Sometime within the next 5 years, the Voyager 1 space craft is expected to reach interstellar space. It will be the first man made object to cross the heliosphere, which is the final stop in our solar system.
After being launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was the first probe to visit many of the outer planets. It has sent back countless original images from space, almost all of which have been released to the public. Although NASA does sell images, and many appear in copyrighted works (such as books); NASA is very good about releasing information into the public domain, almost all scientifically significant information from space is given to the public.
Voyager 1, famously contained a gold phonographic record. The record was filled with iconic sights, images, and sounds from earth, and the prevailing message, “we come in peace”. We think. Even though any alien that can figure out how to play a phonographic record, will have certainly already have received fox news, the contents of the actual gold record are not public domain.
The disc was comprised by a man named Carl Sagan, and it contained many pieces of art, songs, and images, that are all copyrighted. Sagan had to secure the rights to include these items separately, at great expense. The special alien license does not allow the right to free copy and distribution to educators. In fact, it is unclear if an original copy of the entire disc still exists on earth at all.
Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms from other planetary systems. The discs carry photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from the people (e.g. the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States, and the children of the Planet Earth) and a medley, “Sounds of Earth,” that includes the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a variety of music.
In Namibia of southwestern Africa, the sparse grasslands that develop on deep sandy soils under rainfall between 50 and 100 mm per annum are punctuated by thousands of quasi-circular bare spots, usually surrounded by a ring of taller grass. The causes of these so-called “fairy circles” are unknown, although a number of hypotheses have been proposed. This paper provides a more complete description of the variation in size, density and attributes of fairy circles in a range of soil types and situations. Circles are not permanent; their vegetative and physical attributes allow them to be arranged into a life history sequence in which circles appear (birth), develop (mature) and become revegetated (die). Occasionally, they also enlarge. The appearance and disappearance of circles was confirmed from satellite images taken 4 years apart (2004, 2008).
The FBI and national cybercrime agencies are warning people traveling abroad to be wary of shady scammers planting malware via insecure hotel Internet connections.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center notes that malware perpetrators are masking their cybercrime weapons as popup software updates travelers see when setting up their Internet connections.
Legal action conducted by organisations deemed to be “patent trolls” cost US companies an estimated $US29 billion during 2011.
The study suggested that during 2011, 2150 companies mounted a total 5842 defences in US cases against intellectual property companies that owned and licensed patents without producing any related goods of their own.
Applied Cognitive Psychology recently published a study on […] walking while texting (WwT). […]
The researchers looked at how walking while texting alters an individual’s own walking behavior. The researchers found that, on average, people who engaged in WwT where much more cautious than walkers who weren’t texting. Despite this excess in caution, “texters” did not avoid obstacles with more ease than “non-texters.” The scientists concluded that being overly cautious while texting does not decrease the chances of being involved in an accident. […]
In 2010, The Pew Research Center reported that 17% of adult Americans admit to having bumped into objects while texting.
Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who’s The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he’s written for The New Yorker so far. […] What’s the latest? […]
Repackaging the work of others without disclosure is arguably a much more serious offense than reusing your own work without disclosure. […]
This is also why you should never pay someone in their 20s to give a speech and expect to learn something new.
Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson’s agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.
Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.”
She-Hulk has been a member of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Heroes for Hire, the Defenders, Fantastic Force, and S.H.I.E.L.D. A highly skilled lawyer, she has served as legal counsel to various superheroes on numerous occasions. She is the cousin of Bruce Banner, better known as the Incredible Hulk.
In some cases, the electronic information being gathered is used for illegal purposes, such as electronic identity theft. In other cases, the information is gathered for lawful purposes but is extremely annoying to users, such as when targeted and aggressive marketing tactics are used. Users are growing uncomfortable with the amount of information marketers possess today about them and many feel it is an invasion of their privacy even if the marketing is currently considered to be lawful. Moreover, even legitimate and lawful enterprises that collect confidential information about a user runs the risk of having an intruder penetrate their databases and acquiring the information for subsequent unlawful purposes. […]
Assignee: Apple Inc. (Cupertino, CA)
Filed: October 21, 2011
Techniques to pollute electronic profiling
Techniques to pollute electronic profiling are provided. A cloned identity is created for a principal. Areas of interest are assigned to the cloned identity, where a number of the areas of interest are divergent from true interests of the principal. One or more actions are automatically processed in response to the assigned areas of interest. The actions appear to network eavesdroppers to be associated with the principal and not with the cloned identity. […]
The invention claimed is:
1. A device-implemented method, comprising: cloning, by a device, an identity for a principal to form a cloned identity; configuring, by the device, areas of interest to be associated with the cloned identity, the areas of interest are divergent from true areas of interest for a true identity for the principal; and automatically processing actions associated with the areas of interest for the cloned identity over a network to pollute information gathered by eavesdroppers performing dataveillance on the principal and refraining from processing the actions when the principal is detected as being logged onto the network and also refraining from processing the actions when the principal is unlikely to be logged onto the network.
Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts “the worst drug” he has seen in his 20 years there. “With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,” Ryan has said. “If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.”
Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)
Because the chemicals most often found in bath salts — mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, and methylone — were not outlawed initially, a nearly year-and-a-half period ensued where, to the horror of law enforcement, salts were sold legally and widely, not only in head shops, but in gas stations and convenience stores all over the U.S. In 2010, 304 calls were made to poison control centers nationwide regarding bath salts. A year later, the calls skyrocketed to 6,138. […]
DEA officials believe that the base compounds are manufactured primarily in China and India and then imported into the U.S., where traffickers cut and mix the drug in a variety of ways — just one of the reasons why even the first hit of salts can produce unpredictable results.
“Some of these manufacturers will mix these substances purposefully or not purposefully,” says Jeffrey Comparin, a senior DEA laboratory director. “There’s zero quality control. You have no idea what you’re putting in your body.”
If liars betray their true emotions in early, rapid, automatic facial expressions, as some experts have claimed, it would make sense that people who are particularly adept at recognising and processing emotions (one of the hall-marks of emotional intelligence) would therefore have an advantage at spotting deception. […]
The participants performed no better than chance at identifying which clips featured a liar - consistent with past research showing the difficulty of accurate lie detection. However, there was a further paradoxical finding: participants who scored highly on the “emotionality” component of emotional intelligence (pertaining to emotional expression, perception and empathy) were significantly less accurate than average at judging which of the anxious relatives was being genuine.
For the past two decades New Yorkers have been the beneficiaries of the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, rates of several common crimes that inspire public fear — homicide, robbery and burglary — dropped by more than 80 percent. […]
Twenty years ago most criminologists and sociologists would have doubted that a metropolis could reduce this kind of crime by so much. Although the scale of New York Citys success is now well known and documented, most people may not realize that the city’s experience showed many of modern America’s dominant assumptions concerning crime to be flat wrong, including that lowering crime requires first tackling poverty, unemployment and drug use and that it requires throwing many people in jail or moving minorities out of city centers. Instead New York made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without major changes in its racial and ethnic profile; it did so without lowering poverty and unemployment more than other cities; and it did so without either winning its war on drugs or participating in the mass incarceration that has taken place throughout the rest of the nation.
Is there a difference between love and addiction? Is being addicted to love a disease? […]
A group of French researchers, publishing in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, describe the clinical distinctions between “love passion,” “love addiction,” and “sex addiction”. Using advances in neurobiology to compare clinical, neuropsychological, neurobiological, and neuroimaging data on love and passion.
They begin with the most pertinent question: “Is there any legitimate reason to associate a pathological condition (addiction) and a natural, pleasurable one [love]?” […]
“Addiction would be defined as the stage where desire becomes a compulsive need, when suffering replaces pleasure, when one persists in the relationship despite knowledge of adverse consequences (including humiliation and shame).”
The fact that there is currently no data on the epidemiology, genetics, co-morbidity, or treatment of love addiction lead the researchers to conclude that to place some cases of “love passion” within a clinical disorder spectrum […] would be premature.
NASA has lost data from some of its earliest missions to the moon because the machines used to read the tapes were scrapped and cannot be rebuilt. A wise librarian will wish to keep in working order a few antique computers that can read such ancient technologies as CDs and USB thumb-drives. […]
Conscientious institutions already make copies of some web pages, e-books and other digital material, and shift the data to new hardware every five year. […]
Mistakes 30 years ago mean that much of the early digital age is already a closed book (or no book at all) to historians.
{ The two lower curves in beige and green show the instantaneous luminosity measured by the two largest detectors operating on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CMS and ATLAS. […] I called the LHC control room to find out what was happening. “Oh, those dips?”, casually answered the operator on shift. “That’s because the moon is nearly full and I periodically have to adjust the proton beam orbits.” | Quantum Diaries | Continue reading }
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what makes it sustainable and what will make it fail.
A couple of online articles have discussed whether you would be conscious of being shot in the head with the general conclusion that it is unlikely because the damage happens faster than the brain can register a conscious sensation.
While this may be true in some instances it ignores that fact that there are many ways of taking a bullet to the head.
This is studied by a field called wound ballistics. […]
Firstly, if you get shot in the head, in this day and age, you have, on average, about a 50/50 chance of surviving.
