Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth's Temperature, New Modeling Study Shows

Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth's Temperature, New Modeling Study Shows

  10:35:00 AM    Science Lover

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Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.

Various atmospheric components differ in their contributions 
to the greenhouse effect, some through feedbacks and some 
through forcings. Without carbon dioxide and other non-
condensing greenhouse gases, water vapor and clouds would 
be unable to provide the feedback mechanisms that
amplify the greenhouse effect. (Credit: NASA GISS)

The study, conducted by Andrew Lacis and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, examined the nature of Earth's greenhouse effect and clarified the role that greenhouse gases and clouds play in absorbing outgoing infrared radiation. Notably, the team identified non-condensing greenhouse gases -- such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons -- as providing the core support for the terrestrial greenhouse effect.

Without non-condensing greenhouse gases, water vapor and clouds would be unable to provide the feedback mechanisms that amplify the greenhouse effect. The study's results are published Oct. 15 in Science.

A companion study led by GISS co-author Gavin Schmidt that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that carbon dioxide accounts for about 20 percent of the greenhouse effect, water vapor and clouds together account for 75 percent, and minor gases and aerosols make up the remaining five percent. However, it is the 25 percent non-condensing greenhouse gas component, which includes carbon dioxide, that is the key factor in sustaining Earth's greenhouse effect. By this accounting, carbon dioxide is responsible for 80 percent of the radiative forcing that sustains the Earth's greenhouse effect.

The climate forcing experiment described in Science was simple in design and concept -- all of the non-condensing greenhouse gases and aerosols were zeroed out, and the global climate model was run forward in time to see what would happen to the greenhouse effect.

Without the sustaining support by the non-condensing greenhouse gases, Earth's greenhouse effect collapsed as water vapor quickly precipitated from the atmosphere, plunging the model Earth into an icebound state -- a clear demonstration that water vapor, although contributing 50 percent of the total greenhouse warming, acts as a feedback process, and as such, cannot by itself uphold the Earth's greenhouse effect.

"Our climate modeling simulation should be viewed as an experiment in atmospheric physics, illustrating a cause and effect problem which allowed us to gain a better understanding of the working mechanics of Earth's greenhouse effect, and enabled us to demonstrate the direct relationship that exists between rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising global temperature," Lacis said.

The study ties in to the geologic record in which carbon dioxide levels have oscillated between approximately 180 parts per million during ice ages, and about 280 parts per million during warmer interglacial periods. To provide perspective to the nearly 1 C (1.8 F) increase in global temperature over the past century, it is estimated that the global mean temperature difference between the extremes of the ice age and interglacial periods is only about 5 C (9 F).

"When carbon dioxide increases, more water vapor returns to the atmosphere. This is what helped to melt the glaciers that once covered New York City," said co-author David Rind, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "Today we are in uncharted territory as carbon dioxide approaches 390 parts per million in what has been referred to as the 'superinterglacial.'"

"The bottom line is that atmospheric carbon dioxide acts as a thermostat in regulating the temperature of Earth," Lacis said. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has fully documented the fact that industrial activity is responsible for the rapidly increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It is not surprising then that global warming can be linked directly to the observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and to human industrial activity in general."

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Feelings of Love: Effective Pain Relief

Feelings of Love: Effective Pain Relief

  5:52:00 PM    Science Lover

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Intense, passionate feelings of love can provide amazingly effective pain relief, similar to painkillers or such illicit drugs as cocaine, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.

Love-induced pain relief was associated with the activation of primitive brain structures that control rewarding experiences, such as the nucleus accumbens – shown here in color. (Credit: Courtesy of Sean Mackey and Jarred Younger)

"When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study, which will be published online Oct. 13 in PLoS ONE. "We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine -- a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation."

Scientists aren't quite yet ready to tell patients with chronic pain to throw out the painkillers and replace them with a passionate love affair; rather, the hope is that a better understanding of these neural-rewards pathways that get triggered by love could lead to new methods for producing pain relief.

"It turns out that the areas of the brain activated by intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain," said Arthur Aron, PhD, a professor of psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the study's authors. Aron has been studying love for 30 years. "When thinking about your beloved, there is intense activation in the reward area of the brain -- the same area that lights up when you take cocaine, the same area that lights up when you win a lot of money."

The concept for the study was sparked several years ago at a neuroscience conference when Aron, an expert in the study of love, met up with Mackey, an expert in the research of pain, and they began talking.

"Art was talking about love," Mackey said. "I was talking about pain. He was talking about the brain systems involved with love. I was talking about the brain systems involved with pain. We realized there was this tremendous overlapping system. We started wondering, 'Is it possible that the two modulate each other?'"

After the conference, Mackey returned to Stanford and collaborated with postdoctoral scholar Jarred Younger, PhD, now an assistant professor of anesthesia, who was also intrigued with the idea. Together the three set up a study that would entail examining the brain images of undergraduates who claimed to be "in that first phase of intense love."

"We posted fliers around Stanford University and within hours we had undergrads banging on our door," Mackey said. The fliers asked for couples who were in the first nine months of a romantic relationship.

"It was clearly the easiest study the pain center at Stanford has ever recruited for," Mackey said. "When you're in love you want to tell everybody about it.

"We intentionally focused on this early phase of passionate love," he added. "We specifically were not looking for longer-lasting, more mature phases of the relationship. We wanted subjects who were feeling euphoric, energetic, obsessively thinking about their beloved, craving their presence.

"When passionate love is described like this, it in some ways sounds like an addiction. We thought, 'Maybe this does involve similar brain systems as those involved in addictions which are heavily dopamine-related.' Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in our brain that is intimately involved with feeling good."

Researchers recruited 15 undergraduates (eight women and seven men) for the study. Each was asked to bring in photos of their beloved and photos of an equally attractive acquaintance. The researchers then successively flashed the pictures before the subjects, while heating up a computer-controlled thermal stimulator placed in the palm of their hand to cause mild pain. At the same time, their brains were scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine.

The undergraduates were also tested for levels of pain relief while being distracted with word-association tasks such as: "Think of sports that don't involve balls." Scientific evidence has shown in the past that distraction causes pain relief, and researchers wanted to make sure that love was not just working as a distraction from pain.

Results showed that both love and distraction did equally reduce pain, and at much higher levels than by concentrating on the photo of the attractive acquaintance, but interestingly the two methods of pain reduction used very different brain pathways.

"With the distraction test, the brain pathways leading to pain relief were mostly cognitive," Younger said. "The reduction of pain was associated with higher, cortical parts of the brain. Love-induced analgesia is much more associated with the reward centers. It appears to involve more primitive aspects of the brain, activating deep structures that may block pain at a spinal level -- similar to how opioid analgesics work.

"One of the key sites for love-induced analgesia is the nucleus accumbens, a key reward addiction center for opioids, cocaine and other drugs of abuse. The region tells the brain that you really need to keep doing this," Younger said.

"This tells us that you don't have to just rely on drugs for pain relief," Aron said. "People are feeling intense rewards without the side effects of drugs."

Other Stanford contributors include research assistants Sara Parke and Neil Chatterjee.

Funding for the study was received from the Chris Redlich Pain Research Fund.

Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

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Microsofts 3-D Strategy Microsoft's Craig Mundie describes how the company's vision of 3-D gaming could extend to all computer interactions.

Microsofts 3-D Strategy Microsoft's Craig Mundie describes how the company's vision of 3-D gaming could extend to all computer interactions.

  10:01:00 AM    Science Lover

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Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. At a recent talk at MIT, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said he sees the technology as an innovation that "will get people out of treating a computer as a tool" and into treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. Microsoft plans to introduce consumers to the change through its gaming products, but Mundie outlined a vision that would eventually have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well.

