80beats » Technology

Solar Panels Sometimes Pit Global Warming Against Local Ecosystems

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:22:08 +0000

Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert

Solar energy has been enjoying its day in the sun with massive federal subsidies, but the energy taken from sunlight also has a dark side. Building these plants in the American West destroys large swathes of the desert ecosystem. Cacti must be mowed down and local wildlife displaced to make room for the giant mirrors that will essentially carpet the desert. The LA Times has a great feature on the Ivanpah project in the Mojave that began construction in October 2010.

Far from an empty stretch of sand, the Mojave supports diverse wildlife. No one knows exactly how the new solar power plant will affect the tortoises, eagles, and Joshua trees that currently inhabit the area. Is it okay to sacrifice the desert in the fight against larger climate change? The situation has put environmental groups in a bind, as Times reporter Julie Cart explains:

The national office of the Sierra Club has had to quash local chapters’ opposition to some solar projects, sending out a 42-page directive making it clear that the club’s national policy goals superseded the objections of a local group. Animosity bubbled over after a local Southern California chapter was ...

Watch Ants Sip Grenadine, Spheres of Algae Spin, and Other Small-Scale Spectacles in These Movies

Valerie Ross — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:20:11 +0000

The many-times-magnified photos of the Nikon Small World photomicrography contest entrance us year after year, with mesmerizing close-ups of nature’s microscopic marvels. Now, in the first Small World in Motion movie competition, we get to see the world’s wee wonders in action. The three winning films and eleven honorable mentions chronicle circulating blood, budding yeast, gestating eggs, and more.

First Place: This time-lapse video, at 10x magnification, traces the path of ink injected into an artery of a three-day-old chick embryo. As the ink spreads through the chick’s vascular system, the branching blood vessels and beating heart become clearly visible.

Second Place: Mitochondria (in blue), the power plants of animal cells, move through the nerve cells (in green) of a transgenic zebrafish. This film, at 40x magnification, is the first time mitochondria have been watched shuttling through nerve cells in a living vertebrate, says its creator Dominik Paquet.

Third Place: A daphnia, a type of small crustacean, turns its compound eye towards a tiny sphere of Volvox algae, at 50x magnification. The scientist who made the video found these organisms in water from his garden pond.

Honorable Mention: An ant colony devours a drop of grenadine in this time-lapse video.

Watch the rest of the runners ...

The Engineer Who Has “Saved More Lives Than Any Single Person in the History of Aviation”

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:52:02 +0000

The number one cause of plane crashes used to be controlled flight into terrain (pdf), accidents where pilots unintentionally collide with an obstacle. A pilot unable to see through fog, for example, could fly straight into a mountain, crashing an otherwise perfectly functional plane. Such accidents killed over 9000 people—until aviation engineer Don Bateman’s crash-avoidance technology changed all that.

Bateman invented the original Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) in the 1970s. Using information from the altimeter. airspeed indicator, and other devices already standard in planes, the original GPWS warned pilots with increasing urgency—first “Caution—Terrain,” then “Pull up! Pull up!”—if the plane was due to crash. Bateman, now 79 years old, still works at Honeywell and he’s still perfecting the GPWS. The modern warning system integrates GPS locations of potential obstacles. In a profile of Bateman for the Seattle Times, Bob Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, says, “It’s accepted within the industry that Don Bateman has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation.”

Bateman traces his interest in improving flight safety to a horrific plane crash he witnessed as a 8-year-old boy growing up in Canada. He snuck out of school with ...

The Visionary Programmer Behind Those Viral Taiwanese News Animations

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:19:49 +0000

At the pace of 30 videos a day, Next Media Animation is churning out “All the news that’s fit to animate.” The Taiwanese media company is (in)famous for hilarious and hilariously inappropriate news videos reenacting Tiger Woods’ car crash and TSA’s new full body scanners. It’s the day after the Super Bowl and their video featuring Eli Manning, God, and a “geriatric Lady Gaga Impersonator” (aka Madonna) has already been up for hours. How does it happen so fast? The answer is a huge team of animators but also one particular programming whiz. Eliza Strickland at IEEE Spectrum has a profile of Kevin Wang, the guy who makes it all possible:

On Wang’s first day as director of NMA’s multimedia lab, he had no employees, no hardware, and no office. The assignment: Reduce the animation production cycle from 2 weeks to 2 hours so that on-the-fly animations could be ripped from the headlines and published on the company’s websites before the news got stale. Accomplishing this, Wang realized, would require a completely new approach to computer animation, using a combination of tricks and shortcuts that no one had tried before.

The process Wang came up with starts with motion-capture technology: Live actors re-create a scene, ...

New Solar Cell Pulls Electricity Out of Chopped-up Plants

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:08:39 +0000

For years, solar energy researchers have tried to imitate the success of photosynthesis by building devices like an artificial leaf and a solar cell that hijacks chemistry of photosynthetic bacteria. Now researchers at MIT have come up with an innovative technique that also happens to be very cheap: all you need is some “stabilizing powder” and plant waste. Mowed your lawn lately?

