Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 15: Coming HomeIn this final chapter of "A World of Conflict," Kevin Sites returns home to the U.S., only to confirm what he suspected -- that in the year that he was gone little had changed.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 14: Israel-Hezbollah WarThe war between Israel and Hezbollah shook the landscape in the Middle East.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 13: Sri LankaKevin Sites covered Sri Lanka as violence erupted between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, pushing a nation with so much to lose back to the brink of all-out war. In rebel-held territory Sites interviewed Tiger fighters about their tactics and reported on the many effects of war still seen in the region.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 12: Nepal and KashmirKevin Sites covered Nepal during a time of sweeping political change that followed mass nationwide protests, forcing the autocratic King to cede power.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 11: Child BrideIn Afghanistan, Kevin Sites met a 12-year-old girl named Gulsoma, whose incredible story of resilience resonated with millions of people worldwide. She was only six years old when she was sold to a neighbor family in Kandahar as a child bride.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 10: AfghanistanReporting from Afghanistan in spring 2006, more than four years after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban, Kevin Sites found that war is not over in the country.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Nine: ChechnyaIn Chechnya during the winter of 2005-2006, Kevin Sites reported on a region still reeling from lingering conflict between Russia and Islamic separatists. The conflict engulfed Chechnya in the 1990s, and even now, half of the population is yet to return. Those that have eke out a living amid the rubble.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Eight: Iran
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Seven: IsraelIn Israel, Kevin Sites interviewed Kinneret Boosany, a victim of a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv cafe in 2002.
When we put out the call to show us your best superhero costumes, we knew Wired.com readers would be up to the task. And we weren't disappointed: From the Thing to the obscure Scarlet Spider, it's clear that you people know and love your superheroes. And apart from a slightly odd fascination with Edward Scissorhands (who was represented in two separate entries -- and who is really only a superhero among the emo crowd), we're completely cool with that.
Left: The winning entry is "Used Electronics Man," by Ryan Peters. Peters built the suit out of old electronics parts while taking summer school in college, and wore it to class one day. Peters' creation combines the aesthetic of Robocop with the ingenuity of Peter Stark's Iron Man suit, so although it's not strictly speaking a superhero costume, it's a worthy champion for the Gadget Lab contest.
Justin Fields' amazing custom-built costume is an incredibly faithful tribute to Marvel's super-strong, scaly behemoth. The Thing was a close second to Used Electronics Man when the Gadget Lab polls officially closed, although subsequent, unofficial voting has since propelled him to the top of the reader's choice list.
Thomas Boggs' entry is an obscure Spider-Man clone known as the Scarlet Spider. Yes, folks, this is an actual superhero -- a supervillain, actually -- not just some failed attempt at a Spider-Man costume. Boggs' effort includes an impressive pair of web-shooters.
Jessica Hurst's costume is an over-the-top tribute to a British cartoon that came to life in a quickly-forgotten 1995 movie of the same name. The only thing missing from this awesome getup? A mutant kangaroo sidekick.
Never fear, the "comfortably armored superhero of softly padded justice" is here! Reader "JD" submitted this entry, which is made entirely of industrial-grade carpet underlayment, found in a local dumpster. Now that's recycling, folks.
Crystal Foley sent in this photo of herself as one of the X-Statix, an attempt by Marvel at creating a more poppy, cynical brand of superhero. "I even made the stuffed Doop!" Foley writes.
David Martindale writes, "This is me when I'm super." We give him points for chutzpah: Since his "costume" exists entirely on the Photoshop plane, it's a dubious entry for this contest. The bike is amazing, though.
One of two submissions in the Scissorhands category, this one was sent in by Robert O'Brien. One criticism: The blades look a little dull.
Ed Steel's costume owes more to the classic, 1960s-era TV show than the more recent Heath Ledger reinterpretation of the Joker in Dark Knight. Still, we like it: He's got the demonic grin down pat.
Marc-Antoine L. Frenette and companion pose as Captain Jack Sparrow, a superhero among pirates.
Clare McDermott strikes a pose as Barbarella, complete with futuristic ray gun. You go, girl!
Wikipedia defines an aquitard as "an impermeable layer along an aquifer." It's not clear to us how that translates into bicycle helmets and spandex, but it must make sense to Sarah Crane, who submitted this photo with the note, "We are aquitards. Our super power is the ability to stop water."
1993: DNA testing identifies nine bone fragments found in an unmarked grave in a Siberian forest near Ekaterinburg as those of Nicholas II -- the last czar of Russia -- and members of his family.
