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tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum have a story on Japanese attempts to throttle back Solar deployments.

Clashing energy interests on the Japanese island of Kyushu have prompted Japan's government to clamp down on solar power development nationwide. While the government calls it a necessary revision to assure grid stability amidst rapidly rising levels of intermittent solar energy, critics see a pro-nuclear agenda at work—one that could stunt Japan's renewable energy potential.

In response to the threat to grid stability Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) is allowing utilities to refuse interconnects from upcoming Solar developments.

On 28 September, Kyushu Electric announced that it had frozen the interconnection of large solar developments.
...
At least four more utilities followed Kyushu Electric’s lead and froze solar interconnections on their grids, arguing that the solar surge threatened their ability to balance supply and demand.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Halfway up the Shard, London’s tallest skyscraper, you are asked to step out of the elevator at the transfer floor or “sky lobby,” a necessary inconvenience in order to reach the upper half of the building, and a symptom of the limits of elevators today. To ascend a mile-high (1.6km) tower using the same technology could necessitate changing elevators as many as 10 times because elevators traveling distances of more than 500m [1,640 ft] have not been feasible because the weight of the steel cables themselves becomes so great. Now BBC reports that after nine years of rigorous testing, Kone has released Ultrarope - a material composed of carbon-fiber covered in a friction-proof coating that weighs a seventh of the steel cables, making elevators of up to 1km (0.6 miles) in height feasible to build.

Kone's creation was chosen to be installed in what's destined to become the world's tallest building, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. When completed in 2020, the tower will stand a full kilometer in height, and will boast the world's tallest elevator at 660m (2,165ft). A 1km-tall tower may seem staggering, but is this the buildable limit? Most probably not, according to Dr Sang Dae Kim. “With Kingdom Tower we now have a design that reaches around 1 km in height. Later on, someone will push for 1 mile, and then 2 km,” says Kim adding that, technically speaking, a 2 km might be possible at the current time. “At this point in time we can build a tower that is 1 km, maybe 2 km. Any higher than that and we will have to do a lot of homework.”

"crutchy" writes:

http://www.timesofoman.com/News/46394/Article-Temperatures-in-Australia-rising-faster-than-rest-of-the-world

In its most comprehensive analysis yet of the impacts of climate change, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) painted a worst-case scenario of a rise of up to 5.1 degrees Celsius by 2090 if there are no actions taken to cut greenhouse emissions.

"There is a very high confidence that hot days will become more frequent and hotter," CSIRO principal research scientist Kevin Hennessy said. "We also have very high confidence that sea levels will rise, oceans will become more acidic, and snow depths will decline."

The dire warning from the government-funded agency is at odds with the official line from Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who in 2009 declared the science of climate change was "crap". Abbott last year scrapped a tax on carbon pricing and abolished the independent Climate Commission, saying recent severe droughts that have crippled cattle farmers were "not a new thing in Australia".

As the host of the Group of 20 last year, he attempted to keep climate change off the agenda, resulting in an embarrassing backdown at the Leaders Summit in Brisbane after US President Barack Obama used a high-profile speech to warn Australia that its own Great Barrier Reef was in danger.

One of the world's biggest carbon emitters, Australia has declined to join the United States, Japan, France and others in contributing to the United Nations' Green Climate Fund.

frojack writes:

ScienceMag reports that NASA is about to launch the Soil Moisture Activity Probe (SMAP) satellite on January 29th.

One of the weirdest satellites we've seen in a while, the SMAP is designed to map the water content of soil globally with a resolution of 10 kilometers. It replaces a loose and spotty network of people sticking probes in the ground to measure moisture content.

Globally, soils hold a tiny fraction of the Earth’s water. But that moisture is nevertheless a crucial quantity in water, carbon and energy cycles: it determines how vulnerable regions are to drought and flood; how well plants grow and suck up atmospheric carbon; and how the Earth heats up and cools off -- a key driver for storms. Yet for the most part, soil moisture has been monitored by a sparse set of probes stuck in the ground. “The three biggest cycles in a climate model are being modeled with something that’s a complete fantasy,” says Dara Entekhabi, a hydrologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The SMAP is a strange satellite to begin with. See JPL Animation. The instrument's three main parts are a radar, a radiometer and the largest rotating mesh antenna ever deployed in space. The huge rotating antenna dish is 19.7 feet (6 meters) in diameter, and it spins around the arm at about 14 revolutions per minute allow focusing the radar on wide swatches of land covering the globe every three days or less.

