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Anonymous uses its skills to extract user information from darknet websites specializing in child pornography. Tuesday, after hacking into Lolita City, a darknet website used by pedophiles to trade in child pornography, Anonymous released usernames and other information of 1,589 pedophiles trading in kiddie porn. The move comes after the group managed to take down more than 40 pedophile websites last week which were swapping images through the Tor anonymization network. A darknet website is a closed private network of computers used for file sharing. Darknet websites are part of the Invisible Web, sometimes called the Deep Web, containing content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines. Yesterday Pastebin release, Anonymous enthusiasts explain the technical side of how they were able to locate and identify Lolita City and access their user data base. In a prior Pastebin release, Anonymous offers a timeline of events detailing the discovery of the hidden cache of more than 100 gigabytes of child porn associated with Lolita City.

"In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."

A study appearing Feb. 10 in Science Express calculates the world's total technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information, part of a Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data. The study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism estimates that in 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry out 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second on general-purpose computers. General-purpose computing capacity grew at an annual rate of 58%. The world's capacity for bidirectional telecommunication grew at 28% per year, closely followed by the increase in globally stored information (23%). Humankind's capacity for unidirectional information diffusion through broadcasting channels has experienced comparatively modest annual growth (6%). Telecommunication has been dominated by digital technologies since 1990 (99.9% in digital format in 2007), and the majority of our technological memory has been in digital format since the early 2000s (94% digital in 2007).

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals-associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s-to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity-one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization-Thatcher took a different line.

http://www.ted.com How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature. At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.

Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes. A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death. Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported in accident reports to assist in evaluating distracted driving laws and programs. They propose creating low-cost roadway measures that alert motorists when they are drifting out of their driving lane. They also propose that all cell phones be banned on the road, even hands-free versions. In another report by The New York Times, police in Syracuse and Hartford have handed out nearly 20,000 tickets for illegal use of a phone while driving - either for texting or use of a handheld phone. According to the federal government, these efforts have had the desired effect: distracted driving has fallen sharply. Their research shows that drivers talking on a phone are four times as likely to get into a crash as those not on a phone, and that the risks for motorists who text are at least twice as high. In Syracuse, handheld cellphone use and texting have each fallen by one-third. In Hartford, handheld cellphone use by drivers fell 57 percent while texting fell by 75 percent, the Times reports. Ref.: Vicki Harper. et al., Distracted Driving: What Research Shows and What States Can Do, GHSA, 2011

More than 50 severely disabled people in Second Life have been trying out a sophisticated new brain-computer interface (BCI) that lets users freely explore Second Life's virtual world and control their real-world environment. The system was developed by medical engineering company G.Tec of Schiedlberg, Austria as part of a pan-European project called Smart Homes for All. It's the first time the latest BCI technology has been combined with smart-home technology and online gaming. To activate a command, the user focuses their attention on the corresponding icon on a screen. Electroencephalograph (EEG) caps pick up brain signals, which are translated into commands to navigate and communicate within Second Life and Twitter. It can also be used to open and close doors, answer the phone, and control the TV, lights, thermostat, and intercom. G.Tec's system has been tested at the Santa Lucia Foundation Hospital in Rome, Italy.

Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov of the University of Rochester have found that human cells undergoing oxidative stress caused by environmental chemicals or routine cellular processes produce a protein (SIRT6) that stimulates cells to repair DNA double-strand breaks, thought to be associated with premature aging and cancer. The team first measured levels of SIRT6 in stressed cells, then treated a second group of stressed cells with a drug that deactivates the protein. DNA repair in the second group stopped, confirming SIRT6′s role.  The team also found that SIRT6 acts in concert with another protein, called PARP1, to make the repairs. Furthermore, the team found that increased levels of SIRT6 lead to faster DNA repair. They suspect that the protein acts as a "master regulator," coordinating stress and DNA repair activities. Ref.: Zhiyong Mao, Christopher Hine, Xiao Tian, Michael Van Meter, Matthew Au, Amita Vaidya, Andrei Seluanov, and Vera Gorbunova. SIRT6 Promotes DNA Repair Under Stress by Activating PARP1. Science 17 June 2011: 1443-1446. [DOI:10.1126/science.1202723]

The studies found:People who perceive their car as a reflection of their self-identity are more likely to behave aggressively on the road and break the law.People with compulsive tendencies are more likely to drive aggressively with disregard for potential consequences.Increased materialism, or the importance of one's possessions, is linked to increased aggressive driving tendencies.Young people who are in the early stages of forming their self-identity might feel the need to show off their car and driving skills more than others. They may also be overconfident and underestimate the risks involved in reckless driving.Those who admit to aggressive driving also admit to engaging in more incidents of breaking the law.A sense of being under time and pressure leads to more aggressive driving.

The conjugate release pad can perform multiple tasks, the most important of which is uniform transfer of the detector reagent and test sample onto the membrane. The most important function of the conjugate pad is to deliver the detector particles onto the membrane in a consistent volume of sample on every test strip.

What had been lacking until relatively recently was an overarching framework or theory through which to grasp the nature of consciousness. The lack of a general theory of consciousness, of how it comes to be that there is something that it is like to be, was really the last rational bastion of opposition to the scientific assertion that consciousness emerges from the brain.

An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool new interfaces that could be here in five to ten years, estimates Kurt DelBene, President, Microsoft Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. "All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology," he said. "Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration, and data visualization, already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies." "Other companies" … hmm, some of the concepts look a bit like Nokia's visionary Morph concept tech  (see the video at the bottom of this post and our 2010 news item).

This flu season, people with a fear of needles have an alternative. A new device made by PharmaJet uses spring tension to produce a high velocity jet of air to deliver medications and vaccines through the skin. Most people coming in for the flu shot at the Andover Senior Center still opted for the standard needle but the new way is gaining popularity. Nearly one third of those getting a vaccine chose the PharmaJet. (Video by Andre Malok/The Star-Ledger)

In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.* What forces drive the steady march of innovation?* How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson look at where technology is taking us. One of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants, makes the argument that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, explains why certain spaces, from 18th-century coffeehouses to the World Wide Web, have an uncanny talent for encouraging innovative thinking.

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 6.9 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records, which are searchable through highly customizable query forms, and full-text scans of much of the astronomical literature which can be browsed or searched via our full-text search interface. Integrated in its databases, the ADS provides access and pointers to a wealth of external resources, including electronic articles, data catalogs and archives. We currently have links to over 7.6 million records maintained by our collaborators.

A few people said they'd like to hear about the process of getting my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA published.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [