Championship Manager 03/04

Championship Manager 03/04 - 1DVD

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Google phone is latest move against cellphone status quo

Paul Marks, technology correspondent

It has a bigger, higher-resolution screen and better camera than Apple's iPhone, and can be operated using voice commands alone, but the technical specifications of the Nexus One, Google's new Android smartphone, that have impressed gadget reviewers are not the most interesting thing about it.

More significant, say commentators, is that Google is trying to shake up the way we buy phones by selling direct to consumers itself rather than through cellphone networks, and providing the phone unlocked to boot. But they shouldn't be surprised: that Google has plans to change the way we use and buy phones has been plain for a while.
Back in 2008 we revealed an idea of Google's that could completely undermine the way we buy phone service today.

Instead of your phone being linked to one network, the patent explains, it would quickly stage an auction between all the networks available in the area. It would then connect to the best according to whatever criteria had been defined as most important, whether price, clarity, or speed.

There have been other signs the company is interested in undermining the wireless status quo. Google has been politically active in seeking to allow bandwidth freed by switching off US analogue TV - so-called "white spaces" - to be used for wireless communications entirely separate from existing networks. Just this week Google applied for a role in administering the database that will let future white-spaces devices know which frequencies are free to use in their neighbourhood.

It seems clear that more threats to the established model of locking consumers into single providers are on the way.
 
Microsoft's body-sensing, button-busting controller
A LONG-lived videogaming skill could be on the way out this year as Microsoft hones an add-on to its Xbox 360 console aimed at making button-studded games controllers obsolete. The device, called Natal after the city in northern Brazil, allows players to control a game using only their body movements and voice. Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of entertainment and devices, announced at the CES show in Las Vegas, Arizona, this week that Natal would go on sale in November.

New time!

Next time you enter a username and password, think about the rhythm of your typing.
Not only can it be used to identify you, it can reveal if you are in a stressful environment.

The team behind the discovery suggest it could be used by retailers or banks to detect whether you are logging into your account under extreme stress or duress.

It has long been known that the rhythms of a person's typing style are stable over time, leading to suggestions they could be used to verify identity or even spot early signs of Alzheimer's disease. But little was know about the effect of stress on typing patterns, so psychologist Mike Dowman and colleagues at the University of Abertay, UK, investigated.

Stress test
They asked 35 people to log into a computer 36 times over three separate sessions up to a month apart, using the same user name (abertayexperiment) and password (understandsomething). People were put into stressed and neutral states alternately by listening to a range of sounds known to elicit particular emotions and heard either heard gentle paper crumpling or arguing couples and emergency sirens.

The length of time each key was held down and the interval between one being released and another pressed was recorded to generate a typing "fingerprint" for each person. Electrodes were attached to the typists' hands to detect sweating – a sign of stress also exploited by lie detectors.

The team used the data to develop and test software that identifies a person from their typing style alone. Using just the 36 characters of the login details it was able to correctly identify users 97.2 per cent of the time in a total of 42,840 login attempts. It wasn't unusual for a person's timing to vary by just 20 milliseconds between two logins a week apart, says Dowman.

The data also showed that stress can be detected in a person's typing because it changes the pattern of timings – for example by making key-presses shorter on average – although typists retained enough of their style to be identifiable.

"There's no question: people do type differently under stress," says Dowman. He suggests that security systems could be designed to raise the alarm if it seems that a person might be being forced to log into a system, whether a cash machine or online account. More research will be needed, however, before a system could tell if a person is, say, just having a bad day or being held at gunpoint.

No more passwords
Neil Barrett, a computer security consultant and visiting professor at the Centre for Forensic Computing and Security at Cranfield University, UK, says that the Abertay system's success rate is similar to other biometric systems in use, such as voiceprints or the fingerprint scanners built into laptops.

With further improvements to typing-style recognition, passwords may no longer be needed for some systems, he says. "You can take the identification characteristics of the way they type in their username."

The Abertay group have received patents on their ideas about detecting signs of a stressful environment in a person's typing style.

Solar system may be more compact than thought

The solar system may be significantly more compact than previously thought, according to a new computer simulation of the cloud of comets that enshrouds the solar system. The work suggests the cloud may not contain as much material as once suspected, which could resolve a long-standing problem in models of how the planets formed.

Long-period comets, which take longer than 200 years to orbit the sun, come from all directions in the sky, an observation that has long led scientists to believe that they were nudged out of a diffuse halo of icy objects surrounding the solar system – the Oort Cloud.

The objects probably formed from the same disc of material that gave rise to the planets but were scattered outwards by Jupiter and Saturn a few hundred million years after their birth.

The Oort Cloud is too dim to be seen by telescopes, but astronomers believe it has two components. Long-period comets were thought to originate in an outer portion extending from 20,000 to 200,000 astronomical units from the sun (where 1 AU is the Earth-sun distance).

Solar system models also predict the existence of an inner shell that stretches some 3000 to 20,000 AU from the sun. But researchers believed that objects orbiting inside this shell would never come close enough to the sun to produce glorious cometary displays because they would be ejected into interstellar space once they approached Jupiter and Saturn.

A new computer simulation suggests this gravitational barrier might instead be "leaky", allowing a number of objects to pass inside Jupiter's orbit. Jupiter and Saturn may actually nudge the interlopers onto elongated paths that bring them closer to the sun.

Persistent mystery
The work suggests that more than half of all long-period comets could come from this unseen "inner" Oort Cloud, which would mean that the solar system is much more compact than thought.

"There may not be nearly as much stuff as far out as we thought," says Nathan Kaib of the University of Washington in Seattle, who presented the results on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. "The region of the Oort Cloud that is not supposed to produce any comets may be the dominant producer of comets."

That could help solve a persistent mystery about the solar system. Hundreds of long-period comets have been catalogued, and their numbers had suggested that the outer Oort Cloud might contain as much as 40 times as much mass as Earth.

Accounting troubles
Current models of the solar system cannot account for so much mass. That's because objects at such extreme distances are prone to being lost from the solar system altogether, either jettisoned into interstellar space by the gravity of passing stars and giant gas clouds or tugs from the Milky Way itself.

Just 1 to 2 per cent of the material cast outwards by Jupiter and Saturn in the early solar system should have been retained in the outer Oort Cloud.

However the inner Oort Cloud is more insulated from the gravitational tugs of passing stars and should therefore retain 10 times as much material. So if the inner cloud is the dominant source of long-period comets, far less material would need to have been kicked outwards by Jupiter and Saturn billions of years ago.

Tracing origins
Luke Dones of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved in the new research, says the large estimate for the mass of the Oort Cloud "has been a problem for a long time". This work "at least partially resolves that, because it shows that you don't need nearly as much mass in the Oort Cloud to produce what we see", he told New Scientist.

Still, testing the idea may be difficult. Kaib notes that the orbits of long-period comets are still quite uncertain. The easiest ones to observe are those that pass through the inner solar system, but their orbits have likely changed significantly over their lifetimes, making it difficult to trace their origins.

Future telescopes, such as the Pan-STARRS project in Hawaii, should be able to observe much fainter – and therefore more distant – objects, whose orbits may be relatively unaltered.

Instant Expert: Black holes

In the depths of space and the hearts of galaxies lurk monsters: holes in space that drag passers-by to certain doom if they venture too close. That's the popular image of black holes, but these ravenous cosmic beasts are proving to be even more fascinating – and fearsome – than their reputation suggests.

Dark visions
The concept of an object so massive that not even light can escape the pull of its gravity was first mooted way back in 1783. Geologist John Michell wrote in a letter to the Royal Society that if a star were massive enough, "a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light… all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity".

That insight went neglected for more than a century, because physicists came to believe that light could not be deflected by gravity. However, Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity predicted that such deflection could in fact occur – a prediction subsequently borne out by experiment. That meant the light-capturing bodies suggested by Michell were actually possible – although Einstein himself was reluctant to accept that such a weird object could really exist.

The term "black hole" was coined by the quantum physicist John Wheeler, who also gave us "wormhole". Theoretical physicists spent decades demonstrating that black holes really were consistent with Einstein's ideas and working out how they should behave. And then the hunt was on to find one.

Hunting black holes
Given that black holes are black, as is space, you might expect them to be rather hard to spot. But in fact there are several ways astronomers can search for them.

For instance, black holes exert a powerful gravitational pull on nearby stars. This pull, and the black hole's existence, can be inferred by looking at the stars' movements. In some cases stars are found to be orbiting an invisible partner, and if calculations show that partner has more than a certain mass, it is probably a black hole.

A black hole's intense gravity also tends to attract gas and dust, which forms an "accretion disc" around it. Friction in the disc heats up the material, causing it to release vast amounts of radiation, which telescopes can detect. Models suggest that accretion discs could reach the size of a solar system and glow as brightly as a star.

