domingo, 4 de maio de 2014

Malaysian Jet MH370 Search to Use More Sophisticated Tools

 

The search for missing Malaysian Airlines Jet 370 will enter a new phase that focuses on intensifying the undersea search in a larger area, a top Australian official said Monday.

The new phase will undertake more detailed oceanographic mapping of areas that have not been mapped before, Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said at a briefing with officials from Malaysia and China.

That will require more sophisticated equipment — most likely coming from the private sector — that can operate deeper in the ocean than the Bluefin 21 autonomous sub.

Planes, ships and investigators from 26 nations have been scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the Boeing 777 that vanished on March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The unmanned Bluefin 21 — launched from the Australian Defense Vessel, Ocean Shield — has been the only vehicle available to survey the floor of the southern Indian Ocean for wreckage of Flight MH370. It has been taken out of action while the Ocean Shield returns to port for supplies and maintenance, but will return to search a wider area.

Launched on March 30, the Ocean Shield found the “most promising lead” in the hunt for the missing plane, when it recorded signals consistent with transmissions from aircraft black boxes, when towing a U.S. Navy owned “pinger locator.” The U.S. Navy will continue its support of the search for the next four weeks, Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a news release.

The locator searchers to zero in on the area they believe could be the plane’s resting place, although officials assume the batteries in the black box recorders died before they could triangulate its final position.

Since then, Bluefin 21 has failed to find any wreckage.

Image: The Bluefin-21 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is craned over the side of the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield in the southern Indian Ocean during the continuing search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

Australian Defence via Reuters - file

The Bluefin-21 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is craned over the side of the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield in the southern Indian Ocean during the continuing search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in this picture released by the Australian Defence Force April 17, 2014.

You Don't Know What You're Saying

 

Our awareness of our own speech often comes after the words have left our mouth, not before

speech is not planned

Researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak.
Credit: Alamy

If you think you know what you just said, think again. People can be tricked into believing they have just said something they did not, researchers report this week.The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance — speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say. But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak.

So cognitive scientist Andreas Lind and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden wanted to see what would happen if someone said one word, but heard themselves saying another. “If we use auditory feedback to compare what we say with a well-specified intention, then any mismatch should be quickly detected,” he says. “But if the feedback is instead a powerful factor in a dynamic, interpretative process, then the manipulation could go undetected.”

In Lind’s experiment, participants took a Stroop test — in which a person is shown, for example, the word ‘red’ printed in blue and is asked to name the colour of the type (in this case, blue). During the test, participants heard their responses through headphones. The responses were recorded so that Lind could occasionally play back the wrong word, giving participants auditory feedback of their own voice saying something different from what they had just said. Lind chose the words ‘grey’ and ‘green’ (grå and grön in Swedish) to switch, as they sound similar but have different meanings.

After participants heard a manipulated word, a question popped up on the screen asking what they had just said, and they were also quizzed after the test to see whether they had detected the switch. When the voice-activated software got the timing just right — so that the wrong word began within 5–20 milliseconds of the participant starting to speak — the change went undetected more than two-thirds of the time. And in 85% of undetected substitutions, the participant accepted that they had said the wrong word, indicating that speakers listen to their own voices to help specify the meaning of what they are saying. The remaining 15% didn't notice the manipulations, but also didn't seem to notice that the word had changed, and Lind says it is unclear why. The results are published this week in Psychological Science.

Lind says that he was not surprised that the deception was so successful. When he put himself through the test, even he felt that the speech exchanges sounded convincing — even though he knew exactly when the manipulations were occurring. “When you say one thing but hear yourself clearly saying something else, it’s a very powerful feeling,” he says.

Barbara Davis, who studies speech production at the University of Texas in Austin, says that the work is a creative experiment that offers an “intriguing challenge to the dominant paradigm” of speech pre-planning.

