Planet-hunters set for big bounty
Rocky planets, possibly with conditions suitable for life, may be more common than previously thought in our galaxy, a study has found.
New evidence suggests more than half the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way could have similar planetary systems.
There may also be hundreds of undiscovered worlds in outer parts of our Solar System, astronomers believe.
Future studies of such worlds will radically alter our understanding of how planets are formed, they say.
New findings about planets were presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.
Nasa telescope
Michael Meyer, an astronomer from the University of Arizona, said he believed Earth-like planets were probably very common around Sun-like stars.
“Our observations suggest that between 20% and 60% of Sun-like stars have evidence for the formation of rocky planets not unlike the processes we think led to planet Earth,” he said. “That is very exciting.”
Mr Meyer’s team used the US space agency’s Spitzer space telescope to look at groups of stars with masses similar to the Sun.
They detected discs of cosmic dust around stars in some of the youngest groups surveyed.
The dust is believed to be a by-product of rocky debris colliding and merging to form planets.
Nasa’s Kepler mission to search for Earth-sized and smaller planets, due to be launched next year, is expected to reveal more clues about these distant undiscovered worlds.
Frozen worlds
Some astronomers believe there may be hundreds of small rocky bodies in the outer edges of our own Solar System, and perhaps even a handful of frozen Earth-sized worlds.
Speaking at the AAAS meeting, Nasa’s Alan Stern said he thought only the tip of the iceberg had been found in terms of planets within our own Solar System.
More than a thousand objects had already been discovered in the Kuiper belt alone, he said, many rivalling the planet Pluto in size.
“Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System,” he told BBC News.
He said many of these planets would be icy, some would be rocky, and there might even be objects with the same mass as Earth.
“It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud (a band of debris surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances,” Dr Stern added.
“They would look like a frozen Earth.”
Goldilocks zone
Excitement about finding other Earth-like planets is driven by the idea that some might contain life or perhaps, centuries from now, allow human colonies to be set up on them.
The key to this search, said Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University, California, was the “Goldilocks zone”.
This refers to an area of space in which a planet is “just the right distance” from its parent star so that its surface is not-too-hot or not-too-cold to support liquid water.
“To my mind there are two things we have to go after: we have to find the right mass planet and it has to be at the right distance from the star,” she said.
The AAAS meeting concludes on Monday.
via bbc
Planet hunters find ’super-Earth’
Planet hunters have discovered an icy “super-Earth” circling a distant star.
International astronomers suspect it is a bare, icy, rocky world, much colder than the Earth and 13 times its mass.
The planet was spotted last April but details have only just been revealed in a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The extra-solar planet is one of a mere handful detected using a novel technique called microlensing.
The planet orbits a star about half as big as our Sun, positioned some 9,000 light-years away. At -201C, it is one of the coldest extra-solar planets to be discovered.
Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, US, was one of the first people to discover it.
He said the find has two main implications.
“First, this icy ’super-Earth’ dominates the region around its star that in our Solar System is populated by the gas-giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn,” he said.
“We’ve never seen a system like this before because we’ve never had the means to find them.
“And second, these icy ’super-Earths’ are pretty common. Roughly, 35% of all stars have them.”
Brightening effect
Professor Gould is leader of the Microlensing Follow-up Network (MicroFUN) collaboration.
It is one of several international groups looking for Earth-like planets in planetary systems other than our own using the phenomenon called gravitational microlensing.
The technique is an indirect way of obtaining information about large celestial objects that are too dim to see.
When a massive object such as a star crosses the path of a background star, it acts like a powerful lens, gravitationally bending and magnifying the light rays from the more distant star.
The object’s gravity amplifies the starlight, causing it to brighten as the body passes in front of the star.
This can be observed by telescopes on Earth as a brightening and fading effect, as the lens star floats across the face of the background star.
Neptune-mass
Clues to the presence of the planet were first seen last April by a Polish astronomy project led by Professor Andrzej Udalski from Warsaw University.
When Gould and Udalski realised the star was brightening extremely quickly one night, they alerted the duty astronomer at the MDM Observatory in Arizona.
“It was four in the morning,” Gould recalled, “I was very excited and frantic to get someone to observe that star.”
Astronomers in Arizona took more than 1,000 measurements of the event, which, coupled with software models, confirmed the presence of a Neptune-mass planet, 13 times heavier than Earth.
Gould suspects the planet is a bare, icy Earth-like one, a sort of cold “super-Earth”, although he cannot be certain.
“We can’t really tell for sure,” he said. “If we start getting more statistics on this type of planet, we could piece together a better story.”
Extraterrestrial life
Since the 1990s, astronomers have discovered some 170 extra-solar, or exoplanets, a planet which orbits a star other than the Sun.
There is great interest in finding extrasolar planets that are like the Earth, since these could, in theory, have the right conditions for supporting life.
In January, a new planet 5.5 times the mass of the Earth - the smallest yet - became the third exoplanet to be detected by the microlensing technique.
Tim Naylor, professor of astrophysics at Exeter University, UK, said microlensing had great promise for the future.
“It holds out the promise that we will discover many Earth-sized planets with this technique,” he told the BBC News website.
via bbc
Archives:
Goldfish memory myth busted
A 15-year-old South Australian school student has busted the myth that goldfish have a three second memory.
Rory Stokes, from the Australian Science and Mathematics School in Adelaide, conducted an experiment to test the commonly held theory that goldfish have short memory spans.
He was also keen to open people’s minds to the cruelty of keeping fish in small tanks.
“We are told that a goldfish has a memory span of less than three seconds and that no matter how small its tank is, it will always discover new places and objects,” Rory said.
“I wanted to challenge this theory as I believe it is a myth intended to make us feel less guilty about keeping fish in small tanks.”
Rory’s experiment involved teaching a small group of fish to swim to a beacon by establishing a memory connection between the beacon and food.
Over a period of three weeks, he placed a beacon in the water at feeding time each day, waited 30 seconds and then sprinkled fish food around the beacon.
The time taken for the fish to swim to the beacon reduced dramatically, from more than one minute for the first few feeds to less than five seconds by the end of the three weeks.
Following the initial three-week period, Rory removed the beacon from the feeding process.
Six days later, he once again placed the beacon in the water and despite not seeing it for almost a week, the fish swam to the beacon in 4.4 seconds, showing they had remembered the association between food and the beacon for at least six days.
“My results strongly showed that goldfish can retain knowledge for at least six days,” Rory said.
“They can retain that knowledge indefinitely if they use it regularly.”
Rory also conducted a number of other experiments to show goldfish were capable of negotiating a simple maze, by having them move onto a second beacon if they found no food at the first.
“My experiments showed that goldfish have the mental capabilities to learn and remember fairly complex concepts and they can retain that knowledge for at least a number of days,” he said.
Australian Science and Mathematics School principal Jim Davies said the series of experiments were an excellent example of science investigation made fun.
via news.com.au
Reference: The goldfish, Carassius auratus, was one of the earliest fish to be domesticated, and is still one of the most commonly kept aquarium fish and water garden fish. A relatively small member of the carp family, the goldfish is a domesticated version of a dark-gray/brown carp native to East Asia. It was first domesticated in China and introduced to Europe in the late 17th century.
Goldfish may grow to a maximum length of 23 inches (59 cm) and a maximum weight of 9.9 pounds (4.5 kg), although this is rare; few goldfish reach even half this size. The oldest recorded goldfish lived to 49 years, but most household goldfish generally live only six to eight years, due to being kept in bowls. A group of goldfish is known as a troubling.
Why scientists love games consoles
Leading scientists are turning to the extraordinary power of games consoles to do their sums and simulate everything from colliding black holes to the effects of drugs.
Reprogram a PlayStation and it will perform feats that would be unthinkable on an ordinary PC because the kinds of calculations required to produce the realistic graphics now seen in sophisticated video games are similar to those used by chemists and physicists as they simulate the interactions between particles ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.
Such simulations are usually carried out on a supercomputer, but time on these machines is expensive and in short supply. By comparison, games consoles are cheap and easily available, says New Scientist.
“There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science - exploiting the power available to the masses will lead to many research breakthroughs in the future,” comments Prof Peter Coveney of University College London, who uses supercomputing in chemistry.
Prof Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has used an array of 16 PS3s to calculate what will happen when two black holes merge.
