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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (6/03)

Tom McFay — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:04:00 +0000

Backward-Spinning Black Holes More Powerful Oddball black holes that spin backward in the opposite direction of their surrounding debris discs appear to create more powerful jets of radiation than their regular-spinning brethren, a new study has found. The finding could…

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (6/03)

Facebook and Blackberry to Ping Paris!

Tom McFay — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:05:00 +0000

We’ll always have Paris! Oui…As part of a Facebook campaign from BlackBerry, a two-story-high phone will display messages and photos sent in by fans on Facebook outside the Beaubourg Esplanade in Paris from the 20th – 22nd of May, but…

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Facebook and Blackberry to Ping Paris!

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (3/04)

Tom McFay — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:04:00 +0000

How Black Holes Overcome Centrifugal Force to Suck in Gas Astronomers have finally gotten a firmer grip on how supermassive black holes in the centers of most galaxies gobble up gas from their surroundings. In a new study, two astronomers…

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (3/04)

Warner Bros 1944 "Hitler" Cartoons

Tom McFay — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Famed Warner Bros animator, producer, director, and puppeteer, Bob Clampett, best known for his work on the Looney Tunes, directed an astonishing group of cartoons at Warner Bros, during the short period between 1942 and 1946. Many of them rank…

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Warner Bros 1944 "Hitler" Cartoons

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/19)

Tom McFay — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:04:00 +0000

Scientists Decode Genomes of Five Africans, Including Archbishop Tutu The complete genomes of five southern Africans have been decoded, almost doubling the number of published human DNA sequences. The Africans include four Bushmen hunter-gatherers, known as !Gubi, G/aq’o, D#kgao and !Ai, the odd symbols representing different clicking sounds in Bushmen languages. The fifth person, a Bantu, is none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Archbishop Tutu was selected because of his keen interest in medicine and because his parents come from the two largest Bantu groups in South Africa, the Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni. Bantu speakers originated in West Africa and began to migrate southward some 5,000 years ago, displacing the Bushmen, who were until recently hunter-gatherers. Facebook #1 Innovative Company: Sets Sights on Google It was quite a year for Mark Zuckerberg and crew, whose site added a whopping 200 million users. Now, as they brush off the crumbs of MySpace and other competitors, it’s time to look for their next meal. They’re very, very hungry. Why the Blackberry Kindle App May Be More Important Than the Kindle 3 We’ve been pondering how Amazon could turn the next Kindle into a great machine, but the company has just gone and done something that’s probably much more important: It’s released a Kindle e-reader app for RIM’s BlackBerrys. Amazon’s had e-reader apps for Windows smartphones, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch, for ages. And they’re fully integrated into the Kindle ecosystem, even remembering which page you’re reading and then syncing it back to an actual Kindle e-reader, assuming you have one. Releasing these apps made perfect sense for Amazon, since it lets the company broaden its Kindle subscriber base for little or no effort, and small ongoing costs–and it broadens the global reach of its e-book store. Vancouver’s Secret Snowboarding Superpipe Tonight’s the Men’s Olympics Snowboarding Halfpipe event. Have you heard of Shaun White’s personal superpipe in which he compressed the training equivalent of years into a day, mastering insane new tricks that I can’t even wrap my brain around? The 550-foot long half pipe is located 7 miles from Silverton, which is built around Silverton mountain: a ski resort with the most advanced terrain of any resort in America, with no groomed runs, and only one lift chair. It was constructed out of snow from the surrounding inclines. CyberShock: Cyberattack Drill Shows U.S. Unprepared A group of high-ranking former federal officials scramble to react to mobile phone malware and the failure of the electricity grid in a staged exercise. Imagine what would happen if a massive cyberattack hit the U.S., crippling mobile phones and overwhelming both telephone infrastructure and the electricity grid. “Cyber Shockwave,” conceived and executed by the Bipartisan Policy Center along with experts in cybersecurity, simulated such an attack on Tuesday — and discovered that the U.S. is ill-prepared to handle a large scale cyberattack. In an effort to spur U.S. officials to take cybersecurity more seriously. Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (2/19)

Image of the Day: Beauty or Beast?

