New Scientist: Asteroids plummet

Most of you probably remember the 1998 film Armageddon  with Bruce Willis in the main role. A exploration team was sent to an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. Bruce Willis of course single handedly destroyed the meteorite with a nuclear weapon preventing massive destruction to the planet.
However if it ever did crash in reality its effects would be horrendous. The impact would totally destroy the entire surrounding area for several miles. Over the course of the next few weeks dust would cover the sky preventing any sunlight from ever reaching the planet. After a few short months everything on the Earth would die since we depend on sunlight... or rather plants do.

Scientists have uncovered some very good news however.  It seems that there are fewer large asteroids that could potentially destroy life on Earth than previously thought. Using an infrared sky survey rather than reflected sunlight a team of scientists at NASA picked up the heat that the asteroids emit. It depends less on the colour on the rocks which was a unpredictable method to begin with.

The survey estimated that there are 20,000 'planet busters' in the vicinity of the Earth, half previously estimated. 981 of these 20,000 have been thoroughly analysed and their mean diameter is just under 1 km, easily a 'planet buster'. This means that we are less under threat than ever before, which is quite a good future. And when considering the words of the film  Armageddon : ''It happened before. It will happen again. It's just a question of when.'' The when seems to be a little bit farther away.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128332.700-fewer-big-asteroids-stalk-earth-than-we-thought.html

New Scientist: The Age of the Internet

Who can deny that the Internet has become the marvel of society? A web of social networks, communities, information storage as well as countless other uses that not many of us know. However we must consider that the Internet is now in grave peril. Corporations aiming to reshape the internet in their image, cybercriminals and hackers alike vowing to destabilize mayor networks as well as authoritarian governments that restrict any content that may prove to be rebellious or a threat in any way to their rule. These are true problems facing us today and we need real solutions. And to look for those solutions we must look back at the history of the Internet and see the effects that society and politics has had on it and vice versa.

It all started in the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, USA in 1958 when a US Air Force scientist Paul Baran managed to create a communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack. The idea was to pass informations from one point to another without a centralised router or switching station. Dividing the message into small packets scattered all over the network. From then on the Internet grew into a world wide web that became commercially available since 1991. And what has happened to the Web over these 20 years? Almost every company in the world operates in some way through the internet whether they sell products through it or if they simple have a website. The giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple who have achieved the greatest success because of the revolutions they have made to the Internet and to computers in general.

If Apple, Google and Amazon start to fragment the web, can anything be done to stop them?

Recently, however, many problems started to arise such as the Wikileaks launch of many classified documents which stimulated the formation of Anonymous (a group of hackers hell-bent on making all classified documents available to the general public no matter the content as well as caring for free speech in the web) Although this seems like a noble cause one cannot forget the consequences of such actions.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128211.900-welcome-to-the-age-of-the-splinternet.html