Another giveaway is that light from stars that lie behind a black hole as seen from Earth should be deflected by its gravity. This process is called called gravitational lensing, and the measurements of the deflection of light can again be used to infer the existence of the hole.

This might all sound like rather circumstantial evidence, but most (not all) astronomers now agree that the evidence is strong enough to accept that black holes exist. And they are getting closer to imaging the elusive beast directly. In recent years, they have found evidence of matter vanishing in the region of a suspected black hole, suggesting that it has been swallowed – and powerful telescopes may be able to take direct pictures of the traces of a black hole within the next few years.

Follow the heat
There may be another way of spotting them. It sounds like a contradiction: everyone "knows" that black holes do not allow anything, even light, to escape. But 30 years ago Stephen Hawking suggested that they should release heat.

Even in empty space, pairs of particles – one made of matter, the other antimatter – can pop into existence for an instant, before annihilating each other and disappearing. If this happens close to a black hole's event horizon, one partner may be sucked into the black hole while the other escapes. From the perspective of an outside observer, the black hole has emitted a particle.

This has never been observed in the real world, but researchers have developed working models of event horizons and computer simulations suggest it should happen.

And if Hawking radiation does exist, black holes, cosmic superpowers though they are, should slowly evaporate away.

How to make a black hole
Black holes form when the most massive stars collapse in on themselves. As gravity pulls their outer layers inwards, the star's density gets higher and higher. Eventually its gravitational field becomes so intense that even light being emitted by the star is affected, bending back towards its surface rather than being radiated directly outwards.

Once the star has passed a critical point, all of the light is completely bent back, with none escaping into the rest of the universe.

The final collapse is a messy, chaotic event that can take up to a day to occur. This may cause spectacular bursts of gamma rays or supernova explosions. But in some cases at least, it may happen without any accompanying fireworks, in which case the stars would seemingly vanish without trace.

There are other ways black holes can form, at least in theory. For instance, tiny black holes could be formed when high-energy cosmic rays collide with molecules in Earth's upper atmosphere. (The fact that this hasn't had catastrophic effects on Earth, if it happens at all, is one reason that researchers at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, are so confident that scare stories about black holes being produced by their Large Hadron Collider are baseless.)

One shape, many sizes
The process of collapse destroys every characteristic of the original star except its mass, spin and electric charge: everything else is radiated away as gravitational waves. The resulting hole is said to "have no hair" – to bear no trace of its former existence. So black holes can vary only in terms of these three attributes – most obviously, in their masses.

Black holes vary enormously in size, from Goliaths with the mass of a million stars to the literally microscopic. Astronomers group them into four classes:


■Supermassive black holes weigh at least a 100,000 times as much as our sun. They are often found in the centres of galaxies, but it is unclear how they grow so large: the largest known to exist has the mass of 18 billion suns. It has been suggested that there is an upper limit, that no black hole can have a mass greater than 50 billion suns.
■Intermediate black holes are the black sheep of the family. Thought to have masses hundreds or thousands of times that of our sun, until recently there was little evidence that they existed. However, certain bright X-ray sources and mysterious runaway stars have made the case much stronger. The middleweight black holes could be formed when runaway stars crash into, and merge with, several stars in succession.
■Stellar-mass black holes have a mass several times that of our sun. The largest known to exist has the mass of 33 suns, while the smallest is only 3.8 times the sun's mass.
■Micro black holes are hypothetical. Far smaller than a star, they would fall prey to Hawking radiation and evaporate rapidly, so we should not expect to find any now. However, they could have been formed just after the big bang, when the cosmos was extremely hot and dense. Such ancient objects are called primordial black holes and would have come in a wide range of sizes, from micro to supermassive. Only the largest primordial black holes could have survived to the present day.

A black hole's spin and charge can also affect its behaviour. For example, spin may cause some black holes to fire off violent jets of matter. And as described in the next section, it might also cause them to reveal their deepest secret.

The anatomy of a black hole
Despite copious attempts to model what happens inside a black hole, no one knows for sure. The prevailing model of a black hole's interior suggests that its heart is a region of infinite density known as a singularity.

If you find the idea of infinite density puzzling, don't worry: this paradoxical-sounding concept arises because the laws of physics as we know them break down at this point. Until we have a theory that effectively integrates quantum mechanics and gravity, theoretical physicists are likely to remain almost as puzzled as everyone else about what goes on at the heart of a black hole – although that hasn't stopped them from trying to work it out.

