Archive for March, 2009

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The International Space Station Needs Lasers

Monday, March 16th, 2009

OK, let’s cut the crap here, NASA: After today’s near-evacuation, it’s clear that you need weapons on the International Space Station. And don’t forget to put web controls so we all can play.

Seriously now: This is seriously fraked up. The ISS is almost as big as a Corellian corvette and it’s up there defenseless, floating peacefully, sitting like a dinosaur-sized duck, waiting for one of the 18,000 pieces of tracked space debris to crack it open and take it down in a fiery ball of junk.

Sure, they have a escape spaceship for astronauts. In case things go bad—like they almost did today—they can jump in there and fly away before the worst happens. However, after all the money and effort put in the only human post in space, do we want to send everything to hell for a piece of orbiting crap? Wouldn’t it be better to install defense mechanisms against space debris—or, ah, hmmm, alien ships!—to preserve the ISS?
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Obama’s New Tack: Blaming Bush

Monday, March 16th, 2009

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
It hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to return — or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome “inheritance” of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems “inherited” from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The “deepening economic crisis” that the president described six days after taking office became “a big mess” in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.

“By any measure,” he said during a March 4 event calling for government-contracting reform, “my administration has inherited a fiscal disaster.”

Obama’s more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president’s policies are compounding the nation’s economic problems.

Obama had initially been content to leave partisan defense strategy to his proxies, but as the fiscal picture has continued to darken, he has appeared more willing to risk his image as a politician who is above petty partisanship to personally remind the public of Bush’s legacy.

His approval ratings remain strong — above 60 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll — but have dropped from their highs almost entirely because of falling support among Republicans since he took office.
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BitTorrent Freed Music, and Now It’s Yours

Monday, March 16th, 2009

The Internet and file-sharing networks like BitTorrent have shifted music promotion from the labels to the people. Increasingly, record labels are losing control over what music the masses are listening to, and according to some musicians this is is actually a good thing.
Meet Chris Zabriskie, a full-time musician whose career started roughly 8 years ago. Like many other artists, Chris has decided to give all of his music away for free. This isn’t down to Chris lacking a desire for money, but because he thinks that his music should be heard – and that it’s pretty much impossible to sell music nowadays without giving the public the option to “try before they buy.”

Zabriskie, himself an avid BitTorrent user, said he has leaked all of his albums on torrent sites ahead of their official release date. And he’s not the only one doing this. “I can tell you from numerous conversations and firsthand experience that there are few artists left, even in the big leagues, that do not. You wonder where the early leaks come from? Don’t be so surprised.” he writes.
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Lithium breakthrough could charge batteries in 10 seconds

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

A new version of lithium battery technology can either provide a higher storage density than current batteries, or can charge and discharge as fast as a supercapacitor, emptying its entire charge in under 10 seconds.

Lithium-iron-phosphate particles.

Lithium-iron-phosphate particles.


It’s getting difficult to overstate the importance of battery technology. Compact, high-capacity batteries are an essential part of portable electronics already, but improved batteries are likely to play a key role in the auto industry, and may eventually appear throughout the electric grid, smoothing over interruptions in renewable power sources. Unfortunately, battery technology often involves a series of tradeoffs among factors like capacity, charging time, and usable cycles. Today’s issue of Nature reports on a new version of lithium battery technology that may just be a game-changer.
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One-Third Use a Single Password for Everything

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

passwordsA third of web users have admitted to using the same password for a number of different websites, says Sophos.

According to the security firm, just 19 percent never use the same password twice. Sophos added that three years ago, 41 percent of web users said they used the same password, indicating that just 8 percent of web users have realized the importance of strong, unique passwords.

“It’s worrying that in three years very few computer users seem to have woken up to the risks of using weak passwords and the same ones for every site they visit,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
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Democrats to Obama: Hurry up and fix the economy

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Some Democrats are increasingly concerned about President Obama’s $787 billion financial fix for the ailing economy, and are demanding greater transparency on further spending.
With the White House seemingly comparing the nation’s economy to a house on fire, some congressional Democrats are asking, where’s the fire truck?

One New Hampshire congresswoman said as much to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Capitol Hill recently.

“I said, hurry, please hurry, because people are waiting and they are hurting, and they need the help now,” Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-New Hampshire, said.

She’s one of a growing number of nervous Democrats on edge or at odds with some of the Obama’s administration’s plans on the economy. Some are taking aim at the president’s budget proposals that would curb popular tax deductions for wealthier Americans. Video Watch more on why some Democrats are nervous
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Desert ants smell their way home

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Humans lost in the desert are well known for going around in circles, prompting researchers to ask how desert creatures find their way around without landmarks for guidance. Now research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that Desert Ants input both local smells and visual cues into their navigation systems to guide them home.

Until now scientists thought that the Desert Ant Cataglyphis fortis, which makes its home in the inhospitable salt pans of Tunisia, was a pure vision-guided insect. But Kathrin Steck, Bill Hansson and Markus Knaden from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Gera number of used gas chromatography to verify that desert microhabitats do have unique odour signatures that can guide the ants back to the nest.
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The last two British male of blue ducks were gay

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

bluutka_300
The last two remaining male in the UK New Zealand Blue Duck Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos were homosexuals. Unusual behavior of birds, the newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports.

