Follow along with CNET as we dive into Huawei's announcements for CES 2013. The press conference starts at 1 p.m. PT on Monday, and CNET will be there to cover it live. We have a live blog full of news and analysis.
You can tune in to the blog here:
CNET's live coverage of Huawei's 2013 CES press conference
Editors' note: This story has been updated since it was originally published to correct the time of event to 1 p.m. PT.
Jan 6, 2013 4:52pm
(Junko Kimura/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama will nominate former senator Chuck Hagel to be his next Secretary of Defense tomorrow.
Senior officials within the administration and Capitol Hill confirmed the pick to ABC News today after the Nebraska Republican had emerged as a frontrunner among potential candidates several weeks ago.
Hagel, 66, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and businessman who served in the senate from 1997 to 2009. After having sat on that chamber’s Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, he has in recent years gathered praise from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board as well as the policy board of the current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
But the former lawmaker faces an upscale battle in the coming confirmation hearings in Congress; critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at his record toward Israel and what some have called a lack of experience necessary to lead the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy or its operations.
Progressives have also expressed concern about comments he made in 1998, questioning whether an “openly, aggressively gay” James Hormel could be nominated to an ambassador position by then-President Clinton. Hagel apologized for the comments last month, adding that he also supported gays in the military – a position he once opposed.
Who Is Chuck Hagel? Meet Obama’s Top Pentagon Pick
The friction with his former colleagues has left a degree of uncertainty in the air going into the hearings. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell demurred when asked whether he would support the man who, in 2008, he had championed for his candidness and stature in foreign policy.
“I’m going to wait and see how the hearings go and see whether Chuck’s views square with the job he would be nominated to do,” he told George Stephanopoulos.
Senator Lindsey Graham was more blunt in his opposition to Hagel on CNN. The Georgia Republican called Hagel an “in your face nomination,” and said he “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history.”
If confirmed, Hagel will join a crop of new cabinet members expected to join the president in his second term, including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was nominated in December to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
ABC’s Elizabeth Hartfield and Devin Dwyer contributed reporting.
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 Karaś 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.
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Photograph by Nenad Saljic
A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.
Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.
(Read more about full moons.)
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Micah Albert
A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.
The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Jason Ching
Published January 4, 2013
This could have been Mars back before the dinosaurs built a super space ramp to our planet, at least according to software engineer and artist Kevin Gill.
What if the Red Planet weren't always in that constant state of blushing? Kevin Gill, a software engineer who also re-engineers planets every now and then, imagines Mars might long ago have looked quite a bit more like the aqua-green marble we call home.
To create the above image, Gill used data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), picked an arbitrary sea level, and used a script to cover all the surfaces of Mars below that line with a nice shade of royal blue. From there, Gill writes on Google+ that it was a combination of some earthly textures borrowed from NASA and Gill's own imagination -- adhering of course to the kind of strict logic you'd expect from a career engineer... and an artist.
There is no scientific reasoning behind how I painted it; I tried to envision how the land would appear given certain features or the effects of likely atmospheric climate. For example, I didn't see much green taking hold within the area of Olympus Mons and the surrounding volcanoes, both due to the volcanic activity and the proximity to the equator (thus a more tropical climate). For these desert-like areas I mostly used textures taken from the Sahara in Africa and some of Australia. Likewise, as the terrain gets higher or lower in latitude I added darker flora along with tundra and glacial ice. These northern and southern areas' textures are largely taken from around northern Russia. Tropical and subtropical greens were based on the rainforests of South America and Africa.
Paint by number, you have met your match.
Of course, Gill points out that "this wasn't intended as an exhaustive scientific scenario" but hopes some of his assumptions will prove to be true. Here's hoping the Curiosity rover has a secret time machine built in that NASA hasn't told us about yet, so we can see just how close Gill is to the real deal.
Here are a few alternate views Gill cooked up:
A wet Mars with its own Atlantis adrift in a vast sea.
Here's a closer view of the Martian land mass with added oceanic action:
(Via The Register)
As Steubenville, Ohio, prepares for the high-profile rape trial of two high school football players, officials, battling allegations of a cover-up, announced the creation of a new website today to debunk rumors and create what they said would be a transparent resource for the community.
"This site is not designed to be a forum for how the Juvenile Court ought to rule in this matter," the website, called Steubenville Facts, said.
A timeline of the case, beginning with the alleged gang rape of a 16-year-old girl at a party on Aug. 11-12, 2012, is posted on the site. Summaries of Ohio law relating to the case and facts about the local police force including statistics on how many graduated from Steubenville schools, is included.
The case gained national attention last week when hacking collective Anonymous leaked a video of Steubenville high school athletes mocking the 16-year-old female victim and making crude references to the alleged rape.
