how to take two stories and make a horrifying device

Well Aftonbladet a Swedish tabloid has made it again. This time by combining two different technological advances, and then combining them in an article to make it seem like researchers have invented a mind reading machine.

First they write four sentences about a British experiment where scientists have managed to discover where in a virtual world a subject is using a MRI to scan the brain. (Yes they are noisy, and claustrofobic you would notice if someone where scanning you…) Basically just reading out a trace of your spatial abilities. BBC have written about if here.

Then they continue with copying the content of a FOX News article about  “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) which is a technique to monitor how nervous a person is. This is all done by analyzing sweat, temperature, micro movements and breathing. Far from mind reading… (Also they manage to claim that it was a British invention when it in fact was American, also called MALINTENT developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

So by this simple method people can now be scared of riscing having their minds read.

Naturally the blogers got it right. For example here and here.
By the way, no idea to whear that foil hat. It will be dectected too..

shit and alcohol eq energy

Yesterday i wrote about garbage and “secondary raw materials”. Today i stumbled over another strange way of generating energy. In the Swedish cities Laholm and Båstad they extract heat and electricity from, hold your breath! Shit and fine spirits…

Basically they collect manure (that’s a nicer word for shit), leftovers from schools and restaurants and other organic waste and mix this with spirits confiscated from smugglers. Now they ferment this slurry for about 25 days and in the process a lot of methane is generated. Enough to cover 20-25% of the heating in the area and 21 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When they are done they return the dry remnants of the slurry to the farmers to use as fertilizer.

A translation by google translate can be found here.

P is not equal to NP

My friend  Joachim Strömbergson posted on his blog today that there is an article on arxiv.org by the Swedish researcher Sten-Åke Tärnlund claiming that P != NP!

If this proof is correct it will have a huge impact on mathematics and  some cryptographic algorithms. This proof is considered so important that  the Clay Mathematics Institute has named it a Millennium Prize Problem and offered a $1 million USD price for the first correct proof.

This is big and there will be some interesting weeks ahead to see if the proof stands up to a peer review!

Good resource on modern physics

The other day i found a nice resource on modern physics. It is the perimeter institute, PI (By the way for a while ago it was a  rumours that Stephen Hawking was considering  joining them.) who has published a series of introductions to their different research fields.

So if you have even the slightest interest in Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information or Particle Physics check these tutorials out. They are informative and also very up to date. And if you want to study any of the fields in detail they link to a lot of lectures in the end of each tutorial.

If you have pointers to more good lectures like this, please tell me about them in the comment field below.

british ufo archive released

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet wrote today that the British minister of defense now have released a lot of material regarding UFO sightings in the UK. What they missed to tell is that the archives also contain correspondence with the public regarding UFO sightings. So if you are into UFO’s or are interested in what the public think about UFO’s have a look here at The National Archives.

UPDATE:

Those of you interested in UFO’s might also be interested in the news that a Scottish astonomer have created a modified version of the Drake equation. (The Drake equation approximates the number of advanced civilisations in our galaxy.)  His modified equations include the possibility to compare different  models of civilisation creation, but also a huge increase in precision in the models. So how many advanced civilisations are there in our galaxy according to these models? Depending on which model you have for civilisation creation inbetween 361 and 37964.

More information about the modified Drake equations  is at “the physics arXiv blog”.