Rihanna -- I Was Bankrupt Because of My Stupid Accountant

2/12/2014 1:00 AM PST BY TMZ STAFF

Rihanna says her accountant made so many boneheaded decisions that he blew her fortune and she was "effectively bankrupt" by the end of 2009.

The singer claims in new legal docs she had $11 MILLION in cash at the beginning of 2009.  Rihanna says the accountant was not on the ball and she was horrified to learn at the end of the year she had $2 million left. To make matters worse, her expenses doubled, which left her on a financial cliff.

As for how Rihanna blew through $9 million in one year ... she says her accountant gave her the green light to buy a house priced between $7 and 7 1/2 million. So she took his advice. She ultimately sold the house for a $2 million LOSS.

She also claims her 2009 tour -- Last Girl on Earth Tour -- was losing money but the accountant never gave her the heads up.

The legal docs were filed in connection with a lawsuit Rihanna filed against her accountant, claiming gross mismanagement.

BTW ... Rihanna has rebounded nicely.  Her net worth is now estimated at $43 mil.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/12/rihanna-lawsuit-accountant-bankrupt/#ixzz2t9iaI64k

US military begins work on brain implants that can restore lost memories, experiences

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 10, 2014 at 1:07 pm
• • 
  • • DARPA, at the behest of the US Department of Defense, is developing a black box brain implant — an implant that will be wired into a soldier’s brain and record their memories. If the soldier then suffers memory loss due to brain injury, the implant will then be used to restore those memories. The same implant could also be used during training or in the line of duty, too — as we’ve reported on in the past, stimulating the right regions of the brain can improve how quickly you learn new skills, reduce your reaction times, and more.
      The project, which DARPA has wittily named Restoring Active Memory, is currently at the stage where it’s seeking proposals from commercial companies that have previously had success with brain implants, such as Medtronic. As yet, we don’t know who has submitted proposals to DARPA, but it’ll probably be the usual suspects. Medtronic, which creates deep-brain simulation (DBS) implants that are almost miraculous in their ability to control the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease (video embedded below), is surely interested. Brown University, which famously created a brain-computer interface that is implanted into the brain and communicates wirelessly with a nearby computer, must be a contender. Companies with big R&D budgets, like IBM and GE, might be involved as well.
    • The Restoring Active Memory project has two key targets. First, we need to be able to actually analyze and decode a human’s neural signals. Some work has been done in this area, such as brute-forcing the encoding of the optic nerve, but we’re a long way away from reading a bunch of neural spikes and knowing exactly what the person is thinking or experiencing. Second, we want to take that knowledge of how we encode memories (stored experiences), and somehow use it to re-program a human brain that has experienced memory loss. “Ultimately, it is desired to develop a prototype implantable neural device that enables recovery of memory in a human clinical population,” says the proposal. (Read: What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human?)
      This might sound like something out of a sci-fi film — and to be honest, we’re probably quite a few years away from such an implant. While we’ve had a fair amount of success withtDCS and DBS, we’re still very much at the dumb, brute-force stage of neuroscience. The lobotomy might be out of vogue, but modern implants aren’t that much more refined — they just run electricity through a specific part of the brain. We’re not entirely sure why it works, and except for turning the device off we can’t really control it. We are a long, long way away from measuring the exact pattern of neurons firing that gives a soldier the ability to use a sniper rifle or defuse a bomb. (Read: MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons.)
      Still, an implanted device — rather than external, cranial-mounted instrument — is definitely the way to go, if we want to learn more about how the human brain encodes memories. When you boil it down, all memories are ultimately just a specific set of neuron connections and electric pulses (spikes). It stands to reason that, eventually, with enough painstaking data collection (provided by the implant) and a lot of analysis (supercomputers) we’ll be able to work out the exact combinations required to re-program a human brain to remember certain experiences, memories, and skills.
    • 
      

Amazon could take on the PS4, Xbox One, and Apple TV all at once with its own game console

