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Inept modern reconstructions have given seventeenth-century instruments a bad name, says Ford. In contrast to the hazy images shown in some museums and television documentaries, the right lighting and focusing can produce micrographs of startling clarity using original microscopes or modern replicas ( see slideshow ).

A flea, as seen through an eighteenth-century microscope used poorly (left) and correctly (right).

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.

these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.

A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you (www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity

Popular Science explains the rationale: China and other regimes around the world inherently have an upper hand when it comes to cyber defense because their lack of civil liberty protections lets the government freely monitor online activity. Things like “deep packet inspection” (which gained notoriety during Iranian election protests back in 2009) that let governments monitor citizens traffic also let them monitor for unusual activity … The U.S. Internet, by virtue of its adherence civil liberties, is more like the wild west. Everyone does everything online anonymously, and while that’s great for liberties, it’s also dangerous when cyber criminals/foreign hackers are roaming the cyber countryside

The .secure zone would essentially mimic the way the internet is regulated in more oppressive regimes, creating a space where banks, government contractors and the government can do business without fear of being hacked. Keith Alexander, who has the totally not made-up title of Cyber Command Chief, and several lawmakers are pushing for the new infrastructure, saying it’s absolutely necessary for national security. While the vulnerability of our infrastructure is a major concern, we’d wager a lot of Americans might have a problem with a section of the internet where your right to privacy is nonexistent.

Mr Murdoch's close henchman Les Hinton assured MPs that the affair had been dealt with and when, two years later, Mr Coulson – by now director of communications for David Cameron – appeared before a renewed parliamentary inquiry he seemed confident of being fireproof. "We did not use subterfuge of any kind unless there was a clear public interest in doing so," he told MPs. When Scotland Yard concluded that, despite more allegations of hacking, there was nothing new to investigate, Wapping and Mr Coulson must again have concluded the affair was over.

But after an election campaign in which the Conservatives were roundly supported by Mr Murdoch's papers, a succession of further claimants against the News of the World has come forward. Sienna Miller, among others, seems determined to take her case to court, compelling Mulcaire to reveal his handlers and naming in court documents Ian Edmondson, once one of Coulson's executives. Mr Edmondson is now suspended. But the story is unlikely to end there

When Rupert Murdoch came to England last October to deliver a lecture, there were some in the audience who raised eyebrows when the media mogul broke off from a paean to Baroness Thatcher to say of his journalists: "We will vigorously pursue the truth – and we will not tolerate wrongdoing." The latter comment seemed to refer to the long-running phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World, the tabloid he has owned for 41 years. Mr Murdoch's executives at his British headquarters in Wapping, east London, tried to draw a veil over the paper's own dirty secrets in 2007 and had no doubt assured him that the matter was history. Yet here was the boss, four years later, having to vouch for his organisation's honesty. Related articles

Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.

Seven centuries are an eyeblink in the scope of Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, which looks back over some 50,000 years of history and peers nearly that far into the future. His argument is similarly sweeping: Technology, Kelly believes, can be seen as a sort of autonomous life-form, with intrinsic goals toward which it gropes over the course of its long development. Those goals, he says, are much like the tendencies of biological life, which over time diversifies, specializes, and (eventually) becomes more sentient.

We share a fascination with the long history of simultaneous invention: cases where several people come up with the same idea at almost exactly the same time. Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."

he application uses GPS technology and is available for the iPhone and Android devices. The over-the-air (OTA) downloadable app has access to New York City's more than 1,000 free condom outlets. When a user launches a search for rubbers, the nearest five locations are shown, allowing for enough time to act before the mood is lost.

The smartphone application that locates free condoms was a huge hit for New Yorkers this Valentine's Day, users said Tuesday, Feb. 15. The program was launched by the New York City Health Department to help the turned-on find protection at a moment's notice--no matter where they are.

The health department has come under significant fire for its free condom initiative. Parents have complained that it urges children to experiment with sex. "We're not promoting sex," Sweeney said. "We're promoting safer sex. In New York City and around the country, adolescents and pre-adolescents have sex whether you give them condoms or not."

There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date. (Readers in a hurry can download Breakthrough's PowerPoint demonstration here or download the full paper here.)

In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.

The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.

American mainstream media (big news channels or newspapers) are not reporting these protests. (Note the Sydney Morning Herald comes in at third place on the google news search) A quick web-tour of Fox News, New York Times and CNN: all 3 have headlines of Japanese nuclear reactors in the wake of the earthquake. NYT had zero articles on the protests on its main page, Fox News did at the bottom – “Wisconsin Union Fight Not Over Yet” – and CNN had one iReport linked from its main page, consisting of 10 black-and-white photos, none of them giving a bird’s eye view to show the massive turnout. A web commenter had this to say:

Rosling has maintained a fact-based worldview – an understanding of how global health trends act as a signifier for economic development based on hard data. Today, he argues, countries and corporations alike need to adopt that same data-driven understanding of the world if they are to make sense of the changes we are experiencing in this new century, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset. They need a new storage system that can handle this new information. But what I have found over the years is that the CEOs of the biggest companies are actually those that already have the most fact-based worldview, more so than in media, academia or politics. Those CEOs that haven’t grasped the reality of the world have already failed in business. If they don’t understand what is happening in terms of potential new markets in the Middle East, Africa and so on, they are out. So the bigger and more international the organisation, the more fact-based the CEO’s worldview is likely to be. The problem is that they are slow in getting their organisation to follow.

Companies as a whole are stuck in the rut of an old mindset. They think in outworn categories and follow habits and assumptions that are not, or only rarely, based on fact.

We believe the story of Amina to be totally baseless and the doubts expressed by other observers, such as Liz Henry and Andy Carvin, to be entirely founded. We also believe that whoever is responsible for the hoax is attempting to conceal their responsibility and continues to disseminate false information. They have previously engaged in such behavior as taking photographs from the Facebook page of a totally uninvolved individual and deceptively presenting them as being images of Amina and members of her family. We believe that the person or persons responsible should end this deception which has been harmful to individuals who trusted and believed in “Amina” and more broadly has sown confusion, distraction and absorbed energy and attention at a time when real people are in danger in Syria and in other countries in the region. We are sharing the information we have gathered here not in order to level accusations, but so that others might pursue these leads to conclusive ends. The best outcome would be if the person or persons behind the hoax would take responsibility themselves to bring the matter to a close and provide all doubters with reassurance that “Amina” is not in danger because she is a fictitious character. While we believe that the information gathered here is compelling in its own right, we have managed to corroborate additional information from several independent sources that we are not publishing and that significantly increases our confidence in the information we have. We do not know the motives of the person or persons behind this hoax.

The two largest studies of Alzheimer’s disease have led to the discovery of no fewer than five genes that provide intriguing new clues to why the disease strikes and how it progresses.

For years, there have been unproven but persistent hints that cholesterol and inflammation are part of the disease process. People with high cholesterol are more likely to get the disease. Strokes and head injuries, which make Alzheimer’s more likely, also cause brain inflammation. Now, some of the newly discovered genes appear to bolster this line of thought, because some are involved with cholesterol and others are linked to inflammation or the transport of molecules inside cells.

By themselves, the genes are not nearly as important a factor as APOE, a gene discovered in 1995 that greatly increases risk for the disease: by 400 percent if a person inherits a copy from one parent, by 1,000 percent if from both parents.

the UK phone-hacking scandal is of a piece with the Murdochs’ transformation of news into propaganda: both reflect an assault on democracy’s essential walls of separation between media, the state, and political parties. The Murdochs are fusing these entities into a single unaccountable power that, as we see in Britain today, lacks any restraint or scruple.

too many people want what the News Corporation has been offering. And what too many people want can be dangerous to a civilized, law-based society.