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Google Hopes to Expand Wi-Fi (The search giant has asked the US government to open air waves to create high-speed wireless connections for all) Google says the US government is ignoring a precious natural resource. And no, the search giant obviously isn't talking about oil. Google, along with other big companies, wants the US government to open up unused air waves. The company says this could lead to people across the country surfing the Web on handheld devices at gigabits-per-second speeds. Google, Microsoft and others have been petitioning the FCC to free up the unsed portion of the spectrum—known as white space—for some time now, but the company filed a six page letter late last week that makes its intentions, and the potential effects of its plan, much clearer. Now Google says this freeing of the airwaves would enable people all over the U.S. to cheaply and easily access the Internet through small handheld devices by the end of next year. Here's an excerpt from the company's letter to the government: "As Google has pointed out previously, the vast majority of viable spectrum in this country simply goes unused, or else is grossly under-utilized. Unlike other natural resources, there is no benefit to allowing this spectrum to lie fallow." Possible Ocean Beneath Titan's Crust (Another fascinating find from the Cassini probe has scientists buzzing about one of Saturn's moons) The Cassini probe has found evidence that there may be an underground ocean on Saturn's moon Titan. The moon is already an area of tremendous interest to planetary scientists, given its dunes, lakes and mountains. It also has one of the most Earth-like surfaces in the solar system. Now, by using radar measurements to detect changes in the moon's rotation, scientists have gotten more insight into what's below the surface. At this point, scientists think that there may be an ocean of liquid water and ammonia sitting some 60 miles down beneath the surface. A paper describing the work appears in the current issue of the journal Science. The Cassini group is planning to take another close look at Titan today, when the craft will study the moon's upper atmosphere. The Goods: Work at Home (Give yourself the home field advantage by outfitting your office with today's top tech) A Laptop That Docks Without Wires: The R400 is the first laptop that can connect to any peripheral—printer, monitor, speakers, anything with a USB plug—wirelessly. Just plug them into the docking station. It communicates with the laptop through a new wireless technology called ultra-wideband, which carries video, sound and data faster than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Signals can travel short distances with nearly the same quality as they would have over cables. $3,700; toshiba.com Massive Ice Shelf Collapse (An iceberg 160 square miles breaks loose to leave one of the world's largest ice shelves hanging by a thread) At 5,282 square miles the Wilkins Ice Shelf is one of the largest on the Antarctic Peninsula. It is also the latest casualty of global warming. Satellite images released today by the British Antarctic Survey and the National Snow and Ice Data Center reveal a massive collapse over the past month—disintegration resulting in, most recently, a breakaway iceberg seven times the size of Manhattan. Now, the entire shelf is attached by a single strip of ice less than 4 miles wide. "The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said Professor David Vaughan of the BAS. "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be." Over the last few decades the western Antarctic Peninsula has seen the biggest temperature change on Earth. It has also experienced an increasing number of major collapses as warmer temperatures and previously unexposed ocean waves erode its shelves. Wilkins, which scientists believe is at least a few hundred years old, is the largest yet to succumb, and likely a harbinger of more to come. Factory Farming and its Dire Consequences (The ills of factory farming reach beyond the ethical as immunologists grow increasingly concerned about vaccine-resistant bacteria) One of the dire consequences of factory farming is that it encourages the spread of disease due to the close quarters in which the animals live. That’s why they’re fed antibiotics and other medicines when they aren’t sick. This overuse of antibiotics, while beneficial to the flocks and herds in the short term, leads to stronger and more drug-resistant bacteria in the long term. The effect has been widely reported by popular authors like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser. What we haven’t heard much about are how viruses can thrive in this environment. Ian York, an immunologist at Michigan State University, has this week written a story about chicken infected with Marek’s Disease Virus (MDV). The virus was a relatively minor nuisance before industrial scale farming operations brought large flocks of chickens together. Once the disease took hold, a vaccine was developed, but the virus managed to evolve and become more virulent until the vaccine was ineffective. This cycle has happened repeatedly over the past fifty years. What is most interesting about MDV is the vaccines to combat it have likely contributed to the virus’s strengthening because none of them rendered the virus sterile. While the vaccines were effective at preventing the disease MDV causes, they were not effective at preventing transmission from bird to bird. The larger point York makes is that this may be just what the virus wants—he theorizes that viruses aren’t interested in evolving toward greater virulence but rather toward improved transmission. That’s especially bad news in the face of the industry’s current eye toward cloning and genetic homogeny in the name of building a more uniform steak or fillet. Improved transmission among a diverse population is one thing, but among a homogeneous population is certain to lead to ruin. http://www.popsci.com/ |
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Mars Rovers Nearly Killed by Budget Cuts (After surviving tough conditions on the Red Planet, the twin rovers nearly get shut down by a shortage of cash) It would have been pretty heartbreaking for space fans if Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Martian rovers, had survived on the Red Planet all these years, only to be shut down and lost for good due to budget cuts. Apparently NASA sent a letter last week to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lab that runs the rovers' program, specifying a $4 million cut. Scientists said this move would have forced them to put one rover into hibernation mode, and limit the duties of the other. But now NASA has rescinded the letter, effectively acting as though it never was sent, and the rover program is back to normal. Still, this wasn't just an inane budget cut. NASA needs to find some extra cash because its new rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, is already $165 million over budget, and engineers need $20 million more to work out its final kinks. Drop the Rifle and Pick up the Bear Spray (Biologist discovers that guns aren't always the best form of protection in the wild) Brigham Young University bear biologist Thomas Smith says that guns aren't necessarily your best option when facing down one of the beasts. Smith and his team analyzed 20 years worth of incidents in Alaska, and found that the wilderness equivalent of pepper spray effectively deterred bears 92 percent of the time, whereas guns only did the trick one-third less often. (He studied polar bears, too, hence the picture, at left, of an unconscious mother and her cubs. And yes, he did get away before everyone woke up.) The odd thing, though, is that the effectiveness of the stuff doesn't seem to have much to do with the chemicals in the spray. In fact, Smith says he found some cases in which people actually attracted bears by applying the stuff to their tents or other gear. It may be that the cloud of spray, and the sound of its dispersal, are what really incite the bears to turn and run. So, you know, next time you stare down a bear, ditch the gun and whip out a spray. Bat Deaths Baffling Researchers (While scientists are still puzzling over the disappearance of bees, large numbers of bats have begun dying out no less mysteriously) We’ve by now all seen the news that bees are dying in huge numbers. Scientists have labeled the phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Dead bees mean less crop pollination, which means less food at higher prices. What’s causing the problem is still anyone’s guess. Now, strangely, bats in the eastern U.S. are experiencing a similar plague which biologists have dubbed White Nose Syndrome (WNS) for the white fungus that appears on their bodies at the height of infection. Scientists are already calling it the worst disaster for bat populations in the United States, estimating the death of half a million animals this year alone. As with CCD, biologists worry that WNS is a conflation of more than one factor and that the white fungus is merely a secondary infection. While signs point to a disruption in the bats’ food source—perhaps the recently introduced pesticides to combat mosquitoes that may carry West Nile virus—it is unclear whether WNS is caused by a toxin or simply a food shortage. In addition to (or because of) the infections, bats aren’t gaining enough weight before they hibernate and are either dying in situ or are waking up in the dead of winter and flying out into the cold to certain death. There is concern that if the cause is contagious, it will spread rapidly. While humans are not vectors for infection, visitors to caves could be taking it out of caves on their clothes and gear. Bats themselves could do the job as well, migrating hundreds of miles in the summer to roost and give birth. While the economic impact of CCD is immediately apparent, the same may more subtly apply to WNS. Bats are known to consume large quantities of insect pests which would otherwise affect crop yields. How severely this may play out at this year’s harvests remains to be seen. Yahoo Joins OpenSocial (The Internet giant joins forces with Google—should Facebook and Microsoft be afraid?) Yahoo yesterday joined Google’s recently launched OpenSocial network. OpenSocial is built on APIs that let developers build applications to run on any participating social network. It gives the programs access to user data, relationships, and event postings across the board. For example, if the wildly popular Facebook application Scrabulous had been built for OpenSocial, it would work on any network under the OpenSocial umbrella, not just Facebook. It takes the old model of fencing off information from the outside and turns it into a new model where the competition is about how that information is used, not how it is controlled. In tandem with the announcement of Yahoo’s sign-on, Google also unveiled the OpenSocial Foundation a non-profit designed to keep OpenSocial neutral and governed by the community at large. The move effectively pits Facebook and Microsoft Live against just about every other major player in the social networking realm. Whether the two remaining giants will join up as well is unclear, but the consensus online seems to be a resounding no. XCOR Unveils Suborbital Space Vehicle (Introducing the Lynx, a two-seat rocket built for space tourism) The Lynx suborbital space vehicle. Today in Los Angeles, a private space company unveiled the latest entrant in the race to send paying passengers into suborbital space.
The Lynx, in development by XCOR Aerospace, is envisioned as a two-seat vehicle that will allow a paying passenger to ride up front with the pilot to experience weightlessness and see the Earth from space. From the beginning we worked towards a vehicle which is fully reusable, will fly often enough, economically enough and safely enough to succeed in what we expect will be a robust, competitive market place," said XCOR president Jeff Greason at a press conference today. XCOR's been quietly working on liquid fueled rocket engines of all sizes and types in Mojave, California since 1999. The engines range from a diminutive alcohol-fueled "tea-cart" rocket suitable for showing off in hotel ballrooms (and attracting investors), to a methane-powered 7,500-pound-thrust engine completed last year for NASA. Along the way, the company's engineers have also hotrodded a homebuilt Long-EZ airplane with an alcohol-fueled rocket engine, picked up contracts from the Department of Defense to build novel rocket fuel pumps for cheaper operation of high powered rockets, and teamed with the Rocket Racing League to build the X Racer, a rocket-powered raceplane that XCOR chief test pilot and former Space Shuttle commander Rick Searfoss is now flight testing. "As a test pilot and former astronaut, I'm absolutely enthralled to be having the prospect of flying this Lynx up through the development and test phase to the point where we are confident we can safely fly the paying public," said Searfoss at the press conference. Space is defined by an imaginary boundary at 62 miles altitude, and suborbital spaceships built by private companies aim to just sail past that mark for four or five minutes of weightless flight before falling back to Earth. That's far short of the 200 miles or so reached by the Space Shuttle at orbital speeds topping 25 times the speed of sound. Still, suborbital flight is a big challenge for any private company, and only one, Scaled Composites of Mojave, California has actually pulled it off. To get there, a ship has to crack three times the speed of sound using rocket power, keep its passengers alive with onboard life support, use maneuvering thrusters to orient itself in space, and somehow survive reentering the atmosphere, still going Mach 3, to make a safe landing. Scaled's SpaceShipOne, did all that in 2004 to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE, inspiring British airline tycoon Richard Branson to invest in SpaceShipTwo for his newly formed Virgin Galactic. Branson's plans hit a snag last summer, however, when a test stand explosion claimed the lives of three Scaled employees and set back the company's rocket development for the new ships. XCOR plans to launch the Lynx by 2010, the same year called for in Virgin's revised schedule for SpaceShipTwo. The private space race is definitely heating up. Animation: http://www.popsci.com/military-aviat...-space-vehicle http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. Last edited by Princess Royal; Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 02:59 PM. |