Males Ben and Jerry live in the bird sanctuary in West Sussex in the UK. Employees of the Reserve had hoped that they will be able to restore the bird populations, as well as a third of New Zealand blue duck was female Cherry. However, when it was placed in an aviary with Cherry, Ben showed no interest. Jerry also refused to mate with females.

Reserve Officers noticed that the males show a typical marital behavior in relation not to Cherry but to each other. Ben and Jerry lived in an aviary, where they co-exist perfectly together.
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Among the debris from Hurricane “Ike” the sunked in the XIX century “Carolina” was found

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

During the survey the seabed for search carried hurricane “Ike” junk off the coast of Texas the remains of merchant ship “Caroline” sank in 1864 a were found. It is anticipated that they had previously been hidden by a layer of sand and silt, but the hurricane completely “cleaned” the bottom of the bay and made the splinters accessible to researchers, the Associated Press reports.
According to historical data, a private merchant vessel had tried to break through the blockade of the city Galvestoun organized by warships northerners during the Civil War years in the U.S. 1861-1865. After unsuccessful attempts to evade prosecution team had sent a ship in shallow waters where, in order to avoid enemy capture, it was burned. Remains of “Carolina” sanked.
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World’s first computer was used to generate love poetry

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Back in 1952 a team of scientists was desperate to test the capabilities of Mark One `Baby`, the computer built at Manchester University.

One of them, Christopher Strachey, devised a quirky software programme by entering hundreds of romantic verbs and nouns into the new machine.
He then sat back as Mark One `Baby` trawled the literary database to create a stream of light-hearted verse.

In much the same way as magnetic letters are displayed on fridges today, he and his team would print off the computer’s best efforts and put them on a notice board.
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On the Fast Track

Monday, March 9th, 2009

The rest of the developed world has high-speed rail. We don’t. That’s finally about to change.

With its soaring, arched ceilings, 20-story bell tower, and gilded frescoes, the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris feels like a kind of church. This cathedral of transport was built for the World Exposition of 1900, a Belle Époque celebration of the achievements in science and technology that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution a century earlier. Coal soot and dark halos of steam billowed in the rafters, symbols of the original builders’ faith in eternal progress.

Today, sunlight streams through the roof, layers of caked-on coal grime having long since been scrubbed from the latticework of glass and steel. Gleaming silver-and-blue trains glide noiselessly in and out of the station, pushed and pulled at both ends by electrical “power units” that nuzzle the concrete platforms with aerodynamic, space-shuttle-like noses. These supertrains, which shoot through the countryside at almost 200 miles an hour, have transformed the Gare de Lyon from a sooty monument of the revolution that brought us global warming into something quite different. Now it’s a temple to high-speed rail, a technology that some experts say is essential to helping us get out of our climate fix.
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Eating ourselves to death: Britain’s fat epidemic

Monday, March 9th, 2009

The number of people whose deaths are directly related to obesity has leapt by 35 per cent since 2003, according to new figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday.

Obesity was cited on death certificates as a contributing factor in 1,203 deaths in England and Wales in 2007, highlighting how the incidence of related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and blood clots continues to rise alarmingly. The outlook is believed to be as serious in Scotland.

Experts warn that these figures are the tip of the iceberg, as the majority of obesity-related deaths are not being recorded on death certificates.
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Symantec Warns of Worm’s Return

Monday, March 9th, 2009

A third version of Downadup has been identified by Symantec, which says the new variant gives infected machines more powerful instructions to disable antivirus software and analysis tools, among other actions.

W32.Downadup.C is a modular component for machines currently infected with Downadup. This variant of Downadup, also called Conficker, is not attempting to self-replicate and appears to behave more like a Trojan than a worm, says Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Security Response.

“Think of it as an updated module that’s more aggressive, more robust in defending itself,” Weafer says.
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Energy vampires: Fact versus fiction

Monday, March 9th, 2009

It’s well-known that most electronic devices in our homes are sucking up energy even while they are turned off. But for all the information out there, many questions remain. I got hundreds of reader questions after writing the post What’s wasting energy in your home right now. Below are answers to the five most common inquiries:

Which electronic devices waste the most energy when they are turned off but still plugged in?

Set-top cable boxes and digital video recorders are some of the biggest energy hogs. Unfortunately, there’s little consumers can do since television shows can’t be taped if boxes are unplugged. It also typically takes a long time to reboot boxes.

However, some of the other major consumers of standby power are more easily dealt with: computers, multifunction printers, flat-screen TVs, DVDs, VCRs, CD players, power tools, and hand-held vacuums. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) measured standby power for a long list of products.

While it’s true each individual product draws relatively little standby power, the LBNL says that when added together, standby power can amount to 10% of residential energy use.

Why do electronic devices use energy when they are switched off?
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Guess who?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

masked cat
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