Misterio 6: El metano de las Viking

:-o

July 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.

Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.

So why no party?

Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?

The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."

Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.

Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.

Aquí para el artículo original.

Interrobang‽

Pues escuchando un podcast me enteré de la existencia de una de las cosas más increíbles del mundo: el interrobang:

‽

The invention of the interrobang

American Martin K. Speckter concocted the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin for "a rhetorical question" or "cross-examination"; bang is printers' slang for the exclamation point. Graphic treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.

In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders issued the Americana typeface and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington typewriters. During the 1970s, it was possible to buy replacement interrobang keycaps and strikers for some Smith-Corona typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word 'interrobang' appearing in some dictionaries and the mark itself being featured in magazine and newspaper articles.

The interrobang failed to amount to much more than a fad, however. It has not become a standard punctuation mark. Although most fonts do not include the interrobang, it has not disappeared: Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2 character set ( on the }/] and the ~/` keys) available with Microsoft Office. It was accepted into Unicode and is present in the fonts Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS, among others.

En francés se le dice Point exclarrogatif. Si alguien sabe cómo se le dice en español, por favor dígame. Y bueno, traten de usar este signo de puntuación, que es hermoso.

Misterio 5: La materia oscura

Take our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.

And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."

¡No olviden checar la página fuente!

Misterio 4: Los resultados homeopáticos de Belfast

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Artículo original

An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation

By MELENA RYZIK

MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV Networks that is broadcast only on college campuses, will announce today that it has selected its first poet laureate. No, he doesn’t rap. And it’s not Bob Dylan, or even Justin Timberlake.

It is John Ashbery, the prolific 80-year-old poet and frequent award winner known for his dense, postmodern style and playful language. One of the most celebrated living poets, Mr. Ashbery has won MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide.

The idea of the laureate program was not to create more English majors, but simply to whet an appetite, said Mr. Friedman, a poetry aficionado since he majored in literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan. Mr. Ashbery, he added, was the No. 1 choice to inaugurate the position. “He resonates with college students that we’ve talked with,” he said.

And Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The excerpts were chosen by David Kermani, Mr. Ashbery’s business manager, and two interns and an employee, all in their early 20s, in his office.

“We were just trying to pick lines that were catchy and sort of meaningful in some way, something that would appeal to what we thought younger people would be interested in,” Mr. Kermani said. These young people picked “things that had sort of raunchy references,” he added. “They thought it was sort of a hoot.”

Mr. Ashbery too was pleased by their choices, particularly because they reminded him of what was in his own canon. “I have a lot poems, so there are a lot of them that I don’t really think of very much,” he said. (Mr. Ashbery published “A Worldly Country: New Poems” in February, and an anthology, “Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems,” is due out in November.)

But will droves of young people respond?

“It’s our hope that we will interest college kids in poetry in a new way, make it hip for them,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that has published Mr. Ashbery’s work. But, Mr. Halpern admitted, “it’s very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.”

Though his roots are in 1950s bohemia, Mr. Ashbery is perhaps not the most obvious choice for the iPod generation. He works on a typewriter and doesn’t listen to popular music, with the exception of a chance encounter with the Peaches & Herb song “Reunited” in a cab in the 1980s; it inspired his poem “The Songs We Know Best.” (“Just like a shadow in an empty room/Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb/Just like a project of which no one tells-/Or didja really think that I was somebody else?”)

But Mr. Friedman is optimistic that verse will find its new audience, and mtvU plans to continue the program with other laureates after Mr. Ashbery’s one-year tenure is up.

“I don’t think there’s such a big leap from the artists we’re playing to the poetry that John is creating,” Mr. Friedman said. “Some of the music we play, Bright Eyes and the Decemberists, they’re phenomenal poets. I feel like there’s a connection there.”

Though he has not been offered the job, Mr. Ashbery has said that he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in being the United States poet laureate.

“There is a great deal of responsibility that comes with it,” he said. “You have to spend part of the time in Washington. It’s really a public post.”

But the mtvU gig — which is unpaid — came with few strings attached, and was not very demanding of his time, he said.

“I don’t have any specific duties,” he said. “They’re going to publicize my poetry and maybe people will get interested in it and other poets will benefit. That’s about as much work or responsibility as I would want.”

After a 50-year career and nearly as many published volumes, is Mr. Ashbery finally slacking off? He laughed. No, he said. “I’d rather keep the effort for writing poetry.”

Source: NYT

Misterio 3: Rayos cósmicos ultra energéticos

For more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.

As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 10¹⁹ electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.

Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.

Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.

Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 10²⁰ electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.

No olviden checar NewScientist

Y por si a alguien le interesa continuar: esto

Misterio 2: El problema del horizonte

Our universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have traveled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 10⁵⁰ in 10^-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen, but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

Recuerden visitar la página de New Scientist

Compact disc hits 25th birthday

Exactly 25 years ago the world's first compact disc was produced at a Philips factory in Germany, sparking a global music revolution.

