Report accidentally finds pirate movie website to be full of law abiding citizens

In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.

The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.

Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.

“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.

But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true. This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.

“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.

In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.

Full report at Torrent Freak

Milky Way’s Core Hides Big Twisted Ribbon

A space telescope peering into the Milky Way galaxy’s dusty core has spied a colossal twisted ribbon of super-cooled material.

Until now astronomers had only seen bits and pieces of the ribbon’s 600-light-year-wide superstructure, which resembles the Latin symbol for infinity (∞).

“We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy,” said astronomer Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in a press release. Molinari and others describe the strange ribbon in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters study available on arXiv.org.

Astronomers previously studied gas-piercing infrared images of the Milky Way’s cloudy barred core, but they didn’t have photos with resolution high enough to discern the ribbon’s entire structure. Molinari and others found the ring by aiming the European Space Agency’s infrared Herschel Space Observatory toward galactic center.

The telescope’s images suggest the ring is a chilly 15 degrees Kelvin — warmer regions are blue while cooler regions are red — and has two segments that poke out of the galaxy’s pancake-like plain. Ground-based radio telescope data also hint that the ring is spinning around the core as one cohesive unit.

Read more at Wired Science

Experimental Archaeologists Test Past by Making It Real

Of all the scientific disciplines, archaeology lends itself most to the imagination. It's the scholarly embodiment of the impulse to imagine oneself as a Mongol raider or Roman slave, tracking gazelle across the Great Rift Valley or navigating by stars across the Pacific.

For a few lucky researchers, these dreams become hypotheses. Experimental archaeologists test ancient tools and techniques, determining how they worked and whether modern interpretations are correct. Sometimes the studies look more like play than research — but why shouldn't research be fun?

From ancient noodle recipes to spear throwing, here are a few of our favorite studies.

Kon-Tiki

In the annals of experimental archaeology, no experiment is more famous than a 4,300 mile trip taken by six men in a raft called the Kon-Tiki. Led by Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, the voyage was supposed to show that pre-Columbian South Americans could have reached the South Pacific by floating across on rafts made of balsa wood.

Heyerdahl's journey was memorialized in a bestselling book and Academy Award-winning documentary, but the settlement hypothesis was discredited by further anthropological research. In June of this year, however, genetic tests of Polynesian islanders identified scattered DNA markers typically found among South Americans. Maybe a few ancient sailors indeed made the Kon-Tiki's epic voyage.

Read more at Wired Science

Giant Lost Island Found on Atlantic Seafloor

A 10,000 square kilometer (3,861 sq. mile) island sank beneath the waves long ago, in the frigid waters of the Atlantic north of Scotland.

No, it wasn't Atlantis.

The landmass sank beneath the waves of the North Atlantic long before humans arrived on the scene.

The island was created when the Icelandic Plume, a bubble of magma beneath the Earth’s surface, forced the crust up and out of the water. The land was forced up in a series of three steps, each one pushing the land 200-400 meters higher.

The island popped up out of the water for about a million years. Long enough for land plants to colonize it. But it sank back down and now resides almost 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the ocean.

Contractors using echo-sounding technology to search for deep-sea oil found the lost world beneath the sediments and debris that accumulated in the 56 million years since the island sank northeast of the Orkney-Shetland islands.

Echo-sounding involves the release of highly pressurized air beneath the water to create sound waves. The sound waves pass through sediments on the floor of the ocean. When the sound waves bounce back, a microphone records them. The data is then used to create a three dimensional map of what lies beneath the ocean.

Nicky White of the University of Cambridge and his team used those maps to observe the sunken island. They could even see what used to be rivers and mountains. Their findings were recently published in Nature Geoscience.

Read more at Discovery News

What Keeps Earth Cooking?

What spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables Earth's magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from?

Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in Japan, first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly. The trick was to catch what KamLAND dubbed geoneutrinos -- more precisely, geo-antineutrinos -- emitted when radioactive isotopes decay. (KamLAND stands for Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector.)

"As a detector of geoneutrinos, KamLAND has distinct advantages," says Stuart Freedman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which is a major contributor to KamLAND. Freedman, a member of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, leads U.S. participation. "KamLAND was specifically designed to study antineutrinos. We are able to discriminate them from background noise and detect them with very high sensitivity."

KamLAND scientists have now published new figures for heat energy from radioactive decay in the journal Nature Geoscience. Based on the improved sensitivity of the KamLAND detector, plus several years' worth of additional data, the new estimate is not merely "consistent" with the predictions of accepted geophysical models but is precise enough to aid in refining those models.

One thing that's at least 97-percent certain is that radioactive decay supplies only about half Earth's heat. Other sources -- primordial heat left over from the planet's formation, and possibly others as well -- must account for the rest.

Hunting for neutrinos from deep in the Earth

Antineutrinos are produced not only in the decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes but in a variety of others, including fission products in nuclear power reactors. In fact, reactor-produced antineutrinos were the first neutrinos to be directly detected (neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinguished from each other by the interactions in which they appear).

Because neutrinos interact only by way of the weak force -- and gravity, insignificant except on the scale of the cosmos -- they stream through Earth as if it were transparent. This makes them hard to spot, but on the very rare occasions when an antineutrino collides with a proton inside the KamLAND detector -- a sphere filled with a thousand metric tons of scintillating mineral oil -- it produces an unmistakable double signal.

The first signal comes when the antineutrino converts the proton to a neutron plus a positron (an anti-electron), which quickly annihilates when it hits an ordinary electron -- a process called inverse beta decay. The faint flash of light from the ionizing positron and the annihilation process is picked up by the more than 1,800 photomultiplier tubes within the KamLAND vessel. A couple of hundred millionths of a second later the neutron from the decay is captured by a proton in the hydrogen-rich fluid and emits a gamma ray, the second signal. This "delayed coincidence" allows antineutrino interactions to be distinguished from background events such as hits from cosmic rays penetrating the kilometer of rock that overlies the detector.

Says Freedman, "It's like looking for a spy in a crowd of people on the street. You can't pick out one spy, but if there's a second spy following the first one around, the signal is still small but it's easy to spot."

KamLAND was originally designed to detect antineutrinos from more than 50 reactors in Japan, some close and some far away, in order to study the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation. Reactors produce electron neutrinos, but as they travel they oscillate into muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos; the three "flavors" are associated with the electron and its heavier cousins.

Being surrounded by nuclear reactors means KamLAND's background events from reactor antineutrinos must also be accounted for in identifying geoneutrino events. This is done by identifying the nuclear-plant antineutrinos by their characteristic energies and other factors, such as their varying rates of production versus the steady arrival of geoneutrinos. Reactor antineutrinos are calculated and subtracted from the total. What's left are the geoneutrinos.

Read more at Science Daily

Grappling hooks help bacteria slingshot forward

Like tiny mountaineers, bacteria use grappling hooks to pull themselves across a surface – and can get an extra boost by releasing one of the taut lines to slingshot themselves forward. Thwarting them could help combat the biofilms behind hospital infections.

Fan Jin and Gerard Wong of the University of California, Los Angeles, filmed the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa crawling through a viscous medium on a glass surface. They then analysed how it moved using an algorithm. This confirmed what biologists had long suspected: many bacteria use hair-like appendages called pili as grappling hooks to pull themselves along a surface.

But the algorithms also picked up on something else: sometimes a bacterium's rear end performed a jittery but purposeful little dance. Instead of merely contracting their pili, the bacteria released one taut pilus from the surface altogether, sending their behinds skittering across the surface. This fired the cell forwards 20 times faster than contracting pili.

"The paper is interesting and suggests aspects of pilus-based cell movement that I had not considered," says Mark McBride of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who also studies bacterial movement but was not involved in the study.

Read more at New Scientist

All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal's Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," Labuda was quoted as saying in a press release. His team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions.

The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia. They went extinct, or were simply absorbed into the modern human population, about 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time.

"In addition, because our methods were totally independent of Neanderthal material, we can also conclude that previous results were not influenced by contaminating artifacts," Labuda said.

This work goes back to nearly a decade ago, when Labuda and his colleagues identified a piece of DNA, called a haplotype, in the human X chromosome that seemed different. They questioned its origins.

Fast forward to 2010, when the Neanderthal genome was sequenced. The researchers could then compare the haplotype to the Neanderthal genome as well as to the DNA of existing humans. The scientists found that the sequence was present in people across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia.

"There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals," said Nick Patterson of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University. Patterson did not participate in the latest research. He added, "This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details."

David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, added, "Dr. Labuda and his colleagues were the first to identify a genetic variation in non-Africans that was likely to have come from an archaic population. This was done entirely without the Neanderthal genome sequence, but in light of the Neanderthal sequence, it is now clear that they were absolutely right!"

Read more at Discovery News

Fossil Forensics Reveals How Wasps Populated Rotting Dinosaur Eggs

Exceptionally preserved fossils of insect cocoons have allowed researchers in Argentina to describe how wasps played an important role in food webs devoted to consuming rotting dinosaur eggs. The research is published in the scientific journal Palaeontology.

The approximately 70 million year old eggs, from gigantic titanosaur sauropod dinosaurs were discovered in 1989 in the Patagonia region of Argentina, well known for yielding fossils of sauropod dinosaur eggs and even embryonic dinosaurs. Only recently it was discovered that one of the broken eggs contained tiny sausage-shaped structures, 2-3cm long and 1cm wide. The structures closely resembled fossilised insect cocoons, and were most similar in size and shape to the cocoons of some species of modern wasp.

There are many records of fossilised dinosaur eggs, and even several records of fossil cocoons, but, as author Dr Jorge Genise of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales states "this is the first time that these cocoons are found closely associated with an egg." Such a study of organismal behaviour (e.g. burrows, footprints) is known as ichnology.

The results indicate "that wasps probably participated in the food web, mostly composed of scavenging insects, which developed on the rotten egg." The make-up of carrion communities -- spiders, beetles and other creatures populating rotting organic matter -- is more familiar to us from the screens of crime scene investigation documentaries.

The numbers and different types of creatures indicate the length of deposition and the time since death. In this particular CSI, it appears that the dinosaur egg was broken by force, and subsequent fractures in the egg shell allowed scavenging creatures to feed upon the contents. At egg sizes of around 20cm, this represents a sizable amount of yolk! Other creatures later appeared to feed not upon the egg contents, but on the initial scavengers themselves. The wasps represent the top of the food web, and could have been feeding on insects or spiders gorging on rotting egg contents.

Read more at Science Daily

Homo Sapiens, Meet Your New Astounding Family

A single, unforgettable image comes to mind when we ponder human origins: a crouching ape slowly standing and morphing into a tall, erect human male poised to conquer every bit of habitable land on this planet. We walk this earth—we, this unparalleled experiment in evolution—reflexively assuming we are the crown of creation. Certainly we are rare and strange: As biological anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University says, “The chances that a creature like us will ever happen again are so small that I can’t even measure them.”

But that ascent-of-man picture is looking as dated as the flat earth. A series of scientific and technological breakthroughs have altered much of our fundamental understanding of human evolution. In the new view, the path to Homo sapiens was amazingly dilatory and indirect. Along the way, our planet witnessed many variations on the human form, multiple migrations out of Africa, interspecies trysts, and extinctions that ultimately wiped out all hominid species except one (pdf). “Human evolution used to seem simple and linear,” says paleoanthropologist William Jungers of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “Now, you look at almost any time slice and you see diversity. We may be special and we may be lucky, but we’re far from the only human experiment.”

Unexpected fossil finds keep showing us an ever-expanding variety of human and prehuman species. Probably the most stunning of these recent discoveries is Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancestor who displayed a fantastical mosaic of ape and human traits. 
A. ramidus apparently climbed trees but also walked upright some 4.4 million years ago—more than half a million years before the long-accepted origin of bipedalism.

More at Discover

70 year old woman sued for “porn piracy”

For those who believe that using the BitTorrent protocol for piracy is a young person’s game, you might want to know about a San Francisco woman risking a potential $150,000 fine for torrenting porn. She’s 70 years old, you see.

Of course, she claims to not even know what BitTorrent is, but who can believe the word of a thief? Well, as you might expect, the case isn’t exactly a slam dunk. The anonymous 70-year-old was named as part of a lawsuit against multiple users for illegally downloading adult material, but she believes that someone else was using her unsecured Wi-Fi to do so.

Refusing to pay the $3,400 settlement requested by the lawsuit, the woman plans to go to court and explain to the judge what’s what.

Full article at Techland