Geeko friendly's List: WTF

• Trudging gingerly across the arid sands of the Gobi desert, Czech explorer Ivan Mackerle is careful not to put a foot wrong, for he knows it may be his last. He scours the land and shifting valleys for tell-tale signs of disturbance in the sands below, always ready for the unexpected lurch of an alien being said to kill in one strike with a sharp spout of acidic venom to the face. A creature so secretive that no photographic evidence yet exists, but the locals know it’s there, always waiting in silence for its prey, waiting to strike – the Mongolian Death Worm.

• • Canada allready declared BPA toxic
• • fucking amateurs!
• A study has for the first time linked a common chemical used in everyday products such as plastic drink containers and baby bottles to health problems, specifically heart disease and diabetes.
• Until now, environmental and consumer activists who have questioned the safety of bisphenol A, or BPA, have relied on studies showing harm from exposure in laboratory animals.
• analyzed urine and blood samples from 1,455 U.S. adults aged 18 to 74 who were representative of the general population.
• 25 percent of people with the highest levels of bisphenol A in their bodies were more than twice as likely to have heart disease and, or diabetes compared to the 25 percent of with the lowest levels.
• the design of the study did not allow for anyone to conclude BPA causes heart disease and diabetes.
• A U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel of outside experts on Tuesday will hear testimony on health effects from BPA as it reviews a draft report it issued last month calling BPA safe.
• BPA is used to make polycarbonate plastic, a clear shatter-resistant material in products ranging from baby and water bottles to plastic eating utensils to sports safety equipment and medical devices.
• It also is used to make durable epoxy resins used as the coating in most food and beverage cans and in dental fillings.
• present in more than 90 percent of people
• not much that can be done to avoid the chemical of which over 2.2 million tons is produced each year
• Animal studies have suggested the chemical may disrupt hormones, especially estrogen.
• The European Union’s top food safety body said in July the amount of BPA found in baby bottles cannot harm human health.

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• Our level of hormones plays a key role while we choose a mate as high testosterone in women makes them more attracted to masculine actors such as Daniel Craig, with men favoring the femininity typified by Natalie Portman
• changes in testosterone levels affect the extent to which men and women are attracted to different types of faces.
• “Since masculine men and feminine women are thought to produce the healthiest children and sex drive is higher when testosterone levels are also high, these findings suggest that men and women in hormonal states where their interest in sex is highest, show stronger attraction to high quality - or healthy - mates.”

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• The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.
• The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs.
• Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres,
• The increasing number of data centres necessary to cope with the massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.
• The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green.
• Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel
• Microsoft has investigated building a data centre in the cold climes of Siberia, while in Japan the technology firm Sun Microsystems plans to send its computers down an abandoned coal mine, using water from the ground as a coolant.
• “The huge question raised by this proposal is how to keep the barges safe.”

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• A sunday morning stroll on the promenade almost turned into an afternoon swim when 70mph winds whipped up this 33ft wave. Curious onlookers that gathered to watch the storm, in San Sebastian, Spain, scrambled over each other to escape its wrath.
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• Scientists at Genomatica Inc. recently announced that they have developed strains of bacteria that are able to produce plastic without the use of oil or natural gas. The sustainable process utilizes little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol (BDO), which can be manufactured into everything from plastics and fibers to pharmaceuticals. Genomatica estimates that within a year the energy-efficient process will cost less than current hydrocarbon-based processes - a revolutionary development since close to 3 billion pounds of BDO manufactured each year.
• Currently BDO is made exclusively with oil and natural gas, and its production is very energy-intensive.
• Utilizing sugar and E. Coli to create the chemical allows the production process to be conducted under normal pressure and temperatures, which drastically cuts it energy use:
• The bacteria-grown plastic can be produced in large fermentation tanks in a manner similar the way that algae is being used to produce biofuels,
• the company plans on using sugars that are non-competitive with the food industr

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• now dubbed the less-hostile-sounding Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST)
• Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.
• sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions
• "We're still very early on in this research, but it is looking very promising," says DHS science spokesman John Verrico. "We are running at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception."
• Questions remain, however, as to how secure the system is. The machines could reveal health conditions like heart murmurs and breathing problems as well as stress levels - which would be an invasion of privacy.

