Our Top Story Tonight | How the Spaceship Got Its Shape Andrew Chaikin November 01, 2009 | The cover of the March 22, 1952 issue of Collier’s magazine made an audacious promise. "Man Will Conquer Space Soon," blared the headline, above a painting of a multi-stage rocket with engines blazing, bound for orbit. Designed by German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, whose name was still unknown to most Americans, the Collier’s spaceship was a sleek, needle-nosed beauty; its winged third stage would be piloted to a runway landing. But it was all wrong. When the Soviet Union and the United States flew the first real spaceships just nine years later—far sooner than most experts had predicted in 1952—they were anything but sleek. One was shaped like a bowling ball; the other resembled a Styrofoam coffee cup. They came back to Earth not gliding on wings but dangling from parachutes. What happened during those nine years to change the shape of spaceflight? It had less to do with dreams of conquering Mars than with the infant science of hypersonics, a classified missile program, and a couple of visionary engineers. In the spring of 1952, even as millions of Collier’s readers marveled at the magazine’s visions of the future, engineers were grappling in secret with the almost insurmountable difficulties of designing the first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Creating a rocket with enough power and accuracy to lob a multi-ton nuclear warhead at targets in the Soviet Union, some 6,000 miles away, was challenging enough. But another problem was just as daunting: how to make sure the warhead survived its high-speed reentry from the edge of space. Slamming into the upper atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound, the warhead would encounter tremendous friction, creating temperatures of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit. | 1 | Seti: The hunt for ET
27 September 2009 | Seti stands for the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. If intelligent aliens are out there, Dr Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's senior astronomer, believes they will be "thinking machines". He believes a highly advanced species will be several centuries ahead of us in technological development. Professor Duncan Forgan, an astronomer from Edinburgh University, estimates that between 360 and 38,000 life forms capable of interstellar communications have evolved at some point in the history of our galaxy. In April 2006, Dr Shostak predicted we would find evidence of extraterrestrial life between 2020 and 2025. He believes the best way of bringing them up to speed with the human race is to send them the contents of the internet. | 2 | Harnessing nanopatterns David L. Chandler September 24, 2009 | Research at MIT has uncovered new information about how nanoscale patterns on the surface of a material can produce significant changes in the way it interacts with liquids. The discovery could be significant in understanding interactions that affect a wide variety of biological processes in living cells, as well as many manufacturing or energy storage systems. Specifically, the researchers, led by associate professor Francesco Stellacci, were studying a property of surfaces that is technically known as interfacial energy, or, more generally, as wetting. This describes the propensity of liquids to spread evenly over a surface, as opposed to beading up. They found that if the surface bears a particular kind of patterning the wetting capability can increase, or decrease, by at least 20 percent. The findings were described in a paper published in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal Nature Materials. "Especially in biology, these interactions can be quite complex," Stellacci says, and understanding them better could be a significant step towards being able to control some surface processes more effectively. While most research has looked at wetting properties of surfaces based on their overall, averaged chemical composition, he says, "what we found is that the way water or a solvent wets the surface also depends on the structure of the surface." This is a fundamentally new discovery, he says. | 3 | HIV’s Ancestors May Have Plagued First Mammals ScienceDaily Sep. 28, 2009 | The retroviruses which gave rise to HIV have been battling it out with mammal immune systems since mammals first evolved around 100 million years ago – about 85 million years earlier than previously thought, scientists now believe. The remains of an ancient HIV-like virus have been discovered in the genome of the two-toed sloth [Choloepus hoffmanni] by a team led by Oxford University scientists who publish a report of their research in this week’s Science. | 4 | First look: Microsoft Security Essentials impresses Emil Protalinski September 29, 2009 | After a short three-month beta program, Microsoft is officially releasing Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), its free, real-time consumer antimalware solution for fighting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans. MSE is yet another layer of defense the company is offering to help its customers fight the threats that plague Windows PCs. Microsoft Security Essentials is available for Windows XP 32-bit (8.61MB), Windows Vista/7 32-bit (4.28MB), and Windows Vista/7 64-bit (4.71MB). The final build number is 1.0.1611.0. Microsoft warns that MSE should not be installed alongside any other antimalware application. Indeed, MSE's installer disables Windows Defender completely, which makes sense as it is a sort of superset to Windows Defender. It builds upon Windows Defender by offering both real-time protection and on-demand scanning for all types of malware. | 5 | Rating the Carriers: Customer Service Showdown