The future of 3-D: During a talk at MIT last week, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, showed how a natural 3-D interface could let users manipulate and examine products--like the disassembled motorcycle in the background.
Credit: Microsoft/Technology Review

The combination of better chips, better displays, and better sensors, Mundie said, is finally making it possible to move computing from today's graphical user interfaces to the "natural user interface," by allowing people to interact with 3-D content through the gestures they normally use. Today's interfaces require users to learn about menu bars and double-clicks, but Mundie believes natural user interfaces, which work through gesture and voice, will be faster and easier to learn, and will prove more flexible in the long run.

Mundie also argued that natural user interfaces would reduce the mental effort required for people to operate software. Even people who are good at using controllers, keyboards, and mouses might find that a natural interface frees up attention and concentration so that they can focus better on the task at hand, he said. He believes that natural interfaces will make it easier to introduce software to people unfamiliar with computers, as well as make software generally easier to use, and therefore more attractive to consumers.

He also noted that today many programs come with what is essentially "an application-specific prosthetic"--for example, some driving games come with a steering-wheel device. Natural user interfaces may require some peripherals, such as depth-sensing cameras that can detect users' movements, but Mundie sees these as ultimately having broader purpose than most of today's devices.

The first step in this strategy, Mundie said, is Microsoft's release next month of the Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 gaming console; Kinect incorporates a depth-sensing camera and voice recognition and will cost about $150. It will allow users to play games by gesturing, without the need for a controller or additional equipment. This opens the way to 3-D interaction with games that Mundie hopes will lead to broader use of 3-D displays.

Mundie demonstrated how Kinect would allow a user to interact with 3-D game content through hand gestures, virtually picking up clues to examine them or show them to friends. "We're trying to create a genre of games where you don't have to think about how what you would do naturally would map to the controls," Mundie said.

He also showed a concept video for a real-time 3-D multiplayer game called "The Spy from the 2080s" that included a TV show and a game that players could interact with using multiple devices. For example, they might watch an episode in 3-D on TV, then log in through a gaming console to work with friends to solve clues from the show. Mobile devices might provide additional updates. In the video, the outcome of gameplay even influenced the course of the TV show.

But while the company may plan to start with gaming, Mundie envisions 3-D eventually becoming a key part of many computer interfaces and online content. In one example, he demonstrated shopping using a 3-D natural interface; his hand gestures spun a 3-D image of a product, displaying it from a variety of angles, and opened it up to look at the parts inside.

He acknowledged, however, that there are challenges that need to be solved before 3-D can become ubiquitous. "We need a lot more computer than we currently have," Mundie said, noting that processing high-definition, 3-D video in real time would strain the capabilities of most home computers today. He also admitted that companies still need to refine how users would interact with computers through gesture and voice--for example, distinguishing between when a gamer is issuing commands to the computer and when the same user is conversing with another player.

Microsoft is wise to focus on games initially, says Norbert Hildebrand, business development manager for Insight Media, a marketing research firm that covers emerging display technologies. With 3-D technologies, providing enough content is a huge issue today, he explains. Games are already created in 3-D and then rendered to work on a 2-D screen, which makes it easy to convert them for 3-D displays and other types of interfaces.

For other types of 3-D interaction, such as shopping or advertising, Hildebrand says content creators will need to be persuaded to invest the necessary money and resources. As far as Mundie's vision of 3-D shopping, Hildebrand says, "at this point, it's marketing talk only." He points out that today's 3-D displays don't display text well, so marketers would have to come up with a hybrid approach to display both product images and information.

For now, Hildebrand believes that the average person views 3-D technology as something used on special occasions, not as a day-to-day technology. Some people have interpreted sales figures for 3-D-enabled televisions as a sign that consumers are adopting the technology, he adds, but these can be misleading, since most high-end televisions today have 3-D capabilities. It's much harder to determine whether people are actually using 3-D and how often, he says.

3-D is on the way, Hildebrand says, but before Mundie's vision of day-to-day 3-D becomes viable, "a lot of things have to come together." This includes more 3-D content, better bandwidth for delivering it to users, faster processors to render it, and particularly, he believes, the next generation of display technology--one that doesn't require special glasses.

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Apple patents 'anti-sexting' technology

Apple patents 'anti-sexting' technology

  9:06:00 PM    Science Lover

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Apple has patented technology that could be used by parents to prevent their kids from sending sexually explicit text messages -- or "sexting."

An Apple patent shows how an anti-sexting
application might block messages on the iPhone.

The technology, which has not been commercialized, would let a phone's administrator block an iPhone from sending or receiving texts with certain words.

Messages containing blocked material either would not be received or would have the objectionable content redacted. Unlike other text blockers, Apple's version would also be able to filter content based on a child's grade level and claims to filter abbreviated words that maybe missed by other programs.

The patent, awarded Tuesday, does not address the sending or receiving of explicit images.

The U.S. patent, which Apple filed for in January 2008, could also turn these filters into educational tools, according to the patent document.

Parents of kids who are studying Spanish, for example, could be required to send a certain number of messages per month in that language, according to the document. If kids did not meet the foreign language quota, their texting privileges could be automatically revoked until they send more Spanish-language text messages.

Grammarians may cheer this innovation. The texting interface also could prod kids toward better grammar, requiring them to identify and fix spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes before sending a message.

So maybe the Apple texting tool will be the end of LOL-speak.

Apple says old methods of monitoring and controlling text communications on phones have largely failed. Allowing kids to communicate only with a pre-set list of phone numbers or e-mail addresses is limiting, the patent document says, and does not address the content of the mobile phone communications, which Apple says is more important.

Other methods of filtering only block certain expletives, Apple says, instead of trying to recognize the overall offensiveness of a message and comparing that to a kid's age and learning level.

The blog TechCrunch asks if the patent will be the end of sexting:

"Yes and no," Alexia Tsotsis writes on that blog, "as those interesting in 'sexting' will probably find some clever workaround to express how much they want to bang, screw, hit it or a myriad of other words that don't immediately set off the censorship sensors."

The Daily Mail in the UK writes that this anti-sexting news "will be music to the ears of Tiger Woods. Or Ashley Cole, or Vernon Kay for that matter," referring to sexting scandals involving those celebrities.

It's unclear exactly how this technology would be incorporated into Apple's iPhone products, but it would appear to work through the phone's built-in text-messaging application. Other texting apps aim to prevent texting while driving and let iPhone users send text messages without incurring charges from AT&T, the mobile carrier that has exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S.

Do you think this kind of technology will bring about the end of sexting and SMS slang? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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Large Study Shows : Females Are Equal to Males in Math Skills

Large Study Shows : Females Are Equal to Males in Math Skills

  9:58:00 AM    Science Lover

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The mathematical skills of boys and girls, as well as men and women, are substantially equal, according to a new examination of existing studies in the current online edition of journal Psychological Bulletin.

Young women studying mathematics. The mathematical skills of boys and girls, as well as men and women, are substantially equal, according to a new examination of existing studies.

One portion of the new study looked systematically at 242 articles that assessed the math skills of 1,286,350 people, says chief author Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

These studies, all published in English between 1990 and 2007, looked at people from grade school to college and beyond. A second portion of the new study examined the results of several large, long-term scientific studies, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In both cases, Hyde says, the difference between the two sexes was so close as to be meaningless.

Sara Lindberg, now a postdoctoral fellow in women's health at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, was the primary author of the meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin.

The idea that both genders have equal math abilities is widely accepted among social scientists, Hyde adds, but word has been slow to reach teachers and parents, who can play a negative role by guiding girls away from math-heavy sciences and engineering. "One reason I am still spending time on this is because parents and teachers continue to hold stereotypes that boys are better in math, and that can have a tremendous impact on individual girls who are told to stay away from engineering or the physical sciences because 'Girls can't do the math.'"

Scientists now know that stereotypes affect performance, Hyde adds. "There is lots of evidence that what we call 'stereotype threat' can hold women back in math. If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Parents and teachers give little implicit messages about how good they expect kids to be at different subjects," Hyde adds, "and that powerfully affects their self-concept of their ability. When you are deciding about a major in physics, this can become a huge factor."

