The Wall Street Journal reports today that Samsung is "in the last stage of development" for flexible plastic OLED displays, and that the displays will be released in the first half of 2013. The idea with plastic flexible displays isn't that you can fold a phone up into an eighth of its size--it's more that they're both more durable and lighter than comparative glass displays. And given that top phones like the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4 are highly breakable, we could do with some durability. A release in the first half of 2013 sounds optimistic based on the prototypes we've seen, but here's hoping. [WSJ]

When I spoke to Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in the run-up to the release of the Boxee TV, it was hard not to see the nascent set-top box as the best new tool for those wanting to ditch cable. It would have apps like Netflix and YouTube, sure, but it would also be a Boxee, so it'd play downloaded videos in that great, clean way Boxee always has, and then it'd have this cool new cloud DVR so it could record live TV shows and play them back on any device. That's everything! But Ronen repeatedly insisted that the Boxee TV was not a cure-all for cord-cutters. He said it was just a component, not a complete solution. I thought he was just trying to play nice with the content providers like Comcast and Viacom, feigning modesty so they wouldn't see Boxee as an enemy.

In its current form, I can't recommend anyone buy it.But he was kind of right. The Boxee TV isn't the one-size-fits-all solution I'd thought and hoped it would be. That doesn't make it bad, though--as a component of a larger cord-cutting scheme, I think it has a lot of merit. What does make it bad is that the thing is nowhere near ready for retail. It performs like an early alpha--as it stands, it is not usable. Boxee has done this kind of thing in the past with the Boxee Box, which was also basically broken at launch and was slowly fixed with firmware upgrades, but that doesn't make this acceptable. Boxee TV is in stores now, and in its current form, I can't recommend anyone buy it. I've been chatting with Boxee as I test the unit, and they keep telling me firmware updates are coming, but that's not enough. You can't buy a product with the hopes it'll work later--it has to work when you give someone money for it. So don't give anyone money for it, not now.

The pitch for the Boxee TV revolves around the "cloud DVR." The device, a little flat black box about the size and shape of a VHS, comes with a high-def antenna, which, if you're in a major media area (like New York, where I tested it--the others are Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.), picks up a couple dozen stations. For $10 a month (right now; it'll be $15 later), you can record an unlimited number of shows--it records on an Amazon server out in the cloud, not on a hard drive in your house, so no need to worry about storage. (It also has two tuners, so you can watch one thing while recording another, or record two things at once if you're not watching anything.) Record every Seinfeld episode! Why not? Then you can play your recordings back on pretty much any device, from anywhere. You can even watch live TV from any device, with about a 30-second delay. (It is similar thematically to Aereo, except it's actually legal, and designed to play back on your TV rather than on a computer--though it can stream on a computer, or tablet, or smartphone.)

This is totally different from what Boxee has done in the past. Boxee's only other hardware product, the Boxee Box, was in spirit a do-anything Roku: it was designed to get content you already have (or have access to) onto your TV. That's the way all other streaming set-top boxes work, whether an Apple TV or a Roku or a Western Digital or an Xbox 360. You have videos you've downloaded, or a subscription to Netflix or Hulu Plus, and these boxes play that content. They're middlemen.

Boxee TV isn't that. Sure, it has a few apps, but that's not its focus. Instead, it behaves as a service, like Netflix or Hulu Plus or Amazon, except it requires specific hardware--a small $99 box--to work.

How Does It Work?

The Boxee TV is all about the Boxee TV service. When you look at your homescreen, you see a list of what's currently playing on all your channels, plus what's coming up later in the day. It's not a guide, exactly. More like a list of icons, each one showing an individual episode. It looks okay but takes up an awful lot of space with not very much information. Live TV plays in the background; there's actually no way to get it to stop (clicking the pause button gives a message that pausing live TV is "not available...yet."). Click the right button on the remote's directional pad, and you see your recordings, which are organized by most recent and by TV show. You can choose which shows to record on the web app (my.boxee.tv), but there's no way to do it on the Boxee TV itself. Watching something new and want to record future episodes? Go get your laptop. From there, you can record either just the one airing of a program (good for movies), all new episodes (good for dramas you'll never re-watch), or all episodes (good for building up libraries of Seinfeld and The Simpsons).

Boxee TV, at the moment, is one of the buggiest devices I've ever tested.In New York, after a lot of testing and rearranging, my antenna picked up 45 channels. Pretty good! But the only channels of those 45 I'd ever really watch are the broadcast networks--NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox, CW, maybe Univision if I want to see how bad my Spanish has gotten since high school. The others are all local channels, largely in languages I don't speak or sometimes even recognize. Boxee will tell you that you'll get the vast majority of the top shows on TV with those channels, even though you won't have access to basic cable channels like FX, TBS, CNN, Comedy Central, or MTV, let alone premium channels like HBO and Showtime. The idea is that you can record Parks and Recreation, Revenge, and a profanity-free and commercial-added showing of Men in Black, and then get the rest of your TV a la carte from Vudu (which works like iTunes or Amazon--TV shows cost a couple bucks each) and the rest of your movies from Netflix.

