Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 29-04-08
Get the Sci-Tech-Business RSS Feed or Subscribe by Mail.
- At least one Strategy Boutique believes that Google is the most powerful brand on the planet.
- Internet-related homicide news.
- The Pentagon's blue-sky technology office has finally announced the three contenders who will take forward its Vulture project.
- eBay is considering flogging off Skype, the VoIP provider it paid $2.6bn for in 2005. And now you can get Skype on your iPhone.
- Time Machiner: Email someone in the Future.
- Ray Kurweil writes: "The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to
global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other
worldly conundrums."
- The US Geological Survey has just released its first ever statewide earthquake forecast for California, and the odds aren't great.
The study finds a 99.7% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater will hit California by 2037, while the probability of a quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater is 46%.
- Is this the beginning of water wars?
- Rising oil prices lift all alt-energy boats. For proof, look no further than the fat $130 million investment scooped up by eSolar, a company whose basic solar power strategy - using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to generate steam - was all but abandoned in the 1980s, and has recently recently caught investors' attention again.
- Time Magazine on How to Win the War on Global Warming.
- A new study challenges the common practice in many classrooms of teaching mathematical concepts by using 'real-world,' concrete examples.
- Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.
- The latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.
- While microcelebrity is a positive alternative to mainstream media culture, it's important to turn a critical eye on online communities: "Internet culture can be very sexist, homophobic and racist... Popular blogs are all written by white guys ... and the most popular YouTube videos are of hot girls." - Alice Marwick, Saturday's keynote speaker at ROFLCon, a two-day internet culture conference
- Gauging a Collider's Odds of Creating a Black Hole. - and while we' re at it, the stranglet disaster hypothesis.
- The world's largest laser system - the National Ignition Facility - is being built in California and officials say it will go online next year.
- Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
- Food miles don't feed climate change - meat does.
- A mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are very low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of Earth.
- Charles Darwin's private papers online - the largest publication of Darwin's papers in history.
- A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. Their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.
- Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a technique for radically
increasing the number of gigabytes that can be crammed into one square
inch of data-storage chip, raising it from just 3.3GB to around
500,000GB.
- Your DNA falls into the realm of "the world's information," and it seems that Google, as part of its corporate mission, is making a play to organize that, too.
- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat - even if it has caused a "near civil war" within the organization.
- Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres by the end of this century, displacing tens of millions of people. That's the conclusion of a new prediction of sea level rises that for the first time takes into account ice dynamics.
- Good news for rational, level-headed Virgoans everywhere: just as you might have predicted, scientists have found astrology to be rubbish.
- Scientists must work harder at making the public aware of the stark difference between good science and "denialist spin".
That's the call from Professor Barry Brook, Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
- New research by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford provides the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with the mother’s diet.
Space News
Source: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble
Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia,
Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J.
Westphal (Caltech)
Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to mark the 18th anniversary of the telescope's launch. This is the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public simultaneously. In this poster are the best 12 images of the collection.
More.
Related News and Events
