Sci-Tech-Business Blog

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts - March 2009

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:29:55 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. A new search engine coming up: Wolfram Alpha. The Twitter Shorty Awards. - Twitter Etiquette. Robots!, Robots! Robots! Despite a sombre atmosphere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, young entrepreneurs are coming to the fore as Nobel prize winner Kofi Annan launches a group to give the young leaders of tomorrow a voice on global issues Windows 7: A Sight for Sore Vista Users Givology: Using Social Networks to Connect Education with the Developing World TV and movie writer-director Joss Whedon wants to change the way Hollywood does business. While Whedon works inside the studio system on major projects, he also hopes to blaze a trail on the Internet for creating and monetizing independently produced content. In doing so, he is confronting what he terms the "homogenized, globalized, monopolized entertainment system." New powers are needed to combat a culture of "pervasive" surveillance that has seen the UK become the most spied upon country in the world. The Top 10 Social Networks for Generation-Y What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years? While blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them. ITV puts Friends Reunited up for sale. Amazon.com on Feb. 9 unveiled the second-generation version of the Kindle electronic reading device. The Death Of "Web 2.0" Bosses to blame for computer attacks When Skittles Met Twitter - A bold social media marketing experiment on the Mars brand's home page prompted a lively debate at the fourth annual Social Media Conference How to Be Jason Bourne: Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders. McLaren say they face a race against time to match the pace of their rivals ahead of the opening Grand Prix of the 2009 Formula One season on 29 March. On February 3, the Indian government displayed a prototype of the Rs 500, a $10 laptop Netbooks: A bit popular Hybrid fusion-fission reactors to run on nuclear 'sludge' [Externalrss-mstwitter-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] The Singularity University will offer courses in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology Readers can now alter books as they go along. Audio: The Singularity University - The Guardian's Science Weekly team discusses Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity University Telling young people that science is not clever and elitist is a lie. We should be telling them that it is, and it's worth working for Pointing can boost toddlers' language skills, say researchers David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been saying that scientists would create synthetic life in "five or 10 years" for three decades, but finally he might actually be right. "The momentum is building," he says. "We're knocking at the door." A report from the European parliament concluded that computer games are good for children and teach them essential life skills. Evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control. Babies that are looked after by their grandparents while their mothers are out at work are less ready for school than if they went to nurseries or creches, new research suggests. 101 Infrared Photographs Protons will be skirting around the 27-km Large Hadron Collider by the end of September, say CERN officials, with the first proton collisions expected four or five weeks later. As the US starts down the long road to military withdrawal from Iraq, the row over how many deaths were caused by the invasion has reignited. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Half of Britons do not believe in evolution, survey finds - More than one-fifth prefer creationism or intelligent design, while many others are confused about Darwin's theory. How to (really) trust a mathematical proof The benefits of binge drinking - and Apparently, for all their admonitions about responsible drinking, it turns out that older adults aren't as good as young ones about knowing when to stop. Evolution: The next 200 years. In the emerging field of cavity optomechanics, physicists may have the opportunity to investigate the boundary between quantum and classical systems. The first step in creating circuits and logic gates made of live nerves grown in the lab. A decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. The selfless gene: Rethinking Dawkins's doctrine [RandomProduct-143] Environment and Energy As global warming worsens, the idea of vast projects to alter the Earth's environment is moving from fantasy to necessity. Review: Eco-Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet A U.S. scientist says Earth's atmospheric greenhouse gases are increasing more rapidly than expected, resulting in worsening global warming predictions. Chris Field, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says decisive action is needed The public, it seems, thinks climate scientists are less certain about their conclusions than they actually are. Scientists claim they can fight global warming by firing trillions of mirrors into space to deflect the sun's rays forming a 100,000 square mile "sun shade". As if the debate around using ethanol to fuel cars weren't already complicated enough, now an Islamic scholar has suggested that driving or even riding in a vehicle fueled by ethanol could be considered a sin for observant Muslims. Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left? All of Europe’s energy needs could be supplied by building an array of solar panels in the Sahara Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest. Space News Kepler telescope launches to hunt for alien Earths. Alien hunt is too exciting to ignore. Mathematics: The only true universal language. a "worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites." Is Iran's space programme more advanced than thought? Hope that more exo-planets lie buried in Hubble's vast archive. a new paper proposing a design for what could be the first practical fusion-powered spacecraft Lurking in the solar system's dark recesses, rumour has it, is an unsighted world - Planet X, a frozen body perhaps as large as Mars, or even Earth. [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-fintechfocus-titles-rssr-6-30]

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 28-01-09

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:54:20 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The Future Of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook) Updating a Classic: Writing a Great Business Plan Podcast: how to keep Generation Y motivated The Truth about Impulse Purchases Helicopter parents who hover over their children's lives long after they leave home are now turning to social networking sites to keep in touch with their offspring and meddle in their university life from afar. Tweetminster - or MPs on Twitter Twitter ye not: crash survivor updates blog from burning plane Almost 15 years ago, Lew Platt, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, observed that, "if only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive." This quote became a mantra for the knowledge management movement. Companies invested large sums of money to codify knowledge and connect people. Children in the UK are spending increasing amounts of their lives in front of televisions, computers and games consoles, cramming in nearly six hours of screen time a day, according to research. Ten sci-fi devices nearing reality [Externalrss-mstwitter-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] 50 Strange Buildings of the World Our world may be a giant hologram Introducing the Type 45 Daring class destroyer Lots of Gaza Protests in UK Universities. A former F-16 jockey and a skateboard designer collaborate to design the tiny Icon A5 aircraft. Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2008 Top Tech Breakthroughs of 2008 Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions - but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice. The increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Women who are deeply in love struggle to recognise the body odour of male friends, but their ability to distinguish their partner's smell is unaffected. The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Jim Al-Khalili on al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham, the 'first true scientist'? The fall in the value of the pound is having a "crippling effect" on the budgets of UK university libraries, major bodies within the sector have warned. "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill..." - the Vatican Newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano 50 Things We Know Now (We Didn't Know This Time Last Year): 2008 Edition In the past week or so, some 400 earthquakes have added to the already precarious land at Yellowstone National Park. Although the area is the largest supervolcano in North America, the rumbling is a bit more than normal. They are highly social, adhere to a rigid class system and are intensely house-proud. And now it emerges that bees resemble human beings in one more, previously overlooked, respect: they behave just like us under the influence of cocaine. Would you Adam and Eve it? Quarter of science teachers in the UK would teach creationism Neanderthals: Done in by Competition, Not Climate Book Review: Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne Back in 1973, a young boy wrote to Blue Peter to ask for some assistance - he believed he knew "how to make people or animals alive" and wanted help to gather the necessary equipment. 36 years later, Professor Anthony Hollander was involved in one of the most revolutionary medical operations of recent times Atomic-scale computing, in which computer processes are carried out in a single molecule or using a surface atomic-scale circuit, holds vast promise for the microelectronics industry. Immortal Jellyfish. Genetic Engineering at Home. In History - Foucault's Pendulum Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains Laws banning marriage between first cousins are based on outdated assumptions about a high degree of genetic risk for offspring and should be repealed, according to a population genetics expert. [RandomProduct-143] Environment and Energy Almost 700m tonnes of CO2 would be released into the Earth's atmosphere by even the smallest nuclear conflict, according to a US study that compares the environmental costs of developing various power sources. Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star - The Biggest Fusion Experiment Yet. A Freakonomics Quorum: How Will the Recession Affect Clean Technology? Celebs spread their great wisdom on the world's most pressing issues involving the environment. The future of all alternatives to oil rests on a single make-or-break factor -- money. And even as private investors fled other markets last year, clean-tech company coffers were still brimming with venture capital dollars. A group of climate change protesters who brought Stansted airport to a standstill after occupying a taxiway in December were sentenced last week, as it emerged that they and others who joined them face the threat of being sued by Ryanair for more than £2m in damages. Making two internet searches through Google produces about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle, it has been estimated. This has provoked some debate! Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study. One million people will be employed in the world wind-power industry by the end of the decade, despite the impact of the financial crisis. Regional Nuclear War and the Environment Space News Credit: Best 50 Astronomy Pictures of Year 2008 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy Snow falling on Mars Virgin Galactic has signed a 20 year lease agreement with the State of New Mexico. Virgin Galactic’s world headquarters will be established in New Mexico and its operations will be located at New Mexico’s Spaceport America, the nation’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport. The Maiden Flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Mothership Now, new measurements of how quickly our galaxy is rotating have led a team of Harvard astrophysicists to conclude that our galaxy is 50 percent more massive than previously thought, and likely does have four arms. The glow of 'hot Jupiter' planets has been detected with ground-based telescopes for the first time. Supermassive black holes may have matured long before the galaxies that surround them instead of growing in lockstep with each other. If you think the idea of gravitational waves propelling interplanetary spacecraft sounds like science fiction, you're in good company. [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-fintechfocus-titles-rssr-6-30]

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 19-12-08

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:24:56 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The first generation that grew up accessing the web has come of age and is changing the way the internet is being used, according to Europe-based research released today. Organisations in the transport & logistics sector will be hindered in the long term unless they learn to capitalise on the benefits offered by technology. So says the Chartered Management Institute following the release of new data that shows employers view internet activity as a "massive timewaster". Ambitious people are turning to drugs to increase memory power, concentration and focus, according to a survey carried out for Nature magazine. Idiocracy: The Death of Intelligent Advertising A Job Interview at Google Apple's iPod Problem As their finances go into meltdown, companies are scrambling to cut costs across the board - in every place but the right one. According to a new study on global productivity by Proudfoot Consulting. As gloom descends on Silicon Valley, most startups and giants are growing cautious and cutting back. But not Facebook. The social-networking Web site sees a bleak economy as all the more reason to press ahead with aggressive plans for growth. Since I'm in it (!) it's definitely worth mentioning that Courvoisier's branded, invitation-only online and events network Future 500 is now into its second year. Brand Republic asked the brand managers and the network members what's in it for them. As startups go bust, it's boom times for firms that restructure and sell off tech companies' remains - everything from furniture to patents BusinessWeek's Media Predictions for 2009 The chairman of China's largest electronics retailer, Gome, has disappeared. Running a diamond mine in the Arctic is a mind-boggling undertaking. Introducing the Personal Life-Mapper. Laser battles in the sky may not be such a long way off, after a megawatt laser weapon was fired from an aircraft for the first time. The terrorists who struck Mumba last month stunned authorities not only with their use of sophisticated weaponry but also with their comfort with modern technology. [Externalrss-mstwitter-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Asad 'Booyah' Abdulahi, 42, describes himself as a pirate boss, capturing ships in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. Here he tells his story The next decade will see the world become increasingly reliant on robotic labour, according to researchers, who warn that there could also be some unintended social consequences. "'Intelligent Design' advocates say the cell is too complex to be built up by random mutation and selection... But complexity doesn't necessarily mean design. The point is whether there is a natural mechanism that could increase complexity. There obviously is..." In the heat of battle, their minds clouded by fear, anger or vengefulness, even the best-trained soldiers can act in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions or battlefield rules of engagement. Now some researchers suggest that robots could do better. A fabric, made from polyester fibres coated with millions of tiny silicone filaments, is the most water-repellent clothing-appropriate material ever created. Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Some individuals would rather receive clear negative information than deal with ambiguity or uncertainty, according to new research The first phase of an ambitious research venture in cognitive computing, an emerging field that lies at the outer edge of artificial intelligence. The more effort a father invests in his children, the smarter they are as kids and more successful as adults, new research shows. Watching plenty of television combined with low self-esteem, poor relationships with parents, and low academic achievement are some of the factors that may add up to young people having sex before the age of 15. It seems people with psychopathic behavioural traits tend to home in on their most vulnerable colleagues instead of those who might have the greatest value for their career. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Review: a BBC/HBO film, Einstein and Eddington. The case of M. S. El Naschie - Editor in chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier, one of the biggest players in the science publishing business.The journal lists 322 papers with El Naschie as an author. More Here. There has been a "catastrophic slippage" in standards of science taught in UK schools, leaving children with a superficial understanding of chemistry, biology and physics. The UK lecturers' union has abandoned attempts to boycott Israeli universities after years of international controversy, opponents of the policy said. Research Assessment Exercise: Cambridge is UK's top research university - Oxbridge and London universities to get most academic research funding after winning excellence race National Geographic - Top 10 Photographs of 2008 A group of UK scientists has urged the House of Lords to listen to scientific advice rather than the ranting of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and reject her proposal to change the classification of cannabis from C to B. The full genome of the Neanderthal, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals. New data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris, much closer to the equator. How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic A Perspective of Frontiers in Modern Condensed Matter Physics - Nai-Chang Yeh (pdf) Ten Ways the World Could End [RandomProduct-143] Environment and Energy Plane Stupid have been in the news quite a lot recently after closing Stanstead Airport last week. Meet the activists. When it comes to ludicrous reporting of course, you can always trust the Daily Mail. Even 'Blue Peter' has been getting it worng though. Video: When will the oil run out? George Monbiot puts the question to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency - and is both astonished and alarmed by the answer "As the co-founder of cosmetics retailer Lush, I'm proud to donate some of our proceeds to non-violent protest against airport expansion" - Mark Constantine The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading "no new coal". He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence. Africa is a continent of darkness and is desperately in need of power. Only one in three of Africa's 700 million people have electricity - and in the countryside only one in ten has light at the flick of a switch. The 10 big energy myths 10 Ways to save the World Forecast 2030: Oil Use Flat, Hybrids Ascendant Space News Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScI) The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station with Expedition 18 on Oct. 14, 2008. A search for colossal feats of alien engineering called 'Dyson spheres' has so far found no convincing candidates within 1000 light years of Earth. But some say the prospects for finding the hypothetical structures, which could cocoon stars in order to collect solar energy for power-hungry aliens, may be getting brighter. Sign me up: A university course on how to be an astronaut. The simple act of climbing could throw space elevators off track and potentially into harm's way, a new study suggests. Fixing the problem could require agonisingly slow trips lasting nearly a month or the careful choreography of multiple climbers. Formula 1 champ Lewis Hamilton is planning to stump a cool £625,000 for five seats on a Virgin Galactic flight, according to the Evening Standard. The European Space Agency (Esa) is to open a research centre near Oxford. NASA has confirmed a 2011 launch date for its Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft, equipped to probe the planet's "formation, evolution and structure". The tool bag lost by NASA astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during an ISS space walk has been filmed sailing over Earth by a veteran satellite observer At their test facility in Texas, SpaceX, the privately funded space-flight company, have successfully tested their nine-engine cluster which is planned to provide the heavy lifting capability for their Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy rockets. NASA is trying to decide between eight space exploration missions that include further exploring Venus and comet composition as well landing on an asteroid or examining the space around Jupiter. Picture Gallery: 10 Years of the International Space Station NASA has announced plans for disposal of the Space Shuttle fleet and spare main engines It's not just the nature of dark matter that's a mystery - even its abundance is inexplicable. But if our universe is just one of many possible universes, at least this conundrum can be explained. Picture Gallery: The Life and Deaths of Stars [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-fintechfocus-titles-rssr-6-30]

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts - 19-11-08

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:12:42 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Dozens of suspected terrorists have attempted to infiltrate Britain's top laboratories in order to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as biological and nuclear devices, during the past year. The big debate in the near to mid-term future of aviation, according to Professor Ian Poll is not nuclear versus conventional, but noise versus carbon. Airport noise limits, says Poll, are already causing increased emissions. Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos The UK's home office has confirmed, in extreme circumstances, it would be possible for the UK government to close down the internet. See Spooks (ep 2) As more and more people spend their time uploading digital narcissism to Facebook, the uber-social networking site seems to have burned through its Microsoft-juiced funding much quicker than expected. - Facebook is spending "well over" a million dollars a month in electricity alone and "likely" another $500,000 for bandwidth. Video: A Facebook privacy issue worth noting. spEak You’re bRanes In pushing for advertising regulation for Google TV executives are likely to usher in the technical regulation that makes Google invincible. Windows 7 Mental: All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties that are exactly complementary to the space outside them. What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer's hard drive? The Internet is the "Worse Is Better" poster child. A century after it began publication, The Christian Science Monitor is giving up its daily print edition to focus on posting news online. New computer tools have the potential to revolutionize the practice of mathematics by providing far more-reliable proofs of mathematical results than have ever been possible in the history of humankind. Mainstream database management system (DBMS) technology faces a challenge from new approaches that reject the relational model. Kindle Economics Woman out $400K to 'Nigerian scam' con artists [Externalrss-twitters-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 A Few Harsh Words about Twitter. Profile: Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford's new Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science, a post recently relinquished by its first incumbent, Richard Dawkins. The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files, "making science fiction into reality" as Dr. John Parmentola - Director of their Research and Laboratory Management - puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: Regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding", telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging". Sounds like a dangerous combination. The US Army Research Office and the National Security Agency (NSA) are together looking for some answers to quantum physics questions. Under the watchful eye of law enforcement in 40 states, Craigslist pledged Thursday to crack down on ads for prostitution on its Web sites. 2009 is shaping up to be the most challenging year in more than a generation for luxury items such as high-end apparel and fragrances. Why an Economic Crisis Could Be the Right Time for Companies to Engage in 'Disruptive Innovation' Britain will miss its climate change goals without tenfold investment in green technology, say business leaders Steven J. Wallach thinks he has come upon a new idea in computer design in an era when it has become fashionable to say that there are no new ideas. Last week, Dilbert's Spam Filter became Self Aware The future of science fiction - William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K Le Guin comment. The 'Life Cube' - A blow-up survival shelter featuring a bed, a couch, freeze-dried food, a 50-gallon water bladder, a first-aid kit, a radio and a cookstove. The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Singularity Summit 2008 Reviewed The "world's first ruggedised, weaponised high energy solid state laser designed for battlefield applications" How Lightsabers Work [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory - Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many. The world's largest women-only university is being built in Saudi Arabia; with a campus that will cover 8m square metres and accommodate 40,000 students. The 5,300 year old human mummy - dubbed Oetzi or 'the Tyrolean Iceman' - is highly unlikely to have modern day relatives Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said rich nations must abandon their "unsustainable lifestyle" to fight climate change and expand help to poor nations bearing the brunt of worsening droughts and rising sea levels. Cells taken from mice frozen 16 years ago have grown into healthy clones, raising the possibility of reproducing long-dead animals and even resurrecting extinct species. 1675: Gottfried Leibniz writes the integral sign in an unpublished manuscript, introducing the calculus notation that's still in use today. Confusing creation with creationism. Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction Cool Science - Videos Baby talk: The roots of the early vocabulary in infants' learning from speech (topical for me - Ed.) Taking up bowling or tennis is an excellent way to stay fit. But if you're not careful, you might find that these amateur sports can have unexpected long-term health risks. "Eighty per cent of women's inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, but men were even better, accurate 94 per cent of the time" - Men are better at detecting infidelities The Evolution of Insanity - Today's schizophrenic may believe that terrorists are beaming radio transmissions into his brain; 50 years ago, however, Communists were the culprits. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes. New Physics at an Aging Tevatron Amazon UK pulls Scientology exposé for 'legal reasons' [RandomProduct-143] Space News Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScI) The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. For the last 12 months, the International Space Station's Early Ammonia System (EAS) has hung above our heads like an evil-smelling Sword of Damocles, which might suddenly plunge down to release its payload of eyewatering space niff at any time. NASA spinoff firm the Ad Astra Rocket Company has announced a key milestone in ground testing of its prototype plasma drive technology, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). The International Space Station - 10 years in Space. There is a possibility that the Cassini probe might be repurposed to look for signs of life on Saturn's enigmatic moon Enceladus. American weaponrytech behemoth Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $30m contract by the US Air Force Space Superiority Systems Wing. Under the deal, Lockheed will develop a prototype "tactical" space scanner for use in the covert orbital warfare of tomorrow. Winners: The annual Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing challenge. It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. How to eavesdrop on alien chat I like the look of this: The New Star Trek Trailer [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-fintechfocus-titles-rssr-6-30]

