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Australia

Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant 105

Posted by samzenpus
from the variety-is-the-spice-of-life dept.
Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measured lately by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"
United States

Polls Show Americans Wising up to Global Warming->

Submitted by
piccolo2385
piccolo2385 writes "While it may be difficult to ascertain exactly who or what prompted this massive shift in public perception, whether it was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, the increasing amount of coverage surrounding melting ice and rising seas or a combination thereof, one thing is clear: more Americans than ever are concerned about the threat of global warming."
Link to Original Source
NASA

Ex-Aerospace Engineer Wins NASA Glove Contest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "An unemployed former aerospace engineer has built a better spacesuit glove, claiming the first payoff in the NASA-backed Centennial Challenges competition. Peter Homer clinched a $200,000 prize in this week's Astronaut Glove Competition with a spacesuit glove that proved more comfortable, durable and flexible than gloves currently used by spacewalking astronauts. "When I started, I didn't know anything about making a glove," Homer said. "It was a great learning experience along the way.""
Google

Can web applications be trusted?

Submitted by ChrisMounce
ChrisMounce writes "A few days ago, Roberto De Almeida blogged about no longer using Google Notebook. He stopped because of his growing uneasiness with using Google's web-based applications, an uneasiness aggravated by Google sending cease-and-desist letters to a guy who had posted the now-well-known HD-DVD key in his Notebook (the guy's blog is down, but ironically, there's a Google cache of the post Roberto links to). My question is, can (and should) we trust web applications? Google's services are quite convenient, but how paranoid should we be about having a corporation store our data? Have there been similar events this, and have any involved services where people desire more privacy, such as web-based email?"
Privacy

SNP win in Scotland

Submitted by jackster1
jackster1 writes "The Scottish National Party won in the election to the Scottish Parliament (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6620905.st m). Their main policy is Scottish independence from the rest of the UK. I guess people have had enough of the big brother that is the UK government, although we're not independent just yet."
Software

Princeton Comp. Sci. Homework is U.S. State Secret

Submitted by
KSim
KSim writes "According to this blog post ( http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/blogs/prox/2007/0 5/treasonous_use_of_comp_sci_hom.html ), an intro level computer science assignment at Princeton is legally prohibited by U.S. law from being shared with certain other nations:

Legal notice. It is a violation of US law to export your solution for this assignment to foreign governments or embargoed destinations (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Serbia, Sudan, Syria, and Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan as of January 2000). It is also illegal to import your solution into several countries, including France, Iran, Iraq, and Russia.
The assignment has students write a "Public Key Cryptosystem" described here:

"The RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem is widely used for secure communication in browsers, bank ATM machines, credit card machines, mobile phones, smart cards, and the Windows operating system. It works by manipulating integers. To thwart eavesdroppers, the RSA cryptosystem must manipulate huge integers (hundreds of digits). The built-in C type int is only capable of dealing with 16 or 32 bit integers, providing little or no security. You will design, implement, and analyze an extended precision arithmetic data type that is capable of manipulating much larger integers. You will use this data type to write a client program that encrypts and decrypts messages using RSA."
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Bizoos, n.: The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"