Our Top Story Tonight | When antiscience kills: dowsing edition Phil Plait
| I am no fan of pseudoscience, as you may have guessed. Dowsing is a practice that falls squarely in that field. It’s the idea that you can detect an object — usually water, but sometimes gold, or people, or whatever — using a y-shaped branch, or copper tubes, or some other simple device. Dowsers never really have a good explanation of how their devices work, but they tend to claim 100(Graph2) ... But what if your life depended on it? What if thousands of lives depended on it? Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances. | 1 | Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart Michael Bond 02 November 2009 | IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical". How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind. But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray. | 2 | Strong Leonid Meteor Shower Expected Nov. 17 Joe Rao 01 November 2009 | Circle Nov. 17 on your calendar, for early that morning a moderate to possibly very strong showing of annual Leonid meteor shower is likely. The very strong display will favor those living across most of central and eastern Asia. In this region, meteor rates might briefly rise to a few hundred per hour (the time frame for the most intense activity is anticipated sometime around 21:40 GMT). | 3 | Sticky future for the spider suture
31 October 2009 | THE ultra-strong glue that spiders use to trap their prey has given up some of its genetic secrets, raising the hope that similar substances could one day be synthesised to produce surgical adhesives. The glue, which the spider secretes onto the central prey-capturing spiral threads of its web, is known to be based on a complex sugary polymer called a glycoprotein. But no one knew how this supersticky molecule did its job, or which genes coded for it. Now Omer Choresh and colleagues at the University of Wyoming in Laramie have some clues. They took glue-secreting cells from the glands of golden orb-web spiders and extracted messenger RNA from them. They then used this to create a complementary DNA sequence to identify the genes potentially involved in glue creation. | 4 | Oldest Known Spider Webs Discovered Jeanna Bryner 30 October 2009 | Silken spider webs dating back some 140 million years have been discovered preserved in amber, scientists announce today. The viscous tree sap flowed over the spider webs before hardening and preserving the contents, which were discovered in Sussex, England. Other bits sealed up in the amber included plant matter, insect droppings and ancient microbes. "These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge," said lead researcher Martin Brasier, a paleontologist at the University of Oxford. Brasier and colleagues used a computer technique called confocal microscopy to reconstruct the webs and examine the interweaving silk threads. Various clues, including threads that were twisted and coated with sticky fluid droplets, suggest the webs were spun by spiders closely related to modern-day orb-web garden spiders. | 5 | How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession Dennis Yu November 1, 2009 | Did you know how Mark Zuckerberg supported Facebook in the early days, before he got venture funding? Casino ads. And how about those advertisers who were making over href="00,000 a day selling Acai Berry and other weight loss products – they are friends of mine, pioneers of new advertising channels. You see those ads saying "Inbox (5). Nick, someone in San Francisco has a crush on you!" (with your name, profile picture, and city in the ad). I generated millions of dollars from these offers on Facebook – I am not proud of it, but it was very lucrative. I will walk you through how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks – the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you’re reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is? In June 2007, Facebook opened up their application developer platform so that anyone could build games on top of the social network. By having access to user data, game developers could instantly make engaging, viral games. Rate who is hottest among your friends, share quizzes, race cars, grow vegetables, and so forth – all with a click of a button. Users in one click gave the game permission to access their profile data and they didn’t think twice about it. | 6 | 3D TV -- Without the Glasses (w/ Video) Miranda Marquit October 29, 2009 | The idea behind Hitachi's Full Parallex 3D TV is called integral photography with overlaid projection. Tech-On! describes the set up for this 3D television: Specifically, it consists of 16 projectors and a lens array sheet to cover them. The lens array sheet ensures parallax in any direction (not only in the horizontal direction). Because of parallax, the 3D image seen by the user differs in accordance with the angle from which the screen is viewed. In order to get a display that doesn't require special glasses of some kind, the total pixel count requires the multiplication of the pixel count in the 3D image by the number of viewpoints showing different images. The 3D effect requires different viewpoints, but as the number of viewpoints increases, the resolution decreases. | 7 | Ericsson shows off its new "spider" computer concept
