Two weeks ago, an accident in the Red Sea sliced through three fiber-optic telecommunications cables that carried phone calls and connected Internet users in Africa and the Middle East. Then, on Saturday, a ship dropped its anchor at an inopportune spot off the Kenyan city of Mombasa, severing another cable. With those four cables out of commission, a single cable is left to shuttle information into and out of East Africa, slowing down connection speeds by 20% in six countries in the regions for weeks until the other cables are fixed.

It seems, in the increasingly interconnected and wireless world, like a clumsy system at best to rely on cables crisscrossing the ocean floor—particularly when two relatively small maritime mishaps are enough to throw that system out of whack. But as Clay Dillow explains over at Popular Science, these undersea links are actually an impressively efficient, powerful, and—yes—stable way to connect the globe:

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For something that you can’t see or touch, the electromagnetic spectrum sure is valuable property. The auction of a big slice of useful, empty airwaves—used by television broadcasts before they went all digital in 2009—is expected to net the federal government $25 billion to fund payroll tax cut extensions. This auction is one thing everyone could agree on amidst all the bipartisan sniping in Congress. That’s how much of a no-brainer it is.

While the electromagnetic spectrum is fixed by the laws of physics, the use of that spectrum is human and quickly changing affair: global mobile traffic is expected to increase 18-fold in the next 5 years. WiFi, mobile phones, and radio are all vying for a limited slice of the radio frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Luckily, we’ve got a chunk of empty airwaves where analog TV used to be. Mobile phone companies, whose networks are crunched by the hundreds of millions of smartphones we’re now toting around, will definitely be in the auction.

A proposal to designate a chunk of the former TV airwaves as a free, unlicensed ”white space” may be even more interesting. Tech companies such as Google have long campaigned for white spaces, with the hope that public access to the spectrum will spur innovation in wireless technology. WiFi currently operates at high frequencies and short range, which is why you have to be pretty close to a coffee shop to steal its free WiFi.

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Using an exquisitely sensitive probe, scientists at IBM have succeeded in making an image of where a single molecule’s positive and negative charges lie. The molecule in question is X-shaped naphthalocyanine, which can switch back and forth between two different configurations when voltage is applied to it, and which IBM has used in its research into tiny logic switches. It was this shift and its accompanying change in the distribution of the molecule’s charge that the researchers chose to investigate. In the image above, red indicates where the electrical field between the probe and molecule was positive, and blue indicates negative. As scientists and engineers look into building molecule-sized transistors and other electronic devices, being able to detect exactly where a molecule’s charge is and how chemical reactions change it will be invaluable.

Image courtesy of IBM Research

Diagram for AED electrode placement.

Touted as life-saving devices, some 1.5 million automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are around the US. AEDs are designed to be used by anyone, regardless of training, to restore normal heartbeats after sudden cardiac arrest. And in this life-or-death situation, a surprisingly number of the devices fail.

Between 2005 and 2009, there were 28,000 reports of AED malfunction in the US, representing 1 out of 50 devices in the country. Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum investigates the cause of these failures. Surprisingly basic engineering errors were responsible for some of the malfunctions, such as parts that are just too imprecise for a matter of life or death:

One AED, the brand name of which the FDA would not disclose, was found to occasionally misdiagnose the heart’s electrical rhythm. It delivered some shocks that weren’t needed and failed to deliver others that were. The culprit was a resistor that could vary in resistance by up to 10 percent of its stated value. “When our engineer looked at this design, it was an instant ‘uh‑oh,’ ” says [Al Taylor of the FDA].

How could regulations on medical devices be so lax? Harris explains a loophole in the FDA regulation system: (more…)

The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has got many experts predicting a future in which currently tractable diseases, like tuberculosis, became untreatable again. The popularity of modern antibiotics, ironically, is what is leading to their downfall: antibiotics in consumer products, like soaps, as well as the excessive use of antibiotics by people who have no bacterial infections, help select for strains of bacteria that don’t respond to drugs. Factory-farmed livestock, which receive tremendous doses of antibiotics in their feed, are also a likely breeding ground for resistant bacteria that could potentially infect humans.

Proponents of factory farming have scoffed at such claims [pdf], but now, scientists have provided definitive evidence that this happens: through genetic analysis, they found that a strain of MRSA, already resistant to one family of drugs, had hopped from people to farmed pigs, acquired resistance to another antibiotic being fed to the pigs, and then leapt back into humans, taking its new resistance with it. That strain, called MRSA ST398 or CC398, is now causing 1 out of 4 cases of MRSA in some regions of the Netherlands [pdf], where it arose, and it has also been found across the Atlantic in nearly half of the meat in US commerce. After this strain arose in 2004, the European Union began a ban the use of antibiotics in livestock feed. In the United States, however, where most of the antibiotics in circulation are being used in farming, no such regulation exists.

