SciTech Buzz

Supernova Countdown: Giant Star Could Explode Any Day Now

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:27:00 +0000

About 165 years ago, Eta Carinae mysteriously became the second brightest star in the sky. In 20 years, after ejecting more mass than our sun, it unexpectedly faded

When the sun finally dies some 5 billion years from now, the end will come quietly, the conclusion of a long, uneventful life. Our star will, in a sense, go flabby, swelling first, releasing its outer layers into space and finally shrinking into the stellar corpse known as a white dwarf.
Things will play out quite differently for a supermassive star like Eta Carinae, which lies 7,500 light-years from Earth. Weighing at least a hundred times as much as our sun, it will go out more like an adolescent suicide bomber, blazing through its nuclear fuel in a mere couple of million years and exploding as a supernova, a blast so violent that its flash will briefly outshine the entire Milky Way. The corpse this kind of cosmic detonation leaves behind is a black hole.
For Eta Carinae, that violent end might not be long in coming, according to a report in the latest Nature. "We know it's close to the end of its life," says astronomer Armin Rest of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the lead author of the paper. "It could explode in a thousand years, or it could happen tomorrow." In astronomical terms, a thousand years might as well be tomorrow; as for a supernova blowing up literally tomorrow, well, that's almost unheard of.

In 1843 Eta Carinae gave a hint that the end might be near when the hitherto nondescript body flared up to become the second brightest star in the sky, after Sirius. It stayed that way for 20 years or so, then faded and left behind a majestic, billowing cloud of gas known as the Homunculus Nebula. Eta Carinae lost some 10% of its substance in this event, which astronomers now call a "supernova impostor," after which it has returned to relative quiet — or what passes for quiet in such an unstable object.
Astronomers back in the day did the best they could to observe the 20-year flare, but without modern instruments, they couldn't really learn much. That has frustrated investigators now just as it did then, since studying Eta Carinae in detail could tell them a lot about what caused the outburst and maybe even help them figure out when the inevitable supernova explosion is going to occur.

But as the Nature report makes clear, that understanding may now be at hand. Using a fiendishly clever new observing technique, Rest and his colleagues have been able to take readings of the original blast in real time. "We can look directly at the eruption," says Princeton astrophysicist Jose Prieto, a co-author of the report, "as it's never been seen before."
To understand how they did that, start with the basic fact that light from the outburst sped away from Eta Carinae in all directions. Some of it headed straight toward Earth to wow 19th century astronomers. But some of it took a detour, reflecting off dust clouds in interstellar space in what astronomers call a "light echo." At least a bit of that echo was redirected toward Earth. The dust clouds were so far from the star that the long-delayed light is only now reaching us, and unlike in 1843, we now have the instruments to study it.

It gets even better. The 1843 flare-up played out over 20 years, which means the light-echo version will do the same. "We took observations nine months ago," says Rest, "and we were looking at 1843. Now we're looking at 1844. It's like a movie. It's really cool." (Of course, the images are from 7,500 years before 1843 and '44, since that's when the stellar event occurred; it just took 7½ millennia for the light to reach us.) Better still, astronomers can see light echoes from a variety of dust clouds, at varying distances from the star. That creates detours of varying lengths, so they can see different phases of the eruption all at once.
"The big puzzle," says Prieto, "is what caused the outburst. This star has been studied to death with all sorts of telescopes, but no one theory has ever been able to tell us what happened." It might have been some sort of instability deep within the star itself, or the blast might have been triggered by matter dumped on Eta Carinae by a stellar companion.

The good news is that the light-echo observations will give theorists a trove of information to work with — and in the next few years, says Rest, "we'll be getting more observations, and they'll keep getting better."
If Eta Carinae is going to blow imminently, the obvious question is whether Earth is in mortal danger. Fortunately, the answer is no. At 7,500 light-years, the intense radiation from even a powerful supernova would lose its punch by the time it reaches us. All we'll experience is the most spectacular light show in many centuries. The last confirmed supernova explosion in the Milky Way happened in 1604, a teasingly close five years before Galileo pointed his first, primitive telescope skyward.
It is, in short, about time for another big blast, and even though the theorists haven't weighed in, Rest has reason for hope. "There was one of these 'supernova imposters' in another galaxy," he says — something similar to Eta Carinae's 1843 outburst. "And then, a few years later ... kaboom!"

Why Energy Efficiency Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:56:00 +0000

When New Yorker writer David Owen moved his family from Manhattan to a small town in northwestern Connecticut in 1985, it seemed like a green decision. Their tree-shaded house had been built in the 1700s and sat across from a nature preserve. Deer, wild turkeys and even bears could be seen in their yard; woods surrounded their neighborhood. It was a bucolic country existence, something out of a nature poem.
Yet for the global environment, the move was a minidisaster. The Owens' electricity consumption went up more than sevenfold, and the lack of both public transportation and dense housing that's typical of Connecticut (and much of the rest of the U.S.) meant the family had to buy several cars. And those cars got driven — a lot. Owen notes that he and his wife now put some 30,000 miles a year on their odometers, burning carbon with every gallon. Access to trees and wildlife and cleaner air in Connecticut was great, but for the climate, it's dense and efficient Manhattan — where cars are optional and living space is much tighter — that does less damage per capita.
To Owen, the move was a lesson: what looks environmentally friendly isn't always the case. That's an idea he explores in his new book The Conundrum, which argues that energy efficiency, scientific innovation and even good green intentions are actually making our climate and environmental problems worse. While we rush to buy a Prius hybrid or fetishize local organic food, we're doing little to actually reduce the carbon emissions that are warming the planet — and we may even be going backward. "We're not actually making the problem better, we're making it worse," says Owen.
He centers his argument on energy efficiency, which simply means reducing waste and getting more economic output per unit of energy, and is one of the few environmental-policy options that nearly everyone can agree on. Democrat or Republican, climate scientist or climate skeptic, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd be against reducing wasted energy. That's why paeans to efficiency find their way into every energy stump speech, including those of President Obama, who noted in the State of the Union speech that "the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy." One of the White House's most heralded green accomplishments this term has been an increase in automobile fuel-efficiency standards, tightening them from 25 m.p.g. now to 54.5 m.p.g. for cars and light trucks by 2025.
But Owen notes improved efficiency doesn't always translate to reduced energy use, thanks to something called the "rebound effect." It's pretty simple: as we become more efficient at using energy, we can save money — which then allows us to use more of that energy than we did before. Picture it this way: you trade in your gas-guzzling SUV for a new efficient hybrid, end up paying less per mile for gasoline, and use some of the savings to drive more than you did with the SUV. The efficiency has rebounded.
It's not clear how big the rebound effect really is. Efficiency advocates say that the effect, when it exists, is limited. Amory Lovins, the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute and an efficiency evangelist, has written that "no matter how efficient your house or washing machine becomes, you won't heat your house to sauna temperatures, or rewash clean clothes." There's a limit to how much more I would drive after buying a hybrid even as my gas bill shrinks.
But Owen argues that the rebound effect is much broader than a one-to-one relationship. I might drive a little bit more using the savings from my more efficient car, but I might also take the rest of those savings and spend it on something else — perhaps a vacation flight, or a new television. And nearly everything we buy and consume today requires energy, from appliances to holidays. Perhaps that's the reason American electricity production grew 66% between 1984 and 2005 even as the economy overall became much more efficient. And things are likely to be even worse in a rapidly growing nation like China, where a lot of people are acquiring consumer goods and other luxuries for the first time. "Energy efficiency by itself is not a sufficient green strategy," says Owen.
Hopes that we might simply run out of fossil fuels before we've cooked the sky now seem unfounded, thanks to the discovery of new unconventional supplies like oil sands or shale natural gas. We can decarbonize the energy we use by replacing fossil fuels with solar, nuclear and other alternatives, but that will take decades at best, and we're moving far too slowly.
So if we want to bring down carbon emissions, we have to use less energy — even very efficient energy — and that likely means we'd have to live with less growth. Good luck trying to explain that to voters, though. "There is a fundamental conflict between the idea of propagating growth and the idea of reducing carbon emissions," says Owen. "But if you're in a public-policy position, it's almost impossible to say that."
That doesn't mean energy efficiency can't be a useful environmental tool — it can, provided it's coupled with policies that effectively increase the cost of energy, so savings from efficiency are conserved rather than being spent on additional consumption. We can also change policy to promote sustainable, dense urban living. (Hong Kongers are well-off, but they use only one-third as much energy as Americans largely because they live in one of the densest cities on the planet.) And we can focus on the environmental policies that really matter. Buying local food is fine, but what matters much more is how far you drove to get to the market — or whether you needed to drive at all. "What we need to do is make more big cities like Manhattan," says Owen. "But that's a tough sell."
Indeed it is. Owen notes that he likes living in small-town Connecticut, even if it isn't great for the planet. And while everything from highway construction to zoning regulations seem designed to induce sprawl, I suspect many Americans simply don't want to live in New York City, just as they don't really care about climate change enough to accept more expensive energy or slower economic growth. "We already know what we need to do and we have for a long time," Owen writes. "We just don't like the answers." That's the conundrum — and the solution won't be easy.

