Nanotech and skin care

Nanotechnology is changing diverse areas from electronics to medicine and even skin care. Here’s a release from the American Academy of Dermatology that just hit the inbox:

Sizing Up Nanotechnology: How Nanosized Particles May Affect Skin Care Products

MIAMI, March 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The rapidly growing field of nanotechnology and its future use in cosmetic products holds both enormous potential and potential concern for consumers. Currently, major cosmetic manufacturers have imposed a voluntary ban on the use of nanoparticles in products while they await a ruling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the safety of this technology.  However, these manufacturers know that when ingredients in products such as sunscreens and anti-aging products are converted into nanosized particles, the end product displays unique properties that can benefit the skin in ways that otherwise could not be achieved using larger-sized particles.

Speaking today at the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology (Academy), dermatologist Adnan Nasir, MD, PhD, FAAD, clinical assistant professor in the department of dermatology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, presented an overview of nanotechnology and how nanoparticles may eventually be used in cosmetic products.

“Research in the area of nanotechnology has increased significantly over the years, and I think there will be considerable growth in this area in the near future,” said Dr. Nasir. “The challenge is that a standard has not been set yet to evaluate the safety and efficacy of topical products that contain nanosized particles.”

Nanotechnology: On the Plus Side

Products incorporating nanotechnology are being developed and manufactured at an ever-growing rate, especially among clothing manufacturers that incorporate nanomaterials into fabrics to enhance stain and wrinkle resistance, and water repellence.  However, Dr. Nasir explained that a substantial proportion of patents issued for nanotechnology-based discoveries are currently in the realm of cosmetic and consumer skin care products. In fact, the cosmetic industry leads all other industries in the number of patents for nanoparticles, which have the potential to enhance sunscreens, shampoos and conditioners, lipsticks, eye shadows, moisturizers, deodorants, after-shave products and perfumes.

One example of how nanoparticles are being considered for use is to improve some of the undesirable properties of skin care products. Dr. Nasir explained that when certain ingredients are included in micrometer-sized particles, which are considerably larger than nanosized particles, the result is a product than can be cosmetically unappealing.

For example, one common ingredient in broad-spectrum sunscreens, which protect the skin from both UVA and UVB rays, is avobenzone, which can make a sunscreen greasy and very noticeable when applied to the skin. Since titanium, another common sunscreen ingredient, requires an oily mixture to dissolve, a white residue can be apparent on the skin upon application. However, when these active ingredients in sunscreens are converted into nanoparticles, they can be suspended in less greasy formulations – which seem to vanish on the skin and do not leave a residue – while retaining their ability to block UVA and UVB light.

“While widespread use of this technology is currently under evaluation, I think one of the main benefits of nanoparticles used in sunscreens will be that the particles can fit into all the nooks and crannies of the skin, packing more protection and more even coverage on the skin’s surface than microsized particles,” said Dr. Nasir. “Since sunscreen formulations using nanoparticles may be more cosmetically appealing and seem to vanish when applied, consumers may be more inclined to use them on a regular basis.”

Nanotechnology also is generating excitement for its potential use in anti-aging products. When properly engineered, nanomaterials may be able to topically deliver retinoids, antioxidants and drugs such as botulinum toxin or growth factors for rejuvenation of the skin in the future.

In anti-aging products, Dr. Nasir added that nanotechnology may allow active ingredients that would not normally penetrate the skin to be delivered to it. For example, vitamin C is an antioxidant that helps fight age-related skin damage which works best below the top layer of skin. In bulk form, vitamin C is not very stable and has difficulty penetrating the skin. However, in future formulations, nanotechnology may increase the stability of vitamin C and enhance its ability to penetrate the skin.

“Since anti-aging products that contain nanoparticles of antioxidants will be harder to make, we expect that these products will cost more than products using traditional formulations,” said Dr. Nasir. “Once these products are determined to be safe, the consumer will have to decide if the increased costs are worth the added benefits.”

Nanotechnology: Future Melanoma Treatment

Researchers also are reviewing the use of nanomaterials for the treatment of melanoma. In particular, gold, when turned into a nanomaterial called nanoshells, has been shown to be a useful treatment for melanoma in animal studies.

According to Dr. Nasir, gold nanoshells can be engineered to absorb specific wavelengths of light.  If the wavelength of light unique to a particular type of gold nanoshell is used on it, the particle generates heat. In one animal study done at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, investigators joined gold nanoshells with a molecule which homes to melanoma.  When these gold nanoshells are injected into mice harboring melanoma, the nanoshells accumulate in the cancerous tissue.  When mice are illuminated with the proper wavelength of light, their tumors, laden with gold nanoshells, heat up and are effectively killed. The surrounding tissue, which lacks targeted gold nanoshells, is unharmed.

“Nanotechnology holds promise for new non-invasive treatment methods, particularly for challenging dermatologic conditions, such as atopic dermatitis and ichthyosis,” said Dr. Nasir.

Nanotechnology: More Consumer Information Needed

Because the skin is the first point of contact and the first line of defense for newly manufactured nanomaterials, Dr. Nasir noted that many dermatologists have concerns about the potential health risks posed by nanotechnology. “Although nanotechnology is an exciting area that holds enormous potential,” said Dr. Nasir, “we anxiously await the FDA’s review of the safety of nanoparticles which will determine their future role in skin care products.”

Headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., the American Academy of Dermatology (Academy), founded in 1938, is the largest, most influential, and most representative of all dermatologic associations. With a membership of more than 16,000 physicians worldwide, the Academy is committed to: advancing the diagnosis and medical, surgical and cosmetic treatment of the skin, hair and nails; advocating high standards in clinical practice, education, and research in dermatology; and supporting and enhancing patient care for a lifetime of healthier skin, hair and nails. For more information, contact the Academy at 1-888-462-DERM (3376) or www.aad.org.

Source: American Academy of Dermatology

Web Site:  http://www.aad.org/

Latest Beige Book outlines slow recovery

The quick recap — yep, things are getting better, and no, not very quickly. And all that snow in February didn’t help things. The coming unemployment report is expected to show the rate rising to 9.8 percent.

From the link:

Of the Fed’s 12 regions surveyed, nine showed improvement. The Richmond district, which includes Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, was hurt the most by the bad winter. That region reportedeconomic activity had “slackened or remained soft across most sectors” because of the weather.

The economic setbacks from the weather come at a fragile time: The economy is struggling to recover from the worst and longest recession since the 1930s.

After a big growth spurt at the end of 2009, many economists believe the recovery lost steam in the first three months of this year. They predict it will grow at a pace of around 3 percent from January to March. That won’t be fast enough to drive down the unemployment rate, now at 9.7 percent.

The jobs market “remained soft throughout the nation,” the Fed reported.

Update 3/7/10 — If you feel the urge, or just want, to dig much deeper into this Beige Book report, hit this link for a 538 post full of charts and analysis.

Microsoft wants to tax you …

… to help pay for correcting its sieve-like OS and application coding. Now I’m not saying Microsoft is the only reason malware, phishing, botnets and other cybercrime goes on out there, but its shoddy and ubiquitous products are to blame for a very large majority. And that statement comes from a Microsoft user and supporter.

This internet usage tax idea from MS’s “trustworthy computing” veep is the height of stupidly ballsy statements. Maybe Microsoft should remunerate every computer user whose identity has been stolen, data compromised or computer files corrupted or lost due to yet another security fix that came a little too late.

Taxing internet usage to fix a problem largely caused by a single entity? Not a good idea. Try again, Scott Charney.

From the link:

How will we ever get a leg up on hackers who are infecting computers worldwide? Microsoft’s (MSFT) security chief laid out several suggestions Tuesday, including a possible Internet usage tax to pay for the inspection and quarantine of machines.Today most hacked PCs run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and the company has invested millions in trying to fight the problem.

Microsoft recently used the U.S. court system to shut down the Waledac botnet, introducing a new tactic in the battle against hackers. Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney said that the technology industry needs to think about more “social solutions.”

Update 3/8/10 — Looks like I’m not alone in condemning this crazy idea.

Wednesday video fun — amazing chalk art

Here’s the title from the YouTube page, “Jamin’s Crazy Chalk Drawing #2 – Where The Wild Things Are.”

And here’s the video …

(Hat tip: wakooz)

Preserving digital knowledge

This is a much larger issue than most people realize, and I’ve blogged on this exact topic just over a month ago. The problem is different formats and hardware advancement that can render data unreadable. Not because the data file is corrupted (even though that’s a real issue as well), but because there’s no device that can access the data on an archaic storage medium. I agree with the opening sentence of this release — it is one of the most pressing challenges of the information age.

The release:

Blue Ribbon Task Force Report:
Preserving Our Digital Knowledge
Base Must be a Public Priority

Dollars Won’t Do It Alone: Deluge of Digital Data Needs Economically Sustainable Plans

February 26, 2010

By Jan Zverina

Addressing one of the most urgent societal challenges of the Information Age – ensuring that valued digital information will be accessible not just today, but in the future – requires solutions that are at least as much economic and social as technical, according to a new report by a Blue Ribbon Task Force.

The Final Report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, called “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information”, is the result of a two-year effort focusing on  the critical economic challenges of  preserving an ever-increasing amount of information in a world gone digital. The full report is available online
at http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf

“The Data Deluge is here.  Ensuring that our most valuable information is available both today and tomorrow is not just a matter of finding sufficient funds,” said Fran Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and co-chair of the Task Force. “It’s about creating a “data economy” in which those who care, those who will pay, and those who preserve are working in coordination.”

The challenge in preserving valuable digital information – consisting of text, video, images, music, sensor data, etc. generated throughout all areas of our society – is real and growing at an exponential pace. A recent study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that a total of 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 (that’s roughly 3.9 trillion times a trillion) new digital information bits were created in 2008. In the future, the digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months, according to the IDC report.

While much has been written on the digital preservation issue as a technical challenge, the Blue Ribbon Task Force report focuses on the economic aspect; i.e. how stewards of valuable, digitally-based information can pay for preservation over the longer term. The report provides general principles and actions to support long-term economic sustainability; context-specific recommendations tailored to specific scenarios analyzed in the report; and an agenda for priority actions and next steps, organized according to the type of decision maker best suited to carry that action forward. Moreover, the report is intended to serve as a foundation for further study in this critical area.

In addition to releasing its report, the Task Force earlier this month announced plans for a one-day symposium to provide a forum for discussion on economically sustainable digital preservation practices. The symposium, to be held April 1 in Washington D.C., will include a spectrum of national leaders from the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum, Nature Magazine, Google, and other organizations for whom digital information is fundamental for success.

Value, Incentives, and Roles & Responsibilities
The report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force focuses on four distinct scenarios, each having ever-increasing amounts of preservation-worthy digital assets in which there is a public interest in long-term preservation:  scholarly discourse , research data, commercially-owned cultural content (such as digital movies and music), and collectively-produced Web content (such as blogs).

“Valuable digital information spans the spectrum from official e-documents to some YouTube videos. No one economic model will cost-effectively support them all, but all require cost-effective economic models,” said Berman, who was director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, before joining Rensselaer last year.

The report categorizes the economics of digital preservation into three “necessary conditions” closely aligned with the needs of stakeholders: recognizing the value of data and selecting materials for longer-term preservation; providing incentives for decision makers to preserve data directly or provide preservation services for others; and articulating the roles and responsibilities among those involved in the preservation process. The report further aligns those conditions with the basic economic principle of supply and demand, and warns that without well-articulated demand for access to preserved digital assets, there will be no supply of preservation services.

“Addressing the issues of value, incentives, and roles and responsibilities helps us understand who benefits from long-term access to digital materials, who should be responsible for preservation, and who should pay for it,” said Brian Lavoie, research scientist at OCLC and Task Force co-chair. “Neglecting to account for any of these conditions significantly reduces the prospects of achieving sustainable digital preservation activities over the long run.”

Task Force Recommendations
The Blue Ribbon panel report cites several specific recommendations for decision makers and stakeholders to consider as they seek economically sustainable preservation practices for digital information. While the report covers these recommendations in detail, below is a summary listing key areas of priority for near-term action:

Organizational Action

• develop public-private partnerships, similar to ones formed by the Library of Congress
• ensure that organizations have access to skilled personnel, from domain experts to legal and business specialists
• create and sustain secure chains of stewardship between organizations over  the long term
• achieve economies of scale and scope wherever possible

Technical Action

• build capacity to support stewardship in all areas
• lower the costs of preservation overall
• determine the optimal level of technical curation needed to create a flexible strategy for all types of digital material

Public Policy Action

• modify copyright laws to enable digital preservation
• create incentives and requirements for private entities to preserve on behalf of the public (financial incentives, handoff requirements)
• sponsor public-private partnerships
• clarify rights issues associated with Web-based materials

Education and Public Outreach Action

• promote education and training for 21st century digital preservation (domain-specific skills, curatorial best practices, core competencies in relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge)
• raise awareness of the urgency to take timely preservation actions

The report concluded that sustainable preservation strategies are not built all at once, nor are they static.

“The environment in which digital preservation takes place can be very dynamic,” said OCLC’s Brian Lavoie. “Priorities change, policies change, stakeholders change. A key element of a robust sustainability strategy is to anticipate the effect of these changes and take steps to minimize the risk that long-term preservation goals will be impacted by short-term disruptions in resources, incentives, and other economic factors. If we can do this, we will have gone a long way toward ensuring that society’s valuable digital content does indeed survive.”

About the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was launched in late 2007 by the National Science Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The Task Force was commissioned to explore the economic sustainability challenge of digital preservation and access.  An Interim report discussing the economic context for preservation, Sustaining the Digital Investment:  Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation, is available at the Task Force website, http://brtf.sdsc.edu .  Please visit the website for more information about the Task Force and its upcoming symposium, called A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information, to take place April 1, 2010 in Washington D.C. A similar symposium will be held in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2010, at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, in London. Space is limited so early registration is advised.  More information is available at

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/BRTFUKSymposium.aspx

Happy first birthday …

… to the youngest home office denizen.

The birthday boy!

And here’s a virtual steak to celebrate with …

A birthday steak, instead of a cake

Dirty ISPs better watch out

A new ranking system from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University will ferret out providers run by cybercriminals.

From the link (goes to Oak Ridge National Laboratory story tips for March 2010):

Cybercrime—Exposing hackers . . .

Unscrupulous Internet service providers will have no place to hide because of a ranking system conceived by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University. “Criminal enterprises have created entire Internet service providers dedicated to sending spam, phishing messages or spreading viruses,” said Craig Shue of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. While some have been caught by the Federal Trade Commission or other Internet service providers unwilling to do business with them, many are able to escape detection. “These other Internet service providers have customers whose machines become infected and can be used to launch attacks or steal the customer’s data,” Shue said. This work, which creates a ranking system Shue likened to grading systems for comparing school districts, is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Indiana University.

Conductive graphene ink

Looking for a market-ready application for graphene? Well, look no further …

From the second link:

This conductive ink is one of the first products on the market to incorporate graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. Applying the ink with standard techniques can print wiring for RFID antennas, keypads, and display backplanes directly onto paper or cardboard stock. Unlike metallic conductive inks, the graphene ink does not have to be heated after printing.

Courtesy of Vorbeck Materials

Bunning quits playing Don Quixote …

… the unemployed regain jobless benefits and the GOP heaves a great sigh of relief. And Bunning’s next opponent has a goldmine of opposition ad material.

From the link:

The Senate headed reached a resolution of an impasse over unemployment pay on Tuesday night after Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, dropped his objection to extending jobless benefits in exchange for a largely symbolic vote on paying for the aid.

Mr. Bunning’s agreement to relent essentially short-circuited an intensifying political battle that had already resulted in 2,000 workers at the Department of Transportation being furloughed without pay and in the temporary cutoff of benefits to thousands of out-of-work Americans.

It came after Mr. Bunning’s fellow Republicans began to air their own concerns about how the Senate blockade had the potential to damage their political brand while also having a direct impact on their constituents. The Senate later voted 78 to 19 to renew the programs.

Why is Charlie Rangel still head of Ways and Means?

It’s either spinelessness or hypocrisy from the Democrats. Both shoes probably fit.

From the link:

Caught in a swirl of ethics inquiries, Representative Charles B. Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation, appeared to be losing his grip on his powerful post as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday night as Republicans planned to force a vote insisting that he step aside.

The House ethics committee last week admonished Mr. Rangel, an ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for violating Congressional gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.

The ethics panel is still investigating more serious allegations regarding Mr. Rangel’s fund-raising, his failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.

Why does Chuck Grassley hate America?

Does he not understand the rule of law within the United State’s judicial system, or is he just trying to score very cheap and dirty political points? I’m guessing the latter is the case, but arguing lawyers for terrorism defendants are somehow terrorist sympathizers goes against everything our excellent judicial system stands for. If Grassley, and others, want to pervert our system when it comes up against terrorism suspects, the terrorists were clearly successful against Grassley and his other pantywaisted cohorts. I’m pretty sure the rest of us true Americans have faith in a process that has served us well for two hundred-plus years.

Here’s the “quote for the day” from the Daily Dish courtesy of an Air Force Colonel and former military commission prosecutor during the Bush 43 administration. Someone who has a bit more skin in this game and understanding of what is at stake legally than the cowardly Grassley and Liz Cheney:

“It is absolutely outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather Neal [Katyal] and Jennifer [Daskal] and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters. You don’t hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial,” – retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who served as a chief prosecutor for the military commissions under Cheney.

And here is the odious video from Liz Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, that spawned all the blogging today on this topic and brought Grassley’s comments from last November back into the light:

Google is serious about developing solar

Very serious.  A solar thermal plant pumping out electricity at 5 cents/kWh (or less!?!) would be pretty amazing. This advance in efficiency is coming through a redesign of the mirrors with new material on both the reflective surface and the substrate.

From the link:

Google announced last year that they were working on new technology that would make solar thermal energy cheaper than coal.  Just a few months later, they have a prototype and expect a product to be ready in as little as a year.

And:

The prototype is being internally tested before more rigorous external testing, but two solar companies, BrightSource and eSolar, are already interested in the technology.  Google is a major investor in both companies and has said if the prototype works, the companies would use the technology.

That’s a lot of data!

Via KurzweilAI.net — Just wow …

Data, data everywhere

The Economist, Feb. 25, 2010 The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years, says The Economist in a special report on managing information. According to IDG, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. (IDC) By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco. Read Original Article>>

Google Chrome browser gaining market share

The upward trend has reached 16 straight months. I am a huge Chrome fan and highly recommend this nimble and very fast browser for netizens at all levels of tech savvy.

From the link:

As Firefox slid, Google’s (GOOG) Chrome again boosted its share, although the increase was smaller than in the two months before. Chrome ended February with a 5.6% share, up 0.4 of a percentage point. Chrome has doubled its share in the last six months.

Here’s the browser breakdown according to the web measurement vendor NetApplications.com:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer   61.2%
• Firefox                                              24.2%
• Google Chrome                                5.6%
• Apple Safari                                      4.4%

Is health care reform going to pass?

Looks like it. Here’s a solid analysis from Jonathan Bernstein guest-blogging at the Daily Dish.

From the link:

Item: Ten House Dems who voted against the bill the first time around are telling the AP (via Jonathan Chait) that they might vote yes this time around.  Chait is right about the incentives here as far as public statements are concerned.  I’d put it this way: there’s an easily understandable story of going from no, to maybe, to yes…but it makes no sense at all to go from no, to maybe, to no.

I should emphasize here that it is very, very rare for the majority to lose a high-stakes vote on final passage on the House floor.  You just don’t bring a bill to the floor unless you know you’re going to win.  I can’t imagine a reason that Nancy Pelosi and the White House would bring this to the floor knowing that they were going to lose, for some sort of spin advantage.  They either know that they have the votes, or it’s the biggest bluff in who knows how long.  Keep watching: does the president really announce the schedule tomorrow that was leaked today?  Does the Speaker really keep to that schedule, or do leaks start appearing about pushing it back a few days?  I don’t think so, however.  I think they have the votes.

Beautiful nature image — the Coast Mountains of British Columbia

This would also qualify as a beautiful Olympics image …

The Coast Mountains of British Columbia are bathed in morning light as they are viewed from Cypress Mountain in Vancouver, British Columbia on Sunday Feb. 21, 2010, prior to the during the men’s ski cross. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Sean Kilpatrick) #

Cool nanotech image — cadmium sulfide semiconducting laser

This image is part of the series linked in the previous post on the laser turning 50, but it deserves highlighting as a very cool nanotechnology image.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created the smallest semiconducting laser, which could eventually be used for optical computing. A cadmium sulfide wire 50 nanometers in diameter generates visible light and holds it in a five-nanometer space.

Credit: Xiang Zhang Lab/UC Berkeley

Happy 50th birthday to the laser

Lasers are just cool, and now they have been for fifty years. Hit the link for photos and a thorough Technology Review history on controlling excited photons.

From the link:

This year is the 50th anniversary of the laser, a device used in applications from performing precise surgical procedures to measuring gravitational waves. In 1917, Albert Einstein proposed that a photon hitting an atom in a high energy state would cause the atom to release a second photon identical in frequency and direction to the first. In the 1950s, scientists searched for a way to achieve this stimulated emission and amplify it so that a group of excited atoms would release photons in a chain reaction. In 1959, American physicist Gordon Gould publicly used the term “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” for the first time. A year later, scientists demonstrated the first working optical laser.

Credit: HRL Laboratories

Going beyond radio in the search for ET

I’ve been a longtime supporter of SETI’s efforts, but I also welcome any new ideas in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. These ideas from Paul Davies sound worthwhile.

The release

Widening the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been dominated for its first half century by a hunt for unusual radio signals. But as he prepares for the publication of his new book The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone?, Paul Davies tells Physics World readers why bold new innovations are required if we are ever to hear from our cosmic neighbours.

Writing exclusively in March’s Physics World, Davies, director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in the US, explains why the search for radio signals is limited and how we might progress.

As Davies writes, “speculation about SETI is bedevilled by the trap of anthropocentrism – a tendency to use 21st-century human civilisation as a model for what an extraterrestrial civilisation would be like… After 50 years of traditional SETI, the time has come to widen the search from radio signals.”

Questioning the idea of an alien civilisation beaming radio signals towards Earth, Davies explains that even if the aliens were, say, 500 light years away (close by SETI standards), the aliens would be communicating with Earth in 1510 – long before we were equipped to pick up radio signals.

While SETI activity has been concentrated in radio astronomy, from Frank Drake’s early telescope to the more recent Allen Telescope Array, astronomers have only ever been met with an (almost) eerie silence.

Davies suggests that there may be more convincing signs of intelligent alien life, either here on Earth in the form of bizarre microorganisms that somehow found their way to Earth, or in space, through spotting the anomalous absence of, for example, energy-generating particles that an alien life form might have harvested.

“Using the full array of scientific methods from genomics to neutrino astrophysics,” Davies writes, “we should begin to scrutinise the solar system and our region of the galaxy for any hint of past or present cosmic company.”

Following the publication of his book, The Eerie Silence, Davies will be giving a Physics World webinar at 4pm (BST) on Wednesday 31 March. You can view the webinar live at www.physicsworld.com or download it afterwards.

###

Also in the March edition:

• Getting intimate with Mars – robotic rovers are starting to unravel the secrets of the red planet but, according to one NASA expert, we would discover so much more if we brought samples back to Earth.
• The Hollywood actor Alan Alda, star of M*A*S*H and The West Wing, who has a deep and passionate interest in science, is now part of an innovative US project to help scientists to communicate.

:

Your avatar affects your online behavior

Via KurzweilAI.net — This research is not surprising in the least. If your avatar looks like you it stands to reason you’d act something akin to how you normally would. If your avatar has a dramatically different look than you, or is a different gender, species or even an alien life form it also stands to reason you’d be more likely to role-play the actions you think that character would exhibit.

Can avatars change the way we think and act?

Physorg.com, Feb. 25, 2010 You are more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you, Jesse Fox, a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, found in a study that used digital photographs of participants to create personalized avatar bodies. Read Original Article>>

Here’s the YouTube clip found at the link:

The state of the recession

So-so at best. By all, or a least most, accounts the national recession is over and recovery, however slow, is going on right now. Break that national figure down a bit and the picture changes dramatically. Two-thirds of all states are still in a recession. That’s a lot of people who just get frustrated and angry when told things have hit bottom and are now getting better. For a lot of Americans things are not getting any better just yet. And Nevada is alone as the the state with a still-shrinking economy.

From the link:

The national recession may be over, but not everyone feels the change. Some industries and regions continue to suffer. The tepid 3% pace of growth in this recovery means no rising tide lifting all boats.

And here’s a handy chart outlining who’s still feeling the pain:

Microsoft and your privacy

Food for thought …

What is the “Spy Guide”?

The Global Criminal Compliance Handbook is a quasi-comprehensive explanatory document meant for law enforcement officials seeking access to Microsoft’s stored user information. It also provides sample language for subpoenas and diagrams on how to understand server logs.

I call it “quasi-comprehensive” because, at a mere 22 pages, it doesn’t explore the nitty-gritty of Microsoft’s systems; it’s more like a data-hunting guide for dummies.

Which of My Microsoft Services are Affected?

All sorts. Microsoft keeps user information related to its online services. The data ranges from past e-mails to credit card numbers. The information is kept for a designated period of time, sometimes forever.

The sites referenced are:

• Windows Live
• Windows Live ID
• Microsoft Office Live
• Xbox Live
• MSN
• Windows Live Spaces
• Windows Live Messenger
• Hotmail
• MSN Groups

Health care reform won’t help self-employed tax issue

As a self-employed freelance writer, I completely understand the pain of the odd taxes and hoops of red tape the IRS has put in front of the self-employed sole proprietor. Too bad none of the reform ideas floating around include helping those smallest of businesses.

From the link:

By a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers who buy their own health insurance essentially pay an extra tax on their premiums. They’re the only taxpayers in the system who pay taxes on premiums, which count as a business expense for corporations and pretax income for employees. Because self-employed workers have no corporate employers to match their payroll tax contributions to Social Security and Medicare, they pay double the rate of wage and salary workers in a levy known as the self-employment tax equal to 15.3% of their net earnings. That’s on top of regular state and federal income taxes, and the income they spend on health premiums is not exempt.

The nation’s 9 million self-employed—sole proprietors with few or no employees, contract workers, and freelancers—constitute about 8% of the total U.S. labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The Census Bureau counts 22 million sole-proprietors, but it’s not clear how many of those may be payroll workers as well.) “You correct this, think of the widespread health benefit you would give to so many people,” says Kristie Arslan, executive director of the lobbying group National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), which represents the self-employed in Washington.