"The radiometer provides more accurate soil moisture but a coarse resolution of about 40 kilometers [25 miles] across," said JPL's Eni Njoku, a research scientist with SMAP. "With the radar, you can create very high resolution, but it's less accurate. The radar signals penetrates a few inches or more into the soil before they rebound. To get both an accurate and a high-resolution measurement, we process the two signals together."

JPL has a explanation of the technical challenges in building the crazy whirling dervish satellite, but also the problems inherent in signal processing radar and radiometer data, which are constrained by bandwidth limitations, signal interference, and the need to operate within certain radar frequencies that best detect water. 

AnonTechie writes:

About 78 percent of the air you inhaled is the most abundant pure element found on Earth. Besides its role in the atmosphere, it’s used in all sorts of products: fertilizers, propellants, you name it. It's also an essential component of DNA and proteins. It’s called nitrogen.

But it's something of a mystery. The nitrogen found on Earth doesn’t match the nitrogen found in the Sun or in the tails of comets. Those sources have nitrogen isotope fractions that differ from those on Earth. So how did nitrogen get to Earth in the first place, and where did it come from? One clue is that some very ancient meteorites do match the Earth’s isotopic abundances very closely, implying that the nitrogen may have come from an ancient source that wasn't so much interplanetary, but existed before the planets formed.

In a new study, researchers examined an ancient meteorite using techniques called transmission electron microscopy and secondary ion mass spectrometry. These provide a glimpse of the material it contains and revealed that the meteorite contains a mineral called carlsbergite.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/where-did-earths-nitrogen-come-from/

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2339.html

"gewg_" writes:

Noting that today's major providers lack any hint of competitive activity, the headline at El Reg reads Google reveals where AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable Will Next Offer Gbps Broadband

The advertising giant said on Tuesday it will next roll out high-speed connections to 18 cities in and around Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Raleigh-Durham, NC; and Nashville, TN.

[...]The expansion will bring the total number of areas with Google Fiber deployments to seven: the California biz already offers fiber broadband in and around Kansas City, MO; Austin, TX; and Provo, UT.

[...]Google charges $70 a month for gigabit internet, $120 if you want TV with it, or free if you're happy with 5Mbit/s for the downlink. Only the freebie option requires a $300 installation fee. Despite the price tag, the service is hotly anticipated in the few chosen cities.

[...]Later this year, the Chocolate Factory will also make its decision on where the next set of Fiber rollouts will take place. Five areas are being considered: Portland, OR; San Jose, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; Phoenix, AZ; and San Antonio, TX.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Nick Summers has an interesting article at Bloomberg about the epidemic of 90 ATM bombings that has hit Britain since 2013. ATM machines are vulnerable because the strongbox inside an ATM has two essential holes: a small slot in front that spits out bills to customers and a big door in back through which employees load reams of cash in large cassettes. "Criminals have learned to see this simple enclosure as a physics problem," writes Summers. "Gas is pumped in, and when it’s detonated, the weakest part—the large hinged door—is forced open. After an ATM blast, thieves force their way into the bank itself, where the now gaping rear of the cash machine is either exposed in the lobby or inside a trivially secured room. Set off with skill, the shock wave leaves the money neatly stacked, sometimes with a whiff of the distinctive acetylene odor of garlic." The rise in gas attacks has created a market opportunity for the companies that construct ATM components. Several manufacturers now make various anti-gas-attack modules: Some absorb shock waves, some detect gas and render it harmless, and some emit sound, fog, or dye to discourage thieves in the act.

As far as anyone knows, there has never been a gas attack on an American ATM. The leading theory points to the country’s primitive ATM cards. Along with Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, and not many other countries, the U.S. doesn’t require its plastic to contain an encryption chip, so stealing cards remains an effective, non-violent way to get at the cash in an ATM. Encryption chip requirements are coming to the U.S. later this year, though. And given the gas raid’s many advantages, it may be only a matter of time until the back of an American ATM comes rocketing off.

AnonTechie writes:

In 2001, some physicists put their heads together and asked: “What is the color of the Universe?”

By this they meant what color would an observer see, “if they had the Universe in a box, and could see all the light at once.”

“And,” they added, as if that question was too simple, “it wasn't moving.” They added this bit because, because of the Doppler effect, stars that are receding from Earth are redshifted – i.e. they appear redder than if they weren’t moving, relative to us.