Tom McFay — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:12:00 +0000

. Located at a distance of about 45 million light-years in the southern constellation Fornax (the Furnace), NGC 1097 is a relatively bright, barred spiral galaxy seen face-on. The galaxy is a moderate example of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), whose emission is thought to arise from matter (gas and stars) falling into oblivion in a central black hole. Astronomers have been trying to understand for a long time how the matter is “gulped” down towards the black hole. Watching directly the feeding process requires very high spatial resolution at the centre of galaxies. Astronomers obtained images of NGC 1097 with the adaptive optics NACO instrument attached to Yepun, the fourth Unit Telescope of ESO’s VLT in Chile. These new images probe with unprecedented detail the presence and extent of material in the very proximity of the nucleus. The resolution achieved with the images is about 0.15 arcsecond, corresponding to about 30 light-years across. For comparison, this is only 8 times the distance between the Sun and its nearest star, Proxima Centauri. NGC 1097 has a very strong bar and a prominent star-forming ring inside it. Interior to the ring, a secondary bar crosses the nucleus almost perpendicular to the primary bar. The newly released NACO near-infrared images show in addition more than 300 star-forming regions, a factor four larger than previously known from Hubble Space Telescope images. These “HII regions” can be seen as white spots in the photo. At the centre of the ring, a moderate active nucleus is located. Details from the nucleus and its immediate surroundings are however outshone by the overwhelming stellar light of the galaxy seen as the bright diffuse emission all over the image. The astronomers also note that the curling of the spiral pattern in the innermost 300 light-years seem indeed to confirm the presence of a super-massive black hole in the centre of NGC 1097. Such a black hole in the centre of a galaxy causes the nuclear spiral to wind up as it approaches the centre, while in its absence the spiral would be unwinding as it moves closer to the center. Image Credit: NASA/ESO

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Image of the Day: Beauty or Beast?

Supermassive Black Holes Discovered to Play a Critical Role in the Evolution of Galaxies

Tom McFay — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:50:00 +0000

Do black holes hold the key that could unlock the secrets of our patch of the universe? Some of the world’s leading physicists believe that in the event that quantum effects allow time to extend indefinitely into the past that it could be possible that beyond the event horizon of a black hole is the beginning of another universe. Embedded in the heart of each of the universe’s one trillion galaxies is a supermassive black hole that is roughly one million to one billion times the mass of the sun. About 10 percent of these giant black holes feature jets of plasma, or highly ionized gas, that extend in opposite directions of the black hole. By spewing huge amounts of mostly kinetic energy from the black holes into the universe, the jets affect how stars and other bodies form, and play a crucial role in the evolution of clusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the universe. “This black hole in the center of the cluster is affecting everything else in that cluster,” said Dan Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Because a jet gently heats the gas it carries throughout a galaxy cluster, it can slow and even prevent stars, which are created by the condensation and collapse of cool molecular gas, from forming, thereby affecting the growth of galaxies, Evans explained. “Without these jets, clusters of galaxies would look very different.” How these jets form remains one of the most important unsolved mysteries in extragalactic astrophysics. Now Evans may be one step closer to unlocking that mystery. For two years, Evans has been comparing several dozen galaxies whose black holes host powerful jets (known as radio-loud active galactic nuclei, or AGN -like the image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way shown above) to those galaxies with supermassive black holes that do not eject jets. All black holes — those with and without jets — feature accretion disks, the clumps of dust and gas rotating just outside their event horizon. By examining the light reflected in the accretion disk of an AGN black hole, Evans has concluded that jets may form right outside black holes that have a retrograde spin — or which spin in the opposite direction from their accretion disk. Although Evans and a colleague recently hypothesized that the gravitational effects of black hole spin may have something to do with why some have jets. While researchers know that the mass of a black hole is intimately linked to the galaxy in which it is located, they have, until now, known little about the role of its second fundamental property — spin. Evans asserts that spin is crucial to understanding the dynamics of a black hole’s host galaxy because it may actually create the jet that regulates the growth of that galaxy and the universe. Although Evans has suspected for nearly five years that retrograde black holes with jets are missing the innermost portion of their accretion disk, it wasn’t until last year that computational advances meant that he could analyze data collected between late 2007 and early 2008 by the Suzaku observatory, a Japanese satellite launched in 2005 with collaboration from NASA, to provide an example to support the theory. With these data, Evans and colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Yale University, Keele University and the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom analyzed the spectra of a supermassive black hole with a jet located about 800 million light years away in an AGN named 3C 33. Astrophysicists can see the signatures of X-ray emission from the inner regions of the accretion disk, which is located close to the edge of a black hole, as a result of a super hot atmospheric ring called a corona that lies above the disk and emits light that an observatory like Suzaku can detect. In addition to this direct light, a fraction of light passes down from the corona onto the black hole’s accretion disk and is reflected from the disk’s surface, resulting in a spectral signature pattern called the Compton reflection hump, also detected by Suzaku. But Evans’ team never found a Compton reflection hump in the X-ray emission given off by 3C 33, a finding the researchers believe provides crucial evidence that the accretion disk for a black hole with a jet is truncated, meaning it doesn’t extend as close to the center of the black hole with a jet as it does for a black hole that does not have a jet. The absence of this innermost portion of the disk means that nothing can reflect the light from the corona, which explains why observers only see a direct spectrum of X-ray light. The researchers believe the absence may result from retrograde spin, which pushes out the orbit of the innermost portion of accretion material as a result of general relativity, or the gravitational pull between masses. This absence creates a gap between the disk and the center of the black hole that leads to the piling of magnetic fields that provide the force to fuel a jet. The field of research will expand considerably in August 2011 with the planned launch of NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite, which is 10 to 50 times more sensitive to spectra and the Compton reflection hump than current technology. NuSTAR will help researchers conduct a “giant census” of supermassive black holes that “will absolutely revolutionize the way we look at X-ray spectra of AGN,” Evans explained. He plans to spend another two years comparing black holes with and without jets, hoping to learn more about the properties of AGN. His goal over the next decade is to determine how the spin of a supermassive black hole evolves over time. Casey Kazan via Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Supermassive Black Holes Discovered to Play a Critical Role in the Evolution of Galaxies

"Smart Dust" -From SciFi to Reality: The Coming Era of Sensor Computing

Tom McFay — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:52:00 +0000

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winner in Physics The science-fiction dream of “smart dust” had its beginning, perhaps, back in 1964, with astrophysicists Fred Hoyle’s scifi novel, The Black Cloud . In the novel astronomers become aware of an immense black cloud of gas that enters the solar system. The cloud of dust, moving to interpose itself between the sun and the earth, could wipe out most of the life on earth by blocking solar radiation and ending photosynthesis. Astronomers and other scientists gather in England, where they discover that the cloud is a super-organism, many times more intelligent than our human species. Hoyle’s Black Cloud lives in the vacuum of space held together by electric and magnetic interactions, lives in the vacuum of space and is composed of dust-grains instead of cells. It derives its energy from gravitation or starlight, and acquires chemical nutrients from the naturally occurring interstellar dust. The cloud has a network of long-range electromagnetic signals that transmit information and coordinate its activities, much like our nervous system. Like silicon-based life and unlike water-based life, the Black Cloud can adapt to arbitrarily low temperatures of a cold universe, making it immortal, impervious to the eventual death of a star. Meanwhile, back on Earth 2010, Hewlett-Packard has embarked on a ten-year mission, a “Central Nervous System for the Earth,” to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe. H.P. researchers, combining electronics and nanotechnology expertise, announced in November that they had developed sensors with accelerometers that were up to 1,000 times more sensitive than the commercial motion detectors used in Nintendo Wii video game controllers and some smartphones.” HP’s goal to connect the physical world to computing as never before,” using so-called “smart dust” sensors to enable “buildings that manage their own energy use, bridges that sense motion and metal fatigue, cars that track traffic patterns and report potholes, and fruit and vegetable shipments that tell grocers when they ripen and begin to spoil.” Peter Hartwell of Hewlett-Packard Labs in a brilliant article on HP’s project in the New York Times, compared today’s computers to brains that are blind to their surroundings. But development of low-cost sensors, he says, is “closing that gap.” With “smart dust” — tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, will gather all sorts of information and communicate with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways. Microchip-equipped sensors can be designed to monitor and measure not only motion, but also temperature, chemical contamination or biological changes. Advances in sensor chips have expanded the potential data workloads that sensors can handle and the distance over which they can communicate — without batteries. In this model of computing, the sensors are servants creating an “Internet of Things.” And, following Metcalfe’s Law of Networking, the more sensors there are, the better the data quality should be to make intelligent and accurate decisions. The planet already has a have massively distributed wireless sensors -cellphones” integrated with cameras, GPS, accelerometers and Internet connectivity that is spurring a new field called participatory sensing. Ms. Estrin and her colleagues at the university’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have designed several projects that use cellphones and people in data-gathering and analysis. Cellphones, they say, are versatile data collectors and are becoming more powerful all the time — One project involves collecting travel, time and location data that is fed into Web databases to calculate an individual’s personal environmental impact and exposure to pollutants (peir.cens.ucla.edu). Another project, in cooperation with the National Park Service, uses a smartphone application to identify, photograph and track the advance of invasive plants, like Harding grass and poison hemlock, which can crowd out local species and undermine biodiversity (whatsinvasive.com). STILL another is a Twitter application for self-reported data on one’s daily life (your.flowingdata.com), which can be assembled into small graphs that show a person’s behavior over time. The most common use since the site went up last fall, says Nathan Yau, a graduate student who created the application, has been to track personal health — eating habits, weight, blood pressure, glucose and sleep times. The cellphone is a constant companion — immediate and intimate, always there to inform, remind and prompt. “The killer app for this is personalized health and wellness,” Ms. Estrin says. “The potential to help people make behavior changes and lead healthier lives is tremendous.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31unboxed.html

The Cygnus Bubble – Natural or Artificial?

