Lady Gaga trapped in an Android smartphone, we wish she'd stay there (video)

NTT DoCoMo has Darth Vader selling its Android wares, so what could KDDI au possibly counter with? Why, a force even darker and more heinous than the Sith Daddy himself: Lady Gaga. Yes, the music fiend we love to hate has remixed Poker Face just to make sure we take notice of Sharp's IS03, and the kindly Japanese carrier has taken care of inserting her into the phone for maximum promotional value. Yes, au, now that we've seen Lady Gaga strutting around inside it, we totally want to own one of these handsets! See the video promos after the break.

Apple beefs up legal team for fight with Nokia

 

It's boom time for lawyers, with Apple hiring them by the truckload to help it see off Nokia in an intellectual property dispute being heard by the International Trade Commission this week.
Nokia sued Apple in October last year, claiming the iPhone - and, later, all Apple products - infringed its patents. It filed a complaint with the ITC two months later.
Apple has since countersued, calling for imports of Nokia phones into the US to be blocked.
According to Bloomberg, Apple's hired some of the top patent lawyers in the country. These include Robert Krupka of Kirkland & Ellis, who previously struck a settlement deal with Creative Technology under which Apple paid it $100 million, and William Lee of WilmerHale in Boston, who helped Broadcom win a patent battle against Qualcomm.
The company's also hired an in-house attorney, Noreen Krall, who was previously chief IP counsel for Sun Microsystems.
Apple's got similar patent battles raging with HTC and Motorola, each including a range of complaints and counter-complaints. Indeed, according to LegalMetric, it's been the most-sued company in the world for the last two years.
All these disputes are likely to end eventually in some sort of cross-licensing deal - meaning lots more lovely work to come for the lawyers.

Cosmic rebirth

Circular patterns in the universe's pervasive background radiation suggest the Big Bang was only the latest of many


 
Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.
That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation.
The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features indicate that the cosmos itself circles through epochs of endings and beginnings, Penrose and Gurzadyan assert. The researchers describe their controversial findings in an article posted at arXiv.org on November 17.
The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. Those features, Penrose said, cannot be explained by the highly successful inflation theory, which posits that the infant cosmos underwent an enormous growth spurt, ballooning from something on the scale of an atom to the size of a grapefruit during the universe’s first tiny fraction of a second. Inflation would erase such patterns.
“The existence of large-scale coherent features in the microwave background of this form would appear to contradict the inflationary model and would be a very distinctive
signature of Penrose's model” of a cyclic universe, comments cosmologist David Spergel of Princeton University. But, he adds, “The paper does not provide enough detail about the analysis to assess the reality of these circles.”
Penrose interprets the circles as providing a look back, past the glass wall of the most recent Big Bang, into the universe’s previous episode, or “aeon,” as he calls it. The circles, he suggests, were generated by collisions between supermassive black holes that occurred during this earlier aeon. The colliding black holes would have created a cacophony of gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime due to the acceleration of the giant masses. Those waves would have been spherical and uniformly distributed.
According to the detailed mathematics worked out by Penrose, when the uniform distribution of gravitational waves from the previous aeon entered the current aeon, they were converted into a pulse of energy. The pulse provided a uniform kick to the allotment of dark matter, the invisible material that accounts for more than 80 percent of the mass of the cosmos.
“The dark matter material along the burst therefore has this uniform character,” says Penrose. “This is what is seen as a circle in our cosmic microwave background sky, and it should look like a fairly uniform circle.”
Each circle has a lower-than-average variation in temperature, which is just what he and Gurzadyan found when they analyzed data from NASA’s orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which scanned the entire sky for nine years, and the balloon-borne BOOMERANG experiment, which studied microwave background over a smaller fraction of the heavens.
Because the team found similar circular features with two different detectors, Penrose says it’s unlikely he and his colleagues are being fooled by instrumental noise or other artifacts.
But Spergel says he is concerned that the team has not accounted for variations in the noise level of WMAP data acquired over different parts of the sky. WMAP examined different sky regions for different amounts of time. Maps of the microwave background generated from those regions studied the longest would have lower noise and smaller recorded variations in the temperature of the microwave glow. Those lower-noise maps could artificially produce the circles that Penrose and Gurzadyan ascribe to their model of a cyclic universe, Spergel says.
A new, more detailed map of the cosmic microwave background, now being conducted by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, could provide a more definitive test of the theory, Penrose says.

Cassini finds oxygen atmosphere around Saturnian moon

The Cassini-Huygens mission has identified an oxygen-carbon dioxide atmosphere around Saturn's second-biggest moon, Rhea - the first time a spacecraft has captured an oxygen atmosphere from a world other than Earth.
The atmosphere is unbreathable, to say the least, with an oxygen density around five trillion times less than Earth’s. But there's potentially enough, says the Cassini team, to drive complex chemistry.
"The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe," said Dr Ben Teolis, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
"Such chemistry could be a pre-requisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it."
The ion and neutral mass spectrometer 'tasted' peak densities of oxygen of around 50 billion molecules per cubic meter. It also found peak densities of carbon dioxide of around 20 billion molecules per cubic meter, as well as clear signatures of flowing streams of positive and negative ions, with masses that corresponded to ions of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
The team believes the atmosphere is sustained by high energy particles bombarding its icy surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions into the atmosphere.
"Rhea's oxygen appears to come from water ice on Rhea's surface when Saturn's magnetic field rotates over the moon and showers it with energetic particles trapped in the magnetic field," said Professor Andrew Coates from University College London.

Syte Shirt redesigns iPad-toting version, introduces smartphone edition

  


 Look, it's not embarrassing. We too are waltzing around the dinner table, iPad Syte Shirt on, with a slideshow of pilgrims and Tofurkys to really "showcase our spirit." But what about the jubilant among us that aren't about to part ways with their hard-earned clams in order to pick up an iPad? Enter the Smartphone Syte Shirt. Like the original, this all-black shirt is handmade in San Diego, but very much unlike the original, this one's designed to hold your iPhone, Droid Incredible or whatever handset you so happen to own. Better still, there's a zippered pouch at the top to prevent theft, and both landscape and portrait orientations are duly supported. The screen protector still accepts finger touches, and it's both dust and water resistant -- you know, in case your jealous bandmates decide to douse you when you refuse to remove it before heading out on stage. Hit the source link to order yours for $39.95. Seriously, do it. No one's watching.

Shuttle images reveal Egypt's lost great lake

Desert drainage patterns point to ancient oases in Sahara

A huge lake once waxed and waned deep in the sandy heart of the Egyptian Sahara, geologists have found.



Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred kilometers west of the Nile, researchers report in the December issue of Geology. Since the lake first appeared around 250,000 years ago, it would have ballooned and shrunk until finally petering out around 80,000 years ago.
Knowing where and when such oases existed could help archaeologists understand the environment Homo sapiens traveled while migrating out of Africa for the first time, says team leader Ted Maxwell, a geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Modern humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
“You realize that hey, this place was full of really large lakes when people were wandering into the rest of the world,” he says.

Since then, desert winds have eroded and sands have buried much of the region’s landscape, says Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto. But during next summer’s field season, she and her colleagues will be checking for ancient shorelines at the elevations suggested in the new paper.
Other studies have found evidence of mega-lakes in Chad, Libya and Sudan at various points over the past 250,000 years. The new study targeted Egypt, some 400 kilometers west of the Nile, where in the 1980s researchers reporting finding fish fossils in the desert.
That discovery, says Maxwell, triggered scientists to think about how those fish could have gotten there. In 2000, astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour used a radar instrument to take high-resolution pictures of the area’s topography. Maxwell and his colleagues recently analyzed those pictures to deduce how water would have drained across northeastern Africa over the past few hundred thousand years, ever since the Nile was born.
In Egypt, west of the Nile Valley in a region known as Tushka, the researchers spotted a low-lying area where water would have pooled after overflowing from the river, carrying fish with it. At its maximum, this ancient lake would have stretched for 350 kilometers, down to the modern-day Sudan border.
At the time, the Tushka area had more rainfall than today and would have been covered by grasslands, says Maxwell. Heavy rain in highlands to the south, from where the Nile flows, would have caused the lake to grow; dry spells shrank it. “This lake was going up and going down in size, doing all kinds of things over multiple thousands of years,” he says.
Something similar is going on today at a smaller scale, says Mohamed Abdelsalam, a geologist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. Just northeast of where the huge paleolake once lay, the Nile also overflowed, starting in 1998. A series of five small “new lakes of the Sahara” was born. Deprived of water since 2003, these lakes have since almost entirely dried out, says Abdelsalam.
Today, for water, Egyptians rely almost exclusively on the Nile and its annual floods. The ancient lakes, says Maxwell, suggest that such flooding was already under way, at least to some degree, a quarter million years ago.

Physicists create new type of light

Physicists from the University of Bonn have developed a completely new source of light, previously thought to be impossible - a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate consisting of photons.
The discovery could lead to the development of new light sources resembling lasers that work in the x-ray range, and more powerful computer chips.
By cooling Rubidium atoms deeply and concentrating a sufficient number of them in a compact space, they suddenly become indistinguishable, behaving like a single huge 'super particle' - a Bose-Einstein condensate.
This should also work for photons. Unfortunately, though, there's a fundamental problem: when photons are 'cooled down', they disappear. This is the first time scientists have been able to cool light while concentrating it at the same time.
The Bonn researchers succeeded by using two highly reflective mirrors, bouncing a light beam back and forth between them. Pigment molecules were dissolved between the reflective surfaces; the photons collided with them periodically. In these collisions, the molecules 'swallowed' the photons and then 'spit' them out again.
"During this process, the photons assumed the temperature of the fluid," explains Professor Msrtin Weitz. "They cooled each other off to room temperature this way, and they did it without getting lost in the process."
The physicists then increased the quantity of photons between the mirrors by exciting the pigment solution using a laser. This allowed them to concentrate the cooled-off light particles so strongly that they condensed into a 'super-photon'.
This photonic Bose-Einstein condensate is a completely new source of light that has characteristics resembling lasers. But compared to lasers, they have a decisive advantage.