Why you can’t vote with your iPhone

Why you can’t vote with your iPhone - As thousands of people on the U.S. East Coast struggle to reset their lives after a devastating storm, now comes the hassle of getting to the local polling station. So with personal technology in our hands that can help us find a parking spot, make a doctor's appointment or pay the mortgage, why can't we just pull out our smartphones or sit down at the computer and vote?

After all, voting by Internet is already happening. Some nonprofit organizations use it to elect officers. Corporate boards use it in a similar way. People have been able to register to vote over the Internet for more than a decade. In this election, tens of thousands of ballots from military personnel and people living abroad will be taken in electronically, more or less by email, in more than half of the U.S.

The biggest challenge in moving away from polling stations to mobile voting may be psychological. (Jae C. Hongkong )

"The issue is not, 'Is there an app for that?' There is an app for that," said Thad Hall, associate professor of political science at the University of Utah and a researcher at voting technology's forefront. "It's technically feasible to do."

Hall and other experts who have studied the science of voting and the habits of voters say psychology and sociology are as much an obstacle as technology itself, which can often seem to users like a black box. The controversy over Diebold electronic voting machines from 2004 illustrates those concerns, such as how easily they can be hacked. So does the now-debunked conspiracy theory that Tagg Romney, Mitt's son, owns a stake in the company supplying voting machines to people in Ohio and will use them today to cast ballots in the state expected to decide the presidential election.

"The problems of Internet voting are like the problems of mail balloting on steroids," Hall said. In other words: Voters lose control of a ballot's destiny the moment they drop it in a mailbox. A mail ballot could be intercepted and dumped in a landfill. In the same way, Internet votes could be commandeered by a Botnet herder, altered, sold or destroyed.

In New Jersey this week, ballots sent to the Board of Elections by email theoretically are subject to similar risks, as secure domain addresses from which they could be sent, and received, are not yet widespread. "There are concerns about network security in general, and computer science experts are wary specifically of security issues in the United States when it comes to elections," said Charles Stewart, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

It's hardly a secret Internet elections have been subject to hacks. One of Stewart's colleagues, engineering and computer science professor Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan, hacked the test bed at the debut of a Washington, D.C., Internet voting system in 2010 and later published the results. He and his students rigged the system to play the Michigan fight song after a vote was cast. In this case, though, the system's developers, interested in testing the mettle of their code, invited those attacks. Though the Michigan team's shenanigans turned out to be aboveboard, Stewart recalls, "they discovered that the Chinese and the Iranians had beat them to it."

Fear of a catastrophic hack that could destroy the integrity of an election and expose voter identities on a mass scale are difficult to overcome in a similar way that fears of terrorism are difficult to overcome. "One of the most likely situations is that a political person or somebody who wanted to cause problems would hack into the system just to establish the uncertainty," Hall said.

The small European country of Estonia has figured out voting by Internet. (AFP Relax News)

Despite the potential for democracy hijacking, one country has managed to make Internet elections work—Estonia, the tiny Baltic Sea nation that gave birth to, among other things, Skype. A major difference between that country and the U.S., however, is the political system: Estonia has four major parties, six in all. A vote for an Estonian candidate may not go to the winning party, but probably would end up with at least partial representation in a coalition government. "Allegations of fraud are much higher in places where there are two parties," Hall said, "because it's easier to say, 'My candidate lost because of fraud,' rather than because I have a crappy candidate."

The U.S. population, more practically, is about 300 times Estonia's. Voting is decentralized, and each state of the union has its own set of election laws. Paper ballots are published according to regulations that can go deep into the weeds, requiring specific fonts, spacing and multiple languages, making them nearly impossible to render on a mobile phone or similar device. "Sticking a meaningful ballot on a smartphone or a cell phone is a usability issue," Stewart said.

Hall said he sees the electronic process growing organically, though, from communities where it's most needed. The first likely step forward would be kiosks that resemble today's electronic voting machines, but with input transmitted over the Internet and with some type of established paper trail. The Pentagon has already experimented with and used variations on the kiosk setup as part of its Federal Voting Assistance Program, though a report Sunday in the News & Observer of North Carolina prompts some questions as to whether the military pushed the program too fast.

Further in the future, Internet voting could transpire in the same the way we might buy concert tickets online today: A secure transaction followed by a printable receipt—like a ticket, but with an extra precaution: some sort of code that could be used to verify results and identity.

There are, of course, benefits beyond convenience. Tanya Clay House, public policy director at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy organization for minorities, sees the potential for putting the vote in more hands. "If there's a way to protect security and privacy, we would absolutely like something like [voting by smartphone] to occur," she said. "Lower-income and minority communities ... tend to have more access to smartphone technology than [the] Internet, because it's cheaper."

Finally, though, the most significant factor holding up smartphone voting may be the public, which is not yet clamoring for personal technology apps to cast important votes. A 2008 report by the Caltech/MIT project ranked absentee voting by Internet second to last in a list of improvements voters would like to see. Higher priorities on the list? Making Election Day a holiday and being able to vote on weekends. ( news.yahoo.com )

Blog : Contents Of Human Life | Why you can’t vote with your iPhone: There may be an app for it, but there isn’t an appetite

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Technique Keeps Dust Off Solar Cells

Technique Keeps Dust Off Solar Cells — A new technique could help keep dust off of solar cells, a major obstacle that reduces the efficiency of photovoltaic panels.

