Posts Tagged ‘science/news’

I’m in ur atom, probing ur nucleus

// November 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

It has been 100 years since the Geiger-Marsden experiment upended humanity’s longstanding view of the atom as a nice, relatively homogeneous particle. When the alpha particles shot at gold foil targets bounced off at odd angles, it shocked everyone involved (the original paper is now open access ). The realization that atoms have a high-mass center lead to the formation of the Rutherford (or planetary) model of the atom, where electrons orbit a dense nucleus.  It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. - E. Rutherford The Rutherford model is now recognized as a useful metaphor, but, as soon as you get into the details, it falls apart. Electrons don’t travel in nice orbits; rather, their orbitals exist as a cloud around the nucleus. The nucleus is not a singular positive mass, but a complex ball of protons and neutrons that are made up of even smaller particles known as quarks and gluons. Although all this information indicates that the Rutherford model is wrong, it doesn’t necessarily indicate what a replacement for the model should look like.

IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.

Have we started to fill our carbon sinks?

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Each year, human beings put vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through processes like the combustion of fossil fuels or the clearing land for agriculture. Thankfully, the majority of it doesn’t stay there, as there are a number of significant carbon sinks that pull somewhere around 60 percent of human emissions back out of the air, dissolving it into the oceans and sequestering it in growing forests. One of the worries about our continued carbon emissions is that these sinks could eventually start to fill, increasing the challenge involved in limiting the levels of atmospheric carbon. Two new studies have looked at the issue, and they come to what appear to be very different conclusions. Any process that removes carbon from the atmosphere can act as a carbon sink. These include basic processes like having the gas dissolve into the ocean, to more complex ones, like the sequestration that appears to take place in mature forests. The cumulative impact, however, is huge; carbon sinks are estimated to remove about 60 percent of the CO 2 that human activity puts in the atmosphere annually. (The remaining 40 percent is termed the airborne fraction.)

DSi downloads can be moved—with a little help from Nintendo

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

When the DSi was unveiled last year , one of of the biggest selling points for the unit was that it allowed gamers to shop for applications via an online store. This was great, as it allowed users to buy their games online, which meant they could bypass the middleman without any hassle. But this strength is also a weakness, because Nintendo’s EULA only allows gamers to keep the software they’ve purchased on one console, meaning that if a user somehow breaks his or her handheld, there’s the distinct possibility that the only option to recover their purchases is to pay for them all again. So what happens when the console gets smashed, electrocuted, or is accidentally drowned in a toilet? Is there a way to transfer your old purchases to the replacement system? Replacing content on a PSP Go can be accomplished in a number of ways. By returning to the PlayStation Store and selecting the “download list”, everything you’ve purchased in the past can be re-downloaded, easy as pie. In the case of the DSi, things are slightly more difficult, but it’s still possible to work out a solution.

Partial H1N1 immunity can come without exposure to virus

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The arrival and rapid spread of the latest strain of H1N1 flu virus, termed S-OIV, raised fears of a dangerous global pandemic. But, as the virus has continued to spread around the globe, initial fears regarding its potential lethality have gradually subsided; it can be deadly, but apparently no more so than the regular, seasonal flu. Some researchers have now used a public database of flu immunity data to try to understand why, and their results suggest that, on some level, the seasonal flu has prepared our immune systems for the new arrival. As the researchers acknowledge in their paper, the work couldn’t have taken place if it weren’t for extensive data sharing within the community of flu virus researchers. There’s an entire site, the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource that the National Institutes of Health funds; it tracks all data on the viral proteins that are recognized by the immune system, and the specific regions of these proteins that are bound by antibodies and T cell receptors. The authors even posted drafts of their paper on the site for community comment, and conclude that “this experience has demonstrated how ‘real time’ exchange of information on the Internet can catalyze the scientific process in the eye of an imminent public health threat.”

Cray rides AMD’s Opteron to top of supercomputer list

// November 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

You might think that Cray, the company whose name has practically been synonymous with “supercomputer” three decades, would be a regular fixture at the top of the Top 500 Supercomputer List. But you’d be mistaken. Today’s first-place win by Cray marks the company’s debut in the top slot—at long last, after 34 lists, Cray won.

Weird Science gets its kicks huffing glue from old books

// November 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Sniffing the glue of old books: Lots of people speak fondly of the distinct aroma of libraries, both personal and private. It turns out they might not be imagining it. Researchers have done a wholesale identification of the volatile chemicals released by books and performed multivariate analysis on the results. It turns out that it’s possible to identify a series of chemicals associated with the degradation of paper, which could provide archivists a noninvasive way of determining which works need immediate attention. Cheaper pharmaceuticals through computer pop-ups—for real: This one’s a randomized clinical trial that targeted the doctors , rather than the patients. Like everyone else, doctors are susceptible to advertising, and will often prescribe an expensive drug when there’s an equivalent but cheaper generic available. It turns out that simply adding an alert to the computerized prescription system was enough to counteract the impact of heavy marketing, and keep the use of less-well-marketed alternatives at a steady level.

A single smartphone can DoS federal wiretaps

// November 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

As the telecommunications world went wireless and digital, the tried-and-true method law enforcement agencies used for wiretaps—splicing into the local loop—was in danger of becoming an anachronism. In 1994, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , which required telecommunications switches to incorporate a capacity for government monitoring of phone calls and other communications. That requirement ultimately produced an ANSI standard, J-STD-025, that dictated the capabilities of the hardware interface used by law enforcement agencies. A team of academic researchers has now put that standard to the test, and found that it’s vulnerable to various forms of denial and obfuscation attacks. As the authors note, the monitoring of domestic communications has been a source of controversy in recent years; others have questioned whether having a standard capacity built into every piece of communication hardware leaves the US communications infrastructure at risk of external attack. They avoid these issues, however, and focus on a simpler question: how well does the J-standard actually work?

SFLC tech director finds one new GPL violator every day

// November 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has published a helpful set of guidelines about the most productive way to respond to a suspected violation of GNU’s General Public License (GPL). The guidelines caution against jumping to conclusions and encourages free software enthusiasts to give violators the benefit of the doubt. GPL violations are extremely common, he says, but most of them are accidental. The SFLC, which was founded in 2005 with the aim of providing legal support for the free and open source software development community, has played a key role in resolving numerous GPL enforcement conflicts. Its approach to GPL enforcement is typically instructive and non-confrontational. Lawsuits are used as a last resort and have consistently resulted in out-of-court settlements . The organization is perhaps best known for litigating a series of high-profile GPL violation cases on behalf of the developers of the open source BusyBox embedded tools.

Examining science on the fringes: vital, but generally wrong

// November 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The history of science is replete with examples, from plate tectonics to prions, of heretical ideas that received a poor reception from the scientific establishment when they were first proposed. The apparent resistance to new ideas has earned scientists a fair bit of criticism. But some recent publications have indicated both that it is possible for fringe ideas to get a hearing from mainstream science, and that their proponents may end up wishing they didn’t. Fringe ideas that go against mainstream scientific thought are effectively a constant in most areas of science, and there are a number of examples where the ideas have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The classic example here is Alfred Wegener , who is celebrated for his development of the ideas we now know as plate tectonics, a phenomenally successful scientific theory. At the time, however, his ideas were ridiculed. “Reaction to Wegener’s theory was almost uniformly hostile, and often exceptionally harsh and scathing,” as the Berkeley site notes.

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