According to Prof Khanna, the PS3 has unique features that make it suitable for scientific computations, namely, the Cell processor dubbed a “supercomputer-on-a-chip.” And it runs on Linux, “so it does not limit what you can do.”
“A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely,” Prof Khanna says.
And Todd Martinez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console.
Together with his student Benjamin Levine he is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms, as part of work to see how proteins in the body dovetail with drug molecules.
He was inspired while browsing through his son’s games console’s technical specification “I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before,” he says. “That’s when I thought about getting one for myself.”
The Wii, made by Nintendo, has a motion tracking remote control unit that is cheaper than a comparable device built from scratch. The device recently emerged as a tool to help surgeons to improve their technique.
Meanwhile, neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee, is using it to measure movement deficiencies in Parkinson’s patients to assess how well a patient can move when they take part in drug trials.
via telegraph
Reference: A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or electronic device that manipulates the video display signal of a display device (a television, monitor, etc.) to display a game. The term “video game console” is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal computer, which has many other functions, or arcade machines, which are designed for businesses that buy and then charge others to play.
WALMART TO COVER UP “M” RATED GAMES
Bentonville, AR – Censorship, of course, is nothing new. Every creative form of entertainment has endured attempts to restrict its content or who can access it at some point of its existence. Over the past few years video games have taken the brunt of those restrictions. The virulence of the attacks against the industry has only grown along with its rise in popularity.
Early on the industry seemed to learn from its predecessors. With the voluntary introduction of a rating system in the 90’s, the video game industry took a proactive approach to self regulation. The hope was that this show of responsibility would help stave of the more radical proselytizers and give the industry room to breathe. Throughout the Nineties, that approach seemed to be working.
Gaming had its controversies early in its life. Titles such as “Custer’s Revenge” and “Beat ‘em and Eat ‘em” broke boundaries and outraged parents in the nascent days of the industry when they were released for the Atari 2600. Natural selection and technology changes from companies like Nintendo doomed titles of such a controversial nature to extinction. In the early part of the 1990’s though, saw a surge parental outrage, and even US Senate hearings, with the release of titles like “Night Trap” and “Mortal Kombat”.
The resulting controversies forced the industry to form the ESRB and begin to regulate their own product, hoping that they would avoid the censorship the plagued the Film and Music industry before them. For a while, that seemed to work.
The start of the new millennium saw the release of two products that would forever change that calm peace the industry had brokered.
The Sony Playstation 2 and “Grand Theft Auto III” broke new grounds for controversy and popularity. All of a sudden, the industry found itself on the defensive again, and as the decade has progressed, the vigour of the attacks seems to have only increased.
With recent controversies over titles like “Bully” and “Manhunt 2” video games have never been under such scrutiny. That focus has caused not only developers and publishers to become nervous about the content in their titles, but also retailers.
The largest retailer of all has taken new measures to try to protect its consumers from potentially controversial video games.
Much like adult magazines had in the past, Wal-Mart will soon be displaying M-rated titles with a black sleeve covering three quarters of the cover of each title. The hope is that this will prevent children from any kind of exposure to anything that might be offensive on the cover of a game.
“It is the responsibility of Wal-Mart to protect our children from potentially damaging content, such as the covers of some video games,” said a company spokesperson.
When asked why the sleeves would matter when the titles are stored behind glass, the company had no comment.
The new program is expected to be implemented later this year. There are also plans to cover T-rated titles with a more modest half sleeve.
via scrapetv
Reference: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is an American public corporation that runs a chain of large, discount department stores. It is the world’s largest public corporation by revenue, according to the 2007 Fortune Global 500.[3] Founded by Sam Walton in 1962, it was incorporated on October 31, 1969, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. It is the largest private employer in the world and the fourth largest utility or commercial employer, trailing the Chinese army, the British National Health Service, and the Indian Railways. Wal-Mart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with an estimated 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business, as well as the largest toy seller in the U.S., with an estimated 22% share of the toy market.
Wal-Mart operates in Mexico as Walmex, in the UK as ASDA, and in Japan as Seiyu. It has wholly-owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the UK. Wal-Mart’s investments outside North America have had mixed results: its operations in South America and China are highly successful, but it sold its retail operations in South Korea and Germany in 2006 after sustained losses.
Wal-Mart has been criticized by some community groups, women’s rights groups, grassroots organizations, and labor unions, specifically for its extensive foreign product sourcing, low rates of employee health insurance enrollment, resistance to union representation, and alleged sexism.
Yahoo’s Board REJECTS Microsoft takeover Offer!
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s bid to buy the Internet pioneer, The Wall Street Jornal reported on its Web site Saturday.
Board members concluded the unsolicited $44.6 billion offer massively undervalues the Web pioneer, a person familiar with the situation told the newspaper.
The bid was made public Feb. 1.
by breitbart
Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (?22.4bn) in cash and shares.
The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.
Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.
It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
In a conference call, Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson said that the combination of the two companies would create an entity that could better compete with Google.
“Today the market [for online search and advertising] is increasingly dominated by one player,” he said.
Chairman quit
Yahoo confirmed that it has received an unsolicited offer and said that its board would evaluate the proposal, “carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”
If Yahoo accepted the offer, competition authorities both in the US and the European Union would be likely to investigate the tie-up.
Yahoo chief executive, Jerry Yang, announced on Tuesday that he intended to lay off 1,000 staff as part of a restructuring plan.
Terry Semel, who stepped down as chief executive last June, also quit as non-executive chairman on Thursday.
Microsoft said that Yahoo shareholders could choose to receive either cash or shares.
Yahoo shares have fallen 46% since reaching a year-high of $34.08 in October. On Friday they closed almost 48% higher.
Microsoft closed 6.6% lower while Google shares fell 8.6%.
“Ultimately this corporate marriage was forced by the rise of Google, which has grown into a serious competitor for both Microsoft as a software company and Yahoo as an internet portal,” said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.
“It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google.”
‘Exorbitant premium’
According to its letter to Yahoo, Microsoft attempted to enter talks about a deal a year ago, but was rebuffed because Yahoo was confident about the “potential upside” presented by the reorganisation and operational activities that were being put in place at the time.
“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” Microsoft’s letter said.
But there has been some concern about the price that Microsoft is offering.
“To me, the premium seems exorbitant, for what is a dwindling business,” said Tim Smalls from the brokerage firm Execution LLC.
“I personally don’t see how the synergies of Microsoft-Yahoo is going to take on Google.”
Other analysts were more enthusiastic about the offer.
“It is a fantastic offer. It is game on,” said Colin Gillis from Canaccord Adams.
“This consolidates the marketplace down to Google versus Microsoft. These two companies will be going head to head.”
by bbc
Why Republicans like Obama and what it means
Barack Obama is not only popular among Democrats, he’s also an appealing figure to many Republicans. Former GOP House member Joe Scarborough, now a host on MSNBC, reports that after every important Obama speech, he is inundated with e-mails praising the speech — with most of them coming from Republicans. William Bennett, an influential conservative intellectual, has said favorable things about Obama. So have Rich Lowry of National Review and Peggy Noonan. And so have I.
A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.
What is at the core of Obama’s appeal?
Part of it is the eloquence and uplift of his speeches, combined with his personal grace and dignity. He seems to be a well-grounded, decent, thoughtful man. He comes across, in his person and manner, as nonpartisan. He has an unsurpassed ability to (seemingly) transcend politics. Even when he disagrees with people, he doesn’t seem disagreeable.
“You know what charm is,” Albert Camus wrote in The Fall, “a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” Obama has such charm, and its appeal is not restricted to Democrats.
A second reason Republicans appreciate Obama is that he is pitted against a couple, the Clintons, whom many Republicans hold in contempt. Among the effects of the Obama-Clinton race is that it is forcing Democrats to come to grips with the mendacity and ruthlessness of the Clinton machine. Conservatives have long believed that the Clintons are an unprincipled pair who will destroy those who stand between them and power — whether they are political opponents, women from Bill Clinton’s past or independent counsels.
When the Clintons were doing this in the 1990s, it was viewed by many Democrats as perfectly acceptable. Some even applauded them for their brass-knuckle tactics. But now that the Clintons are roughing up an inspiring young man who appears to represent the hope and future of the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment is reacting with outrage. “I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons,” writes Jonathan Chait of the New Republic. Many conservatives respond: It’s about time.