The stabilizing powder is a mix of safe, easily attainable chemicals that preserves photosystem I, a protein complex that captures light energy in plant cells. (In contrast, the newest photovoltaic cells in solar panels require metals that are rare or toxic.) The powder is mixed with plant matter such as grass clippings and crushed, and the resulting green goo is spread onto glass or metal substrate. Hook up wires to capture the electric current and that’s your solar panel.

The efficiency of these solar panels is only 0.1%, compared to the 15 to 18% efficiency of solar panels out in the market right now. Lead researcher Andrew Mershin says the technology still needs to improve 10-fold to become practical. After all, being able to power only one lightbulb with a whole house covered in solar ...

An Ambitious Frontier for Flying Drones: Saturn’s Earth-Like Moon, Titan

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:27:36 +0000

Artist’s rendering of AVIATR flying on Titan.

Saturn’s moon Titan is a lot like Earth: it has rain, seasons, volcanoes, and maybe even life. Well, it’s not exactly like Earth: the rain is liquid methane, the volcanoes spew ice, and any life would be based on methane. But still, it’s an interesting and relatively Earth-like place, considering the other planets and moons in our solar system. And University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes says he has a perfect way to explore this moon: with a flying drone.

Why use a flying machine rather than the rovers that worked so well on Mars? With 1/7 the gravity but 4 times the atmospheric density of Earth, flying through Titan is 28 times easier than on our own planet. In fact, it’s the easiest place to fly in our entire solar system. Drones on Titan can be heavier while requiring less fuel. With these facts in hand, University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes has proposed AVIATR, otherwise known as the Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.

As proposed, AVIATR would fly through Titan for a year on its radioactive power source plutonium-238, previously used on ...

Why Google Thinks You Are (a) Male and (b) Old

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:54:16 +0000

A funny thing happened after Google’s new privacy policy was announced last week. When people started checking what Google knows about them on Ad Preferences Manager—that’s the profile of you they build by watching your movements on the Web, so they can tailor ads accordingly—young women began reporting that actually, Google had aged them quite a bit. And had thought they were dudes. One young lady of our acquaintance is believed by the Ad Preferences genie to be a “65+” male. Why?

Well, as Kashmir Hill at Forbes points out, the way Ad Preferences works is by placing a cookie on the computer you happen to be using at the moment. The cookie records the sites you visit, each of which has certain user demographic information, like percentage of male and female visitors, age range, etc. ascribed to it by Google (though where they get that information, and how accurate it is, is not clear). Then Ad Preferences combines all the demographics of those sites to get your special blend of age, gender, interest in power tools, etc. Your Ad Preferences profile is not based on your Google profile—what you search, what you ...

Thousands of Infrastructure Computer Systems are Online, Unprotected

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:04:55 +0000

We’ve written before about hapless business owners practically handing hackers customers’ information by failing to observe basic computer security (Subway, we’re looking at you). But this is a security fail on a whole different level. A researcher has just revealed that about ten thousand systems controlling water plants, sewage plants, and other infrastructure are online, mostly unprotected and findable with a simple search.

Manufacturers of such industrial control systems, which can be used to direct everything from a high school’s lighting to power plants, have taken comfort in the fact that they aren’t supposed to be connected to the web, and thus protecting them from hackers isn’t necessary, said Eireann Leverett, the computer science grad student who presented these findings at the S4 conference (we learned of them from Kim Zetter at Wired’s Threat Level). But for whatever reason, in many cases the computers running the control software are in fact networked. Using a search that lets you identify Internet-connected devices, previous researchers have shown that you can find such computers, which is worrisome enough. But this single grad student, working full time for three months and part time for three months, ...

Your Laptop is Not Your Mind, Says Judge

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:05:03 +0000

If you think of your personal computer as almost an extension of yourself, a recent federal court ruling in Colorado sounds a little disturbing. The court has ordered that a woman decrypt files on her laptop so they can be used by prosecutors against her. The woman, who is being tried for mortgage fraud, argued that this is a violation of her Fifth Amendment right to keep from testifying against herself, but the court sees the matter differently. Timothy Lee at Ars Technica’s explanation of the problem gets to the heart of it:

In previous cases, judges have drawn a distinction between forcing a defendant to reveal her password and forcing her to decrypt encrypted data without disclosing the password. The courts have held that the former forces the defendant to reveal the contents of her mind, which raises Fifth Amendment issues. But Judge Robert Blackburn has now ruled that forcing a defendant to decrypt a laptop so that its contents can be inspected is little different from producing any other kind of document.

For some, being forced to decrypt your computer and handing over your password to investigators so they can decrypt it might not seem that different—what’s hidden by ...

Captive Cheese Fungus Gobbles Up Spills, Forming a Living, Self-Cleaning Surface

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:11:21 +0000

How a living material of cheese fungi sandwiched between plastic sheets works.

The crusty rind of cheeses like Camembert provide more than texture: they are miniature fortress walls, made of fungus, that protect the cheese’s creamy insides from bacterial invasions. Now, taking inspiration from this delicious snack, chemical engineers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have shown that such a fungus can be enclosed in porous plastic and will digest spills, with implications for creating antibacterial surfaces from living material.

