Technology

BANKS could be an unexpected victim of the revolution in online networking, says a UK study.

Instead of paying commercial interest rates, 74 per cent of Britons say they would consider turning to the growing internet phenomenon of social lending. Just as social networks such as FaceBook let you set up online communities, lending sites including prosper.com and zopa.com match people with cash to lend with borrowers. Users list how much they want to borrow, and what interest they are prepared to pay, and lenders then bid for deals they like the look of.

Now a study by the Lancaster-based Social Futures Observatory has found that the idea of “side-stepping the banks” is catching on, with a third of respondents believing the major banks set out to put people in debt.

GLOBAL warming may help satellites stay in low Earth orbit for longer, but at some cost to their solar panels.

Jan Laštovicka at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Prague, Czech Republic, and colleagues say evidence is mounting that the upper atmosphere is cooling and shrinking as greenhouse-gas levels rise (Science, vol 314, p 1253).

500million dollars has been awarded by the Pentagon to IBM and Cray to develop “petaflop” supercomputers

In the right hands, the violins of

the celebrated 17th-century Italian

instrument makers Antonio Stradivari

and Giuseppe Guarneri produce a

glorious sound. But quite why they

do so has remained a mystery.

Now wood shavings scavenged

from these instruments while under

repair have given fresh clues as to their

exquisite acoustics. Joseph Nagyvary,

a chemist at Texas A&M University in

College Station, analysed shavings

from a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius

using infrared and nuclear magnetic

resonance spectroscopy. He found that

a chemical wood preservative used

in timber yards around Cremona in

Lombardy, where both violin makers

worked, appears to have given the

violins their signature sound quality.

Nagyvary has made analysing

Stradivarius violins – and making

similar-sounding modern versions – his

life’s work. In 1998 he discovered that

treating a piece of modern maple with

salt water and grape juice could produce

a violin back with some Stradavarius-

like resonances. Then in 2001 he found

that borax, the anti-woodworm

treatment Stradivari used, also had an

appreciable effect on a violin’s sound.

Nagyvary’s recent chemical analysis

of the wood shows that it has a

different chemical composition to maple

grown in the region today (Nature,

vol 444, p 565). “The violin backs

appear to have been brutally treated

with salts of copper, iron and chromium

as wood preservers,” Nagyvary says. It

is these salts, he suggests, that provided

the mellifluous tone. He now plans to

find out exactly which salts they were.

LORDS OF THE STRINGS

Heat from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric carbon dioxide and emitted as infrared radiation. In the denser lower atmosphere the CO2 absorbs it and radiates it back to Earth, but higher up it is lost into space.

Cooling shrinks the atmosphere, leaving less gas to create drag on satellites, so they remain aloft for longer. But their solar panels are less well protected from high-energy particles that could degrade them, Laštovicka says.

Paralysed people could communicate and control machines just by thinking hard,

thanks to a non-invasive mind-reading headband developed by Hitachi in Japan.

It shines near-infrared light through the skull and measures how much is reflected

by the brain. In tests, people did mental arithmetic to indicate “yes” and let their

mind wander to say “no”. Working out a sum increased blood flow in the brain,

which dimmed the light reflected back to the sensors, showing what the user meant.

A printer that uses plastic “paper” which can be reused up to 500 times has been

developed by Japanese firm Toshiba. It prints on plastic sheets coated in heat-

sensitive pigments. The pigments switch from white to black at one temperature,

and switch back at another, so text can be printed and then erased.

GIZMO

(per cent of US internet users)

Have ever downloaded a podcast

Nov 2006

Feb - April 2006

12%

7%

1%

1%

Did so yesterday

AUDIO ON THE MOVE

More US internet users are listening to

podcasts, but few do so regularly

Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada, on a new software tool that helps people circumvent government censorship.

The software, called Psiphon, allows people to access the web through a proxy server in an unrestricted country (The New York Times, 27 November).

“We’re trying to restore the internet’s promise of unfettered access”

–What’s so special about a Stradivarius?–

UNIM

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www.newscientist.com 2 December 2006 | NewScientist | 25

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Borrowers vote

with their mice

Less of a drag

for satellites

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