Scientists create the world's smallest 'snowman'

Scientists have created the world’s smallest 'snowman', measuring about a fifth of the width of a human hair.

Experts at the National Physical Laboratory in West London made the miniature figure which is just 0.01mm across.

However, far from the thrill of rolling balls of snow around a field to build their masterpiece, it was assembled using tools designed for manipulating nanoparticles.

The snowman is made of two tiny tin beads, normally used to calibrate electron microscope lenses, which were welded together with platinum.

A focused ion beam was used to carve the snowman's eyes and smile, and to deposit a tiny blob of platinum for the nose

It was put together by Dr David Cox, a member of the Quantum Detection group at the laboratory, who also took the picture.

However, Britons searching for the real thing will have to head for the northern hills of Scotland, where forecasters say there is a chance of snow falling over the weekend.

Meanwhile, the Alps have seen heavy snow falls in the past week allowing the ski season to get under way at many resorts. Andermatt in Switzerland has received nearly 40 ins (100cm) of fresh snow.

The NPL is one of Britain’s leading science facilities and research centres. It is a world-leading centre of excellence in developing and applying the most accurate measurement standards. via

Microsoft releases biggest band-aid ever

MICROSOFT has issued its biggest software patch on record to fix a range of security issues in its programs, including the yet-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system.

In a monthly update sent to users of its software, Microsoft released 13 security bulletins, or patches, to address 34 vulnerabilities it identified across its Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Office and other products.

It said six of the patches were high priority and should be deployed immediately. The patches - which update software to write over glitches - are designed to protect users from hackers or malicious software downloaded from the internet.

Several of the patches affect Windows 7, the software maker's new operating system which will be officially unveiled next week but has been widely used in test versions.

Such an early sign of security issues on Windows 7 is potentially worrying for Microsoft, which is hoping its new operating system will erase ill-feeling among many customers who bought the predecessor Vista.

A Microsoft spokesperson could not immediately say whether the company had identified further security problems with Windows 7. The company generally does not disclose such problems until it has patches available. Source

Airport tests full-body X-ray system

Future passenger security checks at airports may no longer include ‘pat-downs’ with a new full-body imaging technology undergoing trials at Manchester Airport.

Manchester Airport’s Terminal 2 is trialling the Secure 1000 Single Pose, which uses backscatter technology and proprietary image processing software to produce a ghost-like outline of an individual’s body. A concealed threat such as a knife or gun would be clearly detectable on the image.

The US-based developer of the technology, Rapiscan Systems, believes that the technology could, one day, replace metal detectors in airports.

Tim Raynor, the European Union (EU) government affairs technical director for the company, said that the imaging system is different to normal X-ray machines.

The Rapiscan system works by bouncing X-rays off an individual’s skin to produce an outline image of the person’s body, he added. A normal X-ray imaging system detects X-rays that are generated through a person.

Raynor said that, in an airport security check scenario, an individual would be asked to stand between two machines for a few seconds. Each machine would generate a pencil beam of X-rays that would scan an individual in a raster fashion over the body.

Each point of backscatter would be picked up by an array of detectors in the machine. With this input, an image would be formed using Rapiscan’s image processing software and transmitted to a remote security officer who would then electronically confirm if the passenger can proceed or whether a search is required.

Raynor said that the officer would see an image of the person 0.5mm below their skin surface.

‘It is very difficult, if not impossible, to recognise the person,’ he said, addressing concerns about privacy. ‘You do have the curves of the body visible. Anything that is on the body or in clothes being worn by the body show up as different contrasts on an otherwise flat background.’

According to Raynor, a belt buckle or gun would show up as dark shadowed images on the otherwise ghost-like outline of a person, making their detection clearly visible.

Rapiscan performed a trial of its technology at Heathrow Airport in 2004. Raynor said that the trial was a success, but that the technology has now been advanced in a way that ‘improves the passenger experience’.

The system now includes an additional sensor so that a person’s front and back can be scanned at the same time.

‘In the 2004 trial, the passenger needed to pose in a variety of poses for each side of the body to be imaged and therefore scanned,’ he said.

The scanning time has also been decreased by reducing the X-ray dosage and running the pencil beam faster. Raynor said that this change did decrease image quality a bit, but it is still effective.

In addition to privacy concerns, he said that Rapiscan is prepared to address any trepidation about safety.

‘Because we are using a raster pencil beam, the amount of X-rays used to generate images is extremely low,’ he said. ‘The effective dose of the X-ray is similar to the dose you get in an aircraft at 30,000ft [9,144m] for five minutes.’