The team sandwiched a layer of Penicillium roqueforti—from, you guessed it, Roquefort cheese—between a plastic base and a top sheet of plastic with nanoscale pores that allowed gas and liquids to move through, but did not allow the fungus to spread. Then, they mimicked a kitchen spill by pouring sugary broth on the surface and watched as, over the course of two weeks, the captive fungus gradually consumed the entire spill, leaving the surface clean. As shown in the figure above, the fungi can go dormant when there is no food around, so if one had a countertop of such a material, you wouldn’t need to keep spilling sugar on it to keep the fungi happy. ...

The Man Who Takes Care of Stephen Hawking’s Voice Speaks

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:59:05 +0000

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking‘s voice is quite distinctive: the robotic monotone, emanating from an electronic synthesizer he’s used since getting a tracheotomy, is instantly identifiable. But as his neuromuscular disease progresses, and as the technology he’s using grows increasingly obsolete, his personal voice technician has to devise more and more workarounds. Sam Blackburn, who’s occupied the position since 2006, is now moving on, and the New Scientist spoke to him about what the job entails. Blackburn says:

I guess the most interesting thing in my office is a little grey box, which contains the only copy we have of Stephen’s hardware voice synthesiser. The card inside dates back to the 1980s and this particular one contains Stephen’s voice. There’s a processor on it which has a unique program that turns text into speech that sounds like Stephen’s, and we have only two of these cards. The company that made them went bankrupt and nobody knows how it works any more. I am trying to reverse engineer it, which is quite tricky.

Can’t you update it with a new synthesiser?
No. It has to sound exactly the same. The voice is one of the unique things that defines ...

How Hackers Took Subway Customers for Millions of Dollars Due to Franchisees’ Incompetence

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:22:50 +0000

At some Subways, the sandwiches aren’t the only thing that’s
poorly constructed.

Security in the networked world of today isn’t always the easiest to understand, we’ll admit. But business owners, who are in a position of trust when it comes to customers’ debit and credit card transactions, should really be up on basic internet security. When they’re not, they literally give away their customers’ information to hackers. Case in point: about 150 Subway franchises, which, along with at least 50 other small retailers, caused 80,000 customers to lose a total of $3 million after they set up debit card scanners without proper security and encryption.

Here’s what happened: Though Subway distributes lists of security requirements to franchisees, some neglected to follow them. According to a Justice Department statement, in addition to disregarding encryption requirements, they installed cheap remote desktop software, the kind that lets a computer be accessed from another location. All hackers had to do was guess or otherwise determine the password for access, which, as all too many people have found out, isn’t very hard when your password is “password” or “12345.” Once they had that, the hackers were like kids in a ...

Wild Monkeys To Monitor Radiation Levels In Japan

Douglas Main — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:15:57 +0000

How do you do to measure radiation levels in the hard-to-reach forests near Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant? Why, fit wild monkeys with radiation sensors, of course! Researcher Takayuki Takahashi tells CNN that his team plans to fit three monkeys in early 2012 with collars that measure radiation, as well as GPS units that record location and distance from the ground. The researchers plan to leave the monitors in place for about a month, before detaching them via remote control and picking up them up to retrieve their stored data.

The information thus gathered will help scientists understand how radiation travels through the environment and the effects it may have on humans and animals. Radiation levels in the area have been monitored from the air by helicopter, but this has yielded an incomplete picture of what’s going on at ground level. By fitting sensors on the monkeys—who rove along the ground and high in the trees—the researchers may get a better understanding of how radioactive fallout varies by elevation and differs between various habitats. The project will take place in Minamisoma, a mountainous area just outside the exclusion zone about 16 ...

Scamming Social Media with Crowdsourcing is a Million-Dollar Business

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:04:46 +0000

This is not real grass. And that’s not a real comment, either.

Most stories written about online crowdsourcing discuss the philanthropic aspects of people around the world pitching in on a task, like helping out in a study or identifying photographed objects for the blind. Sure, the microtasks are usually tedious, but they need humans to do them and they provide an income stream, albeit a small one, to people who have no other way to make a livelihood. It’s all good, right?

Well, as it turns out, there are other, darker tasks that only humans can do. Specifically, writing spam comments, participating in online discussions to promote brands, making new social media profiles specifically to skew the conversation on a particular topic, and other, similar practices that UC Santa Barbara professor Ben Zhao calls “crowdturfing.” (That’s a portmanteau of “crowdsourcing” and “astroturfing,” the process of faking grassroots involvement.) As detailed in an ArXiv paper, Zhao and colleagues found that this “evil crowdsourcing on a very large scale” consumes the vast majority of business on crowdsourcing sites: On the second-largest such site in the US, ShortTask, 95% of the transactions were crowdturfing ...