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 28-10-08

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:13:25 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Many marketing departments have access to so many facts and figures that 'analysis paralysis' has set in. New Statemen Profile: Joss Garman - Co-Founder of Plane Stupid. Why You Need Parental Approval to Recruit Gen Y The $100,000 Loebner prize for Artificial Intelligence. And the winner is: Elbot The impact of the financial crisis on Open Source Wikipedia and Epistemology or How the Wikipedians have redefined the word 'True'. Could Twitter become terrorists' newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks. Facebook Friendonomics Graphics: papervision3d.org Major leadership changes at Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects The use of social technologies increased markedly in 2008 5 things a days to stay sane. The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet will be the advent of the Semantic Web - that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. The 2008 Singularity Summit - Homepage Bill Gates' mysterious new company Coming up - Holographic TV [Externalrss-twitters-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Hijackers planning a repeat of the September 11 attacks are more likely to be thwarted by secure cockpit doors and passengers and crew fighting back than sky marshals, a study says. Amazing Images: Ice Waterfalls. - Under the Sea - Under the Microscope Why Children Choose the Foods They Do. When money is no object, the possibilities for a high-tech home are endless. One of the longest-sought, most keenly anticipated high-tech weapons of the past century - namely, the dreaded circuitry-frying electromagnetic pulse bomb - seems to have had its schedule moved forward. David Einhorn, a well-known hedge-fund manager has hit out at Microsoft's "overaggressive and almost panicky" attempts to plump up its online investments. Policing the Internet. Sanyo has developed a blue laser that could enable 100GB capacity Blu-ray Discs. What's a Supercar? It Does 200 MPH, Corners Like Cling Wrap, Attracts the Law. According to recent research, at age 39 our brain reaches its peak speed, and it's all downhill after that. The Atlas of the Real World. Creationists declare war over the brain Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) has launched h+, a stylish, web-based quarterly magazine that focuses on transhumanism, covering the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging and overcoming human limitations. [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Reinforcing its place in the scientific community, the arXiv repository at Cornell University Library reached a new milestone in October 2008: Half a million e-print postings -- research articles published online -- now reside in arXiv, which is free and available to the public. The Winner's Curse in Publishing Research. Scientists have demonstrated what is being called the "ultimate miniaturization of computer memory," storing data for nearly 2 seconds in the nucleus of an atom. With Wall Street's vaunted financial models looking shaky, could other models of complex systems - say, the climate models that underpin our understanding of global warming - have similar faults? Berkeley researchers think they have found a way to keep Moore's Law in action and get chip features down to the sub-10 nanometre level. Scientific Hoaxes through the Ages. A Multibillion-dollar "brain city" attracting up to 4500 elite scientists from around the world is earmarked for construction on Brisbane's western fringe. A culture of neglect and, at some age levels, outright social ostracism, is derailing a generation of students in the US, especially girls, deemed the very best in mathematics, according to a new study. The charred remains of flint from prehistoric firesides suggest our ancient ancestors had learned how to create fire 790,000 years ago. Apparently a man's sperm quality turns out to be a decent indicator of his brain power. [RandomProduct-143] Space News The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. Space tourist Richard Garriott is about to begin his 10-day stay aboard the International Space Station following a successful docking of the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft. Behind the Scenes at the World's Most Technologically Advanced Planetarium. A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from aliens in outer space has been developed by a British scientist. Video: How the Weird Mars Science Laboratory Floating Sky Crane Works The biggest black holes may reach only a few tens of billions of times the mass of the sun. 200 UFO files will be made available by the UK's Ministry of Defence over the next four years. The Sounds of the Stars You need to know about The Drake Equation to make sense of A Numerical Testbed for Hypotheses of Extraterrestrial Life and Intelligence Gallery - NASA has launched its Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) on a mission to explore the interaction of our sun and solar system with the galaxy. NASA scientists trying to find out what went wrong during last week's repair of the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves dealing with 486 processors and other outdated computer technology. The Hubble space telescope's main camera is back in action following the reactivation last week of the flying eye's backup computer system. US space agency NASA has announced a competition for schoolchildren to name a prototype inflatable habitat module intended for use on the Moon. VASIMR engines could greatly shorten robotic and human transit times for missions to Mars and beyond Gallery: Scary images from Space. Gallery: 'Fishbowl' spaceships and giant stars The longest-serving of six spacecraft now studying Mars is up to new tricks for a third two-year extension of its mission to examine the most Earthlike of known foreign planets. [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-fintechfocus-titles-rssr-6-30]

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 08-10-08

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:02:15 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. What to Expect from Google in the Next 10 Years Global Catastrophic Risks - Building a Resilient Civilization Google is marking its 10th anniversary by offering 10 million dollars to back world changing ideas. Facebook profiles can be used to detect narcissism - and on this theme: When a group is without a leader, you can often count on a narcissist to take charge, a new study suggests. MBA students taking Tony Blair's course on Faith and Globalisation will receive practical guidance on how religion can affect corporate strategy, personnel management and leadership Bloggers may long for the page views of a Huffington Post or DailyKos, but there's much to be said for speaking to a small, dedicated community Imagine there was one number that could sum up how influential you are. It would take into account all manner of things, from how many people you know to how frequently you talk with them to how strongly they value your opinion. Your score could be compared with that of pretty much anyone in the world. Sony Corp. unveiled a new e-book reader Thursday with a built-in light and a touch-sensitive display. Congress should resurrect the nationwide gambling ban that existed through most of the 20th century to help soothe a fragile U.S. economy shaken by the worst credit and financial crisis in decades The Japanese internet tycoon who paid $21 million to become the first space tourist to walk outside the International Space Station wants his money back. The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which people who are worst at a task show the most illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. From IT to hedge funds and back again At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship. A world that is just 0.5 degrees C warmer in 2100 than before the industrial revolution is a technical, economical possibility – but only just. [Externalrss-twitters-titles-rssr-3-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Three particle physicists who provided insights into how tiny violations in symmetry shape the universe share this year's Nobel prize in Physics – but the decision has already sparked controversy. Whether young people get drunk as a purposeful behavior or as an unintended consequence depends on what country they live in. Enter the meditative practice of mindfulness. Born of Buddhist roots, it's increasingly recognized as a measure to calm the mind's chatter and elevate the brain's thinking and organizational processes. New study looks to define evangelicals and how they affect polling in the US. Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people Money can't buy love, but it seems to earn you more babies. Polygamy left its mark on the human genome New research indicates that in situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories. Scientists explore what happened before the universe's theoretical beginning Outperforming by "Outbehaving": In today's hyperconnected world, power increasingly is derived through people—through relationships, authenticity, transparency, and openness. Amazing Pictures: Earth from Above For the first time, astronomers have found an object on a certain collision course with Earth. Fortunately, it is so small it is not expected to cause any damage [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomProduct-143] A C Grayling: Creation myths have a place in education - but it's in the history lessons of secular schools, and nowhere else The world's 23 toughest math questions Towards a Wiki For Formally Verified Mathematics The editorial in the Guardian and various letters, such as that from the Bishop of Lincoln, contain a significant amount of self-righteous criticism of the Royal Society's decision to ask the Rev Michael Reiss to resign from his position as Director of Science Education. If you feel your life is out of control and you can't change it, it might be your mother's low expectations that are to blame - if you're a woman. Gallery: Stunning visualizations of science The huge Large Hadron Collider will not restart until spring 2009, says the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Why? Forget black holes, thpugh - could the LHC trigger a 'Bose supernova'? The website of leading UK biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins may no longer be accessed in Asia Minor. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. The cause, they suggest, is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe. Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter Ray Kurzweil on 'the Vomit Comet'. Stars at the centre of the Milky Way could gobble up enough dark matter to extend their lifetimes by a billion or more years, a new study suggests. A critical failure on the Hubble Space Telescope has forced NASA to delay its mission to upgrade the observatory until at least February 2009. In a rare public appearance, Neil Armstrong yesterday urged NASA to set its sights on developing new capabilities for future generations, with a goal of human settlement in the universe around us. Multimillionaire tech visionary Elon Musk has finally achieved a long-sought goal on the fourth attempt, as his privately-funded SpaceX Falcon 1 is now circling the Earth. The US air force and NASA have launched a joint research push to advance hypersonic flight technology. NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is about to set off on what may be its final odyssey - a seven-mile (11.3 km) jaunt to a crater around 20 times larger than the Victoria Crater from which it extricated itself earlier this month. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. Gary Vaynerchuk has captured national attention in the US as a businessman and internet celebrity with his multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business building. Here he gives the keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 22-09-08

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:56:03 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. At considerable personal expense, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert Cartoons, commissioned a survey of over 500 economists, drawn from a subset of the members of the American Economic Association of their views on the US Presidential Candidates plans for the Economy. Cloud Computing: "Companies spend billions on information technology, which isn't their core competency, because they've had no choice... That's changing." How to account for an increase in the price of text messages in the US. If you had a choice between receiving $1,000 right now or $4,000 ten years from now, which would you pick? Psychologists use the term "delay discounting" to describe our inability to resist the temptation of a smaller immediate reward in lieu of receiving a larger reward at a later date. Shira Gabriel, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo, conducted a series of three studies on celebrity worship, focusing specifically on how admiration from afar may affect the admirer's self-esteem. In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions Oil supplies will actually last for far longer than our politicians think, the scaremongers fear, and the oil companies tell us. So says Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and someone who isn’t afraid to stir controversy. Wither, then, Peak Oil? "Subjects with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control," - Nervous people 'are likely to be right-wing'. The first ever British spy to purposely appear as such on TV had his false moustache fall off during filming. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] PA Consulting has blamed its loss of the personal details of the entire UK prison population on a rogue employee in an apparent plea not to be kicked off any more big government contracts. Wikileaks has obtained 10 years of messages and interviews by Osama bin Laden. What could arguably be one of the most technologically ambitious rock productions ever conceived. Scientists say an understanding of how the Twin Towers collapsed will help them develop the materials needed to build fusion reactors. Almost Alive: Preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate. Bogus anti-Scientology DMCA notices sent to YouTube have been linked to a Wikipedia user. 9 of the most infamous criminal hackers to ever see the inside of a jail cell. Wired.com's Threat Level blog won the 2008 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism on Wednesday for finding a way to let you readers highlight the worst whitewashing of Wikipedia entries by corporations and governments. According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the "deep Web," is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can't access. U.S. Army psychiatrists may be participating in the interrogation of detainees, while ignoring recommendations to the contrary from professional medical associations. Barack Obama has edited his official website on many issues, including a huge revision on the technology page. When it comes to sex roles in society, what you think may affect what you earn. A new study has found that men who believe in traditional roles for women earn more money than men who don't, and women with more egalitarian views don't make much more than women with a more traditional outlook. [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomCompany-9] Controversy at the Royal Society after an article in the Guardian claims that the Education Director Professor Michael Reis had called for Creationism to be taught in schools. Michael Reis claims he was misrepresented in a letter to the editor. Apparently he has since resigned from his post anyway. Now, Richard Dawkins enters the debate. Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense. Although Sarah Palin's entry into the 2008 presidential race has energized the religious right within the Republican Party, don't expect religion to be a major issue in this year's election Famous retired physics prof Peter Higgs - of boson renown - has stingingly counter-poohpoohed the theories of his equally well known Nobel Prize rival, Stephen Hawking, who has already poohpoohed Higgs' particle concept. Humanists are suing the UK's government's exam agency over its decision to prevent a board giving humanism equal status to faiths in a religious education GCSE. Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called "graphene" as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices. Combined presidential candidate responses to the SEA Science and Technology Survey. The Large Hadron Collider produces it's first images. Some people are claiming that the lauch last week was the most high profile scientific event in history - but oops, it's broken. Doing the math on Global Warming - How much will it cost? [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News The faint dot in the upper left could be the first snapshot of a planet orbiting a sunlike star (central object) beyond the solar system. Image Credit: Lafreniere et al., Gemini North A nuclear reactor for the moon. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has been granted an Operational License by the US Air Force for the use of Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida coast. In a paper published recently in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. Tardigrades or 'water-bears' - are able to do away with space suits and can survive exposure to open-space vacuum, cold and radiation. The Milky Way's spiral arms could have cast the Sun far from its birthplace, a new simulation suggests. Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may be sending signals through space by "tickling" stars, new research suggests. The signalling would be the galactic equivalent of the internet.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 08-09-08

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:59:10 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Barack Obama on Science and Technology. The Internet on Barack Obama. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is promising the Pentagon that it'll have weapons-grade electric lasers by the end of 2008. Which means honest-to-goodness energy weapons might actually become a military reality Management in a world run by Numerati. Today, if you're not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies' impact on business, then you're just not staying current. Period. Google launches, Chrome, a new browser. Here. Here. Here. Google, the world's most powerful 10-year old. Sony has asked West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about how internet superphenomenon Facebook was spawned Nowadays, even Google is questioning Google's rose-colored portrait of its ever-expanding search advertising monopoly. Last month, New York-based novelist Meg Wolitzer, 49 - who has been described as the female Philip Roth - published, The Ten Year Nap -"an addictive examination of the minutiae of the lives of four women friends who find themselves at odds over what to do after 10 years out of the workplace". A $98 Linux Laptop - and on the other hand: The Blue Waters Supercomputer: - "...an unrivaled national asset that will have a powerful impact on both science and society..." The 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net. An artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly. Extract from: Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe. Measuring just 2 inches by 2 inches, the Space Cube is a tiny PC, developed by the Shimafuji Corporation in Japan. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] What's so bad about Bono trying to save the world? Stephane Rousson, a 39-year-old Frenchman who's hoping to cross the English Channel in a homemade, pedal-powered airship. So a study shows it's true, women tend to choose husbands who look like their fathers - and the women in the Proceedings B study also resembled their partner's mother. The handling of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon's case is in marked contrast to how US authorities handled a similar one ten years ago. BBC Profile of Gary McKinnon here. If you've got the wall space to spare, then perhaps you’ll be attracted by the world's largest TV. Bloomberg accidently dispatched Apple supremo Steve Jobs to the hereafter with a 17-page obit inadvertently published during an apparent update. 10 Geeky Movies for Children. Top 5 Gadgets That Could Get You Arrested. Over a period of twelve hours, between last Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology. Future Transport: Sci-Fi Art. Has any single videogame been so relentlessly hyped prior to its release as Spore, the latest brainchild of SimCity creator Will Wright? [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomCompany-5] It should be possible to counteract the global warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide levels by enhancing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds above the oceans, according to researchers in the US and UK. Parents can play an active role in the identity formation of the adolescent children. A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic Physicists at Fermilab in the U.S. have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas. "The Handmaid's Tale shows how patriarchy treats women as escape goats." - And other Great Exam Gaffes Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun? A new study could explain why "daddy" and "mommy" are often a baby's first words. Social inequity is worse for people's health than a lack of medical facilities, but the situation can be remedied "within a generation" Purdue University in the US has announced how it will reprimand Rusi Taleyarkhan after an internal committee ruled in July that he is guilty of scientific misconduct. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Image Courtesy: NASA Google has signed a deal under which GeoEye will supply the search giant with imagery from a satellite due to launch in coming days. August 2008 has made solar history. As of September 1st 2008 we just witnessed the first spotless calendar month since June 1913. Or maybe not. Crewmembers onboard the International Space Station had to take the unusual step this week of firing booster rockets to lower the station's orbit, in order to avoid a chunk of space debris that may have come within a mile of the orbital platform. NASA's Mars Exploration rover Opportunity is heading back out to the Red Planet's surrounding plains nearly a year after descending into a large Martian crater to examine exposed ancient rock layers. By analyzing light from small, faint galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, UC Irvine scientists believe they have discovered the minimum mass for galaxies in the universe – 10 million times the mass of the sun. An alien landscape on earth.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 26-08-08

