Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners









































































































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Gun Show Near Newtown Goes on Despite Anger













A little more than 40 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where last month 20 first graders and six staff members were massacred, gun dealers and collectors alike ignored calls to cancel a gun show, and gathered for business in Stamford, Conn.


Four other gun shows with an hour of Newtown, Conn., recently cancelled their events in the wake of the shootings, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza broke in to the elementary school with a semi-automatic assault rifle and three other guns.


The organizers in Stamford emphasized their show only displayed antique and collectible guns, not military style assault weapons like the one used by Lanza in Sandy Hook.


Still, Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia had called for the show to close its doors, calling it "insensitive" to hold so close to the murders.


Gun show participant Sandy Batchelor said he wasn't sure about whether going ahead with the show was "insensitive," but said the shooter should be blamed, not the weapons he used.


"I don't have a solid opinion on [whether it is insensitive]," Batchelor said. "I'm not for or against it. I would defend it by saying it wasnt the gun."


In nearby Waterbury, the community cancelled a show scheduled for this weekend.


"I felt that the timing of the gun show so close to that tragic event would be in bad taste," Waterbury Police Chief Chief Michael J. Gugliotti said.












National Rifle Association News Conference Interrupted by Protesters Watch Video





Gugliotti has halted permits for gun shows, saying he was concerned about firearms changing hands that might one day be used in a mass shooting.


Across the state line in White Plains, N.Y, Executive Rob Astorino also canceled a show, three years after ending a had that had been in place since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. He said he felt the show would be inappropriate now.


But across the country, farther away from Connecticut, attendance at gun shows is spiking, and some stores report they can hardly keep weapons on their shelves with some buyers fearful of that the federal government will soon increase restrictions on gun sales and possibly ban assault weapons altogether.


"We sold 50-some rifles in days," said Jonathan O'Connor, store manager of Gun Envy in Minnesota.


President Obama said after the Sandy Hook shooting that addressing gun violence would be one of his priorities and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she would introduce an assault weapons ban this month.


But it is not just traditional advocates of gun control that have said their need to be changes in gun laws since the horrific school shooting.


Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat but a long-time opponent of gun control who like Hutchison has received an A rating from the NRA, have both come out in support of strengthening gun laws.


In Stamford, gun dealer Stuart English said participants at the gun show there are doing nothing wrong.


"I have to make a living. Life goes on," gun dealer Stuart English said.


ABC News asked English, what he thought about the mayor of Stamford calling the show "insensitive."


"He's wrong," English said. "This is a private thing he shouldn't be expressing his opinion on."


If you have a comment on this story or have a story idea, you can tweet this correspondent @greenblattmark.


The Associated Press contributed to this report.



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Silent Skype calls can hide secret messages









































Got a secret message to send? Say it with silence. A new technique can embed secret data during a phone call on Skype. "There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed," says Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. So his team's SkypeHide system lets users hide extra, non-chat messages during a call.












Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karaƛ and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype "transmits" silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech.












The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them. The Skype receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end, the team has found. "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult," says Mazurczyk. They found they could transmit secret text, audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.












The team aims to present SkypeHide at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France, in June.


















































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































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Five suspected terrorists killed in Indonesia: police






JAKARTA: Five suspected terrorists were killed in raids on militant camps in eastern Indonesia in the latest in a series of anti-terror operations, police said on Saturday.

National police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar said the raids took place late Friday and Saturday morning on two separate militant training camps in West Nusa Tenggara province.

"Police were forced to open fire as they (the militants) have explosive material. They used the locations to assemble bombs," the spokesman said, adding that five pipe-bombs and materials to make explosive devices such as nitrate urea powder, scores of nails and batteries were seized during the operations.

The raids came after police on Friday killed two suspected militants carrying a handgun and grenades, and arrested four others, in Makassar, capital of South Sulawesi province.

"This is part of the terror group in Poso," Amar said of the latest raids, referring to a restive district in Central Sulawesi province known for being a hotbed of extremism, where militants run a training camp and have been involved in several police killings.

Police had said the group was led by the country's most wanted terror suspect, Santoso, who trained groups of young militants to launch guerrilla attacks against security forces.

Police have beefed up security in the Poso region since late last year after two police officers investigating the camp were found dead and buried in a hole with their throats slit, and several small bomb plots were subsequently foiled.

Indonesia was rocked by a series of deadly terror attacks targeted at Westerners over last decade, with most -- including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people -- blamed on the Al-Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah.

