What’s the News: Many evaluations of scientific excellence singling out specific universities or departments, but two European researchers have taken a different approach: They rated the top scientific cities by looking at what proportion of published science articles are highly cited. Cambridge, Massachusetts, came out as the winner in physics and chemistry (no surprise there—MIT and Harvard) for having lots of influential papers; London was tops in psychology; Moscow was the chemistry and physics loser; and Taipei, Taiwan was the low achiever in psychology.

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How the Heck:

• Researchers used a science database called Web of Science to count the number of total papers and influential papers produced in cities around the world in 2008. (In chemistry, for example, a total of 10,460 papers were published that year.)
• The expectation was that 10% of each city’s papers would appear in the top 10% of the most-cited papers. Researchers tallied up the number of actually influential papers from each city and compared that with the expected figure.
• The under-performing cities are plotted on Google Maps as red dots, while the over-performing are green. For example, on the chemistry-cities map, Moscow’s circle is the largest because it’s publishing the most chemistry papers, but it’s red because only 5 of its papers were in the top 10% of most-cited chemistry papers, far below the expected figure of 47.7 (10% of its output).

What’s the Context:

• The northernmost city with more than expected highly cited papers was Tromso, Norway, proving that science can prosper even in the icy, inhospitable stretches of the Norwegian Sea.
• While fewer in number than North America, Europe, and China, there is still some thriving science cities in countries in the Middle East, including Oman and Iran—though Iraq is noticeably blank.
• Compared to the maps of physics and chemistry, there are far more successful psychology cities.

Not So Fast: As the researchers note, the study fuzzes over any distinctions that emerge on a smaller scale than a city—for instance, the maps don’t show any difference between a city with one superstar who publishes 10 influential papers and another city with a group of 10 researchers who each publish 1. And since the scoring is based on citations, it’s subject to biases based on renown, language, and resources; the same paper published by a famous researcher at Oxford will get more notice than if it were published in Nigeria.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1103.3216: Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff, Which Cities Produce Worldwide More Excellent Papers Than Can Be Expected? A New Mapping Approach—Using Google Maps—Based On Statistical Significance Testing

What’s the News: Yesterday, AT&T announced plans to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion from parent company Deutsche Telekom, making the new behemoth the hands-down largest wireless company in the United States. Though AT&T touts this merger as good for everyone, some technology writers, such as GigaOM’s Om Malik write that “it’s hard to find winners, apart from AT&T and T-Mobile shareholders.”

What’s the Context:

• AT&T says the combined skills of the two companies will improve high-speed mobile broadband service and extend coverage to more rural communities, achieving President Obama’s goal of connecting “every part of America to the digital age.”
• With T-Mobile’s 33.7 million wireless subscribers, AT&T will have 129.2 million subscribers, dwarfing Verizon Wireless’s 94.1 million. So begins a new chapter in the companies’ long-term rivalry, as previously covered in 80beats.
• T-Mobile is the fourth-largest mobile provider in the U.S., and offers cheaper plans than category leaders AT&T and Verizon.

Not So Fast: The company merger is still awaiting regulator approval. Some argue that the bigger AT&T will hurt smaller companies like Sprint and even larger ones like Google. “Sprint and T-Mobile often stood against AT&T and Verizon on a variety of regulatory issues, so if AT&T succeeds, Sprint will stand alone on special access and other issues,” writes Malik. With more power, it’ll be easier for AT&T to “impose its own will” on what services and apps are placed on Android smartphones. If the FCC or Justice Department agree that the acquisition will give AT&T too much power or lead to higher prices, they may veto the deal.

Image: AT&T

What’s the News: Japan has finally called in the robots to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, dispatching this red AKA Monirobo that is equipped with radiation detectors, temperature and humidity sensors, and a 3-D camera.

What’s the Olds:

• This particular robot is one of a suite of earthquake rescue bots that Japan has at its disposal.
• 80beats has covered Japanese robotic wonders such as the first robot marathon runners and catwalk-strutting robots as well. (If you’re wondering why such a tech-savvy, robot-friendly country didn’t deploy robots earlier, Reuters has a couple of guesses: old, robot-unfriendly reactor design, and a surprisingly anachronistic tendency to leave humans in charge of some easily automated tasks, “such as operating elevators and warning motorists of road construction.”)
• Japanese engineers have also created robots that express emotion.
• And one nuclear facility is mere parsley on the fish compared to Japan’s big goal of launching a robot to the moon.