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Computer Viruses: Now, Pre-Installed! (More PCs are succumbing to viruses from freshly-minted iPods, digital frames and more) Used to be, you had to connect your PC to the Internet first before it became bloated with viruses and spyware. Now all it may take is plugging in a brand new iPod or digital picture frame—recently, new peripheral devices have been arriving in stores with viruses pre-installed. The problem is most likely stemming from poor quality control in Chinese factories when devices are tested before packaging. As office IT personnel well know, all it takes is one infected machine to spoil the entire network. While it is difficult for officials to track the precise source of the problem due to the secretive nature of the electronics industry, the consensus is this is not presently the work of sabotage. That’s not to say those with malicious intent couldn’t insinuate themselves on the factory floor, but that the more likely explanation is someone plugged their infected device into a testing PC to charge its battery and a whole mess of bad devices was the result. The incidents are indicative of the Chinese rush to get out in front in the global manufacturing space. Most of the recent highly publicized Chinese factory missteps—poisoned pet food, leaded toys—are functions of improper quality control. Chalk it up to growing pains—if the Chinese are to stay in the game, they’ll be forced to catch up with QA or they may lose out to a nation that can. The Ultimate Paper Airplane (Japanese scientists team up with origami masters to launch paper airplanes in space) Japan's space agency gave it the OK. A famous astronaut says he'd get involved. They even tested a prototype in a wind tunnel. Still, it does sound nearly too off-the-wall to be true: Japanese scientists have teamed up with origami experts to design a paper airplane that could withstand re-entry and make its way from space back to Earth. The idea is to use the super-paper-plane to learn more about designing a re-entry craft or atmospheric explorers. And while it sounds impossible, a prototype ,made of paper with a heat-resistant coating, has already been tested. It successfully drifted in both temperatures of up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit and tremendous winds. Thanks to that test, the Japanese space agency says it will fund the project for three years. Eventually, the idea would be to toss a few of them out of the International Space Station. The hitch right now is figuring out how to track them once they're released. Birth of a Planet (Astronomers find evidence of what may be a planet in formation) Birth of a Planet News of another extrasolar planet hardly grabs headlines anymore, now that scientists have pushed the count far above 200. But yesterday a group of astrophysicists says it may have uncovered evidence of a foreign planet being born. The actual image they captured shows an absence of material around a young star, AB Aurigae. This void could be evidence of an object-in-formation that may be somewhere between 5 and 37 times the mass of Jupiter. Astrophysicist Ben Oppenheimer of the American Museum of Natural History suggests that it could be a planet or a brown dwarf—an object that falls somewhere between a planet and a star. But good looks at these extrasolar objects are hard to come by because their host stars—the ones they orbit about—outshine them. "The image produced speaks directly to the biggest, unresolved question of planet formation—how the thick disk of debris and gas evolves into a thin, dusty region with planets," says Julian Christou of the National Science Foudnation. The work will be detailed in the June issue of Astrophysical Journal. Live Upside Down, Save Energy (New research on spider species suggests that their inverted lifestyle is energy efficient) Scientists in Spain and Croatia have found that certain spider species that feed, breed and travel upside-down are more energy efficient because of it. For the spiders, it turns out, walking is more of a swing—they use gravity to their advantage. They effectively act as a pendulum, and require less muscle mass in the legs to move themselves forward. One of the reasons they can do this, the scientists say, is that they don't need strong muscles to hold on. Instead, they attach to their webs via claws fused to their exoskeletons. The interdisciplinary team of scientists—which included an astrophysicist, for some reason—studied more than 100 spider species, and found that the longer legs of the upside-down spiders enable more efficient inverted travel thanks to these pendulum mechanics, but that they aren't so great for scurrying along the floor. The work is important in terms of spider morphology and evolution, but the group says it could also apply to robotics design as well. The paper will be published in PLoS ONE Pre-Edison Sound Recording Played Back (The sound, made with an obscure device that recorded sound waves on paper, is claimed to be the oldest known audio recording) The Phonautograph: Preceding Edison's phonograph by 20 years was the phonautograph, which recorded sounds visibly on paper but lacked capabilities for playback. Thomas Edison has been dethroned as the father of recorded sound. The New York Times is today reporting on a find by American audio historians in Paris of a 10-second recording etched on paper in 1860, seventeen years before Edison invented the phonograph. The device, called a phonautograph, captured the snippet of song by scratching marks onto a paper blackened by smoke. Its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was a typesetter who was interested in the written preservation of speech. The resulting document was never intended for playback. Modern digital scanning and pattern-recognition software have now, however, brought that document back to life. Scott’s tinkering has long been known to historians, but this is the first organized effort to rediscover the papers and digitally replicate their aural code. While Scott was well aware of Edison’s later work and publicly rebuked him in his autobiography for stealing his methods, scholars agree that Edison developed his technologies on his own. Furthermore, Edison was ultimately interested in sound reproduction, not the seemingly esoteric notion of preserving sound on paper documents. You can hear an mp3 of the entire recording at the Times website. Another Round, Jeeves (The military is designing a robotic “butler” that will provide cover fire, ammo, food and peace