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Math

Submission + - Surfer dude's Theory of Everything (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: NewScientist (subscription required) and others are running a story about a promising new Theory of Everything from surfer/snowboarder/physicist, Garrett Lisi. Based on a mathematical shape called E8, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything has many in the physics community taking notice:
"Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
Quickies

Submission + - Theory of everything

Submitted by wpiman
wpiman writes: A surfer has stunned the physics community by suggesting and publishing a "theory of everything". It has received some rave review from scientists. Read the paper here. What do you think?
Social Networks

Submission + - An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything

Submitted by
lrohrer
lrohrer writes: "Surfer physicist, Garrett Lisi, proposes alternative to string theory. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 — a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape.""
Biotech

Crime Reduction Linked To Lead-Free Gasoline 616

Posted by kdawson from the getting-the-lead-out dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Even low levels of lead can cause brain damage, increasing the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressiveness, and low IQ that are strongly linked with criminal behavior. The NYTimes has a story on how the phasing out of leaded gasoline starting with the Clean Air Act in 1973 may have led to a 56% drop in violent crime in the US in the 1990s. An economics professor at Amherst College, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, discovered the connection and wrote a paper comparing the reduction of lead from gasoline between states (PDF) and the reduction of violent crime. She constructed a table linking crime rates in every state to childhood lead exposure in that state 20 or 30 years earlier. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn't switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years."
Science

Video of Wild Crow Tool Use Caught With Tail Cams 203

Posted by Zonk from the and-bernd-heinrich-is-well-pleased dept.
willatnewscientist writes "Scientists from the University of Oxford have recorded New Caledonian crows using tools in the wild for first time. The footage was captured by attaching tiny cameras to their tail feathers. The wireless cameras weigh just 14 grammes and can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behavior. The trick has provided the first direct evidence of the birds' using tools in the wild and may represent an important development in animal behavior studies. 'The camera also contains a simple radio transmitter that reveals the crows' location. This lets the researchers track them at a distance of few hundred metres, so that they can catch the camera's video signal with a portable receiving dish. Up to 70 minutes of footage can be broadcast by the camera's chip, and the camera is shed once the bird moults its tail feathers.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Secretive company pulls CO2 out of atmosphere (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by
Bayscribe
Bayscribe writes: "A secretive Silicon Valley company called Calera says it can stop global warming and ocean acidification by pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. It is building a way to grab carbon dioxide from its surroundings during the manufacturing of cement. Cement has a huge culprit of greenhouse gas emissions: It uses about 2.5 billion tons of cement, and produces that many tons in carbon dioxide. If this carbon was eliminated, we'd be one third of the way to the target of 7 billion tons per year, some experts say. Started by a Stanford University professor of life sciences, the company has raised a round of venture capital to pursue tests of its technology."
Biotech

Submission + - The Chemistry of Tasmanian Opium (wired.com)

Submitted by
SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: "Tasmania produces massive amounts of opium for the pharmacutical industry. Those crops have been bred to produce massive amounts of thebaine, a precursor to prescription painkillers like oxycontin. However, they contain very little morphine — so that they are useless for making heroin. Despite that, researchers at the University of Newcastle have identified the chemical signature of heroin made from the morphine-deficient poppies. This will allow cops to track breeches in the security of the legal opium farms. If they find a batch of heroin on the street, and it contains the molecular fingerprint of Tasmanian poppies, they will know that some of the crop has been leaked to the black market."
Biotech

Submission + - New Plastic Strong as Steel

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Individual nano-size building blocks such as nanotubes, nanosheets and nanorods are ultrastrong but scientists have had difficulty transferring the strength of individual nanosheets to the entire material. Now researchers at the University of Michigan have created a new composite plastic made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer with a machine they developed that builds materials layer by layer like mother of pearl, one of the toughest natural mineral-based materials. The layers are stacked like bricks, in an alternating pattern. "When you have a brick-and-mortar structure, any cracks are blunted by each interface," explained Nicholas Kotov adding that further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles and could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Nanotechnology Makes 'Plastic Steel' a Reality

Submitted by
foobsr
foobsr writes: "Drawing on the molecular structure of seashells, scientists at the University of Michigan have created a transparent nanocomposite lighter than steel, but of the same strength. The material is built one nanoscale layer after another by a machine developed by the researchers. ScienceDaily and nanowerk have details."
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Why Apple's 'consumer' Macs are enterprise-worthy

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Seth Weintraub provides a number of reasons to think that all of Apple's machines are ready to move into the enterprise, depending on the job at hand. 'There is no comparison between Apple's "consumer" machines and the consumer lines of its competitors. ... The company's simple and elegant product line, which is also highly customizable, will be Apple's entree to the business market — if IT decision-makers can get over their prejudice against equipment that's traditionally been aimed at consumers.'
Media

Submission + - Distributed Proofreaders Completes 10,000 eBooks

Submitted by Jagged
Jagged writes: Distributed Proofreaders today commemorated their digital transcription of 10,000 written works. Distributed Proofreaders, a wholly volunteer organization, was established in 2000 for the purpose of producing quality transcriptions of machine-readable texts from public domain sources. The resulting texts are published on Project Gutenberg.
Space

Submission + - A decade-long mystery has been solved

Submitted by
justelite
justelite writes: "A decade-long mystery has been solved using data from ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton. The brightest member of the so-called 'magnificent seven' has been found to pulsate with a period of seven seconds. The discovery casts some doubt on the recent interpretation that this object is a highly exotic celestial object known as a quark star."
United States

Submission + - Game Theory Computer Model Backs Tim Berners-Lee

Submitted by
Stu
Stu writes: "A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development...so said Sir Tim Berners Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida (the same place that produced the peer-to-peer blocking software, Icarus...which congress might be pushing onto universities across the country), the model shows that everyone looses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs. http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/"
Programming

Submission + - Why Is "Design by Contract" Not More Popul

Submitted by
Coryoth
Coryoth writes: "Design by Contract, writing pre- and post-conditions on functions, seemed like straightforward common sense to me. Such conditions, in the form of executable code, not only provide more exacting API documentation, but also provide a test harness. Having easy to write unit tests that are automatically integrated into the inheritance hierarchy in OO languages "just made sense". However, despite being available (to varying degrees of completeness) for many languages other than Eiffel, including Java, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Ada, and even Haskell and Ocaml, the concept has never gained significant traction, particularly in comparison to unit testing frameworks (which DbC complements nicely), and hype like "Extreme Programming". So why did Design by Contract fail to take off?"

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