Science/news | s1LX

Weird Science ponders the inevitable stupidity of public transit

// November 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

You can make your own joke about batgirl and imagine that it appeared here: The title of this paper about tells you everything you need to know: “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time.” I really cannot think of much to add there. We can all be thankful it wasn’t a coconut-laden swallow: As many of you may have heard, the LHC suffered a brief temperature spike that almost caused a shutdown. Apparently, the issue can be traced back to electrical issues caused by a bird that tried to fly off with a baguette that was a bit too large for it. According to the official CERN statement, “The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.” Nature has some very tongue-in-cheek reporting on the incident, and gets the scoop on whether the bird came from the future to prevent the creation of a Higgs Boson.

Aftershocks from slow faults may arrive centuries later

// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

I have a deep and rather personal interest in earthquake and volcano prediction. This comes from spending most of my youth within a few kilometers of an active fault line and less than 100km from a volcano that has, in the past, left a layer of ash over most of the surface of the Earth. In fact, events in just the last year (nevermind the last decade) have convinced me that accurate earthquake and volcano prediction would probably be a bigger lifesaver than any other single scientific development. So it was with interest that I read a recent Nature paper reporting that scientists might have been misinterpreting some aftershocks as earthquakes, leading them to overestimate the risk on some faults and underestimate the risk on others.

Google opens up its JavaScript development toolbox to all

// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Google is providing the web development community with an intriguing glimpse under the hood at some of the fundamental building blocks of the company’s most popular web applications. The search giant has opened the source code of its comprehensive JavaScript library collection and is making it available to third-party developers for widespread adoption. Google also opened the source code of its own JavaScript compression tools. The library, called Closure, includes an extraordinarily diverse assortment of capabilities with functionality ranging from JSON serialization to standard user interface widgets. All of the features are cross-browser compatible and can be readily adopted without marginalizing any users. The library consists primarily of helper functions and user interface widgets, many of which are recognizable from popular Google applications.

Complete Genomics produces a cheap—well, $5,000—human genome

// November 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

With the newest DNA sequencing technology starting to reach the market, we’re seeing a bit of a bifurcation. Some of the methods can do long reads, covering hundreds of bases, and provide data that’s appropriate for assembling a genome that’s never been sequenced before. Others produce lots of shorter reads, which can only be aligned to a genome that we know the sequence of already. What good is repeating a completed genome? Potentially quite a lot, if that genome happens to be human and, more particularly, yours, since it can provide information on medically relevant issues like disease risks and drug efficacy. The goal here is to make this so cheap that sequencing a person’s genome could be routine. A big step in that direction may have been taken by a company called Complete Genomics, which describes the methods it used to sequence three human genomes in a paper that will be released by Science today. The system described in the paper combines some clever variants of well known molecular biology techniques to read massive amounts of DNA fragments that are, in total, about 65 bases long. But, because the materials used for the reactions are so common, even the enzymes can be purchased cheaply. That allows Complete Genomics to bring an entire human genome in while spending less than $5,000 on materials. All that, plus an error rate of less than one base in 100,000. For comparison, the completion of Jim Watson’s genome, done just a few years ago, is estimated to have cost $20 million.

New tool seeks to block rootkits by protecting their targets

// November 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

In recent years, malware authors have developed increasingly sophisticated rootkits that burrow into the operating system itself, modifying basic filesystem and process management code in a way that ensures they are essentially invisible to anyone using the machine: no files visible, no processes apparent. While some progress has been made in detecting when a rootkit has compromised a system, preemptively blocking an attack has remained challenging, since the malware relies on important system functions. A team of computer scientists have now described a tool, called Hook Safe, that uses virtualization to preempt rootkits by moving and protecting the kernel functions that they target. Rootkits burrow their way into an operating system’s kernel using a process called hooking. �The services provided by a kernel—file system and hardware access, memory management, etc.—are accessible through callable functions. The kernel keeps track of where the functions reside in memory using pointers, which contain the address in memory of the function. Hooking involves replacing a legitimate function pointer with one provided by malware. So, for example, the malware might replace (or hook) a file system function with one that behaves perfectly normally except when it comes to the areas of the filesystem where the malware lives; in that case, it returns information that suggests the files aren’t there. Any software that uses the kernel for filesystem access will never know the rootkit is present.