Steubenville Herald-Star, Michael D. McElwain/AP Photo
"It's disgusting, and I've had people calling, numerous people call here, upset, they have seen it, one woman, two women were crying, because of what they witnessed," Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said. "It really is disgusting to watch that video."
Anonymous has called for more arrests, however Steubenville Police have said their hands are tied.
"Steubenville Police investigators are caring humans who recoil and are repulsed by many of the things they observe during an investigation," the website said, addressing the video. "Like detectives in every part of America and the world, they are often frustrated when they emotionally want to hold people accountable for certain detestable behavior but realize that there is no statute that allows a criminal charge to be made."
Occupy Steubenville, a grassroots group, estimated 1,300 people attended a rally today outside the Jefferson County Courthouse, where rape victims and their loved ones gathered to share their stories.
The father of a teenage rape victim was met with applause when he shared his outrage.
"I've tried to show my girl that not all men are like this, but only a despicable few," he said. "And their mothers that ignore the truth that they gave birth to a monster."
Authorities investigated the case and charged two Steubenville high school athletes on Aug. 22, 2012.
The teenagers face trial on Feb. 13, 2013 in juvenile court before a visiting judge.
Attorneys for the boys have denied charges in court.
Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
(Image: Cityscape/a.collection/Getty)
"You would die if you crashed right now." Would such a warning make you take your foot off the accelerator? That's the idea behind a scheme to warn drivers of the consequences of speeding developed by engineers at Japan's Fukuoka Institute of Technology and heavy goods vehicle maker UD Trucks, also in Japan. They are developing what they call a "safe driving promotion system" that warns drivers what kind of crash could ensue if they don't slow down.
Their patent-pending system uses the battery of radar, ultrasound sonar and laser sensors found in modern cars and trucks to work out the current kinetic energy of a vehicle. It also checks out the distance to the vehicle in front and keeps watch on its brake lights, too. An onboard app that has learned the driver's reaction time over all their previous trips then computes the likelihood of collision - and if the driver's speed is risky, it displays the scale of damage that could result.
The warning that flashes up could vary from something like a potential whiplash injury due to a rear-end shunt to a fatal, car-crushing collision with fire. The inventors hope this kind of in-car advice will promote safety more forcefully than current warning systems, which merely display the distance to the vehicle in front. "A sense of danger will be awakened in the driver that makes them voluntarily refrain from dangerous driving," they predict.
CARACAS: Hugo Chavez's top aides have gone on the offensive, accusing the opposition and media of waging a "psychological war," as Venezuela's cancer-stricken president battles a serious lung infection.
The closing of ranks followed a high-level gathering of top Venezuelan officials in Havana with Chavez, amid growing demands to know whether he will be fit on January 10 to take the oath of office for another six-year-term.
"The official version of what is happening is unsustainable," the head of the main opposition coalition, Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, said in an interview with AFP and digital news outlet Noticias24.
Aveledo said it would make more sense for the government to acknowledge "the truth" and use it to prepare the country for what is to come. But it "doesn't want to admit that the president is absent."
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas disclosed that Chavez, who was convalescing in Havana after a fourth round of surgery last month, was suffering from a "severe pulmonary infection" that had led to a "respiratory insufficiency."
But Vice President Nicolas Maduro made clear on his return from Cuba Thursday that there were no plans for a transfer of power from Chavez before the inauguration.
Venezuela's constitution calls for new elections to be held within 30 days if the president is unable to take the oath of office or dies during his first four years in office.
Diosdado Cabello, the speaker of the Chavista-controlled National Assembly, has said the president could be sworn in at a later date before the Supreme Court.
All eyes here are on a session Saturday of the National Assembly in which Cabello was expected to be re-elected speaker, for signs of what course the government intends to take.
In a television appearance, Maduro and Cabello went out of their way to deny rumours of an internal power struggle between them, with Maduro saying they had sworn before Chavez that they would remain united.
"We are here more united than ever," said Maduro, who is Chavez's handpicked successor. "And we have sworn before comandante Hugo Chavez, and we reaffirmed to him today in our oath... that we would be united with our people."
Maduro attacked a report in the Spanish newspaper ABC alleging a power struggle between the two, and accused the opposition of "lies and manipulation, a campaign to try to create uncertainty."
"We know that the United States is where these manipulations are being managed," he said. "They think that their time has come. And we have entered a kind of crazy hour of offensive by the right, here and internationally."
In a televised statement, Villegas warned "the Venezuelan people about the psychological war that the transnational media complex has unleashed around the health of the chief of state, with the ultimate goal of destabilizing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."
In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied that US officials were meddling in Venezuelan affairs, but acknowledged there had been contact with Venezuelans "from across the political spectrum."