of mind during combat) Follow the Leader: An autonomous BirdDog prototype, armed with a paintball gun, uses software and sensors to shadow the movements of a soldier. The American soldier may soon have a personal combat-ready sidekick that will fetch him essentials such as water, ammo and medicine and provide extra firepower when he’s under attack. It’s a robotic servant dubbed BirdDog that’s in the works by the U.S. Navy and the private research firm Science Applications International Corporation. BirdDog is designed to complement the military’s future fleet of unmanned vehicles, which are expected to account for one third of all ground combat vehicles by 2015. The system will link sensors on a soldier’s body and gear to an all-terrain robot equipped with tools such as radar, GPS and motion detectors. Feeding on real-time data, the robot will be able to track the soldier’s location, ammunition stock and vital signs and then coordinate and provide support. The ultimate goal, says Bart Everett, the director for robotics at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which oversees the research, is a robot that can reason about the actions of a human and respond accordingly. For now, BirdDog is limited to simple tasks, such as shadowing a soldier. “We’re trying to find better ways of letting a robot know how it can help, so the human doesn’t have to babysit it,” Everett says. The next step is to field-test a system that can scan terrain and upload tactical maps to a soldier. The Greening of Hydrogen Fuel Cells (To create a truly clean alternative fuel, scientists are looking towards creating an artificial version of photosynthesis) One of the technologies being touted as the next great thing for our cars is the hydrogen fuel cell. If you’ve heard anything about them, it’s that there are no harmful emissions, the only by-product is pure water, straight from your tailpipe. Of course, that’s only part of the story. While it is true that your exhaust will be clean, that’s only because hydrogen in a cell is not a source of energy the way gasoline naturally is—it’s a carrier, like a battery. The energy to be stored in the cell has to come from somewhere else. Right now, the sources are the same as they’ve always been, relying heavily on fossil fuels. The emissions are simply moved from your exhaust to a power plant.
But what if the hydrogen could be produced with alternative energy sources? That’s a real possibility, as electricity generated by solar or wind power can be used to produce hydrogen from water through the process of electrolysis. It’s currently very expensive and not terribly efficient, but it can be done. A more direct method—and one which researchers have gotten a step closer to achieving—would be through artificial photosynthesis. Plants use photosynthesis to convert solar energy to chemical energy. They take the sun’s rays, mix them with carbon dioxide and water to make sugars, which they consume to survive. In very simplified terms, that transfer of power would be the ideal for a hydrogen fuel cell: taking light energy, mixing it with water and converting it directly to chemical energy in hydrogen molecules which we could put in our cars. An additional ingredient necessary to the reaction is a stable catalyst to use the light energy to turn the water into oxygen and hydrogen. The creation of the stable catalyst is what a research team of German and American scientists has succeeded in doing. It’s a very small step, but it’s an important one. The larger challenge now is to integrate that catalyst into a photoactive system. Currently, they’re only using it to transfer chemical energy to chemical energy. Artificial photosynthesis is still a very long way off, but if we’re successful in mastering it, its applications would be much further reaching than just powering our cars. It’s arguably the most important reaction in the natural world—all life depends on it—and it could prove to be the solution to many of our problems. http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. |
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Designing Greener Dirt (British scientists try to engineer soils that suck carbon out of the air) Getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is just one step. After plants and trees pull CO2 out of the air, some of the surplus carbon is funneled down into the soil, where it can then re-enter the atmosphere or seep into groundwater. To trap this excess carbon, Newcastle University scientists are trying to design new kinds of soils that would transform the stuff into calcium carbonate, keeping it down in the ground. The scientists think that man made or natural soils with calcium-bearing silicates could perform this Earth-friendly trick. To test their theory, they're going to study both natural and artificial soils, and they'll also grow plants in soil stocked with calcium silicates. The idea of using soil as a carbon sink isn't new, but the scientists say that this will be the first time any team has tried to design dirt with this purpose in mind. The first applications could be within 2-3 years. The Phone Wars: Android vs. Apple (Two major players try to lure mobile-phone software developers) At this point we've known for a while that the much-talked-about gPhone isn't actually going to be a single device, but a whole slew of them running Google's Android platform, but that doesn't mean the buzz is dying out. Now CNET says there's a new race heating up, as Google and Apple vie for the attention of independent software developers. Google made some noise when it announced its Android Developer Challenge, a $10 million, X Prize style contest, to motivate developers to build cool tools to run on Android. Then a famous VC firm swooped in and announced a $100 million pool for developers working on iPhone extras. Apple's other advantage? Well, the company actually has a phone out there, with millions of users. This has motivated some developers to adopt a wait-and-see approach with Android, and stick to focusing on the iPhone. Still, it should be interesting to see how this plays out in the next year. CNET has an interesting look at the competition, including details about a few of the developers on both sides, here. Hopefully we the consumers will be the ones who will benefit. The Firefighting Robot (This autonomous firefighting 'bot gets its self-preservation instinct from its (very distant) insect cousins) Stop, Drop and Roll: This autonomous firefighting robot gets its self-preservation instinct from its (very distant) insect cousins. Shifting through the mossy undergrowth of Germany’s Black Forest, antennae raised and leg joints quietly clicking forward, OLE (pronounced “oh-luh”) is a St. Bernard–size bug on the prowl. But this mechanized insect isn’t a scavenger—it’s a guardian. Only a concept now, OLE (short for “Off-road Loescheinheit,” which means “off-road extinguishing apparatus” in German) is a product of the industrial-design studio at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal, about an hour and a half west of Berlin. A robot equipped with tanks of water and powdered fire-extinguishing agents, OLE would be autonomous and guided by GPS, intelligent feelers, and infrared and heat sensors. Design professor Ulrich Wohlgemuth, along with biologist and robot-systems manager Oliver Lange, students, and members of the design firm Transluszent, collaborated on the concept, inspired by the interlinking armor of the common pill bug, Armadillidium vulgare. That armor is OLE’s fireproof suit. The six legs have a similar protective purpose. “Walking can be nice, but it is generally useless for robots,” Lange points out. “Nature invented walking because it cannot invent the wheel from flesh and blood. In this case, though, if you have wheels, you always have contact with the forest. The concept behind OLE is that he’s digging, and he’s near heat. Legs don’t always have contact with heat.” And from a roboticist’s perspective, six legs is the perfect number, providing stability and making it easy to calculate movement points. The designers have suggested two different ways for OLE to do its job. One idea is to place the robots in potential hotspots near towns and campgrounds, where they would remain balled-up, waiting for their sensors to pick up fire within a half-mile radius. Another idea is for the ’bot to patrol the woods, actively searching for blazes, although battery life and forest obstacles would limit its range. Wohlgemuth says a working OLE would be made from fire-resistant ceramic-fiber compounds that could withstand temperatures up to 1,850°F. Each one might cost between $125,000 and $200,000 and weigh 150 to 200 pounds. And in case pranksters wanted to steal one of them from the forest, a GPS beacon on board could be used to track it down. Forest-fire experts are open to OLE, though many believe that it would be a better scout than firefighter. Margaret Simonson, a fire researcher at the SP Technical Research Institute in Sweden, says the robot would be best used to direct air-dropped firefighting crews. And Henrik Bygbjerg of the Danish Institute of Fire and Security Technology doubts that it could put out anything other than the smallest fires. There’s no current plan to put OLE into production, but its designers believe that it’s more practical than it might sound. Forest fires in Europe burn approximately 1.25 million acres every year. At that rate, an effective force of fire-controlling robots starts to sound attractive at nearly any price. Chips Can't Get Much Smaller (Despite the optimism of Moore's Law, scientists predict computer chips have just four more years of shrinkage) About every two years, transistors shrink in size enough to place double the number on an integrated circuit than was possible during the previous two years. It’s held true since the mid-1960’s when the idea was first posited by Gordon E. Moore (today, it’s called Moore’s Law). If you were to plot the rate on a graph, you’d see it come out as an exponential curve. Exponential curves start slowly and then ramp up quickly, theoretically approaching a limit but never reaching it. I say theoretically because in the very practical real world, a limit will always be reached due to environmental feedback. In silicon-based computing (what we use today), that limit may be only four years away. Suman Datta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, has suggested we have only four years more of miniaturization left before we reach that practical limit for silicon chips. While companies like Intel have devised myriad techniques for circumventing these limits over the years, they will need to look elsewhere when the transistors reach the size at which they leak more current than they can retain. http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. |
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Why Trashing the Oceans is More Dangerous Than We Imagined (Degrading plastics may cause serious toxic risk to ocean dwellers and, eventually, us) Last fall we reported on the growing mess of garbage swirling in the North Pacific Gyre. It’s a swath of ocean arguably the size of the continental U.S. where all the plastic refuse from Asia and the western coast of North America ends up when it’s washed out to sea. Turtles mistake bags for jellyfish and birds mistake floating chips for prey. Animals have been discovered starved to death because the entire contents of their stomachs were plastic fragments. Sail a boat out to the middle of the gyre and the problem is in plain sight. Unfortunately for us, the more severe problem is the one we can’t see. Plastics don’t biodegrade like organic matter, which means they can’t be converted by living organisms into useful compounds for life. Instead, they photodegrade, a process by which photons from the sun’s rays pulverize the plastic polymers until they are broken into individual molecules. Even when they have been smashed into the tiniest bits physically possible, they are still plastics. What’s worse, the plastics act as a kind of magnet for toxins in the water, accumulating chemicals on their surface. The worry now is those toxins will be transferred to the bodies of the animals eating the debris. Already, British researchers have discovered that in a “typical sample of the sandy material gathered” along shorelines, one-quarter of the weight may be plastic particles. The trouble for us comes when those polymers enter the food chain. Jellyfish are already mistaking the non-microscopic bits for zooplankton. Larger fish eat the jellyfish and so on up until you’re eating a tuna filled with plastic dust and toxins. Apple Sued for Not Being Colorful Enough (The class-action lawsuit hinges on difference between iMac displays) Colorful imac An angry Apple iMac owner filed a class-action lawsuit against the company because she says the monitors don't display as many colors as advertised. The lawsuit claims that Apple knows its monitors only display 262,144 colors, but asserts in marketing materials that the machines flash millions of hues. This doesn't appear to be come kind of April Fool's prank. Apparently the discontented Apple owner says that the way the iMacs display those colors mess with video and picture editing. As PC World points out, though, the strange thing is that the lawsuit also claims there's no problem with the 27-inch iMacs. But the lawsuit asserts the smaller screens use "radically different technology." Don't these people know that you're not supposed to make Steve Jobs mad? (Re)Introducing the Micropacer (Sports tech takes a step backwards with Adidas's latest sneaker launch) Consortium Micropacer The only thing better than new technology is old technology. Add the term "vintage," price it at a premium and watch us geeks drool. Generally, sports technology isn't old enough to go retro; Adidas begs to differ with the return of its 1984 Micropacer shoe. Predating today's growing pedometer obsession by two decades, the Micropacer was the first shoe to implant a microchip in the big toe area, which registered steps each time the wearer pushed off. Adidas stopped making the shoe in 1987 but has since introduced limited re-launches over the past few years. Its newest batch of 500 (available at just 80 stores worldwide) comes in blue suede at $350 a pop. Ironically, the retro technology is pricier than the latest microchip endeavor by Adidas. The 2005 Adidas 1 used a sensor to automatically adjust the stiffness of the heel based on the running surface but can be found on eBay for $100. Get yours quick though; if history's any judge, in twenty years you’ll be paying at least twice that. Using Phones In-Flight (U.K. regulatory agency approves a system that would enable mobile phone use on airplanes) Mobile Phones Aloft European travelers may soon have a chance to chat away on their own phones while in flight. For the new system to work, planes would be outfitted with small mobile base stations known as pico cells. The cells would be switched off during take-off, and turned on once the planes reach a given altitude, which would be a minimum of 3,000 meters. Phone signals would be routed to the mobile base stations, which would in turn dispatch signals to ground-based networks through a satellite link. A U.K. regulatory agency has given the system the OK, but no airlines have officially announced plans to adopt it, and it still has to pass a few more administrative and safety tests before proceeding. For one, airlines will need to be sure that the technology doesn't interfere with a plane's navigation or communications systems. The service will probably be pricier than making a normal call. Hopefully that will dissuade chatty seat-mates from talking for hours on end. Could a Moon Have Moons? (It's not impossible, say astronomers, but it wouldn't last long) Astronomers can say with near certainty that there are no moons with moons in our solar system. But that doesn’t mean it’s physically impossible. After all, NASA has successfully put spacecraft into orbit around our moon. Although astronomers have spotted some asteroids with moons, a parent planet’s strong gravitational tug would make it difficult for a moon to retain control of its own natural satellite, says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the nonprofit SETI Institute. “You would need to have a wide space between the moon and planet,” he says. Orbiting far away from its parent planet, a relatively massive moon might be able to hold onto a moon of its own. Conditions like these might exist in far-off solar systems, but while some 250 exoplanets have been detected, there’s almost no chance we’ll be able to spot exomoons, much less moons of exomoons, for decades to come. This is because our current methods for planet-hunting—such as spotting one as it passes a large star—lend themselves to detecting mostly huge, Jupiter-like planets, not their moons. Even if astronomers spot a moon with a moon, it probably won’t last long. “Tidal forces from the parent planet will tend, over time, to destabilize the orbit of the moon’s moon, eventually pulling it out of orbit,” says Webster Cash, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. “A moon’s moon will tend to be a short-lived phenomenon.” http://www.popsci.com/
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Space Shuttle Retirement Could Force Major Job Losses (NASA releases preliminary estimates of potential job cuts due to the end of the shuttle program) When the shuttle retires in 2010, as many as 8,000 NASA contractors could lose their jobs. After a request from lawmakers, NASA released these numbers yesterday, but added that this could be a worst case scenario. The Kennedy Space Center would suffer the biggest losses, with 80 percent of its contract workers losing their jobs by 2011. The agency will be switching over to the Constellation program, which is developing a whole new set of spacecraft and rockets designed for getting to the International Space Station, the Moon, and even Mars. The good news is that this program could soak up some of those who lose their shuttle-related work. NASA also added that about 25 percent of the potentially endangered workforce is eligible for retirement. The Beetle as Muse (Engineers copy a toxic-jet-spewing beetle to design better drug-delivery devices, fire extinguishers and more) The bombardier beetle spits out a dangerous jet of venom to ward off predators, and scientists are now figuring out how it expels the toxic stuff. According to an article in April's issue of Physics World, the beetle's abdomen essentially harbors a small chemical lab and combustion chamber. The gases react inside the confined chamber, eventually cranking up the heat and pressure to a point at which a valve is forced upon, and the toxic jet spurts out. Researchers from Leeds University have replicated the process in the lab, and a company called Biomimetics 3000 plans to explore the possibility of applying the findings to medical technology, plus inhalers, fire extinguishers and even car fuel-injection systems. Who knows, soon when you step on the gas, you might have a beetle to thank. Sony Launches Smallest High-Def Camcorder (Titanium case shields from abuse) Sony HDR-TG1 Handycam: The smallest high-definition camcorder weighs just 10 ounces Sony today announced what it claims to be the smallest high-definition camcorder, the 10-ounce HDR-TG1 Handycam. Into this small package (1.3x4.8x2.5 inches), Sony sueezes most of the features that go into bigger models: including 1920x1080i resolution, a 10X optical zoom lens and face-recognition. It’s packed in a titanium shell with a scratch resistant coating that Sony calls “quite fashionable.” So what did Sony toss out to make it so nice? Not much. It doesn’t have optical image stabilization like some camcorders from Panasonic and Canon, and it doesn’t have a jack for an external microphone—but few cameras do have these features. But it has features that really do matter, like a largish (2.7-inch) LCD screen, and an HDMI port for plugging right into a high-def television. And the battery, which can’t be huge, still powers the camera for up to an hour and 35 minutes. So can such a tiny camera take good video? We’ll know better when Sony starts selling them in May (no more details on the date), bundled with a four-gigabyte memory card for “about $900.” http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. Last edited by Princess Royal; Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 07:10 PM. |
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@princess royal,
So u mean that u credited my lil knowledge by posting(cut-copy-paste)stuff..welll..i but sympathize wid u... c'monn buddy,lets play poker.......do u like it?? may b u got bored of urself......hit it out...we r here to absolve u,plz Regards |