2009-10-30 | Ericsson have been demonstrating their new computer concept design for the year 2020 at the Taiwan Broadband show and it’s kind of, well, different. It’s being called The Ericsson Spider PC concept for obvious reasons. The thing looks more like a spider on legs than anything you could call a computer. Apparently the device, if it ever got off the ground, would have all the features of a modern day laptop including Wi-Fi. However, it looks nothing like anything you’ve seen before. The computer on show made use of a pico-projected screen and a laser projected keyboard. So what we’d basically have is a virtual screen projected onto a wall and virtual keyboard projected on to a desk or table or any other hard surface. | 8 | Evolution in the Deepest River in the World Kyle Dickman November 03, 2009 | Ned Gardiner, a scientist who specializes in mapping ecosystems, is fiddling with an instrument floating over the side of our wooden pirogue when the boat emerges from an eddy into the main stream of the Congo River. The transition from the still water to the turbulent flow swings the bow downstream and nearly knocks Gardiner into the water. "Almost fell into the drink, eh?" he says with a laugh, though he knows a swim here could be dangerous, even deadly. The Congo is flowing at 1.25 million cubic feet of water per second, enough to fill 13 Olympic-size swimming pools every second. Gardiner, who works for the National Climatic Data Center, in Ashville, North Carolina, is here because he thinks the Lower Congo may contain the deepest point of any river in the world. We’re in Central Africa, 90 miles west of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital of Kinshasa and about 100 miles east of where the river drains into the Atlantic Ocean, ending its 3,000-mile run across equatorial Africa. A series of grassy hills called the Crystal Mountains rise subtly behind us. Gardiner and John Shelton, a hydrologist from the United States Geologic Survey, are plotting how water moves in such a massive flow. To do this, they brought along an instrument that floats alongside a boat in an orange, plastic vessel about the size of an elementary-school desk. The instrument maps water movement and measures the river’s depth. Gardiner tried to accomplish the same thing last year with a device designed for rivers. "The signal petered out well before the bottom," he explains, his hand skimming the river’s surface. "So we bought one for oceans." We’re midstream, heading from the north bank to the south, on a course directly perpendicular to the current. If we manage to keep the instrument from being swallowed by one of the 40-foot-wide whirlpools studding the flow, Shelton and Gardiner’s work will produce a digital cross section of the river’s currents and depth. The Congo’s power—its depth, speed and turbulence—is of particular interest to ichthyologist Melanie Stiassny of the American Museum of Natural History, one of the scientists in our expedition. She studies fish on the lower Congo and over the past decade has discovered six new species (she’s working on identifying three more). The number of species known to live in the lower Congo now exceeds 300 and the river contains one of the highest concentrations of "endemism," or species found nowhere else in the world. Stiassny thinks the river’s power is shaping evolution in the Congo. | 9 | Origin Of Cosmic Rays: VERITAS Telescopes Help Solve 100-year-old Mystery ScienceDaily Nov. 3, 2009 | Nearly 100 years ago, scientists detected the first signs of cosmic rays -- subatomic particles (mostly protons) that zip through space at nearly the speed of light. The most energetic cosmic rays hit with the punch of a 98-mph fastball, even though they are smaller than an atom. Astronomers questioned what natural force could accelerate particles to such a speed. New evidence from the VERITAS telescope array shows that cosmic rays likely are powered by exploding stars and stellar "winds." These findings were published in the Nov. 1 online issue of the journal Nature, and are being featured today in a press conference at the Fermi Science Symposium in Washington, DC. | 10 | Red Hat takes on VMware with server virtualization solution Ryan Paul November 4, 2009 | Red Hat has announced the general availability of its new Enterprise Server Virtualization solution. It includes virtualization management tools and a standalone hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM. Red Hat expanded its virtualization product portfolio this week with the launch of its Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform. The company touts it as an end-to-end solution which includes management tools and a bare-metal standalone hypervisor that can run both Windows and Linux guest operating systems. Red Hat aimed to become a major player in the virtualization market last year when it acquired Qumranet, the company behind the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). Following the acquisition, Red Hat began transitioning its virtualization strategy towards KVM and away from Citrix's Xen. KVM has strong backing from the upstream Linux kernel development community, making it a natural choice for Red Hat. The company has invested considerable resources to boost KVM's capabilities and has built robust management tools around the technology. KVM was practically the centerpiece in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which was officially released in September. | 11 | Second chance for Large Hadron Collider to deliver universe's secrets Robin McKie 1 November 2009 |
