January 16, 2012

Good Morning,

Are you addicted to your smartphone? The first article outlines a study that finds the big symptom. With great power comes great responsibility, we must not forget this as devices like smartphones become evermore powerful and alluring.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Study: Smartphone addiction a problem

CHESTER, England - Some people are so addicted to their smartphones they hear "phantom vibrations" because they are desperate to receive new messages, a British study has found. Smartphone addicts become obsessive about checking their e-mail accounts and social networking sites to the point of raising their stress levels, a conference of the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology heard Thursday. Researchers say some users are so hooked on their devices they even begin to experience "phantom" vibrations, mistakenly believing their phone is buzzing in their pocket or purse, The Daily Telegraph reported. Many smartphone users acquire the devices to help them keep on top of their work, researchers found, but the help to the user's workload was outweighed by pressure to stay up to date with messages, e-mails and social networking sites. Richard Balding of the University of Worcester, who led the research, said employers should consider the added stress a smartphone could put on workers. "Organizations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress," he said, "so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off, cut the number of work e-mails sent out of hours, and reduce people's temptation to check their devices."


True color of Milky Way described

PITTSBURGH - U.S. astronomers investigating the true color of the Milky Way galaxy say its name is apt, because it is indeed white -- but not just any white. Because the Earth is within the Milky Way, it has not been easy to determine what our galaxy might appear like to an observer outside of it, which could reveal much about our home galaxy, Jeffrey Newman of the University of Pittsburgh said. "The problem is similar to determining the overall color of the Earth, when you're only able to tell what Pennsylvania looks like," Newman said in a UP release Thursday. Color is one of the most important properties of galaxies that astronomers study, he said. "That tells us basically how old the stars in the galaxy are, how recently it's been forming stars -- are they forming today or did its stars form billions and billions of years ago?" Newman and colleagues analyzed data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with information on almost a million galaxies, searching for galaxies with similar mass to the Milky Way and similar rates of star formation, looking for near matches to our galaxy. For those that most closely matched our own Milky Way, they took an average and came up with a precise measure of what color our home galaxy must be. It's indeed white, they said; specifically, very close to the light seen when looking at spring snow in the early morning, shortly after dawn.


Storage memory built with single atoms

SAN JOSE, Calif. - U.S. and German researchers have announced the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit, using 12 atoms to store a data bit, the basic unit of information. Scientists at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science created the nanometer data storage unit atom-by-atom, using a scanning tunneling microscope at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Iron atoms were aligned in rows of six atoms each, with two rows sufficient to store one bit. Each pair of rows has two possible magnetic states, representing the classical 0 and 1 of binary computer data. A byte -- eight bits -- can be stored in eight pairs of atom rows occupying an area of just 4 by 16 nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter.) "This corresponds to a storage density that is a hundred times higher compared to a modern hard drive," researcher Sebastian Loth said in a release from the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. "Looking at the shrinking of electronics components we wanted to know if this can be driven into the realm of single atoms," Loth said. Instead of shrinking existing components the team chose the opposite approach. "Starting with the smallest thing -- single atoms -- we built data storage devices one atom at a time," IBM research staff member Andreas Heinrich said.


Mars mission completes important maneuver

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says its Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft has successfully refined its flight path with the biggest maneuver planned for its journey to Mars. "We've completed a big step toward our encounter with Mars," Brian Portock of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said. "The telemetry from the spacecraft and the Doppler data show that the maneuver was completed as planned." Engineers had planned Wednesday's 3-hour series of thruster-engine firings to accomplish two aims -- to put the spacecraft's trajectory about 25,000 miles closer to encountering Mars and to advance the time of the encounter by about 14 hours, compared with the original trajectory following the mission's Nov. 26, 2011, launch. "The timing of the encounter is important for arriving at Mars just when the planet's rotation puts Gale Crater in the right place," JPL's Tomas Martin-Mur, chief navigator for the mission, said. Gale Crater is the intended destination of the mission's car-sized Curiosity rover, which will search for environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and preserving clues about whether life existed, mission managers said. As of Thursday the spacecraft had traveled 81.2 million miles on its 352-million-mile trip to Mars.


Study: Simple measures could slow warming

NEW YORK - Global warming can be reduced and human health and agriculture improved with relatively cheap, simple ways to cut two common pollutants, U.S. researchers say. A study suggests that instead of focusing on carbon dioxide, the main culprit in climate change, measures should be taken, using proven existing technologies, to cut methane and soot from industrial and farming processes, a release from Columbia University said Thursday. Researchers estimate this would shave nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit off warming projected to occur by mid-century and would also avert premature deaths from air pollution and boost yields of crops. Carbon dioxide, a product of human fossil-fuel burning, is the major long-term driver of global warming but the political, economic and technological challenges to reducing emissions are huge, researchers said. Methane and soot also contribute to warming but in contrast to CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for centuries, they naturally cycle out of the air much faster -- and there are already ways immediately available to deal with them, the scientists say. "Ultimately, we have to deal with CO2, but in the short term, dealing with these pollutants is more doable, and it brings fast benefits," said lead author Drew Shindell, a researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University's Earth Institute. Shindell and colleagues from North America, Europe, Africa, the Mideast and Asia looked at about 400 possible existing pollution control measures that might cut global warming, and found solutions that would have the most immediate effects all turned out to involve cuts in methane or soot.

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