As a service, I like the idea of Boxee TV. Over-the-air HD is surprisingly high quality, and with unlimited storage, I can have Jeopardy! marathons or just set it to record all Seinfeld episodes and eventually build up a multi-season library. It's easy to schedule recordings, and when it works, video quality is excellent. Even for a TV snob like myself, there are lots and lots of shows I want to watch that air on broadcast TV. One problem: I already have a Hulu Plus subscription, and Hulu Plus has access to most of the broadcast shows I watch. Also you can't see what's scheduled to be recorded. Also there's no recommendation service, like TiVo or even Netflix.

The thing just wasn't ready before launch.Another problem: Boxee TV, at the moment, is one of the buggiest devices I've ever tested. The recordings section says it's in "beta." Nope. No, it's not. The cloud DVR is the complete sales pitch for this device; without recordings, this is an extremely expensive antenna with Netflix. You don't get to say "this is beta," offer it for free for a few months, and have a free pass when it doesn't work. Make it work (at least mostly work) before people buy it. You can't sell someone a car with two wheels missing and promise they'll be delivered later, then tell them they can sit inside and use the air conditioning, which works great right now. Cloud DVR is the Boxee TV. It's not a bonus feature that's allowed to not be ready.

Boxee had problems with the Boxee Box when it was first released, tons of bugs that killed its launch momentum, so I was hoping Boxee had learned its lesson and would deliver the Boxee TV all polished and pretty, but man is it ever not.

Bugs

There's a weird crackling/skipping of both audio and video when I watch recorded shows on my computer. Neither the iPhone nor any Android devices can currently play back recorded shows (Boxee says Android tablets larger than 7 inches will work, but a) nobody uses those and b) it's not true, because my Google Nexus 10 doesn't work either), and the iPad version sometimes skips and ruins the audio/video sync. There's no way to pause live TV, which is extra annoying because live TV plays in the background, at full volume, when you browse. Shut up, Cash Cab. Recordings are not faithful about actually starting and ending when the show starts and ends; it's almost always five seconds before or after, and it doesn't adjust if a show is pushed back because of a football game or something. The antenna seems not great: when I watch recordings of some shows, they'll vacillate between a "no signal" error and perfect HD. What the hell? Which one is it? I even substituted a Leaf antenna, which are supposed to be amazing, to no avail (you can use any antenna you want with the Boxee TV, though it includes a decent little one.) And the playback of recordings doesn't have any kind of smart buffering system like Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, in which quality is slightly degraded in the case of a slower connection to give you smooth playback. If your connection isn't up to par (which apparently mine wasn't? It's not great, at around 10-15mbps, but it's fine for other uses), it'll just stop playing, so I'd imagine unless you have a stellar 4G LTE connection, this is pretty much a no go on smartphones. There's no automatic commercial-skipping feature, and fast-forwarding through them is really awkward: it takes awhile to load the video each time, so you have to skip a minute at a time, wait a minute for it to load, see that it's still playing a commercial, skip a minute more, and repeat. I know why that happens--it can't cache locally, so it has to restart the stream each time you skip--but that doesn't make it less annoying to use. Recordings are sometimes schizophrenic; one episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia bounced back and forth between the show and a commercial for a local legal services operation, not staying on either one for more than a few seconds, so it was totally unwatchable. Another time, I watched an episode of The Mindy Project that froze and muted so often that I gave up and thought I'd just watch something on Netflix. So I exited the episode, pressed the Netflix button on the remote, and the Boxee TV froze.

Oh, right, the Boxee TV hardware repeatedly freezes, so you have to completely restart the machine. When I say "repeatedly," I don't mean "more than once during my week of testing," I mean "when you do pretty much anything, and sometimes when you do nothing at all." Like, multiple times per half hour. That's bad for any hard drives you have attached to the USB ports, and the Boxee TV, while quicker than the Boxee Box, is still not very quick to boot up. On the plus side, there's a reset button, rather than a hole you have to press with a bent paper clip. Did Boxee know users were going to have to restart the box about every four minutes? And the hardware gets insanely hot--there's not a lot of metal on it, but the coax jack gets too hot to touch within minutes. And you're supposed to leave this thing on all the time!

Boxee tells me they're working on fixing bugs, that the cloud DVR is a very new idea and that they did all the testing they could before launch but of course there'll be problems with anything this new. But there's no way these are all new bugs, totally unknown during beta testing, and besides, lots of them have nothing to do with the cloud DVR. The thing just wasn't ready before launch, that's all. (Look at these user reviews!)