Judges refuses to block lawsuit over patenting genetic tests

// November 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

In May, the ACLU announced that it was suing to invalidate a patent that covers testing for genetic variants associated with breast cancer. The suit targeted Myriad Genetics, which licenses the patent, and the University of Utah officials that licensed it to them, but also targets the US Patent and Trademark Office, which allowed this form of gene patent in the first place. In a move that surprised no one, each of the three defendants filed motions to have the case against them thrown out. The judge overseeing the case, Robert Sweet, has now dismissed these motions, allowing the case to go forward. Our earlier coverage described the scientific background of the case in detail. In brief, researchers at the University of Utah identified two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2 , that are mutated in many families that have high incidences of breast and ovarian cancer. The University patented the use of this information for medical testing, and has licensed the patents to Myriad Genetics. The company has since attempted to prevent academic researchers that sequenced these genes in the course of their research from revealing the implications of the results to their patients.

Time-travel doesn’t imbue quantum computers with superpowers

// November 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

After spending the past two months on sabbatical, I’ve returned to a deluge of science that I had missed out on. Almost three years ago, a company called D-Wave made waves by announcing that it was about to unveil one of the first-ever functioning adiabatic quantum computers , a device it heralded as being capable of solving NP problems in P time—a claim that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny . This piqued the interest of many about the actual applications and science behind quantum computers, and we at Nobel Intent dove in and tried to shine some� light �on the discussion.� Even with a fully functional, scalable quantum computer, nobody’s large integers are in danger of being factored in polynomial time—it has been shown that integer factorization, via Shor’s algorithm , is solvable in bounded error quantum polynomial (BQP) time. So, quantum mechanicists and quantum computer theorists started looking for ways to improve upon the performance of quantum computers and arrived at a question only a theorist could come up with. What if the quantum computer was capable of traveling through time?

Legislation seeks to deal with growing piles of e-waste

// November 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

Despite the rise of planned obsolescence, manufacturers have continued to push products onto the market with little thought as to what happens to them when they are no longer useful to their owners. A new bill that’s currently active in the Senate would help the United States develop new methods to deal with the growing sea of electronic waste, including research on disposal methods as well as recycling-conscious product design that would help the US get up to speed with other nations that are already moving on the issue. Electronic waste, or “e-waste,” has been a concern for nearly two decades now, especially in terms of environmental and public health. The toxicity of materials used in electronics in particular is a big issue, from flame retardants to good old poisonous lead. According to the bill, the EPA estimates that “over 2 billion computers, televisions, wireless devices, printers, gaming systems, and other devices have been sold since 1980.” Couple that with 67 percent of these people hoarding dead gadgets, unaware that there are restrictions on disposal methods, and there’s a serious problem to deal with.

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers

// October 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there’s been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody’s looked very carefully. The study, which was spotted by TechDirt , appears in an open-access journal , so anyone can read its entire contents. It describes the sharing of over 5,000 research papers on a site frequented by medical professionals, and the formal community rules that governed the exchange.

Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst

// October 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News

One of the awkward aspects of modern physics is that its two most successful fields, relativity and quantum mechanics, are fundamentally incompatible, as things happen in the quantum world that relativity says should not be possible. That’s left physicists looking for a way to harmonize the two, with two primary contenders: string theories, and quantum gravity theories. Testing either of them has been a bit challenging, but researchers have now managed to use a single, intensely powerful photon detected by the Fermi Telescope to significantly limit the number of viable quantum gravity theories. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has only been operational for about a year, but results from its observation have already been appearing in a number of significant publications. The observatory is designed to detect the highest energy radiation, which is only produced by the most energetic events in the universe, such as supernovae. In this case, the key observation was of a single photon produced by the gamma-ray burst GRB 090510, which came in at an extremely energetic 31GeV.

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