  • hmm, interesting
• But Verrico says FAST has been through stringent privacy controls (pdf) and that the data is never matched to a name. It is only used to make decisions about whether to question someone, and then discarded.
• The trial technology was installed in a trailer because it is planned to be easily transportable, so that FAST trucks can appear at any sports or music event as required. They look set to become as regular a sight at such events as mobile toilets and catering trucks
• But is going to make a real difference? Or will bad guys learn to play the system and render it another piece of what expert Bruce Schneier dubs "security theatre".
  
    Given that the FAST approach is not much different to the long established - and long established as unreliable - polygraph, that certainly seems plausible.

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• This, if confirmed, is really, really, really bad news:
• The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
• In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
• Some have already begun calling for a program of massive geoengineering to stave off the triggering of runaway climate change as this methane starts hitting the atmosphere.

  • wtf is geoengineering??
• Our first priority as a civilization ought not to be huge interventions in systems we only barely understand, but a planetary commitment to Zero, now.
• The stakes are rising faster and faster. You often hear the line at conferences that on climate change, science is 10 years ahead of business, and business is 5 years ahead of policy and the public debate; I'm increasingly less sure that science and the public debate are even operating in the same space-time continuum anymore.
• Geoengineering, he said, is a forbidden topic among many who are concerned about climate change, because they fear that it will help to legitimize wasteful lifestyles which they would rather see changed.
• This, he said, is analogous to those who don't want to talk about birth control with teenagers, for fear that it will encourage them to have sex.
• To carry the analogy further: if the methane hydrates are indeed going off, then the girl is officially knocked up.
• Carbon sequestration is the *only* thing which might turn that process around

  • wtf is carbon sequestration?
• Nathan, I take your point, but that's a terrible analogy. Leaving aside the weirdness of gendering the climate as a teenage girl, it's not like geoengineering is abortion and will suddenly make that girl un-pregnant. We don't even know that any of the proposed geoengineering ideas would actually work. History suggests that it's far more likely that they would go disastrously wrong.

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• the reports remain spotty on some critical details. Most important question: is this coming from frozen methane hydrates? If it's not, the potential release of methane could be bad, but probably something we could deal with. If it is... we're in a lot of trouble.
• that's 50 gigatons of methane that could be released. And methane, as has been reiterated time and again, is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.

• Except it's not. It's actually worse. That 23x figure refers to the impact of a given quantity of methane over a 100 year period -- a standard way of comparing the effects of different gases. But methane cycles out after a decade, so a better way of comparing its impact is over a shorter time period -- say, 20 years. Compressed to two decades, then, the relative power of methane as a greenhouse gas is 72 times that of carbon dioxide.

    

  72x.

    

  So that 50 gigatons of methane? That's the equivalent of 3600 gigatons of carbon dioxide, in terms of greenhouse effect.

    

  To put that into comparison: the Earth's atmosphere holds a total of about 3000 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide.

    

  This would more than double the concentration of CO2e in the atmosphere.

    

  So this is not just huge, it's really freaking huge.
• As I said, we still don't know if this is the methane hydrates beginning to melt. If it is, then even going to zero CO2 emissions now won't do a damn thing. Ocean thermal inertia will keep the temperatures up undersea for a good while, even if we stopped all carbon outputs now. Thermal inertia alone would keep us warming on land for a couple of decades, too, after we zero out, but that's comparatively less catastrophic than the hydrates.
• Albedo-modification geoengineering (stratospheric sulfates, "space mirrors," that sort of thing) won't do much to change ocean temperatures in a short enough period to stop hydrate melts.
• CO2 sequestration geo (iron or urea dumps in the ocean, bioengineered supertrees, that sort of thing) won't do a damn thing about methane, even if it worked.
• It's hard to imagine a geoengineering project gone wrong that would be worse than a methane hydrate melt; a big methane hydrate event appears to be connected to one of the largest extinctions in geological history (bigger than the KT event killing the dinosaurs). 90+% of all species gone.
• I've made it abundantly clear that I don't think geo is a good idea. It's a pretty damn crazy idea, in a lot of ways. But if this methane report is as bad as it looks to be, crazy ideas may be all that we have left.

