Space junk reaching 'tipping point,' report warns

A ball of twisted metal, purported to be fallen space junk, is pictured in James Stirton's farm in southwestern Queensland in this undated handout photograph received March 28, 2008.

(Reuters) - The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached "a tipping point" for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday.

NASA needs a new strategic plan for mitigating the hazards posed by spent rocket bodies, discarded satellites and thousands of other pieces of junk flying around the planet at speeds of 17,500 miles (28,164 kilometres) per hour, the National Research Council said in the study.

The council is one of the private, nonprofit U.S. national academies that provide expert advice on scientific problems.

Orbital debris poses a threat to the approximately 1,000 operational commercial, military and civilian satellites orbiting the Earth -- part of a global industry that generated $168 billion in revenues last year, Satellite Industry Association figures show.

The world's first space smashup occurred in 2009 when a working Iridium communications satellite and a non-operational Russian satellite collided 490 miles (789 km) over Siberia, generating thousands of new pieces of orbital debris.

The crash followed China's destruction in 2007 of one of its defunct weather satellites as part of a widely condemned anti-satellite missile test.

The amount of orbital debris tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network jumped from 9,949 catalogued objects in December 2006 to 16,094 in July 2011, with nearly 20 percent of the objects stemming from the destruction of the Chinese FENGYUN 1-C satellite, the National Research Council said.

The surveillance network tracks objects approximately 10 centimetres in diameter and larger.

Some computer models show the amount of orbital debris "has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures," the research council said in a statement released Thursday as part its 182-page report.

"The current space environment is growing increasingly hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts," Donald Kessler, the former head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office who chaired the study team, said in a statement.

In addition to more than 30 findings, the panel made two dozen recommendations for NASA to mitigate and improve the orbital debris environment, including collaborating with the State Department to develop the legal and regulatory framework for removing junk from space.

Current international legal principles, for example, ban nations from salvaging or otherwise collecting other nations' space objects.

"The problem of space debris is similar to a host of other environmental problems and public concerns characterized by possibly significant differences between the short- and long-run damage accruing to society," the report said.

It cited "damage related to atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, storage of nuclear waste and long-lived pharmaceutical residue in underground aquifers. Each has small short-run effects but, if left unaddressed, will have much larger impacts on society in the future," it said.

The study, "Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs," was sponsored by NASA.

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Batmanning Replaces Planking: VIDEO

Batmanning sees planking and raises it a head injury

 

Original Batmanning Video

 

THE FIRST EVER ORIGINAL BATMANNING VIDEO DONE BY THE BATMAN BOILERS! FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @BATMANBOILERS

 

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'Angry Birds' to provide

in-flight entertainment

 

Angry Birds is, by many standards, the world's most successful iPhone game, selling over 350 million copies since its launch in November 2009.

Thanks to the success of its creator Rovio, it's also a proudly Finnish export, something Finland's flag-carrier Finnair intends to capitalize on with the launch of a branded Angry Birds flight.

Though it's something of a surprise that travel brands haven't jumped on the bandwagon already, Finnair is set to be the first company to take Angry Birds to 35,000 feet, inviting top fans to join a flight it's calling the 'Angry Birds Asian Challenge'.

The flight, which takes off September 20 from Helsinki to Singapore, will allow travelers to play Angry Birds on board using games consoles distributed to passengers and programmed especially for the event.

Finnair says that service and entertainment aboard the flight will also be with 'Angry Birds style', adding - rather alarmingly - that a 'real angry bird' will also be on board.

To be selected for the trip, fans have to fill out an application form on the website and collect as many Facebook 'likes' as they can, with a jury screening the final eight winners.

Finnair's partnership with Rovio is a unique one, but it's by no means the only airline working hard to offer passengers in-flight entertainment to while away the time.

Both Virgin America and Qantas unveiled upgrades to their in-flight entertainment systems last month, packing in more entertainment such as live television or destination information.

http://www.finnair.com/angrybirds

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Two Software Developers are Seeing to it That You Never Get Ripped Off Buying Weed Again

 

It’s Friday, and I do have shit to do. But if I’m to believe priceofweed.com, an anonymously crowdsourced, regional index of the going street rates for marijuana, I could steal away from this desk, wander around outside and begrudgingly fork over $500 for an ounce of high quality bud. If I were back in Chicago, that figure would be more like $480; out in Denver, about $290.01; and in Portland, something like $253.35.

