Science & TechnologyS


Cell Phone

You Love Your iPhone. Literally.

Martin Lindstrom
The New York Times
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:18 UTC
iphone love
© Mark Allen Miller
With Apple widely expected to release its iPhone 5 on Tuesday, Apple addicts across the world are getting ready for their latest fix.

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like "addiction" and "fix" aren't as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is "love."

As a branding consultant, I have followed Apple from its early days as a cult brand to its position today as one of the most valuable, widely admired companies on earth. A few years back, I conducted an experiment to examine the similarities between some of the world's strongest brands and the world's greatest religions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects' brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery.

This past summer, I gathered a group of 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had the babies grasped the phones than they swiped their little fingers across the screens as if they were iPhones, seemingly expecting the screens to come to life. It appears that a whole new generation is being primed to navigate the world of electronics in a ritualized, Apple-approved way.
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Info

Human Crises Linked to Climate Change, Study Suggests

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:00 UTC
BBM
© NASAThe big Blue Marble, Earth, as seen from space.

Historically, changes in climate have not only been tied to increased food prices, but also economic crises, social upset and wars, new research suggests.

"Climate is the ultimate cause, and economy is the direct cause, of large-scale human crises," study researcher David Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, told LiveScience in an email. "The issue of environmental change is one that involves our daily life, such as food, health and savings."

Zhang has studied the effect of climate change on humans, specifically on cultural turmoil and wars. His previous work found that swings in temperature were correlated with times of war in eastern China between 1000 and 1911, and also correlated with climate swings and war records worldwide.

Now, he has taken these studies several steps further by looking at all major aspects of human society during times of climate shift. This work also was able to draw a direct link between climate and social factors.
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Question

Spinning Object Discovered In The Kuiper Belt


Europlanet Outreach, Queen's University Belfast
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:07 UTC
Kuiper Belt Spinning Object
© redOrbit

The bizarre, hourglass-shaped Kuiper belt object 2001QG298 spins round like a propeller as it orbits the Sun, according to an astronomer from Queens University Belfast. The discovery that the spinning object is tilted at nearly 90 degrees to the ecliptic plane is surprising, and suggests that this type of object could be very common in the Kuiper belt. The finding will be presented by Dr Pedro Lacerda at the Joint Meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences in Nantes, France, on 3 October 2011.

The Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit the sun beyond Neptune and are the best preserved leftovers of the formation of the planets. 2001QG298 is a remarkable KBO made up from two components that orbit each other very closely, possibly touching.

"Imagine that you glue two eggs together tip to tip - that's approximately the shape of 2001QG298. It looks a bit like an hourglass," says Lacerda.
The strange shape of 2001QG298 was uncovered by Dr Scott Sheppard and Prof David Jewitt in 2004. They noticed that 2001QG298′s apparent brightness periodically tripled every 7 hours or so.

"The object is so distant that we cannot resolve its shape. But this brightness oscillation, called a lightcurve, reveals the strange shape of 2001QG298 as it spins round. The object appears faint at times because one lobe is hidden behind the other, so less area is reflecting sunlight. As the hidden component rotates back into view, we can see the full hour-glass shape. The reflecting area increases and the whole thing looks brighter," explains Lacerda.
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Info

Moon's Shadow Makes Waves in Earth's Atmosphere


Space.com
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:37 UTC
Midnight Eclipse
© Bernt OlsenPhotographer and skywatcher Bernt Olsen snapped this view of the partial solar eclipse of June 1-2, 2011 just during the "midnight sun" in Tromso, Norway. The partial solar eclipse was dubbed a "midnight" eclipse as its viewing path crossed the International Date Line across far northern latitudes.

Like a gigantic boat plying the heavens, the moon's shadow creates waves in Earth's atmosphere that travel at more than 200 mph, a new study reveals.

This effect was predicted back in the early 1970s, but researchers were only finally able to observe it during the total solar eclipse of July 22, 2009. The researchers discovered that acoustic waves, also known as sound waves, in Earth's upper atmosphere pile up along the leading and trailing edges of the moon's shadow as it moves across Earth, like the waves produced when a ship plows through water.

"We not only find the feature of the predicted bow wave but also the stern wave on the equator side of the eclipse path, as well as the stern wake right behind the moon's shadow boat," researchers write in the study, which was published Sept. 14 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The researchers, led by J. Y. Liu of National Central University in Taiwan, used a network of ground-based GPS receivers to track the 2009 eclipse as it passed over Japan and Taiwan. They noticed that acoustic waves were being generated along the edges of the moon's shadow, in a part of Earth's upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere.
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Calculator

HTC flaw gives hackers easy access to your info

Athima Chansanchai
MSNBC
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:50 UTC
Researchers have found serious security problems with some HTC Android smartphones, which could allegedly give hackers your identity, location and who you've been talking with and texting.

They've posted their findings on Android Police about certain HTC phones (including the Evo 3D, Evo 4G and Thunderbolt) and a vulnerability built into them by a suite of logging tools that collects information about the user - an excessive amount that should be secured and isn't.

Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii, Android developer Justin Case and Trevor Eckhart (who found the security hole) put out the alarm over the weekend, which owners of the phone should take heed of ASAP. If you've downloaded any app that requires connection to the Internet (and we're guessing most of yours, as ours, does), that app can now acquire the following off your phone, with[out] your permission:
  • the list of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each
  • last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations
  • phone numbers from the phone log
  • SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text (not sure yet if it's possible to decode it, but very likely)
  • system logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, phone numbers, and other private info
That's a whole lot of information that could be accessible to unscrupulous sorts, those that could easily take advantage of such a windfall. All with a single Internet permission. According to Android Police, HTC has practically opened the door for information robbers and given them the run of the house. Your house.
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Satellite

China's First Space Station Module Reaches Orbit

Shane McGlaun
Daily Tech
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:02 UTC
Image
© MSNBCRendering of Chinese Tiangong-1
Two years from now other modules will launch

China is looking to make itself into a technology, military, and space power over the coming years. China wanted to be part of the ISS, but NASA would not allow the country to participate. Rather than sulk in the corner, the Chinese have set about building an ISS rival and the first section of that rival space station has now been launched into orbit.

The first section of the Chinese space station, called Tiangong-1, was launched into orbit successfully. The Tiangong-1 module lifted off aboard a Long March 2FT1 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. MSNBC reports that the module is about the size of a boxcar and is in orbit 217 miles above the Earth.

The Chinese say that the module will be used to survey Chinese farmland using special cameras and will conduct an experiment that involves growing crystals in space.
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Telescope

SpaceX to Develop Reusable Launch System for Cheap Spaceflight, Mars Settlement

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:22 UTC
Image
© universetoday.com
California-based space transport company SpaceX is looking to build a fully reusable orbital launch system that could make spaceflight more affordable, and eventually send people to Mars for permanent settlement.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has mapped out a way for the Falcon 9 rocket to deliver a Dragon spacecraft to orbit, then return to the launch site by touching down vertically under rocket power on landing gear. At the same time, the Dragon would make a supplies delivery to the International Space Station and return from orbit to make its own landing.

Achieving a reusable space transport has been difficult because of the engineering challenges associated with such a feat, but many have tried because a totally reusable rocket would cut the cost of spaceflight. Traditional rockets can only be used once, and a Falcon 9, for example, can cost about $50 million to $60 million.

Over the past year, Musk and his team at SpaceX managed to solve the complexities that have stumped many before and even made an animation of how the plan could work, which is a 90 percent accurate depiction. They now hope to make the reusable rocket system a reality.
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Radar

No crystal ball necessary: Scientists can accurately predict leadership emergence


VU University Amsterdam
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:43 UTC
Image
© UnknownJohn McCain
Dutch scientists at VU University Amsterdam are able to quite accurately predict the emergence of leaders in domains such as politics and the military. They developed a model of leadership emergence based on the interaction between our biological properties and social environment.

The model suggests that being selected as a leader is for a large part dependent on a match between physical attributes (such as the face), the message the leader conveys, and the perceived situation requirements in which the leader has to make decisions. For instance, this model has shown that in times where the perception of threat is great, potential leaders with a masculine face emphasizing this threat in their message are most likely to be elected as leader. On the other hand, potential leaders with a feminine face may be better off profiling themselves as a peacemaker, and attempt to make the majority of followers perceive the need for cooperation in the social network - rather than conflict - as the most important and beneficial need.
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Bizarro Earth

Earth's First Arctic Ozone Hole Recorded

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:01 UTC
Stratospheric clouds
© Ross J. Salawitch, University of MarylandStratospheric clouds above the Arctic.

The high atmosphere over the Arctic lost an unprecedented amount of its protective ozone earlier this year, so much that conditions echoed the infamous ozone hole that forms annually over the opposite side of the planet, the Antarctic, scientists say.

"For the first time, sufficient loss occurred to reasonably be described as an Arctic ozone hole," write researchers in an article released Oct. 2 by the journal Nature.

Some degree of ozone loss above the Arctic, and the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole, are annual events during the poles' respective winters. They are driven by a combination of cold temperatures and lingering ozone-depleting pollutants.

The reactions that convert less reactive chemicals into ozone-destroying ones take place within what is known as the polar vortex, an atmospheric circulation pattern created by the rotation of the Earth and cold temperatures. This past winter and spring saw an unusually strong polar vortex and an unusually long cold period.

This year's record vortex persisted over the Arctic from December to the end of March, and the cold temperatures extended down to a remarkably low altitude, the researchers write.
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Info

Life's Extremes: Early Birds Versus Night Owls

Adam Hadhazy
Live Science
Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:23 UTC
Life Style
© Karl Tate, LiveScience Infographic ArtistDo you like your morning coffee at 6 a.m. or more like Noon?

It's 6:30 a.m. For "early birds" or "larks," that's prime time. For "night owls," however, such an hour is ungodly.

Most of us are neither pure lark nor owl. But we all know people who can spring out of bed at the crack of dawn or stay alert well into the wee hours. In recent years, science has increasingly shown why these extremes exist.

Right from birth, our personal biological clocks are already wound. Genetics establishes a person's "chronotype," which is pegged to when his or her body feels up and at 'em.

"People span the range of those who are very early risers to very late setters, and this is genetically determined," said Frederick Brown, a professor of psychology at Penn State.

To a certain extent, behavior and environment - say, routinely pumping iron in a well-lit gym toward midnight - can shift our built-in predispositions. But for those of us squarely in one chronotype camp or the other, in the end, the body is the boss.

"If you're a morning-type person, you can't become an evening type, and vice versa," said Brown.
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