|
Latest Articles: Science/Tech
The Future of The Internet: Mind to Mind Communication?
Post Date: 2009-10-12 01:58:32 by wudidiz
3 Comments
The Future of The Internet: Mind to Mind Communication?Sunday, October 11, 2009 - by Dave Altavilla Not long ago we gave you a look at a product manufactured by OCZ that made use of brainwaves as a futuristic but in-the-here-and-now game controller. Dubbed the NIA, for Neural Impulse Actuator, instead of buttons and joysticks, this device gave user the ability to control in-game movement with their mind. At the time, it sounded almost a little crazy but it worked, at least in novel sort of way, perhaps for some freaky party fun. In reality, for us, the product was more of an under-pinning that if mankind can dream it up, for the most part anything can be built. ...
"Abiotic Oil: No Real Shortage, Ever?"
Post Date: 2009-10-11 15:24:58 by wudidiz
0 Comments
Wednesday, September 16, 2009"Abiotic Oil: No Real Shortage, Ever?""Abiotic Oil: No Real Shortage, Ever?""A team of scientists based at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have made a "revolutionary" discovery about how hydrocarbon is formed, learning that animal and plant fossils are not necessary to form crude oil. The discovery, the scientists say, means that the world will never run out of crude oil. Currently, theory states that crude oil is formed very slowly - over millions of years - from the remains of dead plants and animals. Buried under rock, over time the pressure and temperature of natural earth processes results in the creation of ...
FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Crisis
Post Date: 2009-10-10 16:37:31 by farmfriend
1 Comments
FCC Chairman Warns of Wireless Crisis Written by Steven J. DuBord Friday, 09 October 2009 10:26 New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski addressed CTIA-The Wireless Association at the industry trade group’s 2009 convention on October 7. Genachowski told CTIA that he believes “the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis.” According to Genachowski, the government is tripling the amount of spectrum available for use. But AP reported on October 8 that industry experts expect demand for online video and other high-bandwidth applications to cause a 30-fold increase in wireless traffic. CTIA has urged the FCC to ...
Department of Justice Spends Hundreds of Thousands to Study Duct Tape
Post Date: 2009-10-10 16:21:37 by farmfriend
3 Comments
Department of Justice Spends Hundreds of Thousands to Study Duct Tape Written by Joe Wolverton, II Friday, 09 October 2009 13:26 Colonel Mustard, in the library, with… a roll of duct tape? Thanks to a $2 million grant from the United States Department of Justice, researchers at the University of California, Davis are conducting experiments on this famous multipurpose adhesive in the hope that another tool will be put in the belt of forensic crime scene investigators. On Wednesday, UC Davis Forensic Science program announced the receipt of three separate grants from the federal government awarded to first, establish a bullet-matching database; second, study the impression made by ...
What happened to global warming?
Post Date: 2009-10-09 22:00:26 by sourcery
24 Comments
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But ...
Antarctica57;s ice story has been put on ice
Post Date: 2009-10-08 13:54:58 by sourcery
3 Comments
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention? The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history. Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters: A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980-2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008-2009 melt ...
NASA Moon "Bombings" Tomorrow: Sky Show, Water Expected
Post Date: 2009-10-08 12:12:26 by Brian S
0 Comments
With its "bombing" of the moon early tomorrow, NASA's LCROSS mission may beat a telltale signature of water out of a shadowy crater—and all you may need to see it is a good backyard telescope.LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) and its rocket will begin slamming into the South Pole just after 4:30 a.m. PT.The LCRCOSS collision should reveal how much water ice exists in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon. Some theories suggest the lunar pits hold vast stores of water.(Related: "Moon Crash, New Maps to Aid Search for Lunar Water.")How to Watch LCROSS Moon CrashesUnlike most cosmic impacts, though, the LCROSS crashes will have an ...
