Science & TechnologyS


Info

The One-inch Equation to Explain All Physical Laws

Michio Kaku
Big Think
Sun, 16 May 2010 22:57 UTC
You might have heard me speak about the equation that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life: the one-inch equation that will in a sense summarize everything we know about the physical laws governing the universe we live in. I believe that one day, perhaps the destiny of all intelligent life in the universe may hinge on this equation. Finding it is the goal of a lifetime.

It is The Theory of Everything, the equation that might summarize all physical laws into an equation, perhaps no more than an inch long. Scientists and layman alike have been trying to crack this problem for a generation. We think we're very close, in fact, the leading (and only) candidate for it is String Theory.

The main problem, I think, is that String Theory is not in its final form. In the last decade, we have learned that membranes must also be included into the theory as well as strings, and that these membranes can vibrate in 11 dimensions. This means that the complete mathematics behind the theory is not yet known. This means that it might be premature to demand that string theory fit all the properties necessary for the final theory. However, some results can be tested now.
Read More...
Camera

Google debates face recognition technology

Maija Palmer
Financial Times
Wed, 19 May 2010 22:36 UTC
Google executives are wrestling over whether to launch controversial facial recognition technology after a barrage of criticism over its privacy policies.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive, said a series of public disputes over privacy issues had caused the management team to review its procedures and the launch of new technologies. According to Google executives, facial recognition is one of the key topics of internal debate.

Mr Schmidt said: "Facial recognition is a good example . . . anything we did in that area would be highly, highly planned, discussed and reviewed. When you go through these things, you review your management procedures."
Read More...
Info

Mystery of Matter is Behind the Great Darkness of Our Universe


The Irish Times
Wed, 19 May 2010 22:29 UTC
One of the biggest mysteries in science is the fundamental nature of the largest component of the fabric of the universe - dark energy. Identified for sure only in 1998, dark energy constitutes 74 per cent of the total mass-energy of the universe and is responsible for the current accelerating expansion of the universe, writes William Reville.

There is very good evidence that the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago in a huge explosion (Big Bang) at a point. The universe has been expanding outwards like a balloon from this point of origin ever since. It was long thought that this expansion is gradually slowing down under the braking influence of gravity. However in the 1990s, to the great surprise of astronomers, it was discovered that, far from slowing down, the expansion of the universe is currently accelerating, propelled by a mysterious dark energy that acts like negative gravity.

The evidence for accelerating expansion came from studying distant Type 1a supernovae. A supernova is the death of a star in a catastrophic explosion when, for a short time, it becomes millions of times brighter than our sun. A type 1A supernova is produced in a binary star system - two stars, one a white dwarf and the other an ordinary star, revolving around a common centre of gravity. A star like the sun becomes a white dwarf after it exhausts its nuclear fuel and expels most of its outer material, leaving a very hot, extremely dense and gravitationally strong core.
Read More...
Info

New Deep-Sea Cables Needed to Protect Global Economy

Paul Marks
New Scientist
Wed, 19 May 2010 22:01 UTC
Deep Sea Cables
© Luis Marden/GettyLaying down the line.
URGENT action is needed to diversify the global deep-sea cable networks on which the internet depends, to secure them against attacks and accidents that could lead to economic turmoil.

So says a report that highlights the vulnerability of businesses worldwide to the targeting of "choke points" in subsea communications networks by saboteurs, pirates and thieves.

International internet and telephone links are almost entirely dependent on bundles of fibre-optic cables that span the oceans. "More than 99 per cent of intercontinental data traffic goes via submarine cable rather than satellite," says Alan Mauldin, an analyst at Telegeography Research, a New York-based market research firm. "People don't realise the vast role cables play."

It's time they did, says Karl Rauscher, the former Bell Labs engineer who compiled the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) report presented at the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas, Texas, last week.
Read More...
Info

Answering an Age-Old Question: How Deep Is the Ocean?


FOXNews.com
Wed, 19 May 2010 21:52 UTC
A lead weight on a string will let you measure a pond's depth. But how to gauge the ocean's depths -- or total size? Using satellites, oceanographers have pinned the number down.

Earth's Oceans
© FOXNews.com
Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big?

As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume -- the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) set out to more accurately answer that question -- and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles.

And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor.

"A lot of water values are taken for granted," said Matthew Charette, an associate scientist in WHOI's Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry who is part of a research effort to audit all the water on the planet.. "If you want to know the water volume on the planet, you Google it and you get five different numbers, most of them 30- or 40-year-old values."

Until now.
Read More...
Info

Dust Cloud From China Shows How We Share the Air

Jennifer Collings
Physorg.com
Wed, 19 May 2010 21:42 UTC
Dust Plume
© NASAThe six-mile-high Chinese dust plume detected by CALIPSO appears as yellow-green swirls in this image. The tall columns topped in red and yellow are clouds.
The air we breathe doesn't always come from our own backyard. In fact, sometimes it doesn't even come from our neighbors.

