Feel bad about how much time you spend on social media sites like Facebook? The Pavlov Poke could help – by making you feel even worse.
Designed as a joke, but with a serious message at its core about the many hours we fritter away on internet services, the system gives you a small electric shock via the keyboard after you have clocked up a certain amount of time on specified websites or applications. The shock is not harmful, but should be unpleasant enough to act as a deterrent.
Some researchers claim that social media sites can be more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. Given the business model of Facebook and its ilk, that may be no surprise. They are addictive by design.
But while the rest of us have to rely on strength of will, PhD students Robert Morris and Dan McDuff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab fashioned a bespoke gadget out of spare equipment lying around their office. They hope it will help them spend less time cruising social media sites and encourage them to finish off their dissertations instead.
The set-up uses software that monitors what applications are being run. When it detects that a given time threshold has been exceeded by an application, it triggers a short circuit in an electronic device connected to the computer, sending a current to metal pads in front of the keyboard. If a person's hands are resting on those pads they get a jolt.
If that's not enough to wean you off excess internet use, the system can up the ante: if a person keeps up the undesired behaviour, it will also automatically place a job request on Amazon's Mechanical Turk with your phone number and instructions for a crowd-worker to phone up and yell at you whenever your willpower wobbles!
Here is an image, the spacecraft has sent back to Earth on its incredible mission into space. Above, the Cassini spacecraft sent back this image on August 29, 2012 of Saturn’s indigo and ochre hues undergoing a seasonal change. When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, the planet’s northern hemisphere was bathed in azure blue, but as the years have passed, spring has begun in the Northern hemisphere. The blue has begun to fade, migrating south where winter is fast approaching, as shown in this natural-colour image of the gas giant and its largest moon Titan!
Life would face challenges on Mars today, but billions of years ago conditions might have been better
Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard.
New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was.
The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled.
Details of the theory were outlined by Prof Steven Benner at theGoldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy.
Scientists have long wondered how atoms first came together to make up the three crucial molecular components of living organisms: RNA, DNA and proteins.
The molecules that combined to form genetic material are far more complex than the primordial "pre-biotic" soup of organic (carbon-based) chemicals thought to have existed on the Earth more than three billion years ago, and RNA (ribonucleic acid) is thought to have been the first of them to appear.
Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the "soup" does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar.
RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by "templating" atoms at the crystalline surfaces of minerals.
The minerals most effective at templating RNA would have dissolved in the oceans of the early Earth, but would have been more abundant on Mars, according to Prof Benner.
Red or dead?
This could suggest that life started on the Red Planet before being transported to Earth on meteorites, argues Prof Benner, of the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, US.
The idea that life originated on Mars and was then transported to our planet has been mooted before. But Prof Benner's ideas add another twist to the theory of a Martian origin for the terrestrial biosphere.
Here in Florence, Prof Benner presented results that suggest minerals containing the elements boron and molybdenum are key in assembling atoms into life-forming molecules.
The researcher points out that boron minerals help carbohydrate rings to form from pre-biotic chemicals, and then molybdenum takes that intermediate molecule and rearranges it to form ribose, and hence RNA.
This raises problems for how life began on Earth, since the early Earth is thought to have been unsuitable for the formation of the necessary boron and molybdenum minerals.
It is thought that the boron minerals needed to form RNA from pre-biotic soups were not available on early Earth in sufficient quantity, and the molybdenum minerals were not available in the correct chemical form.
Prof Benner explained: "It’s only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidised that it is able to influence how early life formed.
"This form of molybdenum couldn’t have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did.
"It’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."
Early Mars is also thought to have had a drier environment, and this is also crucial to its favourable location for life's origins.
"What’s quite clear is that boron, as an element, is quite scarce in Earth’s crust," Prof Benner told BBC News, “but Mars has been drier than Earth and more oxidising, so if Earth is not suitable for the chemistry, Mars might be.
"The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock," he commented.
"It’s lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless - as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there may not have been a story to tell."
A distant star thought to be almost identical to our own sun is providing scientists with the chance to see how our solar system will look in four billion years time!
A graphic showing our own sun, which is around 4.6 billion years old, while HIP 102152 is 8.2 billion years oldPhoto: European Southern Observatory
The star, known as HIP 102152, is considered to be one of the closest “twins” of our Sun that astronomers have found to date, but is considerably older.
Located 250 light years from Earth, scientists now hope to study it to learn how our own sun will age. It has similar temperature, size and chemical composition to our Sun.
The observations, achieved using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also suggest that the star may be orbited by rocky planets.
If this turns out to be the case, it could even provide some clues as to our own fate as the solar system gets older.
Jorge Melendez, from the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil who led the team of researchers, said: “ “For decades, astronomers have been searching for solar twins in order to know our own life-giving Sun better, but very few have been found since the first one was discovered in 1997.
“We have now obtained superb-quality spectra from the VLT and can scrutinise solar twins with extreme precision, to answer the question of whether the Sun is special.”
Our own sun is around 4.6 billion years old, while HIP 102152 is 8.2 billion years old. Located in the constellation of Capricornus, the astronomers analysed the spectrum of light that came from the star.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Cerro Paranal observing site (European Southern Observatory)
The spectrum produced by a star acts like an identifying bar code, providing details about its chemical composition and history.
In the big bang large amounts of hydrogen and helium were produced along with light elements such as lithium.
As stars age, this lithium is burned up or destroyed, providing scientists with an ability to tell how old a star is. Our Sun has just one per cent of the lithium that it would have had when it was formed.
The new observations of HIP 102152 have already allowed astronomers to pin down the correlation between a sun-like stars age and its lithium content.
Tala Wanda Monroe, also from the Universidade de São Paulo and another of the researchers, said: “We have found that HIP 102152 has very low levels of lithium.
“This demonstrates clearly for the first time that older solar twins do indeed have less lithium than our own Sun or younger solar twins.
“We can now be certain that stars somehow destroy their lithium as they age, and that the Sun's lithium content appears to be normal for its age.”
The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, also found an unusual chemical signal that has not yet been found in other solar twins, but has in the sun.
Both HIP 102152 and our Sun contain low levels of elements that are locked up in meteorites and here on Earth. It suggests that HIP 102152 may also have rocky planets.
If this turns out to be the case, it could well reveal what awaits our own solar system in four billion years!
Evidence of ongoing violence is captured in satellite imagery
Pipeline Bombing in Northern Iraq Google Earth via SkyTruth
It might not make headlines any more, but violence in Iraq rages on, as evidenced by this image snapped from space. This picture, taken with a NASA satellite and published by the nonprofit human and environmental rights group SkyTruth, shows smoke plumes from two fires set to an oil pipeline in northern Iraq. The bombed pipeline goes north through Turkey and then out to the Mediterranean.
When the United States withdrew its last convoy of troops from Iraq in December 2011, Iraq was left in a tenuous state. The presence of a large foreign occupying army had calmed tensions between Sunni extremists and Iraq's Shi'ite-led government, but today, the civil war in Syria attracts radical Sunni foreign fighters to Iraq (and elsewhere in the region). (In 2012, the government of Iraq took action, ordering border guards to prevent adult men crossing from Syria into Iraq, but it doesn't look like it was all that effective.) Iraq's internal political balance, very carefully negotiated between Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds, could easily be upset, and there are groups actively trying to do just that. Al Qaeda in Iraq, thought to be decimated during the American occupation, has been resurgent since the withdrawal, and is active in both Iraq and Syria. A series of terror attacks this July killed 1,000 Iraqis, an amount of terrorist-related violence not seen since 2008.
