Four articles this month, one on the extremely exciting findings by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Enceladus, one on a somewhat weird life form found inside the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and finally two somewhat similar cases of emerging risks to people with medical conditions, one due to the use of implanted medical devices and the other due to exploits on Internet web browsers.

The Cassini-Hugens mission to Enceladus, the sixth largest of Saturn’s moons, not only confirmed the presence of liquid water beneath the icy surface of the moon, but also discovered, from a sampling of the brew vented out by a geyser the spacecraft flew past, that the moon is extraordinarily active and contains a surprising mix of organic chemicals. As the press release notes, heat, water vapour and organic compounds are the basic building blocks for life. As a science geek, I’m also impressed by the technical achievement of flying so close by a small moon at extremely high speeds, successfully intersecting a venting geyser without crashing on the moon with the whole thing carefully planned and coordinated on Earth.

Next, LiveScience reports the discovery of a black fungus growing on the walls inside the damaged and still highly radioactive Chernobyl nuclear reactor. According to scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the fungus was rich with melanin. They further found through experiments in which fungi were exposed to ionizing radiation, that the radiation significantly boosted the growth of the fungi that contained melanin, leading them to speculate that the fungi might be feeding off of the radiation and turning it into energy, much as plants use chlorophyll to convert sunlight to energy. That conclusion is as yet untested but the concept of radiation-eating fungi seems like something straight out of a 1950s science-fiction story.

The two final articles both involve hacking, though in different ways and on different things. In the first one, specialists at the University of Washington and the University of Massachusetts have announced that it was theoretically possible to hack a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker device through its wireless radio communications features. Not only were they able to extract personal patient data from the device, they were also able to instruct it to shut down and to deliver potentially fatal jolts of electricity. All of this was done in a laboratory setting and involved the use of cumbersome and expensive equipment, so there is no real risk yet of such hacking done in the real world on devices that have already been implanted in live human patients, but it does indicate that the makers of such devices need to pay serious attention to security measures to prevent this from being possible.

The second “hacking” attempt isn’t aimed at computers or even devices, but at people who suffer from epilepsy. It seems that malicious hackers have posted messages on an Internet forum for epileptics run by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation containing JavaScript code and animated images designed with the specific purpose of inducing seizures in the persons seeing them. It doesn’t appear that these attacks caused any lasting damage, but descriptions of events like a patient becoming “locked up” and unable to move or speak or tear her eyes away from the screen until her soon moved her gaze away and shut down the browser are eerily reminiscent of the basilisks, mind-crashing images that can cause death, used in stories by science-fiction author David Langford.