October 2003
Friday, 31 October 2003
A new spin on black holes: “Now, for the first time, Genzel and colleagues have detected periodic bursts of infrared radiation from Sagittarius A* with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Moreover, they found that these bright flares arrived periodically - roughly every 17 minutes.”
Thursday, 30 October 2003
FTC calls for stricter patent norms
Berners-Lee comes out fighting to save Web: “The letter also refers to an extensive document put forward by the W3C to dispute the patent’s validity. The W3C claims that there is extensive ‘prior art’ with regard to what the patent covers i.e. someone had already stuck the flag on the summit. It says, among other things, that the ‘EMBED’ tag that the patent claims ownership of was put forward in HTML+ meetings a year before the patent was filed.”
Big Bang sounded like a deep hum: “Physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle has created audio files of the event which can be played on a PC.”
Saturday, 25 October 2003
Patients given artificial blood: “The synthetic blood has also been shown to transport oxygen through the body better than real blood, which can help limit damage to the body, for example during a heart attack.”
Friday, 24 October 2003
Ocean census discovers new fish: “Over the next seven years, the census hopes to bring the number of marine species on the database to well over 210,000. They also plan to establish pharmaceutical uses for some of the new species discovered.”
A tough lesson on medical privacy / Pakistani transcriber threatens UCSF over back pay: “In the case of the threat to release UCSF patient records online, a chain of three different subcontractors was used. UCSF and its original contractor, Sausalito’s Transcription Stat, say they had no knowledge that the work eventually would find its way abroad.”
Monday, 20 October 2003
Astronomers date Universe’s ‘cosmic jerk’: “So after the big bang, matter was still relatively dense in the Universe and therefore gravity braked expansion. But as galaxies moved farther apart, dark energy began to exert a more significant influence. For a brief period, two forces balanced and ‘the expansion of the Universe coasted along at a steady rate, like a car in cruise control,’ says Riess.”
Friday, 17 October 2003
All the President’s votes?: “The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not something that gets discussed much in the United States. The attitude seems to be: we are the greatest democracy in the world, so the system must be fair.”
Wednesday, 15 October 2003
Astronomers find first ‘dark galaxy’: “It appears to be rotating so fast it would fall apart unless it contains a strong, hidden source of gravity.”
Monday, 13 October 2003
Jonathan Edelstein moved his weblog to a new site and added an RSS feed. Billy-Joe Faisal says: check it out.
Monkeys Taught Mind Control: “after only a few days of playing with the robot in this way, the monkey suddenly realized that she didn’t need to move her arm at all”
Thursday, 9 October 2003
Tantalising evidence hints Universe is finite: “If confirmed, they would indeed be stunning. They would mean that the Universe is relatively small, something like 70 billion light years across. What’s more, we could in theory see the entire cosmos and check that there are no hidden corners where the laws of physics are different.”
BigChampagne is Watching You: “In the beleaguered music business, this market research strategy that dare not speak its name is fast becoming the Nielsen ratings of the peer-to-peer world.”
Friday, 3 October 2003
“Matrix” Finale Set for “Zero Hour”: “6 a.m. in Los Angeles, 9 a.m. in New York, 2 p.m. in London, 5 p.m. in Moscow, and 11 p.m. in Tokyo”
Wednesday, 1 October 2003
Male brains give clues to nagging questions: “Such are the advances in technology and understanding that PET radioactive-imaging and MRI magnetic-imaging scans can now show whether a man and a woman are truly in love by measuring the amount of activity in the cingulate gyrus, an emotion centre in the brain, Gurian says.”