It is science’s star experiment: an attempt to create an artificial sun on earth — and provide an answer to the world’s impending energy shortage. Scientists believe that this can’t be achieved for the next hundred years, but having your own sun for energy need is not an impossible dream! Maybe in future we can solve energy crisis by developing our own artificial sun. Scientists have been trying to harness nuclear fusion since Albert Einstein had derived the equation E=mc² in 1905. This equation raised the hope that fusing atoms together could release incredible amounts of energy. If Einstein’s theory is put to practical use, the amount of energy locked up in one gram of matter is enough to power 28,500 100-watt lightbulbs for a year.
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, situated amidst the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric power of the United States generates into a billionth of a second. This will lead to an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.
The scientists will perform the experiment inside a structure that will cover an area the size of three football pitches. A single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.
This hanger-sized room will contain no dust so that impurities can’t get into the path of the beam. This laser beam will be split into 192 separate beams and then converted into ultraviolet light. Finally ultraviolet light will be focused into the centre of a capsule. The inner wall of this capsule has an aluminum and concrete-coated target chamber. When the laser beams strike the inner walls of the capsule, high-energy X-rays will be generated within a few billionths of a second. This activity will create the compressed fuel pellet inside until its outer shell blows off. This explosion is a very crucial step. This explosion of the fuel pellet shell produces an equal and opposite reaction that compresses the fuel itself together until nuclear fusion begins, releasing vast amounts of energy. Scientists have already spent 11 years in development work. They want the last of the lenses and mirrors for the laser to be put in place but this will be easier said than done. The tiresome task of adjusting and aiming the laser could take up to a year before they can successfully achieve fusion. Because the targeting should be right otherwise the experiment will not work. Of course creating the conditions existing inside the sun will be no mean feat!
In the coming spring, scientists will try to activate a tiny man made star that will imitate sun by setting off a thermonuclear reaction. This will generate more than 100 million degrees Celsius temperature and the amount of pressure will be billions of times higher than those found anywhere on the earth. All this can be accomplished from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead! This step will lead to building up of nuclear fusion power stations and no dearth of energy for humankind.
In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction. They will need hydrogen for fusion reaction and the earth and universe have plentiful supply of hydrogen. The whole experiment will cost £1.2 billion! “We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun,” Ed Moses, director of the facility, stated. “It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve.”
Lego's new Mindstorms are keenly anticipated by Silicon Valley engineers. (AP)
Few are more excited about Lego's new Mindstorms sets rolling out next month than Silicon Valley engineers.
Many of them were drawn to the tech sector by the flagship kits that came on the market in 1998, introducing computerised movement to the traditional snap-together toy blocks and allowing the young innovators to build their first robots. Now, 15 years later, those robot geeks are entrepreneurs and designers, and the colourful plastic bricks have an outsized influence in their lives.
Techies tinker at Lego play stations in workplaces. Engineers mentor competitive Lego League teams. Designers use them to mock up larger projects ideas. And executives place Lego creations on their desks alongside family photos.
"Everyone I work with played with them as children. We sit around talking Lego. It's a shared common experience," said Travis Schuh, who reaches into his bin of plastic blocks when he needs a quick prototype at the Silicon Valley medical robotic firm where he works.
The new Mindstorms sets, on sale from September 1, are simpler for the younger crowd and more versatile for sophisticated users than two earlier versions. The sets are designed for kids over 10 and make it easy to build basic, remote-controlled robots, including a cobra-like snake that snaps Lego brick fangs. Some shoot balls, others drive along colour-coded lines. But for $349, far more expensive than typical building toys, customers get a much more complex and powerful system.
"There's actually a lot of engineering that goes into Lego bricks and the systems you can prototype out of them are pretty sophisticated," says Stanford University engineering professor Christian Gerdes, who uses them in his classroom.
Professional hackers will also find plenty to do with the new Mindstorms, as the open source software uses Linux for the first time, and controller apps are integrated for tablets and mobile phones.