Police Could Use DNA to Learn the Color of Suspects’ Eyes

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:37:38 +0000

In the dreams of crime scene investigators, no doubt, they can feed a piece of hair into a machine and see a reconstruction of what the owner looks like. There’s a hint of that fantasy in the news that Dutch scientists have developed a test intended help police tell from a crime scene DNA sample the color of a suspect’s eyes. This information is gleaned from examining six single nucleotide polymorphisms, small genetic markers that are used in DNA fingerprinting, and could potentially help steer investigations when there are few other leads on a suspect and there is no match in police DNA databases. But the test, which can tell whether someone has blue, brown, or indeterminate (which encompasses green, hazel, grey, etc.) eyes with an average of 94% accuracy, doesn’t seem to have been tested outside of Europe, which raises questions about how well it would work in populations with greater diversity. It’s also a little hard to feature how you could bring this information to bear in a vacuum of other details—you’d want to avoid hauling someone in just because they looked suspicious and have the same eye color as the readout ...

Sophisticated, 3D-Printed ATM Skimmer Appears in LA

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:38:07 +0000

We often write about the amazing, charming, ridiculous things that 3D printers makes possible: see the fabbed hermit crab shells, the space shuttle made of pureed scallops and cheese, the “pirated” Penrose Triangle. But machines that can make any physical object using only resin powder can also be turned to more nefarious ends. Security blogger Brain Krebs reports that someone has deployed at least one impressively sophisticated ATM skimmer in LA that appears to have been 3D printed. The device fits over the front of a bona fide Chase ATM. Just looking at these babies sends a chill down your spine—this person or persons knew what they were doing. Here’s more from Krebs:

It is an all-in-one skimmer designed to fit over the card acceptance slot and to record the data from the magnetic stripe of any card dipped into the reader. The fraud device is shown sideways in this picture; attached to an actual ATM, it would appear rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that the word “CHASE” is pointing down….On the bottom of the fake card acceptance slot is a tiny hole for a built-in spy camera that is connected to a battery. ...

More Fun Than a Blood Test: Researchers Want Diagnosis To Be as Simple as Spitting On Your Screen

Valerie Ross — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:24:17 +0000

What’s the News: If two South Korean researchers have their way, the days of needing specialized equipment to test whether someone has strep, the flu, or other common illnesses may soon be numbered. The pair want to check for disease markers in a tiny drop of a bodily fluid by pressing it against a touchscreen, so your diagnosis could come straight from your smart phone. While there’s no app for that yet, the scientists recently finished a proof-of-concept study showing that a touchscreen could differentiate between various concentrations of bacterial DNA—a first step towards diagnosing your disease by spitting on your iPad.

How the Heck:

Touchscreens like those in smartphones and tablets work by detecting changes in capacitance, or how much electric charge a material can store. When you’re using your phone, the touchscreen senses the relatively large capacitance change of fingertip vs. no fingertip. But, the researchers knew, touchscreens can detect much smaller differences. Using screens to measure the capacitance of a bodily fluid droplet could reveal the sample’s contents, they hypothesized, since the type and amount of a pathogen would change a fluid’s capacitance in a particular way. To test ...

Hundreds of Web Sites Seized on Court Order; No SOPA Bill Required

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:58:06 +0000

Corporations don’t have to wait for the SOPA bill to pass to start censoring the Internet, it turns out. Under a ruling just handed down by a federal judge in Nevada, hundreds of websites accused by Chanel of selling counterfeit goods are having their domains confiscated and their names removed from search engine results, with scanty evidence of the accusation’s validity.

The SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act, which you can read more about here, is backed by Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and others and is intended to stem piracy. However, numerous tech companies and civil liberties groups have pointed out that it’s a sledgehammer approach to a delicate problem, since it allows corporations to have the government remove sites from search engines and take other actions that create an Internet blacklist, similar to the Great Firewall of China.

These actions, in fact, would be very similar to what just happened in Nevada. Chanel had filed suits against more than 900 domain names they believed to be selling fake Chanel products. But the proof they provided to the court that these sites were guilty leaves a lot to be desired, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica ...

Rabbits Wear 1st Augmented Reality-Style Contact Lenses. Resolution: 1 Pixel

Valerie Ross — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:22:47 +0000

Bionic contact lenses—which would display navigation data, personal emails, or any other sort of info superimposed on the world before your eyes—have long been mainstays of science fiction. Over the past several years, researchers have been working to make the tech real-world ready, striving to find solutions to the energy, size, safety, and image-quality problems that come up when you’re trying to fit a tiny integrated circuit into something transparent that sits on an eyeball.

Now, University of Washington researchers and their Finnish colleagues have made the first functioning bionic lens: a prototype with a single LED pixel, which could be safely worn by rabbits in the lab. (The image at right shows a rabbit wearing an earlier version of the lens, which contained a circuit but no light-emitting components.) Radio frequency energy emitted from a nearby transmitter and picked up by a circular antenna a fifth of an inch in diameter, printed on the lens, powered the electronics. The transmitter supplied adequate energy from three feet away when the lens was sitting in a dish, but had to be less than an inch away when the lens was ...

What Is the SOPA Bill, and Why Is It Causing Such a Ruckus?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:00:12 +0000

An infographic produced by the organizers of American Censorship Day describes one of the arguments against the SOPA bill.

