(Brief) Hiatus

I have to heavy-heartedly announce that this blog is on a hiatus.

As you might have noticed, I have missed many FSNDs and tried to keep on but badly failed.

I will not stop writing. Maintaining a blog requires a lot of effort and I decided to put first quality over quantity, so I will write again whenever I will have more time.

Thanks for your support and see you soon.

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 31/10/12

Our nearest star has a planet: 

I still remember the times when the question of our loneliness in the universe was encircled by puzzling questions on the same train of thought about the solar system and its uniqueness. We saw many stars, as we always did, but no other planets other than the one in the solar system. That made us think we are a "special" one, and being (so far, at least) the only one with life in our solar system made us even more pretentious on being unique. There was no clear answer for why apparently only our sun had planets. There are trillions of sun in a galaxy and trillion of galaxies in the universe. Why didn't we see more planets around us? That made us feel astronomically lonely and misunderstood.

It was no more that two decades ago when the first confirmed planet outside the solar system was discovered. Since then, more than 800 extrasolar planets have been discovered. The planets were there, but our technology wasn't good enough to see them, next to the luminosity of stars, often many orders of magnitude brighter than ours. The science of looking for exoplantes has increasingly become a very hot topic in astronomy. Techniques are becoming finer and astonishingly precise.

This month, it has been announced that even our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, just 4.3 light years distant, has a planet. And it is a small and rocky one, even if too close to the star to be habitable and to even host water in liquid form. Nonetheless, it is an amazing discovery. Alpha Centauri - being the closest star - was heavily studied and it was the natural first place to look for another planet. Yet it was never found, because its planet is very close to the star and moving quickly.

This news not only is amazing for sci-fi lovers, for which Alpha Centauri has always been target of the creative fantasy of films and books writers, and still not only from a philosophical point of view, giving hints toward a more planet-populated universe, but also for scientists. The technique to make the discovery certain had to deal with measurements with precisions on the scales of half-a-meter per second. That is slower than walking speed. And remember that those measurements are from a source 40 millions of millions kilometers away from us.

From the uncertainty of having other planets at all in the universe to the certainty of having one on our closest star, it only took twenty years. How long will it take to discover the first one in the habitable zone and with life on it?


Dinosaur feathers 'developed for courtship'

Stunning nine gigapixel image is most detailed ever of our own galaxy

5 Passwords you should never pick

I wanted to write a post about which passwords are best and how to find a strategy to pick up a good password.
Then I realized that it would be pointless, as at the same moment you tell a strategy to form a good password, it becomes an information manual for crackers and might be implemented in bruteforce methods.

What I will tell you is what are the 5 passwords you should NEVER pick.

1. password, 123456, qwerty and hunter2.

The first two are between the most used passwords of all time. There have been many passwords leaks and the Yahoo leak which was storing unencrypted passwords and usernames (foolish, I know) made possible interesting statistics: on 450,000 passwords leaked, an astonishing 0.38% was 123456 and 0.18% was password. Figure why those are the first passwords a cracker would check.

2. Vocabulary words.

Bruteforcers have already implemented methods to quickly spot those words. Even a random, only-letter 3 characters word would be safer than a vocabulary word.

3. Passwords without numbers.

Using numbers increases the possible characters used from 26 to 36, which becomes hugely significant if combined with a long password.

4. Passwords without capitals.

Using capitals doubles the possible combinations of characters, so from 26 possible permutation we would have 56, which combined with numbers would give 66. Symbols might be used as well to give extra security for smaller words, but many websites do not accept symbols in passwords.

5. L33t speak.

Crackers already know leet speak (even before normal users). They are already used to bruteforce passwords. If you don't know what it is, it is a technique to exchange letters with numbers which look like letters:

O -> 0
I -> 1
Z -> 2
E -> 3
A -> 4
S -> 5
G -> 6
T -> 7
B -> 8

This methods bypasses the vocabulary word check and potentially makes a good encryption, but it has become too popular.

This is the reason for which it is not good to tell encryption methods to form passwords. They will be used in the future generations of bruteforce software. It is much safer to create your own encryption.


Still, I can tell you a common good method which will not spoil much to crackers:

use mnemonics!

Transforming a sentence only known to you into letters and numbers will be as good as a totally random sequence of characters and numbers. For example: 

I hate to wake up at 8 o'clock every Monday

will become:

Ihtwua8o'ceM

which will give ~79 bits of entropy, which is safe enough. It might seem hard to memorize but it's very easy to retrieve if you forget it and as safe as it can get. It would be one of 5.4036 x 10^23 possibilities and would take 1.7135 x 10^13 Years to discover with 1000 checks per second.

Even if this is an excellent method enough (the only problem occurs if someone manages to guess your initial sentence, which completely destroys the safety of this method, but if you did not pick up something common as the first lines of a popular song or poem, it will be safe enough) there are many other ways to create passwords which are easy to remember and require one (or more) encryption methods as the one used above. I will let you have fun with finding your own method.

But why using encryption?

It is a good method to have easy-to-remember but difficult-to-guess passwords. Of course the encryption method must be only known to you and should be memorable enough.

Another good suggestion would be not to use the same passwords for many websites. This is because some websites might not care to store passwords safely (even Yahoo, as we have seen before) and a leak will give your ultra-safe and encrypted password away, which you also accidentally use for your internet banking. Surveys say that around 60% of people use the same password for every service.

There are, of course, also methods to encrypt a memorable password for different websites and then have a set of different passwords with only one encryption method to remember. I will leave you the fun to find a good one.

Now, quickly go to change your password!

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/10/12

Skydiver breaks sound barrier:

it was a quite spectacular event, the one set up and performed by Felix Baumgartner, Austrian skydiver that pushed his passion a bit too far: farther than any of his colleagues before him, to be precise.

On 14 October, he jumped from a helium balloon at the height of  39,045m (breaking a world record) and reached the free-fall speed of 1,342.8km/h (breaking another world record).

With nothing on apart from his parachute and suit (which served a similar purpose to an astronaut suit), he fell freely for 93% of his 39km trip. It took less to fall for 36km (4'20") than to reach land with his parachute for 3km (4'43").

The skydiver claims he did the dive to collect scientific data on developments of high-altitude parachutes, but the event shook everyone for its spectacular altitudes.

