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Communicating With Dolphins |
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Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they've been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.

Dolphins Using the IPad
To better understand how these sounds are produced, how they travel and even what they mean, researchers need to be able to play them back, watching how dolphins react. This speaker can do it, producing sounds from 6 kHz to 170 kHz. While others have worked in the low-frequency ranges, this is the first type that can cover the whole spectrum.
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Graphene: A Wonder Material |
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GRAPHENE, a form of carbon that comes in sheets a single atom thick, has gained a reputation as a wonder material. It is the best conductor yet discovered of heat at room temperature and is 40 times stronger than steel. It is also a semiconductor whose electrical conductivity is 1,000 times better than silicon's. This means it could be used to make devices far more sensitive than is possible now, leading some to predict that it will one day become the material of choice for computer chips. There was little surprise, therefore, when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, two physicists who were investigating graphene's structure, won the 2010 Nobel prize for their work.

Graphene can be used in many industries - from electronics to water purifiers, from displays to super-capacitors and car batteries offering exciting possibilities for this new technologican advance, although. converting the wonders of graphene into products has been tough. But Frank Koppens and his colleagues at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona think they have found a way to do so. As they describe in Nature Nanotechnology, they believe graphene can be used to make ultra-sensitive, low-cost photodetectors.
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The New Digital Advertising World |
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Social media has empowered brands to break their own news instead of relying on advertising or PR to disseminate their message. As brands become increasingly comfortable with social media on the whole, more budget and attention is being focused on high quality content created specifically for the social web. New Wave of Advertisers Consider Consumers the New Medium.
The spot for Chipotle Mexican Grill starts bleak and gets bleaker: the story of a farmer who becomes Big Agriculture, maltreating his pigs and polluting the water as winter descends. It's long, at two minutes and 20 seconds, and told entirely via stop-motion puppetry. There's no dialogue, only the spooky crooning of Willie Nelson. And the Chipotle logo appears just once, at the very end, on a truck pulling away from a farm returned to its roots, chickens pecking freely in the sun. At any number of companies, the ad would have been killed for any number of reasons. It's unfunny. Political. Expensive to air. There was also a chance that it was brilliant.
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Stopping Iran's Nuclear Ambitions with Covert Operations |
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Iran's nuclear program is one of the most polarizing issues in one of the world's most volatile regions. While American and European officials believe Tehran is planning to build nuclear weapons, Iran's leadership says that its goal in developing a nuclear program is to generate electricity without dipping into the oil supply it prefers to sell abroad, and to provide fuel for medical reactors. The IAEA has confirmed Iran is now enriching uranium to the 20-percent level at its underground bunker housed on an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base.

This advancement comes just months after the IAEA's unprecedented report detailed for the first time that Iran had engaged in activities related to the production of nuclear weapons. These developments are a wake-up call. The United States must immediately implement existing sanctions and pass new, tougher sanctions on Iran to prevent the regime from building nuclear weapons.
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Google to Dig Deeper Into Users' Lives |
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As of March 1, 2012, whatever you do on one Google-owned site will change whatever you see on another Google property – be it Google' search engine, Docs, Maps, Calendar, Gmail, Picassa, YouTube, G+, etc.

"We can provide reminders that you're going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day," reads Google's blog explaining the search giant's unified policy. This works whether you're accessing Google on your computer, tablet or cellphone, as long as you're logged in. "People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out," Google points out. What the blog posts fails to mention however, is that it is now better equipped to help out law enforcement officials and the government when it comes to finding out about you.
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