Q&A: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

From The Guardian:

'My greatest hope for the next 10 years? That we will, on the internet, continue to forge a new cultural dialogue of reason and respect for the individual'

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.org in January 2001. It is now among the top five most visited sites on the web; in 2006, Wales was named one of the world's most influential people by Time magazine.

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Unique Painting Of A Medici Lord Found

Photo: A depiction of an Italian nobleman holding a gold watch attributed to Tommaso Manzuoli

Science Museum Unearths Unknown Portrait Of Medici Lord -- The Telegraph

Art experts at the Science Museum think they may have found the world's oldest painting to feature a watch in a hitherto unknown picture of a member of the influential Medici family.

Since obtaining the painting 33 years ago, it has simply been known as a depiction of an Italian nobleman holding an intriguing golden timepiece.

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Hurricane Rick: Mexico Braces For Disaster As Second Strongest Storm On Record Roars Up Pacific Coast

Hurricane Rick maintained its furious strength early Sunday after becoming what forecasters described as the second-strongest storm on record to hit the eastern north Pacific Ocean

From The Daily Mail:

Residents in Cabo San Lucas were preparing for disaster today as the second strongest storm on record in the Pacific bore down on them.

Hurricane Rick went into the record books over the weekend after it roared to the top of the Saffir-Simpson scale, going from a Category One storm to a Category Five monster in an astonishing 36 hours.

The storm is roaring roaring towards the popular tourist town of Cabo San Lucas on the Baja California Peninsula today. Its howling winds have been measured at 145mph - bringing it down to a dangerous Category Four storm.

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Scientists Announce Planet Bounty

Artist's impression: Astronomers are finding smaller and smaller planets

From BBC:

Astronomers have announced a haul of planets found beyond our Solar System.

The 32 "exoplanets" ranged in size from five times the mass of Earth to 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers said.

They were found using a very sensitive instrument on a 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.

The discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy.

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Artificial Black Hole Created in Chinese Lab

Pocket Black Hole The icons depict the shape of the energy-trapping ridges on the disc at the center and the edges via arXiv.org

From Popular Mechanics:

Just because most black holes are solar-system-sized maelstroms with reality-warping gravitational pulls doesn't mean you can't have one in your pocket! That's right, just in time for the holidays comes the pocket black hole. Designed by scientists at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, this eight-and-a-half-inch-wide disk absorbs all the electromagnetic radiation you throw at it, with none of the pesky time dilation and Hawking radiation associated with the larger, interstellar versions.

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See How The Earth Moves

(Click Above Image to Enlarge)
The image above shows an interferogram, a map of ground movements produced with measurements made remotely by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), plotted atop digital topography. United Kingdom geophysicists Richard Walters and John Elliott used measurements acquired by a European Space Agency satellite on February 1 and April 12 to capture ground movements from the April 6 earthquake in central Italy. The color bands (red through blue) represent contours of ground motion toward or away from the satellite, within its line of sight. Moving towards the center of each lobe, each contour represents an additional 2.8 centimeters of ground motion. The image shows that during the earthquake, the region to the northeast of the Paganica fault moved toward the satellite by about 8 centimeters, whereas the region to the southwest moved away by about 25 centimeters. Each pixel in the interferogram represents an area of about 80 meters squared. Walters’ and Elliott’s research is funded by the United Kingdom’s Natural Environmental Research Council. The ESA data is copyrighted.

From The American Scientist:

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements, collected by satellites circling Earth, can provide big insights into major earthquakes. Richard Walters and John Elliott demonstrated this after a 6.3-magnitude quake struck central Italy in April, killing close to 300 people and severely damaging the medieval town of L’Aquila. By comparing measurements taken before and after the earthquake, the geophysicists pinpointed the responsible fault, measured changes aboveground and calculated likely shifts underground. Walters and Elliott are researchers at the University of Oxford and the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Earth Observation. In an e-mail exchange, Walters explained their studies to American Scientist associate editor Catherine Clabby.