But a crackdown on terrorism has weakened key militant groups and only low-impact attacks have been carried out in recent years by networks targeting law enforcement officers.

- AFP/xq



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Library of Congress digs in to full archive of 170 billion tweets



The U.S. Library of Congress said today that it has completed a process of collecting a full, ongoing stream of tweets, and that it has begun work to archive and organize more than 170 billion tweets.




Under an agreement struck between the government institution and Twitter in 2010, the microblogging company is providing the Library of Congress with a full stream of all public tweets, starting with 21 billion generated from between 2006 and April 2010, and now supplemented with about 150 billion more posted since then.


In an announcement about the status of the project today, the library wrote that:


Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission. As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications, and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.


Though the Library has been building and stabilizing the archive and has not yet offered researchers access, we have nevertheless received approximately 400 inquiries from researchers all over the world. Some broad topics of interest expressed by researchers run from patterns in the rise of citizen journalism and elected officials' communications to tracking vaccination rates and predicting stock market activity.


The Library of Congress isn't entirely clear how the ongoing archive will be utilized, but it has issued a white paper (PDF) outlining the project.


This project, of course, is different than Twitter's recently announced initiative to make every user's full tweet history available to them. That effort is under way, though only some users have been given access to date.


Interestingly, the Library of Congress reported in the white paper that its two full copies of the entire archive of 170 billion tweets comprise about 133 Terabytes of data. Each tweet, the library wrote, contains about 50 accompanying metadata fields.


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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners









































































































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Quadruple Amputee Gets Two New Hands on Life













It's the simplest thing, the grasp of one hand in another. But Lindsay Ess will never see it that way, because her hands once belonged to someone else.


Growing up in Texas and Virginia, Lindsay, 29, was always one of the pretty girls. She went to college, did some modeling and started building a career in fashion, with an eye on producing fashion shows.


Then she lost her hands and feet.


Watch the full show in a special edition of "Nightline," "To Hold Again," TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC


When she was 24 years old, Lindsay had just graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University's well-regarded fashion program when she developed a blockage in her small intestine from Crohn's Disease. After having surgery to correct the problem, an infection took over and shut down her entire body. To save her life, doctors put her in a medically-induced coma. When she came out of the coma a month later, still in a haze, Lindsay said she knew something was wrong with her hands and feet.


"I would look down and I would see black, almost like a body that had decomposed," she said.


The infection had turned her extremities into dead tissue. Still sedated, Lindsay said she didn't realize what that meant at first.








Quadruple Amputee Undergoes Hand Transplant Surgery Watch Video









After Hand Transplant, Relearning How to Hold Watch Video







"There was a period of time where they didn't tell me that they had to amputate, but somebody from the staff said, 'Oh honey, you know what they are going to do to your hands, right?' That's when I knew," she said.


After having her hands and feet amputated, Lindsay adapted. She learned how to drink from a cup, brush her teeth and even text on her cellphone with her arms, which were amputated just below the elbow.


"The most common questions I get are, 'How do you type,'" she said. "It's just like chicken-pecking."


PHOTOS: Lindsay Ess Gets New Hands


Despite her progress, Lindsay said she faced challenges being independent. Her mother, Judith Aronson, basically moved back into her daughter's life to provide basic care, including bathing, dressing and feeding. Having also lost her feet, Lindsay needed her mother to help put on her prosthetic legs.


"I've accepted the fact that my feet are gone, that's acceptable to me," Lindsay said. "My hands [are] not. It's still not. In my dreams I always have my hands."


Through her amputation recovery, Lindsay discovered a lot of things about herself, including that she felt better emotionally by not focusing on the life that was gone and how much she hated needing so much help but that she also truly depends on it.


"I'm such an independent person," she said. "But I'm also grateful that I have a mother like that, because what could I do?"


Lindsay said she found that her prosthetic arms were a struggle.


"These prosthetics are s---," she said. "I can't do anything with them. I can't do anything behind my head. They are heavy. They are made for men. They are claws, they are not feminine whatsoever."


For the next couple of years, Lindsay exercised diligently as part of the commitment she made to qualify for a hand transplant, which required her to be in shape. But the tough young woman now said she saw her body in a different way now.






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Soft, strong and long: The story of toilet paper


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Russians mock Kremlin decision on Depardieu passport






MOSCOW: Russians reacted Friday with amusement, disbelief and a heavy dose of irony to the news that the Kremlin has granted citizenship to French actor Gerard Depardieu to solve his tax woes.