More than 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide since then and it remains the dominant format despite the growth in digital downloads.

The CD was jointly developed by Philips and Sony and the disc has also become a key storage method for computer users.

The first CD produced was The Visitors by Abba.

Piet Kramer, who was a member of the optical group at Philips during the disc's development, said: "When Philips teamed up with Sony to develop the CD, our first target was to win over the world for the CD.

"We did this by collaborating openly to agree on a new standard. For Philips, this open innovation was a new approach and it paid off."

He said the companies had never imagined that the computing and entertainment industries would also opt for the CD as a storage system for content.

Jacques Heemskerk, who was one of the senior engineers involved with the optical side of CD players, said the team knew they were building a revolutionary product.

"It was revolutionary in many fields - the optics were new, the disc was new. At the start of development there wasn't even a laser that would work well enough for our needs.

"The most advanced laser at the time had a lifespan of only 100 hours."

He said the company had always planned on the format lasting at least 20 to 25 years.

"That was the model we had in mind although it seems that CD is going to last a lot longer than that. For many people the CD is still the original format, with others being derivative or back-ups."

The two companies began work on the format in 1979 and targetted a disc which could hold an hour of audio. The capacity was extended to 74 minutes, however, to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, forcing the disk to be made slightly larger."

"I always wish we had stuck with the original plan for an 11cm disc; it would have been more suited to the on-the-go age," said Mr Heemskerk.

He said that it had been a big culture shock for Philips when they had allied with Sony.

"The world was not as globalised as it is today. Our management had told us to be as open as possible and to share everything because that was the only way to have success.

"But we were suspicious and so were their engineers. But after a few days it became clear we could work together."

He added: "There were other companies working on similar technologies, so there was pressure.

"We always knew we could make the product but it was always about making it for the right cost and at scale."

The first CDs went on sale in November 1982 and were mainly classical recordings.

Classical music lovers were believed to be more affluent than pop and rock music fans, and Philips thought they would be more inclined to pay the price for the more expensive CDs and the very expensive CD-players,

The first models cost 2,000 Dutch guilders, about £1,000 at today's rate, taking into account inflation.

"When Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau recorded one of the first CDs for Polygram we discovered that he was grunting and panting while playing. Before on vinyl you didn't hear that but on CD it was crystal clear," said Frank van den Berg, a former member of the Polygram CD development task force.

In the last 10 years CD sales have been dropping worldwide while digital download sales are rising rapidly.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), digital sales will account for a quarter of all worldwide music sales by 2010.

CD sales in the UK have dropped 10% in the first half of this year, while download purchases have increased by 50%.

Richard Gooch, head of technology at IFPI, said: "CDs remain a very popular format for buying music in the digital era - indeed as CDs are a digital format they actually kick-started the digital age.

""The CD remained the most popular Christmas present in Britain last year. Despite the rise of downloading we expect that the CD will be here for many years to come."

Mr Heemskerk said CDs remained his format of choice.

"I don't have an iPod, although my youngest son uses one. But CDs are still his preferred format and he copies them on to his MP3 player."

Misterio 1: El efecto placebo

Michael Brooks, en New Scientist, hizo una lista de los trece fenómenos que no pueden ser explicados con la ciencia actual. El primero:

1 The placebo effect

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

A 30 años de "WOW!"

Hoy hace 30 años, por primera y única vez se recibió una señal del espacio exterior que aún se considera un problema no resuelto por la ciencia.

Aquí la historia de El País:

Treinta años sin oír 'guau'

El 15 de agosto de 1977 una antena para buscar vida extraterrestre captó una intrigante señal

JOSÉ MANUEL ABAD LIÑÁN 15/08/2007

El cosmos, por norma general, emite una señal monótona y aburrida, el eco del Big Bang. Hace 30 años, una señal rompió bruscamente esa monotonía. El 15 de agosto de 1977, a las 11:15 de la noche, la radioantena Big Ear (Gran Oído) de la Universidad de Ohio captó una señal de 72 segundos y una intensidad que superó en algún momento 30 veces al aburrido ruido de fondo. Algo así como un chillido retumbando sobre el leve murmullo del cosmos.

El astrónomo Jerry Ehman había sido despedido de Big Ear cinco años antes. El Congreso de EE UU retiraba su ayuda económica al programa SETI de investigación de vida extraterrestre. Pero Ehman estaba convencido de que la antena podía dar mucho de sí y seguía trabajando como voluntario. Unos días después de aquel 15 de agosto, se dispuso a revisar el montón de papel continuo que había ido escupiendo la impresora con los resultados del rastreo.

