Hasta La Gadget!

Tomorrow marks the 81st anniversary of the discovery of Pluto, that troubled little celestial body that has become the subject of a heated planetary status debate over the past decade or so. In honor of the little dwarf planet, and the recent “discovery” of a giant planet six times the size of Jupiter, which may or may not exist at the edge of our solar system, we’re taking a quick trip down memory lane.

A Chinese television station is drawing fire for a broadcast of magician’s synchronized goldfish act. Animal rights groups have criticized Fu Yandong for the trick, which they believe involves magnets, harming the fish in the process. 

Yandong, for his part, denies that the trick actually harms the fish, though he hasn’t actually revealed how it’s done–he is a magician, after all. “If I used magnets, the fish would stick together,” Yandong told the press.”Some people say I use electricity or high technology. They can say what they want, but the fish are safe.”

Aristarchus of Samos suggested it in the third century BC. Nicolaus Copernicus really drove the point home about 1,800 years later. And, in case anyone still had forgotten, Sun Ra reminded us in 1965, with The Heliocentric Worlds, volumes one and two. But the people of Russia apparently don’t listen to a heck of a lot of avant-garde jazz. According to a new study, 32 percent of Russians are under the impression that the sun revolves around the earth.

Says Olga Kamenchuk, a spokeswoman for the organization that did the polling, “It’s really quite amazing. All of [the questions] were absolutely obvious… the data speaks of the low levels of education in the country.”

Also on the survey: a question about whether humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed believe they did. The survey polled 1,600 people across the country. The margin of error is 3.4 percent.

I never thought I would live to see something like this: A hand held scanner that can detect if a patient is healthy or not just by pointing it at the skin. It seems out of Star Trek, but it is real and it works today. More »

Have you ever wondered how much information there is in the world? No? Well, someone has. In fact, new research by a team at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, led by Martin Hilbert, has gone ahead and done some calculations to that effect, and the results, while seemingly trivial, are rather interesting. Turns out that there’s a ton of information in the world, and the rate of its production is ever-increasing. A few fun tidbits: the current capacity for information, including digital and analog devices, is 295 exabytes, and by their metrics, 2002 is considered the start of the digital age. By 2007, around 94 percent of information was stored digitally. The full research is in the February issue of Science Express, and a video describing their methodology is after the break.

Continue reading Researchers calculate the amount of information in the world, move on to calculate how much time they wasted on silly calculations

Researchers calculate the amount of information in the world, move on to calculate how much time they wasted on silly calculations originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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