Thursday, December 17, 2009
McDonald's Free Wi-Fi Part Of Growing Trend
From Computerworld:
Everybody wants free Wi-Fi, and McDonald's Corp. is responding to that demand with Wednesday's announcement that more than 11,000 of its U.S. restaurants will have free Wi-Fi in January.
"We've had Wi-Fi working in our restaurants for five years under the pay-to-play model, but now is the time, with the ubiquity of Wi-Fi devices -- including handhelds and laptops -- to extend that offer," McDonald's USA CIO David Grooms said in an interview today.
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A Global 'Planetary Skin' Network Will Monitor Earth's Resources
Planetary Skin Satellites join forces with drones andsurface sensors to monitor the Earth NASA/Cisco
From Popular Science:
NASA and Cisco officially launch a $100 million effort to integrate ground, sea, air and space sensors.
Every day, farmers and legislators make billions of small- and large-scale decisions that affect the Earth's resources, and typically rely on thousands of fragmented sources of data. Now NASA has joined tech firm Cisco in creating a $100 million "Planetary Skin" that would integrate all the Earth data from satellites, aerial drones and ground sensors, and put it in the hands of any decisionmakers who need it.
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Inconvenient Truth For Al Gore As He's Caught Exaggerating The Threat Of Global Warming... Again
Spin row: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore makes his controversial speech during a presentation of a report on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, at the Bella centre of Copenhagen yesterdayFrom The Daily Mail:
Green crusader Al Gore was at the centre of a new spin row last night after he was caught out for a second time exaggerating the threat of global warming.
In a keynote speech at the Copenhagen talks, the former U.S. vice-president claimed the North Pole could be completely free of ice by the middle of the next decade.
He claimed a study showed a ‘75 per cent chance’ that the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer months within five to seven years.
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Michelangelos Make Smart Lovers
From The Science Blog:EVANSTON, Ill. --- Is that really Bob? You've seen him hundreds of mornings for the last 10 years at local coffee shops. Since he started dating Sara, he looks you in the eye -- and smiles. Sara takes every opportunity to let coffee shop cronies know that Bob is her guy and to gush about how funny he is. And he is. Who knew?
Think of Sara like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble to release the ideal figure slumbering within.
A new international review of seven papers on "the Michelangelo phenomenon" shows that when close partners affirm and support each other's ideal selves, they and the relationship benefit greatly.
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More Powerful Superconducting Magnets will Make More Powerful Particle Colliders
From The Next Big Future:
The completed long quadrupole shell magnet (LQS01) in the Building 77A assembly area of Berkeley Lab's Engineering Division.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has just started producing collisions, but scientists and engineers have already made significant progress in preparing for future upgrades beyond the collider’s nominal design performance, including a 10-fold increase in collision rates by the end of the next decade and, eventually, higher-energy beams.
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Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
From Wired Science:
Meet GJ 1214b, the most Earth-like planet ever found outside our solar system.
It’s not exactly Earth’s twin: It’s about six times bigger, a whole lot hotter and made mostly of water. But compared to the giant gas balls that account for nearly every other extrasolar planet ever found, it’s pretty darn close. And through a fortunate happenstance of cosmic geometry, astronomers will be able to study GJ 1214b in great detail.
“If you want to describe in one sentence what this planet is, it’s a big, hot ocean,” said Harvard University astronomer David Charbonneau. “We can even study its atmosphere. This planet will occupy us for years. That’s part of what’s so exciting about it.”
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Dying Star Previews Our Own Sun's Fate
Artist's impression of Chi Cygni. As the red giant star runs out of fuel, it pulses in and out, beating like a giant heart and ejecting shells of material. Credit: ESO/L. CalçadaFrom Cosmos:
CAMBRIDGE: New images of the surface of a distant, dying star offer a preview of the ultimate fate of our own Sun, French scientists say.
"This work opens a window onto the fate of our Sun five billion years from now, when it will near the end of its life," said lead author Sylvestre Lacour of the Observatoire de Paris.
About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system.
Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart.
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New Displays For E-Readers: Read All About It
Photo: Getty ImagesFrom The Economist:
Display technology: Readers of electronic books must choose between long battery life or vibrant, living colour. Could they have both?
THE sudden surge in the popularity of e-readers—slate-like devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, on which electronic books can be read—has been one of the big surprises of 2009. Recessions are often a good time to launch new products, as old certainties are questioned and consumer tastes shift. The iPod made its debut in 2001 in the depths of America’s recession, and e-readers may prove to be a similar success story this time. But today’s e-readers, like that first iPod, are technologically quite simple. Most of them have a monochromatic screen to display text and black-and-white pictures, and none can handle video.
Even so, around 5m e-readers will be sold worldwide in 2009, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm, and a further 12m in 2010. The Kindle is by far the most popular e-reader, but there are many others.
