Archive | Geek Stuff
Unprecedented
Hopefully, nothing will go wrong:
After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.
Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.
Helpful fungi
The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills.
The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.
The common plastic is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. Once it gets into the trash stream, it persists for generations. Anyone alive today is assured that their old garden hoses and other polyurethane trash will still be here to greet his or her great, great grandchildren. Unless something eats it.
The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and–even more surprising–do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.
Student Pria Anand recorded the microbe’s remarkable behavior and Jonathan Russell isolated the enzymes that allow the organism to degrade plastic as its food source. The Yale team published their findings in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology late last year concluding the microbe is “a promising source of biodiversity from which to screen for metabolic properties useful for bioremediation.” In the future, our trash compactors may simply be giant fields of voracious fungi.
What is wrong with SOPA
Sidelined for now, but of course will try to sneak in under the radar later…
ICANN
Even though I’m not a geek, I like geek things, so I’ll point out that yesterday was a historic day here in the intertubes. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the non-profit corporation that oversees the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers, started accepting applications for non-Latin alphabet domains, otherwise known as generic top level domains, or gTLDs. That means new competition and entrepreneurial opportunities for more diverse domains in Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic.
For the first time, organizations can apply for an Internet address all their own, marking the start of a new era in the growth of the Internet.
For example, .com and .org could be replaced by .starbucks or .newyork.
The expansion was planned by the one organization empowered to regulate the global Internet — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.
Debate over the new policy has highlighted the key issue of who, if anyone, should control the Internet.
Anyone who wants his own Internet suffix — his own domain name — will have to pay $185,000 for it. This development could be costly even for those who just want to prevent someone else from grabbing their name. Not surprisingly, ICANN has been criticized for pushing the change.
Some members of Congress actually wanted the Department of Commerce to order ICANN to delay the domain name expansion. The Internet was a U.S. creation, and ICANN was chartered by the Commerce Department.
But there is now a big international pushback over U.S. domination of the Internet, and a growing move to diminish the U.S. role.
By urging the Commerce Department to give ICANN orders, members of Congress may inadvertently highlight that effort. Kieren McCarthy, an analyst of Internet governance issues, sums up the concern about the congressional pressure this way: “It’s making the Internet look exactly like the rest of the world fears that it is, which is a U.S.-controlled entity,” he says.
I have a friend who used to work for ICANN, so I know there’s been a long and contentious process of getting this before the public. Many geeks wanted ICANN to roll out the new domains in phases, but for whatever reason, they didn’t. (One of their concerns is that someone can buy a domain say, .green – without actually being a green organization.)
The attempts by U.S. corporations to hold it up didn’t work, either, so now we’ll get to see whether it works – or is a real mess:
In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, ICANN insists that the rollout of the new domain-name program will be uneventful, and says it has learned from two previous expansions (PDF link): one in 2000 that added domains like .info and .biz, and another in 2009 that added domains that include non-Western characters. It also says managing hundreds of domains isn’t an issue, since there are already more than 200 “country code” domains — including some popular ones such as .tv (the code for the island nation of Tuvalu) and .me (the code for Montenegro).
Not everyone is convinced things will be so easy, however. Domain industry blogger Andrew Allemann, for example, says he is worried about a number of potential problems, including a raft of registrations by domain-name hijackers and cybersquatters, but also controversy over potential top-level applications — such as .gay or .sex, or racially sensitive terms. In any case, the land-rush has officially begun.
Planets
PARIS — The Milky Way is home to far more planets than previously thought, boosting the odds that at least one of them may harbour life, according to a study released Wednesday.
Not long ago, astronomers counted the number of “exoplanets” detected outside our own solar system in the teens, then in the hundreds. Today the tally stands at just over 700.
But the new study, published in Nature, provides evidence that there are more planets than stars in our own stellar neighbourhood.
“We used to think that Earth might be unique in our galaxy,” said Daniel Kubas, a professor at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, and co-leader of the study.
“Now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way.”
