Day: March 24, 2012

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From The UberReview: Adam Savage Describes How Credit Card Companies Shot Down RFID Episode

Uh oh… man, I don’t wanna carry around my credit cards anymore!  At least not the ones with RFID!

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Here is something that you might not know. Mythbusters had planned to air an episode on how “hackable and trackable” RFID chips are – it never saw the light of day. What happened was this: calls were made to arrange a meeting with someone at Texas Instruments and when the meeting was scheduled to happen a bunch of legal heavies from Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover explained that showing the episode would be a really, really bad idea.

So the episode never happened and Mythbusters won’t be examining any RFID-related myths anytime soon.

I’ve got to admit that I am finding myself curious. It isn’t like the Mythbusters episode was going to show people how to defraud their credit card company – so the card companies’ objections more likely stemmed from other aspects of RFID that they might be uncomfortable with customers finding out about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Source]

from The UberReview

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From The UberReview: FAA gives OK to space tourism from the USA for 2014

If you grew up like me, watching the Jetsons jet around in their aircrafts, commuting to work in their flying hovercars, flying them on air highways, and spend a holiday on the Moon, or Mars, or Saturn then this might jerk a tear from your eyes.

Starting in 2014, space tourism will begin to spread its wings in the United States, rocket planes and spaceships to carry passengers beyond the atmosphere, similar to the suborbital hops taken by Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil “Gus” Grissom in 1961, are being built and tested, with commercial flight services targeted to begin in 2013 or 2014.

Another perk will be commercial flights that will take passengers from one location to another on Earth, but that will be flying at an altitude of 62 miles, allowing the passengers to experience weightlessness and giving them a view of the Earth’s curvature and of black space.

Will I go to space? Tragically not. I don’t have the physical fortitude for that kind of trip (read I’m a wimp, I can barely stand on a chair because I’m afraid of heights…) but I’m sure they’ll have plenty of customers. George Nield, associate administrator for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also testified that they expect commercial space tourism to take up to a 1 billion $ marked within 10 years.

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from The UberReview

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Catalyst Helps Store Hydrogen In Liquid Form for Simple, Safe Future Fuel Use

Hydrogen Storage System This diagram shows the new catalyst in its protonated and deprotonated states. It converts hydrogen and CO2 gas to and from liquid formate or formic acid at ambient temperature and pressure. The gases can thereby be stored and transported as a liquid, and used later as a carbon-neutral energy source, simply by adjusting the pH. Brookhaven National Laboratory

A future powered by hydrogen fuel, whose only byproduct is water, has long been an eco-friendly dream too difficult to realize. Storing and transporting hydrogen can be difficult and dangerous, and hydrogen production methods can also produce unwanted carbon dioxide. A new catalyst promises to solve these problems, using CO2 and hydrogen to store energy in liquid form. The only thing you need to worry about is pH.

It’s the first catalyst to combine hydrogen and CO2 at room temperature and pressure, using water as the liquefying solution. As such, it could use existing fuel infrastructure built for the liquid hydrocarbons we have been using since the dawn of the combustion engine.

In basic (as in alkaline) conditions, the catalyst converts hydrogen and CO2 into formic acid, a promising hydrogen-storage fluid that is safer to handle and transport than cryogenically stored dihydrogen. If you flip the pH switch to acidic, the resulting redox reaction frees the hydrogen from its carbon bonds, allowing you to grab and use the hydrogen for use in a fuel cell.

Scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan worked with iridium-based catalysts with specific types of ligands, which are clusters of atoms surrounding the central metal atom. These ligands improve the catalyst’s ability to release protons. The researchers say they drew inspiration from nature’s catalysts – enzymes – and the way they move protons and electrons around inside biological molecules.

Under the right conditions, the iridium catalyst helps hydrogen react with CO2. The research team figured out the atomic structure of the catalyst to see exactly how it promotes this reaction. It worked extremely well, they say – they converted a 1:1 mixture of dihydrogen (the form you would want to use in a hydrogen fuel cell) and CO2 to formate, a form of formic acid, at room temperature. Then they increased the pH of the solution, and were able to regenerate the H2 at high pressure. There were no unwanted byproducts like carbon monoxide, the researchers say.

The paper was published online Sunday in Nature Chemistry.