The equipment in the voluntary trial has been approved by the National Radiological Protection Board, which is part of the Health Protection Agency and is responsible for licensing all X-ray equipment in the UK.

The imaging technology trial will run in Manchester Airport’s Terminal 2 only for at least 12 months or until enough data is gathered to assess all aspects of the equipment.

Rapiscan recently received an order worth $25m (£16m) from the US Transportation Security Administration for multiple units of the Secure 1000 Single Pose for airport security screening systems.

According to Raynor, Rapiscan fully expects other governments to approve their use and roll out the systems in other parts of the world following the US deployment.

‘In the US, you will find that the walk-through metal detectors will be augmented - if not replaced - by whole-body imaging systems,’ he said.

‘That will lead the EU to make similar requirements that therefore will need to be rolled out in Europe,' added Raynor. 'Manchester Airport will obviously understand how that works operationally from the trial it is now doing.’ via

Web 2.0 Winners & Losers

The success of Web 2.0 means everyone can now publish - but at what costs, asks Nick Galvin.

April 15, 2009: A 96-strong symphony orchestra performs to widespread acclaim under the baton of the distinguished American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall. The musicians are part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the first online collaborative orchestra, and come from 30 countries. They met each other face-to-face only a few days before and have been selected from 3000 players who responded to the open call for entries by submitting a video audition.

May 16, 2009: The Tucson Citizen, Arizona's oldest daily newspaper, produces its last edition after 138 years. In its heyday, the Citizen had a circulation of about 60,000. That number had dwindled to 17,000 by the time its owners, Gannett, pulled the plug. The publisher, Jennifer Boice, pens an emotional open letter in that final edition. "It has been an honour to be a part of the community, invited daily into your homes . . . " she wrote. "Newspapers don't just close, they die. And death is personal."

AT FIRST glance, these two events appear to have little or nothing in common.

Look a little closer, however, and you'll see they are inextricably linked – two sides of the same coin. They are emblematic of the winners and losers in the rolling digital revolution that is simultaneously demolishing and rebuilding our cultural landscape.

For those talented amateur musicians who were given a chance to play together in one of the world's great concert halls, there's no downside. Being able to audition online from their homes opened doors to opportunities few of them would ever have dreamt possible.

But for the 65 staff and the loyal readers of the Tucson Citizen – and all the other newspapers struggling to meet the internet challenge – the digital revolution could hardly be less welcome. The situation is particularly dire in the US, where 11 metropolitan dailies have closed in the past couple of years, with a further seven switching to web-only operation.

Not that this is all about just newspapers – they just happen to be the latest and most visible front in a culture war being fought on multiple fronts.

Take music: the latest figures from the music industry estimate 95 per cent of music downloads are illegal. Meanwhile, pirated movies on disc and online are laughably easy to obtain and the practice is so widespread and accepted that the industry is going to considerable pains to remind us that it is actually against the law.

Then there's television. Increasingly, viewers are finding ways to avoid watching the ads that subsidise the production of many programs, cutting the economic ground from under the feet of the networks. Even the traditional book is under assault from sharing services such as Scribd.

No part of our culture, it seems, is immune to the transforming and challenging force labelled "Web 2.0" by the publisher Tim O'Reilly in 2004.

There is no precise definition of the term but it is generally accepted to mean the second generation of the web (following the dotcom bust) that has at its core information-sharing and collaboration.

Think of Facebook and Flickr, open-source software and Twitter, Wikipedia and blogging. Suddenly, the power to create and share content has been placed in the hands of anyone with access to the internet.

This has left the cultural gatekeepers – the television executives, newspaper owners, book publishers, record companies and movie producers – under siege like never before.

No longer do you need a printing press and a big distribution operation to begin publishing news – just start a blog.

Hankering to share your expertise on anything from the history of needlepoint to US foreign policy (and edit others' work)? Wikipedia is waiting to hear from you.

Fancy yourself as a musician? Record and distribute your songs via YouTube and iTunes. If you're good enough, so the theory goes, the audience will come.

It's the Nike approach to creativity – just do it – which is exactly what Jason van Genderen did. Van Genderen is a Newcastle filmmaker who last year won Tropfest New York with a 3-minute short film about homelessness.

Mankind Is No Island was widely acclaimed as the best entry that year and brought a welcome payday for van Genderen of $US20,000 ($24,000). The movie was shot entirely on a mobile phone, cost $57 to produce and has so far scored more than 600,000 views on YouTube.

That all this sharing and free distribution is unquestionably a good thing, however, is for many of the web generation less a theoretical proposition than an article of faith. Get on board or get out of the way is a widely held sentiment.

The editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, has been on board for most of his adult life and in 2005 he famously waxed rhapsodic about the benefits to come.

The web, he predicted, would become a megacomputer that encompassed the internet, "all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network".

"This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form," continued Kelly, suffused in his own hyperbole. "In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds."

Among many bloggers there is an almost unseemly glee at the perceived impending demise of all the old cultural industries, such as broadcast TV, the music industry and newspapers.

The heady scent of revolution is in the air and there is a sense that finally the People have pushed beyond the velvet rope shielding the cultural elites, who should get out of the way and stop spoiling the party for those people who get it.

It's a very seductive proposition. Now we can all show off our talents – something that has been denied us for so long by the cultural gatekeepers. (And there's no shortage of people out there who think their genius has gone unrecognised only because of the unfair system. Unfortunately, they are mostly wildly deluded – try sitting through an early round of Australian Idol or reading most self-published novels). The argument is that culture has been liberated and democratised, allowing those outside the mandated mainstream to have their say.

One indisputable effect has been the fragmentation of audiences. The era of the mass shared cultural experience has all but ended.

In the 1950s, more than 40 million American adults sat down simultaneously to watch I Love Lucy each week. From the standpoint of the networked 21st century, the concept of a compliant mass audience watching only what CBS wanted to show at a given time appears quaint if not downright bizarre.

Now, whatever your interest (which doesn't just equate to sexual predilection, despite what the moral panic merchants would have us believe), you can find others to share it with online.

Attempts by traditional gatekeepers to push back against this digital tide have so far proved by turns farcical and sinister – and almost wholly ineffective. Perhaps the best examples are the many, long-running lawsuits by the music industry against file-sharing that have had little effect other than to alienate fans.

In one case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother from Minnesota, was slapped with $US1.92 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. A more grotesque application of the maxim “pour encourager les autres” would be difficult to imagine.

And just last month the French lower house of parliament passed a law that would cut off internet access for those caught pirating movies and music. If the bill makes it onto the statute books, draconian is not the word. Offenders face having their access suspended, fines of up to almost $500,000 and even jail time. Oh, and parents will be held responsible if their children are caught with illegal downloads.

Not surprisingly, the French entertainment industry, driven by that most powerful of motivators – pure financial self-interest – is behind the legislation.

And it's that same fear-infused self-interest that is driving the response of the many others, which makes it all too easy to dismiss their arguments. If James Murdoch was at all surprised at the ridicule heaped on him after his recent intemperate spray at the BBC (he called the public broadcaster's growth plans "chilling"), he just hasn't been paying attention.

Other than those with a big financial interest in perpetuating the existing system, there are precious few voices raising concerns.

At the forefront of a small group of commentators is the journalist Andrew Keen, who has become a hate figure to many of the 2.0 crowd by suggesting in his book The Cult of the Amateur that the internet is “transforming culture into cacophony”. The French newspaper Libération went so far as to call Keen the "antichrist of Silicon Valley" and when I brought up his name with one leading internet figure he only half-jokingly exclaimed: "Oh, God, you mentioned Keen. Now I'll have to go shower."

Keen finds parallels between the internet and T. H. Huxley's infinite monkeys theory.

"Today's technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters," he writes. "Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren't quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers and the monkeys aren't quite monkeys but rather internet users."

These "exuberant monkeys" are producing an "endless forest of digital mediocrity", publishing everything from "uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels".

Keen is obviously a contrarian who has set out to tweak noses in often quite childish ways and that leads to many flaws in his argument. His blustering, provocative style has conveniently allowed his opponents not to take his proposition seriously. In web terms, he is a "troll".

Such fundamental questions, however, deserve to be shorn of the histrionics and given much closer attention.

Is culture in all its forms being dumbed down by a pernicious amateurism, as Keen contends? Is it really possible for the best to sink under the weight of D-grade user-generated content? Can readers, viewers and listeners be trusted to identify the best without the guiding hand of authority. Is elitism necessarily a bad thing?

And if the commercial underpinnings of, say, movie production collapse, does that matter? If blockbusters were to disappear and be replaced by low-budget independent productions, is that a problem?

Recently the board of Wikipedia, the user-created online encyclopedia and poster-child for Web 2.0, announced an editorial review system. At this stage these “flagged revisions” apply only to articles about living people but may conceivably be extended to other topics.

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” the board chairman, Michael Snow, was reported as saying.

The changes were mooted earlier this year by Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, touching off a major debate with plenty of accusations that he was sullying the purity of Wikipedia's original charter as a wholly open user-generated reference work.

