3:21 AM
whiskey in the jar
So that's what a digital revolt looks like. A million-and-a-half emails and almost 90,000 phone calls to US Congress. Public complaints from Google and Facebook. Even a few thousand old-fashioned letters to the US House of Representatives.
This internet ire, marshalled under the banner of American Censorship Day on 16 November, came in opposition to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation aimed at tackling the online trade in copyrighted movies and music.Claims that the act, if passed, will "break the internet" helped persuade several big companies, including a trade group which represents Apple and Microsoft, to withdraw their support. Then, last week, SOP& backers in the House said they were open to changing the bill. Internet Activists 1, Big Media 0. But elsewhere the...
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Leaks, Hacks and Science
The words "science" and "censorship"clo not sit easily together. And yet over the past decade, science has come to occupy an increasingly important role in debates over free speech. This is partly due to public clashes between science and politics, from the censoring of climate science in the US under the Bush administration to David Nutt's dismissal as the UK government's adviser on drugs after voicing his views on the safety of ecstasy. But it also reflects a revolution in access to information which has exposed every sector of society to an unprecedented level of scrutiny. From WikiLeaks to phone hacking, the tension between openness, privacy...
Airbursts Trigger Martian Landslide
THE surface of Mars may be cold and desolate, but it is not unchanging. New images show that avalanches of dust scour dozens of Martian sites each year. Without the abundant water and plate tectonics that keep Earth's surface in motion, the surface of Mars is much slower to change. But in one way it is more active.While Earth's atmosphere shields us from asteroids smaller than 30 metres across, which burn up or shatter too high above the ground to have much effect on us, Mars's atmosphere is just I per cent the density of Earth's. Even rocks less than a metre across make it to the ground and gouge out craters. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance...
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Ravens Use SticksTo Attract Attention
How do you capture a raven's heart? Arrest its attention by showing it a twig or stone. Ravens use referential gestures — one of the foundations of human language —to initiate relationships. From an early age we learn to use referential gestures such as pointing to direct another's attention. "People think that this pointing forms the basis of language," says Simone Pika at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. "It has also been linked with mental-state attribution — the idea that you understand what I am pointing out." Apes raised in captivity can learn to use referential gestures to communicate with their human caregivers. Now...
Tilt The Head To Pick Up Brainwaves
Getting a more accurate picture of someone's brainwaves could simply be a case of lying them down. The boost this gives to the electrical signals that can be read from the brain could improve diagnosis of brain disorders and enhance control of brain-machine interfaces. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is a relatively cheap, non-invasive way to measure brain activity using a cap of electrodes. But the signal it picks up can be weak, as it must pass through a layer of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the skull before it reaches the scalp and electrodes. It was assumed that the skull was the biggest obstacle in the signal's path. But Justin Rice...
Fight HIV with Muscle Antibodies
HIV doesn't play by the rules: instead of dodging the immune system it attacks it head on. Now it seems our best hope for a vaccine against the killer virus might also involve tearing up the rule book — by fighting an infection without help from the immune system. Using this approach, mice can keep HIV at bay even when given loo times the virus that would be needed to cause a lethal infection. Conventional vaccines work by exposing the body to safe versions of a pathogen or parts of it, which primes the immune system to fight off future infection. But like other failed attempts to tackle HIV (see page 4) this approach has yet to deliver significant...
Climate’s Dark Dawn
AS THE latest round of United Nations climate negotiations began in Durban, South Africa. on Monday. expectations could scarcely have been lower. A globally binding deal is further away than ever. That makes considerable warming from climate change inevitable. In the last few weeks major reports by the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme (UN EP) have concluded that we can still meet the UN's target ofl imiting warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels. But climate scientists are far less optimistic. Many say the chance to avoid a 2°C rise has been and gone, and we must now prepare for the damage to come. To have a fair chance of keeping below 2°C, global emissions would have to peak by 2020 or so before falling. There's no sign of that: they made their biggest-ever...