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:21:34 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Burj Dubai Skyscraper - August 2008.- And while we at it: the Burj Al Arab. A Carbon-neutral Ziggurat pyramid could house 1.1 million in Dubai. Elbonian Spies have stoles Dilbert's Laptop. The human brain could become a battlefield in future wars, a new report predicts, including 'pharmacological land mines' and drones directed by mind control. Researchers in the UK have harnessed signals from thousands of disembodied rat neurons, and manipulated them to get a robot to respond to instructions. The scientific evidence against Bruce Ivins, the 62-year-old Army scientist who killed himself while about to be indicted for the anthrax murders, is finally emerging. 10 Next-Gen Olympic Doping Methods. Why Your Office Isn't Like Google's., What's Eating Generation X? How Much Time Should You Spend Networking? Into the future: Pros and cons of a Google world. The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth. Has Google Lost Its Mojo? [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell misled the public about the green credentials of a vastly polluting oil project in Canada, in an attempt to assure consumers of its good environmental record. Should directors at stricken companies stay in their posts until the bitter end, even if insolvency is inevitable? If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove. Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo. Stealthy Persistent Perch and Stare. UK government departments have managed to leak a total of 29 million personal records over a single year. The problem of long-term digital storage is a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationaly. Legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury turned 88 years old on August 22. A small subculture of amateur physicists and science-fiction fans - fewer than 100 worldwide - are building working nuclear-fusion reactors at home. If superluminal signals are responsible for entanglement they must travel at more than 10,000 times the speed of light. Daniel A. Spielman, professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale, has been awarded the prestigious Godel Prize for developing a technique, known as Smoothed Analysis, that helps predict the success of problem-solving with real data and computers. [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomCompany-5] Britain's honeybees have suffered catastrophic losses this year. Researchers who analysed 30,000 academic studies dating back to 1970 said man was responsible for changes that ranged from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse in numbers of many species of wildlife. Book Review: Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese. There have been few previous attempts to investigate the idea that people seem to find others more attractive when drunk. Bigfoot Apparently. Or Apparently Not. People who've exchanged wedding vows tend to be healthier than their single, divorced or widowed peers, but new research shows that health gap may be narrowing. Visualising 4D shapes. Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found. As astonishing as Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100-meter sprint was, his time of 9.69 seconds is nowhere near what biostatisticians predict is the natural limit for the human body. How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World. The psychology behind students who don't cheat. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Space shuttle replacement delayed until 2014 Star formation could happen in up to one-quarter of universes with different values of three important constants. "In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly," said researcher, Fred Adams. Cassini Pinpoints Source of Jets on Saturn's Moon Enceladus. Cassini's first-of-a-kind sharp shooting over the south polar terrain of Enceladus to image the unusual geology there was a dazzling success. Short on time and tight on money, a team of NASA engineers aims to solve the mystery of lunar ice in late winter - by crashing a low-budget kamikaze spacecraft into a crater. Solar systems like ours likely to be rarer than we thought. Inside Russia's Camp for Cosmonauts. Many believe that humanity's destiny lies with the stars. Sadly for us, rocket propulsion experts now say we may never even get out of the Solar System.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 12-08-08

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:35:58 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Bill Gates wants to make Capitalism more Creative. A top US scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks War of the Words: Scrabulous Is off Facebook in the US, but Did Hasbro Win the Game? Plenty of digital ink has been spilt this week over the launch of the suicidally-monikered new search engine Cuil.com - "Lunch is ordered in every single day... Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area..." Inside Google's AdWords auction. Britain's top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers - something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs. Twitter's Business Model? Managers seeking to hire star employees away from competitors are likely to be disappointed with their costly new employee's performance - and the star is likely to be unhappy, too - according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. How big is the free economy? Pretty disturbing report on NHS computers, dumped in Ghana, where their hard drives are mined of confidential data by criminal gangs and children die melting down the highly toxic empty shells. Next Generation Web-Browsing. A US intelligence office Friday warned Americans traveling to the Beijing Olympics or elsewhere to expect cyber spies to surreptitiously compromise their laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices. In an assessment that could lead to a substantial charge against its future profits, Google Inc. believes its $1 billion investment in advertising partner AOL is souring. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] openstreetmap.org It's official: The Home Office is listening. Fiction: Engineers' Dreams by George Dyson - For 400 years, we have been waiting for machines to begin to think. Extract: The Last Theorem by Arthur C Clarke and Frederik Pohl. Two weeks ago, the US Navy canceled plans to build the rest of its hulking stealth destroyers. At first, it looked like the DDG-1000s' $5-billion-a-copy price tag was to blame. Now, it appears the real reason has slipped out: The world's most advanced warship is all but defenseless against one of its best-known threats. Unsolved problems in philosophy Book Review: "The Gridlock Economy" by Michael Heller The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. Aston Martin unseats the Veyron as the World's Most Expensive Car. Profile: Raymond Kurzweil - Still Inventing. The term "cloud computing" encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomCompany-5] Some amazing photos of the Large Hadron Collider which is due to destroy the world at the end of the year. The Russians have withdrawn their claim to have made the deepest freshwater submersion in Siberia's Lake Baikal after hitting bottom at just 1,580 metres (5,180 feet) - short of their planned touch-down at 1,680 metres (5,510 feet). The Bugatti Veyron is among the most exclusive cars in the world, a 1,000-horsepower super exotic owned by fewer than 150 people. Every one of them is about to be upstaged by the drop-dead gorgeous roadster Bugatti will unveil later this month. "The pollution from driving a Lamborghini is bad enough, but flying one thousands of miles for a service is taking climate-wrecking behavior to new heights." - Tony Bosworth of Friends of the Earth. Secretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street. Now the former computer scientist at Columbia University-turned-tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history. "It's a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that." - George Church, The Personal Genome Project. At over 3 kilometres beneath the surface, sitting atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, it's the hottest water ever found on Earth. For some philosophers, attending the World Congress in Seoul is a huge privilege. So why does it leave British delegates cold? UK scientists publish more research than any other country in the world except the United States. Scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects. Research in diamond mechanosynthesis - building diamond nanostructures atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy -- just received a major boost with a $3 million grant from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. A carbon membrane only a single atom thick has been used to create a pressurised "balloon" that is impermeable to gas. High-flying kites tethered to generators could supply as much as 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 100,000 homes, according to researchers from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. 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Nukes are not the best way to stop an asteroid. The idea that certain aspects of our universe make it uniquely suited to life has never been properly tested. There is a group of people who claim they believe the planet really is flat. Are they really out there or is it all an elaborate prank? Top 10 Exoplanets: Weird Worlds in a Galaxy Not So Far Away Last week at Climate Camp - Kingsnorth, Kent, UK 3-11 August, 2008 - "political policing of the worst kind" - Police clash with protesters who refuse to be searched. - Plane Stupid Protest at Gatwick. - Food vans are being stopped by the Police. - Mass Action at Kingsnorth on Saturday - Protest at RBS HQ - Protesters target a biofuel depot in Essex. - Objections to Police in Riot Gear. - Arthur Scargill Shows up. - The Medway harbour master has refused permission for a River procession on Saturday. - Coverage on You Tube

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 24-07-08

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:21:35 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. 'Not a Site, but a Concept': Tapping the Power of Social Networking. Facebook: Too Creepy, Childish for the Workplace Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money. Time magazine calls it the wellspring of net culture and its online pranks are world-famous. David Smith in the Guardian reports on the man who began the chaotic but powerful 4chan website from home. Google and the Real Search for Meaning on the Web. Google announced on its official blog Wednesday the debut of Knol, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia penned by authoritative sources. The challenge of working with mavericks. As a marketing exercise to boost interest in its forthcoming game Spore, Electronic Arts' release of Creature Creator has been something of a masterstroke. MIT Students develop a parabalic solar collector hot enough to melt steel. The UK Ministry of Defence has told parliament that it has lost or had stolen some 87 USB sticks holding "protectively marked" - ie classified - material since 2003. Google's ginormous second quarter profits didn't quite match Wall Street expectations, driving share prices down as much as 7 per cent in after hours trading. Does anyone else remember when technology companies were propping up this economy? Corporate misconduct can be the stuff of high drama. But prevailing theory has it that "settling up," the process of meting out consequences for corporate misdeeds, is largely determined by quite rational, unbiased financial markets and often the legal system. The Guardian's excellent Web 2.0 blog-up A $23,000 vial? Drug Companies Get Healthy, but at Whose Expense? [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] The projection used for this world map, also known as the "Dymaxion Map," was created by Buckminster Fuller. It is the only flat map of the entire surface of the earth that reveals our planet as it really is, an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The Dodge Tomahawk Concept Motorcycle. Procedural generation in Video Games. Even 60 milliseconds of exposure to a brand name such as Wal-Mart or Tiffany can alter consumers' subconscious goals, according to new research. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people who made annual budgets were more accurate than those who made monthly ones. Life extension is a growing market and could be the next significant industry targeted by Venture Capitalists and private investment as alternative energy and clean tech eventually wane. A Book With 90,000 Authors. Johns Hopkins University researchers have found that babies use the same technique as adults to overcome limits in their working memory: grouping things into hierarchical categories. A 419er with added menace: "i was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within10 days" The scary Spyhone II 8210. The BBC's Panorama team have revealed that UK airport operator BAA has cynically colluded with the government to falsify the environmental impact of expanding Heathrow airport. Downing Street has denied claims that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is currently super-glued to a climate action campaigner. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] [RandomCompany-5] The university of the future. The Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space. A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation. 40,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnoid people - the first people who had a skeleton that looked anatomically modern - entered Europe. Their DNA was just like ours. 1925: John Scopes, an unassuming high school biology teacher and part-time football coach, is found guilty of teaching evolution in schools, in violation of Tennessee law. Temptation may be everywhere, but it's how the different sexes react to flirtation that determines the effect it will have on their relationships. In a new study, psychologists determined men tend to look at their partners in a more negative light after meeting a single, attractive woman. On the other hand, women are likelier to work to strengthen their current relationships after meeting an available, attractive man. For the first time, researchers have measured the intrinsic strength of graphene, and they've confirmed it to be the strongest material ever tested. Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News What would Earth look like to alien astronomers? If they had access to telescopes far more powerful than our own, it might look a lot like what the Deep Impact spacecraft recently saw from its vantage point 50 million kilometres away. A leaked internal report shows that NASA's ambitions to get its new moonshot spacecraft off the ground in five years may be thwarted by technical and financial issues. Using the International Space Station to get to the Moon. What good can studying the Moon do us? How do you weigh the biggest black holes in the universe? One answer now comes from a completely new and independent technique that astronomers have developed using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. For decades, scientists have theorized – romanticized, even – that Mars has harbored water. The evidence has grown stronger as recent missions to the Red Planet have revealed in stunning detail Martian topography, mineralogy and clues to past climate. But how much water, where it was or is located and what it was doing have been hard to pin down. Recently, media reports have described a sort of "shadow army" of engineers who - in their spare time - are designing an alternative to NASA's future Ares rockets. Up about 50 kilometers above the surface Venus is the most Earth-like environment, other than Earth itself, in the solar system. To coordinate with observations made by an orbiter flying repeatedly overhead, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is working a schedule Monday that includes staying awake all night for the first time.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 15-07-08

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:42:53 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The 2008 State of the Future report proposes 15 global challenges. Is Google Making Us Stupid? Honestly, Google Lively. The BBC iPlayer is well ahead of the game when it comes to online video. Court papers have told the world what it already knows: Facebook is not worth $15bn. Poor reading and writing skills among graduates are a concern for half of the UK's top employers, a survey suggests. The future of brain-machine interfaces. The final novel by legendary sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke is to be published in August. Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer. The Central London County Court has ordered four BitTorrent users to pay a video games company £750 interim damages following a landmark victory by no win, no fee copyright lawyers. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment - which fittingly started on April Fool's Day - was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam. Hitachi has pledged to release a 5TB 3.5in hard drive within two years, and it claims two of the drives will boast enough capacity to store everything in your brain. message and pop-up ad on their PC. College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. A bizarre case was reported in the Times last week of a woman who used a website - www.hitman.us.com - to hire a contract killer to "rub out" her multi-millionaire partner. "Experimental Philosophy" (Oxford University Press), edited by Knobe and Nichols, brings together seven "greatest hits," considered the most influential papers in experimental philosophy. It also includes several provocative new papers, including an introductory chapter by Knobe and Nichols, "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto." The roundest objects in the world. A new understanding of how energy can be transferred in collisions at the molecular scale. Review: Pixar's 'WALL*E' succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] The Function of Dysfunction: An associate professor ponders the cause and effect of academic infighting. The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge?. A PDF of the full paper is available here. 2-Hour Charge Gets 150 Miles In Electric Car UK MPs have welcomed moves to secure the immediate future of the Jodrell Bank observatory. The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" Uranium - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. A ray gun that uses the "microwave audio effect" to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads. The F-22 is arguably the world's most sophisticated fighter jet, a so-called fifth generation jet, hailed by US pilots in a promotional video showed by Lockheed Martin as excellent at "taking care of the air threat, paving the way for the bombers to get through". One of the most avidly-followed aircraft now under development - the F-35B supersonic stealth jumpjet - was on show at Farnborough Last week's dramatic rescue of 15 hostages held by the guerrilla organization FARC was the result of months of intricate deception on the part of the Colombian government. At the center was a classic man-in-the-middle attack. Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand Up? Scientific American takes a close look at Batman. Most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction. William Trubridge freedives The Arch, 58 meters down, at Blue Hole, Dahab - Fantastic! [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Why Canada is the best haven from climate change. Does Osama bin Laden Still Matter? Upcoming Aubrey de Grey Q&A at Slashdot. In case you don't know who he is: A Biogerontologist who has spent much of the last 20 years investigating the science of aging by considering the aging process as a multifaceted disease whose manifestations can be mitigated. A new attempt to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial. "Xian-Jin Li's purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis (reported on recently) has been rebuked by Fields Medalist Terence Tao . Fortunately, Dr. Li's proof fails alongside a respectable graveyard of previous attempts." British professors have secured government research funding for their plans to generate energy using gigantic black rubber snake-like devices moored off the UK coasts. Now comes word that it isn't just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century. Two separate groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics. Life on Earth might have emerged about 750 million years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests. The traditional picture of how liquid water behaves on a molecular level is wrong, according to new experimental evidence collected by a collaboration of researchers from the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Jupiter's third red spot (far left) took a beating when it tried to pass between the Great Red Spot (right) and Red Spot Junior (lower left) (Image: NASA/ESA/M Wong/I de Pater/University of California, Berkeley) US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed. New pictures of White Knight Two and SpaceShip 2. NASA's sun-focused STEREO spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year, allowing University of California, Berkeley, scientists to map for the first time the energized particles in the region where the hot solar wind slams into the cold interstellar medium. Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, astronomers have discovered. NASA's first mission capable of finding earth-sized and smaller planets - Kepler. The UK's largest ever space rocket was unveiled to the public on Tuesday 1 July by a Salford University academic who has ambitious plans to send tourists into space by 2013. A Japanese firm has begun accepting reservations for couples who really want to make the big leap and get married in space.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 30-06-08

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:57:17 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The inner workings of Google just became a little less secret. Google's Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web. If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, Matt Cohler, a pivotal player in Facebook Inc.'s rapid growth, is departing the popular online hangout to find other promising Internet startups for a prominent venture capital firm. From next year, all those who wish to work, either paid or unpaid, with children or vulnerable adults in the UK will need to be vetted. The Legacy of Bill Gates. The Replicating Rapid-prototyper (RepRap) was created by scientists from the University of Bath and is essentially a printer that's able to build 3D plastic objects After more than a decade of seeing its massive Lotus Notes business threatened by Microsoft, IBM faces a new threat: Salesforce.com. The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Facebook has overtaken rival social network MySpace for the first time. US Election forecasters preparing for an historic election. Established methods for estimating the human cost of war typically underestimate by a factor of three. Google is now offering software that streams video, photos, and music from your PC to your television. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] An interesting corollary to 'The Wisdom of Crowds'. Media reports suggest that the US military has begun a secret, multibillion-dollar programme which will develop a new and more effective Stealth bomber. Reports indicate that Scaled Composites - famous for its X-Prize and Virgin Galactic rocketplane work - will play a key role. Humour: 150 CV mistakes and bloopers. A solar powered solar panel factory. What Does the U.S. Do with Nuclear Waste? The most radical supply-side reform ever considered by the music business in the modern era. Every Lego set ever manufactured. Could nuclear warheads go off 'like popcorn'? Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda's core leadership has built an increasingly prolific propaganda operation. The Future has a Kill Switch. Greenpeace posed as a pro-coal organization to become a sponsor of the 2008 McCloskey Coal USA conference, which was surprised but allowed them to deliver a brief anti-coal message, officials said Friday. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Eigenfactor: - Mapping and Ranking Scientific Knowledge. The World's Youngest Professor. In what has to be an embarrasment for the U.S. Department of Energy, an anonymous donor has ponied up $5 million to keep the country's only remaining particle physics laboratory operating efficiently. An embarrassing picture of the UK's bio research facilities. Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic freedom" law CERN has declared its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) perfectly safe. Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid. Was questionable behavior behind the abrupt departure of Alden March Bioethics Institute's chief? The way mothers interact with their babies in the first year of life is strongly related to how children behave later on. One in four UK state secondary schools do not employ a specialist physics teacher. June 30, 1908 - The Tunguska event. What We Can Learn From Buckminster Fuller. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Martian Skies - some amazing images. ESA's Jules Verne ATV was used for the first time to transfer in one step 811 kg of refuelling propellant to the International Space Station while the two vehicles orbited Earth at 28 000 km/h. With this premiere for Europe, Jules Verne becomes the first western spaceship to succeed in refuelling another space infrastructure in orbit. The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black holes. The most extreme life-forms in the universe. Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is - though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, warned in an interview published Sunday that the United States risked falling behind Russia and China in the space race if it did not redouble its efforts.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 28-05-08

