27267546
submission
HansonMB writes:
It’s one thing to have the U.S. symbolically ending all major combat operations in Iraq for the second time in eight years. It’s an entirely other thing to watch the Americans physically rolling out of a warzone, especially after a nine-year campaign that cost the U.S. nearly $1 trillion and 4,500 lives, not to mention the lives of over 100,000 Iraqis, mainly unarmed civilians.
It’s only fitting, too, that footage of a final American convoy discreetly exiting Iraq early Sunday morning comes by way of a U.S. Predator surveillance drone. That the U.S. even had an unmanned aerial vehicle loitering high above yesterday’s dawn departure suggests that America’s stake in a seemingly endless Iraq conflict isn’t flat ending, but is simply phasing into something else – something with a lot more drones.
26994096
submission
HansonMB writes:
Call it researching disease in the cloud or just plain illuminating, but Princeton researchers today published a paper in Science that demonstrates how aerial night images can be used to monitor the spread of epidemic in the developing world by tracking light density.
That’s a mouthful, but the concept is really pretty straightforward. In developing nations with migratory populations, there are parts of the year when everyone tends to meet up, creating localized, seasonal population booms. Those booms, with a large number of people in a concentrated area, are a hotspot for the spread of disease. Unfortunately for health agencies, tracking migratory populations has never been an easy task, which means epidemic can get out of hand quickly.
26809170
submission
HansonMB writes:
Apart from the networks of infected computers and poorly-translated emails offering shady pharmaceutical drugs, the inner workings of the shadowy criminal empires that deal in Internet spam remain a mystery. Every once in a while though, we match a face to junkmail. He’s called “the King of Spam” among members of the internet’s seedy underground, and now he’s been caught by authorities — 24 year old Oleg Nikolaenko, aka “Docent,” is the alleged owner of the “Mega-D” botnet, an enormous web of zombie-computers that collectively sends around 10 billion spam messages per day.
26721654
submission
HansonMB writes:
If the world’s combined space fleet was in a school classroom together, NASA’s Voyager probes would be those annoying kids who constantly show up the the rest of the class with perfect assignments, extra credit homework and general overachievement.
Like Spirit and Opportunity – the equally keen Mars rovers who continued to work for years after they could have quit – the twin Voyagers just keep on turning in new science reports, three decades after their launch. As if discovering Jupiter’s faint ring system, Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, active volcanoes on Io, giant magnetic bubbles and, oh, a little something called entering the heliosheath wasn’t enough, the Voyagers have now allowed scientists to detect the long sought-after Lyman-alpha emission from our galaxy.
26462320
submission
HansonMB writes:
It can’t be very hard for Bertrand Piccard to explain to his family why he wants to fly around the world with only sunlight for fuel. In the 1930s, his grandfather, Auguste Piccard, a physicist and inventor, applied his excitement and interest in ballooning to designing a high-flying balloon attached to a pressurized aluminum gondola. The first of its kind, Auguste’s flying machine completed a record-breaking climb more than 50,000 feet into the air, gathering valuable data about the Earth’s upper atmosphere along the way. Fitting that Bertrand, for what it’s worth, defeated the notorious Sir Richard Branson by becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon in 1999.
26172422
submission
HansonMB writes:
Massive oil spills like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster last year – or the ongoing disaster along the Niger Delta – are fortunately rare. But smaller scale ocean pollution isn’t, and collectively it adds up to cause enough damage to alter ecosystems and affect fish stocks. A key to protecting the oceans (and the ecosystems and industries that live there) is collecting regular data on pollution levels to help target clean-up efforts. But given the scale of the world’s oceans, how can we monitor them effectively and cheaply?
Dr. Huosheng Hu of the University of Essex has a rather elegant solution: setting loose a fleet of robotic fish to continually monitor water quality, without the costly man-hours of sending marine scientists out on boats. Like Cesar Harada, the drone sailboat fleet builder, Huosheng’s working towards a future where artificially-intelligent, self-sustaining robots swim alongside their living brethren, continually sending data about water conditions via wireless signals to collection points on shore.
