ikenbot: Eternal Clock Could Keep Time After Universe Dies The idea for an eternal clock that would continue to keep time even after the universe ceased to exist has intrigued physicists. However, no one has figured out how one might be built, until now. Researchers have now proposed an experimental design for a “space-time crystal” that would be able to keep time forever. This four-dimensional crystal would be similar to conventional 3D crystals, which are structures, like snowflakes and diamonds, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns. Whereas a diamond has a periodic structure in three dimensions, the space-time crystal would be periodic in time as well as space. The idea of a 4D space-time crystal was first proposed earlier this year by MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, though the concept was purely theoretical. Now a team of researchers led by Xiang Zhang of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has conceived of how to make one a reality. “The idea of creating a crystal with dimensions higher than that of conventional 3D crystals is an important conceptual breakthrough in physics, and it is very exciting for us to be the first to devise a way to realize a space-time crystal,” Berkeley Lab physicist Tongcang Li, a member of the research group, said in a statement. Zhang and his colleagues suggest that a space-time crystal could be constructed using an electric field to trap charged atoms (called ions), and taking advantage of the natural repulsion between two like-charged particles (positive and positive, or negative and negative), which is called Coulomb repulsion. Image: This proposed space-time crystal shows (a) periodic structures in both space and time with (b) ultracold ions rotating in one direction even at the lowest energy state. Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group Full Article
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ikenbot:

Eternal Clock Could Keep Time After Universe Dies

The idea for an eternal clock that would continue to keep time even after the universe ceased to exist has intrigued physicists. However, no one has figured out how one might be built, until now.

Researchers have now proposed an experimental design for a “space-time crystal” that would be able to keep time forever. This four-dimensional crystal would be similar to conventional 3D crystals, which are structures, like snowflakes and diamonds, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns. Whereas a diamond has a periodic structure in three dimensions, the space-time crystal would be periodic in time as well as space.

The idea of a 4D space-time crystal was first proposed earlier this year by MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, though the concept was purely theoretical. Now a team of researchers led by Xiang Zhang of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has conceived of how to make one a reality.

“The idea of creating a crystal with dimensions higher than that of conventional 3D crystals is an important conceptual breakthrough in physics, and it is very exciting for us to be the first to devise a way to realize a space-time crystal,” Berkeley Lab physicist Tongcang Li, a member of the research group, said in a statement.

Zhang and his colleagues suggest that a space-time crystal could be constructed using an electric field to trap charged atoms (called ions), and taking advantage of the natural repulsion between two like-charged particles (positive and positive, or negative and negative), which is called Coulomb repulsion.

Image: This proposed space-time crystal shows (a) periodic structures in both space and time with (b) ultracold ions rotating in one direction even at the lowest energy state. Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group

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(via scinerds)

Source: ikenbot

A Scottish start-up has figured out how to make biofuel—and other useful stuff—out of whiskey distillery waste. Celtic Renewables has figured out how to ferment whiskey waste and turn it into biofuel, along with two other useful products. Here’s how it works: To make Scotch whiskey, you take barley, separate out the sugar, add water and yeast, and ferment it. The result is similar to beer. The next step is to distill the alcohol from that beer in pots. Set it to age in wooden casks, and a few months later, you have whiskey. The problem is that the process creates a lot of byproduct: First there are the remains of the barley, called draff. And when you distill the alcohol, you’re left with a liquid called pot ale, which is hard to dispose of because it contains biological components that can acidify ecosystems, along with traces of copper that are leached from the pots. Celtic Renewables makes a soup out of the pot ale and draff. Then—through a fuel-making fermentation process that was developed during the leadup to World War I but fell out of favor when it couldn’t compete with petroleum—the company converts the stuff into biobutanol fuel, animal feed, and acetone.
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A Scottish start-up has figured out how to make biofuel—and other useful stuff—out of whiskey distillery waste.

Celtic Renewables has figured out how to ferment whiskey waste and turn it into biofuel, along with two other useful products.

Here’s how it works: To make Scotch whiskey, you take barley, separate out the sugar, add water and yeast, and ferment it. The result is similar to beer. The next step is to distill the alcohol from that beer in pots. Set it to age in wooden casks, and a few months later, you have whiskey.

The problem is that the process creates a lot of byproduct: First there are the remains of the barley, called draff. And when you distill the alcohol, you’re left with a liquid called pot ale, which is hard to dispose of because it contains biological components that can acidify ecosystems, along with traces of copper that are leached from the pots. Celtic Renewables makes a soup out of the pot ale and draff. Then—through a fuel-making fermentation process that was developed during the leadup to World War I but fell out of favor when it couldn’t compete with petroleum—the company converts the stuff into biobutanol fuel, animal feed, and acetone.

Apple’s new iPad screen gets compared to iPad 2 under a microscope There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the new iPad has a display that puts every other tablet to shame. But if you’re interested in seeing what is perhaps the most vivid representation of just how much more advanced it is than the iPad 2′s display, you’ll need a microscope. Luckily, even if you don’t have one, someone else has taken the trouble to do the comparison. That someone is Lukas Mathias, a user interface designer by trade. He took his digital microscope and looked at the new iPad screen with a magnification of 80x. Then he did the same thing with the iPad 2. The difference between the two is what you see above. The new iPad’s resolution is 2048 x 1536. It is officially the most pixel-dense tablet on the market today. There are other devices with more refined pixels, like the iPhone 4S and the Xperia Play, but those have much smaller screen sizes. The larger the display, the more difficult it becomes, exponentially, to keep that kind of graphical fidelity intact. Of course, when the iPad 2 came out, many were already impressed with that display, so the question is how much further the technology can go.
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Apple’s new iPad screen gets compared to iPad 2 under a microscope

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the new iPad has a display that puts every other tablet to shame. But if you’re interested in seeing what is perhaps the most vivid representation of just how much more advanced it is than the iPad 2′s display, you’ll need a microscope. Luckily, even if you don’t have one, someone else has taken the trouble to do the comparison.

That someone is Lukas Mathias, a user interface designer by trade. He took his digital microscope and looked at the new iPad screen with a magnification of 80x. Then he did the same thing with the iPad 2. The difference between the two is what you see above. The new iPad’s resolution is 2048 x 1536. It is officially the most pixel-dense tablet on the market today.

There are other devices with more refined pixels, like the iPhone 4S and the Xperia Play, but those have much smaller screen sizes. The larger the display, the more difficult it becomes, exponentially, to keep that kind of graphical fidelity intact. Of course, when the iPad 2 came out, many were already impressed with that display, so the question is how much further the technology can go.

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha You may have heard of Wolfram Alpha, which is a “computational knowledge engine.” That makes it sound a bit scary, but it’s a great tool once you can wrap your head around it. Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches. You can leverage that magic and put Wolfram Alpha to work for you — the empty search box on its homepage holds endless possibilities. Read More
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10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha

You may have heard of Wolfram Alpha, which is a “computational knowledge engine.” That makes it sound a bit scary, but it’s a great tool once you can wrap your head around it.

Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches. You can leverage that magic and put Wolfram Alpha to work for you — the empty search box on its homepage holds endless possibilities.

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Mitsubishi i-MIEV Is The Greenest Car Of 2012  The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has published its 14th annual Greenest Cars List and for the first time an electric vehicle takes the number one spot. The new Mitsubishi i-MIEV bested the Honda Civic Natural Gas, which held the number one spot for eight straight years. A variety of environmental criteria are assessed when evaluating a vehicle’s green score, including the emissions created by the power plant used to provide electricity to the i-MIEV and other electric vehicles. The changing face of the eco-friendly automotive scene actually led to a few changes in the ACEEE’s methodology this year. “This year, a number of updates were made to the Green Book® methodology to more accurately estimate vehicles’ environmental impacts. These include improved emissions estimates for the vehicle manufacturing process, changes reflecting current natural gas extraction practices, and consideration of upcoming shifts in the generation mix for the electricity used to power electric cars.” Source: ACEEE (read more and see the top 14 ‘green’ cars)
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Mitsubishi i-MIEV Is The Greenest Car Of 2012 

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has published its 14th annual Greenest Cars List and for the first time an electric vehicle takes the number one spot. The new Mitsubishi i-MIEV bested the Honda Civic Natural Gas, which held the number one spot for eight straight years.

A variety of environmental criteria are assessed when evaluating a vehicle’s green score, including the emissions created by the power plant used to provide electricity to the i-MIEV and other electric vehicles. The changing face of the eco-friendly automotive scene actually led to a few changes in the ACEEE’s methodology this year.

“This year, a number of updates were made to the Green Book® methodology to more accurately estimate vehicles’ environmental impacts. These include improved emissions estimates for the vehicle manufacturing process, changes reflecting current natural gas extraction practices, and consideration of upcoming shifts in the generation mix for the electricity used to power electric cars.” Source: ACEEE

(read more and see the top 14 ‘green’ cars)

Quantum Cryptography Comes to Smart Phones

A smart phone can do pretty much anything a PC can. But, aside from password protection, phones have very littlesecurity—a real problem with more and more people using phones for online banking and shopping.

But researchers at Los Alamos National Lab hopequantum encryption can help. Quantum encryption typically requires a lot of processing power and covers only short distances. But Los Alamos says it’s developed a minitransmitter that encodes the encryption key on a single photon. They call it the QKarD transmitter, short for Quantum Smart Card. Any change in the photon’s quantum information reveals an attempted hack and cancels the transaction.

Good luck, hackers.