A third reason for Obama’s GOP appeal is that unlike Clinton and especially John Edwards, Obama has a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment. He stresses that “out of many we are one.” And to his credit, Barack Obama is running a color-blind campaign. “I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina,” Obama said in his victory speech last weekend. “I saw South Carolina.” That evening, his crowd of supporters chanted as one, “Race doesn’t matter.” This was an electric moment. Obama’s words are in the great tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Obama, more than any figure in America, can help bind up the racial wounds of America. In addition, for the past eight years, one of the most prominent qualities of the American left has been anger, which has served it and the country very poorly. An Obama primary win would be a move away from the politics of rage.
The one thing that will keep Obama’s appeal from translating into widespread support among Republicans is that he is, on almost every issue, a conventional liberal. And while rhetoric and character matter a lot, politics is finally and fundamentally about ideas and philosophy. Whether we’re talking about the Iraq war, monitoring terrorist communications, health care, taxes, education, abortion and the courts, the size of government, or almost anything else, Obama embodies the views of the special-interest groups on the left. In this respect, he should borrow from the Clinton strategy in 1992, when Bill Clinton ran as a “New Democrat,” championed free trade, promised to “end welfare as we know it” and criticized, on hawkish grounds, the “butchers of Beijing.”
Bill Clinton ran an intellectually creative race whose ideas appealed to non-Democrats. Barack Obama has shown no such inclination so far (his speeches, while inspiring, mostly avoid a serious discussion of policies). If he wanted to demonstrate his independence from liberal orthodoxy, for example, he could come out in favor of school choice for low-income families, which would both help poor families and demonstrate support for some of the best faith-based institutions in America: urban parochial schools.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and fails to take steps such as this, his liberal views will be his greatest vulnerability. Obama will try to reject the liberal label — but based on his stands on the issues, at least so far, the label will fit, and it will stick.
Barack Obama is among the most impressive political talents of our lifetime. If he defeats Hillary Clinton, the question for the general election is not whether he can transcend his race but whether he can reach beyond his ideology.
by chron
Reference: Barack Hussein Obama is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. The U.S. Senate Historical Office lists him as the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history, the third to have been popularly elected, and the only African American currently serving in the Senate.
Obama was born in Honolulu to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He lived most of his early life in the U.S. state of Hawaii. From ages six to ten, he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, University of Chicago lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office and serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
The following year, while still an Illinois state legislator, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama co-sponsored legislation for controlling conventional weapons and for promoting transparency in public life; in addition, he made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the 110th, and current, Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as major priorities. He married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has written two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics.
‘Duke Nukem Forever’ release possible in 2008, coming to home consoles
Garland-based video games developer 3D Realms has said Duke Nukem Forever, the highly anticipated sequel to its revolutionary 1996 PC game Duke Nukem 3D, is projected to be completed in late 2008, with versions likely for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3 home video game consoles and personal computers.
“We haven’t formally announced any platforms for DNF,” wrote 3D Realms President Scott Miller in an e-mail exchange. “But, of course hitting the big three makes the most sense (PC, PS3, 360).”
Miller added a note of caution on the 12-years-coming sequel and its release window, claiming, “We can’t make an official announcement. Frankly, we may miss the mark by a month or two, but I feel very confident that we’re on target this time. Its definitely an internal push.”
Duke Nukem Forever is not the only 3D Realms title coming to home video game consoles in 2008. Miller also confirmed the existence of a downloadable Xbox Live Arcade version of Duke Nukem 3D, which will feature on-line multiplayer support, Xbox Live achievements, on-line score boards, and a co-op mode.
“We’re really excited about bringing classic Duke to the 360,” said Miller during an interview. “We’re talking to Microsoft about getting a release slot sometime this year.”
For more about Duke Nukem Forever, developer 3D Realms, and the North Texas video games industry at-large, pick up the Feb. 15, 2008 edition of the Dallas Business Journal for a special report.
An earlier version of this story said 3D Realms had “confirmed” the game’s release in late 2008. The current version also features an expanded quote from Miller regarding the possible release window.
by bizjournals
Duke Nukem Forever coming in 2008 alongside XBLA title
This just in: Duke Nukem Forever may see release in 2008. No, really. This unprecedented news comes by way of a recent email exchange between developer 3D Realms and the Dallas Business Journal.
While 3D Realms’ president Scott Miller notes that the company hasn’t “formally announced any platforms for DNF,” it does “make the most sense” that the title would be hitting “the big three,” referencing the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PCs. Miller does concede that the company “can’t make an official announcement” because it “may miss the mark by a month or two,” but confidence is high in the project due to an “internal push.”
Aside from the long-awaited release of the title 11 years in the making, 3D Realms also confirmed plans to bring Duke Nukem 3D to the Xbox Live Arcade with on-line multiplayer and co-op to boot. No date or priced has been confirmed yet.
It has been a long time coming, but there could very well be a day when the game that has been in development longer than the time it took to completely conceive, design, develop, and produce the atomic bomb will hit the streets. What a glorious era for gaming.
Ben’s Update: Well, the information may not be wrong, but it certainly wasn’t meant for public consumption. 3DRealms has just posted about this story on its official website, and George Broussard sounds just a little angry about the story. “In what appears to be an unfortunate turn of events, there seems to have been some confusion between what was ‘off the record’ and what was not. I suppose we’re used to dealing with gaming press and not mainstream press. Lesson learned,” he wrote.
The release date is still ‘when it’s done’, and will be until the appropriate moment. Platforms have not been finalized or announced. You can rest assured that we are moving toward a goal and that the recently released teaser trailer is the start of that process and seeing more of the game, sooner than later.
“We apologize to gamers and websites everywhere for this series of events. Sometimes, you can be too trusting of people and assume things that come back to bite you,” he finishes.
by arstechnica
Archaeologist ‘Strikes Gold’ With Finds Of Ancient Nasca Iron Ore Mine In Peru
A Purdue University archaeologist discovered an intact ancient iron ore mine in South America that shows how civilizations before the Inca Empire were mining this valuable ore
“Archaeologists know people in the Old and New worlds have mined minerals for thousands and thousands of years,” said Kevin J. Vaughn, an assistant professor of anthropology who studies the Nasca civilization, which existed from A.D. 1 to A.D. 750. “Iron mining in the Old World, specifically in Africa, goes back 40,000 years. And we know the ancient people in Mexico, Central America and North America were mining for various materials. There isn’t much evidence for these types of mines.
“What we found is the only hematite mine, a type of iron also known as ochre, recorded in South America prior to the Spanish conquest. This discovery demonstrates that iron ores were important to ancient Andean civilizations.”
In 2004 and 2005, Vaughn and his team excavated Mina Primavera, which is located in the Ingenio Valley of the Andes Mountains in southern Peru. The research team performed field checks and collected some samples in 2006 and 2007.
The researchers determined that the mine is a human-made cave that was first created around 2,000 years ago. An estimated 3,710 metric tons was extracted from the mine during more than 1,400 years of use. The mine, which is nearly 700 cubic meters, is in a cliffside facing a modern ochre mine.
Vaughn hypothesizes that the Nasca people used the red-pigmented mineral primarily for ceramic paints, but they also could have used it as body paint, to paint textiles and even to paint adobe walls. The Nasca civilization is known for hundreds of drawings in the Nasca Desert, which are known as the Nasca-Lines and can only be seen from the air, and for an aqueduct system that is still used today.
Vaughn and his team discovered a number of artifacts in the mine, including corncobs, stone tools, and pieces of textiles and pottery. The age of the items was determined by radiocarbon dating, a process that determines age based on the decay of naturally occurring elements.
“Archaeologists have a very good sequence of pottery from this region, so I can look at most pots from this region and determine a date within a century that is based on stylistic changes of the pottery,” Vaughn said. “Even before the dating, we knew this was an ancient mine because of the ceramic pieces. These very small fragments, about the size of a penny, had distinct designs on them that are characteristic of the early Nasca civilization.”
The artifacts from the excavation are being curated by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura of Peru at its museum in Ica, Peru.
Now that there is archaeological evidence that ancient cultures in the Andes were mining iron ore, it is important to give credit to New World civilizations, Vaughn said.
“Even though ancient Andean people smelted some metals, such as copper, they never smelted iron like they did in the Old World,” he said. “Metals were used for a variety of tools in the Old World, such as weapons, while in the Americas, metals were used as prestige goods for the wealthy elite.”
This excavation was part of Vaughn’s Early Nasca Craft Economy Project, a multiyear National Science Foundation-funded study of Nasca ceramic production and distribution. The project’s goal is to better understand the origins of inequality and political economy in this ancient culture.