26013430
submission
HansonMB writes:
Worse, it was as if someone along the way purposefully destroyed all confiscated electronics, a strategic smashing of at least part of the digital record logged by full-on occupiers. “Dude, all the laptops are in a row," he tells us, baffled and raking his shock of brown hair. "They’ve all been smashed with bats.” When asked about the mangled property, LiPani admits that, inevitably, certain items could’ve been damaged in the shuffle: “I’m not surprised,” he says, to hear of damaged laptops. He adds that the DSNY is providing clearance forms to those occupiers concerned their property may’ve been mishandled or misplaced.
25967158
submission
HansonMB writes:
Given one of my more immediate life goals is to be living in a somewhat self-contained cabin somewhere far away from all of this — yet still have a way to keep my deer meat frozen and my laptop charged — the Volo Stirling engine is very relevant to my interests. Basically, it’s a lot like an internal combustion engine, except instead of the heat coming from inside the engine via exploding gasoline, the heat comes from outside the engine, like from a woodstove. It’s an old concept, dating back to 1812, that got shoved to the side with the advent of the grid and the internal combustion engine. Detroiter Tim Sefton and his Volo Designs are aiming to bring it back, with plans to have a consumer-ready Stirling engine capable of generating a household’s worth of electricity ready by spring 2012, for less than $100.
25920168
submission
HansonMB writes:
On May 24, 2011—the same day Brazil's Parliament voted to decrease logging restrictions in the country's Forest Code—married environmental activists Zé Cláudio Ribeiro and Maria do Espirito Santo were shot to death outside their house in the Amazonian state of Para. A month later we traveled to Zé Cláudio's hometown of Marabá, which was once in the middle of the rainforest and is now surrounded by miles and miles of clearcut cattle land. As the investigation into Zé and Maria's murders went nowhere, we drove into the forest to the site of the killings, followed the heavily armed men of Brazil's environmental protection agency as they busted up illegal timber mills, visited the militant squatters of Brazil's Landless Movement, met modern day slaves, and marveled at the lawless, violent atmosphere that permeates the town locals call Marabála (that means Mara-bullets).
25610892
submission
HansonMB writes:
While the idea of building small, thorium-based nuclear reactors – thought to be dramatically safer, cheaper, cleaner and terror-proof than our current catalog of reactors – can be shooed away as fringe by some, the germ of the idea began in the U.S. government’s major atomic lab, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1960s. It’s only in the past half-decade that the idea has picked up steam again on the Internet, thanks to enterprising enthusiasts who have chronicled the early experiments, distributed documents, and posted YouTube videos. But if thorium’s second life on the Internet has grown the flock of adherents exponentially, it’s also pulled in more than a few people whose nuclear expertise doesn’t extend far past Wikipedia, adding a sheen of hype to the proceedings.
24998660
submission
HansonMB writes:
The planet is heating up. Three big projects from NASA, NOAA, and a collaboration between Britain’s Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, all confirm that the surface of the planet on which we reside and depend upon is heating up and heating up at an increasing rate. This is, of course, not enough for a small but influential crowd that would prefer to not admit that a planet of nearly 7 billion terribly inefficient, rapidly consuming human beings can knock Earth out of stasis.
So, the University of California’s Richard Muller launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study, yet another analysis, this one independent and aimed at the skeptics. Muller’s crew devised a new statistical method that allowed them to use nearly every land temperature station on the planet, some 39,000 of them, rather than having to use subsets as used by the other groups. The group also used some different statistical techniques to help eliminate data skewing from things like the urban heat island effect, something used often as a counter-argument against climate change.
23900054
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23389172
submission
HansonMB writes:
“They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and, I think, more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.”
A lot has changed about hackers and how people perceive them. But at least the last part of the above description, uttered by Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand in this 1984 TV special, still holds true. It hearkens back to when the term “hacker” took its most literal definition: A devoted computer hobbyist who ‘hacked’ away at a computer keyboard to make something work, or work better.