| T-Mobile wins with in-store assistance that (despite a rush-hour wait of 45 minutes) answered all our questions and the best web support in the bunch, thanks to speedy helpful tech support and easy online email setup for BlackBerry phones. Our experience with Sprint in-store was helpful too. Though in-store employees couldn't answer all our questions, they were organized and considerate each step of the way and we appreciated how organized each store was, with LCD screens representing our queue positions. Also, one store employee helped us before it was even our turn. | 6 | Holographic storage, phase-change memory coming soon John Timmer September 29, 2009 | Last week's EmTech 09 meeting played host to a panel discussion on the future of data storage. All three of the panelists were from companies that have a poorly known product on the market, and each of them discussed improvements that are in the pipeline, which we'll cover towards the end of this article. But they also provided a more general overview of the challenges facing storage technology at a time when data production is beginning to outstrip our ability to cope with it. Ed Doller, of memory maker Numonyx, put things into perspective by discussing the launch of the iPhone 3GS. The hardware itself doesn't store all that much, but its capabilities led to downstream issues: within a few weeks of its release, mobile uploads of videos to YouTube had shot up by roughly 400 percent, and it's likely that other data-intensive activities will follow personal video before very long. | 7 | How to Make Your Tools, Gadgets and Appliances Last Forever Jim Gorman October 2009 | Yes, we live in a throwaway society. But a growing band of old-school tinkerers and new-school modders are rediscovering the joy of fixing what’s broken. How many M.I.T. engineering Ph.D.s does it take to repair a dishwasher? In the case of a balky Maytag at Eric Wilhelm’s house in Oakland, Calif., one doctorate sufficed. After a plastic wheel on the dishwasher’s upper rack broke off of its assembly, Wilhelm faced a classic consumer conundrum. The same plastic part had broken and been replaced three times—and now the warranty had ended. Considering this history and Wilhelm’s mounting frustration, repairing the 3-year-old appliance seemed marginally less logical than buying a new one. But discarding the machine didn’t feel right to Wilhelm, who is the co-founder and CEO of Instructables.com, a website that details DIY projects, from simple repairs to elaborate, artsy computer mods. Armed with a drill, a vise and a spare stainless-steel bolt, Wilhelm repaired the wheel and got his rack rolling again—and it hasn’t broken since. "From a purely monetary standpoint, it probably made no sense for me to spend an hour and a half fixing a plastic wheel on my dishwasher," he says. "But I got an intangible reward—a satisfied feeling that I fixed something and didn’t replace it." | 8 | Three ways to save some cash and repair or upgrade your iPod Jacqui Cheng September 28, 2009 | Just because your iPod is broken in some way doesn't mean you have to buy a new one—there are ways to fix some basic problems on your own at home with little more than replacement parts and a steely resolve. Apple may be all about being green lately, but throwaway culture has made it so that anytime a gadget becomes less-than-perfect, we're frothing at the mouth for excuses to buy a new one. Dead pixels? Guess I need a new laptop! Battery is dying? That thing was old anyway. Need to take more music with you? That 160GB iPod is calling your name. But with budgets tight, now is the perfect time to step back and contemplate the repairs and upgrades we can perform on our own. Influenced by the numerous people we know (both on staff and not) who have tossed perfectly good iPods, we thought we would go over some relatively easy fixes to give our iPods new life. | 9 | Nvidia's 'Fermi' GPU architecture revealed Scott Wasson September 30, 2009 | Graphics processors, as you may know, have been at the center of an ongoing conversation about the future of computing. GPUs have shown tremendous promise not just for producing high-impact visuals, but also for tackling data-parallel problems of various types, including some of the more difficult challenges computing now faces. Hence, GPUs and CPUs have been on apparent collision course of sorts for some time now, and that realization has spurred a realignment in the processor business. AMD bought ATI. Intel signaled its intention to enter the graphics business in earnest with its Larrabee project. Nvidia, for its part, has devoted a tremendous amount of time and effort to cultivating the nascent market for GPU computing, running a full-court press everywhere from education to government, the enterprise, and consumer applications. Heck, the firm has spent so much time talking up its GPU-compute environment, dubbed CUDA, and the applications written for it, including the PhysX API for games, that we've joked about Nvidia losing its relish for graphics. That's surely not the case, but the company is dead serious about growing its GPU-computing business. | 10 | GPS: Got Plenty of Snow? Phil Berardelli 29 September 2009 | A global positioning system (GPS) can help you find a campground or that new restaurant downtown, sure, but scientists have now discovered another use: When placed on platforms above the ground, GPS receivers can report the depth of the local snowpack, allowing researchers to compile maps of snowfall in real time. The discovery could help scientists improve weather forecasts