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Rambo Tribble writes: It sounds like a "Mission Impossible" scenario, but aerospace company Boeing is teaming with Canadian phone maker Blackberry to produce an ultra-secure mobile phone that "self-destructs". The phone uses encryption on calls and is aimed to serve the high-security needs of government and industry. As Blackberry CEO, John Chen, said, "We're pleased to announce that Boeing is collaborating with BlackBerry to provide a secure mobile solution for Android devices utilizing our BES 12 platform. That, by the way, is all they allow me to say."
No word yet if you'll need the services of the bomb squad when you go over your minutes.
Rambo Tribble writes: Scientists from the University of Leeds have proposed that brighter ships' wakes, created by reducing their component bubbles' sizes, could increase their reflectivity and produce a cooling effect on the climate. The technology is touted as being available and simple, but side-effects might include such things as wetter conditions in some regions. Still, compared to many speculative geoengineering projects, "The one advantage about this technology — of trying to generate these tiny 'micro-bubbles' — is that the technology does already exist," according to Leeds' Prof Piers Forster.
Rambo Tribble writes: It was long thought that gamma ray bursts were the exclusive province of deep space sources. More recently it was found that storms could produce such emissions, but such occurrences were thought rare. Now, data from NASA's Fermi satellite suggest such events happen over a thousand times a day. Per Prof. Joseph Dwyer, from the University of New Hampshire, "These are big, monster bursts of gamma rays, and one would think these must be monster storms producing them. But that's not the case. Even boring-looking, garden-variety, little storms can produce these."
Rambo Tribble writes: There is a certain tendency for people to long for the "good old days". I am curious if anyone has done the math on that for greenhouse gas emissions comparing horses to automobiles. Since horses emit carbon dioxide and methane even when they aren't being used, it would be most reasonable to compare ownership over a time period, say a year. At the same time, the differential in the greenhouse effect of methane versus carbon dioxide would need to be taken into account. Finally, the relative load-carrying and distance-covering capacities of the two transportation modes would need to be compared. So, it isn't a simple prospect, but has anyone tried to do it?
... it will be sprawling multinational oil corporations that will profit most off the oil. Nation-states will get crumbs, albeit very lucrative crumbs.
Rambo Tribble writes: It has been proposed that the pervasive use of social media to document our lives could be used to mine useful information about how the public interacts with nature. Speaking at the joint annual meeting of the British Ecological Society and Société Française d’Ecologie in Lille, France, researcher Daniel Richards from the National University of Singapore outlined a study that investigated such a possibility. Although the techniques described sound labor intensive, they seem to show that images posted on social media could give meaningful insights to those managing conservation efforts and providing public access, as well as establishing the value of such programs. According to Richards, "We wanted to try to create an indicator... that you can quickly and easily get information on a very small scale on the use people get from a habitat."
Rambo Tribble writes: Reuters reports that flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports have been shut down "due to a computer failure". The information comes from European air traffic control body Eurocontrol. No word as yet as to the nature of the failure. Incoming flights are still being accommodated.