Vaughn says material scientists and engineers, as well as mineralogists, will be interested in this discovery.
“This study of mining is a great example of how archaeology bridges the social and physical sciences,” he said.
The National Science Foundation and the Heinz Foundation funded the Mina Primavera excavation. Next, Vaughn will be excavating a habitation site that has a 4,000-year occupation in hopes of understanding the long-term settlement history of the region.
“I hope to continue surveying for mines and mining-related sites in the region, and hopefully undertake additional excavations at the mine,” he said.
The findings of the excavation are published in December’s Journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.
by Purdue University
The end of cheap food
FOR as long as most people can remember, food has been getting cheaper and farming has been in decline. In 1974-2005 food prices on world markets fell by three-quarters in real terms. Food today is so cheap that the West is battling gluttony even as it scrapes piles of half-eaten leftovers into the bin.
That is why this year’s price rise has been so extraordinary. Since the spring, wheat prices have doubled and almost every crop under the sun—maize, milk, oilseeds, you name it—is at or near a peak in nominal terms. The Economist’s food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845 (see chart). Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005. No doubt farmers will meet higher prices with investment and more production, but dearer food is likely to persist for years (see article). That is because “agflation” is underpinned by long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef.
But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America’s reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America’s (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV’s fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world’s overall grain stocks.
Dearer food has the capacity to do enormous good and enormous harm. It will hurt urban consumers, especially in poor countries, by increasing the price of what is already the most expensive item in their household budgets. It will benefit farmers and agricultural communities by increasing the rewards of their labour; in many poor rural places it will boost the most important source of jobs and economic growth.
Although the cost of food is determined by fundamental patterns of demand and supply, the balance between good and ill also depends in part on governments. If politicians do nothing, or the wrong things, the world faces more misery, especially among the urban poor. If they get policy right, they can help increase the wealth of the poorest nations, aid the rural poor, rescue farming from subsidies and neglect—and minimise the harm to the slum-dwellers and landless labourers. So far, the auguries look gloomy.
In the trough
That, at least, is the lesson of half a century of food policy. Whatever the supposed threat—the lack of food security, rural poverty, environmental stewardship—the world seems to have only one solution: government intervention. Most of the subsidies and trade barriers have come at a huge cost. The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that.
With agflation, policy has reached a new level of self-parody. Take America’s supposedly verdant ethanol subsidies. It is not just that they are supporting a relatively dirty version of ethanol (far better to import Brazil’s sugar-based liquor); they are also offsetting older grain subsidies that lowered prices by encouraging overproduction. Intervention multiplies like lies. Now countries such as Russia and Venezuela have imposed price controls—an aid to consumers—to offset America’s aid to ethanol producers. Meanwhile, high grain prices are persuading people to clear forests to plant more maize.
Dearer food is a chance to break this dizzying cycle. Higher market prices make it possible to reduce subsidies without hurting incomes. A farm bill is now going through America’s Congress. The European Union has promised a root-and-branch review (not yet reform) of its farm-support scheme. The reforms of the past few decades have, in fact, grappled with the rich world’s farm programmes—but only timidly. Now comes the chance for politicians to show that they are serious when they say they want to put agriculture right.
Cutting rich-world subsidies and trade barriers would help taxpayers; it could revive the stalled Doha round of world trade talks, boosting the world economy; and, most important, it would directly help many of the world’s poor. In terms of economic policy, it is hard to think of a greater good.
Where government help is really needed
Three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas. The depressed world prices created by farm policies over the past few decades have had a devastating effect. There has been a long-term fall in investment in farming and the things that sustain it, such as irrigation. The share of public spending going to agriculture in developing countries has fallen by half since 1980. Poor countries that used to export food now import it.
Reducing subsidies in the West would help reverse this. The World Bank reckons that if you free up agricultural trade, the prices of things poor countries specialise in (like cotton) would rise and developing countries would capture the gains by increasing exports. And because farming accounts for two-thirds of jobs in the poorest countries, it is the most important contributor to the early stages of economic growth. According to the World Bank, the really poor get three times as much extra income from an increase in farm productivity as from the same gain in industry or services. In the long term, thriving farms and open markets provide a secure food supply.