In a letter broadcast on Russian television on Thursday, the former Oscar nominee declared his love for President Vladimir Putin and called Russia a "great democracy".

"He is impressed by our democracy -- he has completely lost his marbles," wrote one Facebook user, Vladimir Sokolov.

Far-left politician Eduard Limonov suggested Depardieu could reprise his famous film role of French revolutionary Georges Danton and risk detention by riot police at a regular unsanctioned rally against Putin.

"Gerard, come to Triumfalnaya Square on January 31 with your new Russian passport in your pocket," Limonov wrote on his blog.

"Our French friend: here's an invitation to a real historical role."

Depardieu seemed unlikely to take up this offer after Putin praised their "very friendly, personal relationship" at a recent news conference.

Many jokingly speculated about how the film star might adapt to life as a Russian pensioner if he moved after threatening to renounce his French citizenship over a proposed 75-percent tax rate on the super-rich.

If Depardieu, 64, opted to live in Russia more than half the tax year, he would pay just 13 percent tax to the government whose budget is highly dependent on state-owned energy resources.

"We're going to meet him pushing a trolley in the shop, in the queue for blood tests at the polyclinic or at the social security office," wrote journalist and blogger Anton Orekh on the website of popular Moscow Echo radio station.

"I'm ready to give him registration in my apartment, he can stay as long as he likes," wrote television host Tina Kandelaki on Twitter.

Depardieu, like other Russian citizens, would have to register at his place of residence with local authorities.

Yet many also questioned the morality of Russia's fast-tracking Depardieu's citizenship request.

His public opposition to paying high taxes in France showed he "loves money more than motherland," wrote Orekh.

"Let's give our passports to everyone who has lots of money and doesn't want to pay taxes at home!"

-AFP/fl



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The 10 biggest tech innovations (that we personally use) of our lifetimes



Next-train arrival signs, like this one for NYC subway system have revolutionized commutes. Screen shot: Instragram photo by Sree Sreenivasan



As the father of 9-year-old twins, I often find myself telling them about tech products and innovations that I didn't have growing up. All parents do it: trying to get their kids to understand how much tougher life was in the old days.


In my case, the old days were in the 1980s - not that long ago. But the range of change in our lives continues to impress me and make my children roll their eyes.


Yesterday, I posted a photo on Instagram (see above and on my Sreenet account), saying the NYC subway's next-train arrival guides are among the top 20 technology innovations of my lifetime.


As you can tell, I had to post in a hurry as the next train arrived two minutes later. As I stood inside the subway, blissfully without cell service, I had a chance to think about that concept of top tech innovations and asked myself whether those guides were, indeed, worthy of a top 20 listing.



I've now taken a shot at that list. Before you read it, some ground rules I gave myself:


  • The technology had to be for personal use, something that affected me and that I use myself. So innovations in space travel, nuclear physics and enterprise computing don't count.

  • Innovations that have benefited millions of others, but I don't personally use don't count (sorry, electric
    car).

  • They had to be widely available only after my teen years - i.e, around 1988 - to be considered (eliminating the Walkman, the CD, the home video camera, the microwave oven).

  • Innovations so new or so rare or so expensive - or all three - that my family couldn't acquire them until many years later, do count (some of the items below might have been under your Christmas tree, but not mine).

  • Innovations that were widely adopted but then became irrelevant in their original form aren't here (example: America Online, Compuserve, etc).
  • Tech products that are mostly an evolution from something prior don't count (therefore, the DVD doesn't make the list; it's too similar to its predecessors, Betamax, VHS and laserdisc).
  • And if I saw my dad using it, it doesn't count, even if it's wonderful and I use it every day (sorry, electric razor).

Basically, it has to be stuff I didn't have when I was a kid.

What would be on your version of this list? Here's mine (the first six are in order of importance; the rest aren't):


  1. The Internet/Web/Search: No explanation needed.

  2. Email: Electronic messaging recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, but it wasn't a true mass product until the mid-1990s.

  3. Cellphones and smartphones: Cellphones have been around for decades, but the true revolution has only happened since the mid-1990s.

  4. Digital cameras: These cameras changed the way I capture and share memories and how I see the worlds of my friends, family and complete strangers. While more of my friends than ever before sling fancy digital SLRs, the only digital camera I've used in the last 15 months or so is the one in my iPhone. The other day, when someone took a group portrait with a point-n-shoot digital camera, several of us in the picture commented on how long it had been since we had used an "old-fashioned" camera.