[via Superbug and NPR]

Image courtesy of wattpublishing / flickr

A developing human egg.

What’s the News: Since the 1950s, it’s been generally accepted that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. One gets doled out with each menstrual cycle, and when they run out, you get menopause. But a smattering of papers over the last decade or so have indicated that that dogma might be incorrect: scientists found cells in the ovarian tissue of female mice that appear capable of producing new eggs. Now, working with donated tissue, researchers have found similar cells in human ovaries.

Headlines hyping the find have been spreading across the web, and we feel compelled to point out that this paper doesn’t mean that we will be able to grow fresh new eggs in Petri dishes, and it doesn’t prove that in real, live women these cells actually mature into eggs that can develop into offspring. It does, however, provide an interesting chance to see whether egg production by these cells can be jump-started using drugs.

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Whatcha looking at? This is just my face.

This new leaf-nosed bat species was recently discovered in Vietnam. What’s with the strange nose? Scientists think that its protuberances and indentations help the bat in echolocation. Come to think of it, it does kind of resemble another excellent sound detector: the inside a cat’s ear.

As strange as the Hipposideros griffini’s nose is, it’s really got nothing on the star-nosed mole.

[via National Geographic News]

Image courtesy of Vu Dinh Thong / Journal of Mammalogy 

Thank god for air friction. Without it, falling rain would smack into our heads at hundreds of miles per hour. But friction works both ways—falling raindrops also slow down the movement of air molecules in the atmosphere. A new paper in Science calculated that raindrops dissipate as much kinetic energy from the atmosphere as air turbulence. Granted, at 1.8 watts per square meter and 0.75% of the atmosphere’s total kinetic energy, that’s not very much. What’s surprising is that rain drops are pulling more than their weight, as they make up only 0.01% of the atmosphere’s mass.

Researchers calculated the kinetic energy dissipated by a single raindrop and put it together with precipitation rates around the world. Since satellite precipitation data also show the height from which rain started falling, the researchers could plug how far raindrops fell into their energy calculations. It all adds up across the whole globe: the researchers estimate the total rate of energy dissipation from rainfall to be 10¹⁵ Watts. That’s a lot of energy, but still unlikely to affect major weather phenomena like hurricanes or tornados.

[via Nature News]

Image via Shutterstock 

Dingoes are in the news lately: the infamous “a dingo ate my baby” case may be nearing its conclusion, 32 years after an Australian baby disappeared on a family camping trip; her mother, who long claimed the baby was stolen by a dingo, has been vindicated by an inquest this week noting that dingo attacks on humans have been well-documented in the intervening decades. But dingoes can use their cleverness for less gruesome purposes, as well. What is apparently the first tool use in a canid was observed recently, in a dingo named Sterling who really, really wanted to chew on something out of his reach.

As you can see in the video above, Sterling is trying to get a hold of a piece of food placed on his enclosure at the Dingo Discovery Research Center in Australia, after researchers caught him on tape yanking down a name tag from the same location. He has never been trained in any similar tasks, as far as the researchers know, but after jumping fails to get him close enough, he heads off to the back of the enclosure and hooks his teeth around the leg of a white table. Then the table begins to move, as Sterling pulls it towards the front of the enclosure. Once he gets it near the front, one of his compatriots jumps on, but then stands around doing nothing. Sterling hops on, pushes the offender out of the way, and, after several false starts, manages to walk his forelegs across the wire mesh to bring the food within his reach. He promptly tears his prize to the ground.

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The Y chromosome, at the bottom right of this set of human
chromosomes, is dwarfed by the X.

Over the last few decades, scientists and journalists have speculated that the end of man—men, that is—was nigh. The biological reason for this possibility is the ever-shrinking Y chromosome: 300-200 million years ago, the Y, like females’ X chromosome, had hundreds of genes, but it now contains less than 80, 19 of which code for specifically male traits such as sperm production. This remarkable contraction set people’s imaginations spinning, especially after an opinion piece said in Nature 10 years ago that the Y chromosome might disappear, as it already has in voles, in 10 million years.

A Nature paper published this week, however, may indicate that the Y is sticking around. Biologists at the Whitehead Institute have compared the Y chromosome of rhesus monkeys with the human Y chromosome, and they’ve found that the two have the same number but one of key male-specific genes. This implies that the human Y chromosome’s shrinkage, at least when it comes to key genes, stopped at least around 25 million years ago, when the common ancestor of humans and rhesus monkeys was alive. The team says that this 25 million years of stasis indicates that the Y’s days of sloughing genes are over, that the genes it carries now are the essential ones and cannot be removed without seriously impacting reproductive function, while the genes lost in the past were expendable.

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Moon Rocks Opener from The Atavist on Vimeo.

