Penguin huddle secrets revealed with time lapse footage

This time lapse footage, taken over two hours, shows the intermittent waves through the huddle

The mystery of how penguins stay warm while they huddle has been revealed by an international team of scientists.

Emperor penguins survive the tough Antarctic winters by forming tightly packed clusters – but scientists have pondered how penguins on the outside stay as cosy as those in the centre.

Now time lapse video shows the birds move in almost imperceptible waves through the group, which over time drastically change its structure.

The study is published in Plos One.

The footage was recorded during the winter at Dronning Maud Land in the Antarctic, where temperatures can dip to below -45C and winds can reach 180km/h (110mph).

During this period, male Emperor penguins pack tightly together not only to keep themselves toasty, but also – thanks to the fact that they are the only vertebrate to breed during the Antarctic winter – to incubate their eggs (the absent females have headed out to sea).

Previously, researchers thought these groups were so tightly packed that any motion would be impossible, meaning unlucky penguins at the periphery would be forced to remain there.

Lead author Daniel Zitterbart, a physicist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said: “The penguins have to huddle or otherwise they lose energy.

“If the huddle is too loose – the penguins freeze.

“But if you huddle too tight, you can’t move at all. Anywhere you want to go, there is another penguin there.”

…But cameras, which took an image of a colony every 1.3 seconds over a period of several hours, revealed that the huddle was far from a motionless mass.

Dr Zitterbart explained: “The colony would stay still for most of the time, but every 30-60 seconds one penguin or a group of penguin starts to move – just a little bit.

“This makes the surrounding ones move – and all of a sudden this moves throughout the colony like a wave.”

The coordinated movement through the group was so subtle that in real-time, it was invisible to the naked eye, but over a longer period it had an impact on the colony’s structure.

By propelling the tightly packed penguins forward, it allowed smaller huddles to merge into larger ones – allowing for some readjustment of the penguins’ positions.

But the footage also revealed that as the wave swept to the front of the group, some penguins there would waddle out of the pack and head to the back.

This means that over several hours, penguins would use the waves to travel through the colony, and get a chance to share the warmth. …

via BBC News – Penguin huddle secrets revealed with time lapse footage.

Global war on drugs has ‘failed’ say former leaders

The global war on drugs has “failed” according to a new report by group of politicians and former world leaders.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

The White House rejected the findings, saying the report was misguided.

…  Their report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.

It cites UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%.

The authors criticise governments who claim the current war on drugs is effective:

“Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,” the report said.

Instead of punishing users who the report says “do no harm to others,” the commission argues that governments should end criminalisation of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organised crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users.

It calls for drug policies based on methods empirically proven to reduce crime and promote economic and social development.

The commission is especially critical of the US, saying it must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in healthcare and human rights….

via BBC News – Global war on drugs has ‘failed’ say former leaders.

I’m so anti-drug that I don’t even like aspirin, but I’m in agreement with most of the world: legalize and tax drugs and give people help who are hooked.

That won’t happen because the “war on drugs” is a failure on purpose. It being the kind of failure it is is what makes it profitable.  Making drugs a crime limits supply to only the top crime lords who can pay off authorities, all the way to the misguided top.  A money addiction is behind it all.

Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ delivers huge first week sales

A string of hit records and a massive marketing campaign boosted Lady Gaga’s Born This Way to the biggest first-week album sales in six years, a strategic success that industry observers say won’t be easily replicated.

The 1.11 million copies she sold, the most since 50 Cent’s The Massacre sold 1.14 million in 2005, is the result of a steady stream of TV appearances — including recent ones on Saturday Night Live, American Idol and Good Morning America— buzzworthy videos, a rabid fan base and widespread availability. Taylor Swift, whose Speak Now sold 1 million when it was released in November, was the last album to hit the mark.

“Whenever an album sells so much in one week, people ask if it’s an indication of something broader,” says Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s associate director of charts/retail. “She is a true pop superstar, ostensibly the biggest in the past three years. Every single is a hit. Every video is a water-cooler moment. All eyes are on Gaga.”

The album’s sales were helped when Amazon, which often offers $2.99 daily deals on new and hit albums, decided to make Born This Way available for 99 cents. Albums wholesale for more than $8 and sell for an average of $11.99, according to Billboard. The response to the Amazon sale was so massive that the retailer’s servers slowed. …

via Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ delivers huge sales – USATODAY.com.

Weirdest gay alien birth video I’ve seen all day.  Not sure I understand it… I think she gave birth to a machine gun to protect a unicorn. Sounds like a Madonna song to me. I went and listed to samples on Amazon. Poker Face and Just Dance and Alejandro are the most catchy to me.

Microsoft previews Windows 8

Windows 8 looks a lot like Windows Phone 7. And that is meant as a compliment.

Microsoft demonstrated the next version of its operating system at the All Things D conference on a prototype touch-screen tablet as well as laptops with a keyboard and mouse.

Early headline: The new Windows is a lot prettier than its familiar predecessor.The touch interface is based on customizable live tiles similar to whatMicrosoft has on its smartphones. The new start screen replaces the start button, tiles and taskbar every Windows user has lived with. That more familiar-looking Windows apparently isn’t gone for good however—tap a desktop icon for an Office app such as Excel, for example, and Windows looks, well, like Windows.

Under the hood, Windows 8 will include a new set of tools and services developers can take advantage of. But the new operating system (whatever it ends up being called) can run all regular Windows 7 applications, says Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at the company.

Sinofsky won’t spill the beans on when the new Windows is coming but it won’t be as early as this fall. “Right now we’re focusing on getting a release done,” he says. Microsoft is planning to reveal more at his developer’s conference in the fall.

via Microsoft previews Windows 8 – USATODAY.com.

Will you need to click “Start” to stop your computer in Windows 8?

USC study locates the source of key brain function

Scientists at the University of Southern California have pinned down the region of the brain responsible for a key survival trait: our ability to comprehend a scene—even one never previously encountered—in a fraction of a second.

The key is to process the interacting objects that comprise a scene more quickly than unrelated objects, according to corresponding author Irving Biederman, professor of psychology and computer science in the USC Dornsife College and the Harold W. Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience.

The study appears in the June 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain’s ability to understand a whole scene on the fly “gives us an enormous edge on an organism that would have to look at objects one by one and slowly add them up,” Biederman said. What’s more, the interaction of objects in a scene actually allows the brain to identify those objects faster than if they were not interacting.

While previous research had already established the existence of this “scene-facilitation effect,” the location of the part of the brain responsible for the effect remained a mystery.  …

A recent study by Kim and Biederman suggested that the source of the scene-facilitation effect was the lateral occipital cortex, or LO, which is a portion of the brain’s visual processing center located between the ear and the back of the skull. However, the possibility existed that the LO was receiving help from the intraparietal sulcus, or IPS, which is a groove in the brain closer to the top of the head.

The IPS is engaged with implementing visual attention, and the fact that interacting objects may attract more attention left open the possibility that perhaps it was providing the LO with assistance.

While participants took the test, electromagnetic currents were used to alternately zap subjects’ LO or IPS, temporarily numbing each region in turn and preventing it from providing assistance with the task.

All of the participants were pre-screened to ensure they could safely receive the treatment, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which produces minimal discomfort.

By measuring how accurate participants were in detecting objects shown as interacting or not interacting when either the LO or IPS were zapped, researchers could see how much help that part of the brain was providing. The results were clear: zapping the LO eliminated the scene-facilitation effect. Zapping the IPS, however, did nothing.

When it comes to providing a competitive edge in identifying objects that are part of an interaction, the lateral occipital cortex appears to be working alone. Or, at least, without help from the intraparietal sulcus.

via USC study locates the source of key brain function.

Google e-mail accounts compromised by ‘Chinese hackers’

Hackers in China have compromised personal e-mail accounts of hundreds of top US officials, military personnel and journalists, Google has said.

The US company said a campaign to obtain passwords originated in Jinan and was aimed at monitoring e-mail.

Google said its security was not breached but indicated individuals’ passwords were obtained through fraud.

Chinese political activists and officials in other Asian countries were also targeted, Google said.

“Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails,” the company said on Wednesday.

“We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.”

In Washington, the White House said it was investigating the reports but did not believe official US government e-mail accounts had been breached.

The e-mail scam uses a practice known as “spear phishing” in which specific e-mail users are tricked into divulging their login credentials to a web page that resembles Google’s Gmail web service (or which appears related to the target’s work) but is in fact run by hackers, according to a technical report released by Google.

Having obtained the user’s e-mail login and password, the hackers then tell Gmail’s service to forward incoming e-mail to another account set up by the hacker.

In Washington, the BBC’s Adam Brookes says it is extremely difficult for analysts to determine whether governments or individuals are responsible for such attacks.

But the fact that the victims were people with access to sensitive, even secret information, raises the possibility that this was cyber espionage, not cyber crime, our correspondent says. …

via BBC News – Google e-mail accounts compromised by ‘Chinese hackers’.

Strange Exits: Russian who buried himself alive dies by mistake

A Russian man has died after persuading a friend to bury him alive for a night, hoping it would bring him “good luck”.

The victim dug a hole in a garden in the eastern city of Blagoveshchensk and climbed into an improvised coffin, with holes for air pipes, taking a mobile phone and a bottle of water with him.

His friend covered the coffin with earth and then left, after the buried man phoned to say he was fine.

The next morning, he returned to find his friend dead, investigators said.

The 35-year-old victim had believed that burying himself alive for a night would bring him luck the rest of his life.

“According to his friend, the man wanted to test his endurance and insistently asked his friend to help him spend the night buried,” said Alexei Lubinsky, a senior aide to the region’s chief investigator.

“We know that the victim was a computer programmer and that he has a small child.”

The coffin was covered with soil to a depth of around 20cm (eight inches), Mr Lubinsky said.

He speculated that heavy rainfall overnight could have blocked the air supply to the man trapped inside.

The superstitious victim was probably influenced by reading stories about self-burial on the internet, investigators said.

In a bizarre trend, numerous Russian bloggers write of undergoing supervised self-burial. State newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta has even run a feature on the practice….

via BBC News – Russian who buried himself alive dies by mistake.

US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as ‘acts of war’

The US is set to publish plans that will categorise cyber-attacks as acts of war, the Pentagon says.

In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently.

The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.

A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks.

“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.

Mr Lapan confirmed the Pentagon was drawing up a cyber defence strategy, which would be ready in two to three weeks.

Cyber-attacks from foreign nations that threaten widespread US civilian casualties, like cutting off power supplies or shutting down emergency-responder networks, could be treated as an act of aggression under the new policy.

But the plan does not mention how the US may respond to cyber-attackers, such as terrorists, who are not acting for a nation state.

‘All necessary means’

The Pentagon’s planning follows an international strategy statement on cyber-security, issued by the White House on 16 May.

The US would “respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country”, stated the White House in plain terms.

“We reserve the right to use all necessary means – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests.”

The Wall Street Journal quoted a military official as saying: “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”

White House officials said consideration of a military response to a cyber-attack would constitute a “last resort”, after other efforts to deter an attack had failed, the New York Times newspaper reported. …

via BBC News – US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as ‘acts of war’.

Oh grow up. You don’t shoot someone dead for slapping you in the face.  Improve your computer security and stop getting all missile happy. Besides, what’s the target? A computer doing the attacking may be a victim of the attacker, not the attacker. We’ve been dealing with this for many years. It is annoying, but people don’t die from cyber-attacks, AFAIK.

Adam Brookes  comments: … Savvy Computer Network Defence (CND) specialists may be able to track the attack to a specific country, even to a specific internet address. But who is operating the computer terminal? An operative of a rival state acting under orders? Or a hacker acting on her own initiative? Or something in between?

“Whose fingers are on the keyboard?” ask the CND specialists. When you don’t know who your attacker is, finding a legal and ethical response becomes very difficult.

Related:

… Few details were available, but Lockheed said its security team had detected the threat quickly and ensured that none of its programmes had been compromised.

The Pentagon said it is working to establish the extent of the breach.

Lockheed makes fighter jets, warships and multi-billion dollar weapons systems sold worldwide.

Lt Col April Cunningham, speaking for the US defence department, said the impact on the Pentagon was “minimal and we don’t expect any adverse effect”.

Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it detected the attack on 21 May “almost immediately” and took counter-measures.

As a result, the company said, “our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised”.

However, it is still working to restore employee access several days after the attack.

via BBC

Translation:  Some accounts probably used guessable passwords and now every employee has to get a new more difficult to hack password.

Japan pensioners volunteer to tackle nuclear crisis

A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners are volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.

The Skilled Veterans Corps, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of 60.

They say they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

It was while watching the television news that Yasuteru Yamada decided it was time for his generation to stand up.

No longer could he be just an observer of the struggle to stabilise the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The retired engineer is reporting back for duty at the age of 72, and he is organising a team of pensioners to go with him.

For weeks now Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends, sending out e-mails and even messages on Twitter.

Volunteering to take the place of younger workers at the power station is not brave, Mr Yamada says, but logical.

“I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live,” he says.

“Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer.”

Mr Yamada is lobbying the government hard for his volunteers to be allowed into the power station. The government has expressed gratitude for the offer but is cautious. …

“I don’t think I’m particularly special,” he says. “Most Japanese have this feeling in their heart. The question is whether you step forward, or you stay behind and watch.

“To take that step you need a lot of guts, but I hope it will be a great experience. Most Japanese want to help out any way they can.”

… He says he is as fit as ever – with a lifetime of experience to bring to the task.

And he laughs off suggestions his proposed team is comparable to the kamikaze pilots who flew suicide missions in World War II.

“We are not kamikaze. The kamikaze were something strange, no risk management there. They were going to die. But we are going to come back. We have to work but never die.”

via BBC News – Japan pensioners volunteer to tackle nuclear crisis.

Thank you Mr. Yamada. I’ve been wondering why there isn’t a team of robots doing the job…

Striking view of ‘Milky Way twin’

Astronomers have released what they say is the best-yet picture of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy described as a “sibling” of our own Milky Way.

The image was snapped by the European Southern Observatory’s MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile.

The galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the constellation Pavo.

While it is almost twice as large as the Milky Way, it exhibits the same sharply-defined spiral arms and stretched central region.

There is even a small companion galaxy, visible at the lower right of the image, which is analogous to our own galactic neighbours the Magellanic Clouds.

Those arms host many star-forming regions; the glow coming from hydrogen gas in these active regions shows up as red in the image.

via BBC News – Striking view of ‘Milky Way twin’.

Probably us at a different time.