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."
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.
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.
There you are again, at the 11th hour, wrapping that present.
Off comes the price tag, ‘snip’ goes the scissors, and you peel off a piece of tape. Except that the tape, sensing your hurry, tapers down to a point and leaves with a useless, triangular piece. So you try again, once you find the point that was left on the tape roll. And once again, you find your piece of tape narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
The same *!@#$ phenomenon happens with wallpaper, too. You can’t just peel it off in a nice, even swath; no, it has to peel away from the wall in those deterministically infuriating triangles.
Well, for what it's worth, it’s not you, it’s physics.
Now, an MIT mathematician and his international team of colleagues officially christen that effect "The Wallpaper Problem.” More importantly, in the March 30 issue of Nature Materials, they try to explainwhy, using a model of the peeling problem that accurately predicts the angle of the triangle.
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.
Well, sort of. Fans of classic science fiction and/or campy Disney films will recall that squid and humans have a score to settle. But Captain Nemo will be happy to hear that our cephalopod friends may have finally repaid their debt to humankind.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, my alma mater, have discovered a property of squid beaks that may lead to breakthroughs in the design of medical devices. They've answered a long-standing, deceptively simple conundrum: "Why don't squid hurt themselves?"
See, squid beaks are nasty, hard, sharp little things. Or, as UCSB biologist Herbert Waite so eloquently put it to the Associated Press:
"A dozen of them could eat you, or really hurt you a lot."
Squid, on the other hand, are soft, pulpy, boneless little creatures. How is it that they can clamp down on their prey with these knifelike little things and not hurt themselves at the same time? It'd be sort of like you or me trying to cut up a piece of cardboard using a pair of scissors that was missing a handle. The sharp part may be aimed at the box, but the ragged end that digs into your hand still hurts like hell.
The back end of that sharp beak, figured biologists, must be like ragged scissor handle on squishy squid body. But squid don't seem to mind, and so scientists asked that most fundamental question: "What's up with that?"
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.
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.
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.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from National Geographic News: A meteor zipped across the U.S. Pacific Northwest sky early Tuesday morning before exploding, possibly littering eastern Oregon with marble- to basketball-size space rocks, an expert says. Impact sites are yet to be found, according to Richard Pugh, a scientist with the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University in Oregon. Pugh is coordinating a search for potential meteorites. He said 40 to 50 eyewitnesses have contacted his lab to report the fireball. ... The meteor was first spotted over Washington State moving in an east-southeast direction. "The light was bright enough to wake up people even though the shades were pulled, and then the sonic boom hit, rattling windows and making the dust fly, and the dogs crawled under the bed," Pugh said.
Almost everyone — even the scientists among us — have likely had a brush with a lame science project of our own. I'll own up to copping out with the ubiquitous and ultra-lame "see what light grows plants best" experiment, and I seem to remember presenting a science project that had something to do with popcorn cooking times. Not my brightest moment.
But it takes real ingenuity to come up with a science project this great:
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
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from the New York Times (Registration Required): It's been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy. And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory. For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from the San Francisco Examiner: SYDNEY, Australia (Associated Press) - Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they
have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths. Australian experts taking part in an international
program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said
many may never have been seen before. Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists
still do not fully understand.