Apps

Here's one big reason the Boxee TV isn't competing with Roku or Apple TV: it has twelve apps. There's Netflix, which works exactly the way it did on the Boxee Box (which is to say, pretty well, though the interface is a bit outdated), there's Vudu, which nobody uses but is pretty nice, there's YouTube, and there's Pandora and Spotify. That's it, as far as top-tier apps go. No Hulu Plus, no Amazon, certainly no iTunes. There isn't even a convenient way to watch movie trailers. Again, there are reasons; Boxee doesn't have Hulu because Boxee has an awkward past with Hulu (though from talking to Boxee, it seems like an eventual Hulu app is not out of the question), and it doesn't have Amazon because the Boxee's major retail partner is Walmart--and Walmart owns Vudu, a direct competitor to Amazon. But just because there are reasons doesn't mean that doesn't suck for users.

Sorry, Boxee Box Devotees

Boxee TV is very much not the Boxee Box 2, even though the Boxee Box is being discontinued now that the Boxee TV is around. The Boxee TV does not have AirPlay, the futuristic and very easy way to fling any video or audio from an iPhone or iPad up to your TV. It doesn't support DLNA to stream from your network, though Boxee tells me it will, at some undetermined point in the future. It has a file browser, and it can still play back any file you can throw at it, but it no longer organizes them in that nice way the Boxee Box did. The Boxee Box snagged metadata from all your TV and movies, got cover art from IMDb, and organized them all really nicely. The Boxee TV is just a file browser; you have to remember which hard drive your video is on, then which folder, then which annoying long filename it has. The Boxee Box was great for pirates; the Boxee TV has the same featureset for pirates as a tiny, cheap Roku, except much buggier. Are you supposed to use a Boxee TV and a Boxee Box?

Oh, and the hardware's worse. It no longer has dedicated audio-out; the Boxee Box supported both RCA and optical audio, the Boxee TV has neither. The Boxee Box worked with USB hubs, so you could plug in as many USB devices as you want. The Boxee TV has two USB ports and does not support hubs. The remote control is worse in every way; it loses that fantastic QWERTY keyboard on the back, gains a specific button for Netflix and Vudu (these are basically just free advertising, and in the Boxee TV's current state, pressing the Netflix button usually caused the Boxee TV to crash), and uses a different wireless protocol that forces you to point the remote directly at the Boxee TV. And there's no universal search, which the Boxee Box had and which even Roku has now.

In Conclusion

I genuinely have a lot of respect for this company and for the products they've made in the past; I think they have the right ideas about the future of television and I think they have the capability to make some really outstanding stuff. So I find it sort of insulting that, for the second time (out of only two hardware products in the company's history!), they'd release a product that is nowhere near ready for release. This kind of thing is acceptable in the hacker communities that spawned Boxee; you can have the ideas, and then fix the execution later. A person who has serious opinions about SMB sharing would be fine with that. But the Boxee TV is not for that person; the company's retail partner is Walmart, for God's sake, and they've taken a lot of pains to get the price down to a competitive $100.

The Boxee TV is, as Boxee's CEO told me, "for the people, by the geeks." He also told me that Boxee's goal is to pass the "babysitter test," in which a stranger in your house can pick up the remote and figure out how to use it. And, like, maybe, because the Boxee TV is certainly simplified, but the babysitter won't want to use it, because it doesn't work. I don't even want to use it, and I wrote a goddamn 5,500-word article about how great this company is.

My roommate, who is a normal guy (meaning, not a nerd like me), has recently adapted to the Boxee Box. He understands it now, and he thinks it's great. He uses it when I'm not there. He was really excited when I told him I had the new Boxee. An hour later, after we couldn't play a video over AirPlay, after live TV skipped and stuttered, after the Boxee TV had to be reset twice, after a recording had the phrase "no signal" on a grey background for 10 minutes, and after we had to scroll through folders on a hard drive to play a downloaded video, he delivered his verdict. "This sucks," he said. And went to his room.

I was very hesitant to even write this review. I never review things in beta; I prefer to wait until I can speak about the product as a consumer will actually use it. And I actually do have faith that Boxee will fix many of the problems with the Boxee TV. In six months, I'll review it again, and I wouldn't be surprised if I like it quite a bit. (I also won't be surprised if it's half the price it is now.) But this product is in stores, stacked high on endcaps in Walmarts across the land, with big bold letters on the boxes promising that you can cut thousands of dollars from your cable TV bill if you only drop a hundred bucks on this box. People will buy it. Not a lot of people, probably, but some. And that's messed up, because this product is not ready for people to buy it. The promise of the product working later isn't good enough; the Roku works now, the Apple TV works now, the Xbox 360 works now. This isn't 2003 and their potential users aren't a BBS messageboard full of Linux users. This is Walmart and this is Christmas season, and this thing is not ready.

Water hides itself really well. Its molecules can form weak chemical bonds with many substances, allowing it to remain concealed within their crystal structures. There's no sign of water's presence-no dampness, no softness, no anything-until something triggers its release.

Quite a few rocks and minerals contain water, but you would never know it from looking at them. Turquoise, for example, is made up of copper and aluminum phosphates. Remarkably, for every copper atom in turquoise, there are four water molecules. Heat it enough and this water can be driven out, discoloring the stone.

The difference between water merely soaked into a material, such as cloth, and water that is chemically bound lies in how finely separated a material's molecules are. At the atomic level, a damp cloth contains pockets of trillions of water molecules held in place by fibers. But in turquoise, those molecules are distributed evenly around the phosphate units, individually bonded to the copper or aluminum atoms. Dioptase, a copper silicate with green crystals, similarly has water bonded to it, as does the mineral apophyllite, which flakes apart when heat releases its water.

I was recently introduced to a culinary curiosity that this phenomenon might explain: shrimp chips (also known by the Indonesian name krupuk). This snack starts out as solid, dry disks made from rice or cassava flour that look, feel, and taste like hard plastic. When my girlfriend first showed them to me, I assumed they were another one of the inedible healthy foods she routinely tries to get me to eat. But nothing could be further from the truth!

When I dropped the disks into hot oil, they puffed up to 10 times their size. The heat may have freed the chips' hidden water molecules and turned them instantly to steam. In one form or another, the water was there all along-waiting to turn dry starch into a deliciously unhealthy deep-fried indulgence.

Warning: Hot oil can burn you and easily catch fire. We used a glass container for photographic purposes only: This is not a safe way to deep-fry.

Well, this was unexpected. Nintendo is trying the take-a-cool-thing-and-make-it-smaller business model. A Best Buy blog post gives the details on the Wii Mini. Short version: it's a smaller Wii, more or less. It looks lovely in the screenshot and only costs $99, but it doesn't have Internet support and doesn't play Gamecube games. Also there's this other system called the Wii U that's out, so that makes this a weird time to offer another system that could compete with it. [Forbes]

The structure of the universe is quite similar to the structure and design of other large, complex networks, like human brains and the Internet, according to a new study. This is not to say brains and universes follow some sort of master plan, though. Rather, it's that the rules underlying the structures of such complex things can be understood in a similar way.

This is interesting because it suggests some kind of universal rule or system of laws controlling large systems. Network science is about unraveling those rules and trying to predict or control the behavior of complex networks.

"By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer," said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the new paper, which was published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. "But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems."

It's not possible to simulate infinity, so the researchers assumed the universe is really huge--for the sake of having an input, they said it would be at least 10²⁵⁰ atoms of space and time (a 1 followed by 250 zeroes). That is very large. This was scaled down to a more manageable size and put into a supercomputer named Trestles. Trestles used this data to perform detailed simulations of the universe's causal network, and computer scientists were able to do it in a day. Without parallel operations and some creative programming, this computation would have taken three or four years, according to SDSC.

The result is a graph that looks a lot like the visualizations representing other complex networks, like the Internet, social networks and biological networks, according to SDSC. "Who would have guessed that the emergence of our universe's four-dimensional spacetime from the quantum vacuum would have anything to do with the growth of the Internet? Causality is at the heart of both, so perhaps the similarity Krioukov and his collaborators found is to be expected," SDSC Director Michael Norman said in a statement.

This similarity in structure is probably not a coincidence, the researchers say. It might even be a step toward a new discovery of some universal rules. Maybe the rules are the same everywhere, but there are certain limiting factors--like gravity--that change the size and eventual outcomes.

[UCSD]

Observe the criticisms of nearly any major public education system in the world, and a few of the many complaints are more or less universal. Technology moves faster than the education system. Teachers must teach at the pace of the slowest student rather than the fastest. And--particularly in the United States--grade school children as a group don't care much for, or excel at, mathematics. So it's heartening to learn that a new kind of "classroom of the future" shows promise at mitigating some of these problems, starting with that fundamental piece of classroom furniture: the desk.

A UK study involving roughly 400 students, mostly aged 8-10 years, and a new generation of multi-touch, multi-user, computerized desktop surfaces is showing that over the last three years the technology has appreciably boosted students' math skills compared to peers learning the same material via the conventional paper-and-pencil method. How? Through collaboration, mostly, as well as by giving teachers better tools by which to micromanage individual students who need some extra instruction while allowing the rest of the class to continue moving forward.

Traditional instruction still shows respectable efficacy at increasing students fluency in mathematics, essentially through memorization and practice--dull, repetitive practice. But the researchers have concluded that these new touchscreen desks boost both fluency and flexibility--the critical thinking skills that allow students to solve complex problems not simply through knowing formulas and devices, but by being able to figure out what the real problem is and the most effective means of stripping it down and solving it.

