Our Top Story Tonight | Top 10 Reasons Why the World Won't End in 2012 Ray Villard Nov 04 2009 | In the early days of computers, when hard drives weighed as much as a piece of furniture, a popular phrase was "Garbage-in, Garbage-out" (GIGO). It meant that computers would unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output. "GIGO" describes the abysmal lack of intelligent thought and critical thinking on the Internet when it comes to all the hysteria about the end of the world coming on December 21, 2012 -- just in time to ruin Christmas. I'm getting e-mail about this weekly and I expect the nonsense to ratchet up. 10. Changes in the Sun's magnetic field will lead to powerful flares. 9. The Earth's magnetic field will reverse. | 1 | Solar Space Satellite Will be Fueled Solely by the Sun’s Rays! Brit Liggett 11/10/09 | For centuries sailors have used stars to navigate around the world. Now space-sailors might be able to use the stars to move through the universe — literally! Instead of cruising to Mars on a giant tank of oil, we could soon sail through space using just the energy from sunlight. The Planetary Society — a non-profit space exploration organization — just announced that in 2010 it will send a satellite dubbed LightSail-1 into space that will be propelled by solar sails. The mylar-winged vessel will carry not a drop of fuel (making it much lighter than contemporary space craft) and will be the first in a three part program that aims to prove that solar sailing is a viable technology The LightSail-1 is a solar sail propelled satellite that will travel through space using only the energy contained within the sun’s rays. To do this the craft features 4 triangle-shaped aluminized Mylar sails that are capable of capturing the momentum of light emitted by the sun. When the photons in these light rays hit the sails on the LightSail-1 they will transfer the momentum they carry to propel the craft into space, much like wind transfers momentum to the sails on a sailboat | 2 | Will probe's upcoming fly-by unlock exotic physics? David Shiga 10 November 2009 | What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it. The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005. Scientists have ruled out various mundane explanations like atmospheric drag or the effect of deviations in Earth's shape. This has led some to propose that exotic new physics is involved, such as modifications of Einstein's general relativity, the currently accepted theory of gravity. | 3 | Islam’s Darwin problem Drake Bennett October 25, 2009 | Three weeks ago, with much fanfare, a team of scientists unveiled the fossil skeleton of Ardi, a 4-foot-tall female primate who lived and died 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. According to her discoverers, Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus, her species - is our oldest known ancestor. She predated Lucy, the fossilized Australopithecus afarensis that previously had claimed the title, by 1.2 million years. The papers announcing the find described a transitional specimen, with the long arms and short legs of an ape and strong, grasping big toes suited to life in the trees, but also a pelvis whose shape allowed her to walk upright on the ground below. That, at least, is what one discovered by following the coverage in the Western press, or by reading the scientific papers themselves, published in the journal Science. If you learned about Ardi on the Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera’s website, however, you discovered something else: The find disproved the theory of evolution. | 4 | Google hopes to remake programming with Go Stephen Shankland November 10, 2009 | Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go. And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project. The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach. | 5 | Plextor Announces Blu-Ray Writer With 12x Write Speeds Jennifer Johnson November 10, 2009 | Plextor announced a new Blu-ray internal writer, the PX-B940SA. This new drive features Blu-ray write speeds of up to 12x, which Plextor claims is the fastest available on the market today. The drive comes with CyberLink’s BD Suite software package and uses a Serial ATA interface. In addition to Blu-ray, the drive also supports DVD R/RW and RAM. It can accept both 12cm and 8cm discs (horizontally) and has a 4MB buffer. Plextor, a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment, introduces its latest entry into the Blu-ray market with the new PX-B940SA internal BD writer. Featuring Blu-ray write speeds of up to 12x – the fastest available in the market – the drive also includes CyberLink’s BD Suite software package, including the TrueTheater™ HD technology to provide users with the latest in high-quality movie playback. | 6 | Google’s Plan to Make the Web Twice as Fast Barb Dybwad November 12th, 2009 | Google is apparently in the early stages of a research project that appears to aim as high as perhaps replacing the HTTP protocol, the fundamental technology that essentially makes the World Wide Web possible. In a somewhat obscure post on the Chromium blog, the development branch of their Chrome (Chrome) browser, Google (Google) reveals they’ve been working on a new protocol dubbed SPDY for "SPeeDY" for its goal of making the web faster. | 7 | Carbon Nanotube Sponge Can Absorb Toxic Oils and Solvents up to 180x Its Weight! Michael Graham Richard 11.10.09 | Cleaning up toxic spills has always been a problem. It's hard, and it's expensive, and you have to be thorough. But things might have just got easier: Scientists from the Peking University and Tsinghua University have created a sponge like no other. It is made of carbon nanotubes - regular carbon atoms arranged in a specific cylindrical shape - and can absorb organic pollutants from the surface of water (such as oil and solvents) up to 180x its weight (!) without absorbing water (see video below to see how light it is). And once its full of toxic liquids, the best part is that you can just wring it and start again. | 8 | Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time ScienceDaily Nov. 11, 2009 | A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it." | 9 | Dinos Evolved by Fattening Up Jennifer Viegas Nov 10 2009 | Think of a dinosaur and what may come to mind is a large, lumbering animal with four legs, a long neck, a tiny head and tail. Now a new species helps to explain how this iconic dino body shape evolved. The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods -- gigantic, four-legged herbivores -- but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs. | 10 | As oceans fall ill, Washington bureaucrats squabble Les Blumenthal November 8, 2009 | Off the coast of Washington state, mysterious algae mixed with sea foam have killed more than 8,000 seabirds, puzzling scientists. A thousand miles off California, researchers have discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling vortex roughly twice the size of Texas filled with tiny bits of plastic and other debris. Every summer a dead zone of oxygen-depleted water the size of Massachusetts forms in the Gulf of Mexico; others have been found off Oregon and in the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie and the Baltic and Black seas. Some studies indicate that North Pole seawater could turn caustic in 10 years, and that the Southern Ocean already may be saturated with carbon dioxide. A recent bird kill off the coast of Washington state came without warning, said Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There will be more surprises than that," she said. The danger signals are everywhere, some related to climate change and greenhouse gases and others not: | 11 | Vatican Holds Conference on Extraterrestrial Life Nicholos Wethington November 10th, 2009 | Though it may seem an unlikely location to happen upon a conference on astrobiology, the Vatican recently held a "study week" of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials. This follows the statement made last year by the Pope's chief astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, that the existence of extraterrestrials does not preclude a belief in God, and that it's a question to be explored by the Catholic Church. The event, put on by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, took place at the Casina Pio IV on the Vatican grounds from November 6-11 The conference was meant to focus on the scientific perspective on the subject of the existence of extraterrestrial life, and pulled in perspectives from atheist scientists and Catholic leaders alike. It was split into eight different segments, starting with a topics about life here on Earth such as the origins of life, the Earth's habitability through time, and the environment and genomes. Then the detection of life elsewhere, search strategies for extrasolar planets, the formation and properties of extrasolar planets was discussed, culminating in the last segment, intelligence elsewhere and 'shadow life' – life with a biochemistry completely different than that found on Earth. Speakers at the event included notable physicist Paul Davies and Jill C. Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research. Numerous astrobiologists and astronomers researching extrasolar planets also were in attendance to give lectures. The whole series of speech abstracts and a list of participants is available in a brochure on the Vatican site, here. | 12 | 'Frankencamera': A Giant Leap For Digital Photos?
