171848760
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et alia
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward
PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
138122406
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Australia has recorded its first day of no local cases of Covid-19 in almost five months.
Zero cases were reported in the 24 hours between 20:00 on Friday and 20:00 on Saturday — the first time this has happened since 9 June.
The state of Victoria — epicentre of Australia's second wave — recorded zero cases for the second day in a row after a 112-day lockdown.
Health officials say more restrictions may be eased in the coming days.
"Thank you to all of our amazing health & public health workers & above all else the Australian people," Health Minister Greg Hunt said on his Twitter account.
Australia has recorded some 27,500 infections and 900 deaths to Covid-19 since the pandemic started — far fewer than many nations.
77866867
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.
"We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity," said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.
Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.
71177917
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Researchers at the University of Rochester and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using “twisted light.” This remarkable achievement is possible because the researchers used the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information, rather than the more commonly used polarization of light. The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems.
Quantum cryptography promises more secure communications. The first step in such systems is quantum key distribution (QKD), to ensure that both the sender and receiver – usually referred to as Alice and Bob – are communicating in such a way that only they know what is being sent. They are the only ones who hold the “key” to the messages, and the systems are set up in such a way that the presence of any eavesdropper would be identified.
69724753
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have simulated the behaviour of two-dimensional disk arrays with N parity disks and N(N – 1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our conclusion is that having N(N + 1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a 99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures.
54141697
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., joined a team of researchers reporting the findings Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 92 degrees Celsius on a clear winter night.
Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 93.2 C was set Aug. 10, 2010.
51904935
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Current digital data storage systems are able to store huge amounts of data. Even though the data density of digital information storage has increased tremendously over the last few decades, the data longevity is limited to only a few decades.
If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years. In this paper a medium is investigated consisting of tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time.
47433713
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
The pervading carpet of perchlorate chemicals found on Mars may boost the chances that microbial life exists on the Red Planet — but perchlorates are also perilous to the health of future crews destined to explore that way-off world.
Perchlorates are reactive chemicals first detected in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix lander that plopped down on Mars over five years ago in May 2008.
It is likely both of NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 measured signatures of perchlorates, in the form of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Other U.S. Mars robots — the Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — detected elemental chlorine. Moreover, orbital measurements taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft show that chlorine is globally distributed.
Smith said microbes on Earth use perchlorate for an energy source. They actually live off highly oxidized chlorine, and in reducing the chlorine down to chloride, they use the energy in that transaction to power themselves. In fact, when there's too much perchlorate in drinking water, microbes are used to clean it up, he said.
Furthermore, seasonal flow features seen on Mars may be caused by high concentrations of the brines of perchlorate, which has a strong attraction to water and can drastically lower its freezing point, Smith told SPACE.com.
Devilishly dangerous
The high levels of perchlorate found on Mars would be toxic to humans, Smith said.
42109269
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Authorities are warning lives and property are under immediate threat as a large bushfire burns out of control near communities in northern New South Wales.
The Rural Fire Service has issued an emergency warning for the large, fast moving blaze near Coonabarabran, which has already destroyed two properties.
Siding Springs, the principal optical observatory is under threat with some buildings lost to a bush fire
The MtStromlo observatory was destroyed in a bush fire in 2003
Photo of bushfire approaching observatory
25558200
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
EU politicians are mulling new data protection laws that could make Europe a hostile place for social networks.
EU law should require that consumers give their explicit consent before their data are used. And consumers generally should have the right to delete their data at any time, especially the data they post on the internet themselves.
We both believe that companies who direct their services to European consumers should be subject to EU data protection laws. Otherwise, they should not be able to do business on our internal market. This also applies to social networks with users in the EU.
25194574
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
ASUS company has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November.
"Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop," Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters.
23329298
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body.
Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.
"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground."
21024242
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
a new study indicates that heavy coffee drinking staves off deadly prostate cancer in men.
Some 47,911 US men were surveyed over the period 1986 to 2008 for the research. During this time some 5,035 of them developed prostate cancer with 642 dying of it.
According to analysis by investigating scientists, men who drank the most coffee (a fairly normal six-plus cups per day) had a 20 per cent lower risk of developing any kind of prostate cancer. If they did get prostate cancer, the java-swillers were much less likely to die from it than others: their risk of deadly prostate cancer was no less than 60 per cent lower than normal.
Even less thirsty coffee drinkers who only put away one to three cups daily saw their chance of deadly prostate cancer fall by a useful 30 per cent. With the original report here
17471728
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Microsoft's new smartphone platform is off to what could be considered a slower start than expected in North America. That's according to The Street, which has released a report saying that the company sold some 40,000 units on its first day on the market.
Early sales numbers from other phone platform launches include Apple's estimated 500,000 iPhones being snatched up during its launch weekend in 2007, and a million and a half G1 Android phones (the first Android device on the market) being bought up by T-Mobile subscribers in the phone's first six months. Those numbers have since improved with later device launches on the same platform such as the iPhone 3G and 3GS which both hit a million units in their first weekend on sale, as well as the iPhone 4, which sold 1.7 million units in its first weekend. Google too recently pegged Android activations as being north of 200,000 a day.
Story at C-NET
Also noted at The Register
16414342
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock.
"At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal," explains Dr Alton Horsfall of Newcastle uni's Centre for Extreme Environment Technology.
"We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano."