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:53:26 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Ex-US President Jimmy Carter has said Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons in its arsenal. Ten Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World. 10 reasons why the back hats have us outgunned. The Top 100 IT Companies 2008. Ray Kurzweil Talks Up a 3D Mobile Future. Reading the E-Leaves With Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The least surprising headline of the year? Web 2.0 fails to produce cash Godel, Escher, Chopin: Inuitive links between musical chords and geometries A group of leading medical scientists has called on the government to investigate what effects the use of brain performance-enhancing drugs by healthy people could have on society, education and the workplace. Anti-Scientology campaigners are up in arms after it emerged that City of London police issued a court summons to a teenager for displaying a sign that branded the Hollywood-bothering, UFO-fancying sect a "cult". BBC Radio 4 news flagship The Today Programme said today it will axe its online message boards at the end of this month, prompting anger and charges of censorship from users. What do you do with a robot armed with a million-round-per-minute gun? ' Crowd control,' apparently. The Pentagon's internal watchdogs can't keep up with the explosive growth in military spending. Which means $152 billion's worth of contracts annually aren't being reviewed for fraud, abuse and criminal interference. [Externalrss-BehaviouralFinance-titles-rssl-6-30][Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Book Review: Freeman Dyson on ' Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies', by William Nordhaus. 10 Green Heresies 16% of US science teachers are creationists. Many people marvel that we live in a universe that seems to be precisely tailored to suit the development of intelligent life. The observation is the basis for some forms of 'Anthropic Principles' that strive to explain why the laws of physics take the form we observe, given the nearly countless other possibilities permitted by schools of thought such as string theory. An Older Brain really may be a Wiser Brain. McCain and Obama on Technology Billions of dollars are spent developing cancer drugs, but precious few get approved. Is the US FDA part of the problem? A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the 'psychological torture' he endured in custody. An influential group of MPs has urged the UK government to seek assurances from Washington that the Patriot Act would not be used to access personal data contained in the UK census, if it is outsourced to US defence contractor Lockheed Martin. On Friday, an international court ruled that amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius doesn't get a boost from his carbon-fibre prosthetic legs - called Cheetahs. A French skydiver's hope to set a new free-fall record has been dealt another setback - his ride to the sky left without him. The helium balloon Michel Fournier, 64, was going to use to soar to the stratosphere detached from the capsule he was going to use to jump from 130,000 feet (40,000 meters). Cyclone Nargis struck southern Myanmar on May 2, 2008, with an estimated death toll in the range of 100,000. This Google mapplet shows the latest maps available which include significant towns and landmarks such as medical facilities, with two special layers of satellite imagery showing before and after the storm. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30][Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is sinking billions of dollars into a new wind farm in Texas. It is likely to become the biggest in the world, producing enough power for the equivalent of 1.3 million homes. A 16-year old student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags. "Amphibian horror" isn't a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. 8 Child Prodigies. Bristol-based researchers have said that they "can't recommend" the idea of solving global warming by putting a giant sunshade in space so as to cool the earth down. God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved- By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out - perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion. Why Are Academics So Weird? Six Degrees of Wikipedia. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-4-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Mysteriously, four spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions. The doughnut is making a comeback – at least as a possible shape for our Universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that ET will be communicating using photons, not neutrinos. An ordinary observation with NASA’s Swift research satellite recently led to the first real-time sighting of a star in the process of exploding. Polygons on Mars. More Mars in High Res. A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. The spot, along with new measurements of record-high wind speeds on Red Spot Junior, come at a time when the solar system's largest planet is experiencing a time of global upheaval. ANU astronomers have found there is nothing special about the Sun after conducting the most comprehensive comparison of it with other stars - adding weight to the idea that life could be common in the universe. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times. On August 16, 1960, Joseph Kittinger jumped from an air-thin height of 102,800 feet (31,334 meters). From that nearly 20 miles altitude, his tumble toward terra firma took some 4 minutes and 36 seconds. Exceeding the speed of sound during the fall, Kittinger used a small stabilizing chute before a larger, main parachute opened in the denser atmosphere. He safely touched down in barren New Mexico desert, 13 minutes 45 seconds after he vaulted into the void.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 19-05-08

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:57:30 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Condos in Miami, traditional music stores, gas-guzzling cars, pharmaceuticals that get bad press and foods made with trans fats: All marketers, from time to time, confront products that, for whatever reason, become difficult to sell. "Integrating Environmental Concerns in Business Decision-Making: Internal Processes and External Pressures," and "Business and Climate Change: Mitigation and Adaptation; Regulation and Costs." Seldom are businesses in the developed world implicated directly in torture, but too often they avert their eyes as their products, purchases or independent contractors support abuses. Beijing Games sponsors like Coke are pushing their participation within China, while simultaneously playing it down in the West. Women who alert authorities to their organizations' wrongdoing perceive they suffer more retaliation than do men, reports an initial study published in the current issue of Organization Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The appeal of twittering. (Something I'm playing with - Ed.) 50 habits of highly successful people. Social Networking to Watch: Ning. Facebook's coming Facelift. It is one of the best-performing tourist destinations in the world. The number of guests in the past year has more than doubled. Welcome to sunny Palestine. A crush of developing nations trying to gatecrash the nuclear power club has prompted fears of a subsequent race to develop nuclear weapons. When credit was easy, private equity's multibillion-dollar buyout frenzy was like a great party: The champagne was flowing and no one was too concerned about who was picking up the tab. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-FinanceFocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Quantum gambling machines may not be popping up at futuristic casinos any time soon, but the devices could have other uses – such as enabling physicists to study game theory in situations where cheating is impossible. Cyborg animals, psychotropics and flying lasers are just some of the terrifying weapons government labs have cooked up over the years. 10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die. The "world's longest sea bridge", a 36-kilometre (22-mile) structure which connects Jiaxing city near Shanghai to the port city of Ningbo in China. The World Wide Web is still only in its infancy, its British inventor Tim Berners-Lee, seen here in 2001, said on the 15th anniversary of the web's effective launch. The Pentagon's way-out researchers don't just want to build an Internet simulator, to test out cyberwar tactics. They want the range's operators to "realistically replicate human behavior and frailties," too. Meet Peter Thiel - co-founder of PayPal, angel investor in Facebook, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and self-described libertarian. In an attempt to bring one of the most famous inventions of the 20th century into the digital age, scientists of the "Ambient Intelligence Group" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the "intelligent stickies". These are essentially Post-its with a twist. 2500 Government websites in thw UK. Don't call it a flying car. It's a "roadable aircraft." How to survive a nuclear blast. Gary Fung (25) heads the popular BitTorrent search engine Isohunt and two tracking sites, Podtropolis and Torrentbox. How Web 3.0 will work. Newly released UFO files from the UK National Archive. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Climate scientists call for their own 'Manhattan Project'. Your Brain on Ethics. The new Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM) will apply mathematics to gain quantitative insights into some of the 21st Century’s most pressing problems. Organizers of ScienceDebate 2008 are "disappointed" but "not surprised" that the three main US presidential candidates have ignored invitations to participate in a public debate on science that was scheduled to take May 2. Professor Keith Mason, the man in charge of scything £80m from the UK's physics research budget, has been sharply criticised by MPs investigating cutbacks which have forced job losses in labs and threaten to shut down many projects. .A leading Scottish churchman and bioethics thinktank operator has warned again of the dangers attendant on genetic research, and recommended that there should be a law against men having children with female chimpanzees. Auctioned last week in London, a letter by Albert Eistein, leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions". Why we lie to children. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider? Space News A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope! Artificial intelligence (AI) being used at the European Space Operations Centre is giving a powerful boost to ESA's Mars Express as it searches for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet. Physicists have come up with a way to explain how information could escape from a black hole, an idea that's been debated since the 1970s. Detection Probability of Terrestrial Radio Signals by a Hostile Super-civilization A team of astronomers looking at the universe’s distant past found nine young, unusually compact galaxies, each weighing in at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. The findings appeared in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth's skies for tens of millions of years. Mounting mirrors on the Moon and using them to signal across space could let ET know we Earthlings are here. The universe is twice as bright as it appears, astronomers now suggest. Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. A student at the University of Mississippi will leap into the final frontier of the legal system Saturday when he receives the first-ever space law certificate in the United States.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 29-04-08

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:12:02 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. "cognitive surplus". How Social Networking could kill web search as we know it. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are learning that their supposedly private remarks can be made widely public, thanks to bloggers. Holographic storage ships next month! The man who created the Fortean Times. Physicists quantify the 'coefficient of inefficiency'. Rebranding the bin Ladens. Google makes money selling ad inventory. And its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone. James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation in Europe and Asia, has attacked the BBC for squashing competition in the broadband TV market with its costly iPlayer service. The human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate. Unearthing diamonds through human resources knowledge discovery. SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses. New nanotechnology consumer products are coming on the market at the rate of 3-4 per week. Storing data for the next 1000 years. Chilling evidence of Google's extraterrestrial ambitions: with googlejupiter.com, googlemercury.com, googlesolarsystem.com, googlegalaxy.com and indeed google-universe.net An American law student has published an analysis of international law regarding war crimes that might be committed using future brain-interface-controlled weapon systems. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-SciTech-titles-rssr-6-30] At least one Strategy Boutique believes that Google is the most powerful brand on the planet. Internet-related homicide news. The Pentagon's blue-sky technology office has finally announced the three contenders who will take forward its Vulture project. eBay is considering flogging off Skype, the VoIP provider it paid $2.6bn for in 2005. And now you can get Skype on your iPhone. Time Machiner: Email someone in the Future. Ray Kurweil writes: "The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums." The US Geological Survey has just released its first ever statewide earthquake forecast for California, and the odds aren't great. The study finds a 99.7% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater will hit California by 2037, while the probability of a quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater is 46%. Is this the beginning of water wars? Rising oil prices lift all alt-energy boats. For proof, look no further than the fat $130 million investment scooped up by eSolar, a company whose basic solar power strategy - using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to generate steam - was all but abandoned in the 1980s, and has recently recently caught investors' attention again. Time Magazine on How to Win the War on Global Warming. A new study challenges the common practice in many classrooms of teaching mathematical concepts by using 'real-world,' concrete examples. Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists. The latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web. While microcelebrity is a positive alternative to mainstream media culture, it's important to turn a critical eye on online communities: "Internet culture can be very sexist, homophobic and racist... Popular blogs are all written by white guys ... and the most popular YouTube videos are of hot girls." - Alice Marwick, Saturday's keynote speaker at ROFLCon, a two-day internet culture conference [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Gauging a Collider's Odds of Creating a Black Hole. - and while we' re at it, the stranglet disaster hypothesis. The world's largest laser system - the National Ignition Facility - is being built in California and officials say it will go online next year. Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90. Food miles don't feed climate change - meat does. A mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are very low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of Earth. Charles Darwin's private papers online - the largest publication of Darwin's papers in history. A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. Their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a technique for radically increasing the number of gigabytes that can be crammed into one square inch of data-storage chip, raising it from just 3.3GB to around 500,000GB. Your DNA falls into the realm of "the world's information," and it seems that Google, as part of its corporate mission, is making a play to organize that, too. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat - even if it has caused a "near civil war" within the organization. Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres by the end of this century, displacing tens of millions of people. That's the conclusion of a new prediction of sea level rises that for the first time takes into account ice dynamics. Good news for rational, level-headed Virgoans everywhere: just as you might have predicted, scientists have found astrology to be rubbish. Scientists must work harder at making the public aware of the stark difference between good science and "denialist spin". That's the call from Professor Barry Brook, Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, Australia. New research by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford provides the first evidence that a child's sex is associated with the mother's diet. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News A new ion engine developed by Qinetiq. The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen the GSI accelerator facility to assess radiation risks that astronauts will be exposed to on a Mars mission. Once upon a time, time was different. Supernova explosions in the early universe appear to age more slowly than today's supernovae, as if time itself was running slower back then, according to a recent series of astronomical observations. If war ever breaks out in space it's not the loss of individual satellites that will do the damage, but the debris this produces. It will stay in orbit and go on harming satellites for decades, according to two studies presented at the American Physical Society meeting in St Louis, Missouri, last week. Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary. He has also been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, "Are we alone?" The answer is probably not, he says. The Future of Space Sports. Source: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech) Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to mark the 18th anniversary of the telescope's launch. This is the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public simultaneously. In this poster are the best 12 images of the collection. More.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 10-04-08

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:35:34 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Hypercube Courtesy: Wikimedia 100 miles per gallon. The age of killer robots is upon us. The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs. The number 6174. 16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me in School There are over 2000 patents covering the atom bomb. Hypercubes may act as the building blocks for tomorrow’s nanocomputers [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-VideoResources-titles-rssr-6-30] Plane Stupid and the spy who got thrown out into the cold. What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? (1968) Why Techcrunch are suing Facebook for $25 Million in statutory damages. Meet the laptop you'll use in 2015. When does context matter in product evaluations? Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel "biofeedback" games developed by its partners. Making a truly bionic arm requires far more than mechanical breakthroughs, better processing power, or longer batteries. None of these enable the prosthetic to respond to the wearer's intent with a natural limb's unthinking grace. Google's federal government sales team. Intel and Microsoft are planning to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems intended to break the industry out of a technological cul-de-sac that threatens to end decades of performance increases in computers. Based in the Waitakeres, in West Auckland, software developer and artist Vik Olliver is part of a team developing an open-source, self-copying 3D printer. The RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper) printer can replicate and update itself. It can print its own parts, including updates, says Olliver, who is one of the core members of the RepRap team. "Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people." - Economist, Jeffrey Sachs on the shift in the Global Warming debate. Tired of hearing other people’s cellphone conversations? It may become worse. Soon you may have to watch their favorite television shows and YouTube videos, too, as they project them onto nearby walls or commuter-train seatbacks. Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser. A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the Large Hadron Collider may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out. Physicists have turned on the world's most powerful laser, whose pulses are more intense than any known light source in the universe. Scientists have revealed what may well be the first pervasive 'rule' of evolution. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. Gambling addicts don't learn from their mistakes, according to a study published in the open access journal Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health. The problem could be explained by a kind of mental rigidity that leads to harmful compulsive behaviour in sufferers. A new mathematical object was revealed yesterday during a lecture at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). Two researchers from the University of Bristol exhibited the first example of a third degree transcendental L-function. These L-functions encode deep underlying connections between many different areas of mathematics. Statistics show that monogamous men have the most children if they marry women younger than themselves. How much younger is the key question. Why some people remain calm in the face of life's niggles, while others 'flip' with little provocation. Apart from the human devastation, a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would destroy much of the ozone layer. A new "Darwin chip" could make evolution as easy as pressing play. Researchers have created an automated device that evolves a biological molecule on a chip filled with hundreds of miniature chambers. Snorting cocaine is an environmental crime whatever your views on drug use, scientists declared last week. "We have to bear in mind that the 80 tonnes of kerosene used for a one-way commercial flight to New York is equivalent to the annual biofuel yield from an area of approximately 30 football pitches..." - Dr Richard Pike, chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News The Iconic UK telescope, Jodrell Bank, faces closure. Earth-like rocky planets could be hiding just a few light years away in our closest stellar neighbours. It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought. Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site. NASA's Cassini spacecraft tasted and sampled a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 13-03-08

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:08:55 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Britain is stealing the US crown of No 1 climate villain. A surge in innovation is shaking up the DNA sequencing market. At £820,000, the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities is the biggest science prize around – and one of the most controversial. This year’s winner is Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest, who is being recognised for his work on whether the universe needs a cause. A team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University announced Monday that a five-year study examining the link between polyphenols and lower cholesterol rates has found jack shit. Damning new evidence has emerged that faith schools in the UK are siphoning off middle-class pupils, as research shows they are failing to take children from the poorest backgrounds nationwide. On a cold day in January, Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland, became the second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code. A UK-wide independent inquiry that will look at how the use of new technologies by the "Google generation" will shape higher education was launched today. The number of female professors in UK universities reached record levels last year. It's popular today to point out that Gen Y as children often received trophies for simple participation and extensive praise for just about any idea. Detractors criticize Y's (individuals born between 1980 and 2000) as products of a misguided movement in parenting and education designed to buffer children from the negative effects of competition and build self-esteem. Eric Chester, president of Generation Why, a consulting organization that speaks about generational differences, is the author of Getting Them to Give A Damn: How to Get Your Front Line to Care About Your Bottom Line. They met on a train and fell in love. Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life – as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia's brutal civil war. With their story set to become a major Hollywood film, he recalls an extraordinary, doomed romance. Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group on Facebook has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University. Business and government leaders from the US, UK and three other countries have spent a week simulating and defending against a large-scale cyber attack in an exercise designed to strengthen coordinated responses to what many perceive as a growing threat. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-neuro-titles-rssr-6-30] A keynote talk with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg descended into chaos as the audience heckled the interviewer for failing to get to the point. Naval warships might look like all-powerful vessels but they are also highly vulnerable to being spotted by the enemy. That fear of being detected has led the military to develop new stealth technologies that allow ships to be virtually invisible to the human eye, to dodge roaming radars, put heat-seeking missiles off the scent, disguise their own sound vibrations and even reduce the way they distort the Earth’s magnetic field. Most employees pay attention to what the boss says, while the savvy employee also pays attention to how it is being said. Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers unveiled "Eddie," a 4-year-old virtual child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age."Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have - as avatars - states that are correlates to those experienced by humans." There's always been a distinction between indoor and street-level prostitution, and advances in technology have increasingly separated the two. Talk about commitment. A former Church of Scientology investigator was required to contract himself to a group linked with the organization for one billion years, according to documents recently posted to whistleblower website Wikileaks. The world's largest Christian church has 7,000 individually air-conditioned seats, standing-room for 11,000 in a surrounding 3ha marble plaza, and enough room for 100,000 more - 300,000 at a squeeze - beyond that. Yet the chances of even the 7,000 seats ever all being occupied at one time are about nil, because rather than finding this church in one of the great cities of the world, you'll discover it in a community of just 120,000 people in the middle of the jungled hills, arid plains and farmlands of Africa's Ivory Coast. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] This is your brain on jazz: researchers use MRI to study spontaneity, creativity. Should scientists categorically avoid dating people who believe in astrology? Do you teach your children about Darwin? A problem which has defeated mathematicians for almost 140 years has been solved by a researcher at Imperial College London. Professor Darren Crowdy, Chair in Applied Mathematics, has made the breakthrough in an area of mathematics known as conformal mapping, a key theoretical tool used by mathematicians, engineers and scientists to translate information from a complicated shape to a simpler circular shape so that it is easier to analyse. It might come as a surprise to find out that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an "artificial" black hole in the lab. A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Marvin Minsky on what makes Mathematics hard to learn? Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter. A defining feature of smoking addiction is that smokers pursue their habit even when it's clear they are forgoing other benefits, such as good health. Now brain scans suggest that this dodgy decision-making may extend into other areas of their lives. Borrowing some of the mathematics that string theorists invented to plumb the secrets of the physical universe, Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko has found a way to represent the universe of all possible musical chords in graphic form. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base Space News Credits: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Following the recent news that the government's popular Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has decided to pretty well destroy UK radio astronomy, we're saddened to note that Jodrell Bank observatory is up for sale on eBay. Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a "monstrous" two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed. A Mars-orbiting spacecraft has captured the first images of avalanches happening on the Red Planet. A camera called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured the events occurring near the Red Planet's north pole on 19 February. Earth-based radar observations have produced a detailed 3D map of the Moon's south polar region, revealing a dramatic and rugged landscape. The map will help NASA assess the site's potential for setting up a base. Such is the interest in Enceladus that Nasa has directed its Cassini spacecraft to pass just 50km from the Saturnian moon. Europe's space freighter, the ATV, has had its propulsion system fully restored after an earlier glitch had closed down a quarter of its thrusters.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 13-02-08

