New U.S. space rockets include crew-escape systems

Heeding a lesson from history, designers of a new generation of U.S. rockets will include escape systems to give crew members a fighting chance of surviving launch accidents such as the one that felled an unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket on Tuesday.

The U.S. space agency NASA bypassed escape systems for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, believing the spaceships to be far safer than they turned out to be. The illusion was shattered on Jan. 28, 1986, when gas leaking from a solid-fuel booster rocket doomed the shuttle Challenger and its seven crew about 72 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Taking a page from design books for the 1960s-era Mercury and Apollo capsules, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's next manned spaceship, Orion, will include a rocket-powered tower attached to the top of the spacecraft that can separate from a troubled launch vehicle and parachute the crew to safety.

The so-called Launch Abort System can activate in milliseconds, catapulting the crew capsule about 1.6 kilometres in altitude in seconds.

"We proved in shuttle that it was a bad idea to not have a launch escape system ... so there's been a lot of work to build this really Cadillac version of a launch escape tower that they've got on Orion," said Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who oversees human space flight for Colorado-based consulting firm Special Aerospace Services.

Huge, steerable escape capsule

"It's a big, heavy capsule that requires a big, heavy rocket that steers you all over the sky to get away from problems with the big rocket booster. It's a huge system," Hale said.

NASA's Orion spacecraft is moved ahead of its test flight in early December. The spacecraft is equipped with a steerable escape capsule that can be ejected with the astronauts on board in case of a launch accident. (The Associated Press)

While Orion is intended for deep-space missions beyond the International Space Station, which flies about 418 kilometres above Earth, NASA is requiring commercial companies hired to taxi astronauts to and from the orbital outpost to have launch escape systems as well.

Privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX as the California-based firm is known, next year will test an alternative technology that uses its capsules' own steering thrusters to boost it away from a malfunctioning rocket.

Boeing plans to use a similar pusher abort system for its CST-100 capsule. SpaceX and Boeing last month won contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion US to finish development of their passenger spaceships, test them and fly up to six operational missions each for NASA beginning in 2017.

Currently station crew members fly on Russian Soyuz capsules equipped with Apollo-style rocket-powered launch escape towers. In 47 years of Soyuz rocket flights, the escape system has been used once in an actual emergency.

On Sept. 26, 1983, a fuel leak sparked a fire on the launch pad that engulfed a Soyuz rocket about a minute before liftoff. Seconds before the booster exploded, the rocket's launch abort system ignited, carrying cosmonauts Gennadi Strekalov and Vladimir Titov to safety.

"The interesting thing on the Soyuz then and even today is the crew can't initiate the launch escape tower, unlike the American designs. The ground control has to actually initiate it," Hale said.

"I would tell you that just because you've got a launch escape tower on your rocket doesn't mean that you're guaranteed safety," he added.

Space shuttles has 2 fatal accidents in 135 flights

NASA wants its commercial space taxis to be 1,000 times safer than the shuttle, which had two fatal accidents out of 135 flights.

The cause of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explosion remains under investigation. The accident, which occurred about 10 seconds after liftoff from the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, claimed a cargo ship bound for the space station, which is a $100 billion research laboratory owned and operated by 15 nations.

The Antares rocket, which previously made four successful flights, has been grounded pending results of the investigation.

Orbital Sciences uses refurbished Soviet-era motors for the rocket's first stage and already had been planning to replace the engines, known as AJ-26, due to technical concerns and supply limitations.

"It is possible that we may decide to accelerate this change if the AJ-26 turns out to be implicated in the failure, but this has not yet been decided," Orbital Sciences President and Chief Executive David Thompson told analysts in a conference call on Wednesday.

"Under the original plan we were, as of now, about two years away from conducting the first launch of Antares with the second-generation propulsion system ... I certainly think we can shorten that interval, but at this point I don't know by how much," Thompson said.

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Moto360 smartwatch is capable, but not always cool

Dick Tracy. Michael Knight from Knight Rider. Penny from Inspector Gadget. The original Power Rangers. All classic characters over many generations, all popularizing the idea of a wristwatch doing more than telling time.