5 Things You Should Know Before the Facebook Timeline Switch Happens

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:20:00 +0000

As we mentioned recently, Facebook Timeline is coming whether you like or not. In the next few weeks, your Facebook profile will be assimilated, giving you seven days to get your house in order before everyone can browse through your virtual history.
Earlier, I wrote a full account of why Timeline is both awesome and a little disturbing, and what you can do to prepare for it — but in the interest of time, here are some basics for getting your profile ready for Facebook Timeline.

1. ‘Hide from Timeline’ Is Your Friend

Get ready to click “Hide from Timeline” a lot. You can find it under the “Edit or Remove” pencil icon that comes up when you hover your mouse over the top right corner of every Timeline post. Remember, it’s not just embarrassing photos that Timeline unearths — it’s every inappropriate status update you’ve ever posted and every asinine message your old college buddies have ever written on your wall at 3 a.m.
If you’ve had Facebook for a long time, you’re going to want to spend at least an hour combing through everything in your virtual past and hiding what you don’t want seen. You can also remove or hide posts through your “Activity Log,” which presents everything posted on your profile in a more compact, easy-to-digest form.

2. Smile! Your Album Covers Are Now Huge

Before, old photo albums hid in an archive — a collection of small thumbnails that only the most committed Facebook stalker would search through. Now it’s all front and center on your Timeline. That means that the photo of you drinking a giant novelty margarita in Las Vegas could now be displayed in unsettling clarity in one of Timeline’s two giant columns. If you want to keep your photo albums visible, but just want to switch the cover to something a little less embarrassing, click “Change Primary Photo” in the “Edit or Remove” menu.

3. The Internet Knows Where You Are

Photos and photo albums can now be tagged with locations, which are then displayed neatly on a map. That means if your friend geotags your album “Vacation Time,” all of a sudden instead of just photos from a cabin in the woods, everyone can tell that your August vacation took place near Lake Tahoe. Now you have to either untag yourself from every geotagged photo or have your friend manually remove the geotag from every photo you’re in. It’s a total pain. Welcome to Timeline.

4. Violation of Privacy? There’s an App for That

A lot of the apps out there for Timeline are pretty cool, but a few venture into TMI territory or, at the very least, turn your profile into a kind of corporate billboard. Think carefully before you let a third-party app have permission to automatically add activity to your Timeline. Do you really want everyone to know where and what you’re eating at all times or what products you’re buying online?
You can always manage your apps by clicking on “Account Settings” in the very top right pull-down menu on your profile. Then click “Apps,” and you’ll be presented with a list of all the apps that have access to your Timeline. Remove the ones you don’t like or, under “App activity privacy,” change who can and can’t see the content posted by that app.
Remember, you can always remove any individual embarrassing app revelations on your Timeline by clicking “Hide from Timeline.”

5. When in Doubt, ‘View As …’

On your Facebook Timeline, you should see a little gears icon on the far right. Click on it, and then select the “View As” option. This will let you view your profile as if you were a stranger or let you pick a specific person to see how he or she sees your profile. It’s a handy tool to use when trying to evaluate how well you’ve cleaned up your profile.

Study: Pythons Killing Everglades Wildlife

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:16:00 +0000

University of Florida researchers hold a 162-pound Burmese python captured in Everglades National Park, Fla.

(WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.) — A burgeoning population of huge pythons — many of them pets that were turned loose by their owners when they got too big — appears to be wiping out large numbers of raccoons, opossums, bobcats and other mammals in the Everglades, a study says.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that sightings of medium-size mammals are down dramatically — as much as 99 percent, in some cases — in areas where pythons and other large, non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
Scientists fear the pythons could disrupt the food chain and upset the Everglades' environmental balance in ways difficult to predict. "The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem, which extends well beyond the national park boundaries, are likely profound," said John Willson, a research scientist at Virginia Tech University and co-author of the study.
Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons, which are native to Southeast Asia, are believed to be living in the Everglades, where they thrive in the warm, humid climate. While many were apparently released by their owners, others may have escaped from pet shops during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and have been reproducing ever since.
Burmese pythons can grow to be 26 feet long and more than 200 pounds, and they have been known to swallow animals as large as alligators. They and other constrictor snakes kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it.
The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000. Among the largest so far was a 156-pound, 16.4-foot one captured earlier this month.
For the study, researchers drove 39,000 miles along Everglades-area roads from 2003 through 2011, counting wildlife spotted along the way and comparing the results with surveys conducted on the same routes in 1996 and 1997.
The researchers found staggering declines in animal sightings: a drop of 99.3 percent among raccoons, 98.9 percent for opossums, 94.1 percent for white-tailed deer and 87.5 percent for bobcats. Along roads where python populations are believed to be smaller, declines were lower but still notable.
Rabbits and foxes, which were commonly spotted in 1996 and 1997, were not seen at all in the later counts. Researchers noted slight increases in coyotes, Florida panthers, rodents and other mammals, but discounted that finding because so few were spotted overall. "The magnitude of these declines underscores the apparent incredible density of pythons in Everglades National Park," said Michael Dorcas, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and lead author of the study.
Although scientists cannot definitively say the pythons are killing off the mammals, the snakes are the prime suspect. The increase in pythons coincides with the mammals' decrease, and the decline appears to grow in magnitude with the size of the snakes' population in an area. A single disease appears unlikely to be the cause since several species were affected.
The report says the effect on the overall ecosystem is hard to predict. Declines among bobcats and foxes, which eat rabbits, could be linked to pythons' feasting on rabbits. On the flip side, declines among raccoons, which eat eggs, may help some turtles, crocodiles and birds.
Scientists point with concern to what happened in Guam, where the invasive brown tree snake has killed off birds, bats and lizards that pollinated trees and flowers and dispersed seeds. That has led to declines in native trees, fish-eating birds and certain plants.
In 2010, Florida banned private ownership of Burmese pythons. Earlier this month, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a federal ban on the import of Burmese pythons and three other snakes.
Salazar said Monday that the study shows why such restrictions were needed. "This study paints a stark picture of the real damage that Burmese pythons are causing to native wildlife and the Florida economy," he said.

A Telescope as Sharp as Hubble — But On the Ground

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:14:00 +0000

Most people think that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is the most powerful stargazing system in the world. It's understandable, given the astounding images and spectacular science the instrument has been delivering since it went into full operation back in 1993.

In fact, though, the Hubble is relatively puny. The mirror at its heart is just 7.9 ft. (2.4 m) across, which gives it only about one-seventeenth of the light-gathering power of the 33-ft. (10 m) twin Keck telescopes, atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The HST's big selling point is its super-sharp vision. Hubble orbits high above the Earth's atmosphere, a turbulent sea of constantly roiling air that makes the stars twinkle and blurs the vision of ground-based telescopes. A Keck in space would be the ideal solution — if it wouldn't be impossibly expensive to build, and if there were any way of wrestling such a gigantic piece of hardware into orbit.
But there's another way: a technology known as adaptive optics (AO) can de-blur the vision of a ground-based telescope — and astronomers at the 26-ish-foot (8-ish-meter) Gemini South telescope in Chile have debuted the most powerful AO system to date. According to astronomer Francois Rigaut, who led the team that built the new hardware, its images rival the Hubble's for sharpness, and in a press release, Matt Mountain, director of the Hubble's home base, the Space Telescope Science Institute, called the image quality "incredible."
Adaptive optics itself isn't a new concept, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable. The idea is to counteract distortions in the atmosphere by bouncing light off a mirror that puts an opposite distortion on what you're looking at, thus canceling out the original blur. It's as though you were looking at a funhouse mirror via an anti-funhouse mirror with exactly the opposite shape.
But things are actually trickier than that. Since shifting air pockets cause the atmospheric blur to change constantly, this "opposite distortion" has to change as well. So the mirror isn't rigid: it's thin, and backed by tiny adjusters that change its shape as conditions change, many times a second. The mirror knows what adjustments to make because a small telescope nearby is always watching a bright star in the bigger telescope's field of view: since a star should always look like a perfect pinpoint of light, any deviation from that perfection tells the AO system how the atmosphere is jiggling at that moment, and the deformable mirror adjusts instantly to counter it.
Unfortunately, you can't always count on finding a bright star in the direction you want to look, so AO designers now make their own: they shine a laser to bounce off sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere, creating an artificial guide star you can place pretty much anywhere.
That solves one of the problems with AO. The other is that the deformable mirror corrects only blurriness relatively close to the reference star (or laser point), since atmospheric turbulence is very localized. Rigaut's team solved this one by creating five different laser guide stars and using multiple deformable mirrors in a single AO system. It's kind of Rube Goldbergian in its complexity, but it works.
Impressive as AO technology is, this doesn't mean NASA should stop work on the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble's successor, which is slated to go into orbit in 2018. The new system sharpens only a small amount of Gemini's field of view, while JWST will have perfect vision across its entire 21-foot mirror. The Webb is also designed to work in infrared light, ideal for seeing the most distant galaxies and for spotting newborn planets around nearby stars. Infrared light doesn't get through the atmosphere very well, and no amount of de-blurring will change that.
Still, the notion of producing space-sharp images from the surface of the Earth is something astronomers could barely imagine back when the Hubble first went into orbit. And for those astronomers who have to wait patiently for their turn at the oversubscribed space telescope, it's a welcome alternative.

