David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 9, 2012, 7:42 am
UPDATE: 2012-02-09 There have been rumors for several years that Google account holders would one day have a legitimate cloud storage system: Google Drive, GDrive, whatever. GHacks alerted me today that this might very well, at long last, be imminent. Wall Street Journal reports that “Google Inc. ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 8, 2012, 9:15 am
Researchers have defined just four factors about a news story that can predict with 84% accuracy how popular the story will be on a social media network like Twitter. It’s almost what journalists and editors do by intuition, but could automate the process allowing editors (or a computer)t to opti...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 8, 2012, 8:32 am
Security by obscurity is never a good plan. So, in one sense it is a good thing that hackers have managed to download source codes for Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Utilities, Norton GoBack, pcAnywhere and Norton Internet Security. It will show up the loopholes and flaws in these applic...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 7, 2012, 4:45 pm
Tweets Between lets you see what one user last said to another user. No logging in necessary. Just enter the two twitter usernames of the people you want to monitor and hit “GO!” TweetsBetween. Thanks to Phil Bradley (no relation) for my first sighting/siting of this application here. Related ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 8:38 am
Real-life action hero Felix Baumgartner plans to take a balloon up to the edge of space and then to jump out. In freefall he hopes to break the speed record for a human travelling without a machine, the needle, as it were, reaching speeds in excess of the speed of sound. In the BBC newsclip there’...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 8:38 am
Real-life action hero Felix Baumgartner plans to take a balloon up to the edge of space and then to jump out. In freefall he hopes to break the speed record for a human travelling without a machine, the needle, as it were, reaching speeds in excess of the speed of sound. In the BBC newsclip there’...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 3:48 am
A phantom limb is the perception that an amputated or missing limb or other body part is still attached to the body. The sensations, by most accounts, are unpleasant and commonly painful. Mirror therapy has been used to help alleviate some of the problems experienced by veterans, accident victims an...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 3:48 am
A phantom limb is the perception that an amputated or missing limb or other body part is still attached to the body. The sensations, by most accounts, are unpleasant and commonly painful. Mirror therapy has been used to help alleviate some of the problems experienced by veterans, accident victims an...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 3:03 am
UK government minister, Lord McNally, responded for the government declining to pardon Turing: The question of granting a posthumous pardon to Mr Turing was considered by the previous Government in 2009. As a result of the previous campaign, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivoc...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Feb 7, 2012, 3:03 am
UK government minister, Lord McNally, responded for the government declining to pardon Turing: The question of granting a posthumous pardon to Mr Turing was considered by the previous Government in 2009. As a result of the previous campaign, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivoc...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Feb 6, 2012, 10:19 am
A team in the US has created a boron compound that has the highest coordination number of any planar species, squeezing 10 spoke-like bonds from a central metal hub to 10 boron atoms equally spaced around a nanoscopic wheel. I asked theoretical chemist Pekka Pyykkö of the University of Helsinki, F...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Feb 6, 2012, 10:19 am
A team in the US has created a boron compound that has the highest coordination number of any planar species, squeezing 10 spoke-like bonds from a central metal hub to 10 boron atoms equally spaced around a nanoscopic wheel. I asked theoretical chemist Pekka Pyykkö of the University of Helsinki, F...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 3, 2012, 5:57 am
While we’re on the subject of compression, it’s always a good idea to have a caching plugin running on a WordPress site in case you get a traffic spike that runs too many CPU cycles or whatever on the host servers and leads to the dreaded 500 Server Error one so often sees when a small site gets...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 3, 2012, 5:24 am
Compression is an easy way to cut your hosting bills if you pay for bandwidth. It can also reduce page download times for your readers, which is always a good thing (and benefits you in terms of Google‘s latest algorithm, which takes such things into account). To implement GZIP compression login t...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 2, 2012, 12:30 pm
The most common — and still surprisingly widespread — misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They’re not. A good way to understand this is via a railroad analogy. On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on the virtual tracks of...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 2, 2012, 11:33 am
John Battelle recently pointed out how his search blog has a newsfeed subscriber base of about 400,000 and that the number has doubled in the space of a year. However, his reach, according to newsfeed system Feedburner, is a mere 664 or so. That, he concedes is not a very good hit rate. Just 0.15% o...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 2, 2012, 10:42 am
EFF published a nice summary explaining what the substantial changes are to Google‘s privacy policy. If you use any Google tools – GMail, Google Docs, G+, Youtube etc, you cannot fail to have noticed the pop-ups alerting you to imminent changes that come into effect March 1, 2012. Previously, t...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Feb 1, 2012, 12:10 pm