But she does not think this means there is no preverbal planning going on. “Naming a colour is different than fluid discourse, it’s a different level of complexity,” she says. “A lot of people would agree that there is both pre-planning and auditory feedback going on.”

Adults who lose their hearing can go for a long time before their speech patterns begin to deteriorate, Davis says, which indicates that auditory feedback is not necessary for speech.

Lind agrees that auditory feedback is not the only factor in play. “If you don’t have it you can still speak,” he says. “But if you do have it, you probably rely on it more than other types of feedback when it comes to determining the meaning of your own words.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on May 2, 2014.

Outrage Against the Machines

 

A short history of tech wrongs righted by widespread indignation

May 1, 2014 |By David Pogue

apple protest

Protest against Apple for ignoring Foxconn's Labor Conditions Credit: SACOM via Wikimedia Commons

My Scientific American column this month praises the upside of techno-fear. Yes, fear of new machines is often irrational—but it also keeps us vigilant. When technology really does start to threaten the public good, public outrage frequently rights the ship.

Here are some of my favorite examples from the annals of consumer technology:

December 2009: Verizon's flip phones were programmed to take you to the Web when you pressed the “UP” button. An internal whistle-blower revealed that you got billed $2 each time, even if you immediately canceled.
Verizon's first response was to deny it. "Usage fees are not charged when a customer simply launches the Internet browser and lands on the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web home page, which is the default setting," it said in a statement at the time.
But the public was outraged, the Federal Communications Commission investigated, and Verizon turns out not to have been so innocent after all. It was charging $2 per accidental button-press—and it had to refund $52 million to customers and pay the FCC a record $25 million fine.

August 2010: The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania had issued MacBook laptops to every student. It had also installed software that permitted administrators to operate the laptop's built-in camera remotely and secretly. Although school administrators claimed that the software was intended to help track down laptops after they'd been stolen, an investigation determined that the district had taken over 30,000 pictures of students (including at home) and 27,000 screen shots of what they were doing.

After a public outcry the school system wound up paying $610,000 in fees and fines. It immediately ended the spying program and implemented new policies to "safeguard the protection of privacy" of its students.

September 2011: Google's Street View vans have been driving and photographing roads and their surroundings around the world since May 2007 so that you can see what any address looks like on Google Maps.

Unfortunately, those cameras also capture people—who are occasionally doing things they would probably rather keep private, such as leaving strip clips, hiring prostitutes and so on.

When public outrage (and fines in several countries) erupted, Google added tools for blurring faces and license plates, and for flagging images for removal.

January 2012: Protests, petitions and demonstrations ignited when a front-page New York Times article documented working conditions at Foxconn Technology, the Chinese factory that builds Apple's products. The article mentioned fatal accidents, employees working with toxic chemicals, long hours, low wages and suicides. (Apple was singled out but Foxconn also builds products for Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Asus, HP, Dell, Intel, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, NETGEAR, Nintendo, Nokia and Vizio—products that include the Xbox, PlayStation and Amazon Kindle.)

The outrage set in motion a long series of reforms that continues to this day. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to survey 35,000 Foxconn employees about factory conditions. Foxconn raised salaries as much as 25 percent.

A year later the FLA reported that Foxconn had made "steady progress," constructing additional restrooms and limiting overtime hours to 36 a month and three a day. Apple’s own Foxconn workers' average workweek dropped to 53 hours.

Most interestingly of all, the scandal triggered a new emphasis on exploring tech manufacturing here in the U.S. Apple's new top-of-the-line Mac Pro, for example, is built in Austin, Texas.

In short, you shouldn't assume you can get away with anything in our connected age. The public will find out—and the outrage will hurt.

Proof that the Universe Inflated Rapidly After the Big Bang

 

Traces of primordial gravitational waves could tell us how and when the early universe went through its precipitous expansion

May 1, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

BLOWING ITSELF UP: A rapidly expanding universe spawns gravitational waves that stretch and compress spacetime.