It is fair to underline that the view from the stratosphere is not as fantastic as the one from the ISS. It is easy to be tricked by the high curvature of Earth in the pictures. Those are "fish-eye lens" picture which are distorted to include angles which would be otherwise left out. Nonetheless impressive, the height from which he jumped was still relatively very close to Earth, being only 0.6% of Earth's radius. At that height just a glimpse of curvature can be caught with perfect visibility.

In this picture, the height from which Felix jumped is exactly one pixel. I drew it on top, it might be visible with some zoom. This should give a good sense of the scales involved.

Physics Nobel goes to Serge Haroche and David Wineland

Planet with four suns discovered

The Past and the Future of Computing

It is curious how deeply computers are entering into our life.

Think of only 60 years ago and computers were very young and as big as a room. Most of the people did not own one and did not even know what was that beeping and flashing "devil's machinery".
The high potential of computers was understood soon and they grew big (not in size!) very fast to reach the consumer market in the 80s. They were still very hard to use and the graphical interface was not so graphical at all, as input and output was still mainly text.
For a decade, computers were still in a niche market of electronic lovers and programmers, and they slowly started to enter into families only in the 90s, where one computer was enough and hardly used as well.
The birth of internet was another milestone, which potential only came out later, when bandwidth started getting larger and could be used as a better method of communication than land-line phone.

Today we have smartphones. You can bring them in your pockets, they have quad cores inside and are far more powerful than thousands of old personal computers.
They are incredibly popular and, most importantly, cool.
We use them to perform loads of small tasks and we are getting always more dependent on them. They are our map, our calendar, our camera, our newspaper, our encyclopedia and, mainly, our connection to the world. We can keep in touch with a friend almost instantly, if we wanted to.

As our dependence on technology is increasing, many people wonder if this is a good thing. People are scared that technology is making us dumber, because we let them do tasks, that otherwise we would have to do ourselves, and because we know that we have a source of knowledge readily at our hand. This would let us give up on thinking about the resolution of a problem, as it could be easily looked up over the internet.

Should we give up on technology, then? I do not think that is the right approach to face this problem.
I think the problem lies in how companies are presenting technology to us, and making it addictive, for profit. What are smartphones mostly used for? Sadly, Facebook and Angry Birds. This is a bit of a downer if you think that mankind went to the Moon with computers thousands of times less powerful than our smartphone.
Unfortunately companies are making profit over games on smartphones and I think it is a big waste, as time could be well spent to improve other aspects or make "smarter" programs, which would stimulate better our brain in a less flashy and noisy way.

Also, they should teach us to use it responsibly. Technology has a great potential for doing the most amazing things, if directed in a good direction, and this is a good enough reason to not let it stop from galloping.

This reminds me of the same question we faced with calculators. Using them will not let us practice on simple math which stimulates the brain. Are they a good tool, then? Surely they are, and thanks to them we can do a much better job of calculating, in an incredibly quicker way, but the problems arise when they are getting abused. They should not be used for calculations that can be easily done mentally and, most importantly, they should not let be used to children, who need to learn fundamental mathematics.

At the same time, calculators, and computers, opened up a whole new branch, which otherwise would have not existed: programming, which stimulates logic.
Despite popular belief, technology is not a brain-killer. It can stimulate logic, design and problem-solving skills in ways that were never found before. What kills the brain is the way we use technology, how do producers present it to us.

Computers can now do a number of tasks that we could have never imagined ten years ago. We are way closer (and in many aspects, even over) to the robots age we imagined in the past. Computers can recognize human speech and work out an answer. They can crawl the web to search for information and memorize things in a much better way than humans. Many computers already are unrecognizable from humans when chatting to some testers.

But what about the future?

What scares me most is the potentiality of computers of even programming for us, in a future, which might not be that distant. Like it happened for calculators, doing basic mathematical operations for us, it might as well happen again for programming. It is already becoming easier thanks to graphical editors making it more intuitive, and its evolution could lead to completely eliminate the intervention of the user writing the code.
A smart enough computer could listen to our speech, understand the basic functions we want in a program or a script and build it for us.

This could seem like an end to programming, but if we take the comparison to calculators again, mathematics did not just die with the advent of calculators. The same way, programming could become more accessible to everyone, when the syntactic (and logical) part will be left to do to computers themselves. Creativity would surely benefit from such a change, as everyone would be able to "program", and computers will almost be like servants, being able to potentially write programs that respond to our needs.


In conclusion, I think that we live in very unique and exciting times for technological advance and the future still holds many surprises for us. Stay tuned.

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 30/09/12

Landau levels revealed: using scanning tunneling spectroscopy, physicists at University of Warwick revealed the first image of Landau's prediction for the homonymous levels. Those were predictions that made Landau win the Physics Nobel Prize in 1930, but we were only able to picture them now. Landau predicted that in a clean system, the electrons would take on the form of concentric rings. Interesting how this could also be used to give a definition of kilogram (which is still debated) as the spaces between the rings could be as universal marker for weight, being dependent on electron's mass.

Ig Nobel honours ponytail physics

'Meteors' sighted in skies across UK

Off-Peek: Radio Telescopes Edge In on Plasma Jet Spewing from Massive Black Hole


P.S.: as you might have noticed this was posted ridiculously late and it is missing description for most of the news. I apologize for the first, and about the second: from now on I decided to only write something about the first news and just post links about other major news. This is to keep the FSND feature alive as I will not have as much free time now. I just started a PhD, have mercy on me!

A picture of us all

The thing I like the most in writing science news is that the majority of the news is good news. Think of scientific research. It can only bring progress, and most of it is directed towards discovering things we can do and not things that we cannot do.

Sometimes, though, there are bad news. Exactly a month ago the first man that stepped on the moon died. A pioneer, or better, the pioneer of lunar exploration had complications after heart surgery and left us with one of the most remarkable achievements of humans, not just on the world, but on the universal scale. This is a gift not only appreciated by people in the USA, which launched the Apollo 11 expedition, but by the entire world, and consequently everyone mourned his death.

He did not like to be in the spotlight for his biggest achievement and he dropped his career as pilot (and astronaut) after his big mission. However, he did not stop from looking at the future as he started teaching in the University of Cincinnati in the department of Aerospace Engineering.

If you want to know more about his life, there are plenty of sources, and I would suggest you to do it, as it was a very interesting one, for sure, regardless of his longest trip.
What I am going to talk about here is about one of my favorite pictures of Neil:

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. You really want to click on this picture to enlarge it.