  5. Laptops and wifi: Sure, there were ridiculously expensive laptops around in the 1980s, but none had the transformative effect on my life the way the ones in the 1990s did. And the arrival of wifi freed those laptops from the suffocating ethernet cord.

  6. GPS (with a nod to web-based Mapquest and Google Maps): I still remember our car vacations started with my dad would going down to the AAA (Wikipedia tells me it was "known formerly as the American Automobile Association" - sort of like IBM, I guess) and get maps with our route highlighted in yellow. When I first saw Mapquest I was blown away by the potential; the arrival of Web-based Google Maps just continued the innovation and set the stage for how we all use GPS today.

    My friend Arik Hesseldahl (@AHess247) of AllThingsD once explained to me, for another story, how cool technology by itself isn't likely to change the landscape. Luck and government decisions play a role, too:

    GPS existed [prior to 1997], but was deliberately made inaccurate for non-military users under a federal directive known as "selective availability" that was eliminated in 2000 by order of President Clinton; prior to this, consumer GPS was good enough for hiking, but nowhere near good enough for in-car navigation, let alone geocaching.

  7. MetroCard: Prior to the arrival of these yellow electronic payment cards for the subway, New Yorkers had to be obsessed with having enough tokens on hand to enter the system. The MetroCard literally changed my life.

  8. Next-train arrival signs: Londoners and Londonphiles love to tell me how they've had these forever in the Underground, but these arrived in NYC only three years ago. Until these real-time signs showed up, you had no idea if your train was coming in two minutes or 20. Just last week, a handy next step: MTA Subway Time, an iPhone app that gives you the same real-time arrival data. It was officially released only for iOS, but, in a sign of the times, someone made an Android version within 24 hours, thanks to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's API offerings (more on APIs below). Yes, it's only for a few subway lines, but 90 percent of my trains are covered and this is my list, after all.

  9. Wii and Kinect: When I was growing up, Atari, Intellivision and Commodore were major players in the home console market. The systems that came after that were much more powerful and more popular, but were basically improvements on what came before (sorry, Sega, Nintendo 64,
    PlayStation, Xbox). But the
    Wii, which I first tested at a family gathering on Thanksgiving 2006, was a breakthrough worthy of this list. I saw something I'd never seen before: Grandparents, parents and kids all gathered around the big-screen TV, playing digital bowling, golf and tennis.

    Some of that may have happened on occasion in the Atari days, but now, the players were all standing, not sitting on a couch, thanks to the wireless remotes. I predicted on my local TV segment the following week that the Wii would be unlike any other video game product and outsell the competition. At the time and in the years to follow, gamer-snobs felt the Wii wasn't any good in comparison to consoles with fancier graphics, better sound and more complex - and more gruesome - titles. The Wii went onto to outsell the other so-called "seventh generation" consoles, including PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

    A logical next step in gaming has to be on my list. The Microsoft Kinect sensor, which works on Xbox, does away with the wireless remote and uses a player's arms and entire body to control the games - everything from sports to dance-offs. As I wrote in January 2011 about Five Things I Learned from Two Weeks With Kinect, this is only the beginning. "The Kinect shows that there's still lots of room for innovation in a field that seemed pretty saturated. I expect to see more developments in this area as the sensors gets smarter, the cameras gets sharper and the game play gets more sophisticated.


  10. Social media, including blogging: Here I'm including various platforms - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging - that have changed the way a billion-plus people spend their time, express themselves and engage with each other. For better and worse.

  11. Wikipedia: While it's easy to complain about some of the problems of Wikipedia, the fact is that it has completely changed the way I do everyday research. It's my first stop, not my last - and I sometimes spend as much time on the footnotes and where they lead as I do on the main text. Even hoaxes like the one uncovered last week don't deter me (see Bicholim Conflict on this list of the biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia history). If you want to truly understand Wikipedia's impact, potential and pitfalls, you have to read the definitive book about it, "The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia" by my friend Andrew Lih (@fuzheado).

  12. YouTube: I had considered not including YouTube because it is, in many ways, just an evolution in online video. But in recent years, YouTube has become its own community with four billion hours of video watched every month; an important tool for all kinds of marketing, promotion and propaganda; and a source of entertainment and information for 800 million people every month (a stat I found in this compelling Peter Kafka (@pkafka) post that makes that case that Al Jazeera English should have gone with a web-only platform, rather than buying Current TV as announced this week).

