In a secret bunker known as the Swiss Fort Knox deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers recently deposited a “digital genome” that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology. Accompanied by burly security guards in black uniforms, scientists carried a time capsule through a labyrinth of tunnels and five security zones to a vault near the slopes of chic ski resort Gstaad.
The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 ton door strong enough to resist nuclear attack at the data storage facility.
The capsule is the culmination of the four-year “Planets” project, an 15 million-euro ($18.49 million) project which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives and research institutions, to preserve the world’s digital assets as hardware and software. The capsule deposited contains the digital equivalent of the genetic code of different data formats, a ‘digital genome.’
Around 100 GB of data—equivalent to 24 tons of books—has already been created for every single individual on the planet, ranging from holiday snaps to health records, project organizers said, adding this amounted to over 1 trillion CDs worth of data across the globe.
But as technological breakthroughs help people to live longer, the lifespan of technology gets shorter, meaning the European Union alone loses digital information worth at least 3 billion euros every year, they said. Studies suggest common data storage formats like CDs and DVDs only last 20 years, while digital file formats have a life expectancy of just five to seven years. Hardware even less.
“Unlike hieroglyphics carved in stone or ink on parchment, digital data has a shelf life of years not millennia,” said Andreas Rauber, a professor at the University of Technology of Vienna, which is a partner in the project.
The project hopes to preserve “data DNA,” the information and tools to access and read historical digital material and prevent digital memory loss into the next century.
This could have uses for countless different organizations, from pharmaceutical companies trying to access test data decades from now or aerospace companies checking design details of planes built to fly for 30 or 40 years.
People will be puzzled at what they find when they open the time capsule, said Rauber. “In 25 years people will be astonished to see how little time must pass to render data carriers unusable because they break or because you don’t have the devices anymore,” he said. “The second shock will probably be what fraction of the objects we can’t use or access in 25 years and that’s hard to predict.”
Jacques Cousteau’s Underworld Village in the Red Sea via BBC on YouTube
Legendary marine explorer, inventor, innovator, filmmaker and environmental activist Jacques Cousteau was born June 11, 1910 in Saint André de Cubzac, a small town in southwest France.
To mark the centennial of his birth, the Cousteau Society is launching a year-long celebration in Paris with Cousteau’s global legion of admirers, and welcomes proposals from around the world.
The re-launch and tour of Calypso, the ship aboard which Cousteau created many of the world’s first glimpses of deep-sea life, will highlight the end of the centennial in 2011.
Instantly recognizable by his red cap and gaunt silhouette, Cousteau was just 33 when he co-invented the aqualung that enabled divers to explore ocean depths for extended periods, opening a window to an entire world then virtually unknown to humankind.
He went on to pioneer many areas, including documenting the sonar-like capabilities of dolphins, public demonstrations to protect the oceans from radioactive dumping and over-exploitation, and mass communication of marine research through films and television.
In 1996, the year before his death at age 87, Cousteau’s historic Calypso was sunk and badly damaged when a barge in Singapore accidentally rammed it. Today the vessel is in the Brittany region of France being refurbished under the direction of the Cousteau Society and l’Equipe Cousteau, led by Francine Cousteau, widow of the late explorer.
Calypso will be re-purposed as a touring educational exhibition, to include the Cousteau-designed one- and two-person mini-submarines, the underwater scooters, aqualungs, diving suits, cameras and other emblematic equipment used during his expeditions, which earned him countless awards including Emmys, Oscars and the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival.
“In this year, the 100th anniversary of his birth, we owe it to his memory to ensure that the spirit of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his work inspires new generations,” says Pierre-Yves.
“The oceans occupy nearly 72% of our planet’s surface and they contain more than 97% of all our planet’s water. They are the place where life appeared 3.8 billion years ago and remain the largest living space in our known universe. Nevertheless, less than 20% has been explored by humans and we have already damaged most of it.” says Tarik Chekchak, the Cousteau Society’s Director, Science and Environment.
“Our research with UNESCO into how best to educate people and protect our oceans and indeed all our vital waterways is more necessary today than ever – as the tragic event unfolding this past month in Gulf of Mexico sadly demonstrates.”
Under Pierre-Yves’s leadership, the Cousteau Society is developing a monitoring program of the oceans, Cousteau Divers, which will involve the active participation of divers worldwide.
The public is invited to contribute to an online book of remembrances and appreciation at The Cousteau Society.
Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before—over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), bringing us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.
Quantum teleportation is not the same as the teleportation most of us know from science fiction, where an object (or person) in one place is “beamed up” to another place where a perfect copy is replicated. In quantum teleportation two photons or ions (for example) are entangled in such a way that when the quantum state of one is changed the state of the other also changes, as if the two were still connected. This enables quantum information to be teleported if one of the photons/ions is sent some distance away.
In the experiments, pairs of photons were entangled and then the higher-energy photon of the pair was sent through a free space channel 16 km long. The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, found that even at this distance the photon at the receiving end still responded to changes in state of the photon remaining behind.
The distance of 16 km is greater than the effective aerosphere thickness of 5-10 km, so the group’s success could pave the way for experiments between a ground station and a satellite. This means quantum communication applications could be possible on a global scale in the near future.
The public free space channel was at ground level and spanned the 16 km distance between Badaling in Beijing (the teleportation site) and the receiver site at Huailai in Hebei province. Entangled photon pairs were generated at the teleportation site using a semiconductor, a blue laser beam, and a crystal of beta-barium borate (BBO). The research team designed two types of telescopes to serve as optical transmitting and receiving antennas.
The experiments confirm the feasibility of space-based quantum teleportation, and represent a giant leap forward in the development of quantum communication applications.
Photo of Psychedelic Frogfish by David Hall / seaphotos.com
The International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) announced the top 10 New Species for 2010. Chaired by Dr. Janine Caira of the University of Connecticut, an international committee of taxon experts selected the Top 10 New Species from the thousands of species fully described and published in calendar year 2009. Nominations from the public were invited through the IISE Web site and were also generated by IISE staff and committee members themselves.
Nominations for 2011 Top 10 New Species is open. Anyone may nominate a species for consideration. The species must have been officially described as new during calendar year 2010. The closing date for nominations is March 15, 2011. There are no firm rules or guidelines for the selection of the top ten species and the final list shall be determined by a vote of an international committee of experts appointed by the IISE.
Obvious examples of criteria for selection include “records” (largest, smallest, etc.), “superlatives” (most, first, last, etc.), humorous or interesting names, surprising characters, properties or distributions, etc. Nominations should include a reference to the actual description in a journal or monograph, reference to a Web site or images of the species if they exist. If you would like to nominate a species, please visit IISE Species Nomination.
A new family of extraterrestrial particles has been identified for the first time in Central Antarctica.
Discovered by researchers from the Center for Nuclear Spectrometry and Mass Spectrometry (CSNSM), attached to the Institut national de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules, the micrometeorites, which are remarkably well preserved, are made up of organic matter containing small assemblages of minerals from the coldest and most remote regions of the Solar System.
The team discovered two micrometeorites in ultra-clean snow near the French-Italian camp, “Concordia,” established in 1955 to 1970 and located in the central region of the Antarctic continent, one of the most remote places in the world.
The larger object is 85% carbon -the essential ingredient for the organic chemistry needed for life, and the smaller one is 48% carbon. Both contain higher-than-expected amounts of deuterium, a rare form of hydrogen, in a concentration 30 times higher than is usually found mixed with hydrogen on Earth - all elements common in interstellar clouds of dust in deep space, far more ancient than the Sun.
When the team used a microscope to examine the dust particles, says the study, they also found tiny crystals which could only have been “condensed or processed at close distances from the young sun.”
