it caught my ear

“Nanotubes assemblies of various types are black and highly conductive,” said Dr. Mikhail Kozlov, a research scientist and the study’s lead author. “Their dark, conductive surface can be effectively heated with laser light or electricity to induce variations in the pressure of the air around the nanotubes — which we perceive as sound. It’s called the photo- or thermo-acoustic effect, and it’s the same principle Alexander Graham Bell used to produce sound on the first telephone.” With laser excitation, no electrical contact with the nanotube speaker is required, making the speakers wireless. “Speakers made with carbon nanotube sheets are extremely thin, light and almost transparent,” Kozlov said. “They have no moving parts and can be attached to any surface, which makes the surface acoustically active. They can be concealed in television and computer screens, apartment walls, or in the windows of buildings and cars. The almost invisible strands form films that can ‘talk.’” In addition to filling a room with sound from invisible speakers, nanotube speakers could easily cancel sound from the noisiest neighbor or dim the roar of traffic rushing past a neighborhood, using the same principles as current sound-canceling technologies. “The sound generation by nanotube sheets can help to achieve this effect on very large scales,” Kozlov said.

Microsoft revealed on Wednesday that it gained a court order that compelled VeriSign, the .com registry, to remove 277 ".com" names from its rolls, effectively cutting off communication between the Waledac's controllers and their infected machines. The legal action is unprecedented at the domain name level, said Andre' M. DiMino, co-founder of The Shadowserver Foundation, a group that tracks botnets and helped take down Waledac. In June 2009, a federal court ordered the shutdown of 3FN, a rogue ISP supplying connectivity to botnets such as Pushdo and Mega-D, but this appears to be the first major action at the domain-name level. "It's definitely pretty groundbreaking," DiMino said. "To disable and disrupt a botnet at this level is really pulling the weed out by the root." But behind the scenes, Microsoft's legal action was just one component of a synchronized campaign to bring down Waledac. Last year, researchers with the University of Mannheim in Germany and Technical University Vienna in Austria published a research paper showing how it was possible to infiltrate and control the Waledec botnet. They had studied Waledac's complicated peer-to-peer communication mechanism. Microsoft -- which was annoyed by Waledec due to its spamming of Hotmail accounts -- contacted those researchers about two weeks ago to see if they could perform their attack for real, according one of the University of Mannheim researchers, who did not want to be identified. "They asked me if there was also a way besides taking down those domains of redirecting the command-and-control traffic," said the Mannheim researcher. Waledac distributes instructions through command-and-control servers that work with a peer-to-peer system. Led by a researcher who did his bachelor thesis on Waledac, the action began early this week. "This was more or less an aggressive form of what we did before," the Mannheim researcher said. "We disrupted the peer-to-peer layer to redirect traffic not to botmaster servers but to our servers." At the same time, Microsoft's legal efforts brought down domain names that were used to send new instructions to drones. The result has been dramatic: Up to 90 percent of the infected machines, which amount to at least 60,000 computers, are now controlled by researchers, half of which are in the U.S. and Europe and the rest scattered around the globe.

Trade's effect on military conflict is one of the most important issues in international relations. The last decade has seen research and debate into the role of trade intensify; Liberals argue that trade brings peace, neo-realists and neo-Marxists reason that trade brings conflict, and classical realists contend that trade has no impact. This debate is not just academic: some key U.S. policymakers (Senator McCain and former President Clinton for instance) believe that trade brings peace, a view that contributes to their support for free trade. Economists developed bilateral trade models in isolation from models of interstate conflict, which were the work of political scientists. These two types of models handle distance between nations differently. Bilateral trade takes its cue from Isaac Newton's formula for the gravitational attraction between two objects: the larger the objects' masses and the shorter the distance between them, the larger the attraction. So the larger the trade partners' economies and the closer they are to one another, the greater their trade. However, conflict models instead incorporate shared borders by land or close distance over water (contiguity) - stressing the role of border disputes in sparking interstate conflict. Distance is included in conflict equations based on the idea that an army gets weaker the farther it strays from its base, but what point in a nation to pick for the trade and conflict equation is unclear. Often theorists use the distance between capital cities, which is problematic: wars generally happen around borders where armies are often based, and capitals have historically changed without this altering the likelihood of war between the nation and its neighbours. The authors suggest that the trade data set plugged into trade and conflict equations is critical. This type of data often contains gaps - there are a number of reasons why data from a particular nation might be unavailable, inevitably leaving researchers to make assumptions. The majority of trade and conflict studies define conflict to include all types of militarised interstate disputes (MIDs). But Keshk, Reuveny, and Pollins question the results generated when different conflict definitions are chosen. For instance, a conflict such as a threat to use nuclear weapons would not cause fatalities, but may still have some impact on trade and vice versa. In fact, by altering the data treatment and assumptions in the equation, the authors generated a variety of results, which supported several different theoretical viewpoints. The authors suggest that future research should investigate questions of missing bilateral trade data, and attempt a more subtle use of the meaning of "military conflict". Researchers might also develop distance and contiguity measures at a more sophisticated level. "Any signal that trade brings peace remains weak and inconsistent, regardless of the way proximity is modelled in the conflict equation. The signal that conflict reduces trade, in contrast, is strong and consistent," say the authors. "Any study of the effect of trade on conflict that ignores the reverse fact is practically guaranteed to produce estimates that contain simultaneity bias." Studies of the relationship between international trade and military conflict can be traced back many centuries, particularly in the works of luminaries such as de Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, John Hobson, Vladimir Lenin, Henry Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Frederic List, and Albert Hirschman. This latest study emphasises that international politics are affecting trade between nation pairs, while it is far less obvious whether trade systematically affects politics. "To our colleagues from the liberal camp we would like to say that we still believe there are limited circumstances in which more trade may help lead countries to more peaceful resolutions of their differences, particularly if they are already at peace," the authors state. "However, it is past time for academics and policymakers to look beyond the naive claim that the cultivation of trade ties will always and everywhere produce a more peaceful world."

In remarks at the University of San Diego, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen said that rather than experiencing a "V-shaped recovery," the economy will continue to be sluggish and won't be operating at its full potential until 2013. As reasons, she cited consumer anxiety due to the high unemployment rate; a housing sector that "could weaken again"; "very nervous and exceedingly cost-conscious" businesses; and a commercial real estate market that won't contribute to growth "for some time." For workers, though, her prognosis was particularly dire: the labor market will be slow to recover because businesses have learned that they can cut workers yet maintain output.

King's comments weren't recorded, but a staffer for Media Matters, who heard the comments, provided TPMmuckraker with an account. The staffer, who requested anonymity because she's not a communications specialist, said that King, an extreme right-winger with a reputation for eyebrow-raising rhetoric, appeared as a surprise guest speaker on an immigration panel at the conservative conference. During his closing remarks, King veered into a complaint about high taxes, and said he could "empathize" with the man who flew a plane into an IRS building last week. During the question and answer session, the Media Matters staffer asked King to clarify his comment, reminding him of his sworn duty to protect the American people from all sworn enemies, foreign and domestic. In response, said the staffer, King gave a long and convoluted answer about having been personally audited by the IRS, and ended by saying he intended to hold a fundraiser to help people "implode" their local IRS office.