Roughly translates as “Advancement through technology”, although you might imagine it simply means “competitive edge”. Either way, it’s the marketing strapline of German car maker Audi. They have used it since the 1970s in their advertising campaigns all over the world. When Audi repositio...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 31, 2012, 12:07 pm
Did you know that the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia started out as a wood pulp company? It is unlikely that it would have grown to have been one of the world leaders if it had remained so. Today, Nokia represents 2/3 of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector in Finland, a fi...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 31, 2012, 6:30 am
Graphene is perhaps the thinnest material known. Essentially it is a single, isolated layer of the carbon allotrope graphite. In SpectroscopyNOW this week I discuss new research into how a single layer of graphene is transparent to water molecules in the sense that the water can “see” whatever i...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 31, 2012, 6:30 am
Graphene is perhaps the thinnest material known. Essentially it is a single, isolated layer of the carbon allotrope graphite. In SpectroscopyNOW this week I discuss new research into how a single layer of graphene is transparent to water molecules in the sense that the water can “see” whatever i...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 31, 2012, 12:29 am
When you leave your body to medical science you might imagine some marvellous discovery among your organs and tissues that leads researchers to the wondrous discovery of a universal anticancer drug or something equally stupendous. In reality, it can be a much more mundane, especially for any women d...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 31, 2012, 12:29 am
When you leave your body to medical science you might imagine some marvellous discovery among your organs and tissues that leads researchers to the wondrous discovery of a universal anticancer drug or something equally stupendous. In reality, it can be a much more mundane, especially for any women d...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 30, 2012, 1:00 am
It was perhaps inevitable that a paper published in the journal Journal of Applied Toxicology that showed parabens (a preservative used in underarm deodorants and countless other products) to be present in breast cancer tissue samples would be grabbed by the tabloids and others and turned into the l...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 30, 2012, 1:00 am
It was perhaps inevitable that a paper published in the journal Journal of Applied Toxicology that showed parabens (a preservative used in underarm deodorants and countless other products) to be present in breast cancer tissue samples would be grabbed by the tabloids and others and turned into the l...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 29, 2012, 11:51 am
Neowin is one of the most informative techie sites out there, always worth a regular read. Today, they’ve got part one of a reclaim your online privacy series. The tips are quite drastic and in part two they’ll show you how to get some privacy back without going quite so far. It is very hard to...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 29, 2012, 8:06 am
I started a Twitter “meme” on Friday, #mundanemetal. Idea was a bit of fun on a Friday: substitute a word or two in a rock song title for something more mundane, as in “Boat on the Water” instead of Smoke on the Water, the Deep Purple Classic. “Stairlift to Heaven” as an alternative to t...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 28, 2012, 4:46 am
The Alchemist learns how to manipulate tiny polystyrene beads with a set of micro-tweezers this week and spots the smoking gun in forensics using capillary-scale ion chromatography and suppressed conductivity. In the world of chemophobia has asked why parabens are still the focus of research into un...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 28, 2012, 4:46 am
The Alchemist learns how to manipulate tiny polystyrene beads with a set of micro-tweezers this week and spots the smoking gun in forensics using capillary-scale ion chromatography and suppressed conductivity. In the world of chemophobia has asked why parabens are still the focus of research into un...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 27, 2012, 6:53 am
A new WordPress plugin makes it rather easy to uncensor sites that have been blocked for whatever reason. In just a few clicks you can establish a proxy site using the well-known blogging software. It could become an essential tool for users in countries that restrict free speech, which is pretty m...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 27, 2012, 3:08 am
How about a new “meme” for a Friday? #mundanemetal All the hard rock greats deconstructed. Here’s a few for starters, would love to see yours spread all over Twitter: Highway to Hull Eels of Steel Smells Like White Spirit Sabbath Muddy Sabbath Don’t Fear the Sweeper The Number of the Y...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 27, 2012, 2:22 am
Coming soon: The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video and has slots for USB 2.0 ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 26, 2012, 4:46 pm
Sofa, settee, couch. It’s where the potatoes sit. It’s where the media moguls would prefer you to be, passively consuming the cr*p they want to feed you and watching inane advertisements. Off the couch creating and sharing is where they’d rather you weren’t, hence DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 26, 2012, 9:52 am
On Christmas Day 2006, I posted a blog about how snowflakes are not all different and some of the science underlying the formation of snowflakes. The American Chemical Society had a nice infographic at the time showing the principles of snowflake formation (PDF here). There’s no snow around here, ...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 26, 2012, 9:52 am