Comets are made up of a mixture of icy materials and dust. Occasionally, some of them enter the inner Solar System. When they pass near the Sun, the rise in temperature causes massive sublimation of the icy materials, leading to an ejection of a mixture of gases and cometary grains into interplanetary space. Some dust grains may cross Earth’s orbit as they drift towards the Sun, where most of them finish their journey. It is probably some of these cometary grains that the CSNS scientists discovered in Antarctica.
Until now, only the US Stardust space mission had enabled international teams to carry out mineralogical and geochemical analysis of cometary grains. The micrometeorites discovered at Concordia show numerous similarities to the samples from the Stardust mission.
For the first time, they allow scientists to study extremely well preserved assemblages of minerals and organic material that were present beyond Jupiter’s current orbit at the time when the Sun and the planets were being formed. Their chemical and isotopic composition should make it possible to comprehend the physical and chemical processes at work inside the disk of gas and dust that surrounded the early Sun 4.5 billion years ago.
The Russian government has used rain prevention methods since Soviet times, seeding clouds for major celebrations three times a year—Victory Day, City Day and, more recently, Russia Day.
Alexander Akimenkov has seeded clouds over Moscow on important state holidays for many years. He says the Russians use two different methods to try to drive the rain away.
“Either there’s a special machine that spits out silver iodide, dry ice or cement into the clouds, or a hatch opens and a guy with a shovel seeds the clouds manually,” he explains.
“As soon as the chemicals touch the cloud, a hole appears. It becomes bigger and bigger, and it either rains right there and then or, if the clouds aren’t very dense, they disperse without any precipitation.”
There are also private companies that for some $6,000 per hour say they can guarantee sunshine on your wedding day—or for any other private party. Many ecologists agree that these techniques, also used in many other countries for irrigation purposes, do not pose much of a threat to the environment or people’s health, as the period of active influence on the clouds is very short.
But when Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov suggested the technique could shift the winter snow outside the capital—and therefore save more than $10m in snow-clearing costs—many felt the city authorities were going a bit too far. Even if the idea might appeal to Moscow drivers, tired of constant traffic jams—especially bad in snowy conditions—it has stirred concerns among local ecologists.
“Millions of tonnes of snow diverted from Moscow will create chaos in the areas where it is forced to fall and might even lead to the collapse of bridges and roofs,” said Alexei Yablokov, one of Russia’s leading environmentalists, who was ecological adviser to former President Boris Yeltsin. “Besides, a lack of snow in Moscow would cause many problems in the capital itself,” he said.
“Why do we need snow in Moscow? Snow on the ground helps the roots of trees to survive during severe frosts. If there’s no snow, lots of vegetation—trees, bushes—will die. Snow also cleans the atmosphere very effectively. If there’s nothing to clean the Moscow atmosphere, many people will die—there will be tens or even hundreds of additional deaths,” explains Mr Yablokov.
The idea didn’t come to the Moscow mayor from nowhere, it is based on facts. “In the early 1980s, back in the Soviet period, there was a special service to limit snowfall over Moscow. It stopped working during perestroika [Gorbachev's reforms], when money became scarce. Some eight to 10 planes had to find clouds with the most precipitation and spray them with crystallizing chemicals. Not all water vapor in the atmosphere turns to precipitation, and for the snow to fall, water vapor should concentrate on ice crystals first. So we were making snow fall before it reached Moscow and this work reduced the amount of snow in the capital by 20, 30 and sometimes 40%.”
Regardless of the Moscow authorities’ final decision on snow cloud seeding, Russia remains one of the few nations where weather control is more than using anti-hail cannons and battling droughts.
So if you want to visit Moscow and don’t fancy rain, go there on one of the three precipitation-free holidays.
And if you want to ensure your wedding day is dry—it might just be possible to make it happen.
Developmental biology (’devo’) and evolutionary studies (’evo’), once seen as distinct, yet complementary disciplines, have recently merged into an exciting and fruitful relationship. The official union occurred in 1999 when evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo,” was granted its own division in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB).