It’s been a busy couple of days in the discussion of free speech in the United States, and if you’re a regular reader of tech blogs, chances are you’ve begun to hear about one of this week’s issues: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This bill, intended to help stem online piracy and backed by companies like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, has set off the alarms of many sites and companies on the internet because it essentially allows the government and private corporations to censor entire sites that they fear are illegally distributing copyrighted material. Many companies—including Google, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Zynga, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and Ebay, which took out a full-page ad in the NYTimes with a letter to the congressmembers involved—and numerous sites and civil-liberty groups—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and others—have spoken up against the act. Some sites that would likely be among the blocked, including Tumblr, are self-censoring in protest. A coalition of Internet civil liberty and ...

How San Francisco’s Massive New Suspension Bridge Will Withstand Megaquakes

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:28:53 +0000

One cable holds the bridge up.

San Francisco has its share of massive earthquakes, but the Bay Bridge, one of the city’s main transit arteries, is not as quake-safe as you’d hope. That’s why, alongside it, the state is building a massive new replacement structure—the largest self-supporting suspension bridge ever built. Jim Giles at New Scientist went to visit the bridge and provides a primer on its engineering:

In a regular suspension bridge, the cables that support the roadway are hung between two or more towers, like a hammock between trees, and anchored at each end by a connection to land. The new bridge is more like a sling. A single cable loops under the roadway, over the tower and beneath the roadway on the other side of the tower. The enormous forces placed on the cable by the road cancel out, leaving a structure that is balanced but not directly supported by a land anchor…

As the [road] segment fell into place it revealed the full length of tower that stands behind it, an elegant structure made up of four concrete pillars. These drop into enormous steel foundations, parts of which were built in Texas and shipped ...

Low-Tech Vikings May Have Used Mineral With Funky Optics to Reach New World

Douglas Main — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:40:59 +0000

What’s the news: Viking legend has it that sailors could hold up crystal sunstones to the sky to help them find their way. Turns out the legend could be true. In a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers found that a type of crystal called an Icelandic spar commonly found in that country could accurately reveal the position of the sun in cloudy or near-dark conditions. How Vikings Got Around:

Researchers have long wondered and argued about how the Vikings were able to successfully navigate their way around the Northern Hemisphere in the late eighth to 11th centuries, hundreds of years before the magnetic compass reached Europe around 1300. Besides the direction of the wind, waves, and swell, the only way to navigate during the day away from shore is by knowing the sun’s direction. But that’s not so easy on a foggy or stormy day, or during the long twilight of Northern summers. Historians have speculated that, due to their optical properties, crystals of calcite (a common form of calcium carbonate) could have been used to ...

Acoustical Archaeologists Solve the Mystery of the Doge’s Stereo System

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:25:02 +0000

Saint Mark’s basilica was where many Venetian polyphonic works had their debut performances, but the reverb presented a puzzle for historians.

Ah, the Renaissance—lots of deep thinkers, gorgeous art, busty maidens, fried dough on a stick (if Ren faires are to be believed), and the liveliest music this side of the Middle Ages. But when you compare the elaborate, up-tempo harmonies of late Renaissance polyphony to the churches where they would have been performed, a serious discrepancy pops up. Giant Renaissance churches like Saint Mark’s basilica and the Redentore, both in Venice, have way too long of a reverberation time for those tunes to sound good. It takes a full 7 seconds for a note to fade after it’s played or sung, and that means that songs, especially fast ones, blend into a giant muddy mess.

A physicist and a music technologist, who presented their work at the American Acoustical Society on Monday, wondered if the churches, when packed full of people and hung with heavy draperies during holy festivals, might have sounded much better than they do today. Working with architectural historians, they calculated the chairs, drapery, and audience members’ ability to ...

NASA to Develop Dust-Grabbing Tractor Beams for Future Missions

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:04:37 +0000

Put ‘er here, R2.

Fans of intergalactic exploration both real and fictional, rejoice: Future NASA missions may incorporate tractor beams, lasers that can pick up objects at a distance. “We’re caught in a tractor beam and it’s pulling us in!” is a long way off, but NASA has just awarded a team of scientists $100,000 to explore three different methods of trapping objects with laser light and reeling them in.

Dust, rather than Corellian light freighters, are the objects in question: the hope is to use tractor beam tech to collect atmospheric particles or grab dust from a planet’s surface without resorting to using a drill, as the Mars rovers have. And indeed, one of the three methods—optical tweezers—has been used by biologists for decades to hold microscopic particles, including viruses and bacteria, in place for experiments.

The challenge will be developing techniques that will work in all the different environments that an exploratory craft might explore. Optical tweezers won’t work in the vacuum of space, for example, but could be useful on a planet with an atmosphere. The other techniques, which use solenoid beams and Bessel beams, could work ...

New, From the Makers of Stuxnet: The Duqu Virus

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:55:17 +0000

On October 14, security company Symantec got word from a research lab that they’d discovered a piece of malware that looked a lot like Stuxnet, the sophisticated computer virus that made headlines last year after its anonymous designers used it to attack Iran’s nuclear program. This new malware, called Duqu by the researchers who discovered it, shares much of Stuxnet’s code, suggesting that it came from the same people who built the first virus, or at least people who had access to the source code.

Found in computer systems in Europe, Duqu isn’t intended to destroy a physical object, the way Stuxnet was, but rather is gathering information by recording users’ keystrokes and collecting details from the infected system. While Stuxnet contained instructions for hijacking industrial control systems in order to wreck uranium-purification centrifuges, Duqu is searching for plans and specifications that will let its designers launch an attack on such a system in the future. Launched after Stuxnet was discovered, Duqu doesn’t replicate, and appears to have been directed to a very limited number of European targets, including companies that make industrial control systems. It self-destructs after 36 days, presumably to avoid detection.

Read ...

Scottish Doctors Are Applying Ultrasound to Broken Bones. Does That Really Help?

Douglas Main — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:02:52 +0000

A team of doctors in Glasgow, Scotland, have begun using ultrasound to help heal patients’ broken bones, claiming the technique can reduce recovery time by up to 40 percent with especially bad fractures. Developed in the 1950s by physicians in the same city, ultrasound is widely used in sonograms to produce images of developing fetuses. Sonograms are made by emitting sound waves into the body and recording the reflected patterns. To heal fractures, sound is emitted at a slightly different frequency and stimulates the development and activity of osteoblasts, which lay down new bone.

So does it work? So far the physicians only have anecdotal evidence to support their claims, like the surprisingly quick recovery of a Scottish man who fell off a 20-foot water tank and broke his ankle into eight pieces. A recent review of more than 40 years of research into ultrasound’s bone-healing abilities determined there’s good evidence the technology can help heal “fresh” fractures, i.e., within one to two weeks after the injury. While the study found some hints that ultrasound could help heal older fractures, the authors determined there wasn’t ...

Will Data-Crunching Give Obama an Edge?

Valerie Ross — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:10:26 +0000

As the 2012 presidential race ramps up, campaigns are courting voters not only at the traditional county fairs and town hall meetings, but online—and generating, in the process, an enormous amount of data about who potential voters are and what they want. At CNN.com, Micah Sifry—an expert on the intersection of technology and politics—delves in the Obama team’s extensive efforts to mine and manage the data in a way that could help them better interact with voters and home in on important issues. He writes:

Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers — number of calls made, number of doors knocked—and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.

No Republican candidates, however, seem to have similar systems in place to help them manage and ...

US Drone Fighters Have Been Infected by a Computer Virus of Unknown Origin

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:58:55 +0000

Unmanned drones like this Predator are now central to US warfare—but they are also vulnerable to cyberattacks.

What’s the News: A computer virus that records the keystrokes of US military operators has infected two classes of American military drones. “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” a military source told Wired’s Danger Room, which broke the story. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

What’s the Context:

Drone missions have become a staple of the US’s post-9/11 warfare. Controlled by crews usually located in the Nevada desert, the unmanned drones wing over deserts half a world away in Afghanistan and Iraq and have contributed to the killing of at least 2,000 suspected fighters and civilians. And in Pakistan, drones have attacked numerous targets on behalf on the CIA. Drones’ implications in civilian deaths, as well as their use in CIA-directed assassinations, have made them a subject of fierce controversy. You can read more about drones and unmanned warfare in this DISCOVER feature, which explores the eventuality that the decision-making processes usually handled by human crews may soon be relegated to the drones themselves. But information security has been revealed to ...

Here’s a Tribute That Speaks to the Real Steve Jobs

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:34:45 +0000

The Internet’s cup runneth over with elegies for the Apple cofounder, who died yesterday at 56. People around the world are pouring out their stories of how Jobs, via the company’s products, changed their lives.

Many have a frankly religious tone, like the middle-aged mom who spoke in a breathless voice about the iPhone’s “grace” and the architect Jobs hired in the mid-80s who told how Jobs “put his hand on mine” when teaching him to use a mouse (both were on NPR member station WNYC this morning). Other testimonials focus more on when the teller first encountered an Apple product, back in the days when mice were the big new thing. People are even setting up shrines in Apple stores, a move that strikes some as fitting tribute, others as cultish (“If you needed any more proof that brands are our new gods…” one person tweeted in response to the news). Though the blog “Steve Jobs is God” appears to be defunct, its message is on many lips today, in some form or another. It’s simply astounding how much of a connection many felt to Jobs, whom they see as the architect of a significant ...

The House From Pixar’s Up!…in Real Life

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:00:28 +0000

Finally! After teasers released in March whetted our appetites, this maker’s dream is now airing: This week National Geographic’s DIY show “How Hard Can It Be?”, the team satisfies your hunger to see Carl Fredricksen’s balloon-propelled house in the flesh—using around 300 technicolor weather balloons and a lightweight cottage that the team was still stapling together just hours before it rose into the sky, to bob along at 10,000 feet. You can’t not root for this spunky bunch (even though this first video ends in a cliffhanger):

Luckily, with a bit of searching on the NatGeo site, you can find the clincher:

When they launched the balloon a few months ago, Wired did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the physics involved here. Though Wired didn’t address this, we suspect that one reason they couldn’t use party balloons is that the pressure from balloons on the outside of the cluster pushing in on the ones in the center would cause them to burst. What do you think?

