Celebrating The Real Einstein

From New Scientist:

Today is Einstein's birthday - and it's time to celebrate.

Everyone loves to celebrate Einstein. He's a movie, an opera, an asteroid, a cartoon. He's an advertisement for a Danish beer. Rock bands exist with names like Einstein's Sister and Forever Einstein. He graces the periodic table of elements--Einsteinium, atomic number 99. People have designed religions around Einstein. His brain was stolen, sliced up into nearly two hundred and fifty pieces, and sent bit by bit through the mail to the curious around the globe.

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RealNetworks: A Tale Of Opportunities Missed

Rob Glaser with Bill Gates. Glaser left Microsoft in 1994.
(Credit: Microsoft)

From CNET News:

Rob Glaser's 16 years at the helm of RealNetworks started with the pioneering of the early dot-com days and ended with a courtroom drubbing at the hands of the entertainment industry. In between, Glaser, who by most accounts saw the promise of Web video and music long before his peers, proved himself to be a better visionary than executive.

Earlier this month, Real announced it was giving up on attempts to defend its RealDVD technology against a lawsuit filed by the major movie studios. RealDVD is software that enabled users to create copies of their film discs and store the digital versions on hard drives. It was also the backbone of a planned DVD player, code-named Facet. The device would copy and hold 70 digital movies and enable users to instantly jump from film to film and scene to scene.

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Why Do We Have Daylight Savings Time?

From Discovery news:

It's a question people are probably more likely to ask themselves this time of year when we go to bed and then lose an hour. It can feel wildly unfair for the clock to say 7:00 a.m. when it actually feels like 6:00 a.m.

Well, to some degree we may have Benjamin Franklin to thank.

Franklin, who penned the proverb, "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," was among the first to suggest the idea. In a 1784 essay he wrote that adjusting the clocks in the spring could be a good way to save on candles.

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Obama Nasa Plans 'Catastrophic' Say Moon Astronauts

From The BBC:

Former Nasa astronauts who went to the Moon have told the BBC of their dismay at President Barack Obama's decision to push back further Moon missions.

Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, said Mr Obama's decision would have "catastrophic consequences" for US space exploration.

The last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, said it was "disappointing".

Last month Mr Obama cancelled Nasa's Constellation Moon landings programme, approved by ex-President George W Bush.

Nasa still aims to send astronauts back to the Moon, but it is likely to take decades and some believe that it will never happen again.

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Orange Dwarf Confirmed To Be On Collision Course With Earth

Gliese 710 Hi there, neighbor! NASA

From Popular Science:

Our solar system's 'hood may get a bit rougher sometime during the next 1.5 million years. An astronomer has given an 86 percent chance for a neighboring star to smash into the frozen Oort Cloud surrounding the outskirts of the solar system, and may scatter some comets toward Earth, Technology Review reports.

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Google Widens Assault On Microsoft's Dominance Of Business Software

From Times Online:

Google is to broaden its assault on Microsoft's dominance of the market for business software by launching on online marketplace for other companies' enterprise products.

The internet search giant wants to convert companies to using applications piped over the internet in a challenge to Microsoft's model of selling licences of its Windows operating system and software programs such as Office.

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Revealed: The 160 Species Living Inside Our Guts

The human gut: home to numerous species of unknown microbes. Science Photo Library

From The Independent:

Scientists have decoded the DNA of the bacteria that take up residence in the typical human body.

Some scientists dream of sending a probe to Mars, others work on ways of exploring the sea bed with robotic submersibles. Now a team of researchers have boldly gone where no human has gone before – they have decoded all the bacterial genes found in the human gut.

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World's Oldest Rivers Mapped Under Huge Desert Dunes

The Simpson desert's fabled dunes block its underground water channels from remote sensing (Image: visionandimagination.com/Getty)

From New Scientist:

A network of ancient rivers and streams that once flowed beneath Australia's Simpson desert – famed for its dune fields – has been mapped in a new study. The map could lead the way to valuable minerals and water resources in this drying continent.

Michael Hutchinson and John Stein of the Australian National University in Canberra extracted data from previous ground surveys to map an ancient river system 35 metres below the surface of the desert. They think the channels are among the world's oldest at 50 million years old, when the now barren land would have been lush and well watered.

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Extinct Elephant Bird Of Madagascar Could Live Again

Egg laid by great elephant bird of Madagascar compared to a hen's egg Photo: JANE MINGAY

From The Telegraph:

Towering 10 feet into the air and weighing more than half a ton, it was the biggest bird that ever lived until French colonists wiped it out more than three hundred years ago.

But the giant elephant bird of Madagascar could be resurrected after scientists discovered how to extract DNA from ancient egg shells.

Genetic material from the bird along with extinct emus of Australia and moas of New Zealand have been collected by a new technique.

