http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...ingincellphones

Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones?

LiveScience Staff
livescience.com – Wed Jun 10, 1:03 pm ET

Forget fumbling with tiny cell phone keys. A prototype of a new application allows cell phone users to write short notes in the air and send them automatically to an e-mail address.

This represents just one possible step toward allowing people to naturally merge the real world with the information power of the Internet. Travelers and other mobile users could air-write notes to themselves rather than have to text on the run.

"By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air," said Sandip Agrawal, an electrical and computer engineering student at Duke University in North Carolina.

The air-writing app takes advantage of accelerometers already inside cell phones such as Apple's iPhone. Accelerometers normally keep track of phone movements and orientation, such as having the display screen rotate from portrait to landscape mode.

Speed writers may still want to stick with texting for now, because air-writers currently have to pause briefly between each letter and cannot use cursive. But researchers expect an improved app that will come with better algorithms and accelerometers.

Future versions of this PhonePoint Pen app may even allow users to take a photo with their phone and write a quick note on it.

Such interactivity has also emerged in the work of other research groups, such as MIT's Sixth Sense project, and may signal the new era of cyborg technologies. Applications that can piggyback on existing cell phone technology may also get an advantage.

"We're trying to get past the whole idea of typing on a keyboard or using a stylus to enter information into devices," said Romit Roy Choudhury, an electrical and computer engineer at Duke who acted as Agrawal's mentor.

Agrawal won an inaugural Hoffman + Krippner Award for Excellence in Student Engineering for his work on the application, at the 2009 Sensors Expo and Conference in Chicago on June 9.

Researchers expect the app to become available for download in the next several months. So if you like to jog and tweet on Twitter without running into trees, take note.

    * Video - Implanted. Enhanced. Invaded? Human-Robot Mergers
    * Cell Phones Allow Everyone to Be a Scientist
    * Robot News and Information

    * Original Story: Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones?

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Telescope blasts into space to find other Earths
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer – Sat Mar 7, 10:01 am ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA's planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, rocketed into space Friday night on a historic voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.

It's the first mission capable of answering the age-old question: Are other worlds like ours out there?

Kepler, named after the German 17th century astrophysicist, set off on its unprecedented mission at 10:49 p.m., thundering into a clear sky embellished by a waxing moon.

"It was just magnificent. It looked like a star was being formed in the sky," said Bill Borucki, Kepler's principal scientist. "Everybody was delighted, everybody was screaming, 'Go Kepler!'"

Kepler's mission will last at least 3 1/2 years and cost $600 million.

The goal is to find, if they exist, Earth-like planets circling stars in the so-called habitable zone — orbits where liquid water could be present on the surface of the planets. That would mean there are lots of places out there for life to evolve, Borucki said.

On the other hand, "if we don't find any, it really means Earths are very rare, we might be the only extant life and, in fact, that will be the end of 'Star Trek.' "

Once it's settled into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, Kepler will stare nonstop at 100,000 stars near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, between 600 and 3,000 light years away. The telescope will watch for any dimming, or winks, in the stellar brightness that might be caused by orbiting planets.

Astronomers already have found more than 300 planets orbiting other stars, but they're largely inhospitable gas giants like Jupiter. Kepler will be looking for smaller rocky planets akin to Earth.

Kepler is designed to find hundreds of Earth-like planets if they're common and, perhaps, dozens of them in the habitable zone, Borucki said. The telescope is so powerful that from space, NASA maintains, it could detect someone in a small town turning off a porch light at night.

It won't be looking for signs of life, though. That's for future spacecraft.

NASA was counting on a successful launch to offset the loss last week of the space agency's Orbiting Carbon Observatory. That environmental satellite ended up crashing into the Antarctic because of rocket failure. It was a different type of rocket than the one used for Kepler.

Everything seemed to go well with Kepler's launch.

___

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

video: http://www.yahoo.com/s/1039954
text: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...E5247NO20090305

Optimists live longer and healthier lives: study
Thu Mar 5, 2009 4:56pm EST
By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Optimists live longer, healthier lives than pessimists, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that may give pessimists one more reason to grumble.

Researchers at University of Pittsburgh looked at rates of death and chronic health conditions among participants of the Women's Health Initiative study, which has followed more than 100,000 women ages 50 and over since 1994.

Women who were optimistic -- those who expect good rather than bad things to happen -- were 14 percent less likely to die from any cause than pessimists and 30 percent less likely to die from heart disease after eight years of follow up in the study.

Optimists also were also less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes or smoke cigarettes.

The team, led Dr. Hilary Tindle, also looked at women who were highly mistrustful of other people -- a group they called "cynically hostile" -- and compared them with women who were more trusting.

Women in the cynically hostile group tended to agree with questions such as: "I've often had to take orders from someone who didn't know as much as I did" or "It's safest to trust nobody," Tindle said in a telephone interview.

"These questions prove a general mistrust of people," said Tindle, who presented her study Thursday at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting in Chicago.

That kind of thinking takes a toll.

"Cynically hostile women were 16 percent more likely to die (during the study period) compared to women who were the least cynically hostile," Tindle said.

They were also 23 percent more likely to die from cancer.

Tindle said the study does not prove negative attitudes cause negative health effects, but she said the findings do appear to be linked in some way.

"I think we really need more research to design therapies that will target people's attitudes to see if they can be modified and if that modification is beneficial to health," she said.

And she said while a pessimist might think, "'I'm doomed. There is nothing I can do,' I'm not sure that's true," Tindle said. "We just don't know."

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

Video: http://www.yahoo.com/s/1038592
Text: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/2949637...#storyContinued

Fertility clinic to offer custom-designed babies
updated 4:19 p.m. CT, Tues., March. 3, 2009
Associated Press

NEW YORK - Do you want blue eyes with your baby? That's one of the questions a fertility clinic will be asking when it begin offering custom-designed babies to would-be moms and dads.

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, who operates clinics in Manhattan and Los Angeles, says that within six months he plans to let customers choose their baby's eye, hair, and even skin color, according to the New York Daily News.

Steinberg, who helped produce the first test-tube baby, acknowledges the technology is not 100 percent perfect and says best results are couples with Scandinavian heritage, whose gene pools are least diluted.

Critics, though, have blasted the idea of designer babies, likening it to the pursuit of a master race.

---

Debunked: Unlike real archeological techniques that found a lost city off the coast of India reported in the BBC 2002, artifacts in Google Ocean’s mapping technology seemed to have served for tabloid gossip more than actual science.

Thanks to Phi for tipping us off.

---

http://www.techradar.com/news/inter...s-google-535617
Atlantis still a lost city, says Google
Despite what The Sun says about Bernie Bamford's discovery

Friday at 14:54 GMT

Google has denied that the fabled lost city of Atlantis has been 'discovered' via the recently released Ocean in Google Earth.

A number of UK tabloids got slightly ahead of themselves earlier today, claiming that a rectangular grid around the size of Wales 620 miles off the west coast Africa on Madeira Abyssal Plane was indeed the lost city of Atlantis.

The grid was spotted by Bernie Bamford from Chester while taking a virtual dip in Google Earth.

And while The Sun was quick to jump on the fact that Bamford claimed he had found a "man-made aerial map" of an underwater city and a number of other media outlets quoted curator of historical archaeology at New York State University saying that "the site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis," Google has quickly denied the possibility.

Google does the PR switch

Quick to capitalise on this unexpected publicity, Google's Laura Scott told TechRadar:

"It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth - a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species, a fringing coral reef off the coast of Australia, and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa, to name just a few.

"In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or seafloor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the seafloor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

So. To quickly recap. A man with a funny name in Chester didn't find Atlantis on the internet. But Ocean in Google Earth still rocks.
By Adam Hartley

---

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepag...icle2255989.ece

And you know if its in that celebrity gossip rag - excuse me - bastion of wisdom known as the Sun it just has to be true.  The surrounding media attention has been perhaps the most talk about a Sun article that has probably ever appeared on any semi-legitimate new source. 

Of course, its much more salacious to label it the lost city of Atlantis, but there does exist another immediate, more readily-digestible archeologically-based hypothesis.

Considering human migration and examining the surrounding areas, one logical connection may have to do with the Basque people.  The Basque people are relatively genetically, linguistically, and culturally isolated from the surrounding peoples - an argument that has been used in their independence movement in Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_people

“Since the Basques speak a non-Indo-European language and have the highest proportion of the Rh negative blood type of all the peoples of the world, they were widely considered to be a genetically isolated population, preserving the genes of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, until recent genetic studies found that modern Basques have a common ancestry with other Western Europeans.”

The Basque language is one language that doesn’t fit into the traditional evolutionary tracing of languages recently seen in another thread:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/images/indoeuro.jpg

---

Climate & geological change are quite capable of changing a city into a reef, or a fertile plain into a desert.

Let's just hope that it doesn't happen to northern Canada anytime soon. 

The underwater remains of an ancient city off the coast of India were reported in the BBC 2002:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
Saturday, 19 January, 2002, 06:33 GMT
Lost city 'could rewrite history'

The shipping rights in the arctic circle are a current area of international debate.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily...0127_954391.htm
Who Owns Rights to Melting Arctic?
As the ice melts, Russia, Canada, and the U.S. vie for shipping and natural resource rights around the North Pole

In the last decade, there have existed public announcements of the discovery of the 'Pain gene' & the 'Fear gene,' genetic strands that influence our decision making process and that have a role in defining what it means to be 'human.'

As with much of genetics, ethical questions surrounding the application of such scientific knowledge abound.

---

Thursday, 10 January, 2002, 18:19 GMT
'Pain gene' found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1753737.stm
    
Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2005, 00:07 GMT
Gene controlling fear discovered
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4449226.stm

---

Thursday, 10 January, 2002, 18:19 GMT
'Pain gene' found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1753737.stm

Scientists have found a gene whose absence can help reduce pain.

Tests on genetically engineered mice which lacked a particular gene showed a "dramatic" loss of sensitivity, appearing to feel up to 50% less pain compared to mice who had the gene.

The discovery by Canadian researchers could one day open the door for the development of drugs to help patients with terminal cancer, chronic backaches and other problems.

The gene concerned is DREAM (downstream regulatory element antagonistic modulator).

The DREAM gene blocks production of dynorphin, a chemical with pain-relieving effects produced in response to pain or stress.

In the mice which did not have the DREAM gene, more dynorphin was produced in the part of the spinal cord involved in transmitting and controlling pain messages.

The mice were discovered to have reduced sensitivity to all types of pain.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children and the Amgen Institute said the success in reducing neuropathic pain, sharp - chronic pain resulting from nerve injury - was particularly significant because there are currently no widely effective treatments for this kind of pain.

Different approach

Professor Michael Salter, director of the University of Toronto Centre for the Study of Pain and co-author of the study, said: "Pain is a huge, silent public health crisis that is only beginning to be addressed by researchers.

He added: "There's a great interest in this finding because it's so different from the traditional approaches researchers have been taking to pain management."

At the moment, patients experiencing severe pain are given drugs to control their condition.

A treatment based on the DREAM gene discovery could prove a breakthrough because the mice in the study did not become addicted to the pain control chemicals their bodies produced.

This, say researchers, may prove to be an advantage over the potentially addictive drugs such as morphine.

Professor Saltier said: "These findings point to a novel pharmacological approach to pain management where researchers will be looking for drugs that could block the ability of DREAM to bind to DNA or simply prevent the production of DREAM."

But such a treatment may be hard to develop because the DREAM gene works deep inside cells.

The research is published in the journal Cell.

---

Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2005, 00:07 GMT
Gene controlling fear discovered
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4449226.stm

Scientists have discovered a gene that appears to control whether fear reactions to impending danger are appropriate or not.

Mice lacking the gene stathmin appeared fearless in conditions that should instinctively inspire fear.

The gene is expressed in particularly high levels in a part of the brain, called the amygdala, known to be important in human fear.

The US team told Cell their findings could shed light on anxiety disorders.

Daredevil mice

The same researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute identified a similar gene a few years ago, called GPR that appeared to be important in the process of "learned fear".

This is where animals, including humans, learn over time that something is a threat or danger, as opposed to the instinctive fear which animals are born with.

GPR appeared to block the action of "circuitry" in the amygdala of the brain which learns fear.

Conversely, the newer gene discovered, stathmin, appears to help this circuitry.

Mice bred to lack stathmin showed abnormally low levels of anxiety in situations that would normally make a mouse very afraid, such as being in large open spaces - innate fear.

They also reacted less to learned fear.

In the study, this was a neutral tone that was played while the animals were delivered a mild electric shock.

The mice showed a decreased memory for the fearful situations and had difficulty recognising dangerous environments.

Their memory for things other than fear was not impaired, however.

Co-researcher Dr Gleb Shumyatsky, from Rutgers University Piscataway, New Jersey, said these mice could be used to study human phobias and anxiety-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Survival mechanism

"These animal models could be used to develop new anti-anxiety agents," he added.

He said that taken together, their work on genes and anxiety supported clinical data indicating that anxiety is a spectrum of disorders.

He said it was likely that each disorder would have a "unique molecular signature" and therefore require individually tailored drugs for treatment.

Professor Alexander Gardner, a clinical psychologist in Glasgow and member of the British Psychological Association, said: "There is already evidence that the amygdala is involved in fear.

"This is very interesting research indeed."

He said it was important for animals and humans to recognise and respond to fearful situations for survival.

However, he questioned whether fear could be truly innate.

For example, he argued that man was not naturally afraid of fire - man used it to be able to exist in colder climates - but we learn that it can be dangerous and therefore do fear it.

He suggested it might be that certain genes laid down a map in the brain for further acquisition of fear.

More in jet pack news:

---

German inventor designs jet pack propelled by water

Video: http://www.yahoo.com/s/1032181

Wired Text: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/02/...d-motion--.html

Fluid Motion: JetLev-Flyer H2O-Propelled Jet Pack
By Chuck Squatriglia February 02, 2009 | 5:02:03 PM

Jet packs are a cool idea too often undone by their voracious thirst for fuel, which limits your barnstorming to no more than a minute or so. A German entrepreneur has sidestepped that problem by using water pressure to create a "jet pack" he claims will stay aloft for hours.

Provided you're flying over a lake.

Lars Ramke says the JetLev-Flyer he unveiled at the big Dusseldorf boat show can reach an altitude of about 50 feet and a top speed of about 46 mph. Even more spectacular is his claimed range of 300 kilometers - which is about 186 miles for the metrically challenged.

So how's it work?

Ramke doesn't offer any details at his website, but according to Der Westen, a floating pump powered by a four-stroke engine (115 to 130 horsepower) sends water through a 140-foot-long hose to a pair of nozzles mounted on the "jet pack." It looks a lot like the "personal propulsion device" Canadian inventor Raymond Li patented about two years ago. Li calls it JetLev, for jet levitation.

Li has touted the safety of the contraption, noting that the pack floats, it has no moving parts and the water shoots out of the two nozzles at no more than 100 PSI. You're also no more than a few dozen yards above the water if something goes pear-shaped. That makes the risk a little more acceptable than, say, strapping on a hydrogen-peroxide pack and jetting across a gorge like Eric Scott or soaring over the alps or across the English Channel on homemade jet wings like Yves Rossy.

Ramke says the JetLev-Flyer is a breeze to operate, and the €100,000 ($128,000 U.S.) price tag includes "detailed instructions by a qualified personal trainer." At that price, its no surprise that Ramke told Spiegel most of the people buying them are Russian oligarchs.

See Also:

* Fusionman's Jet Wing Soars Over the English Channel
* Soaring Over the Alps on Homemade Jet Wings
* Jet Pack Flies (Two Feet) High
* Wired Video: Jet Pack Pilot Blasts Off
* Water-Jet Pack Patented. The Jet-Ski of 2020?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...n-identity.html

Pill to erase bad memories

By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 12:42 PM on 16th February 2009

A drug which appears to erase painful memories has been developed by scientists.

The astonishing treatment could help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder and those whose lives are plagued by hurtful recurrent memories.

But British experts said the breakthrough raises disturbing ethical questions about what makes us human.

They also warned it could have damaging psychological consequences, preventing those who take it from learning from their mistakes.

Dr Daniel Sokol, a lecturer in medical ethics at St George's, University of London, said: 'Removing bad memories is not like removing a wart or a mole. It will change our personal identity since who we are is linked to our memories.

'It may perhaps be beneficial in some cases, but before eradicating memories, we must reflect on the knock-on effects that this will have on individuals, society and our sense of humanity.'

Dutch researchers claim to have erased bad memories by using 'beta-blocker' drugs, which are usually prescribed to patients with heart disease.