One reason for this, the researchers say, is the multi-touch aspect of the technology. Students working in the next-gen classroom can work together at the same tabletop, each of them contributing and engaging with the problem as part of a group. Known as SynergyNet, the software uses computer vision systems that see in the infrared spectrum to distinguish between different touches on different parts of the surface, allowing students to access and use tools on the screen, move objects and visual aids around on their desktops, and otherwise physically interact with the numbers and information on their screens. By using these screens collaboratively, the researchers say, the students are to some extent teaching themselves as those with a stronger grasp on difficult concepts pull other students forward along with them.

Moreover, the teacher can simultaneously monitor what's happening on various desktops via a master screen, allowing he or she to intervene quickly if one student or group of students begins to derail over a particular concept or problem. From the master desktop, the instructor can beam different problem sets to different groups around the classroom, or move one group's set of solutions over to another desk for a second group to check or build upon. This enhances the collaborative aspect and keeps the entire class moving forward together at a steady pace, without any one student or group of students getting way ahead or falling woefully behind.

At least, that's what the study published in the most recent journal Learning and Instruction suggests. This kind of stuff can be really hard to quantify, though testing showed that 45 percent of the students who used the technology for instruction were able to increase the number of "unique mathematical expressions" they were able to produce, compared to just 16 percent of those students taught via traditional paper-based exercises. (Just a note here: neither of those numbers inspires an overflow of confidence.)

It's going to take a lot more time, research, and money (especially money) to prove this out, though we'd venture to guess that even if the "classroom of the future" isn't necessarily boosting student performance it's likely not hurting it either. After all, the future is increasingly multi-screen and multi-touch, wireless and paperless. Shouldn't elementary education reflect that?

Some unusual new physics may be emerging at the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are behaving in a surprising way. Collisions between protons and lead nuclei might be forming a new type of matter that relies on quantum entanglement, according to particle physicists.

The Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the two major-magnet particle detectors in the LHC, has been busy smashing together lead ions and protons. When particles collide at incredible energies, they blow apart into their constituent pieces, and physicists look for those building blocks in the shrapnel. This is how LHC scientists found the Higgs boson this summer. (In this new case, the scientists were looking for particle behavior, not necessarily new fundamental bits.)

The shrapnel usually flies out in all directions, at speeds approaching that of light -- but sometimes, the exploded bits do something different. They fly away from each other but in an orderly fashion, correlated with each other. This has been seen before in proton-proton collisions, and also in collisions between the nuclei of heavy metals like lead. In the heavy ion collisions, this correlation makes some sense, because physicists think it's the result of something called a quark-gluon plasma. This roiling soup of particles is the same primordial soup that existed for the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The soup gathers particles together and pushes them in the same direction. Similarly, in proton-proton collisions, the particles are thought to be swept up in something called a color-glass condensate, which also behaves like a wave of gluons.

Now CMS scientists say this directional correlation has happened in proton-lead collisions, too. This was a surprise. It may have something to do with quantum mechanics, according to MIT.

"Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us," MIT physics professor Gunther Roland, whose group led the analysis of the collision data, told MIT News.

In September, CMS members cranked up the particle accelerator to a little more than half its full capacity and started colliding lead nuclei with protons, looking for these two-particle angular correlations. In a sample of 2 million lead-proton collisions, a few pairs flew apart with their respective directions correlated. How?

The LHC and other particle colliders are all about accelerating particles to give them more energy, which equates to more mass. This allows them to get "heavier" so more shrapnel comes out when they blow apart. But this also introduces some changes to the particles' behavior. Namely: Normal protons have three quarks, but when protons speed up and get heavy, extra gluons glom onto them. These gluons exist (as all particles technically do) as both particles and waves. Their wave functions are correlated with each other--they're entangled, as MIT News explains it. This quantum entanglement, spooky action at a distance, explains how particles that fly away from each other can have shared behavior.

Why care about all this? The result wasn't expected at all--the CMS team ran some proton-lead collisions for the purpose of getting better control data. So that's interesting. But more fundamentally, it suggests some newly understood behavior at the tiniest levels. Refining our understanding of how quarks and gluons behave within protons will improve our understanding of the building blocks of all matter, and how it behaved right after the Big Bang. Just the sort of science the LHC was built for.

[MIT News]

We've known for over half a century that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but for people like University of California, Davis geologist Qing-zhu Yin, that number just isn't good enough--they need to determine what digit comes after the '5'. Yin has spent the last fifteen years trying to figure out exactly how our solar system formed--how, over a span of some tens of millions of years, a large chaotic disc of dust and gas turned itself into eight planets in orderly orbit around a central star.

Scientists have come up with a couple versions of the story: in one version, Earth emerged from an era of meteoric collisions so intense that the entire planet was, at first, a spherical sea of magma. In another version, the process was more drawn out--Earth was a rocky mini-planet where, every ten million years or so, something the size of Mars slammed into it and stuck, until finally all the Mars-size objects had either collided or--in the case of Mars itself--settled into an orbit of its own. But in order to figure out which version of the story is right, they need to know how long the era of ultra-violent planetary collisions lasted, down to a precision of tens of millions of years; in other words, they need to resolve the history of Earth to one more decimal point.

The secret to Earth's exact age lies in the planet's oldest rocks. Scientists can calculate an approximate age of those rocks by measuring the amount of two isotopes, uranium-238 and lead-206 the rocks contain. Because uranium-238 decays into lead-206 at a predictable rate, the ratio between the two isotopes tells scientists about how long the rocks have been around. But there's a catch: in order to figure out what the relative proportion really tells us, scientists have to know exactly how much of each there was to start with. And in order to figure that out, they have to know how much uranium-238 and lead-206 there is, not just in the rocks at Earth's surface, but also in the underlying mantle and--here's the tricky part--in the totally unreachable, irreproducible core.

Once upon a time, the composition of Earth's inner core was a solved mystery.Once upon a time, in the 1930s and 1940s, the composition of Earth's inner core was a solved mystery: Seismologists used data from earthquake waves passing through the planet to determine that the center of the planet was made out of solid metal, surrounded by a thick semi-liquid outer core. Meanwhile, geologists used meteorites as a proxy for the bulk composition of Earth, and determined that the planet's outer layers were missing a good deal of iron and nickel. The logical conclusion was that Earth's inner core was made of iron and nickel.

If that conclusion had held, researchers would be able to infer the amount of lead and uranium in the core based on the properties of iron and nickel. But in the 1950s, measurements of the core's gravity revealed that Earth's center wasn't dense enough to be made of iron and nickel alone.

"We knew we needed some lighter elements to account for the density deficit," says Yin. It didn't take scientists long to come up with a list of possible suspects, since the elements had to be relatively abundant in the solar system. "So that rules out things like lithium, beryllium, and boron," says Yin, "and leaves oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen."

But narrowing things down past that short list wasn't so easy: the inner core's remote setting and extreme temperatures and pressures made it virtually impossible to conduct useful observations or experiments to figure out which elements would have stayed in, and which would be squeezed into the mantle.

"So that makes computer simulations handy," says Yin. Until recently, computers simply didn't have enough power to run the kind of complex calculations necessary to simulate the inner core on an atomic level. But now, "computing power is at a state where we can do something reasonable."

Yin and his colleagues at UC-Davis ran an experiment on a 500-core supercomputer for three months to determine which elements are in the inner core, and in what amount. They were particularly interested in measuring carbon, an element whose presence in the core is associated with a higher proportion of lead. The more carbon Yin found, the more lead there probably is in the core, and the more lead there is, the younger the Earth.

The team's results so far suggest that carbon holds only a tiny proportion of the core--something less than 1 percent by weight. Relative to the rest of Earth, that's still a lot of carbon--it's more than in the whole rest of the planet combined--but it's a small fraction of the lighter elements in the core.

So far, the results support the long version of Earth's creation story--the idea that a solid Earth formed as early as 30 million years after the birth of the solar system, and that the Earth grew in fits and starts, one major impact at a time, over the next hundred million years.

By using ever more powerful supercomputers, Yin, his colleagues, and other geologists are getting a handle on how to fill in the blank to the right of that 5.

For spacecraft, you really can't beat the efficiency and simplicity of a nuclear power supply. From the Pioneer probes to the Mars rover Curiosity, a nuclear battery allows a slow drip of electricity where solar power would be impractical or impossible, and fuel cells or other batteries would drain. But radioisotope thermoelectric generators, as these are called, give a spacecraft about a household light bulb's worth of juice--and they need plutonium-238, an unstable and hard-to-obtain isotope.

The nuclear engineering wizards at Los Alamos National Laboratory have an alternative: Uranium-powered nuclear fission reactors that convert heat into electricity.

Scientists tested a new heat-pipe-based nuclear reactor in a test called DUFF, for Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions, in an experiment near Las Vegas recently. It's the first demonstration of a space nuclear reactor system to produce electricity in the U.S. since 1965, according to LANL.

It's a very simple design, using heat from a uranium fission reaction and transferring it to a pair of Stirling engines. A four-inch-diameter cylinder of enriched uranium makes up the core, and heat pipes cool it down, moving this energy into the engines. These free-piston engines produced 24 watts of electricity.

A real space-based engine would have to get a lot hotter, and would be able to produce about a kilowatt of electricity, but the experiment proved the concept can work.