• By Grant Brunner on February 11, 2014 at 10:45 am
• • 
  • • Hot off the heels of the Xbox One and PS4 launches, Amazon is rumored to be releasing its first console later this year, and it will likely sell for under $300. With an incredibly low entry price, an existing content ecosystem, and a recent high-profile developer acquisition, Amazon is primed to take on Microsoft and Sony head-on.
      Recently, VG24/7 revealed a number of juicy details regarding Amazon’s new console. With an Android-derived OS, this machine will be able to run existing mobile games. In fact,Amazon is reportedly demoing the console using existing mobile titles. That’s a nice parlor trick, but that’s certainly not where Amazon is headed. We’ve already seen the Ouyas of the world fail to gain traction, so it seems highly unlikely that Amazon will market this console as the ultimate Candy Crush platform.
      An affordable set-top box from Amazon would also offer an opportunity to compete directly with the Apple TV and Roku. Amazon has millions of existing customers, and offering a tightly integrated experience could potentially perform quite well. Amazon already has a huge content library, so it’d be wise to leverage that in the living room. As the company continues to expand into hardware, this is definitely the next logical step — with or without games in the mix. It is easy to imagine AirPlay-like functionality, between Kindle Fire tablets and an Amazon set-top box.
      Okay, it’s an Android-based machine that will probably stream Amazon Prime videos really well. What about actual games, though? Well, it seems as if Amazon isn’t content with just a handful of mobile ports. Last week, Amazon announced that it has acquired Double Helix — the developers of last year’s Killer Instinct on Xbox One. With that purchase alone, this machine becomes much more interesting from a gamer’s perspective.
      It’d be very easy for Amazon to launch this console with nothing but half-hearted ports ofAngry Birds, Cut the Rope, and a mountain of Flappy Bird clones. Thankfully, it seems as if the Seattle company has much larger ambitions. If Amazon can offer a reasonably powerful console with top-notch dev tools, it doesn’t matter if it’s running Android under the hood. With a low price, and strong developer support, this could potentially be a viable competitor to the PS4 and Xbox One. Of course, it remains to be seen if Amazon can actually pull any of that off.
      At this stage, there’s no reason to get hung up on the stigma of Android gaming. Think of the Android roots of this potential platform as little more than an implementation detail. After all, the PS4 runs a variant of BSD, and nobody bats and eyelid. We still don’t know much about what Jeff Bezos has up his sleeve for 2014, but don’t count it out simply because of the word “Android.” Let’s actually see what Amazon and Double Helix can deliver as a team before we dismiss this new console outright — it’s not any crazier than Microsoft’s original Xbox was a decade ago.

New nature-inspired antenna improves wireless performance by 6-8x, coming to routers and smartphones soon

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 11, 2014 at 12:23 pm
• • 
  • • A Dutch company, which goes by the rather uninspiring name of Antenna Company, says it has discovered a new way of building radio antennas that have six to eight times the performance of the existing antennas in your smartphone or wireless router. Such a performance boost could result in much longer range, lower power operation, better use of available bandwidth, and increased speeds. The key to these new antennas, oddly enough, is the superformula — a fairly new mathematical concept that appears to describe many complex shapes found in nature. By building antennas based on this formula (which results in some rather organic looking shapes, incidentally), efficiency can be massively increased, improving transmission and reception quality.
      

      Some of the natural shapes that the superformula describes
      Antenna Company, which doesn’t appear to be shipping any commercial products just yet (but it sounds like it’s close), is promising to bring two interesting bits of technology to the antenna world. First, there’s the aforementioned superformula — a formula created by Johan Gielis, a horticultural and biosciences engineer who sought to describe some of the more complex shapes that emerge in nature. The second piece of the puzzle is a differentkind of antenna — a dielectric resonator antenna. (Read: Duke’s metamaterial superlens could finally allow for long-range wireless charging.)
      Almost every radio antenna in commercial use is made of metal. The wireless and cellular antennas in your smartphone are made of metal. The antennas on the back of your router are made of metal (but covered in protective plastic). Your TV and radio antenna are made of metal. At lower frequencies, metal is just fine — but at microwave and higher frequencies they become lossy, dissipating energy into the atmosphere and degrading the signal strength/quality. This is a problem, because almost all cellular and WiFi communications use microwave frequencies. A dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is fashioned out of a dielectric (ceramic or plastic in this case) rather than metal, reducing the amount of signal loss. The military already use DRAs for high-frequency radar applications, but for some reason they have never come to the consumer market (probably due to fabrication complexity, cost, brittleness, etc.)
      

      Antenna shapes, as described by the superformula
      Now, though, Antenna Company wants to bring superformula-inspired DRAs to the consumer market. As you can see in the image above, these superformula antennas come in a variety of odd, organic-looking shapes. Depending on the application, you would opt for an antenna shape that produces the desired signal spread. The performance gain is on the order of 2-4x for a single antenna (3-6dB), and 6-8x for multiple antennas (MIMO). There is also the possibility to reduce the number of antennas used, due to improved signal strength, better beam forming, and so on. (Read: Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second.)
      It seems the current designs have been successfully tested at the 2.4 and 5GHz frequency bands, which covers WiFi, Bluetooth, and some other wireless technologies, but not cellular (which generally sits between 700MHz and 2.1GHz). According to Myce, Samsung, LG, and HTC are the kind of customers that Antenna Company would like to pick up — and apparently, the company is already in an “advanced stage of negotiations” with some of these companies. These new antennas could really change the wireless landscape — but for now, until we actually see one of these superformula-inspired DRAs, we probably shouldn’t get too excited. Antenna Company has a pretty impressive company roster, though, and it’s backed by billionaire entrepreneur Marcel Boekhoorn. Maybe… just maybe… there’s something to these super antenna.