October 11, 2009 | It's big. It's ugly. And it's made from recycled parts, at least for now. It's called the "Frankencamera" — and it might someday change the way you take pictures. Computer scientists at Stanford University say the new camera works something like an iPhone: It can be altered in nearly infinite ways, depending on the applications downloaded to it. Even the best digital camera on the market today has lots of limitations, the professor behind the prototype, Marc Levoy, tells NPR's Guy Raz. Say you want to take a photo of your child playing with a new toy in a dark room, near a bright window. It's tough to do now because of the variations in lighting within that single frame. If Junior's face is visible and bright, the tree and the sky through the window will be bleached out. If the scene outside comes out just right, Junior will be so underexposed you won't be able to see the glee on his face. | 13 | Top 10 Early Hominid Finds and Their Locations Robert Lamb
| Sink a spade into the ground near any area of long-term human habitation and you're likely to experience something not unlike time travel. Where day-to-day observations and recorded history fail us, discarded remnants shed light on ages past. Such is the very meat of archaeology. Buried tombs, forgotten habitations and even garbage heaps cast a shadow through time. Dig deep enough, however, and the knickknacks and tools will begin to vanish. The further back into prehistoric time we delve, the more it becomes evident that the ascension of man is a tale told in bones. Humans have left an evolutionary trail of fossils ever since our earliest ancestors split off from the rest of the hominid family. Before that, fossils clue us into the various hominids that roamed the Earth before us. Yet paleoanthropologists study these bones not only to discover all the links in the great chain of evolution, but also to learn about the biological and technical origins of evolution. | 14 | 15,000 reasons to worry about invasive species Dan Egan November 9, 2009 | A day at the beach in Wisconsin's North Woods didn't used to go like this. Candy Dailey spent a Fourth of July holiday splashing with grandkids on the sandy shore of Lake Metonga when she felt a nasty sting on her foot. She didn't need to look down to know the culprit was a zebra mussel -- cuts from the razor-sharp shells have become as unremarkable as bee stings since the mussels invaded Dailey's lake eight years ago. The natives of the Caspian Sea region first turned up in North America in the summer of 1988, thanks to overseas freighters' long-standing -- and ongoing -- practice of dumping their contaminated ballast water in the Great Lakes, which are now home to more than 185 non-native species. | 15 | Compute This: World’s Oldest Working Computer On Display
| And you thought your computer was a dinosaur. Recently, the world’s oldest working computer was dug out of storage and restored to working order at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The Harwell Computer, also known as WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell) is a relay-based computer that was first functional in 1951. From 1952-1957 it was in use at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Oxfordshire. It spent its remaining years, until 1973, as an educational tool at Staffordshire Technical College. After that, it was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in Birmingham, where it has since been in storage for nearly 30 years. |
| The giant machine is now being hauled out of its packaging to once again be displayed and admired at the National Museum of Computing. It is on loan as a part of a Computer Conservation Society project, and is being carefully reassembled from old photographs. Though the original circuit diagrams are available to aid in the restoration, there’s not much else to go on. Photographs have proven to be extremely useful in putting the machine back together correctly. | 16 | Spirit bears become 'invisible' Jody Bourton 6 November 2009 | On a few islands in western Canada, white 'spirit bears' walk the woods. Now scientists have discovered why these striking animals, a race of black bear, survive. White bears are less visible to fish than their black counterparts, making them 30(Graph4) | 17 | Quantum Gas Microscope Offers Glimpse Of Quirky Ultracold Atoms ScienceDaily Nov. 12, 2009 | Physicists at Harvard University have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways. The work, published November 5 in the journal Nature, represents the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice. It's part of scientists' efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials. | 18 | Metal-Air Battery Could Store 11 Times More Energy than Lithium-Ion Lisa Zyga November 5, 2009 | A spinoff company from Arizona State University plans to build a new battery with an energy density 11 times greater than that of lithium-ion batteries for just one-third the cost. With a $5.13 million research grant from the US Department of Energy awarded last week, Fluidic Energy hopes to turn its ultra-dense energy storage technology into a reality. The new Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery is being designed by Cody Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, along with other researchers. The key to the new battery is that it uses ionic liquids as its electrolyte, which could help it overcome some significant problems faced by previous metal-air batteries. In the past, metal-air batteries have usually used water-based electrolytes, but due to water evaporation, the batteries tended to fail prematurely. | 19 | Scientists Search for Loch Ness Monster, Find 100,000 Golf Balls David DeFranza Nov 11 12:45:00 GMT 2009 | When Scottish scientists boarded their submersible and dove into the depths of Loch Ness, they were hoping to find evidence of a prehistoric creature along the loch floor. Instead, what they discovered were golf balls; hundreds of thousands of them. The discovery illustrates an alarming report released from the Danish Golf Union showing that golf balls may take between 100 and 1,000 years to decompose in the wild. And decomposition is not a clean process. As the balls break down, they release toxins and heavy metals into the environment. The study shows that zinc, in particular, has the potential to cause problems because it attaches itself to sediments and poisons surrounding plants and animals. | 20 | 'Invisibility Cloaks' and 'Perfect Lenses' One Step Closer Tudor Vieru 12th of November 2009 | Scientists and engineers at the Imperial College London (ICL), in the United Kingdom, were recently awarded a new, £4.9-million ($8.1-million) grant to investigate the properties of metamaterials. The money, which came from The Leverhulme Trust, are destined for the creation of invisibility cloaks and perfect lenses, devices that are only made possible by this particular class of materials. They could also be used in the future to create completely new and advanced security sensors, that could help to detect tiny amounts of a certain dangerous substance in various environments. In the case of the perfect lenses, these instruments would essentially be used to image objects that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, something that was, until not long ago, considered to be impossible. It was only recently that this obstacle was overcome by a new series of scientific devices. The ICL team will work together with experts at the Southampton University for the new research. Metamaterials are widely known in the international scientific community as the materials that can be employed to bend and control, and manipulate light waves. This ability makes them especially suitable for invisibility cloaks, which walk the border between physics and materials science. The main goal of this emerging field of research is to create coatings that could essentially make on object invisible. Photons that make up light would be bent and twisted around corners, and then simply allowed to pass one as if nothing stood in their way. This amazing feat has already been achieved in two dimensions, and now experts around the world are working frantically at making this possible in 3D as well, AlphaGalileo reports. | 21 | Best Of National Geographic Photography 2009 Shravan Labels
| This post is a showcase of the best of "best of the day photos" from National Geographic 2009 collection. As the year 2009 is coming to its end now, this was the best time to publish this post and review the past one year of amazing experience brought to us by NatGeo with help of some great photographers. |
| This post is a farewell to these photographs which brought joy to us by experiencing those moments through these pictures where we have never been and many of us will never ever be there ever in our lives, so its a great way to experience the life and joy with these marvelous photographs. | 22 | A Tumultuous Year at the LHC Lisa Randall November 12, 2009 | On October 21, 2008, in accordance with some overly optimistic scheduling, 1,500 physicists and world leaders gathered outside Geneva to celebrate the inauguration of the biggest, most international, most expensive, most energetic, most ambitious experiment ever built. I enjoyed the day, which was filled with speeches, music, and—as is important at any European cultural event—good food. And despite anxieties (more on that later), everyone was filled with hope that these experiments would shed light on some of the mysteries surrounding mass, the weakness of gravity, dark matter, and the forces of nature. The machine in question is, of course, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The name is literal, though admittedly uninspired. The LHC is indeed large, containing a 27-kilometer circular underground tunnel that stretches between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva near the French-Swiss border. This tunnel’s depth varies from 50 to 175 meters underground; the uneven terrain was in fact an interesting constraint on the tunnel’s depth and location. Electric fields inside this tunnel will accelerate two beams of protons (which belong to a class of particles called hadrons, hence the collider’s name) as they go round and round, more than 10,000 times each second. Then—and here’s where all the action happens—magnets will guide the two proton beams so that they collide in a region smaller than the width of a human hair. When this collision happens, some of the energy of the accelerated protons will be converted to mass (that’s what Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, tells us). In fact, the energy will be so high that the ingredients inside the proton—particles called quarks and gluons—will collide and convert to energy. And with these collisions and the energy they release, new elementary particles, heavier than any seen before, can be created. The day’s events did not yet celebrate discovery but instead recognized the potential of the LHC and the triumph of the many countries that participated in its creation. An international community of scientists and officials began planning the LHC more than 20 years ago at CERN (the acronym stems from the original name, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). CERN is a miracle of international cooperation, with scientists from 85 countries participating. The cost of the LHC is about href="0 billion, of which CERN has paid two-thirds; CERN’s 20 member countries contribute according to their means, ranging from 20 percent from Germany to 0.2 percent from Bulgaria. Although the United States isn’t officially part of CERN, many American physicists work there, and we’ve put in $531 million. | 23 | Bush Concerned Successor Might Revoke Telco Spy Immunity David Kravets November 12, 2009 | The George W. Bush administration expressed concern future administrations might not use the legal amnesty it wanted to give the nation’s telecommunication companies that were being sued for assisting the president’s warrantless, electronic wiretapping program, according to internal documents released Thursday. The documents, unearthed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, also suggest the administration was wary it might first have to concede that the telcos were complicit in the alleged dragnet surveillance to garner congressional support for the amnesty bill. The legislation, passed in July 2008, killed the EFF’s federal civil rights lawsuit against the companies. Ultimately, Congress approved legislation granting immunity to the telcos without any admission of guilt– provided the attorney general requested the power on their behalf. In July 2008, President Bush signed the package, which was endorsed by then-Sen. Barack Obama. | 24 | Miami-based Psystar takes on Apple Tim Elfrink November 10, 2009 | Robert Pedraza is a 24-year-old self-taught programmer with a thin frame, spiky dark hair, gleaming braces, and squinty eyes. His brother Rudy is a year older and a quarter-foot taller. He counters the computer-nerd image with a half-buttoned dress shirt and an intense stare. Last year, the two Miami natives — one relaxed and jovial, the other driven and relentless — shoved a stick in the eye of America's coolest corporation. Robert cracked the code behind Apple Computer's elegant operating system, OS X. It's the engine that drives iPhones, MacBooks, and all the other shiny white toys the world loves. For more than a decade, the Silicon Valley firm has coded its operating system to work only on the firm's expensive hardware. | 25 | 20 Essential Tricks And Skills Every Bittorrent User Should Know Paul Lilly 11/11/09 | Every week, we're going to spotlight a popular program or service and show you how to grab hold of the reigns and get the most out of what you're doing. We already kicked off the series with guides to tweaking Outlook and Firefox, and today we turn our attention to BitTorrent. BitTorrent, as you're probably already aware, is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing protocol ideal for transferring large files (and if you didn't know that, don't worry, we also include some lightweight tips to get you started). In a nutshell, the way it works is when you're downloading a massive file -- like a Linux distribution, for example --bits and pieces of the file will be uploaded at the same time. Typically BitTorrent allows for a more efficient and faster transfer method than traditional, Direct Connect P2P software. | 26 | Oil industry sinkhole threatens to swallow city Bryan Nelson Nov 10 2009 | Parts of the New Mexico town near Carlsbad Caverns National Park could collapse because of irresponsible extraction practices by the oil industry. |
| "U.S. 285 south subject to sinkhole 1,000 feet ahead," reads a bright yellow sign along the stretch of highway heading through Carlsbad, N.M. Normally a motorist driving through the area might not find a sign like that unusual. The city is, after all, home to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, a network of some of the largest natural caverns in North America. But on this occasion, the sign's sharp colors make the message clear: what's happening in Carlsbad is not natural. In fact, the massive sinkhole currently running through the center of town was created by the oil industry. As MSNBC reports, it was formed over three decades as oil field service companies pumped fresh water into a salt layer more than 400 feet below the surface and extracted several million barrels of brine to help with drilling. | |