Long lost painting dating back 500 years found in Angkor Wat
Washington: Long-lost paintings have been discovered on the walls of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat temple by an Australian National University (ANU) researcher.
The ancient paintings date back almost 500 years and depict deities, animals, boats and the temple itself, giving historians a new understanding of life in a relatively unknown period of Cambodia’s history.
Rock art researcher Noel Hidalgo Tan discovered the hidden images while working as a volunteer at an archaeological excavation in Angkor Wat during a university break in 2010.
“I was walking through the temple on a lunch break and I saw some pigments on the wall. I took some pictures, but didn’t think they would be anything special,” he said.
It was only when Tan enhanced the images on his computer that the paintings emerged, revealing the long-lost artworks.
Tan said that he didn’t expect the images would be so elaborate and detailed.
Angkor Wat is one of the world’s most famous monuments and a national symbol of Cambodia. Built in the 12th century, Angkor Wat was in the centre of the city of Angkor, which was the capital of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries.
The team suggests that the paintings seem to come from the 16th century reign of King Ang Chan, who commissioned a restoration of the temple to Theravada Buddhist use from a Vishnavaite Hindu temple. (ANI)
Free-form gestures could be passwords of the future
New York: Imagine unlocking your smartphone or tablet with free-form gestures – sweeping fingers in shapes across the screen! As more people use smartphones or tablets to pay bills, make purchases, store personal information and even control access to their houses, the need for robust password security has become more critical than ever, researchers said.
A new Rutgers University study shows that free-form gestures – sweeping fingers in shapes across the screen of a smart phone or tablet – can be used to unlock phones and grant access to apps. These gestures are less likely than traditional typed passwords or newer “connect-the-dots” grid exercises to be observed and reproduced by “shoulder surfers” who spy on users to gain unauthorised access.
“All it takes to steal a password is a quick eye,” said Janne Lindqvist, one of the leaders of the project. “With all the personal and transactional information we have on our phones today, improved mobile security is becoming increasingly critical,” said Lindqvist. Lindqvist and the other researchers from Rutgers and collaborators from Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, and University of Helsinki studied the practicality of using free-form gestures for access authentication. With the ability to create any shape in any size and location on the screen, the gestures had an inherent appeal as passwords. Since users create them without following a template, the researchers predicted these gestures would allow for greater complexity than grid-based gestures offer.
“You can create any shape, using any number of fingers, and in any size or location on the screen,” Lindqvist said. The researchers applied a generate-test-retest paradigm where 63 participants were asked to create a gesture, recall it, and recall it again 10 days later. The gestures were captured on a recogniser system designed by the team. Using this data, the authors tested the memorability of free-form gestures and invented a novel method to measure the complexity and accuracy of each gesture using information theory.
Their analysis demonstrated results favourable to user-generated, free-form gestures as passwords.
The researchers then had seven computer science and engineering students, each with considerable experience with touch-screens, attempt to steal a free-form gesture password by shoulder surfing.
None of the participants were able to replicate the gestures with enough accuracy, so while testing is in its preliminary stages, the gestures appear extremely powerful against attacks. (PTI)
Harvard owns century-old book bound in human skin
Washington: Harvard University is home to a book which has its binding done in real human skin.
The donor of the 1880’s book titled Des destinees de l’ame (Destinies of The Soul), which had belonged to Harvard’s Houghton Library since the 1930’s, explained in a note that was kept inside the book, saying that it was indeed bound in human skin parchment on which “no ornament had been stamped to preserve its elegance”, the Verge reported. Harvard investigated the binding’s origin, and Bill Lane, director of the university’s Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Laboratory, said that the results were 99.9 percent in favor, making the binding very unlikely to be in something other than human skin.
It is believed that the of the owner book, which is now the only one known to be bound in human skin throughout all the Harvard libraries, got the skin from the back of a dead female mental patient, whose body was unclaimed. (ANI)
