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Science & Policy News
Recent News Items
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Behind Manti Teo hoax about girlfriend lies a deep desire to believe:
The Internet can be a blunt and brutal place. It’s built on unruly mobs moving across the virtual terrain, digesting stories and leaving behind carcasses. But it is also one of the last vestiges of wide-eyed, unfettered belief.
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January 17, 2013
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3-D printers could bring manufacturing to your home office:
3-D printers, once an obscure and expensive innovation, are gaining traction among businesses, with broad implications for manufacturing. Ford is putting them in the hands of every one of its engineers. NASA uses the printers to test parts that could eventually make it to space.
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January 7, 2013
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Disney creates the happiest data mine on earth:
Okay...so how's this for a fantasy? You take the kids to Disney World, or go yourself, and there are no turnstiles to deal with. No epic lines at Space Mountain. And you've got reserved front row seats for the fireworks. Magic? No. More like Disney's new MagicBand. Come spring, visitors to Disney World will be given wristbands with chips that hold credit card numbers, FastPass codes and other personal information, like your child's name and birthdate.
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January 7, 2013
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As Biofuel Demand Grows, So Do Guatemalas Hunger Pangs:
In the tiny tortillerias of Guatemala City, people complain ceaselessly
about the high price of corn. Just three years ago, one quetzal — about
15 cents — bought eight tortillas; today it buys only four. And eggs
have tripled in price because chickens eat corn feed. Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing
use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists
say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes
more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.
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January 5, 2013
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Online Science News With User Comments Fraught With Unintended Consequences, Study Suggests:
A science-inclined audience and wide array of communications tools make the Internet an excellent opportunity for scientists hoping to share their research with the world. But that opportunity is fraught with unintended consequences, according University of Wisconsin-Madison life sciences communication professors, Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele, in a Perspectives piece for the journal Science.
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January 3, 2013
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Highway of the future is seriously smart:
How a Dutch design lab could make roads cleaner, safer and weirder.
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January 3, 2013
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Neuromarketing:
A new branch of market research is using neuroscience to look inside the living brain to understand and manipulate consumer behaviour.
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January 1, 2013
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Games for Science:
Scientists are using video games to tap the collective intelligence of people around the world, while doctors and educators are turning to games to treat and teach.
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January 1, 2013
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New Car Features May Keep Older Drivers Out Of The Big Yellow Taxi:
In some of the most potent cultural images we have of cool cars, they are being driven by young men — Ron Howard cruising in American Graffiti, cousins Bo and Luke from The Dukes of Hazzard sliding over the hood of the General Lee, James Dean behind the wheel of his Porsche. But these days some of the coolest things about our cars aren't there to dazzle the young. They're there to accommodate the aging. With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day, it's easy to see why.
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December 17, 2012
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Helping Decide Guilt or Innocence:
As DNA evidence is increasingly used in courtrooms, forensic scientists are struggling to find more-precise ways to analyze smaller and smaller samples that contain multiple contributors. Two scientists at the forensic biology laboratory of the New York City medical examiner’s office have created a way, the Forensic Statistical Tool, an algorithm for a software program that can analyze a mixture of DNA from a crime scene and determine the probability that it could include the defendant’s profile.
December 15, 2012
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THE END OF SMARTPHONES: Here's A Computer Screen On A Contact Lens:
Over in Belgium, scientists have finally taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses. Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens. To do it, they had to come up with new kinds of "conductive polymers" – and mold them into "a very thin, spherically-curved substrate with active layers."
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December 14, 2012
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New Replay Jeans Are Equipped to Update Social Media Statuses for You:
If you think selvage denim was hot, wait until you check out this new self-updating Social Denim from Italian brand Replay. Outfitted with a vinyl pocket with Bluetooth connection, this bad boy can communicate with your phone updating your Facebook status for you with the touch of a button. It also acts like a social media mood ring, informing your friends of your emotional state with eight different mood settings. Finally, your dates can no longer call you rude when you can just update your phone discreetly under the table.
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December 14, 2012
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Ah, Wilderness! Nature Hike Could Unlock Your Imagination:
Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors. That's the word from David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies multitasking at the University of Utah. He knew that every time he went into the southern Utah desert, far from cellular service, he started to think more clearly. But he wanted to know if others had the same experience.
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December 13, 2012
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Everyone Chip In, Please: Crowdfunding Sandy:
Big-hearted Americans always rush to give money after a disaster. Just how much and how fast is often determined by technology. After the earthquake in Haiti, texting small donations, for example, became a new
standard practice. This time around,
Hurricane Sandy has shown crowdfunding websites are a simple tool for
quick-response giving. Anyone can go on these sites and ask for money to
rebuild or to help their neighbors rebuild. Friends, family and
strangers chip in.
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December 10, 2012
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A Vault for Taking Charge of Your Online Life:
“YOU are walking around naked on the Internet and you need some clothes,” says Michael Fertik. “I am going to sell you some.” Mr. Fertik, 34, is the chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps people manage their online reputations. From his perch here in Silicon Valley, he views the digital screens in our lives, the smartphones and the tablets, the desktops and the laptops, as windows of a house. People go about their lives on the inside, he says, while dozens of marketing and analytics companies watch through the windows, sizing them up like peeping Toms.
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December 8, 2012
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Making Permanent Digital Records Not So Permanent:
The Internet is forever—and so are texts, tweets and Facebook updates—but a startup has big ambitions to bring privacy and impermanence to online communication, letting users decide how long a message lives.
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December 4, 2012
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Manhattan Project Sites Part Of Proposed Park:
Congress is considering whether to turn three top-secret sites involved with creating the atomic bomb into one of the country's most unusual national parks. The Manhattan Project largely took place at Los Alamos, NM; Oak Ridge, TN; and Hanford, WA. A park would be a commemoration, not a celebration--a chance to say, 'Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?' Tough questions to ask in a place where scientists are doing ongoing weapons research—but maybe necessary if the Manhattan Project sites are going to become national parks.
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December 4, 2012
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Was a Texas Student Really Expelled for Refusing To Wear an RFID Chip?:
The Texas school district that began requiring its students to wear RFID tracking chips this year is now facing a fight in federal court. A sophomore has refused to wear the ID tag on biblical grounds, comparing it to “the mark of the beast.” On Friday, attorneys for the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group, announced that they’re filing suit in federal court to keep the student from being expelled.
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November 30, 2012
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How Ordinary Chinese Are Talking And Fighting Back:
Never have so many Chinese people spoken so freely than on Weibo, China's answer to Twitter. Just 4 years old, the series of microblog services now has more than 400 million users. And, increasingly, Chinese are using it to expose corruption, criticize officials and try to make their country a better place — even as China's Communist Party tries to control the Weibo revolution.
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November 27, 2012
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In Soviet Russia, Book Reads You:
There are good reasons to be excited about the immense potential of digital technologies to help spread knowledge - access to online video lectures, texts and course materials. But CourseSmart Analytics tracks for its digital textbooks how much time each student spends with each page of the book, what
chapters they skip, what passages give them trouble, and so forth.
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November 27, 2012
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CyberCity allows government hackers to train for attacks:
CyberCity has all the makings of a regular town. There’s a bank, a hospital and a power plant. A train station operates near a water tower. The coffee shop offers free WiFi. But only certain people can get in: government hackers preparing for battles in cyberspace.
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November 26, 2012
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Pioneering the granny pod: Fairfax County family adapts to high-tech dwelling that could change elder care:
The MedCottage, designed by a Blacksburg company with help from Virginia Tech, is essentially a portable hospital room. Virginia state law, which recognized the dwellings a few years ago, classifies them as “temporary family health-care structures.” But many simply know them as “granny pods,” and they have arrived on the market as the nation prepares for a wave of graying baby boomers to retire.