Robocops Come to Pittsburgh
Post Date: 2009-10-08 06:28:57 by Ada
11 Comments
…and bring the latest weaponry with them No longer the stuff of disturbing futuristic fantasies, an arsenal of “crowd control munitions,” including one that reportedly made its debut in the U.S., was deployed with a massive, overpowering police presence in Pittsburgh during last week’s G-20 protests. Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the many thousands of police (most transported on Port Authority buses displaying “PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD”), from as far away as Arizona and Florida with overreacting…and they had plenty of weaponry with which to do it. Bean bags fired from shotguns, CS (tear) gas, OC (Oleoresin ...
Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back
Post Date: 2009-10-07 13:12:49 by Prefrontal Vortex
1 Comments
Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back October 5th, 2009 by christian Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there. When I first started ...
Cosmic Ray Decreases Affect Atmospheric Aerosols And Clouds
Post Date: 2009-10-06 16:02:20 by sourcery
1 Comments
Billions of tonnes of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds. Researchers of the National Space Institute in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from some of the cosmic rays -- the energetic particles raining down on our planet from exploded stars. "The Sun makes fantastic natural experiments that allow us to test our ideas about its effects on the climate," says Prof. Henrik Svensmark, lead author of a report newly published in Geophysical Research Letters. When solar explosions interfere with the cosmic rays ...
Global Warming Profiteers Exposed: AGW Is Not and Never Was a Crisis
Post Date: 2009-10-04 19:30:24 by sourcery
25 Comments
Christopher Monckton says in the July 2009 issue of SPPI Monthly CO2 Report that it simply cannot be credibly argued that anthropogenic global warming is some kind of catastrophe warranting the sacrifice of our freedom and prosperity. Temperature change predicted by the UN, and (dotted line) adjusted to reflect the negligible impact of the Waxman/Markey Climate Bill, which might cut temperatures by 0.2-0.02 F by 2100, at a cost of $18 trillion. Source: Chip Knappenberger: cost estimates $180 bn/year from the White House. No longer can it be credibly argued that "global warming" is worse than previously thought. No longer can it be argued that "global warming" was, ...
Columbia University study ties southeast drought to population
Post Date: 2009-10-04 14:05:14 by buckeroo
3 Comments
With the world's governments working feverishly to create climate change legislation standards, a Columbia University study on drought conditions in the southeast disputes prior conclusions on the ties to global warming. European leaders and worldwide environmental organizations have been pressuring the United States to move forward with a climate change bill. It's part of an ongoing effort to further the pressure on India and China to comply with emission standards and to help shape a global continuity on cap-and-trade legislative structure. To this end, there have been numerous attempts to attach randomly-occurring weather events to a bigger global warming umbrella - and to ...
Ig Nobel awards go to knuckle-cracker, tequila chemists, other laureates
Post Date: 2009-10-02 11:44:06 by IDon'tThinkSo
2 Comments
Ig Nobel awards go to knuckle-cracker, tequila chemists, other laureates A Thousand Oaks doctor testing an arthritis link by cracking his knuckles for 60 years is among the winners of the mock Nobel Prizes. A man who cracked the knuckles of one hand -- but not the other -- for six decades, scientists who figured out why pregnant women don't topple over and chemists who made diamonds from tequila were honored Thursday at the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony -- a tongue-in-cheek parody of the famous and august Nobels, which are due to be announced next week. Produced by a science humor magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, the event was celebrated at a raucous event at Harvard ...
Hot and cold
Post Date: 2009-09-30 00:15:36 by sourcery
6 Comments
If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists believe, Arctic shipping will not happen in our lifetimes. The Arctic ice "is melting far faster than had been previously supposed," we heard this week from the UN's Environment Program, in releasing its 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium. This same week, National Geographic reported that the Arctic ice is probably melting far slower than previously supposed. After ramping up the rhetoric -- two years ago National Geographic told us that "the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions," and last year that "Arctic warming has become so ...