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:02:54 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. J.G. Ballard is now in his late seventies and suffering from advanced prostate cancer. Miracles of Life, his autobiography, may well be the last of his many books. It may claim to have the world's tallest building and biggest airport, but Dubai is also a truly global village with an odd cultural equilibrium. Thane Heins is nervous and hopeful. It's Jan. 24, a Thursday afternoon, and in four days the Ottawa-area native will travel to Boston where he'll demonstrate an invention that appears - though he doesn't dare say it - to operate as a perpetual motion machine. Just how much money does Google make from so-called "domain parkers" - those clever characters who populate countless web pages with nothing but advertising? Microsoft and Yahoo: Does It Make Sense (and Will It Work)? US spooks will not get access to English and Welsh census information even if the census contract is won by US defence firm Lockheed Martin. The World War II style 14-tonne conventional bunker-busting penetrator bomb being developed for the US air force has hit development snags, according to reports. Entry to service will be delayed, and costs have risen. The Islamic Republic of Iran announced that it had fired a rocket "into space" and transmitted footage of the launch on state media. The next Facebook privacy scandal. The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable "of hosting the entire internet as an application." 10 sci-fi technologies we could build if they weren't so damn expensive. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Slashdot-titles-rssr-6-30] Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time. Podcast: 'Six Degrees of Separation' The Third Reich's Diabolical Orbiting Superweapon. The continuous fabrication of complex, three-dimensional nanoscale structures and the ability to grow individual nanowires of unlimited length are now possible with a process developed by researchers at the University of Illinois. British engineers unveiled plans Tuesday for a hypersonic jet which could fly from Europe to Australia in less than five hours. According to the Business Communications Company, the market for AI software and products reached $21 billion in 2007, an impressive figure that doesn't touch on the wealth that a human-level artificial intelligence could generate across industries. The North Sea oil and gas industry has always been seen as a prime target for terrorism or sabotage, although no such incidents have ever occurred. The current, popular, definition of a mashup is of a web-based application that combines data from two or more sources, into a single integrated solution. On Facebook: "It's like the Hotel California... You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." - Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account. The Church of Scientology says a group that has been protesting against the church are religious bigots that are merely perpetrating religious hate crimes. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] Resources Focus On Financial Recruitment Financial Education Financial Publishing Financial Technology Financial Services Hedge Funds Forex Financial Conferences Financial Training Link Library > Blogs & Blogging > Research & Learning >> General Math >> Historical Resources >> Introductions & Guides >> Reading Lists >> Research Engines >> Study Guides & Strategies >> Tutorials & Lecture Notes > Web Links by Subject > Publications & Papers >> Featured Articles >> eBooks >> Scholarly Journals >> Papers & research >> Preprint & ePrint Servers >> Review Papers > General Resources >> Recruitment & Careers >> Communities & Groups >> Directories & Portals >> Financial Calculators >> Financial Glossaries >> Forums & Discussion >> Fun & Games >> Gambling & Markets >> Podcasts & Audio >> Software & Coding >> Video Resources Financial Services Directory Accounting Services Banking & Investment Business Schools Conferences & Events Communications & Marketing Consulting Services Financial Publishing Hedge Fund Services Legal Services Recruitment Services Software & Technology Stocks & Trading Training Providers More 100 Most Recent Posts Financial Intelligence Bookshop US Financial Intelligence Bookshop UK Wiley Finance Library Hedge Fund Tutorials Information Base An international team of scientists has presented its list of those regions of the planet most at risk from global warming. Dutch researchers have confirmed what fat smokers have waited years to hear - that healthy people are actually a greater burden on the state, because they live longer and oblige the taxpayer to deal with the cost of "lingering diseases of old age like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's". University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting what they call a significant pattern among Iraqi adolescents and their reaction to the war in Iraq - the higher the perceived threat of the war, the higher the teens reported their self-esteem. Adolescence is a critical time of development on many different levels, but especially concerning the initiation and escalation of alcohol use. Behavioral experiments indicate that infants aged 4 ½ months or older possess an early "number sense" that allows them to detect changes in the number of objects. However, the neural basis of this ability was previously unknown. Active father figures have a key role to play in reducing behaviour problems in boys and psychological problems in young women, according to a review published in the February issue of Acta Paediatrica. "If I'm Not Hot, Are You Hot or Not" Physical Attractiveness Evaluations and Dating preferences as a Function of Own Attractiveness. One hundred and ninety-nine years after Charles Darwin was born, and 149 years after he published On the Origin of Species , some scientists say that the theory of evolution is due for a revision. Not a religiously inspired revision - intelligent designers need not apply. Space News Credits: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Mars is about to come into 3D focus as never before, thanks to the data from the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). A new high-resolution Digital Terrain Model data set that has just been released onto the Internet, will allow researchers to obtain new information about the Red Planet in 3D. An astronomer based in Canada has published a paper arguing that distances within the solar system should no longer be measured using Astronomical Units (AU), which is currently standard practice. Gateways to parallel universes or distant parts of our own cosmos may be found if astronomers look for the right signs, a Russian physicist claims. What do you call an absence of darkness? Dark matter is supposed to be spread throughout the universe, but a new study reports a spiral galaxy that seems to be empty of the stuff, and astrophysicists cannot easily explain why. Organic molecules - in the form of methane - have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The European Columbus laboratory has completed its voyage to the International Space Station.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 02-02-08

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 22:09:45 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The Entrepreneurship Myth. Richard Branson's Remarks at the SpaceShipTwo Unveiling Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing. The Internet is not the font of all knowledge, despite the plethora of information available at your fingertips. Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have found that while Internet searches do bring up a variety of useful materials, people pay more attention to information that matches their pre-existing beliefs. Could the pursuit of happiness go too far" Most self-help books on the subject offer tips on how to maximize one's bliss, but a new study suggests that moderate happiness may be preferable to full-fledged elation. D-Wave Systems has attracted a lot of criticism from computer scientists over claims it has developed a way to create a marketable quantum computer. But whether its technology will ever be viable outside of a laboratory setting or not, investors seem to be eating it up. Minority groups lose out on training in workplaces that have won the Investors in People training award, new research shows. A new study of almost 15,000 people by Nottingham University Business School found that a wider range of minority groups suffer disadvantage with regard to training provision in workplaces with the prestigious Investors in People (IiP) training award than elsewhere. Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections. People frustrated by the delayed arrival of a bus should take the lazy option and wait for it to show up rather than walk to their destination, mathematicians say. The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever. For true sci-fi fans, any mention of a real-world rail gun will draw an instant, slightly audible gasp. Instead of relying on chemical propellants -- such as gunpowder -- a rail gun uses magnetic "rails" to launch a solid, nonexplosive projectile at incredible speed. Theoretically, rail guns would be able to precisely strike targets at extreme ranges, and would negate the risks associated with carrying around tons of explosive ammo. In an age where cheating scandals plague elite universities and major corporations are brought down by unethical actions, the debate about the origins and nature of our decisions play into a larger debate about genetic determinism and free will. Swarms of robots that use electromagnetic forces to cling together and assume different shapes are being developed by US researchers. A new breed of image-manager is emerging in the United States to take on the masked and hooded cybermobs who, bolstered by anonymity and weak laws, launch damaging attacks on other web users. The regulator for Britain's snoopers has released a report covering the last nine months of 2006, painting a panglossian picture of a period which saw a quarter of a million intercepts. The Church of Scientology has restored it website to normal after a campaign of denial of service attacks. Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading. The Next 25 Years in Tech. [Externalrss-econophysicsfocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Are you searching for cutting-edge scientific justification for a Biblical account of Earth's origins? Then search no longer: the first issue of the Answers Research Journal , the "professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework," is now online! Climate scientists are collaborating with experts in economic theory to improve their forecasting models and assess more accurately the impact of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Although there is broad consensus that there will be a significant rise in average global temperature, there is great uncertainty over the extent of the change, and the implications for different regions. Greater accuracy is urgently needed to provide a sound basis for major policy decisions and to ensure that politicians and the public remain convinced that significant changes in consumption patterns and energy production are essential to stave off serious consequences in the coming decades and centuries. Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth's history and marked the start of a new epoch. Climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold environmental policy decisions are needed now to protect the world's population, according to the author of an article published in the BMJ today. The threat to human health is of a more fundamental kind than is the threat to the world's economic system, says Professor McMichael, a Professor of public health from the Australian National University. “Climate change is beginning to damage our natural life-support system,” he says. TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half-angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom — has been installed at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Researchers at the University of Sheffield have shown that mothers are choosing to have fewer children in order to give their children the best start in life, but by doing so are going against millenia of human evolution. The research sheds new light on the decline of modern day fertility. Is the air coming out of the Facebook Bubble? The Wall Street Journal has just accepted Facebook's request to be online friends. Hoping to tap into the growing buzz of online social networks, the Journal is adding a feature to its Web site that will allow readers to see which Journal stories are popular among that user's Facebook friends. An ethics row has broken out among palaeontologists over the naming of aetosaurs, a type of ancient armoured reptile. Doctoral students in the United States and Poland are accusing scientists at the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) of publishing articles that allegedly pilfered their research. British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life. In research that may be a key step toward real-life quantum communication - the transmission of information using atoms, photons, or other quantum objects - researchers created an experiment in which a quantum bit of information is transported across a distance of seven meters and briefly stored in memory. This is the first time that both quantum memory and teleportation, as the information transfer is known, have been demonstrated in a single experiment. [RandomProduct-19] Space News (Image: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW) Scientists are puzzling over this strange spider shape formed by a set of radiating troughs at the centre of Mercury's huge Caloris impact basin. The largest asteroid to come near the Earth in more than 20 years will make its closest approach on Tuesday, venturing as close as 1.4 times the distance to the Moon. Already, the first radar observations of the space rock reveal it may have formed from two separate asteroids that fell together and stuck. Russia, whose space programme relies heavily on a base in neighbouring Kazakhstan, is to build its own launch site for manned flights by 2018, First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was quoted as saying Wednesday. Traces of vast cosmic strings have been found in radiation from the early universe, a controversial new study says. If confirmed to exist, cosmic strings could offer an unprecedented window into the extreme physics of the infant universe. If there were a portal linking us to a parallel universe or some other region of space, how would we spot it? One suggestion is that it will give itself away by the curious way it bends light. A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from. Space tourism may be just one of the services Virgin Galactic ends up offering future customers. Last week it said its first tourist space vehicle (right) could also be used to launch satellites and make super-fast intercity trips. A bizarre spider shape has been discovered on the surface of Mercury during the first flyby of the planet by NASA's Messenger spacecraft. The discovery of the spider - which is unlike anything seen elsewhere in the solar system - was announced on Wednesday along with other results from the historic pass. UK astronomers have lost their front-row view of the northern sky. Following UK funding cuts to the Gemini Observatory, the observatory's board has refused to allow the country to use the 8-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, US – the only telescope of its calibre in the northern hemisphere that the UK had direct access to.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 22-01-08

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:11:23 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. Arcologists Dream: 7 Proposed Futuristic Sky Cities. Lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings. Digg wasn't the first social bookmarking (now social news) site, nor was it the first to popularize the concept. It was, however, the first site with a story that touched people, and helped the site outgrow all its competition and become an industry (and even mainstream media) darling. Do today's young people really think they are so extraordinary? We often read or hear stories about older adults being conned out of their life savings, but are older individuals really more susceptible to fraud than younger adults? And, if so, how exactly does aging affect judgment and decision-making abilities? An internet search engine rivalling the multimillion pound Google is to be launched at the end of January by The University of Manchester's national data centre Mimas. Most energy experts agree that global warming is a serious threat, and they also agree that green technology has the power to fundamentally reshape how business gets done. But at this early stage, these experts - including investors - are finding it hard to separate truth from exaggeration when it comes to the benefits that green technology can offer. Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper. Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. "The greatest unwitting enemies of public-service broadcasting are those who say we should leave it be. I'm afraid the world doesn't allow for that," - UK Culture Minister, James Purnell. A British man who was selling £12,000 software for £12 on eBay faces up to 10 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to copyright infringement and will be sentenced in February. Novels Composed on Cellphones. Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker's productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. Modeling Urban Panic. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssr-6-30] Two physics students at the University of Bristol have organised a petition against the recently-announced funding cut of £80 million by the body that funds physics research in the UK, the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Women are more likely to have their research published if the referees who peer review their work are unaware of their gender, a new study suggests. James Yoo uses a standard inkjet printing mechanism to create layers of viable cells, which can then be built into 3D structures. He says the structures may comprise several different types of cells, just as conventional image printers use several different colours of ink. Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century. Within hours of the US government's announcement that milk and meat from cloned animals is safe, food companies insisted they had no plans to sell such products and consumer groups said Americans had no plans -or desires - to eat them. Climate change is warming Britain's waters, eroding its coastline, harming its marine wildlife and increasing the likelihood of devastating storms and floods, the government said in a report published last week. The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory. The material was created from carbon nanotubes - sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders. [RandomProduct-51] Space News The first image of Mercury returned by the Messenger probe may hold evidence of ancient lava flows on the innermost planet (Image: NASA/JHU APL/CIW) Images from NASA's Messenger spacecraft hint at the presence of solidified lava flows on the surface of Mercury. If confirmed, they should provide crucial clues to unlocking the planet's history. The unseen side of Mercury. A single black hole can contain more disorder than all the stars in the universe put together. A new study may explain why, by connecting them to chaotic distortions in the fabric of space-time known as "monsters". Consider it a case of exquisite timing. Just last week, solar physicists announced the beginning of a new solar cycle and now, Jan. 14th, the Ulysses spacecraft is flying over a key region of solar activity - the sun's North Pole. Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration" - one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft. Antimatter comes from black holes, neutron stars. Astrobiology Magazine is reporting that astronomers have announced a mystery object orbiting the 8-million-year-old brown dwarf 2M1207 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 14-01-08

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:16:53 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. The Edge Annual Question - 2008 - What have you changed your mind about? Why? Benoit Mandelbrot - Fractal Art Contest 2007: Winners As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? When it came down to business, Cosa Nostra could always count on fear. No more. In a rebellion shaking the Sicilian Mafia to its centuries-old roots, businesses are joining forces in refusing to submit to demands for protection money called "pizzo." The Easiest Hard Problem. Informed Choice? Armed Forces and Recruitment Practice in the UK. 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. Are we running out of helium? Cheemos and Rudettes. The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. China to contribute 1.4 billion dollars to ITER. How Arab Countries Are Coping with Globalization. 'What Are You Giving Away?' The Challenges of Marketing in Asia. Every parent of a secondary school pupil will have online access to real-time data on their child's behaviour by 2010 under new targets set by UK schools minister Jim Knight. The anti-nuclear movement has fired an opening shot in the UK energy-policy debate, ahead of expected Parliamentary announcements from the Brown government this week. Jeremy Clarkson is a Wally. Prediction markets have been used for years to predict things like elections. At Google, they are used, of course, for business. In the last two and a half years, 1,463 employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel -based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter? Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship. It certainly takes more than a pretty face to run a leading national corporation. But according to a recent Tufts University study, the performance levels of America's top companies could be related to the first impressions made by their chief executive officers (CEOs). Top executives who appear powerful and leaderlike at first glance are more likely to run profitable companies. When operators of sex-oriented Web sites gather at the Internext convention starting Sunday in Las Vegas, a major leak at a little New Jersey company is likely to be a big topic. A totally new way of generating electricity from heat. UK Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails. Millennials - employees between the ages of 18 and 31 - represent the top challenge for IT managers: "Millennials are coming in with high expectations and are disillusioned about the reality of a work place. They feel they should be rewarded and start at the top, when we all know you have to work your way up. They have been raised to be rewarded often and when you get into the workforce those rules change a bit..." Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site. Harry Potter & The Well of Scammers. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssr-6-30] Since stories have started surfacing more recently, many have wondered if the rumors are true. Are there really ‘continents', or massive floating garbage patches residing in the pacific ocean? It's called eco-anxiety - free-form worry triggered by concerns about the worsening fate of the planet - and if you suffer from it, you might want to give Lester Brown's new book, Plan B 3.0 The typical distancing from parents by adolescents is exacerbated by divorce for fathers, but not for mothers, according to a recent study. Contrary to earlier predictions, Duke University engineers have found that a three-dimensional sound cloak is possible, at least in theory. Such an acoustic veil would do for sound what the "invisibility cloak" previously demonstrated by the research team does for microwave - allowing sound waves to travel seamlessly around it and emerge on the other side without distortion The percentage of teens who report solely positive benefits from not having sex declines precipitously with age. University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. The healing power of cranberries apply only to women. The agency that governs educational technology in the United Kingdom has advised schools in the country to keep Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 software out of the classroom and administrative offices. [RandomProduct-51] Space News Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost? Solar physicists have been waiting for the appearance of a reversed-polarity sunspot to signal the start of the next solar cycle. The signal for the start of a new cycle is sighting a particular kind of sunspot. That wait is over. The first spacecraft to visit Mercury in more than 30 years passes the planet on Monday at a distance of just 200km. Bill Gates has donated $10m to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) - an 8.4 metre beast boasting the world's largest digital camera designed to capture the entire available night sky every three days, "opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales". Our planet is changing before our eyes, and as a result, many species are living on the edge. Yet Earth has been on the edge of habitability from the beginning. If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy. Nearly four years after their warranties expired, the Mars Explorations Rovers"Spirit" and "Opportunity" continue to play productively in the red dirt. The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations, SETI, is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated. A gas cloud weighing a million times the mass of the Sun is hurtling towards the Milky Way galaxy and is set to trigger stellar fireworks in 20 to 40 million years.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 31-12-07

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:59:11 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. 2008: The Year in Science. T here have been a number of theories put forward to explain how our tastes in cinema, theatre, music and the fine arts relate to our position in society. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, has concluded that there is little evidence of a ‘cultural elite' that aspires to ‘high culture', while turning its back on popular culture. Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality. "If there were drugs for investment bankers, journalists, teachers and scientists that made them more successful, they would use them too," says Charles E. Yesalis, a doping researcher and emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University. "Why does anyone think this would be limited to an athlete?" IBM reveals five innovations that will change our lives over the next five years. The three largest Internet companies have agreed to pay a combined $31.5 million to settle federal civil allegations they took ads for illegal gambling, the U.S. Attorney for eastern Missouri said Wednesday. A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies. Here are three of history's best. Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. The British weekly journal Nature on Wednesday named Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as "Newsmaker of the Year," an award reflecting an individual's contribution to public debate on science. Pressured by a lawsuit, Internet social network Facebook Inc. will adopt new measures to prevent its 58 million members from sending text messages to recycled cell phone numbers. In a rather desperate bid to attract wealthy technology advertisers, BusinessWeek lowered itself this month by publishing data center erotica. A new material, nano flakes, may revolutionise the transformation of solar energy to electricity. If so, even ordinary households can benefit from solar electricity and save money in the future. Israeli scientists said on Tuesday they have created the world's smallest Bible, fitting a Hebrew-language version of the holy book on a gold-coated silicon chip smaller than a pinhead. Sakhrat Khizroev insists the 10-terabit hard drive will be a near-term innovation, appearing in as little as two years. We doubt this came up last week at the United Nation's conference on global warming in Bali , but Britain's top government scientist says the best thing women can do to ease global warming is "stop admiring young men in Ferraris." What's next for Web search. The X Prize Ecosystem. Twelve years ago, Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark was still a software programmer at Charles Schwab & Co. But that changed after he began sending out self-composed e-mails to a small group of friends to tell them of cool art exhibits and high-tech events going on in his adopted city of San Francisco. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-econophysicsfocus-titles-rssr-6-30] The new editor-in-chief of Science Magazine is Bruce Alberts. Several theories of the maximum possible temperature. Youngsters who are allowed to leave the house without an adult are more active and enjoy a richer social life than those who are constantly supervised. A University of Arkansas researcher says people use tattoos as a way to find meaning, permanence and stability - and thus a coherent identity - in an increasingly complex and fragmented world. To grow future supercomputing performance and accommodate the resulting spiking data flows in the system, IBM researchers have been investigating the use of light for data transmission. It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube. Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA. Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. The Annals of Improbable Research , a scientific publication that hosts the annual Ig Nobel awards, has decided to offer its publication free online [RandomProduct-48] Space News Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/ STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN Mars has been runusually bright recently. The Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, an "international hub" that will draw together cosmologists young and old to answer the big questions of the universe, was launched at the University of Cambridge in the UK. New research suggests that the moon is actually 30 million years younger than anyone had thought, and that it is merely a 'chip off the old block' of Earth rather than being made up of the remnants of a Mars-sized body that slammed into Earth billions of years ago. Astronomers are puzzling over a powerful cosmic explosion that seems to have detonated in a region of empty space. An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life. But what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet" Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life"