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

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From Discover Magazine: Scientists Identify Molecule That Makes Men Go Bald | 80beats

spacing is important

Although male pattern baldness affects some 80% of Caucasian men by age 70, it’s remained a puzzle to scientists. Existing treatments were discovered by chance: Rogaine was originally a drug for high-blood pressure and Propecia was for prostate enlargement. In a new study, however, researchers have identified a molecule called Prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) that inhibits hair growth in men, which could provide a target for future drugs designed to treat baldness.

The first thing researchers did was find a good use for the scalp fragments, usually discarded, from men undergoing hair transplant surgery. (Well, where else do you find volunteers to get scalped?) Comparing bald and non-bald tissue from these scalp parts, they discovered that the bald scalp had ten times as much PGD2 and elevated levels of PTGDS, the enzyme that makes PGD2, compared to normal scalp. The gene for PTGDS is also expressed more when there’s lots of testosterone floating around, which may explain why baldness is so endemic to men.

Once scientists identified PGD2 as a potential culprit in baldness, trials in mice were the next step. They found that mutant mice with unusually high levels of PGD2 also had the atrophied hair follicles …

 

 

from Discover Magazine

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From Engadget: Boeing’s SUGAR Freeze is a cool way to power a plane

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No, not the sensation you get when you have gulped your ice cream too fast. SUGAR Freeze is the a new propulsion concept developed by Boeing that aims to revolutionize air travel. Standing for Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research, the NASA-commissioned project (codenamed “N+4”) looks at immature technologies in the hope of kickstarting research for the future. It’s reportedly 60 percent more efficient than the equivalent Boeing 737-800, thanks to a very experimental propulsion system. Cryogenically stored liquified natural gas (hence “Freeze”) is burned in a pair of unducted fan engines while also powering a solid-oxide fuel cell as an aft-thruster. With LNG projected to remain abundant, more environmentally friendly and cheap well into the century, it makes an ideal substitute to current aviation fuel, which is none of those things. Currently it’s far too unsafe a design to contemplate building, and there are concerns about methane in the natural gas production process, but hopes remain that the kinks will be ironed out well before the 2045 deadline.

 

from Engadget

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From Coolest Gadgets: Google Street View now explores the Amazon

The Google Street View team has certainly done their part in mapping around major portions of the streets around the world, and there has been some pretty zany images to look at in the past. Having said that, I am just waiting for Google’s Street View team to head off into space, although getting their orientations right might take some time. Well, this time around, they have not traveled that far – at least not into the outer reaches of space, but rather, a handful of members of the Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams were invited to the Amazon Basin in order to collect ground-level images of the rivers, forest and communities that are located in the Rio Negro Reserve.

I could have sworn that I saw an Angry Bird in some parts of the rainforest featured, but then again, it might have just been my overactive imagination. World Forest Day has come and past, hence the images captured have been uploaded and are now available to the masses via the Street View feature on Google Maps. No longer do you need to book a flight to South America if you want to check out the natural beauty and diversity of the Amazon with your own eyes. Hey, it is better than nothing, right?

You are able to take a virtual boat ride down the main section of the Rio Negro, or choose to float up into the smaller tributaries where the forest is flooded, without having to slap on an entire tube of mosquito repellent. How about strolling along the paths of Tumbira, the largest community in the Reserve? Not only that, you are able to visit some of the other communities who have invited the Google Street View team into recording their lives and cultures.

This project would have been impossible if it were not for the partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), which is actually a local nonprofit conservation organization. The Street View trike was good to go even in such challenging environments, while the tripod camera with a fisheye lens saw action, capturing the beauty of the natural landscape and the local communities. Over 50,000 still photos were stitched together as a result of this mammoth effort, resulting in immersive, 360-degree panoramic views.

Since many areas of the Amazon such as the Rio Negro Reserve remain under the protection of the Brazilian government, with the public having restricted access, so this might be the closest you will ever get to the rainforest in real life, in that part of the world.

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from Coolest Gadgets

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From Ars Technica: Facebook says it may sue employers who demand job applicants’ passwords


Facebook has taken a stand against what it calls a “distressing increase” in reports of employers demanding the Facebook passwords of employees and job applicants.

One such report came from the Associated Press this week, which detailed cases of interviewers asking applicants for Facebook usernames and passwords, a clear invasion of privacy if we’ve ever heard of one. Employers examining applicants’ and employees’ activity on social media networks isn’t new—but typically it is restricted to what information users have made publicly available to everyone. Facebook said it could seek policy changes or file lawsuits to prevent employers from demanding passwords.

Read the rest of this article...

 

from Ars Technica