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The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics

From The New Atlantis:

By the second quarter of the twentieth century, one of the world’s most revered figures was a long-haired, somewhat rumpled European refugee. His public persona combined a Gandhi-like saintliness with the awesome impression that his sleepy-looking, baggy eyes gazed not on the everyday world of ordinary mortals but into far vistas of space and time unseen by others. This suggestion of contact with transcendent reality was central to Albert Einstein’s charisma. It arose from his success in opening the door of human imagination to previously unknown concepts of time and space.

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Commandos Field Test ‘Plasma Knife’

Photo: Quickparts

From The Danger Room:

Nobody ever said the Light Saber was a practical weapon – it’s no match for a good blaster, if you ask me – but it exerts a powerful fascination. Special Operations Command have “completed ongoing testing and field evaluation studies” of the next best thing, according to a Pentagon budget document. It’s a Plasma Knife which cuts through flesh with a “blade” of glowing ionized gas. But rather than being a weapon, the Plasma Knife is a surgical instrument that could save lives.

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Labs-On-A-Chip That You Can Shrink To Fit

Shrinking down to size (Image: Maggie Bartlett, NHGRI)

From New Scientist:

INTEL's latest microchip technology has created transistors 22 nanometres wide - a mere 200 times the width of a hydrogen molecule. Carving such tiny features is devilishly difficult and expensive, but in another realm of microchips altogether, something odd is happening: chips are being made on an outsized scale and then shrunk to the required size, avoiding much fiddly hassle.

The shrinking innovation is happening in the field of the "lab-on-a-chip". Such chips are typically plastic slivers scored with serried ranks of fluid-filled microchannels and recessed pools for chemical reactions to occur in; they are often replete with deposits of chemicals, cells and proteins of interest.

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New View Of The Heliosphere: Cassini Helps Redraw Shape Of Solar System

Images from the Ion and Neutral Camera (INCA), part of the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggest that the heliosphere may not have the comet-like shape predicted by existing models. The instrument imaged a population of hot particles that resides just beyond the boundary of where the solar wind collides with the interstellar medium, forming a termination shock. (Credit: JHU Applied Physics Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 18, 2009) — In a paper published Oct. 15 in Science, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) present a new view of the region of the sun’s influence, or heliosphere, and the forces that shape it. Images from one of the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument’s sensors, the Ion and Neutral Camera (MIMI/INCA), on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest that the heliosphere may not have the comet-like shape predicted by existing models.

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High-Speed 'Other' Internet Goes Global

A newly expanded global Internet, to focus solely on science and education, now includes half of the world's countries. The high-speed fiber-optic network connects users at speeds of 10 Gbps. Credit: GLORIAD.

From Live Science:

A super high-speed global Internet devoted solely to science and education has just expanded to include half the countries of the world, and yes, you at home can be jealous.

The Taj network, funded by the National Science Foundation, now connects India, Singapore, Vietnam and Egypt to the larger Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) global infrastructure, and "dramatically improves existing U.S. network links with China and the Nordic region," according to an NSF statement.

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Clean Tech's Hot New Tool

Image: Beaming in: Electron-beam sterilization of the inside of a beverage bottle causes the walls of the bottle to fluoresce when exposed to electron emissions. Credit: Advanced Electron Beams

From Technology Review:

Smaller and more practical electron-beam emitters could save millions of tons of C02 emissions.

Electron-beam emitters that are one-hundreth the size and cost of conventional electron emitters could usher in a wide array of new uses for the devices that could dramatically cut the energy use of industrial processes. Advanced Electron Beams (AEB), a Wilmington, MA, startup, has developed a small, low-powered electron emitter that is the size of a microwave oven, compared to the conference-room equipment now needed for electron-beam processes.

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Mars Missions Boosted By Communication Breakthrough

From the Telegraph:

Engineers have found a way to communicate continuously with Mars in a research project to help manned space missions.

Communication with Mars had not been possible for several weeks at a time when the Sun obscured the Earth's view of the planet.

But the University of Strathclyde researchers found a way to allow continuous communication with just one spacecraft.

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Scientists Develop 'Marilyn Monroe' Gene To Make You Irresistible (But Sorry, It Only Works On Fruit Flies)

Photo: Researchers have found a way of turning females into the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe by tampering with pheromones

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have developed a way of turning ordinary males into irresistible sex gods and females into the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe.