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tremors Between Slip Events: More Evidence of Great Quake Danger to Seattle
Seattle skyline with Mount Rainier in the background. (Credit: iStockphoto/Natalia Bratslavsky)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Dec. 16, 2009) — For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They last three weeks on average and release as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake.
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Robotic Planes Capture Detailed Images Of Remote Antarctic
After three stokes of bad luck, the group launches the unmanned aerial vehicle in mission No. 4, a 15-hour trip to Terra Nova Bay and back. Credit:Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science.From Live Science:
SAN FRANCISCO — Unmanned planes flying over one of the most forbidding regions of Antarctica have captured the first close-up images of the area, where the cold, dense seawater that drives the ocean's circulation is formed.
These unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are proving a boon to scientists who study the frozen regions at Earth's poles, many parts of which simply aren't reachable to humans.
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Scientists Decode Entire Genetic Code Of Cancer
Cracking the Cancer Code A cluster of breast cancer cells, with blue ones marking actively growing cells and yellow marking dying cells. Could scientists crack their code next? Wellcome Trust From Popular Science:
And cigarette smokers get a free mutation in every pack.
In a major step toward understanding cancer, one of the biggest problems bedeviling modern medicine, scientists have now cracked the genetic code for two of the most common cancers. This marks just the beginning of an international effort to catalog all the genes that go wrong among the many types of human cancer, the BBC reports.
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Susan Boyle's I Dreamed A Dream Audition Tops List Of Most Watched YouTube Video This Year With 120m Hits
From The Daily Mail:
Britain's Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle was the star of the most-watched clip on video website YouTube this year, figures showed today.
The Scottish singer's rendition of I Dreamed A Dream on the television show was watched more than 120 million times by viewers across the world.
She netted more than three times the number of internet hits achieved by the second most-watched video of 2009.
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The Publishing Disruption
From The Futurist:What a unique thing a book is. Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume. Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency. Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions.
Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monasteries knew how to read. There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century. Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate.
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Russians Confirm That UK Climate Scientists Manipulated Data To Exaggerate Global Warming
From The Telegraph:
Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
Calls To Debate 'Fertility Outsourcing'
Most countries do not permit commercial surrogacy, say experts (Source: iStockphoto)From ABC News (Australia):
In a world where rich countries look for cheap labour in poor ones, bioethicists, lawyers and women's health advocates are raising questions about the outsourcing of baby-making - especially to countries like India.
Australian sociologist Associate Professor Catherine Waldby of the University of Sydney told a recent conference in Brisbane that India was undercutting the US as a preferred source of surrogate mothers for couples from developed countries.
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30,000 Flee Philippine volcano
Lava flows down the slopes of the Mayon volcano in the PhilippinesFrom CNN:
(CNN) -- More than 30,000 people have fled their homes ahead of an expected eruption of the Mayon volcano in the central Philippines, the Red Cross said Wednesday.
Philippine authorities have said a large-scale eruption of the 2,464-meter (8,077-foot) peak is imminent, and have begun trying to evacuate about 50,000 people living around the nation's most active volcano.
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Scientists Crack 'Entire Genetic Code' Of Cancer
From BBC:
Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers - skin and lung - a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.
Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team.
Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer.
The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth.
China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.
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15% Of Teens 'Sexting' On Cells, Study Says
From San Francisco Chronicle:
About 15 percent of American teenagers have received nude or sexually suggestive photos on their cell phones, and that percentage doubles as teens get older, according to a study released Tuesday about the tech-fueled trend called "sexting."
Boys are as likely as girls to send sexts, while teens who pay for their own cell phone bills are more likely to text salacious shots, according to the study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project of Washington.
The study does show the vast majority of teens aren't sexting, with 4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds admitting to sexting photos or videos of themselves.
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Who Needs The Grid?
From The Atlantic:In the boardroom at Bloom Energy, a single picture hangs on the wall: a satellite image of the world at night. Clusters of bright lights mark the industrial centers, and thin white lines trace connecting passageways such as the U.S. Interstate System and the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In between, huge swaths lie in shadow.
Standing almost reverently before the image, K. R. Sridhar, the CEO of Bloom, points to the dark areas—places where electricity isn’t accessible or reliable. “This is my motivation for everything,” he says. To improve the lot of the more than 2 billion people living in those dark areas, he says, you have to get them reliable, affordable energy. And if you don’t want to doom the environment in the process, you have to make that energy very clean.
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Scientists Decode Memory-Forming Brain Cell Conversations
Artist's rendering of neurons. (Credit: iStockphoto)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Dec. 16, 2009) — The conversations neurons have as they form and recall memories have been decoded by Medical College of Georgia scientists.
The breakthrough in recognizing in real time the formation and recollection of a memory opens the door to objective, thorough memory studies and eventually better therapies, said Dr. Joe Tsien, neuroscientist and co-director of MCG's Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute. He is corresponding author on the study published Dec. 16 in PLoS ONE.
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