New BlackBerrys have fewer serious competitors, but still face many challenges

By David Friend, The Canadian Press - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 6:14 PM - 0 Comments

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

TORONTO – Several months ago the smartphone industry was preparing for an all-out brawl over technology and innovation, but a knockout device hasn’t hit the market yet and some say that could give BlackBerry an opportunity.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company could have been pulverized earlier this year by competitors after it unveiled its two new smartphones, which were considered more catchup than game-changer.

But a mix of fortunate timing and a lacklustre slate of new phones from other developers has given the company a bit of a boost in its quest to return to the game, likely as the No. 3 smartphone player.

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Why is Twitter opening up a Canadian office, anyhow?

By Jesse Brown - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

The tweet sounded like a joke. Kirstine Stewart, vice president of CBC English language services (translation: the woman who runs the CBC) has left the public broadcaster to head up Twitter Canada. Why did it seem like a prank?

Because there is no Twitter Canada.

But there will be. Twitter Canada‘s offices will be opening in Toronto. They are hiring, and Kirstine Stewart will be at the helm. Twitter has verified this, as has Stewart herself.

So what does it mean?

For the CBC

It’s hard to see an upside to this for the Ceeb. Stewart was in the middle of steering a major “renewal” effort, an attempt to find steady footing following massive budget cuts and layoffs. News was “modernized”, radio razed, and a major emphasis on primetime TV ratings began to bear fruit. Online has languished, as it awaited new management, with the exception of one major project, the free streaming CBC Music service. Like these changes or hate them, most CBC employees accepted them, and welcomed Stewart as their face. She washed away much of the bad taste left by her predecessor, the detested Richard Stursberg. For those weathering the storm within the CBC, trusting in Stewart’s relentless positivity (is there a more exuberant executive on Twitter?) and believing that they would all pull through the bad times together, her departure can’t be good news. I know a number of young(ish) CBC employees who’ve been debating whether or not to keep building careers at the Ceeb, questioning what place it will have in tomorrow’s digital media environment.  Morale must suck for them today.

For Twitter

Why is Twitter opening a Canada outpost anyway, and why do they want Stewart to lead it? Stewart’s first (mini) interview today was with U.S. site TechCrunch, which hurt my feelings, but which provided a hint about what Twitter will be up to here. Stewart spoke to TechCrunch in riddles, describing herself as a “longtime champion of great content,” an area where Twitter is doing “incredibly exciting” things. She also commented on Twitter’s newest ally, the massive ad firm StarCom MediaVest, which Stewart said is “really setting itself up as quite the partner”.

Reading the tea leaves here, this talk is all about Twitter’s second-screen dreams. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently remarked that Twitter’s future is intertwined with television, as a “complementary” media platform. Be it Oscars, Olympics, or news, Twitter sees huge traffic spikes when big TV events occur and viewers want to chatter about them. This audience is ripe for targeted advertising, and Twitter wants to work with big brands on hybrid campaigns. TV ad spots are bought at the national, not international level. If Twitter wants to piggyback Canadian TV advertising deals, it’ll need a Canadian office. So far, they’re hiring ad sales people here, not developers. Twitter Canada will likely have little to do with technology, a field Stewart has no experience in. She is a career television executive, and Twitter must be hopeful that she can cut them a clear path through Canada’s insular and change-resistant TV and advertising industries.

For Kirstine Stewart

What would you rather do, make TV shows or sell Twitter ads? Leaving the CBC for Twitter sounds sexy, but for an executive known for getting deeply involved in the creative side of television production, Twitter may prove a bore. True, it’s a far more dynamic setting than the CBC, but Stewart will be subservient to big decisions made in San Francisco, and she’ll have to compel Canadian brands to take chances and invest online, when they’re notorious for waiting to see how things go down in the U.S. first. It’s a lot less power than she’s used to.

For Canada

There’s nothing bad about this for the rest of us, but there’s not much to get excited about either. Best case scenario: Twitter makes like Google and opens up a Canadian policy shop to deal with privacy, regulation, and free expression issues. Twitter has generally protected its users’ rights admirably in the U.S., and Canadians could use some of that here.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown

Scientists are closing in on dark matter

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

(NASA/European Space Agency/AP)

The first results from a particle physics detector aboard the International Space Station are in—and show tantalizing hints of dark matter, a mysterious substance that binds the galaxies together.