Not So Fast: It isn’t clear how much work (if any) the AKA Monirobo is accomplishing thus far.

Image: Asahi Shimbun

It wasn’t too surprising when scientists first hacked into a car using its own onboard diagnostic port—sure, it’s easy to get into a car’s electronic brain if you’re already inside the car. Now the science of car-hacking has received a digital upgrade: Researchers have have gained access to modern, electronics-riddled cars from the outside. And in so doing, they’ve managed to take control of a car’s door locks, dashboard displays, and even its brakes.

The oddest part of these findings, which were presented this week to the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Electronic Vehicle Controls and Unintended Acceleration, is that they weren’t entirely intentional: It was all part of an investigation prompted by the Toyota acceleration problems, and was meant to probe the safety of electronic automotive systems. But testing those system’s safety also uncovered some flaws.

How It Works

The researchers took a 2009 sedan (they declined to identify the make and embarrass the manufacturer) and methodically tried to hack into it using every trick they could think of. They discovered a couple good ones.

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Ant trails, airborne chemicals, wood vibrations—scientists have a long history of borrowing clever communication techniques from the animal kingdom. Inspired by the odd social habits of a cave-dwelling cricket, scientists have now taught robots to communicate by firing rings of pressurized air at each other.

The cricket in question is the African cave cricket (Phaeophilacris spectrum), which rapidly flicks its wings to launch donut-shaped air rings, a type of vortex, to both potential mates and enemies. Reduced to two kinds of messages, its “language” is pretty simple: It sends isolated vortices to threaten its rival, and a rapid sequence of vortices to woo would-be lovers.

When Andy Russell, an engineer at Monash University in Australia, learned about the cricket, he thought this technique would improve robots’ ability to communicate in noisy environments—but that wasn’t the only benefit. “Like the cave crickets, there may be times when a robot does not want its communications intercepted,” Russell told New Scientist. Researchers speculate that the cricket uses vortices to communicate undetected by predators—so why not robots? Chris Melhuish, a researcher at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK said, “This could be a useful addition to the communication armoury of future robotic systems.”

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From the perspective of a kidney cell, light is a toxic substance: It spends its life hidden under layers of skin and guts, far away from any kind of intense illumination. As a result, biologists using microscopes to study kidney cells and other living cells are always racing the clock—the very light required to see the cell will also kill it. But light toxicity is no longer an issue with the invention of a new microscope that uses focused sheets of light to create 3-D movies of living cells.

The technique is called Bessel beam plane illumination microscopy, and it works by shooting thin planes of light toward the side of a cell, illuminating the specific plane the microscope is focusing on, instead of drowning the entire cell in top-down light.

“We have for the first time a technology that allows you to look at the three-dimensional complexity of what’s going on, at the sort of rates at which things happen within cells,” Dr [Eric] Betzig [the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) physicist who led the research] said. [BBC]

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Light is pushy. The physical pressure of photons is what allows for solar sail space missions that ride on sunlight, and what allows for dreams of lasers that will push those sails even faster. And light can trap objects, too: Optical tweezers can hold tiny objects in place. Pulling an object with light, however, is another matter. Though it’s counter-intuitive to think you could create backward-tugging force with a forward propagating laser and create a real-life tractor beam, the authors of a new physics paper write that they have shown a way it could be done.

Jun Chen’s research team says that the key is to use not a regular laser beam, but instead what’s called a Bessel beam. Viewed head-on, a Bessel beam looks like one intense point surrounded by concentric circles—what you might see when you toss a stone into a lake. The central point in a Bessel beam suffers much less diffraction than a standard laser, and so scientists can use them for precision operations like punching a hole in a cell.

If such a Bessel beam were to encounter an object not head-on but at a glancing angle, the backward force can be stimulated. As the atoms or molecules of the target absorb and re-radiate the incoming light, the fraction re-radiated forward along the beam direction can interfere and give the object a “push” back toward the source. [BBC News]

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Tech bloggers can relax those fingers and recover from endurance live-blogging: The iPad 2 has been revealed by the turtlenecked wonder himself, Steve Jobs. Now that the world has had a look at the next-gen tablet, do its improvements satisfy the wants of the computing masses?

No surprise, the specs are impressive. Apple’s iPad 2 is one-third skinnier and 0.2 pounds lighter than its predecessor. It boasts cameras on both the front and the back, and a video camera which can sync up with iPhones for video chat. It has a 1GHz dual core processor but maintains the 10-hour battery life of the original. The base price is the same, $499, and it goes on sale in the U.S. on March 11. And yes, the rumors are true: It’s coming out in white as well as black.

The toys aren’t bad, either. The new version of iPad’s operating system includes Photo Booth, the standby application for taking gratuitous photos of yourself and mutilating them in new and interesting ways. The app iMovie—which has long been on Apple laptops—is on iPad now, too, allowing users edit film on the tablet. And Jobs gleefully spent much of the presentation fiddling with the iPad version of Apple’s music creation program, Garage Band.

You can play a piano on the iPad, as well as a whole mess of other instruments. There’s a button for a sustain pedal, and the virtual keys are touch sensitive. Play a key softly, the sound is soft. Play it hard, and the sound changes. The iPad uses its accelerometer to measure the force with which the keys are struck. [The New York Times live blog]

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• Shark seek: Tiger sharks and thresher sharks remember and zero in on specific places to hunt for food in an area that might be 30 miles across. That shows they might possess not only the ability to navigate by smell or by the Earth’s magnetic field, but also broader spatial memory for their home range.
• “If you eat by shoving your entire writhing body into your meals, your dinner companions are probably going to leave.” The hagfish, however, has no such concern for manners: It absorbs its nutrients right through its skin.
• We be jammin’: Satellite provider Thuraya Telecommunications and news channel Al Jazeera both report that sources in Libya are illegally trying to jam their signals, and traced the attempts to “a Libyan intelligence service facility south of Tripoli.”
• British researchers discover a way to use urine tests to screen for prostate cancer—and potentially double the accuracy of current methods.
• Numismatist power: Coin experts create interactive digital maps of coins through history and where they came from, putting a treasure trove of information at historians’ fingertips.
• Super honey from down under: A myrtle native to Australia produces honey packed with antibacterial compounds that can stymie even antibiotic-resistant microorganisms like MRSA.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Modern microscopes opened up the world of the minute to an amazing degree, allowing people to see all the way down to a bacterium wriggling on a slide. But if you want to see down even smaller in regular optical light—to a virus, a cell’s interior, or other objects on the nanoscale—you’ve been out of luck. Those objects are smaller than 200 nanometers, what’s been considered the resolution limit for microscopes scanning in white light, and so the only was to see them was through indirect imaging devices like scanning electron microscopes.

Not anymore. Lin Li and colleagues report a new way using tiny beads to resolve images at 50 nanometers, shattering the limit for what can be seen in optical light.

Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of “evanescent waves“, emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether. Instead, the beads gather the light and re-focus it, channelling it into a standard microscope. This allowed researchers to see with their own eyes a level of detail that is normally restricted to indirect methods such as atomic force microscopy or scanning electron microscopy. [BBC News]

Those beads are called microspheres—they’re tiny glass balls about the size of red blood cells. The researchers apply these spheres to the surface of the object they want to see. In essence, the spheres capture light that normally would be lost before it ever reached the observer’s eye (those evanescent waves), enabling Li’s team to overcome the diffraction limits of microscope machinery that have limited the maximum possible resolution.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “We’re not running out of oil. We’re running out of easy oil.” One place where oil is hard (and heavy) is below the Californian ground, where extractors must blast the sludgy petroleum with steam to get it flowing. Most such operations use natural gas to make the steam, but one startup has turned to an unusual partner for oil mining—solar energy—to try to make the business more efficient.

How? Greenhouses full of mirrors.

GlassPoint, a company based in Fremont, California, wants to use solar thermal energy to cook up some steam. Unlike photovoltaic solar, which converts the sun’s radiation directly into electricity, solar thermal projects trap and focus the sun’s heat. Those projects typically involve using the heat to turn turbines and create electricity, but this design is simpler.

