Joey Seiler

France offers "zen-zones" on its high-speed trains, Vienna just ordered public transit users to keep the phone on silent, and more and more U.S. states are banning cell phone use while driving.

Emirates Airlines, though, is giving obsessive communicators another place to gab: coach. Beginning in March, the airline rolled out technology designed to let users operate cell phones at low enough levels to avoid completely futzing up the plane's navigation and ending the conference call with a bang.

Now in the U.S., we look at the Arab world and say, "You can take your excessive freedoms and shove it. We're on a banning spree."

Continue reading 'Congress on cell phones in planes: "We have the technology, but it'd be reaaaaal annoying."' >

Okay, maybe not, but Mitch Kapor, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and generally near-prescient entrepreneur is sending the resources of Kapor Enterprises in that direction.

Kapor currently serves as the Chairman of the Board for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. One of the biggest complaints about virtual worlds--and we'll skip the tired flying penis jokes--is that it's hard to navigate in a 3D environment using a mouse and keyboard. His solution is to use a 3D camera to register movement and let users ride their avatars as if they were riding Segways.

Video of developer Phillipe Bossut flapping his hands to fly after the jump.

Continue reading 'In the future we'll all ride the Internet with our 3D camera Segways' >

So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.

At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.

Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.

[Google News]

Continue reading 'Hawaiians sue to stop Large Hadron Collider / save the world' >

I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a personal failing I chalk up to mild ADD, horrible spatial organization skills, and the desire to not get beaten up in middle school. Somehow, none of that gets in the way of my interest in reading a 10-page paper proving that all formations of a Rubik's Cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.

Ah, for the salad days of hiding my nerdery.

Continue reading 'Rubik's Cubes just got a whole lot easier - by one move' >

Methane-filled cow toots have long been the bane of environmentalists and pythonophobes everywhere (see also: megacorporations and carbon dioxide).

Now there's a chance that at least one thing coming out of cows could actually help stop global warming.

"When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure. We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities, and for California," said David Albers, dairyman and collaborater in The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project.

Continue reading 'Everybody poops, but cow's power the world' >

Remember how when you were little and it rained, your parents told you God is crying because you did something wrong? Turns out it's actually just a whole host of bacteria coalescing into ice and plummeting back to Earth. Because you did something wrong.

Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, with colleagues in Montana and France, reported today in Science that most ice nucleators, particles ice forms around, found in snow at mid- and high-latitude locations were biological in origin. I.e., it's just just the yellow snow you need to worry about. It's pretty much all filled with creepy crawlies (or, more appropriately, fearsome flagellum).

Their guess, then, is that the bacteria affects the rain cycle or actually causes their own precipitation.

Continue reading 'Why's it raining? Bacteria. That's why.' >

Astrophysicist John Dubinski has been running simulations on his supercomputer of galaxies forming, colliding into each other, and otherwise moving around as they are wont to do. Last year he compiled nine animations onto a DVD, wrapped them up with "the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension," and sold Gravitas.

As of this week, he's begun giving the DVD away for free via torrent, but he's posted the series of animations on YouTube, making my day far, far happier than otherwise possible.

Continue reading 'Free galactic simulations are the best part of my day' >

Okay, once you start smashing or pulling atoms apart, they get pretty exciting, but IBM has just published its finding on just how little force it takes to move an atom: about one-130-millionth of an ounce of force (210 piconewtons) to push a cobalt atom across platinum or only one-1,600-millionth (17 piconewtons) of an ounce of force to shove at across copper.

It takes about 30 billion piconewtons to pick up a penny.

Geeks across the world rejoiced, now able to finish every work out (or gaming session) with a shout of "I hold the power of 130 million cobalt atoms in my hand! What type of guns are these? Yeah, atom-pushing guns."

Anyone? No? Okay, just me.

Continue reading 'Atomic power actually kind of wimpy' >

Is there no end to the wonder that is a carbon nanotube? The things can be used to make really black bulletproof objects and slow, tiny computers!

Those computers are hard to make, though. Nanotubes are, well, small and sometimes hard to work with, resulting in a lot of failure. IBM has a different take, though. Instead of arranging the nanotubes to replace traditional circuits by hand (or, more likely, traditional tools), Big Blue is stringing them together with DNA molecules. Once it's all put together, you slip the DNA out, and--ta dah!--you've got a grid of nanotubes

Continue reading 'IBM builds nanotube chips out of DNA; HAL waves hello to Deep Blue' >

"Orgasm is a compelling, brief event that is an integration of cognitive, emotional, somatic, visceral, and neural processes," begin Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer and Beverly Whipple in their sweet talking new article in The Psychologist.

They note that most previous studies of the orgasm have focused on how physical actions affect the body, but new research into the effects of drugs like anti-depressants on sex has shifted the focus to where it really belongs. The mind.

Inside our brain we have "orgasm accelerators" and "orgasm brakes." Hit the jump for the all-important differentiation.

Continue reading 'Happy Valentine's Day! Here's how orgasms work.' >

Actually, the chances for wiretapping immunity are probably a good deal higher. We mentioned the AT&T wiretapping scandal back in November with a handy-dandy introduction to the ongoing vote over granting telecom companies immunity from lawsuits for their complicity. Now it appears to be less of a scandal, and it seems like that whole voting thing may be winding down as well.

On Tuesday the Senate voted 68-29 to keep a provision in the current spy bill that would grant retroactive immunity to any of the network providers who happily looked the other way or encouraged the NSA to use their services to eavesdrop on American citizens.

For those of you interested in what your candidate thinks about science, you might want to take a gander at how they feel about tech: Obama voted to strike immunity, McCain to preserve it, and Clinton couldn't be bothered to show. Bush is pressing the House to follow suit.

Continue reading 'In this week's tech fright forecast: 50% chance of wiretapping immunity with potential breaks for net neutrality' >

In an attempt to measure how social media affects the music biz (a different take than the constant attempts to just shut down the Interwebs), NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar looked at how the number of blog items about an album posted before its release could predict its sales. Looking at 108 albums released in early 2007, he found that it worked out pretty well.

With more than 40 "legitimate" blog posts prior to the album's drop, the artist could expect three times as many sales as the average. If that album was associated with a major label, the artist could expect five times as many sales. So, you know, there go the hopes of tastemakers everywhere looking for the next indie band out of Omaha.

Continue reading 'Bloggers can help sell music; influentials can't; I'll take cash to write about Bright Eyes' >

San Francisco is getting to be a pain to fly in and out of, which, sadly, I'll be doing within the week. At the end of January, the local TSA authorities started asking fliers to remove each individual gadget or piece of electronics they happened to be carrying. After some of the major blogs picked the story up, the TSA investigated and then issued an apology (sort of, while still managing to be both head-patting and self-congralatory) on its own blog yesterday.

Today the Washington Post reports that things are even worse: "A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself."

Other passengers have had their laptops seized and unreturned.

Continue reading 'New airport fun-time game: stand around and watch while the TSA steals your laptop' >

Ah, the never-ending dance revolving around the questionable link between mobile phones and cancer. It's like Ross and Rachel, Sam and Diane, Cigarettes and Cancer--mostly like the last one. However, a new study from Tokyo Women's Medical University has reported that after looking at phone use by 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people, regular phone use (at least once a week for 6 months) does not increase your likelihood of getting cancer.

Of course, if you live in the country and gab more over your phone than your fence, you'll probably still get a tumor in your salivary glands--but that's for quibbling. You'll also stop sleeping. And age like a zombie--but no cancer!

Continue reading 'Cell phones won't give you brain cancer' >

My girlfriend plays video games--it's awesome. She likes to joke that somewhere inside of her is trapped the mind of a 16-year-old boy, just trying to express himself (video games, jamming on the drums, wearing awesome pageboy hats, gender studies)--it can be weird. Guess what, honey? Things just got more awkward.

A Stanford study has shown that video games activate the reward zone in men's brains more intensely than in women's, which I suppose means I'm more likely to get cancer, but learn a lot more about physics. So... it's a wash?

Continue reading 'It's official: Guys like video games (and territory) more than girls' >