ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 771

Insect Aerobatics: How Mantises Control Spin For Targeted Jumps

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Not just on the dancefloor… the praying mantis can throw some crazy shapes in mid-air. Malcolm Burrows, Author provided

Praying mantises are notorious – both for their deadly striking behaviour that they use to capture prey and for the gruesome female habit of eating their partners after mating. But their speed, agility and accuracy at jumping has not been widely recognised – until now. New research in Current Biology shows that the mantis jump is something rather special.

New Nanomaterials Will Boost Renewable Energy

Technology





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Fossil fuels can only go so far towards meeting our burgeoning energy demands. Shutterstock

Global energy consumption is accelerating at an alarming rate. There are three main causes: rapid economic expansion, population growth, and increased reliance on energy-based appliances across the world.

Darwin Day 2015 Questions: Is Homosexuality Nature’s Population Control?

Richard Dawkins answers your questions about evolution in honor of Darwin Day 2015.

“I’ve always believed that homosexuality was nature’s population control so that we don’t overpopulate. Thoughts?”

Edited by Stephanie Renee Guttormson

Copyright 2015 Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

American atheist blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images

By Agence France-Presse

A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin has been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, after he allegedly received threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site – which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation – was found covered in blood after an attack that also left his wife critically wounded.

“He died as he was brought to the hospital. His wife was also seriously wounded. She has lost a finger,” local police chief Sirajul Islam said.

The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them on to the pavement before striking them with machetes, local media reported, citing witnesses.

Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.

Genetics Reveal Antarctica Was Once Too Cold For Penguins

Plants and Animals





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Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Gary Miller/Australian Antarctic Division, Author provided

Emperor penguins are truly remarkable birds – they thrive in the coldest environment on Earth and live year-round on the ice. Breeding colonies congregate on sea ice during the Antarctic winter and must withstand temperatures that regularly drop below -30C.

Killer Frog Fungus Could Actually Help Amphibians Survive Disease

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

A Madagascan bright-eyed frog (Boophis rappiodes), one of more than 400 species on the island. Axel Strauß, CC BY-SA

The loss of amphibian species across the world from chytridiomycosis, an infectious disease caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), has been described as “the most spectacular loss of vertebrate biodiversity due to disease in recorded history”. So it’s of grave concern that the pathogen has been discovered in Madagascar, an incredibly biodiverse region previously thought free of the fungus.

Your Life, Your Data: Pushing Back at Government and Corporate Incursions into Personal Privacy [Excerpt]

Excerpted with permission from Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, by Bruce Schneier. Available from W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2015, by Bruce Schneier.

 

Introduction

If you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science-fiction world, look at your cell phone. This cute, sleek, incredibly powerful tool has become so central to our lives that we take it for granted. It seems perfectly normal to pull this device out of your pocket, no matter where you are on the planet, and use it to talk to someone else, no matter where they are on the planet.

 

Yet every morning when you put your cell phone in your pocket, you’re making an implicit bargain with the carrier: “I want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I allow this company to know where I am at all times.” The bargain isn’t specified in any contract, but it’s inherent in how the service works. You probably hadn’t thought about it, but now that I’ve pointed it out, you might well think it’s a pretty good bargain. Cell phones really are great, and they can’t work unless the cell phone companies know where you are, which means keeping you under their surveillance.

 

This is a very intimate form of surveillance. Your cell phone tracks where you live and where you work. It tracks where you like to spend your weekends and evenings. It tracks how often you go to church (and which church), how much time you spend in a bar, and whether you speed when you drive. It tracks—since it knows about all the other phones in your area—whom you spend your days with, whom you meet for lunch, and whom you sleep with. The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time than you can, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory. In 2012, researchers were able to use this data to predict where people would be 24 hours later, to within 20 meters.

 

Before cell phones, if someone wanted to know all of this they would have you put under surveillance. They would hire a private investigator to follow you around taking notes. Now that job is obsolete; the cell phone in your pocket does all of this automatically. It might be that no one retrieves that information, but it is there for the taking.

 

Your location information is valuable, and everyone wants access to it. The police want it. Cell phone location analysis is useful in criminal investigations in several different ways. The police can “ping” a particular phone to determine where it is, use historical data to determine where it has been, and collect all the cell phone location data from a specific area to figure out who was there and when. More and more, police are using this data for exactly these purposes.

 

Governments also use this same data for intimidation and social control. In 2014, the government of Ukraine sent this positively Orwellian text message to people in Kiev whose phones were at a certain place during a certain time period: “Dear subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Don’t think this behavior is limited to totalitarian countries; in 2010, Michigan police sought information about every cell phone in service near an expected labor protest. They didn’t bother getting a warrant first.

 

There’s a whole industry devoted to tracking you in real time. Companies use your phone to track you in stores to learn how you shop, track you on the road to determine how close you might be to a particular store, and deliver advertising to your phone based on where you are right now.

 

Your location data is so valuable that cell phone companies are now selling it to data brokers, who in turn resell it to anyone willing to pay for it. Companies like AirSage and Sense Networks specialize in using this data to build personal profiles of each of us.

 

Phone companies are not the only source of cell phone data. The US company Verint sells location tracking systems to both corporations and governments worldwide. The company’s website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone—one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter. The company boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei, Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United States. Defentek, a company mysteriously registered in Panama, sells a system that can “locate and track any phone number in the world...undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.” It’s not an idle boast; telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated the same thing at a hacker conference in 2008. Criminals do it today.

 

All this location tracking is based on the cellular system. There’s another entirely different and more accurate location system built into your smartphone: GPS. This is what provides location data to the various apps running on your phone. Some apps use location data to deliver service: Google Maps, Uber, Yelp. Others, like Angry Birds, just want to be able to collect and sell it.

 

You can do this, too. HelloSpy is an app that you can surreptitiously install on someone else’s smartphone to track them. Perfect for an anxious mom wanting to spy on her teenager—or an abusive man wanting to spy on his wife or girlfriend. Employers have used apps like this to spy on their employees.

 

The US National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), use location data to track people. The NSA collects cell phone location data from a variety of sources: the cell towers that phones connect to, the location of Wi-Fi networks that phones log on to, and GPS location data from Internet apps. Two of the NSA’s internal databases, code named HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA, contain comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The NSA uses the databases to track people’s movements, identify people who associate with people it’s interested in, and target drone strikes.

 

The NSA can allegedly track cell phones even when they are turned off.

 

I’ve just been talking about location information from one source—your cell phone—but the issue is far larger than this. The computers you interact with are constantly producing intimate personal data about you. It includes what you read, watch, and listen to. It includes whom you talk to and what you say. Ultimately, it covers what you’re thinking about, at least to the extent that your thoughts lead you to the Internet and search engines. We are living in the golden age of surveillance.

 

Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy said it plainly way back in 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” He’s wrong about how we should react to surveillance, of course, but he’s right that it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid surveillance and maintain privacy.

 

Surveillance is a politically and emotionally loaded term, but I use it deliberately. The US military defines surveillance as “systematic observation.” As I’ll explain, modern-day electronic surveillance is exactly that. We’re all open books to both governments and corporations; their ability to peer into our collective personal lives is greater than it has ever been before.

 

The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange for free service. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt and its Director of Ideas Jared Cohen laid it out in their 2013 book The New Digital Age. Here I’m paraphrasing: if you let us have all your data, we will show you advertisements you want to see and we’ll throw in free web search, e-mail, and all sorts of other services. It’s convenience, basically. We are social animals, and there’s nothing more powerful or rewarding than communicating with other people. Digital means have become the easiest and best way to communicate. And why do we allow governments access? Because we fear the terrorists, fear the strangers abducting our children, fear the drug dealers, fear whatever bad guy is in vogue at the moment. That’s the NSA’s justification for its mass-surveillance programs; if you let us have all of your data, we’ll relieve your fear.

 

The problem is that these aren’t good or fair bargains, at least as they’re structured today. We’ve been accepting them too easily, and without really understanding the terms.

 

Here is what’s true. Today’s technology gives governments and corporations robust capabilities for mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is dangerous. It enables discrimination based on almost any criteria: race, religion, class, political beliefs. It is being used to control what we see, what we can do, and, ultimately, what we say. It is being done without offering citizens recourse or any real ability to opt out, and without any meaningful checks and balances. It makes us less safe. It makes us less free. The rules we had established to protect us from these dangers under earlier technological regimes are now woefully insufficient; they are not working. We need to fix that, and we need to do it very soon.

Novel Energy Inventions Seek Greater Impact

Biofuel makers struggle, utilities wage war against rooftop solar power and fuels knit together by microbes using carbon dioxide and electricity remain firmly in the lab—but at least there are no oil well blowouts to staunch anymore. Chemist Ellen Williams joined the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy as its new head in December 2014. And although some energy innovations currently falter that is nothing compared with the events of 2010 when she joined BP, one of world’s largest energy companies, as chief scientist. That was the year of the blowout of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that resulted in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

 

"When I was recruited to join BP as chief scientist, the plum they offered was the opportunity to run their energy sustainability challenge," she recalled at the sixth annual ARPA–E summit on February 10, noting the concerns about the interaction between energy, climate as well as the availability of water, land and minerals. "Energy with climate is the really big connection we have to pay attention to."

 

As BP notes in its annual analysis of global energy, the human enterprise burns ever more fossil fuels—hence the need to explore for oil in the deep waters of the gulf. The energy company's latest set of statistics foresees no end to that trend and, therefore, continuing increases in the carbon dioxide emissions, among other pollution, that results from all that burning. Rising levels of atmospheric CO2, which have already touched 400 parts per million, trap ever more heat, changing the climate.

 

Slowing and reversing that trend while ensuring the vitality of the U.S. economy is what ARPA–E was created to do back in 2009, an agency Williams also called "the coolest thing on Earth so how could I possibly stay away?" She added "I'm a true geek. There is nothing I like more than talking technology." Scientific American sat down with Williams at the summit to chat about her vision for the future of energy innovation.

 

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

 

What are your plans for ARPA–E?

The first thing that I'm hoping to do in this new role—and the most important thing—is to expand our impact. The ARPA–E model of how we do business is unusual, and it's actually unique where we combine cutting-edge technology innovation with a cold-eyed focus on market reality. We bring those two things together, and that's what makes ARPA–E different.

 

We have developed a pipeline of products in the five years that ARPA–E has been funding projects. Truly innovative things that you never thought were possible have been put in a position where we've shown they can fit into a competitive space. So, moving forward, we're going to see pushing more and more of those products out, developing their impact, understanding their impact and building on what we've learned to design our next round.

 

Are there particular programs you would like to see? You have an open call right now.

ARPA–E is all about change. It reinvents itself every two to three years. We love our programs and, as I said, they fill up our pipeline. But then they're done. And at the end of the program we're constantly reevaluating and planning the next place to go, so we're going to constantly change and constantly build on our learnings from the past.

 

Has the ambition changed? Some of the early programs like electrofuels were very audacious whereas some of the more recent programs like methane monitoring are perhaps less so.

I think we've got a great balance and a great opportunity to sustain that balance. So electrofuels was, as you said, very early-stage, but it had the benefit of nucleating an entirely new field. Our construct is really to drive forward technology and evaluate what it would take to bring it to market. Electrofuels was a success because we now understand what it's going to take, and it will take awhile for electrofuels to reach commercial readiness.

 

So that would be one end of the spectrum. And then we move all way towards programs where there's a real new advance that's going to make it possible to a much more efficient engine. And that's an equally valid part of ARPA–E's portfolio.

 

Are there particular past successes or new projects that helped attract you to ARPA–E?

So you know we have an aging grid. I mean people say that Thomas Edison would recognize this grid. There's nothing in this grid that would surprise Edison in how it works and how it's set up.

 

In our lifetime, however, everything else in our lives has been completely revolutionized by the digital revolution. Now the grid is certainly using more digital technologies but there's a huge opportunity there. It's such a big, complicated system and it's facing so many more stresses in terms of extreme weather, changing usage patterns and integration of distributed and renewable generation.

 

ARPA–E by itself is not going to solve the grid. We don't do road map problems. What we do do is look at everything that's already going on out there and look for an opportunity in the space that no one else is looking at.

 

So we're looking beyond demand response activity and saying: "Can we really look at the grid as a dynamic system where we tie together all demand, all generation to really tailor the demand and response to work in synchrony in an effective way?" So this very exciting opportunity brings together applied mathematicians, computer scientists and experts in the power grid in a way that hasn't been done before. And we're going to give it a push, ARPA–E's specialty, giving a hard push in an area of high-risk opportunity and see if we can break that loose. If it goes, it will have a big impact on the grid overall.

 

Do you have enough money to take those high risks? I know from talking to past directors, like Arun Majumdar, that he was always wistful that he couldn't do anything in nuclear because he just didn't have enough funds.

Was he wistful?

 

Well, that's what he expressed: "That is something that I wish I had had the budget to try."

Interesting. Well, we've got a program structure around this idea of giving a sharp push into a well-focused area of opportunity. So we are well structured to use the budget we have very effectively, because we can tune the number of projects that we undertake to match our budget. More is always better, but we can do a great job with what we have.

 

Coming in from the outside, are there particular failures that ARPA–E hasn't learned enough from?

We absolutely kill projects. I would say it's rare that we've killed a project because it was actually a failure. We're trying high-risk projects because they're high risk. And we need to de-risk them. If we discover going forward through a project that this one approach isn't working…. I mean, that in itself is not a failure—that in itself is learning. It would be a failure if we kept pushing, trying to get to a goal that we couldn't get. So each of those times that we've canceled a project, in general, it's meant that we've really learned something.

 

Are programs in biofuels and the like at risk given the current low cost of oil?

We have to keep in mind that ARPA–E is about options, and oil prices are low right now but you've lived long enough to see a few oil shocks—I've certainly lived even longer, I've seen quite a few oil shocks. So nothing's certain but I'll say that I'm as certain as these things come that there will be another oil shock. We're about options at ARPA–E and making sure those options for the future are on the table so we're not caught flat-footed.

 

Are there options like solar that ARPA–E no longer needs to work on, thanks to recent price drops?

If you come back to our model of working, we'll look at the big energy system and we're always looking for a place that has an opportunity or a need. And if there's not an opportunity or a need, we're not there. So we'll stop working in that area.

 

We have solar projects because we see a different way of addressing the problem, and it has the potential to have a big impact. Again, more options for the future.

 

Who is the customer for these options?

Much of our structure draws from [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], and DARPA has a customer—DARPA has the Department of Defense and that is one way in which we are very different from DARPA.

 

To a large extent our customer is the U.S. economy. If you really read our founding language, you will see that it's very clearly stated that we're here to help the U.S. economy, to improve technical competitiveness, to improve energy security. So I think it's fair to say that our customer is the U.S. economy.

 

What can you achieve at ARPA–E that you couldn't do a major global oil company or in academia?

As an academic, I was involved in very fundamental research. I started out my career taking my data with a pen that made traces on a piece of paper. I lived the digital revolution and saw firsthand how it's completely changed what we can do and research. So that was a great aspect of being an academic. But, especially being very fundamental with my work, I wasn't going to be able to see the immediate transformation of things that I had produced in a laboratory into the marketplace.

 

At BP, it was just a great opportunity to learn about the energy system. It was a stupendous opportunity for me to see what it takes in a corporate environment to move a technology from concept into implementation. Especially in a big company like BP, the requirement on impact was pretty big. You know, a small project that was going to make a small amount of money was probably not something that was going to be a major focus.

 

What we have here at ARPA–E is, I think, the best of both worlds. From the point of view of someone who loves innovation and loves seeing lots of new technologies, we have the ability to try a lot of things that are high risk, that are very innovative and identify the ones that are going to go forward and have big impacts. So we have both impact and the ability to look at lots of different options.

This Is What Your Brain Looks Like With Alzheimer’s Disease

The Brain





Photo credit:

David Shenk / AboutAlzOrg

A short “pocket” film by David Shenk explains how Alzheimer’s disease alters the brain. The animation calls for an understanding of the disease in order to reduce stigma and increase patience when caring for individuals with Alzheimer’s.

Researchers Achieve Record-Smashing Wireless Connection Speeds

Technology





Photo credit:

Natthapenpis Jindatham/shutterstock.com

Do you know what wireless speeds of one terabit per second gets you? One hundred full-length movies downloaded onto your phone in just three seconds. Researchers in the U.K. are now saying that they’ve achieved just that: 1 Tbps over a 5G connection for the first time ever. That's the fastest wireless speed to date.