and keep better track of changing snowfall patterns. Researchers who study small movements of Earth's surface find GPS receivers a bit more troublesome than the rest of us do. That's because some of the satellite signals these receivers depend on strike the ground before they reach the antenna, forming echoes that create noise in the signal. These echoes make precise measurements--which in the case of plate tectonics, need to be down to the millimeter--more difficult. Painstaking analysis is required to factor out the noise. "They've been a nuisance for 20 years," geophysicist Kristine Larson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, says of the echoes. | 11 | Hacker ships tool to circumvent China's Green Dam filter Ryan Naraine September 29th, 2009 | A security researcher at the University of Michigan has released a tool that help Chinese computers users disable the censorship functionality of the controversial Green Dam Youth Software. The Dam Burst utility, created by researcher Jon Oberheide, works by by injecting code into a running application and removing the Green Dam hooks that enable it to monitor and block user activity. This effectively restores the running application to its original uncensored state, Oberheide explained. | 12 | U.S. Loosens Control Over ICANN CHRISTOPHER RHOADS OCTOBER 1, 2009 | The U.S. government said Wednesday it had ended its 11-year contract with the nonprofit body that oversees key aspects of the Internet's architecture, after demands from other countries for more say in how the Web works. The move addresses mounting criticism in recent years that no one country should have sole control over important underpinnings of the Internet, such as determining domain name suffixes like ".com." | 13 | Autodesk, eBay seller suit could impact sales of secondhand software Nancy Gohring September 30, 2009 | A judge Tuesday heard arguments in a dispute over software sales that could potentially have repercussions on the secondhand sale of virtually any copyright material. The suit was filed by Timothy Vernor, a seller on eBay, after Autodesk, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asked eBay to remove some of its software products that Vernor had listed for sale there, and later to ban him from the site. Vernor had not illegally copied the software but was selling legitimate CDs of the products secondhand. For that reason, he argued, he was not infringing Autodesk's copyright. | 14 | How monarch butterflies find their way to Mexico RANDOLPH E. SCHMID September 28, 2009 |
Millions of monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winter and scientists have long speculated on how the insects find their way. Turns out, their antennas are the key. How do we know? Well, researchers painted butterfly antennas black, and the insects got lost. Managing to fly south may not sound like a big deal to people armed with maps and GPS receivers, but all butterflies have for navigation is the sun in the sky. | 15 | Two Hubble STUNNERS! Phil Plait
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Those magnificent images are of the galaxies NGC 4402 and NGC 4522, respectively, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (from before the recent repair mission). They’re both spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large collection of galaxies to us, roughly 60 million light years from Earth. | 16 | Carbon nanotubes may power ultracapacitor car John Timmer September 30, 2009 | At Technology Review's EmTech conference last week, MIT professor Joel Schindall told the audience at a panel on energy storage why ultracapacitors may have a significant role to play in our transportation future. The good properties of these devices—fast charge/discharge cycles and an essentially unlimited number of cycles—make them a compelling choice for powering an electric vehicle. Schindall also explained why their downside, a far lower charge density than batteries, might not be as much of a problem as it might appear at first glance. Schindall, who had spent some time away from academics, explained that during his first stint at MIT, a capacitor that could hold 350 Farads would have filled the whole stage. Before he returned, someone working on fuel cells had accidentally produced the first ultracapacitor. Now, with refinements, he was able to walk on stage with a 350 Farad ultracapacitor that was about the size of a D battery. The current generation of devices use activated carbon to hold charges, as its highly complex topology creates a lot of surface area across which charge differences can build up. | 17 | Final Frontier: How Far Could Astronauts Go? RACHEL COURTLAND Sept. 26, 2009 | How far could an astronaut travel in a lifetime? Billions of light years, it turns out. But they ought to be careful when to apply the brakes on the return trip. Ever since cosmologists discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating, many have wondered just how much this will constrain what we could see with telescopes in the future. Distant regions of the universe will eventually be expanding so fast that light from any objects there can never reach us. Likewise, dark energy -- the mysterious force behind the acceleration -- places a limit on human exploration of the universe, says Juliana Kwan at the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, who has now refined this limit on our travels. Even with rockets that could take us to within a whisker of light speed, expansion would still eventually leave us behind. | 18 | Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them Betsy Mason September 29, 2009 |