You might be asking yourself if I it is a typo or not. And you are right, the most visible astronaut in the picture above is Buzz Aldrin, but if you zoom on his helmet's visor, you will notice a familiar reflection:

Zoomed-in visor showing reflections

And this landscape in the reflection is what makes me love this picture.
That is the reflection of Neil Armstrong, right in the middle, taking the picture of Buzz.

It is amazing to think about the trip photons had to undertake in order to form this picture. Coming from the sun, traveling through a distance of 149980571 kilometers, at around a billion km/h, roughly taking 8 minutes, to end up hitting Armstrong's suit.

In all the possible direction they could have been reflected (or absorbed, finishing their trip), they got reflected towards Buzz Aldrin's helmet. Instead of going through the visor, into Buzz's eyes, or (more rarely) being absorbed by the visor itself, they got reflected back exactly towards Neil. In particular, they got reflected towards his camera, and having passed the lens and all the components of the camera smoothly, finally they met their fate getting absorbed by the film, which is now letting us seeing the amazing pictures of men on the Moon.

But that is not all. There are at least other two amazing facts in this picture.

The first, being the "halo" around Buzz's shadow.
If you see the picture of the reflection from the visor, you will notice that the lunar grounds look lighter around Buzz's shadow. An interesting fact, which helps explaining the phenomenon, is that the halo of light is not seen in the original picture (unzoomed) where Buzz's shadow can be seen unreflected.

That is because it is an optical illusion, commonly called opposition effect. It does not just happen on the Moon, as seen here, but the high concentration of regolith on the moon increases the strength of the effect.
The opposition effect happens when the observer (or photographer) is pointing at the opposite direction of the light source (the sun). As regolith has high retroreflective properties, the zone which opposes the sun will reflect much more light and will then be brighter.
All of this, reflected back to us thanks to Buzz's helmet.

It was not just enough having Neil's reflection and a reflected opposition effect, as the picture includes something even more astounding.

Mankind in a shot

All of us are in the pictures as well, as the visor also reflects the Earth in the sky. Highlighted in the picture above, we are all there, on the pale blue dot. I can safely say that this is the only human-made picture which includes the whole of humanity (Michael Collins is in the module, which is also reflected by the visor, on the right) and in general, a picture which includes every living organism known to us.

I need to say it again: I love this picture, and I hope you can fully understand why, now. I will conclude with a touching quote about this very photo, from Buzz Aldrin, which can surely express better than me the beauty of this shot:

"As I walked away from the Eagle Lunar Module, Neil said 'Hold it, Buzz', so I stopped and turned around, and then he took what has become known as the 'Visor' photo. I like this photo because it captures the moment of a solitary human figure against the horizon of the Moon, along with a reflection in my helmet's visor of our home away from home, the Eagle, and of Neil snapping the photo. Here we were, farther away from the rest of humanity than any two humans had ever ventured. Yet, in another sense, we became inextricably connected to the hundreds of millions watching us more than 240,000 miles away. In this one moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind."

Buzz Aldrin - Apollo, Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

The curse of Productivity

It's now clear to me why I eat later and later, and become nocturnal

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/09/12

The Ulam spiral: when arranging numbers in a spiral, highlighting prime numbers,
they produce the (yet not fully understood) pattern showed above

Deep connection between prime numbers proved:  “If Mochizuki’s proof is correct, it will be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century.” says Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University, New York. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University, Japan claims to have proved the abc conjecture. It was one of the unsolved problems in number theory. The abc conjecture needs the concept of radicals to be understood. A radical of a number $n$, $rad(n)$ is the multiplication of the prime numbers dividing $n$ (e.g. $ 360 = 2^3 \cdot 3^2 \cdot 5$, then $rad(360) = 2 \cdot 3 \cdot 5 = 30$). The abc conjecture then states that, given three integers $a$, $b$, and $c$, such that $a+b=c$, the number $ \frac{rad(abc)^r}{c} $ is always greater than 0 for any $r>1$. The proof of this theorem is split between 4 papers and is based on many others, so it might take a while to verify, but Mochizuki was known for his deep mathematics proof and provides lot of confidence. The proof of this theorem will not only help solving similar problems in future, but also solves many other problems, such as the famous Fermat's Last Theorem.

First visible-light evidence for gravitational waves:  before this discovery, an evidence for the general theory of relativity in strong gravitational fields was the measurements of binary pulsars' (a bright x-ray source) periodicity. This was achieved measuring the shrink in the period of revolution, given by the loss of gravitational waves. For the first time, the model including Einstein's general relativity has been tested in a pair of white dwarves, which has spectrum in the visible light and a significantly lower mass. Direct detection of gravitational waves could be possible with an ambitious experiment involving building an interferometer into space with arms separated a million kilometers, but connected through lasers.

Proximity-induced high-temperature superconductivity using Scotch tape:  Scotch tape is proving to be a good friend to physicists, lately. After the discovery (following a Physics Nobel Prize in 2010) of an easier production of graphene, using Scotch tape, by Andre Geim, a research group from University of Toronto discovered another use of Scotch tape. High-temperature superconductivity is a property of a few materials only, which allows them to show superconductive properties at room temperature, without overheating and losing energy. Cuprates show this property, but were believed to be impossible to be incorporated as superconductors. Then, other techniques, as proximity effects were used to induce superconductivity (from Cuprates) into semiconductors, but this requires the two materials to be close in nearly perfect contact. Cuprates cannot be fabricated that way (chemically), hence here comes the tape: the team used it to tape glass slides and Cuprates to topological insulators, known to have semiconducting properties as a whole, but to be very metallic on the surface. This induced semi-conductivity into the the topological insulators, making it a first. These semi-conductors can be used to improve energy efficiency in quantum computation.

Heisenberg's uncertainty might not be that uncertain:  the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is one of the biggest pillars of quantum mechanics. A team from University of Toronto built a new experiment involving entangled photon pairs in order to try to determine the "indeterminacy" of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg is still right, but the quantitative aspect of the uncertainty was never singularly tested. According to results, the "outcome" blurred out less than expected.

Of Einstein's genius

This man oozes brainpower. Maybe not in this picture, though.

The real genius in Einstein's work is in the fact that he discovered a fundamental property of the universe from only a few assumptions.
He set the speed of light as constant in different frames of reference and developed the mathematics of Lorentz transforms further to come up with one of the most beautiful theories in physics.