On Christmas Day 2006, I posted a blog about how snowflakes are not all different and some of the science underlying the formation of snowflakes. The American Chemical Society had a nice infographic at the time showing the principles of snowflake formation (PDF here). There’s no snow around here, ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 26, 2012, 3:52 am
One can never predict which blog posts are going to be popular among the readers. I posted a video referring to a health didact on Sciencebase recently that was picked up by Lifehacker and gave the site a week-long traffic spike bringing us several thousand of new readers (most of whom seem to have ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 25, 2012, 4:25 am
Apparently, if you’re browsing the web on your O2 mobile phone in the UK, the phone’s web browser sends your phone number to every site you visit using their mobile data network. Here’s a simple script page you can visit on your smart phone to check whether your network is handing over privac...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 25, 2012, 3:22 am
I’ve not yet seen the Aurora borealis, nor the Aurora australis, but they’re always on my mind. I am sure they’re amaaazing and wunderfuuul. This week a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun stimulated the earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field to produce some marvellous lights that were e...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 25, 2012, 3:22 am
I’ve not yet seen the Aurora borealis, nor the Aurora australis, but they’re always on my mind. I am sure they’re amaaazing and wunderfuuul. This week a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun stimulated the earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field to produce some marvellous lights that were e...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 24, 2012, 2:52 pm
A flavonoid compound found in fruit and vegetables, luteolin, was recently hailed as an anticancer supernutrient by the tabloid media. Aside from the fact that over-dosing on antioxidants could be detrimental to one’s front-line immune response to pathogens, the research was purely laboratory base...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 24, 2012, 2:52 pm
A flavonoid compound found in fruit and vegetables, luteolin, was recently hailed as an anticancer supernutrient by the tabloid media. Aside from the fact that over-dosing on antioxidants could be detrimental to one’s front-line immune response to pathogens, the research was purely laboratory base...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 24, 2012, 2:07 pm
How much better would the new social search feature in Google be if it pulled in results from all across the web rather than doing the self-promotion thing? Well, you can, of course, switch it off (if you’re logged into your Google account), but the social search might sometimes actually be useful...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 24, 2012, 11:41 am
In case anyone was in any doubt about the market dominance of Apple products for mobile browsing, here’s the breakdown of mobile visitors to Sciencetext.com, Sciencebase.com and averaged across my other blogs: Apple iPhone – 41% Apple iPad – 31% Apple iPod Touch – 5% SonyEricsson LT15i X...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencetext Tech Talk - Jan 23, 2012, 1:22 pm
A group of Web researchers has created a new type of Twitter bot, dubbed a "socialbot," that rather than simply spamming the social networking site and annoying everyone can actually serve as virtual social connectors, speeding up the natural rate of human-to-human communication. The bots are desi...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 23, 2012, 11:38 am
Sometimes an old viral video needs another airing. In this video from about three years ago, a mixture of corn starch poured into a speaker cone is vibrated at 30 Hz using a signal generator and the video shot at 30 frames per second (coincident timing with the speaker frequency). Corn starch is a ...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 23, 2012, 11:38 am
Sometimes an old viral video needs another airing. In this video from about three years ago, a mixture of corn starch poured into a speaker cone is vibrated at 30 Hz using a signal generator and the video shot at 30 frames per second (coincident timing with the speaker frequency). Corn starch is a ...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 23, 2012, 8:35 am
My gut feeling is that visceral manipulation is yet another sCAM practice based on falsehoods, an economy of truth, and, basically, lies. Science-based medicine gives us the low down: “I think we can reasonably assume that any abdominal manipulation sufficient to disrupt adhesions would risk tiss...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 23, 2012, 8:35 am
My gut feeling is that visceral manipulation is yet another sCAM practice based on falsehoods, an economy of truth, and, basically, lies. Science-based medicine gives us the low down: “I think we can reasonably assume that any abdominal manipulation sufficient to disrupt adhesions would risk tiss...
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David B. posted an article on Sciencebase Science Blog - Jan 21, 2012, 1:13 pm
A stream of very viscous syrup falling from a nozzle on to a moving belt. At first, the speed of the belt is enough that the thread of syrup is just pulled out straight. However, as the belt is slowed down, the thread at first bifurcates to a meandering state, producing a sine wave and then to a “...
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David B. posted an article on SciScoop Science News Blog - Jan 21, 2012, 1:13 pm
A stream of very viscous syrup falling from a nozzle on to a moving belt. At first, the speed of the belt is enough that the thread of syrup is just pulled out straight. However, as the belt is slowed down, the thread at first bifurcates to a meandering state, producing a sine wave and then to a “...
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