It was natural for evolutionary biologists and developmental biologists to find common ground. Evolutionary biologists seek to understand how organisms evolve and change their shape and form. The roots of these changes are found in the developmental mechanisms that control body shape and form. Developmental biologists try to understand how alterations in gene expression and function lead to changes in body shape and pattern. So although SICB only recently validated evo-devo as an independent research area, evo-devo really started over a decade ago when biologists began using an individual organism’s developmental gene expression patterns to explain how groups of organisms evolved.
To highlight this emerging field, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Editorial Board has sponsored a special feature on Evolutionary Developmental Biology. This evo-devo special feature contains eight Perspective articles and a review that examine evo-devo’s progress to date, as well as 15 research articles that add new information and focus on the most recent evo-devo biology trends. The majority of the research articles were submitted directly to the PNAS office through the Track II system, and were evaluated by an Editorial Board member. After the initial screening, papers were assigned to an Academy Member-editor who oversaw a process where research manuscripts were rigorously peer-reviewed by experts in the field.
Biologist Donald Ingber explains how tensegrity helps to understand the origins of life in a 2007 conversation with Sputnik Observatory:
There’s beautiful work from 1917. D’Arcy Thompson had a book where he had a picture of one fish or one face of one ethnic group on a grid. Then they deformed the grid. They pull it this way, they pull it this way, they stretch it that way, and you get all the different species from that form. It’s not saying they we’re physically deformed in that way, but it’s basically saying that physical alterations of the structure are how you get different forms. They could be from internal forces, the cells pulling differently in this area than that, or it could be in a different physical environment, adapting. And the reason that I thought tensegrity really helps to understand origin of life is that each time you go through a systems jump where you put many elements together, whether they’re molecules or cells or tissues, you now have something that when the environment changes, for example it gets very cold or if it gets very salty and you change the structure, most things might break and you lose them but tensegrity is resilient so it can change when it freezes and then come right back again. Those would be selected. Without genes there would be natural selection, environmental selection by physicality, by stability. I think that’s something that’s interesting because most people who work on evolution only think about DNA and RNA and selection by genetic selection. Basically, we’ve had geodesic forms in the inorganic world for millions of years before we had life. We see it in cells, we see it in subcellular components, we see it in our bodies. So that means that the same rules must have been driving evolution in the inorganic world before life and DNA came about.
Michael Hensel, architect, discusses the notion of ‘morpho-ecology’ and how we need to understand the process of formation:
The title Morpho-Ecology brings, in principle, two or three notions or concepts together. On the one hand, morphology or morphogenesis; on the other hand, ecology. This is basically saying that in the morphological part we’re looking at the material constituent, and in the ecological part we’re looking at how this is embedded in a given environment. The term “morphology” was originally coined by Goethe in his studies on botanics, and he basically stated that when we look at nature we cannot concern ourselves merely with gestalt, with shape. Because everything that acquires a shape immediately, in the next moment, changes it’s shape. And he was arguing through the growth of a plant that any time you try to describe a shape it’s only a snapshot in time, because the next day it’s bigger and distributed in a different way. So material is redistributed all the time. It’s a constant process of formation. So what he states is that, up to that point, maybe plant shape studies were merely focused on drawing these snapshots. And he said we need to understand something other than that – we need to understand the process of formation. What is driving plants to grow into a particular shape and into a next shape and next shape? He basically says once something has acquired a shape, it immediately transforms into another. So morphology in that sense, or morphogenesis, the way form comes into being, is a dynamic process. And this dynamic process can only be understood in relation to the environment with which the organism that develops is in contact.
So what we call “morpho-ecology” is probably unnecessary for a biologist, because a biologist would always understand that every organism unfolds and becomes a kind of individual material expression in permanent exchange with the environment. But architects don’t. First of all, because we build our buildings for long time spans. And we don’t think of a building as something that in and of itself will change unless it’s mechanically done. An example would be, for instance, the Schroder House by Rietveld where you have panels that you move around and you change the interior configuration of the house or, for instance, the facade for the Institute for the Arab World by Jean Nouvel which has camera-like apertures that close and open in relation to the sunlight. But this is, again, all mechanically enhanced. So the question is really how can we begin to think of buildings not just as temporary storages of material but also as something that is somehow, in someway, in exchange with the environment and that might also be affected by the environment, while in turn affecting the environment.
