Tapping your cell phone

Years ago people thought I was crazy for taking out my cell phone battery during certain conversations. They left out the fact that you can activate someone’s cell phone camera too.

Al Gore joins Cheney-Obama feud

In a CNN interview this morning, former Vice President Gore got involved in the political feud over his successor Dick Cheney.

Gore said he wished Cheney would have given President Obama more time in office before criticizing national security policy. A stern critic of Bush policy over the years, Gore told CNN’s John Roberts that “I waited for two years after I left office to make statements that were critical, and then of policy.”

Cheney has stayed in the news for months, arguing that Obama’s decision ending a program of enhanced interrogation techniques undermines national security and makes the U.S. more vulnerable to attack.

Gore, who like Obama has described some of those techniques as torture, questioned Cheney’s credibility, citing the Iraq War: “You talk about somebody that shouldn’t be talking about making the country less safe, invading a country that did not attack us and posed no serious threat to us at all.”

via Al Gore joins Cheney-Obama feud – The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency.

Ancient cannons found on Kinmen

At least 25 ancient cannons have been found at Chincheng, the largest township on the island of Quemoy, also known as Kinmen (Gold Gate). …

Military historians of the Ministry of National Defense will be asked to certify if the newly found cannons were the weapons of the Koxinga army, which fought against the Manchu hordes to restore Ming rule over China.

Koxinga, a loyal Ming general, drove the Dutch out of Taiwan to claim the island for China in 1672. He and his son Zheng Jing fought the Manchu army that founded the Qing Dynasty.

That dynasty ruled China for more than 260 years until 1911. The Kuomintang, founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, toppled the Qing in the Chinese Revolution of 1911.

All cannons were discovered by a land developer, Chen Chang-chiang.

He chanced to find a 12,000-pounder while his workers dug deep atÿ20the site of construction he had contracted at Chincheng early last month.

Chen then urged the workers to look for more. And his collection of Ming cannons rose to 25 pieces, some of them smaller than the first one discovered. “Those smaller ones are exactly like those Koxinga’s army used,” Chen said.

via Discoveryon: Ancient cannons found on Kinmen.

Baby monitors killing urban Wi-Fi

Baby monitors and wireless TV transmitters are responsible for slowing down Wi-Fi connections in built-up areas according to an Ofcom-commissioned report. The regulator commissioned the report to evaluate the effectiveness of the unlicensed 2.4GHz band that Wi-Fi operates over.

The report smashes the myth that huge congestion on overlapping Wi-Fi networks is responsible for the poor performance of Wi-Fi in urban areas. Instead it points the finger of blame at the raft of unlicensed equipment operating on the 2.4GHz band. “There is a view that some domestic users generate excessive amounts of Wi-Fi traffic denying access to other users ” claims the report from wireless specialists Mass Consutling.

“Our research suggests that this is not the case rather the affected parties are almost certainly seeing interference from non-Wi-Fi devices such as microwave ovens Audio Video senders security cameras or baby monitors.”

via Programmica: Baby monitors killing urban Wi-Fi.

The plant that can water itself

In the deserts of Israel, there is a plant that waters itself.

The plant, a type of rhubarb, has specially designed leaves that channel rain water to its roots.

It is the only known plant in the world able to self-irrigate.

The adaptation allows the rhubarb to flourish in extreme arid conditions by collecting up to 16 times more water than other plants in the region, say the scientists who published details of the discovery in Naturwissenschaften.

…

Their study of desert rhubarb (Rheum palaestinum) growing in the Negev Desert showed that each plant typically harvests 4.2 litres of water each year, while the largest plant found harvested 43.8 litres.

Deep depressions in the rhubarb’s leaves channel water along the leaves’ veins, which are orientated towards it base. The leaves are also coated in a waxy cuticle, which repels water helping it flow over the leaves. …

“On average, the plant’s leaves allow it to collect 16 times more water than other desert plants in the region,” says Professor Lev-Yadun.

via BBC – Earth News.

Google Service Outage Intensifies Scrutiny

Google Service Outage Intensifies Scrutiny

Much to the consternation of users of Web-based applications around the globe, Google Thursday experienced outages involving many of its services.

The fact that a “traffic jam” caused applications like Gmail and Google Analytics to become unavailable may call into question the reliability of Web-based applications.

To its credit, Google has pointed the finger at itself, blaming a routing error and calling the mistake “embarrassing.”

The outage started around 7:48am PDT on Thursday and lasted for about an hour, resulting in sluggish traffic and causing the search engine giant to reroute some if its traffic through Asia. All told, the company said in a blog post that about 14 percent of users experienced problems with YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense and Blogger.

Google’s periodic service blips are undoubtedly a source of consternation for users and institutions.