• Zero emissions from human activity needs to be the standard, world-wide, and remediation techniques have to be developed and deployed, oh, yesterday.

    

  Looks like we're going to have an interesting 21st century. I know the Uh-ohs (what I call this present decade) has been fair crazy already.

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• Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species.
• Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
• areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
• The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
• An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.
• At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane
• "The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed
• Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

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• a fruit that when eaten, renders sour foods sweet.
• Dubbed miracle fruit, this small red berry hailing from West Africa is the star performer at “flavour tripping parties” organized by Franz Aliquo in the United States. Bartenders have also been experimenting with the fruit to create new cocktails, and UK art magazine Cabinet has included it on the menu at their events.

  • what people use it for
• The flavour-altering berry (or Synsepalum dulcificum, if you want to be technical), contains a protein called miraculin. When miraculin comes into contact with acids, the result is a sweet, sweet taste in your mouth. We want.

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• Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.
• The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
• The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental security weaknesses in some of the internet's core protocols.
• Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, noted computer security expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998 that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. "I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago.... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail."

  • RA
• The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network.
• The technique, devised by Pilosov, doesn't exploit a bug or flaw in BGP. It simply exploits the natural way BGP works.
• The issue exists because BGP's architecture is based on trust. To make it easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they're the quickest, most efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that when a router says it's the best path, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic.

  • RA

•   Here's how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user's ISP then consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from announcements, or "advertisements," issued by ISPs and other networks -- also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes -- declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they'll deliver traffic.

    

    The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific prefix "wins" the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific one.

    

    To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide, before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.

  • explains the process. Not that interesting

• Pilosov's innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

    

    Ordinarily, this shouldn't work -- the data would boomerang back to the eavesdropper. But Pilosov and Kapela use a method called AS path prepending that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its rightful recipients.

  • explanation how they do it and not get noticed
• "Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent," Kapela said. "They simply don't because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive."

  • RA

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• Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.

  • the "real-scope" thing is supposedly crap
• Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth.

• Some office towers and buildings are keeping their AC use to a minimum by using an energy-saving system that relies on blocks of ice to pump chilly air.
• Officials said there are at least 3,000 ice-cooling systems worldwide.
• Because electricity is needed to make the ice, water is frozen in large silver tanks at night when power demands are low. The cool air emanating from the ice blocks is then piped through the building. At night the water is frozen again and the cycle repeated.
• Ice storage can be used as the sole cooling system, or it can be combined with traditional systems to help ease the power demands during peak hours.
• In the basement, three main cooling rooms house chilling machines and 64 tanks that hold 800 gallons of water each. Credit Suisse has a traditional air conditioning system, but engineers use the energy-saving system first.
• Construction on the system took about four months, and company engineers say it is extremely efficient.
• “The idea of not only saving money for large companies, but doing something that benefits the environment, is win-win,” he said. “It’s doing the right thing.”
• The technology is not for every office space. There has to be room to install the large tanks—and costs are considerable. Credit Suisse spent more than $3 million to renovate its cooling system and Morgan Stanley’s costs were comparable, meaning the technology is best suited to large companies.

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• Environmental responsibility
• In 2001, the company released a statement regarding a move toward using responsibly and sustainably farmed ingredients in the chain restaurants.^[16] The statement reported that the use of these ingredients and the implementation of sustainable architecture were to reflect CEO Steve Ells' philosophy for their food.

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• Superheroes have nothing on this guy
  
  As a follow-up to our recent Superheroes article, here is a movie poster for the Sultan Rahi's action vehicle:
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• trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us.
• Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
• We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box',"
• One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians' elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

  • !
• they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere."
• divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.
• To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

  • how they conducted the experment
• trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information
• The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

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