Enjoy hands-on activities at Wonders of Science event

Presenters use Bernoulli's Principle to inflate plastic bags at last year's Wonders of Science event.

High school teachers will take science out of the textbook and put it into children's hands at Fermilab's annual Wonders of Science event.

"The Wonders of Science show is a wonderful opportunity for children and their parents to come learn science from expert teachers and have fun at the same time," said event coordinator Mary Jo Murphy.

On Sunday, March 29, from 1-2 p.m. award-winning high school teachers will perform fast-paced demonstrations on chemical and physical phenomena. Portions of the event have appeared on TV shows such as the "Late Show with David Letterman" and "CBS News."

"This is a great event for younger kids," said Spencer Pasero, an education program leader at Fermilab. "The Weird Science guys always manage to bring out some surprises."

This year's event will have an astronomy theme in honor of the International Year of Astronomy, and particularly to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of the telescope as a scientific instrument. A group of current and retired high school teachers who have been recognized locally and nationally for their ability to engage young minds will give the presentations. That group includes Lee Marek, of the University of Illinois at Chicago (formerly of Naperville North High school); Tom Redig, of Downers Grove North High School; and Karl Craddock, of William Fremd High School in Palatine.

The program is designed for ages 7-12, and Scout troops are welcome. Students will receive an activity packet including a mini-telescope, and instructions for how to make a sundial, a star clock and other activities. Tickets are $4 and can be ordered using a form from the Fermilab Education Office Web site. For additional information, contact Nancy Lanning at lanning@fnal.gov or (630) 840-5588.

Hackers in action

This video shows hackers probing areas of Fermilab's computing network in search of vulnerabilities.

Most of us operate a computer daily without thinking about its vulnerabilities or the hackers waiting to exploit them.

For computer security experts such as Joe Klemencic, vulnerabilities and hackers are often all they focus on.

The above linked video, sent in by Klemencic, computer security coordinator, shows a recorded snippet of a two-minute capture of hacker activity.

In the looped video, each bubble represents a hacker probing the network for potential vulnerabilities.

"This goes on all day and all night," Klemencic said. "Traffic similar to this hits our networks all the time."

Thankfully, the traffic visible in this video is of probes to darknets, areas of the network with no machines "living" on them. Computer security experts use darknets to watch the hacker activity to detect trends or unusual activity.

The upper left portion of the video shows a standard scan. The activity on the lower left of the screen shows an outside node that is fiercely probing the network. The video also shows the probes in color. Those showing up in red and black are new hackers starting to scan the networks.

The frightening thing, Klemencic said, is that the same sort of activity happens anywhere, including when you connect to the Internet from home.

"You connect and you get swarmed," he said. "Each one of these is an opportunity for exploitation."

-- Rhianna Wisniewski