Science & TechnologyS


Cell Phone

AT&T Violates Net Neutrality, Forces Customers to Subscribe to More Expensive Plans

Craig Aaron
Freepress
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
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From electricity to earmuffs, once you buy a product or service from a company, it shouldn't be any of their business how you choose to use it.

The power company doesn't say you can't use the energy-saving features on your new refrigerator unless you buy more electricity; and your grocer doesn't make you buy an extra loaf of bread if you stop purchasing potato chips.

Then there's the upside-down world of AT&T -- where Ma Bell's spawn sees nothing wrong with making you buy more of what you don't want just to use something you like.

AT&T's latest proposal is a clear violation of Net Neutrality -- the fundamental principle that keeps the open Internet free from discrimination -- and a serious test of whether the Federal Communications Commission will protect mobile users.

AT&T just announced that unless its iPhone customers subscribe to a more expensive "mobile share" unlimited text-and-voice plan, the company will cripple the device's built-in FaceTime app so users can't make mobile video calls.
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Telescope

Mars rover Curiosity aces first test drive

Irene Klotz
News Daily
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:29 UTC
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© Reuters/JPL/HandoutHandout image courtesy of NASA shows tracks left by the Curiosity rover on Mars August 22, 2012. The rover made its first move, going forward about 15 feet (4.5 meters), rotating 120 degrees and then reversing about 8 feet (2.5 meters). Curiosity is about 20 feet (6 meters) from its landing site, now named Bradbury Landing.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took a 16-minute drive on Wednesday, its first since reaching the Red Planet to search for habitats that could have supported microbial life.

The $2.5-billion, two-year mission, NASA's first astrobiology initiative since the 1970s-era Viking probes, kicked off on August 6, with a risky, but successful landing on at a site NASA has named "Bradbury Landing," a nod to the late science fiction author and space aficionado Ray Bradbury.

Aside from a quick steering test earlier in the week, the one-ton rover had stood firmly on its six wheels since touching down inside an ancient impact basin called Gale Crater, located in the planet's southern hemisphere near the equator.

At 10:17 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, Curiosity became a rover, trudging out a total of 15 feet, turning 120 degrees and then backing up 8 feet to position itself beside its first science target -- a scour mark left behind by the rover's descent engine.

Most of Curiosity's drive time was spent taking pictures, including the first images of the rover's tread marks in the Martian soil.
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Magnify

Elusive Metal Discovered: Nickel Oxide Turned Into an Electricity-Conducting Metal


ScienceDaily
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:24 UTC
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© Carnegie InstitutionScientists have discovered the conditions under which nickel oxide can turn into an electricity-conducting metal.
Carnegie scientists are the first to discover the conditions under which nickel oxide can turn into an electricity-conducting metal. Nickel oxide is one of the first compounds to be studied for its electronic properties, but until now scientists have not been able to induce a metallic state. The compound becomes metallic at enormous pressures of 2.4 million times the atmospheric pressure (240 gigapascals).

The finding is published in Physical Review Letters.

"Physicists have predicted for decades that the nickel oxide would transition from an insulator -- a compound that does not conduct electricity -- to a metal under compression, but their predictions have not previously been confirmed," remarked team leader Viktor Struzhkin of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory. "This new discovery has been a goal in physics that ranks as high as achieving metallic hydrogen, but for metal oxides."

The outer shells of atoms contain what are called valence electrons, which play a large role in electrical and chemical behavior. Metals generally have one to three of these valence electrons, while non-metals have between five and seven. Metals are good conductors of electricity because the valence electrons are loosely bound, so the electrons are free to flow through the material.
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Chalkboard

Sun's Plasma Loops Recreated in the Lab to Help Understand Solar Physics


ScienceDaily
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:19 UTC
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© Eve Stenson / CaltechPlasma loops created in the lab were recorded using high-speed cameras.
In orbit around Earth is a wide range of satellites that we rely on for everything from television and radio feeds to GPS navigation. Although these spacecraft soar high above storms on Earth, they are still vulnerable to weather -- only it's weather from the sun. Large solar flares -- or plasma that erupts from the sun's surface -- can cause widespread damage, both in space and on Earth, which is why researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are working to learn more about the possible precursors to solar flares called plasma loops. Now, they have recreated these loops in the lab.

"We're studying how these solar loops work, which contributes to the knowledge of space weather," says Paul Bellan, professor of applied physics at Caltech, who compares the research to studying hurricanes. For example, you can't predict a hurricane unless you know more about the events that precede it, like high-pressure and low-pressure fronts. The same is true for solar flares. "It takes some time for the plasma to get to Earth from the sun, so it's possible that with more research, we could have up to a two-day warning period for massive solar flares."

The laboratory plasma loop studies were conducted by graduate student Eve Stenson together with Bellan and are reported in the August 13 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
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Chalkboard

Researchers Return Blood Cells to Stem Cell State


ScienceDaily
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:58 UTC
Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a reliable method to turn the clock back on blood cells, restoring them to a primitive stem cell state from which they can then develop into any other type of cell in the body.

The work, described in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS One), is "Chapter Two" in an ongoing effort to efficiently and consistently convert adult blood cells into stem cells that are highly qualified for clinical and research use in place of human embryonic stem cells, says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

"Taking a cell from an adult and converting it all the way back to the way it was when that person was a 6-day-old embryo creates a completely new biology toward our understanding of how cells age and what happens when things go wrong, as in cancer development," Zambidis says.

"Chapter One," Zambidis says, was work described last spring in PLoS One in which Zambidis and colleagues recounted the use of this successful method of safely transforming adult blood cells into heart cells. In the latest experiments, he and his colleagues now describe methods for coaxing adult blood cells to become so-called induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPS) -- adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic like state, and with unprecedented efficiencies.
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Eye 1

Sensitive data in human brain successfully extracted by Hackers

THN Security Analyst
The Hacker News
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:52 UTC
hack
© unknown
It is now possible to hack the human brain ? YES ! This was explained researchers at the Usenix Conference on Security, held from 8 to 10 August in Washington State. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it's possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you'd rather keep secret.

In a study of 28 subjects wearing brain-machine interface devices built by companies like Neurosky and Emotiv and marketed to consumers for gaming and attention exercises, the researchers found they were able to extract hints directly from the electrical signals of the test subjects' brains that partially revealed private information like the location of their homes, faces they recognized and even their credit card PINs.

Brain-computer interface or BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotive or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer.
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Rocket

Curiosity: Did NASA discover life on Mars... 36 years ago?

Michael Hanlon
Mail Online
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:09 UTC
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© EPAFirst images: Curiosity is not equipped with the sort of laboratory kit that could identify forms of life
Trebles all round at JPL (well it would be, but this being the US alcohol is strictly banned at NASA's planetary exploration facility in Pasadena) after the successful arrival on the planet Mars of the mega-rover Curiosity.

When I first heard how they were planning to get more than a tonne of nuclear- powered kit down on to the Martian surface in one piece I thought they were joking.

'You're going to use parachutes?'

Yup.

'Then retro-rockets?'

You betcha.

'Fine, but then you are going to dangle the thing on four steel cables, lower it gently to the ground from a hovering rocket-powered mothership, those cables are going to automatically detach then the mothership is going to scoot off and crash out of harm's way. And all this with absolutely no control from Earth?'

You have understood correctly.
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Info

Professor's Breakthrough on Human Combustion Theory

Rachel Allen
Cambridge News, UK
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:54 UTC
Prof Brian J Ford
© Cambridge News, UKProf Brian J Ford
A Cambridge professor has tackled the issue of spontaneous combustion - using belly pork.

Prof Brian J Ford is a research biologist and author of more than 30 books, most about cell biology and microscopy but he has turned his attention to the mechanisms behind why people 'explode'.

He said in an article in New Scientist: "One minute they may be relaxing in a chair, the next they erupt into a fireball.

"Jets of blue fire shoot from their bodies like flames from a blowtorch, and within half an hour they are reduced to a pile of ash.

"Typically, the legs remain unscathed sticking out grotesquely from the smoking cinders. Nearby objects - a pile of newspapers on the armrest, for example - are untouched."

The first record of spontaneous combustion dates back to 1641 when Danish doctor and mathematician Thomas Bartholin described the death of Polonus Vorstius - who drank wine at home in Milan, Italy, one evening in 1470 before bursting into flames.

Since then more reports of spontaneous combustion have been filed and linked to alcoholism - though the link was later disproved.
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Info

For Better or Worse: Older Dads Pass on More Mutations to Kids

Charles Choi
LiveScience
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:01 UTC
Man and Son
© Timurpix, ShutterstockA 50-year-old dad will pass on four times as many new mutations to his kids than would a 20-year-old father, according to research detailed in the journal Nature on Aug. 23, 2012.
The older a father is, the more likely he will pass new mutations to his children, upping the chances of disease, researchers say.

"A 36-year-old father gives twice more new mutations to his child than a 20-year-old father does, and a 50-year-old father gives about four times the number of mutations," said researcher Kari Stefansson, chairman and CEO of deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland.

"This is not a subtle effect - this is a very, very large effect. And it increases the probability that a mutation may strike a gene that is very important, which can lead to a disease."

Past studies have linked a father's age at conception to the risk of schizophrenia, autism and other mental disorders. The new research links new mutations to these same diseases - mutations seen in patients but not in their parents.

Genetic errors crop up in the body over time, and scientists had conjectured that older parents accumulate more mutations in their sperm and egg cells than younger ones. To better understand the rate at which novel mutations emerge over time, researchers sequenced the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic trios of parents and offspring.

The scientists found that the age of the father at conception was by far the dominant factor in determining the number of novel mutations in children.
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Snowflake

Intelligent Living System: Scientists capture incredible close-ups of ice crystals and snowflakes

Nina Golgowski
Daily Mail, UK
Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:47 UTC
Photographed using a specialized microscope whose viewing stage is chilled to -170C, scientists in Maryland are showing a whole new side to what's caught on the tip of our tongues.

Using a low-temperature scanning electron microscope, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center have captured an astonishing new view on naturally-occurring snowflakes.

Shipping in the samples collected from snow banks or during fresh snow fall from around the country, the researchers study their composition for their effects on our ecosystem.
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© emu.arsusda.govThese unique images captured with a low-temperature scanning electronic microscope capture show a side to snowflakes rarely seen before
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