Future interfaces.

"NBA Basketball Referees as Single Points of Failure". Another good security essay by Bruce Schneier.

"Eels imitate Alien":

Researchers studying one species of moray eels have uncovered a deadly secret that helps the snake-like fish to swallow their prey. Like the fearsome extraterrestrial from the sci-fi horror classic Alien, these real-life beasts have a second, extendable pair of jaws — encrusted with sharp teeth — that thrusts forward to ensnare hapless fish and shrimp.

High-speed videos and X-ray photos show how the second jaws, called pharyngeal jaws, lie in wait inside the throat, and then extend forwards into the mouth to grab prey that has been captured by the eel's main teeth. The morsel is then drawn into the eel's oesophagus.

Of course there's a video.

"Fate of a couple is sealed with first kiss":

While a kiss may just be a kiss for a man, for a woman it’s an all-important means of gauging a prospective partner's compatability. She uses it, the study suggests, to assess a "rich and complex exchange" of romantic and chemical clues that pass between partners as their lips touch.

A "good kiss" will help convince her that the partner is worth perservering with but a man who is judged to be a bad kisser is unlikely to find himself invited in for coffee.

In the longer term the woman treats kissing as a means to induce bonding and to help her assess whether her partner has remained faithful and interested.

(Via Cosmic Log.)

"Pee-Powered Batteries to Make Recharging Much Grosser".

More theoretical work on a "pillar of invisiblity":

The researchers analyzed the properties of a simulated tube of special metamaterials (manmade materials with intricate, microscopic structures) that can force light to follow a specified path. With the ideal wall thickness, the tube would flawlessly guide light around the inner chamber, rendering the wizard inside invisible. You could walk about, unaware of the cloaked wizard's presence, unless you unceremoniously slam yourself into a pillar that looks like nothing but empty air.

The wizard, who would be unable to see anything outside of the invisibility cloak, could reveal himself by deconstructing the cloak a layer at a time. Imagine if he could wave his wand and remove a layer from the inside of the column, leaving it the same diameter on the outside but making that inner chamber a little larger.

With the inner layer removed, the wizard would appear as a thin line, and the background would be slightly distorted. As more of the inside is removed, the wizard would become more apparent and the background would become more distorted. Physicists haven't yet worked out exactly how these distortions would appear to human eyes.

Scientists have "traced the origin of the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs."

A related Nature article notes:

Most scientists think that the age of the dinosaurs was doomed when a killer asteroid struck Earth 65 million years ago. But new findings suggest that the giant reptiles may have been destined for death some 100 million years earlier, with the fateful collision of two faraway asteroids.

Potentially interesting article: "Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property without Law". Here's the abstract:

Intellectual property scholars have begun to explore the curious dynamics of IP's negative spaces, areas in which IP law offers scant protection for innovators, but where innovation nevertheless seems to thrive. Such negative spaces pose a puzzle for the traditional theory of IP, which holds that IP law is necessary to create incentives for innovation.

This paper presents a study of one such negative space which has so far garnered some curiosity but little sustained attention - the world of performing magicians. This paper argues that idiosyncratic dynamics among magicians make traditional copyright, patent, and trade secret law ill-suited to protecting magicians' most valuable intellectual property. Yet, the paper further argues that the magic community has developed its own set of unique IP norms which effectively operate in law's absence. The paper details the structure of these informal norms that protect the creation, dissemination, and performance of magic tricks. The paper also discusses broader implications for IP theory, suggesting that a norm-based approach may offer a promising explanation for the puzzling persistence of some of IP's negative spaces.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. (Via Neatorama.)

"Do the wrongfully imprisoned get compensation?"

"The world's largest digital camera has been installed on a new telescope designed to hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids."

Typical consumer digital cameras offer imaging chips just a few millimetres across. The new Pan-STARRS camera, by contrast, boasts a light-detecting surface that spans 40 centimetres. Sixty separate chips lie on that surface, providing a total of 1.4 billion pixels.

Did the USSR really build a "doomsday machine"? One interesting tidbit about the American nuclear command and control system:

One crew member even disclosed to me a flaw in the "command and control" "permissive action" system that was supposed to prevent a madman missile commander from launching his "birds" and starting an apocalyptic nuclear war all by himself. The flaw: the system's susceptibility to the "spoon and string" improvisation.

So much focus has been placed—in film, fiction, and nonfiction—on our supposedly "failsafe" barrier to a lone-madman launch. We'd been told that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms to twist both the keys simultaneously.

But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.

You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."

American ingenuity! Can't beat it for finding a new way to end the world.

New graph theory solution to the transplant recipient matching problem:

People are born with two kidneys but need only one to survive. That can be a blessing for those with two failed kidneys, because sometimes they can receive a donated kidney from a family member. But the good fortune can turn bitter: a third of the time, the donor and the recipient aren't a compatible match.

One solution is to arrange a kind of surgical double-date. When two donor-recipient pairs are in the same predicament of incompatibility, it can happen that the donor of one pair is a good match for the recipient of the other, and vice versa. Doctors and lawmakers are working to create a national database of kidney donation pairs that could vastly improve the chances of finding such matches.

Multiple transplants involving more than two pairs are possible, and have occasionally been performed, but the complex logistics of such procedures ensure that they can happen only rarely. But even matching up two pairs raises difficult questions about how to find the matches. A new mathematical study shows how to match up the maximum number of donors with recipients while simultaneously guaranteeing high compatibility in each case.

Blast from the Past: "Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual". (Via TUAW.)

"eBay hard drive spills out governor's campaign documents":

[A] California man stumbled upon a stash of confidential data belonging to the Arkansas Democratic Party after its computer consultant accidentally sold a hard drive containing the material on eBay.

Bill Ries-Knight, also an IT consultant, purchased the 120 GB Seagate hard drive for $69. Although the drive had been advertised as new, Ries-Knight quickly discovered it contained scores of files created by high-level party officials while campaigning for Mike Beebe, who successfully won the state's governorship last November.

Among the files were documents listing the private cell phone numbers of political allies, including US Senators Blanch Lincoln and Mark Pryor and US Representatives Marion Berry, Mike Ross and Vic Snyder. It also included talking points to guide the candidate as he called influential people whose support he sought.

"IBM Stores Data on Single Atoms"

"So what happens when you shoot an aluminium BB at 20,000 miles per hour at satellite shielding?" (Via SciTechDaily.)

The home of the future as envisioned in 1979. Blogger Cynical-C notes, "Their predictions for the technology is surprisingly accurate except for the video phone which just never panned out."

More reviews of noise-canceling headphones.

"Inside the GooglePlex": An interesting analysis of Google by The Economist.