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via geekosystem.com

We love the visions of 'alternate' history. Prints of Buchholz’s work are available on Etsy.

via blog.kissmetrics.com

source: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-increase-viewership/

The study from KISSmetrics and Wistia shows that surfers like it short and impacting. :60 Seconds seems to be the sweet spot. I believe this number will continue to rise as devices become more comfortable to watch on.

via makeuseof.com

Ever since the Internet began, online piracy has been a big problem with the two biggest casualties being the music industry (RIAA) and the movie industry (MPAA). The Internet made it extremely easy to download whatever people wanted and the music & movie industries responded with copy protection measures, including the infamous and universally hated Digital Rights Management (DRM). Then the music industry started going after people suspected of sharing music resulting in dirty tricks, absurd lawsuit judgments and miscarriages of justice.

Now it seems that the next trick up their sleeve is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which has been introduced to the US Congress as possible legislation. The Bill has its prominent supporters and opposers both inside Congress and outside it, as they argue either the Bill’s benefits or its disadvantages.

Here to lay it all out for you below is an infographic by the Business Insurance Blog. It explains what SOPA is, who supports it, who opposes it and what the advantages and disadvantages of it are. It also tells you what you can do if you want to get involved in the debate.

SCIENCE HAS MADE a patchwork of this field. Strips of wheat roughly 3 m wide run west, each treated with different amounts of fertiliser, making some full and lush but others sparse and wispy.

Herbicide has been held back from a 4 m stretch at the same point along each strip, allowing poppies and wild plants to spring up in a belt that cuts through the whole field, choking the wheat.

This is Broadbalk field at Rothamsted Research, north of London, the world's oldest agricultural research centre. Scientists have tracked Broadbalk's wheat through 150 years of drought, flood, harsh winters and fine summers. Their databank works like an ice core, allowing Rothamsted's 200 scientists to explore the past.

The centre's history is prolific with fundamental agricultural inventions: inorganic fertiliser and the world's most widely used herbicide - 2,4-D (2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) - have roots at Rothamsted. The payoff is the staggering abundance of food afforded to the West by modern farming, but the inventions haven't been all good news. 2,4-D, for example, was a component of the notorious chemical weapon Agent Orange, which U.S. forces used to destroy Vietnamese crops during the Vietnam War, poisoning hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

Read the entire article at Comos Magazine - http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/5054/the-future-food

The quest for the Higgs boson, often called the ‘God particle’ after the title of a 1993 book by Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman, is the public face of science at the LHC. Most high-energy physicists wince at the deistic designation, but they hold a near-religious devotion to the boson. Contrary to the popular view, their belief has less to do with mass than with fundamental forces.

Four fundamental forces are at work in nature: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. Since the mid-1960s, physicists have strongly suspected that the weak and electromagnetic forces are actually different aspects of a single ‘electroweak’ force. This is partly because the photon, the force-carrying particle of electro­magnetism, is highly similar to the force-carrying particles of the weak force — the W and Z bosons. Moreover, a single electroweak theory successfully predicts the interactions of fundamental particles.

There is one problem, however: the W and Z bosons are extremely heavy, nearly 100 GeV, whereas the photon is massless. To explain the difference, a number of physicists (including Peter Higgs in 1964) proposed a new field and particle. The eponymous Higgs mechanism would interact with the W and Z bosons, giving them mass, but would ignore the photon, allowing it to remain massless. Relatively straightforward tweaks to the Higgs machinery allow it to endow other particles, such as quarks, with their observed masses as well.

“The Higgs now sought at CERN is expected on the basis of the simplest picture” for the electroweak theory, says Steven Weinberg, a theorist who won a Nobel prize in 1979 for his work unifying electromagnetism and the weak force. “But there are other possibilities,” he adds, reckoning the odds that the LHC’s detectors will find the Higgs at 50/50

read entire article - @ Nature - http://www.nature.com/news/higgs-hunt-enters-endgame-1.9399

European Southern Observatory photo ambassador Yuri Beletsky shot a series of epic photos showing astronomers shooting powerful laser beams into the night sky. The photo above showing a laser beam pointed at the center of our galaxy was voted as last year’s Picture of the Year over at Wikipedia.

for more pics and link to high res. images - http://www.petapixel.com/2011/11/18/epic-photos-of-a-laser-slicing-through-th...

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Sonar and ultrasound, which use sound as a navigational device and to paint accurate pictures of an environment, are the basis of countless technologies, including medical ultrasound machines and submarine navigation systems. But when it comes to more accurate sonar and ultrasound, animals' "biosonar" capabilities still have the human race beat.

But not for long. In a new project that studies bats, dolphins, and mole rats, Prof. Nathan Intrator of Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Science, in collaboration with Brown University's Prof. Jim Simmons, is working to identify what gives biosonar the edge over human-made technologies. Using a unique method for measuring how the animals interpret the returning signals, Prof. Intrator has determined that the key to these animals' success is superior, real-time data processing. "Animal 'echolocations' are done in fractions of milliseconds, at a resolution so high that a dolphin can see a tennis ball from approximately 260 feet away," he says, noting that the animals are able to process several pieces of information simultaneously.

Their research, which has been reported in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and presented at the 2010 and 2011 MLSP conferences,could lead to cutting-edge navigation systems and more accurate medical imaging.

Detecting "shape" from sound

Biosonar animals send ultrasonic sounds called "pings" into the environment. The shape of the returning signals, or echoes, determines how these animals "see" their surroundings, helping them to navigate or hunt for prey. In a matter of tens of milliseconds, the neurons in the animal's brain are capable of a full-scale analysis of their surroundings represented in three dimensions, with little energy consumption. Even with the aid of a supercomputer, which consumes thousands of times more energy, humans cannot produce such an accurate picture, Prof. Intrator says. With echolocation, a bat can tell the difference between a fly in motion or at rest, or determine which of two fruits is heavier by observing their movements in the wind.

The fifth video in our the "State of" series, The Evolution of Radio Waves is our second video release of 2011.

http://jess3.com/​the-evolution-of-radio-waves

Note that The Evolution of Radio Waves is a project released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA).