Logging The Cyber World

Tags: Brookesia micra, chameleon, madagascar, mini-meleon, reptile

A species of chameleon small enough to easily perch on a match head has been discovered on a tiny island off Madagascar, a group of scientists has announced.

In addition to the discovery of Brookesia micra, now the tiniest chameleon ever discovered, the researchers also announced the discovery of three additional tiny chameleon species.

Adult males of the B. micra species grow to only just over a half-inch (16 millimeters) from nose to bottom, making them one of the smallest vertebrates ever found on Earth.

More on Scientific American

Tags: Google, google wallet, mobile payments, prepaid cards, security issues

Google Wallet is an ambitious experiment, to say the least. And it doesn’t help Google’s case much that the company has now had to suspend the creation of new prepaid Google Wallet cards for an undisclosed amount of time – a quick-fix response to an easy hack that could allow an attacker to access the entire contents of one’s prepaid Google card.

“People are asking if Google Wallet is safe enough for mobile phone payments. The simple answer to this question is yes. In fact, Google Wallet offers advantages over the plastic cards and folded wallets in use today,” wrote Osama Bedier, Google’s vice president for Google Wallet and Payments, in a blog post Friday.

In theory, it should be a lot easier for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of a person’s credit card than Google Wallet smartphone app. Swipe the card, and that’s it – unless a merchant attempts to match a thief’s ID against the card name, it’s not all that difficult to go on a shopping spree (especially online) with a pilfered credit card.

PCMag

Tags: EML-2, lunar base, moon far side, moon outpost, orion capsule

NASA is looking at the possibility of parking a manned outpost beside the Moon as a way station for astronauts on their way to deep space missions.

According to a memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, cited by Space.com, the agency is putting together a team to assess the possibilities of a potential location on the far side of the Moon known as Earth-Moon libration point 2 (EML-2).

Libration, or Lagrangian, points are parking spots in space where a small object is equally affected by the gravitational pull of two large masses, which cancel each other out, holding the craft in place.

More here

Tags: atomic laser, powerful beam, SLAC, two million degree, x-ray laser

An x-ray laser fired at a sample of aluminum has generated temperatures of 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the sun’s corona.

Scientists achieved the sizzling temperatures using a powerful x-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. By focusing rapid-fire pulses from the beam on a piece of aluminum foil thinner than spider’s silk, they were able to create a material known as hot dense matter.

The advancement represents the first time researchers have been able to produce such plasmas in a controlled way. The findings appear Jan. 25 in Nature.

More on Wired

Tags: earth's magnetic field, energy blast, radiation, solar flare, space hurricane, space storm

The largest solar storm since 2005, which hit Earth over the weekend and caused northern lights called auroras, peaked Tuesday after the Sun released a solar flare of radiation and plasma. As Brian Vastag reported:

Fast on the heels of a solar storm that delivered a glancing blow over the weekend — triggering bright auroras in Canada and Scandinavia — the sun released an even more energetic blast of radiation and charged plasma overnight that could disrupt GPS signals and the electrical grid Tuesday, especially at high latitudes, space weather experts warned Monday.

WashingtonPost

Tags: Borneo, extinct species, gray monkey, grizzly langurs

Scientists working in the dense jungles of Indonesia have “rediscovered” a large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct.

They were all the more baffled to find the Miller’s Grizzled Langur — its black face framed by a fluffy, Dracula-esque white collar — in an area well outside its previously recorded home range.

The team set up camera traps in the Wehea Forest on the eastern tip of Borneo island in June, hoping to captures images of clouded leopards, orangutans and other wildlife known to congregate at several mineral salt licks.

The pictures that came back caught them all by surprise: groups of monkeys none had ever seen.

With virtually no photographs of the grizzled langurs in existence, it at first was a challenge to confirm their suspicions, said Brent Loken, a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and one of the lead researchers.

The only images out there were museum sketches.

More here

Tags: aerospace, mars probe, Russian Defense Ministry, spacecraft

A huge hunk of Russian space junk is set to crash to Earth in the next few days, but nobody knows exactly when or where it’s going to come down.

The 14.5-ton Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, may re-enter the atmosphere at 11:22 a.m. EST (1622 GMT) on Sunday (Jan. 15), according to the latest estimate published today (Jan. 13) by Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency.

If that projection is accurate, pieces of the failed spacecraft will splash into the Atlantic Ocean about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) south of Buenos Aires.

Collectspace.com

Tags: computer chips, hard drives, IBM, memory chips, nanotech

Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks: atoms. Big Blue’s prototype chip is only 12 atoms across (click here for an awesome visualization of how small an atom is. No really, click it!) but is another way of thinking about ways to get beyond the limits of building ever-smaller chips keeping Moore’s Law on track.

Andreas Heinrich, the project lead for IBMs efforts, explained in an interview that this tech may never be realized in part because it requires an entirely new type of manufacturing equipment to be built. However, IBM is learning how to manipulate atoms for storing bits and identified a new type of magnetism that could one day be used. Unlike the type of magnetism that keeps your magnets stuck to your fridge, IBM is looking at the reverse of those properties to make this highly dense type of memory.

More at GigaOM

Tags: Google, google plus, search engine land, search results, social network

The long-standing and persistent accusation that Google unfairly uses its search engine to promote its other online services is once again in the spotlight, triggered by new social search functionality the company is rolling out this week that more tightly links its search engine with its Google+ social networking site.

The complaints have come from different quarters, including competitors and industry experts, and have focused on various arguments, but at bottom all charge Google with using its dominant search engine to deliberately boost Google+’s popularity, by giving Google+ pages and profiles an artificially prominent position in result pages.

More here

Tags: android, comscore, ios, samsung, US mobile market

The latest comScore report shows that Android is still dominating U.S. mobile subscriber market share ahead of Apple’s iOS.

The report, which measures mobile market share for the U.S. during a three month period ending November 2011, provides an average among over 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers.

According to comScore, 234 million Americans age 13 and over used mobile devices in the three month period, and 91.4 million of them are smartphone owners. Android-based devices took the lead position with 46.9 percent share in the smartphone market. Apple took second place with 28.7 percent, followed by RIM (16.6 percent), Microsoft (5.2 percent) and Symbian (1.5 percent).

Daily Tech