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 17-12-07

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:46:57 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. A poll of 2,500 UK workers has confirmed what most of us already knew: The Chrismas holiday started last Friday night at 5pm Television can encourage awareness of political perspectives among Americans, but the incivility and close-up camera angles that characterize much of today's "in your face" televised political debate also causes audiences to react more emotionally and think of opposing views as less legitimate. Corporate culture involves more than just dress codes and the atmosphere in the office – it helps define a company's most important economic decisions, according to new research. The BBC has launched the first redesign of its homepage in five years. Check it out. "For most people computers are complex and unreliable... given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then it will be a real improvement in people's lives..." - Eric E. Schmidt. The Soul of the Corporation: Managing Your Company's Identity. In the past year, the development of illegal malware has reached the point where it is almost as sophisticated as the traditional software-development and sales channel. Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input. More adults in Britain use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace than in any other European country. Men are more optimistic than women about the economic outlook, Massey finance researchers say. Using consumer confidence data from 18 countries, they have identified a difference in outlook between sexes. By analyzing some lesser known photographs, taken by world famous documentary photographers, art historian Cecelia Strandroth relates a new history of the Depression Era in the United States. Although psychiatrists are among the least religious physicians, they seem to be the most interested in the religious and spiritual dimensions of their patients. For Timothy P. Flynn, chairman of the global accounting firm KPMG, ethics and integrity are not just boilerplate language in the company mission statement. University of Queensland researchers are part of an international team to have made the first ever execution of a quantum calculation, a major step towards building the first quantum computers. The MagLev wind turbine is expected take wind power technology to the next level with magnetic levitation. Britain is to launch a huge expansion of offshore wind-power with plans for thousands of turbines in the North Sea, Irish Sea and around the coast of Scotland. "Civilian," "Military" Nukes: What's the Difference? Umami. 20 quotes for Entrepreneurs. The best timepiece in the world lives deep in a '60s-style concrete government building, where it resembles nothing so much as a teenager's science-fair project. Jeb Corliss wants to fly - not the way the Wright brothers wanted to fly, but the way we do in our dreams. He wants to jump from a helicopter and land without using a parachute. A business trust is looking at sites for a Christian showplace to challenge the theory of evolution. Google is starting a Wikipedia of its own. Distributed Computing: The state of play. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-econophysicsfocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Researchers at the University of Warwick and the Research Unit for General Practice in Copenhagen have found that parents are often totally unaware of just how often their children take risks and just how good they are at managing that risk. 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2008. The remains of one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs ever found have recently been recognized as representing a new species by a student working at the University of Bristol. This is your brain on Faith. Everything that goes into Frank Pringle's recycling machine - a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup - turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. "I've been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me," Pringle says without sarcasm. The Road to Success: A Cartoon. [RandomProduct-48] Space News Virgin Galactic expects its White Knight II (WK2) aircraft's last engine to be delivered in January and the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) carrier fully assembled by June for a July test flight in 2008, which it is calling the "year of the spaceship". NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin Voyager 1 into the solar system's final frontier. NASA will fill the space shuttle Atlantis' fuel tank next week in hopes of cracking a vexing fuel gauge problem that led to back-to-back launch delays. Recent breakthroughs in scramjet engines could mean two-hour flights from New York to Tokyo. They could also mean missiles capable of striking any continent in a moment's notice. No wonder the race to develop them is as fierce as ever By analyzing organic material and minerals in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001, scientists have shown for the first time that building blocks of life formed on Mars early in its history. Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007 Work is progressing on designing the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the next generation of NASA spacecraft that will take humans to the International Space Station, back to the Moon, and hopefully on to Mars. But one major question about the spacecraft has yet to be answered. A return to Europa? Climate News What happened in Bali. Shell, the oil company that recently trumpeted its commitment to a low carbon future by signing a pre-Bali conference communique, has quietly sold off most of its solar business. As oil prices and energy demand soar in tandem in Southeast Asia, many nations are turning to nuclear power - to the horror of environmentalists who say it is not a safe option. Europe is known as a champion of combating climate change. But a developing country famous for its capital's polluted air is also a surprising front-runner: Mexico. A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere. Study shows that more plant litter resulting from higher CO2 could boost the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. Two researchers here spent months scouring through old expedition logs and reports, and reviewing 70-year-old maps and photos before making a surprising discovery: They found that the effects of the current warming and melting of Greenland 's glaciers that has alarmed the world's climate scientists occurred in the decades following an abrupt warming in the 1920s. The UN is to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated by its delegates attending the climate change summit currently underway in Bali.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 10-12-07

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:46:41 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Although more and more drug advertisements are appearing on television in the US, the bulk of the approximately $21 billion dollars that pharmaceutical companies spend annually to market their products is targeted to physicians, doctors in training (residents) and medical students. Unconfirmed reports are coming in about a daring 'Ocean's Eleven'-type robbery said to have taken place at a data centre in the Kings Cross area of London late Sunday night. Thieves, said to have been dressed as police officers, are thought to have handcuffed security guards and walked off with around $4m of computer hardware, including motherboards and processors. A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. Leading British firms and government agencies have been warned Chinese state organisations may be spying on them. UK intelligence network MI5 has contacted 300 chief executives and security experts at banks and financial institutions to raise the concerns. Software is being designed to allow companies to flag up employees who are potential saboteurs, industrial spies or data thieves. It might also flag up whistle-blowers. Once upon a distant time, papers had editors, deputy editors and department editors. The fewer the qualifying adjectives, the more power you wielded. "Doctoral education in the U.S. is still structured, for the most part, as if all students were destined to become university professors." -Maresi Nerad. Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing has invested 60 million dollars in Facebook with a right to acquire another 60 million dollar stake. RIP Facebook? A company's good reputation can be a bad thing. The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular file-sharing websites in the world and much of the content reachable via the site is pirated. Here the founders of the site and those that keep it running talk about what they do, why they do it and how hard it is to stop them. The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems How America Lost the War on Drugs. Why do magazine circulation departments treat people like idiots? The Golden Compass: The Making of Philip Pullman's Epic Fantasy. Teaching people to have a "growth mind-set," which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life. The Return of the Yes Men? - "In an effort to encourage decisive action [at the climate change talks] in Bali this week, USCAP's members have committed to a 90% reduction in their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050... This commitment should send a strong message to the assembled countries and businesses about the type of reductions needed to stop global warming." The average home owner spends only £6 a year on renewable power. Men in powerful jobs in the UKare much less likely to die prematurely than their lower-achieving subordinates, the Office for National Statistics said after measuring mortality rates in England and Wales using a new social classification for the first time. Media Predictions for 2008. A new kind of "3-D" transistor that provides 10 times the computing speed of current chips. The New Media world is bewildering, and few Chief Marketing Officers can live up to the sky-high expectations. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has annoucned it paid an undisclosed sum for Beliefnet.com, a faith portal. The World Food Situation: New Driving Forces and Required Actions. Patrick Byrne, Naked Shorts and Wikipedia. The US Department of Justice has given government backing to the $222,000 fine slapped on Minnesota woman Jammie Thomas. She was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Ass. of America earlier this year for illegaly sharing 24 songs. As the average Trekkie counts down to next year's big-screen prequel, hardcore space fanatics are waiting patiently for the year 2010, when Virgin Galactic hopes to start sending the VSS Enterprise, and six paying customers at a time, into the cosmos. Fertility in Scotland is below that of other countries and regions in the UK. In comparison with their English neighbours, Scottish women leave longer gaps between their children and are more likely to stop at two children. As a result fertility in Scotland is not only below the average required to replace the population (as is the case in many developed countries) but also the lowest in the UK. 'Scotland's demographic trends: insights from Scotland's Demography Research Programme Findings'. Has Facebook Worn Out Its Welcome? What's new in Blade Runner: The Final Cut? [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-econophysicsfocus-titles-rssr-6-30] Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement. The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won't commit to mandatory caps at the U.N. climate conference here, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday. Are we genetically programmed to be generous? The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment. Some anti-drinking advertising campaigns may be "catastrophically misconceived" because they play on the entertaining ' drinking stories' that young people use to mark their social identity, say researchers who have just completed a three year study of the subject: "Inebriation within the friendship group is often part of a social bonding ritual that is viewed positively and linked with fun, friendship and good times..." It has been estimated that within the continental United States, there is a sizable resource of accessible geothermal energy - about 3,000 times the current annual U.S. consumption. The next intelligent design showdown will take place in Florida. The 6 Most Important Experiments in the World: From the smartest artificial brain to the first artificial life. Three new giant underground particle detectors have been proposed for construction in Europe that could help achieve some major milestones in physics Even after more than a year of maintaining a normalized body weight, young women who recovered from anorexia nervosa show vastly different patterns of brain activity compared to similar women without the eating disorder. The teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control. We can disguise environmentally harmful practices and dress them up in words to help ease our consciences, argues Albert Bandura of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, but such practices will have a negative impact on the planet and the quality of life of future generations, no matter how we label them. Optimism isn't always healthy. Americans believe in God - and hell, UFOs, witches, astrology. The "Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic is open for business. [RandomProduct-48] Space News Odyssey Moon, the first team to complete registration for the Google Lunar X Prize, has unveiled it's entry. The NYTimes has an in-depth piece describing an upcoming shuttle mission, scheduled for next August, to make a final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope. Between 2010 (the end of the shuttle era) and 2015 (expected date for the launch of the Orion project) the United States will have little or no spaceflight capability. Perhaps the first stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible “dark stars” 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun and powered by the annihilation of mysterious dark matter, a University of Utah study concludes. For NASA and Mars, it's no humans allowed. As reported by the Mars Society and other space enthusiasts, Congress is finally clamping down on the menace of human life on Mars

Sci-tech-Business Shorts 30-11-07

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:47:22 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. If you've seen Spooks you'll know what fictional spies do. But what is the reality of the job? The BBC has been given unprecedented access to speak to real spies about their jobs. Fewer than one in three middle-class families in America is financially secure, and the remaining majority are either borderline or at high risk of falling out of the middle class altogether, according to a new study published this week by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University. The Times of India reports scarcely 48 hours ago that a living "monkey head" in North Carolina was able to "control a pair of robot legs in Japan via a web link". A person can be guilty of deceit when he lies to a machine rather than a human, a judge has ruled. Top 10 terrible tech products. How sci-fi influences today's gadgets. 99 Remarkable Photographers The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It’s shaped like a sake cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere. Encase it in concrete, truck it to a site, bury it underground, hook it up to a steam turbine and, voila, one would generate enough electricity to power a 25,000-home community for at least five years. or peculiar business reasons, Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages (although much of Canada has shifted away from this). This creates a stilted social dynamic whereby a friend forces you to pay $.10 (or use up a precious token msg in your plan) simply by deciding to send you something... Needless to say, this alters the culture of texting. The recent departures of two of the world's most prominent chief executives in the wake of major financial losses at their firms - Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch and Charles Prince of Citigroup - have focused renewed attention on an important but often neglected component of corporate management: succession planning. Terrorists are leveraging information technology to organize, recruit, and learn - and the West is struggling to keep up. Why is the BBC's iPlayer a multi million pound disaster? Still, it looks like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are to launch a joint on-demand service, which will bring together hundreds of hours of television programmes in one place. Restrictive tools and rash approaches to security challenges are endangering the health of the online ecosystem, an Oxford University researcher warned Wednesday. Growth in TV watching will outpace internet for years to come, according to figures released this week. It means the pot of gold lusted after by internet video disciples will remain out of reach, if it exists at all. Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid. [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-linklibraryassorted-titles-rssr-6-30] 10 Solutions for Climate Change. Hackers have responded to a purge of malicious links within search results by Google with a fresh effort to subvert the search giant's page rank system. The cult-within-the-organisation. A prosecutor in Turkey has launched an investigation into Richard Dawkins' bestselling polemic The God Delusion on suspicion that it incites religious hatred and insults religous values. How journalism really works. Having gained a certain degree of expertise in developing and designing its own energy efficient data centers, Google thinks it's in a position to help spur on the adoption of even more renewable energy sources. Where does stored nuclear waste go? He learned at the knee of his bookmaker father in New York, took street bets in his teens, and partied with Las Vegas high-rollers. He made millions of dollars as a self-proclaimed offshore sports gambling "pioneer," flirted with Internet gambling, and was pinched by the FBI. According to new research from the University of Bristol, some fathers do not provide their young sons with the same quality of intellectual stimulation as mothers do. Boys who spend at least 15 hours a week in their father's care as toddlers perform worse in academic assessments when they start school. Ted Leonsis: 'It's the Greatest Time to Be an Entrepreneur' A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by some 80%. The emerging field of connectomics could help researchers decode the brain's approach to information processing. [RandomProduct-48] Space News NASA says it will send a 400,000kg crewed spacecraft on a 30-month round trip to Mars as early as February 2031. Mars Express has completed 5,000 orbits of the red planet, just short of four years after it arrived on Christmas day, 2003. ESA's Venus Express has revealed Venus as never before. Using a computer model simulation, Haruichi Washimi, a physicist at UC Riverside, has predicted when the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the "termination shock," the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. Scientists analysing data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft have confirmed the presence of heavy negative ions in the upper regions of Titan's atmosphere. These particles may act as organic building blocks for even more complicated molecules and their discovery was completely unexpected.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 23-11-07

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:19:17 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Key findings from Saturday's Report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking. Philosophy graduates are suddenly all the rage with employers. What can they possibly have to offer? Your company's secret life. Google's Android agenda. More than three in four small UK firms struggle to recruit enterprising staff, a survey suggests. The Ferrari FXX prototype is one of the most extreme supercars ever built. But only a handful of people will ever get to drive it -- or see it Riding shotgun with Google Street View's revolutionary camera. How many copyright violations does an average US citizen commit in a single day? The world's biggest airship will make its first commercial flight over Tokyo later this week, 70 years after the Hindenburg disaster brought the golden age of the dirigible to a fiery end. Is the social graph Web 3.0? A parents' guide to the HMRC data giveaway. A genetics website encouraging people to send in swabs of their saliva began operating in a closely watched Silicon Valley venture with links to the search firm Google. The firm claims to offer the first "personal genome service" for $999 (£488). Tired of the Web masses? Now you can find your own gated communities on the Net - if they'll let you in Facebook is facing investigation by UK data protection watchdogs after a complaint from a British user who tried, and failed, to delete his account. 10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets. More evidence we've entered the End of Oil. eBay: Two CD-R's - Have data on them - some sort of database. The best television is yet to come. We are entering an age where competition will really start to drive production. Expect the Americans to win on big budget production and everyone else to win on innovation and humour. Birth of a Gadget: Inside the Industrial Design Process. [Externalrss-Complexity-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-energybulletin-titles-rssr-6-30] What Makes Us Moral? "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Garrett Lisi Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. French "mathlete" Alexis Lemaire showed off his rare mental agility Thursday, claiming a new world record after working out in his head the 13th root of a random 200-digit number in just 72.4 seconds. Pastafarianism - the official religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - is as serious as the religious-studies wonks are taking it. You might also like to investigate the religion of the invisble pink unicorn. [RandomProduct-48] Space News In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms. Having a moon like ours makes us very special, cosmically speaking. NASA said it has built a tiny, low-cost satellite it says will be ideal for adventure seekers or companies with high-tech space applications who need to get into space quickly and relatively inexpensively. The Arecibo Observatory funding has been slashed. Have we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That's the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion. During the past month, Mars has doubled in brightness and it is putting a nice show for backyard stargazers. Russia is planning a new rocket launch facility that will be prepared to put a manned mission in space by 2018. Astronomers have discovered white dwarf stars with pure carbon atmospheres.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 15-11-07

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:53:43 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Google's OpenSocial for scholarly networking. What are some of the reasons why "climate sceptics" dispute the evidence that human activities such as industrial emissions of greenhouse gases and deforestation are bringing potentially dangerous changes to the Earth's climate? 6 Future directions in computing. From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm. If there are any lingering doubts as to whether the age of oil is nearing its end, the International Energy Agency has put them to rest and made it clear that only a massive and immediate investment in sustainable energy will prevent a global crisis. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Presents our Top 20 Logical Fallacies. The universe's clock has neither a start nor finish, yet time is finite according to a New Zealand theorist. The theory, which tackles the age-old mystery of the origin of the universe, along with several other problems and paradoxes in cosmology, calls for a new take on our concept of time. Recent research by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Florida Institute of Technology doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar, indicates that various crowd formations exacerbate or minimize injuries and fatalities in the event of a pedestrian suicide bomb attack. An educational study unprecedented in scope finds that children who enter kindergarten with elementary mathematics and reading skills are the most likely to experience later academic success - whether or not they have social or emotional problems. The computer sciences department at Cambridge University has said it is "desperate" to attract more students to its courses, despite the fact that it currently turns down two applications in three. The world's smallest double slit experiment. Google: In Search of Itself. The Pentagon is paying Lockheed Martin to try to predict insurgencies and civil unrest like the weather. The "Electronic Program of Jihad". New measurements of brain activity in individuals addicted to cocaine confirm that addicted individuals have compromised sensitivity to monetary rewards. [Externalrss-econophysicsblog-titles-rssl-7-30] [Externalrss-linklibraryassorted-titles-rssr-10-30] Women seeking to balance career, social life and family life in making the decision on when to have a child may benefit from applying formal decision-making science to this complex emotional choice. Canadian scientists have uncovered new evidence which shows genetics has a role to play in determining whether an individual is homosexual or heterosexual. Drip Paintings and Fractal Analysis. Silicon Valley's richest bachelor is getting married next month. Almost six out of 10 West Europeans now regularly access the Internet Most of the oil that spilled into San Francisco Bay when a container ship struck the Bay Bridge will never be retrieved and eventually will be absorbed into the ecosystem, authorities said Friday. Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior. Imagine peering into a hole, only to see a distant object as though it were right next to you. No cameras, no elaborate periscopes are involved — instead you are gazing through "an electromagnetic “wormhole" created in a specially designed material. Amsterdam After the Mushroom Ban. Creationists and intelligent-design boosters have a guerrilla tactic to undermine textbooks that don't jibe with their beliefs. They slap a sticker on the cover that reads, EVOLUTION IS A THEORY, NOT A FACT, REGARDING THE ORIGIN OF LIVING THINGS. The Animal Kingdom in Ultra-Hi-Res A recent application to build the first American nuclear power plant in nearly 30 years has the nuclear community aglow with talk of possible industry resurgence. [RandomProduct-48] Space News ESA's comet chaser, Rosetta, is on its way to its second close encounter with Earth on 13 November. NASA's Mars rover Spirit will soon begin to trundle towards a slope on which it will try to ride out the coming winter – its third on the Red Planet. A newly discovered form of space weather. Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov says the Russian space agency will build three new modules for the International Space Station by 2011. New evidence for extragalactic life-forming matter. From the Moon to the Earth in photos. Review: Razor slices smartly into Galactica's past In the World of the Strange There is little substantive evidence that binge drinking while pregnant seriously harms the developing fetus, finds a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Could We Live Forever? Or Even Come Close? A new study by University of Virginia clinical psychologists has found that teens who have sex at an early age may be less inclined to exhibit delinquent behavior in early adulthood than their peers who waited until they were older to have sex. The study also suggests that early sex may play a role in helping these teens develop better social relationships in early adulthood. Sex partner acquisition while overseas: Results form a British national probability survey. UFOs may be fodder for comedians but there was no joking Monday when a group of former pilots recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky and demanded the US government reopen an investigation into unidentified flying objects.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 07-11-07

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:10:19 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. "Venter's real importance – one he seems not to recognise fully himself – is not that he raced some other scientists to a predictable goal, but that he ushered in the 21st century by shattering the 500-year assumption that businesses cannot do fundamental research. " - Book Review: A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life by J. Craig Venter. Vegas property tycoon Robert Bigelow has always been aware of the main problem besetting his plan to sell cheap inflatable space habitats in orbit - he can build them, but no one can afford to come. The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century The launch of OpenSocial. - and two opinions. Now the big players are drawing the Battle Lines. UK Police will appeal against a ruling from the information commissioner to remove records, including on covering the theft of a 99p piece of meat. How did a desktop computer with 4Kb of memory; a refrigerator-sized magnetic disk drive with just 5Mb capacity; and Intel processor capable of running only a calculator - start a revolution? Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World. The New School of Videographers. I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone. Time Magazine is reporting on the best inventions of the year. The Wireless Network after Next, a complete military communications infrastructure. Some puzzling land formations on Mars's equator could be huge glacier-like deposits of frozen water, new radar observations suggest. It is downhill all the way for oil, according to a study by the Energy Watch Group (EWG) in Berlin, Germany. It was reported last week that world oil production peaked in 2006 - far earlier than expected. How will Apple spend its cash? "I don't think that sites like Facebook are 'profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private". Rather, they're changing our ability to make our public lives more public." Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he's not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years. 3d Print on Demand. And just to take it one step further, a Missouri professor has taken several types of chicken heart cells and 3D printed them into large sheets with cell-friendly gel. The cells took over from there, sorting themselves into working order. Then they began beating, just as a heart would. The History of Slashdot Part 4 - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow Tsar Bomba (literally "Emperor Bomb") is the Western name for the RDS-220 (codenamed "Ivan" by its developers), which was the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated - Video. Bad behavior seems rampant in business, and scholars are divided as to why people act ethically or unethically. Many have argued that ethical behavior is the result of simple judgments between right and wrong. Others suggest that the driving force behind ethical behavior is the individual's moral identity, or whether the individual thinks of him/herself as an ethical person. New research from the University of Washington suggests that both of these forces are at play. The continuing impact of Facebook. Now is the time that many parents will be choosing secondary schools for their children but with education policy mostly focused on individual success and achievement, the importance of children's school friendships is largely ignored, according to a study funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. [RandomProduct-126] "Secular Muslims who embrace various aspects of their heritage are often overlooked – both as social and as intellectual actors in modern Islamic societies,"said Prof. Richard C. Martin, one of the key speakers at a symposium on contemporary Islam held 26 October at De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. The question of who secular Muslims are and why they need to be part of future research in religious studies was the focus of discussion at the scientific meeting. The symposium, called Beyond the Stereotypes, was organized to help establish a new field of research - contemporary Islam. Prof. Martin: "The modern Muslim identity is far more complex and dynamic than most people are aware of." When matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests. Another day, another 3 exoplanets. Along with a newly disovered 5-planet system. The Physics of a golf swing. The engine of an experimental Moon lander exploded on the launch pad on Sunday, dashing Armadillo Aerospace's hopes of winning up to $1.35 million in NASA prize money. Chris Wyatt is on a mission: GodTube. The BBC has already begun serving advertising to overseas visitors to its website Elephants on acid, and other strange experiments. A new way to make water. Computers might not be clever enough to trick adults into thinking they are intelligent yet, but a new study shows that a giggling robot is sophisticated enough to get toddlers to treat it as a peer. Google Inc.'s stock price barreled through $700 for the first time last Wednesday, propelled by a belief that the Internet search leader will become even more profitable as it plants its products and services in new markets. Enhanced Brane Tunneling and Instanton Wrinkles. Taking a page from Nature herself, a team of researchers developed a method to enhance removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and place it in the Earth's oceans for storage. The UK will be the first country in the world to have legally binding emissions targets under the Climate Change Bill announced in the Queen's Speech. Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca once noted, "You can have brilliant ideas; but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere." In their new book, The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas, Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor G. Richard Shell and management consultant Mario Moussa provide a systematic approach to idea selling that addresses the problem Iacocca identified. A ten-person Arizona based start-up has claimed victory in the annual US Army precision airdrop competition, claiming to landed disguised spy sensors from a plane flying at 10,000 feet "within ten, seven and three metres" of their intended touchdown points. 38% of downloaders paid for Radiohead album, "In Rainbows". Nanotech Back in the mid-1980s, a joke made the rounds that the Kremlin was preparing a major announcement: After a decade-long top-secret crash program, socialist science had succeeded in building the world's largest microprocessor. Now the Russian government is dumping billions into nanotech. Harnessing the electrical and mechanical properties of the carbon nanotube, a team of researchers has crafted a working radio from a single fiber of that material. "I'm not talking about flying robots delivering breakfast in the morning." - Michael Kozicki - Nanotech will replace magnetic disk drives in iPods, laptops and servers within five to 10 years. Nanotech takes energy storage beyond batteries. A set of nine molecular tools for diamond mechanosynthesis (molecular assembly) - a significant new step toward creating the nanofactory - was presented by Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph C. Merkle at Saturday's Foresight Unconference. A research paper published in the Institute of Physics' Nanotechnology details how engineers have found a way to use the elasticity of carbon nanotubes to not only stop bullets penetrating material but actually rebound their force.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 30-10-07

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:23:00 +0000

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. In what sense is Facebook a book? A neural network that may generate the human tendency to be optimistic has been identified by researchers at New York University. Climate change models, no matter how powerful, can never give a precise prediction of how greenhouse gases will warm the Earth, according to a new study. 87 Bad Predictions. Most people in Africa and Asia are born and die without leaving a trace in any official records, giving policymakers and researchers little information on which to base public health decisions A school in Doncaster is piloting a monitoring system designed to keep tabs on pupils by tracking radio chips in their uniforms. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized last Friday for leading a staged news conference earlier in the week in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. "Active, supermassive black holes were everywhere in the early universe...We had seen the tip of the iceberg before in our search for these objects. Now, we can see the iceberg itself." Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support. In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life". 52 years later, he has retracted it. Business-wise, Skype is a basketcase. But that's just one of the things that makes it one of the most emblematic companies of our time - a real, Ur-Web 2.0 company. In the future everyone who is connected to the electricity grid will be able to upload and download packages of electricity to and from this network Humans and monkeys share Machiavellian intelligence. Nuclear power worldwide: status and outlook. How to Invest in Social Capital. In a cutting message to the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list, Stanford's Vaughan Pratt has pointed out an elementary mistake in the recently announced proof that Wolfram's (2,3) machine is universal. Just as the BBC is slashing jobs at home, its commercial tentacle is ramping up efforts to squeeze money from its programming and web content abroad. Several weeks after Radiohead's digital release of its seventh studio album, "In Rainbows," aftershocks are still reverberating though the music industry. The St Bernard dog – named after the 11th century priest Bernard of Menthon – may have ironically challenged the theory of creationism, say scientists. A prizewinning paper by a USC Viterbi School engineer elegantly solves a basic transit scheduling problem, potentially meaning shorter waits and faster trips for riders. What happens if you buy something from a spam email? What's the brain got to do with education? Ruthless head of a print news empire, William Dean Singleton has become a crusader for efficiency and collaboration as a way to save the industry. The Semantic Web goes mainstream. Paris Hilton has allegedly invested heavily in the Cryonics Institute, reportedly the biggest suspended animation cemetery west of the Mississippi.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 22-10-07

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:58:23 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Data centers of the future: "Google hashired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box." Could "hypertime" help develop a theory of everything? The team of mathematicians that first created the mathematics behind the "invisibility cloak" announced by physicists last October has now shown that the same technology could be used to generate an "electromagnetic wormhole." Almost four in ten would-be entrepreneurs are too scared of failure to do anything about their business idea, a report suggests. French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world. The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August . NASA's Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) concept. When it comes to explaining the evolution of human cooperation, researchers have traditionally looked to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game as the paradigm. However, the observed degree of cooperation among humans is generally higher than predicted by mathematical models using the IPD, leaving unanswered the question of why humans cooperate to the extent they do. In another sign of potential friction in the warming Arctic, Canada has warned that it will step up patrols of the Northwest Passage. More UK companies are being transparent about the size of their carbon footprint, a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project has suggested. Countries are altering their nuclear arsenals, prompting the U.S. to refurbish its own warheads. 10 Predictions for 2008 and Beyond. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has joined scientists from SETI -the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - to unveil the first major telescope devoted full time to answering the question: Is anyone out there? Russian Viagra spammer murdered. James Watson, the Nobel prize-winning scientist who caused an uproar last week with his comments to a Sunday newspaper has been suspended by his research laboratory. The University of Maastricht in the Netherlands is awarding a doctorate to a researcher who wrote a paper on marriages between humans and robots. Robert Aymar, the director general of CERN, has dispelled rumours that a series of buckled electrical connectors at the Large Hadron Collider will delay the accelerator's official start-up date of May 2008. In a recent study, Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer N. Gutsell offer an account of what is happening in the brain when our vices get the better of us. A Brussels think-tank has accused the US government of reneging on commitments made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over internet gaming. Panellists at a trade forum levelled harsh criticism at the US, focusing on a burgeoning trade clash between the US and Europe over internet gaming. Which came first, the chicken genome or the egg genome? Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who've invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from "Beowulf" to "Canterbury Tales" to "Harry Potter." A Brief History of Slashdot Part 2, Explosions. Australian-led scientists have designed a new space habitat that might one day allow astronauts on the Moon or Mars to be 90 to 95 per cent self-sufficient. Aboard the International Space Station, the three Russian computers that control the station's orientation have been happily humming away now for several weeks, proof that the crisis in June that crippled the ISS and bloodied the U.S.-Russian partnership that supports it, has been resolved. Almost one month after Japan's successful launch of the Kaguya lunar probe, the unmanned observatory has begun its first major activities in orbit around the moon.. Botnets are fulfilling law enforcement fears that online casinos could prove fertile ground for money laundering. By labeling shyness and other human traits as mental conditions with a biological cause, the doors were opened wide to a pharmaceutical industry ready to provide a pill for every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem. Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff. Children seen as athletic by their classmates are also better liked and less likely to feel lonely, while unathletic children experience the opposite. Microbes can survive trapped inside ice crystals, under 3 kilometres of snow, for more than 100,000 years, a new study suggests. The study bolsters the case that life may exist on distant, icy worlds in our own solar system. What does the sound of a Minke whale look like? Is it possible to read secret messages in broken eggs that hide an abbreviated form of binary code? Police in Japan arrested a man who ran an Internet suicide site for allegedly killing a woman who paid him to do so, an official said Thursday. The "carbon nanotube radio" device is thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Gossip may do more to shape a person's opinion than facts they know to be true, even when the chit-chat contradicts the evidence.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 08-10-07

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:04:06 +0100

Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail. Science and the Islamic world. "A new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics." Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. Researchers have found a way to calculate rates of evolution. Podcast: In this 2006 interview (mp3), my old friend Graham, talks to the Ecologist Magazine Online about climate change, airport expansion and his work with the direct action group Plane Stupid. The Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency (MDA) has announced a successful test of its ICBM-nobbling space interceptor system. Skype's founders say they are happy despite missing out on the huge payday they would've scored if the service was a bigger success. "Aren't we all replicants now?" What is intangible wealth, and how on earth is it measured? "Your cat is not lost, his waveform has temporarily collapsed" - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detetctive Agency by Douglas Adams, on BBC Radio 4. As many as 95 per cent of CCTV systems in the UK are operating illegally, according to a CCTV expert. The Vatican is hosting its second astronomy conference in seven years, as the Roman Catholic church strives to avoid being seen as anti-science. Meeting in Strasbourg, France, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe members approved, in a non-binding 48-25 vote, a report that criticizes creationism advocates for potentially sacrificing children's education "to impose religious dogma" and to promote "a radical return to the past." [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-6-30] [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-6-30] Subscribe Subscribe A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction. The Ig Nobel peace prize went to the US Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Ohio for its 1994 plan to develop a weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another , an idea later dubbed the "gay bomb". North Korean leader Kim Jong Il called himself an "Internet expert" during summit talks with South Korea's president last week Environmental advocates have finally managed to put the issue of global warming at the top of the world's agenda. But the scientific, economic, and political realities may mean that their efforts are too little, too late. Over the last decade, U.S intelligence funding of academic research has taken on cavalier, even brazen qualities. This article reveals over 3,000 National Security Agency funded papers, over 100 Defense Intelligence Agency funded papers and draws attention to recent unreported revelations of CIA funding for torture research. Individuals who are more conscientious - in other words, those with a tendency to be self-disciplined, scrupulous and purposeful - appear less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. MIT is developing a brain-to-machine algorithm that can translate the thoughts of a paralyzed person into driving action for a prosthetic device. The Problem with Atheism: An edited transcript of a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference on September 28th, 2007. The future of web start-ups. Photorealism. China have blocked RSS feeds. An object lesson in breakthrough game design. More than 300 hours of University of California, Berkeley, classes and events have been made available on YouTube. Another week, another Sun-Like star. Astronomers have found the most Sun-like yet, and they say it is an ideal place to hunt for alien civilisations. Color images documenting the past 10 billion years of galactic evolution were distributed online this week as part of the first public release of data from a massive project to map a distant region of the universe that combines the efforts of nearly 100 researchers from around the world Nearly three-quarters of Americans are willing to pay more in taxes and other expenses to support local government-led initiatives designed to reduce global warming, according to a first-of-its kind survey conducted by GfK Public Affairs and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Virgin Galactic preps for liftoff at the world's first commercial Spaceport. In what must surely be a joke, the BBC is reporting that Scientists have come up with a new currency designed to be used by inter-planetary travellersThe currency is called the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, or Quid. Anorexia and ecstasy use activate some of the same brain pathways, according to researchers who used mice to arrive at their conclusions. Considerable attention, both in blogs and in popular media, has been given to abusive bosses over the past few years. Less discussed are employees' responses to such behavior. How do employees react to abusive supervisors? BitTorrent Addiction: The Thrill of the Chase. A man who joined Facebook to look at his friend's wedding pics, was sent to jail after the site automatically sent a "friend request" message to his estranged wife. Anti-panic and depression computer programs. UC Irvine's Henry Samueli School of Engineering has been awarded $2.18 million to blend traditional DNA sequencing techniques and cutting-edge nanotechnology to develop a faster and less costly method of analysis.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 30-09-07

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:58:52 +0100

Partners in the international space station are arguing about when to shut it even though the orbital platform, billed as the most successful joint space endeavour, is not fully assembled. An experiment that envisaged sending a parcel from space to Earth on a 30-kilometre tether fell short of its goal yesterday when the long fibre rope did not fully unwind, Russian Mission Control said. Two of Britain's best known scientists proposed Wednesday to curb global warming by sowing the world's oceans with thousands, perhaps millions, of giant vertical pipes 100-to-200 meters deep. Facebook users: Trading privacy for friends? The MySpace generation is a "somewhat alien life force," a Navy recruiting presentation contends - with a language and lifestyle that's almost unrecognizable to adults. Asian giants Japan, China and India are engaged in a race to map lunar resources and make the moon a platform to explore planets beyond, amid a renewed burst of global space activity. The European Commission has admitted the new euro coin - designed to sport a revised map showing the expanded happy band of brothers - is "not exactly the one the commission has proposed" Are there times when it is better to simply give up? Psychologists have been exploring this question, and more specifically a possible link between tenacity and both physical and mental health. So it looks like aliens aren't using poisonous space rocks to soften us up in advance of an invasion, after all. Scientists have worked out the properties of a variety of weird planet types that they say could circle alien suns, including worlds of graphite and globes of carbon monoxide. A new study finds that young girls and women are more likely to believe that negative past events predict future events, compared to boys and men. >Is Scientific Journalism Doomed? Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science ". Facebook officials have been subpoenaed by New York's top law enforcement official after a preliminary review revealed "significant defects in the site's safety controls" designed to shield underage users from sexual predators. What's Weirder Than a Black Hole? Children who have older brothers become more aggressive over time, on average, than those who have older sisters. Older siblings with younger sisters become less aggressive. Q&A with Geoffrey West, president of and a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, named in 2006 as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. The millionaire son of a retired astronaut is about to follow his father into orbit, after buying a seat on a Russian rocket. Britain unveiled plans on Thursday to phase out energy-wasting traditional light bulbs by 2012 to cut the equivalent of a coal-fired power station's carbon dioxide emissions. A new Institute of Physics' (IOP) report, Climate change prediction: A robust or flawed process?, published today reveals that while there is general consensus on the underlying causes of the changes in our atmosphere, there is not unanimity. It is a simple matter to print an E-book or other document directly from your computer, whether that document is on your hard drive, at a web site or in an email. But, imagine being able to 'print' solid objects, a piece of sports equipment, say, or a kitchen utensil, or even a prototype car design for wind tunnel tests. US researchers suggest such 3-D printer technology will soon enter the mainstream once a killer application emerges. The first new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in more than 30 years. When a child is distressed, anxious, or angry, mum and dad shouldn't necessarily respond in the same way. A new study finds that when both parents are supportive, they may shield the child from handling negative emotions. What is the current total global energy consumption of the internet? Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell. Evolution's evangelist Richard Dawkins was left steaming after creationist filmmakers used interviews with him and other prominent atheists in a film promoting intelligent design. A commonly used method for repairing Windows computers can disable the automatic installation of Microsoft updates, or patches, it was revealed last week. Chinese officials have admitted that the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River will, in the absence of urgent preventative action, provoke an ecological and environmental "catastrophe". Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself . Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 24-09-07

