Category: Science and Technology

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The Earth’s rotation is slowing, so everyone gets an extra second this week

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BY ARIEL BOGLEAUSTRALIA

In case you need a little extra time this week, the last minute of Tuesday, June 30 will contain 61 seconds instead of the usual 60.

Atomic clocks around the world will coordinate the leap second, which is necessary to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — the system that guides most international civil times systems — synced with the Earth’s rotation.

On Tuesday, atomic clocks should read 23:59:59, then 23:59:60, before switching over to Wednesday with 00:00:00.

https://mashable.com/2015/06/29/tuesday-leap-second/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

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New privacy app takes a page from NSA technology

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By Rob Lever

Washington (AFP) – Before the National Security Agency began complaining about being shut out of encrypted devices, it helped develop software for secure communications that could be adapted by the private sector.

That technology is hitting the public this month in the form of a smartphone application called Scrambl3 from a California startup which claims its “dark Internet tunnel” thwarts snooping on voice calls and messages.

Scrambl3 was launched Monday as a stand-alone app for Android devices by the startup, USMobile, which describes it as a way to create “trusted connections on untrusted networks.”

The system creates the smartphone equivalent of a virtual private network to make messages invisible on the Internet, according to USMobile president and co-founder Jon Hanour.

“We want to provide the most private and most secure mobile program on the market,” Hanour told AFP.

“We think we have the best combination of anything that’s available today.”

https://news.yahoo.com/privacy-app-takes-page-nsa-technology-085850591.html

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Ridgewood STEM clubs are branching out

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MAY 28, 2015    LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, MAY 28, 2015, 3:11 PM
BY DARIUS AMOS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS

It might sound like a scene straight out of a science fiction film, but this weekend’s rise of the machines won’t be the result of a Hollywood blockbuster. The anticipated sights and sounds, instead, are the products of middle school creativity and ingenuity.

George Washington Middle School (GW) will be crowded Saturday afternoon with young scientists and engineers, most of them showing off their robotic creations at the second annual FIRST Robotics Showcase. Those not exhibiting and competing will simply be there for the show.

And based on last year’s inaugural event, there will be plenty in attendance.

“Last year was a tremendous success; we had almost 500 people come,” student Ashton Rollins said during a presentation to the Ridgewood Board of Education earlier this spring. A member of the GW STEM Club, Rollins noted that roughly eight new teams formed as a result of the 2014 showcase.

“In other words,” he said, “they were so influenced at our event that they wanted to have a team themselves.”

The showcase, which takes place from 1 to 3:30 p.m. inside the new gymnasium at GW, will boast New Jersey’s best robotics teams in all age groups. Teams will compete in several categories: Junior FIRST LEGO League, FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition.

A handful of teams from both Ridgewood middle schools are expected to compete, as are notable squads from Glen Rock and the Pascack Valley area. Last year’s event, which also took place at GW, attracted teams from as far as Livingston.

Enthusiasm for learning STEM topics – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – is the main draw to the Robotics Showcase, and many believe the excitement is contagious.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/education/ridgewood-stem-clubs-branching-out-1.1344511

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Living and working in paradise: the rise of the ‘digital nomad’

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Fed up with spending the 9 to 5 in a stuffy office? Anna Hart packs her Mac and follows the trend for extreme remote working – in Bali

By Anna Hart

7:00AM BST 17 May 2015

Typing these words, my forefinger sticks sweatily to the trackpad. When I glance up from the screen, I see steam rising from the neighbouring paddy field. As with all workplaces, there’s a steady hum of white noise: coffee being brewed, group meetings peppered with jargon such as “touch base”, “reach out”, “loop back” and “incentivise”.

But Hubud, AKA “Hub-in-Ubud”, Bali, isn’t a conventional office. It is a bamboo and wood building with an outdoor organic café and a pretty garden dotted with beanbags – and monkeys, as it is just 100m from Ubud’s famous Monkey Forest. For everyone who has ever come back from holiday and wished they could have stayed, I am living the dream – and working in paradise.