Hyde hopes the new results will slow the trend toward single-sex schools, which are sometimes justified on the basis of differential math skills. It may also affect standardized tests, which gained clout with the passage of No Child Left Behind, and tend to emphasize lower-level math skills such as multiplication, Hyde says. "High-stakes testing really needs to include higher-level problem-solving, which tends to be more important in jobs that require math skills. But because many teachers teach to the test, they will not teach higher reasoning unless the tests start to include it."

The new findings reinforce a recent study that ranked gender dead last among nine factors, including parental education, family income, and school effectiveness, in influencing the math performance of 10-year-olds.

Hyde acknowledges that women have made significant advances in technical fields. Half of medical school students are female, as are 48 percent of undergraduate math majors. "If women can't do math, how are they getting these majors?" she asks.

Because progress in physics and engineering is much slower, "we have lots of work to do," Hyde says. "This persistent stereotyping disadvantages girls. My message to parents is that they should have confidence in their daughter's math performance. They need to realize that women can do math just as well as men. These changes will encourage women to pursue occupations that require lots of math."

Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

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A Touch Screen with Texture Electrovibration could make for a better sensory experience on a smooth touch surface.

A Touch Screen with Texture Electrovibration could make for a better sensory experience on a smooth touch surface.

  10:32:00 AM    Science Lover

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Touch screens are ubiquitous today. But a common complaint is that the smooth surface just doesn't feel as good to use as a physical keypad. While some touch-screen devices use mechanical vibrations to enhance users' experiences of virtual keypads, the approach isn't widely used, mainly because mechanical vibrations are difficult to implement well, and they often make the entire device buzz in your hand, instead of just a particular spot on the screen.

Subtle sensation: In this TeslaTouch demonstration, one finger is stationary while the other experiences the sensation of friction as it moves.
Credit: Disney Research

Now, engineers from three different groups are proposing a type of tactile feedback that they believe will be more popular than mechanical buzzing. Called electrovibration, the technique uses electrical charges to simulate the feeling of localized vibration and friction, providing touch-screen textures that are impossible to simulate using mechanical actuators.

One of these groups, composed of researchers from Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Paris Sud, presented a paper earlier this month at the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) symposium in New York City. In the paper, they described their approach to electrovibration, called TeslaTouch, in which they modified a commercial touch panel from 3M that uses capacitive sensing -- the approach used in most mobile phones and in the iPad.

The touch panel is made of transparent electrodes on a glass plate coated with an insulating layer. By applying a periodic voltage to the electrodes via connections used for sensing a finger's position on the screen, the researchers were able to effectively induce a charge in a finger dragged along the surface. By changing the amplitude and frequency of the applied voltage, the surface can be made to feel as though it is bumpy, rough, sticky, or vibrating. The major difference is the specially designed control circuit that produces the sensations.

It's a challenge, says Ivan Poupyrev of Disney Research, to vibrate a screen in a way that makes sense for a user. When an entire device buzzes, it can be more annoying than helpful. There are also technical hurdles and extra costs in making a touch screen mechanically move. The goal, then, was to create a tactile sensation without using any mechanical motion. "It sounds crazy," Poupyrev says, "but that's what we've done with TeslaTouch."

Electrovibration was first proposed for touch screens in the 1950s, but the approach didn't see widespread use because the screens didn't achieve commercial success until recently. Now, with many researchers looking for ways to improve the now-popular screens, other groups have also rediscovered electrovibration. Nokia recently announced a smartphone prototype that uses the approach. And a Finnish company called Senseg has also implemented electrovibration in touch screens, having closed deals with three companies to incorporate the technology into products that could be available in 2011.

All three groups have filed patents for electrovibration; each outlines a different approach. Currently, the Disney demonstration only provides the feeling of texture when a finger is moving, although the group is working on a way to give feedback to a still finger. Senseg's technology, however, already provides localized feedback to a nonmoving finger, says Ville Mäkinen, founder of the company.