Cord-Cutting 101: ‘PlayLater’ Records Online TV Shows to Your Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:13:00 +0000

PlayLater is not new – it was announced back in September. But me getting a video demo of it in action while at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show is new, so it seems we’re at an impasse.
The concept of PlayLater is simple and smart, especially if you consume a lot of your TV and movies via online streaming sites such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and just about any other mainstream content provider . You choose a particular episode from, say, Hulu, and PlayLater records it as a video file to your computer that you can watch later. You can queue up multiple episodes from multiple providers, and they’ll get recorded one by one.

Is this legal? Apparently so. PlayLater isn’t pulling video files off of streaming sites; it’s literally making a recording of each one. It’s the same concept as your TiVo or cable DVR box at work here – complete with the ability to skip past any embedded commercials.
Aside from the ability to skip commercials, I see a few other advantages to this idea. For starters, the recorded videos can be played back offline, which is much faster than surfing to a particular site, finding the episode you want and waiting for it to buffer. Second, it corrals just about every video service you’d want to use in one place and lets you cherry pick content from each one instead of going to each individual site one by one. And finally, for services like Hulu that might only show the five most recent episodes of a particular show, this method lets you stockpile a bunch of them so you can watch them on your own time.
The service costs $5 per month, $40 per year or $80 for an unlimited-use license. The site is currently holding a sale, too – $20 per year or $50 for an unlimited license. The company also has a service called PlayOn, which lets you stream content from the same gaggle of popular websites directly to your smartphone and video game consoles.

It's an Apple-Google-Microsoft World — CES Just Lives In It

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:07:00 +0000

The Las Vegas Convention Center where CES is held every year. The show covers 1.6 million square feet of floor space.

I don’t buy the notion that the Consumer Electronics Show is dead or dying, if only because the Samsungs, Sonys and LGs of the world need a place where they can peacock on a grand stage — and Las Vegas is ideal.
But over my last three years of covering the show, I’ve realized these gadget makers can’t do much to make CES exciting. That responsibility falls to Apple, Google and Microsoft, regardless of whether or not they pay for a booth or deliver a keynote.

I should have figured this out at CES 2010. Around that time, speculation about an Apple tablet had reached unbearable levels, and nearly everyone expected it to be expensive. I figured at least a few reputable device makers would preempt Apple with their own tablet designs at CES, but instead they hung back, waiting to see how Apple would blow them away with the iPad a few weeks later. The couple of tablets I did see at the show were barely usable prototypes that never made it to market.
Come CES 2011, again I mistakenly thought this would be the year of the tablet. The iPad had enjoyed nine months of unrivaled success, so device makers should have come to the show with plenty of answers. Again, that wasn’t the case, because Google wasn’t ready. Honeycomb, the version of Android that would be optimized for tablets, was a couple months from launch, and only Motorola was allowed to show a tablet with an early, half-working version of the software installed. Some tablet makers demoed hardware without the proper tablet software, but most held off entirely. Another bust.
This year, there would be no excuses, right? The source code for Android Ice Cream Sandwich allows any company to put tablet-ready software on their own hardware, so I braced myself for a tablet glut. Once again, the scene was dead. Samsung didn’t announce any new devices beyond a couple that had already launched overseas. Same goes for Toshiba. Sony and Motorola didn’t bring any new tablets either. What happened? My best guess is that tablet makers, discouraged by slow sales of Android slates, are now waiting for Windows 8.

I’m not just talking about tablets, though. You could also see the shadows of Apple, Google and Microsoft on televisions, a CES mainstay. Samsung was dabbling in gesture and voice controls and LG added voice commands to one of its smart TV remotes — all nods to Kinect and perhaps to Apple’s Siri. Vizio joined those two companies in announcing new sets with Google TV integrated. But even these improvements smacked of the typical gadget maker’s compulsion: more features, more apps, more bells and whistles. What was sorely lacking was a vision to tie all those apps and features into one seamless experience. Maybe next year, when Google TV is more fleshed out and perhaps an Apple TV has provided more inspiration for competitors.
As for smartphones, the improvements at the show — better cameras, higher pixel counts and 4G LTE everywhere — were all too predictable. And the show’s most exciting phone, Nokia’s Lumia 900, was exciting primarily because of what it meant for Microsoft. Even the cool futuristic stuff I saw, such as Tobii’s eye-tracking technology, won’t amount to much unless it gets built into future operating systems.
All of this is a really long-winded way of saying software has become way more important for technology innovation than hardware, and the gadget makers of CES will forever be shackled by that notion. I’ll still enjoy going to the show — and I hope that playing with previously-unseen tech toys never gets old for me — but it’s no longer the best way to figure out where technology is headed. Apple, Google and Microsoft have their own industry events for that.
Of course, there’s a chance that next year, whatever the software makers are working on will align perfectly with CES, and the show will be an amazing display of technology’s future. But by now, I should know better.

Lunar Liquid: More Water than Ever Found on the Surface of the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:04:00 +0000

These images produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in the regions that lie in perpetual darkness. They show many permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs, are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths (top inset) and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight (bottom inset). The darker PSR regions are consistent with having large surface porosities — indicating "fluffy" soils — while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.

There are a whole lot of forbidding places in the solar system, but the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon have to be near the top of the list. Found in the northern and southern lunar poles, the PSRs are low-lying spots — often deep in the bowls of craters — that never receive so much as a breath of warmth or a flicker of light from the sun. As a result, they don't go through the same heating and cooling cycle as the rest of the moon, where temperatures soar to 200°F during lunar daylight and plunge to –200°F at night. Instead, the PSRs remain in an unending deep freeze.
That ought to make those areas unlikely places for astronauts ever to visit, much less settle — except for one little wrinkle: if there happened to be water ice nearly anywhere on the surface of the moon, it would boil away the instant it felt the solar fires; at the poles it would last forever. In 2010, scientists discovered that even at lower latitudes, the moon is not entirely dry, with faint traces of ice surviving beneath the surface, making lunar soil about twice as wet as the sands of the Sahara — which by moon standards is practically drenched. Now, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found that the PSRs indeed have a whole lot more water than that, with up to 2% of the surface in those blacked-out regions consisting of ice crystals.
Water ice was likely imported to the moon by incoming comets, a bombardment similar to the one that many astronomers believe helped fill the earth's oceans. Our planet's dense atmosphere and comparatively powerful gravity would have kept the water in place. The small, airless moon would have frittered most of its into space — except on the poles, that is.
To test that theory, the LRO trained its eye down on the dark polar regions, using an instrument appropriately named LAMP (the Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project). The LAMP system analyzes the spectrum of different species of hydrogen ions, a technique that is typically used to study the deep-space interstellar medium, but on the moon can reveal the presence of water molecules — which, after all, are two-thirds hydrogen. In this case, LAMP revealed extensive areas in the PSRs that showed up in one of two wavelengths: the dark ultraviolet and the deep infrared. The ultraviolet readings indicated soil regions that are more porous than other parts of the moon, giving them an unexpected fluffiness. "LAMP's technique supports a fairy castle–like arrangement of grains in the PSR soils," said senior research scientist Kert Retherford.
The fluffy regions, however, could not be wet, but there were plenty of other regions that glowed in the far infrared. This indicated water ice — and lots of it. Not only are the PSRs wetter than the soil on the rest of the lunar surface, they are also losing what water they do have at a much slower rate than thought. Even in a permanently dark region, a volatile substance like water would eventually degrade, but given the age of the moon and the quantity of ice found, the LRO scientists believe this is happening 16 times slower than earlier estimates suggested.
None of this makes the moon a wellspring, and it would have a long way to go before it became a remotely hospitable place. But a sine qua non for any lunar base would be a steady supply of water, and transporting even a little bit of it from earth would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive. Knowing that there would be a steady supply on hand for drinking, raising food in greenhouses and even manufacturing rocket fuel allows space planners to check at least one essential box long before we even consider a lunar journey. Now all we need is the will, the wallet and the technical know-how to check all the rest.

A Cosmic Illusion: How Gravitational Lensing Is Helping Scientists Redraw the Map of Space

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:02:00 +0000

The observations show that dark matter in the Universe is distributed as a network of gigantic dense (white) and empty (dark) regions, where the largest white regions are about the size of several Earth moons on the sky.