Arizona State University, for example, has switched its e-mail service from .edu over to user-created Gmail accounts. While the students may have enjoyed the outage to a certain degree — “I sent my term paper, professor, but Gmail was down; I’ll resend it when I get back to my dorm.” — professors and administrators were probably less than thrilled with the downtime: In addition to productivity losses, many universities use e-mail alerts to warn of on-campus emergencies or dangers.

via Google Service Outage Intensifies Scrutiny – The Channel Wire – IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness.

First Optical SETI Detection?

From a recent article in The Australian:

…when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.

Instead, he’s spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.

Even if he picks up the signal again – he’s been scouring the same co-ordinates of the night sky on an almost daily basis since – the scientific rule book dictates he’ll need to get it peer-reviewed before he can take his announcement to the world. “And that is a lot of ifs,” he concedes.

Has Bhathal made the first detection of an advanced technological civilization from an extrasolar planetary system?

According to the article, Bhathal’s OZ OSETI program is an optical SETI program searching for extraterrestrial laser bursts. The only optical SETI program in Earth’s southern hemisphere, OZ OSETI searches out to 100 light-years — an area large enough to contain at least 1000 stars and perhaps 20 times as many planets.

Which could mean — if Bhathal finds that elusive signal again — our first confirmed galactic neighbor may be closer than many predicted.

via Estimate of the Situation™ 2009: First Optical SETI Detection?.

Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed.

“It’s like molecular choreography, where the molecules choreograph their own behavior,” said organic chemist John Sutherland of the University of Manchester, co-author of a study in Nature Wednesday.

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

However, though researchers have been able to show how RNA’s component molecules, called ribonucleotides, could assemble into RNA, their many attempts to synthesize these ribonucleotides have failed. No matter how they combined the ingredients — a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four different nitrogenous molecules, or nucleobases — ribonucleotides just wouldn’t form.

Sutherland’s team took a different approach in what Harvard molecular biologist Jack Szostak called a “synthetic tour de force” in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

“By changing the way we mix the ingredients together, we managed to make ribonucleotides,” said Sutherland. “The chemistry works very effectively from simple precursors, and the conditions required are not distinct from what one might imagine took place on the early Earth.”

Like other would-be nucleotide synthesizers, Sutherland’s team included phosphate in their mix, but rather than adding it to sugars and nucleobases, they started with an array of even simpler molecules that were probably also in Earth’s primordial ooze.

They mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, then allowed it to evaporate, leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half-sugar, half-nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it evaporate, and then irradiated it.

At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, Sutherland’s team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland.

According to Sutherland, these laboratory conditions resembled those of the life-originating “warm little pond” hypothesized by Charles Darwin if the pond “evaporated, got heated, and then it rained and the sun shone.”

Such conditions are plausible, and Szostak imagined the ongoing cycle of evaporation, heating and condensation providing “a kind of organic snow which could accumulate as a reservoir of material ready for the next step in RNA synthesis.”

Intriguingly, the precursor molecules used by Sutherland’s team have been identified in interstellar dust clouds and on meteorites….

via Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory | Wired Science | Wired.com.

PHOTO: Biggest Trilobite Sea Beasts Found … in Swarms

Talk about ruining a good beach day.

Swarms of up to a thousand giant trilobites—extinct marine arthropods such as this 35-inch-long (90-centimeter-long) fossil specimen—roamed shallow prehistoric seas, new fossils show.

The 465-million-year-old fossils, found recently in northern Portugal, are of the largest trilobites ever discovered.

The trilobites may have clustered to mate and molt—shedding old exoskeletons as new ones grew in—as well as avoid predators, scientists say.

The benefits of swarming may explain why these distant relatives of horseshoe crabs were among the most widespread arthropods of the Paleozoic era (542 to 251 million years ago).

(Related: “Horseshoe Crabs Remain Mysteries to Biologists.”)

Even so, finding complete specimens bigger than 12 inches (30 centimeters) is rare—making the new find “remarkable,” the study authors write in a recent edition of the journal Geology.

The critters lived at high latitudes near Gondwana—a huge southern supercontinent—and close to the South Pole during the Ordovician period (map of Earth during the Ordovician period).

This oxygen-rich, cold-water habitat may have contributed to these trilobites’ gigantic sizes, the authors added.

But repeated, sudden, “lethal” influxes of oxygen-starved water may have led to the newfound trilobites’ demise millions of years ago.

—Christine Dell’Amore

via PHOTO: Biggest Trilobite Sea Beasts Found … in Swarms.

Obama ‘to revive military trials’

US President Barack Obama is expected to announce on Friday that he is reviving military trials for some of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

But legal rights for defendants facing the military commissions will be significantly improved, officials said. President Obama halted the trials as one of his first acts on taking office in January, saying the US was entering a new era of respecting human rights.

The decision to revive the military trials has angered civil rights groups.

There are currently 241 detainees still at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President Obama has pledged to close the camp by January 2010.

‘Disappointing’

Administration officials told journalists that President Obama would announce plans to restart the military commissions – but with improved rights for detainees.

via BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama ‘to revive military trials’.

This is bullshit. Obama to revive lies.