New research from the $2-billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), revealed today by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, confirm an excess of positrons (the antimatter counterpart to an electron) that could very well be a sign of dark matter particles annihilating each other in space. Then again, maybe these signals are just some cosmic debris, although scientists are cautiously excited.

“Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin,” Ting said in a statement.

Since it launched to the Space Station in 2011, the AMS has recorded about 25 billion cosmic ray signals, including the largest collection of energetic antimatter particles ever measured from space. Scientists predict that collisions of dark matter particles produce positrons and electrons, which is why the ratio of these tiny particles is so interesting to dark matter hunters, Ting included. But we still don’t know for sure if the positrons AMS has found are from dark matter, or  something more mundane, like pulsars. What the AMS has found “is an indication, but by no means is it a proof” of dark matter, Ting told New Scientist earlier today from a seminar at CERN, near Geneva, from where he presented his results.

Still, an indication is exciting enough. Ting’s results had been hotly anticipated for months, and in February he teased reporters with a promise that news was coming soon. “The Cosmos is the ultimate lab,” he said then. While scientists on the ground continue the hunt for dark matter—at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, for example, and at SNOLAB, deep underground in Sudbury, Ont.—this massive orbital experiment, which continues until the Space Station is decommissioned in 2020, looks to be quickly closing in on one of the enduring mysteries of science. Dark matter makes up about a quarter of our universe, yet we know almost nothing about it; many predict we’ll have found dark matter within the next ten years. Maybe sooner.

Has Facebook become less fun?

By Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

NEW YORK, N.Y. – To see what Facebook has become, look no further than the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer.

Sometime last year, people began sharing tongue-in-cheek online reviews of the banana-shaped piece of yellow plastic with their Facebook friends. Then those friends shared with their friends. Soon, after Amazon paid to promote it, posts featuring the $3.49 utensil were appearing in even more Facebook feeds.

At some point, though, the joke got old. But there it was, again and again — the banana slicer had become a Facebook version of that old knock-knock joke your weird uncle has been telling for years.

The Hutzler 571 phenomenon is a regular occurrence on the world’s biggest online social network, which begs the question: Has Facebook become less fun?

That’s something many users —especially those in their teens and early 20s— are asking themselves as they wade through endless posts, photos “liked” by people they barely know and spur-of-the moment friend requests. Has it all become too much of a chore? Are the important life events of your closest loved ones drowning in a sea of banana slicer jokes?

“When I first got Facebook I literally thought it was the coolest thing to have. If you had a Facebook you kind of fit in better, because other people had one,” says Rachel Fernandez, 18, who first signed on to the site four or five years ago.

And now? “Facebook got kind of boring,” she says.

Chatter about Facebook’s demise never seems to die down, whether it’s talk of “Facebook fatigue,” or grousing about how the social network lost its cool once grandma joined. The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project recently found that some 61 per cent of Facebook users had taken a hiatus from the site for reasons that range from “too much gossip and drama” to “boredom.” Some respondents said there simply isn’t enough time in their day for Facebook.

If its users leave, or even check in less frequently, Facebook’s revenue growth would suffer. The company, which depends on targeted advertising for most of the money it makes, booked revenue of $5.1 billion in 2012, up from $3.7 billion a year earlier.

But so far, for every person who has left permanently, several new people have joined up. Facebook has more than 1 billion users around the world. Of these, 618 million sign in every day.

Indeed, Fernandez hasn’t abandoned Facebook. Though the Traverse City, Mich., high school senior doesn’t look at her News Feed, the constant cascade of posts, photos and viral videos from her nearly 1,800 friends, she still uses Facebook’s messaging feature to reach out to people she knows, such as a German foreign exchange student she met two years ago.

Fernandez uses Facebook in the same way that people use email or the telephone. But she prefers using Facebook to communicate because everyone she knows is there. That’s a sign that Facebook’s biggest asset may also be its biggest challenge.

“We have never seen a social space that actually works for everybody,” says danah boyd, who studies youth culture, the Internet and social media as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. “People don’t want to hang out with everybody they have ever met.”

Might Facebook go the way of email? Those who came of age in the “You’ve got mail” era can reminisce fondly about arriving home from school and checking their AOL accounts to see if anyone sent them an electronic message. Boyd, who is 35, recalls being a teenager and “thinking email is the best thing ever.”

Few people share that sentiment these days. Ian Bogost, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently listed email alongside “Blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, death of the firstborn” in a Facebook post.

“I was just going through my daily email routine, reflecting on the fact that it feels like batting down a wall of locusts,” Bogost says.

Although email has gone from after-school treat to a dull routine in the space of 20 years, no one is ready to ring its death knell just yet. And similarly, Facebook’s lost lustre doesn’t necessarily foreshadow its obsolescence.

“I don’t see teenagers leaving in droves,” boyd says. “I just don’t see it being their site of passion.”

In early March, Facebook unveiled a big redesign to address some of its users’ most pressing gripes. The retooling, which is already available to some people, is intended to get rid of the clutter that’s been a complaint among Facebook users for some time.

Facebook surveys its users regularly about their thoughts on the site. Jane Leibrock, whose title at Facebook is user experience researcher, says it was about a year ago that she noticed people were complaining about “clutter” in their feeds. Leibrock asked them what they meant. It turns out that the different types of content flowing through people’s News Feeds —links, ads, photos, status updates, things people “liked” or commented on— “was making it difficult to focus on any one thing,” she says. “It might have even been discouraging them from finding new content.”

The new design seeks to address the issue. There is a distinct feed for “all friends,” another for different groups of friends, one just for photos, and one for pages that users follow. As a result, says Chris Struhar, the lead engineer on the new design, the new feeds give people a way to see everything that’s going on.

“The amount of stories you have available to see has continued to increase,” Struhar says. “What we try to do now is give you more control over what stories you see in your feed.”

With that kind of control, the company hopes people will spend more time on the site and share more information about themselves so companies can target them better with advertisements.

Paul Friedman, a 59-year-old dentist in New York City says he’s using Facebook less now than when he first signed on four years ago, but he’s not sure if the site has “become less interesting or that I am just less interested in it,” he says.

“I think that it might have seemed more interesting in the past because it was a new ‘forum,’” Friedman says. “Now that it is not new, it takes does take more unique content to make it interesting.”

That said, Friedman still uses Facebook, to see if friends are organizing events, such as music gigs or yoga classes, or to check out interesting YouTube videos. He says seeing the same jokes reappear doesn’t really bother him.

“Ninety-nine per cent of it is a waste of time anyway,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the one per cent, I’d close my account.”

When it comes to people of a certain age, Friedman may be in the minority. Tammy Gordon, vice-president of the AARP’s social media team, says the 50-plus set is just now settling into Facebook. The organization’s own Facebook page grew from 80,000 fans to a million last year. This age group is growing the fastest because older people tend to be latecomers to Facebook. According to a recent Pew survey, 32 per cent of people 65 or older use social networking sites, compared with 83 per cent of those 18 to 29.

“They are not necessarily at that point where some of the younger generation is, where they have News Feed overload,” Gordon says.

Robert Worden, who is 62 and has nearly 1,100 friends on Facebook, isn’t overwhelmed. He says he got on Facebook two or three years ago primarily to establish a relationship with his estranged son, whom he didn’t see for a quarter century before he found him on Facebook.

Through his son, he also found out he had a granddaughter, who has been adopted and used Facebook to find her biological family when she turned 18. They are now all connected.

Worden, who lives in Paducah, Ky., says he probably wouldn’t have found his son were it not for Facebook, never mind his granddaughter. He also reconnected with people from his Memphis, Tenn., neighbourhood using Facebook — people he had not seen in half a century. The neighbourhood, he says “literally fell apart” in the 1960s “and we had never been able to get back together.”

“So someone said ‘why don’t you start a Facebook page?” he says. The group recently had its first reunion, 50 people showed up.

Worden says Facebook is his “major communication tool to the world.”

“Other people use news and I don’t find the nightly news or daily news to be adequate,” he says. “On Facebook I can actually hear from people who are living in the places where things are happening, and I can get instant information.”

Daniel Singer is 13 and, according to his public Facebook profile, he enjoys “designing beautiful user interfaces and sitting down at my desk and creating great iOS apps.” Last year, the eighth-grader created YouTell, a site that lets people ask for anonymous feedback from friends. You can use Facebook to log in, or email. As someone who designs applications, Singer calls Facebook’s graphical design “brilliant.” Still, he thinks the average teenager wants to see new stuff. Twitter, comes to mind, along with Instagram and Pheed, a photo-text-video-audio sharing app launched last fall.

For Singer, Facebook is part of a daily routine. “Kind of like brushing your teeth,” he says.

In the seven years since Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dormitory, Facebook has moved from a closed social networking service available to college students to a place where one-seventh — of the world’s population logs in at least once a month. No other social networking fad has accomplished such a feat.