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK reveals universal cross-platform apps, on-screen buttons, more

• By Ryan Whitwam on February 11, 2014 at 1:52 pm
• • 
  • • Microsoft has been toiling over the last few years to shape Windows Phone into a competitive mobile operating system. Android and iOS are still riding high, but Windows Phone 8.1 is just around the corner. Microsoft today made the SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 available to developers, who are now busily digging through the features they will have to work with — and, of course, sharing those features with us.
      One of the most notable new features in WIndows Phone 8.1 is the inclusion of universal apps. This is the beginning of Windows Phone merging with another beleaguered Microsoft product — Windows 8. (Sebastian has written extensively about the eventual merger between Windows Phone and Windows.) Universal apps in the new SDK will be able to take advantage of templates for large screen devices running Windows 8 or RT and Windows Phone with the same shared library of HTML and JavaScript.
      Developers will have to use the .appx format for Windows Phone apps going forward, which is the same one used for Windows 8 Metro apps. Merging the two app catalogs together could allow Microsoft to beef up its offerings into something respectable. Windows Phone apps under this new scheme will also take on a Windows 8 feature: Apps won’t be terminated when you enter multitasking mode, but will be suspended instead. They can be swiped away from multitasking mode to be manually closed, though.
      
      Windows Phone 8.1 will be introducing the concept of on-screen buttons to users, which is the direction Android devices have been heading in the last few years. On-screen buttons can save bezel space and make an interface more consistent, but implementing it can be tricky. A new setting also indicates users will be able to change the color of this bar. The options are always dark, and match the background and accent colors. That could go either way with regard to consistency.
      If the SDK behavior is anything to go on, Microsoft will allow users to hide the new navigation bar with a small arrow button off to the left. Having the option of reclaiming that screen real estate when you really need it is very handy and is something Android users have been hoping for since on-screen buttons gained traction. This wassomewhat addressed with immersive mode in Android 4.4.
      Windows Phone 8.1 brings users new settings for monitoring storage and battery life, as well as support for VPNs. However, Microsoft seems to have removed some of the native Facebook integration. That might be a bug in the SDK, or Microsoft could be rethinking the way social media is woven into the OS.
      
      The last time around, Microsoft gave developers the ability to create camera apps that could be set as the default by users, and it looks like that capability is being extended to SMS. The Windows Phone 8.1 SDK includes an option to set a third-party messaging app as the default. That’s a very Android-y thing to do, and will come as a boon to those looking to use alternative messaging clients such as WhatsApp. Users might be less likely to change the stock camera app in Windows Phone 8.1, though, with the addition of an updated camera app with burst mode.
      One of the things that’s missing from the SDK might be the biggest story — anything related to Bing or search brings up an error. Microsoft is rumored to be building a virtual assistant codenamed Cortana for Windows Phone 8.1. It seems that Redmond isn’t ready to tip its hand just yet. A completely new search protocol is the sort of thing developers would like to see in the SDK, so Microsoft must have a good reason for excluding it — perhaps Cortana has some really impressive features that Microsoft wants to properly show off for maximum impact, or it might just be a bit of a mess.
      A full preview of Windows Phone 8.1 is expected to debut at the Build conference in April. Developers will be watching closely — as will we. This might be Microsoft’s last chance to make Windows Phone work before Android starts looking like the only option.

ARM announces Cortex-A17, the new CPU core that finally replaces Cortex-A9

• By Joel Hruska on February 11, 2014 at 3:01 pm
• • 
  • • ARM has announced new plans for a successor to the Cortex-A12, the upcoming 32-bit CPU core that’s scheduled to ship out later this year, which itself is the successor to the Cortex-A9. The new Cortex-A17 is a further 32-bit evolution of the ARM product family and illustrates something ARM told me last year when I visited its headquarters in Cambridge: The advent of the 64-bit Cortex-A53 and A57 families and the AArch64 instruction set doesn’t mean ARM is finished with the 32-bit market.
      The Cortex-A17 is ARM’s targeted solution to offer high-end 2013 performance in the 2015 midrange market. It’s going to be built on somewhat older 28nm technology (by 2015 standards), which may surprise some folks, but makes sense given the design targets of the SoC. ARM’s own internal cost savings for 20nm match the flat curve we predicted back in 2012, as well as comments from TSMC and GlobalFoundries. With 20nm flat on cost, it makes sense to look for ways to optimize the architecture, particularly in cost-sensitive mobile devices.
      
