From slashdot.org

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created ‘the world’s first material that reflects virtually no light.’ This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and ’smarter’ light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space.

Full story here.

From slashdot.org

Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it.

This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It’s impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein’s special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.

From slashdot.org

“According to an article from PC World, a source close to the CSS Managed Recording forum said that technology which allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs, using the same content-protection system as commercial discs, received official approval on Thursday. ‘The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players … Despite Thursday’s approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.’”

From slashdot.org

“The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet’s ring system as seen from above and below the planet. ‘Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we’ve never seen before. It just doesn’t look like the same place. It’s so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.’ The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June.”

Read the review here.

Archeologists have solved the mystery of the Thirteen Towers, a line of low stone structures that have spanned an arid Peruvian slope like a massive set of prehistoric teeth for 2,400 years.
The towers lined up outside the citadel at Chankillo are a massive solar observatory that marks not only the summer and winter solstices, but also the days and weeks of the year.
The evidence that they are an observatory is unequivocal, said Clive Ruggles, a professor of archeo-astronomy at the University of Leicester and one of the authors of the paper in today’s issue of the journal Science.
The site is not the oldest solar observatory in the New World. That honor goes to a 4,200-year-old site just north of Lima, Peru’s capital, that marks the solstices. Other ancient structures have been found that clearly have astronomical alignments.
Archeologists have argued for more than a century over the citadel’s purpose. Many believe it is a fortress, but the lack of water inside suggests that is unlikely. The new findings support the argument that it is a ceremonial center of some sort.

The New Horizons spacecraft began sending a limited number of photographs of Jupiter and some of its moons as it slingshots by the planet on its way to Pluto. The craft will reach a record speed of 52,000 miles per hour to reach Pluto by 2015.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

From www.theregister.co.uk

Hardware hackers have developed a technique to hack Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console so that it might be possible to run alternative operating systems on the hardware.
The approach, which only works given physical access to the hardware and is strictly for fun, relies on a taking advantage of a vulnerability in the Xbox 360 hypervisor. Properly exploited, the bug allows tinkerers to run arbitrary code (even an alternative OS) with full privileges and full hardware access.
The hypervisor on Xbox 360 machines controls access to memory and provides encryption and decryption services. The approach means that all games and other applications running on the Xbox 360, in theory at least, need to be cryptographically signed with Microsoft’s private key and run in non-privileged read-only mode.

Full details here.

AMD has publicly demonstrated a Barcelona system with a pair of 200W R600 cards running in Crossfire mode which is capable of hitting one teraflop. This achievement represents a ten-fold performance increase over today’s high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second. Researchers at Stanford are already writing supercomputing applications for R600 and that R600 uses 320 multiply-accumulate (MAC) units which could imply 40 vec4 per GPU and ~800MHz clock. The reasons for R600 delay cited by Henri Richard: “R600 is doing very well and there’s a reason we’re going to launch it when we’re going to launch it…I’ll take the blame.

From В  www.itwire.com

Adobe will continue its move into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market with a free, entry-level version of Photoshop.
According to News.com, the web-based Photoshop will be even simpler than Photoshop Elements (the consumer version of Adobe’s pro image-editing application) and is likely to be ad-supported.
Adobe already offers Remix (a simplified version of Premiere Elements offered through Photobucket) and Create Adobe PDF Online (a subscription-based service for converting documents to Portable Document Format).
‘Photoshop Online’ (or whatever it is called) is likely to be offered via a partner, just as Remix is, but the News.com article does say that Adobe may offer such hosted services directly if it appears that the revenue would justify the necessary investment.

A more attractive price isn’t the only thing that sets the new Sony Blu-ray player apart from the current model. I got a look at the new player here, and noticed several differences, cosmetic and otherwise.
The player is much slimmer than Sony’s current model, the BDP-S1. It also lacks the mirrored front found on the BDP-S1, and it has improved button design on the front panel (for example, the power and eject buttons are still near the top of the unit, but these are now softer and easier to press, as opposed to the annoying, hard-to-press slim metallic buttons now found on the BDP-S1.
Other improvements: the BDP-S300 adds support for playing audio CDs and decoding Dolby Digital Plus audio; and it integrates Sony’s new Bravia Theater Sync technology for synchronizing compatible Bravia devices (including LCD televisions introduced today, and new audio/video receivers). Like the BDP-S1, the BDP-S300 doesn’t support advanced audio compression technologies Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master; it only supports the core audio stream contained within those two codecs.
The BDP-S300 is the first dedicated Blu-ray device priced by its manufacturer for sale at $600; Sony’s four-month-old BDP-S1 costs $1000. That lower price matches the price of the 60GB PlayStation 3–a device considered by some as a comparatively inexpensive entry Blu-ry player.