Facebook’s predecessors MySpace and Friendster shone brightly but fizzled once finicky teenagers moved on to the next big thing. To boyd, though, Facebook is not only a destination site, but “a technical architecture that underlies many different things.”

“It’s not about new features to lure people back in,” boyd says. A bigger question, now, she says: What does it mean when your company is providing a vital service, rather than “a fun, glittery object”?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose for-profit content creation site Wikia recently surveyed its young users about their technology habits, agrees. Teenagers, he says, “do see value in Facebook.”

“I think we are seeing a shift from (it being) a place to talk to each other as just part of the world —the infrastructure of the world,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s to the detriment of Facebook in the long run.”

Elise Andrew on why she loves science

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, science fans expressed shock at the news that the wildly popular “I F–king Love Science” Facebook page, which has over 4.3 million “likes”, is run not by a man, but a woman: Elise Andrew, a 23-year-old Brit who lives in Midland, Ont., to be precise. After Andrew posted a link to the page to promote her new Twitter profile, which included a photo of her, reader responses ranged from “F*ck me! This is a babe ?!!” to “holy hell, youre a HOTTIE!” Some had assumed IFLS was run by celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Taken aback by the reaction, Andrews tweeted: “Is this really 2013?”

Andrew works for LabX Media Group as social media content manager. A self-taught social media mogul, she launched IFSL in March 2012, and runs the site in her free time.

Q: Tell me about how you launched IFLS. What was the idea behind it? 

A: I started IFLS while I was in my last year of university [studying biology at the University of Sheffield]. I was three months away from graduation, so I really should have been focusing on other things, but I got addicted to this very quickly. I promoted it to my friends, and it just gained traction so quickly and it didn’t stop. We got thousands of subscribers in the first day. I keep expecting it to level off at some point, and it doesn’t. [When the page reached 100,000 "likes"], it scared me a little bit. At that point I was still in university, and 100,000 people just seemed a bit insane.

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Solar plane set to cross the USA

By Rosemary Westwood - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

It’s shaped like a toy glider, but it could be the future of aviation. And if not, the Solar Impulse is still set to make history when it flies across the United States this spring.

The world’s first solar-powered plane will take off in San Fransisco, drop in on Washington, D.C. and finish in New York City, according to the flight plan’s broad strokes. More stops will be revealed in a press conference Mar. 28 in San Fransisco.

The trip will take three long months (from May to July), because the plane can only travel a leisurely 65 to 80 km/h. Then there’s the matter of strong headwinds, which had the plane flying backwards on an excursion from Rabat, Morocco to Toulouse, France last year.

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Google picks 8,000 Americans to test Google Glass

By The Associated Press - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 5:24 AM - 0 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO – Google has picked 8,000 people in the U.S. who will have a chance to wear the company’s new Internet-connected glasses, which are being described as the next breakthrough in mobile computing.

Google Inc. began notifying contest winners Tuesday.

The winners will have to pay $1,500 apiece if they want a test version of the product, called “Google Glass.” They also will have to travel to New York, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area to pick up the device, which isn’t expected to be available on the mass market until late this year or early next year.
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Chris Hadfield ready to take command of the International Space Station

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 9:23 PM - 0 Comments

It’s official: Canada will soon have its first-ever commander of the International Space Station. On March 13, after spending decades preparing, astronaut Chris Hadfield takes control of the ISS.

You’ll be able to watch a livestream of handover of the ISS here around 5 p.m. ET.

Even for an astronaut, Hadfield’s career has been remarkable. On previous missions, he became first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit; the first Canadian to float freely in space; the only Canadian ever to visit the Russian space station Mir. None of those milestones captured the public’s attention—and not just in Canada, but around the world—as much as his commandership of the ISS.

Hadfield, who arrived on the Space Station Dec. 21, has been using Twitter and other social media to share his experience with millions at home. And while other astronauts have used Twitter (the first live tweet from space was sent in 2010), none have been as prolific, or as enthusiastic, as Hadfield. “Chris is putting a lot of effort into this,” Jeremy Hansen, one of Canada’s newest astronaut recruits, recently told Maclean’s. “He’s a busy guy on orbit, and tweeting isn’t factored into the daily plan.” Marc Garneau, the first Canadian to fly in space, agrees that Twitter has made space more accessible than ever. ”It’s incredible,” says Garneau, who was campaigning for Liberal leadership, and is a tweeter himself. “I wish it had existed on my last flight.”

