Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Is Personal Blogging Fast-Fading?



Blogging
©Unknown

Remember when people used to blog for fun? When you could type in a friend's clever web address and be instantly delighted with the goings-on of their daily lives?

I recall a not-too-distant blogging golden age when just about everyone's dog kept an online journal. The daily musings of friends and neighbours seemed to be a big part of the common online diet.

Lately, however, I'm hard (word) pressed to find a (live) journaler to save my iBook (sorry). Gone are the days when "I already read that on your blog" was a common conversation killer. So what's happened?

Magnify

Nanotech: The Unknown Risks

Nanotechnology, now used in everything from computers to toothpaste, is booming. But concern is growing that its development is outpacing our understanding of how to use it safely.

"It's green, it's clean, it's never seen - that's nanotechnology!"

That exuberant motto, used by an executive at a trade group for nanotech entrepreneurs, reflects the buoyant enthusiasm for nanotechnology in some business and scientific circles.

Robot

Robots to engage in 'loving relations' and sex with humans by 2050

Maastricht, Netherlands - Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction - researchers expect them to become reality within four decades.

Star

SOHO discovers its 1,500th comet

The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft has just discovered its 1500th comet, making it more successful than all other comet discoverers throughout history put together. Not bad for a spacecraft that was designed as a solar physics mission.

SOHO's record-breaking discovery was made late on 25 June. When it comes to comet catching, the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory has one big advantage over everybody else: its location. Situated between the Sun and Earth, it has a privileged view of a region of space that can rarely be seen from Earth. From the surface, we can see regions close to the Sun clearly only during an eclipse.

Image
©SOHO
SOHO

Telescope

Stephen Hawking's explosive new theory

Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.

Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.

They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.

But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?

Now New Scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, working with Prof Thomas Hertog of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris.

Hawkings
©NASA
The new theory believes original estimates of Big Bang expansion are wrong

Comment: The article says:
"In this theory, the early universe can be described by a mathematical object called a wave function and, in a similar way to the light particle, the team proposed two years ago that this means that there was no unique origin to the cosmos: instead the wave function of the universe embraced a multitude of means to develop."
But why would this "object called a wave function" want to develop at all? Was there a developer not taken into account in the equations? Pulling the strings? And what is the exact relation of this mathematical object to the objective reality?

Then we have these two funny pieces:

Piece A:
"Their idea is therefore to start with the conditions we observe today - like the fact that at large scales one does not need to adopt quantum lore to explain how the universe (it behaves classically, as scientists say) - and work backwards in time to determine what the initial conditions might have looked like."
Piece B:
"The next step is to find specific predictions that can be put to the test, to validate this new view of how the cosmos came into being."
Piece B seems to contradict piece A since, if we find something new tomorrow, we will simply go backward and change our initial conditions. If necessary, we will replace our wave function by a pair or a triple of wave functions. Hawking and Hartle will have fun while the audience will take it seriously and adore these great scientists. Creationists, on the other hand, will have one more enemy and one more target to shoot at!


Meteor

Ancient impact may have created deep niche for life

Hollywood directors, take note - geologists have pieced together a cinematic account of a violent impact that gouged out a 90-kilometre-wide crater in the US state of Virginia 35 million years ago. Surprisingly, the impact may have created a new niche for life deep underground.

Hidden by younger sediments, the Chesapeake Bay Impact Structure is among the world's largest and best-preserved craters. Now, Gregory Gohn of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, and colleagues have drilled nearly 2 km into the basin to reveal its formation.

Comment: It should be noted that the impact was extremely harmful for all of the life that was there previously!!!


Meteor

In 1807, a comet appeared in the Natchez night sky

On Tuesday, March 1, 1808, Judge Thomas Rodney wrote a letter to his son -- U.S. Attorney General Ceasar Rodney -- with news of the sighting of a comet in the Natchez sky.

Telescope

Ancient bacterial fossils may exist on moon

Some scientists believe that at least one meteorite found in Antarctica preserves evidence of ancient life on Mars.

Now, work by a team of English scientists reinforces an earlier suggestion that evidence of life on the early Earth might be found in meteorites on the moon.

The original idea was presented in a 2002 paper by University of Washington astronomer John Armstrong, who suggested that material ejected from Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment (a period about four billion years ago when the Earth was subjected to a rain of asteroids and comets) might be found on the moon.

Sheeple

Preparing the sheeple! Martian soil appears able to support life

LOS ANGELES - "Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said on Thursday that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.

Display

Website domain names: any suffixes could be possible after landmark vote

Icann, the organisation that regulates the internet domain name system, has passed a landmark vote to relax rules limiting web addresses to "top-level" suffixes, such as .com and .uk, a move that could see people and companies register almost anything they want.

The unanimous vote, held in Paris today, also approved a second proposal to allow domain names written in languages other than English, such as Arabic.