Because singularities break the known laws of physics so spectacularly, Roger Penrose and others proposed the "cosmic censorship hypothesis", which states that all singularities must be enclosed by an event horizon. This isn't a physical barrier but a point of no return: objects that pass beyond it can never escape the black hole (but see below to understand how quantum mechanics undermines that idea). Thus the singularity is effectively hidden from the rest of the universe: we should never see a "naked" singularity.

The cosmic censorship hypothesis has never been proven, and over the years there have been several attempts to show that naked singularities really can exist. For instance, some have suggested that charged, fast-spinning black holes might be persuaded to reveal their singularities – and others have shown that this wouldn't work.

Destroying a black hole
Every time a black hole "releases" a particle of Hawking radiation, it should decrease in mass. Over billions of years, even the most massive black hole would shrink and eventually disappear. And this leads to a massive problem.

If you know a black hole's mass, electric charge and rate of spin, you know literally everything there is to know about it. To fully describe a star, on the other hand, you would need information about every single constituent particle. So a vast amount of information apparently vanishes when the hole forms. This information cannot simply escape the hole, because that would involve travelling faster than light.

If the black hole existed forever, the information might be "locked away" inside it. But if the black hole ultimately evaporates, as Hawking radiation would dictate, the information is utterly destroyed, and the laws of quantum mechanics do not allow that. This is the black hole information paradox.

Many proposed solutions involve rethinking black holes using string theory. These solutions lead to strange but physically plausible consequences: for instance, that an object thrown into a black hole would exist in two places at once, or that the singularity would be a "fuzzball" of subatomic strings.

The paradox could also be resolved if black holes do not include a true singularity, or if, as Stephen Hawking has suggested, the Hawking radiation contains the information, albeit in a mangled and unreadable state. It has even been suggested that black holes could actually be wormholes: gateways to other universes.

When holes collide
Despite the popular image of black holes as monsters lurking in wait to catch the unwary, at least some have been observed speeding through space. This raises the possibility that they could collide with each other, if the conditions are right.

If they did, computer simulations suggest that they would merge to form a single, larger black hole. Three-way mergers have also been successfully simulated.

Such mergers could give themselves away by their effect on the shapes of the black holes' parent galaxies, and in infrared and ultraviolet afterglows.

No collisions have been observed directly, but astronomers have found several pairs of black holes that are very close to each other, including some that are orbiting each other and some that seem to be on course for a collision.

Living with a black hole
The neighbourhood of a black hole can be a busy place. As previously mentioned, the black hole can accumulate a mass of dust called an accretion disc, but this is just the start.

Matter has been seen spiralling into a black hole, and the black hole's gravity can cause individual light photons to temporarily go into orbit around it.

On a larger scale, many black holes fire out huge jets of energetic matter, powered by magnetic fields. In one case, these jets have been shown to produce energetic bubbles 300,000 light years across.

Perhaps surprisingly, simulations suggest that stars can form in the vicinity of a black hole – though stars that venture too close may self-destruct.

And as we might expect, some unlucky stars get swallowed by black holes. Some black holes do this conspicuously, releasing outbursts of gamma rays and X-rays every time they feed, while others are "closet eaters" that emit very little radiation at feeding time.

Galaxies and black holes
Astronomers generally agree that enormous black holes lurk at the centre of most galaxies, and have identified plausible candidates in many galaxies, including the neighbouring dwarf galaxy M32 – and our own Milky Way.

The Milky Way's central black hole has been closely studied. At the moment it is on a starvation diet, having not eaten any large clumps of matter for several decades, but if it gets another large meal it could flare up again.

There have also been claims that there is a second, smaller black hole at the heart of our galaxy, but the evidence at present is inconclusive. It's also been suggested that the bigger black hole ate its baby brother.

When galaxies collide, their central black holes may collide as well. There have been hints that these collisions could eject one or both of the black holes, sending them hurtling across intergalactic space.

It has been suggested that these black holes must be there if galaxies are to form, and even that they directly seed galaxy formation. However, some galaxies seem to lack them, so the case is far from closed as yet.

The cosmic connection
Even if black holes aren't responsible for forming galaxies, they are still extremely important to our understanding of the universe as a whole.

They may have been responsible for mysterious cosmic "blobs" that littered the early universe. They may also be the power source behind both the incredibly luminous quasars and the most high-energy cosmic rays. And black holes evaporating explosively could also help reveal extra spatial dimensions.

And despite their formidable nature, they might even be put to humanity's service, acting as the ultimate particle accelerators. Theoreticians have even suggested that they could be used to power interstellar spacecraft.

It's a long shot, but black holes might just help our descendants explore the universe, as well as to understand it.