Hadfield finds any spare moment (and there isn’t much free time for astronauts on the ISS) to share snippets of his life—an observation about what he had for breakfast, or a photo of Dublin from space, or Havana, or Vancouver. With the help of his son Evan, who’s become his unofficial PR person on the ground, Hadfield recently did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. He’s released a song from low Earth orbit. He’s participated in countless interviews and chats with schoolkids and the press. Kathy Bolt of NASA’s Johnson Space Center was the Chief Training Officer on Hadfield’s mission, and has spent years working closely with him to help him prepare. “Chris has got a gift for public speaking,” she tells Maclean’s. “He’s been doing it for so many years in his role with the astronaut office here, representing Canada.” And he’s expected to keep it up at least until he returns to Earth, in mid-May.

Hadfield decided he wanted to be an astronaut at age 9, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Since then, he’s worked to be in a position to command what he calls “the world’s spaceship.” As he takes over the ISS, millions will be watching.

• Inside NASA with Chris Hadfield
• Our man in space

The cure for Facebook’s feature-bloat? New features!

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 4:53 PM - 0 Comments

before and after the News Feed redesign

When I first got on Facebook, it felt kind of like a party—a place to hang out and joke around with my friends. Then a bunch of  people I hadn’t seen since high school showed up.  It was nice to catch up, but knowing they were around changed the vibe.  Then came co-workers, cousins, aunts and uncles.  People I barely knew started inviting me to see their bands play in cities I don’t live in.  I was urged to pledge public support for political causes I don’t care about.  Then someone started selling weight-loss pills and someone else kept urging me to play Scrabble.  I rarely hang out at that party anymore. 

Last week, Facebook announced a redesign that’s intended, it seems, to cut back on the clutter and refocus on stuff users want most.

The problem is that no two users want the same thing.  So, to simplify our news feeds, Facebook has to complicate them.  With the new design (which will be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks) you can choose “Only Friends” to filter out updates from all the pages and products you’ve “liked” or subscribed to over the years.  You can choose “Photos” to turn Facebook into an  image feed, with pics featured bigger and better in the new layout.  You can choose “Music” to — you get it.

Naturally, choosing any of these new feeds gives Facebook relevant info for targeting and integrating ads, and the same space opened up to feature bigger, juicier photos will also be used to display bigger ads.  That’s all to be expected.

Facebook’s feature-bloat paradox is an interesting one, where simplification becomes yet another potentially confusing feature. Like Twitter and Instagram did, any new player has the advantage of anonymity.  They can come on the scene and offer one new great thing without having any legacy obligations.  But if Facebook killed apps,  groups, or pages, could you imagine the uproar?

Heck, they couldn’t even get rid of the poke.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown 

Chris Hadfield learns to fly

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

What’s surprised you the most since arriving on the International Space Station? And what’s something you never could have trained for? These are the two questions we put to astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has been living aboard the Space Station since December, and as of March 13, will become its first-ever Canadian commander. Hadfield, who has been inspiring many as he documents his adventures orbiting Earth via Twitter and other social media, gave us some insight into life in space in these exclusive videos.

• See some of Hadfield’s stunning photos from space in the current issue of Maclean’s
• Read “Inside NASA with Chris Hadfield” to learn more about how he trained and prepared for this mission
• See our gallery of 60 Hadfield photos from orbit

The 2013 AAAS Meeting in 55 tweets

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 3:07 PM - 0 Comments

Big news on dark matter? Soon, scientists promise. Real soon.

By Kate Lunau - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

NASA

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

The International Space Station isn’t just home to astronauts like Canadian Chris Hadfield, who’ll assume command in a few weeks’ time. It’s also an orbiting laboratory: hundreds of experiments are done there, looking into everything from human health to colloids. The ISS holds a $2-billion particle physics detector, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is searching for signs of exotic stuff that makes up our universe, like dark matter. Big news might be coming soon. At the AAAS Meeting, Nobel laureate and AMS principal investigator Dr. Samuel Ting promised that the first results from the AMS detector should be published in two or three weeks’ time. “It will not be a minor paper,” he told a crowded room of reporters.