At first glance, the piece of metal in Steve Myers's hands could be taken for a harmonica or a pen. Only on closer inspection can you make out its true nature. Myers, director of accelerators at the Cern particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, is clutching a section of copper piping from which a flat electrical cable is protruding. It looks unremarkable. Yet a piece of cable like this one was responsible last year for the world's most expensive short-circuit. More than �30m-worth of damage was done to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most advanced particle accelerator ever built, a few days after its ceremonial opening. It has taken Myers \u2013 and hundreds of other Cern scientists \u2013 more than a year to pinpoint the guilty piece of cable and repair the wreckage. "It was a very small piece, but it did immense damage," he said. It remains to be seen whether Myers can fix Cern's tattered technological reputation in the process \u2013 when his team restart their great machine in a few weeks. "I am not a nervous person," said the 63-year-old Belfast-born engineer. "And that is probably just as well." It looks unremarkable. Yet a piece of cable like this one was responsible last year for the world's most expensive short-circuit. More than �30m-worth of damage was done to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most advanced particle accelerator ever built, a few days after its ceremonial opening. It has taken Myers \u2013 and hundreds of other Cern scientists \u2013 more than a year to pinpoint the guilty piece of cable and repair the wreckage. "It was a very small piece, but it did immense damage," he said. It remains to be seen whether Myers can fix Cern's tattered technological reputation in the process \u2013 when his team restart their great machine in a few weeks. "I am not a nervous person," said the 63-year-old Belfast-born engineer. "And that is probably just as well." | 12 | Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy David Shiga 30 October 2009 | Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars. Thirteen unexplained radio blips have turned up in radio telescope observations since the 1980s. They emerged in spots where there are no stars or galaxies to be seen, last anywhere from hours to days, and do not seem to repeat. The blips could be traces of a vast population of stellar corpses – neutron stars that roam the universe largely unseen, suggests a team led by Eran Ofek of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Most of the galaxy's estimated billion neutron stars are invisible. Some of the newly formed ones have been detected because their rapid rotation sends radio pulses our way multiple times per second. These are thought to fade with age. | 13 | A close look at the new antitrust allegations against Intel Jon Stokes November 4, 2009 | Fresh off of Intel's hefty EU antitrust fine, New York's Attorney General has piled on with a whopper of an antitrust suit against the chipmaker. Ars drills down to the core of the allegations. Intel has been fighting a vicious antitrust battle in Europe for years, is battling AMD in US court, and now New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has opened up an American front in the Intel war by filing an antitrust suit against the chipmaker. The allegations in the suit will be old hat to veteran PC market watchers, because there's almost nothing in the 87-page filing that Intel hasn't been accused of at least once over the past decade, either openly as part of the EU proceedings, in the course of AMD's antitrust lawsuit, or discretely in the form of gossip at industry conferences. The complaint itself is actually a good read—it's not dry at all, and it provides a great introduction to how the PC market actually works for those who don't follow it. In fact, if you read this filing, you'll know more than 90 percent of those who mouth off online about computers. But for those who don't want to read the whole thing, here's the CliffsNotes version (via Jane Austen). The story as told by AG Cuomo's legal team is essentially a love triangle involving Intel, Dell, and AMD. Intel and Dell are "married" (seriously, Intel's language), and Intel plays the part of the jealous, controlling husband with Dell as the wife who gets seduced by the younger and, for a time, handsomer AMD. Intel retaliates, and there's a bunch of stuff about margins and rebates and partnerships and concubines, but that's the gist of it. If you're thinking that none of this sounds like it has much to do with actual microprocessors and benchmark