for a long time they’ve kept up with the Net’s phenomenal growth. Until now.
The Insecure.org developers have announced the release of version 5.0 of Nmap, their popular network scanner and mapper. The release features nearly 600 significant changes and the developers consider it to be "the most important Nmap release since 1997". Major improvements to the network scanner include the addition of the Ndiff scan comparison tool and the Nmap Scripting Engine