There’s another reason to watch what happens in 2012: Neutrino mass will be measured by The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment in Germany, in the quest for the missing link to understanding dark matter, the undetectable matter (so far) that makes up about 25 per cent of the matter in our universe.
There are many theories of what dark matter consists of. We do know that around twenty to twenty-five per cent of all matter is dark, while less than one per cent emits light. The current paradigm is that of ‘cold’ dark matter: heavy particles that were already collecting together before the primordial plasma turned into hydrogen and helium. These would then move towards the collections of dark matter, which explains the current structures of galaxies and clusters. However, despite many attempts, the particle in question has never been identified.
In a recent report, physicist Theo M. Nieuwenhuizen suggests that neutrinos could be the missing link. Neutrinos are uncharged particles, such as those created during the nuclear fusion processes in the sun. Their role in ‘cold’ dark matter is considered to be negligible, partly because the neutrino mass has never been determined. Nieuwenhuizen now concludes that this is indeed light, but not super-light: 1.5 electron volts or three millionths of the electron mass. He obtained this information by studying data from a cluster of galaxies, where there is a great deal of dark matter present, as well as a large amount of hot gas. Nieuwenhuizen formulated a new theory for this purpose, based on Newton’s laws and quantum mechanics, but also virial equilibrium (a state in which all speeds are approximately the same). He then used this theory to determine the mass of the dark matter particle and even the temperature of the gas. The dark matter forms a quantum structure in the centre of the cluster that is a couple of light years in diameter: the largest known.
Up until a few years ago, it was believed that neutrinos were left-handed (like a top that spins to the left), and that anti-neutrinos were only right-handed. This theory leads to 9.5 percent dark matter; much more than is anticipated from neutrinos, but less than the estimated twenty to twenty-five per cent. It is possible to explain twice as much dark matter if right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos are also normally present. However, this assumption requires changes to be made to the standard model of elementary particles. The lepton number (an indication of the number of subatomic, elementary particles) is therefore violated. This means that it must be possible for two neutrons to disappear simultaneously without the release of neutrinos. This therefore leads to nineteen per cent ‘hot’ dark matter and also the need for a new explanation for structure formation in the early universe. A definite answer on the theory will be obtained in 2012, when neutrino mass will be measured by The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment in Germany.
In a conversation recorded in 2007, artist Hiro Yamagata questioned what else the neutrino may carry:
We base everything we think, capture thought in 3D. There is something we call zone, area, territory, or another world or this other world we talk about so many things explain, but we don’t know. For example neutrino, the most weakest power from the edge of the cosmos. They go through Earth to the edge of the cosmos. They journey, travel. The neutrino is the most weakest power and their frequency travel. But the neutrino particles we know people capture now the neutrino. Might neutrino carry something else with each particle, for example? We don’t know. We call the focus of neutrino here. Now we capture the neutrino, but not only neutrino. There’s a neutrino carry something else together, stick on, or time-wise, field-wise, we don’t know where the neutrino come, how it comes through your body. We don’t know. Just basic we capture it now, the neutrino now, but we don’t know. 2.7% we know about light. 99% we don’t know what’s going on the light or all the knowledge of the light. How they put on the 2.7%, even that number we don’t know. So there are so many where light come from: original light, meta particle, or proton between the electron; one of the particle of the electron, they are hitting the light and releasing like gravity, they come to light. All light like that.
How do pedestrians move in the street? How do they interact? Researchers from the Centre de recherches sur la cognition animale (Université Toulouse 3 / CNRS), in partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, have carried out a series of studies to improve understanding of the group behavior of pedestrians in urban environments. Published in PloS ONE, their results establish realistic models of crowd dynamics to improve pedestrian traffic management.