Experiments on animals had already shown that the drugs - beta-adrenergic receptor blockers - can interfere with how the brain makes and remakes memories of frightening events.

In the latest study, Dr Merel Kindt of Amsterdam University tested the drugs on 60 men and women.

His team created fearful memories in volunteers by showing them pictures of spiders while giving them gentle electric shocks.

The volunteers were urged to 'actively remember' the images, creating a strong negative association between spiders and discomfort.

The following day the volunteers were split into two groups. One was given the beta blocker and the other a placebo pill before both were shown the same spider pictures.

The researchers recorded the level of fear in the volunteers by playing sudden noises and measuring how strongly they blinked.

A strong startle response showed they were in a fearful state, while a mild response showed they were calm.

The group given the beta blocker had a much weaker fear response than those given the dummy pill, the researchers report in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

A day later - once the drug was out of their systems - their fear response was tested again.

Once more, those given the beta blocker the previous day showed fewer signs of spider phobia, suggesting the memory was completely erased.

Beta blockers appear to work because each time someone recalls a powerful emotional memory the memory is 'remade' by the brain.

The drug interferes with this re-creation of the stressful memory - and prevents the brain renewing it.

In theory, it could eradicate memories of traumatic events that happened years ago. It might also help patients overcome phobias, obsessions, eating disorders and even sexual hang-ups.

Dr Kindt said: 'Traditionally, therapists seek to teach people with such disorders strategies to build new associations and block bad memories but the problem is the memories remain and people often relapse.'

It could be several years before doctors prescribe the drugs for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The scientists say more tests are needed to confirm the drug's memory- erasing properties. Dr Kindt said: 'The next steps are to look at how long the drug's effects on memory last, and testing the treatment in people who actually are suffering from some kind of disorder or phobia.'

But British experts warned the drug raises some difficult questions.

Professor John Harris, an expert in biological ethics at the University of Manchester, said: 'It is obviously up to the individual whether or not she wishes to risk the possible effects, including psychological discontinuity, of erasing unpleasant memories.

'An interesting complexity is the possibility that victims, say of violence, might wish to erase the painful memory and with it their ability to give evidence against assailants.

'Similarly criminals and witnesses to crime may, under the guise of erasing a painful memory, render themselves unable to give evidence.'

Paul Farmer, chief executive of the mental-health charity Mind, said he was concerned about the 'fundamentally pharmacological' approach to problems such as phobias and anxiety.

He told Channel 4 News that the unintended consequences 'could include the eradication of positive memories'.

Professor Neil Burgess of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience told the programme that wide-scale use of the drug was a long way off.

'All they've shown so far is that the increased ability to startle someone if they are feeling a bit anxious is reduced,' he said.

The ability to remove memories has been the stuff of science fiction for decades.

In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which starred Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, a couple used a technique to erase memories of each other when their relationship turned sour. 

You've probably heard of this by now.

Its actually starting to pile-up up there.  This is our history's first publicly reported accidental collision.

Iridium has many low orbit satellites.

---

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090212...mFzaG9mdXNydXM-

*

Crash of US, Russian satellites a threat in space
Seth Borenstein And Douglas Birch, Associated Press Writers - 1 hr 29 mins ago

MOSCOW - U.S. and Russian officials traded shots Thursday over who was to blame for a huge satellite collision this week that spewed speeding clouds of debris into space, threatening other unmanned spacecraft in nearby orbits.

The smashup 500 miles (800 kilometers) over Siberia on Tuesday involved a derelict Russian spacecraft designed for military communications and a working satellite owned by U.S.-based Iridium, which served commercial customers as well as the U.S. Department of Defense.

A prominent Russian space expert suggested NASA fell down on the job by not warning of the collision. But U.S. space experts said the Russian has the wrong agency.

The U.S. military tracks the 18,000 objects in orbit, monitoring only certain threats because it lacks the resources to do everything, said Maj. Regina Winchester, spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the military's Space Surveillance Network.

Iridium spokeswoman Elizabeth Mailander said the company can move any of its 65 satellites out of the way if it gets a precise warning ahead of a crash. Such a warning was not made Tuesday, Mailander said.

But the company has never redirected a satellite before because the warnings they get aren't precise enough and there are just too many satellites to be constantly rejiggering their orbit, she said.

"Ours was where it was supposed to be and it was functioning," Mailander said. She said Iridium hasn't talked with Russian space officials.

No one has any idea yet how many pieces of space junk were generated by the collision or how big they might be. But the crash scattered space junk in orbits 300 to 800 miles (500 to 1,300 kilometers) above Earth, according to Maj.-Gen. Alexander Yakushin, chief of staff for the Russian military's Space Forces.

Experts in space debris will meet next week in Vienna at a U.N. seminar to come up with better ways to prevent future crashes, said NASA orbital debris program manager Nicholas Johnson.

Igor Lisov, a prominent Russian space expert, said Thursday he did not understand why NASA's debris experts and Iridium had failed to prevent the collision, since the Iridium satellite was active and its orbit could be adjusted.

"It could have been a computer failure or a human error," he said. "It also could be that they only were paying attention to smaller debris and ignoring the defunct satellites."

But that job belongs to the U.S. Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network, which was created with NASA's help.

The network's top priority is protecting astronauts - warning if there is a threat to the international space station or manned spacecraft. And it gives NASA precise warnings for about a dozen satellites that could be maneuvered out of the way, something that happens once in a while, Johnson said.

There are 800 to 1,000 active satellites in orbit and about 17,000 pieces of debris and dead satellites, like the Russian one, that can't be controlled, he said. The U.S. space tracking network doesn't have the resources to warn all satellite operators of every possible close call, Johnson and Winchester said.

"It's unfortunate that we cannot predict all of the collisions all of the time," said Winchester.

A private Web site, named Socrates, does give daily risk of crash warnings for satellites and Iridium, with 65 satellites, frequently is in the top 10 daily risks, Johnson said. However, the Iridium satellite wasn't on Tuesday's warning list, he said.

Lisov said the debris may threaten a large number of earth-tracking and weather satellites in similar orbits.

"There is a quite a lot of satellites in nearby orbits," he told The Associated Press. "The other 65 Iridium satellites in similar orbits will face the most serious risk, and there numerous earth-tracking and weather satellites in nearby orbits. Fragments may trigger a chain of collisions."

Both the U.S. surveillance network and Russian Space Forces are tracking the debris, believed to be traveling at speeds of around 200 meters - or about 660 feet - per second.

NASA said it would take weeks to know the full magnitude of the crash, but both NASA and Russia's Roscosmos agencies said there was little risk to the international space station and its three crew members.

Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin noted the station's orbit has been adjusted in the past to dodge space debris.

The space junk also is unlikely to pose a threat to the space shuttle set to launch Feb. 22 with seven astronauts, U.S. officials said, although that issue will be reviewed.

The Iridium orbiter weighed 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms), and the decommissioned Kosmos-2251 military communications craft weighed nearly a ton. The Kosmos was launched in 1993 and went out of service two years later in 1995, Yakushin said.

Some Soviet-built, nuclear-powered satellites long out of action in higher orbits may also be vulnerable to collisions, Lisov said. If one of them collides with the debris, the radioactive fallout would pose no threat to Earth, he said, but its speeding wreckage could multiply the hazard to other satellites.

Iridium said the loss of the satellite was causing brief, occasional outages in its service and it expected to fix the problem by Friday. The Bethesda, Maryland-based company said it expected to replace the lost satellite with one of its eight in-orbit spares within 30 days.

The replacement cost for an Iridium satellite is between $50 million and $100 million, including the launch, said John Higginbotham, chief executive of Integral Systems Inc., which runs ground support systems for satellites.

___

AP Writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson in New York contributed to this report. AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed from Washington.

___

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

---

*This image provided by the European Space Agency shows and artist impression of catalogued objects in low-Earth orbit viewed over the Equator. Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites - one American, the other Russian - smashed into each other hundreds of miles above Siberia Tuesday Feb. 10, 2009. The collision was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said. The debris field shown in this image is an artist's impression based on actual data but not shown in their actual size or density.
(AP Photo/ESA)

Another technological alternative to the computer screen:

Perhaps Cryptos had a pair of these.

Virrago and mods: If less topics are preferred, this thread can be merged with the "MIT Students: Wearable Computer" thread.  http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300027697

---

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/121134

Contact lens TV in 10 years?