While usually in physics direct evidence and data is studied to deduce a phenomenon, he inductively derived his theory having no evidence at all. He made his own axioms and derived everything again from them. And the best part is that it worked, at least in theory. Despite a few physicist immediately recognized his genius, his theories were not completely recognized by the scientific community at the beginning, especially when the paper for his theory of Special Relativity presented no references. Einstein's reasoning was outside the lines, but sharp, nonetheless, and it proved no mistakes.

Evidences for his special theory of relativity started to come up only much later, around 1932, with the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment testing the dependence of the speed of light on the velocity of the measuring device.
Direct evidences of the general theory of relativity are still feeble, even though it is now a firmly accepted theory.

No, it is not photoshopped

The difficulty in testing this theory (linked to the difficulty to discover it) lies in the fact that we need astronomically strong gravitational fields in order to detect the space-time fabric and its tiny ripples: the gravitational waves. I did not use the word astronomical by chance, as the best empirical evidences come from deep space. Usually quasars (active galactic nuclei), which are very far, but bright x-ray sources, are used as indirect test for the theory of general relativity, as their ginormous gravitational field can bend light. Pictures of galaxies behind quasars could be worked out from their light being bent right into our eyes (or telescopes), forming "rings" of light around the quasars.

A more direct evidence of general relativity would be detecting its evident result: gravitational waves. Unfortunately, these waves are far less energetic than anything we can imagine, making it easy to let them disappear into the much higher and chaotic background of radiation. Experiments exist trying to achieve the impossible through interferometers, but a much more concrete evidence, at least for now, is presented by binary pulsars.

Not the most scientifically
accurate gif I could find,
but surely the coolest.

Binary pulsars move into space and their gravitational field emits gravitational waves, which is a leak of energy from the system. Everything, in fact, emits gravitational waves, but for small (less heavy, to be precise) objects their emission is undetectable. As energy is leaking from the binary system of pulsars, their period of revolution will get slightly slower than usual and with enough time passed, this accumulated time will get significantly big to be measured. This is not a direct evidence, as the energetic leak that slows the period down is not necessary given by gravitational waves, but that is the only phenomenon we know that could cause it, for now, and Einstein's model works really well when applied to these bodies, so it is still evidence, even if indirect.

When I started writing this post, it was meant to be an introduction to one big recent news in science in one of the FSND series. I was so excited writing about how marvelous Einstein's theories are that it got too long and I decided that it would easily be a blog post on its own.

The news regards the recent first visible-light evidence of gravitational waves from a pair of dwarf stars, and I'll now leave you in a pointless cliff-hanger (pointless as the news is already out elsewhere) as I will talk about it in the next Fortnightly Science News Digest on 15 September.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 31/08/12

Neil, tired but happy after the "walk" on the moon, in the Eagle lunar module still landed on the Moon

Neil Armstrong is dead:  Neil did not survive after complications of an operation on blocked coronary arteries, on 25 August 2012. The man that set the first step on the moon, announcing the famous line: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" survived 82 years, but did not live in the shadow of his big mission. Before working in space and going to the moon, he was between the top pilots in the world. After, he decided to teach in Cincinnati University, continuing to inspire young students into the wonders of aeronautics. The news of his death saddened not just the US, but the whole world.

Fermilab proposes plans for neutrino experiment:  having served the world of particle physics thanks to its Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider, Fermilab is proposing a new big experiment. Tevatron closed due to lack of funds and the advent of the bigger LHC at CERN, Geneva. Fermilab proposed a new neutrino experiment five months ago, which budget would have been 1.9 billion dollars. Due to the amount of money required, they were asked to rework their plans and on the 28th of August, they proposed a new plan, requiring only 789 million dollars. The new experiment would be called Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) and would research on one of the most mysterious particles: neutrinos, its oscillations (between three of his families: muon, electron and tau neutrinos) and differences between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which could shed some light on the CP violation, a fundamental law which could explain why more matter than antimatter exists in the universe.

Ice cover in arctic seas reaches new low:  a satellite survey by NASA reported that ice cover in the arctic seas reached a new low on August 2012, taken from a sample of recordings since 1979. It is also expected to be lower on September. Scientists at NASA say the increased sea ice lost is due to the increased temperatures last year. The survey recorded a surface of 1.58 million square miles, from 1.61 million square miles in September 2007. Professor Peter Wadhams, from Cambridge University, reported to BBC News that models and calculations show that the arctic sea could become ice-free by 2015 or 2016. The alarmist view of the professor has been criticized in the past, but this new measurement could show hints toward this prediction. The ice cover getting thinner is a positive feedback system - which accelerates when it starts - as warmer temperatures caused by less ice in the seas allows the generation of storms which destroys more ice and accelerate its melt. The implications of ice-free artic seas are serious, as lack of ice would decrease the reflected light by the planet increasing temperatures even further, and causing permafrost to melt, which would release copious amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

NASA plans new mars mission:  just after a few weeks from the launch of Curiosity, the new mars rover, NASA announces plans a 425 million dollars lander which scope would be drilling into the red planet to probe its mantle, crust and core. The analysis of the interior of Mars would help understand how it evolved from the stage of incandescent ball of magma. Earth's interiors have been unveiled analyzing seismic activity, but the structure of the other rocky planets (Venus, Mars and Mercury) is mostly unknown. Mars is big enough to have developed a crust, mantle and core, but does not show the expected tectonic activity.

Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/08/12

NASA's Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars grounds:  on the 5th of August, 10:31pm PDT, after 7 minutes of terror, the newest NASA's jewel safely landed on the Mars surface. The landing itself was already a big mission and a show of the finest engineering, as the delicate equipment inside the capsule approaching Mars needed to decelerate from 21,000 kph to 0 kph without crashing on the ground. This required different systems to make the landing safe, but everything went well and the rover already sent the first high-resolution pictures from the red planet. The mission is one of NASA's biggest on Mars, due to its size and the funds spent on it. Its aim is to determine whether Mars hosted life once (or still!). The mission will last 2 years, but the plutonium on board Curiosity can provide energy up to 14 years. Hopefully, it will serve as well as Spirit.

Virtual sensation comes closer:  scientists at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign experimented a new device which could recreate virtual sensory touch using an electronic "fingertip". The device would consist of a silicon hollow tube to be placed around the fingers with a circuit inside which could provide electrical stimuli to the fingertips simulating sensation. These circuits were built only on flat surfaces, making impossible to give a full sensory experience. The new study is experimenting and opening the way to provide sensations such as temperature, pressure and texture. The potential applications are variate, the first being giving sensation back to people who have lost it due to burnt skin.

Triumph expression is universally recognized:  having seen many, recently thanks to London 2012, a study suggest that the expression of olympic triumph is an expression which is universally recognized, next to anger and happiness. Psychologists noted that it is present in cultures which have nothing in common and are different on many grounds.

The Ultimate guide to install a broadband wireless dongle on Linux

Yet another mobile broadband dongle is not working out of the box on your beloved Linux distribution.

If you are new to Linux, this might be one of the most annoying problems you will face, as there is a sea of different kinds of these internet dongles and they usually all require different drivers to be detected.

Fortunately, as almost every single wireless broadband dongle user seeks for help on Linux forums for his particular hardware, there is lot of help around from which you can guess and work out what is your problem.
But this makes the search messy, as often beginners get easily lost and reading discontinue posts on what to do is sometimes more difficult than trying to work out a solution on your own.


Check out the post on my other forum about Linux:

http://www.greplinux.net/2012/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/07/12

Most powerful laser blast achieved:  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a fusion research laboratory, blasted their fuel pellet with the most powerful laser beam attained in history. The laboratory, holding already the record for the biggest and most powerful laser, generated 300 trillion watts of power. The technique used by the laboratory is firing 192 lasers within a few trillionths of a second onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target in order to reach pressures, inside the pellet, high enough to generate fusion. This would release an enormous amount of energy, which is cleaner than fission. Although we can already make fusion happen, the real problem in the fusion energy research is to take useful energy from it. Nobody managed yet to do it, but scientists at LLNL hope to reach a break-even point (in which energy expenditure to fire the lasers equals energy income from fusion) by the end of the year.


Bacteria consumes waste and produces energy:  A new microbial is capable of consuming organic waste and produce energy at the same time. The microbial consumes waste and an energetic potential is the end product. This technique constitutes about 2% of annual electrical American power consumption, but most of the energy produced is used to power the facilities. This is not a problem as the microbial still work on consuming waste. Unfortunately there are limits for these bacteria, as only organic waste can be consumed.


Furthest spiral galaxy discovered:  Hubble spots a new furthest spiral galaxy. About two-thirds of bright galaxies discovered is spiral. When astronomers at the university of Toronto discovered it, they immediately thought of an error, being 10.7 billion light-years distant from Earth. The distance was calculated from the light-shift and that puts the galaxy to an astounding age of 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The age of the universe now is around 14 billion years and that would make this galaxy the earliest spiral galaxy every found.

Advertisements and How to block them

I have been recently using a web-browser different than mine to perform some tests and I have noticed the copious amount of adverts which I was missing. I am using an ads blocker and, without it, I have found ads even in websites I did not expect having them.

For this reason, I decided to follow the masses and join an advertisement program. Not that I want to make money from it, but I need some more motivation to keep writing.

I do not have lots of readers, even if people say I deserve more, and I always do a long work of gathering info to provide accurate information about science and technology. Do not get me wrong, I really like doing it, but it takes time, and it is well known that time is money.

For these reasons, I will put adverts in this website.

But, since I feel guilty and I know that you might be an usual reader if you are reading this, I will tell you how to remove them!

How to block ads in your web browser

I use Firefox, and the easiest and more efficient way to block ads is using an extension called AdBlock Plus.

To install it, you just need to click the install button following the link I gav above and it will handle your ads automatically.

I am sure there are extensions similar to this one also in Chrome and other web browsers.

A really neat feature is that it also blocks YouTube adverts (the ones inside videos) making generally the web-surfing experience a great deal better.

How to balance two forks on a toothpick

I posted a video a while ago about balancing forks on the rim of a cup:

This trick can be easily made using just 2 forks, 1 stick and a glass.
Your eyes won't believe it, but physics laws have not been violated in the making of this video.

The physics behind it

The center of mass of the system (forks + stick) falls around the middle of the stick, which lies exactly on the pivot.

That is the most stable position giving then stable equilibrium. Even for small displacements the system is balanced by a restoring torque.

Moreover, the system remain balanced even if half of the stick is burned, because the missing weight of the burned stick is negligible with respect to the weight of the whole system, then the center of mass approximately stays in the same position as before.

How to make it

The making of follows three simple steps:

1.   Put a toothpick (or any stick that can stand the weight of two forks) between the teeth of a fork.

2.   Take another fork (of the same kind) and push its teeth between the ones of the first fork. This is the most difficult bit as most of the times, the two forks and the toothpick will not stick together (you could use glue at this point without making the trick pointless, but I managed to do it without glue).

3.   Put the structure on any edge, trying to find the point on which it will balance (no glue allowed at this point). You will find it by the pressure on your fingers while you try to do it. The point depends on the shape of the forks and in my case the centre of mass fell on the middle of the toothpick.

3b.   Impress your friends!

iGoogle is closing down. What now?

I have been a faithful user of iGoogle for years. I did not consider it something vital and did not spend much time on it, but when I've heard the news it will close in 16 months ( November 2013 ), I realized that it was my (only) daily source of world news, weather and recipes.

Even if, by far, not the most used website, I think Google is doing a bad move here. I know many people that use iGoogle, more than Google+, honestly, and even if I understand the choice, I think Google is pointing exactly in the direction that I do not like (promoting more profitable Google products).

This is an extract from the news page:

I really like iGoogle -- are there any other alternatives?
On your mobile device, Google Play offers applications ranging from games to news readers to home screen widgets.
If you’re a fan of Google Chrome, the Chrome Web Store provides a similar range of options like productivity tools and applications to check the weather. In addition, just like iGoogle, you can personalize Chrome with a theme.

This is as helpful as convincing users to set the blank page as homepage.
First of all, I am sure there is a big number (the majority? They should know) of people using iGoogle from PCs, including me, so Google Play is useless.
For the rest, they just suggest to use Google Chrome. Please tell me where is the bit where they suggest alternatives, if you can find it.

Since Google didn't do a great job providing alternatives, I went looking for them and I can suggest a few. As trying them out is worth a thousand words, I will not spend much time describing them.

-   Netvibes: maybe the second most popular after iGoogle
-   Protopage: very easy to use, but less implementations
-   Favoor: clean interface
-   uStart: there is no possibility to share content (which I regard as good)
-   Webmag: similar to Netvibes, promoted even for non-smartphones

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/07/12

More hints towards the Higgs:  as you might have already heard, there is lots of excitement in the field of Particle Physics because of a new discovery. As announced on a CERN seminar on 4 July, a new particle at 126 GeV of mass was discovered to 5-sigmas. The particle resembles a lot the Standard Model Higgs, which is a particle predicted by the Higgs mechanism. This model assumes that we live immersed in a field which gives mass to particles and the Higgs would be a ripple in this field, that can be detected at particle accelerators. It is not certain yet, though, if this new particle is the Higgs we are looking for. For more info about the discovery itself, you can check out my in-depth easy-language article.

Arsenic bacteria might not live without phosphorous after all:  on December 2010, NASA claimed an extraordinary news, the news that life could substitute arsenic to phosphorous. There are 6 elements, without which life cannot exist, and phosphorous is one of them. Research by NASA showed that some bacteria were substituting phosphorous with arsenic and managing to live with arsenic. People were ready to "expand definition of life", but further research is showing that bacteria do not replace all the phosphorous with arsenic and there might be evidence that these bacteria cannot survive with no phosphorous at all. NASA stated that research is not complete yet.

Ocean acidification in California and CO2 in the atmosphere:  scientists from Gruber's group investigate, using a model, the acidification of the waters near the California Current System, which are susceptible to ocean acidification. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere threatens the health of the ocean and its variate ecosystem, changing the saturation state of Argonite. If you still doubt about CO2 high levels having an effect on Earth, science says they do: http://www.co2science.org/.

Magnetic cells isolated for the first time:  magnetic cells are found in animals, such as birds and fishes. There are claims that these cells are used to perceive the Earth's magnetic field and have a sense of orientation (literally a sixth-sense based on magnetism). Walker et al. of the University of Auckland, performing studies on trout's nose cells, managed to isolate cells containing magnetite, which is the strongest magnet. The task was hard to accomplish because of the scarce availability of magnetic cells. As their magnetic field could interfere with each others one, each one of them is a distance apart, so only a few of those are found over a thousand normal cells. The magnetite found by the group was stronger than they expected and could also be used to get a sense of latitude and longitude (a small GPS). The next step is now to find whether this magnetic cells are linked to the brain and used for orientation.

Higgsteria - How to interpret the mass spectrum graph

The seminar on the 4th of July held at CERN in Geneva - despite the use of Comic Sans font - gave very interesting news to the Physics community.

ATLAS and CMS, two experiments from LHC, both discovered a new particle (5-sigma level is a requirement for a discovery) at 126 GeV in the mass spectrum.

Jargon apart, if you are not a physicist, you can read info about the Higgs boson (such as what is the Higgs, what is a boson, how does it give mass to other particles...) pretty much everywhere nowadays.

What many people may wonder is: what is this 5σ? And what about this 95% confidence level (CL)? But, most importantly, what is 126 GeV?
In this post I will give you an idea, with simple language, about these concepts and you will be finally able to understand this (not-so) mysterious graph.

The sad truth with vegetables

Bacon is out of scale

However easy to cook they are, there will always be a meat-alternative which is tastier.

How to recover a deleted post in Blogger

It is very easy to accidentally delete a post in Blogger, especially when mass deleting posts, as it is common that a precious post keeps a previous selection and gets deleted with the unwanted ones.

It happened to me as well. Unfortunately, Blogger does not provide any help for restoring a deleted post, but fortunately I kept a backup copy of my blog and just re-posted it again. I noticed, though, that the html link to the post was different (even if re-posted with the same date and title of the old one). It was the same as before, but with a -01.html at the end.
This is bad, because everybody who made a link to the old post now linked to a 404 Error (non existent URL).

This gave me the suspicion that Blogger stored the deleted posts somewhere, and I found a way to restore it fully, with pictures, number of views and comments.

The 5 steps to recover a deleted post in Blogger

1. First of all you need to retrieve your deleted post ID. If you have it, you can skip to step 4. If you don't have it, the only solution is to find it in cached web pages from search engines. For this reasons, this procedure will not work for very new posts or private blogs.
   
2. Find your old post in any search engine. For example, for my previous post, I googled "natural selection and prime numbers" and I have found the URL "http://www.badscientist.net/2012/06/natural-selection-and-prime-numbers.html". Now you need to access the cached content (click on Cached in Google when hovering with the mouse on the >>).
   
3. Access the Source code (in Firefox, right-click anywhere in the page and "View Page Source") and find this line:
   
   

   <div class='post-outer'>
   <div class='post hentry' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
   <a name='2003347239440929962'>a>
   <h3 class='post-title entry-title' itemprop='name'>
   Natural selection and prime numbers
   h3>
   
   

   Here, the post ID is 2003347239440929962.
   
4. Now that you have the post ID, create a new post in your blog, the usual way. In the URL bar you see above the editing fields, for example:
   
   

   http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4658705474308031765#editor/target=post;postID=2231649307872317536

   
   replace the number after postID with the deleted post ID. In this case, I will replace  2231649307872317536  with  2003347239440929962  .
   
   
5. Press Enter and your old deleted post will (magically) reappear. You can edit it again or just press Publish to have it back.

Hope this helps, let me know if there are easier ways to do that.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I revert to draft posts, instead of deleting them directly. The posts, this way, will not be on the web, but it will give me time to see if I did any mistakes before deleting a post completely.

Microsoftian Rhapsody

Is this the hard drive?
Is this ram memory?
Caught in a bootload,
No escape from SCSI
Open your ROMS,
Look up to the BIOS and see,
I'm a read-only, I need no fixing,
Because I'm easy run, easy load,
Little Hz, little clock,
Any slow the boot loads doesn't really matter to
Me, WinMe


Inspired from this video.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/06/12

Tractor Beams might be a reality:  the idea is be based on negative radiation pressure, using just light. In order to drag an object, negative pressure is needed. Previous ideas implemented gravitational pressure, heating air or inducing electrical or magnetic charges in objects. The latest proposal implements pressure differences created by light. This is already used in experiments as optical tweezers and can be used for making "tractor beams" thanks to unusual materials with negative refractive index. The mechanism depends on light that has group velocity and phase velocity travelling in opposite directions, which are able to create negative pressure. The applications can also span into the medical field, where it can be implemented in lung surgery as suction device.


Fuel cell runs on brain power:  the very idea under The Matrix movie might be right after all. Of course, with its limits. Scientists at MIT have developed an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the cerebrospinal fluid around the brain through glucose oxidation. This cell, unfortunately, with its hundreds of microwatts produced would not be able to power an electrical device through our body, but it can be a first step to more powerful machine being able to allow paralized patients to regain control of their arm and legs. The cell, which looks like a computer chip, strips electrons off the glucose and uses them to generate electricity.


Fracking can cause Earthquakes:  the National Research Council reports that fracking is linked to an increase in earthquakes magnitude and can even anticipate earthquakes which were due at a later time. The practice of fracking consist in pumping pressurised water and chemicals into cracks in the terrain and can create conducts to oil or gas reservoir. Shall we stop fracking then? Not really, as it is not the practice of fracking itself which causes the increase quakes chance, but the fact that the wastewater is stored into deep sandstone or other formations for permanent disposal, instead that on the surface. Most troubling, the committee found that there is no set of industry best practice in the operation, which might complicate the action of establishing rules on it.


Change in exoplanet atmosphere:  an international team of astronomers detected an abrupt change in an exoplanet atmosphere, using data from Hubble telescope. This exoplanet has been named HD 189733b and it was discovered in 2010 and classified as a gas giant bigger than Jupiter with an orbit very close to its sun, making it just a bit more than 2 Earth days. This incandescent fast ball of gas has been recently discovered to lose part of its atmosphere at rates of a thousand of tons a second! This was due to a solar flare, which due to the proximity of the planet made this catastrophic change to happen! The planet will still be a gas giant, since that much loss in gas is like a blow of wind for such big planets, but it was the first time we detected such a phenomenon and it is interesting to study planets with sudden changes in their atmosphere.


Chinese crew in space:  for the first time in history, on June 17 the Chinese launched and docked a crewed capsule in space. It is only the third nation being able to do that (US and Russia being ahead). This is a fantastic progress for Chinese space exploration and surely means that money and effort have been put to achieve it, and will be in the future. On the other side, Chinese effort in space exploration can be a worrying sign of a race similar to the one between US and Russia during the cold war. There is no doubt that it brings innovation, but space was becoming a peaceful target, especially with the construction of the ISS. It is good to know that there is another country being able to perform manned missions into space, especially now that cuts in NASA budget are killing most of the space missions in the US. Hopefully, China will be collaborative to space exploration with other nations, rather than an adversary.

Natural selection and prime numbers

The adults [of periodical cicadas] live for a few weeks, but the 'juvenile' stage (technically 'nymphs' rather than larvae) lasts for 13 years (in some varieties) or 17 years (in other varieties). The adults emerge at almost exactly the same moment, having spent 13 (or 17) years cloistered underground. Cicada plagues, which occur in any given area exactly 13 (or 17) years apart, are spectacular eruptions that have led to their incorrectly being called 'locusts' in vernacular American speech. The varieties are known, respectively, as 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas.
Now here is the really remarkable fact. It turns out that there is not just one 13-year cicada species and one 17-year species. Rather, there are three species, and each one of the three has both a 17-year and a 13-year variety or race. The division into a 13-year race and a 17-year race has been arrived at independently, n fewer that three times. It looks as though the intermediate periods of 14, 15 and 16 years have been shunned convergently, no fewer than three times. Why? We don't know. The only suggestion anyone has come up with is that what is special about 13 and 17, as opposed to 14, 15 and 16, is that they are prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is not exactly divisible by any other number. The idea is that a race of animals that regularly erupts in plagues gains the benefit of alternately 'swapping' and starving its enemies, predators o parasites. And if these plagues are carefully timed to occur a prime number of years apart, it makes that much more difficult for the enemies to synchronize they own life cycles. If the cicadas erupted every 14 years, for instance, they could be exploited by a parasite species with a 7-year life cycle. This is a bizarre idea, but no more bizarre than the phenomenon itself. 

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

Why scientists will never be popular

There's things that will never change, and one of them is here right in front of our eyes.

I know the news is a bit old, but I've bumped on this link which I saved in my favourites a while ago:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=scarlett+johansson&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0

I am curious by nature and I love interpreting data, then one of my favourite services of Google is of course, Google Trends. But this search shows something obvious to any reader. The amount of queries for "scarlett johansson" was ridiculously increased when there was the news that her nude pictures taken from her phone by some hacker and published over the internet. Then, it went back to almost normal after a few days (when people obtained the pictures or could not manage to get them).

I've found this particular search query so incredibly relevant to easily explain two problems:

-   Science will never be popular between the general public, as it is clear that people are interested in something else: porn. And all that comes with it, from nude pictures to light gossip between celebrities. If you ask people to name who won the Academy Awards in 2009 I am sure you'll get more right answers than asking who won the Chemistry Nobel prize in 2009. I can't even name anyone who won the ducking Nobel prize that year, figure how well would do someone not involved in science.

-   Never consider anything on your happily connected-to-the-internet smartphone as safe. If people wanted it, they could easily get something you consider private and share it. And don't think that legal actions will make you justice, as Ms. Joahnsson desperately tried. Anything which is (or has been) on the internet once, is public forever.
Oh, and if you use facebook on your mobile, everything in it is property of facebook, anyway.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/06/12

Welcome to the very first FSND (Forthnightly Science News Digest)!

Every two weeks, I will group and give a brief comment about the news that I think are most relevant in science, so that you don't need to hunt for them or you won't feel ashamed the next time your geek friend will tell you "oh, have you heard...".

The past two weeks have been quite full of good exciting news and I've struggled to keep it short, but here we go:

Venus transit has happened:  it was all over the news the past week, so it was difficult to miss, but on the 6-7th of June, the Sun, Venus and Earth were in conjunction, which means that the Sun was "eclipsed" by Venus. Since the eclipse would be tiny, we call that transit, but we can still see the shadow of Venus passing in front of the Sun, creating the opportunity for fantastic shots. Unfortunately, if you want to see it again, you would have to wait until 2117, so this was a one-chance in a lifetime event. The strange periodicity of the transit is given by a simple recipe: Venus year being about 3/5 of Earth year and the Venus ecliptic being 3.4° tilted to the Earth ecliptic.
A peculiar event related to the transit puts some light on the thick Venus atmosphere (literally). A few days before the transit astronomer Daniele Gasparri took a shot of Venus, showing something we are not used to see: instead of seen one side of Venus illuminated by the Sun (like crescent Moon) there is a ring surrounding Venus. This is caused by refracted light.
And if you want to know more about the history behind the event.


Speeding neutrinos are not speeding:  you might remember the other big news from OPERA in Gran Sasso laboratory claiming the speed of neutrinos being faster than the speed of light according to measurements. This has shaken the scientific community, as Einstein's theory of relativity is solid and now scientifically accepted, because it explains many phenomena which are otherwise unexplained.
On the 8th of June, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to later measurements, the speed of neutrinos is almost the same as the speed of light (but not faster for sure). This is good news, even if kind of expected for two reasons: the precision of the experiment being ridiculously high for such speeds and Einstein's theory being rock solid. Case closed, now OPERA can focus on its real objective: finding tau neutrinos.


Higgs hunt is coming close to an end:  CERN is accumulating enough luminosity to be close to the statistical significance of a discovery for the Higgs boson. After the announcement of the past December there was lots of excitement about a peak building up in both ATLAS and CMS detectors around the masses of 124-126 GeV. It was a blinded experiment, meaning that ATLAS and CMS did not share any data in order to eliminate bias on the measurements.
Data collected over this months will be analysed in the summer and a major scientific achievement could be made this year: the discovery (or not) of the Higgs boson. Both outcomes are exciting and provide more research in both directions.
Even if I have personally worked in a group at ATLAS about W and Z bosons, and consequently the Higgs, my hope is that the Higgs boson will not be found and the peak will disappear into the background with enough statistics. My reasons for that is that the Higgs mechanism is a contrived theory in many ways and the theory being true, I think, would be a miracle itself, as it was developed as desperate theoretical model to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons.
Still, any news on the topic will be really exciting and the discovery of the most hideous particle would surely be something to celebrate and many people say, a sure Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs.


Fusion research funding restored in the US:  fusion research has been a dubious field for decades now. Since its advent, which predicted unlimited amount of energy, there has been only predictions of unlimited postponements. It is known, as a joke, that fusion has always been 20 years ahead. That is true, but it is also true that a success in fusion energy production would seriously solve the world's energy problem once and for all.
Two days ago, US Reps. Rush Holt visited the Princeton Plasma laboratory to announce that the $76 million funding has been restored for fusion energy research.
This is excellent news, as I think that even if fusion is not possible in reality, we need to get a clear answer, very soon, about its feasibility. A negative answer would be sad, but at least we could be able to move on and focus on alternatives. Holt said: “Fusion research is key to America’s energy future, and we are proud to have this important work in New Jersey”. I would replace America with World and I would agree on that. I hope that big news in the clean energies field will come soon.

10 Nautilus tips and tricks

This page has been moved to my new blog dedicated to Linux, here.

The eye's complexity

The light-sensitive cells ('photocells') are not the first thing the light hits, but they are buried inside and facing away from the light [...]. The first thing the light hits is, in fact, the layer of ganglion cells which constitute the 'electronic interface' between the photocells and the brain. Actually the ganglion cells are responsible for preprocessing the information in sophisticated ways before relaying on it to the brain and in some ways the word 'interface' doesn't do justice to this. 'Satellite computer' might be a fairer name. Wires from the ganglion cells run along the surface of the retina to the 'blind spot', where they dive through the retina to form the main trunk cable to the brain, the optic nerve. There are about three million ganglion cells in the 'electronic interface', gathering data from about 125 million photocells. [...] As you look at the fine architecture of the photocell, keep in mind the fact that all that complexity is repeated 125 million times in each retina. And comparable complexity is repeated trillions of times elsewhere in the body as a whole. The figure of 125 million photocells is about 5,000 times the number of separately resolvable points in a good-quality magazine photograph. The folded membranes on the right of the illustrated photocell are the actual light-gathering structures. Their layered form increases the photocell's efficiency in capturing photons, the fundamental particles of which light is made. If a photon is not caught by the first membrane, it may be caught by the second, and so on. As a result of this, some eyes are capable of detecting a single photon. The fastest and most sensitive film emulsions available to photographers need about 25 times as many photons in order to detect a point of light.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

How to circumvent the Pirate Bay censorship

The annoying screen many people are
experiencing when trying to access
the domain piratebay.org.

I wrote a post about Pirate Bay being censored in Italy a few years ago. I was disgusted at the time and I provided some methods to get around the block.

When I've heard the same news here, not so long ago, I could not believe it. How ignorant and naive must a government be to think that blocking a torrent website should stop piracy?

I will not go into describing all of the copyright problems and morality of using Pirate Bay, as the debate is big and still going on, but I must comment on how stupid is the choice of blocking it.

First of all, I am against any form of censorship and this alone puts me against that choice.
Most importantly, though, Pirate Bay is only one of the million torrent websites. Stopping one is like vaccinating one person against malaria and thinking of having eradicated the bacteria forever.
On top of that, people will always find way around to such puny barriers, and I will list a few down:

1. This is the most hilarious. There is already a new domain with Pirate Bay on it for UK people:
   
   tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
   
   This might be brought down as well, but no worries.
   
2. Use a web-proxy, such as Anonymouse. This is the "anonimized" link to Pirate Bay:
   
   http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thepiratebay.se/
   
   It's as easy as that and safe on the long-term.
3. Use a proxy (there are many) or VPN services as TOR or Hotspot Shield. Which might be even useful to bypass other country-dependent blocks. 

If you want to stop piracy, you need to think of other smarter and indirect ways. We are in 2012 and it is still much easier to download a pirated version of a movie or a game rather than buying it. This means that a service provided by pirates, for free, is better than any one provided by big money-eater production companies, which only good job is putting irrelevant locks and pointless anti-piracy videos on their products.

Take as an example a person wanting to see a movie already out on DVD:

Legal way:
- Find movie on Amazon.
- Look for cheapest price and buy.
- Wait a few days (or more) for the DVD to be shipped and arrive.
- Put on DVD and watch 10 minutes of trailers even if you didn't ask for it (and can't be skipped).
- Watch the same anti-piracy video for the billionth time, even if you know it by heart, and even if, to watch it, you must've bought your beloved DVD in the most legal way possible.
- Finally watch the movie, if you still have some time left.


Illegal way:
- Find movie on any torrent website.
- Look for positive reviews and download torrent.
- Wait 20 minutes.
- Enjoy movie.


Honestly, I would pay for the illegal way.
A big applause to the incompetent, narrow-minded governments, production companies and anti-piracy associations around the world.