The 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti yesterday is devastating. We will continue to update this post with ways to support relief efforts and encourage our readers to add additional legitimate initiatives in comments. We ask that those with blogs repost these links on their sites.

American Red Cross International Response Fund
AmeriCares Help For Haiti
Direct Relief International
Doctors without Borders
HaitiArise
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund
Mercy Corps
Oxfam
UNICEF
Yele Haiti

@wyclef on twitter:

‘Haiti is in need of immediate AID please text Yele to 510 510 and donate $5 toward earthquake relief.’ ~Wyclef Jean, founder of Yele Haiti

@nytimes/haiti-earthquake

‘Reports from individuals, news orgs, relief agencies in Haiti.’ ~NYTimes Haiti earthquake twitter list

You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.

But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.

Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. Magee

Abstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]

So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.

For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.

There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.

This seems to be the decade of "I don’t like what you say, so instead of refuting it with evidence I’ll sue you to shut you up!" for the alt-medders.

First, it was Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association, and now it’s Barbara Loe Fischer from the ironically named National Vaccine Information Center, who is suing writer Amy Wallace and vaccine researcher Paul Offit about an article Wallace wrote in Wired magazine. The article is one of those rare ones that actually uses facts and evidence rather than anecdotes and hearsay, so of course shines a very ill-received spotlight on the antivaxxers, showing them for what they are: a public health menace.

As usual, Orac has the details. One thing that Orac notes is that Fischer chose to file her suit in Virginia which does not have SLAPP laws, designed to prevent lawsuits intended to silence critics. So it really really looks like she is suing simply to silence critics. Others think so too.

That is enough for an interesting story all by itself, of course. But the thing about people who deny reality, though, is that eventually they find themselves having to believe seven different things before breakfast, and at some point the irony meter can get pegged as they twist and spin. In this case, Ms. Fischer blows the gauge because she is asking for a "fearless" discussion about vaccines in 2010.

Yes, you read that correctly. She wants this because open and fearless conversation is so well-supported by libel lawsuits tossed around specifically to silence your opponents.

And people wonder why I think the mouthpieces for the antivax movement are so awful.

Skeptic Rebecca Watson agrees. Here’s what she has to say about this:

You can read Ms. Fischer’s complete statements on the NVIC website, but I’d make sure you clean your computer with bleach afterwards; who knows what you might catch from going there. You might want to protect your brain, too, since she somehow manages to link vaccines with terrorism and 9/11. When it comes to terrorism, I think the antivax movement fits better than vaccines, since fear is something they use all-too-well to scare parents into not vaccinating their kids.

Of course, if they used such things as evidence and scientific research, they’d have no movement at all.

The best thing we can do is keep shining this light on the hypocrisy and distortions of the antivax movement. They will continue to push garbage like this, and we have to make sure that the public sees it. The only alternative is to wait for kids to start dying from measles, pertussis, HiB, and other preventable illnesses in greater numbers than they already are… an event which, tragically, is already underway due in part to the antivaxxers.

The best way to make a point about privacy and “invasive” body scanners at the airport–is to strip down to your underwear and then publish that video to YouTube so the whole world can see you in your nearly naked glory. Might sound strange at first, but we are covering it in Discoblog, so I guess it worked.

Warning: This video has mild nudity and so may be NSFW.

German activists from the Pirate Party thought organizing a “fleshmob” of people to strip down to their skivvies and converge on the Berlin-Tegel airport was a great idea. The activists were protesting the use of what the Germans call the Nacktscanner, or naked scanner–a body scanner that may increasingly be used for airport security, in the wake of the botched underwear bombing on Christmas Day.

As Wired reported:

The protesters marked their bodies with a number of messages such as, “Something to hide?” and “Be a good citizen — drop your pants.” One woman has the word “diaper” scrawled on her lower back with an arrow pointing to her underwear and the word “prosthetic” printed on her leg. The word “piercing” and an arrow point to one of her breasts. Another woman dressed in a beige sweater and flesh-colored tights wears a sign reading “pixelated.” (To address privacy concerns, security officials say the scanners can be programed to produce a blurred, pixelated image of passengers to protect their modesty.)

