Our Top Story Tonight | Discovery of ‘magnetricity’ marks important advance in physics Hannah Devlin October 15, 2009 | Scientists have generated a magnetic version of electricity, which they have called magnetricity. The discovery marks an important advance in theoretical physics. The existence of magnetic "charges" has been predicted for nearly 70 years but has never been observed in practice. The study was led by Professor Steve Bramwell, of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. He said: "It is not often in the field of physics you get the chance to ask, ‘How do you measure something?’, and then go on to prove a theory unequivocally. This is a very important step to establish that magnetic charge can flow like electric charge." | 1 | The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate DENNIS OVERBYE October 12, 2009 | More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half. | 2 | Physicists determine nature's limit to making faster processors. Lauren Schenkman Oct 13, 2009 | With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast -- except they can't. A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip. His prediction became known as Moore's Law, and it has held true throughout the evolution of computers -- the fastest processor today beats out a ten-year-old competitor by a factor of about 30. | 3 | Avoid Windows Malware: Bank on a Live CD Brian Krebs
| An investigative series I've been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud. The simplest, most cost-effective answer I know of? Don't use Microsoft Windows when accessing your bank account online. I do not offer this recommendation lightly (and at the end of this column you'll find a link to another column wherein I explain an easy-to-use alternative). But I have interviewed dozens of victim companies that lost anywhere from href="0,000 to $500,000 dollars because of a single malware infection. I have heard stories worthy of a screenplay about the myriad ways cyber crooks are evading nearly every security obstacle the banks put in their way. But regardless of the methods used by the bank or the crooks, all of the attacks shared a single, undeniable common denominator: They succeeded because the bad guys were able to plant malicious software that gave them complete control over the victim's Windows computer. | 4 | Copyright collective: free format and time-shifting never OK Nate Anderson October 14, 2009 | If your mother was like my mother, she probably spent your childhood telling you things like, "If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you follow?" In other words, just because something becomes popular doesn't make it a good idea. Apparently, Canada's Access Copyright collective is staffed by Canuck versions of my mother, because the arguments are the same: format shifting and time shifting might be popular with the kids everyone who owns an iPod or a DVR, but that doesn't mean they should be legal. Not without payment, anyway. Canada's recent government-sponsored copyright consultation is looking at an overhaul of Canadian copyright law, and it has brought out some interesting responses. Access Copyright's may be one of the most brazen, though; not content with simply beating back some of the more extreme proposals related to "fair dealing" (the Canadian version of "fair use"), the copyright collective actually argues that fair dealing should be restricted even further. | 5 | The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out? Linda Geddes 14 October 2009 | THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen. I've just walked into a windowless room on an industrial estate in Tamworth, UK, where three cellphone analysts in blue shirts sit at their terminals, scrutinising the contents of my phone and smirking. "If it's any consolation, we would have found them even if you had deleted them," says one. | 6 | A Tour of Google's Chicago Headquarters Marcus Leshock 10.14.09 | | You probably knew that Google was a California-based technology company, but did you know they have 67 locations across the world, one right here in Chicago? Their local headquarters at 20 W. Kinzie employs about 450 engineers, sales people, creative developers, team leaders and more. They took me on a tour of the very colorful facility, and rubbed in some of their employee perks. The best part - they told me they're hiring. Feel free to drop off an application with the 10,000 other people doing the same. | 7 | How the Moon produces its own water PhysOrg October 15th, 2009 | The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface. It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System. The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team. | 8 | First black hole for light created on Earth Anil Ananthaswamy 14 October 2009 | An electromagnetic "black holeMovie Camera" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity. A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards. | 9 | Smartphones suck 8x more cellular capacity than laptops Jacqui Cheng October 14, 2009 | Conventional wisdom says that laptops with data cards cause more of a traffic jam on cell networks than handhelds because of the relative increase in data consumption. However, a new study from mobile broadband technology provider Airvana says that smartphones generate the majority of "signaling activity"—messages to and from cell sites for polling purposes. This is an indicator of an "urgent need" for improved data processing among cell networks in the US. According to Airvana, smartphones generate as much as eight times the network load as laptops on the same network because of how smartphones work. Since they're always on and performing multiple functions at once (acting as a mini-computer, your phone, a mapping device, and whatever else you can think of), they're constantly sending small signals to nearby cell sites—more so than regular cell phones, and much more than laptops using data cards. "While a smartphone user downloads a fraction (typically 1/25th) of the data consumed by a laptop user, the signaling load produced by the smartphone user is much higher and in fact one third of the laptop user on average," wrote Airvana. "In other words, while it takes 25 smart phones to equal the data throughput from one laptop, it only takes three smart phones to equal the signaling network impact of one laptop (25/3 ≈ 8x)." | 10 | Samsung quietly testing mini SSD for laptops, netbooks Lucas Mearian October 13, 2009 | Samsung Corp. said during an interview today that it is testing a new consumer-class