      With 14nm-XM (GlobalFoundries) and 16nm FinFET (TSMC) providing only small cost advantages on a per-transistor basis, the emphasis at ARM is on building a cost-effective product. The Cortex-A17 is meant to squeeze better performance out of steady transistor counts rather than pushing those counts higher due to cost savings. That dovetails well with mobile’s overall goals, which is to improve performance efficiency in any case.
      Thus, we have the Cortex-A17. The new chip will extend the Cortex-A12′s performance to reach current high-end 32-bit ARM CPU levels, with added support for big.LITTLE, which the current Cortex-A12 implementation lacks. The front-end and execution cores are expected to be similar to the Cortx-A12, with most improvements coming in the memory subsystem. According to ARM’s internal estimates, the new chip will hit a DMIPS/MHz rating of 4.5 compared to the Cortex-A57′s rating of 5.0, the Cortex-A12′s 3.5, and the Cortex-A19′s 2.5.
      
      High-end 2013 performance in midrange 2015 devices may not seem particularly exciting, but as the pace of smartphone performance increases have slowed, we’ve seen longer-lived products and some killer deals from companies like Google. The Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and Motorola G have all been well-regarded smartphones with relatively high-density screens and good battery life, and that’s a trend we expect will continue to strengthen in the next few years. Meanwhile, midrange products have a better chance of penetrating emerging markets, where customers are more sensitive to price and mobile sales are expected to surge.
      When ARM unveiled the Cortex-A12 last year, many people saw it as a reaction to the Cortex-A15′s general set of problems. While the A15 was an unquestionably powerful chip, its high heat dissipation and troubles with big.LITTLE led to weaker market adoption. Qualcomm’s Krait CPU may be Cortex-A15 class, but its power consumption and overall characteristics are superior to the ARM core itself. Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 is Cortex-A15 based, but the T4 hasn’t enjoyed much success in terms of design wins or product shipments. Again, performance wasn’t the problem — thermal dissipation and power consumption were.
      The Cortex-A17 will achieve the A15′s performance, but will do so in a smaller power envelope and with better overall characteristics. If ARM hits the 2015 readiness target, we could see the chip in shipping devices by late in 2015 or early 2016. The delay is the inevitable result of the difference between having chips validated at the foundry and having devices fully integrated and passed through carrier validation.

Did the genesis of life occur just after the Big Bang, almost 14 billion years ago?

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 5, 2014 at 9:07 am
• • 
  • • After last night’s Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham (evolution vs. creationism) debate, it seems fitting to start the day with new research from a Harvard astrophysicist that suggests the first life in the universe may have emerged just 10-20 million years after the Big Bang. This is a few billion years before most scientists believe that the universe had suitable conditions for the genesis of life. If life really did emerge way back then, and then continued to travel through space on the back of asteroids and other interplanetary debris, it would seem almost certain that a) Earth was not the home of the universe’s first life, and b) life on Earth arrived on the back of an asteroid (panspermia).
      As it stands, our best method of locating extraterrestrial life — and thus solving the mystery of whether life is unique to Earth — is based on the concept of habitable zones. Basically, the only thing we know for sure is that Earth has the right conditions for supporting life — and so it stands to reason that, if we can find other planets that have a similar setup (an atmosphere, a nearby star, liquid water on the surface), we might find life. This is the theory of the “Goldilocks planet,” which has been popularized in the last few years by NASA’s Kepler telescope, and other similar endeavors.
      

      Most scientists believe that, if there’s life out there, it’ll probably be on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone — like Kepler-62f (artist’s impression)
      According to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, though, there was a brief period in the universe’s timeline — a period of about 7 million years, which Loeb calls the habitable epoch — where most of the universe would’ve been habitable by life. How? Cosmic microwave background radiation.
      All throughout the universe, there is thermal radiation — cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation — that’s theorized to be left over from the Big Bang. Today, the universe is so old and so large that the CMB only warms space to around 2.7 Kelvin (-270.45 Celsius, -454.81 Fahrenheit). Billions of years ago, though, just 10-20 million years after the Big Bang, the CMB would’ve kept the entire universe feeling like a “warm summer day on Earth” (Loeb’s words). For around 7 million years, Loeb says the conditions would’ve been just right for the genesis of simple life. [Research paper: arXiv:1312.0613 - "The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe"]
      

      An all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation, from when the universe was just a few hundred thousand years old. The heat fluctuations eventually turned into galaxies.
      His new theory has some logical flaws, though, which he readily admits. Most astrobiologists think that life couldn’t emerge during the first few billion years of the universe because it lacked the rocky planets and heavier elements that life (as we know it) requires. The current understanding of the universe is that heavier elements (i.e. carbon, phosphorous, metals) — elements that are needed for the genesis of life — are created in supernovae explosions. Just 10 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was full of hydrogen, helium, and not much else. It’s possible that even the first stars hadn’t formed by this point. Loeb’s explanation is that, just maybe, there were some rare regions of the early universe that were mega-dense, and thus could begin the whole star formation/supernova/rocky planet process sooner than expected.
      Loeb says that this theory could be tested by searching the Milky Way for planets orbiting stars that contain no heavy elements. These planets would be similar to those that occupied the very early universe, and thus might tell us something about whether life began just 15 million years after the Big Bang. (Read: Alien spotting: By 2020, we’ll finally have the ability to locate life-harboring, alien planets.) If genesis really did occur that early on, when the universe was still very small and dense, it’s entirely possible that those life-bearing asteroids, meteors, and planetoids have been hurtling through space for the last 13.7 billion years, seeding large portions of the universe with life.