The full-body scanners work by using high frequency radio waves to produce an image of a passenger’s naked body beneath clothes. So anything strapped to the body–explosives, drugs–would be exposed. But if you chuck something in a body cavity the scanner fails to detect that. The scanners have raised concerns about passengers’ privacy, as pointed out by the semi-naked activists, but German authorities are pressing ahead with their plans to deploy them across the country’s airports over the next two years.

Related Content:
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As Haiti reels from yesterday’s massive earthquake and its continued aftershocks, and nations rush to put rescue efforts together, scientists analyzing the seismic event say this disaster may have been a long time coming.

The earthquake in Haiti had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and it appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, scientists say [AP]. This fault, called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, may have been slowly building up pressure since the major 1760 earthquake that struck Haiti.

“It’s been locked solid for about the last 250 years,” said Dr Roger Musson from the British Geological Survey (BGS). “It’s been gathering stress all that time as the plates move past each other, and it was really just a matter of time before it released all that energy” [BBC News]. Chillingly, scientists led by Paul Mann warned just two years ago that such a massive quake could strike Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. But there wasn’t much the impoverished Caribbean nation could do with that information, Mann said: “The problem with these kinds of strikes is that they can remain quiescent — dormant — for hundreds of years,” he said Tuesday evening. “So it’s hard to predict when they’ll occur” [CNN].

The BBC reports that the fault system of which Enriquillo-Plantain is a part normally moves less than an inch per year as the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates slide by each other, but this earthquake may have caused the earth’s surface along the fault line to offset by as much as three feet.

The fact that the Enriquillo-Plantain appears to have released all its fury at once raises further worry for people living near strike-slip fault zones—California’s San Andres fault also falls under this category. However, Caribbean geology expert Grenville Draper says that the Hispaniola fault system doesn’t behave exactly like California’s. The movement along the Hispaniola fault is relatively small compared with plates moving underground in California, Draper said. The effect would be less-frequent earthquakes, but relatively large ones when they do occur [Miami Herald].

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80beats: Major Earthquakes Can Weaken Faults Around the Globe
80beats: A Major Quake Could Release Plutonium from Los Alamos Lab
The Intersection: Ways to Support the Relief Effort in Haiti

Image: Wikimedia Commons / The Weatherman

Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.

The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].

The standoff comes as no surprise to China watchers, however. “The idea that Google would be allowed to run an uncensored search engine would be inconsistent with everything the Chinese government has done and every single statement it has made over the past year” about the need for controls on the internet, says Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on new media in China [Christian Science Monitor]. In fact, the news of this fight over censorship remains itself censored in China, The New York Times reports. Early reports in the Chinese news media mentioned terms like “free speech,” but those quickly disappeared.

The details of Google’s other grievance—China-based hacks against it—haven’t all come to light yet. But these sophisticated attacks against more than 30 firms, mostly Silicon Valley-based, appear to have targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese humans right activists. Perhaps that was the last straw for Google; an anonymous source told Wired.com that the company already deals with the Chinese government harassing its own people over there. “[Google is] really concerned about their safety and feels that there is a very real possibility that they will be interrogated,” the source said. “They have been [interrogated] numerous times before, and this time they could be arrested and imprisoned” [Wired.com].

What happens if Google actually breaks with Beijing? Baidu, China’s number one search engine, will benefit, but it won’t be the only one. “With the easing of competition from Google, it’s actually going to benefit everybody. The small operators now see an opportunity to gain some market share,” said Elinor Leung, an analyst at CLSA. [Wall Street Journal]. But what’s good for the market share of Chinese search engines may not be good for Chinese Internet users. Google’s pullout could hamper the fight for Web freedom there and elsewhere, leaving governments with even more power to set the rules about how much of the Internet people within their borders can see.