These are averages, of course. And maybe this is a no-brainer bit of Manifest Destiny (probably not), but it magnifies a central tenet of Economic Theory 101: Criminalize a good and you not only forfeit all control over it, but you fracture its underground economies. By nature, black markets aren’t disposed to rigorous study and analysis. They often lack empirical data and are full of skittish research participants that are flung across all possible environments.

It’s only fitting that the economic-information geographers behind “Data Shadows of an Underground Economy”, a new draft report that “drew upon over 16,000 spatially-referenced, retail purchases of marijuana” amassed at PoW to “cartographically and statistically analyze” price differentials throughout the States, are so dispersed. Matthew Zook is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, where an ounce of high quality bud will set you back $386.63. Monica Stephens is a PhD student at the University of Arizona, where that same ounce goes for $370.54. Mark Graham is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, where I have no credible way of knowing what a decent O runs for these days. After poking around PoW late last year, Zook tells me, “We thought, ‘Wow, this data is really interesting. It’s really this sort of nice, fine grain. We could do something interesting with it!’”

They reached out to PoW, a two-man operation launched in 2010. Both are software developers, and by now are used to academics coming around, asking for help. One helmsman, who I’ll call Cory, says they get requests every week from master’s students and researchers from across the world looking to make sense of their copious time- and date-stamped data. “We’re happy to send it out to them,” he tells me.

So after ridding the data from this volunteered geographic information (VGI) of outliers, the researchers – all members of the Floating Sheep collective – drew up a continuous surface through kriging, a geostatistical interpolation formula, to flag the average variance within price spreads with a spherical semivariogram model. Their analysis illustrates that this particular underground economy, in terms of “supply and transportation effects,” adheres to established economic theory. It also affirms the idea that any one state’s legalization regime has a significant (see: negative) impact on the price you pay for the good shit. These findings aren’t at all surprising, really, but they illustrate the effectiveness of merging crowdsourced geographic data with studies of economic habits “that would otherwise be impossible to conduct.”

Of course, the Floating Sheep collective aren’t solely bent on handling street prices of illicit drugs. But the equivalent of a PoW website could be made for almost any activity, Zook claims, and likewise pull from user-generated reports. And what’s remarkable here is we’re talking about a nearly full-blown illegal economy: “You just don’t see this sort of market data,” he explains.

It’s true. Poke around the internet and you’ll find a lot of homebrew “indexes” of street values within underground economies, but most are slipshod and sorta slimy and, with regard to illegal drugs, largely catering to the pill-head set. PoW is far more together. Maybe that’s testament to the simplicity of a design that’s allowed its creators to sit back and busy themselves with other projects as the data comes rolling in. “We haven’t had a chance to work on it too hard in the last little while,” Cory admits.

But their blog, dormant for nearly a year, was updated around the time he and I spoke. “Has it really been that long?” the post begins. “Anyway, here’s what’s been going down.” PoW has reached 30,000 submissions, and their data, via Floating Sheep, is featured in a nice Infoporn spot in this month’s issue of Wired. They’ve also got some unreleased features they’ve been tinkering on. These will plot data “for all countries” (particularly Europe), break down prices by city and create “an animated heatmap of price change over time."

Will PoW continue reaping submissions? There’s an inherent paradox behind all this. Today’s snowballing crowd-source movement rests on legions of subjects who may have no idea how the innocuous personal information they give up may be flipped against them. “There’s so much data on what people do, when they do it, where they do it,” Zook says. A dearth of information used to be a problem. “You couldn’t find any good information about local consumer behavior. Now, we’re sort of at the opposite end. We have too much data. We have these massive data sets, and no one quite knows how to work with them.”

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World's biggest electronics fair opens in Berlin

 

The IFA consumer electronics fair, which opened to the public in Berlin on Friday, is shaping up as a battleground for tablet computer makers to attack the Apple iPad's dominant market position.

Fears of a recession have not hit the German capital, where fair organizers said they had expanded its exhibition surface by four percent as the number of participants edged higher to 1,441. The IFA attracted 235,000 visitors last year.

The fair was formally opened Thursday evening by German Economics Minister Philipp Rösler.

Apple's shadow hovers once again over the event, which is often presented at the European equivalent to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Although the US company itself is not present, it typically presents products at dedicated shows of its own, Apple products are on the minds of most visitors here.

Jeff Orr, from the sector company ABI Research, noted that tablet computers which run on the Android operating system owned by Google have managed to occupy 20 percent of the growing market.

But he added that while "many vendors have introduced media tablets, none are separating themselves from the pack to pose a serious threat to Apple."

His opinion is not completely shared however by Sasha Pallenberg from the specialist internet site Netbooknews.

True, the iPad has "years of advance in terms of content" with myriad applications and its music store iTunes, and Apple "will likely remain the reference in terms of design," Pallenberg said.

Even the resignation of Steve Jobs as Apple's chief executive has left "only a few thousand fans" feeling like orphans, he added.

"But the tablet market has changed in recent months," especially in Asia where Apple is less dominant, Pallenberg told AFP, pointing out that a Chinese model is available there for only €70 ($100).

He forecast that sales of tablet computers using Android would surpass those of the iPad by the end of next year.

But that is too far away for the giant Hewlett Packard, which has decided to stop making personal computers.

Asian manufacturers, meanwhile, are hanging on. Sony might announce the European launch date for its latest two models, one of which can be folded.

Another highly awaited producer is Korea's Samsung, which Apple is pursuing worldwide for alleged patent violation.

Apple won a court ruling that prevents Samsung tablets from being sold in Germany, but the group said that will not stop it from unveiling new products at the IFA.

Media reports and internet sites have speculated about the launch of a small format Samsung tablet computer.

Other premieres are expected from Toshiba and HTC. Makers of "low-cost" tablets that start at around €200, less than half the price of an iPad, are also attracting attention, and visitors could see something from Medion, which makes computers for the hard discount German distributor Aldi.

Pallenberg said Medion might unveil a tablet that measures just seven inches (18 centimeters), compared with 10 for the Apple benchmark.

Beyond the launch of tablets, smartphones, 3D displays and other gadgets, a highlight of the show is a planned videoconference with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange early on September 6.

The anti-secrets site has been accused by US authorities of putting people's lives at risk with its latest publication of US diplomatic cables that contained the names of sensitive sources.

The IFA will be open 
until September 7.

 

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F1: Heidfeld takes Senna in the Lotus

Senna brings major sponsorship with

The Brazilian Bruno Senna is for Lotus The rest of the Renault Formula 1- World Cup 2011 contest

The English team has split from Nick Heidfeld. He had previously tried to use legal means zurückzuergattern his seat in the cockpit. Instead of the Germans now Senna will go together with the Russian Vitaly Petrov for Lotus at the start.

Already in the last Grand Prix in Belgium was the nephew of triple world champion Ayrton Senna replaced Heidfeld. Heidfeld, who had followed for the injured Robert Kubica, Poland, testified in a Lotus Sending out his disappointment wants, but focus on future tasks.

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Hungary Introduces

'Fat Tax'

Life is about to get more expensive for chip-munching 

couch potatoes in Hungary

In an effort to address rising obesity rates and health care costs, Hungary on Thursday implemented a law imposing special taxes on foods with high fat, salt and sugar content. The move comes as other European countries also consider policies to fight obesity.

The dobostorta cake, a five-layer vanilla and chocolate buttercream dessert with a caramel-glazed top layer, is probably Hungary's best-known treat -- at least after goulash. The cake can be seen in the vitrines of coffee houses and bakery shops lining the streets of Budapest.

"Hungarians are really into desserts," said Carolyn Banfalvi, co-founder of Taste Hungary. The tour company operator describes Hungarian food in general as "very fatty," with traditional cooking ingredients that include pork and goose fat. "What they call bacon here is often pieces of pure lard," she said.

The Hungarian government argues that this kind of diet is also leading to obesity and increased health problems, and that those who partake in indulgences like sweets should also pay a premium to help offset those costs. Enter the "fat tax."