Another limitation of the Disney prototype is that it provides only a single sensation at a time. However, it is possible to split up the screen in various ways to generate different sensations in different parts of the screen, but the design of such a screen would most likely depend on the specific application.

Nokia is exploring ways to use the tactile feedback as a way to augment communication with another person, says Tapani Ryhänen, Nokia lab director in Cambridge, UK. "There's a possibility to use this as a type of communication," he says, "so if I do something on my screen, then you can feel it on your screen."

While electrovibration can provide a different feel for touch screens, the type of interaction is somewhat limited, says Bic Schediwy, director of research at a touch-screen company called Synaptics. Since some systems only work when a finger is moving, those systems couldn't simulate a button click, one of the biggest complaints with touch screens. Additionally, he says, in demonstrations of electrovibration systems, it appears that people have varying responses to the induced current, possibly because of varying skin thickness.

At the UIST symposium, the Disney researchers showed a range of demos to illustrate TeslaTouch, including a simulated ice-covered window that changes friction as virtual ice is removed and a racetrack that provides different sensation as a finger traverses varying terrain. On hand to test the system was Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. While the demos were simple, he says, they were "very convincing." TeslaTouch may not provide "the basis for getting rid of keyboards or such," Baudisch says, but "it really enriches the interaction on touch devices."

Disney's Poupyrev isn't sure about what his company plans to do with the technology, but the applications that are most obvious involve honing electrovibration so it could be used to more easily draw and paint on a smooth touch surface. Poupyrev also thinks electrovibration, since it is so easily implemented, could find a home in more unusual applications, such as large surfaces like wallpaper, and conformable materials like cloth.

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Tiny Creatures: Big Role in Global Carbon Cycle

Tiny Creatures: Big Role in Global Carbon Cycle

  9:55:00 AM    Science Lover

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Two separate research groups are reporting groundbreaking measurements of the fluid flow that surrounds freely swimming microorganisms. Experiments involving two common types of microbes reveal the ways that one creature's motion can affect its neighbors, which in turn can lead to collective motions of microorganism swarms. In addition, the research is helping to clarify how the motions of microscopic swimmers produces large scale stirring that distributes nutrients, oxygen and chemicals in lakes and oceans.

Researchers have mapped the flow field around a swimming Volvox carteri microbe by tracking the movements of tiny tracer particles. The spherical Volvox is swimming towards the top of the image. Streamlines appear as red curves, and the color map corresponds to the fluid velocity. (Credit: K. Drescher, R. E. Goldstein, N. Michel, M. Polin, and I. Tuval, University of Cambridge)

A pair of papers describing the experiments will appear in the Oct. 11 issue of the APS journal Physical Review Letters.

In order to observe the flow that microorganisms produce, researchers at the University of Cambridge tracked the motion of tiny tracer beads suspended in the fluid surrounding the tiny swimmers. They used the technique to study the fluid around two very different types of creatures: a small, blue-green form of algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that swims by paddling with a pair of whip-like flagella, and the larger, spherical alga Volvox carterii that propels itself with thousands of flagella covering its surface.

The tracer beads showed that the two types of organisms generate distinctly different flow patterns, both of which are much more complex than previously assumed. In a related study performed at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, researchers used a high speed camera to track the flow of tracer particles around Chlamydomonas in a thin, two-dimension film of fluid over the course of a single stroke of its flagella.

The studies should help scientists develop new models to predict the fluid motions associated with aquatic microorganisms. The models will provide clearer pictures of the ways microbes mix bodies of water, and potentially offer insights into the role plankton plays in the carbon cycle as it stirs the world's oceans.

David Saintillan (University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne) gives an overview of the microorganism swimming research in a Viewpoint article in the October 11 edition of APS Physics.

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Now Your App Knows Where You Are Geolocation analytics could help companies to improve their apps--and make more money from them.

Now Your App Knows Where You Are Geolocation analytics could help companies to improve their apps--and make more money from them.