More efficient nuclear power supplies would help spacecraft do their work and transmit their data more quickly, according to LANL. It would also allow NASA to use less plutonium, using materials that are a lot easier to obtain.

Eventually, the reactors could be scaled up into spacecraft propulsion systems, providing a reliable and safe fuel source for long-distance travel, LANL says.

[LANL]

We know it can be hard to resist the temptation of bikini models on the Internet, but physicist Paul Frampton was duped pretty bad. The University of North Carolina professor flew to Bolivia to meet up with model Denise Milani, but Milani never showed up. Instead, a man with a briefcase claiming to be Milani's intermediary sent Frampton on a drug smuggling mission. Frampton was arrested before he made it back the United States and convicted last week. We're all fools in love, huh?

Frampton isn't the only physicist to get caught up in a love scandal. Though most of them haven't ended up in an Argentine prison, some did have awkward run-ins with the media. Check out these physicists who probably wish their sex lives were as invisible as dark matter.

Albert Einstein's theory of relatives

The father of relativity wasn't very good to his second first wife, Mileva Maric. He made her do all the housework, and in return, she got... well, nothing much in the love department. That's because he was too busy taking lovers, including his cousin Elsa whom he later married. When asked about his love life, he would probably say, "It's all relatives." Zing!

Marie Curie's radioactive love

Apparently, two Nobel prizes aren't enough to get people off your back about that one affair you had. After Marie Curie's husband died, she fell in love with his former student, Pierre Langevin. The man was married, so the French press made a big stink about it and started calling her a homewrecker and a Jew. For the record, Curie was not cheating on anyone herself (and was also not Jewish.)

Erwin Schrodinger's mistresses

Here we have another physicist who wanted little do with his wife. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger had several mistresses, one being the wife of his assistant, Arthur March. The weird part: March was cool with it and stepped in as the father of the child while his wife Hilde moved into the Schrodinger household.

Stephen Hawking and the sex clubs/>

It doesn't really seem fair to pick on Hawking for a few reasons, the main one being that he currently doesn't have a wife to cheat on, but the media did it anyway. Hawking apparently frequents the sex clubs, and the only reason that's a scandal is because it is now horrendously public. No one's getting hurt here, at the very least.

The designers of We Are Dorothy are masters at representing snippets of pop culture in fresh, visual ways. The British team has created maps for a musical town (Penny Lane, Highway 61) and a Los Angelesesque city atlas with cinematic landmarks (Reservoir Dogs, Jurassic Park). As a followup to those, and in that same vein, their newest project is pure pop Pantone: color charts that feature only colors named for songs and musicians.

There are two color wheels, one for "The Colour Of Song" and one for "The Colour Of Popular Music." For example: Ruby Tuesday is a dark red on the song wheel and Black Sabbath is a, well, black, on the popular music wheel.

But it's debatable how popular some of that music is, exactly. We Are Dorothy's Ali Johnson explained how they dug around for musical touchstones. "We started with our own record collections (some of the more obscure psychedelic prog rock bands and tracks are courtesy of [We Are Dorothy colleague] Phil's collection) and when we exhausted these we consulted books like 'Martin C. Strong's Essential Music Discographys'," she says. "And yes, when we were running out of ideas and needed to fill in the gaps we did resort to Google."

The designs are meant to look like both a color chart and a vinyl record, with the bands standing in for the grooves of a record. Not every band with a color in its name makes the cut, of course, even though a walloping 154 artists are featured on the musician chart and 576 songs on the song chart. So Johnson and the rest of We Are Dorothy discriminated slightly, picking a few based on their tastes. (Although you can't not include Pink Floyd in this sort of thing.)

You can purchase prints of the designs at We Are Dorothy's shop. £100 per signed and stamped limited edition print and £30 per open edition print.

Gadgets and the Internet are big in South Korea. Really big, as this Associated Press story points out. Now "addiction" to the devices is enough of a problem that the government is stepping in. Officials plan to make mandatory classes for children as young as three (!) so the problem is dealt with early. This is the first line of the article: "Park Jung-in, an 11-year-old South Korean, sleeps with her Android smartphone instead of a teddy bear." Yeah, that sounds like an issue. [PhysOrg]

Average temperatures on the planet are increasing, ocean levels are rising, and storms are getting more severe. These are known facts, but some people--people who might even be your friends or family members--still believe anthropogenic climate change is a myth. Let's help change that.

Click to launch the photo gallery

We have selected some lovely items that will bring home the message that climate change is real, happening now and a serious problem. Click through the gallery to see some suggestions.

When floodwaters rise there aren't a lot of places to hide, and in the oft-rainy UK that can spell big problems and major property damage. So in an attempt to mitigate the problem, British authorities have just built the country's first amphibious house on the banks of the River Thames. When the river rises, the house rises with it. Bring on the Biblical deluge.

Britain's Environment Agency is not the first to dream up or even build a floating domicile of this kind--variations on this theme exist in Canada, Germany, and the U.S. for instance, as well as in some Southeast Asian and Latin American countries (where homes are commonly built on stilts to avoid seasonal floodwaters). But for the UK government to take an active interest in modern buoyant abodes is significant in that it could help drive technology development forward in coming years. It also serves as a kind of indicator that governments around the globe are quietly recognizing that the coming decades are likely going to bring increasingly nasty weather events.

For guidance in floodwater control the British are naturally looking to the Dutch, reports the BBC. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and the Dutch have a reputation for having the best flood mitigation technology on the globe. Several years ago, a Dutch firm built a few floating houses outside of Amsterdam to see how they might work. Another Dutch design house is working on a multi-unit apartment complex that could float on water.

The British concept, designed by UK firm Baca Architects, builds on these earlier ideas. Secured in place by four vertical posts sunk deep in the ground, the house resides partially submerged in the ground in a kind of dock lined with retaining walls and seated on a concrete slab. If floodwater begins to flow across the surface of the land, it is diverted down into this dock, where it begins to fill the chamber in which the house rests. The house itself is designed as a kind of free-floating pontoon, buoyed upward by hollow chambers made of wood and concrete. Secured in place by those four posts, the house can move vertically but not laterally, so it won't float away.

When flooding subsides, it comes to rest again in its original position in the dock, its occupants and their possessions no worse for wear. At least, that's the idea. We'll have to wait and see if this one sinks or swims, but the idea is intriguing in a world where sea levels are on the rise and population growth increasingly drives human habitation toward places where water often wants to flow.

[BBC]

The Skylon, a concept spaceplane that (theoretically) could go from a standing start to orbit and back without disposing of any rocket stages, took another big step forward today as tests independently audited by the European Space Agency confirmed that the Sabre engine underpinning it is conceptually sound. It's the second key endorsement from the ESA that Skylon and the Sabre engine have picked up in the past two years--giving Sabre-maker Reaction Engines cause to call its technology the biggest engine breakthrough since the jet.

That's big talk for a small aerospace firm, but then Skylon is a really big idea. The Sabre engine, if successful, should be able to double the normal top speed of conventional jet engines from 2.5 times the speed of sound to 5 times the speed of sound, and it should be able to do so using atmospheric air (rather than tanked oxygen, like a rocket). At that speed Skylon could climb to more than 15 miles up. Once up there amid the much thinner air, its hybrid propulsion system would switch to rocket mode to climb the rest of the way into space.

Other scramjet-style vehicles like the U.S. Air Force Waverider or DARPA's HTV-2 have similarly used atmospheric air to generate huge amounts of thrust, but these vehicles have to be carried to very high speeds by either rockets or other aircraft before their powerful propulsion systems can engage. Sabre's breakthrough is that it can (again, theoretically) flirt with hypersonic speeds after starting from a full stop on a conventional runway, without the need for multiple rocket stages or carrier aircraft.

How does it do this? Reaction surely isn't saying. The company hasn't even filed patents on its engine because it doesn't want to share its secrets, so novel is the technology. But we do know that the main obstacle in this kind of engine design is in heat exchange. Super fast-moving air being sucked into the engine has to be compressed before the combustion stage, and that compression can push the air to more than 1,800 degrees in temperature--hot enough to melt engine components. So the air must be cooled and cooled quickly, in just one hundredth of a second. Moreover, this has to be done without causing any frost to form in the air, which would also gum up the engine and cause it to malfunction. Somehow, Sabre has achieved this and demonstrated to the ESA that it can scale this technology to a working jet/rocket hybrid engine that could carry Skylon to orbit.

If it flies, and the ESA seems to think it could, it would become the first engine to launch a vehicle to space in a single stage and would seriously pave the way for regular flights into orbit aboard a reusable space plane as the cost-per-kilogram for payloads would be drastically diminished. It's important to keep in mind that Skylon still only exists on paper (where it has been for nearly three decades), but with this latest independent endorsement Reaction may pick up the funding and confidence it needs to change that.

[Reuters]

There are lots of different kinds of animal intelligence, and actually a lot of debate about what "intelligence" even means. According to The Smartest Animals on the Planet by Dr. Sally Boysen, recently revised and updated with new studies and sections, you can break down animal intelligence into a few categories: social learning, mirror self-recognition, numerical abilities, language comprehension, cooperation with others, and altruism.

Most of the animals in the book are the ones you'd expect: apes, monkeys, dolphins, and parrots. But there are a whole mess of highly intelligent animals you might not expect. What we're saying is, if you really want a smart pet, don't get a dog or cat. Get a domesticated raven.

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