You can hardly accuse Albert Einstein of being short on imagination. The man who invented General Relativity and helped invent quantum theory probably had more creative thoughts in an hour than most folks have in a year. But one of Einstein's more intriguing scientific papers, which appeared in Science in 1936, wasn't really his idea in the first place. It came instead from a Czech electrical engineer named Rudi Mandl, who was intrigued by one of relativity's implications.
If massive objects bend light rays as relativity claims, Mandl asked, why couldn't a relatively nearby star act as a sort of cosmic lens, magnifying the image of a more distant one? That, after all, is how an ordinary glass lens works — bending incoming beams of light to sharpen, expand or otherwise manipulate what we see. Worn down by Mandl's relentless prodding, Einstein did the calculations and concluded that yes, stars indeed could operate that way — although he added that "there is no great chance of observing this phenomenon."
He was quite right about the first part of his conclusion — and quite wrong about the second. It was in the 1970s that gravitational lensing was first observed and confirmed by scientists, and in that time it has become one of astronomy's most powerful tools. Two major announcements this week reinforce that fact. In the first, astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, in Hawaii, released the largest map ever made of how dark matter is distributed through space. And in the second, a team using a network of smaller telescopes, presented evidence that the Milky Way is host to a minimum of 100 billion planets.
Different as they are, both discoveries rely on the cosmic optical illusion Mandl proposed and Einstein described, but it may the dark-matter map that illustrates the power of that illusion most dramatically. Astronomers have been convinced since the early 1980's that the cosmos is filled with some mysterious, invisible substance that outweighs the stars and gas clouds we can see by a factor of about six to one. This dark matter is probably everywhere, but tends to be especially thick in clusters of galaxies. We know that because galaxies whirl around each other so fast that they'd fly off into space without the extra gravity dark matter provides.
So much invisible matter in so defined a space ought to produce a lot of lensing — and it does, with galactic clusters in the foreground of a visual field dramatically distorting the images of galaxies in the background, not magnifying them so much as stretching them into elongated shapes. For just a single background galaxy, the elongation can be subtle, but when astronomers look at a lot of them together, the collective distortion can be revealing, providing a way to calculate backward to figure out what distribution of dark matter it took to produce the image in the first place. It's a little like looking at your own distorted face in a funhouse mirror and inferring what the mirror's shape must be.
What the scientists found when they used this technique on background clusters was that dark matter is spread through the cosmos like an immense spider web, with clumps and filaments interspersed with largely empty expanses of space. It's not the first dark-matter map to show such a structure, but it spans more than a billion light-years, which makes it far larger than any of its predecessors. This does more than give us a macro look at the dark-matter landscape; it also helps strengthen a more-micro theory about just what the stuff is made of. If dark matter is some sort of yet-undiscovered elementary particle, as astrophysicists believe, computer simulations suggest it should be distributed just this way.
The other discovery, which appears in the current edition of Nature, is more in keeping with Einstein's original concept, with individual stars rather than vast galactic clusters serving as gravitational lenses. As Einstein explained it — and as later scientists confirmed — every so often, a distant star drifts just behind a relatively nearby one, causing the faint light of the background one to be magnified. If the nearby star has a planet in tow, that much smaller body can act as a little lens of its own, making the background star brighten too, albeit less dramatically. This so-called microlensing will occur either before or after the main lensing event, depending on whether the planet leads or trails its parent star.
It's very rare for two stars to line up so precisely (that's why Einstein thought lensing would never be observed; he didn't count on powerful modern telescopes that can see very faint stars). It's even rarer for the foreground star to be orbited by a planet that is positioned just the right way to make the microlensing visible. For that reason, astronomers who search for these events have to watch millions of stars at a time. Even then, a half-decade's worth of watching by two separate groups picked up just three planets, according to the Nature paper.
But when you factor in the odds against seeing anything at all, that turns out to be an impressively number — so large, in fact, that it suggests that every star in the galaxy, on average, has at least one planet. That's 100 billion planets, give or take. Even more significant, say the scientists, there are more small planets than big ones, which means the search for a twin of Earth is almost guaranteed to succeed.
Einstein died long before gravitational lensing became such a powerful astronomical tool, so it's hard to know what he might say about it now. Back then, he was clearly a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. He wrote a private note to the editor of Science, thanking him, "for your cooperation with the little publication, which Mister Mandl squeezed out of me. It is of little value," the great man continued, "but makes the poor guy happy."

The 12 Coolest Things We Saw at the Consumer Electronics Show

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:58:00 +0000

Samsung Galaxy Note

Why it’s cool: At 5.3 inches, it’s either a huge Android phone or a pocketable Android tablet, yet it’s only about as thick as the iPhone. Aside from its size, the Galaxy Note stands out by attempting to resurrect the ill-fated stylus. This one’s much more than a simple plastic stick, though: Its pen strokes are detailed enough for complex sketches.

As Project Runway winner Anya Ayoung-Chee told me, “I love it. If I had this, I really would be able to use it for all of my sketching.”

Notable specs: 1280×800-resolution screen; 4G LTE connection; corporate security features.

Availability: “In the coming weeks” from AT&T; pricing hasn’t been disclosed.

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook

Why it’s cool: Dell has put together a thoughtful design with the XPS 13. It’s got an aluminum lid and a carbon fiber underbelly, and the 13.3-inch screen’s surrounding bezel is so narrow that the computer travels like an 11-incher. Dell’s promising close to nine hours of battery life, too.

Notable specs: Weighs 2.98 pounds; measures 3/4 of an inch thick.

Availability: Late February, starting at $999.

Toshiba Excite X10

Why it’s cool: Toshiba’s latest tablet is so thin and so light it plays tricks on the mind, yet this Android slate still includes a bevy of ports for hooking it up to a TV, connecting peripherals and expanding its memory.

Notable specs: Weighs 1.18 pounds; measures 0.3 inches thick.

Availability: February, starting at $529.

Intel Smartphone Reference Design
Why it’s cool: Intel’s betting big on smartphones, announcing a multi-year partnership with Motorola and rolling out an Intel-designed Android handset that its partners can toy around with as they work on their own designs. More players in the smartphone market hopefully means more competition, better selection and better prices.

Availability: We’ll see Intel-powered Motorola smartphones in the second half of the year. Expect pricing to be in line with other smartphones.

Samsung Series 9 Notebook

Samsung
Why it’s cool: The 13.3-inch, second-generation Series 9 barely tips the scales at 2.5 pounds and measures just a half-inch thick. Stepping up to the 15-inch model only adds an extra pound, which is still insanely light for a 15-inch notebook. Both models feature 1600×900-resolution screens; a huge upgrade over the 1366×768 screens found in last year’s line.
Notable specs: Weighs 2.5 pounds (13-inch version); measures half an inch thick; 1600×900 screen.
Availability: February, starting at $1399.

Nokia Lumia 900
Why it’s cool: Nokia’s first 4G LTE Windows Phone handset has a big screen and bigger ambitions. The polycarbonate handset gives it a premium touch, signaling the beleaguered mobile maker’s attempts to win back the hearts of U.S. cellphone users. If you’re 30 or older, wasn’t your first phone a Nokia?
Notable specs: 4.3-inch screen; 4G LTE compatibility; Windows Phone 7.5 software; carved from a single block of polycarbonate.
Availability: ”In the coming months,” says AT&T. No word on pricing.

Eye-Controlled Computing
Why it’s cool: Forget the mouse, just look directly at whatever you want to manipulate on your screen. That’s the promise of Tobii’s eye-tracking technology. It won’t be affordable enough as a consumer product for a couple years but once it’s here, we may wonder how we ever lived without it. Try looking at something on your screen and then move your mouse cursor to the same spot. See how much faster your eyes move?
Availability: Medical use in about a year, consumer use about a year after that

Motorola Droid Razr MAXX
Why it’s cool: Fast though they may be, the next-generation mobile data speeds afforded by new 4G LTE networks can sap a phone’s battery before your lunch has had a chance to digest. Motorola’s feat with the Droid Razr MAXX:? An enormous battery that’s been promised to clear 20 hours of talk time in a form factor no thicker than just about any other smartphone on the market.
Notable specs: 4.3-inch 960×540 display; 3,300 mAh battery rated at 21 hours of talk time; Android; 4G LTE compatibility; measures 0.35 inches thick.
Availability: ”In the coming weeks,” says Verizon, for $299 with a two-year contract.

Windows 8 Tablet/Laptop Hybrids

Doug Aamoth / TIME
Why they’re cool: Microsoft’s going big on touch with Windows 8, but many users will still want to be able to fall back on a traditional keyboard and mouse experience. Several companies showed off prototypes that attempt to address both needs, in the form of standard-looking laptops featuring detachable screens that transform into Windows 8 tablets for finger-friendly use.
Availability: Likely by the end of the year, shortly after Windows 8 ships.

OnLive Desktop

OnLive
Why it’s cool: Most well-known for its cloud gaming service, OnLive rolled out a pretty ambitious product for Windows users looking to get a little work done. The company’s new OnLive Desktop iPad app grants you access to a version of Windows and, most importantly, Microsoft Office apps that run from OnLive’s servers directly to your tablet. Oh, and it’s free.
Availability: Now; there’s a paid version with extra features available for $10 per month, too.

3D Body-Mapping
Why it’s cool: Bodymetrics leverages the same technology used in Microsoft’s Kinect camera to create a 3D model of your body that mirrors your every move. Drop that 3D version of yourself into your favorite online clothing store and before you know it, you’re virtually trying on outfits. The camera’s sensors even relay where certain garments are fitting too tightly or loosely so you’ll know if you need to go up or down a size.
Availability: This summer in certain U.S. retail stores, though partners haven’t been disclosed yet. Home versions should come along “in the near future.