  13. Zipcar: This car-sharing service changed my family's life, allowing us to access a car in more convenient ways than traditional rental cars (we don't own a car, in part, because parking in our Manhattan building is $500 a month). This week's purchase of Zipcar by Avis for $500 million is causing consternation. Here's an article saying this is good for consumers; here's one that argues the opposite.

  14. Credit cards in NYC taxis: Until they came along, I had to always check my wallet for cash before grabbing a taxi. Since they became widely available in 2007, I've not had to hesitate before hailing a cab and, unlike some folks who complain about drivers unhappy to take cards, I've never faced an issue with that.

    There's another reason to use credit cards in cabs, as I wrote in 5 Lessons From a Lost iPhone: "3. I'll always pay for my NYC cabs with credit cards. Turns out the taxi medallion number (the unique number displayed on top of all yellow cabs in Manhattan) is recorded with every credit card purchase, meaning you have way of tracking down cabs you've taken." The taxi industry in the city is the process of a much bigger disruption: figuring out new apps that are changing the decades-old system of hailing cabs.


  15. DVR: The arrival of TiVo, and, later, the generic digital video recorder provided by the cable company, introduced us all to timeshifting TV in ways the complicated VHS system and its blink "12:00" clock never could.

  16. Netflix: I'm including Netflix here as a representative of a whole new class of video watching, a big leap from the DVR. Whether Netflix will be the eventual winner in this space or not (Amazon, Hulu and others are attacking it), the concept of getting movies anytime from anywhere has changed how our family accesses entertainment.

    But I don't understand how anyone uses Netflix without also accessing Instawatcher.com, which provides a much better, searchable listing of the on-demand movies on Netflix, including my favorite feature, "Expiring soon."

    If you don't want to spring for Netflix, but are an HBO subscriber, you have to check out the free HBO Go app or website, which provides access to dozens of movies and entire seasons of HBO shows that are no longer available on the HBO On Demand service on your cable box. For instance, I saw and enjoyed "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," a quirky, charming show I never saw when it first ran on the network.


  17. iPod and iTunes: These changed the music world forever, let us carry thousands of songs at a time and got millions of us to pay for digital music for the first time.

    My friend Hari Sreenivasan (@Hari; no relation), now an anchor on PBS Newshour, was the first to outline to me the power of iPod beyond music. One day in late 2001 (soon after iPod was launched), he predicted that the iPod would be a great way to introduce the Apple brand to PC users skeptical of the Mac. He saw it as a way to get people comfortable using an Apple product and getting them hooked and ready to try others. Even though he didn't call it that, iPod became a gateway drug that changed the company's fortunes and set it on the path to iPhone, iPad and beyond. If you are curious, the price of Apple stock on Oct. 1, 2001 was $15.49. On Oct. 1, 2012, it was $671.16 (it's down since then).


  18. Tablets and apps: In some ways, tablets feel like cousins of laptops and not worthy of this list. But in many other ways, they are, indeed, new. The key here are the apps we use in smartphones, too. As millions of users have discovered, tablets can be used in ways that are different from laptops and we see them being used as cash registers, restaurant menus, medical devices and much more. And all this is just getting started.

    I didn't include e-readers such as the Kindle on this list because while they were innovative, they are not going to stick around much longer. Thanks to tablets that let you read Kindle content without a Kindle, e-readers are dying much faster than anyone could have predicted. See this chart to understand the whole picture.


  19. APIs: I am not an engineer, but I play one on TV, thanks to my CNET tech segments on WCBS-TV. Since I don't program, it's not obvious why I'd include APIs - or application programming interfaces - on this list.

    But these web APIs, which allow live data and content from one web service to be posted and used on another have changed how we access information. Everything from mashups of real-estate listings and Google maps, to embedding videos, to the subway-arrival app I mentioned in #7 above, APIs are now a critical part of our digital lives. Here's a list of the most popular APIs.


  20. Cordless irons: I know some of you will claim to have had cordless electric irons for decades now, but the day I saw one of these, I had to have one when the prices became reasonable. They aren't as good as corded ones (the heat dissipates too quickly), but they changed my ironing life.


That's my 20. Am sure I am missing some others and that you will disagree with many of my choices (especially if you are in a different age bracket). That's what makes this list so much fun to put together. It has no right or wrong answers and it's all about you.

Hope you'll take a stab at creating a similar list of 5-20 tech innovations. You can post it in the comments below and/or tweet it with #mytoptech.





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