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November 25, 2012
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EyeSee mannequin silently collects consumer data for overzealous retailers:
With the luxury goods market sagging under the weight of a sluggish economy, some retailers are turning to more surreptitious and rather controversial means of targeting consumers. Several high-end retailers have begun deploying a new mannequin known as the EyeSee, which looks like any other mannequin but embedded within is a camera that captures images of passersby, as well as facial-recognition software capable of identifying a customer's age, gender, and race.
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November 20, 2012
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As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why:
Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.
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November 19, 2012
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'Big Data' can change the world:
Digital information being captured by companies carries great promise, but also privacy risks.
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November 19, 2012
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Battleground Twitter:
As Israel continues air strikes in Gaza, its army is also increasingly moving to war tactics online. The Israeli army announced its military operation not through a news conference, but on Twitter. Both the Israeli army and Hamas are posting updates on their attacks in real time. Israelis and Palestinians used dueling hashtags as they battled for control of the narrative on social media. Twitter also became a vital outlet for Gazans to spread information even after the power was cut off. The hacker collective Anonymous is reportedly fighting to keep Gaza online after fears spread that the Internet might be cut.
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November 15, 2012
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Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can't Protect Us Anymore:
It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of
characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re
cautious—that can reveal everything about you. No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.
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November 15, 2012
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Across Pa., Abandoned Wells Litter The Land:
The state estimates that about 325,000 wells have been drilled since the
mid-1800s, but the locations of 200,000 of them are unknown. This
proves problematic when new wells occasionally intersect abandoned ones,
and gas rockets up to the surface in a geyser.
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November 13, 2012
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Academic Dream Team Helped Obamas Effort:
Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign,
called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a
political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who
attended the session. “He said, ‘Bring the whole group; let’s hear what you have to say,’ ” recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election.
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November 12, 2012
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New Technologies Boosted Obama Campaign's Efforts:
As far as we know, supercomputers weren't used by either of the
presidential campaigns this year. But other technological advances are
credited with helping propel President Obama to victory. The campaign
developed new online tools, including a program called Dashboard that
allowed volunteers to work remotely. Why head into a phone bank when you
can make calls from home?
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November 12, 2012
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Joy That Lasts, on the Poorest of Playgrounds:
Sometimes a soccer ball is more than just a ball. Sometimes, it’s a lifesaver. Tim Jahnigen was so moved by watching children in Darfur play soccer with a ball made out of trash and twine, that he set out to construct an indestructible soccer ball.
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November 8, 2012
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Costs of Shoring Up Coastal Communities:
As coastal towns clamor for sand, scientists are warning that
rising seas will make maintaining artificial beaches prohibitively
expensive or simply impossible. Even some advocates of artificial beach
nourishment now urge new approaches to the issue, especially in New
Jersey.
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November 7, 2012
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Norfolk, Va., Puts Flooding Survival Plan To The Test:
Superstorm Sandy got officials in New York and New Jersey talking about how to prevent flooding in a time of global warming and sea level rise. But the place on the East Coast that's most vulnerable to flooding is several hundred miles south, around Norfolk, Va. — and Norfolk has already spent many years studying how to survive the rising waters. Scientists say what Norfolk has learned is especially important in light of new research showing that the coastline from North Carolina to Boston will experience even more sea level rise than other areas.
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November 6, 2012
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UT/TT Poll: Weighing Scientists vs. Politicians:
Texans think politicians should pay heed to the advice of experts—even when it means going against their own ideology—but their degree of faith in those experts depends on the issue, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. Two-thirds of the respondents agree that the politicians should follow the experts’ advice, even when it’s out of sync with their ideology. It’s muddled, though: Slightly more than half believe that instinct and gut reactions are just as good as the advice of scientists most of the time. And they’re split on whether faith is a better guide than science on many important questions.