This hybrid approach may be a clue to the existence of a middle path – neither an online free-for-all nor a return to the heavy hand of the cultural gatekeepers; a world in which the best of the old is melded with the best of the new.

It is indeed a nice idea that this unprecedented social and cultural experiment may turn out to be more evolution than revolution, but that may be all that it is – a nice idea. On the available evidence, the power and fury unleashed by the internet is not big on compromise, nor is it easy to predict where it will head next. We should be careful what we wish for. Source

Pentagon Wants ‘Space Junk’ Cleaned Up

The orbit around Earth is a very messy place and the Pentagon’s far-out research arm wants to do something about it. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put out a notice yesterday requesting information on possible solutions to the infamous space debris problem.

“Since the advent of the space-age over five decades ago, more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network,” the agency notes. “Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris.”

These figures do not even include the objects too small to count. Hundreds of thousands of these smaller objects are estimated to exist, and as debris hits other debris, it creates even more small pieces, exponentially increasing the objects that could threaten satellites and spacecraft.

Space debris has long been a concern as the number of satellites in orbit has increased over the years. But the issue was again highlighted in 2007, when a Chinese anti-satellite missile test created a massive debris field of some 40,000 pieces. The next year, the U.S. conducted its own shoot down of an errant satellite, creating yet another field of debris. The concern is that these pieces of debris could strike satellites, or a manned spacecraft, like the International Space Station. It doesn’t take much to cause a catastrophe; even something as small as a paint chip could prove potentially disastrous if it struck the space shuttle.

Darpa is looking for “solutions that could effectively remove significant amounts of debris in a cost-effective fashion.” No doubt, there will be a good mix of creative, unusual and bizarre suggestions. Source

Encrypting Messages In Our "How-to-Make-a-Human" DNA Instruction Manual

DNA isn't just a code, it's the ultimate information - the data without which the ability to perceive data wouldn't exist. We now have the ability to write our own messages into this biological blueprint, but there are important factors to consider before you start scribbling cellular graffiti.

The human genome contains about three quarters of a gigabyte of data, and it's pretty unflattering to find out that the "How to make YOU" instruction manual is less than a quarter of the size of an "X-Men: Wolverine" DVD. (But don't worry - the real "you" in your head is, even by the simplest estimate, at least seventy terabytes). Scientists have so far inserted the equation of relativity, their own names and even Latin poetry into the "junk" DNA of bacteria and plants.

Which is an extremely dangerous sentence: the idea of "junk" DNA is an extremely popular misconception which leaps from "we don't know what it does" to "it doesn't do anything." Research teams are continually discovering regions of "junk" which turned out to do something vital after all, almost as if it was unlikely we'd be saddled with 97% of our genomes doing nothing. We can confirm that regions of it don't seem to code for proteins or instructions, but until someone builds an organism without all the extra code we'll have to assume it's doing something. Or even better, try using the "extra" storage space for something else and let us know what happens.

The idea of encoding information in DNA is so spectacularly sci-fi that people can't help but come up with crazy applications - which is awesome. That's exactly what science should do! People want to record evolutionary archives of our innovations, coding cockroaches to carry our knowledge past any future catastrophes, while others only want to trademark their genetic innovations (an unsettling and unfortunately far more likely outcome), but the fact remains that DNA is still a terrible place to put information - if only because any species which could extract it knows at least as much as we do anyway.

Some say we should search our own selves for messages from extra-terrestrials, encoded messages from the alien creators of the human race. But the facts are:

1) Beware any idea that was actually used as a Star Trek plot once

2) The "aliens made us" theory is better suited to late-night radio talk shows

3) It could still be true, but if it is we'll find any such messages in the course of regular, real research into the code instead of hunting for a message

In fact, it's essential we don't start searching for scrawls inside our cells, because with seven hundred and fifty megabytes of data there'll be such a fantastic Nostradamus factor (finding messages in random garbage once you've already decided to) that anything identified will be an artifact of the observer.

A real application of genetic information is the idea of genetic computation - the idea of encoding a problem in DNA and evolving a solution. Obviously there's an immense amount of work in setting up such a computation (not only encoding the information, but designing a situation in which solving the problem is beneficial to the organism), but that's okay because it's only intended for use in otherwise "insoluble" problems - quandaries where the analytic methods fail and the computation time is longer than the expected endurance of the sun.

Evolution, after all, came up with things butterflies, pilot fish and duck-billed platypii - if anyone can come up with unexpected answers, it's nature. The great unkown is: will DNA and the ability to encrypt communication prove to be a constant throughout the Universe?