Tonight
Wednesday, Jan 4 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking Science | MSNBC’s Alan Boyle (Cosmic Log) talks with Marc Abrahams, creator of the Ig Nobel Prizes and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, about the scientific findings from the past year that made us laugh … and then made us think. VS Science is produced in cooperation with MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. Follow @b0yle @MarcAbrahams @ImprobResearch Watch the 2011 Ig Nobels Listen live and later on BTR
Meteor shower
If you snooze you’ll lose Wednesday morning, when a little known but active meteor shower will start 2012 for people stalwart enough to brave the chilly hours before dawn.
The Quadrantids, named for a now-extinct constellation, will be visible for two hours early Wednesday, from about 3 to 5 a.m. local times.
The shower is likely to produce up to 100 falling stars an hour, making for a good show. People across North America who stay up late enough, and who have a clear sky, should get a nice view, says Conrad Jung, an astronomer at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland.
Wide load
So I’m guessing this means people were more advanced than they give them credit for? Fascinating:
Some of the volcanic bluestones in the inner ring of Stonehenge officially match an outcrop in Wales that’s 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the world-famous site, geologists announced this week. (See Wales pictures.)
The discovery leaves two big ideas standing about how the massive pieces of the monument arrived at Salisbury Plain: entirely by human hand, or partly by glacier.
As it looks today, 5,000-year-old Stonehenge has an outer ring of 20- to 30-ton sandstone blocks and an inner ring and horseshoe of 3- to 5-ton volcanic bluestone blocks. (See Stonehenge pictures.)
The monument’s larger outer blocks, called the Sarsen stones, were likely quarried some 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 kilometers) away in what’s now England, where sandstone is a common material.
The origin of the bluestones, however, has weighed heavy on the hearts of archaeologists. Rocks resembling the material under a microscope haven’t been found anywhere relatively near Stonehenge—at least until now.
Pinpointing the stones’ origins is crucial to understanding how so many heavy hunks of rock made their way to the open plain where Stonehenge now stands.
“There’s no way of explaining how these stones were transported without knowing where they came from,” said study co-author Robert Ixer of the University of Leicester in the U.K.
Cool
Some time ago, MIT began to offer much of its course material online, for free. Now they’re going to offer MIT certifications, also for free:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced a new program that will expand the university’s free online courses and allow would-be students to earn official certificates from a program called MITx.
The Internet courses will not only present course materials but will also offer student-to-student communication, interactive features, and online laboratories. Perhaps most interesting is that this program will not be limited to the United States. Anyone on the planet with an Internet connection will be able to take the courses, which are slated to begin in the spring of 2012.
“MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables,” MIT president Susan Hockfield said in a statement. ” OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”
Mayan ruins in Georgia
Most archaeologists contend that the Mayans died out in a mass extinction, so this find turns that theory on its head. Some experts are calling this the most important archaeological find ever. How about that?
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in the mountains of North Georgia believed to be at least 1,100 years old. According to Richard Thornton at Examiner.com, the ruins are reportedly what remains of a city built by Mayans fleeing wars, volcanic eruptions, droughts and famine.
In 1999, University of Georgia archeologist Mark Williams led an expedition to investigate the Kenimer Mound, a large, five-sided pyramid built in approximately 900 A.D. in the foothills of Georgia’s tallest mountain, Brasstown Bald. Many local residents has assumed for years that the pyramid was just another wooded hill, but in fact it was a structure built on an existing hill in a method common to Mayans living in Central America as well as to Southeastern Native American tribes.
One of my friends is a former archaeologist and a member of a North American tribe. She says Indians have been saying all along that the Mayans were here first, but of course, white people don’t pay any attention to oral traditions.
Virtually Speaking Science
Wednesday, Dec 21 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking Science | Host Tom Levenson
talks with science writer Tim Ferris about The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. Best known for his work in cosmlogy, including The Red Limit, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, and The Whole Shebang, Tim is also a filmmaker with three feature documentaries on PBS including, most recently, Seeing in the Dark. Listen live and later on BTR.
A science documentary filmmaker and blogger – Balloon Juice and Inverse Square – Tom is Director of MIT’s Graduate program in writing and humanistic studies. He hosts VS Science on the third Wednesday of the month to discuss history of science, economics, and some climate science.
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