San Francisco-based software engineer Will Gorman is one of those adult users. He has torn apart Mindstorms kits to create a Lego toilet flusher, a Wii-playing robot that bowled a perfect game and a Lego Mars Curiosity Rover. ProtoTank co-founder Adam Ellsworth, whose headquarters are on the third floor of TechShop San Francisco, says, "There is a culture of design in the Silicon Valley, and Lego bricks are how so many of us started."
"This place is just one big Lego station," he added, raising his voice above the buzz of laser cutters and 3-D printers. "Taking an idea, a concept, and finding the right way to turn it into something real, that's fundamentally what you're doing with Lego bricks."
Denmark-based Lego first sold their plastic bricks 55 years ago, and watched them grow into one of the world's most popular toys. But company officials say Mindstorms, designed for children but quickly snapped up by adults, changed their market.
"In the last 15 years, we have worked hard to balance the needs and wants of this shadow market while at the same time engaging kids," said Michael McNally, a brand director at LEGO Systems.
Many Bay Area engineers also grew up competing in the First Lego League, which also launched in 1998 with 200 teams. Since then the league has expanded — last year more than 280,000 children around the world, ages 6-18, participated.
Organisers expect 600 teams participating in Northern California this autumn.
"We have a culture that only celebrates superheroes in the worlds of entertainment and sports. We need to create superheroes in the world of innovation," said Dean Kamen, who founded For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which includes the First Lego League.
Nagy Hakim first played with Mindstorms at a robotics summer camp when he was in 6th grade. Since then, the college-bound 18-year-old from Santa Clara, California, has joined — and even mentored — Lego leagues.
Is this something he's going to grow out of? "Time will tell," laughs Hakim.
ComScore in its latest report "2013 India Digital Future in Focus" has some interesting findings, says three-quarters of India's online population is under 35. Below are a few more findings that give you an idea of the Indian online population demographic.
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Riding on a 31% year-on-year increase, India’s online population grew to 73.9 million. With an extended online universe in excess of 145 million the market is at a tipping point for online businesses. - Younger males and women aged 35-44 emerge as power users - Three-quarters of India’s online population is under 35. - Males in the segment and women aged 35-44 are amongst the heaviest users - 60 percent of web users in India visit online retail sites. Myntra leads India’s online retail category in terms of users, Flipkart gets highest per-user engagement. - Social networks capture the largest percentage of consumers’ time in the region. - Facebook continues to be the number one social network in India with a 28% increase in traffic and a reach of 86%. - On an average, 217 minutes are spent on Facebook every month by Indian users - LinkedIn emerges as number two, while Pinterest and Tumblr are the fastest growing networks. - The online video audience in India grew an astounding 27 percent in the past year, YouTube continues to be the top video property with more than 55% share. - International publishers including Facebook, Yahoo and Dailymotion get a majority of the 54 million who watched videos. - Local content is distributed mainly through the Youtube platform dominated by Bollywood. - Indian blogging audience grew 48%, close to 36 million. - 26% blog traffic from mobile and tablets - Non-PC traffic in India zooms ahead, grows from 10.9% to 14.2% in 2013 -31% year-on-year growth makes India the fastest growing online population in Asia Pacific, 2nd in the world behind Brazil
In graphs:
India overtook Japan by adding 17.6 million users in the past year
Females comprise 39 % of the Indian Internet population. Indian women spend less time online than men.
The phablet war is becoming very tough in the market. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 vs Nokia Lumia Bandit specs & camera features makes interesting reading
Nokia is apparently to join the phablet flurry sometime this fall. To take on the competitors like Samsung Galaxy Note series, the Finnish mobile firm is all set with its Windows Phone 8 OS. The company wishes to raise severe threat to the dominance of all popular Android phablet devices out in market with its Windows Phone 8-based phablet or phablets this fall, reports Reuters referring to some unknown sources.
A phablet means a handset that sports a 5-inch or bigger display. Reuters further writes that the Finnish mobile firm is all set to announce one or more phablets at an event to be held in New York late September. We have no access to the rumored specs or other features of the devices except that a Lumia 825 is rumored to come with a 5-inch or big display.
“The sources would not elaborate on details such as specifications and price but said the new models will include a phablet, a common name for smartphones with screens over 5 inches,” writes Reuters. By the way, the site refers to the fact that technology blogs have started to talk about the phablets to be expected from the leading Windows Phone maker.
However, Nokia officials haven’t also commented positively to the rumor. But, chance is high that we could expect some phablet from Nokia sooner especially in a time the upcoming Windows Phone 8 GDR3 update is said to most likely support FullHD and big screens with proper customization for the phablet-like larger gadgets.
Nokia Phablet Vs Samsung Phablet Samsung is the first gadget maker ever that introduced a phablet through its 5.2-inch Galaxy Note two years back. In the following year, Samsung upgraded the device with a second edition called the Galaxy Note 2 to give a new vigor for the phablet market, which has recently received a lot of new models including the ones from LG, Sony, Huawei and more.
Indeed, the move from Nokia to imagine a phablet might have come from the need to take on Samsung and Apple, which outdo the Finnish mobile firm in smartphone sales across the world. For a while, Nokia has been designing more competitive models of handsets that are able to fight with the alternatives from Samsung, Apple and other leading tech firms.
Lately, you might have witnessed to the rollout of Lumia 1020, a camera-centric phone with a massive 41MP PureView rear camera to compete with the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Zoom and other alternatives. “Market leader Samsung has led the way in phablets, proving wrong early critics who said they were too clunky,” says Reuters.
For sure, during its early days, the Galaxy Note original was blamed for its bulkier form factor, but now it is the trend. Samsung’s latest upgrade to the Note series, the Note III is not rumored for official rollout in a September 4 event in Berlin, Germany. That means things won’t be a pushover for Nokia with its rumored Lumia phablet.
Nokia Phablet and GDR3 Update As per reports, Nokia will be waiting for the GDR3 update to roll out its much-touted phablet. The Windows Phone GDR3 update is expected to bring in support for larger screens along with FullHD display. It is also to enhance the Windows Phone 8 with many more improvements including a revamped look for its Live Tiles-based home screen.
As per reports, the GDR3-updated WP 8 will let you customize the Live Tiles in a way you can place three medium sized-tiles in a single row. Of now, only two tiles can be placed in a row, meaning that the new feature is something essential for a phablet, which is rather bigger!
European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano outside the International Space Station. Italy's first spacewalker has written an account of his near-drowning last month after water leaked in his spacesuit helmet. (NASA / July 14, 2013)
The barest details of Luca Parmitano’s near-drowning in space are harrowing enough: The Italian astronaut’s spacesuit helmet began filling with water as he floated outside the International Space Station. Now, Parmitano has published a first-person account on the European Space Agency website that brings the chilling ordeal to life.
In an unprecedented malfunction, Parmitano’s suit and helmet began to fill with about 1 to 1.5 liters of leaked water, officials said at the time. The floating liquid soon blocked the astronaut’s ears, nose and sight, forcing officials to cut the spacewalk from roughly six hours to 1 hour and 32 minutes, the shortest in space station history.
"You can imagine, you’re in a fishbowl. So go stick your head in a fishbowl and try to walk around – that’s not anything you take lightly," NASA flight director David Korth said at a news conference.
If that doesn’t sound bad enough, Parmitano, who became Italy’s first spacewalker last month, now lays out key details of what happened leading up to the July 16 leak.
“As I move back along my route towards the airlock, I become more and more certain that the water is increasing," Parmitano wrote. "I feel it covering the sponge on my earphones and I wonder whether I’ll lose audio contact. The water has also almost completely covered the front of my visor, sticking to it and obscuring my vision.”
Then it goes from bad to very bad.
"As I turn 'upside-down,' two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head," the astronaut recounted. "By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid."
And yes, very bad quickly transitions to worse.
"To make matters worse, I realise that I can’t even understand which direction I should head in to get back to the airlock," he continued. "I can’t see more than a few centimetres in front of me, not even enough to make out the handles we use to move around the Station."
Almost entirely blinded, Parmitano comes up with the idea to use the tug of recoil from his safety cable to guide him back to the hatch. At one point, he even considers a crazy-sounding idea: making a hole in his suit as he hung in the vacuum of space.
"The only idea I can think of is to open the safety valve by my left ear: if I create controlled depressurisation, I should manage to let out some of the water.... But making a 'hole' in my spacesuit really would be a last resort."
In the days following Parmitano’s close shave, his American spacewalk partner Chris Cassidy described how the leaking water must have poured into Parmitano’s helmet from a ventilation slit inside the suit’s neck hole. "Scary situation," Cassidy said in a video.
Meanwhile, NASA officials said they’d be looking at what caused the leak, pointing to water from the suit’s cooling system as the potential source.
Messages from readers wishing Parmitano well poured in, many in Italian. The investigation appeared to be ongoing, based on comments that the astronaut apparently left for readers.
"We know now it was the cooling loop - but we don't know the exact source," Parmitano wrote to a commenter.
As for whether they’ll try another spacewalk during this go-round, perhaps to complete the unfinished tasks from the aborted spacewalk, Parmitano said it was unlikely.
"It is not expected ... but the hope remains until the last day," he wrote.
And, of course, the astronaut also had to respond to skeptics.
"Could he not just drink any water that went in his mouth?" one reader asked.
"You need to be able to breathe in order to drink," Parmitano replied.
The space-based telescope known as WISE has been orbiting our planet in a hibernative state for the past two and a half years. But now, nap time is over.
WISE has some serious asteroid hunting to do.
This week, NASA announced it will reactivate the sleeping space telescope and put it back to work as an asteroid hunter, focused on finding potentially hazardous asteroids and other space rocks that could come uncomfortably close to our planet.
NASA hopes the sleeping infrared telescope still has enough juice in it to discover 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects, and to help scientists learn more about the shape and size of 2,000 others, the agency said in a statement.
It may even help the agency find the perfect asteroid to capture and land a spacecraft on, later this decade.
WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, was launched in December 2009, tasked with scanning the night sky in infrared light -- looking for heat emanating from galaxies, stars and asteroids.
By the time its primary mission ended in February 2011, WISE had captured more than 2.7 million images in multiple wavelengths and cataloged more than 560 million objects in space, according to NASA.
In a separate mission, dubbed NEOWISE, the telescope also made the most accurate survey of near-Earth objects to date.
When the mission was over, the scientists decided to put it to sleep, rather than turn it off completely.
"We turned off the cameras, and all the unnecessary electronics, and what was left was basically enough power to keep its solar arrays pointing toward the sun so it can still get power," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Waking up the telescope and getting it back into working mode shouldn't be too hard, said Mainzer, but the first step is to cool it down.
"The temperatures have warmed up to about 200 degrees above absolute zero, which sounds cool to us on Earth, but is actually quite warm for an infrared telescope," she said.
Because all the telescope's refrigerants are long gone, the team plans to cool WISE off by having it stare off into deep space for a bit.
"When it looks at the cold background of deep space, most of the heat will radiate away," Mainzer said.
Once the telescope is down to 75 degrees above absolute zero, Mainzer and her team will recalibrate its instruments. She said only two of the telescope's four channels can operate without refrigerants.
Although WISE was not originally designed to be an asteroid hunter, Mainzer said its infrared sensors that measure heat make it especially good at finding and characterizing space rocks.
Telescopes that rely on light sometimes can't see dark asteroids, or if they happen to be shiny, can be tricked into thinking they are larger than they are.
"WISE can see the heat signature from the object, and as long as it has some warmth from the sun, which these objects do, it is very sensitive to dark objects," she said.
A German government technology agency has warned that new security technology in computers running Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system may actually make PCs more vulnerable to cyber threats, including sabotage.
Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI, said in a statement posted on its website on Wednesday that federal government agencies and critical infrastructure operators should pay particular attention to the risk.
The warning comes after weeks of public indignation in Germany over leaks related to U.S. surveillance programmes. The spying scandal has become a headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of a September 22 election.
The problem, according to the BSI, is with the use of a computer chip known as the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM 2.0, which is built into Windows 8 computers. TPM 2.0 is designed to better protect PCs by interacting with a variety of security applications.
But the BSI, which provides advice on technology and security to the government as well as the public, said the joint implementation of Windows 8 and TPM 2.0 chips could lead to "a loss of control" over both the operating system and hardware, without specifying exactly how that could occur.
"As a result, new risks occur for users, especially for federal and critical infrastructure," it said.
The statement concluded: "The new mechanisms in use can also be used for sabotage by third parties. These risks need to be addressed."
Microsoft declined comment on the BSI statement.
The company provided Reuters with a statement saying that PC makers have the option to turn off TPM technology, so that customers can buy PCs with it disabled.
TPM was developed by the Trusted Computing Group, a non-profit organization backed by technology firms including IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.
The BSI said it was working with the Trusted Computing Group and operating systems producers to find a solution.
A spokeswoman for that group declined to comment on the specific claims raised by the BSI. She said the group has provided PC makers and users with plenty of advice on best security practices to avoid any threats that they may face.
The scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology revealed in the third week of August 2013 that they created the most precise clock of the world. The ticking rate of this clock varies less than two parts in one quintillion, or ten times better than any clock in the world.
Features of the most precise clock of the world
• The clock is made up of the element ytterbium. This element can be used for technological advancements beyond the timekeeping. • The clock can be used for various purposes such as checking temperature, navigation systems as well as magnetic fields. • The co-author of the study which revealed the clock, Andrew Ludlow explained that the stability of this ytterbium lattice clock paves way for other practical applications of high-performance timekeeping.
Mechanism of the clock
The mechanical clocks make use of the pendulum movement in order to keep the time. The atomic clocks, on the other hand, make use of an electromagnetic signal of light which is emitted at exact frequency, which in turn moves the electrons in cesium atoms.
The scientists built the ytterbium clocks by making use of around 10000 rare-earth atoms which were cooled to 10 microkelvin (10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero). These atoms were then trapped in the optical lattice made out of laser light.
Yet another laser ticks 518 trillion times per second and triggers the transition between two energy levels in the atoms. The higher level of stability and precision of the clock is because of the presence of larger numbers of atoms.
In order to extract best performance of any clock, the technicians need to average the current US civilian time standard, the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, for about 400,000 seconds (about five days). However, in case of ytterbium clocks, the same result can be achieved in around one second of averaging time.
Devices that can make wireless connections even without an onboard battery could spread computing power into everything you own.
A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.
These seemingly impossible devices could lead to a slew of new uses of computing, from better contactless payments to the spread of small, cheap sensors just about everywhere.
“Traditionally wireless communication has been about devices that generate radio frequency signals,” says Shyam Gollakota, one of the University of Washington researchers who led the project. “But you have so many radio signals around you from TV, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks. Why not use them?”
Gollakota and colleagues have created several prototypes to test the idea of using ambient radio waves to communicate. In one test, two credit-card-sized devices—albeit with relatively bulky antennas attached—were used to show how the technique could enable new forms of payment technology. Pressing a button on one card caused it to connect with and transfer virtual money to a similar card, all without any battery or external power source.
Here is a video of the prototypes:
“In that demonstration, the LEDs, touch sensors, microcontrollers, and the wireless communication are all powered by those ambient TV signals,” says Gollakota.
The devices communicate by varying how much they reflect—a quality known as backscatter—and absorb TV signals. Each device has a simple dipole antenna with two identical halves, similar to a classic “rabbit ears” TV aerial antenna. The two halves are linked by a transistor, which can switch between two states. It either connects the halves so they can work together and efficiently absorb ambient signals, or it leaves the halves separate so they scatter rather than absorb the signals. Devices close to one another can detect whether the other is absorbing or scattering ambient TV signals. “If a device nearby is absorbing more efficiently, another will feel [the signals] a bit less; if not, then it will feel more,” says Gollakota. A device encodes data by switching between absorbing and not absorbing to create a binary pattern.
The device gets the power to run its electronics and embedded software from the trickle of energy scavenged whenever its antenna is set to absorb radio waves.
In the tests, the devices were able to transfer data at a rate of one kilobit per second, sufficient to share sensor readings, information required to verify a device’s identity, or other simple tidbits. So far the longest links made between devices are around 2.5 feet, but the University of Washington team could extend that to as much as 20 feet with some relatively straightforward upgrades to the prototypes. The researchers also say the antennas of backscatter devices could be made smaller than those in the prototypes.
Gollakota says the devices could be programmed to work together in networks in which data travels by hopping from device to device to cover long distances and eventually connect to nodes on the Internet. He imagines many of a person’s possessions and household items being part of that battery-free network, making it possible to easily find a lost item like your keys. “These devices can talk to each other and know where it is,” he says.
The researchers tested that scenario by placing tags on cereal boxes lined up on a shelf to mimic a grocery store or warehouse. Each tag communicated with its nearest neighbor to check if it was in the correct place, and blinked its LED if it was not.
That demonstration impresses Kristofer Pister, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work on tiny devices dubbed “smart dust,” which gather data from just about anywhere, helped spawn many research projects on networked sensors. Using TV signals to enable such applications without batteries is “a really clever idea,” he says.
While Pister and others around the world—including the Washington group—have spent years creating the technology needed to make cheap, compact sensors practical (see “Smart Specks”), such networks are relatively scarce. Josh Smith, a University of Washington professor who led the backscatter project with Gollakota, says that being able to do without onboard power could help.
“The need for batteries is one thing that has been slowing down their deployment,” he says. Without batteries, sensors can be significantly cheaper, and much longer-lasting, allowing them to be placed in areas otherwise not worth it, says Smith. “You could build sensors into the walls of a building knowing they would work years later.”
Bhaskar Krishnamachari, who works on sensor networks at the University of Southern California, notes that in some rural areas and indoor environments, there may not be enough ambient radio waves to support the battery-free approach. “For many practical implementations, an onboard battery may be unavoidable,” he says. “However, the proposed approach may go some way in extending the time between battery-charging events.”
The backscatter communication technology was developed by Gollakota with Smith and David Wetherall, also a University of Washington professor, along with grad students Vincent Liu, Aaron Parks, and Vamsi Talla. A paper on the technology won best paper award at the ACM Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong this week .
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be one of the largest telescopes ever made, and will allow scientists to observe distant realms in unprecedented detail. It will display the far reaches of the universe at 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, and will also be able to measure the spectra of these distant objects. The GMT, located in Chile's Atacama Desert, will be completed in about 10 years and will require extraordinary precision and care.
Seven "perfect mirrors"–20 tons of glass in each–will be enclosed in a structure the height of a 22-story building. The quality of both the mirrors and their calibration is immensely important and challenging: "We have to make this optic precise enough so that when the light travels 5, 10 billion light-years and comes and hits our telescope, we don't scramble and lose that information that's traveled so long," explains the director of GMT, Dr. Pat McCarthy.
This new video shows the extreme precision with which the telescope is currently being constructed:
The GMT team knows the telescope will prove its worth. Dr. Wendy Freedman, chairman of GMT, predicts: "We will witness, directly, the first galaxies forming, the first supernovae forming, the first black holes forming, and see how the universe that we're living in now... came to be."
