In the second week of July, nearly 50 students in Tamil Nadu were caught submitting bogus marksheets for college admissions, blowing the lid off a coordinated, state-wide fake marksheet scam. The modus operandi of the forgers, it was discovered, involved the simple use of blank marksheets pilfered from university offices, desktop scanners and a piece of software called Adobe Photoshop. A week later, halfway across the world, energy company BP Plc admitted after an online firestorm that it had digitally altered or "photoshopped" some of the images released to show the company's response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The landmark image editing program celebrates 20 years since its first release in June 1990, and its appearance in recent news is perhaps unfair to its legacy and importance in the world of photography and digital design. It's among the few hallowed pieces of technology to have its own verb, and it has democratized professional photo-editing on the Internet (bloggers spotted BP's Photoshop faux pas, not image analysis experts). Its ubiquity, however, has led us to an interesting question: Where does one draw the line between digital "improvement" and "manipulation"? "When I look at a picture I like to ask myself the question, is that real? If I can't tell, then the person either took a phenomenal photo or did a fantastic job in Photoshop," says Terry White, worldwide evangelist for Photoshop developers Adobe.
Science & Technology
© NASA PL-Caltech
China leads in outer space pollution
China leads in outer space pollution
All together, the three main space powers produce 93% of space debris, according to a statement published on the agency's website.
"According to estimates, 40% of space debris is produced by China. The U.S.'s share accounts for 27.5%, and Russia's [share] for 25.5%, with 7% falling on other countries involved in space exploration," the statement said.
The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has named Russia and CIS countries as the main polluters of outer space. According to the organization, Russia and its former Soviet allies disposed of a total of 5,833 spacecraft or their parts, including 1,402 satellites and 4,431 parts of carrier rockets, by ejecting them into near-Earth space.
© Barcroft
Diver Sabrina Monella explores the wreck of the B24 Tulsamerican bomber in the Adriatic Sea off Vis Island, Croatia.
Diver Sabrina Monella explores the wreck of the B24 Tulsamerican bomber in the Adriatic Sea off Vis Island, Croatia.
Gerald Landry, 73, spent the best part of three decades looking for the bomber pilot shot down by the Luftwaffe in December 1944.
Now, in a remarkable discovery, artefacts recovered from the bottom of the Adriatic Sea near Croatia could confirm the death of First Lt Russell Landry.
Lt Landry was part of an 800-strong force of Allied fighter pilots sent to bomb oil refineries in Blechhammer and Odertal, Germany.
However, Luftwaffe fighters supporting the German army at the Battle of the Bulge fended off the attack, shooting down 22 planes in just ten minutes.
Newly-discovered 318-million year old animal tracks in Canada have confirmed the long-held theory that reptiles were the first vertebrates to thrive in Earth's arid inland environments.
The tracks provide evidence for a key point in the history of life. They were formed during the period that saw the emergence of the first animals to lay hard-shelled eggs - a key feature of the reptiles' success.
A team of UK and Canadian researchers found the footprints in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada - by a mixture of luck and accident.
'We were looking for plant fossils in a remote location scattered with sandstone boulders,' says Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research team. 'I tripped over one of the boulders and saw all these wonderful trackways over the surface.'
© Planet Earth Online
Ancient gecko-like reptiles thrived in continential interiors.
Ancient gecko-like reptiles thrived in continential interiors.
A team of UK and Canadian researchers found the footprints in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada - by a mixture of luck and accident.
'We were looking for plant fossils in a remote location scattered with sandstone boulders,' says Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research team. 'I tripped over one of the boulders and saw all these wonderful trackways over the surface.'
Noah Shachtman reports at Wired Danger Room blog that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are together backing a firm that monitors the web in real time, and claims to use that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.
© VOPA
University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero, who led the expedition, surveys Pool 1, the deepest of the pools her team explored.
University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero, who led the expedition, surveys Pool 1, the deepest of the pools her team explored.
This project, led by University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa Lucero and funded by the National Geographic Society and an Arnold O. Beckman Award, was the first of what Lucero hopes will be a series of dives into the pools of the southern Maya lowlands in central Belize.
The divers will return this summer to assess whether archaeological excavation is even possible at the bottom of the pools, some of which are more than 60 meters deep.
"We don't know if it's going to be feasible to conduct archaeology 200 feet below the surface," Lucero said. "But they are going to try."
© Unknown
The death of Hypatia, and the loss of the world's largest collection of scientific and mathematic writings, were factors that contributed to the halt of scientific advances in the West halt for nearly a thousand years.
The death of Hypatia, and the loss of the world's largest collection of scientific and mathematic writings, were factors that contributed to the halt of scientific advances in the West halt for nearly a thousand years.
When Hypatia was born, her father, Theon, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy in Alexandria. He believed, as many Greeks did, that it was possible to raise a perfect human being. So he gave his daughter the best possible education, including studies in mathematics, languages, rhetoric, and natural philosophy-or science.
Upper-class women of the time were usually secluded, expected to devote themselves solely to their husband and children, but Hypatia found a job at the most famous institution in the ancient world, the library at Alexandria. She taught mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and wrote many books about these subjects-thirteen books on algebra, her favorite subject, and another eight books on geometry.
© Bill Youngblood
Caltech astronomer John Johnson
Caltech astronomer John Johnson
Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other's gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.
Now, however, John A. Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and his colleagues have found two systems with pairs of gas giant planets locked in an orbital embrace.
In one system-a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth-the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen. "This new planet pair came in an unexpected package," says Johnson.
Adds Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville, "A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be destroyed quickly if the planets weren't doing such a well synchronized dance. This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm."
© ESO
This image of part of the Carina Nebula was created from images taken through red, green and blue filters with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
This image of part of the Carina Nebula was created from images taken through red, green and blue filters with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Very massive stars live fast and die young. Some of these stellar beacons have such intense radiation passing through their thick atmospheres late in their lives that they shed material into space many millions of times more quickly than relatively sedate stars such as the Sun.
These rare, very hot and massive objects are known as Wolf-Rayet stars, after the two French astronomers who first identified them in the mid-nineteenth century, and one of the most massive ones yet measured is known as WR 22.
Today the Gulf, tomorrow the world
This Thursday, the X Prize Foundation will announce its next competition: a challenge to inventors and entrepreneurs to find ways to clean up after such environmental disasters as BP's Gulf gusher.
The effort won't encompass the entire mess that BP has made, nor will it target all the oil released in future underwater discharges of Texas tea. It will, in the words of the Foundation's announcement of its upcoming announcement: "inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface."
This Thursday, the X Prize Foundation will announce its next competition: a challenge to inventors and entrepreneurs to find ways to clean up after such environmental disasters as BP's Gulf gusher.
The effort won't encompass the entire mess that BP has made, nor will it target all the oil released in future underwater discharges of Texas tea. It will, in the words of the Foundation's announcement of its upcoming announcement: "inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface."