'Tis the Season to Be Good-Naturedly Jealous

2/4/2014 4:30 AM PST, by Sarah Taylor

Mariah Carey posted this photo on her Instagram account, and by all accounts (see what I did there?), she's completely silly. See, Mariah made the comment that she was "working" in her "favorite" environment, but boo, "bad hair day." Seriously, Mariah? First off, your hair looks rad -- most of us wish our hair would be that "bad" naturally, and second -- who is even paying attention to your hair, girl? I'm not sure about anybody else, but the only thing yours truly is scoping out is your toned ab section, your lean arms, ample chest, and radiant smile. Girl, you realize you've got basically everything, right? Quit the hair, OK?

Dang. 



Read more: http://www.fishwrapper.com/post/2014/02/04/mariah-carey-beach-body-gym-bikini-post-baby-photos/#ixzz2sMvseOax 

Woody Allen's Lawyer -- Mia Farrow's Just a Bitter Bitch

2/4/2014 6:02 AM PST BY TMZ STAFF

Mia Farrow is a bitter woman living in the past, brainwashing her children, and propagating outrageous lies just to hurt her wildly successful and acclaimed ex ... so claims Woody Allen's lawyer.

Attorney Elkan Abramowitz did Allen's bidding on the "Today" show Tuesday ... claiming Mia went on the warpath because she couldn't handle the fact that his client got a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award.

As you know ... Woody's adopted daughter Dylan claims he molested her when she was 7 and she got real specific over the weekend ... claiming, among other things, he shoved his face in her naked crotch.

To believe Abramowitz you also have to believe that Mia has brainwashed both Dylan and Woody's biological son, Ronan Farrow.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/04/woody-allen-mia-farrow-lawyer-dylan-molestation-today/#ixzz2sMvcp7Yh

Dog the Bounty Hunter -- Smashed Up in Hit and Run Car Accident

2/3/2014 8:45 PM PST BY TMZ STAFF

6:10 AM PT -- Police say the driver of the white truck was arrested and booked for DUI.

Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife just got wrecked in a nasty multi-car hit and run accident in Hawaii ... TMZ has learned.

According to witnesses ... Dog and Beth Chapman were in a black GMC Yukon on Highway 1 when they got smashed in the rear by a white Chevy truck -- and ended up in a ditch off the shoulder of the road.

We're told a third vehicle allegedly started the chain reaction accident -- but that driver fled the scene after the truck hit Dog and Beth's SUV.


We're told ambulances are on the way ... as there may be some minor injuries. Dog and Beth seem to be fine at this point.

The other black SUV in the photo was also part of Dog's entourage ... carrying several of his family members ... but it was NOT involved in the wreck.

Dog is still on the scene ... and we're told police put the driver of the white truck in handcuffs. It's unclear at this point why he would be arrested.


Story developing ...

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2014/02/03/dog-the-bounty-hunter-car-accident-hit-and-run-hawaii/#ixzz2sMvC8Lwi

NASA is planning to make water and oxygen on the Moon and Mars by 2020

• By Sebastian Anthony on January 30, 2014 at 1:07 pm
• • 
  • • NASA is forging ahead with plans to make water, oxygen, and hydrogen on the surface of the Moon and Mars. If we ever want to colonize other planets, it is vital that we find a way of extracting these vital gases and liquids from moons and planets, rather than transporting them from Earth (which is prohibitively expensive, due to Earth’s gravity). The current plan is to land a rover on the Moon in 2018 that will try to extract hydrogen, water, and oxygen — and then hopefully, Curiosity’s successor will try to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen in 2020 when it lands on Mars.
      In 2018, NASA hopes to put a rover on the Moon that will carry the RESOLVE (Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction) science payload. RESOLVE will contain the various tools necessary to carry out in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Basically, RESOLVE will sift through the Moon’s regolith (loose surface soil) and heat them up, looking for traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be combined to make water. There is also some evidence that there’s water ice on the surface of the Moon — RESOLVE will find out for certain by heating the soil and seeing of water vapor emerges.
      