The effect is so strong it has been likened to a 'sexual tsunami'.

Males and females that were altered in the experiment even managed to turn their heterosexual peers gay.

Researchers discovered the secret to sex appeal by tampering with pheromones.

There is only one catch - so far, it only works on flies.

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Newly Discovered Magnetic Monopole Particles Flow Like Electric Currents

Dy2Ti2O7: This rare, "spin ice", crystal contains the atomic monopoles needed to create magnetricity. via Muon Science Laboratory

From Popular Science:

They're calling it "magnetricity" -- catchy, eh?

In 1931, physicist Paul Dirac hypothesized that on the quantum level, magnetic charge must exist in discrete packets, or quanta, in the same way that electric energy exists in a photon. This implies the existence of magnetic monopoles: particles that have a single magnetic charge, or polar identity -- north or south.

For 78 years, Dirac's speculation interested only hardcore theorists, because the conjecture failed to find any expression in observed phenomena. All magnets had two poles, one north and one south, inextricably attached to each other.

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Bites Of Passage

From The National:

In the past few decades, the Asian tiger mosquito has travelled from its natural home in Southeast Asia to the ends of the earth, becoming one of the world’s most invasive species. Tom Scocca reports from the frontlines of the battle to halt the winged invasion.

The picnic cooler, resting up against the back side of a row house in Trenton, New Jersey, was an artefact designed solely for the use of human beings. It had been invented to meet a particular and exclusive set of needs, unique to 21st-century Homo sapiens: to allow the transport of cold beverages to locales without refrigeration – and, once there, to allow those humans, while drinking, to free up their opposable thumbs by setting their beverages down in the wilderness without a spill. For this, humans needed more than a picnic cooler; they needed one whose lid was inset with four cup holders.

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There’s No Place Like Home

From Newsweek:

Fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment.

On almost any night of the week, Churchill's Restaurant is hopping. The 10-year-old hot spot in Rockville Centre, Long Island, is packed with locals drinking beer and eating burgers, with some customers spilling over onto the street. "We have lots of regulars—people who are recognized when they come in," says co-owner Kevin Culhane. In fact, regulars make up more than 80 percent of the restaurant's customers. "People feel comfortable and safe here," Culhane says. "This is their place."

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A World Redrawn When America Showed Up On A Map, It Was The Universe That Got Transformed

Image: Nicholas Copernicus (Getty Images)

From Boston.com:

NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES ago, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus went public with one of the most important arguments ever made in the history of ideas. The earth did not sit immobile at the center of the universe, he wrote. It revolved around the sun.

It was the mother of all paradigm shifts, dismantling a model of the universe that had been dogma since antiquity. When he published his theory, in “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543), Copernicus provided a wealth of data on the movements of celestial bodies in support of his case. But what’s often overlooked is that he began his argument from the ground up, by focusing not on the heavens but the earth. In particular, he began with a geographical revelation, prompted by something he had recently come across on a new map.

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Bouncing Back: How We Deal With Bereavement

Bouncing back (Image: Michael Blann/Stone)

From New Scientist:

WHAT is the best way of coping with the death of a loved one? Why do some people grieve more intensely than others? Such questions are traditionally left to counsellors and self-help gurus, but George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University in New York, is on a mission to answer them empirically. He has done a good job, interviewing thousands of bereaved people over decades and monitoring how they get through their troubled times.

Yet Bonanno's bottom line - that people are often much more resilient than we're led to believe - is rather unremarkable. Studies of Londoners during the Blitz and New Yorkers after 9/11 showed that few people suffer serious reactions to traumatic events.

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Suppose 21st Century Disasters Like 19th Century

Redoubt Volcano from the east, with a massive eruption plume produced by pyroclastic flows on April 21, 1990(photo by R. Clucas)

From Future Pundit:

We remember the 20th century because we've all lived in some part of it (unless of course a 9 year older is reading this) and seen lots of video about it. The century was well covered by modern media. We know less of the 19th century and some of its major natural events are not widely known.

As compared to the 19th century the 20th century was pretty calm from the standpoint of big natural changes. What I'm going to do with this post: Imagine that the 21st century turns out to be like the 19th century in terms of the severity of climate, volcanic, and other natural events.

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