moonbuggy

`Coinciding with the recent 50th anniversary of Silicon Valley, today IBM announced a chip-making advance that will allow it to create semiconductors with wires less than 30 nanometers wide — one-third the width in today’s industry-standard chips — which should keep Moore’s Law (the density of chips doubles every two years) in effect for several more years, according to experts.’

`A mathematical proof is irrefutably true, a manifestation of pure logic. But an increasing number of mathematical proofs are now impossible to verify with absolute certainty, according to experts in the field.

“I think that we’re now inescapably in an age where the large statements of mathematics are so complex that we may never know for sure whether they’re true or false,” says Keith Devlin of Stanford University in California, US. “That puts us in the same boat as all the other scientists.”

As an example, he points to the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, a claimed proof announced in 1980 that resulted from a collaboration in which members of a group each contributed different pieces. “Twenty-five years later we’re still not sure if it’s correct or not. We sort of think it is, but no one’s ever written down the complete proof,” Devlin says.’

`Not only are physically unattractive teenagers likely to be stay-at-homes on prom night, they’re also more likely to grow up to be criminals, say two economists who tracked the life course of young people from high school through early adulthood.

“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking,” claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.

Mocan and Tekin analyzed data from a federally sponsored survey of 15,000 high-schoolers who were interviewed in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2002. One question asked interviewers to rate the physical appearance of the student on a five-point scale ranging from “very attractive” to “very unattractive.”

These economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were small but consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed seven crimes including burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.’

`A group of New Zealand school children have found the remains of what is believed to be a 40 million-year-old “giant” penguin, a report says.

Had the species of penguin survived to the present day it would have looked “many men in the eye”, the Waikato Times report says.

The remains were found last month near Kawhia, on the west coast of the North Island, by children looking for fossils for a nearby natural history museum.

“I went ‘oh my God’, and just about keeled over on the reef,” group leader Chris Templer recalled saying when several bones were seen sticking out from a sandstone platform uncovered by the tide.’

`A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth’s upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday.

No known eruption beyond our solar system has ever appeared as bright upon arrival.

But you could not have seen it, unless you can top the X-ray vision of Superman: In gamma rays, the event equaled the brightness of the full Moon’s reflected visible light.

The blast originated about 50,000 light-years away and was detected Dec. 27. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).’

`”Don’t work too hard,” wrote a colleague in an e-mail today. Was she sincere or sarcastic? I think I know (sarcastic), but I’m probably wrong.

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

“That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley.’

`For the first time, researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors.

As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore’s Law, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame has fabricated a chip that uses nanoscale magnetic “islands” to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code. [..]

Because the chip has no wires, its device density and processing power may eventually be much higher than transistor-based devices. And it won’t be nearly as power-hungry, which will translate to less heat emission and a cooler future for portable hardware like laptops.’

`Video games and the Internet have been subject to suspicion since the computer became a household fixture. One complaint: People get sucked into spending enormous amounts of time on the computer, to the detriment of other parts of their life.

But are they addicted?

The answer depends on what you mean by “addicted.” Most experts say computers are not addictive in the same sense that drugs are, but they could be on the same level as gambling.’

I should have been at work about an hour and a half ago. Heh. :)

`For the first time in more than 20 years, U.S. nuclear-weapons scientists are designing a new H-bomb, the first of probably several new nuclear explosives on the drawing boards.

If they succeed, in perhaps 20 or 25 more years, the United States would have an entirely new nuclear arsenal, and a highly automated fac- tory capable of turning out more warheads as needed, as well as new kinds of warheads.

“We are on the verge of an exciting time,” the nation’s top nuclear weapons executive, Linton Brooks, said last week at Lawrence Livermore weapons design laboratory.’

followup to: US scientists designing new generation of nuclear arms

`Ford is developing a new form of automotive propulsion, and the implications for the American Auto Industry are huge. The Hydraulic Hybrid could be the greatest innovation since the internal combustion engine itself, and Ford is on the inside track with its F-150 Hybrid. New Tech Spy Has learned details about the system that are simply amazing and could put Ford in a commanding position in the fiercely competitive full size pickup market.

The Idea behind the current crop of Hybrid cars is well known; the cars main energy comes from gasoline which recharges batteries that move the car at low speeds. Hydraulic Hybrids work in the same manner, only instead of batteries, excess energy is stored in hydraulic cylinders.That in itself is not revolutionary, except for the fact that Nickel Metal Hydride batteries used today are not an efficient way to store energy, and hydraulic storage blows them away with 3X the efficiency. Even next generation Lithium Ion batteries do not come close to Hydraulic Energy Storage.’