That’s if Google follows through on its threat and ends its Chinese operations. As the Wall Street Journal reports, an Irish betting site is already taking wagers whether the company will do it by 2012, and the odds aren’t good—the bookies seem to think China is too tempting a market to surrender.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / M. Weitzel

My latest Science Progress blog post looks at the case of a recent Science paper that has had a dramatic impact on the debate over so-called “MTR”–an extremely destructive and invasive form of mining that literally takes the caps off of mountain peaks to access the coal inside them. In essence, it’s the story of scientists being willing to stand up and say what they think about policy, and having a real influence as a result–a case study in how to make scientific information have its maximal impact. An excerpt:

To me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research on their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it….

To hear more of the story, you can read the full post here.

A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

Face it: your pee smells after you eat asparagus. (And if you think yours doesn’t, it’s because you can’t smell it.) This phenomenon (which is caused by various malodorous sulfur-containing compounds) has tickled the fancies of many researchers, as well as such luminaries as Proust, who wrote of asparagus: “exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, and whose precious essence when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like a fairy-play by Shakespeare) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume (translated from Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, 1988, I, 119; I, 131).

But our favorite allusion to the asparagus-pee phenomenon has to be from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1871 1781, wrote a letter asking researchers to come up with a solution to fart smells (the letter is definitely worth reading in full: To the Royal Academy of Farting):

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?”

So, now that we understand why our pee stinks when we eat asparagus, can we address Benjamin’s larger concern? Check back tomorrow for some cutting-edge research on fart-smell-reduction!

The term “Very Long Baseline Interferometry” (VLBI) isn’t one with which many people are familiar, but I bet that although you may not know the name you are familiar with the concept.  VLBI is a means in radio astronomy by which simultaneous observations of an object by many telescopes are combined into one image.  If your VLBI involves radio telescopes every ten miles for one thousand miles, the resultant image is as if it were made by one telescope… one thousand miles across.

Image produced by Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe

There are several VLBI arrays operating successfully, but the most sensitive is the European VLBI Network (EVN).  It’s even possible to connect arrays in Europe with those in the US (or Canada, or Japan), to have what amounts to a global radio telescope.

The image on the left was taken by UK’s MERLIN Array, while the same area is imaged on the right with EVN e-VLBI.

You know what the next step is… don’t you.

NASA/JPL  Artist rendering of HALCA (MUSES -B)

Space.

Ground-to-space VLBI link-ups already in operation (like HALCA) can provide as much as 10 times the resolution of ground-based VLBI.

Baseline interferometry is really only in its infancy.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see future link-ups stretching between the Earth and the moon.  Very likely Mars.

Goldstone DSN antenna (used for VLBI, among other things)  NASA/JPL DSN  **This is one of my favorite images**

After a long weekend of Las Vegas fanboy salivating, another year of the Consumer Electronics Show has come to a close. Here are DISCOVER’s choices for the most important storylines among the flood of gadget-philia emanating from the desert.

1. OMG, It’s Coming Toward Us!

Between the unstoppable worldwide phenomenon that is “Avatar” and ESPN rolling out 3D broadcasts for this summer’s FIFA World Cup, 3D is back with a force not seen since the crazes of the 1950s and 80s. The bandwagon has close to universal industry ridership‚ almost every major manufacturer is launching 3D sets at CES this week, the Blu-ray format will support 3D and many gaming consoles should soon follow suit [Popular Mechanics]. But unless you’ve got a big wad of extra cash burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to wait a while before taking the 3D dive, tech experts warn. 3D TVs will come with plenty of sticker shock at first, there won’t be very much content to watch on them… and oh yeah, you’ll still have to wear those stupid glasses.

2. Tablets: Loading, Please Wait

Rumors swirled before CES that Microsoft would show off a new tablet-style electronic display. Not wanting to disappoint, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer pulled out a tablet midway into his address, demonstrating an H-P device running e-reader software. But it was only a prototype, and it couldn’t be found on the show floor [CNN Money]. Apple, too, is supposed to be developing a tablet, though the timetable for the secretive company remains unclear.