Wed Feb 11, 2009 11:31AM EST

Oh, the bother of having to be near an actual television when you want to watch a program! Researchers say those dark days may soon be behind us: Contact lenses that can beam video programming right into your eyeball may be just 10 years away from reality.

Ian Pearson, a futurist (not an engineer, mind you), says that body heat would provide all the energy needed to power the high-tech lenses. And that's not all: "Digital tattoos" could also be developed to allow wearers to literally feel the emotions that the director wants you to feel. Per the piece: "This would allow James Bond fans to feel the thrill of outdoing the enemy or sports fans to experience the elation of jubilant players."

Color me skeptical: Ten years seems like an awfully short time horizon for these developments. The technology for injecting an emotional state (er... legally and safely) via a skin patch is awfully out there, and contact lens TV suffers from the problem that the eye simply can't focus on objects that close to it. Some sort of projection system or complicated light-focusing arrangement could be a solution, but both of those technologies in a device the size of a contact lens are, again, currently far-fetched. People may also feel a bit squeamish about dropping a television into their eye socket... not to mention placing their emotional well-being in the hands of Hollywood.

The closest we can get to eyeball TV today? Head-mounted displays like the Vuzix line of "video eyewear." Throw in a super-sized Mountain Dew to simulate "the elation of jubilant players" and you're halfway to the future.

Video of one current Wearable Computer design

http://www.wired.com/video/latest-v...ter/10288173001

MIT Students: Wearable Computer
Added: Feburary 5, 2009
Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer

MIT students have been playing around with this concept for a while, and we've seen the essential ideas in movies, commercials, video games, the news, military tech, etc - each incarnation widening the possible applications & flexibility of computing.

Outside of the traditional screen, mouse, & keyboard (or cell-phone touch screen) computer interface, this version of the wearable computer consists of projector & camera. 

Hand gestures involving the index and thumb on each hand operate the user interface, as in the 2002 movie, Minority Report*.  Consider a touch screen, but instead using free space in which to perform the motions.

Use a wall as a screen: draw on the projected image with your finger.

Take a picture by making a box w/ your hand and a camera mounted on your head. 

Dial your cell phone on the palm of your hand.

Definitely check out this current version of the wearable computer in the video at the wired link:

http://www.wired.com/video/latest-v...ter/10288173001

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* Minority Report still:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090211.../us_korea_north

Ship movements signal possible North Korea missile test
By Jon Herskovitz – Tue Feb 10, 10:06 pm ET

SEOUL (Reuters) – Chinese fishing vessels have moved out of waters near a disputed sea border between the two Koreas, a South Korean military official said on Wednesday, which could signal a North Korean missile test is imminent.

North Korea usually orders its vessels to stay out of Yellow Sea waters off its west coast when it conducts short-range missile tests. China is the closest thing the North can claim as a major ally and is the impoverished state's biggest benefactor.

"The (Chinese) fishing boats have disappeared, but no other unusual moves have yet been detected," said an official with South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff who asked not to be named. The official would not comment on a possible missile test.

During its last test launch of short-range missiles in that area in October 2008, the North issued a no-sail order to its ships a few days before firing off missiles, South Korean government officials have said.

Impoverished North Korea, angry at the hard-line policies of the South's government, in recent weeks has stepped up tension by threatening to reduce its wealthy neighbor to ashes and making moves to test fire its longest-range missile.

Analysts said the steps were aimed at putting pressure on the South and at attracting the notice of new U.S. President Barack Obama, who is sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the region next week to discuss regional security concerns.

"We are hopeful that some of the behavior that we have seen coming from North Korea in the last few weeks is not a precursor of any action that would up the ante or threaten the stability and peace and security of the neighbors in the region," Clinton said at a new conference in Washington on Tuesday.

It takes weeks for North Korea to prepare a launch of its Taepodong-2 missile, which has never successfully flown but is eventually supposed to be able to hit U.S. territory. It was last fired in 2006, fizzling less than a minute after launch.

The U.S. military stepped up its monitoring of North Korea this week amid concerns of possible missile launches, a U.S. military official said.

The North can easily test-fire short-range missiles, with South Korean government officials telling a leading local daily they suspect such a test may take place soon near the disputed naval border called the Northern Limit Line (NLL).

The NLL was set unilaterally by U.N.-led forces at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War and the North has said it is illegal. The area was the site of deadly naval clashes between the two Koreas in 1999 and 2002.

The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan issued a statement after meeting in Seoul calling on North Korea to stop its provocations.

"The two shared the perception that it is undesirable for North Korea to create tension with hard-line comments and urged the North to act in a manner that would contribute to regional stability," their joint statement said.

(Additional reporting by Kim Junghyun and Jack Kim in Seoul and Arshad Mohammed and David Morgan in Washington)

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Nick Macfie)

http://www.livescience.com/health/0...-instincts.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...utinstinctswork

Study Suggests Why Gut Instincts Work
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 08 February 2009 08:08 pm ET

Sometimes when you think you're guessing, your brain may actually know better.

After conducting some unique memory and recognition tests, while also recording subjects' brain waves, scientists conclude that some gut feelings are not just guesswork after all. Rather, we access memories we aren't even aware we have.

"We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too," said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and co-researcher on the study. "Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level."

The findings were published online Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The research, done with only a couple dozen participants, adds to a growing body of conflicting evidence about decision-making. In one study done in 2007, researchers found that quick decisions were better than those given lots of thought. But a study last year suggested neither snap judgments nor "sleeping on it" trump good old-fashioned conscious thought.

The new study

During the first part of the memory test in the new study, participants were shown a series of colorful kaleidoscope images that flashed on a computer screen. Half of the images were viewed with full attention as participants tried to memorize them. While viewing the other half, the participants were distracted: They heard a spoken number that they had to keep in mind until the next trial, when they indicated whether it was odd or even.

In other words, they could focus on memorizing half of the images but were greatly distracted from memorizing the others.

A bit later, they viewed pairs of similar kaleidoscope images in a recognition test.

"Remarkably, people were more accurate in selecting the old image when they had been distracted than when they had paid full attention," Paller said. "They also were more accurate when they claimed to be guessing than when they registered some familiarity for the image."

Splitting attention during a memory test usually makes memory worse.

"But our research showed that even when people weren't paying as much attention, their visual system was storing information quite well," Paller said.

The brain's role

During the tests, electrical signals in the brain were recorded from a set of electrodes placed on each person's head. The brain waves during implicit recognition were distinct from those associated with conscious memory experiences. A unique signal of implicit recognition was seen a quarter of a second after study participants saw each old image.

Other related research has shown that amnesia victims with severe memory problems often have strong implicit memories, Paller and his colleague, Joel L. Voss of the Beckman Institute, said in a statement.

"Intuition may have an important role in finding answers to all sorts of problems in everyday life," Paller said.

• Brain News and Information
• 5 Things You Must Never Forget
• Memories: News and Information

Ancient Whales Gave Birth on Land

http://www.livescience.com/animals/...ale-fossil.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...gavebirthonland

Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com – Tue Feb 3, 8:10 pm ET

More than 47 million years ago, a whale was about to give birth to her young ... on land. That's according to skeletal remains of a pregnant cetacean whose fetus was positioned head-down as is the case for land mammals but not aquatic whales.

The teeth of the fetus were so well-developed that researchers who analyzed the fossils think the baby would have been born within days, had its mom not died.

The fossil discovery marks the first extinct whale and fetus combination known to date, shedding light on the lifestyle of ancient whales as they made the transition from land to sea during the Eocene Epoch (between 54.8 million and 33.7 million years ago).

Philip Gingerich, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his team discovered the pregnant whale remains in Pakistan in 2000, and then in 2004, Gingerich's co-authors and others found the nearly complete skeleton of an adult male from the same species in those fossil beds. The adult whales are each about 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) long and weighed between 615 and 860 pounds (280 and 390 kg), though the male was slightly longer and heavier than the female.

(Gingerich is also director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology.)

Confusing find

On the dig that ultimately yielded the pregnant whale, Gingerich and his team first spotted what looked like a line of chalk on the ground surface, which later turned out to be the teeth of the whale fetus.

"Very quickly I got into the baby's teeth," Gingerich told LiveScience. "Then I kept going around it, and the ribs seemed too big for the size of the animal and they were all going the wrong way. So I have to say I spent the whole day excavating this thing confused about what in the world was going on here."

Soon after, Gingeric discovered another, larger, skull, and he realized the fetus was still inside its mother.

The new species, now called Maiacetus inuus, is a member of the Archaeoceti, a group of cetaceans (an animal group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises) that predate modern toothed and baleen whales. Archaeocetes had mouths full of several types of teeth, as well as nostrils near the nose tip. Both features are seen in land mammals but not in today's whales.

Like other archaeocetes, the newly discovered whale was equipped with four legs modified for foot-powered swimming (sort of like climbing, or scrambling, up a steep hill but instead in water). While the whales likely could support their weight on their flipper-like limbs, they probably couldn't go far on land.

"They clearly were tied to the shore," Gingerich said. "They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."

Land delivery

The team suggests that Maiacetus fed at sea and came ashore to rest, mate and give birth.

The head-first position of the fetus matches what is found in many land animals, particularly the artiodactyls (pigs, deer and cows), which are thought to have given rise to ancient whales. Human babies also emerge head first, ideally.

Scientists speculate that a head-first orientation allows land mammals to breathe even if they get stuck in the birth canal.

That's not the case underwater. "If you're born in the water you don't want the head out away from the mother until it's going to pop free, because you don't want it to drown," Gingerich said.

In addition, tail-first delivery in modern whales and dolphins would ensure the baby is facing in the same direction as its mother who is likely swimming. To keep mom and baby from getting separated, tail-first delivery would be optimal, Gingerich said.

The research, published in the Feb. 4 issue of the online journal PloS ONE, was funded by the Geological Survey of Pakistan, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

    * Whale News, Information and Images
    * Early Whales Had Legs
    * Why Whales Sing

    * Original Story: Ancient Whales Gave Birth on Land

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...templelocations

How Ancient Greeks Chose Temple Locations
Graciela Flores
Natural History Magazine
LiveScience.com – Sat Jan 31, 1:10 pm ET

To honor their gods and goddesses, ancient Greeks often poured blood or wine on the ground as offerings. Now a new study suggests that the soil itself might have had a prominent role in Greek worship, strongly influencing which deities were venerated where.

In a survey of eighty-four Greek temples of the Classical period (480 to 338 B.C.), Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon in Eugene studied the local geology, topography, soil, and vegetation - as well as historical accounts by the likes of Herodotus, Homer, and Plato - in an attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: why are the temples where they are?

No clear pattern emerged until he turned to the gods and goddesses. It was then that he discovered a robust link between the soil on which a temple stood and the deity worshiped there.

For example, Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility, and Dionysos, the god of wine, both were venerated on fertile, well-structured soils called Xerolls, which are ideal for grain cultivation.

Artemis, the virgin huntress, and her brother Apollo, the god of light and the Sun, were worshiped in rocky Orthent and Xerept soils suitable only for nomadic herding.

And maritime deities, such as Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Poseidon, the sea god, were revered on Calcid soils on coastal terraces too dry for agriculture.

The pattern suggests that the deities' cults were based on livelihood as much as on religion. And, says Retallack, temple builders may have chosen sites to make the deities feel at home.

The findings were detailed in the journal Antiquity.

Not quite 007 Die Another Day set quality*, but still pretty cool.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2009013..._20090131201854

Luxury igloos chill out the Davos crowd
by Andre Lehmann Andre Lehmann   – Sat Jan 31, 3:17 pm ET

DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) – Perched high above the five-star hotels and heated debate amongst global leaders in the Swiss resort of Davos, an igloo hotel offers the chance to chill out and enjoy life as an Eskimo might.

Set in the midst of the groomed, snow-clad ski slopes 2,600 metres up (8,500 feet), where temperatures sometimes hang around minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit) during the daytime, the cluster of igloos nonetheless takes a few liberties with the genuine polar experience.

Iglu-Dorf is built out of packed snow, but the network of 15 igloos linked by tunnels looks more like a cross between neolithic caves and an eco-housing complex perched in the Alps.

They also offer some creature comforts that are not so common on the wild expanse of polar icecap, such as a sauna and whirlpool bath. And they were not hewn out of ice.

"We built the complex in five weeks using giant inflatable balloons which were then covered with snow," explained Alexander Lau, one of the staff at the Davos igloos.

"Building in a traditional manner would have taken us all winter," the tanned snowboarder grinned.

The balloons were covered by the snowploughs used to prepare the ski runs every night, and the cold did the rest.

Once the purpose-built plastic moulds were deflated, the ideal home appeared: rooms, bathrooms, bar, restaurant, an even a conference room.

Inside, four Swiss couples were enjoying a rather more manageable minus five degrees (23 Fahrenheit) as they embarked on their overnight stay.

"I was expecting anything but this," said Marc, whose wife offered him the frozen night out as a present.

"I'm surprised by the beauty of the decoration and the size of the rooms, I never imagined you could build such enormous igloos," he added, sitting on a chamois leather-clad bench carved with a chainsaw.

The igloo hotel was born out of a bet. Adrian Guenter, a Swiss snowboarding fanatic, swore he would be the first on the slopes in the morning so he built an igloo nearby. Over the years, it turned into a lucrative business.

Thirteen years on, Guenter presides over Iglu-Dorf, a thriving company that now has four village-hotels in Switzerland, one in Germany and, for the first time this season, a hotel in the tiny principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees.

Last year, 9,000 people spent a night in accommodation ranging from a more summary standard igloo (119 euros on weekends) to the "romantik-iglu plus" (339 euros) complete with candles, carved features, animal skins, a private whirlpool and even the luxury of a toilet.

While the wind howled relentlessly outside, the last guests left the bar or sauna for their private igloos, to slip into sleeping bags fit for a polar expedition - "minus 50 certified" according to Lau.

The next morning, the first clients emerged from an icy night. "I didn't manage to sleep," muttered a bleary-eyed Conny, while her husband, Fredi, claimed he had spent "a very good night."

The prospect of the bitter cold seems to do little to deter the more adventurous winter holidaymakers.

"The demand for our igloo stays is growing," said Joern Grundmann, the manager of the Davos igloo hotel.

As a result, the Swiss luxury igloos are on their way to the mountains behind the Russian city of Sochi, the Black Sea resort that will host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

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* Die Another Day movie set; Davos is rustic in comparison to this make-believe James Bond set:

I've seen this blanket with sleeves product advertised on TV, and it makes the wearer look like an ancient druid or some inhabitant of a futuristic totalitarian society.

Now, the "newspaper" (and that term applies loosely), [the] "The USA Today," is advertising & hyping the Snuggie up by claiming there is a Snuggie-mania sweeping the land.  Personally, I have not seen evidence of such Snuggie-maniacal behavior.

"Snuggie gets a warm embrace from pop culture"
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifest...m?se=yahoorefer

YouTube: The Cult of Snuggie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Ox...feature=related

Snuggie Sightings
http://snuggiesightings.com/snuggie/

Compare the Snuggie to the Stonecutters costume from the Simpsons episode, Homer the Great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_the_Great

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Legol...r3821463303.jpg

"More than a thousand mini-figures are shown on display as Legoland unveils a replica of the 56th presidential inauguration in Carlsbad, California January 16, 2009."

First reported for public knowledge around 2006, the possibility of a material science cloaking technology exists and has been a hot topic in the mainstream media in recent years.

off-topic thread from 2006 regarding original announcement:

http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300004896

Announced here is another application regarding related communication signal transmission.

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Cloaking device may make cell phone static vanish (Reuters)
Posted on Thu Jan 15, 2009 2:08PM EST

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090...cloaking_device

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new light-bending material has brought scientists one step closer to creating a cloaking device that could hide objects from sight.

Beyond possible military applications, it also might have a very practical use by making mobile communications clearer, they said on Thursday.

"Cloaking technology could be used to make obstacles that impede communications signals 'disappear,'" said David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the study published in the journal Science.

Smith was part of the same research team that in 2006 proved such a device was possible.

He said the new material is easier to make and has a far greater bandwidth. It is made from a so-called metamaterial -- an engineered, exotic substance with properties not seen in nature.

Metamaterials can be used to form a variety of "cloaking" structures that can bend electromagnetic waves such as light around an object, making it appear invisible.

In this case, the material is made from more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass material arranged in parallel rows on a circuit board.

The team, which included Ruopeng Liu of Duke University and T.J. Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, in lab experiments aimed microwaves through the new cloaking material at a bump on a flat mirror surface. That prevented the microwave beams from being scattered and made the surface appear flat.

Smith said the goal was not to make something visible disappear. Cloaking, he said, can occur anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum.

"Humans 'see' using visible light, which has wavelengths just under a micron (a millionth of a meter). But cell phones and other wireless devices 'see' using light that has a wavelength on the order of many centimeters," Smith said in an e-mail.

He said objects can block the "view" of these devices, making mobile phone communications more difficult.

"You might have two or more antennas trying to 'see' or receive signals, one being blocked by the other," he said. "You could imagine adding cloaks that would make one antenna invisible to the next, so that they no longer interfered."

Smith said the notion of a device that makes objects invisible to people is still a distant concept, but not impossible.

"This latest structure does show clearly there is a potential for cloaking -- in the science fiction sense -- to become science fact at some point," he said.

While the study's funders included Raytheon Missile Systems and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Smith said the technology is not intended to replace "stealth" technology.

"Just about all technologies that have any application, naturally have potential in military applications," he said.

"If this has an impact on communications applications, even commercial, those same applications presumably exist in defense contexts."

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Vicki Allen)

Someone takes his education very seriously...

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video report: http://www.yahoo.com/s/1012413

text: http://www.wtop.com/?nid=600&sid=1565807

6-year-old takes family car after missing bus
January 6, 2009 - 3:45pm

WICOMICO CHURCH, Va. (AP) - A 6-year-old Virginia boy who missed his bus tried to drive to school in his family's sedan _ and crashed. His parents were charged with child endangerment. State police said the boy suffered only minor injuries and authorities drove him to school after he was evaluated at a local hospital for a bump on his head. He arrived shortly after lunch, Sgt. Tom Cunningham said.

It happened around 7:40 a.m. Monday on Route 360, about 61 miles east of Richmond.

The boy, whose name wasn't released, missed the bus, took the keys to his family's 2005 Ford Taurus and drove nearly six miles toward school while his mother was asleep, police said.

He made at least two 90-degree turns, passed several cars and ran off the rural two-lane road several times before hitting an embankment and utility pole about a mile and a half from school.

The boy told police he learned to drive playing Grand Theft Auto and Monster Truck Jam video games.

"He was very intent on getting to school," said Northumberland County Sheriff Chuck Wilkins. "When he got out of the car, he started walking to school. He did not want to miss breakfast and PE."

His parents, Jacqulyn Deana Waltman, 26, and David Eugene Dodson, 40, are each charged with child endangerment, Wilkins said. Waltman is being held without bond. Dodson was released on a $5,000 bond.

It was not clear if they had attorneys.

The boy and his 4-year-old brother were placed in protective custody.

"This really is a story of miracles," Wilkins said. "The Lord was with him, along with everybody else on the highway."

What else is new...

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http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20081...plorer_security

Serious security hole in Internet Explorer not fixed yet

SAN FRANCISCO - Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday.

The flaw lets criminals commandeer victims' machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc.

The sites are mostly Chinese and have been serving up programs that steal passwords for computer games, which can be sold for money on the black market. However, the hole is such that it could be "adopted by more financially motivated criminals for more serious mayhem — that's a big fear right now," Paul Ferguson, a Trend Micro security researcher, said Monday.

"Zero-day" vulnerabilities like this are security holes that haven't been repaired by the software makers. They're a gold mine for criminals because users have few ways to fight off attacks.

The latest vulnerability is noteworthy because Internet Explorer is the default browser for most of the world's computers. Also, while Microsoft says it has detected attacks only against version 7 of Internet Explorer, which is the most widely used edition, the company warned that other versions are also potentially vulnerable.

Microsoft said it is investigating the flaw and is considering fixing it through an emergency software patch outside of its normal monthly updates, but declined further comment. The company is telling users to employ a series of complicated workarounds to minimize the threat.

Many security experts, meanwhile, are urging Internet Explorer users to use another browser until a patch is released.

___

On the Net:

Microsoft's advisory:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/se...ory/961051.mspx

This is just an idea, take it or leave it.

Daily events no longer exist in the form they once did.  This thread concerns attendance of future plot-related events and the evaluation of what succeeded and failed in the attendance of past live events.

On the importance of advertising events if one would wish to reach a larger customer base:

Advertising matters.  If one were unable or unwilling to advertise a product, one should accept a lower minimum rate of return on the product's success.

A few suggestions of some straightforward advertising concepts are included below after justification of why the advertising of daily-events would be a concern for a manager of an MMO.

Hypothesis:  Event attendance would be boosted with advertising and announced time/date advanced warning of events.

This theory can be seen to correspond with the standard techniques from the field of Marketing and might be evidenced by the large turnout for the all-operative party and the 11.3 organizational meetings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing#Advertising

One astute cause of concern that was pointed out in another recent thread in the development roundtable (among many other places) consists in the sincere observation that the same (roughly) dozen players attended past live events.

If an arbitrary product successfully develops a returning client base and establishes a goal to expand that number, Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) exists as only a fraction of possible forms of advertising that would accomplish this goal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_mouth

In the example of MxO daily events, the returning clientele can be represented by the number, a dozen; Word of Mouth Marketing would be represented by the players telling their faction about an event.  An example of impairment to WOMM would be classifying the passing of advanced warning of a daily event as a potentially ban-able offense or the consequence of client being asked to leave LESIG. 

An MMO where daily events act as a differentiating feature from the competition and a strong selling point to potential customers should invest thought into the advertising of the daily event.

Suggested ways that an MMO with daily events could advertise those daily events:

Out of game:

Headline on the homepage front-page.

A row of text on the top one-third of the MxO homepage, Data Node One, advertises the subject of the event of the day, the time, and the meeting location of the event.  This is analogous to a headline in a daily paper or periodical. 

A client or a potential client that checks the front-page of the homepage would see immediately what was going on that day and observe that the MMO was a vibrant and dynamic place worthy of subscription.  On the other hand, an MMO with a static front-page would immediately suggest the opposite to a potential client.

RSS feed.

In an age where Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices are common, expansion of the simple row of text on the front-page to include an RSS feed would allow instant communication and advertising directed towards clients and potential clients with RSS running on their phones and computers.

Text-messages and real world e-mails.

Any product can benefit from a good mailing list.  Clients or potential clients would have the ability to sign-up for a real-world mailing list or text-messages.  Signing up for a list or being removed from the lists should be a tolerable process for the consumer to avoid negative blowback.

Forums.

Analogous to the Live Events forum, posts by moderators would announce an events time and location.  The post would have a link to it on the front-page headline, RSS feed, text-message, or real world e-mail.  This was successful in the recent 11.3 meetings and the all-operative party

In-game:

Message of the Day:  Evidence that this would increase event attendance exists in the successful implementation during the 11.3 meetings and the all-operative party.

Billboards in-game.  With some creativity, billboards that would be obvious to a redpill character, but veiled to a bluepill could advertise from the schedule of live events.

System e-mails to the players of a given organization and with necessary rep.

System chat used consistently throughout the day.  System messages shouldn't just be introduced moments before an event, but in the hours leading up to an event.

Advertising matters.  Advertising shows people that a manufacturer is confident in his product and shows people that the manufacturer is willing to take the steps to introduce people to the product.  Advertising can convey information regarding improvements to and the merits of a product.  Often, advertising of a quality product can be as important as the quality product itself.

Building a bigger client base through successful advertising takes effort and persistence, but with the right steps and a well-made product, one can be confident that such work would be rewarded.

Thank you for your time and patience.

How do you define 'real?'

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081202...n_body_swapping

Body-swap illusion tricks mind in new study

By KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writer Karl Ritter, Associated Press Writer   – 2 hrs 3 mins ago

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much. Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm's renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.

"We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies," project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. "To study this scientifically we've used tricks, perceptual illusions."

It sounded intriguing enough for me to try it, though entering the laboratory on Monday, I was having second thoughts.

The first props I saw were two kitchen knives, three naked dummies and a prosthetic hand sticking out from behind a curtain.

"You have the right to say stop at anytime if you feel uncomfortable," said Ehrsson's colleague, Valeria Petkova, as she rubbed my left hand with electrolytic gel and attached electrodes to the middle and index fingers.

She assured me I was not in any danger. Still, a nervous tingle rushed through my body as she placed the headset over my eyes.

In the first experiment, the goggles were hooked up to CCTV cameras fitted to the head of a male mannequin, staring down at its feet. Through the headset I saw a grainy image of the dummy's plastic torso. I tilted my head down to create the sensation I was looking down at my own body.

At that point, it didn't feel very real. But when Petkova simultaneously brushed markers against my belly and that of the mannequin, the effect started setting in. As my brain processed the visual and tactile signals, I had a growing impression that the mannequin's body was my own.

