2022 World Cup: High-Tech Way To Beat The Heat In Qatar – “Qatar won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup by promising that its nine new open-air soccer stadiums would be air-conditioned. Now the Qataris have announced another cool twist to their hospitality — an artificial cloud to hover above the stadium and provide shade….”

The meltdown that wasn’t – “How a handful of operators at a crippled reactor averted a greater catastrophe at the Fukushima plant….” See also: Neutron beam observed 13 times – “Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday it has observed a neutron beam, a kind of radioactive ray, 13 times on the premises of its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant….”

RIM PlayBook Priced for Apple iPad Head-to-Head – “RIM is pricing the PlayBook in ways that create a head-to-head comparison with the Apple iPad, along with setting a release date of April 19….”

Samsung Galaxy Tab “beats” iPad 2: 10.1 & 8.9 inchers at CTIA – “Yes, Samsung showed off its own second generation Android tablet today. And, I have to say, this will get the fanbois thinking. So why am I so excited by the new Tabs? The two new slates don’t just provide competition for Apple’s iPad, but they potentially blow right past the new iPad 2, showing us the new platform to beat….” See also: GAlaxy tab visual tour

Another iPad 2 Problem: Glitchy Facetime – “Some iPad 2 users who expected a flawless product are instead finding a handful of problems with their shiny new tablets. The latest is a freezing issue with Facetime that can only be fixed by rebooting the iPad 2….”

Secret Subs, Rescue Ospreys: Mil Tech Gets Libya Remix – “Every war creates improvisation. Even though it’s only four days old, the U.S.-led attack on Libya is already showing more tactical innovation than most, at least where military hardware is concerned. Weapons that you thought you knew are getting essentially repurposed and functionally reinvented….”

As Phones Become Wallets, Many Have Hands Out – “The cellphone has been more than a cellphone for years, but soon it could take on an entirely new role — standing in for all of the credit and debit cards crammed into wallets. Instead of swiping a plastic card at the checkout counter, consumers would merely wave their phones….”

New Electrode Tech Could Recharge Batteries in Two Minutes – “Batteries are an essential part of most modern gadgets, and their role is expected to expand as they’re incorporated into vehicles and the electric grid itself. But batteries can’t move charge as quickly as some competing devices like supercapacitors, and their performance tends to degrade significantly with time. That has sent lots of materials science types into the lab, trying to find ways to push back these limits, sometimes with notable success. Over the weekend, there was another report on a technology that enables fast battery charging. The good news is that it uses a completely different approach and technology than the previous effort, and can work with both lithium- and nickel-based batteries….”

Ask Ars: What’s the best way to back up my computers on-site? – “There’s almost no end to backup solutions and configurations these days, and virtually no excuse for not backing up your computer. Even if you have only a few important files, it’s worth it to shell out for an 8GB USB flash drive to store copies on; if you don’t, you’ll cry out that $20 you saved in anguished tears….”

EXXON VALDEZ 22 YEARS LATER – “After the Exxon Valdez oil spill soiled pristine Alaskan waters 22 years ago Thursday, (March 24) one of the tiniest victims was herring—a cornerstone fish species of Prince William Sound and a booming source of income for fishermen. The devastation to this small creature exacted an enormous cost: dozens of fishermen lost their livelihoods and effects rippled through the marine food chain….”

Surgeons use Kinect to speed up cancer surgery – “The Sunnybrook Hospital doctors use the hands-free controller to manipulate images, rather than having to leave the sterile area around the patient to pull them up manually on a computer screen….”

Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books – “The company’s plan to digitize every book ever published and make them widely available was derailed on Tuesday when a federal judge in New York rejected a sweeping $125 million legal settlement the company had worked out with groups representing authors and publishers….”

Tsunami Was More Than 77 Feet High At Its Peak – “”A tsunami wave that hit a coastal city in Iwate Prefecture after the March 11 massive earthquake is estimated to have reached 23.6 meters in height, a government-commissioned field survey by the Port and Airport Research Institute showed Wednesday,” Kyodo News reports. That’s 77 feet, 5 inches. Or, about the height of a six- or seven-story building….”

Prop-Driven ‘Rail Zeppelin’ Is Many Kinds of Awesome – “Time again for an outrageous pre-war German vehicle design. You’ve already seen the Nazi rocket plane built to nuke New York from orbit. The propeller-driven aluminum train Schienenzeppelin is miles tamer but every bit as magnificent. And unlike the Amerika Bomber, it really ran — at 140 mph in 1931!”

The Cranky Dieter Explained: How Self-Control Makes You Angry – “Have you ever noticed that people on diets are really crabby? While many might blame low blood sugar or a general lack of pleasure (rice cakes, cabbage soup — ugh!), recent psychological research suggests that it’s actually the exercise of self-control that leads people to become irritable and aggressive at inappropriate times….”

Serotonin-lacking male mice not picky about sex of their mates – “Courtship rituals within the animal kingdom can get rather elaborate. Even fruit flies use sex-specific pheromones and have a courtship maneuver that includes the male buzzing its wings alluringly. But the genetic control behind performing these mating rituals seems, at least in the flies, to largely be separate from the system that controls how they’re targeted—mutations in a single gene can flip fly behavior so that male animals start pursuing other males. Now, researchers have identified a key regulator of mate choice in an organism much closer to us—the mouse….”

IEA comparison of Sources of Electricity – “New Scientist compiled the fatality information in the IEA report into a graphic…”

Epidemiology: Study of a lifetime – “In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable than ever before….”

Where Has All the Nitrogen Gone? – “The federal government isn’t the only group with a problem balancing its budget these days. Oceanographers have a budget problem too. Nitrogen — an essential nutrient for all life on the planet — is at the heart of this budget crisis. Some estimates of the amount of nitrogen leaving the ocean exceed estimates of the amount of nitrogen coming in by several hundred teragrams (that’s one billion kilograms) per year….”

Breastfeeding women viewed as less competent – Why are only one-third of American mothers exclusively breastfeeding at three months, and only 43 percent breastfeeding at all at six months? Perhaps because they’ve gotten a sense of how harshly they are being judged….”

Melanoma Diagnosis in Women Associated With Higher Socioeconomic Status – “The incidence of melanoma appears higher in non-Hispanic white adolescent girls and young women living in higher socioeconomic neighborhoods than those living in lower socioeconomic areas, according to a report posted online that will appear in the July print issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals….”

Thousands of Gulf Oil Spill clean-up crew are dying! Video of the dying! – “You won’t see this in national headlines! Jennifer Rexford, a BP-hired oil spill cleanup worker has been documenting her condition that is getting worse by the day….”

Final Act: Artist Photographs CRT Televisions Turning Off – “Stephan Tillmans, a Berlin-based artist, recently set to work capturing television screens the exact second they had been turned off. Each abstract system, according to Ignant, a German design, art and photography blog, is like a fingerprint. Unique to the moment of release, the duration of exposure and the device type, each of Tillmans’ photographs is one-of-a-kind….”

Are you a Martian? – “Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence. …”

The Facts and Fiction of Broadband Caps and Congestion – “AT&T recently announced the elimination of one of broadband Internet’s most prized features: unlimited use at a flat rate. While the trend toward metered bandwidth is not inherently pro-consumer, ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. Such concepts are simplistic and easy to imagine. They are also completely wrong….”

133 US cities now have their own broadband networks – “If you want 100Mbps symmetrical broadband—which offers the same upload and download speeds—and you live in the state of North Carolina, you have only one choice: a city-owned broadband provider. The city of Wilson’s “Greenlight” ISP recently bragged about signing up “North Carolina’s first homeowners” with the service, which costs $150 a month if packaged with other services….”

Stock trades to exploit speed of light, says researcher – “Financial institutions may soon change what they trade or where they do their trading because of the speed of light…”

An Introduction to the Federated Social Network – “Lately, EFF’s work to protect rights and liberties in the online world has focused rather heavily on social networking sites and their policies. The logic is borne out by the numbers — Facebook and Twitter combined claim hundreds of millions of worldwide users, so advocating for stronger privacy and less censorship from these kinds of websites will mean a better Internet for lots and lots of people….”

Facebook booting ’20,000′ underage users per day – “According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly half of all 12-year-olds in the U.S. are using social network sites, despite not meeting the minimum age requirements for sites like Facebook….”

Sea mollusks hold secret to stronger body armor – “Abalones are members of a large class of mollusks that have one-piece shells. The shell is thin, lightweight, and for millions of years, has protected abalones from many large and powerful natural marine predators. The interior surface of the shell is mother-of-pearl, or nacre, which is iridescent, hard, strong, and tough. Scientists have found that nacre is made of micron-sized tiles stacked like bricks….”

PS3 Hacker GeoHot Owned by Sony, Flees Country – “The plot thickens. George Hotz aka GeoHot first came to internet prominence by “jailbreaking” the iPhone and PS3 and posting the software necessary to unlock the capabilities of each device without the restrictions set by Apple or Sony. This January, GeoHot might have crossed a line by publishing online the root key that allowed complete control over the PS3 hardware, posing huge security risks for Sony. Never a company to take such issues lightly, Sony has brought the full force of its legal team against Hotz. And even though GeoHot was able to raise enough legal funds to fight back, Sony today filed a motion saying that the hacker has not cooperated with court orders to hand over the hard drive of his PC and that he lied about having a PSN account. Sony claims that Hotz has now left his home in New Jersey and traveled to South America in order to escape further legal action….”

Prehistoric Garbage Piles May Have Created ‘Tree Islands’ – “Piles of garbage left by humans thousands of years ago may have helped form tree-covered biodiversity hot spots in the Florida Everglades, according to a new study. The authors say the findings show that human disturbance of the environment doesn’t always have a negative consequence….”

Infographic Illustrates If E-Readers Are Really Green

The spluttering invention machine – “FOR all America’s anxieties about its decline as a superpower, its deficits and its weak economy, it can still be proud of its strength as an innovator. Americans make four times as many patent applications per head as Europeans. Patents spur innovation and lay the foundations for future growth, by assuring inventors that they will reap the rewards of their effort and by publicising their discoveries….”

Function of ‘Junk DNA’ in Human Genes – “Part of the answer to how and why primates differ from other mammals, and humans differ from other primates, may lie in the repetitive stretches of the genome that were once considered “junk.”..”

3 Reasons AT&T Could Be the Biggest Loser in Its Own Merger – “There’s been a lot of talk since AT&T announced a proposed merger with T-Mobile Sunday about how the new giant company would be bad news for consumers. AT&T service might improve with increased bandwidth, but less competition in an already uncompetitive marketplace—combined with the removal of T-Mobile as the current bargain cellular option—has led consumer advocates and many in the tech press to predict an outcome of higher prices and reduced choice for customers….”

[[[Interesting Reading #711 – 3D smartphone, new Galaxy tablets, full face transplant, dying cosmonauts and much more!]]]

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