`The huge profits reported by oil and gas companies would turn into losses if the social costs of their greenhouse gas emissions were taken into account.

That is the conclusion of research by the New Economics Foundation (Nef).

Nef found that the £10bn-plus profits just reported by Shell and BP are dwarfed by costs of emissions associated with their products. [..]

Reporting previously undisclosed figures, Nef’s policy director Andrew Simms writes: “Our new calculations from research in progress with WWF, based on Treasury statistics, show that UK government income from the fossil fuel sector – conservatively estimated at £34.9bn ($61bn) – is greater than revenue from council tax, stamp duty, capital gains and inheritance tax combined.’

`Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. The new results are described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.’

`A Chinese astronomer from the University of St Andrews has fine-tuned Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of gravity, creating a ‘simple’ theory which could solve a dark mystery that has baffled astrophysicists for three-quarters of a century.

A new law for gravity, developed by Dr Hong Sheng Zhao and his Belgian collaborator Dr Benoit Famaey of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), aims to prove whether Einstein’s theory was in fact correct and whether the astronomical mystery of Dark Matter actually exists. Their research was published on February 10th in the US-based Astrophysical Journal Letters. Their formula suggests that gravity drops less sharply with distance as in Einstein, and changes subtly from solar systems to galaxies and to the universe.’

`Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”‘

`At the heart of PixelOptics’ technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer — a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision — and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.

Traditional glasses correct lower-order aberrations like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisms. PixelOptics’ lenses handle higher-order aberrations that are much more difficult to detect and correct.’

`”A space suit is almost a spacecraft in itself – it provides life support, pressurization, thermal control, micrometeorite protection and other functions necessary to keep the astronaut alive,” says Liang Sim, a researcher in the MVL. “Current spacesuits pressurize the body using the breathing gas inside the suit, which limits mobility, complicates functions such as temperature control and moisture removal, and carries the risk of a catastrophic failure in the event of puncture.”

The suit being developed by MIT and Midé, by contrast, would use a skin-tight weave of controllable materials to maintain surface pressure. Additional layers could then be added to perform other functions such as radiation protections and temperature control. This could provide more mobility and comfort, increase safety, and lower cost.’

`A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.

“The people who were video game players were better and faster performers,” said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor at York University. “Those who were bilingual and video game addicts scored best — particularly at the most difficult tasks.”‘

`Sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska are likely using the sounds of fishing boat engines as underwater dinner bells to hone in on longlines hung with valuable sablefish, scientists said.

The engines make loud, erratic bubbling noises as fishermen maneuver their boats while winching up hundreds of bottom-dwelling sablefish.

“That’s the whales’ cue,” said Jan Straley, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast who since 2002 has helped lead an ongoing study of the whales’ behavior.

The study has helped researchers devise low-cost ways for fishermen to hoodwink the highly intelligent cetaceans.

It estimates there are 90 male sperm whales feeding from longlines in the eastern Gulf of Alaska, part of the world’s largest sablefish fishery.’

`Some of the most famous physicists in the world are not telling the truth about one of the most taken for granted concepts in scientific history. They are not telling us how they can come up with their fanciful time travel theories (wormholes, advanced and retarded waves traveling in spacetime, etc…) using a model of the universe that precludes the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime or in a time dimension-axis by definition. This is because motion in time is self-referential. It is for this reason that Sir Karl Popper compared Einstein’s spacetime to Parmenide’s unchanging block universe[*], in which nothing ever happens.

The following is a short list of notorious time travel and spacetime crackpots, not necessarily in order of crackpottery. Some, like Hawking, Wheeler and Feynman, are venerated by the physics community and are considered by many to be among the most brilliant scientific minds that ever lived. Too bad they believe in time travel.’

`Milliseconds before a giant star dies in a spectacular explosion, it hums a note around ‘middle C’, astronomers say. [..]

“Our simulations show that the inner core starts to execute pulsations,” says Professor Burrows.

“They show that after about 500 milliseconds [after the core collapses] the inner core begins to vibrate wildly. And after 600, 700 or 800 milliseconds, this oscillation becomes so vigorous that it sends out sound waves.