Score one for inflation. The idea that the universe ballooned rapidly after the big bang received a boost in March, when physicists confirmed a prime prediction of inflation theory. The Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment at the South Pole found evidence for primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space and time, that were created when the early universe swelled. The discovery is not just a major validation of inflation, physicists say, but a good way to narrow down the many possible versions of inflation that might have taken place. “This really collapses the space of plausible inflationary models by a huge amount,” says Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the discovery but who co-predicted back in 1997 how these gravitational-wave imprints could be found. “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, we'll be looking for a needle in a bucket of sand.”

BICEP2 found a pattern called primordial B-mode polarization in the light left over from just after the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background. This pattern, basically a curling in the polarization, or orientation of the electric field, of the light, can be created only by inflation-induced gravitational waves. “We've found the smoking-gun evidence for inflation, and we've also produced the first image of gravitational waves across the sky,” says Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford University, who designed the BICEP2 detector and co-leads the collaboration.

Such a groundbreaking finding requires confirmation from other experiments to be truly believed, physicists say. Nevertheless, the result was heralded as a huge win for cosmology. “There's a chance it could be wrong, but I think it's highly probable that the results stand up,” says Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who first predicted inflation in 1980.

Physicists are now parsing the finding for clues about the timing and details of inflation. The BICEP2 measurement suggests that inflation began a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang, a time when the universe would have been so energetic that all the fundamental forces of nature—the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces, with the exception of gravity—might have been unified into a single force. The new results could also quell any remaining doubters of inflation. “If this discovery is confirmed,” says Andrei Linde of Stanford, one of the main authors of inflation, “inflationary theory does not have any real alternatives.”

 

This article was originally published with the title "Our Inflated Universe."

Curiosity Mars Rover Beside Sandstone Target 'Windjana'

 

Sandstone Target 'Windjana'

This image from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a sandstone slab on which the rover team has selected a target, "Windjana," for close-up examination and possible drilling.  The target is on the approximately 2-foot-wide (60-centimeter-wide) rock seen in the right half of this view. 

The Navcam's left-eye camera took this image during the 609th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (April 23, 2014). The rover's name is written on the covering for a portion of the robotic arm, here seen stowed at the front of the vehicle.

The sandstone target's informal name comes from Windjana Gorge in Western Australia.  If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission's third drilled rock and the first that is not mudstone.

The rock is within a waypoint location called "the Kimberley," where sandstone outcrops with differing resistance to wind erosion result in a stair-step pattern of layers.  Windjana is within what the team calls the area's "middle unit," because it is intermediate between rocks that form buttes in the area and lower-lying rocks that show a pattern of striations.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and the rover's Navcam.

> Read more: NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects Site

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Drones são proibidos de voar no espaço do parque Yosemite, nos EUA

 

O Serviço de Parques Nacionais americano (NPS) declarou ilegais os objetos voadores não pilotados por interferirem na vida nativa do parque

O Yosemite National Park, talvez o mais belo parque florestal americano, e onde o sensacional fotógrafo Ansel Adams produziu maravilhosas obras de arte fotográfica, está sendo ameaçado por drones, segundo o National Parks Services (NPS - agência que cuida dos parques e florestas dos EUA).

O excesso de objetos voadores não pilotados, ou Drones, está interferindo com a fauna do Yosemite, espantando animais, assustando pássaros e enchendo o ambiente calmo do Yosemite com seu ruído irritante de motor. O NPS emitiu uma nota no final de semana alertando que o uso de "Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Drones) é ilegal em quaisquer circunstâncias na região do parque e seus limites".

O serviço de parques está se apoiando na norma 36 do Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), item 2.17(a)(3), que afirma que é proibido "entregar ou recolher uma pessoa ou objeto por paraquedas, helicóptero ou outro meio aéreo sem permissão", e informa que a proibição se estende a drones de todos os tamanhos e tipos (ouviu, Jeff Bezos?).

O NPS diz que os drones são usados por visitantes para filmar e fotografar as áreas do Yosemite, mas que seu ruído e movimentação impactam o som natural do ambiente selvagem, causam intereferência em possíveis operações de resgate e invadem especialmente o espaço do falcão peregrino, que faz seus ninhos nas encostas dos penhascos da região.

O parque publicou em sua página no Facebook uma foto de um drone flagrado no alto de um penhasco. Os comentários do fãs variam de apoio incondicional às medidas, a ameaças de tomar em suas próprias mãos a justiça e sair caçando drones pelo Yosemite

Photo: Violet and yellow sky stretches over mountain peaks

 

Violet and yellow sky streaches over mountain peeks

credit: Timm Jensen

Timm Jensen writes that he photographed this beautiful view from a mountain in Greece. I love the way the plant shapes are silhouetted against the different colors of the sky.

Would you like to see your photo of the great outdoors featured on TreeHugger? Join the TreeHugger Photo Pool on Flickr and add your photos to the group!

The Miracle of Chocolate, Glass and Other "Stuff"

 

illusion

Materials scientist Mark Miodownik is on a mission to make people appreciate the substances around us

May 1, 2014 |By Clara Moskowitz

Some of the mundane materials most of us take for granted—plastic, paper, glass—are miraculous when you think about them. Glass’s strength, for instance, protects us from the elements as its transparency allows light to shine through; without such a material houses and buildings would be decidedly dreary. Just what gives glass these properties? It’s all in the chemistry, materials scientist Mark Miodownik of University College London explains in his new book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (May 2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Miodownik’s book chronicles the extraordinary science behind the ordinary objects that surround us. Chapters are devoted to steel, glass, chocolate, concrete, plastic and other constituents of our modern world, explaining their history and why their chemical properties produce the effects we rely on. Miodownik recently spoke with Scientific American about why plastic gets a bad rap, what material is ideal for bathroom construction and how he plans to build a wearable exoskeleton.

[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]

Why are materials so fascinating?
Materials are an expression of our values. We want to be protected from extreme weather, so we invent concrete. We want to live in open, light places but keep out the rain, so we invent glass. By getting to know these materials, you get to know yourself, and humanity in general.

Does studying materials make you really particular about the materials you use in your daily life?
I am a bit obsessive. We recently redid our bathroom, and that was just one long moment of considering: Why are bathrooms full of materials that are cold to the touch when you're naked? I spent time thinking about how we want to be warm and comfy and private, and yet the feeling of coldness reinforces cleanliness. It turns out bamboo is the perfect material, I think, for bathrooms. It has antibacterial properties; it’s really hard-wearing; it’s very warm to the touch; it’s smooth. The only real problem with it is that when you fall into that realm the whole thing looks like a Swedish sauna.

In your book you describe chocolate as a solid drink—a solid that is engineered to turn into a liquid inside your mouth. Do you think its material properties account for its popularity even more than its flavor?
I do think that. There's a quality of the mouth-feel you get with chocolate that you get with no other food or confectionary. Even something like a chocolate mousse I find inferior to putting a really good piece of chocolate on your tongue and just waiting, just letting it turn into a liquid. That process pushes a lot of sensory pleasure buttons. Chocolate is as technically sophisticated as steel. It’s just a genius of science and engineering.

You describe how the Japanese samurai achieved matchless sword-making skills long before science understood steel. How did they do it?
Obviously the big problem with steel is that what you're trying to do is at the atomic scale—at the microscale—but unless you've got microscopes you can’t see any of this stuff. They were manipulating this thing at the scale of humans. They dealt with their hands. That’s just impressive.

It shows that you underestimate your ancestors at your peril. They were probably much more in touch with things we’ve lost, which is the ability to pick something up and really understand it with your hands, and to spend 30 years doing it to the point where you really understand it.

