Science & TechnologyS


Butterfly

Facebook agrees with Canada on privacy controls

Facebook agreed Thursday to give users more control over the information they share with outside applications like games and quizzes in response to concerns raised by Canadian privacy officials.

Currently, people who wish to use such software have to agree to share all their data with the application. For example, when a user signs up to take a quiz, the software developer could tap the user's biographical information, photos and hobbies, along with profiles and information on friends, even if such data aren't needed to take the quiz.

With the changes, the application developer will have to specify ahead of time which categories of data the software needs. Users will have the opportunity to hold back certain pieces of information when they approve access. A link also will be provided so users can get an explanation of what information is collected and why.

Blackbox

Wanted: Interrogation that works and isn't torture

Image
© Sabah Arar / Rex FeaturesIn Baghdad, a boy stares at a wall painting of the well-known photograph of an abused Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison
In a fight against terrorism, information is everything.

The White House attempted to draw a line under the dubious intelligence-gathering practices of the Bush administration last week by announcing the creation of a special interrogation group that will use "scientifically proven means" to extract information from detainees with links to violent extremist groups.

It also indicated it would start a research programme to compare the effectiveness of different methods. But to what extent can science help determine what constitutes an adequate interrogation technique?

Science has thus far played a minimal role in this. The last comprehensive review (PDF) of the effectiveness of interrogation methods, which was published in 2006 by the US government's Intelligence Science Board and was one of the triggers for last week's announcement, concluded that there had been almost no empirical research into interrogation methods in the past 40 years.

As a result, interrogators had been forced to "make it up on the fly", wrote forensic psychologist Robert Fein of Harvard Medical School, who chaired the review. The lack of research-based methods, he said, may have led to "unfortunate cases of abuse".

The empirical vacuum applies particularly to techniques for eliciting information from strongly resistant prisoners. Former US vice-president Dick Cheney and others claim the use of methods such as water-boarding on Al-Qaida suspects have led to significant intelligence breakthroughs.

Telescope

Suicidal planet seems on death spiral into star

planet into star
© CARREAU/ESA/NatureThis artist's impression depicts an exoplanet similar to the newly discovered WASP-18b. As seen from the planet, the host star spans an angle of more than 30° and hovers menacingly at a fixed position in the sky.

Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.

The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.

The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.

It's a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at the Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"It's causing its own destruction by creating these tides," Hellier said.

The star is called WASP-18 and the planet is WASP-18b because of the Wide Angle Search for Planets team that found them.

Sherlock

Milk Drinking Started Around 7,500 Years Ago in Central Europe

The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn't enough sunlight to do this for most of the year. In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment, says: "Most adults worldwide do not produce the enzyme lactase and so are unable to digest the milk sugar lactose. However, most Europeans continue to produce lactase throughout their life, a characteristic known as lactase persistence. In Europe, a single genetic change (13,910*T) is strongly associated with lactase persistence and appears to have given people with it a big survival advantage. Since adult consumption of fresh milk was only possible after the domestication of animals, it is likely that lactase persistence co-evolved with the cultural practice of dairying, although it was not known when it first arose in Europe or what factors drove its rapid spread.

Telescope

The Crater That Time Forgot

Crater
© NASA
Erlanger crater, located at the moon's north pole, looks like a bottomless pit. That's because its floor is perpetually in pitch-black shadow. It's a place where sunlight hasn't fallen over 4 billion years. It would be a great place for aliens to stash a 2001-style monolith.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter made this eagle-eye photo as it swept over the moon's north pole to look down on the gaping abyss.

At six miles wide, the lunar crater is coincidentally the diameter of Crater Lake near Eugene, Oregon.

Imagine how eerie it would be to climb down into this crater and look up toward a star-saturated sky. The circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon would wrap around the center of your field of view. The star Polaris and the bright star Vega would, farther out, flank either side of Draco. The Mikly Way would arc high overhead.

A brilliant sliver of light would mark the crater rim. You'd be walking on regolith perpetually frozen to -370 degrees Fahrenheit.

Robot

Artificial Life will be created 'Within Months': Genome Experts claim Vital Breakthrough

Scientists are only months away from creating artificial life, it was claimed yesterday.

Dr Craig Venter - one of the world's most famous and controversial biologists - said his U.S. researchers have overcome one of the last big hurdles to making a synthetic organism.

The first artificial lifeform is likely to be a simple man-made bacterium that proves that the technology can work.

But it will be followed by more complex bacteria that turn coal into cleaner natural gas, or algae that can soak up carbon dioxide and convert it into fuels.

They could also be used to create new vaccines and antibiotics.

The prediction came after a breakthrough by the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland.

Info

Digging up the Saudi past: some would rather not

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Much of the world knows Petra, the ancient ruin in modern-day Jordan that is celebrated in poetry as "the rose-red city, 'half as old as time,'" and which provided the climactic backdrop for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

But far fewer know Madain Saleh, a similarly spectacular treasure built by the same civilization, the Nabateans.

That's because it's in Saudi Arabia, where conservatives are deeply hostile to pagan, Jewish and Christian sites that predate the founding of Islam in the 7th century.

But now, in a quiet but notable change of course, the kingdom has opened up an archaeology boom by allowing Saudi and foreign archaeologists to explore cities and trade routes long lost in the desert.

Powertool

SOTT Focus: Water For Oil: The Devil's Bargain For Natural Gas

Dirty water cannot be washed - African proverb


If you had a choice between filling your car of the future with natural gas (now being promoted as a viable, green, clean, future alternative to oil), or quenching your thirst with unpolluted water which would you choose? This is not a hypothetical question. If the natural gas lobby continues to have its way, natural gas - the supposed safe, ecologically friendly fuel source - may do some serious damage to the earth's water.

In 2002 advances in horizontal drilling (a technology invented by Halliburton in 1949), drastically reduced the costs previously required to extract natural gas from rock and shale located miles deep within the earth. Although the industry asserts that the process is safe, does the following industry summary from slide 65 of a January 17, 2008 Halliburton power point presentation entitled A Historic Perspective of Hydraulic Fracturing inspire confidence?

Info

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop tool to rank death rates

Pittsburgh - Have you ever wondered what the chances are that you may die in the next year? Would it be from illness or an accident? Is it something you can control? Or is it completely out of your hands?

A new Web site, www.DeathRiskRankings.com, developed by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University, allows users to query publicly available data from the United States and Europe, and compare mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region. The Web site not only gives the risk of dying within the next year, but it also ranks the probable causes and allows for quick side-by-side comparison between groups.

Question

Australia: Mysterious Tubular Clouds Defy Explanation

Tubular Clouds
© Mick Petroff/APOD
These long, crazy-looking clouds can grow to be 600 miles long and can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft even on windless days.

Known as Morning Glory clouds, they appear every fall over Burketown, Queensland, Australia, a remote town with fewer than 200 residents. A small number of pilots and tourists travel there each year in hopes of "cloud surfing" with the mysterious phenomenon.

Similar tubular shaped clouds called roll clouds appear in various places around the globe. But nobody has yet figured out what causes the Morning Glory clouds.

Comment: Could this be the explanation of what was seen in the video in this article?