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Traces Of The Past: Computer Algorithm Able To 'Read' Memories

To explore how memories are recorded, researchers showed volunteers three short films and asked them to memorize what they saw. The films were very simple, sharing a number of similar features -- all included a woman carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street, and each film was the same length, seven seconds long. For example, one film showed a woman posting a letter. (Credit: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 11, 2010) — Computer programs have been able to predict which of three short films a person is thinking about, just by looking at their brain activity. The research, conducted by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London), provides further insight into how our memories are recorded.

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Oil Production To Peak In 2014, Scientists Predict

From Live Science:

Predicting the end of oil has proven tricky and often controversial, but Kuwaiti scientists now say that global oil production will peak in 2014.

Their work represents an updated version of the famous Hubbert model, which correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would peak within 20 years. Many researchers have since tried using the model to predict when worldwide oil production might peak.

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MoD Trains Army To Fight Using Sophisticated Video Games

From The Daily Mail:

Poised with a rifle in the desert terrain, a British soldier dives for cover as he comes under enemy fire. But amazingly he comes to no harm... because he's sitting in a Bristol armed forces base 3,500 miles from the front line in Afghanistan.

Soldiers are being prepared for combat using a newly upgraded virtual training system. Called Op JCOVE, it runs on PCs and laptops and allows soldiers to experience a wide range of scenarios both in vehicles and on foot.

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2011 Ford F-Series Super Duty Test Drive

From Popular Mechanics:

PHOENIX, Ariz.—Has the definition of leadership in the heavy-duty/super-duty truck segment changed since the last time Ford, Chevrolet/GMC, and Dodge brought out new truck bruisers? Make no mistake: Horsepower, torque, towing and payload are still the primary fields of battle for winning over ranchers, construction workers and contractors. But we can add another event to the heavy-duty Olympics, according to those customers—fuel economy. That's right. Even with gas and diesel comfortably below $3.00 a gallon in most parts of the U.S., fuel economy has become the new torque when it comes to impressing customers. Ford, in fact, named fuel economy as its leading concern when it set out to build a new diesel engine after severing its relationship with diesel-engine supplier Navistar. The results are surprising, and may well entice Dodge and Chevy owners.

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Are Our Asteroid-Destroying Nukes Big Enough?

Asteroids! courtesy of Sandia National Laboratory

From Popular Science:

A new study shows that blasted asteroids could re-form, Terminator-style.

Pop quiz. An asteroid the size of Manhattan is hurtling towards Earth, its impact is sure to result in mass extinction and the destruction of humanity as we know it. What do you do?

The traditional answers would be "blow it up". But new research from Los Alamos National Lab and the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that if the asteroid isn't moving fast enough, or if the nuke isn't big enough, the asteroid will pull itself back together, T-1000-style, within a matter of hours.

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OnLive Threatens To End Video Gaming As We Know It

The serivce could undermine the multi-billion pound business models of Nintendo's Wii - with New Super Mario Bros - Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox. (Nintendo/Handout)

From Times Online:

The era of the video games console is under threat after the launch today of a service which streams high-quality games over the internet to the computer or TV set.

For years those who wanted to play sophisticated, action-packed games have used controllers and consoles. Now gamers will get the chance to play high-end immersive games over the internet with the arrival of OnLive, which promises to deliver the most advanced games on demand to their PC or Mac computer.

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Hadron Collider To Be Closed Amid Fears Of A Very Big Bang

Large Hadron Collider

From The Independent:

12-month shutdown to repair design flaw that could break apart world's most expensive scientific experiment.

The world's single most complicated and expensive scientific experiment, designed to discover the "God particle" and recreate the conditions that existed at the dawn of creation, will be switched off for a year to correct a design problem that could break it apart if it ran on full power.

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Obesity: Food Kills, Flab Protects

Your fat cells lock away the burger grease (Image: Getty Images)

From The New Scientist:

OBESITY kills, everyone knows that. But is it possible that we've been looking at the problem in the wrong way? It seems getting fatter may be part of your body's defence against the worst effects of unhealthy eating, rather than their direct cause.

This curious insight comes at the same time as several studies distancing obesity itself from a host of diseases it has long been blamed for, including heart disease and diabetes.

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Has Twitter Reached Its Peak?

Barracuda says that Twitter's user growth has almost stopped

From The Guardian:

Micro-blogging service Twitter's user growth has almost levelled off since September 2009, according to a study.

Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.

Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.

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Short Blasts Of Exercise As Good As Hours Of Training, Scientists Find

From The Telegraph:

Less really can be more when it comes to exercise, scientists have discovered.

The body can get as much benefit from a short but intensive bursts of exercise lasting ten minutes than it can from ten hours of moderate training.

The technique not only takes less time but also involves much less physical effort.

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First Contact: The Man Who'll Welcome Aliens

We don't want anybody just turning a radio ­telescope on the sky and sending their own ­messages to the source.' Photograph: Felix Clay

From The Guardian:

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I'm having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he's chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They're a group of the world's most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet's alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn't take lightly.

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