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The mystery of memory

By Kate Lunau - Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

A 3D print of famous memory patient HM's brain. (photography by Kate Lunau)

In 1953, at the age of 27, the man who later became known to scientists as “HM” lost his memory. Henry Gustav Molaison had suffered acute epileptic seizures, and as part of his treatment, he had part of his brain surgically removed, including much of the hippocampus. While the procedure helped alleviate his seizures, it left him unable to remember much of anything, including who he was. Before his death in 2008, HM partcipated in countless experiments, and helped give rise to an entirely new understanding of the human brain. At the AAAS Meeting, neuropsychologist Dr. Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, who conducted pioneering studies of HM’s condition with her student Suzanne Corkin, discussed this famous case.

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Catching neutrinos

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

Scientists distributed out buttons featuring the neutrino sign, the peace sign and hearts for the "Neutrinos for Peace" effort, which is against nuclear proliferation. (Photo by Kate Lunau)

Did you know that about 100 billion neutrinos pass through your thumb every second? Catching a single one is like trying to grab at a ghost.

We heard about this today at an AAAS Meeting talk on these mysterious little particles. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe, like a photon (light particle), an electron, or the recently discovered Higgs boson; they come from the sun, from exploding stars (supernovae) and from cosmic ray collisions. Neutrinos, which carry no electric charge, hardly interact with ordinary matter and slip right through the Earth; you’d need a wall of lead “as thick as the solar system” to stop one from the sun, said André de Gouvêa in his introduction. But perhaps most importantly, they could tell us about why we’re here.

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The downsides of human evolution

By Kate Lunau - Friday, February 15, 2013 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

In a talk this morning on human evolution, I kept imagining that classic diagram of an ape transitioning to an upright human—and how it should show him hunched over in back pain, hobbling on a twisted ankle, on his way to the dentist to get his wisdom teeth removed. Evolution has put us at the top of the food chain, but “evolution doesn’t produce perfection,” anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva said today at the AAAS Meeting, where he spoke on a panel with others. Adapting to bipedal walking has left us with all sorts of aches and pains that no other animals seem to suffer, everything from hernias and flat feet, to fallen pelvic floors. He called these adaptations the “biological equivalent of duct tape and paper clips,” which affect us everyday.

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New worlds, brain machines, feathered dinosaurs and the Higgs boson

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 2:33 PM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is in Boston covering the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where some of the world’s finest brains and celebrities of science meet to mix, mingle, and share their latest and greatest ideas. On Feb. 14-18, she’ll give you a sneak peak into the current research—everything from dinosaurs to neutrinos, from stem cells to extreme weather, and all sorts of sorts of stuff in between. Follow her on Twitter: @katelunau, #AAASmtg

Photo by Kate Lunau

As I landed in Boston bright and early this morning, and hopped on the subway to the Hynes Convention Center (host of this year’s meeting), I was gripped by a familiar feeling—one I remember from covering this event last year, too—the fear of missing out. The AAAS is the world’s biggest general scientific society, and their annual meeting is a scientific smorgasbord. Over the next few days, thousands of researchers, journalists, engineers, teachers and policy-makers will be here to talk about their work. The program is as thick as a paperback novel. How to attend all the sessions that have already caught my eye?

There are a few I know I’ll be attending: like one on exploring other worlds, and what they can teach us about our own; and another on brain-machine interfaces. There’s a talk on whale evolution, and another on China’s feathered dinosaurs—especially interesting given the newly discovered Yutyrannus huali, a massive feathered cousin of T. rex. (As we now know, feathered dinosaurs weren’t just in China; last year, Canadian paleontologists found them in Alberta, the first time we’ve seen such a thing in the Americas.) Another session, on science at the International Space Station, should be interesting given that Canada’s own Chris Hadfield is about to take command. And, of course, the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” makes an appearance on my list, too.

It’ll be an exciting few days in Boston, soaking up some of the biggest ideas in science. Follow me @katelunau and check back at Maclean’s for the latest.

Man vs. robot

By Peter Nowak - Sunday, February 3, 2013 at 9:13 PM - 0 Comments

It’s easy to tell when a new technology has reached critical mass – discussions over its long-term effects start kicking into overdrive. That’s happening now with robots and how they are going to affect the human job market.

Conventional thinking has always held that automation and robots have historically been good things, because when a machine takes over a task, the human who used to do it is forced to do something smarter and better. This has had traditional repercussions both great and small, from auto assembly line workers necessarily having to upgrade their skills or maybe even start their own businesses, to regular people simply not having to remember minutiae like phone numbers because machines do it for them. Machines have traditionally freed our brains to worry about other, more important stuff.