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:53:15 +0100

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/USGS The Mars Odyssey orbiter has come across what look to be openings to cavernous spaces under the surface of Mars. NASA is recruiting for Astronauts. Google Inc.'s stock reached a new high on Friday, reflecting Wall Street's renewed faith in the Internet search leader as it introduces new ways for advertisers to reach its steadily expanding online audience. A former Boeing engineer claims the 787 Dreamliner is unsafe, and that in the event of a crash its innovative composite material fuselage would "shatter too easily and burn with toxic fumes" Electronically-enhanced paper. How to do philosophy. The US Air Force has inked a deal with DARPA to collaborate on a "combined cycle hypersonic vehicle that could take off and land like a plane" Were vast numbers of black holes spawned during our universe's earliest moments? A Nobel laureate physicist has poured scorn on human space exploration, saying "the whole manned spaceflight programme, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value". The US Department of Homeland Security's plan to build hundreds of all-seeing networked surveillance towers along American borders has run into further problems. It's a familiar question that's come up time and time again: Is there an end state to Moore's Law? A new study argues that simple economic forces arising from segregation directly create economic inequity, independent of any psychological effects. Highly-sensitive documents that disclosed secret information about the inner workings of the technical strategies adopted by rival Formula One (F1) teams have been exposed for all to see on the internet. Wikipedia 2.0 - now with added trust. Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest level ever this week, shattering a record set in 2005 and continuing a trend spurred by human-caused global warming, scientists said on Thursday. The Future of Nano & Bio Technologies LEGO robots made easy. List of countries by current account balance. With the recent announcement of Google's X-prize for a successful private landing of a robot on the Moon , someone has asked the Explainer at Slate.com if permission is required to land something on the Moon ? [Externalrss-PhysNewsVert-titles-rssl-4-30] [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-4-30] In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased. The UK has built up a stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium - enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs, according to a Royal Society report. Andrews Space & Technology have introduced an innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months!) and enable our spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling. Why do some juries take weeks to reach a verdict, while others take just hours? How do judges pick the perfect beauty queen from a sea of very similar candidates? New psychological research explains how groups come to a collective decision. The UK's nuclear bomb factory has been struggling to remedy as many as 1000 safety defects uncovered by the government's official watchdog. What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Pornography and the End of Masculinity All (known) bodies in the solar system larger than 200km. A study demonstrates for the first time that abusive boys and men often actively promote pregnancy including contraceptive nonuse in their relationships. More details emerges about the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years. How much is your private business worth? A better definition for the kilogram? "The drive to leave a legacy through offspring can be side-tracked by an attraction to legacy through other things like career, fame, and fortune - distractions that, until recently, were only widely available to men" - Lonnie Aarssen, a Biology professor who specializes in reproductive ecology. I used to think I understood where babies come from - until I learned about the lies and distortions of the secular reproductionists. In a slightly bizarre twist:"Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report." A Texas family has sued Creative Commons after their teenaged daughter's photo was used in an ad campaign for Virgin Mobile Australia. Crazy stuff: Audio for all talks and panel discussions at the recent Singularity Summit 2007 is now available. Sharks gnawed at its carcass Saturday as the third blue whale to die off California in two weeks was towed to a beach for examination.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 19-09-07

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:41:14 +0100

The next generation of citizen surveillance. gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" A map of the visible universe. Very young children can step into the minds of storybook characters. We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong. Hundreds of people in Peru have needed treatment after an object from space - said to be a meteorite - plummeted to Earth in a remote area, officials say. When it is time to sell a change in your company, know the culture of your organization, especially of the group you need to impress, and tailor your argument in the language and metrics of your target group so your message will resonate. Diluting the scientific method: Ars Technica looks at homeopathy. Harvard Medical School researchers have successfully synthesized a DNA-based memory loop in yeast cells, findings that mark a significant step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology. DNA barcoding. 20 Optical Illusions. Salesforce.com's incredible disappearing act will continue next week the announcement of its latest platform and tools initiative to target developers. The cost of a full English breakfast is set to soar. Facebook has silenced a 20,000-strong campaign group called "Campaign to lose the mandatory 'is' from facebook updates!". Formula One team McLaren must pay a $100m fine and has been kicked out of the constructors' championship for spying on rival team Ferrari. Temple University researcher Adam Davey has found that the impact of divorces, widowhood, and remarriage can predict if a child will provide more involved care in the future. Saturn's two-faced moon Iapetus appears to have flaking paintwork. The vaunted "$100 laptop" that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept now it's slated to cost $188.00. Google, at age 10, is the official heart of the Internet. Still, the company loses about $1 billion US a year to "click fraud" or other invalid click-throughs on its ad service. Thirty-one per cent of users of social networking services enter false information into the sites to protect their identity, according to Emedia. Japan launched its first lunar probe on Friday, nicknamed Kaguya after a fairy-tale princess, in the latest move in a new race with China, India and the United States to explore the moon. Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior. The UK government has been accused of trying to reclassify two kinds of cluster bombs so they can still be used after a proposed global ban begins. Following the first Gulf War of 1991, the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard made the famous statement that "the Gulf War did not take place". It was seized on by academics, journalists, and pub intellectuals in the English-speaking world as a prime example of the absurdity and irresponsibility of French philosophy. When he died earlier this year, it was this bizarre comment of his that the obituary-writers fixated on. What did Baudrillard mean by it? OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.3.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 13-09-07

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:22:50 +0100

Wall Street: 6 years on from 9/11. Sources in Washington have indicated that the cyber attack last June which targeted the office of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was conducted by the Chinese military. for the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy. Russia will put cosmonauts on the Moon by 2025. Thoughts related to God cultivate cooperative behaviour and generosity, according to University of British Columbia psychology researchers. UK hit by one online crime every 10 seconds. Review: Razr2 German paleobiologists studying 260-million-year-old fossils found in Russia have discovered what's believe to be the first anatomically modern ear. In the annals of perks enjoyed by America's corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard. A B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several US states last week The first kiss can make or break a couple's relationship, suggests a new study. A police officer involved in the search for adventurer Steve Fossett - who went missing last Monday after taking off from hotelier Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, roughly 70 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada - has admitted he "may never be found" Another former Harvard student has come forward claiming to have invented a precursor to social networking giant Facebook. Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit where people have been asking some interesting questions. A Belgian prosecutor last Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization. A di-positronium molecule consists of two positronium atoms, exotic atoms which are made from an electron and a positron. Now a US team has created thousands of the molecules, a key step in the creation of ultra-powerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers. The Next Fifty Years In Space. How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform. In images: 30 Years of the Voyager Probe. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, multi-millionaire Facebook backer and now the president of Clarium Capital Management , a global macro hedge fund. explains how to invest in the Singularity. Everything you need to know to get started with Content Management Systems. The Dark Web project team catalogues and studies places online where terrorists operate. Reed Elsevier Presents: Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEI) - In Pictures. [Externalrss-Kurzweil-titles-rssl-5-30] [Externalrss-PhysOrg-titles-rssr-5-30] How to hide beer in the office. Drug dealers found with bank notes contaminated with unusually high levels of drugs are now less likely to get away with their crimes, thanks to new evidence from a team led by the University of Bristol, UK. "The way digital poetry experiments with language raises questions and challenges conceptions of literature that were formed by printed books..." - Maria Engberg. It might seem like an esoteric achievement of interest to only a handful of computer scientists, but the advent of quantum computers that can run a routine called Shor's algorithm could have profound consequences. A primary mystery puzzling neuroscientists - where in the brain lies intelligence? - just may have a unified answer. Authorities placed two towns in southern Democratic Republic of Congo in quarantine on Tuesday to contain an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. A planet that was nearly engulfed when its host star swelled up into a red giant has lived to tell the tale. Chinese surgeons will try to remove 23 needles from a woman that doctors believe may have been imbedded under her skin by grandparents trying to kill her so that a baby boy might take her place. Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace are unlikely to help users build close new friendships, a British researcher said Tuesday. The world's most powerful air-delivered vacuum bomb. Fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws account for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the Computer and Communications Industry Association. The OpenOffice.org community has announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. Google is going after Facebook.

Not all risk is created equal

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:56:08 +0100

A camper who chases a grizzly but won't risk unprotected sex. A sky diver afraid to stand up to the boss. New research shows that not all risk is created equal and people show a mixture of both risky and non-risky behaviors. The survey also shows that men are significantly riskier than women overall. The University of Michigan research refutes the standard theories of risk that group people as either risk-seeking or risk-avoiding, and suggests that we can have a mix of both risky and non-risky behavior depending on the type. The study appears in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. Daniel Kruger, a research scientist at the U-M School of Public Health, and colleagues X.T. Wang, University of South Dakota, and Andreas Wilke, UCLA, identified areas of risk taking (risk domains) based on the types of challenges that our ancestors faced during many thousands of years of human evolution. "People are complex," said Kruger. "Just because somebody seems to be a big risk taker in one area doesn't mean they will take risks in all areas." The types of risks identified include competition with other individuals; competition with other groups; mating and allocating resources for mate attraction; environmental risks (chasing a bear or skydiving); and fertility risks. The study showed that our tendencies for risk taking follow these different types of challenges. "It is remarkable not just that we were able to identify different areas of risk taking, but also that many of the challenges faced by our ancestors are similar to challenges we face in our modern world today," Kruger said. People surveyed for the study were least likely to take fertility risks, and most likely to take risks related to social status in one's group --- like standing up to one's boss. In all domains, men were significantly more risk taking than women. During human evolution, men competed for social status and resources in order to attract mates. Thus, this pattern is not surprising, Kruger said. The risks that threaten fertility function differently than the others, Kruger said. Other types of risk have a possible benefit in terms of survival and reproduction. But with fertility risks, there is just a threat to reproduction. They can only cause harm in the evolutionary sense since they would only hurt our ability to procreate. "Those were types of risks that weren't attractive to other people, those risks were the least likely to be taken, and people saw those risks as unattractive in a potential mate," Kruger said. Although in most parts of the world, threats from predators may be limited to those making wilderness expeditions, we still live in a world with complex challenges involving other individuals and material investments. The basic elements of our social environment have not changed; we just live on a much larger scale. The study appears in the latest issue of Evolutionary Psychology. http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep05555568.pdf Via Eurekalert.

Podcast: The Democratisation of Innovation

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:18:53 +0100

Peter Day at the BBC talks to Professor Eric Von Hippel, Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology about his revolutionary thinking and what he calls the "democratisation of innovation". Professor Von Hippel specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He also develops and teaches about practical methods that firms can use to improve their product and service development processes. Listen to the Podcast at the BBC. Visit the Professor's Home Page.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 27-08-07

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:35:23 +0100

Even renowned science fiction author William Gibson has given up guessing what the future looks like. Why do people have sex? Researchers explore 237 reasons. What do you get when you turn an invisibility cloak on its side? Venture Capital firms set their sights on new ideas - not new technologies. Surviving Immortality: Just getting to the Singularity is the hard part. The Fermi Paradox is alive and well. For those entrepreneurs who want to run a company but prefer to skip the start-up stage, search funds offer a possible alternative. A controversial biologist at Harvard claims he can extend life span and treat diseases of aging. Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. "If Brands Are Built Over Years, Why Are They Managed Over Quarters?" Can You Survive in Space Without a Spacesuit? Playing favorites - romantic or otherwise - is a messy game in the workplace. Engineers have adapted a decades-old computer aided design and manufacturing process to reproduce nanosize structures with features on the order of single molecules. What will future lunar bases look like? The Slashdot Firehose is partially a collaborative news system and partially a redesigned & dynamic next-generation Slashdot index. Earlier this month, employees for LinkedIn, a social network site that caters to business people, received an unusual proposition from a security researcher who had just uncovered a vulnerability that put many of its users at serious risk. A newly discovered void in space is 1 billion light years across. Observations also reveal that four massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen. Robots have been roaming the streets of Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time - the first time in any warzone - the machines are carrying guns. Book Excerpt: Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space An Optical Solution For The Traveling Salesman Problem. A new perspective on the Industrial Revolution. Crowd Farms. Insurers claim global warming makes some regions too hot to handle. By using lasers to etch data onto microbial proteins, researchers at the University of Connecticut may have demonstrated a way to produce rewritable holographic memory. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence presents the Singularity Summit 2007, a major two-day event bringing together 17 leading thinkers to address and debate a historical moment in humanity's history. Attempts in the US to ban genetic discrimination in insurance and employment have hit a speed bump. The Black Death killed so many people in the Middle Ages that, to this day, genetic diversity is lower in England than it was in the 11th century. According to a new study in Economic Inquiry, an individual's body weight depends not just on physiology and economic circumstances, but also on average body weight of the population at large. According to the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, over 10,000 academics (32 Nobel Laureates and 53 foundation and university presidents) have signed a declaration against a recent vote by the UCU (Colleges Union) and British University to promote a boycott of Israeli academics and institutions. The Cassini probe is to to a close fly-by of Saturn's strange moon, Enceladus. The UK government may have to postpone the roll out of satellite tracking of offenders after a study uncovered serious technology flaws. The unexpected profile of the modern terrorist: 26, from a caring family, married, with children, graduate New research on "The Memory of Water". The "America Competes Act" "Future generations will look at patio heaters as a symbol of our collective urge to self-destruction..." A classified space platform employing new technologies, designated L-21, has been in orbit since last December. Reportedly made by American arms-tech colossus Lockheed, the platform said to have cost "hundreds of millions of dollars," but has never responded to communications from the ground since being launched. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, Jupiter does not protect Earth from comet strikes. Although most religious traditions call on the faithful to serve the poor, a large cross-sectional survey of U.S. physicians found that physicians who are more religious are slightly less likely to practice medicine among the underserved than physicians with no religious affiliation. Adolescents who claim they are "madly in love" might not be too far off the mark. By the end of the year, twin underwater turbines should be generating 1.2 megawatts of electricity off the coast of Northern Ireland in a landmark demonstration of tidal power technology. Sixty years ago, a former tank sergeant named Mikhail Kalashnikov submitted an assault-rifle design to the Red Army for trials. See Who's Editing Wikipedia. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. Within ten years, virtual worlds will be bigger than the Web itself. So says Philip Rosedale, the man who invented Second Life. A huge urban sprawl once surrounded Cambodia's famous Angkor Wat temple, according to a newly created map. Temperature records will be repeatedly shattered over the next few years, say researchers behind the first rigorous look at how global climate will change during the next decade. Britain is likely to put forward legislation within three months to cut carbon emissions by at least 60 percent in the fight against global warming Global Warming will exacerbate global water conflicts. Anorexia is a common, often severe, but highly transient illness. An introduction to Bitorrent. Reductionism, emergence, and levels of abstractions.

Sci-Tech-Business Shorts

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:35:13 +0100

"To mainstream engineers there is a disbelief that a self-organising process like an Evolutionary Algorithm can produce designs that outperform those designed using conventional top-down, systematic, intelligent design..." Internet Bubble 2.0. Modern Approaches to Data Visualisation. The return of the Delorean. Is there a secret city beneath Tokyo? What does 120 Calories look like? Facebook's new demographic. Six major firms have withdrawn advertisements from the networking website Facebook, after they appeared on a British National Party page. 'Why Should I Hire You?' and Other Favorite Interview Questions Healthy eating, exercise, security - these are just some of the means to living a longer life, we are often told. But what about our perceptions of time itself? A new book argues that by "slowing down" time we can extend our lives further. Harry Potter And The Logistical Nightmare. Remember the mammoths , say the clean-cut organisers at the Nashi youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia". Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated. Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. A trio of security vulnerabilities surrounding the use of nuclear power are highlighted today in research papers online with Inderscience Publishers. In recent years, the economics of pop music have been upended. The market for CDs has collapsed, and not even the rise of legal downloading can offset the damage to record companies. Meanwhile, demand for live performances has rocketed Nuclear Alchemy . 52 Influential Photographs After two thousand hands and countless "flops", "rivers", and "turns" , two elite poker players have narrowly defeated a formidable computer opponent. 100 items to disappear first in a national emergency. A 32GB USB Flash memory drive The Porn Myth What now for Scaled Composites and SpaceShipTwo? Why do people love horror movies? Life in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints NASA is investigating the apparent sabotage of electronic equipment bound for the international space station aboard the shuttle Endeavour, officials said Thursday. University of Florida researchers are developing devices that can interpret signals in the brain and stimulate neurons to perform correctly , advances that might someday make it possible for a tiny computer to fix diseases or even allow a paralyzed person to control a prosthetic device with his thoughts. Nicholas Maxwell's Is Science Neurotic contains one very big revisionist vision : Science needs to make its aims explicit in an underlying scheme or set of principles. Drunken NASA astronauts were allowed to fly on a Russian spacecraft and cleared to fly on the U.S. space shuttle, a panel convened by NASA said on Friday, citing "heavy use of alcohol by astronauts." "Heretical Thoughts About Science & Society" - By Freeman Dyson. Hard questions at the World Transhumanist conference. Rolls-Royce has signed a £1bn contract with the Ministry of Defence to keep Royal Navy submarines at sea for the next 10 years. Meanwhile orders for two new Royal Navy aircraft carriers have been confirmed by Defence Secretary Des Browne. In a rare interview the head of Bloomsbury explains his plans for Harry Potter's legacy.