Todos los registros entraban en la norma, hasta que topó con un código, 6EQUJ5, que venía a decir que la señal a la que se refería, en comparación a la de los objetos celestes, era extraordinariamente intensa y concreta y procedía de un único punto en el espacio. Es decir, muy parecida a las emisiones que se emplean en las comunicaciones humanas. Alguien o algo parecía haberla emitido intencionadamente desde el espacio. Ehman agarró un lápiz rojo y anotó al lado del código la exclamación "wow!" ("¡guau!"). La señal quedaba bautizada.

Desde entonces, el astrónomo, que firma sus mensajes electrónicos como Jerry Wow Ehman, se ha dedicado a descartar desde las explicaciones más obvias a las más estrafalarias. Entre las primeras, que aquella señal viniera de una galaxia, planeta o asteroide. Negativo. Otros fenómenos cósmicos más complejos, como las lentes gravitatorias o el centelleo interestelar, quedaron descartados.

Aquel grito cósmico ponía a prueba el escepticismo de cualquier científico, pero admitir directamente que viniera de una inteligencia extraterrestre resultaba osado. Había que ampliar el círculo de sospechosos, y Ehman incluyó las emisiones humanas. Como la de los satélites. Pero la señal se había emitido en la banda de los 1.420 megahercios, prohibida para todo tipo de transmisiones en la Tierra. Un avión o vehículo espacial tampoco podían ser su origen. En 72 segundos, la duración de la señal, una aeronave habría descrito una amplia línea en el cielo. Y Wow procedía de un único punto.

Cabría la posibilidad de que la señal hubiera salido desde Tierra y se reflejara en un trozo de chatarra espacial. Ehman piensa que esa posibilidad existe, aunque es demasiado remota. El trozo tendría que haberse quedado quieto. Pero además de orbitar en torno al planeta, suelen rotar sobre sí.

¿Qué explicación queda? Ehman refiere en el análisis que ha publicado con motivo del aniversario: "Ya que todas las posibilidades de un origen terrestre han sido descartadas o parecen improbables, y ya que no se ha podido descartar la posibilidad de un origen extraterrestre, debo concluir que una inteligencia extraterrestre podría haber enviado la señal que nosotros recibimos como la fuente de Wow. Estoy a la espera de recibir otras señales como la de Wow que puedan captar y analizar muchos observatorios", afirma. Pero con Big Ear será ya imposible. Se desmontó en 1998 para construir en su lugar un campo de golf de 18 hoyos y 400 viviendas.

Cómo puede ser que el golf sea más importante y rentable que la ciencia; vamos, más allá, que la curiosidad misma. . .

Who's next now?

Rare river dolphin 'now extinct'

A freshwater dolphin found only in China is now "likely to be extinct", a team of scientists has concluded.

The researchers failed to spot any Yangtze river dolphins, also known as baijis, during an extensive six-week survey of the mammals' habitat.

The team, writing in the Royal Society Biology Letters journals, blamed unregulated fishing as the main reason behind the dolphins' demise.

But the WWF campaign group said the research was not conclusive.

"WWF does not think that the baiji dolphin can be declared extinct or 'effectively extinct' because the search was conducted within a short period of time over a limited area of the river," said a spokesman.

He said a species cannot be formally classed as extinct until no animal has been found in the wild for 50 years - but the last report of a wild baiji dolphin was verified in 2004.

The World Conservation Union's Red List of Threaten Species currently classifies the creature as "critically endangered".

Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), one of the paper's co-authors, described the findings as a "shocking tragedy".

"The Yangtze river dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20 million years ago," Dr Turvey explained.

"This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet."

If confirmed, it would be the first extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years.

'Incidental impact'

The species (Lipotes vexillifer) was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae, an ancient mammal family that is understood to have separated from other marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, about 40-20 million years ago.

The white, freshwater dolphin had a long, narrow beak and low dorsal fin; lived in groups of three or four and fed on fish.

The team carried out six-week visual and acoustic survey, using two research vessels, in November and December 2006.

"While it is conceivable that a couple of surviving individuals were missed by the survey teams," the team wrote, "our inability to detect any baiji despite this intensive search effort indicates that the prospect of finding and translocating them to a [reserve] has all but vanished."

The scientists added that there were a number of human activities that caused baiji numbers to decline, including construction of dams and boat collisions.

"However, the primary factor was probably unsustainable by-catch in local fisheries, which used rolling hooks, nets and electrofishing," they suggested.

"Unlike most historical-era extinctions of large bodied animals, the baiji was the victim not of active persecution but incidental mortality resulting from massive-scale human environmental impacts - primarily uncontrolled and unselective fishing," the researchers concluded.

Blackle

Según los cálculos, si Google tuviera una pantalla negra, se ahorrarían 750 mega watts/hora cada año.

En respuesta, Google creó una versión en negro de su página de búsqueda:

Blackle

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

There are a lot of great web sites about saving energy and being more environmentally friendly. They are full of great tips covering the little things that we can all do to make a difference today. Try Blackling "energy saving tips" or visit treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental awareness.

Back from Vallarta!

Y lo único oque tengo que decir es:

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