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November 2, 2012
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Beginnings of Bionic: Flexible, stretchable electronics could launch cyborg era:
Michael McAlpine’s shiny circuit doesn’t look like something you
would stick in your mouth. It’s dashed with gold, has a coiled antenna
and is glued to a stiff rectangle. But the antenna flexes, and the
rectangle is actually silk, its stiffness melting away under water. And
if you paste the device on your tooth, it could keep you healthy.
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November 2, 2012
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Big Healthy Brother: 'Google Now' Surprises Users By Tracking Miles Walked and Biked:
“Does this surprise ‘feature’ strike you as more creepy than not?” asked
a friend via email. “Your phone was tracking how far you were walking
and biking without telling you???”
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November 2, 2012
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Researchers Say Drug Subsidies Led To Overtreatment Of Malaria In Africa:
There's a hot debate in global health right now. And the stakes are high.This month the Global Fund will vote to continue or scrap a $225 million project that subsidizes the cost of the most effective malaria drugs in seven African countries. Supporters of the pilot program say it has been a success. It slashed the cost of effective drug treatment and boosted its availability. But some critics argue the program has done more harm than good. It puts drugs in the hands of untrained, unsupervised shopkeepers, who don't know how to diagnose and properly treat malaria.
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November 1, 2012
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Cheap New Nanoparticle HIV Test Gives Fast Results Visible To The Naked Eye:
Researchers at Imperial College London have created a simple and quick HIV test that is both more sensitive and 10 times cheaper than existing methods. The new test, which uses nanotechnology to produce results visible to the naked eye, could be invaluable in poorer countries that lack sophisticated lab equipment.
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October 31, 2012
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Pricey Prostate Cancer Therapy Raises Questions About Safety, Cost:
Proton therapy is being promoted to treat prostate cancer. Because it can be targeted much more precisely, it should
minimize any damage to sensitive nerves and tissue around the prostate.
The hope is that it translates into far fewer side effects, such as
impotence and incontinence. But proton therapy has become
the center of an intense debate. Critics say it's an example of a big
problem with the U.S. health system: Doctors start using expensive new
treatments before anyone knows whether they work, whether they're safe,
and whether they're worth the extra money.
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October 29, 2012
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Sweden Wants Your Trash:
Move over Abba, Sweden has found new fame. The small Nordic country
is breaking records — in waste. Sweden's program of generating energy
from garbage is wildly successful, but recently its success has also
generated a surprising issue: There is simply not enough trash.
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October 29, 2012
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Study Linking Aspartame, Cancer Causes Controversy:
A study linking the artificial sweetener aspartame — which is found
in lots of diet sodas — to a possible cancer risk in people was set to
make a splash earlier this week. But shortly before the paper was
published, in a very unusual move, the scientific leaders at the
hospital released a statement saying the findings were too weak to
promote.
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October 26, 2012
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U.S. Satellite Plans Falter, Imperiling Data on Storms:
The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites
that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of
years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching
replacements, according to several recent official reviews.
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October 26, 2012
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Google's Street View Goes Into The Wild:
Google's Street View maps are headed into the backcountry. Earlier this week, two teams from Google strapped on sophisticated backpacks jammed with cameras, gyroscopes and other gadgets, and descended to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But this is just the first step in the search giant's plan to digitally map and photograph the world's wild places.
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October 24, 2012
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L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter:
Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L'Aquila. A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter. Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes.
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October 22, 2012
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Doctors Strike Mutating Bacteria In Teen Acne Battle:
Acne, the scourge of many an adolescent life, is getting harder to treat. Conventional treatment includes topical and oral antibiotics. Studies are now finding the bacteria that cause acne are increasingly resistant to antibiotic treatment. Alternatively, there are effective laser treatments. But these are costly and typically not covered by insurance. Now, researchers are scrambling to come up with new treatments for acne. One promising possibility involves harnessing a harmless virus living on skin that naturally seeks out and kills the bacteria that cause pimples.
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October 15, 2012
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