Asus MeMo Tablet

Why it’s cool: It’s a 7-inch Android tablet that somehow delivers several cool features without an astronomical price tag. There’s an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core (yes, four cores) processor, 1280×800 display resolution, the newest version of Android, 16-gigabytes of storage, and an 8-megapixel camera. All that for just $250.
Availability: Second quarter, priced at $250.

Apple Threatens Maker of Steve Jobs Action Figure with Lawsuit

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Well, this isn’t much of a surprise. According to The Telegraph, Apple is threatening to sue In Icons, the Chinese company responsible for the world’s most eerily realistic Steve Jobs action figure.
The 12-inch doll is slated to be released in February. For $99, you get a black turtle-necked Steve Jobs complete with red apple props, product launch backdrop and optional to-scale iPad.

This, like M.I.C. Gadget’s Steve Jobs bobble head before it, did not please the suits in Cupertino:

Apple reportedly stipulates in a letter to the Chinese manufacturer that any toy that resembles the technology company’s logo, person’s name, appearance or likeness of its products is a criminal offence.

The In Icons website is still up and accepting orders and the doll is still available on eBay. It’s obvious that this isn’t something that will last, so if you’re desperate for a waxen Steve Jobs likeness that will creep out your neighbors and haunt your dreams, the time to act is now.

Updates from Beyond the Grave: App Lets You Leave Last Words on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:51:00 +0000

When I die, preferably by crashing a motorcycle into the sun while wailing on a guitar, I hope that my last Facebook status update isn’t something like “Wow, crazy vid of dude getting hit in the crotch lololol!” That’s where If I Die comes in.
The “digital afterlife Facebook application” lets you share a message with your friends in the event of your untimely demise.

Here’s how it works: First you choose three trustees who are responsible for confirming that you’ve officially bit the big one. Next, you record a farewell video or compose a message bidding your friends adieu. Then, you die.
According to Mashable, the app is expected to hit 100,000 users within a couple of months. Messages and videos posted to the public are free, and founder Eran Alfonta is working on a subscription model for sending discrete messages out to specific people.
All joking aside, this makes a lot of sense. Facebook profiles already serve as virtual memorials when people die; you might as well give the deceased the last word.
The whole process is so simple, there really isn’t much of a reason not to do it, especially with the cold hand of Death ever at your shoulder, waiting patiently to drag you into the abyss. Have a nice weekend!

Yup, the iPad 4 Rumors Have Begun

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:50:00 +0000

iPad 3 rumors? Old and boring. The rumor mill is already moving on to talk of the iPad 4, which is apparently coming this October, six months after the supposed launch of its predecessor.
The source of this rumor, as expected, is DigiTimes, which reports that the iPad 4 will have “much upgraded hardware specifications and integrated applications” to better compete with Android and Windows 8 tablets.

But let’s back up for a moment. Keep in mind that DigiTimes sometimes debunks its own rumors. A week ago, the site reported that Apple was making a 7.85-inch iPad to combat Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and then shortly after that, reported those rumors were false. And now, DigiTimes is saying Apple will cut the price of the iPad 2 to $399 when the iPad 3 launches, days after the site conjectured that the iPad 2 may sell for $299. DigiTimes rumors are not so much facts as educated guesses that become more accurate with time.
With that in mind, I have my doubts that Apple would release a fourth iPad so close to the iPad 3. To justify it, Apple would need a major selling point, and I don’t think simple spec boosts — like a faster processor — would cut it. As for “integrated applications,” I’m reminded of a report from last year that Apple would launch an “iPad HD” with apps for creative professionals, such as Final Cut or Aperture. The rumor didn’t pan out then, and it doesn’t seem much more plausible to launch a niche device now, when the iPad has mass market appeal.
It’s fun to observe Apple rumor madness, but I wouldn’t take this one too seriously.

SOPA: What if Google, Facebook and Twitter Went Offline in Protest?

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:46:00 +0000

Can you imagine a world without Google or Facebook? If plans to protest the potential passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) come to fruition, you won’t need to; those sites, along with many other well-known online destinations, will go temporarily offline as a taste of what we could expect from a post-SOPA Internet.
Companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are said to be discussing a coordinated blackout of services to demonstrate the potential effect SOPA would have on the Internet, something already being called a “nuclear option” of protesting. The rumors surrounding the potential blackout were only strengthened by Markham Erickson, executive director of trade association NetCoalition, who told FoxNews that “a number of companies have had discussions about [blacking out services]” last week.
According to Erickson, the companies are well aware of how serious an act such a blackout would be:

This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.

The idea of an Internet blackout should seem familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the debate so far. In addition to a blackout already carried out by Mozilla, hacking group Anonymous proposed the same thing a couple of weeks ago, suggesting that sites replace their front pages with a statement protesting SOPA. That suggestion itself came a week after Jimmy Wales had asked Wikipedia users about the possibility of blacking out that site in protest of the bill.

As a way of drawing attention to the topic, it’s something that will definitely work. Just Google alone going dark would cause havoc online, but the idea of it happening at the same time as Facebook, Twitter et al. follow suit seems almost unimaginable.
The question then becomes how to translate the inevitable confusion and outrage from those who don’t know what SOPA is into activism. The key, I assume, lies in the execution of the blackout: Will the sites that voluntarily go down be entirely unavailable or will they follow the Anonymous-proposed model of replacing the front page with a statement explaining what is going on, why and how users can best become involved in the discussion? If the sites do go entirely dark, is the hope that the resulting outrage will be enough to fuel news stories about the reason behind the decision? And that users will not transfer their frustration to the sites themselves, as opposed to the bill they’re protesting?
The fact that Facebook and Twitter are both said to be considering taking part in the blackout is simultaneously heartening and worrying. The former because, well, they’re standing up for what they collectively believe in — and that’s a good thing. But the latter because the lack of availability for social media on the proposed blackout day feels like it’s giving up the best chance to harness the frustration and energy people will feel about the temporary loss of the Internet as they know it, and a great possibility to focus and direct that energy into productive activism against SOPA. Then again, it may take losing Facebook and Twitter to really drive home how dramatically SOPA could affect the Internet.
All of this may come to nothing, of course. The companies may decide not to black out their sites and find other ways to protest SOPA. That could be for the best; collectively closing down the most trafficked sites on the Internet to prove a point will certainly garner a lot of attention, but the effects it’ll have beyond that (and the reactions it’ll cause as a result) are difficult to predict and could easily end up causing a backlash against the sites responsible at a time when they least want it. But still … just try to imagine an Internet without Google, Facebook or Yahoo. Even for a day. Almost makes you want it to happen, just to make people realize how reliant we are on the Internet as we know it now, doesn’t it?

The Reason for Recess: Active Children May Do Better in School

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:45:00 +0000

First Lady Michelle Obama is constantly promoting her "let's move" message to Americans, and she may be onto something. Physical activity does the body good, and there's growing evidence that it helps the brain too.
Researchers in the Netherlands report that children who get more exercise, whether at school or on their own, tend to have higher GPAs and better scores on standardized tests. In a review of 14 studies that looked at physical activity and academic performance, investigators found that the more children moved, the better their grades were in school, particularly in the basic subjects of math, English and reading.
The data support earlier research that linked exercise with greater productivity and fewer sick days among adults and will certainly fuel the ongoing debate over whether physical-education classes should be cut as schools struggle to survive on smaller budgets. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, students need about one hour of physical activity every day to remain healthy; only 18% of high school students met this requirement in the week before a 2009 survey, and 23% had not exercised at all during that period.
Ironically, the arguments against P.E. have included concerns that gym time may be taking away from study time. With standardized test scores in the U.S. dropping in recent years, some administrators believe students need to spend more time in the classroom instead of on the playground. But as these findings show, exercise and academics may not be mutually exclusive. Physical activity can improve blood flow to the brain, fueling memory, attention and creativity, which are essential to learning. And exercise releases hormones that can improve mood and suppress stress, which can also help learning. So while it may seem as if kids are just exercising their bodies when they're running around, they may actually be exercising their brains as well.

RTBot?

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:08:00 +0000

URL - http://www.rtbot.net

What is RTBot?

RTBot is a Real-time information service, where you can enter a topic title and instantly get related digital contents from multiple sources (e.g. Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Books, Newspapers, Magazines) all at once.
RTBot aims to be a global top reference site, enriching the way people research, explore, learn, discover and monitor their topics of interest
RTBot which can also be called as a Real Time Bot is a web application structured thematically around topics, like in an encyclopedia, enhanced with a set of features and interactive functions. It integrates contents loaded from different online sources under one single interface, providing a wide spectrum of digital contents and up-to-the-minute data. For every valid topic, RTBot presents a list of modules with content loaded in real-time from multiple web services, categorized by media type or data source. By jumping modules, you'll find fresh data and digital media from Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Books, Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Social Answers and additional online resources

Why use RTBot?

RTBot aims to simplify the access to information and content stored in different sites, reducing the time it takes to find relevant and fresh information on the internet.

Access the freshest information and multimedia content about almost any subject, person, place or event in one single place.
Complete research tasks quickly and easily.
Get a multi-perspective vision and real-time context for every topic.
Eliminate the need to visit different online resurces separately.
Obtain new information each day - even if you are looking at the same article.
Visualize multimedia and social-media content related to every topic.
Embrace a didactic, intuitive, holistic approach to learning.
Discover new, relevant content about your favorite topics and interests.
RTBot offers a fun and engaging learning experience.
Topics research is moving from being "stateless" to being very much in the here and now

RTBot provides content only for specific topics such as concepts, subjects, personalities, events, places, companies, products, etc., but not for broader, unspecific searches.

Can a Planet Survive the Death of Its Sun? Scientists Find Two That Did

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:46:00 +0000

An artist's rendition of two hot Earth-size planets orbiting a subdwarf-B star

Natalie Batalha has had plenty of experience fielding questions from both layfolk and other scientists over the past couple of years — and with good reason. Batalha is the deputy principal investigator for the spectacularly successful Kepler space telescope, which has found evidence of more than 2,000 planets orbiting distant stars so far — including, just last week, a world almost exactly the size of Earth and another the size of Venus.
But Kepler is giving astronomers all sorts of new information about stars as well, and that's what a European TV correspondent wanted to know about during an interview last year. Was it true, she asked, that stars like the sun will eventually swell up and destroy their planets? It's a common question, and Batalha recited the familiar answer, one that's been in astronomy textbooks for at least half a century: Yes, it's true. Five or six billion years from now, Earth will be burnt to a cinder. This old news was apparently quite new to the European correspondent, because when she reported her terrifying scoop, she added a soupçon of conspiracy theory to it: NASA, she suggested, was trying to downplay, and maybe even suppress, the story.
It was not a proud moment for science journalism, but unexpectedly, at about the same time the European correspondent was reporting her nonbulletin, Kepler scientists did discover a whole new wrinkle to the planet-eating-star scenario: it's apparently possible for planets to be swallowed up by their suns and live to tell the tale. According to a paper just published in Nature, the Kepler probe has taken a closer look at a star called KOI 55 and identified it as a "B subdwarf," the red-hot corpse of a sunlike star, one that already went through its deadly expansion. Around it, whirling in orbits so tight they last only about 5 and 8 hours, respectively, are two planets, both a bit smaller than Earth — and both so close to their home star that even the tiniest solar expansion ought to have consumed them whole. And yet they seem, writes University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Eliza Kempton in a Nature commentary, "to be alive and well. Which begs the question, how did they survive?"
How indeed? A star like the sun is powered by nuclear fusion, in which hydrogen is converted to helium and releases massive amounts of energy in the process. It takes about 10 billion years to use up the hydrogen supply, which means that the sun, which is 5 billion years old, is running on a half-empty fuel tank. Once the hydrogen is gone, the star cools from white hot to red hot and swells dramatically: in the case of our solar system, the sun's outer layers will reach all the way to Earth. Eventually, those outer layers will waft away to form what's called a planetary nebula while the core shrinks back into an object just like KOI 55.
If a planet like Earth spent a billion years simmering in the outer layers of a star — a plausible time span, given what astronomers know of stellar evolution — it would, says University of Arizona astronomer Betsy Green, a co-author of the Nature paper, in a press release, "just evaporate. Only planets with masses very much larger than the Earth, like Jupiter or Saturn, could possibly survive."
And yet these two worlds, known as KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02, lived through the ordeal anyway. The key to this seeming impossibility, suggest the astronomers, is that the planets may have begun life as gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, with rocky cores surrounded by vast, crushing atmospheres. As the star expanded, the gas giants would have spiraled inward until they dipped into the stellar surface itself. The plunge would have been enough to strip off their atmospheres, but their rocky interiors could have survived — leaving, eventually, the bleak tableau of the naked cores of two planets orbiting the naked core of an elderly star.
What makes this discovery doubly surprising is that the astronomers who made it weren't looking for planets in the first place: they were trying to get a handle on the final stages of stellar evolution — specifically, on the pulsations old stars go through in their extended death throes. KOI 55 was pulsing, all right, in much the way theorists have described, and that provided the clues that led to the discovery of the star's dry-roasted offspring.
Superimposed on the days-long pulsations, the astronomers discovered, were changes in brightness that came at periods of just hours. Unlike the worlds Kepler normally finds, these changes weren't found to be the result of the planets passing in front of the star and dimming some of its light. They occurred instead because the planets go through phases like the moon — fully illuminated when they're on the far side of the star, nearly dark when they're on the near side.
That nifty bit of cosmic deduction was exciting for astronomers, but it offers little reassurance for those fretting about how we'll fare when our own sun bloats out to Earth-frying size. Waiting for Jupiter to spiral in and lose its atmosphere, then hopping on over, doesn't really feel like a workable solution. But — note to that European TV reporter — never fear. Given that we have 5 billion years to figure things out, it might be a little premature to panic.

Designer Behind Apple’s Products Knighted in U.K.

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:44:00 +0000

Apple

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Fans of the clean, inviting look of the iPhone, iPad and other blockbuster Apple products are legion, and that includes Queen Elizabeth II.
The British monarch has awarded a knighthood to Jonathan Paul Ive, a Brit and head of Apple Inc.’s design team since the mid-’90s.

Ive received a KBE, short for Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The honor was announced Saturday for services to design and enterprise.
“To be recognized with this honor is absolutely thrilling and I am both humbled and sincerely grateful,” Ive said in a statement. “I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design. I feel enormously fortunate that I continue to be able to design and make products with a truly remarkable group of people here at Apple.”
Ive is credited with helping the late Steve Jobs bring the consumer-electronics company back from the brink of financial ruin in the late 1990s with his whimsical design for the iMac computer, which originally came in bright colors at a time bland shades dominated the PC world.
He later helped transform Apple into a consumer-electronics powerhouse and the envy of Silicon Valley with the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

The knighthood is the second royal honor Ive has received. He was awarded a Commander of the British Empire honor in 2006 for achievements in British design and innovation.
Britain’s honors are bestowed twice a year by the monarch – at New Year’s and on her official birthday in June. Recipients are selected by committees of civil servants from nominations made by the government and the public.
Most of the honors go to people who are not in the limelight, for services to community or industry, but they also reward a sprinkling of famous faces.
Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter and music producer Steve Lillywhite were among those included with Ive in the queen’s New Year honors list for 2012.
Ive started out far from Apple Inc.’s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple.
In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, Ive was hired as a senior designer.
After Jobs returned, he and Ive worked closely, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.
Apple’s pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, “Designed by Apple in California.” Six of Ive’s works, including the original iPod, are part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Design, as well as software that makes the gadgets easy to use, is a crucial part of setting Apple products apart from those of its rivals. Apple didn’t make the first music player or smartphone, but it dominated the market by making ones that looked cool and worked well.
Now, Apple’s products are more popular than ever, vaulting it past rival Microsoft Corp. in 2010 as the most valuable technology company in the world.

Looking Forward to 2012: Credible iPad Threats

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:42:00 +0000

Jared Newman

The iPad is a great tablet, but you know what’s even better? Competition. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of that in 2011, as Apple’s rivals rushed out clunky, expensive tablets based on Android Honeycomb, which itself was buggy and short on proper tablet apps. Next year will be better — I hope.
The Amazon Factor
Android tablet makers had three big problems in 2011: their hardware wasn’t cheap enough, the software wasn’t polished enough, and there weren’t enough apps compared with the iPad. Amazon tried to fix these flaws with the Kindle Fire, a 7-in. (18 cm) tablet that costs $199 and runs a heavily modified version of Android. The interface is easy to understand, and because of the small screen size, Amazon could get away with offering Android smart-phone apps slightly blown up to fit the larger display.

You might argue that Amazon’s Kindle Fire is already providing serious competition to the iPad, but as a smaller tablet at a much lower price, the Fire caters to a different market than the iPad does. Amazon’s tablet is a cheap content-consumption device, whereas the iPad is primarily a way to enjoy big-screen tablet apps. These two tablets can thrive independently.
That’s not to say Amazon won’t go after the iPad in 2012. Rumor has it that Amazon is working on new Kindle Fires with 8.9-in. (22.6 cm) and 10.1-in. (25.7 cm) displays, DigiTimes has reported. If true, these tablets would likely undercut the iPad on pricing and would use the same simple interface as the original Kindle Fire. And because the original Kindle Fire is a hit, a larger Amazon tablet would likely draw interest from developers, who would finally start tailoring their Android apps to bigger screens.
Taking this speculation a bit further, a larger Kindle Fire could have a ripple effect on other tablets. Apps developed for Amazon’s tablets could also be made available through the Android Market, alleviating the app shortages of other Android tablets. But those rival tabletmakers would have to slash prices to compete with Amazon. Apple, meanwhile, may decide to keep selling earlier iPads at lower prices, as it does now with the iPhone. Consumers who have no interest in the Kindle Fire may still benefit from Amazon’s making larger tablets, simply because of how other companies respond.