      Canada’s Artemis Jr. rover, which has been testing the RESOLVE payload
      A similar payload would be attached to Curiosity’s successor, which is currently being specced out by NASA and will hopefully launch in 2020. This second IRSU experiment will probably suck in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, filter out the dust, and then process the CO2 into oxygen.
      If either tech demonstration works as planned, future missions might include large-scale ISRU devices that are capable of producing significant amounts of hydrogen, oxygen, and water on the Moon or Mars. This would probably be the most important advance since we first landed on the Moon in the ’60s. Basically, as it stands, space travel needs lots of hydrogen and oxygen (rocket propellant) and water (to keep astronauts alive). Water has the unfortunate characteristic of being both heavy and incompressible, meaning it’s very difficult and expensive to lift large amounts of it into space (gravity can be really annoying sometimes). Likewise, unless we come up with some other way of powering our spacecraft, it’s infeasible to carry the rocket fuel that we’d need for exploration from Earth.
      

      An artist’s impression of what Mars might have looked like billions of years ago, when it still had an atmosphere.
      In short, if we want to colonize space, we really, really need some kind of base outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, preferably on the Moon — but Mars would be good, too.

Stephen Hawking’s new research: ‘There are no black holes’

• By Sebastian Anthony on January 27, 2014 at 9:48 am
• • 
  • • Exactly 40 years after famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking brought event horizons and black holes into the public eye, he is now claiming that black holes don’t actually exist. Instead of all-consuming event horizons and black holes which nothing can escape from, Hawking now proposes that there are “apparent horizons” which suck in matter and energy — but only temporarily, before eventually releasing them again.
      To be clear, Hawking isn’t proposing that black holes don’t exist — just that black holes, as we’ve understood them for the last 40 years or so (thanks to work done by Hawking and others), don’t exist. The current understanding is that black holes are surrounded by an event horizon — a boundary in spacetime which only allow matter and energy to pass through one way, towards the black hole. It is, in other words, the point of no return. This is why black holes appear black — energy can’t escape, and so they produce no light and no heat. In thermodynamics terms, a black hole is a perfect black body — an object that absorbs all energy and radiation.
      The problem with this theory, though, is that it’s based on general relativity. In recent years, as our understanding of quantum theory has improved, numerous conflicts have arisen, especially in places where both theories apply — such as black holes and event horizons. Basically, quantum mechanics has a big issue with the idea that event horizons completely and utterly destroy information — a big no-no in the world of quantum. Hawking’s new proposal tries to ameliorate this conflict between the two theories. (Read: Wormholes are just quantum entangled black holes, says new research.)
      

      The Event Horizon’s “gravity drive.” I wonder if the film will have to be renamed Apparent Horizon…
      In a short research paper (arXiv:1401.5761) called “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes,” Hawking proposes that black holes are instead enveloped by an apparent horizon. Basically, instead of an event horizon that blocks everything absolutely, an apparent horizon suspends matter and energy from trying to escape — and when it does escape, due to the wild fluctuations within a black hole and its apparent horizon, the energy would be released in a garbled form. Hawking likens these fluctuations to weather on Earth: “It will be like weather forecasting on Earth. That is unitary, but chaotic, so there is e ffective information loss. One can’t predict the weather more than a few days in advance.” (Unitarity is the part of quantum theory that strongly disapproves of event horizons being a point of no return.)
      The research paper concludes: “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infi nity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.” (Read: NASA’s Swift discovers 100,000 super-massive black holes, in its spare time.)
      It’s worth noting that Hawking’s new paper is just two pages long, contains no calculations, and hasn’t yet passed peer review. It does seem to do what it set out to achieve, though. Complex problems don’t necessarily have complex solutions. Speaking to Nature, Hawking had a little more to say about the matter, too: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking said. “[Quantum theory, however] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole.” To fully explain the process, though, the theoretical physicist admits that we’re still looking for a theory that ties up gravity with the other universal constants — a theory that , Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”

The International Space Station will soon become the coldest place in the known universe… for science!

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 3, 2014 at 2:04 pm
• • 
  • • Here’s one of the coolest sentences you’ll ever read: The International Space Station will soon be the coldest place in the known universe. A new instrument that will be sent to the ISS, called the Cold Atom Lab, will reach temperatures as low as 100 picokelvin — 100 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. As matter approaches absolute zero, it starts to exhibit some very odd, rather quantum behavior. Because it’s so hard to reach these temperatures, and because the material universe acts so weirdly when you get down that low, no one actually knows what the Cold Atom Lab will discover — but NASA seems to be pretty certain that the findings will be fascinating, in any case.
      