“In these computer runs, these sound waves actually cause the star to explode, not the neutrinos.”‘

`Goldilocks would approve. Dark matter is not too cold and not too hot, but just right, researchers have found. Furthermore, its lukewarm temperature may help pinpoint just what the mysterious material is. [..]

According to their calculations, dark matter is “tepid” – about 10,000°C. By comparison, the surface of the Sun is about 6000°C, while its core is about 15.5 million °C.

“This temperature tells us something very fundamental about the properties of dark matter,” says Gilmore. He believes that tepid dark matter is almost certainly made up of a type of WIMP – massive theoretical particles that interact only weakly with other forms of matter, but attract or repel other WIMPs very strongly.’

`McDonald’s french fries just got fatter – by nutritional measurement. The world’s largest restaurant chain said Wednesday its fries contain a third more trans fats than it previously knew, citing results of a new testing method it began using in December.

That means the level of potentially artery-clogging trans fat in a portion of large fries is eight grams, up from six, with total fat increasing to 30 grams from 25.

Often used by restaurants and in packaged foods, trans fats are thought to cause cholesterol problems and increase the risk of heart disease. The dietary guidelines for Americans that were issued by a government panel last year said people should consume as little trans fat as possible.’

`The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s in 1922 contains five sarcophagi with mummies, breaking the nearly centurylong belief that there’s nothing more to find in the valley where some of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs were buried.

The tomb’s spare appearance suggests it was not dug for a pharaoh, said U.S. archaeologist Kent Weeks, who was not involved in the University of Memphis team’s find but has seen photographs of the site. “It could be the tomb of a king’s wife or son, or of a priest or court official,” he told The Associated Press on Thursday.’

`Could what we see as neutron stars really be so-called strange stars? Prashanth Jaikumar and his fellow researchers think so. They recently published a letter in Physical Review Letters that redefines the characteristics of a star composed mainly of strange quark matter.

Right now, physicists postulate that if strange stars exist they possess enormous density gradient at surface and exhibit a luminosity beyond that of other stars. The conventional wisdom is that the electric field of a strange star at its surface would be so large that it would be impossible to determine that the strange star is anything but. This paradigm has existed in astrophysics since the possibility of stars made from strange quark matter was acknowledged.’

`Through my own investigations I have just discovered that George Deutsch, the Bush political appointee at the heart of administration efforts to censor NASA scientists (most notably to prevent James Hansen from speaking out about global warming), did not actually graduate from Texas A&M University. This should come as a surprise, since the media has implied otherwise, with even The New York Times describing the 24-year-old NASA public affairs officer, as “a 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M.” Although Deutsch did attend Texas A&M University, where he majored in journalism and was scheduled to graduate in 2003, he left in 2004 without a degree, a revelation that I was tipped off to by one of his former coworkers at A&M’s student newspaper The Battalion.’

`As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft winds its way on a nine-year journey toward Pluto and the outer solar system, at least one expert wonders why such missions need to take so long.

Paul A. Czysz, a 30-year veteran of the industry, continuing consultant to the U.S. military and professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at St. Louis University, thinks NASA can curb the travel time to the outer planets from nearly a decade to a matter of weeks – something he considers critical for the human exploration of the solar system. What’s required, he said, is a renewed commitment to nuclear propulsion.’

`Water, water everywhere and we are duped into buying it bottled.

Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief–often mistaken, as it happens–that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).

For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week. [..]

“Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing–producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy,” said [a researcher]. “Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more.”‘

`Australian and other scientists have found a “Lost World” in a remote Indonesian mountain jungle, home to exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants as well as mammals unafraid of humans despite being hunted to near extinction elsewhere.

“It’s as close to the Garden of Eden as you’re going to find on Earth,” said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the US, Indonesian and Australian expedition to part of the cloud-shrouded Foja mountains in the province of Papua that covers the western half of New Guinea.’

`A flock of pigeons fitted with mobile phone backpacks is to be used to monitor air pollution, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.

The 20 pigeons will be released into the skies over San Jose, California, in August.

Each bird will carry a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone.

Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon “blog,” a journal accessible on the Internet.’

`Scientists at the University of Kentucky have built tiny pipes that move water 10,000 times as fast as the conventional laws of fluid flow allow, mimicking for the first time the seamless way fluids progress through our cells. They’ve also found a way to control which molecules can pass through the pipes, a discovery that could yield safer, more efficient skin patches to deliver medicine into the body. The pipes are made of carbon nanotubes, thin sheets of graphite rolled into cylinders just seven billionths of a meter in diameter. [..]’