In August, we posted a photograph of some odd, rare clouds known as Morning Glory clouds without providing an explanation for how they form. In response to reader interest, we followed up with meteorologist Roger Smith of the University of Munich, who has studied their formation. "Over the years we’ve developed a good understanding of them," Smith said. "It’s no longer a mystery, but still very spectacular." | 19 | Space Colonization: Future or Fanatsy? October 01, 2009
| Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Some even believe that colonizing new planets or moons our best hope for the future. The popular idea is that we’ll eventually need some fresh, unexploited new worlds to inhabit. In a recent Galaxy post we wrote that Stephen Hawking, world-celebrated expert on the cosmological theories of gravity and black holes who holds Issac Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University, believes that traveling into space is the only way humans will be able to survive in the long-term. | 20 | 10 Best Pollution-Busting Houseplants Brian Clark Howard September 30, 2009 | Over the years there has been quite a bit of debate about whether houseplants really can filter indoor air by removing toxins and particles. An early and often repeated study showed very promising results -- in space. NASA tests in a spacecraft packed with plants showed markedly better air. But proving that plants are efficient filters in real world, terrestrial situations hasn't been so easy. Still, it seems most likely that some houseplants can't hurt. Not only might they take out some of the nasty stuff that's in your space (remember, the EPA estimates that indoor air quality is often up to 10 times worse than what's outside), but some think they may offer some protection against electromagnetic radiation. And plants certainly can help your home retain comfortable moisture levels, especially in winter; they can provide shading in windows; and they do release oxygen. Plants are also beautiful to look at, and can help lessen the feeling of detachment from nature that affects so many of us in modern society. | 21 | How wave warnings work Alan Boyle September 30, 2009 | nd exploration for MSNBC.com. He is a winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award, the NASW Science-in-Society Award and other honors; a contributor to "A Field Guide for Science Writers"; and a member of the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. The tsunami alarm may not have gotten out quickly enough to avoid the loss of life in Samoa, and there are still gaps in the system. Nevertheless, this week's response demonstrated how much things have changed since 2004. "It's night and day," Stuart Weinstein, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, told me today. "So much more has transpired in the intervening five years." "Back in 2004, when the Sumatran disaster struck, there were only four instruments in the Indian Ocean that were transmitting their data and making it available in near real time," Weinstein said. "Now there are over 50." | 22 | Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us Bob Holmes 30 September 2009 | WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch. Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age. | 23 | Researchers create Amazing X-Ray Wireless Network! Donald Melanson Oct 1st 2009 | Don't freak out or anything, but those wireless signals you bask in everyday could be watching you. Or at least they might, someday, if the work from a group of researchers at the University of Utah makes it beyond the lab. As Technology Review's Physics arXiv blog reports, they've devised a means to modify a standard 802.15.4 wireless network (commonly used by home automation services like ZigBee) to actually "see" movement through walls, and with some degree of accuracy, no less. As you might expect, however, that's not quite as simple as a firmware upgrade, and currently requires a 34-node network to keep watch on a standard living room, which is apparently enough to pin down moving objects within a meter or so. To do that, the system essentially bombards the space with an array of wireless signals and keeps watch on any changes in signal strength, building up a "picture" of the room in the process. No promises on a commercial version just yet, but the researchers see plenty of potential for it, and are even talking about a portable, GPS-equipped version that police or emergency responders could use before entering a dangerous area. | 24 | 10 reasons why Windows XP will be around a while Brien Posey September 21st, 2009 | A few months ago, TechRepublic ran a poll asking members whether their organization was still using Windows XP as its primary OS. Nearly 13,000 people responded - and of those, a whopping 96 percent said yes. It appears that despite the favorable press surrounding the impending arrival of Windows 7, IT pros and the companies they work for are not planning to migrate from XP any time soon. Here are a few reasons why. 1: Many organizations don’t see the need to upgrade For many organizations, sticking with Windows XP makes sense from a business standpoint. After all, Windows XP has already been bought and paid for, and the help desk staff has already been trained in how to support it. If there are no business reasons driving an organization to upgrade, it can avoid incurring additional costs by sticking with what’s already in place. | 25 | Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy JOHN NOBLE WILFORD October 1, 2009 | | Lucy, meet Ardi. Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis. Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to "the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees." | 26 | Ardipithecus FAQ John Hawks