  9:53:00 AM    Science Lover

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A new platform for analyzing when, where, and how smart-phone apps are used will soon be available to thousands of mobile developers.

Pizza tracking: A spike in coupon redemption at PizzaLand at lunchtime is revealed in San Francisco by FortiusOne and Appcelerator's Titanium+Geo package.
Credit: Appcelterator

Appcelerator--a software development platform that lets Web programmers create apps that run natively on both iPhone and Android devices--will release the new mobile analytics platform within the next three months. The platform was developed by Appcelerator and FortiusOne, a company that specializes in visualizing location information.

Accurate geolocation analytics data will help companies improve their software and make money from location-targeted advertising.

Appcelerator has around 72,000 users, including developers from large businesses such as NBC and Budweiser. It has proven popular because it lets developers create apps without requiring the technical expertise needed to build them from scratch.

The new platform, called Titanium+Geo, lets Appcelerator developers see what users are doing, and where they're doing it, as long as geolocation functionality has been built into an app. For example, the startup Scoutmob, which offers location-specific deals to subscribers through an Appcelerator app, could see when and where users open the app, and how they respond.

Titanium+Geo collects data every time a user opens an app. A developer can instruct the app to report various events to a remote server, such as when a user views an advertisement--or a coupon for a discount--or when the user responds to the ad or redeems the coupon.

"Most of what we see currently in terms of smart-phone advertising, not much of it is geotargeted," says Sean Gorman, president and founder of FortiusOne. Without the metrics to determine how well mobile, geotargeted ads work, there simply hasn't been a business case for using them, he adds.

"We're used to Google Analytics for Web pages, but until now, we haven't had that for how apps are used," says Gorman.

SimpleGeo, another startup company that offers geolocation tools for developers, has announced that it is working on a similar analytics platform.

Adding spatial data to the information that apps already gather will allow for new forms of data mining. Gorman says that researchers have, for example, been able to determine with near-perfect accuracy who the friends of a given smart-phone user are simply by analyzing data about where and when that user comes into contact with others.

The approach could also allow for much more targeted advertising. "When you understand when and where [a person is when they use an app], then you understand context," says Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing at Appcelerator. "If it's 7 a.m. and a person is in the marina district, then you understand where that person lives."

Targeted ads would allow developers to command higher rates for advertising. But this kind of data could also reveal things that users might rather keep secret.

"It's like Minority Report," says Byung-Gon Chun, a researcher at Intel Labs Berkeley. "As Tom Cruise walks by the billboards, they change their advertisements based on his presence."

Chun, who studies mobile security, recently coauthored a paper showing that many Android apps share user data, including location information, without making it clear to users.

Chun and colleagues Jaeyeon Jung at Intel and William Enck at Penn State University developed a program called TaintDroid that examines the data that Android apps pass to the Web. Half of the apps they analyzed transmitted geolocation data, most without asking for permission or making it explicit in their documentation that they would.

"Even if this disclosure is in the [end user license agreement], it's hard for users to figure out what kind of information the app is actually sending," says Chun.

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Tsunami Risk Higher in Los Angeles, Other Major Cities Than Thought, Haiti Study Suggests

Tsunami Risk Higher in Los Angeles, Other Major Cities Than Thought, Haiti Study Suggests

  7:13:00 PM    Science Lover

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Geologists studying the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake say the risk of destructive tsunamis is higher than expected in places such as Kingston, Istanbul, and Los Angeles.

Following the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake, sediments near 
the town of Grand Goave slid into the sea, triggering a 
tsunami. Satellite images before (top left) and after 
(bottom left) show the location of the landslide. Seafloor 
bathymetry collected with sonar (right) reveals the slide path. 
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas at Austin)

Like Haiti's capital, these cities all lie near the coast and near an active geologic feature called a strike-slip fault where two tectonic plates slide past each other like two hands rubbing against each other.