"There's no 'made-in-America' solution here. This has to be something that Venezuelans have to do," Nuland said.
Chavez was re-elected October 7 despite his debilitating battle with cancer and the strongest opposition challenge yet to his 14-year rule in Venezuela, an OPEC member with the world's largest proven oil reserves.
But he has not been seen in public since he underwent a long and complicated surgery for a recurrence of cancer in Cuba on December 11, and officials have acknowledged that his recovery has been difficult.
The rector of the Central University of Venezuela, Cecilia Garcia Arocha, proposed sending a team of medical experts to Havana to assess his condition. Opposition leader Antonio Ledezma said it should include opposition figures.
Cancer was first detected by Cuban doctors in June 2011, but the Venezuelan government has never revealed what form of the disease Chavez is battling.
Medical experts say infections are common and often fatal in cancer cases because chemotherapy treatments for the disease involve suppressing the victim's immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable.
"Up to 50 per cent of deaths of patients affected by solid tumours are provoked directly or indirectly by infections," Doctor Thierry Berghmans of the Jules Bordet Institute hospital in Brussels said in a report.
A 1990 study in the European Journal of Cancer found that "major infections" resulted directly or indirectly in 24 per cent of deaths of cancer patients in intensive care units.
- AFP/jc
Twenty-three hundred years ago, hordes of mice, snakes, and insects fled the Greek city of Helike on the Gulf of Corinth (map). "After these creatures departed, an earthquake occurred in the night," wrote the ancient Roman writer Claudius Aelianus. "The city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared."
Since then, generations of scientists and folklorists have used a dizzying array of methods to attempt to predict earthquakes. Animal behavior, changes in the weather, and seismograms have all fallen short. (Watch: home video footage and the science of earthquakes.)
The dream is to be able to forecast earthquakes like we now predict the weather. Even a few minutes' warning would be enough for people to move away from walls or ceilings that might collapse or for nuclear plants and other critical facilities to be shut down safely in advance of the temblor. And if accurate predictions could be made a few days in advance, any necessary evacuations could be planned, much as is done today for hurricanes.
Scientists first turned to seismology as a predictive tool, hoping to find patterns of foreshocks that might indicate that a fault is about to slip. But nobody has been able to reliably distinguish between the waves of energy that herald a great earthquake and harmless rumblings.
Seismologists just can't give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether we're about to have a large earthquake, said Thomas Jordan, director of the University of Southern California's Southern California Earthquake Center at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco in December.
So some scientist have turned their attention to other signals, including electricity, that might be related to activity occurring below ground as a fault prepares to slip. (How to build earthquake-ready homes—cheaply.)
Like Underground Lightning
One theory is that when an earthquake looms, the rock "goes through a strange change," producing intense electrical currents, says Tom Bleier, a satellite engineer with QuakeFinder, a project funded by his parent company, Stellar Solutions, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"These currents are huge," Bleier said at the AGU meeting. "They're on the order of 100,000 amperes for a magnitude 6 earthquake and a million amperes for a magnitude 7. It's almost like lightning, underground."
To measure those currents, Bleier's team has spent millions of dollars putting out magnetometers along fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan, and Greece. The instruments are sensitive enough to detect magnetic pulses from electrical discharges up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) away.
"In a typical day along the San Andreas fault [in California], you might see ten pulses per day," he told National Geographic News. "The fault is always moving, grinding, snapping, and crackling."
Before a large earthquake, that background level of static-electricity discharges should rise sharply, Bleier said.
And that is indeed what he claims he's seen prior to the half dozen magnitude 5 and 6 earthquakes whose precursors he's been able to monitor.
"It goes up to maybe 150 or 200 pulses a day," he said.
The number of pulses, he added, seems to surge about two weeks before the earthquake then drop back to background level until shortly before the fault slips. "That's the pattern we're looking for," he said.
False Alarms
But magnetic pulses could be caused by a lot of other things, ranging from random events within the Earth to lightning, solar flares, and electrical interference from highway equipment, lawn mowers, or even a nearby farmers' tractor engine. And that's not the only thing that can interfere with sensitive electrical equipment. "Spiders got inside of our instruments once, so we had to put screens in front of it," Bleier remembers.
Bleier also saw that charged particles called ions produced from currents deep within the Earth eventually migrate to the surface. "So we added a negative ion sensor and a positive ion sensor," he said.
And because rainy weather can also produce spikes in ion concentrations, his team also added humidity sensors to help rule out this possible cause of false alarms.
Finally, he noticed that when the ions reach the air, the positive and negative charges neutralize. This produces a burst of infrared radiation that can fool weather satellites into thinking the ground near the fault is warming up, even when ground-based weather stations say it isn't. This is easily visible by GOES weather satellites, he says.
"If all of these things happen, then we think there's going to be an earthquake greater than magnitude 5 about two days after," he said.
His team hasn't yet monitored enough large earthquakes for him to be sure that what he's found is valid for all quakes. "But the patterns look really interesting," he said.
But he does feel they have enough good clues to move ahead. Starting in January, his team will try to start making forecasts. "Instead of looking backwards in time, we're going to start looking forwards," he said.
Other scientists are contributing laboratory analysis to support the magnetic field theory. Robert Dahlgren, an electrical engineer at the SETI Institute, has spent 16 months working with other scientists to squeeze rocks under high pressures to see if they produce electrical currents.
He confirmed that dry rocks indeed produce pressure-dependent current and voltage signals. But he found no discharges from rocks soaked in the type of brine found at earthquake epicenter depths, presumably because the salty brine short circuits the current.
What does this say for earthquake prediction? He has no idea. "I'm the instrument guy," he says. But he notes that the signals he measured in the laboratory could indeed generate magnetic fields under the right conditions.
It's a very painstaking type of research. "It takes a year to prepare the brine-saturated rock samples," he said. "It's like breeding elephants. It takes a long time to get results."
Nor is earthquake prediction a field rife with successes.
Sorting the Wheat From the Chaff
A few years ago, some scientists thought earthquakes might be predictable by changes in the Earth's ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere a couple hundred miles (300 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. The theory was that ions produced by the soon-to-slip fault could disturb the ionosphere.
But an analysis of five ionosphere disturbances recorded before earthquakes found that each could have been caused by something else—usually the sun. That's "a space-physics signal, not an earthquake signal," says Jeremy Thomas, a space plasma physicist at Northwest Research Associates and the Digipen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Thomas also presented his findings at the AGU meeting.
It's particularly telling, Thomas says, that the same disturbances in the ionosphere could be found far away from the earthquake epicenter. "If it's related to the earthquake, you wouldn't have the signal thousands of kilometers away," he said.
This lack of success doesn't mean that earthquake prediction is quackery.
"It is a field that is very much alive," says Michael Blanpied, executive director of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, whose scientists assess the believability of proposed earthquake prediction methods and report findings to the U.S. Geological Survey.
"There are a lot of people attacking the problem from a lot of angles and trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff—to find out if there is some wheat in there, which is still not clear," he said.
"The heart of the issue is that the field contains people who are working at a very highly professional level, people who come from other professional fields, and people who don't have a scientific background but think they have something to contribute."
And sorting that out, he added, is what earthquake prediction science is all about.
Guess which hot chocolate is most delicious?
I've always heard that smell plays an important role in how food tastes. I didn't expect that color could also sway the taste buds. A study published in the Journal of Sensory Studies found that the color of a cup can influence the way people taste hot chocolate.
Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, and Charles Spence, a professor at the University of Oxford in England, subjected 57 participants to what may be one the tastiest science experiments ever.
The participants tasted samples of hot chocolate served in four different colors of plastic cups: white, cream, red, and orange. The sippers preferred the flavor of the beverage in orange or cream-colored cups.
So why did orange and cream set themselves apart from white and red? It's a bit mysterious, but it definitely involves the way the brain processes visual information and allows it to influence our sense of taste.
"These results should hopefully help stimulate chefs, restaurateurs, and those working in the food and beverage packaging sectors to think more carefully about the color of their plateware/packaging and its potential effects on their customers' perception of the taste/flavor of the products that they happen to be serving/delivering to market," the researchers write.
There has already been research into how the color of food itself impacts our taste. A 2007 study in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that the color of orange juice had a greater impact on taste perception than actual differences in samples. What's intriguing about this latest study is how the color of the packaging impacts our taste perceptions.
The taste challenge
Not one to shy away from a science challenge, I took it upon myself to become a guinea pig and tackle this important issue head-on. I raided the cabinet for Fiestaware, coming up with mugs in the colors of red, blue, and orange.
I prepared two packets of Starbucks-brand hot cocoa in double chocolate flavor in a 2-cup measuring cup. I poured an equal amount into each mug. Sipping them thoughtfully, I thought I detected a greater smoothness and sweetness in the hot chocolate that was gently steaming in the orange mug.
The problem with my findings is that I already knew the results of the study. I needed an unwitting test subject, so I called the one person I know who is a hot chocolate connoisseur... my mother.
My mom came over and tasted the hot chocolate from each cup. She considered the flavors. She thought the red mug tasted a bit bitter. She thought the blue was nicely chocolatey. Her favorite, though, was the hot chocolate in the orange mug.
Sure, my test sample size is incredibly small, but the orange mug is the clear winner of my mini-experiment. I also learned something very important today. Science is delicious.
The taste test requires deep contemplation.
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