In Conversation

To the Itokawa and Back Again

Japanese scientists have confirmed that particles found inside the Hayabusa probe after its seven-year space trip are from the asteroid Itokawa.

Does Anyone Still Need to Buy the White Album?

Apple launched the Beatles on iTunes Tuesday, but the company this afternoon answered another question about band’s music — the exclusivity of the deal with Apple. “The Beatles will be available for digital downloads exclusively on iTunes, with the exclusive expiring in 2011,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop.

I Still Won't Pay for Hulu

Hulu Plus, which provides streaming video access to a large variety of network programs shortly after they air, has lowered its monthly subscription price by $2. At less than $100 a year it’s almost tempting to subscribe even if you’d use the service only occasionally — it comes just in time for Christmas — and maybe that’s just the value prop the service needs to break through.

Facebook vs. Gmail

Facebook is seeking to replace e-mail with what it calls a “modern messaging system” that combines all the ways people send messages — including e-mail, IM and SMS — into a single interface. It’s a clear assault on Google and and its popular “social” application — Gmail.

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Facebook’s message system sorts all messages between two people into a single, long thread.

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Facebook’s algorithms will decide whether to deliver a message to SMS, IM or e-mail. In order for Facebook to do that, however, you will have to tell Facebook what those addresses are.

“We are trying to make it so that people don’t have to think about this stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “We are trying to make sure a message doesn’t go to five different channels.”

Hey, which one of our nukes did this?

Nuclear-weapons scientists have analyzed post-explosion debris for decades, but usually with an eye toward evaluating the effectiveness of the weapons they’ve built, or in the case of above-ground tests by another country, to determine what the explosive yield was, Dr. Fahey says. Such has been the case with trinitite.

But in speaking with weapons scientists, he says he learned that “they never bothered to ask the question: If I didn’t know what happened, how could I figure it out?” he says.

Reading Steals Parts of Your Brain

The authors of a paper that will be released by Science today suggest two possible alternatives to explain this widespread literacy. Either reading is similar enough to something that our brains could already do that it’s processed by existing structures, or literacy has “stolen” areas of the brain that used to be involved in other functions. (A combination of the two is also possible.) In the new paper, they use functional MRI imaging of brain activity to figure out just what literacy does to the brain, and discover that literacy does take over some new areas of the brain, with mixed effects on other areas of cognition.

Anti-Matter form of Hydrogen Isolated

Physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen – the antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom – a milestone that could soon lead to experiments on a form of matter that disappeared mysteriously shortly after the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

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While the number and lifetime are insufficient to threaten the Vatican – in the 2000 novel and 2009 movie “Angels & Demons,” a hidden vat of potentially explosive antihydrogen was buried under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – it is a starting point for learning new physics, the researchers said.

This Week in Wikis: NCC & USS on Star Trek

Can someone please settle this great debate for us?  The forums don’t seem to help…

DARPA Mach 20 Weapon Tumbles

The Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 — a 12-foot, 2,000-pound wedge packing a three-stage Minotaur booster — launched without incident from California on April 22. It climbed to the edge of space for a planned 30-minute, 4,000-mile jaunt toward Kwajalein in the middle of the Pacific.

But nine minutes into the flight, controllers on the ground lost contact with the HTV-2. The culprit, according to Darpa’s Engineering Review Board? “Higher-than-predicted yaw, which coupled into roll, thus exceeding the available control capability at the time of the anomaly.”

In other words, the HTV wobbled too much. Rather than risking an out-of-control flight, the bot self-destructed. On the bright side, according to a chipper Darpa release, the failed test “demonstrated successfully the first-ever use of an autonomous flight-termination system.”

The Power of the Force, er, Cleavage?

After two seasons trotting around the universe half-naked in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker’s female understudy is finally dressing the part of a mostly modest Jedi warrior. Wired.com complained about Ahsoka’s tube-top-and-miniskirt costume, which was strangely revealing in light of the fact that most Jedis rock full-length robes, even on the desert hell of Tatooine.

Awesome Kinect Hacks

The first properly impressive use of Microsoft’s new peripheral comes from Oliver Kreylos, as he shows off Kinect being used as a 3-D video capture tool. Thanks to the Kinect’s depth-sensing camera, which bounces thousands of infrared dots off objects in your room to detect how far away they are (much like sonar or echolocation, but with light), Kreylos can use that depth data to make a crude 3-D reconstruction of his room.

Talking to Your Kids About Episodes I, II, III

The GeekMoms wrote earlier this week about talking about sex with your kids, which is certainly a daunting and important conversation. But for many geeky parents, there’s another important topic: how soon do you talk to your kids about Star Wars? In what order do you watch the films? What do you tell them about Jar Jar? And when do you talk to them about Luke’s father?

Oh God No, It's a Space-Time Cloak

That space-time cloak—or TARDIS, or Star Trek transporter—you always wanted may be within reach. Researchers first proposed an “invisibility cloak” a few years ago. But now, optical physicists have now drawn up blueprints for a cloak that creates a separate reality pocket in which any event can be concealed, Nature reports.

Here’s how it works: the space-time cloak’s refractive index changesconstantly, pulling light waves apart in time. The material is manipulated to speed up a light wave as it hits the cloak, only to then slow it down again as the trailing edge hits, the report said.

“Between these two parts of the light, there will be a temporal void — a space in which there will be no illuminating light for a brief period of time,” said Martin McCall, an optical physicist at Imperial College London who led the project.