That idea — wearable technology — is now thriving. With today's launch of the Moto 360, Canadians can talk to their watch, get vital information off of it and even respond to friends.

But the day-to-day realities of having a connected wrist are about as cool as Inspector Gadget or the Power Rangers are in 2014.

When the voice controls on the Moto 360 work, 'you feel a sense of accomplishment by leaving your phone in your pocket,' says CBC's Anand Ram. (Anand Ram/CBC)

The device itself is well-made. Despite the popularity of the term "smartwatch," Motorola doesn't call its wearable device that. It prefers "timepiece," to demonstrate the thought process behind the 360: Make it look and feel more like a dress watch and less like a 1980s Casio calculator watch.

The leather strap is very comfortable and combined with the stainless steel housing, keeps the watch very light. Wrists, big or small, won't feel put off by the 11.5-millimetre thickness and 46-millimetre diameter. 

All that keeps the Moto 360 very unassuming. During my two weeks of wearing it, no one really noticed it was more than a watch.

The round, vibrant, touchscreen display is made of the latest Gorilla Glass and held up to rain, sweat and spit. (Just try talking to your wrist without at least a few droplets flying out.)

The voice controls, however, aren't perfect. After three attempts of trying to tell my wife on WhatsApp that I'll pick up the milk, I resorted to scrolling through a preset list of responses. 

When the voice controls do work, it's very smooth. You feel a sense of accomplishment by leaving your phone in your pocket.

To be clear: I only felt that accomplishment talking to my 360 when I was alone. In public, I hunched over, whispering for fear that someone would see me, wondering, "How loud do I have to speak? How close do I have to bring it to my mouth?" Dick Tracy's trench coat would have helped — I was surprised by how embarrassed I felt.

That awkwardness aside, the 360's functionality goes beyond the gimmick of talking to your wrist. Since it's connected to your Android phone (running version 4.3 or higher), it's great for handling notifications.

The Moto 360's battery lasts all day, but it can only be charged on a special dock that comes with the watch. (Anand Ram/CBC)

Don't want to read that fifth email about a work server being down? Swipe, delete. Can't answer a call in a meeting? Swipe left to refuse. Pause your music? Tap.

It also uses Google Now, the made-for-you set of cards on Android that show contextual information such as flight times or transit directions. You can even use navigation, which makes a short vibration at every turn-by-turn direction. 

All this makes the Moto 360 very capable, hitting more than it misses.

Its battery can last all day, but charges only on a dock that comes with it, which can be inconvenient.

Another question is whether you want to pay $279 for what is essentially an accessory, some elegant hardware that will probably be obsolete in a couple of years.

Finally, there's still the issue of what a smartwatch is — in essence, a wearable device that does less than your phone.

People heaped the same criticism on tablets when they first came out, but they soon became a must-have gadget. And with the Apple Watch coming out next year, there will be a greater public consciousness over the connected wrist — perhaps even making it cool to talk into one.

For now, though, it seems only crime-fighters on TV can get away with it.

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New leopard frog species found in New York City

A brand-new species of frog has been discovered in the middle of America's largest metropolis, New York City.

Not only had the green, black-spotted Atlantic Coast leopard frog gone unnoticed by the eight million residents of New York City, but it appears to be widespread along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, researchers reported this week in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

"This discovery clearly demonstrates that human knowledge of the natural world remains incomplete even in the best-known locales," wrote lead author Jeremy Feinberg, a PhD student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and his colleagues.

The paper noted that New York is "one of the most developed, heavily settled and well-inventoried places on Earth" and that "novel and undescribed vertebrate species are unexpected here."

In fact, the last new amphibian discovered in New York or New England was the Fowler's toad in 1882, the paper said.

Rutgers University PhD student Jeremy Feinberg was studying frogs in the marshes near the Statue of Liberty on Staten Island when he noticed one that had an unusual call. (Courtesy Jeremy Feinberg/Rutgers University)

The new frog looks similar to two known species, but was identified from its distinctive calls and genetic testing.

The frog has been given the scientific name Rana kauffeldi, after Carl Kauffeld, an amphibian expert who claimed in the 1930s that a third species of leopard frog existed in the northeastern U.S. His claim was generally rejected by other biologists in subsequent decades.

In 2008, Feinberg was studying frogs in marshes on Staten Island, near the Statue of Liberty, when he noticed one that had an unusual call — a single "chuck," instead of the "pulsed ak-ak-ak" and "snore-like calls" of the two known species.

New frog species found in New York City0:39

The researchers confirmed the existence of a new leopard frog species in 2012, after comparing the frog's DNA to that of the two known local species. But at that time, they didn't have enough information to "formally describe" or name it.

This week's report gives a full description of the frog's physical characteristics, its behaviour, including its call, and its range.

Based on recordings from people who have contacted the researchers since first hearing about the new species, the frog lives in seven U.S. states as far south as North Carolina, said Matt Schlesinger, chief zoologist of the New York Natural Heritage Program and co-author of the paper. DNA from the species has also been collected in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The researchers have now released recordings of the frog's call to the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program. The U.S. government-run program relies on volunteers to listen for frog and toad calls to track their populations.

The Atlantic Coast leopard frog was never described before largely because it is a "cryptic" species — one that has a close physical resemblance to another species but is genetically different. The researchers think that other cryptic species could still be found in "well-catalogued" areas like big cities.

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Antares rocket explosion: Will it set back the commercialization of space?

The explosion of an unmanned commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space Station has raised some questions as to whether the incident will pose a significant setback of the commercialization of the space industry.

"The big fear here is that the reputation of this private company, Orbital Sciences, which is one of several private companies, that are going up into the International Space Station, whether this is going to erode the confidence that private companies can actually do this job," said Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Antares rocket blew up just moments after liftoff Tuesday evening from the Virginia coast. The rocket was carrying a capsule loaded with space station experiments and equipment for NASA. No one was injured when it exploded, shooting flaming debris down onto the launch area and into the ocean.​

'Don't have much margin for error'

"At the beginning, private companies, they're going to make mistakes and things will go wrong. The problem is they don't have much margin for error," McDonald said. "And so it's sad that after 50 years in spaceflight, that rockets still blow up like this and it's just hoping they'll be able to recover from this tragedy."

In recent years, particularly after retiring the space shuttle program, NASA has relied on private companies for certain tasks, including providing supply rockets to the International Space Station. Supporters of commercialization say the move to the private sector has and will save the government space program millions of dollars. 

'Accidents do happen, and we've seen catastrophic accidents happen on NASA missions.'- Mark Sundahl, Cleveland State University law professor

"With the departure of the shuttle missions, the fact that the United States, who is supposed to be this space superpower, can't launch their astronauts into space, is a really big thing," said Ryan Marciniak, a host and astronomer at the Ontario Science Centre, "The fact that they have to get to Russia to send their astronauts to the ISS, that definitely kicked off all these private companies coming up."

NASA is paying $1.9 billion to Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences for eight cargo hauls and $1.6 billion to California's SpaceX for 12 shipments. So far, all private space ventures to the space station have involved unmanned flights carrying cargo. But Marciniak said that he believes in a couple years, some of these flights will be taking crew along with cargo.

"At the end of the day it's beneficial for NASA who will be able to direct its funds to missions only NASA can do because they're not profit-bearing missions such as deep space exploration," said Mark Sundahl, Cleveland State University law professor who specializes in space commercialization. 

"I think some skeptics of this move from government resupply missions to the ISS to the private sector may point at this [accident] and say 'I told you so, you can't count on private companies.' But I think that's an absolutely unfair reaction. Accidents do happen, and we've seen catastrophic accidents happen on NASA missions."

The explosion won't likely have any long-term implications, Sundahl predicted, adding that private industry has been remarkably successful with commercial cargo deliveries, including companies like Orbital, which has already had two successful resupply missions to the space station.

"We will learn from this accident, see what happens and what went wrong and will ensure success in future missions. There will be a silver lining in all this."

Marciniak said he expects the accident will cause a ripple through the industry, forcing companies to second guess their systems and take extra precautions. 

Industry 'growing unbelievably quickly'

"I think it's going to be in people's minds moving forward with the rest of the launches that are going on but I don't think it will slow it down at all. This is an industry that is growing unbelievably quickly."