That was good fun, until the gleaming blade of a bread knife entered my field of vision. Petkova slid it across the dummy's stomach, sending shivers down my spine and a pulse of anxiety through the electrodes. My heightened stress level was illustrated by a spike in a computer diagram shown to me after the experiment.

"Approximately 70-80 percent of the people experience the illusion very strongly," Petkova said.

Apparently, I was one of them.

The second experiment was more benign. This time my headset was connected to cameras mounted on a round hat that Petkova was wearing. We faced each other, extended our right arms and shook hands.

Now that was weird: I was supposed to have the sensation of shaking hands with myself. The illusion wasn't perfect as I couldn't quite recognize Petkova's grip as my own, even though that's what the goggles meant to make me believe.

Perhaps the session was too short. The actual study, in which 87 volunteers participated, consisted of repeated sessions that gradually provided more accurate data. The results were published in PLoS One, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.

The principle finding was that under certain conditions a person can perceive another body as his or her own, even if it is of an opposite gender or an artificial body.

"These findings are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that make us feel that we own our entire body," the study said.

Ehrsson said the study built on a previous experiment known as the "rubber hand illusion" in which participants were manipulated to experience a rubber hand as their own.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, said the Karolinska study was a "step up" from other research on the subject.

"This goes beyond other recent studies, where you've taken ownership of rubber hands and rubber legs," said Spence, who was not involved with the study.

His only concern was whether there might be any lasting effect on participants.

"The questions is what happens if you did it much longer? If you were in there for days and weeks. Would it be like something out of Total Recall?" Spence said, referring to the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger science fiction movie about a virtual vacation that turns into a nightmare.

Ehrsson suggested the findings could be applied in research on body image disorders by exploring how people become satisfied or dissatisfied with their bodies. Another possible application could be developing more advanced versions of computer games such as Second Life, he said.

"It could lead to the next generation of virtual reality applications in games, where people have the full-blown experience of being the avatar," Ehrsson said.

Quite a hot topic in the mainstream in recent years:

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Yahoo, AP: Micro Aerial Vehicles

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Micro...eab1f1b120d00b1

"In this photo, taken from video of computer animation and released by the U.S. Air Force, shows the next generation of drones, called Micro Aerial Vehicles, or MAVs. The MAVs could be as tiny as bumblebees and capable of flying undetected into buildings, where they could photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists. U.S. military engineers are trying to design flying robots disguised as insects that could one day spy on enemies and conduct dangerous missions without risking lives."

---

Of course, not exactly new. 

google images: cia dragonfly

For example:

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From Wired

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/...d-power-fo.html

As far back as the 1970's the CIA were experimenting with a micro air vehicle which looked like a dragonfly. Flight International reported last year:

Developed during the 1970s, the CIA has displayed a mock-up of the micro UAV in its museum at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia since 2003. However until now no media organisation has been given access to the material that proved that the artificial dragonfly had been flight tested.

…. In the 1970s the CIA was interested in the dragonfly concept as a small unmanned surveillance device. Flight cannot reveal exactly what materials have been seen, but can confirm the four-winged robotic insect achieved sustained flight…. The CIA's entomopter dragonfly's power supply and actuation system for its wings are still highly classified subjects.

The CIA drone really does look like a real dragonfly – see the photo to the left. The problem was apparently with the flight control system, as the craft could not cope with crosswinds. This type of problem can be solved much more easily with modern electronics. The big issue with a craft so small is the power supply. Until we can get something as compact and efficient as the biological version (and there already ecobots that power themslves by digesting insects), the answer for robotic insects is likely to be beamed power.

Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com 1 hour, 21 minutes ago

A researcher has come up with some simple math that sucks the life out of the vampire myth, proving that these highly popular creatures can't exist.

University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou's work debunks pseudoscientific ideas, such as vampires and zombies, in an attempt to enhance public literacy. Not only does the public believe in such topics, but the percentages are at dangerously high level, Efthimiou told LiveScience.

Legend has it that vampires feed on human blood and once bitten a person turns into a vampire and starts feasting on the blood of others.

Efthimiou's debunking logic: On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600.  A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.

If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect.

"In the long run, humans cannot survive under these conditions, even if our population were doubling each month," Efthimiou said. "And doubling is clearly way beyond the human capacity of reproduction."

So whatever you think you see prowling around on Oct. 31, it most certainly won't turn you into a vampire.

Full Frightening Coverage

• Original Story: Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility, Scientist Says

The device [image] only works in the microwave range of light, so cloaked objects are still visible to humans. Also, it only works in two dimensions and only for microwaves moving in a plane. A three-dimensional invisibility cloak would hide an object completely.The microwave cloak is also slightly reflective and casts a partial shadow.

Despite these shortcomings, however, the new device is "a very good achievement," said Ulf Leonhardt, a theorist at the University of St. Andrews in England who was not involved in the study.

"It's surprising that it's as simple as it is and that it works so well," Leonhardt said in a related news article about the work in the journal Science.

The achievement, reported online today by the journal, comes five months after the same team published a study detailing the precise mathematical specifications a needed to build such a cloaking device.

Metamaterials

The apparatus was made using "metamaterials," artificial materials engineered to have precisely patterned surfaces that interact with and manipulate light in novel ways.

Although called a cloak, the device is not something that can be worn. Rather, it consists of a series of concentric circles, made of copper rings and wires patterned onto sheets of fiberglass, and resembles a loosely coiled reel of film.

The patterns enable the manipulation of light, and the size of the patterns determines which wavelengths of light can be manipulated. Smaller patterns affect shorter the wavelengths. Microwaves have relatively long wavelengths and can be affected with metamaterials having relatively large patterns. Manipulating visible light, which has much shorter wavelengths, will require metamaterials with much finer patterns.

While making those finer patterns is possible with current nanomanufacturing technologies, the metals used to make the microwave cloak would behave differently with visible light, Smith said.

"They act very differently at optical wavelengths; they become very absorptive. A cloaked object would just become very opaque, rather than transparent," he told LiveScience.

But even if metamaterials are made that can deflect visible light, don't expect the kind of invisibility offered by Harry Potter's cloak or Star Trek cloaking devices any time soon.

Human eyes are sensitive to many different wavelengths of light, as evidenced by the rainbow of colors that we see, and it's still uncertain if metamaterials can deflect so many wavelengths simultaneously.

Still useful

But even imperfect cloaking devices might be useful, the researchers say. Cloaks that deflect radio waves could render an object invisible to radar or improve cell phone receptions by rerouting signals around obstructions. They might also be used to protect people from penetrating and harmful radiation.

"If you knew that you had radiation of a certain bandwidth frequency, you could have it skirt around some region that you wanted shielded," Smith said.

The team says the next step is to create a cloak that works in three dimensions and to perfect the cloaking effect.

• Original Story: Scientists Create Cloak of Partial Invisibility

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Science, Animal and Dinosaur Pictures, Science Videos, Hot Topics, Trivia, Top 10s, Voting, Amazing Images, Reader Favorites, and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!

OSLO (AFP) - Attack the causes of poverty and you remove the roots of conflict -- that is the message the Nobel Committee wanted to send out by awarding its Peace Prize to the creator of a micro-credit scheme which benefits millions, analysts said on Friday.

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, the so-called "Banker to the Poor", and the Grameen Bank he founded three decades ago were the surprise winners of the award for pioneering a system of small-scale loans that has helped 6.6 million people escape the grind of poverty.

As the head of the Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, said: "Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty."

A glance at recent Peace Prize winners reveals a shift in emphasis in the thinking of the secretive five-member committee away from the classic role of peacemaker, as it has honoured people working in the fields of human rights and the environment.

Asle Sveen, a Norwegian historian who closely follows the Nobel Prize, told AFP: "It is the first time that the fight against poverty has been rewarded in itself.

"There were enough good nominations in the area of conflict resolution in the strictest sense but the Nobel Committee is increasingly taking the fight to the fundamental reasons for which war is waged.

"It is not enough to make peace, this peace must be a just peace and the causes of war, such as hunger and poverty, must be treated at their roots."

Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai was another surprise winner in 2004 and the latest award shows that the Nobel Committee is moving with the times, said Sverre Lodgaard, the director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

"Challenges to peace have become different over the years. We have become more aware of new connections which impact on our security.

"Peace is not just the absence of war but also the absence of reasons for having a war. The committee has been good at updating its concept of peace," Lodgaard said.