GlassPoint’s system is cheaper because it doesn’t need the turbines, and because it has redesigned its mirrors and pipes to pump out steam that’s 250 °C to 300 °C (whereas the steam required to drive turbines must be 350 °C to 400 °C). [Technology Review]

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• Materials violence: NASA will use a million pounds of force to crush a 20-foot-tall aluminum-lithium rocket fuel tank outfitted with sensors (all in the name of science, of course). The idea is to test out how modern composite materials buckle under incredible pressure, in the hope of finding out where the weaknesses might be.
• Real-life forensic science is rarely as easy or glamorous as its TV counterpart. Actual blood spatter experts, for example, don’t operate with quite the ease of the title character in “Dexter.” But a new study proposes a way to use simple trigonometry to calculate not only the point of origin for blood but also the height above the ground, which previously couldn’t be determined.
• You knew this day would come: The United States has approved the first deepwater offshore drilling permit given out since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• As strong as metal and as moldable as plastic: Yale scientist Jan Schroers’ new super-alloys.
• Half of adult males may be carrying the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to a study in The Lancet. It often lingers quietly but is transmitted sexually and is the cause of most cervical cancers in women.
• “Strictly speaking, there should be no blue whales.” So begins DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer as he explores the curious question of why blue whales, with so many more cells than human beings and so many chances for those cells to go wrong, are not killed by cancer at an astounding rate.

Image: NASA

• Who needs a vomit comet? The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado reached a deal with Virgin Galactic to send some of its scientists up on SpaceShipTwo’s suborbital flights, allowing them to conducts tests in weightlessness.
• Fire ants may have originated in South America, but their home base for invading the world at large is right here in the United States. So says a new study of more than 2,000 fire ant colonies spread around the globe.
• Gone in a flash: About 150,000 Gmail users woke up to find their mailboxes wiped clean—messages, folders, and all. Google is racing to recover the lost correspondences. In the meantime, this is a reminder of two things. First, you should back up your email. And second, Google is really, really big. Those 150,000 people represent just .08 percent of Gmail users.
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“May your day be full of jasmine.” “My lady, how I want to climb this wall of silence.” “I LLLLLove you.” No, this isn’t the tortured verse of botanically inclined lovesick teens. It’s the coded poetry of revolution.

As uprisings spread across northern Africa this month, protesters lit up social networking sites with updates—even Egypt’s attempt to shut off the Internet couldn’t stop them completely. But in Libya, where the fight is getting hotter and hotter, few people use sites like Facebook or Twitter, and many would be afraid to write there openly. So protest leader Omar Shibliy Mahmoudi found a place where they could speak in code: dating sites.

Mahmoudi – leader of the Ekhtalef, or “Difference,” movement – acted as if he was looking for a wife under the profile name “Where is Miriam?” and sent coded love letters to spur people to revolution. Since men cannot talk to other men on the site, revolutionaries posed as women to make contact with Mahmoudi, taking on names such as “Sweet Butterfly,” “Opener of the Mountain,” “Girl of the Desert” and “Melody of Torture.” [Herald Sun]

Once Mahmoudi connected with his sham love interests on the website (called Mawada), they bantered in cryptic poetry to suss out the other’s feelings. The “jasmine” reference above is a nod of support to the ongoing Jasmine Revolution. The five L’s in “”I LLLLLove you” means that a person has five supporters with them.

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For NASA, this was a week of launches and lack of launches. The space shuttle Discovery successfully blasted off yesterday on its final mission, but NASA’s climate-watching Glory satellite, which was scheduled to launch on Wednesday, is still stuck on the ground.

With an estimated 40,000 viewers at the Kennedy Space Center, Discovery launched at 4:53:24 p.m. ET on Thursday. Its crew of six is bound for the International Space Station, after four months of delay due to fuel tank repairs.

“Discovery now making one last reach for the stars,” the Mission Control commentator said once the shuttle cleared the launch tower. [CBS News]

Also on board is the first ever space-bound humanoid robot: Robonaut 2, or R2. This robot resembles a human from the waist up, and may eventually take on tedious chores and complete station repairs that are too dangerous for humans. At it entered space the robot tweeted (via its earthly handlers): “I’m in space! HELLO UNIVERSE!!!”

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