What is Amazon Silk?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:21:33 +0000

What’s the News: Along with a whole passel of new Kindles, Amazon yesterday announced a new browser to accompany them, named Silk. And it’s got some unusual characteristics that have some crowing about the next big thing in mobile browsing and others wondering about privacy implications.

How Does It Work:

Silk, according to statements by the company (check out the video above), is a browser that uses Amazon’s massive cloud computing resources to relieve the processing burden on its Kindle Fire tablet, resulting in super-fast page loading. When you go to a webpage on the tablet, Amazon’s remote servers, rather than the processor on the tablet, go forth and assemble all of the pictures, style sheets, HTML, and other gear that your browser usually needs to go track down by itself. Then the servers send that information to the tablet, accomplishing the task much quicker than a normal browser. Silk also keeps track of where you tend to go and caches images, style sheets, etc., so frequently visited pages load faster on the device. For a detailed-yet-accessible rundown of Silk’s backend, check out Ryan Paul’s piece at Ars Technica.

Haven’t We Heard Something Like This Before?

Indeed we have. The Norwegian software company Opera ...

New Gene Sequencing Technique Opens the Doors for Studying Elusive Bacteria

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:49:14 +0000

If bacteria can’t grow in a Petri dish, sequencing them is difficult.

What’s the News: Want the genome of a bacterium you found in your belly button? Or, for that matter, of a bacterium producing a promising new antibiotic? Well, unless you can get it to thrive in a Petri dish and create a billion sister cells for analysis, you’re out of luck.

But sequencing the genomes of notoriously finicky bacteria, like those on skin, could be on the horizon with a new procedure that bypasses the Petri dish step. Pairing a new algorithm with an earlier technique, scientists from the Venter Institute and their collaborators can now get all that information from a single cell.

How the Heck:

The team has been working on sequencing the genomes of single cells for a while and had developed a technique that, instead of requiring a billion cells, simply replicates fragments of the genome of a single cell over and over in a test tube until there’s a billion-cells’ worth of DNA. But the replication is haphazard: some fragments are replicated many times while only one or two copies exist of others. This meant that legitimate sections of ...

“Beyond Frugality”: Senate Panel Cuts NSF Budget by $162 Million

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:17:14 +0000

Yesterday, the Senate subcommittee that funds the NSF, NASA, and research agencies in the Department of Commerce announced that they could see no way out of startlingly drastic budget cuts.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which develops and curates technical standards for science and industry, will see a 10% drop in its budget, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for 20% of the basic research funding in the nation, will lose $162 million, or 2.4% of its budget. Under the plan, which passed 15-1 in the subcommittee, other programs will be wiped completely, like the Technology Innovation Program, which funds high-risk, high-reward research. “We’ve gone beyond frugality and are into austerity. … We didn’t want to do this, but that’s the way the world is,” said an unhappy Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) (via ScienceNOW), who has frequently gone to bat for science funding and heads the subcommittee. Today, the whole Senate Appropriations Committee will vote on the plan—for more news as it develops, head over to Science NOW.

[Disclosure: DISCOVER Magazine is a media partner of the NSF, helping produce public-science programs like Changing Planet.]

Tiny Head-Mounted Microscope Rides Along As Mice Go About Their Business

Valerie Ross — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:49:17 +0000

What’s the News: A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.

What’s the Context:

To watch a living brain in action, researchers usually have to make sure the animal that brain belongs to is keeping very still, be it a human in an MRI machine or a mouse under a benchtop microscope. That’s not such a problem for researchers studying, say, vision or memory—but it’s difficult to investigate the neuroscience of movement or behavior when your subjects can’t move around and behave.

How the Heck:

The new device is a fluorescence microscope, meaning it shines light on a sample, then captures the glow that bounces back. Despite the scope’s tiny size, the researchers fit all the necessary optical components—lenses, sensors, a mirror, an LED light, and more—inside it. In addition to being mobile, the microscope captures the activity of more cells ...

How Human Are You? A New Turing Test Relies on Spatial Relations

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:56:08 +0000

Where is the cup? THERE IS NO CUP.

What’s the News: Ever since Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, proposed that sufficiently advanced computers could pass as human in a conversation, the classic Turing test has involved what’s essentially instant messaging. Computers designed to imitate human conversational patterns are often entered by their designers in competitions where they aim to fool people in front of a distant monitor into thinking they’re human—and they do a pretty good job, although some human mimics, like chatbots, sound like crazed children on their first spin in cyberspace (“I’m not a robot, I’m a unicorn!“).

But scientists have noticed that humans describe where objects are in space in a specific way, taking into account what spatial relationships would be most useful for a human listener. Artificial intelligences, even fairly sophisticated ones, talk about space differently, and the difference is large enough that it can form the basis of a new type of Turing test, British scientists reported at a conference in April. Now, New Scientist has developed an interactive version of the test, which lets you see for yourself what statements about space set off your silicon-lifeform alarms. ...

Tumor-Monitoring Implant Could Give Advance Warning of Growth

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:01:34 +0000

The blood oxygen-monitoring chip, which is about 2 cm long and encased in plastic, is still in the
early stages of testing.