After two years of staying out of the tablet wars, Microsoft will roll the dice in 2012 with Windows 8. The operating system will sport some radical changes, including an interface designed for touchscreens and an app store for tablet software.
What makes Windows 8 intriguing is that — depending on what type of processor is inside — it’ll still support the classic Windows desktop and legacy software. And because Windows is at the core, all devices will support external mice and keyboards, complete with helpful shortcuts like copy and paste. This opens the possibility of having a single device that can act like a tablet, a laptop or a desktop as users attach keyboards, mice and external monitors. That’s one way to answer the all-important question: Why should someone buy this instead of an iPad?
The first tablets based on Windows 8 are expected in the second half of next year. Because millions of people will get Windows 8 as they upgrade to new PCs, Microsoft’s mission is simple: slow the iPad’s ascent by selling people on Windows machines with touchscreens.
Despite these threats, the iPad isn’t in any serious trouble next year. It remains the gold standard for tablets, and most competitors won’t have a chance. But at least 2012 will bring products with clear strategies for competing with Apple. That’s enough to make me optimistic.

Toshiba’s Thrive 7: Still Searching for the Perfect 7-inch Tablet

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:39:00 +0000

Toshiba

Toshiba's Thrive 7 tablet

Almost two years after it was announced, Apple’s iPad remains the very definition of a category-defining product. Every other tablet that’s arrived since — and there have been bajillions of ‘em — must start by trying to answer a basic question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Rising to that challenge has proven unexpectedly tricky, which is why nearly every tablet that isn’t an iPad has turned out to be an also-ran.
Two reasons you might buy a non-Apple tablet are reasonably straightforward, however: You might prefer one that’s smaller and cheaper. Those factors help explain the relative success of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet, two 7-inch models that are $300 and $250 cheaper, respectively, than the iPad.
They also come into play with Toshiba’s new tablet, the Thrive 7. Unlike the Fire and Nook, this Android device hasn’t been stripped down to hit a low price point. In fact, it features many of the same features and components as Toshiba’s first tablet, the 10.1-inch Thrive. It also starts at the same price as the earlier model: $380, or $119 less than the lowest-cost iPad. (That’s for a unit with 16GB of storage space — a 32GB version is $430.)

Using the Thrive, I got the same twinge of good news/bad news I’ve experienced with 7-inch tablets dating back to Samsung’s original Galaxy Tab. The small size makes for a distinctly different, more portable device than the 9.7-inch iPad. In portrait orientation, it feels like a paperback book; in landscape mode, you can still cradle it in your fingers and type with your thumbs. It can slip into a coat pocket or a purse, making it easier to tote than the definitely-not-pocketable iPad.
But both hardware and software issues keep the Thrive, like its 7-inch predecessors, from providing iPad-like overall excellence in a more compact form. I’m as convinced as ever that this is a legitimate size for a tablet — and I’m still looking for the first one that nails it.
As with Toshiba’s first tablet, this one has less of an iPad-wannabe feel to it than some of Apple’s rivals. Instead, Toshiba seems to have set out to translate what it knows about building laptops into tablet form. The 13.2-oz. Thrive 7 is a tad chunky and unapologetically plasticky, but it includes some PC-like features that the iPad 2 lacks: a Mini USB port for attaching peripherals, a Micro HDMI connector for hooking up a TV and a MicroSD slot that lets you expand its storage capacity.
(Outside of the U.S., incidentally, Toshiba sells a 10.1-inch tablet that goes head-to-head with the iPad 2 in terms of raw sex appeal, but the company hasn’t announced plans to bring it to this country.)
The single best thing about the Thrive 7 is its screen. Toshiba essentially took the display on the 10-inch model and squooshed it down, retaining the 1280-by-800 resolution of the original. That gives the Thrive a strikingly high pixel density for a 7-inch tablet: 66% more pixels than the Kindle Fire and Nook, and 25% more than the iPad 2. Movies from Netflix, which comes preinstalled, looked sharp and beautiful — especially once I’d cranked up the brightness a tad beyond its default setting — and Kindle books sported crisper typography than they did on the Kindle Fire.

Unlike many tablets, the Thrive lacks IPS technology, which permits a wider-than-normal viewing angle. I didn’t find this to be a problem, though.
Beyond the nice display, the Thrive’s hardware is a mixed bag. I liked the 2-megapixel front-facing camera, which let me make video calls on Skype with a minimum of fuss. The 5-megapixel camera on the backside, however, took an eternity to focus even in decent light, making it tough to take photos that didn’t come out fuzzy. The Thrive suffers from the fundamental conundrum that hobbles almost all tablet cameras: Manufacturers think they need to include them to be competitive, but they don’t care enough to make them really good. (Of course, if you have a phone with a respectable camera, you might not care.)
Battery performance seems to be a weak spot, too. I didn’t perform formal testing. But battery tests by Engadget, PCMag.com and The Verge show the Thrive 7 running for 4 hours and 42 minutes, 3 hours and 50 minutes and 3 hours and 51 minutes, respectively. None of those figures are impressive compared to other 7-inchers, and all fall far short of Toshiba’s claim of “up to” nine hours.
Then there’s software: The Thrive runs Google’s Android 3.2.1, also known as Honeycomb. Toshiba, unlike many of its tablet-making peers, has resisted the temptation to futz much with the operating system. For the most part, it’s Android as Google intended it, without “improvements” that add bloat and confusion. That’s a good thing.

Even full-strength Honeycomb has its downsides. Despite the Thrive’s robust tech specs — it has a speedy dual-core processor and a theoretically roomy 1GB of RAM — Android was occasionally pokey, failing to immediately respond to my taps. Like nearly every Android device I’ve ever used, it crashed within about 10 minutes of the time I turned it on for the first time, displaying an unhelpful error message. And while there are hundreds of thousands of Android apps, very few are tailored for tablets; most are designed for phones, and expand to fill the Thrive’s roomier display with varying degrees of success. Apple’s iOS 5 remains far slicker, with a vastly better selection of tablet-friendly software.
Google’s new version of Android, version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, is much more polished and pleasing than Honeycomb. It hasn’t arrived on any major tablets yet, and Toshiba isn’t saying when — or even if — it’ll arrive as an upgrade for its tablet. When and if it does, it could make the Thrive meaningfully better all by itself. But with Android updates, it’s dangerous to assume anything.
For now, the Thrive is worth a look, if you have your heart set on a 7-inch tablet and want one which offers the unrestricted access to the Android Market that the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet lack. If you’ve been waiting for the definitive 7-inch tablet, though, this isn’t it, and neither is anything else. Shall we try for 2012?

MySpace Returns with Facebook-Integrated Music Player

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:17:00 +0000

Not content to remain in the history books as the social network that people flocked to between Friendster and Facebook, MySpace has apparently decided to become the new Spotify with the release of its first major product since they were purchased by Specific Media: a music player with built-in search engine and Facebook integration.
To be fair, MySpace makes some sense as a player in the online music business–at least as much sense as it does being a social network, these days. The site has around 42 million songs in total, with an exclusive library of around 30 million songs from unsigned artists. While the site’s traffic has more than halved in the past 12 months–from 54.3 million unique monthly visitors in November 2010 to 24.9 million last month–partnering with Facebook would give MySpace (and its users) a much larger audience to perform for.

MySpace COO Chris Vanderhook agrees, calling it “a natural partnership,” and adding that “Because of the users they have and the integrations with Spotify, Mog and Rdio, it makes sense to open up our catalog to their users.” The new music player–free to users, being ad-supported (although users won’t hear audio ads midstream)–is just the start of a full-on relaunch for MySpace, which Vanderhook promises should appear sometime in 2012, although he’s understandably cagey on details: “We’re gonna build great product and we’re gonna put it out when it’s ready. I think under previous leadership they put out a timeline and put out whatever product they had. We haven’t said, ‘This has to be out by this date’.”
Will this be enough to rescue MySpace from being a footnote in digital history books? It’s unclear, but Vanderhook’s enthusiasm is oddly infectious, and it’s not the most unlikely resurrection imaginable. Maybe 2012 will be the Second Year of MySpace, after all.

Looking Forward to 2012: The Continued Demise of Cash How mobile payments, NFC and person-to-person apps will change the way that people pay each other in the coming year.

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Jin Lee / Getty Images

Okay, so cash isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, but 2012 looks to be a pivotal year in the transition towards a world where we have options besides just cash and credit.
What’s wrong with the way things are? Let’s start with cash. It’s dirty, it costs a lot to withdraw from the ATM, nobody will reimburse you if it’s stolen, not to mention that walking around with a bulging wallet seems strangely anachronistic in a world where super-slim smartphones do everything from recording video to telling you where your friends are eating dinner.

Credit cards might be convenient for consumers but they aren’t always great for businesses. That’s because each time you swipe your Visa or Mastercard, the merchant has to pay an interchange fee ranging between 1% to 2% of every transaction. That’s no big deal for large retailers such as Best Buy and Target, but it can cut into the already slim profit margins of small businesses.
Even if you are willing to fork over a percentage of each sale, the rise of tiny DIY businesses — from Etsy shops to foodies selling homemade pickles at farmer’s markets — demands that bulky credit card readers and old-school shopping cart applications become things of the past.
So, what’s going to happen in 2012?
As Google Wallet becomes more common, expect people to lose their fear of paying for products via smartphones. The biggest obstacle here isn’t technology, it’s competing financial interests, as carriers and banks fight for their cuts while merchants, as usual, feel the pinch. It would be nice to see the product extended to more banks and credit unions instead of just a handful of financial institutions, but hey, you have to start somewhere.
If anything, it’s companies’ eagerness for a piece of of the mobile payments pie that’s keeping NFC (near field communication) technology from really taking off, as evidenced by Google and Verizon’s spat over putting Google Wallet on the new Galaxy Nexus. Yes, it’s a painful delay, but it also legitimizes the entire market — giant corporations don’t fight tooth and nail over something that they don’t think is going to be profitable.

