Alexis C. Madrigal

Radioactive elements on Earth are like geological watches. A radioactive isotope of carbon is used to date human civilizations, among other things, because we know that its half-life is precisely 5,730 years; count how much of the carbon 14 has decayed and you can get a pretty accurate measure of how old something is. (If half of the expected amount is left, you'd say, "This thing is likely 5,730 years old.")

But what if the rate of radioactive decay -- the watch -- was not constant? One minute, the second hand is moving at one speed, and the next it has sped up or slowed down. And what if what changed that rate of decay was solar activity on the sun, 93 million miles away?

That's what recent research at Purdue University suggests. In a slate of recent papers, physicists Ephraim Fischbach and Jere Jenkins argue that measured differences in the decay rates of radioactive isotopes cannot be explained by experimental errors. Instead, they seem to vary with the earth's distance from the sun and periodic changes in solar activity.

"We are led to suggest that nuclear decays may be intrinsically influenced by the Sun through some as-yet unexplained mechanism, possibly involving neutrinos," they wrote earlier this summer. The researchers got interested in the problem when a solar flare on December 13, 2006 (seen above) decreased the decay rate of a radioactive sample they were studying.

The work has not been followed up by other researchers, and certainly remains on the outskirts of thought about radioactive decay, but it's piqued the interest of Stanford physicist Peter Sturrock, who is attempting to understand the variations Fischbach and Jenkins observe. The radioactive decay data doesn't quite match up with most other solar patterns, which has led Sturrock to suggest that the sun's core, which produces neutrinos, rotates slower than the rest of the star.

But even if the solar physics all works out, there's still the problem that scientists don't know how neutrinos could possibly affect the radioactive decay rates of isotopes on Earth.

"It's an effect that no one yet understands," Sturrock told the Stanford Report, the university's well-respected house organ, this week. "Theorists are starting to say, 'What's going on?' But that's what the evidence points to. It's a challenge for the physicists and a challenge for the solar people too."

If and when scientists figure out what's going on, we could need to update one of science's basic premises about how to measure deep time -- and change the way we've thought about those barely-there particles, neutrinos.

While trolling the Internet for photos to illustrate an upcoming story, I came across this particular failed experiment in headgear. We have little information about what's going on other than what's provided in the Netherlands Nationaal Archief's bibliographic record. It indicates that we're looking at "Plastic face protection from snowstorms. Canada, Montreal, 1939." In Dutch, these things have a name: Plastic sneeuwstormbeschermer.

The triangular plastic snouts also make the young ladies appear to be fans of the Manichean main characters from that staple of Mad Magazine, Spy vs Spy.

Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created a unique laboratory for studying the long-term effects of radiation on living creatures. Turns out, things continue to grow pretty well
in the soil near the old reactor.

New biological techniques allow scientists to measure exactly how the plants are switching on and off their genes to respond to their unusual circumstances. You might expect that the plants are radically changing, but a new study in flax plants finds that they made only minor adjustments in their genetic expression profiles relative to a control group grown far from the site.

"Based on the observed changes, the proteome of seeds from plants grown in radio-contaminated soil display minor adjustments to multiple signaling pathways," wrote the authors of the new paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

When scientists look at the "proteome," they are measuring the proteins that are produced by an organism's genes. When we say DNA is our "genetic code," what we mean is that it encodes the instructions for how to make those proteins, which are the body's molecular machines. Of the 720 protein spots that the scientists looked at, only 35 of them differed meaningfully between the Chernobyl plants and their cousins planted in normal soil.

The work is part of an ongoing line of research into just how bad radiation is over the long term. We know from atomic weapons research that a lot of radiation is very bad for every living thing, but we don't know the precise impacts of lower levels of radioactive cesium and strontium.

Via C&EN

Citation: "Proteomics Analysis of Flax Grown in Chernobyl Area Suggests Limited Effect of Contaminated Environment on Seed Proteome"

I'm a pretty fast texter, even with the iPhone. So, when I saw that Melissa Thompson of Great Britain crushed the standing world record, I wanted to see how close I really was to greatness. Apparently, there is a gold-standard set of words to test these sorts of things. Here it is:

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.

Thompson whipped out that message in 25.94 seconds, shaving more than 9 seconds off the previous record best. (This has not yet been verified by Guinness.)

Just looking at the words, it didn't seem out of the question that I'd get close to at least the old record. So I fired up a flash stopwatch and tried it myself on my phone (landscape, two hands). Turns out, it's much harder than you'd think.

My personal best? 53 seconds (with one error). I'd love to know where I rank among the community here.

People pushing sustainability don't tend to be the same types who love our digital-crazed iWorld. And that's a problem because it means they don't push one of the great advantages of dense, energy-efficient cities: urban life integrates far better with mobile devices than does its car-logged suburban cousin.

Take the "distracted driving" debate. Last week, Gizmodo's Joel Johnson asked a sensible question, "Why Isn't There a Better Way to Text While Driving?" His conclusion is that there is just no way to pilot a 2,000 pound vehicle while tapping out a message with your fingers. "I can't envision an optimal solution short of bespoke systems that integrate text messages into heads-up displays, for instance--solutions that cause as many problems as they solve," he wrote.

But I'd question the whole car commute + mobile device paradigm. As you sit on the subway or on the bus or walk, you can tweet, read your RSS feeds, catch up on email, knock out a few pages of a book, or whatever else you might like to do. You can't do that in a car, and I agree with Johnson that there isn't going to be an easy technological fix.

This might seem like a trite bonus of city life. But I think it's more than that. Car time is wasted time, but commuting time doesn't have to be. Look at well-heeled Silicon Valley companies. They offer their employees cushy, WiFi-enabled buses for commuting. That first hour of the day, Apple and Google employees are banging out emails and getting ready for the day, not sitting in traffic carrying out a set of repetitive, low-level, and occasionally dangerous tasks to maneuver their exoskeletons southward.

When we think about the networks that defined modern life in the 20th century -- roads, electrical transmission grids, sewer, water -- it's important to remember that they worked together. The historian David Nye likes to point out that roads and cars may have allowed people to get to the suburbs, but it was the electrical appliances and entertainments those suburban homes contained that made them desirable places to live.



"If the high energy society forced some farmers off the land, at the same time the networks of roads and electric lines made rural living more attractive, encouraging migration from the city," Nye wrote in Consuming Power. "Using electricity, virtually all places can be lighted or supplied with power equally well... Had only the automobile had been involved, work and commerce would have retained a tighter urban focus."

Similarly, the things we did in our cars reflected the entertainment available. And in the broadcast world, being in your car wasn't so bad: you listened to the radio for fun at home, so the car was kind of a couch on wheels. (See: drive-in movie theaters.) One system helped support the other.

But the latest network to overspread our country -- the wireless electromagnetic one -- is just not fully compatible with driving, at least for human brains. In more economic terms, the opportunity cost of car commuting is going up. You can listen to Howard Stern in a car; you can run your business from a train or bus.

Infrastructure is a viscous social structure, so I have no illusions that a century-old transportation system and its attendant urban forms are suddenly going to disappear. But it's all the networks we layer on top of one another -- information, power, transportation, water -- that help determine the social desirability of a place.

And mobile devices tapping on wireless networks can exert a powerful social influence, as we've all noticed. They could help tip the scales towards denser city living, or at least shorter commutes, for the wired workforce.

Last month, when the government Copyright Office OK'd jailbreaking your smartphone -- a process that allows you to circumvent a company's "app store" -- the news resounded in a minor key. Jailbreaking was technically legal, but there were no protections for users who chose to do it. Now, the blog Mashable brings via The Register that Apple has filed a patent for technolog that could theoretically be used to disable your jailbroken phone.

Most of the patent covers ways of dealing with the theft of a phone, but broadly, it addresses "hacking, jailbreaking, unlocking, or removal of a SIM card."
 
Mashable explains how Apple could use the technology:

[T]he patent also covers methods for identifying devices that have been hacked, jailbroken, unlocked or had their SIM cards removed, such as monitoring sudden increases in memory usage that could "indicate that a hacking program is being run and that an unauthorized user may be using the electronic device." Theoretically, Apple could then wipe personal data from these devices and then alert AT&T to "shutdown any telephone service to the electronic device, shutdown the electronic device itself, or otherwise suitably extract the functions of the electronic device."

In other words, the system described in the patent allow Apple to effectively kill jailbroken devices under the guise of protecting customers from theft, since it may not be able to determine whether a device has been stolen or if it is being willingly jailbroken by users.

Obviously, Apple's not going to deploy such a drastic measure wily-nilly, but it's certainly worth keeping in mind that they might have such abilities stashed away in Cupertino.

Fred Brooks is a legend for his time at IBM and his book, The Mythical Man-Month, which became a Bible for software developers. The book identified the key concept that "you can't always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers; beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays," as Wired's Kevin Kelly explains in a new interview with Brooks.

Brooks, a University of North Carolina computer scientist, has a new book out, The Design of Design, in which he takes on a host of new fields. Across of all of them, he singles out one crosscutting idea: know your limiting factor.

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

There is one other great moment in Kelly's interview with Brooks in which the latter reveals that someone (a real person! who is still alive!) had to make the decision to enable the use of lower-case letters in computing.

Kelly: What do you consider your greatest technological achievement?
Brooks: The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere.

If you haven't read the Spanish writer Javier Marías, you're really missing out. His three-volume Your Face Tomorrow is a stunning literary achievement, may be the best book of the past decade. Just to get a taste of his work, though, check out his short piece, "Airships," in the newly released anthology The Best Technology Writing 2010. The story, which first appeared in Granta, is a bouncy riff on the odd relationships we develop with different kinds of technologies.

Marías begins with his own fear of flying, detailing his need to act as an imaginary co-pilot, who must remain "attentive not only to any possible changes of mood in the engines, or to the plane's recognizable or unexpected noises, or to its scheduled or unscheduled ups and downs." Apparently, the only way he's gotten over his phobia is to carry and caress a wooden plane figurine given to him by a stewardess.

"And that same air hostess, as well as recounting a few anecdotes from her long experience in the air, made me think of planes, for the first time, as relatively 'humanizable' objects, which one could, in a way, and depending on the circumstances, mentally direct," Marías writes. "Not that there's anything very remarkable about that. Indeed, it's perfectly normal. She told me in her letter that whenever the plane she was on lurched or bumped about a bit or jolted, she would issue a silent order: 'Down, boy!' Yes, an order, an exorcism, a persuasive word."

He then delves into a gorgeous historical treatment of the way we treated ships, the ones that ply the seas. They got prominent names, respect, and even a gendered pronoun in English ("She was a good catamaran.") He quotes Joseph Conrad: Ships are "not exactly what men make them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance."

Airplanes, airships, deserve that kind of love and admiration, Marías argues. "In fact, given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them - those complex machines endowed with movement to which we surrender ourselves and that transport us through the air - is that it isn't more 'personal', or more 'animal', or more 'sailor-like', if you prefer."

Our planes need names and histories befitting a vessel humans use to knit civilization across the globe. Marías requests that the airlines give their planes "a little more literature or - which comes to the same thing - a little uniqueness; a little history and background; a little life."

One day soon, he imagines, you'll be sitting in a plane and hear this coming from the cockpit or nearby flight attendant:

'This plane, the Pierre Ménard, has had an amazing life so far. It was born ten years ago, has made five hundred flights and crossed the Atlantic on sixty-three previous occasions. It has always responded well to us, even in the most unfavourable of circumstances. It's a docile plane by nature, but very sensitive as well. Why, I remember once...'

I loved Marías' story and attitude to technology so much that I decided to take up his call to action. I got in touch with Katie Baynes, who does publicity for Virgin America, and demanded to know the names of all their planes. She sent over the list at the bottom of this post. The name should be painted near the door of the plane, so you can often spot it as you're boarding.

It turns out that the different airlines have different naming practices, it seems. United tends to name them after employees. JetBlue's are all puns on blue ("It Had to Be Blue" etc). Hawaiian Airlines has some of the best names, using the native words for birds ("Apapene").

Frontier has made the biggest show of personalizing its planes, with a cast of 60 "spokesanimals" (don't shoot the messenger!). They've even got kitschy little backstories for Larry the Lynx and Griswald the Grizzly. Grizwald, for example, seems to have a bit of a weight issue, though he likes to shake "his groove thing." His pet peeves include "beehives, bear-skin rugs, and delays on the runway."

Most of the planes' sobriquets probably don't reach the heights of literary that Marias imagined (compare: Mach Daddy vs. vs. Griswald vs Pierre Ménard), but they're better than nothing.

Perhaps, it's best then, for you to just ask the sailors aboard your airship about your plane's name and backstory. If you do, report back to me here. I'd love to hear about your experience.

And for the curious, here's the full list of Virgin America's planes' names; some of them (e.g. Dotcomsecrets air) were chosen by people who purchased the rights in a charity auction. My personal favorite: "Unicorn Chaser," as chosen by BoingBoing.

• Spruce Moose
• Arnold
• Breanna Jewel
• Dotcomsecrets air
• Refresh air
• Air drake
• San Francisco Pride
• An Airplane Named Desire
• Airplane 2.0
• My Other Ride is a Spaceship
• Mach Daddy
• The Tim Clark Express
• YouTube Air
• Chic Mobile
• Superfly
• Midnight Ride
• Entourage Air
• Runway Angel
• Unicorn Chaser
• Jefferson Airplane
• Fred, White & Blue
• Three if by Air
• California Dreaming
• Air Colbert
• Gogo Dancer
• Moodlights, Camera, Action
• Fog Cutter
• Rubular Belle
• Jane
• Virgin & Tonic
• Dark Horse
• Contents May Be Under Pressure
• The 1 Year-Old Virgin
• Let there be flight

[Note: I also appear in The Best Technology Writing 2010 along with friends Doug Fox, Evan Ratliff, Steve Silberman, and Anne Trubek. I made the cut with a story about this crazy magnetic storm in 1859, which pumped so much current into the air that you could run a telegraph without batteries.]

Image: martincron/flickr

Monday, I profiled Tencent, China's largest Internet company. Wednesday, Facebook announced the launch of their location-based app, and I noted that the company is looking more and more like a business, and less like a piece of technology.

In the wake of Facebook's announcement, a Chinese investment banker wrote in with this perspective about the company's new strategy:

The natural analogy [for Facebook] is Tencent. Slow follower as I have called them (though that is entirely unfair since they did do the virtual goods thing earlier and better than most).

The beauty of Goog is that the cash machine was just one machine. FB will need to stack a lot of businesses together. Again, Tencent proves that the most important thing is the user base. Monetization is easy on a sticky base, even if you have to essentially build a myriad of businesses.

It's a good point. If you look at Tencent's business, they began with an IM service, which is a kind of social network. Once they'd built the best network, they started rolling out different products like mobile services, games, virtual goods, and more involved social tools.

Tonight, Facebook officially announced Places, its location-based competitor to Foursquare. The much-foreshadowed announcement means that you'll be able to use your phone to "check-in" at and share the places you go with your friends.

The general reaction, as with Facebook's new Questions app, seems to be that the company has built a high-quality, low-risk product. For example, the eminent reviewer Walt Mossberg tried out the service and liked it just fine. "I've been testing the new service, and found it easy to use and reliable, with mostly logical privacy controls, an issue on which Facebook has been bruised in the past," Mossberg wrote.

But Questions and Places aren't technologically innovative products. Other companies, Quora and Foursquare respectively, already do what they do. But to focus on that would be to miss the point: what we're watching is Facebook figuring out new ways to monetize its half a billion users. They let the little guys figure out that search-result friendly Q&As and location-based services seem to be good businesses -- and then launch something similar.

Exciting? Maybe not. Effective? Those startups don't have Facebook's 500 million users and proven ability to drive scale and adoption.

If you're one of those people (like myself) who can't understand why you'd want to check in everywhere you go, forget about the nature of this specific product. There's a more interesting structural story here. We've known Facebook the social network, now it's time to get ready for Facebook the business. Facebook employees, even privately, have stuck to the line that they're building the best social network they can and that it isn't about money. Monetizing has been almost a dirty word. (Almost.) I think we're about to see that subtly change.

Remember when Google didn't really focus on the money? "In Google's case, we were really interested in developing our search technology. It wasn't a get-rich-quick thing, and it still isn't," co-founder Sergey Brin said back in 2002. "We're trying to build better and better products and a stronger and stronger company, but you don't see us running around trying to make a buck by IPO-ing or selling the company."

Then, one day, the company started to crank up the Google AdWords money machine, and became the largest Internet company around.

Don't be shocked to see Facebook follow a similar path, if Zuckerberg is lucky.