Even though, as New Scientist observed, the question might seem about as useful as “the ‘answer’ to life, the Universe and everything given in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - 42,” the astronomers knew the spectral analysis would help them trace the history of star formation. So they forged ahead with the calculations and, in January 2002, captured the public’s attention when they announced their result.

“In space no one can hear you scream, which is probably a good thing,” the Guardian wrote in their coverage, “as scientists have discovered that the universe is a shade of turquoise.”

The Guardian’s reporter might have been glib, but many others embraced the color. The real problem was, the universe isn’t turquoise. The scientists had gotten it wrong.

http://priceonomics.com/what-is-the-average-color-of-the-universe/

Labskaus writes:

When Opera switched from Presto to Webkit/Blink in 2013 it lost a lot of functionality and distinctive features like the built-in mail client and the side bar. Since then it has regained few of these features and it seems unlikely that it will do so in the future. Now the original creators of Opera are back with the Chromium-based browser Vivaldi. Vivaldi aims to be a browser for power users and the first technical preview already contains many features from Opera 12, as well as new ones such as traffic-, and memory-profiling for web-pages.

AnonTechie writes:

While the immediacy of publishing information on the Internet dramatically speeds the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system has introduced challenges that Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are seeking to address.

"For more than 70 percent of papers that link to web pages, revisiting the originally referenced web content proved impossible," said Herbert Van de Sompel, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. "These results are alarming because vanishing references undermine the long-term integrity of the scholarly record."

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-online-scholarly-articles-affected.html

[Article]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

"crutchy" writes:

A research team from UC Davis and Rice University has discovered a technique that would enable natural proteins to self-assemble into amyloid fibrils. Nature has several instances of self-assembly, and researchers have always been interested in replicating or manipulating these proteins to develop novel and practical materials or devices. The team’s research findings have been published online by the journal ACS Nano.

http://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=43202

-- submitted from IRC

ah.clem writes:

Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how to eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers.

The year was 2013. Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business.

Link to Wired article here.

Arik writes:

Der Spiegel reports the infamous Regin malware, only publicly discovered last year but known to have been used in many serious attacks over the past decade, has been identified conclusively as NSA product. In addition to many circumstantial clues, source code for an NSA keylogger from the Snowden archives matches that of the Regin keylogger plugin. So Regin is most likely the system referred to as 'warriorpride' in the same documents.

What sort of fallout do you expect this to cause? Presumably many of those attacked already suspected who lay behind the attacks, but now that there is clear evidence to back up the suspicion, will that change things between the '5 Eyes' community and allies like Holland, Germany and non-state actors like the IAEA, who have been targets for attack?

martyb writes:

Go to nearly any major site on the web and you are bombarded with advertisements. Like many other people I know, I use browser plugins like AdBlock to try and remove them from my browsing experience.

But, for one time each year, there is an event in the USA where I actually tune in as much to see the advertisements as to see the event itself. I'm talking about the Super Bowl where we find out who wins the National Football League (NFL) championship. This year's game, Super Bowl XLIX, pits the New England Patriots versus the Seattle Seahawks and is scheduled for Sunday, February 1 at 6:30 PM EST.

With such a large viewing audience and such large sums spent to acquire a spot during the game, advertisers go out of their way to try and make ads that are actually interesting and memorable. Some have strained the limits of technology to pull them off.

If I were to mention nothing but net, you'd probably know I was referring to a series of ads pitting Larry Bird against Michael Jordan going one-on-one on increasingly challenging and then outlandish basketball shots, the winner to get a McDonald's Big Mac.

So, with the big game soon to be upon us, I ask: What are your most memorable Super Bowl ads? What's the biggest flop? Some advertisers have "leaked" copies of commercials on-line before the big show. Where did you find them? What's your favorite so far?

LancePodstrong writes:

Related to our story yesterday, the US Secret Service has release some of its findings: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/drunken-spy-satellite-agency-employee-crashed-drone-on-white-house-lawn/

Today, ... the Secret Service revealed new details into their investigation—including a confession by the pilot himself. According to the Secret Service, an unnamed employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) claimed responsibility for crashing a remote-controlled quadrocopter into a tree on the grounds of the White House.

The yet-unnamed employee reported the incident to his superiors at NGA. He claimed to have been drinking at an apartment near the White House when he decided early Monday morning to fly a friend’s new DJI Phantom drone. He claimed that he then lost control of the drone. Soon after the drone slipped unnoticed over the White House fence, it was spotted flying low over the grounds before it crashed into a tree.