Kindle, iPad, MacMillan, And The Death Of A Business Model

From Pajamas Media:

If you visited Amazon.com this weekend, hoping to buy a book that happened to have been published by MacMillan, you got a rude surprise. You couldn’t do it. Whether you hoped to buy an e-book for the Kindle, or an old-fashioned physical book, Amazon wouldn’t sell it to you. In a protest against the pricing model that MacMillan and other publishers had negotiated with Apple for the iBookstore, Amazon simply removed the “buy” button from MacMillan’s books.

The protest didn’t last very long — just long enough to be noticed and to make the New York Times on the evening of January 29. By the evening of the 31st, Amazon had relented, with the following statement:

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Secrets To Superb Malting Barleys Explored

ARS chemist Mark Schmitt is discovering what happens -- biochemically -- inside malting barley grains as they sprout, so that plant breeders will have a better basis for developing superior varieties. (Credit: Image courtesy of USDA/Agricultural Research Service)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 6, 2010) — Many favorite breakfast cereals, candies, beers, and other foods and beverages owe much of their smooth, delicious flavor to malt. Malting barleys--the source of that malt--are the focus of studies at the Agricultural Research Service's (ARS) malting barley laboratory in Madison, Wis., part of the Cereal Crops Research Unit.

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'Snowmageddon'

From Live Science:

Write this one down. President Obama called it "Snowmageddon." Remember back when we just called them things like "The Great Storm of ..."?

Reuters is sticking with "powerful snowstorm," noting though that there could be 20 to 30 inches of snow and near-blizzard conditions from Virginia to southern New Jersey. MSNBC calls it a blizzard and reports 2 feet have already fallen in some parts of Maryland. CNN avoids the word "blizzard" but employs "clobbered," which sounds just as bad.

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A Bidding Frenzy For Search Engine Keywords During The Super Bowl

The Super Bowl will be held Sunday at Sun Life Stadium in Miami. Advertisers can tweak their online marketing campaigns in real time. (Win McNamee / Getty Images / February 4, 2010)

From The L.A. Times:

Advertisers will vie for the top 'sponsored links,' bidding on terms they think lots of fans will be seeking as they watch the game.

When New Orleans takes on Indianapolis at the Super Bowl on Sunday, Brandon Nohara will be sprawled in front of his big-screen TV like millions of others across the nation, drinking beer as friends pack into his apartment.

But Nohara, a marketing analyst for the Bay Area online retailer CafePress, will also be on the job.

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Top 5 Technologies In NFL Stadiums

(Photograph by Ronald Martinez /Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

As football fans around the world turn their attention toward the Miami Dolphins' Sun Life Stadium for Super Bowl XLIV this Sunday, Popular Mechanics looked at the other 30 NFL stadiums and found five that lead the league in innovation.

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Which Organs Can I Live Without, And How Much Cash Can I Get For Them?

Pricey Organs Victor de Schwanberg/Photo Researchers

From Popular Science:

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It’s also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you’re doing it for cash in a back alley. No, really: Don’t do this. OK? OK.

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The Location-Based Future Of The Web

Get the information relevant to where you are (Image: Russel A. Daniels/AP/PA)

From The New Scientist:

THAT the internet is the same for everyone, wherever they are, is one of its defining features. But increasingly your location matters, and will alter what you see online.

Two events last week offer a preview of the web's location-aware future. Social network Twitter started telling users the most talked-about topics in their vicinity. Meanwhile, Canadian newspaper publisher Metro teamed up with location-based social network Foursquare to offer users restaurant reviews based on their GPS-enabled phone's location.

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The Big El Niño That Nobody Saw

From Discovery News:

One of the biggest, meanest El Niño episodes of the 20th Century came and went and almost nobody noticed. It was 1918, a year when many people had their hands full just staying alive. The first World War was ravaging Europe, and an influenza pandemic of Biblical proportions was killing more than 50 million around the world.

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Feds Still Unhappy With Google Deal

From CBS News:

Book Battle Continues As DOJ Frets About Threat to Stifle Competition, Undermining of Copyright Laws.

(AP) The U.S. Justice Department still thinks a proposal to give Google the digital rights to millions of hard-to-find books threatens to stifle competition and undermine copyright laws, despite revisions aimed at easing those concerns.

The opinion filed Thursday in New York federal court is a significant setback in Google's effort to win approval of a 15-month-old legal settlement that would put the Internet search leader in charge of a vast electronic library and store. A diverse mix of Google rivals, consumer watchdogs, academic experts, literary agents, state governments and even foreign governments have already urged U.S. District Judge Denny Chin to reject the agreement.

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Pluto's Dynamic Surface Revealed By Hubble Images

The maps of Pluto reveal a mottled brown and charcoal surface.

From The BBC:

The icy dwarf planet Pluto undergoes dramatic seasonal changes, according to images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The pictures from Hubble revealed changes in the brightness and the colour of Pluto's surface.