Until now, geologists did not consider the tsunami risk to be very high in these places because when these faults rupture, they usually do not vertically displace the seafloor much, which is how most tsunamis are generated. This latest research suggests even a moderate earthquake on a strike-slip fault can generate tsunamis through submarine landslides, raising the overall tsunami risk in these places.

"The scary part about that is you do not need a large earthquake to trigger a large tsunami," said Matt Hornbach, research associate at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics and lead author on a paper describing the research in the Oct. 10 online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

"Organizations that issue tsunami warnings usually look for large earthquakes on thrust faults," said Hornbach. "Now we see you don't necessarily need those things. A moderate earthquake on a strike-slip fault can still be cause for alarm."

Within minutes after the magnitude 7 Haiti earthquake, a series of tsunami waves, some as high as 9 feet (3 meters), crashed into parts of the shoreline. A few weeks later, a team of scientists from the U.S. and Haiti conducted geological field surveys of sites on and offshore near the quake's epicenter.

The scientists determined the tsunamis were generated primarily by weak sediment at the shore that collapsed and slid along the seafloor, displacing the overlying water. Combined with newly discovered evidence of historic tsunamis, the survey revealed a third of all tsunamis in the area are generated in this way. Geologists had previously estimated only about 3 percent of tsunamis globally are generated through submarine landslides.

"We found that tsunamis around Haiti are about 10 times more likely to be generated in this way than we would have expected," said Hornbach.

In addition to Hornbach, team members from The University of Texas at Austin include: Paul Mann, Fred Taylor, Cliff Frohlich, Sean Gulick and Marcy Davis. The team also includes researchers from Queens College, City University of New York; U.S. Geological Survey, University of Missouri; Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University; University of California, Santa Barbara; Bureau of Mines and Energy (Haiti); and Universite d'Etat de Haiti.

The researchers gathered data on faults beneath the seafloor and land, vertical movement of the land, bathymetry (underwater topography) of the seafloor and evidence of tsunami waves. They worked on foot, on a small inflatable boat and on the 165-foot research vessel Endeavor.

This research was funded by a Rapid Response grant from the National Science Foundation and The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences.

With additional funding from The Society for Geophysics' Geoscientists Without Borders program, Hornbach and others are now conducting a new research project in nearby Jamaica to assess the tsunami threat there.

"The geology of Kingston, Jamaica is nearly identical to Port Au Prince, Haiti," said Hornbach. "It's primed and ready to go and they need to prepare for it. The good news is, they have a leg up because they're aware of the problem."

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Is That a BlackBerry in Your Tablet? Details emerge on RIM's soon-to-come Blackberry PlayBook tablet.

Is That a BlackBerry in Your Tablet? Details emerge on RIM's soon-to-come Blackberry PlayBook tablet.

  12:09:00 AM    Science Lover

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RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook Could Be the First Real iPad Competitor

BlackBerry PlayBook

RIM

Extra evidence that the future of tablet computing is going to be very active—today RIM dropped some details on its upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook seven-inch tablet, with a new BlackBerry Tablet OS.

It's smaller than Apple's existing 9.7-inch iPad screen, but it promises to be more powerful and feature-rich, with a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB of embedded RAM, dual front and rear HD cameras, HDMI video output, tethering to BlackBerry phones and support for Adobe Flash 10.1 as well as Adobe's Air publishing platform.

RIM claims that it will launch in Q2 of next year, and with the install base of BlackBerry Exchange servers in the corporate world, it could be a formidable business device. Whether it will gain the same type of acceptance that the iPad currently enjoys will have everything to do with how many developers embrace the platform, and how much the device will cost­­—still a big question mark on that.

And the biggest question mark of all is what will happen between now and the second half of 2011.

How many Google Android or Chrome tablets will be on the market by then? Will HP beat RIM to market with Palm webOS tablets? And, of course, Apple likes to make big announcements in January—and I wouldn't be too surprised to see a lineup of at least two iPads with cameras all over them, FaceTime support, Retina displays and dual-core A4 processors popping up next year. So as usual, we hold our breath.

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