The identification, made by British scientists working with Russian colleagues, ended a 75-year mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the Romanovs, the last ruling family before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union.
Drs. Peter Gill and Kevin Sullivan of the British Forensic Science Service in Birmingham were able to establish with near certainty that the remains found in the Koptyaki Forest indeed belonged to Nicholas, the Czarina Alexandra, four of their five children (the remains of Prince Alexei were not recovered), the family's personal physician and three servants.
Despite some subsequent criticism of the scientific methodology employed in the nuclear- and mitochondrial-DNA testing, the 1993 findings are considered to be accurate.
Nicholas and his family were arrested by the Bolsheviks, who were then engaged in a struggle with the Mensheviks, or Whites, for control of Russia following the country's collapse during World War I.
Although the Bolsheviks originally planned to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the Russian people, the sudden approach of White troops caused the Red Guard to panic. Fearful that the czar might be rescued, the guard commander, with Lenin's approval, executed the Romanovs on July 17, 1918, in the basement of the Iptiev House, the Ekaterinburg mansion that served as their makeshift prison.
As the lab tests eventually determined, the bodies were taken to Koptyaki and buried in a mass grave. Further testing in Great Britain established the mitochondrial-DNA haplogroup and sequences for the Romanov family line.
The Soviet Union kept mum about the family's fate until finally admitting, in 1926, that they were dead. Although two Russians -- a movie producer and an ethnographer -- claimed to have discovered the grave in 1976, the burial site remained a closely guarded state secret until the USSR itself ceased to exist in 1991.
The mystery remained fixed in the popular consciousness throughout most of the 20th century, and there was no shortage of crackpots and frauds emerging from obscurity claiming to be Princess Anastasia or some other down-at-the-heels member of the czar's family.
Once the remains were examined, tested and identified, they were laid to rest in the imperial crypt in Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, exactly 80 years after the Romanovs' execution. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the czar and his family in 2000.
Complete closure came earlier this year when DNA testing on some newly unearthed bone shards identified Prince Alexei, the last missing Romanov.
Source: Various
Carbon nanotubes have been around for more than a decade, but so far they haven't shown up anywhere outside of R&D labs and tennis racquets.
Now, two separate groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics.
Because they are so small and could potentially replace two of the basic components of modern microchips (conductors and semiconductors), nanotubes have continued to pique the interest of electronics researchers. And that interest continues to grow, especially as the current technology used to make chips for electronics begins to reach its physical limits.
The trouble is that, until recently, making nanotubes was a somewhat random affair: You'd mix the required ingredients, grow a batch of nanotubes, and then sort through the resulting batch to see what you got. Researchers had no effective way to grow exclusively metallic or exclusively semiconducting nanotubes, and even ordering the nanotubes in regular patterns was a challenge. That has made using nanotubes on an industrial scale impractical to the point of impossibility.
"An ant is incredibly strong for its size. But nobody uses ants to do useful work, because they all run around in different directions," says Mike Mayberry, the director of components research for Intel. (Mayberry was not involved in the research.)
And so nanotubes have grown for the past 15 years -- knotty and bent -- since the single-walled variety were discovered in 1993 by IBM researcher Donald S. Bethune and NEC researcher Sumio Ijima. As molecular oddities, carbon nanotubes have always been fascinating. Each nanotube is made of a "sheet" of interlocked carbon atoms, rolled up into a single- or multi-walled cylinder. Although each cylinder is a single, narrow molecule no more than a nanometer (nm) or two in diameter, the molecules can grow up to several centimeters in length -- or 30 million times their width. A human hair that long would stretch 1.5 miles.
Even better, these strange carbon molecules exhibit great physical strength because they're held together by atomic bonds. They've also got unusual electrical properties: Depending on which way the sheets of carbon are rolled up, nanotubes are either metallic, making them good electrical conductors, or semiconducting, making them potentially useful components for the logic components of microchips.
A paper -- presented last month at the VLSI Symposium by Nishant Patil, Albert Lin, Edward R. Myers, H.-S. Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, all of Stanford's electrical engineering department -- addresses the problem of getting the nanotubes straightened out so they could be put to work in chips.
To be useful in large-scale chip manufacturing, nanotube components will have to be integrated with existing silicon-based chips. Unfortunately, growing nanotubes on silicon wafers produce a disorderly mess. The authors tackled that problem by growing the nanotubes on crystalline quartz, where they grow in orderly rows, then transferring them to a silicon wafer.
"If you grow carbon nanotubes on silicon, you will see that the carbon nanotubes are really unruly, like a bowl of thin rice noodles," says Mitra. "If you use a quartz wafer, the nanotubes are largely aligned with each other. They still have kinks and bends and so on, but they're pretty good."
Even if the nanotubes are reasonably straight, the problem of selectively creating semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes remains. Another paper, published last week in Science by Stanford and Samsung chemical engineers Melburne C. LeMieux, Mark Roberts, Soumendra Barman, Yong Wan Jin, Jong Min Kim and Zhenan Bao, reports that by changing the substrate on which the nanotubes are grown, manufacturers can control what kind of nanotubes form. Using a substrate of aminosilanes, the resulting nanotubes were almost entirely semiconducting, while substrates of aromatic compounds (such as phenyls) produced metallic nanotubes.
That's a more effective way of getting the right kind of nanotube than previous techniques, which involved sorting nanotubes after they are made using electrical or magnetic fields -- and which weren't usable on a commercial scale.
Nanotubes might be coming on the scene just in time, as modern chipmaking technologies approach their physical limits. Current cutting-edge chip technology creates circuit elements that are 45nm wide, and the next-generation technology, expected in prototype form later this year, will be 32nm. (Smaller circuits are faster and also allow chipmakers to pack more components into a single chip, making processors more powerful and capable.) That's getting pretty close to the limit of current technologies for two reasons: leakage and light.
As silicon-and-copper circuits get smaller, electricity leakage and heat dissipation become proportionally greater problems than they are with larger circuits. By contrast, a nanotube circuit could potentially be as small as 1 or 2nm, and it would be extremely efficient, even over comparatively long distances.
Also, the photolithography techniques used to etch microchip circuits are running into a physical barrier: The components are smaller than the wavelengths of the light used to etch them. Going smaller will require a completely different technology.
"Lithography is running out of steam," notes Subhasish Mitra, a co-author of one of the nanotube papers.
While industry researchers welcomed the new papers, they cautioned that it will be quite awhile before nanotubes are used inside microchips.
"These techniques and others are all steps in the right direction. They're good progress along the way," says Mayberry.
In the meantime, however, nanotubes might find applications on a larger scale than the inside of a chip. For instance, Mayberry notes that Intel has done research into using nanotube-based wiring as the interconnecting wires between different sections of microchips, or even as part of a chip package's cooling system.
Forty years ago, if you wanted to see a full-length movie with no interruptions you needed to spend the evening in the company of those with a similar desire to sit in the dark and do nothing.
Twenty years ago, you could bring the movie home, but you needed to get out of the house long enough to have a public argument with your significant other at the video store. Ten years ago, Netflix started to send the movies to you, but you still needed to get to your mailbox, which for most people involves mandatory pants.
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Being generally anti-pants, I recently picked up the Netflix Player, a device that allows you to stream movies directly into your home. Being a recluse has never been easier!
The device works quite nicely. It's easy to set up, easy to use and the image quality is arguably better than a garage-sale VHS tape. The main limitation is in the movie selection. Not everything is available for instant download, and what is available is often somewhat ... perverse. For instance, you can watch Young Guns II, but not Young Guns. That's something like Round Table coming out with an all-crust pizza.
There is one area where Netflix is chock-full of options, though, and that's in the realm of the documentary. As it turns out, pretty much anything that can be documented has been, and it's all ready to be poured into your lap like so much hot soup. You're going to need some help sorting through this mountain of movies.
Luckily, most documentaries come in one of three varieties.
First off, there's the sort of documentary you can get high school extra credit for watching. These are about old things, or scientific things. These are easy to spot, because the title tells you what the movie's about and why you should care.
Possible titles:
The second sort of documentary involves a director who wants you to throw off the shackles of convention and/or oppression and get really steamed about some variety of injustice. For some reason, these titles are always weird half-puns. I'm not sure why lackadaisical wordplay goes hand-in-hand with social activism, but that's how it works.
The third type of documentary is about some semi-obscure band, artist or quirky person with a cult following. These are marketed to people who are already fans of the subject, so the moviemakers don't need to explain what the documentary is about. In fact, the more obscure the title, the better -- that makes the fans feel smart for "getting it."
When in doubt, you should go with something with a dinosaur, a penguin or a fighter plane on the cover when choosing a documentary. They're all pretty good, and it's a proven fact that penguin, fighter plane and dinosaur documentaries are being made faster than you can actually watch them, so you'll never run out.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to start development on a documentary about a dinosaur-penguin-fighter pilot.