However, in a recent 60 Minutes interview, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Bruce Welty raised a worrying issue – that robotic development has now reached the exponential phase, which means that machines are taking over human tasks faster than humans can come up with new and better things to do.

“Right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history,” Brynjolfsson said. “So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.”

By that estimation, robots will eventually take over all human jobs, leaving us with nothing to do. This is very bad, says the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, because that means all wealth will be controlled by the people who own the robots (assuming the machines don’t turn on us and kill us all, of course):

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

Wired writer Kevin Kelly, on the other hand, takes a more optimistic approach when he says that we can’t evenimagine the jobs we’ll create because of this increasing automation. Humans’ role in the future will thus be the same as it is now: to create jobs that only people can do at first, with those tasks eventually falling to machines, whereupon the cycle will keep repeating.

This stuff is exactly the meat of the current chapter I’m working on for Humans 3.0, my upcoming book. I’m more inclined to side with Wired because, if there’s one thing we can be certain of when it comes to the future, it’s that it’s very difficult to imagine. As Kelly puts it:

Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

Where Krugman’s thesis falters is in the notion that it’ll somehow be big entities that own the robots. With even children creating their own Lego robots, that’s highly unlikely. Robots are getting better and cheaper, which means that everyone is likely to benefit from the robotic revolution.

Calling all Trekkies: There’s a new ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ App

By Jessica Allen - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Tiding over eager fans of director J.J. Abrams’ next Star Trek installment–which doesn’t premiere until May–is a new app that will allow users to “have unprecedented access to all Star Trek content, as well as the opportunity to participate in missions and win valuable prizes,” according to a Paramount press release.

The free app includes:

• A geofencing function for location-based experiences such as encouraging viewers to go to the movies

• An audio scan function that can be turned on to automatically recognize and reward users for watching Star Trek Into Darkness content on TV and other media

• An image scan function that enables users to interact with images printed or viewable in the real world

• New Star Trek Into Darkness content, such as videos, images and wallpapers delivered directly to users’ mobile devices

• Exclusive opportunities and special offers only available to app users

IMdB says that Abrams’ second Star Trek film will have Captain Kirk, played by Chris Pine, leading the crew of the Enterprise on “a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.”

Who’s the man? Even though Abrams has said the villain’s name is “John Harrison”, it’s rumoured that the “unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization” might be a young Khan. Yes. THAT KHAN. The Khan–played memorably by Ricardo Montalbán–who was Captain Kirk’s nemesis in the 1983 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I can’t even. It’s too much. Can you even imagine? It gets better. This John Harrison, who may actually be Khan, is being played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Yes, the guy who plays Sherlock Holmes in the television series. I know. Believe me. I am counting down the days, too. (It’s 105 days.)

In the meantime, fans can download the free app here.

Or just rewatch Star Trek II.

Here’s a twentysomething that doesn’t want a sleek new BlackBerry

By Mika Rekai - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 5:59 PM - 0 Comments

As a young person with a BlackBerry, sometimes I get lonely.

I first felt the loneliness in the winter of 2010, when I would get together with my regular crew of early twentysomethings in a dive bar or a beer-glazed living room. It was the first true winter of the iPhone, and where once, in the heyday of our youth, we would spend our time socializing meaningfully, looking deeply into each other’s eyes as we discussed world issues, now everyone seemed to be transfixed by their cool new phones, and specifically, by“apps”. Charlie had an app which helped him build a bookshelf, Chad had an app to help him run five kilometres, Lucy had an app which was just a bunch of photos of fit girls’ bottoms and they all had Angry Birds. “What apps do you have?” they asked me.

“I have no apps,” I said, the shame welling up inside me. “I only have a competent phone, which keeps me reliably connected to friends, family and school.”

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A bite out of Apple’s brand

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 11:22 AM - 0 Comments

Shares of Apple, formerly the world’s most valuable company, have lost more than a third of their value since September, tumbling from a high of US$705 to below US$450. Investors are concerned that Apple has suddenly lost its mojo just as competition facing its flagship product—the iPhone—mounts. Last week’s quarterly results, though not shabby by any stretch ($13.1 billion in profit on $54.5 billion in sales), did little to change anybody’s mind. Analysts were hoping to have their expectations surpassed. Instead they were barely met.

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Why astronaut Cmdr_Hadfield is a rock star on Twitter

By The Canadian Press - Saturday, January 26, 2013 at 4:07 AM - 0 Comments

MONTREAL – Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is currently floating beyond the stratosphere, may soon surpass Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Twittersphere.