Even more encouraging is the rise of products like Square and Intuit, which lets merchants run credit cards through their smartphones. The old 9-to-5 employment model where you get a gold watch after 40 years is dead. More people than ever are working as independent contractors, which means more people need easy ways to get paid.
Take this example: I was at a party where I met a guy wearing a witty, meat-themed T-shirt, which I expressed interest in purchasing. It just so happened he had a bag full of them — I just needed to go to an ATM to get cash. Needless to say, I opted to stay at the party rather than search the streets for an ATM, meaning he lost a sale.
In the future, this won’t be a problem. Every person who makes artisanal jams or funky clothing in their basement will have a way to accept payments no matter where they are or how big their operation is.
Another area where we can expect to see big changes? Person-to-person payments. This year saw a huge jump in products that let you transfer money from one bank account to another.

After using Chase’s QuickPay to pay rent, the idea of writing and ripping out a check seems woefully outdated. Other banks are also jumping on the person-to-person payment trend, meaning by the end of 2012 you may never have to write a check again.
In 2011, PayPal broke out several intriguing new products, including a Facebook payment app and NFC Android-to-Android payments, all of which don’t bode well for the future of cash and checks. In certain tech-savvy social circles, I’m sure there are people who barely even touch a credit card, let alone cash.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve read the reports about the slow adoption of mobile payments in 2012. But we have to remember what we’re comparing the current progress to.
Five years ago, you needed cash to pay a New York City cab driver, lest you get an earful of angry epithets. Today, you can simply pass your iPhone near the MasterCard PayPass terminal installed in every cab and your fare is paid. No, it’s not the universal standard, but it’s still pretty impressive.
Google Wallet, Square-equipped smartphones and person-to-person payment apps aren’t as ubiquitous as analysts would like, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t on our way to a future where all of our transactions are done through computers and smartphones. The more accessible these technologies become to smaller banks and merchants, the closer we’ll be to a more convenient, cash-free world.

Winning the Conservation War: How to Manage the World We're Stuck With

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:45:00 +0000

Gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon. We're losing forests in South America, but we're gaining them back in the northern hemisphere, as trees retake former agricultural lands

Conservation is one of the environmental movement's greatest successes — a bit of a trick because it's also one of its greatest failures. As anyone who follows the scientific literature — or just this blog — would know, we're losing old-growth forests in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Species are going extinct at unusually high rates, and one study last year found that almost one-fifth of all existing vertebrate species are threatened. Big predators like tigers are disappearing altogether — there are perhaps 3,000 still left roaming the wild — and our closest animal cousins, the apes, are in danger of being wiped from the face of the planet. For every species we manage to draw back from the brink of extinction through measures like the Endangered Species Act, we surely lose far more. By almost every measure, the planet — humans excepted — is in a worse state today than it was a century ago.

Yet when you measure the results another way, conservationists are winning. As species have gone extinct, the worldwide number of protected areas has exploded tenfold, growing from under 10,000 in 1950 to over 100,000 by 2009. From Yellowstone National Park in America to Ankarana National Park in Madagascar, nearly every nation on the planet has set aside land on which economic development is restricted — a concept that hardly existed a century ago. Some 13% of the world's land mass is under some form of legal protection — an area that's bigger than South America. How are conservationists winning such a huge battle — but losing the war?

That's a question that a number of environmental experts explore in an intriguing new collection called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. The book is edited by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, a pair of Bay Area provocateurs who've made a career out of poking holes in the mainstream environmental consensus. In their introduction, Shellenberger and Nordhaus — who now run the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that advocates innovation-centered policies — argue that as long as environmentalism focuses on trying to shrink the human footprint, it will be "doomed to fail in a world of seven going on 10 billion souls seeking to live energy-rich modern lives."

In other words there are so many of us and our influence on the planet is so great that there's really no getting back to unmitigated nature, no saving the planet as it was before human beings showed up. So we have a choice: embrace the power of technology and our ability to actively shape the planet to the best of our ability — best for both human beings and the other species with which we share the earth — or remain passive and suffer the consequences. "What we call 'saving the earth' will, in practice, require creating and recreating it again and again for as long as humans inhabit it," Shellenberger and Nordhaus write.

It's a provocative argument, not the least because it departs from the usual apocalyptic environmental narrative, which has reached its apex in the fear over climate change. Shellenberger and Nordhaus and the other writers represented in Love Your Monsters believe in the man-made danger of climate change, but they don't believe it poses an existential threat to the human race itself. That's debatable — the science is firm on the mechanics and causes of climate change, but it gets very cloudy when it comes to determining just how severe global warming could be in the decades to come. We may be able to adapt to climate change as well as Shellenberger and Nordhaus suggest we will, but that is a gamble — and it's one that carries terrifying consequences if we lose.

Still, it's hard to look at the history of humanity — including the transformative growth seen in once poor nations like China and India — without doubting that any amount of environmental finger wagging is likely to halt the drive for development. We may call for Brazilians to stop clearing the Amazon, but Americans essentially deforested much of what would become the U.S. on the way to accumulating more wealth than the world has ever seen. (Four hundred years ago midtown Manhattan — where I now work — was part of a quiet and wooded island, home to black bears, bald eagles and wolves.) Human beings may well be O.K. — and if we continue to innovate, more and more of us will be more and more O.K. But as Shellenberger and Nordhaus write: "What modernization may threaten most is not human civilization, but the survival of those nonhuman species and environments we care about."

So what can we do about those "nonhuman species and environments" that may not be vital to human development, but that have a value all their own? In the best essay in Love Your Monsters, Peter Kareiva — the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy — and a pair of co-authors try to construct workable conservation policies for the Anthropocene, our new human-dominated geological era. They criticize the focus on creating nature reserves, which has often led to problems with indigenous peoples in developing nations — after all, someone was probably living in that park before it was a park. (That's been true in the U.S. as well — forced evictions that accompanied the creation of Yellowstone, America's first national park, led to the deaths of 300 Shoshone Native Americans in a single day.) As Kareiva and his co-authors write: "The bigger questions for 21st century conservation regard what we will do with the rest of [the planet]: the working landscapes, the urban ecosystems, the fisheries and tree plantations, the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures, and the growing expanses of marginal agricultural lands and second growth forests." In other words, the planet that most of us live on.

Kareiva and his co-authors believe that nature is much more resilient than we give it credit for. They note a recent scientific review that looked at 240 studies of different types of ecosystems following major disturbances like deforestation or oil spills, and found that the abundance of plant and animal species recovered at least partially in 72% of them. We're losing forests in South America, but we're gaining them back in the northern hemisphere, as trees retake former agricultural lands. With the right amount of "planetary gardening" — a term that recurs a few times in Love Your Monsters — we can keep nature thriving well into the Anthropocene.

At least that's the hope, and Love Your Monsters is nothing if not an optimistic book — perhaps overly optimistic, as critics will surely note. But in a world where economic values almost always trump environmental ones, this may be the best we hope for.

Youtube lets it snow with special Holiday Snowflake Button

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:26:00 +0000

Have you ever seen a cat play the piano? Ah, but have you ever seen a cat play the piano covered with snow? Yes, YouTube is jumping on the holiday functionality bandwagon with its new snow button, which makes snowflakes fall from the top of the screen.

Perhaps you’ll also remember the Great Internet Snowstorm of Three Days Ago, when flurries were spotted on Google’s search results page after you typed “Let it snow.” Considering the unseasonably warm weather a lot of places are experiencing right now, this could well be your only chance to see it snow this Christmas.

YouTube’s snow button works like this: Open a video, press the red snowflake icon on the bottom of the video. then watch it snow, swatting away snowflakes with your cursor if you feel so inclined. Press the red snowflake icon again to make it all stop. (Look, it’s snowing on 30 Rock comedy superstar Tracy Morgan! What an age we live in…)

Anti-Theft Chair Recognizes the Unique Signature of Your Rear-End

noreply@blogger.com (Scitech Buzz) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:22:00 +0000

Just like a special snowflake, your tuckus has its own unique pattern. Shigeomi Koshimizu of Japan’s Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology has a developed a chair that can identify people’s rear-ends to do things like start a car or log into a computer.

According to Nikkei, it works by recording data from 360 different pressure points located under the seat, with each point measured on a scale of 0 to 256. The data is then sent to a computer which can recognize individuals with 98% accuracy.

Why develop this technology when fingerprint and iris scanners already exist? Because those scanners can be easily influenced by environmental factors (greasy fingers and low light, respectively) while–unless you have a giant George Costanza wallet in your back pocket–there is very little to interfere with a chair measuring the pressure you create while sitting down.

Koshimizu hopes to collaborate with automakers and get this technology in cars within two or three years.