The technique, developed by Sergey Biryukov, a researcher at the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center, uses an electric field to charge dust and small particles before repelling them. At a recent demonstration, Biryukov poured a small amount of a dustlike powder onto an electrified solar cell. The dust was immediately thrown back prevented by the electric field from settling onto the panel.

Sergey Biryukov demonstrating his dust-repulsion technique.

Two electrodes are used to repel the dust. One electrode charges the particles through a process called field charging, or ion bombardment. This gives all particles, regardless of size, the same charge, Biryukov told  TechNewsDaily. Another electrode bearing the opposite charge then repels the particles.

This technology can be added to solar panels after they have already been manufactured and installed, meaning it can be used to retrofit old solar cells, Biryukov said.

While it's better at repelling dust, it can also be used to clean solar panels, said David Faiman, also a researcher at Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center who is familiar with Biryukov's research but not directly involved. Since weather conditions such as humidity affect how strongly dust adheres to the panels, Biryukov has made a special computerized control system designed to pick the right moment for cleaning, he said.

The process can also sort particles of specific sizes, which could make it useful in the production of powdered foods and pharmaceuticals, which depend upon specific particle sizes to function optimally, Biryukov added. ( liveScience.com )

Blog : Contents Of Human Life | Technique Keeps Dust Off Solar Cells

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‘PlayStation phone’ rumours

‘PlayStation phone’ rumours - A Sony executive has hinted that it will be bringing a PlayStation phone to the market, following leaked photos of such a product appearing online last week.

The photos, which were leaked onto Engadget’s site, purported to show a Sony Ericsson handset combined with a PlayStation Portable games console.

The blog speculated that the device will run the upcoming version of Google’s Android operating system, known as Gingerbread, along with a custom-made “Sony Marketplace” that will enable people to download games designed specifically for the device.

Engadget expects the device to be launched officially next year, and an announcement about the so-called PlayStation phone’s availability could be made at Mobile World Congress in February.

Last week Sony refused to comment. However, Masaru Kato, Sony’s chief financial officer, hinted it may launch a PlayStation phone product on an earnings call over the weekend.

He said, through an interpreter: “As for the new PSP product, as mentioned, I know that you are not asking me to tell you when we will be coming out with a new product, but there is a gaming market based on [the] cellphones, and there are many changes that are being seen [with] Nintendo, as well as ourselves, in the field of the product for the gamers. And there are smartphones and others or even cellphones gaming markets are very popular here in Japan. So the market itself is very... expanding.”

Leaked photos have appeared online, purporting to show the fabled 'PlayStation Phone', which could be launched next year Photo: Courtesy of Engadget

He stopped short of talking about specific products, but also mentioned the company’s interest in tablet computers.

“Of course, we can't talk about specific products, but smartphones and tablets... it is difficult to tell you how we can put the games on them, but they are not going to be planned in different parts of our company.

“When we organized ourselves last April, we introduced network services, and within that umbrella, network services, all of these products are handled. Therefore, the planning and the prototypes for various content [are] all carried out within this... one umbrellas. So we are trying to figure out what we can do as Sony in this market. I think this is as far as I can tell you regarding these products at market," he explained.

Speculation has been rife for some time that Sony would license its PlayStation brand to the Sony Ericsson mobile arm of its business. In July last year, Nikkei, a respected daily business newspaper in Japan, reported that Sony was considering such a product.

Sony was said to have set up a dedicated team to work on the handset, that would bring together the Sony Ericsson division with the multimedia and gaming team behind the PlayStation Portable handheld games console.

Sony is said to be concerned by the threat posed by Apple’s iPhone. Dozens of major games studios, including Capcom and Electronic Arts, are developing games for Apple’s touch-screen device, potentially pitting the iPhone and iPod touch directly against Sony’s PSP console and Nintendo’s hand-held device, the DS.

However, gaming fans will not be getting their hopes up – rumours of a PSP phone first surfaced in 2007, when Sony filed a patent application showing a portable games device with phone capabilities, while in January 2009, Sony was said to have refused to sanction the use of the PlayStation brand by its Sony Ericsson telecoms arm. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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The vitamin and mineral

The vitamin and mineral supplement industry is worth billions of bounds, but few people are really clear about which - and how much - nutrients they should take in pill form. We put some searching questions to our resident expert, Dr John Briffa.

Is taking vitamin C necessary?

Vitamin C is one of the most beneficial substances known to man. It has myriad biological effects and plays a role in many body processes, such as immune activity, wound healing, protection from pollution and smoking, and a reduction in the risk of cataract.

Should we always stick to Recommended Daily Allowances?

Not necessarily. The RDAs, established more than 50 years ago, represent the level of nutrients needed to prevent deficiency diseases. For instance, 60mg of vitamin C (the RDA) is deemed to be the amount of this nutrient we need to consume each day to keep us from getting scurvy. In practice, RDAs are of little relevance for many reasons.

To begin with, the RDAs take no account of individual circumstances. Requirements for nutrients can vary according to genetic makeup, sex, age, levels of stress, activity levels, alcohol consumption, pollution, smoking, the use of prescription medications, pregnancy and menopause.

Generally, the levels of nutrients required to achieve these important health-giving effects are way in excess of the pitifully low RDAs.

Isn't it true that the whole supplement industry is all about money?

The manufacturers of nutrient supplements are no doubt in the business of making money. However, I do not believe that the motivation for the industry as a whole is entirely financial. It is clear that the nutritional supplement industry provides products to the public which often have very significant health-giving properties. Natural remedies are generally very safe and often help where conventional medicine has failed.

Wouldn't we be better off simply eating a healthy diet?

A healthy diet is the cornerstone of any nutritional approach to health. However, intensive farming methods and processing have stripped our food of much of its vital nutrient content. Many of the foods we eat today are nutritionally lacking. Even if we eat a 'healthy diet', it is virtually impossible to get the amounts of nutrients we need for optimal health.

Another reason why supplements may be advised is when it is not practical to obtain a nutrient from the diet at the levels required to achieve a particular effect.

An example of this is vitamin E in the prevention of heart disease. Studies have shown that taking 100-200 IU of vitamin E each day reduces the risk of heart disease by about 40 pc. It is, however, virtually impossible to consume this quantity of vitamin E through diet alone.

Another example is folic acid, which is recommended by doctors at a dose of 400mcg per day for pregnant women. To get this quantity of folic acid via the diet is impractical, which is why the medical profession recommends supplementation in this instance.

I am often asked whether people need to take supplements. My answer is that no one needs to take supplements. However, if an individual is interested in preventing illness and optimising their health, supplements can have a useful role to play.

Is there any evidence that people live longer or are any healthier taking handfuls of supplements every day?

Yes. Numerous scientific studies demonstrate that nutrients can be effective in treating a wide range of conditions. It is important to remember that, while we know people do not get sick because of a lack of prescription medication, nutrient deficiencies are quite often an important factor in disease.

Don't most vitamins just pass straight through the body, in effect, money down the drain?

The body will generally dispense with what it doesn't need and nutrients are no different in this respect. Excess nutrients are removed from the body, often through the urine. Yet a significant proportion of nutrients that are consumed are retained by the body and go on to play a vital part in all bodily processes. Even the nutrients that are expelled will exert some effect as they pass through the body.

Point by point, how do you answer charges that: Too much vitamin A causes birth defects, dry skin, scaly skin, headaches, fatigue, painful bones and loss of appetite?

Vitamin A in excess may give rise to all the symptoms listed here. However, the smallest daily supplement generally considered to generate any risk of birth defects is 25,000IU per day. To be on the safe side, it is recommended that pregnant women should take no more than 10,000IU of vitamin A per day.

With regard to the other problems associated with vitamin A usage, the scientific literature shows that vitamin A is safe in adult men and postmenopausal women at a dose of 30,000 IU per day. This is about ten times the dose of vitamin A found in multivitamin and mineral supplements.

Too much vitamin D leads to high blood calcium, headache and appetite loss?

Vitamin D plays an essential role in the absorption of calcium from the gut and may therefore help prevent osteoporosis and other conditions. The toxic effects of vitamin D have been found only at doses which exceed 2,000IU per day in adults. Again, this is about ten times the dose of vitamin D found in multivitamin and mineral supplements.

Too much vitamin E can thin the blood and may be dangerous for those on certain medications?

Vitamin E is a natural blood thinner. In fact, it is this effect which probably accounts at least in part for vitamin E's beneficial effect in the treatment and prevention of heart disease. Certain medications, notably warfarin, also thin the blood and this effect may be enhanced by taking vitamin E. For this reason, it is generally advised that individuals on warfarin or other anticoagulant medication do not take vitamin E.

Too much folic acid can disguise a deficiency in B12 with potentially serious neurological consequences?

It is true that folic acid supplementation may mask the symptoms of B12 deficiency. Nerve damage can result, which may not be responsive to the B12 supplementation. It is an established part of natural health dogma that folic acid is given either with B12, or as part of a B-complex supplement containing B12. It is conventional doctors who tend to advise use of folic acid on its own. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Top Secret Jobs at the CIA

Top Secret Jobs at the CIA. If you were one of the thousands to receive an e-mail recently listing available jobs with the Central Intelligence Agency, you may have thought it was just another cyber scam.

Well, it turns out the e-mail wasn't spam after all but part of the agency's beefed up efforts to recruit new employees.

"We've really focused on upping our outreach," says CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf, about the agency's recruiting strategies. They include e-mails, TV and radio campaigns targeting college students, former Wall Street workers, and anyone with foreign language skills, especially Middle Eastern languages.

The CIA was plagued with low morale after failing to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then providing crummy intelligence that led to the Iraq War. But the agency has seen a bit of a bounce back in its reputation recently despite a report questioning its interrogation techniques. People seem to be clamoring to join. Last year, the agency received 120,000 job applications online and expects a 40 percent to 50 percent increase this year.

In the years following the Sept. 11 tragedy, the agency has hired about half of its overall work force. Currently, there are open positions in 90 different occupations from psychologist to software engineer.

Susan, a covert officer in the CIA who cannot even disclose her real name, applied for a job at the agency online last year while she was still in graduate school studying neuroscience. "The primary thing that attracted me was the impact I could make," says Susan, who is in her late 20s. "It puts you close to the forefront of the nation's defense."

She was hired in June of 2008 as a research scientist doing work on "biological issues" in a department that is similar to the gadget lab of "Q," the character in the James Bond movies.

More than just undercover agents

Indeed, a job at the CIA may conjure up images of spies in overcoats or 007 on a speedboat in Monte Carlo, but the majority of the jobs the agency is looking to fill are a bit more mundane. "We're looking for everything from analysts and operations officers to linguists, engineers and accountants," Harf says.

Becoming a CIA employee, especially if you're undercover, is not your typical suit-and-briefcase gig. Choosing such a career can be a difficult on you and your family – not to mention the hurdles you'll have to clear to land a job.

