Knocking on Opportunity's Window

Knocking birds

Students on a Florida campus who strayed too close to a mockingbird nest found themselves under personal attack, according to a new study. A species of songbird has been shown to identify individual people in a crowd in order to target them aggressively if they pose a threat to their nests. In the new study, by Douglas Levey and colleagues at the University of Florida, Gainsville, in the Procee...

Attacks on Port Knocking Authentication Mechanism

Research in authentication mechanisms has led to the design and development of new schemes. The security provided by these procedures must be reviewed and analyzed before they can be widely used. In this paper, we analyze some weaknesses of the port knocking authentication method that makes it vulnerable to many attacks. We will present the NAT-Knocking attack, in which an unauthorized used can...

Knocking down glycosaminoglycan synthesis.

Knocking out the Argonautes

Argonaute proteins are key players in gene silencing involving small RNAs. In this issue, Yigit et al. (2006) report a comprehensive study of Argonautes in the worm that places many of the 27 family members into a complex gene-silencing network.

“Knocking out” a Neural Circuit

Although the visual system occupies nearly half of the mammalian brain, we still do not completely understand its first synaptic stage. One reason is that the dendrites postsynaptic to photoreceptors comprise such a maze of fine processes that doubt remains whether all the second order circuits have been identified—even after 4 decades of electron microscopy. Now advanced functional methods app...