On April 22, 2010, a NASA satellite captured the appearance of a large dust cloud over the eastern coast of United States that originated on the other side of the world -- in China.

"Dust can stimulate the production of more clouds, altering local weather and potentially the climate," said Zhoayan Liu, a researcher at the National Institute of Aerospace and NASA's Langley Research Center who is monitoring the dust movement. The dust cloud was in upper troposphere, the atmospheric layer in which we live.

The dust plume that arrived in the U.S. maintained an average size of more than 1,200 miles wide and six miles tall as it traveled across the Earth. It began in China's Taklimakan and Gobi Deserts, and over 10 days, NASA captured the dust moving across the Pacific Ocean, through the United States and Canada and over Virginia.

"It is likely that a cold front over the deserts generated strong surface winds that pushed a large amount of the dust into the atmosphere and from there the jet streams brought it across the world," said Liu.
Read More...
Telescope

New type of supernova may shed light on some universal mysteries

Robert Sanders
PhysOrg
Wed, 19 May 2010 21:12 UTC
Image
© vishay Gal-Yam; Weizmann Institute of ScienceOne theory of this new exploding system is that a white dwarf steals helium from a companion until the mass thief becomes very hot and dense and a nuclear explosion occurs. The helium is transformed into elements such as calcium and titanium, eventually producing the building blocks of life for future generations of stars.
In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers' attention to scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may or may not point to new and unusual physics.

But supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley's Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), is one of eight known "calcium-rich supernovae" that seem to stand out as horses of a different color.

"With the sheer numbers of supernovae we're detecting, we're discovering weird ones that may represent different physical mechanisms compared with the two well-known types, or may just be variations on the standard themes," said Alex Filippenko, KAIT director and UC Berkeley professor of astronomy. "But SN 2005E was a different kind of 'bang.' It and the other calcium-rich supernovae may be a true suborder, not just one of a kind."

Filippenko is coauthor of a paper appearing in the May 20 issue of the journal Nature describing SN 2005E and arguing that it is distinct from the two main classes of supernovae: the Type Ia supernovae, thought to be old, white dwarf stars that accrete matter from a companion until they undergo a thermonuclear explosion that blows them apart entirely; and Type Ib/c or Type II supernovae, thought to be hot, massive and short-lived stars that explode and leave behind black holes or neutron stars.
Read More...
Robot

New Research Reveals How DNA Could Power Computers


TechNewsDaily
Wed, 19 May 2010 19:34 UTC
Image
© Chris DwyerA close-up of a DNA 'waffle' nanostructure that could function as a logic circuit in a computer chip.
Engineers have long dreamed of using DNA as the backbone for the next generation of computer circuits. New research shows just how it might be done.

Instead of conventional circuits built of silicon that use electrical current, computer engineers could take advantage of the unique properties of DNA, the double-helix molecule that carries life's information.

"Conventional technology has reached its physical limits," said Chris Dwyer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering.
Read More...
Meteor

Faint Comet in the June Dawn

Greg Bryant
Sky & Telescope
Wed, 19 May 2010 18:30 UTC
We rarely see a good comet when it's at its best. Most comets are brightest when nearest the Sun - just when they're most likely to be hidden in the Sun's glare or below the sunrise or sunset horizon.

That's the situation this spring with Comet C/2009 R1 (McNaught). Even so, observers in the Northern Hemisphere should be able to pick it up with telescopes, and possibly binoculars, just before dawn for at least part of June, during its runup in brightness.

Comet C/2009 R1
© Michael JaegerOn May 19th, when Michael Jaeger shot this image from Austria, Comet C/2009 R1 was 8th magnitude and showing the characteristic green comet color in large telescopes. Note the thin blue gas tail. Click image for larger view.
And in fact, the comet is turning out to be 1 or 2 magnitudes brighter that we predicted in the June Sky & Telescope (page 60). Let's hope this behavior keeps up!
Read More...
Einstein

Creative Brains Share Trait with Schizophrenic Ones, Study Finds

Frances Schwartzkopff
Bloomberg
Tue, 18 May 2010 11:00 UTC
Creative people may think broadly and make unusual associations because they, like schizophrenics, may be less able to filter out information, a Swedish study found.

Researchers at the Stockholm-based Karolinska Institute followed 13 healthy men and women who took creativity tests. The more solutions the participants found for a problem, the higher their creativity levels were. The researchers also studied images of the people's brains.

The creative problem-solvers had a lower concentration of proteins that aid in the chemical transmission of information in the thalamus, the part of the brain that determines what data is relevant for reasoning, according to the study. That's a trait commonly found in patients with schizophrenia, a mental illness whose symptoms include hallucinations, jumbled thoughts and paranoia.
Read More...