"The prize this year is distinct because it's really focused on Yunus' contribution to alleviate poverty.

"There is a good justification for that. There are more lives lost because of extreme poverty than because of war."

He said the Nobel jury had probably expanded its reach as far as it could go for now.

"I don't see much of an expansion in terms of fields or subject areas for a while because I think that the Committee has come to its outer limits," he said.

Lodgaard said however that new categories within the existing fields, such as artists or poets, could be rewarded for their role in creating the conditions for peace.

Stein Toennesson, the head of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, said he believed a genuine peace broker such as former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, who helped end a three-decade conflict in the Indonesian province of Aceh last year, should have won.

"Yunus and the Grameen Bank are very good winners but I would have preferred someone who did something earth-shattering for peace," Toennesson said.

Ahtisaari, a veteran mediator whose also led Namibia to independence and helped end the fighting in Kosovo, was the favourite in betting ahead of the announcement.

With a technique that takes data from the surface of the brain, a 14-year-old boy from St. Louis was able to play the two-dimensional Atari game without so much as lifting a finger [see video of the study]. 

In Space Invaders, a popular computer game from the 1970’s, players control a movable laser cannon in attempts to shoot rows of aliens that move back and forth across the screen. The objective is to kill the aliens before they have a chance to get to the bottom of the screen. Once they land, the game ends. The aliens can also shoot at the cannon, so the player has to try and evade the shots.

The boy, who already had grids implanted to monitor his brain for epilepsy, was connected to a computer program that linked the video game to the grids. He was then asked to move his hands, talk, and imagine things. The researchers correlated these movements to the different signals fired by the brain.

They then asked the boy to play Space Invaders by moving his hand and tongue and then to imagine those movements without actually performing them.

"He cleared out the whole Level One basically on brain control," said Eric Leuthardt, a researcher at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. "He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination."

A couple of years back, Leuthardt and colleagues performed this research on four adults. But they wanted to explore possible differences between teenagers and adults. Although it’s too early to tell from testing just one teenager, Leuthardt thinks that teens may win this game.

“We observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control—for instance, he wasn't moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right,” Leuthardt said.

• Original Story: Teenager Plays Video Game Just By Thinking

hmm....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061002..._partygaming_dc

Online gaming in crisis over U.S. ban

By Pete Harrison

LONDON (Reuters) - Online gambling firms faced their biggest-ever crisis on Monday after U.S. Congress passed legislation to end Internet gaming there, threatening jobs and wiping 3.5 billion pounds ($6.5 billion) off company values.

Britain's PartyGaming Plc, operator of leading Internet poker site PartyPoker.com, and rivals Sportingbet and 888 Plc said they would likely pull out of the United States, their biggest source of revenue.

"This development is a significant setback for our company, our shareholders, our players and our industry," PartyGaming Chief Executive Mitch Garber said.

The House of Representatives and Senate unexpectedly approved a bill early on Saturday that would make it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

The measure was sent to President George W. Bush to sign into law, which most analysts see as a certainty.

"We believe that this will have a very material impact on the long-term prospects of online gambling, and in particular poker," said analyst Julian Easthope at UBS. "This will lead to a rapid decline in the use of online poker sites."

PartyGaming generates about 78 percent of its revenue from the United States, while Sportingbet gets about 62 percent there.

CRACKDOWN

Shares in PartyGaming, which rakes in nearly $4 million a day from its 19 million customers, fell 57 percent by 1155 GMT.

Sportingbet, which owns sportsbook.com and ParadisePoker.com, lost 60 percent, 888 was down 33 percent and Austria's bwin.com fell 24 percent.

Bwin could be pushed to the brink, having paid heavily for Swedish online poker site Ongame earlier this year to gain access to the U.S. market, said Leopold Salcher, an analyst at Austria's RCB. "This could break their neck," he said.

Online gaming exploded in 2005 with a string of high-profile company flotations in London, which has become the industry's corporate center.

The bulk of revenue has always come from U.S. players, but the firms were located in offshore jurisdictions like Costa Rica and Antigua for fear of prosecution in the United States, where the legal status of online gaming and betting was uncertain.

Shares in Sportingbet and BETonSPORTS had already been hammered after recent arrests of senior executives on charges of illegal gambling in individual U.S. states, but investors remained hopeful online betting and gaming would not be completely banned at a federal level.

Meanwhile, big American corporations like Las Vegas-based Harrah's Entertainment Inc. were forced to sit on the sidelines as gaming money streamed out of the country.

PartyGaming said in a statement, "If the President signs the act into law, the company will suspend all real money gaming business with U.S. residents."

"Any such suspension would also result in the group's financial performance falling significantly short of consensus forecasts for 2006 and 2007," it added.

MERGER SCRAPPED

Stephen Whittaker, joint chief investment officer at Britain's New Star Asset Management, said the likely ban could be challenged.

"This represents protectionism, and the WTO have said you can't do that," said Whittaker, whose portfolio includes about 2 percent of online gaming stocks. "Overall, we'll probably remain with most of our holdings."

"We'll probably reduce one, maybe two," he added. "We want to let the dust settle a bit -- it will take a few days."

Sportingbet said a ban would hit trading and it would scrap a planned merger with World Gaming as a result.

888 Plc said the move would hit its results, as did gaming software provider Playtech, whose shares fell 42 percent.

But Paul Leyland at Arbuthnot Securities said Playtech was relatively well positioned. "The only company for which you could categorically say that redeployment is easy is Playtech," he said. "But for the others it's much more difficult."

A ban would also hit payment processors such as Neteller Plc and Optimal Group's FireOne subsidiary.

(Additional reporting by Laurence Fletcher in London and Alexandra Schwarz in Vienna)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060822...ain_math_genius

By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer

MADRID, Spain - A reclusive Russian won the math world's highest honor Tuesday for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline's greatest minds for a century - but he refused the award.

Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal - often described as math's equivalent of the Nobel prize - for a breakthrough in the study of shapes that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe.

John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said that he had urged Perelman to accept the medal, but Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and "does not want to be seen as its figurehead." Ball offered no further details of the conversation.

Besides shunning the award for his work in topology, Perelman also seems uninterested, according to colleagues, in a separate $1 million prize he could win for proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space.

The award, given out every four years, was announced at the mathematical union's International Congress of Mathematicians. Three other mathematicians - Russian Andrei Okounkov, Frenchman Wendelin Werner and Australian Terence Tao - won Fields medals in other areas of mathematics.

They received their awards from King Juan Carlos to loud applause from delegates to the conference. But Perelman was not present.

"I regret that Dr. Perelman has declined to accept the medal," Ball said.

Perelman's work is still under review, but no one has found any serious flaw in it, the math union said in a statement.

The Fields medal was founded in 1936 and named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields. It come with a $13,400 stipend.

Perelman is eligible for far more money from a private foundation called The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

In 2000, the institute announced bounties for seven historic, unsolved math problems, including the Poincare conjecture.

If his proof stands the test of time, Perelman will win all or part of the $1 million prize money. That prize should be announced in about two years.

The Poincare conjecture essentially says that in three dimensions you cannot transform a doughnut shape into a sphere without ripping it, although any shape without a hole can be stretched or shrunk into a sphere.

Proving the conjecture - an exercise in acrobatics with mindboggling imaginary doughnuts and balls - is anything but trivial. Colleagues say Perelman's work gives mathematical descriptions of what the universe might look like and promises exciting applications in physics and other fields.

"It is very important indeed because it really gives us an insight into geometry and in particular the geometry of the space we live in," said Oxford University math professor Marcus du Sautoy. "It does not say what the shape (of the universe) is. It just says, 'look, these are the things it could be.'"

Academics have been studying Perelman's proof since he left the first of three papers on it on a math Web site in Nov. 2002. Normal procedure would have been to seek publication in a peer-approved journal.

Three separate teams have presented papers or books explaining the details of Perelman's work, which draws heavily from a technique developed by another mathematician, Richard Hamilton of Columbia University. The Clay Mathematics Institute says the two men could conceivably share the Poincare money.

Ball said he asked Perelman if he would accept that money. Perelman said that if he won, he would talk to the Clay institute.

Perelman is believed to live with his mother in St. Petersburg. Repeated calls over many days to a telephone number listed as Perelman's went unanswered. Acquaintances refused to give out his address or the number they use to contact him, saying he did not want to talk to the media.

I'd give it a 2 out of 5 stars.