You've said you like to defend plastic. Do you think it has an undeservedly bad reputation?
I think it is misunderstood. I don’t think plastics are wholly good but they’re not wholly bad either. Recycling plastic is really tricky and it degrades really easily in the process. That’s not the fault of plastic, but it is a problem we need to take seriously.

Yet if you took plastic away from people’s lives they would regress about 100 years in terms of their comforts. Take away [synthetic rubber] tires for instance—where would we be? Plastic is so a part of our lives and it provides a cushion, literally, in many cases: your seat, bed, pillows, the filling inside your warm jacket. People lazily dismiss something as, “That's a plastic, it’s got less value.” But it definitely expresses something about humans, which is that we ultimately want a bit of comfort—and it’s plastic that gives it to us.

What is your latest research on?
I’ve got a research program making self-healing materials, self-repairing materials, so-called smart materials. I spent a lot of my life before this doing fundamental research into how material properties come about. I didn’t want to get to the end of my career and just think, “I know a lot about them.” I want to use that knowledge to create new things in the world.

We’re developing a wearable exoskeleton. It’s a piece of clothing you wear that is going to be able to change shape and create a way of supporting your knees and hips and arms when you need it. It will understand if some of your faculties are impaired—you might have an injury or be disabled. But we want you not to feel this is an external piece of technology—you respond to it.

Fashion people are tapping into your emotional needs. We need to do that and also create a medical device and something that can be washed in the washing machine. So we’re bringing together teams of people who understand different parts of that problem. We’ve got designers, chemists, engineers and patients themselves.

Do you think materials science gets short shrift in popular consciousness?
Materials science doesn’t have an image problem; it’s just invisible and that’s the real problem for it. If you’re talking about graphene, people slap it into physical chemistry or they’ll talk about buildings and label it architecture. Material science really is the multiscale view of the world, how it all interconnects.

I am on a bit of a mission, actually. It really ought to have a bigger place in the public imagination and it doesn’t. That is what I am trying to do.

That’s evident from the title: Stuff Matters. What do you hope people take away from the book?
I want them to look at the world differently and see the richness of the urban world in the same way they would appreciate a tropical forest. In a forest you get awed by nature, the birds, the insects. And I just don’t see anything different in a modern city. Each one of those materials is incredibly sophisticated and has an enormous body of people around it who care about it and make it what it is. I just wanted to give people an insight into that.

O que é Doença cardíaca?

 

Sinônimos: Distúrbios cardiovasculares, doença do coração

Doença cardíaca é qualquer distúrbio que afeta a capacidade do coração de funcionar normalmente. Várias formas de doença cardíaca incluem:

  • Angina (angina pectoris) estável
  • Angina (angina pectoris) - instável
  • Regurgitação aórtica
  • Estenose aórtica
  • Cardiomiopatia - alcoólica
  • Cardiomiopatia - dilatada
  • Cardiomiopatia - idiopática
  • Cardiomiopatia - isquêmica
  • Cardiomiopatia - periparto
  • Choque cardiogênico
  • Doença cardíaca congênita
  • Endocardite
  • Ataque cardíaco (infarto do miocárdio)
  • Insuficiência cardíaca
  • Tumor cardíaco
  • Regurgitação mitral - aguda
  • Regurgitação mitral - crônica
  • Estenose mitral
  • Estenose pulmonar
  • Regurgitação tricúspide

Causas

A causa mais comum de doença cardíaca é uma estreitamento ou um bloqueio nas artérias coronárias que fornecem sangue ao músculo cardíaco (doença das artérias coronárias). Algumas doenças cardíacas estão presentes no nascimento (doença cardíaca congênita).

Outras causas incluem:

  • Ritmo cardíaco anormal
  • Funcionamento anormal da válvula cardíaca
  • Alta pressão arterial (hipertensão)
  • Cardiomiopatia - enfraquecimento da capacidade de bombeamento do coração, frequentemente causado por doença cardíaca, infecção viral ou toxinas