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...
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Do Lipid Rafts Exist?
The contention that molecular platforms known as lipid rails sail on the cell's outer, or plasma. membrane has kept researchers debating for more than a decade. Although many scientists argue that rafts either don't exist or have no biological relevance, their supporters insist the idea remains afloat. Cell biologist Kai Simons. now at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. and his colleague Dina lkonen christened the term "lipid raft" in a I 997 Nature paper that detailed the concept. At the time, the main model of the plasma membrane portrayed it as a sea of lipids through which proteins drifted...
Monday, November 28, 2011
To Self-Diagnose, Spit On iPhone
Handheld gadgets could one day diagnose infections at the push of a button by using the supersensitive touchscreens in today's smartphones. Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis. But Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon think touchscreens could improve the process by letting your phone replace the lab work. Park suggests the lab-on-a-chip could...
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Extreme Weather, Time To Prepare
An international scientific assessment finds for the first time that human activity has indeed driven not just global warming but also increases in some extreme weather and climate events around the world in recent decades. And those and likely other weather extremes will worsen in coming decades as greenhouse gases mount, the report finds. But uncertainties are rife in the still-emerging field of extreme events. Scientists cannot attribute a particular drought or flood to global warming, and they can say little about past or future trends in the risk of high-profile hazards such as tropical cyclones. Damage from weather disasters has been climbing,...
Sauna's Boost For Heart and Homour
That warm, fuzzy feeling you get from sitting in a sauna isn't in your imagination — and it may also help your heart. People with chronic heart failure who took saunas five times a week for three weeks improved their heart function and the amount of exercise they could do. Meanwhile, neurons that release the "happiness molecule" serotonin respond to increases in body temperature, perhaps explaining the sauna's pleasurable effects. Heart failure occurs when the heart is unable to supply enough blood to the body, resulting in shortness of breath and difficulty exercising. Previous studies have hinted that saunas might boost health. To investigate,...
Friday, November 25, 2011
Alzheimer’s Damage Reserved With A Jolt
Brain shrinkage in people with Alzheimer's disease can be reversed in some cases - by jolting the degenerating tissue with electrical impulses. Moreover, doing so reduces the cognitive decline associated with the disease. "In Alzheimer's disease it is known that the brain shrinks, particularly the hippocampus," says Andres Lozano at Toronto Western Hospital in Ontario, Canada.
What's more, brain scans show that the temporal lobe, which contains the hippocampus, and another region called the posterior cingulate use less glucose than normal, suggesting they have shut down. Both regions play an important role in memory. To try to reverse these...
Humanity’s First Word? Duh!
You may think humanity's first words are lost in the noise of ancient history, but an unlikely experiment using plastic tubes and puffs of air is helping to recreate the first sounds uttered by our distant ancestors. Many animals communicate with sounds, but it is the variety of our language that sets us apart. Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac — a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises. All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. Palaeontologists can date when our ancestors lost the organ, as the tissue attaches to a skeletal feature called the hyoid bulla, which is absent in humans. "Lucy's baby", an Australopithecus...
Our Ancestor, The Mega-Organism
ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor — not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others. The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling...
Thursday, November 24, 2011
A Collection Of Nothings Means Everything To Mathematics
THE mathematicians' version of nothing is the empty set. This is a collection that doesn't actually contain anything, such as my own collection of vintage Rolls-Royces. The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics. It all started in the late 1800s. While most mathematicians were busy adding a nice piece of furniture, a new room, even an entire storey to the growing mathematical edifice, a group of worrywarts started to fret about the cellar. Innovations like non-Euclidean geometry and Fourier analysis were all very well - but were the underpinnings sound? To prove...
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
A Burger Every Few Days To Keep Climate Change At Bay
Meat is bad: bad for you, bad for the environment. At least that's the usual argument. Each year, the doors to the UN climate negotiations, which kick off again in Durban, South Africa, on 28 November, are assailed by demonstrators brandishing pro-vegetarian placards. The fact is that livestock farming accounts for a whopping 15 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. We can't all go veggie, so just how much meat is it OK for an eco-citizen to eat?It's not just the demonstrators who are concerned about food's impact on the climate. This week, a major report concludes that food production is too close to the limits of a "safe operating space" defined by how much we need, how much we can produce, and its impact on the climate.Meat is a major contributor to that: 80 per cent of agricultural...
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Hothouse Earth Is On The Horizon
An era of ice that has gripped Earth's poles for 35 million years could come to an end as extreme global warming really begins to bite. Previously unknown sources of positive feedback — including "hyperwarming" that was last seen on Earth half a billion years ago— may push global temperatures high enough to send Earth into a hothouse state with tropical forests growing close to the poles. Climate scientists typically limit themselves to the 21st century when predicting how human activity will affect global temperatures. The latest predictions are bolder, though: the first systematic forecasts through to 2300 are beginning to arrive. They follow...
See Beyond The Light To Find Future Disease
DEEP in the heart of the cell, your DNA may be undergoing subtle changes that could lead to a devastating disease several years down the line. New microscopy techniques are now lifting the lid on this inner world, potentially offering an early-warning system for cancer or Alzheirner's long before the diseases begin to bite. Full-blown disease may be preceded by a long build-up. For example, a change in chromatin — the complex of DNA and proteins that packages DNA into the cell nucleus— is one of the earliest events to occur after exposure to carcinogens or ultraviolet rays. Changes sometimes happen years before symptoms of a tumour manifest themselves. However,...
Brain Doping
MOST of us want to reach our full potential. We might drink a cup of coffee to stay alert, or go for a run to feel on top of the job. So where's the harm in taking a pill that can do the same thing? So-called cognitive-enhancing drugs are usually prescribed to treat medical conditions, but they are also known for their ability to improve memory or focus. Many people buy them over the internet, which is risky because they don't know what they are getting. We also know next to nothing about their long-term effects on the brains of healthy people, particularly the young. But some scientists believe they could have a beneficial role to play in society,...