• Five reasons why everyone should live abroad at least once

This is one of a rapidly increasing number of co-working spaces, where freelancers, sole traders and small companies rent desks and share printers and coffee machines. But even within that hip, fast-evolving realm, Hubud is an outlier – and its 250-strong community believes that this highly covetable office environment is the workplace of the future. The diversity of this group also signals another change: that more and more jobs are becoming portable, possible to do at a digital distance – not just web designers and freelance writers but fashion designers, photographers, models, marketers and even a remote-working GP.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/11597145/Living-and-working-in-paradise-the-rise-of-the-digital-nomad.html

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THE HUMAN UPGRADE : The revolution will be digitized

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Spearheaded by the flood of wearable devices, a movement to quantify consumers’ lifestyles is evolving into big business with immense health and privacy ramifications

In San Diego

From the instant he wakes up each morning, through his workday and into the night, the essence of Larry Smarr is captured by a series of numbers: a resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute, a blood pressure of 130/70, a stress level of 2 percent, 191 pounds, 8,000 steps taken, 15 floors climbed, 8 hours of sleep.

Smarr, an astrophysicist and computer scientist, could be the world’s most self-measured man. For nearly 15 years, the professor at the University of California at San Diego has been obsessed with what he describes as the most complicated subject he has ever experimented on: his own body.

Using their ideas and their billions, the visionaries who created Silicon Valley’s biggest technology firms are trying to transform the most complicated system in existence: the human body.

Smarr keeps track of more than 150 parameters. Some, such as his heartbeat, movement and whether he’s sitting, standing or lying down, he measures continuously in real time with a wireless gadget on his belt. Some, such as his weight, he logs daily. Others, such as his blood and the bacteria in his intestines, he tests only about once every month.

Smarr compares the way he treats his body with how people monitor and maintain their cars: “We know exactly how much gas we have, the engine temperature, how fast we are going. What I’m doing is creating a dashboard for my body.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/05/09/the-revolution-will-be-digitized/

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Space Ventures Will Spawn First Trillionaire

The Robot from Lost In Space

MAY 3 2015, 10:32 AM ET
by KATIE KRAMER and NBC NEWS

A passion for exploration is the fuel to an innovative economy, says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In an interview with CNBC’s On the Money, the host of the new National Geographic Channel show StarTalk — based on Tyson’s podcast and Sirius XM radio show of the same name — described the dynamic implications of scientific discovery.

“You have to innovate,” said Tyson, arguably the most famous astrophysicist in America. When “an engineer comes out with a new patent to take you to a place — intellectually, physically … that has never been reached before, those become the engines of tomorrow’s economy.”

When it comes to space innovation, many of the headlines about exploration beyond Earth have been generated by private enterprises like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, tech giant Google and even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Separately, Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures, companies that offer tourism opportunities for non-scientists.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/cosmic-log/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-space-ventures-will-spawn-first-trillionaire-n352271

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As Hubble Space Telescope turns 25, N.J.-born developer works on its successor

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When Bill Ochs was 21 and fresh out of Fairleigh Dickinson University with an electrical engineering degree in 1979, he landed a job with a local government contractor, Bendix in Teterboro. He soon found himself developing the software that would keep the Hubble Space Telescope pointed in the right direction for 25 years, providing unimaginably beautiful images of intergalactic space.

Hubble, which was intended to have a useful life of 15 years, hits the quarter-century mark today, and scientists expect its nearly 8-foot mirror to keep peering into deep space and providing spectacular sights for at least five more years. (Norman/The Record)

https://www.northjersey.com/news/as-hubble-space-telescope-turns-25-n-j-born-developer-works-on-its-successor-1.1317475

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World Atlas ice loss claim exaggerated: scientists

World Atlas ice loss claim exaggerated: scientists
By Nina Chestney

(Reuters) – The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland’s ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said on Monday.

The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and significant shrinking could lead to a global rise in sea levels.

“While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available,” HarperCollins said on its website on Monday.

https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/us-atlas-ice-idUSTRE78I4UG20110919