| Today is Ardipithecus day. Eleven papers in tomorrow’s issue of Science describe the research on one exceptional skeleton (numbered ARA-VP-6/500, nicknamed "Ardi") as well as more than thirty other individuals, mostly represented by isolated teeth with a few partial sets of teeth. I have a lot of material to share about these papers and how they change things in paleoanthropology – so much that I can’t possibly fit it all into one post. | 27 | A planet that rocks Meg Marquardt October 1, 2009 | Imagine the following scenario: You are preparing to leave for work, and shout down the hall to your significant other. "Honey, what’s the weather supposed to be like?" And the reply: "50(Graph4) | 28 | Wireless Network Modded to See Through Walls October 01, 2009
| The way signal strength varies in a wireless network can reveal what's going on behind closed doors. It's every schoolboy's dream: an easy way of looking through walls to spy on neighbors, monitor siblings, and keep tabs on the sweet jar. And now a dream no longer... Researchers at the University of Utah say that the way radio signals vary in a wireless network can reveal the movement of people behind closed doors. Joey Wilson and Neal Patwari have developed a technique called variance-based radio tomographic imaging that processes the signals to reveal signs of movement. They've even tested the idea with a 34-node wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol, the protocol for personal area networks employed by home automation services such as ZigBee. | 29 | Battery 500 Project Charged Up over All-Electric Cars R. Colin Johnson 2009-09-29 | The project is progressing with its goal of boosting the range of rechargeable batteries for all-electric cars to 500 miles. The Battery 500 Project recently held its kickoff meeting at IBM's Almaden Laboratory in San Jose, Calif., where leading scientists, engineers and other experts brainstormed about how to perfect the power source for all-electric automobiles. As a part of IBM's 2-year-old Big Green Innovations program, the Battery 500 Project aims to boost the range of rechargeable batteries for all-electric cars from less than 100 miles today to as far as 500 miles. The consortium's efforts are being led by the Almaden Lab in collaboration with several U.S. universities and the Department of Energy's national labs. | 30 | NASA spacecraft sends back new data Tudor Vieru 30th of September 2009 | According to experts at the American space agency, the concentration of cosmic-ray radiation around us has increased considerably this year, reaching its highest level in more than 50 years of observations. The level of cosmic rays has been under constant surveillance since the advent of the space age, and such a sharp increase has never before been observed, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) report. NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft sent back the new results, LiveScience reports. "In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19 percent beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years. The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions," Caltech expert Richard Mewaldt explains, adding that the boost in cosmic-ray concentrations has no adverse effect on the Earth and the life forms it supports. He also reveals that the most likely reason for this is the current solar minimum, a period of very low activity from the Sun that began in 2007. | 31 | Microsoft blackballs pirates from getting free Security Essentials software Gregg Keizer September 30, 2009 | Microsoft will block users running counterfeit copies of Windows from installing the free Security Essentials antivirus software, the head of the company's anti-piracy group said yesterday. Security Essentials, which launched early Tuesday, is basic anti-virus and anti-spyware software that Microsoft touts as suitable for users who can't, or won't, pay for security. "During installation, you'll be asked to validate Windows running on your PC to make sure that it's genuine," said Alex Kochis, director of Microsoft's Genuine Windows team, in a post to a company blog Tuesday. Genuine Windows is the umbrella label for several of the company's anti-piracy technologies, including product activation and the often-criticized validation and notification components, which regularly determine whether the copy of Windows running on a PC is legitimate. | 32 | The dark secrets of the trillion-dollar oil trade
26 September 2009 | With a combined capacity for 313,000 tonnes of oil, the Delta Ios and the NS Burgas supertankers were launched two months ago to criss-cross the globe in search of trade. Instead, the vast vessels were to be found yesterday lying idle off the coast of Singapore after their owners were paid by two of the world's richest and most secretive oil companies to turn them into floating petrochemical warehouses. At first glance, the decision by Trafigura Group and Vitol Holding BV to charter the newly built ships at an estimated cost of £47,000 a day to do nothing for up to four months in South-east Asia while laden with cargos of diesel worth at least £77m per vessel makes little economic sense. When this is combined with the fact that the Delta Ios and the NS Burgas are just two ships in an enormous fleet of tankers which are currently being paid about £80m a month by independent oil traders like Trafigura and Vitol, as well as giants such as Shell, to stay anchored around the globe with anything between 50 and 150 million barrels of redundant crude on board, it seem that the ruthless barons of black gold must be losing money as fast as they can make it. | |