Perfect storm for silver brewing as antibiotics substitute
Post Date: 2009-09-29 15:45:59 by DeaconBenjamin
1 Comments
Silver may soon replace antibiotics as an alternative for healing, and is increasingly gaining ground in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology. SPOKANE, WASHINGTON - The over-prescription of antibiotics and the rapid spread of bacteria globally are creating "a perfect storm for silver," which will encourage even more medical use of the precious metal, Silver Institute Executive Director Mike DiRienzo said Thursday. In a presentation to the Silver Summit in Spokane, DiRienzo detailed new and emerging uses for silver, lead by the metal's growing significance in hospitals and the practice of medicine. "Currently we're seeing a surge of applications for silver-based ...
Breaking news: Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions
Post Date: 2009-09-29 13:55:18 by sourcery
4 Comments
A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time... The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre's site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up. The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking. The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included. Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his ...
Study finds poor toddlers often spanked by age 1
Post Date: 2009-09-29 13:43:06 by Prefrontal Vortex
13 Comments
Study finds poor toddlers often spanked by age 1 By MELISSA HEALY Los Angeles Times Updated: 09/17/2009 01:44:15 AM PDT There's no topic more incendiary than spanking. Add to that the spanking of very young children by mothers in minority, low-income households, and you have a minefield. A group of Duke University researchers has not only ventured into that minefield, it has set off a few bombs in the process. Published in this month's issue of the journal Child Development, their study of 2,573 toddlers enrolled in Head Start found that for poor children, early and frequent spanking — by the age of 1 — is not only very common, but it also makes their behavior at age 2 ...
Climate Science: Funding Hypocrisy
Post Date: 2009-09-28 15:59:29 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Climate Science: Funding Hypocrisy By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, September 28, 2009 “Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing” Edmund Burke I experienced two apparently disparate events recently. Both speak to the magnificent hypocrisy Burke identifies. They also illustrate Burke is wrong when he said it costs nothing. We’re all paying and will continue to pay for hypocrisies in climate science and research funding. The first event involved a stay in an upscale hotel. I’ve learned to ignore moral lectures in the bathroom – reuse the towels and save the planet - because I know the real ...
NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worsening
Post Date: 2009-09-27 16:19:02 by buckeroo
4 Comments
WASHINGTON — New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode. British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature. Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop ...
Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
Post Date: 2009-09-27 04:57:50 by sourcery
4 Comments
James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that 'anthropogenic global warming' is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a 'first-world luxury' with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore's imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the ...
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"
Post Date: 2009-09-27 03:50:50 by sourcery
19 Comments
New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. After studying it, ...
Preindustrial People Had Little Effect on Atmospheric Carbon Levels
Post Date: 2009-09-25 17:36:13 by sourcery
0 Comments
There's no doubt that the burning of fossil fuels over the past 2 centuries has caused a huge spike in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But CO2 levels increased gradually over the preceding millennia, too, and scientists did not know how much of that rise was caused by human activity. Now, an isotopic analysis of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice shows that humans caused little if any of the preindustrial buildup of CO2. The findings negate previous thinking about the role of early humans in the process, experts say, and the research should help scientists develop better baseline models to forecast future climate. After the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago, ...
The Moon Is Surprisingly Wet
Post Date: 2009-09-25 14:12:12 by mininggold
2 Comments
Title: The Moon Is Surprisingly Wet Published: Sep 25, 2009 Author: SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (Sept. 24) - The moon isn't the dry dull place it seems. Traces of water lurk in the dirt unseen.
Orwellian camera network to be made smarter
Post Date: 2009-09-25 11:20:47 by X-15
0 Comments
How can the UK's place as one of the most CCTV-surveilled nations in the world be improved upon? Why, with more surveillance technology of course. So say engineers at the shiny new Centre for Secure Information Technologies in Belfast, Northern Ireland, dedicated to investigating technologies that improve personal security - whether that's out in the street or online. One focus is improving security on Britain's buses using software that predicts violent behaviour from what's captured on the CCTV now common on the vehicles. "Despite massive investment in CCTV, the impact on antisocial and criminal behavior is negligible because very little video is ever analysed," ...
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Post Date: 2009-09-24 16:09:09 by sourcery
12 Comments
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are ...
Latest [Newer] 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 [Older]
|