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Lightning From Laser Beams (Scientists get closer to generating lightning bolts on-demand by firing laser pulses at thunderclouds) Scientists have been trying to figure out how to stimulate lightning strikes with lasers for several decades, and now a group of European researchers have made an important advance. The group, led by Jerome Kasparian of the University of Lyon, used laser pulses to trigger electrical activity in thunderclouds passing over New Mexico's South Baldy Peak. By tweaking these laser pulses in the future, Kasparian thinks they should be able to create charged channels of molecules that act like conducting wires, and provide the lightning with a path to the ground. In these experiments, the channels generated by the current laser didn't last long enough. The team estimates that they'll need to boost the power of the laser pulses ten-fold. The ability to generate laser-triggered strikes on-demand could make it easier for scientists to study lightning itself. But engineers could also use it to test whether airplanes and power lines are resistant to strikes. The work is published in the latest issue of Optics Express. The Mobile Phone as Tour Guide (New technology uses object-recognition software to identify and provide info on points of interest in a just-snapped photo) The days of lugging around and pulling out hefty guide books could be nearing an end: The eyePhone, a program currently being developed in Europe, uses a combination of satellite information, object-recognition software and Internet data to provide information on landmarks in a scene captured through a mobile phone's lens. The user snaps a photo, highlights a building or mountain or some other major site, then waits as the object-recognition program, developed by SuperWise Technologies AG, identifies this image and links it to the relevant facts. Initially, the search draws on pre-processed information, but by clicking on "more," you can gather additional details. The advantage of the Apollo object-recognition system, according to its developers, is that it can work in a variety of weather or lighting conditions, and effectively picks out objects regardless of the person's position. In other words, you don't need to be standing in a certain place for it to recognize a church or mountain peak. Check out this promo video; but don't get too anxious, since the technology probably won't be available for consumers until 2009 or 2010. The Real Journey to the Center of the Earth (Scientists discover ancient rocks on the sea-floor that give them a window into the Earth's mantle) Studying Ancient Rocks: Geophysicist Jonathan Snow inspects rocks gathered from the Arctic Ocean's floor - some of the samples collected were two billion years old. No, you can't hike or spelunk or even tunnel down to the center of the Earth, even if movies like The Core or this summer's 3D adventure flick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, suggest otherwise. To find out about our planet's insides, scientists rely on very different tricks. And, apparently, a little luck. A group of researchers led by University of Houston geoscientist Jonathan Snow recently announced the discovery of a collection of two-billion-year-old rocks that were spat up and onto the sea-floor from Earth's mantle. The rocks could change scientists' ideas about how the mantle works, and how often its rocks are churned and mixed up. “We can’t exaggerate how important these rocks are," Snow says, "they’re a window into that deep part of the Earth.” A paper describing their findings is published in the most recent issue of Nature. http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. Last edited by Princess Royal; Monday, April 14, 2008 at 09:04 PM. |
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Under the Eye of the Hurricane (Researchers find that listening for storms underwater can help them predict intensity) MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive). But this new technique, reported in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, involves the use of underwater microphones, or hydrophones. Previously, the group proposed the link between the intensity of sound underwater and the strength of a storm rushing by overhead. Now, using data gathered by a NOAA hydrophone sitting nearly a half mile below the surface during a 1999 hurricane, they have shown that the correlation is real. In the long run, if the link holds up, the group would like to see hydrophones placed in known hurricane hotspots. NASA Tweaks a Spacecraft's Path en Route to Mars (Zoning in on the right landing site is key to a safe touchdown for the space agency's latest Red Planet explorer) Phoenix Touches Down Setting a spacecraft down on Mars isn't exactly easy—just ask Beagle 2. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, en route and due for a May 25 rendezvous with the surface, recently received a course adjustment from mission planners as they try to ensure that the craft doesn't drop down in a danger zone. According to NASA, researchers have found loads of rocks in Phoenix's potential landing area that are big enough to pose a threat. If the lander hit one of these during its final descent, the mission could be over. Thankfully, though, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been passing over the region, gathering high-quality images. NASA scientists have been sifting through these images to find the safest spots, and they adjusted the spacecraft's flight path accordingly, firing its thrusters for about 35 seconds. Eventually, in the last few minutes of its flight, the lander will slow down from 13,000 miles per hour to about 5 miles per hour and, ideally, land softly on its three legs. And no, that's not a simple job, even for NASA. "Landing on Mars is extremely challenging. In fact," says Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "There's no guarantee of success, but we are doing everything we can to mitigate the risks." Biofuel Diversity at the University of North Dakota (A maverick group of engineers and scientists at the University of North Dakota's Energy & Environmental Research Center looks beyond corn and other food crops for biofuel production) Today's New York Times has a front-page story about how biofuels are driving up food prices around the world and how they therefore may not be a such a great idea after all. That could be true if the only feedstocks available for producing biofuels were food crops, as the article implies, but that's far from the truth. Yesterday I visited the Energy and Environmental Research Center, or EERC, at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks and got a distinctly different side of the biofuels story. “We're going to have to move away from using food to produce energy,” EERC director Gerald Groenewold told me simply. He sees no contradiction with doing that and continuing to ramp up biofuel production. He favors a portfolio approach, with our energy coming from many different sources. Last December, working under a DARPA contract, the EERC successfully tested military grade jet fuel, called JP-8, made from 100% pure vegetable oil. The DARPA program manager in charge of the project, Douglas Kirkpatrick, tells me the stuff is chemically identical to the petroleum variety and can be used unmodified in jet engines. Next step is to optimize the conversion process for large-scale production, and