There’s not a lot of evidence they do any good, but that doesn’t stop us. What we’re really buying is not protection from illness, but a sense of wellbeing – the illusion that we’re doing a bit extra over what nature can do, and that makes us feel satisfied. Health experts know it’s all a bit of a con, but they keep fairly quiet about it – mainly because the prevailing belief is they don’t do any harm, as long as the dosage is moderate, and if people want to buy the illusion of wellness in a capsule, well it’s their money.
But that’s about to be turned on its head after a sophisticated analysis of vitamin studies done by Danish researchers and published in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association.
These researchers looked at clinical trials involving the common antioxidant vitamins beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C (ascorbic acid), vitamin E, and selenium either singly or in combinations. They looked only at well-designed studies – ones that compared groups of people taking vitamins, single or in combinations with other vitamins – and compared them to similar groups taking a placebo or taking nothing. The researchers were looking for any evidence of an increase in death from any cause in those taking vitamins. There were 68 trials from all over the world, totalling 232,606 people – some healthy, others with specific health problems (but not seriously ill people).
They discarded some trials which they regarded as unreliable. Amongst the rest, they found there was a significantly increased risk of death in people taking some vitamins – alone or in combinations. Vitamin A increased mortality risk by 16 per cent. Vitamin E upped the risk by four per cent and beta carotene seven per cent. Selenium and vitamin C didn’t show any increased risk (and selenium actually seemed to lower the risk of death).

Full story here.

The makers of a new TV documentary claim to have uncovered the biggest archaeological story of the century – the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In resurrecting the theme of “The Da Vinci Code,” the Discovery Channel film plays into the public fascination and controversy over Jesus and legends surrounding his life.
The tomb at the center of the story was actually discovered in 1980 in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood. (The BBC covered it in a documentary in 1996.) The filmmakers assert that it is the tomb of Jesus’ family. The crypt contained 10 ossuaries, six of them with inscriptions. Four of them reportedly read “Jesus son of Joseph,” two names for Mary, and “Judah the son of Jesus.”

Full story can be read here.

From www.voanews.com

A U.S. spacecraft has taken the closest images of Jupiter since the Galileo probe perished in a programmed dive into the huge planet’s atmosphere four years ago. The spacecraft’s destination is icy, distant Pluto, but the U.S. space agency NASA wanted to fly close to Jupiter on the way out to get a scientific update and a speed boost.
NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft has been taking pictures of Jupiter since January and will continue to dispatch them through June, but the close pass more than two million kilometers away is giving astronomers another detailed look at the gas giant, its rings, and its four biggest moons.
The spacecraft will also become the first to take a trip down the long tail of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a wide stream of charged particles extending tens of millions of kilometers.

From www.livescience.com

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.
They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

From firstshowing.net

In general, Google’s hard drive population saw a failure rate that was increasing with the age of the drive. Within the group of hard drives up to one year old, 1.7% of the devices had to be replaced due to failure. The rate jumps to 8% in year 2 and 8.6% in year 3. The failure rate levels out thereafter, but Google believes that the reliability of drives older than 4 years is influenced more by “the particular models in that vintage than by disk drive aging effects”.
Breaking out different levels of utilization, the Google study shows an interesting result. Only drives with an age of six months or younger show a decidedly higher probability of failure when put into a high activity environment. Once the drive survives its first months, the probability of failure due to high usage decreases in year 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and increases significantly in year 5. Google’s temperature research found an equally surprising result: “Failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend,” the authors of the study found.

Full story can be found here.

From www.electronichouse.com

Is 1080p resolution better than 720p? Industry expert Greg Nicoloso examines the formats.

“I think that there is a good deal of confusion that arises in comparisons between DLP 720p and 1080p solutions. First, the current assumption that 1080p is always the “better” choice relies completely on the assumption that resolution is the most important indicator of overall performance—an assumption that really does not hold up in many situations.
In fact, a recent SMPTE (Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers) study found that the four aspects of a picture that the human eye “sees”—in order of importance – are:
1. Contrast Ratio/Dynamic Range
2. Color Saturation
3. Colorimetry/Color Temperature or Grayscale
4. Resolution
So, all else being equal, resolution is actually the last item on the list in terms of picture quality and evaluation. High contrast ratio and accurate, deep color reproduction are generally greater contributors to overall perceived quality.
Now, this is not to say that increased resolution is not a substantial improvement in many situations. Particularly in theaters where viewing distance is relatively close—within 1.8 screen widths, say— the increase of resolution to 1,080 lines (1080p) makes the picture noticeably sharper and more detailed.
In the end, you can’t really lose, as both 1080p and 720p products are capable of delivering outstanding picture quality for home theaters, and manufacturers will continue to provide a wide array of models and configurations to meet these demands.”

Sony Corp. said Monday it is bringing out a cheaper player for Blu-ray discs early this summer, a crucial step in its battle to make the high-definition format the replacement for DVDs.
The BDP-S300 will cost $599, yet will have the same capabilities as the $999 BDP-S1 Sony is currently selling, said Randy Waynick, senior vice president of the home products division of Sony Electronics.

More info and pictures here.