However, there is an obvious catch—and one that justifies government help. High prices have a mixed impact on poverty: they hurt anyone who loses more from dear food than he gains from a higher income. And that means over a billion urban consumers (and some landless labourers), many of whom are politically influential in poor countries. Given the speed of this year’s food-price rises, governments in emerging markets have no alternative but to try to soften the blow.
Where they can, these governments should subsidise the incomes of the poor, rather than food itself, because that minimises price distortions. Where food subsidies are unavoidable, they should be temporary and targeted on the poor. So far, most government interventions in the poor world have failed these tests: politicians who seem to think cheap food part of the natural order of things have slapped on price controls and export restraints, which hurt farmers and will almost certainly fail.
Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world’s wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.
by economist
Pirate Bay Says It Can’t Be Sunk, Servers Scattered Worldwide
The world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, won’t be going to Davy Jones’ Locker, even if its four operators are convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, one of the defendants said in an interview Friday with THREAT LEVEL.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the four Swedes charged in Sweden on Thursday, said in a telephone interview that the site has set up a clandestine, double-blind operation with its servers spread throughout the world — and out of reach of the Swedish authorities.
“The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden,” the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said.
Where are the servers?
“It’s a distributed system. We don’t know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don’t know it’s The Pirate Bay,” Kolmisoppi said. “They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don’t want to know because then you’ll have a problem shutting them down.”
The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and access indexed torrents, which contain the information needed to download data containing copyright-infringing content like movies, music, software and other material from users of the service. The Bay, he said, operates like the search engine Google, which also points the way to copyrighted works on the internet.
“We’re just a general-purpose search engine and torrent-tracking system. You can put whatever you want on the Pirate Bay,” Kolmisoppi said. “We don’t participate in how the people communicate with each other. We only participate in bringing the possibility to communicate and share files.”
The Bay has been on the entertainment industry’s and police authorities’ watchlists for years.
In June, 2006, a police raid shuttered it for three days after the authorities confiscated its servers, which were later moved. The raid sparked street protests in Sweden, and garnered the site an international presence after the mainstream media began reporting on it.
The four charged in Stockholm are Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstroem and Kolmisoppi. According to charges lodged in Stockholm, the four are accused of “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.”
“I think they’re lame,” he said of the charges.
Prosecutor Hakan Roswall was not immediately available for comment.
None of the defendants, Kolmisoppi said, have prior convictions, meaning even if they are convicted, they won’t likely be jailed for the two years the charges potentially carry.
“As a worse-case scenario for us, we get a fine,” Kolmisoppi said. “They can say we have to shut down the site, don’t host it in Sweden. But they can’t say it won’t be accessible in Sweden or anywhere. They can’t do anything about it, no matter what happens.”
He also disputes that the company is generating millions in profit, as the authorities allege.
“It’s so stupid to say we’re making a profit,” he said “We’re spending hours and hours of our own time to do this. If we were making millions, we wouldn’t have day jobs. And even if we did make millions, it would not change the fact that this is not illegal.”
Kolmissoppi said his day job is “developing a micro payment system.”
No court date has been set.
by wired
Reference: The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 154 (as of January 20, 2008) in the Alexa ranking list and ranked 258 (as of February 1, 2008) by Quantcast.
The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyr?n (’The Pirate Bureau’) in early 2004, but since October 2004 it has been a separate organization. The site is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (”anakata”), Fredrik Neij (”TiAMO”) and Peter Sunde (”brokep”).
On May 31, 2006, the site’s servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, causing it to be offline for three days. Later it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands – The Pirate Bay has since taken measures to ensure a restoration time of hours rather than days. On June 14, 2006 the Swedish newspaper SvD reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to “pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands].” Upon reopening, the site’s number of visitors doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertising revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. According to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD, the advertisements generated about 75,000 USD per month directly after the raid.
The raid, alleged to be politically motivated and under pressure from the MPAA, was reported as a success by the MPAA in the immediate aftermath, but with the site being restored within days and the raising of the debate in Swedish culture, The Pirate Bay and other commentators considered it “highly unsuccessful”.
Swedish prosecutors have announced that charges will be filed before the end of January 2008 against five individuals concerned.
On January 31, 2008, Swedish prosecutors filed charges against four of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay.
