Gizmodo reports that NASA has released this pair of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a couple of years ago. As you can see, a fairly substantial object instantaneously appeared in a portion of space that the telescope was pointed at while looking for supernovae. It increased in magnitude over the period of 100 days, then faded away back to nothingness in the same amount of time. According to the scientists who wrote this up for the Astrophysical Journal, the object did not match any known pattern for a supernova, is inconsistent with gravitational microlensing, and does not match any known object in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database.

Maybe the Vogons finally got all the necessary permits for that hyperspace bypass after all. Do you know where your towel is?

DSL Reports says that scientists at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy have successfully tested a wireless network technology capable of a throughput speed of 1.2 terabits per second. That utterly shatters the previous record, which was 160Gbps. By comparison, your typical home wireless network running 802.11g (which is soon to be superseded by 802.11n) crawls along at 19 megabits per second, literally about a billion times slower. The technology uses a combination of optical and radio transceivers, where present conventional wireless networking is entirely radio-based. The first practical use for such technology is hoped to be inter-satellite communication, but before you know it, you’ll be able to pick up one of these babies at Circuit City for 69 bucks.

Okay, if that link wasn’t geeky enough for you, this one is guaranteed to make your eyes roll back in your head: it’s an Ars Technica interview with Tim Sweeney, the guy who developed the Unreal 3D graphics engine and co-founded Epic Games. Having just spent the better part of an entire weekend frigging around with replacing the graphics card in my computer so that I would be able to play Spore, this article caught my eye. The subject of the interview is his view that gaming PCs are going to swing away from big fat GPUs (graphics processing units) on motherboards and graphics cards and back towards processing all graphics right in the CPU itself. The advent of the GPU was a big, big deal for high-speed three-dimensional rendering when it first emerged in the ’90s — it took lots of load off the CPU, which could then be given over to other tasks, and it created a particular paradigm of graphics processing that has taken the animation of computer games from the clunky styles of yesteryear to the near-flawless rendering you see today. But, Sweeney argues, the multi-core processor is ready to take back graphics and do an even better job with improved software-based rendering. The best part is that you won’t even need a tricked-out gamer PC to achieve all of this; even laptops will come with the processing power necessary to render 3D graphics flawlessly soon enough.

Back to outer space for a minute…remember that Gamma Ray Burst that was so powerful it was visible to the naked eye? You don’t? Well, I posted about it when it happened. You just weren’t paying attention. A few days ago, astronomer and blogger Phil Plait filled in some of the details about just how close we all came to being crispy-crittered by the aforementioned GRB. Let’s just say we wouldn’t have had to worry about the Large Hadron Collider, if this thing had been a few billion miles closer, mm-kay?

A sign of the times: The University of Kentucky has decided to yank all the land-line telephones wired into dorm rooms on their campus because students have abandoned using them in favor of cellphones, IM and other modern communications devices. I can still remember standing in line for what seemed like a bazillon years as a freshman at Northwestern to get signed up for an account with Illinois Bell. Every dorm room at NU had (has?) a landline, and rare was the pair of roommates who did not have their own telephone. By comparison, my friends who went to University of Maine didn’t have in-room phones, and it was always a crapshoot trying to call them on the one public-use phone in their dorm lounge. We’d have to coordinate a call-time via letters (yes, snail-mail! It took a week and a half to arrange a 10-minute phone call once a month!).

Another sign of the times: while UK students might have traded landlines for iPhones, their iPhones are spying on them. This Wired blog post discusses a little-publicized bit of information about the iPhone: the clever way it returns you to the exact place you left off when you turned off your phone is by caching screenshots every time the screen changes. That cache persists in the iPhone’s memory, and, according to one hacker, can be accessed by anyone savvy enough to find the cache, not the least of whom are the assorted phone-tapping intelligence people George Bush keeps on hand to “fight terrorism”. Your entire history of activity on the iPhone, not just your phone calls, can be completely traced. So whatever you do, the next time you plan to blow up the World Trade Center, don’t call Osama on your iPhone, got it?

One more doomsday fetish down the drain, I see. Of course we’ve still got killer asteroids, bird flu, monster tsunamis, and a fourth judge on American Idol still waiting to destroy the world, so don’t give up the ship yet you fear-mongers.

The gang at Neatorama have wasted no time in cashing in on someone else’s success (a.k.a The American Way) by ginning up this “I Survived The LHC” logo and putting it on a t-shirt. It can be all yours for a mere $9.95 (plus shipping and handling). I’m a bit disappointed that the back doesn’t say “And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”, but chiggers can’t be boozers after all. I have to admit that I’m sorely tempted to buy one, except that they come from CafePress.com, who use inferior t-shirts.

What they’ll do with this huge thing a couple of years from now, I can’t quite figure out yet. Are they going to put it up for sale on Craig’s List? Try to sell it on eBay like Sarah Palin tried with the governor’s jet? Put it out on the curb for “large item pickup” day and hope someone drives by and takes it before the garbage men show up? Do they even HAVE large item pickup day in Switzerland?

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and All The Ships At Sea…FLASH!

