Technology
Hank |
Courtesy of GrrrlScientist at Guardian Blogs (who I found courtesy of the venerable yet still awesome ScienceURLs), I got a chance to view an interview of Richard Dawkins conducted by Matt Ridley. Dawkins is a polarizing figure and maybe not a great public face for people who just want to do positive science outreach but when he stays on message there's really no one better.
In the video, he talks about what E.T. might be like, the same topic Michael Shermer wrote about for us in What Aliens Can Tell Us About Evolution:
In discussing what life is, he gets into virtual…
Malware - malicious software written for purposes like identity theft - could get a lot more dangerous.
With so much information stored, and advancements in programming, malware programs could soon not only engage in traditional data theft or taking over a computer, but also 'steal' data on behavior patterns, a higher level of danger than easily detectable attacks.
A new generation of malware threats could extract personal information about relationships in a real-world social network, as well as characteristic information about individuals in the network. Using mathematical models, based on…
Hank |
People sometimes ask me how I have access to so much great stuff. Well, I am somewhat plugged in to other people who find good stuff, like Andrea Kuszewski and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter for things I might otherwise never notice, but for science I have always used ScienceURLs.com
As I have discussed in the past, it is often the case that tools are built out of selfishness. Science 2.0 was built, yes, as a way to give scientists a platform to provide content directly to the audience, but also because I didn't want to bounce around to 40 sites to find the best writers, so it was…
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the third most common synthetic polymer and accounts for about 18% of world polymer production. It is an aromatic/aliphatic polyester which possesses very practical thermal properties that are not found in the all aliphatic commodity thermoplastics polyethylene or polypropylene: a glass transition temperature (Tg) near 67°C and a melting temperature (Tm) of 265°C. But like those two, it is derived from fossil fuels: the key aromatic component of PET, terephthalic acid, is derived from petroleum, while ethylene glycol is derived from petroleum or…
A French court has just decided a case that will likely have a great deal of effect on online search engines if the decision is upheld after appeals. A French man had been accused of “crimes relating to the corruption of a minor,” ultimately resulting in a suspended sentence. He found that Google search results snagged the news items about his case, putting them at the top of search results on his name:
Given extensive press coverage of the alleged crime at the time, querying the man’s name on the popular search engine returns web pages from news publications that suggested he was a “rapist…
Biometric scientists at the University of Southampton say they can identify ears with a 100% success rate.
In a new paper, scientists from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how a technique called the image ray transform can highlight tubular structures such as ears, making it possible to identify them.
The research describes how the transform is capable of highlighting tubular structures such as the helix of the ear and spectacle frames and, by exploiting the elliptical shape of the helix, can be used as the basis of a method for enrolment for ear…
When I was a lad (a little bit later than when Sarahsaurus was around), there was a common misunderstanding among schoolboys that methane was responsible for the foul smell of flatulence. A story was told of a boy who used to set fire to his farts with a cigarette lighter, the fabric of his trousers acting as a kind of Davy safety lamp protecting his nether regions. This was indeed evidence of methane, but methane was not the source of the smell.
However, the connection between human waste and methane did not go unnoticed. Poo power cuts Thames electricity bill by £15m,…
Hank |
NPR, National Public Radio, is in a tough spot - they are constantly accused of liberal bias (and, let's be honest, they have never done a story on how taxes hurt poor people or how much better the environment is than 40 years ago, so there is something to that perception (1)) and no one who gets taxpayer money likes being a political football and having people in government asking what they do with the money but that is the price of taking government money.
When I was young, PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, which is the television brother of NPR and the other big project of the…
Software uses many kinds of data. Sometimes it concerns worksheet data and sometimes it is data that is retrieved or generated in some way or it are results of actions. Often these data are interrelated. In that case the ensemble forms a complex object. When this is the fact then it becomes worthwhile to attach the actions that are regularly applied to the data to the object that contains the data. With comparable data structures the same will happen. The object oriented software generation uses this approach intensively.
In software programs data is often exchanged between locations or they…
There’s a relatively newly discovered (within the last few months) computer worm called Stuxnet, which exploits several Windows vulnerabilities (some of which were patched some time ago) as it installs itself on people’s computers. It largely replicates through USB memory sticks, and not so much over the Internet (though it can replicate through storage devices shared over networks). And it’s something of an odd bird. Its main target isn’t (at least for now) the computers it’s compromised, and it’s not trying to enslave the computers to send spam, collect credit card numbers, or mount…