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Aug 9

Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time.

NASA Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space for First Time:

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as “buckyballs,” in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago.

They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

“We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,” said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.” Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science.

Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional, spherical structures. Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons match a typical black-and-white soccer ball. The research team also found the more elongated relative of buckyballs, known as C₇₀, for the first time in space. These molecules consist of 70 carbon atoms and are shaped more like an oval rugby ball. Both types of molecules belong to a class known officially as buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes.

Humans can mind-meld too:

The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people’s brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.

The scans showed that the listeners’ brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.

“We found that the participants’ brains became intimately coupled during the course of the ‘conversation’, with the responses in the listener’s brain mirroring those in the speaker’s,” says Uri Hasson of Princeton University.

Justin Boland spits some hard truth about the Top 5 Social Media Lies.

This one just kills me. Social Media is making everything better, right? Well, let’s see…it’s enabled increased surveillance (government and corporate) into our private lives and daily activities, and it’s definitely increased the reach, accuracy and saturation of advertising. All technology is a double-edged weapon — the Machine giveth, and verily, the Machine taketh away.

It gets disturbing fast when you actually think about the major innovations Social Media has bestowed on us. Words like “CrowdSourcing,” which is an exciting new way for corporations to replace paid professionals by running massive contests, where they get thousands of free submissions they will always own the rights to, from people they will never have to pay. Now that’s Capitalism.

Don’t get me wrong — I know very well that people are making money off Social Media. I’m saying that’s not really the point. People make a lot of money off landmines and crack cocaine, too…and both of those things are “changing lives” every day.

Did a Blue screen of death cause the BP oil spill?

Looks like there might not be water on the moon afterall.

Giant Balloons could clear out space junk:

Any new satellite could be launched with a folded-up balloon stowed on board. Once the satellite reached the end of its useful life, the balloon would fill with helium or another gas, creating extra drag as the balloon collided with Earth’s tenuous outer atmosphere.

A balloon 37 metres across would take just one year to drag a 1200-kilogram satellite from an initial orbit of 830 kilometres to an altitude low enough to burn up in the atmosphere, the Global Aerospace team calculates. Without the balloon, this would take centuries.

The balloon and the equipment needed to inflate it would add just 36 kilograms of mass to the satellite, less than the amount of fuel that would be needed to de-orbit it without the balloon, the team says.

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation in Washington DC, which promotes the peaceful use of space, says the concept sounds feasible. But he says it would not work for all satellites – geostationary satellites orbit 36,000 km above Earth, where there is too little gas to provide the necessary drag.

This Guy’s made an awesome DIY Wearable computer by the way: