[Special Issue News] Drop test
About 425 years ago, Galileo Galilei supposedly dropped pairs of balls of different sizes and materials from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that all objects accelerate at the same rate under gravity's pull. Now, physicists are performing various versions of this classic experiment (which Galileo probably never performed) to test a basic premise of Einstein's theory of gravity, or general relativity, called the equivalence principle. In April 2016, a French satellite will blast off to see whether two free-floating cylinders of different materials orbit Earth at exactly the same altitude. Another team of physicists aims t...
Source: Science: This Week - March 6, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] General Relativity: The comic book
In 1915, Albert Einstein explained that the force of gravity arises when mass and energy warp space and time, or spacetime. Freefalling objects then follow the straightest possible paths, or geodesics, in that warped spacetime, which to us appear as the arcing trajectory of a thrown ball or the elliptical orbit of a planet. Einstein labored for years to translate this notion into a mathematically consistent theory. But anybody can understand how Einstein arrived at the basic idea. All we need to do is to follow his mental footsteps—which led him up an imaginary building and off of its roof. Bring your cape and take the p...
Source: Science: This Week - March 6, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The dark lab
Searching for the ultimate test of general relativity, researchers are looking toward the center of our galaxy. There, shrouded in dust, lurks a bright, compact source of radio waves known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Astronomers think that Sgr A* marks the dark heart of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole weighing as much as 4 million suns. That black hole produces the most intense gravitational field in our galaxy and so provides a unique laboratory for testing the predictions of general relativity. Over the next few years, using a range of new instruments, astronomers are hoping to see whether Sgr A* is bending rela...
Source: Science: This Week - March 6, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Daniel Clery Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Einstein's milestones
Einstein's general theory of relativity has survived a tumultuous century, enduring wars between nations and between scientists and triumphant confirmations and puzzling new implications of the theory. Early on, World War I put kinks in scientists' plans to test general relativity. Despite this setback, highly anticipated experiments thrilled Einstein by confirming his theory. But passionate arguments soon erupted about the implications of the theory. Could black holes really exist? Were gravitational waves producing ripples in spacetime? Scientific debate finally resolved these conundrums, and today the theory is essentia...
Source: Science: This Week - March 6, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Emily Conover Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] To catch a wave
After decades of effort, physicists say they are on the verge of detecting ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, whose existence Albert Einstein himself predicted nearly a century ago. Researchers working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) will use enormous instruments in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, to look for the gravitational waves set off when two neutron stars spiral into each other. LIGO ran from 2002 to 2010 and saw nothing, but those Initial LIGO instruments aimed only to prove that the experiment was technologically feasible, physicists say. Now, they'r...
Source: Science: This Week - March 5, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Privacy Arms Race: Camouflaging searches in a sea of fake queries
From health questions to shopping habits, your Web search history contains some of the most personal information that you reveal online, and search engine giants like Google and Bing save these data. Privacy-conscious users can switch to anonymous search engines, but these don't match the speed and convenience that Google offers. For consumers who want to continue using their favorite search services but with added protection, researchers at New York University in New York City have developed a browser extension called TrackMeNot that produces dummy search requests that drown out a user's real queries, thwarting any attemp...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Jia You Tags: The Privacy Arms Race Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The End of Privacy: Trust me, I'm a medical researcher
It's becoming more and more difficult to safeguard the privacy of patients who participate in scientific studies. Many patient samples today are banked, sequenced, and shared with potentially thousands of researchers, and it's widely accepted that if you can read someone's DNA, you may be able to figure out who they are. That's why researchers are seeking new ways of gaining patients' trust and keeping them involved—for instance by giving them more control over how their samples are used or being more transparent about the studies that their data are used in. Some are looking at popular websites like Uber and Airbnb as t...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Tags: The End of Privacy Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Privacy Arms Race: Hiding in plain sight
Most people allow their smart phones to send their GPS locations to apps and websites like Yelp, AccuWeather, or Google Maps without a second thought. But these data might be shared with advertisers and other third parties that profile users' movement patterns, often without their knowledge. Computer scientists have developed clever countermeasures that let users extract information from such apps without revealing exactly where they are, camouflaging their whereabouts. For instance, a smart phone can send along a series of dummy locations along with the user's real coordinates and from the app's response use only the info...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Jia You Tags: The Privacy Arms Race Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Privacy Arms Race: Could your pacemaker be hackable?