solid state drive (SSD) with computer makers that's about one-third the size of a business card and that would plug directly into an internal PCI Express (PCIe) slot in a desktop, laptop or netbook. Samsung told Computerworld at the Storage Networking World show that its new SSD conforms to the new mini-SATA (mSATA) interface that the SATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced at Intel's Developer's Forum last month. | 11 | Weird Kindle tricks: screensavers, screenshots, and games Jacqui Cheng October 14, 2009 | Sure, the Kindle makes a good e-book, magazine, and newspaper reader—despite its limitations, many of us at Ars are Kindle owners—but there are a few secrets to the Kindle that most people don't know about. These tips and tricks may not radically change your Kindle experience, but they range from the helpful to the pointless-yet-fun. Here are some of our favorites. Change your screensaver This one was a hard one to nail down, only because this "hack" has existed since the early days of the Kindle but has morphed over the years to include new methods as the old methods went by the wayside. However, if you're using a Kindle 2 or DX, it's still possible for you to change the screen saver images displayed by the Kindle when it goes into sleep mode. Instead of those default pictures of old authors and typewriters, you can instead look at pictures of your family, friends, or whatever else you can dream up. | 12 | Einstein's Telescope: Searching for Dark Matter and the Future of the Universe
October 14, 2009 |
| The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away, the inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 and approximately 11 billion light-years. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of Californi, Santa Barbara. Treu says the odds of seeing such a special alignment are so small that they "hit the jackpot" with this discovery. "When I first saw it I said ‘wow, this is insane!’ I could not believe it!" But this sight is more than just an incredible novelty. It’s also a very rare phenomenon that can offer insights into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and the curvature of the Universe itself. The discovery is part of the ongoing Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS) program. | 13 | GOP senators: Net neutrality rule making must be bipartisan Nate Anderson October 14, 2009 | Now out of power, the Republican party is preaching the virtues of bipartisanship. A new letter from 18 Republican senators to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski opens with a line of congratulations but moves quickly to the real business at hand: telling Genachowski that he had better not plan on moving forward with his ambitious net neutrality agenda unless he has bipartisan support. "Such a major policy shift should be contemplated only with all of the FCC Commissioners involved," says the letter. "To do it with just one party reduces the confidence the public and the Congress has in the proposal." The two Republican Commissioners on the FCC are patently skeptical of the need for net neutrality, however. When Genachowski unveiled the general principles that would guide his decision making, Commissioners Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell issued a statement of their own in response. | 14 | Judge: ringtones aren't performances, so no royalties Jacqui Cheng October 15, 2009 | If you have been blessing everyone around you with cell phone "performances" of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies," rest assured that your cell phone provider won't have to pay royalties on it. A federal court has ruled that ringtones played aloud in public are not infringing on the content owners' copyrights because they don't constitute a true performance. (In other news, children are still allowed to sing songs without paying royalties.) Joking aside (actually, that's less of a joke than you might think), the ringtone argument was made by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) earlier this year when it sued certain mobile carriers in the US in an attempt to force them to fork over royalties every time a customer's ringtone is played. Even though the carriers were already paying for download rights to the songs, ASCAP argued that each ring was a "performance" and therefore those download payments weren't enough. | 15 | The Internet is about to die. Literally die! Nate Anderson October 14, 2009 | In 2007, Nemertes Research released a dire report on Internet traffic. By 2010, it said, the "exponential" growth in demand for bandwidth will butt up against the "linear" investment in networking technology, and that whole Internet thing you've come to know and love will start experiencing "brownouts or snow days, during which performance will (seemingly inexplicably) degrade." By mid-2009, this certainly seemed implausible. Millions of people now stream Netflix on-demand video to their computers and TV sets, YouTube has added high-quality options to its videos, and Hulu's launch showed that ad-supported Web video could be hugely popular. Despite the growth in video (which is usually pitched as the thing that will bring the Internet to its knees), "Internet snow days" were about as likely as real snow days in Havana. Which is why it was surprising to see Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson double down on the doom-mongering in a May 2009 column for Computerworld called "The Internet sky really is falling." The article's point was largely that "we were right" because YouTube has "recently announced it's discontinuing video delivery to certain geographies due to—ahem—lack of access capacity." (We have no idea what's being referred to here, but it's certainly not related to anything happening in the US, Canada, Europe, and other places with good Internet infrastructure.) Also, ISP usage caps prove that there's some kind of bandwidth crunch and IP (both v4 and v6) are doomed. | 16 | Hacker High: 10 Stories of Teenage Hackers Getting into the System IT Security Editors October 15, 2009 | Much like Lolcats, some überteens are up in the Internet, stealing your ... well, whatever they want. If you envision these kids as harmless nerds who hole themselves up in their rooms clicking away their adolescence, check out this list, which details the costly and frightening toll their computer "games" have exacted throughout recent history. 1. Student at Downingtown High School West — Downingtown, Pa. 2. Matthew the phone phreak — Boston 3. Jeanson James Ancheta — Los Angeles | |