Split-Second Events Cloaked in Time May Aid Computer Hacking

By altering the speed of light beams, like those used for data transmission, U.S. military-funded scientists created a hidden pocket in time that one day may be used in computer espionage.

Researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York showed that it’s possible to cloak very fast events — those lasting less than about 40 trillionths of a second. Further investigation may enable longer occurrences to be obscured as well, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

The scientists took a stream of light and shifted it through a lens, causing some beams to travel faster and others slower. That created a so-called temporal void, where events — in this case, a fast pulse of light — can happen without being observed. When the stream passed through a second lens, no one watching it would know that the light pulse had taken place, the paper said.

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NASA Gets Into Sci-Fi Literature Game

Many a science nerd has been born while reading science-fiction novels. As a way to hook those kids early, NASA has partnered with a book publisher to develop sci-fi–themed books.

The line of books, which the space agency is calling “NASA Inspired Works of Fiction,” will be created with Tor-Forge Books. Through the partnership, NASA will pair its space geeks with the publisher’s writers to create books intended to spark interest in engineering, mathematics, technology and science.

“This agreement will benefit the public, as we look for innovative ways to communicate our past and current achievements, while focusing on the needs of the future,” Nona Cheeks, the director of Innovative Partnerships at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

 

NASA isn’t the only organization looking to tap writers to create inspiring prose. Intel recently asked writers Scarlett Thomas, Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond and Markus Heitz to write short stories about what the future would look like. Those stories are available for free download on Intel’s website.

Perhaps one day in the near future, these stories will get optioned for movies and Hollywood can get yet another chance to shoot the moon.

So who would you like to hack today?

Hacktivists, pranktivists, idealists and malware coders are oozing past the circa-2000 network-security gates of corporations and governments with ease. Among the biggest hacks was the one that brought down Sony’s PlayStation Network. Some fingered the politically motivated group Anonymous, and authorities in Spain have arrested several purported members. But Anonymous has said, Not us.

When Sony announced that it had finally restored service, the gang of merry hacksters called LulzSec began to trample through its websites, including Sony Pictures. LulzSec, which makes a point of pointing out holes in Web security, used a hack called an SQL injection, then tweeted about it: “We accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?” It has since broken into gaming companies such as Bethesda Softworks and Minecraft. It used a hack called a distributed-denial-of-service attack to lock up the CIA’s website; it accessed account information from Citibank.(See if hackers are getting smarter.)

LulzSec may be the headline hacker, but it’s not the most malevolent. The black-hat, criminal side of the practice is booming by adopting a similar approach. Cyberthieves have shifted their focus to social networks. Instead of attacking corporate firewalls head-on, they are breaching corporate sites using social engineering, convincing someone within a company that an e-mail is from a friend or colleague. It’s a technique called spear phishing: the idea is to identify vulnerable targets — say, someone in human resources or finance — and, through them, burrow into corporate networks. They are feasting on small and medium size businesses like wolves on lambs.

There is also a real cyberwar being waged by nations. Reports of cybersecurity incidents from federal agencies have increased 660% over the past five years, to 41,776 in 2010, according to the Government Accountability Office’s information-security-issues director. The networks of the Department of Defense (DOD) are probed millions of times every day. More than 100 foreign intelligence agencies have attempted to penetrate DOD networks or those of military contractors — attacks characterized as APTs, or advanced persistent threats. At least one got into the Pentagon via Lockheed Martin by cracking the RSA security token, the random-number-generating device that many companies use for secure access to computer networks.

To experts, this is just another sign that the older technology that protected IT is passé. “User-named passwords are breakable now. They weren’t when they first started,” says Bill Conner, CEO of Entrust, an IT-security firm. “Tokens have been around a long time. One lockmaker has now been breached. Even tokens aren’t good against some of the new-age cybercrimes.”(See whose emails were exposed in a LulzSec hack.)

The New Threat Matrix
It adds up to an entirely different threat matrix bubbling up on the Web. The hacker community that once operated in its dark recesses has broken the surface, embracing social networks and exploiting them to expand in all directions, legal and otherwise. “What we are seeing is beyond a technical improvement,” says Dave Jevans, chairman of the Web-security firm IronKey. “They have a social element to bring people together [via the network] to create more sophisticated attacks than we’ve ever seen. That’s what makes it accelerate.”

And it’s not just Nigerian spammers and post-Soviet computer jocks anymore. In the past quarter, the IT-security company AVG traced hack attacks tied to about 700 command-and-control servers — servers that take over computers infected by botnets — used by various hackers around the world. “About 30% of the hackers were in the U.S.,” says CEO J.R. Smith. “This is a shocking experience to see the data being stolen — medical data, business data. The volume of data being stolen is constantly increasing.” So is his business, since the thieves are also expanding into cell phones. Smith says his company blocks 10,000 malicious mobile-app downloads every day.

See the 140 Best Twitter Feeds.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2079423,00.html#ixzz1R9wX2Tmp

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