[SKRIVA] Nyheter, sf/f och litet vetenskap

From: Ahrvid <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:25:26 +0200
Intressanta notiser och utdrag från Concatenation följer. (Se även tidigare 
postningar om denna nyhetskälla, som finns på 
http://www.concatenation.org/news/news4~14.html) Man tar inte enbart upp 
fantastiknyheter, utan även vetenskap och datornytt t ex. På något sätt hör 
spetsvetenskap och hi-tech en smula till SCIENCE fiction...
Brian Aldiss is not well, has had a couple of heart attacks and so we may not 
be seeing him at the 2014 London Worldcon. We do wish him the best of health. 
Though his likely missing Loncon will be a huge shame; Brian was a GoH at the 
1979 Worldcon in Brighton.  Also, in 2012 we lost Harry Harrison from the 
Aldiss-Harrison-Lundwall triumvirate, and Sam Lundwall probably made his last 
appearance at a major international con at the 2011 Eurocon (though did get a 
Eurocon Award). Some of us will be thinking of, and raise a glass to, the three 
at Worldcon.

George Orwell must be rotating in his grave after the announcement that the 
1956 film of 1984 is being remade as Equals, described as a 'futuristic love 
story'. Kristen Stewart, playing the female lead, breathlessly comments: 'It's 
a love story of epic, epic, epic proportion ... I'm scared.' Is it she, rather 
than the hapless Winston, who at the end will really, really, really love Big 
Brother?" (US Weekly, 24 January.)

The 2014 Abel Prize for maths has gone to Yakov Sinai. The Russian scientist 
picks up the prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters along with 
6 million Norwegian kroner (£625,000, US$1m). The World's most prestigious 
mathematics prize was given to Sinai for his work on complex dynamic and 
chaotic systems.

Adobe may be making old e-readers redundant! Adobe has announced that starting 
in July, the vast majority of e-reader apps and hardware devices will not be 
able to read any newly bought e-Books. This is due to Adobe's forthcoming major 
upgrade to its encryption system in their new Digital Editions 3.0. This will 
have reverberating effects on ePub books all over the world. Unless thousands 
of app developers and e-reader companies update their firmware and programming, 
customers will be unable to read books they have legitimately purchased. Some 
are saying that, in effect, Adobe is killing eBooks and e-readers! The big 
impact will be for all of the old e-readers, reading apps, and older bookstores 
that will never make this change. An e-reader issued by a company three years 
ago, is likely never going to receive the firmware update to read protected 
ePub or PDF Files.
(AE: Jag tror att Adobe skjuter sig i foten om man genomför detta!)

Scandinavia's book industry has slowed Amazon's entry into its book market by 
talking tough terms. Norway still has a fixed-price system (Britain had one 
with the 1900 NET Agreement that ended in 1997). Norway's commercial sales are 
all monitored by Bookbasen (a sort of Britain's BookScan) and payment relates 
to sales but Amazon is hesitating to release its sales data. Sweden's book 
sales database company is Bokrondellen and the word is that it is talking tough 
terms with Amazon. Denmark stopped fixed-price charging in 2011 and its small 
book industry has seen arguably chaotic times since then: Amazon is probably 
making the most progress here.

In case you are missing it, BBC America is just broadcasting a four-pert 
documentary series The History of Science Fiction. The first two episodes were 
broadcast in N. America in the latter half of April just prior to our posting 
this seasonal news page. Early May sees the remaining two episodes. The British 
Isles will see the series over the summer.  (AE: SVT borde köpa in den!)

Förutom Helsingfors till 2017, har både Irland och Frankrike anbud för 
sf-världskongressen 2019 och Nya Zeeland för 2020 (för alla dessa vorde det 
första Worldconen).

Poland's 15th Pyrkon 2014 saw a reported attendance of nearly 25,000! Held in 
Poznan, this three-day event in terms of size rivals France's SF Utopiales and 
is Poland's equivalent of the US Comicon. By all accounts it was largely a 
success, and here note the 'largely' for that is where the problems lay. Now, 
if you have been following our coverage of Poland's Pyrkon in recent years you 
will have noticed that this year's event was double the size of last year's 
event which in turn was more than double that of the previous year's event. 
Pyrkon is growing.
(AE: Grejen är nog att det till betydande del är en s k media-con, skulle jag 
tro.)