      Dilution refrigerator that gets to around 1K. Each platform gets a little bit cooler, with the bottom one being the coldest.
      As you probably know, space is already very, very cold — roughly 2.7 Kelvin (-270.45 Celsius, -454.81 Fahrenheit). This is mostly due to a lack of atmosphere and the vacuum-like nature of space — with very few molecules to energetically bounce around, there can be no heat. At 2.7 Kelvin, though, nothing weird happens; classical physics are still completely in control. To go quantum, you need to go colder — a lot colder. (Read: Negative temperature: Understanding what happens below absolute zero.)
      Now, getting to say, 1 Kelvin (-272C) isn’t all that hard. A multi-stage dilution refrigerator (pictured right), which mixes helium-3 and helium-4, will happily get you to around 0.3 Kelvin. This is the method that most quantum computers currently use. Another option is laser cooling — but here on Earth, where the nagging force of gravity on the cooled sample has to be counteracted with strong magnetic traps, there are fairly strict limits on just how cold you can get. In the International Space Station’s microgravity climate, however, laser cooling can be very effective indeed. Only weak traps are needed to hold the sample in place while the laser cools it — and less power means lower temperatures can be reached. 100 picokelvin in this case, or 100 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero.
      

      Click to zoom in
      NASA says the Cold Atom Lab, which will launch to the International Space Station in 2016, will be the coldest place in the known universe. To be fair, one group hit 100 picokelvin way back in 1999. That experiment isn’t running any more, though, and it also had a very different purpose — while they were looking at the magnetism of rubidium atoms, NASA will be investigating something far more interesting: Bose-Einstein condensates. Basically, when you cool a very dilute gas of bosons (force-carrying particles, as opposed to matter-carrying fermions), a large number of the bosons start to exhibit quantum behavior on the macroscopic scale. That’s the important part — macroscopic scale means that these quantum effects will be visible to the naked eye.
      In short, this coldest spot in the universe is expected to be the first time that quantum physics makes the jump from the realm of quarks and gluons and other phantasmal forces, into the real world that you and I occupy. The crazy thing is, though, no one even knows what this Bose-Einstein condensate will actually do once we cool it down to 100 picokelvin. No one’s ever done it before, and no one knows where it will lead. How exciting!

2014 Hyundai Santa Fe review: Driver-friendly tech sets it apart

• By Bill Howard on February 3, 2014 at 12:59 pm
• • 
  • • The yearlong rollout of the redesigned Hyundai Santa Fe SUV is now complete, including the addition of three useful tech-based driver aids. Parking sonar, blind spot detection, and xenon headlamps are available on the 2014 Hyundai Santa Fe, which now comes in a two-row version called the Santa Fe Sport and a longer three-row Santa Fe.
      Hyundai is adding the kinds of tech that buyers have on their wishlists. These are features that would make the company late to the game if added a year from now but that are nice to see today. And they come in addition to the existing backup camera option, which has been made standard on some trim lines and cheaper on others. That’s important on a first-class SUV that cries out for better rear vision.
      The Santa Fe is one of the best midsize SUVs, more for its mainstream features and cockpit fit-and-finish than fuel economy or smothering levels of tech. Leaders in the mainstream price class offer what Hyundai just added, plus lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, city safety and pedestrian safety emergency stopping at low speeds. The best SUVs today are the Subaru Forester, our Editors’ Choice among compact SUVs and one of the 10 best tech cars of 2013; the Volvo XC60; and the Ford Escape. Now the Santa Fe is a more serious competitor among tech-savvy buyers. In a few years, it will be rare midsize vehicle that doesn’t offer blind spot detection, lane departure warning, and parking sonar. The rear camera appears likely to be mandated the Department of Transportation.
      

      2012 Santa Fe and Veracruz becomes 2014 Santa Fe, Santa Fe Sport

      Two years ago, Hyundai’s compact and midsize part of its SUV line comprised the popular two-row Santa Fe and the lesser-known three-row Hyundai Veracuz (which struggled to sell 10,000 units a year). For the 2013 model year — when the redesign kicked in — the Veracruz nameplate went away, succeeded by a stretched Hyundai Santa Fe of 193 inches with three rows of seats and a V6 engine. The two-row Santa Fe became the Santa Fe Sport (rhymes with short), 185 inches long, with four cylinder or turbo-four engines. All can be had with front-drive or, for $1750, all-wheel-drive. The Santa Fe and Santa Fe Sport last year sold about 80,000 units, putting it around 10th among midsize SUVs last year.
      Step inside either Santa Fe and you’ll appreciate the quality of materials in a mid-price vehicle. There’s reasonable room in the second row of both models but adults will still prefer sitting in front. If you read other reviews saying middle row room is “good” or “reasonable,” it isn’t. The phrase you’d use is “just OK.” The Santa Fe is not a Ford Flex with business class second row legroom — the third row on the Santa Fe is strictly kids-only. Only when you get past 200 inches length in the Chevrolet Suburban class does the third row work and then only for small adults. The middle row Santa Fe occupants will, however, appreciate the integrated sunshades that come with the premium package.
      

