Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Group asks U.S. FTC to probe Google privacy safety

Alexei Oreskovic
Reuters
Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:19 UTC
San Francisco - An online privacy group called on Tuesday for government regulators to investigate the adequacy of Google Inc's security safeguards after the company inadvertently released consumers' private information this month.

In a complaint filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center faults Google's practices relating to its so-called cloud computing services, which store user-generated documents and other personal information on Google servers instead of on an individual's personal computer.
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Telescope

Aurora Blarneyalis


Space Weather
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:37 UTC
Image
© Thomas Bojer Eltorpbut

Green auroras over Greenland? It must be St. Patrick's Day. The celebration began last night with this display over Nuuk.

"They were not the most powerful auroras," says photographer Thomas Bojer Eltorpbut, "but it was such a beautiful display." He took the picture by opening the shutter of his Nikon D3 for 90 seconds at ISO 1600.
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Telescope

Rainbow Planet


Space Weather
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:34 UTC
Rainbow Venus
© Sadegh Ghomizadeh

Something special is happening to Venus. The brightest of all planets is hanging low in the western sky at sunset, and if you look at it with a backyard telescope, you'll see that it is a slender 4% crescent. But that's not the special part.

What's special is, Venus looks like a rainbow.
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Meteor

Small Asteroid Buzzes Earth Tonight‏


SpaceWeather.com
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:22 UTC
Newly-discovered asteroid 2009 FH is flying past Earth tonight only 85,000 km away. That's about twice the altitude of a geosynchronous communications satellite. Advanced amateur astronomers in North America can photograph the 20-meter-wide space rock racing through the constellation Gemini after sunset on March 17th. It should be about as bright as a 14th magnitude star. [ephemeris] [3D orbit]
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Info

'Consciousness signature' discovered spanning the brain

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:24 UTC
Image
© Harry Sieplinga / HMS Images / The Image BankBrain scans have long been used to try to find the "seat of consciousness" in the brain

Electrodes implanted in the brains of people with epilepsy might have resolved an ancient question about consciousness.

Signals from the electrodes seem to show that consciousness arises from the coordinated activity of the entire brain. The signals also take us closer to finding an objective "consciousness signature" that could be used to probe the process in animals and people with brain damage without inserting electrodes.

Previously it wasn't clear whether a dedicated brain area, or "seat of consciousness", was responsible for guiding our subjective view of the world, or whether consciousness was the result of concerted activity across the whole brain.

Probing the process has been a challenge, as non-invasive techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and EEG give either spatial or temporal information but not both. The best way to get both simultaneously is to implant electrodes deep inside the skull, but it is difficult to justify this in healthy people for ethical reasons.
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Info

Fossil of 'ultimate predator' unearthed in Arctic

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:03 UTC
Image
© Atlantic ProductionsThe pliosaur had a huge skull and a bite four times the force of T rex's.

Fossil remains of a huge and fearsome marine predator, dubbed "Predator X", have been discovered in Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago.

About 15 metres long and weighing 45 tonnes, the creature is a new species of pliosaur, and ruled the Jurassic seas some 147 million years ago.

Predator X had a head twice the size of Tyrannosaurus rex and its bite had four times the force, at around 15,000 kilograms (33,000 pounds). Its teeth were each around 30 centimetres (1 foot) long.

The remains were discovered in June 2008 during a two-week expedition led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.
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Light Saber

Browser plugin blocks ad-tracking cookies

Jeremy Kirk
Techworld.com
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:55 UTC
A researcher has developed a browser extension that stops advertising networks from tracking a person's surfing habits, such as search queries and content they view on the web.

The extension, called Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO), enables its users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are employing behavioural advertising systems, wrote Christopher Soghoian, who developed it, on his website.

Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, modified a browser extension Google released under an Apache 2 open-source license.

Google's opt-out plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox blocks cookies delivered by its Doubleclick advertising network. A cookie is a small data file stored in a browser that can track a variety of information, such as websites visited and search queries, and transmit that information back to the entity that placed the cookie in the browser.
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Evil Rays

'Star Wars' scientists create laser gun to kill mosquitoes

Anouk Lorie
Cable News Network
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:46 UTC
Image
The WHO has reported that around half of the world's population is at risk of malaria.
London, England -- Scientists in the U.S. are developing a laser gun that could kill millions of mosquitoes in minutes. The WHO has reported that around half of the world's population is at risk of malaria.

The laser, which has been dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings.

The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.

Developed by some of the astrophysicists involved in what was known as the "Star Wars" anti-missile programs during the Cold War, the project is meant to prevent the spread of malaria.

Lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jordin Kare, told CNN that the laser would be able to sweep an area and "toast millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes."
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Chalkboard

Black Sea Pollution Could Be Harnessed As Renewable Future Energy Source


Science Daily
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:07 UTC
The Black Sea harbours vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide, the toxic gas associated with the smell of rotten eggs. This noxious gas could be used as a renewable source of hydrogen gas to fuel a future carbon-free economy, according to Turkish researchers writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nuclear Hydrogen Production and Applications.

The waters of the Black Sea contain very little oxygen. As such, the rare forms of life that live in the depths of the inland sea, so-called extremophile bacteria, survive by metabolising sulfate in the water. The sulfate fulfils a similar biochemical role to oxygen in respiration for these microbes allowing them to release the energy they need to live and grow from the nutrients they absorb from the water.
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Meteor

Comet impacts can destroy stellar systems

Michael Schirber
Space.com
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:55 UTC
Many scientists believe the dinosaurs were snuffed out by comet collision

Some stars have a high level of comet activity around them, and that could spell doom for any life trying to take root on any local planets. Ongoing research is trying to determine what fraction of stellar systems may be uninhabitable due to comet impacts.

Many of our own solar system's comets are found in the Kuiper Belt, a debris-filled disk that extends from Neptune's orbit (30 AU) out to almost twice that distance. Other stars have been shown to have similar debris disks.

"The debris is dust and larger fragments produced by the break-up of comets or asteroids as they collide amongst themselves," says Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
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