Our Top Story Tonight | Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science? John Timmer January 14, 2010 | The year is only a couple of weeks old, but it's already been a strange one for science news. With a steady flow of coverage on a huge range of complex subjects, it's easy for things to go wrong, and for journalists to come up with material that doesn't get the science right. But a few recent cases appear to involve news organizations that have gone out of their way to get a science story wrong. The news industry tends to respond badly to cases where people make up the contents of their stories—witness Jayson Blair and the fake Bush National Guard records. But, so far, the response to the recent science news-related events has been complete indifference. The most egregious case seems to have happened at the UK's Daily Mail, which ran an article in the Science and Technology section of its website entitled "The mini ice age starts here." In it, the author argues that we're due for decades of global cooling, driven by ocean currents that the article claims produced the last century's warming—not greenhouse gasses. These facts are ascribed to impeccable scientific sources: the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, and Mojib Latif, a prominent climatologist based in Germany. A substantially similar story, with precisely the same attributions, later appeared on the Fox News site. There was small problem here, though: Mojib Latif is still alive, and was easy to get a hold of. When contacted, he pointed out that large portions of the report were inaccurate. A prominent climate blogger contacted both Latif and the NSIDC; he quotes Latif as saying, "I don't know what to do. They just make these things up." Referring to "facts" attributed to it by the article, The NSIDC's director said, "This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail. " | 1 | New Tech From Microsoft(TM)
| 2 | Engineers find a new way to punch holes through steel The Economist Jan 14th 2010 | ELECTROMAGNETIC pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare. The idea is to use a blast of energy to fry the enemy’s computers and telecommunications gear. One common way proposed to do this is with an atomic bomb. In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminium and copper. Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight—steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines. Verena Kräusel and her colleagues performed their trick by beefing up an existing electromagnetic-forming machine. Such machines use a bank of capacitors to discharge a current rapidly through a coil. The coil converts the current into a powerful magnetic field. When the component to be worked is placed next to such a machine, the coil induces in it a corresponding field. Like poles repel, and the repulsion between the two fields is strong enough to make the metal distort. Dr Kräusel and her colleagues boosted the power of their machine by strengthening its coil and speeding up the rate at which the capacitors dump their charge. The result is an extremely strong field—one that delivers enough pressure when it hits the steel to punch out the material next to it, leaving a hole behind. The impact pressure on the steel is about 3,500 atmospheres. That is the weight of three small cars pressing on an area only a centimetre or so square. | 3 | To Charge your iPod, Plug in Your Jeans Priya Ganapati January 21, 2010 | A breakthrough in wearable computing lets researchers change ordinary cotton and polyester into electronic textiles that can double as rechargeable batteries. That means powering an iPod or cell phone could become as easy as plugging it into your tee shirt or jeans and charging the clothing overnight. "Energy textiles will change the development of wearable electronics," Liangbing Hu, one of the researchers from Stanford University involved in the project told Wired.com. "There are not that many solutions available for energy storage for wearable devices. Electronic textiles tries to solve that problem." Wearable electronics is an attempt to create a new category of devices that are flexible and lightweight such as wearable displays, embedded health monitors and textiles with electronics melded in. In case of textiles, though, most attempts, so far, to integrate electronics involve patching sensors and resistors on to existing fabric. | 4 |
January 13, 2009 | Intel's Insides is intended as a parody of events occurring within the semiconductor sector, with particular focus on its largest and most-commented-upon competitor. |
| 5 | Jetting into the Quark-Gluon Plasma
January 14, 2010 | The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Physics recently named Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division to lead a nine-institution collaboration investigating the "Quantitative Jet and Electromagnetic Tomography of Extreme Phases of Matter in Heavy-Ion Collisions" – JET, for short. The JET Collaboration is a five-year theoretical effort to understand the properties of the extraordinarily hot and dense state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. The quark-gluon plasma filled the Universe a few millionths of a second after the big bang but instantly vanished, condensing into the protons and neutrons and other particles from which the present Universe descended. | 6 | Yahoo stayed quiet about Chinese cyber-attacks Adam Hartley
| Yahoo knew it had been a target of the same kind of Chinese cyber attacks on US companies before Google raised the alert about such attacks, according to emerging reports. A source familiar with the situation told Reuters that Yahoo chose to not rock the boat, prior to Google going public about the attacks last week. | 7 | Down to Earth: Gadgets from outer space Jon Cartwright 18 January 2010 | A SPACE probe plunges its way through Titan's atmosphere and lands safely on the surface. Over a billion kilometres away here on Earth, a machine fills a bag of potato crisps. Georg Koppenwallner didn't think that Saturn's largest moon had much in common with his favourite bar snack - at least not until he got a call from the European Space Agency (ESA). Koppenwallner's company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany runs experiments in wind tunnels and calculates the aerodynamics of spacecraft, including ESA's. This time ESA had an unusual request: could the firm's scientists and engineers take time out from their daily grind to help find a way of packing crisps faster? Koppenwallner's team duly obliged. Sure enough, they found a way to fill 50 per cent more bags using clever aerodynamic tricks with air pulses to speed up crisps on the production line. | 8 | Tough Snail Shell Could Inspire Better Body Armor Rachael Rettner 18 January 2010 | A snail's shell that protects it from attacks underwater could provide clues for designing improved body armor to guard human soldiers, a new study suggests. The research involved an unusual sea snail, the so-called "scaly-foot" snail which was first reported in 2003 and makes its home in the harsh environment of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent in the Indian Ocean. Past studies of the snail, a type of sea mollusk, revealed its foot was covered in plates of iron-sulfide minerals, and it is now the only known animal today to employ iron sulfides as a structural material. Like other snails, this one also sports a shell covering its body. Although hard, a typical snail's shell will fracture if persistently squeezed by a predatory crab. Hoping to learn exactly how the scaly-foot snail's shell is designed to resist such crushing, the authors took a close look at the shell's structure, examining it on the nanoscale. | 9 | Oceans of Liquid Diamond May Exist On Neptune and Uranus John Messina January 18, 2010 | The research was conducted by taking detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond. When diamond is melted it behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. Diamond is a very hard material which makes it difficult to melt. Measuring the melting point of a diamond is very difficult because when it's heated to very high temperatures the diamond changes to graphite. Since it's the graphite and not the diamond that turns to liquid, scientist are faced with the problem of melting the diamond without it turning to graphite. | 10 | Observing Alert: Possible Nova in Ophichus Tammy Plotner January 17th, 2010 | Are you ready for some excitement that won't take an observatory telescope to spot? Then get out your binoculars, because according to CBET 2128 there's a new object showing its stuff off in the constellation Ophiuchus... Released by A. Henden in AAVSO Special Notice #187: "CBET 2128 indicates that Hideo Nishimura has discovered a new outbursting object in Ophiuchus. This object has magnitude 8.4 on Jan 15.857UT, and is located at RA 17:39:40.94 DEC -21:39:47.9 J2000. No spectra have been reported, but K. Kadota has inspected the 1997 DSS red plate and finds no object at this position, with a limiting magnitude of 20. This object has now been added to VSX. You may submit observations as N Oph 2010, VSX J173940.9-213947, or with AUID 000-BJS-899. Note that there is a 10.3 magnitude irregular variable a few arcmin west of this position, so do not use it as a comparison star." | 11 | How to keep dust out of your PC Simon Williams
| Have you ever had a PC that started making strange whining noises? Even if you've investigated the cause of the noises, which can often sound pretty serious when you hear them, you may not realise the reason for them. The chances are they're caused by a cooling fan with dust in its bearing. Fans are one of the few components in a PC which have unsealed moving parts. By their nature, they have to be open to the air to suck heat out of the machine and push cool air in. As a result, they're extremely susceptible to all the airborne particles that make up household dust. | 12 | Giant cattle to be bred back from extinction
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| But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life. The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years. | 13 | Pocket Projector Roundup Kim January 14, 2010 | As electronics continue to dwindle in size, we can find very powerful devices that will literally fit into our pockets. While this is great for empowering the user, there is a problem – viewing of media on these devices often leaves us with a tiny screen that is hard to see. It seems that there is a tradeoff on portability versus viewing pleasure. But there could be a solution to this conundrum on the horizon. The media projector has collapsed in size along with other technology, and today it is quite possible to buy a projector that will fit in your pocket and still give you a larger projected viewing screen. In some cases, a separate media source is not even required, since some projectors have internal storage memory and/or an SD card slot for the media, with a built in player. As with any technology that aims to be highly portable, there are some tradeoffs. For pocket projectors, tradeoffs tend to be found in battery life and in projection brightness. Battery life on some units last well under two hours, which means that a typical TV show, shorter movie, or presentation might be fine, but a longer movie would not be watched in a single sitting without an external power source. | 14 | The Explosive Quest for Immortality
Jan 14, 2010 | Undoubtedly, the invention of gunpowder changed the course of history forever. Perhaps as far back as 200 AD, Taoist mystics, who were also alchemists, concocted and swallowed many combinations of minerals, salts and liquids in a ritualistic attempt to extend their lifespan and gain immortality. With supreme irony, some of these supposedly life-extending mixtures would be converted into gunpowder and with it an entirely new class of weapons to extinguish life. |
| Outside the realm of military historians, few know the name of Wei Boyang. In 142 AD, he set down notes about experiments where heat caused his ingredients to 'fly and dance' in a violent reaction that suggests gunpowder. Around 300 AD, Ge Hong, an alchemist of the Jin Dynasty, recorded experiments with heated saltpetre, pine resin and other carbon materials – mixtures that most historians accept as primitive gunpowder. | 15 | Do All Animals Sound the Same?
January 14, 2010 | What do a whale and a frog have in common? According to a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, pound for pound, they sound the same. Sounds fishy? I mean, if you’ve ever heard the eerie song of the humpback whale [whale song], you know that it don’t sound like no spring peeper [frog sound]. But scientists at the University of Florida Health Science Center have compared the calls made by 500 different animals, from crickets [sound] to crocodiles [sound], and ostriches [sound] to chimps [sound]. And they find that the basic features of every animal’s cry, such as frequency and duration, depend on the creature’s metabolism. Which, in turn, depends on the animal’s size and body temperature. | 16 | Dainis Jam 22, 2010 | Kurt Wenner is a master artist best known for his extremely high quality street painting and chalk murals using a projection called anamorphosis. These 3D chalk drawings on pavement have been featured in many newspapers and on several television shows. And in this article you will find out why. K.Wenner canvas are streets. He create amazing 3D artworks.Kurt Wenner has combined traditional street painting techniques together with his interest in classical art, to create an art form all his own. Many of the images use anamorphic techniques as well as trompe l'oeil, in order to create a world where fantasy and reality combine. More aboutKurt Wenner read on Kurt Wenner Street Painting website. | Ghetto | |