Friday, October 1, 2010
Faces Of Facebook: Who's Who In 'The Social Network'?
From ABC News:
Hollywood Film About Mark Zuckerberg and Friends Opens Nationally Today.
Mark Zuckerberg may the biggest face attached to Facebook, but he's not the only one. "The Social Network," the controversial story about the world's most powerful social network, has a colorful cast of characters -- on screen and off.
Read more ....
It's The End Of The World: 8 Potential Armageddons
From FOX News:
Oil plumes threaten to choke the oceans and methane gas explosions shoot sky high -- and those are hardly the biggest threats facing the Earth. From cosmic rays to asteroid impacts to the threat of general destruction, our planet may be less safe than you think.
Here are the top eight risks to life as we know it, detailed by scientists and science fiction writers -- and whether it's even possible to save ourselves.
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Surprise: Solar System "Force Field" Shrinks Fast
Shown in a Hubble Space Telescope image, the "astrosphere" around the star L.L. Orionis approximates the heliosphere around our solar system. Image courtesy ESA/NASAFrom The National Geographic:
NASA craft reveals unexpected unpredictability of our protective bubble.
It's cold, dusty, and bereft of planets, but the outskirts of our solar system are anything but dull, according to increasing evidence from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) craft.
As charged particles flow out from the sun, they eventually bump up against interstellar medium—the relatively empty areas between stars. These interactions "inflate" a protective bubble that shields Earth and the entire solar system from potentially harmful cosmic rays (solar system pictures).
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NASA's Future Looks Bleak Amid Policy Shift
From The L.A. Times:The demise of the Constellation moon rocket means 7,000 job losses in a year. Funding for a heavy-lift rocket for asteroid missions will be comparably less than that for the moon rocket.
Reporting from Washington — A new law passed by Congress this week finally gives NASA some badly needed direction, but the future of the space agency remains bleak — at least in the near term.
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Reports From The Hive, Where The Swarm Concurs
The author, on Appledore Island, watching a swarm launch into flight from the vertical board that he uses as a swarm mount. The two feeder bottles on the mount provide sugar syrup to keep the swarm well fed. From the book “Honeybee Democracy” by Thomas D. SeeleyFrom The New York Times:
What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination.
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Ray Kurzweil’s Blio E-Book Launch Met With Confusion, Controversy
From Gadget Lab:
This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.
“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.
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Scribd Facebook Instant Personalization Is A Privacy Nightmare
From Epicenter:
Online document sharing site Scribd hooked up with Facebook to create “instant personalization” so Scribd users can get reading recommendations based on their Facebook likes and what their friends are sharing. Sounds interesting, right?
But the document sharing and embedding service has created a privacy nightmare that involves drafting users who are already logged into Facebook without offering a clear opt out process either on the site or through e-mail.
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How To Cyber Attack A Nuclear Plant
Photo: Going nuclear: The Stuxnet computer worm may have designed to infiltrate an Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, 180 miles south of Tehran. Credit: Getty Images A Way To Attack Nuclear Plants -- Technology Review
Industrial computer systems are typically far less secure than they should be, experts say.
For the last few months, a sophisticated computer worm has wriggled its way between some of the most critical control systems in the world.
The timing of the worm's release, combined with several clues buried in its code, has led some experts to speculate that the worm, dubbed Stuxnet, was originally designed to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility, possibly the enrichment plant in Natanz, roughly 180 miles south of Tehran. This week, officials in Iran confirmed that Stuxnet had been found on systems inside the plant, although they denied that it had caused any harm.
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The Supernova's Secrets Cracked At Last?
Hank Childs / Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryFrom Time Magazine:
Most stars end their lives in a whimper — our own sun will almost certainly be one of them — but the most massive stars go out with an impressive bang. When that happens, creating what's known as a Type II supernova, the associated blast of energy is so brilliant that it can briefly outshine an entire galaxy, give birth to ultra-dense neutron stars or black holes, and forge atoms so heavy that even the Big Bang wasn't powerful enough to create them. If supernovas didn't exist, neither would gold, silver, platinum or uranium. The last time a supernova went off close enough to earth to be visible without a telescope, back in 1987, it made the cover of TIME.
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Budget Deal Propels NASA On New Path
From Wall Street Journal:House's Passage of $58 Billion Compromise Bill Funds Commercial Space Travel, More Robotic Deep-Space Missions.
In unusual bipartisan fashion, the House on Wednesday approved a three-year $58-billion compromise bill intended to revive NASA's manned-exploration programs while funding plans for pioneering private rockets able to blast astronauts into orbit.
Capping nearly a year of intense industry turmoil, agency uncertainty and congressional debate, the vote reflected last-minute decisions by House leaders from both parties to embrace a previously-passed Senate blueprint for NASA, though it doesn't completely satisfy any of the rival interest groups or regional factions maneuvering to shape the agency's future.
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Google Launches Latin Translation Tool
Google has added Latin to its list of languages on Google TranslateFrom The Telegraph:
Google Translate, a service that can instantly translate entire web pages or chunks of text in to another language, has added Latin to its list.
Google Translate supports more than 50 languages, including minority languages such as Welsh and Haitian Creole, and the addition of Latin is sure to please scholars and traditionalists.
In a blog post, written entirely in Latin, Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, said that Latin was far from a “dead language”.
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Heard For The First Time In 2,000 years: Scientists Post Readings Of Ancient Babylonian Poems Online
A clay tablet known as the Jursa tablet that proves the existence of a Babylonian official in the BibleFrom The Daily Mail:
The ancient language of Babylonian can be heard for the first time in almost 2,000 years after Cambridge University scholars posted readings and poems online.
Babylonian, one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia, dates back as far as the second millennium BC but died out around 2,000 years ago.
However, Cambridge historians have resurrected the ancient tongue by discovering how the language was pronounced and spoken.
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Rivers Threatened Around The World
From New Scientist:
The water supplying 80 per cent of the world's population is exposed to "high levels of threat". That's the conclusion of a study that surveys the status of rivers throughout the world, and looks at their effects on both humans and the ecosystem at large.
Writing in this week's Nature (vol 467, p 555), Charles Vorosmarty of the City College of New York and colleagues pull together a swathe of data on factors affecting water security, from dams that reduce river flow to the pollution and destruction of wetlands.
Read more ....
Thursday, September 30, 2010
'Giant' Step Toward Explaining Differences In Height Among People
Scientists have identified hundreds of genetic variants that together account for about 10 percent of the inherited variation of height among people. (Credit: iStockphoto/Stefanie Timmermann)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2010) — An international collaboration of more than 200 institutions, led by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, the Broad Institute, and a half-dozen other institutions in Europe and North America, has identified hundreds of genetic variants that together account for about 10 percent of the inherited variation of height among people.
Read more ....
Are UFOs Disarming Nuclear Weapons, And If So Why?
Did UFOs Disarm Nuclear Weapons? And If So, Why? -- Live Science
At an unusual press conference recently held in Washington, D.C., a UFO author and a half-dozen or so former U.S. military airmen asserted that "The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it." They claim that since 1948, extraterrestrials in spaceships have not only been visiting Earth but hovering over British and American nuclear missile sites and temporarily deactivating the weapons.
Read more ....
My Comment: I am skeptical .... but these guys are former senior U.S. military airmen, and they should be listened to. Unfortunately .... they have no visible proof.
Lost Language Unearthed In Letter
Photo: A letter discovered in northern Peru in 2008 showing a column of numbers written in Spanish and translated into a language that scholars say is now extinct, is seen in this undated photo released by archaeologists September 22, 2010. (HANDOUT)From CNews:
LIMA - Archaeologists say scrawl on the back of a letter recovered from a 17th century dig site reveals a previously unknown language spoken by indigenous peoples in northern Peru.
A team of international archaeologists found the letter under a pile of adobe bricks in a collapsed church complex near Trujillo, 347 miles (560 km) north of Lima. The complex had been inhabited by Dominican friars for two centuries.
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Glacier Found To Be Deeply Cracked
While drilling holes in Alaska’s Bench Glacier, scientists discovered dozens of massive cracks that extend from the ground far up into the ice. The movement of water through these cracks could affect glacier movement and melting. Joel HarperFrom Science News:
Pressure and stress can lead to a crack-up, or several, if you are a glacier. Researchers have discovered a system of deep cracks extending from the ground up into the overlying ice of southern Alaska’s Bench Glacier. The crevasses are described in the Sept. 30 Nature.
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Stonehenge Boy 'Was From The Med'
The boy was buried with around 90 amber beadsFrom The BBC:
Chemical tests on teeth from an ancient burial near Stonehenge indicate that the person in the grave grew up around the Mediterranean Sea.
The bones belong to a teenager who died 3,550 years ago and was buried with a distinctive amber necklace.
The conclusions come from analysis of different forms of the elements oxygen and strontium in his tooth enamel.
Analysis on a previous skeleton found near Stonehenge showed that that person was also a migrant to the area.
Read more ....
Google Celebrates Birthday With Cake
Google turned 12 today. And the media giant celebrated with a pixelated birthday cake. Google.comFrom Christian Science Monitor:
Twelve years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain for Google.com, a site which they hoped would revolutionize the very way information is organized on the Web. It's fair to say they succeeded. And today, Google, a multi-billion dollar company based in Mountain View, Calif., is celebrating its 12th birthday with a big, digitized birthday cake logo, courtesy of the American painter Wayne Thiebaud.
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Revealed: The Secret World Of The Panda
Giant Pandas eating bamboo in Sichuan Province, China Photo: ALAMY From The Telegraph:
New research has revealed that, contrary to popular beliefs, pandas are surprisingly well-equipped for survival.
The giant panda is one of the best-known symbols in the world, used to sell everything from electronic goods to fizzy drinks, chocolate to biscuits, liquorice to cigarettes – not to mention global conservation. Yet thanks to its shy and retiring nature, it has long been one of the planet’s most mysterious creatures. Why, for example, do pandas eat bamboo? Why do they appear to have such difficulty breeding? And how on earth has such a seemingly maladjusted species managed to survive for so long?
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