In a 2012 episode of the TV series Homeland, Vice President William Walden is assassinated by a terrorist who hacks into his Internet-enabled heart pacemaker and accelerates his heartbeat until he has a heart attack. This scenario is more than just a flight of fancy. Internet security experts have been warning for years that devices such as insulin pumps, glucose monitors, and pacemakers or defibrillators, when connected to the Internet, may be vulnerable to hackers who can take control of a device and change its settings. Manufacturers are starting to wake up to the issue and are employing security experts to tighten up t...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Daniel Clery Tags: The Privacy Arms Race Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The End of Privacy: Risk of exposure
Protecting medical information is difficult enough, but when you fall ill during an outbreak of a new or particularly scary disease, everything appears to become fair game. It's not just reporters who pore over your life. Doctors and public health officials, too, want to know where you have been, what you have done, and with whom. The more widely they share any of that information, the greater the risk to your privacy. A rise in the number of new and re-emerging diseases in the past 2 decades—including SARS, MERS, and several influenza subtypes—has brought such problems painfully into focus, and the advent of social me...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Martin Enserink Tags: The End of Privacy Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Privacy Arms Race: Game of drones
Drones are becoming more widespread, monitoring endangered wildlife, mapping rainforests, and filming athletes. And although there is little doubt that they can be very useful, they also pose new threats to privacy; the robotic fliers could film you in your own house or garden, for instance. Many countries are still debating how to balance privacy and freedom as drones proliferate, but current laws may offer some protection. In the United States, for instance, the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens inside their homes from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant, may shield Americans from miniature gover...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: David Shultz Tags: The Privacy Arms Race Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The End of Privacy: Breach of trust
Each year, recruiters from the National Security Agency (NSA), said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, visit a few dozen universities across the country in search of new talent. It used to be an easy sell. The agency has long supported U.S. mathematics with education programs and research grants. But the recruiters' task has become more complicated since 2013 after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began releasing documents revealing, among other things, that the agency has been harvesting e-mail and phone records from ordinary American citizens on a massive scale. NSA may also have purpo...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Tags: The End of Privacy Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Privacy Arms Race: When your voice betrays you
Like a fingerprint or an iris scan, every voice is unique. Security companies have embraced voice recognition—in which a segment of speech is recorded and the frequencies at which the sound is concentrated are analyzed—as a convenient new layer of authentication. Physical and behavioral traits of the speaker create a unique spectral signature, and demand for the technology is now skyrocketing. But experts worry that voiceprints could be used to identify speakers without their consent and compromise their anonymity, infringing on their privacy and freedom of speech. How and when voiceprints can be captured legally is st...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: David Shultz Tags: The Privacy Arms Race Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The End of Privacy: Unmasked
It's hard for a machine to pluck your face out of a crowd. If you appear in a photo taken at a protest march, an abortion clinic, or a gay bar, for example, your anonymity is safe—for the time being. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you and it has already trained on dozens of photos of your face—and the quality of the images you appear in is excellent—there is little chance that it will spot you. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to search the Internet for all photos in which your face appears, unless you are named in captions. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the large...
Source: Science: This Week - January 30, 2015 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Tags: The End of Privacy Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Privacy: Credit card study blows holes in anonymity
For social scientists, the age of big data carries big promises: a chance to mine anonymized demographic, financial, medical, and other vast data sets in fine detail to learn how we lead our lives. For privacy advocates, however, the prospect is alarming. They worry that the people represented in such data may not stay anonymous for long. A study of credit card data in this week's issue of Science bears out those fears, showing that it takes only a tiny amount of personal information to de-anonymize people. The result, coming on top of earlier demonstrations that personal identities are easy to pry from "anonymized" data s...
Source: Science: This Week - January 29, 2015 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Tags: Privacy Source Type: research