• At NewTeeVee.com, Chris Albrecht offers a catch-all summary of the various Video-On-Demand set-top boxes on the market. The transition from DVRs to VOD is already moving very rapidly; there are 11 different products on this list. Given the consistent resistance to DVRs from the broadcast television networks and their continued efforts to thwart people from skipping commercials, subscription-based VOD should see very easy acceptance from both the consumers AND the content providers. However, the lure of subscription-based VOD really threatens the continued existence of local television stations, who could find themselves without network affiliations down the road and have nothing to put on the air.
• One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor — this blogger at PhysicsWorld.com has found a recent paper that outlines a method for forming diamonds by growing crystals in tequila . (via) Apparently the process, which is called chemical vapor deposition, is well-established, but the scientists who wrote the paper say that tequila is an excellent choice of ethanol because of its wide commercial production and low cost. And, yes, the two men who wrote the paper ARE from Mexico. So, fellas, when your GF starts hinting around for that rock, just buy her a bottle of Jose Cuervo and tell her to hit the laboratory
• Engadget links to this article at Laptop Magazine which offers the first hands-on review of the Garmin Nuviphone I have been ga-ga over since I first read about it six months ago. It’s only a tantalizing taste, though, because most of the device’s functionality wasn’t available in the prototype the blogger got to play with. That doesn’t bode well for the original plan to launch the Nuviphone in the U.S. in Q3, but maybe they can still get it out the door in time for Christmas sales. If this materializes with all the features they promise, I would gladly forget all about the new iPhones.
• Remember VeriChip? I wrote about them last September when they announced a plan to implant RFID tags into Alzheimer’s patients in Florida. Well, CASPIAN, the anti-RFID consumer watchdog group, has released a scorching report that takes the company to task for covering up research that showed a link between implanted RFID chips and cancer, lying and deceiving investors about their products and profitability. The company is going down in flames and trying to save what it can by selling off the implant chip business, but this new publicity from the report sure won’t make that any easier. A link to the full report from CASPIAN is in the Wired article in the first link, or at CASPIAN’s own website.
• Are you ready for indestructible paper? This ScienceNOW article describes a new process for making paper that breaks up the cellulose fibers from wood pulp into substantially smaller lengths that present papermaking processes do, creating nanofibers that, when combined with a substance called carboxymethanol, have a tensile strength eight times greater than that of ordinary paper and more than double the strength of cast iron. Let’s see Dick Cheney shove THAT in his Vice Presidential Paper Shredder.

Today’s link dump is all about SCIENCE! For you fundamentalist Christian freaks out there, you might want to look away while I threaten your precariously constructed world view with facts, reason and information.

• The well-known blog Making Light featured an “open post” last week. If you’re not familiar with the idea, the blog author merely declares a post “open” and people carry on a conversation using comments without any particular topic to direct the discussion. This format is popular on a lot of blogs with big audiences, but we could try it here sometime, too. At any rate, it’s apparently their 109th such open post, so to mark the occasion, the post includes an interesting bit about Element 109 in the Periodic Table, which is now known as Meitnerium, after the physicist Lise Meitner.
• You might remember some brief news items last year about a team of Italian astronomers who claim to have found the impact crater left by the meteor that struck the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. Now they’ve published some preliminary reports of their findings and claim they may have found a piece of the actual meteor at the bottom of Lake Cheko, which is the body of water that formed in the crater. The team is going back to the region this year to conduct more investigations.
• Remember the media hysteria a month or so ago about Bisphenol A in plastics? Well, I hope you didn’t go and throw out your Nalgene water bottles just yet. While the media and environmentalist groups latched on to this story and whipped up quite the frenzy, this article in the British political magazine Spiked deflates a lot of that hot air. Here’s a relevant pullquote:
  

  Both human beings and rodents metabolise orally ingested BPA in the process of digestion. In human beings, the liver combines BPA with a sugar molecule, transforming it into BPA-glucuronide, BPA’s harmless, water-soluble cousin. Studies in human volunteers show that 100 per cent of BPA ingested is excreted in the urine in about six hours. No BPA at all enters the blood.

  In rodents, BPA is metabolised somewhat differently. It passes from the gut to the liver, then back to the gut again in a process known as enterohepatic recirculation. In the course of this process, some of the BPA is absorbed into the bloodstream, where it appears to have ‘estrogenic or toxic potential’.

  The Canadian study that started all the concern itself concludes that there is only “minimal concern that exposure to bisphenol A in utero causes effects on the prostate or accelerates puberty and negligible concern that it produces birth defects and malformations.” I don’t know about you, but to me the word “negligible” means “insignificant enough to be ignored” not “Aaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeee!!!! Panic!!! Save my baby from evil!!!!”

• Scientists at an archaeological dig site in Denmark say that they have been able to retrieve some authentic DNA samples from the skeletons of the Viking people who lived there more than 1000 years ago. Apparently it is difficult to obtain uncorrupted DNA samples from human remains, but the scientists used protective suits and strictly-controlled procedures on-site to obtain the samples, then used “clean-room” type laboratory setups for their analysis. Recent scholarship into the lives of the Vikings have offered a completely different perspective from the tradition portrayal of them as savage raiders; the findings of these scientists will also help establish genetic markers to trace the spread of the Vikings into the populations of other parts of Europe.
• In its latest issue, Discover Magazine informs us that “everything we know about water conservation is wrong”. Just as people are beginning to grasp the concept of measuring their so-called “carbon footprint” based on their daily use of things that rely on burning petroleum fuel, we should start coming to terms with our “virtual water footprint” to understand how much water is really being used to maintain our modern lifestyle. For example, it takes 155 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of wheat, and 33 gallons of water for a single 8-ounce cup of coffee. So, our enormous waste of food is an even greater waste of water. It may make you feel morally superior to take a shorter shower, the article says, but you are helping to conserve far more water by not wasting food than you are by taking a quick shower.