On December 13, 1972, on the surface of the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 17 paused in their lunar ramblings to pick up a chunk of rock about 10 centimeters long. After showing to their video camera, they brought the rock back to Earth, where it was named Sample 70017 and broken into hundreds of fragments, 366 of which were each embedded in plastic, glued to a plaque, and presented by the United States to the leaders of the world’s nations as a symbol of peace.

A new piece of narrative journalism published at The Atavist by Joe Kloc tells the story of that 10-centimeter rock and all its far-flung daughters, which, over the last 40 years, have variously disappeared in coups, been forgotten on museum shelves, or made their way by mysterious avenues to the black market. At the heart of the story is Joseph Gutheinz, a former NASA special agent driven by a kind of mania to return stolen moonrocks to their places of honor—even if few others see the value of his quest. I asked Kloc explain the power of these tiny fragments of the moon.

VG: What is it about moonrocks that exert this pull for some people?

JK: The answer isn’t the same for everybody. For [Gutheinz], I think it is about the time in history they capture. He sees them as a way to inspire kids to get back to that time, to become dreamer-scientist-explorers. And then the people who try to sell them for millions [on the black market] obviously want money. But in each case, the idea behind the desire is ultimately that sort of intangible fascination we all have with the moon.

But these particular moon rocks—the fragments presented to the nations of the world in 1973—seem bizarrely at odds with that kind of sacred viewpoint. They were a PR stunt, despite the stated purpose of giving them as emblems of peace. That they are embedded in plastic and glued to plaques makes them unlikely objects of worship.

Maybe the best way to think about it is that the moon missions were always two things: on the one hand a Cold War-sized political power play, on the other a monumental—perhaps the most monumental—human achievement. Now the rocks embody that same positive-negative duality. On the one hand they are a Cold War power play that some want to sell for millions; on the other, they are this relic of one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

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Tampering with GPS signals can cause big problems in both shipping routes and financial markets, warned experts at a conference on GPS security. The technology is routinely used in navigation and time synchronization nowadays, but signals are left vulnerable to jamming and spoofing.

This is partly because GPS signals are relatively weak: ”A GPS satellite emits no more power than a car headlight, and with that it has to illuminate half the Earth’s surface,” said David Last, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, to the BBC.

Jamming devices work by broadcasting a signal at the same frequency as GPS, and can be bought for less than $100 online. When researchers set up 20 jamming monitors in locations around the UK, they caught 60 incidents in 6 months. They think most of these are from stolen trucks, where thieves jam the truck’s GPS to keep from broadcasting its location. According to Last, jamming GPS ships on ships isn’t much harder: Tests found that every major system was affected by a device with less than 1/1000 the power of a cell phone. The Financial Times reports:
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Each of us, just sitting in our chairs, is a little heat energy factory. So why not harness that body heat to power our phones and flashlights? Researchers have invented a thin, flexible “power felt” that can be worn as clothes, converting heat into an electric current. Dead batteries are so out in the future.

The thermoelectric fabric is made by stacking layers of plastic insulation with carbon nanotubes, one-atom-thick cylinders of carbon that are showing up everywhere from x-rays to fuel cells. The current version only makes about 140 nanowatts of power, so it’ll need some improvement before it becomes practical.

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King penguin with chick.

Three squawks for conservation! After New Zealand businessman Joseph Hatch boiled down 3 million Macquarie Island king penguins for their blubber, public outrage helped make the island a wildlife sanctuary in 1933. The king penguins then flourished undisturbed, growing from the decimated population of 3,400 to half a million today. Those raw numbers look good, but to gauge the population’s viability, scientists needed to find out a little more. A new study has found that the population has also recovered to pre-slaughter levels of genetic diversity, just 80 years after their near-extinction.

Population bottlenecks like the one caused by Hatch’s steam digester mean not only fewer individuals but also less diversity in the gene pool. This makes it difficult for the population to adapt to any stresses—a disease, for example, that can wipe out the remaining population if everyone has the same immune system.

To compare pre- and post-bottleneck genetic diversity, the researchers sequenced DNA from 1,000-year-old penguin bones on the island. The ancient DNA samples had similar levels of diversity as modern samples from the foot of living penguins. The researchers were surprised by how the population had recovered and saw this as a testament to conservation efforts.

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Along the top of this satellite image lies the coast of South Africa, but follow the sheets of clouds south about 500 miles, and a beautiful, incongruous-looking blue swirl appears. That plankton-laced eddy, which is 90 miles wide, is the oceanic version of a storm, spun off from a larger current and caused by roiling of water instead of air. Eddies in this region bring warm water from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic, and they can even pull nutrients up from the deep sea, fertilizing surface waters and causing blooms of plankton in areas that are otherwise rather devoid of life. It is just such a bloom that lends this eddy its cerulean hue.

Image courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory