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Lords of the strings
UNIMEDIA/INTERNATIONAL/REX
Technology LORDS OF THE STRINGS
Borrowers vote with their mice BANKS could be an unexpected victim of the revolution in online networking, says a UK study. Instead of paying commercial interest rates, 74 per cent of Britons say they would consider turning to the growing internet phenomenon of social lending. Just as social networks such as FaceBook let you set up online communities, lending sites including prosper.com and zopa. com match people with cash to lend with borrowers. Users list how much they want to borrow, and what interest they are prepared to pay, and lenders then bid for deals they like the look of. Now a study by the Lancasterbased Social Futures Observatory has found that the idea of “sidestepping the banks” is catching on, with a third of respondents believing the major banks set out to put people in debt.
Stradivarius violins – and making similar-sounding modern versions – his life’s work. In 1998 he discovered that treating a piece of modern maple with salt water and grape juice could produce a violin back with some Stradavariuslike resonances. Then in 2001 he found that borax, the anti-woodworm treatment Stradivari used, also had an appreciable effect on a violin’s sound. Nagyvary’s recent chemical analysis of the wood shows that it has a different chemical composition to maple grown in the region today (Nature, vol 444, p 565). “The violin backs appear to have been brutally treated with salts of copper, iron and chromium as wood preservers,” Nagyvary says. It is these salts, he suggests, that provided the mellifluous tone. He now plans to find out exactly which salts they were.
500
–What’s so special about a Stradivarius?–
Less of a drag for satellites GLOBAL warming may help satellites stay in low Earth orbit for longer, but at some cost to their solar panels. Jan Laštoviˇcka at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Prague, Czech Republic, and colleagues say evidence is mounting that the upper atmosphere is cooling and shrinking as greenhouse-gas levels rise (Science, vol 314, p 1253).
million dollars has been awarded by the Pentagon to IBM and Cray to develop “petaflop” supercomputers
Heat from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric carbon dioxide and emitted as infrared radiation. In the denser lower atmosphere the CO2 absorbs it and radiates it back to Earth, but higher up it is lost into space. Cooling shrinks the atmosphere, leaving less gas to create drag on satellites, so they remain aloft for longer. But their solar panels are less well protected from high-energy particles that could degrade them, Laštoviˇcka says.
GIZMO
AUDIO ON THE MOVE More US internet users are listening to podcasts, but few do so regularly
Paralysed people could communicate and control machines just by thinking hard, thanks to a non-invasive mind-reading headband developed by Hitachi in Japan. It shines near-infrared light through the skull and measures how much is reflected by the brain. In tests, people did mental arithmetic to indicate “yes” and let their mind wander to say “no”. Working out a sum increased blood flow in the brain, which dimmed the light reflected back to the sensors, showing what the user meant.
(per cent of US internet users) Have ever downloaded a podcast Did so yesterday
Nov 2006 12% 1% Feb - April 2006 7% 1%
SOURCE: PEW INTERNET
In the right hands, the violins of the celebrated 17th-century Italian instrument makers Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri produce a glorious sound. But quite why they do so has remained a mystery. Now wood shavings scavenged from these instruments while under repair have given fresh clues as to their exquisite acoustics. Joseph Nagyvary, a chemist at Texas A&M University in College Station, analysed shavings from a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He found that a chemical wood preservative used in timber yards around Cremona in Lombardy, where both violin makers worked, appears to have given the violins their signature sound quality. Nagyvary has made analysing
A printer that uses plastic “paper” which can be reused up to 500 times has been developed by Japanese firm Toshiba. It prints on plastic sheets coated in heatsensitive pigments. The pigments switch from white to black at one temperature, and switch back at another, so text can be printed and then erased.
“We’re trying to restore the internet’s promise of unfettered access” Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada, on a new software tool that helps people circumvent government censorship. The software, called Psiphon, allows people to access the web through a proxy server in an unrestricted country (The New York Times, 27 November).
www.newscientist.com
061202_N_p25_TechOpener.indd 25
2 December 2006 | NewScientist | 25
27/11/06 5:41:34 pm
Technology LORDS OF THE STRINGS
Borrowers vote with their mice BANKS could be an unexpected victim of the revolution in online networking, says a UK study. Instead of paying commercial interest rates, 74 per cent of Britons say they would consider turning to the growing internet phenomenon of social lending. Just as social networks such as FaceBook let you set up online communities, lending sites including prosper.com and zopa. com match people with cash to lend with borrowers. Users list how much they want to borrow, and what interest they are prepared to pay, and lenders then bid for deals they like the look of. Now a study by the Lancasterbased Social Futures Observatory has found that the idea of “sidestepping the banks” is catching on, with a third of respondents believing the major banks set out to put people in debt.
Stradivarius violins – and making similar-sounding modern versions – his life’s work. In 1998 he discovered that treating a piece of modern maple with salt water and grape juice could produce a violin back with some Stradavariuslike resonances. Then in 2001 he found that borax, the anti-woodworm treatment Stradivari used, also had an appreciable effect on a violin’s sound. Nagyvary’s recent chemical analysis of the wood shows that it has a different chemical composition to maple grown in the region today (Nature, vol 444, p 565). “The violin backs appear to have been brutally treated with salts of copper, iron and chromium as wood preservers,” Nagyvary says. It is these salts, he suggests, that provided the mellifluous tone. He now plans to find out exactly which salts they were.
500
–What’s so special about a Stradivarius?–
Less of a drag for satellites GLOBAL warming may help satellites stay in low Earth orbit for longer, but at some cost to their solar panels. Jan Laštoviˇcka at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Prague, Czech Republic, and colleagues say evidence is mounting that the upper atmosphere is cooling and shrinking as greenhouse-gas levels rise (Science, vol 314, p 1253).
million dollars has been awarded by the Pentagon to IBM and Cray to develop “petaflop” supercomputers
Heat from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric carbon dioxide and emitted as infrared radiation. In the denser lower atmosphere the CO2 absorbs it and radiates it back to Earth, but higher up it is lost into space. Cooling shrinks the atmosphere, leaving less gas to create drag on satellites, so they remain aloft for longer. But their solar panels are less well protected from high-energy particles that could degrade them, Laštoviˇcka says.
GIZMO
AUDIO ON THE MOVE More US internet users are listening to podcasts, but few do so regularly
Paralysed people could communicate and control machines just by thinking hard, thanks to a non-invasive mind-reading headband developed by Hitachi in Japan. It shines near-infrared light through the skull and measures how much is reflected by the brain. In tests, people did mental arithmetic to indicate “yes” and let their mind wander to say “no”. Working out a sum increased blood flow in the brain, which dimmed the light reflected back to the sensors, showing what the user meant.
(per cent of US internet users) Have ever downloaded a podcast Did so yesterday
Nov 2006 12% 1% Feb - April 2006 7% 1%
SOURCE: PEW INTERNET
In the right hands, the violins of the celebrated 17th-century Italian instrument makers Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri produce a glorious sound. But quite why they do so has remained a mystery. Now wood shavings scavenged from these instruments while under repair have given fresh clues as to their exquisite acoustics. Joseph Nagyvary, a chemist at Texas A&M University in College Station, analysed shavings from a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. He found that a chemical wood preservative used in timber yards around Cremona in Lombardy, where both violin makers worked, appears to have given the violins their signature sound quality. Nagyvary has made analysing
A printer that uses plastic “paper” which can be reused up to 500 times has been developed by Japanese firm Toshiba. It prints on plastic sheets coated in heatsensitive pigments. The pigments switch from white to black at one temperature, and switch back at another, so text can be printed and then erased.
“We’re trying to restore the internet’s promise of unfettered access” Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada, on a new software tool that helps people circumvent government censorship. The software, called Psiphon, allows people to access the web through a proxy server in an unrestricted country (The New York Times, 27 November).
www.newscientist.com
061202_N_p25_TechOpener.indd 25
2 December 2006 | NewScientist | 25
27/11/06 5:41:34 pm