Tom McFay — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:46:00 +0000

Is the solar-system sized bubble in the Consellation Cygnus a planetary nebulae or could it be an “AC” or astroengineering construction, also known as a Dyson sphere, named after Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study who proposed the theory? Dyson’s thought experiment suggested that in our search for advanced extraterrrestrial civilizations that Instead of radio signals we should look for spheres, which are artificial mega structures that enclose the orbit of a star, fabricated from the material of that solar system. The key is to distinguish a Dyson sphere from natural dust components. The Dyson sphere is the marker of what Kardashev calls a Type 2 civilization, which is capable of using up all the energy produced by a star. A Type three civilization uses up all the energy produced by a galaxy.” ACs are expected to have spectra similar to the black-body spectra because they re-emit all the energy that they absorb, although in the infrared range. “Fermi Bubbles” is the term used by Richard Carrigan at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in his latest work on the search for artifacts like Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations. A Fermi bubble according to Carrigan would grow as the civilization creating it colonized space. Carrigan notes that, as Carl Sagan and others have observed, that the time to colonize an individual system is small compared to the travel time between stars. A civilization could engulf its galaxy on a time scale comparable to the rotation period of the Milky Way, or every 225–250 million years, and perhaps, fewer. According to Carrigan, of the 11,224 potential sources of low range emissions identified that might be a manifestation of Dyson spheres in the Milky Way there are only 16 that have strong potential. Casey Kazan

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The Cygnus Bubble – Natural or Artificial?

Will Orbiting Space Colonies Trump Planets? (A Galaxy Classic)

Tom McFay — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Expanding into space has been a dream of scifi since before the genre had a name. Adventure, overcrowding, the chance of tall blue-skinned women – the reasons are manifold but the idea is always the same, because the need to advance and prosper in new locations is fundamental to our species. The fact it’s usually because we ruined the last place (or we don’t like the people who live there) is best ignored. There are many largely unaddressed questions, both moral and practical that have not been presented alongside the space colonization platform. It’s called “reality” and it’s not nearly as rosy as the dream. Astrophysicists and cosmologists around the globe seem to be in agreement that life on Earth is fragile and bereft with risks. Scientists like Dr. J. Richard Gott, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who says we should get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years, and men like Stephen Hawking, who is a well known space colonization advocate, may be absolutely right about the risks, but are they right about the solution? Then there is the other argument—that we don’t even need a planet at all. Dave Brody of the National Space Society says “orbiting colonies” are the way to go. “Just because you evolved on a planet does not necessitate that you continue to live on one. And there are some profoundly good reasons not to do so. Like that big honkin’ ‘gravity well’ that you have to expensively and dangerously blast your way up out of each time you need to go someplace. And the bigger the planet, the worse the penalty.” Maybe Brody is onto something, but the same logic can be applied to this idea as to colonizing Mars—long-term sustainability with no parent planet with vast resources to send reinforcements makes the likelihood of this being a long-term solution quite slim. Also, with both of these plans there would have to be some serious population control. A really interesting aspect of colonization will be whether we can really get over ourselves enough to do it properly – or whether our existing stupidities will be enough to stop it. Once the Moon and Mars open up it could be the New World, Australia and most of human history all over again – though this time without the inconvenient natives. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The incredible expense involved in space travel (partly because every superpower insists on having to re-invent each other’s wheels) acts as a filter for how many countries can make it at a time. The vast areas available on each near-Earth object mean we could probably avoid conflict for a few generations (unless something inconveniently useful or expensive turned up). Some nations have already agreed that acting on their own is not smart, with the European Space Agency acting as a group effort among dozens of nations. We could hope that ESA, RSA, ISO, JAXA and NASA could similarly get over themselves and pool their efforts. We could also hope that we evolve into energy beings and teleport off the planet. There’s something so frustratingly stupidly limiting about getting off world, beyond the very gravitational attraction of our origin world, and still doing it as rival groups groups. On the other hand the competition spurs development far faster than otherwise possible (though sometimes far too fast, as with the original Moon program). It’s a reminder that we’re not even a Type I civilization – on the old Kardashev scale, a Type I civilization was the lowest rank on the interstellar ladder, a group who had harnessed the entire energy output of one planet. We don’t. We waste massive quantities of the energy we have to cancel out other huge fractions of the same energy wasted by other groups. That’s another reason for the scifi obsession with getting off-Earth, we suppose. Imagining a world where we band together and achieve something incredible. (Or at the very least, we make the effort to be equally stupid somewhere awesomer). Luke McKinney Stephen Hawking on Space Migration Kardashev Scale

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Will Orbiting Space Colonies Trump Planets? (A Galaxy Classic)