we'll be off and running toward independence from petroleum. And, no, the veggie oil doesn't have to come from corn, soy, or other food crops. It can just as easily come from switchgrass or even algae. Among the EERC's many other projects is an electric generator that runs off any kind of organic matter you can feed it in quantity. The slow burn of the fuel inside the processor produces gas, and it's the gas that runs the generator. A prototype running at a North Dakota truss plant powers the whole facility on scrap wood. Also under development is an on-demand hydrogen producer that will use biofuels as feedstock. You'll pull your hydro-powered car up to the pump, and when you stick the nozzle in, the system will generate hydrogen fast enough to fill your tank. This will eliminate the need for a large-scale hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure, and with biofuel as feedstock, it will also cut the CO2 output from conventional hydrogen production from natural gas. EERC has a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers' research lab to develop a portable unit suitable for running on the back of a humvee for generating the hydrogen for fuel cell batteries. And until we move completely away from fossil fuels, the EERC is working on carbon sequestration projects, devising ways to efficiently pipe CO2 away from power plants and pump it back into the ground before it can escape into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. Last edited by Princess Royal; Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 06:59 PM. |
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Wikipedia Moves to Bookshelves (The online community-generated encyclopedia will be testing out a print version in Germany) Bertelsmann AG announced plans to release a single-volume, printed and bound version of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in September. And it's already out of date. Kul Wadhwa of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that promotes the site, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that the move is "groundbreaking"—it's his job to figure out how to make some money through Wikipedia, even though the site doesn't post ads and all the content is free. The head of publishing at Bertelsmann's encyclopedia group says the book will be condensed to roughly 50,000 of the most popular articles, each of which will be just eight to ten lines each. So, if you're wondering, the answer is no, that little stub you wrote about yourself probably won't be included. Bertelsmann also says at least some of the entries will be fact-checked. Fighting Poverty With Technology (MIT professor awarded for his innovative, human-powered irrigation pump) The Super MoneyMaker Pump—yes, that's the real name—sucks up water from sources as many as 30 feet below the ground, can spray it up to 40 feet high, and can even push it through 1,000 feet of hose to cover a larger section of land. In all, the pump can irrigate two acres of land, and costs only around $100. MIT professor Martin Fisher and his team at KickStart, a nonprofit, invented the pump for small-scale farmers. Since it's human-powered and easy to use, it allows them to irrigate crops all year round, instead of just waiting for the rainy season. And no, it's not really about money-making in the American sense. It's designed to help farmers start small businesses. At this point, the pump's users are generating an average of $1,000 extra profit each year. A smaller, less expensive version is helping farmers clear $650 extra per year. The work is a reminder that great new technology doesn't always have a chip at its core. Turning an Ant Into a Berry (A worm that invades its host's belly to make it look more edible proves an unusual parasite) Parasites are well known to have evolved an exceptional array of strategies for perpetuating themselves. A microscopic tropical nematode worm which lives in the gasters of ants in Panama is one of the more impressive. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have recently illuminated its method, which manages to make the ant appear to be a fruit so that it will be eaten by birds. The worms begin their life cycle as eggs in the feces of birds. The ants forage on that feces for its mineral content, bringing samples back to their colonies to feed their young. The ant larvae have no defenses against the worm and so the eggs hatch inside them and the worms live out their lives in the end segment—called the gaster—of the ant's body. This is where the worm's evolutionary sleight of hand comes into play. As the worms lay increasing numbers of eggs, the outer layer of the ant's gaster—which is regularly black—is stretched thin so that it becomes translucent. In the sun, it appears to be a red berry. Birds are then attracted to eat the ants and by consequence consume the worm eggs inside as the entire cycle begins again. Tracking Racers with RFID (NASCAR drivers and others may soon be sporting the same cheap timing technology as marathoners) Everybody loves a photo-finish. But, what if you can’t afford the camera? At prices that start around $25 thousand, high-speed cameras aren't practical for lower levels of racing. Now Hardcard Systems, in cooperation with Alien Technology, thinks they can lower the cost of electronic timing to just a few dollars per competitor—not with cheaper camera technology, but by shattering the speed limits on radio-frequency identification. While RFID tags have become a popular timing method for marathons, it has proven more complicated to track a stock car moving about 16 times the speed of the fastest runners. Hardcard, however, has already successfully completed testing on motorcycles at up to 140 mph and has no doubt it will work at +200 mph. They've tested on dirt tracks, and have confidence that the paper thin stamp-size sticker can withstand the elements. Even for elite levels where photo-finishes are bound to continue, Hardcard believes its RFID technology can replace existing transponders. Currently they're used for timing not deemed photo-worthy, but can cost up to $800 per competitor. As deep as NASCAR’s pockets are, even they’ll enjoy the savings. Testing to date has validated accuracy at 1/100s: more than sufficient for amateur and lower level races. A few minor tweaks should make RFID hit the 1/10,000s accuracy mark claimed by transponders. According to Hardcard, there are ongoing discussions with “major” players in the racing industry. Hmmm. Wonder who that could be? Happy Birthday Hubble (To celebrate, NASA has released the largest single collection of images from the famous telescope. See all 59 amazing shots inside) Today marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate, NASA has released a collection of 59 new Hubble images (under the fantastic title "Galxies Gone Wild!") that present galaxies in all of their volatile wonder. For all 59 images, launch our gallery here. http://www.popsci.com/
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Regards, P.R. |
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