The mechanisms that govern crowd motion remain largely unknown. However, this knowledge is essential for the management of pedestrian flows (walking comfort, traffic fluidity, etc.) in urban areas. The lack of information is due in part to the difficulty of studying these phenomena experimentally and of building quantitative models able to account reliably for them.
For simplicity’s sake, most current models of crowd dynamics consider that pedestrians move independently of one another, trying to reach their destination while avoiding collisions. Using video recordings made in urban areas, Guy Theraulaz’s team from the Centre de recherche sur la cognition animale (Université Toulouse 3 / CNRS), in partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, has shown that depending on the situation, 50 to 70% of pedestrians do not walk alone but in small groups, most commonly composed of two to four members.
The study of the spatial organization of pedestrians within these groups reveals that when they have enough room, group members choose to walk side by side. Conversely, when crowd density increases the group no longer has enough room to walk abreast: the pedestrians in the middle move back slightly and those at the sides move towards each other, forming a concave structure. A group of three pedestrians adopts a “V”-like pattern. In groups of four, a “U”-like formation is observed. These configurations facilitate communication between group members, but they considerably reduce their walking speed. A concave configuration makes the group’s forward motion difficult and forces individuals moving in the opposite direction to perform avoidance maneuvers. At the scale of a crowd, this significantly modifies the spatial and temporal characteristics of pedestrian flows. Numerical simulations based on these observations demonstrate that the presence of pedestrian groups reduces overall traffic efficiency by about 17% compared to a situation in which pedestrians walk in isolation.
This study shows that it is important to take into account the highly heterogeneous composition of crowds and the presence of pedestrian groups who privilege their social activities to the detriment of their walking efficiency. This new knowledge will help improve the reliability of pedestrian traffic predictions in urban environments.
A new study shows that hand-washing does more than remove the guilt of past misdeeds—it also “wipes the slate clean,” removing doubts about recent choices.
According to University of Michigan psychologist Spike W. S. Lee, “It’s not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research. Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever.”
For the study, Lee, a doctoral candidate in social psychology and his colleague Norbert Schwarz, who is affiliated with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Ross School of Business in addition to the Department of Psychology, asked undergraduate students to browse through 30 CD covers as part of an alleged consumer survey. Participants picked 10 CDs they would like to own, ranking them by preference. Later, the experimenter offered them a choice between their 5th and 6th ranked CDs as a token of appreciation. Following that choice, participants completed an ostensibly unrelated product survey — of liquid soap. Half merely examined the bottle before answering while the others tested the soap by washing their hands. After completing a filler task, participants were asked to rank the 10 CDs again.
“People who merely examined the soap bottle dealt with their doubts about their decision by changing how they saw the CDs: As in hundreds of earlier studies, once they had made a choice, they saw the chosen CD as much more attractive than before and the rejected CD as much less attractive. But hand-washing eliminated this classic effect. Once participants had washed their hands, they no longer needed to justify their choice when they ranked the CDs the second time around,” Schwarz said.
The researchers replicated the findings in a study using a different task — taste expectations of jars of fruit jams and ostensibly unrelated surveys of antiseptic wipes. “Participants who merely examined an antiseptic wipe after choosing a jar of fruit jam expected the taste of the chosen jam to far exceed the taste of the rejected one. This difference was eliminated when participants tested the antiseptic wipe by cleaning their hands,” said Lee.
According to the authors, the results show that as much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them.
This “clean slate” effect may be relevant to many choices in life. Does washing away the urge to justify one’s choice of one car over another, or even one partner over another, result in less rosy evaluations of them in the long run? If so, does this increase buyer’s remorse because buyers are less likely to convince themselves that they made the best choice possible?
Listen to change! Think for yourself! Discuss with others! Sputnik Observatory is dedicated to promoting public awareness on the issues and ideas shaping society.