The 53-year-old astronaut has been tweeting daily from the International Space Station and now has more than a quarter of a million followers.

Hadfield has received international attention and praise for the colourful, detailed photos of the world he’s been sending since he arrived on the orbiting space lab on Dec. 21, 2012.

The Canadian space veteran passed the mark of 250,000 followers on Jan. 24 — just over a month into his five-month stay on the space station.

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Thumbs up for real buttons on a touchscreen

By Erica Alini - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Thumb-happy loyalists of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion might soon be tempted to defect: Silicon Valley has finally figured out how to stick real buttons on a touchscreen.

The familiar frustration with typing on glass kept California entrepreneur Craig Ciesla faithful to his BlackBerry’s QWERTY keyboard. But it also inspired him to found Tactus Technology, a company devoted to fixing the touchscreen’s greatest shortcoming. Tactus has created a technology that can be applied to any smartphone or tablet display. It uses nanotechnology to inflate or deflate physical buttons by increasing or decreasing pressure on a transparent fluid beneath a layer of clear polymer. Users can call up a keyboard when they need one, and make it disappear when they don’t.

The system, which Wired calls “downright magical,” will be used on devices on sale in mid-2013, according to Ciesla. Trouble, perhaps, for BlackBerry, but a welcome development for millions of frustrated texters.

Vine lets you tweet six-second videos, just like you never wanted

By Jesse Brown - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

What to make of Vine? Twitter rolled out the “micro-video” app yesterday, and like Twitter, it’s more than it seems. 

Vine lets you shoot and share videos with your phone. Big deal, right? But six years ago, I heard about Twitter, an app that lets you share sentences. I said “big deal” then too. I could already do that, just as I could already make and share videos.

Twitter turned out to be a big deal indeed. Its genius was its simplicity. Sure, I could already write sentences–lots of them–on my blog and share them with the world, but by constraining me to 140 characters and feeding my tweets into an opt-in stream with pushbutton network effect (the brilliant “retweet”), Twitter removed all barriers to real-time chatter with an unlimited audience. The result, we now see, was a pretty significant transformation in communication.

Vine applies the same factors to video. It constrains you to six seconds, max. It removes all trickier aspects of video production–even basic editing tools are absent. It processes all videos into files similar to animated gifs–those lightweight, looping meme-able moments that proliferate wildly. Vine is integrated with Twitter (naturally), so you can attach one to a tweet as easily as you would a photo.

Early hype has it that Vine will be huge. I’ve learned my lesson and won’t predict otherwise, but I do have some reservations:

• The written word is incredibly efficient. You can say a lot in 140 characters. But video? Less may be more here. Moving pictures often convey less info than still photos. What can you say with a six-second clip that you couldn’t say with a TwitPic? I guess we’ll find out.

• Streamlining video is a step in the right direction when it comes to the instantaneous culture of social media. But even constrained to six seconds of compressed loopage, a vine is much more data-heavy than a tweet. It apparently takes a full 30 minutes for Vine to process and post each clip. On the receiving end, the burden of loading a constant stream of twitching videos is already crashing and clogging twitter clients. (Incidentally, I’m not embedding any vines in this post, since this page filled with them keeps crashing my browser.)

• What the heck will we use it for? Twitter succeeds (for Twitter, at least) when it becomes second nature–when you barely think before you tweet. But people seem to be having lots of trouble thinking of anything substantive to share through Vine. Day one has brought us a barrage of pet videos and cinematic panoramas of people’s desks.

I look forward to eating these words in the days ahead, as users the world over stretch the limits of the micro-vid.

Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseBrown

Work begins on B.C. radio telescope that will act like time machine: scientists

By The Canadian Press - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 5:31 AM - 0 Comments

VANCOUVER – Construction has begun on a new radio telescope in British Columbia’s south Okanagan that will act like a type of time machine and help astrophysicists travel back to better understand the composition of our expanding universe.

The $11-million project is being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory southwest of Penticton, B.C., and will use components from the cellphone industry to capture and turn radio waves emitted six to 11 billion years ago into a three-dimensional map.

It’s the first research telescope built in Canada in more than three decades and includes scientists from the observatory, the University of British Columbia, McGill University and the University of Toronto.

“It’s almost like time travel,” said Kris Sigurdson, an astrophysicist from UBC and co-investigator on the project. “It’s looking back into the past and how the universe was at that time and it’s just amazing.”

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