The Nature 'Future's micro-story (200 characters or less) results have been 
announced. ... The first prize went to Catherine Rastovski, who won a years 
subscription to Nature. The winning entry was:
    I pass your empty chair every day. Across the room sits the computer, your 
voice, your face locked inside. I ache to bring you to life, but fear keeps me 
in my chair. What if you say no? 

Our favourite runner up is:
    off that switch, Professor! Your time machine cant travel back in time 
past the moment of its own creation and instead will trap the Universe in an 
endlessly recursive time-like loop! Take your hands

Magnetic monopole analogue created. Common garden magnets have two poles: a 
north and a south pole. Split a magnet in two and each still has two poles. 
Conversely, monopoles are theoretical magnets with just one pole, and these 
have been a staple of some hard SF stories. Now M. W. Ray and colleagues in the 
US have engineered a 'Dirac monopole' in a Bose-Einstein condensate cloud of 
rubidium atoms that mimics a monopoles magnetic field. This process is a 
quantum simulation that uses real quantum systems to model others that would 
otherwise be very hard to make, or which we have yet to learn how to make. 
Although what has been created is only an analogue, its compatibility with 
theory reinforces the eventual possibility of detecting real monopoles.

The Earth is about 4,470 million years old a new analysis reveals. The 
international team of geoscientists and astronomers have used a combination of 
computer modelling of the early Solar System and the Earth-Moon system 
formation, and isotopic geological evidence. To cut a complicated story short, 
the Earth-Moon system likely formed late during the first 150 million years of 
the Solar System. They conclude it took around 95 million years to form the 
Earth (with an uncertainty of 32-39 million years) and made it about 4,470 
million years old.

New cracked glass is way tougher! Glass etched with tiny sine-wave like cracks 
(several per centimetre) filled with shock-absorbent polyurethane is 200 times 
tougher than normal glass. The cracks do not spread as the shock travels along 
the channels and absorbed by them.

New metamaterial gathers energy from the air. Researchers have constructed a 
metamaterial with structures the size of microwave wavelengths. These pick up 
microwaves from the air and convert them into electricity. If the efficiency 
can be improved this may enable people to carry devices (such as a smartphone) 
that are powered by mobile phone and Wi-Fi microwave signals.

A small planet well beyond Pluto called 2012VP113 has been found. It is located 
in the Inner Oort Cloud. It comes closest to the Sun at 76 Astronomical Units 
(AU) and furthest at 1,000 AU. 

The International Space Station is to have its life extended. Previously, 
crewing the station was due to end in 2020, but now the leaders of the 
sponsoring space agencies have agreed to extend this to 2024.

NASA is contemplating a mission to Europa by 2025. In March ((2014) the White 
House's 2015 federal budget request included US$15 million to develop a space 
programme to visit the icy moon of Jupiter. Europa has a potentially 
life-supporting ocean of liquid water underneath its icy exterior.

DNA nano-robots have been animal tested. Researchers at Bar-Ilan University 
(Israel) have created folds of DNA that open and close and do this in response 
to their environment as well as coordinatedly with each other. When tested in 
the cockroach (Blaberus discoidalis), different combinations of these 
'nano-bots' created seven kinds of logic gate and their associated outcomes 
such as releasing an antibody payload. There are a number of potential uses for 
these nano-bots including site specific drug delivery in humans such as for 
cancer tumour treatment

Lost Einstein papers found that could have supported astronomer Royal and SF 
author Fred Hoyle's steady-state Universe theory. A manuscript in Einstein's 
archives from 1931 lay unnoticed: it did not help that it had been misfiled. 
It's importance has now been recognised thanks to physicist Cormac 
O'Raifeartaigh from Ireland. It shows that Einstein had still been seriously 
considering a steady-state Universe in 1931 even though others and Hubble had 
discovered evidence in the 1920s of cosmic expansion (presumably from a then 
more-hypothetical big bang). Had this paper been known, it would have lent more 
credibility to Fred Hoyle's own case for a steady-state Universe in the 1950s. 
Einstein himself seems to have found a mathematical error in his paper (crossed 
out with a different colour ink) and presumably at that point stopped working 
on it.

--Ahrvid
--
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[SKRIVA] Nyheter, sf/f och litet vetenskap

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