Beginning Sept. 1, Hungarians will have to pay a 10 forint (€ 0.37) tax on foods with high fat, sugar and salt content, as well as increased tariffs on soda and alcohol. The expected annual proceeds of €70 million will go toward state health care costs, including those associated with addressing the country's 18.8 percent obesity rate, which is more than 3 percent higher than the European Union average of 15.5 percent according to a 2010 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Germany, by comparison, 13.6 percent of adults are obese, with Romania at the bottom of the list with 7.9 percent.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said, "Those who live unhealthily have to contribute more." In other words, the new law is based on the idea that those whose diets land them in the hospital should help foot the bill, particularly in a country with a health care deficit of €370 million.

Governments Take on Girth

The controversial "fat tax" is the most comprehensive on unhealthy foods in the world to date; but with other European countries closely watching Hungary's move, it is unlikely to be the last. Obesity rates are rising across Europe, and several countries are already taxing unhealthy foods to tackle plunging budgets and expanding waistlines.

Denmark is one of several European countries to tax sodas, and it has imposed a levy on candy for nearly 90 years. The country was the first in the world to pass a law banning trans fats, with Austria and Switzerland following closely after. Later this year, Denmark also plans to levy a sin tax on foods with high saturated fat content.

"What Denmark plans to do interests us," Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen said this spring, hinting at the domino effect the introduction of these taxes can have in other European countries. "Finland and Denmark have introduced taxes on sugared products such as soft drinks, ice cream and chocolate. A saturated fat tax is a logical next step."

Romania also considered a "fat tax" early last year, expanding beyond sodas and candies and trans fats to tackle junk food more broadly. Romanian Health Minister Attila Cseke said the tax would "be a percentage of the sale of fast-food products" and that the revenue would be used "to increase the budgets of health programs and fund investments into the system's infrastructure."

The idea was axed after the government considered its potential impact on consumers, particularly given rising food prices. There were also concerns that the tax might lead low-income Romanians to resort to even cheaper products, potentially worsening their diets.

But the Hungarian parliament seemed to believe that the benefits outweighed the risks when, on July 12, it passed a tax very similar to the one rejected in Romania.

Will Tax Put Poor at Disadvantage?

Initially dubbed the "hamburger tax," the new legislation is now referred to as the "chip tax" or "fat tax," because it applies to products like packaged snacks and sugary drinks rather than fast food.

"The Hungarian tax is a tax on products with high sugar, salt, and/or caffeine; taxable products include soft drinks with added sugar, energy drinks with added sugar and caffeine, pre-packaged sweetened products, salty snacks, high salt content condiments, soup mixes, gravy mixes and bases," explained Lisa McCooey, director of communications for Food Drink Europe, an industry lobby group.

Hungarians already spend 17 percent of their income on food, and they pay an extra 25 percent tax on most of the food and drink products they consume -- one of the highest rates within the EU. A major criticism of the new tax is that it will hit low-income groups the hardest, given their higher consumption, on average, of processed foods. "The economic situation here is really pretty bad. A lot of people don't have any extra money to spend on anything," said Banfalvi. "Life here is not cheap if you're an average Hungarian making an average salary."

While generally supportive of the new tax, Archie Turnbull of the Brussels-based European Public Health Alliance, a network of public health NGOs, suggested in a letter to the Hungarian government that it "consider using other pricing mechanisms or subsidies to make the healthy options" of fresh fruits and vegetables "more widely available and affordable."

'Not An Effective Instrument'

There are also questions over the effectiveness of fat-tax legislation. The growing list of taxes on unhealthy foods is leading to a debate on whether an increase in taxes can actually translate to a decrease in obesity.

Scientific research shows that taxation is not an effective instrument in addressing consumer behavior and will have no impact on obesity rates," McCooey argued. "Consumer information and education, not tax, is the way to advance consumer understanding of healthy eating."

"The link between the price of a product and its purchase is clear and has been well substantiated," countered EPHA's Turnbull. But, he added, taxes alone cannot lead to healthier habits. "Combined with health promotion measures designed to increase awareness of the health issues associated with a poor diet, the impact of fiscal measures applied to food policy can be significant."

But in a country where goose fat is common in cooking and where, as Banfalvi says, "the salads are just different plates of pickled vegetables," an increase in prices for unhealthy foods is no small change.

 

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