bakeoffs, then you're right—it doesn't, and that's the point of the suit. Cuomo wants the story to read like a drama about greed, jealousy, and manipulation, and not like a story about products competing on the merits. | 14 | Space arms race 'an inevitability' # From correspondents in Beijing, China (AFP) November 02, 2009 | A TOP China air force commander has called the militarisation of space an "historical inevitability", state media said today, marking an apparent shift in Beijing's opposition to weaponising outer space. In a wide-ranging interview in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, air force commander Xu Qiliang said it was imperative for the PLA air force to develop offensive and defensive operations in outer space. "As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space... this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back,'' Commander Xu told the paper. "The PLA air force must establish in a timely manner the concepts of space security, space interests and space development. | 15 | Dark matter "wrecking ball" may have hit Milky Way Dan Vergano November 1, 2009 | Darth Vader's Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris? Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years. The real explanation may be the power of an invisible wrecking ball made of dark matter — a cloud of the enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns. Left behind by this "Dark Matter Clump" cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the " Gould Belt," which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia's University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. | 16 | Guide To LED Technology Brent Butterworth
| LEDs have risen from their original occupation as humble indicator lamps to serving as the light source for some of today’s most advanced TVs. Electronics engineers prize the LED for its brightness and cool-running efficiency. Environmentalists and utility companies tout its low power consumption. Videophiles are warming to it for the performance enhancements it facilitates. And average consumers love the way it has slimmed their new TVs. In this article, we’ll explain how the LED works; how it’s used in current-model TVs and in the latest video projectors; and how it’s likely to be used in future displays. Of course, we can’t say exactly what the LED’s future in video will be, but we can say with a great deal of confidence that within the next 10 years, you’ll own at least one LEDbased TV — if you don’t have one already. LED is the acronym for light-emitting diode. A diode is the simplest type of semiconductor. Rather than control the flow of electrons, as a transistor does, a diode just conducts electricity in one direction and blocks it in the other. It’s made from a semiconducting material such as gallium arsenide or indium gallium nitride, combined with another substance that changes its electrical properties to suit the task at hand. About a century ago, scientists discovered that diodes emit infrared light as an electrical current passes through them. In the 1960s, several companies developed diodes that produced visible light, and the LED was born. Early LEDs were dim and mostly limited in color to red, green, and amber. Despite these restraints, LEDs quickly replaced incandescent light bulbs for use as indicator lights, primarily because they last so much longer. Almost all LEDs have lifetimes specified in tens of thousands of hours, and some are even rated to last 100,000 hours or longer. In the 1980s and 1990s, brighter LEDs emerged, along with LEDs in white, blue, and other colors. These breakthroughs caught the attention of video engineers. As display technologies evolved away from light-emitting cathode-ray tubes toward "light valve" technologies such as LCD and DLP, engineers needed a cool-running, efficient, reliable light source. LED delivers on all three. | 17 | US Uses Less Water Now Than 35 Years Ago Julia Whitty November 4, 2009 | This news is particularly relevant heading into Copenhagen...for those who think conservation of any kind is impossible or unattainable or out of keeping with American goals. The US Geological Survey released a study today showing that Americans used less water in 2005 than 35 years ago—despite a 30 percent population increase. Most of the decline is attributable to alternative cooling methods at power plants and to more efficient irrigation systems. (The AAAS reminds us that some commercial farmers in the US have doubled the crops they grow with a given amount of irrigation water by using sub-surface drip irrigation.) | 18 | 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions Benjamin Radford Nov 4, 2009 | With the upcoming disaster film "2012" and the current hype about Mayan calendars and doomsday predictions, it seems like a good time to put such notions in context. Most prophets of doom come from a religious perspective, though the secular crowd has caused its share of scares as well. One thing the doomsday scenarios tend to share in common: They don't come to pass. 1) The Prophet Hen of Leeds, 1806 2) The Millerites, April 23, 1843 3) Mormon Armageddon, 1891 or earlier | |