Mike Brown, from the California Institute of Technology, suggested Pluto had the most dynamic surface of any object in the Solar System.

Hubble will provide our sharpest views of Pluto until the New Horizons probe approaches in 2015.

The researchers note that Pluto became significantly redder in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.

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Solar Flares Back, But Oddly Small

Sun activity rises and falls in an 11-year-long cycle, such as this cycle from top left taken in early 1997 to bottom right, taken in early 2000. Credit: NASA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: After a long silence, the Sun erupted in an unusual pattern of small solar flares, said an Australian astrophysicist, which may provide a unique opportunity to predict when bigger solar flares will erupt.

Solar flares are explosions in the Sun's atmosphere marked by a burst of X-rays. They increase or decrease in a roughly 11-year cycle — larger flares can reach tens of millions of degrees Celsius and interfere with communications satellites and affect astronauts' health.

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Ancient Human Teeth Show That Stress Early in Development Can Shorten Life Span

Teeth from a site near Cuzco, Peru, show grooves of enamel damage.
(Credit: Valerie Andrushko)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2010) — Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans.

"Prehistoric remains are providing strong, physical evidence that people who acquired tooth enamel defects while in the womb or early childhood tended to die earlier, even if they survived to adulthood," says Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos.

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Bees See Your Face As A Strange Flower

From Live Science:

Bees can learn to recognize human faces, or at least face-like patterns, a new study suggests.

Rather than specifically recognizing people, these nectar-feeding creatures view us as "strange flowers," the researchers say. And while they might not be able to identify individual humans, they can learn to distinguish features that are arranged to look like faces.

The results suggest that, even with their tiny brains, insects can handle image analysis. The researchers say that if humans want to design automatic facial recognition systems, we could learn a lot by using the bees' approach to face recognition.

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Are Iran's New Anti-Helicopter Missiles A Real Threat to Apaches?

AH-64A Apache Helicopter (Photo by Getty Images/Don Farrall)

From Popular Mechanics:

A new Iranian missile and the Pentagon's funding illustrate the importance, and the vulnerabilities, of helicopters in modern battlefields.

Call it a case of defense-press diplomacy: An Iranian colonel this week spoke publicly about a "special weapon" that was tailor-made to destroy U.S. Apache attack helicopters. The government-run Iranian news agency also released images of the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

In the photo, the launcher is to the left, in green, and the grey missile is also to the left, with a white cap covering the seeker at the tip. The straight black piece sticking out is a simple aiming device

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This Week, Cybersecurity Efforts Advance On Several Fronts

Tic-Tac-Toe's Not On The List! via PC Museum

From Popular Science:

Google teams up with the NSA, the DoD invests in cyberdefense, smart-grid defense costs add up, and more.

For cybersecurity wonks who see Chinese agents or al Qaeda hackers lurking behind every email from a Nigerian prince, this was one hell of a busy week. With fallout continuing from the recent attack against Google, Director of National Intelligence, National Security Agency, House of Representatives, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and Department of Defense all shifted their attention to the many threats against our Internet infrastructure.

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First Breath: Earth's Billion-Year Struggle For Oxygen

The complex story of oxygen's rise (Image: Reso/Rex Features)

From The New Scientist:

OXYGEN is life. That's true not just for us: all animals and plants need oxygen to unleash the energy they scavenge from their environment. Take away oxygen and organisms cannot produce enough energy to support an active lifestyle, or even make them worth eating. Predation, an essential driver of evolutionary change, becomes impossible.

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Great (and Not So Great) Spaced Out Super Bowl Ads

From Discovery News:

As the Super Bowl weekend begins, excitement (or dread) is building for the infamous Super Bowl commercials that will grace our screens at half time. I'm hoping there might be one or two space-themed ads.

Last year, the tire company Bridgestone knocked it out of the park with astronauts dancing to House of Pain's hit tune "Jump Around" on an alien planet/moon only to return to their rover to find its tires had been stolen by thieving aliens.

Unfortunately, the Bridgestone effort is more of an exception than a rule, because some of the other space-themed Super Bowl ads can be on the wrong side of "cheesy" (but don't worry, I doubt there will be any ill effects from bad-ad exposure).

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Facebook Redesigns, New Microsoft Deal

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

(CBS) Facebook is redesigning its site yet again, this time to better emphasize applications, games and search.

Links and items have moved around the home page as Facebook tries to streamline navigation and make games and apps stand out more.

The latest evolution continued Friday after Facebook started rolling the changes out late Thursday, the company's sixth birthday. The changes were being made in stages, so not all users were seeing them right away.

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Last Speaker Of Ancient Language Of Bo Dies In India

From The BBC:

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.

The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

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Solar Activity Intensifies After Long Period Of Calm

From The BBC:

New photographs taken by space telescopes show activity on the surface of the sun has intensified in recent weeks.

Scientists say solar flares and regions of powerful magnetic fields known as sun-spots have increased markedly after a period of the lowest activity for almost a century.

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