We almost bought the farm in 1883? Comet's near miss discovered.

technology review (MIT)

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.


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The next decade in science revealed

 What's ahead for science and technology in the next 10 years? According to The Institute for the Future in their newly published "A Multiverse of Exploration - The Future of Science 2021," we can look forward to the following:

Decrypting the Brain
Hacking Space
Massively Multiplayer Data
Sea the Future
Strange Matter
Engineered Evolution.

Check out the PDF here.

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The ideas you should follow in 2012

Want to keep up? As we start climbing the curve of accelerating technological change, you'll have to work a bit harder to avoid being left behind. Here's the New Scientist's Smart Guide to 2012:

Neutrinos may be tachyons

Next year, experiments will test claims of particles breaking the cosmic speed limit - but how to meld these misbehaving particles with the rest of physics?

Higgs hunt is all about catching Zs

Confirming the existence of the Higgs boson will be like trying to identify the tracks of a zebra after a herd of horses has passed by.

The Rio Earth Summit

Spaceship Earth needs a pilot – at Rio we will have to push for a global system of "environmental governance"

How best to test machine IQ

A hundred years since the birth of Alan Turing, his famous benchmark for machine intelligence is both too hard and too narrow, but there's another way.

How to win at the Olympics

Athletes have the right combination of genes and will have trained for years, their diets finely honed. It is in their minds where medals will be won or lost.

Humans' chimeric origins

The roots of our species are being called into question in ways that challenge the roots of our identity.

The US cyber election

The way we live our lives online will make it easier for US presidential candidates to target their message.

Billion-dollar price of privacy
Facebook is about to go public and could be worth up to $100 billion – and it's all because of you.

Mapping the human brain

The Human Connectome Project aims to map the large-scale connections of 1200 human brains and will start reporting data in late 2012.

The networks that run the world

From the global economy to the human brain, understanding the connections is key. To make sense of the world you've got to know network theory.


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Machine Morality

New York Times - December 25, 2011 by Colin Allen

A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”

The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the “Three Laws of Robotics” to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; second, obey human orders; last, protect oneself. From the first story in which the laws appeared, Asimov explored their inherent contradictions. Great fiction, but unworkable theory.

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Watching light move - Camera catches light in motion

New York Times - December 12, 2011 by John Markoff

More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk.

Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.

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Is Majel the Siri Killer? Android v. iOS Battle Rages!

Android and Me - December 14, 2011 by Taylor Wimberly

A couple days ago we posted about Majel, and now some more tips are starting to come in. We compared Majel to Apple’s Siri voice assistant because that’s how it was described to us, but the project could be much larger than we initially imagined. Read on for new details and some interesting quotes from Google employees.

First we had a tip from “Ted,” who described his experience with an early release of Majel on an Android tablet. Even though this tip was sent from an anonymous IP, we believe it to be accurate since it matched an earlier description we received.

Ted wrote: “It’s definitely as good, or better, than Siri. At least on the tablet you can sort through different answers with these swipe-able trays. Like, if you say “show me the Statue of Liberty” it’ll automatically take you to Google Image results, but another tray beneath it might be its location on Google Maps and then another tray might have a Wikipedia page. It’s also pretty good at giving you succinct answers if you ask it a question. The UI is definitely more powerful than Siri’s, even if a little harder to navigate.

At least at one phase of the development you would activate it by saying “Computer…” It was hard not to use a Jean Luc Piccard accent when doing it!”

As you can see, the first release of Majel might be rather simple and focus solely on natural language questions with answers from Google Search.

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A Hint of Higgs!

CNET News - December 13. 2011 by Stephen Shankland

These red lines show how the LHC's Atlas experiment registered the arrival of four particles called muons. They could have been the byproducts of a short-lived Higgs boson--or they could have been more humdrum events. CERN's LHC particle accelerator will continue smashing protons into each other to spot the statistical significance that means the Higgs really has been found. (Credit: CERN)

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of events around mass of about 126 GeV," CERN physicist and Atlas leader Fabiola Gianotti said in slides presented today at a CERN seminar to physicists who applauded her results. That equates to about 212 quintillionths of a gram; by comparison, a proton is more than 100 times lighter with a mass of 0.938GeV.


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Has the God particle been found? Tune in tomorrow!

FoxNews - December 12, 2011

The world of physics is abuzz with speculation over an announcement expected Tuesday, Dec. 13, from the CERN laboratory in Geneva -- home of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The announcement, planned for 8 a.m. EST (2 p.m. CET), will address the status of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, sometimes called the "God Particle" because of its importance to science.

This particle, which has long been theorized but never detected, is thought to give all other particles mass. Scientists at the LHC have been hoping that when protons inside the machine collide together at extremely high speeds, the energetic explosions that result will create the Higgs.

Researchers on two of the LHC's experiments, called ATLAS and CMS, will present the status of their search for the Higgs at a public seminar tomorrow.

"These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs," CERN scientists said in a statement.

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The coming programmable universe

New York Times - December 5, 2011 by Larry Smarr

Over the next 10 years, the physical world will become ever more overlaid with devices for sending and receiving information.

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances and buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centers — the “clouds” of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are “spatially aware.” For instance, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Smart electric grids are measuring our homes’ use of power; active people are tracking their heart rates; and hundreds of millions of us are uploading geo-tagged data to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook and Google Plus. As we look 10 years ahead, the fastest supercomputer (the “exascale” machine) will be composed of one billion processors, and the clouds will most likely grow to this scale as well, creating a distributed planetary computer of enormous power.

Such computational power, co-located with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world gradually becomes programmable.

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