Borg Satellites of DARPA: The Phoenix Program

Satellites envelop our world like a web, another kind of world wide web. Proving to be indispensable for communications, scientific exploration and avoiding getting lost when shopping, they have become our eyes and ears in the sky, an essential part of everyday life. DARPA, America’s greatest research and development organizations has turned it’s  attention to space junk and satellites. With such previous contributions to society such as the Internet and GPS satellites DARPA isn’t the sort of company you ignore. Sure they may have their odd flight of fancy, the flying Humvee idea turned a lot of heads, turned heads with curious looks wanting to ask flying what now? Project Phoenix aims to create a new class of satellite, the Borg Satellite. The Borg or Tender – DARPA’s designation – space robot will be able to disassemble and maintain other satellites. Eventually DARPA hopes the Tender’s will be able build working satellites from various spare parts floating around in GEO - geostationary – orbit. Could the DARPA Borg satellites begin eating other satellites and produce kill-bots to take over the world, possibly but thee are a lot of technological hurdles to overcome yet B★B READ MORE

Nanotechnology: A Particle of Life Since The Iron Age

Since the emergence of nanotechnology, researchers, regulators and the public have been concerned at the potential toxicity of nano-sized products, the U.S. government has an admirably large funding program for the technology, especially in it’s medical application. And though their haven’t been any large-scale commercial breakthroughs, nanomedicine battles on to refine the application of molecular nanotechnology. Much hope is placed in the forward looking researchers who are as we write, furthering their research into the delivery of drugs via nanoscale particles, macromolecules, biopharmaceuticals, flesh welding surgery utilizing gold coated nanoshells, or the visionary field of neuro-electronic interfaces. The uses of nanoparticles in medicine is seemingly endless, except of course for that handicap all foreign objects face when entering the human body; our immune system and it’s antibodies, Nanomedicine it would seem is the way of the future. At any moment a breakthrough is likely to hit the journals, ‘Nanoparticle Targeting Kills Cancer’ until that day though nonomedicine is largely restricted to diagnostic practice. A new study undertaken by the University of Oregan suggests that humans have been in the presence of nanoparticles at least since our species first started processing metals, nanoparticles have been transferred to our skin from bracelets, and dropped into our mouths by forks and spoons, we’ve been living with nano particles for well over 3,000 years. M★D READ MORE

Girl Shortage Creates Bachelor Nations

As the global population hits seven billion, experts are warning that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile “bachelor nations” driven by an aggressive competition for brides. The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the “alarming demographic masculinisation” of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear. But many demographers believe the resulting shortage of adult women over the next 50 years will have as deep and pervasive an impact as climate change. The statistics behind the warnings are grimly compelling. Nature provides an unbending biological standard for the sex ratio at birth of 104-106 males to every 100 females. Any significant divergence from that narrow range can only be explained by abnormal factors. In India and Vietnam the figure is around 112 boys for every 100 girls. In China it is almost 120 to 100 and in some places, higher than 130. The trend is spreading to regions like the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia all post birth ratios of more than 115 to 100, and further west to Albania and Kosovo. Global awareness of the problem was raised back in 1990 with an article by the Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen that carried the now famous title: More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing M★C READ MORE

Facebooks NEW Security Update: Call Your Friends!

In a blog entry on last week, Facebook stated that about 600,000 log-ins every day are compromised. In it’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, under update/10150335022240766. Facebook claims to have locked it’s site down with new clever security policies, the best of which is Call a Friend? Controlling how you share content on Facebook is quite complex and will probably make your head hurt, but it’s essential that you take a good look at the settings and decide for yourself what you want to share and with whom, from where. Whenever Facebook opens it’s considerable mouth, it seems to do the exact opposite to the words that fall out. Security site Sophos, was in the first to jump on the (what ever the opposite to security is . . . ) issues Facebook is having with it’s stats. The infographic Facebook has posted on it’s blog and  scribd.com introducing it’s new security features, seems to indicate that Facebook in-fact has a considerable security problem?. Sophos dug deep into the numbers and pulled out a a stat showing 0.06% of 1 billion logins per day are compromised, 600,000 compromised users? Less than 0.5% of Facebook users experience spam on any given day. M★S  READ MORE

Quote of the Day: Raychul Moore

Apple Mobile App Downloads Overtaken By Android

​The growth of Googles Android platform has been stratospheric over the past 12 months, at October 2010 Android held 19 percent of the U.S. smartphone market - with Apples iPhone iOS at 24 percent. Fast forward 12 months to October 2011 and Android was holding 38 percent of the smartphone market, an increase of almost 20 percent, against Apples 26 percent market share, an increase of only 2 percent. Androids big big numbers are also reflected in it’s massive increase of available apps to 500,000. Android has also overtaken iOS in app downloads, becoming the market leader in mobile application downloads. The market shares of Android and iOS were 44% and 31%, respectively in Q2 2011. Note worthy in all these numbers is Samsungs strangle hold on the smartphone market. Our favorite semiconductor behemoth has consistently outperformed Apple in sales. Samsung smartphones make up almost 25 percent of the U.S. market, while the much lauded Apple iPhone has consistently sat below 9 percent. This explains Apples aggression toward Samsung [check the litigation links]  84.5 million smartphone handsets in the U.S. equates to 21 million Samsung handsets to Apples 8 million iPhones, ouch! M★C  READ MORE