What’s the News: Scientists in Germany are developing a chip that keeps track of blood oxygen levels for implanting near tumors, reports Kate Baggot at Technology Review. When blood oxygen levels drop, signalling a burst of tumor growth, doctors would be alerted immediately, jump-starting the treatment process.

How the Heck:

The chip, called the IntelliTuM, contains a sensor, electronics for measurements, and a transmitter that will send status updates to a receiver carried by the patient and thence to the doctor, reports Technology Review. Right now, the chip senses the levels of dissolved oxygen in its immediate area, which, if it’s near a tumor, can change as the tumor transitions into a more aggressive mode. But the team has also been able to change the sensor remotely to detect pH instead, so there is some flexibility in the kinds of markers it can detect. All tests, so far, have been in tissue culture, not in animals. The team envisions the device being useful in monitoring slow-growing or inoperable tumors in areas like the brain or ...

New Stealth Tech Lets Tanks Blend Into the Infrared Background

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:18:03 +0000

Giant pixels pasted onto tanks can now sense the general pattern of infrared energy, or heat, distributed around a bucolic mountain meadow or windy desert and camouflage the vehicle accordingly, so heat-spying eyes will be none the wiser.

Such adaptive cloaking has been on the wishlist of world governments for decades, but most attempts so far have been limited by cost and technical problems, like not being able to change the cloak fast enough to be convincing on a moving vehicle or failing to stand up to enemy fire. There aren’t a lot of details available about this implementation, called Adaptiv and developed by BAE Systems in part for the Swedish government, but a press release from the company says that not only can the pixels adapt quickly, they use relatively little energy and can serve as armor as well. Tests in July showed that the tiles could make a tank go invisible entirely or impersonate a 4×4 vehicle, at least from an infrared scanner’s point of view, and the company’s engineers are looking into using the pixels to cloak vehicles in other areas of the electromagnetic spectrum, like the visible-light bit, as well. Check out the above video ...

Cyborg Beetles’ Neural Implants Could Suck Power From Bugs’ Wing Beats

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:03:41 +0000

These spiral generators scavenge power when the beetle beats its wings.

What’s the News: Building tiny fly-like robots—for spying, search and rescue, and so on—has a long history in robotics. But some researchers, citing the challenge of building agile, dynamic machines at that scale, have turned to Mother Nature instead and made living beetles into cyborgs, controlling their flight via neural implants.

Finding a power source that’s light enough for these beetles to port around has been difficult, but now, a team of roboticists have found that harvesting power from their beating wings could be a way to make these ‘borgs go battery-less.

How the Heck:

The researchers mounted piezolectric generators, which produce power when they’re bent or compressed, on the thoraxes of green june beetles near where the wings attach. Trying out two different shapes, spiral and beam-like, with two different designs each, they were able to harvest about 45 µW of power from each beetle, and demonstrated that the closer they got to the base of the beetles’ wings, the more they could scavenge. Right near the base, they could increase their power output to 115 µW. They estimate that if the generator can be hooked ...

For Authoritarian Regimes, Turning Off the Internet is a Fatal Mistake, Study Says

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:16:35 +0000

Once the Egyptian government cut the Internet, the protests in Tahrir Square were joined by protests across the country.

What’s the News: Social networking has been a star of the Arab Spring revolutions. People can’t stop talking about how Twitter and Facebook helped protestors organize, and when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak suddenly cut access to the Internet and cell phone service on January 28th, many wondered how the protestors would share information and keep momentum. But as it turned out, depriving people of information had an explosive effect—far from the epicenter at Tahrir Square in Cairo, so many grassroots protests sprung up that the military was brought in. Two weeks later, Mubarak resigned.

Using the Egyptian revolution as a case study, a new paper makes the case that theories of group dynamics explain why access to information can actually have a quenching effect on revolutions, and argues that regimes that shut information sources down are signing their own death warrants.

How the Heck:

The paper’s author, political science graduate student Navid Hassanpour, describes various other revolutions in which information kept people content, but he focused on the Egyptian revolution because the information shut-off was sudden and ...

In Development: Networks of Unmanned Quadcopters to Ferry Medicine to Isolated Areas

Valerie Ross — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:11:15 +0000

Matternet’s design for a Medical Aid Quadcopter

What’s the News: Many of the unmanned aerial vehicles we hear about are flying off to war, laden with weapons or surveillance equipment. The tech start-up Matternet, however, is designing small quadcopter UAVs to carry peaceable payloads, delivering medical supplies and other necessities to areas dangerous or difficult to reach by road.

How the Heck:

The quadcopters are based on already-developed, open-source UAV tech from DIY Drones. They navigate both by GPS and by homing in on landing pads, which serve as beacons. Matternet’s current prototype can fly nearly two miles while carrying a two-pound load. Its first commercial model, which could be ready in three to six months, will be able to carry a four-pound load more than six miles. One kit of a quadcopter and two stations will cost $1200 for parts plus labor, and the company plans to sell the kits for $2500 each.

The Future Holds:

The immediate applications, the company says, will be in public health, carrying drugs, diagnostic tests, tissue samples, and other medical supplies to and from areas isolated by poor roads, seasonal flooding, or natural disasters. As ...