3. Wireless Power Wows the Crowd

If you’re among the “it’s 2010 and we shouldn’t need wires anymore” crowd, you may have found yourself giddy with excitement over another of 2010’s hot trends, wireless power. Fulton Innovations garnered particular esteem with its system, ECoupled. ECoupled uses a wireless powering technique called “close proximity coupling,” which uses circuit boards and coils to communicate and transmit energy using magnetic fields. The technology is efficient but only works at close ranges [Forbes]. Another promising system is “Venetial hotel tower” by WiTricity, which operates with “highly coupled magnetic resonance.” As proof that it works, an LCD TV is powered by a coil hidden behind an oil painting located a few feet away [Forbes].

4. Baby, You Can Interface with my Car

Ford took best-of-show honors for the automotive category with its redesigned cabin interface. Ford vehicles equipped with MyFord will get two 4.2-inch color LCDs, one mounted in the instrument cluster and one in the center of the dashboard. The instrument cluster display shows vehicle information such as engine speed, temperature, and trip data, and the one in the dashboard shows audio, phone, and navigation information [CNET]. The Fusion Hybrid will be the main testing ground for this new system.

5. The Swagger Is Back, and so Is the Little Guy

Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show returned to its usual over-the-top affair in 2010, with endless proclamations of how this year will see the return of the industry’s growth. Humbled no more by the global recession, electronics makers pulled out all the stops [CNN Money]. But it wasn’t all pomp and spectacle by behemoths like Microsoft: Popular Mechanics has the best of the small companies at CES.

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Discoblog: Our collection of weird iPhone apps

Image: Ford Motor Company

Set your watches, apocalypse watchers: On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock—that harbinger of untimely death run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—will change again.

When the organization debuted its clock in 1947 in the wake of the new dangers of the nuclear age, they set it at “7 minutes to midnight.” From there, the scientists have adjusted the metaphorical apocalypse countdown either up or down in response to geopolitics. The furthest we’ve ever been from our collective end is 12 minutes, after the signings of SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1979 17 minutes, after the end of the Cold War. The closest we’ve gotten is 2 minutes (the namesake of the Iron Maiden song), in response to hydrogen bomb tests.

What now? From Politico:

“The last time the doomsday clock was reset was in 2007, from 7 minutes to five minutes to midnight.

(Director Kennette) Benedict said she would offer no hints about whether the clock would be reset closer or further away from “doomsday” on Thursday. One suspects the group of scientists would be likely to show some appreciation for Barack Obama’s efforts on nonproliferation, climate change, etc. compared to his predecessor.”

This will be the first time you can watch live streaming of the Doomsday clock change, which happens at 10 a.m. EST on Thursday here in New York. I, for one, will not be watching, since we all know the world’s actually going to end in 2012 because of some Central American prophecy.

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Image: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The Cold War didn’t just restrict the movement of people, ideas, and trends in rock n’ roll, according to a new study–it also kept invasive species from moving into Eastern Europe.

Researchers looked at the number of non-native birds present in both Western and Eastern Europe over the past century. Before the Cold War restricted trade on the continent, Western Europe had 36 alien bird species and Eastern Europe had 11. By the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain crumbled, the number of alien birds in Western Europe had increased to 54, but the number in Eastern Europe had declined to five.

A National Geographic blog explains:

“Global trade is a real concern for invasive species, and the lessons we can learn from the Cold War offer a warning flag to developing countries that are now expanding in an international economy,” said Susan Shirley, a research associate in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.

Although birds can fly over walls and through no-fly zones, the researchers say they usually stick to their native territories; however, when imported pet birds are released into the wild they can carve out a niche in the new land. The new findings, reported in the journal Biological Conservation, suggest that Eastern Europe may now be filling up with avian aliens. Anybody remember if Pink Floyd released any doves during that concert on the wall?

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Forget the myths about massive numbers of slaves or Jews building the great pyramids, Egypt’s chief archaeologist argues this week. He says Egyptian researchers have found the tombs of more pyramid builders, and in those tombs more evidence that free men erected these monumental tributes to the ancient pharaohs.

Zahi Hawass this week unveiled new research on 4,000-year-old tombs found near the pyramids—tombs he says belonged to pyramid builders. Graves of the pyramid builders were first discovered in the area in 1990 when a tourist on horseback stumbled over a wall that later proved to be a tomb [Canadian Press]. These new ones stretch beyond those previously-discovered tombs, and contain a dozen skeletons.

What matters for the historical interpretation, Hawass stressed, is location, location, location. “These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves,” said Mr Hawass. “If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king’s” [The Times]. In addition, Hawass says that the walls of the tombs (which the builders probably built for themselves) bear graffiti like “friends of Khufu (a pharaoh).”

For Egyptologists like Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, this is more confirmation than surprise. “The myth of the slaves building pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood…. The world simply could not believe the pyramids were build without oppression and forced labour, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs” [Canadian Press], says Wildung. In particular, Egyptian officials like Hawass, who have national pride at stake, have long pushed against the idea slave-built pyramids, saying it undermines the skill involved in their construction, and the sophistication of ancient Egypt’s civilisation [BBC News].

Actually, the slave myth dates back much further than “tabloids and Hollywood,” to ancient texts. The Greek historian, Herodotus, visited Egypt several thousand years after Khufu’s pyramid was built, he wrote that Khufu forced his people to “labour as slaves for his own advantage” thus prompting the first accounts that the pyramids were built by slaves [The Times]. Legends have also held that Jews worked on the pyramids, and the first century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus includes a mention. But Jews did not arrive in Egypt until long after construction was completed.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Ricardo Liberato

The book isn’t out in paperback until the summer, but I’ve already put 5 spring events on the calendar, so I decided I’d also list them here. Travels will take me to St. Louis, Houston, Bethesda, New Haven, and Lansing. Further details:

Saturday, January 23
Keynote Speech, Stem Cell Hope Summit
6:30 PM–7:30 PM
Event sponsored by the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures
Sheraton St. Louis City Center Hotel & Suites
400 S. 14th St.
St. Louis, MO

Friday, February 5
Lunch Discussion and Book Signing
12:30 PM–2:30 PM
Event sponsored by the Science and Technology Policy Program, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dore Commons
James A. Baker Hall
Rice University
Houston, TX

Monday, February 8
Speech at the National Institutes of Health
10:00 AM–11:00 AM
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
NIH Clinical Research Center
(Building 10)
Bethesda, MD

Monday, February 15
Speech Before the Yale Political Union
Details TBA
New Haven, CT

Saturday, March 6
Public Lecture: “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future”
1:00 PM–2:45 PM
Michigan Science Teachers Association 57th Annual Conference
Raddison Hotel, Capital 2
Lansing, MI

I think it will be good to be “on the road again”….

Very rare, but fascinating.

What if we could outsource the manufacturing process to the very things we’re manufacturing? That’s the tantalizing promise of self-assembling systems, in which scientists use the laws of nature to get components to organize themselves into, say, a computer chip. Or in this case, a solar panel. Researchers have announced the creation of self-assembling solar cells that rely on the a principle known to everyone who’s ever made a vinaigrette salad dressing: that oil and water don’t mix.

The researchers’ efforts to made a self-assembling solar panel had been unsuccessful for years, because the components were just the wrong size. Above a certain size it’s possible to use gravity to drive self-organization; on the nanoscale it’s possible to use chemical processes, like the base pairing of DNA, to drive the assembly process. That leaves an awkward range of devices on the micrometer scale in between that aren’t heavy enough for gravity to drive assembly, but too big to be pushed around by substances like DNA [Ars Technica].

To get around this problem, the researchers designed a kind of conveyor belt. They made a solar cell substrate with regular depressions lined with low-temperature solder, which were designed to receive the individual solar cell elements. Each element had gold on one side and silicon on the other. The silicon side was painted with a hydrophobic molecule that is repelled by water, and was painted the gold side with a hydrophilic, or “water-loving,” molecule. When the elements were dumped into a vial containing oil and water, the elements neatly lined up in a row at the boundary between the two liquids. Each element had its gold side pointed towards the water.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how the solar cell took over the work from there. The conveyor belt process is to simply dunk the [substrate] through the boundary and draw it back slowly; the sheet of elements rides up along behind it, each one popping neatly into place as the solder attracts its gold contact. The team made a working device comprising 64,000 elements in just three minutes…. The method tackles what [experts say] is the most challenging problem – the proper alignment of thousands of parts, each thinner than a human hair [BBC News].

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Image: PNAS / Robert J. Knuesel and Heiko O. Jacobs

CLICK! (~110 k)

Here is one of Hubble’s latest pictures and it is simply jaw dropping.  The image shows part of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey or GOODS.  You REALLY need to click the image to get the larger version to begin to appreciate it; I recommend very highly you go to this link which will take you to Hubblesite’s Zoomable image, it is fabulous.

The image shows thousands of galaxies and 12 billion years of cosmic history.  Yeah like we’re really alone.

To see the Hubble press release and more images, including the zoomable one go here to see the Hubblesite offerings.

Credit: : NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, and M. Rutkowski (Arizona State University, Tempe), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Observatories), N. Hathi (University of California, Riverside), R. Ryan (University of California, Davis), H. Yan (Ohio State University), and A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute)

There’s nothing like the launching a company from your college dorm room that achieves global Internet hegemony within a few years to make you think you can offer royal pronouncements about how the world has changed.

OK, so that was a bit melodramatic. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earned some howls and guffaws in the last few days over his statements saying that, in a nutshell, people aren’t terribly interested in privacy anymore. Specifically, he said:

“In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”

Some have interpreted his comments as an indication that he thinks that privacy is over and that the depth of privacy you might have expected, say, five years ago is very different to that you should expect today [BBC News]. The privacy changes that Facebook recently made—changes that ruffled plenty of feathers—seem to be in line with Zuckerberg’s statement. From last December onwards, all Facebook users’ status updates are made publicly available unless the user actively opts to change the settings and make [it] private. Users were alerted to changes via a ‘Notification’ posted in the bottom right hand corner of the site [The Telegraph].

The self-serving element of Zuckerberg’s statements wasn’t lost on some commenters, either. The more information that Facebook users share, the more information Facebook can vacuum into whatever ad-based revenue stream they’re debuting this quarter [The Atlantic].

Not everyone, though, was mocking the baby-faced CEO. Social networking is, by nature, anything but private. The fact is that if Facebook restricted and controlled the sharing of data the way some privacy groups would like, it wouldn’t really be a social networking site and it wouldn’t have over 350 million users willingly sharing information with each other. Joining a “social” networking site and then complaining that your information is being shared is like buying an ice cream sundae and complaining that it’s cold [PC World].

And as TechCrunch points out, credit-rating agencies have been making money by gathering an enormous database of personal information since long before Facebook existed. “Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day. You just don’t really see that other stuff because those companies don’t like to talk about the data their gathering” [TechCrunch].

Related Content:
80beats: Facebook and Myspace Kick Out Thousands of NY Sex Offenders
80beats: Bankrupt Spam King Is Ordered To Pay Facebook $711 Million
Discoblog: Stole a Piece of the Internets? Prepare to Be Arrested.
Discoblog: Are Happy Facebook Pics Proof That You Aren’t Depressed?

Image: flickr / benstein

One year. 365 parasites. Be a part of it.

I’ve been bad: I haven’t linked to the Carnival of Space for two weeks, so now you get two for the post of one! Carnival #135 is at Steve’s AstroCorner, and 136 is at Simostronomy. Go there, and spend a few hours reading up on the latest in the astronomy blogospherule!