      Want tech? You’ll need to get leather and a moonroof too

      Many Asian automakers deal with the long trans-Pacific shipping times and dealer inventory complexities by offering a mere handful of options packages rather than as many as two dozen individual options. That mindset carries over to the Santa Fe, which is manufactured in a Hyundai factory town called Montgomery, Alabama. This is despite the fact that a vehicle built there can reach its dealership a week later.
      When Hyundai introduced the third-generation Santa Fe, it talked about the base models’ “price walk,” or step-ups in price, being reasonable each at every level from the entry Santa Fe Sport to the high-end Santa Fe Limited. That ignores the price cliff you scale going from the stripped base model through the options packages you need (all three of them) to get the tech you want.
      Say you want the two-row Santa Fe Sport with backup camera, blind spot detection, parking sonar, and navigation but you don’t care about leather seats or a big sunroof. For those tech essentials (essentials to some buyers) you need the popular equipment package ($1150) for the backup camera; the $3200 premium package for blind spot detection; and the $3200 technology package for navigation and rear sonar. Premium requires Popular Equipment; Tech requires Premium and Popular Equipment.
      All this means that your $26,000 (base with shipping) Santa Fe Sport becomes a $33,000 tech-heavy gem with heated, ventilated leather seats in front, heated rears, and a panorama sunroof, among added optional features. If you want xenon headlamps, that’s only on the turbocharged Sport 2.0T, so you’re looking at $36,000.

Did life’s building blocks fly to Earth and Mars on solar winds?

• By Graham Templeton on February 1, 2014 at 9:30 am
• • 
  • • New research out of the University of Hawaii suggests that both water and organic molecules travel the universe in tandem, seeding planets with “little reaction vessels” that could help provide dead planets with that first, all-important step in life’s development. This is another piece of evidence in favor of the panspermia hypothesis, which argues that life on Earth began thanks to an influx of molecules from outer space. Comets and meteorites are the typical carriers for this material, but this study suggests that even dust blown through the solar system on solar winds could provide a planet with both life’s most complex precursors and the water needed to allow those precursors to assemble into life.
      The central finding of this paper relates largely to solar wind, the stream of charged particles — mostly naked protons called H+ ions — ejected from the sun. The paper shows that in an airless environment typical space rocks will react with impacting protons to create tiny vesicles of water. The process essentially knocks stable molecules apart, allowing some portion of the resulting molecular debris to reorganize as H2O. Interestingly, the paper comes soon after NASA released evidence that Mars once sported a fair amount of water, and that this water is sometimes found in unexpected places.
      

      Regolith, or “moon dust,” is a prime candidate for creating water when pelted with solar wind.
      The finding that water can be generated within dry space rocks and solar wind was coupled with the fact that space rocks are known to deliver organic compounds to the surface of the Earth. Other recent papershave suggested that life’s important molecules arrived intact from Mars — a primitive version of RNA is one major proposed molecular stow-away — but these researchers claim only that “complex organic molecules” came from somewhere else in space. Complex organic compounds and liquid water, in conjunction, could theoretically provide the potential for non-living material to come alive.
      One important aspect of this idea is that it focuses on small particles of material, rather than whole objects, like comets. Prior research has looked to such large bodies as not just carriers but, through their violent impacts with the Earth, energetic drivers of the chemistry of early life. It’s been suggested that the earliest living things were cobbled together from high-energy molecules that couldn’t exist unless their synthesis was driven by massive astronomical impacts. This more passive, dust-based explanation seems to fit well with the known history of the Earth, which predicts high levels of dust flux (a lot dust falling on Earth) in the time directly preceding the historical outbreak of life.
      Actually, this mechanism of forming water via proton-blasting could help explain more than just the origin of water in developing life. For instance, predominantly shadowed areas of the Moon, another airless silicate body, show unexpectedly high levels of water. NASA has plans to launch RESOLVE (Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction) in 2018 to collect and analyze ice samples from the Moon, using it to look back into just that sort of astronomical history. Large quantities of water are thought to have arrived on the Moon via impacting comets, but this research suggests that at least some of it could have been created on the Moon itself. Earth’s atmosphere would make such a reaction impossible here, however.
      

      Is this the world’s first alien? No.
      Panspermia was in the news recently thanks to this study, which gained a lot of interest then fell out of the public eye. It claims to have found genuine fossils, the remnant ofactual life in a crashed meteor! The only problem is that, according to follow-up research, the rock is probably not extraterrestrial at all, and was blown off of a larger rock by a lightning strike. The questionable nature of the team’s “algae” also call the research into question, being far too Earth-like in appearance to be credible alien life-forms.
      Evolutionary theory can adequately explain how a bacterium becomes a protist that becomes an animal, but it cannot explain how a pile of non-living molecules ever became a living cell. Evidence seems to be mounting that, whether it was seeded with dust or fused into existence by huge asteroid impacts, life on Earth needed a kickstart in its earliest days. Interestingly, Earth’s atmosphere and the abundance of messy lifeforms on its surface could mean that Earth is the single worst place to search for such evidence; the origins of life on Earth might well be discovered on Mars or the Moon, even if the event happened right here on Earth.