First off, if secrecy is not your thing, forget it.

No one knows Susan works for the CIA except her parents, and agency officials asked that she not disclose her exact age or anything about her background that could identify her. She's thought about the secrecy issues that could arise if and when she gets married and has kids and concluded she could live with it. "It's sort of exciting because I know it's for a higher purpose," she says.

Unfortunately, the life of an undercover agent can be tough on some families.

"You're asking your children to carry a heavy burden of secrecy and shame," says Martha Finney, whose father, Richard Finney, was an undercover case officer for the CIA throughout her life.

"I found out when I was 16, and then I had nightmares," explains Finney, author of "Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss."

Her family moved once or twice a year, and Finney says living in places such as Mexico City or Berlin was incredible global exposure. But, she adds, the isolation her family felt ended with tragedy.

"My mother died of alcoholism at 42, and it was primarily because she couldn't reach out for help because it would have compromised my dad's career," she says.

For workers who are not undercover, balancing work and family may be easier.

Jane, a 34-year-old employee at the agency who started in May 2008, was a stay-at-home mom before she applied. (Despite not being undercover, CIA officials did not want her real name used because when she travels abroad she may sometimes be undercover.)

"The CIA is very family friendly, offering flex schedules, and very accommodating if a child has an illness," explains Jane, who went to Harvard graduate school and spent 10 years in the military.

She's now a CIA military analyst covering Africa, preparing reports for the intelligence community, and she travels abroad two to three times a year. "I have a good family support base, and my husband has been excellent about being a single dad a bit," she says.

If you decide the CIA is right for you, expect a grueling interview process and lots of competition, especially in this economy.

All interested job seekers have to apply via the agency's Web site, www.cia.gov, and you must be a U.S. citizen. Most jobs require at least a bachelor's degree, but higher degrees are sought after.

If you make the initial cut, you'll then have to go through an exhaustive screening process over many months, since ultimately all CIA employees, no matter what department or level, require a government clearance.

Federal employees, or those coming out of the military or working for federal contractors, may already have such a clearance, says Evan Lesser, director of ClearanceJobs.com. But there are different levels of clearance, and what you need depends on what you will do.

A top secret clearance takes about a year, and a secret clearance averages about six to eight months, he says, adding that 70 percent of jobs at the CIA require a secret clearance or above.

The process includes a polygraph, psychological testing, medical evaluations, and credit and criminal background checks. Also, agency personnel will interview your friends, family and maybe even your neighbors.

Background checks go back seven to 10 years, Lesser adds, so anyone applying should have at least 11 years of history ready, including places you lived, names of employers, divorce papers or bankruptcies.

Internships at the CIA are a good way to get your foot in the door, he says, because younger people don't have as much history and can often get clearance more easily.

Life at the agency

Even if you get hired, the probing into your life won't end. "CIA officers undergo periodic security checks throughout their careers, which also may include a polygraph," Harf adds.

If you want to join the CIA to get rich, don't count on it.

"The starting salary for incoming agency officers is based on the education, work experience, and specialized skills that they bring with them," says CIA spokeswoman Harf. "Starting salaries generally range from about $40,000 to $100,000. Incoming officers can receive a hiring bonus of up to $35,000 for foreign language skills."

Steve Lee, who worked for the CIA as an analyst in the mid 1990s, eventually left because the pay wasn't enough and he was sick of the bureaucracy.

While he doesn't regret the stellar training he received at the agency, the exposure to the latest and greatest technologies, and the prestige his CIA experience has brought to his career, he stresses that anyone who decides to join the CIA definitely has to have a calling.

"Everyone that works there is going to go through intrusive investigations, and you have to be ready to live up to that," says Lee, author of "Super Secret Bungling and Crookery: National Security Drone," who blogs and writes under the name Frank Naif. "Young people ought to know, casual drug use will no longer be part of your life. And you have to watch who you associate with, in particular, foreigners."

For Lee, it wasn't the lifestyle he wanted to have.

"It's probably not a whole lot different than a lot of other federal workplaces, very Kafkaesque," he says. "A lot of absurdity."

Undercover analyst Susan, who loves her job and says it's just what she expected, doesn't see it like that.

"If the opportunity is there, I encourage anyone to apply," she says. "The CIA has always been my first choice. You need to have the skill set, and you need to have that commitment to want to do the right thing." ( msn.com )

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Mammoths roasted in prehistoric barbecue pit

Mammoths roasted in prehistoric barbecue pit. Archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen. Central Europe's prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today's hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served.

The site, called Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic near the Austrian and Slovak Republic borders, provides a homespun look at the rich culture of some of Europe's first anatomically modern humans.

Jiri Svoboda and Antiquity

Archaeologists have uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped "kitchen" where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served. Here, some remains of the prehistoric BBQ — a mammoth bone — is excavated.

While contemporaneous populations near this region seemed to prefer reindeer meat, the Gravettian residents of this living complex, described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, appeared to seek out more super-sized fare.

"It seems that, in contrast to other Upper Paleolithic societies in Moravia, these people depended heavily on mammoths," project leader Jiri Svoboda told Discovery News.

Svoboda, a professor at the University of Brno and director of its Institute of Archaeology, and colleagues recently excavated Pavlov VI, where they found the remains of a female mammoth and one mammoth calf near a 4-foot-wide roasting pit. Arctic fox, wolverine, bear and hare remains were also found, along with a few horse and reindeer bones.

The meats were cooked luau-style underground. Svoboda said, "We found the heating stones still within the pit and around."

Boiling pits existed near the middle roaster. He thinks "the whole situation — central roasting pit and the circle of boiling pits — was sheltered by a teepee or yurt-like structure."

It's unclear if seafood was added to create a surf-and-turf meal, but multiple decorated shells were unearthed. Many showed signs of cut marks, along with red and black coloration. The scientists additionally found numerous stone tools, such as spatulas, blades and saws, which they suggest were good for carving mammoths.

Perforated, decorative pebbles, ceramic pieces and fragments of fired clay were also excavated. The living unit's occupants left their fingerprints on some of the clay pieces, which they decorated with impressions made from reindeer hair and textiles.

Some items might have held "magical" or ritualistic significance, according to the scientists. One such artifact looks to be the head of a lion.

"This carnivore head was first modeled of wet clay, then an incision was made with a sharp tool, and finally the piece was heated in the fire, turned into some kind of ceramic," Svoboda explained. "We hypothesize that this may be sympathetic magic."

"Sympathetic magic" often involves the use of effigies or fetishes, resembling individuals or objects, and is meant to affect the environment or the practitioners themselves.

Archaeologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University supports the new study, saying the site was "excavated meticulously" by Svoboda and his team.

"This is one more example, in this case from modern detailed excavation and analysis, of the incredibly rich human behavior from this time period," Trinkaus told Discovery News. ( Discovery Channel )

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Mammoth skeleton unearthed in Serbia

Mammoth skeleton unearthed in Serbia. Well-preserved bones is believed to be about one million years old - A well-preserved skeleton of a mammoth that is believed to be about one million years old has been unearthed in eastern Serbia, archaeologists said Thursday.

The discovery was made during excavation two days ago at an open-pit coal mine near Kostolac power plant, said Miomir Korac, from Serbia's Archaeology Institute.

Srdjan Ilic / AP

An archeologist works on a recently unearthed skeleton of a mammoth at the open pit coal mine.

The skeleton was found 89 feet below ground, he said. The mammoth was more than 13 feet high, 16 feet long and weighed more than 10 tons.

"It is very well-preserved with only slight damage to the skull and the tusks," Korac told the AP. "There have been practically no major tectonic disruptions here for at least a million years."

Korac said the mammoth was a so-called southern mammoth, or mammuthus meridionalis, originating from northern Africa. Experts will continue research to find out more about the environment it lived in.

Another mammoth skeleton, from a much later period, was discovered at a factory in Serbia in 1996 and was named Kika. ( Associated Press )

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Prehistoric mammoth site in Waco opens

Prehistoric mammoth site in Waco opens. The bones, over 68,000 years old, were officially unveiled to the public - A site where dozens of prehistoric mammoths died in a landslide and flooding some 68,000 years ago has opened to the public in Waco, Texas.

The fossils were discovered in 1978 by two men hunting for snakes. They took one of the bones to a Baylor University museum official who identified it, triggering an archaeological dig.

Rod Aydelotte / AP

Baylor Univeristy Mayborn museum collection manager Anita Benedict talks about the discovery of the largest known collection of rare prehistoric Columbian mammoths bones.

Baylor and the city preserved the remains for two decades and, following a community fundraising effort, a permanent pavilion was built over the site, which opened to the public for the first time Saturday.

Visitors can observe the mammoth remains from walkways above the dirt where the fossils remain encased.

Legislation is pending to make the site a national monument and part of the National Park Service ( Associated Press )

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Stellar Fossils from Milky Way's Past Revealed

Stellar Fossils from Milky Way's Past Revealed. A cluster of ancient stars is likely the relic of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its early days, scientists now find.

Called Terzan 5, the globular star cluster lies within the Milky Way's central bulge of stars that protrudes up and down from the galaxy's flattened disk. A globular cluster can host a collection of 10,000 to 1 million-plus stars bound together by gravity. The traditional view of the 150 or so clusters in our galaxy has been that the stars of each one, typically ancient in cosmic terms, were born at about the same time from one cloud of gas and dust.

New observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope show that's not the case for Terzan 5, whose stars break out into two populations with different ages and chemical compositions, which can indicate where the star's material originated.

The findings will be detailed in the Nov. 26 issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists had already known about another anomalous cluster, Omega Centauri, which has two distinct star groups in its grasp, suggesting the cluster was a remnant of a disrupted dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way. (Omega Centauri is our galaxy's largest globular cluster known, thought to contain some 10 million stars.)

In another paper published this week in Nature, a team of scientists led by Jae-Woo Lee of Sejong University in Korea finds various other globular clusters contain two star populations and could be relics of more massive dwarf galaxies.

Both new findings will help astronomers piece together our galaxy's past, including how it formed some 13.7 billion years ago and then evolved at least in part by gobbling up other galaxies.

"The history of the Milky Way is encoded in its oldest fragments, globular clusters and other systems of stars that have witnessed the entire evolution of our galaxy," said University of Bologna researcher Francesco Ferraro, who led the team studying Terzan 5.

Odd cluster

Specifically, when looking at data collected on Terzan 5, Ferraro's team found one group of stars dating back 12 billion years, while the youngest stars were born some 6 billion years ago. The two populations have different abundances of iron, with the younger group having three times more of the heavy element.

Iron and other heavy elements are mostly produced in supernovae explosions, the guts of which form seeds for new star formation. Each generation of stars, theory holds, have more heavy elements than their predecessors.

"The supernovae explosions are so violent that they tend to eject the gas outside the entire stellar system," Ferraro told . "Then in order to retain the gas the stellar system must be very massive." Ferraro added a typical globular cluster doesn't have enough mass, or gravity, to retain the supernova's ejected material.

As such, the team says their findings indicate Terzan 5 is not a genuine globular cluster.

Piecing together the past

Here's what Ferraro and colleagues think must have happened: Some 12 billion years ago, Terzan 5's first clump of stars formed, then some exploded. Then, about 6 billion years ago, the iron-enriched gas from the explosions helped to generate a second group of stars.

Since supernovae explosions tend to kick gas out from the clusters in which they originate, the researchers think Terzan 5 must have been much more massive, by a factor of 500 to 1,000, in the past compared with today.

The team also found the oldest stellar population in Terzan 5 has the same chemical composition as the Milky Way's central bulge.

Taken together, the results provide insights as to how the bulge, though not the entire galaxy, formed.

"Hence the bulge may have formed through the early aggregation of individually pre-formed and somewhat internally evolved stellar systems," Ferraro said. "Thus suggesting that the inner bulges of spiral galaxies can originate by accretion of small sub-structures." ( space.com )

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Wallet of the future? Your mobile phone

Wallet of the future? Your mobile phone. These days, it seems that most Americans carry three things in their pockets or purses at all times: keys, a wallet and a phone.

But, in the not-too-distant future, you may be able to leave the wallet and the keys behind.

The mobile phone is staging a coup.

Some analysts say that within five years, mobile phones in the United States will be able to make electronic payments, open doors, access subways, clip coupons and possibly act as another form of identification.

These futuristic uses for phones are becoming reality in countries like South Korea and Japan, which typically are ahead of the United States when it comes to mobile technology.

A 963-person survey by Forrester Research, for instance, found that 15 percent of Japanese mobile phone users make payments and purchase products in stores with their phones.

The ideas have been tried in the United States too, but with less success.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, banks and cell phone makers started conducting trials with U.S. customers. Limited groups of people were given the ability to scan their phones to make payments, enter stadiums and access public transit.

Those phone-forward guinea pigs didn't like the new functionalities as well as expected, and the ideas never took off on a commercial scale, said Ed Kountz, a senior analyst at Forrester.

But Kountz said there's now resurgent interest in merging phones with wallets and keys. In 2009, people are more dependent on their phones than they used to be.

"I think it is different this time around," said Kountz, who believes that phones in the United States will be used to make mobile payments within five years.

"The overall utility of cell phones has expanded, and more consumers are using the data aspects of cell phones," he said.

Phones everywhere

At the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. That's about two cell phone subscriptions for every three people.

The fact that phones are everywhere and are commonly used to access the Internet and compute means they're well poised to overtake wallets, said Justin Denison, vice president of strategy for Samsung Telecommunications in the United States.

Gartner Inc., a technology research company, issued a report in May saying mobile payments will increase 70 percent in 2009, to 73 million people worldwide.

By 2012, the company says, 190 million people will make mobile payments.

Still, that adoption rate is relatively low. Only 3 percent of people in North America are expected to conduct mobile payments in 2012, Gartner says.

Potential problems

There are no guarantees that the technology will catch on in the United States as it has in Asia, Denison said.

"We can make investments. We can test things. But it's not always the case that [new technologies] get adopted here," he said.

And technology that turns phones into credit cards and IDs poses several potential problems.

If phones replace wallets, would-be thieves will see every person walking down the street talking on his or her phone as a target for robbery, said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"It would be the ultimate form of identify theft, that's for sure," she said.

Banks and mobile phone makers say the technology is safe. But it's not clear whether consumers will demand the change.

There's also no firm plan about who would pay for the technology to be added to phones and put into stores, said Simon Pugh, vice chairman of the NFC Forum, which supports the technology, and head of mobile payments at MasterCard.

"With any new technology, there's an ecosystem that needs to develop to make it viable," he said. "One of the key things that's needed is new hardware. You need a special chip in the phone, and you need another radio frequency antenna to communicate ... and that costs money."

Swipe a phone

Squeezing the contents of a person's purse into a phone relies mostly on a technology called near-field communication, which allows any enabled device to communicate with a cash register or subway turnstile through a secure radio frequency.

The technology is similar to the scanners and passes that allow commuters to pay for drives on a turnpike without stopping at a toll booth.

When a phone is enabled with near-field communication technology, shoppers can load bank and credit card information onto their phones and then scan them to buy goods at the grocery store, gas station, subway or any other place set up to read the device.

Doug Brown, head of mobile product development at Bank of America, said the idea is popular with consumers because it simplifies their lives.

"You don't need cash anymore. You don't need your wallet. That's really the endgame here, is that we can replace the physical wallet and all of the cash needs and the plastic that you're using today," he said.

Similarly, phones could include scannable identification information.

Eye scans and fingerprints would make phone IDs and payments more secure, Brown said. The ID technology might work like a corporate security badge, which pulls up personal information when scanned.

Some hotels have played with the idea of using near-field communication technology to enable a guest's phone to act as a room key. According to the NFC Forum, a New Zealand hotel last month installed locks that are opened with mobile phones.

Texting and barcodes

People can make transactions with their phones through lower-tech means, too.

Mobile banking apps use the Internet to allow people to transfer money and purchase goods online. And in some parts of the world, text messages sent by mobile phone are used as a form of currency.

In Kenya, for example, more than 6 million people are registered with M-Pesa, a service that lets people send text messages to make payments and transfer money from phone to phone.

Some of those users have access to banking for the first time because of their phones, said Susan Teltscher, head of market information and statistics at the International Telecommunication Union.

iPhone users in the U.S. and elsewhere already can upload plane tickets onto their phones and then scan a digital version of the ticket's barcode instead of presenting paper tickets.

There's hope that, eventually, bank customers here may have individual barcodes they can use to purchase goods in stores.

Kountz, the analyst at Forrester, said the economic recession may hold many of these ideas back. And consumer interest in mobile payments remains low: less than 10 percent, he said.

Still, many companies and consumers want to ditch plastic cards, unwieldy cash and hefty wallets.

To them, it's just a matter of how and when -- and who will pay. CNN

READ MORE - Wallet of the future? Your mobile phone

New phone apps seek to 'augment' reality

New phone apps seek to 'augment' reality. Blair MacIntyre imagines a world where tiny clouds of information -- Facebook statuses, business cards, Twitter posts -- float above all of our heads.

In some ways, it's not that far from reality.

Advancements in mobile phone technology have cleared the way for a coming wave of "augmented reality" applications that merge the physical world with information compiled about people and places on the Internet.

"When the technology gets there, this stuff could be amazingly useful and mildly terrifying in some ways," said MacIntyre, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has taught classes in augmented reality for a decade.

The idea of pairing digital information with our real, 3-D environments is not especially new -- think robot-human vision in the "Terminator" movies. MacIntyre even plodded about college campuses in the 1990s wearing a 40-pound backpack and nerdy goggles, trying to make something similar happen.

But as mobile phones become better equipped with GPS systems, which use satellites to locate the phones; compasses, which tell the direction the phone faces; and accelerometers, which relay the device's tilt; the once-lofty idea of augmented reality is being put into the hands of consumers.

Last July in the Netherlands, a company called SPRXmobile released a mobile browser, Layar, that lets people see pieces of this new info-reality through their phone screens.

A Layar user sets his or her phone to video mode, aims it around and sees all kinds of information pop up on the screen: blinking dots on apartments that are for sale, the values of those units, pull-down reviews of the bar up on the corner or details about sales at a nearby retail store. Watch a video demo of the app

This makes information easier to find and helps people make better sense of the physical world around them, said Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder of Layar.

"I think it will actually get you out more than you would stay at home," he said. "You're not at your couch anymore, you're not at your desk" when you need to find information.

Layar, which bills itself as the first mobile browser that features augmented reality, is only available in the Netherlands and only on certain phones, including Google's Android, T-Mobile's G1 and the HTC Magic. But Lens-FitzGerald said the company plans to announce a global expansion plan on August 17 and will develop an app for the iPhone if Apple changes policies that obstruct developers from creating such applications on that device.

A range of other "AR" apps are in development or are on the market. One, called Nearest Tube, highlights subway routes in New York and London. Wikitude is an app that aims to show people encyclopedic information about nearby landmarks. Like Wikipedia, users can add information to the service. The idea could usher in an era of cell-phone tour guides.

Total Immersion, a French company, developed an app that makes 3-D baseball players spring to life from baseball cards. Users can turn the card to see their favorite players, through a phone screen, from all angles. And at Georgia Tech, researchers are working on video games that may one day make it look like virtual zombies are chasing players down real-world streets.

Alex Michaelis, CEO of Tweetmondo, a site that pairs Twitter posts with geographical information, said he has developed an app that will let mobile phone users see their friends' tweets through the video camera on their phones. He expects it to be available within the month.

"It adds information to your world, and this is what it's all about," he said.

To picture how that service would work, think about walking into your living room in the evening. If a roommate had posted to Twitter from the couch, his or her Tweet would hover in that space when viewed through a mobile phone's video camera.

Michaelis admits the model is a bit clunky for now. But he sees a future when the app will let people stand on a street corner, hold their phone up to their face, and see the Twitter posts of crowd members as they mill about. Phones would have to be able to communicate with satellites and computer services constantly, instead of only when someone posts a message, to make that possible, he said.

"I see this being resolved in the near future," he said, "because, really, it's just a matter of really experimenting with this technology and pushing it to the limit."

But there are doubts about augmented technology on phones.

Lens-FitzGerald, of Layar, is concerned that augmented reality is being over-hyped and may create unrealistic expectations from consumers.

"It's a cool technology, but yeah, we need to see how much [funding and visibility] our companies will get," he said. "It's getting a lot of press now without being proven, but do we make money, are we going to make people happy with it? We don't know. We're just starting."

He added: "It's like the first TV. We need to build an audience."

MacIntyre, of Georgia Tech, said the technology behind today's augmented reality apps is crude. Mobile phone GPS isn't nearly accurate enough to make sure a Twitter post is tagged to a person, for instance, rather than the lamp post that's 50 feet away.

Furthermore, the idea behind the information-reality mesh on mobile phones is off-base, he said.

"I don't see them answering a problem that needs to be solved," added MacIntyre, who believes two-dimensional maps can be used to display information much more easily with current technology.

More functional problems exist as well. People don't necessarily want to walk around the world holding cell-phone screens in front of their faces. And the world's information has to be tagged geographically to make sense in an augmented-reality setting.

But MacIntyre does see a bright future for augmented reality.

Within a year, mobile phone applications will become much more functional, he said, and in the foreseeable future, augmented reality will move off of phone screens and onto futuristic sunglasses, whose wearers will see blips of information about everything around them, he said.

If that happens, the "Terminator" vision will have truly arrived. CNN

READ MORE - New phone apps seek to 'augment' reality

Does class decide online social networks?

Does class decide online social networks?. Like a lot of people, Anna Owens began using MySpace more than four years ago to keep in touch with friends who weren't in college.

But soon she felt too old for the social-networking site, and the customizable pages with music that were fun at first began to annoy her. By the time she graduated from the University of Puget Sound, Owens' classmates weren't on MySpace -- they were on Facebook.

Throughout graduate school and beyond, as her network began to expand, Owens ceased using MySpace altogether. Facebook had come to represent the whole of her social and professional universe.

"MySpace has one population, Facebook has another," said the 26-year-old, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit in San Francisco, California. "Blue-collar, part-time workers might like the appeal of MySpace more -- it definitely depends on who you meet and what they use; that's what motivates people to join and stay interested."

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes.

A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods," said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. "They're on their way up, or perhaps not college educated."

By contrast, Mancini said, "Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs," driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.

Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the microblogging site, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year.

Nielsen also found a strong overlap between those who use Facebook and those who use LinkedIn, Mancini said.

Nielsen isn't the first to find this trend. Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens' use of social networks in 2006.

When she began, she noticed the high school students all used MySpace, but by the end of the school year, they were switching to Facebook.

When boyd asked why, the students replied with reasons similar to Owens: "the features were better; MySpace is dangerous and Facebook is safe; my friends are here," boyd recalled.

And then, boyd said, "a young woman, living in a small historical town in Massachussetts said to me, 'I don't mean to be a racist or anything, but MySpace is like, ghetto.'"

For boyd, that's when it clicked.

"It's not a matter of choice between Facebook and MySpace, it was a movement to Facebook from MySpace," she said, a movement that largely included the educated and the upper-class.

So why do our online worlds, unencumbered by what separates us in daily life, reflect humans' tendency to stick with what -- and who -- they know? A lot of it has to do with the disparate beginnings of MySpace and Facebook, said Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of Mashable, a blog about social media.

Facebook originated at Harvard University and was limited at first to students at approved colleges before opening itself to the public in September 2006. MySpace, on the other hand, had a "come one, come all" policy and made a mad dash towards monetization, Ostrow said.

"They used a lot of banner ads without regard to the quality, and it really diminished the value [of the site] for the more tech-savvy demographic."

And while the Internet can build bridges between people on opposite sides of the globe, we still tend to connect with the same people through online social networks who we connect with offline, said technology writer and blogger Sarah Perez.

"It's effectively a mirror to our real world," she told CNN. "Social networks are the online version of what kids do after school."

These social-networking divides are worrisome to boyd, who wrote "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." Instead of allowing us to cross the boundaries that exist in our everyday lives, these online class differences threaten to carry those boundaries into the future.

"The social-network infrastructure is going to be a part of everything going forward, just like [Web] search is," boyd said. "The Internet is not this great equalizer that rids us of the problems of the physical world -- the Internet mirrors and magnifies them. The divisions that we have in everyday life are going to manifest themselves online."

Jason Kaufman, a research science fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, examined the Facebook profiles of a group of college students over four years and found that even within Facebook, there's evidence of self-segregation.

Multiracial students tended to have more Facebook friends than students of other backgrounds and were often the sole connection between white and black circles, Kaufman said.

Nonetheless, Kaufman feels that social networks may one day help us overcome our instinct to associate with those who share our income level, education, or racial background.

"I think it's fair to say that the Web has great potential to at least mitigate everyday tendencies towards self-segregation and social exclusion," Kaufman said.

"In some ways, [Facebook] levels the playing field of friendship stratification. In the real world, you have very close friends and then there are those you just say "Hi" to when you pass them on the street. "The playing field is a lot more level in that you can find yourself having a wall-to-wall exchange with just an acquaintance. If you pick up the unlikely friend, not of your race or income bracket, the network may [help you] establish a more active friendship than if you met them in real life."

But MySpace's users still find something appealing about MySpace that they don't about Facebook, and it may have nothing to do with class or race, blogger Perez said.

"It's not just the demographics that have people picking one over the other," Perez said. "It also comes down to what activities you like. If you like music, you'll still be on MySpace. If you're more into applications, then you might go to Facebook because you're addicted to Mafia Wars or whatever."

In the end, boyd isn't as concerned about the reasons behind these divisions online as she is about the consequences of people only networking within their chosen social-media groups.

"Friendships and family relationships are socially divided; people self-segregate to deal with racism sometimes," she said. "Okay, fine: We've made a decision to self-segregate, but what happens when politicians go on Facebook and think they're reaching the whole public? What happens when colleges only go on Facebook to promote?"

When and if that does happen, Mashable's Ostrow said, we'll know perhaps we've given social networks more credit than they're worth.

"When it comes to information, I don't think social networks are the best source for that. The Internet is so open," said Ostrow, who believes users would go beyond their networks to search out information online.

If you're looking to branch out of your social network box, your best option may be Twitter. Nielsen's survey didn't find a dominant social class on Twitter as much as they found a geographical one: Those who use Twitter are more likely to live in an urban area where there's greater access to wireless network coverage, Mancini said.

"The simplicity of Twitter definitely creates less of a divide, because it's not a relationship like it is on MySpace or Facebook," Ostrow said. "If you live in the middle of nowhere or you live in a city, you can follow anyone about anything.". CNN

READ MORE - Does class decide online social networks?