"Unfortunately when you have setbacks like this it raises questions with folks," said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "I'm sure there will be elements of Congress that raise questions on whether this is the right path NASA should be going on, using the commercial sector. 

"Personally I'm not concerned," he said.  "I think this is just one small aspect of the whole commercial space industry and these things happens. This is not the first launch failure and it probably wont be the last unfortunately."

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Kilauea volcano lava 30 metres from Hawaiian village home

Rain fell on a red-hot river of lava as it threatened to consume its first home on its slow advance into a rural Hawaii town.

A breakout of the lava flow was about 30 metres from a Pahoa residence — about the length of a basketball court, said Hawaii County Civil Defense Director Darryl Oliveira. The couple that lives in the home has left.

Scientists from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory who are walking alongside the lava reported its leading edge was 220 metres from Pahoa Village Road, which goes through a commercial hub of the Big Island's sprawling and isolated Puna district.

"This is just a little quiet village in a very rural community. We farm, we fish, we hunt," said Jamila Dandini. "We're going to be an island on an island."

The leading edge remained in a large agricultural parcel that included another house, which was about 91 metres from the lava, Oliveira said.

Dozens of homes, business and other structures are in the area of the lava flow. That number could increase as the flow front widens.

"The people who are meant to stay will stay. The people that have to leave, sadly, will leave," Dandini said.

So far, lava has burned a garden shed, tires and some metal materials.

On Wednesday, it burned mostly vegetation, while the rain helped tamp down smoke from the crackling stream.

Officials are monitoring hazards from the smoke. Chemists from the observatory detected only low levels of sulphur dioxide, Oliveira said.

The lava flow emerged from a vent in June and until recently had been slowly weaving through uninhabited forest and pastureland.

The flow is expected to slither past properties across the street from Jeff and Denise Lagrimas's home as it works its way toward the ocean, about 10 kilometres away. The Lagrimases decided not to stay and see if the lava burns their home. They packed up to leave for a town 22 kilometres away.

"I don't want to stick around and just wait for it to come and take it," Denise Lagrimas said while taking a break from loading kitchen cups and bowls in cardboard boxes. "You just never know."

She said they decided to move to Kurtistown because it's a safe distance away.

"Never in my wildest dreams as a kid growing up did I think I would be running from lava," Denise Lagrimas said.

Erbin Gamurot, 48, a handyman, said Pele, the volcano goddess, just wants to visit her sister, Namakaokahai, the sea goddess.

"She gotta go see her sister. She gotta go say hi. You know how family are. It's all good," Gamuret said.

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Apple's Tim Cook reveals he's gay and proud of it

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has come out of the closet.

The public declaration, in an essay written for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, makes public what had been widely known in some corporate circles. And more importantly, it likely makes Cook the highest-profile gay person in corporate America.

"Plenty of colleagues at Apple know I'm gay, and it doesn't seem to make a difference in the way they treat me," Cook wrote. "Of course, I've had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people's differences. Not everyone is so lucky."

Cook said that while he never denied his sexuality, he never publicly acknowledged it, either. Cook wrote in the column published Thursday that it wasn't an easy choice to publicly disclose that he is gay, but that he felt the acknowledgement could help others.

"I've come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important," he wrote.

Three days ago, Cook spoke out publicly against his home state of Alabama to ensure the state take steps to ensure the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Alabama is among the states that do not recognize same-sex marriage, and it doesn't offer legal protections on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Cook is a native of Robertsdale, Ala., and attended Auburn University.

"So let me be clear: I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," Cook said.

Cook succeeded Apple founder Steve Jobs as chief executive officer of Apple Inc. in 2011.

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Researchers uncover real name of Egyptian mummy 'Justine'

Researchers have uncovered the real name of a mysterious Egyptian mummy nicknamed Justine.

Justine, who is temporarily on display at THEMUSEUM in Kitchener, Ont., was actually known as Nefret-Mut when she worked as the "chantress" or singer-musician of the Temple of Amun-Re in the city of Thebes in ancient Egypt, 3,000 years ago.

'I hate not to have a name for people.'- Gayle Gibson, Royal Ontario Museum

"She becomes much more alive now," as a result of having her real name known, said Andrew Nelson, the Western University archeologist who revealed the new discovery in a ROM blog post and a public lecture at THEMUSEUM this past weekend.

"Nefret-Mut means "beautiful one of the goddess Mut," said Gayle Gibson, the Toronto Egyptologist who originally nicknamed the mummy Justine and managed to decipher her real name last week. Mut was a powerful mother goddess of sovereignty, and the main goddess of the city of Thebes, where Nefret-Mut lived, Gibson said. She added it was common for people of the time to be named after her, although typically the name was the other way around – Mut-Nefret.

Archeologist Andrew Nelson confirmed that Justine was female when he studied the mummy using high-resolution CT scanning to X-ray the mummy, layer by layer, in 2007. (Andrew Nelson/Western University)

Gibson teaches at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which owns the mummy. She managed to find the name in high-quality photographs taken by ROM technician Bill Pratt of the messy hieroglyphics scrawled on what is believed to be Nefret-Mut's coffin.

"The writing is really sloppy," said Gibson, who worked as an English teacher earlier in her career. "It's like a bad high school kid's writing."

Because of that, she said, Egyptologists don't typically work too hard to decipher writing like that unless they have a good reason. In this case, she had a closer look after a query from Nelson ahead of his talk. He had asked how archeologists knew Justine's occupation.

Paint with name had flaked off

Gibson knew it was on the coffin, but thought she'd better check. Beside the words "the chantress of Amun-Re," the paint had flaked off where her name should have been.

But Gibson managed to find another instance of it elsewhere on the coffin.

"I certainly have never noticed it with my naked eyes," she said. "I think it really helped to have excellent pictures and the nice big modern computer screen."

The name 'Nefret-Mut' was found in messy hieroglyphics on a coffin associated with the mummy. (Royal Ontario Museum)

David Marksell, CEO of THEMUSEUM, said it's "pretty cool for us to have that new information" as an indirect result of the museum's lecture series. The museum borrowed the mummy from the ROM to accompany and add "authenticity" to Unwrapping Egypt, a  travelling exhibition featuring replicas of artifacts found in King Tutankhamun's tomb. It runs until February 2015. Nelson's public lecture was part of a series called Egyptian Dialogues that will feature a talk by Gibson this Sunday.

According to Gibson, Nefret-Mut lived during the 22nd Dynasty of ancient Egypt, around 945 B.C., during the rule of King Shesonq I, about 300 years after King Ramses II. It was a period of relative calm after a spate of invasions, anarchy and civil war.

Nefret-Mut would have worked as a singer in something like a church choir.

"Only hers is like a really good Baptist choir, so there would be tambourines and swaying and really exciting, good music, I suspect," said Gibson, based on paintings of activities at the temple.

The chantress would have been part of noisy processions through town during large festivals to encourage people in their homes and at work to join them, Gibson added.

2 coffins

According to THE MUSEUM, the mummy was excavated in 1905 to 1906 by Egyptologist Eduoard Naville. The mummy, along with a man's coffin and a woman's coffin, were later acquired by Charles Trick Currelly, the ROM's first curator. For a long time, no one was quite sure whether the mummy was a man or a woman and which coffin it belonged to.

Gibson thought she was female, due to her small stature and feminine-looking forehead, and named her Justine.

"I hate not to have a name for people."

The nickname was based on ancient Egyptian mythology, which said that when someone died, they were judged by the gods. If they received a good judgment, they were "justified" and could pass off to the next world "in good stead."

Nelson confirmed that Justine was female when he studied it using high-resolution CT scanning to X-ray the mummy, layer by layer, in 2007. Her skeleton clearly revealed the womanly shape of her pelvis.

The scans also revealed the unusual way she had been mummified – her brain had been left in her skull, not removed through her nose as was thought to be the tradition. And her internal organs had all been removed from between her legs, not from her flank.

"The take-home message from that is there is a lot more variability in how mummies were mummified than we tend to think," Nelson said.

Nelson and Gibson hope to study Nefret-Mut more when she returns to the ROM this spring and publish some of the scientific data they have uncovered.

But already, they know quite a lot more about Nefret-Mut than about most mummies in the world, including her origin, her name and her occupation, Nelson said.

"It really makes her quite an important mummy."

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Antares rocket explosion: Orbital Sciences Corp. looks for cause of blast

The company behind the dramatic launch explosion of a space station supply mission promises to find the cause of the failure and is warning residents to avoid any potentially hazardous wreckage.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Antares rocket blew up just moments after liftoff Tuesday evening from the Virginia coast.

Meanwhile, early Wednesday, the Russian Space Agency launched its own cargo vessel from Kazakhstan and the spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station six hours later with 2.7 tonnes of food. The smooth flight was in stark contrast to the Orbital Sciences' failed launch, and had been planned well in advance of the accident.

The Orbital Sciences rocket was carrying a Cygnus capsule loaded with space station experiments and equipment for NASA. No one was injured when the rocket exploded moments after liftoff, shooting flaming debris down onto the launch area and into the ocean.

An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket explodes shortly after takeoff at Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. on Tuesday. No injuries were reported following the first catastrophic launch in NASA's commercial spaceflight effort. (Jay Diem, Eastern Shore News/Associated Press)

Ground crews were ready to access the fire-stricken area of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at daybreak Wednesday to search for accident debris.

The company's Cygnus cargo ship was carrying 2,300 kilograms of experiments and equipment for NASA, as well as prepackaged meals and, in a generous touch, freeze-dried Maryland crabcakes for a Baltimore-born astronaut who's been in orbit for five months.

All of the lost materials will be replaced and flown to the 420-kilometre-high space station, NASA's station program manager Mike Suffredini said. The six-person space station crew has enough supplies to last well into spring.

The accident is sure to draw scrutiny to the space agency's growing reliance on private U.S. companies in the post-shuttle era. NASA is paying billions of dollars to Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and the California-based SpaceX company to make station deliveries, and it's counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start flying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting lab as early as 2017.

It was the fourth Cygnus bound for the orbiting lab; the first flew just over a year ago. SpaceX is scheduled to launch another Dragon supply ship from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December.

"Today's launch attempt will not deter us from our work to expand our already successful capability to launch cargo from American shores to the International Space Station," NASA's human exploration chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, said in a statement following the accident.

Until Tuesday, all of the supply missions by Orbital Sciences and SpaceX had been near-flawless.

President Barack Obama has long championed this commercial space effort. He was in Wisconsin for a campaign rally and was kept informed.

Orbital Sciences' executive vice president Frank Culbertson said the company carried insurance on the mission, which he valued at more than $200 million US, not counting repair costs. 

John Logdson, former space policy director at George Washington University, said the explosion was unlikely to be a major setback to NASA's commercial space plans. But he noted it could derail Orbital Sciences for a while given the company has just one launch pad and the accident occurred right above it.

At a news conference Tuesday night, Culbertson and others said everyone at the launch site had been accounted for and the damage appeared to be limited to the facilities.

He noted that the cargo module was carrying hazardous materials and warned residents to avoid any contact with debris.

"Certainly don't go souvenir hunting along the beach," he said.

Things began to go wrong 10 to 12 seconds into the flight and it was all over in 20 seconds when what was left of the rocket came crashing down, Culbertson said. He said he believes the range-safety staff sent a destruct signal before it hit the ground, but was not certain.

This was the second launch attempt for the mission. Monday evening's try was thwarted by a stray sailboat in the rocket's danger zone. The restrictions are in case of just such an accident that occurred Tuesday.

Culbertson said the top priority will be repairing the launch pad "as quickly and safely as possible."

"We will not fly until we understand the root cause," he said, adding that it was too early to guess how long it might take to make the rocket repairs and fix the launch pad. It will take a few weeks, alone, to assess the damage and extent of potential repairs.

Culbertson also stressed that it was too soon to know whether the Russian-built engines, modified for the Antares and extensively tested, were to blame.

"We will understand what happened — hopefully soon — and we'll get things back on track," Culbertson assured his devastated team. "We've all seen this happen in our business before, and we've all seen the teams recover from this, and we will do the same."

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Apple Pay not expected in Canada any time soon

While Apple is heralding Apple Pay, its new mobile payment system, as a roaring success, Canadians shouldn't expect to use their newest iPhone to pay for goods any time soon, as It's unlikely the company will be rolling out the service in Canada in the immediate future. 

"Apple has given no indication as to when it will come to Canada or even if," said analyst Troy Crandall, of MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier. "However, it is logical that it is something they are likely working on for the future. But is Canada one of the main priorities? I would probably say no."

Apple Pay lets users of the newest models of iPhones and iPads pay for purchases through their devices on credit or debit card accounts without having to show their card or account number.

On Monday, during a tech industry conference in California, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said the payment system had more than one million activations in the first three days after it became available, and is now more widely used than any competing payment system.

I think it's the novelty," Crandall said about Apple Pay's success. "Apple's kind of made it a fun way to pay."

Making people part with their money is the most difficult part of the transaction, Crandall said, and "if you can actually make that part fun, that's really powerful. And I think that's what Apple has successfully done. They've made it easy, and they've made it fun."

Contacted by CBC News, a spokeswoman for Apple would not say when or if there were any plans for offering the system into Canada,. She referred to the speech Cook gave on Oct. 14, which made no mention of any plans for Canada.

China probably next target

"I wouldn't say Canada is necessarily a priority," Crandall said, adding that China is probably Apple's next target. Indeed, Jack Ma, executive chairman of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, told the same audience at this week's California tech conference that he would be "very interested" in teaming with Apple to bring Apple Pay to China. 

Canada certainly poses no technological barriers for Apple Pay. The system is based on a near-field communication (NFC) chip, which transfers encrypted data from one device to another. Many Canadian retailers and services already use similar technology with the use of Paypass, which allows users to just tap their debit or credit cards on terminals in order to pay.

The  launch of Apple Pay in Canada will be based partly on how cumbersome it will be to introduce from a regulatory standpoint.

"If it's going to be pretty tough, they'll just probably focus on the easier [countries] first," Crandall said.

Not only would Apple Pay have to comply with Canada's privacy regulations, it would also need the approval of the banks, which are much more conservative than their American counterparts. Since banks issue credit cards and debit cards (which can also be used in Apple Pay), Apple would need to enter into a partnership with the major Canadian banks, as it did with major banks in the U.S. 

Canada better suited for Apple Pay

"There's a good argument to say that Canada is better suited environment for Apple Pay to launch, because we already have these tap-to-pay terminals installed throughout Canada, and we're already using them," said Brian Jackson, editor of ITBusiness.ca. "It's really a deal with the banks that has to be done."

Apple CEO Tim Cook Apple said the payment system had over one million activations in the first three days after it became available, and is now more widely used than any competing payment system. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)

​

However, Jackson said it's possible that Canadian banks may set up obstacles, wanting to own mobile payments themselves, and create an app that allows Canadians to pay through that avenue.

Earlier this month, Jeff Martin, vice-president and CIO of direct channels technology solutions at TD Group, told a crowd at the Mobile Enterprise Canada Summit that the bank is closely watching the developments of Apple Pay in the U.S, reported IT World Canada.

He predicted that Apply Pay is at least a year away from coming to Canada and noted that U.S. banks and credit card issuers can make money from debit transactions while Canadian financial institutions do not.

"There are a lot of regulatory things they will have to work out," he said. "We have a mobile wallet. We can do what Apple Pay does. You could have done it a few months ago."

Better shopping experience

While Apple has entered partnerships with major U.S. banks and large retail chains including Macy's, Walgreen and McDonald's., critics have noted that Apple Pay isn't accepted by other large chains. Among them are the drugstore chains CVS Caremark and Rite Aid, which belong to a retail coalition working on a rival system.

Michael LeBlanc, senior vice president of digital retail for the Retail Council of Canada, said the organization supports any that makes for a better shopping experience for our customers,

And to the degree it would do that, we broadly support it," he said. 

"The other thing we look for is something that helps our operating costs and ultimately allow us to lower our costs to consumers. To us, Apple Pay seems to be another layer in the payment supply chain versus a competitive payment type." 

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BP spill left big oily 'bathtub ring' on seafloor

The BP oil spill left an oily "bathub ring" on the sea floor that's about the size of U.S. State of Rhode Island or a little larger than Canada's Manitoulin Island, new research shows.

The study by David Valentine, the chief scientist on the federal damage assessment research ships, estimates that about 37 million litres (10 million gallons) of oil coagulated on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico around the damaged Deepwater Horizons oil rig.

Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil went and what effects it had. Some of the surface slicks were managed with controlled burning. (David Valentine)

Valentine, a geochemistry professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, said the spill from the Macondo well left other splotches containing even more oil. He said it is obvious where the oil is from, even though there were no chemical signature tests because over time the oil has degraded.

"There's this sort of ring where you see around the Macondo well where the concentrations are elevated," Valentine said. The study, published in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calls it a "bathtub ring."

Oil levels inside the ring were as much as 10,000 times higher than outside the 3100-square-kilometre ring, Valentine said. A chemical component of the oil was found on the sea floor, anywhere from two-thirds of a mile to a mile below the surface.

The rig blew on April 20, 2010, and spewed 651 million litres of oil into the Gulf through the summer. Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil went and what effects it had.

BP questions the conclusions of the study. In an email, spokesman Jason Ryan said, "the authors failed to identify the source of the oil, leading them to grossly overstate the amount of residual Macondo oil on the sea floor and the geographic area in which it is found."

It's impossible at this point to do such chemical analysis, said Valentine and study co-author Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, but all other evidence, including the depth of the oil, the way it laid out, the distance from the well, directly point to the BP rig.

Outside marine scientists, Ed Overton at Louisiana State University and Ian MacDonald at Florida State University, both praised the study and its conclusions.

The study does validate earlier research that long-lived deep water coral was coated and likely damaged by the spill, Reddy said. But Reddy and Valentine said there are still questions about other ecological issues that deep.

The 'bathtub ring' of hydrocarbon contamination is seen on the seafloor near the Macondo Well, with dots indicating affected coral communities. The lower right inset depicts the molecular structure of hopane, a chemical component of the oil found on the seafloor. ( Image courtesy of G. Burch Fisher.)

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Greenhouse gas emissions drop brings Europe near 2020 target

The European Union's environment agency says the bloc's greenhouse gas emissions dropped by nearly 2 per cent last year, putting the EU very close to reaching its emissions target for 2020.

That goal is to reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases by 20 per cent compared to 1990 levels.

The European Environment Agency said Tuesday that emissions already have fallen 19 per cent, meaning the 28-nation bloc is likely to achieve a larger reduction than it aimed for.

The EEA projected that 2020 emissions will be 21 per cent or 24 percent lower than they were in 1990, depending on whether planned climate action is implemented in full.

However, some countries weren't on track to meet their individual targets through domestic action, including Germany and Spain.

Most scientists agree the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation are the main cause of climate change.

The EEA said the EU as a whole also was on track to meet its goals on getting 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydropower by 2020, and of improving energy efficiency by 20 per cent.

Nine member states — Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Britain — are on track to meet targets for all three climate and energy policy objectives.

Just last week the EU set new goals for 2030: 40 per cent emissions cuts, 27 per cent renewables and a 27 per cent reduction in energy consumption.

"The current projections for 2030 indicate that further efforts are required at national and EU level to keep the EU on track toward its new 2030 targets," the EEA said.

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Invasive green crab impact being surveyed by conservation group

The Nature Conservancy of Canada will be using a drone, as well as "boots on the ground," to try and get a clearer picture of the impact of the invasive green crab on eel grass beds.

European green crab have been eating their way up the coast, feeding on clams, oysters, mussels, small fish — but perhaps most alarming is their tendency to destroy ecologically vital eel grass in the process.

Without the eel grass, lush estuaries become underwater deserts and that can have a huge impact on species that rely on it. (dfo-mpo.gc.ca)

Eel grass serves as a nursery for more many important commercial marine species, as well as for a number of species at risk. Without the eel grass, these lush estuaries become underwater deserts and that can have a huge impact on species that rely on it.

Eel grass meadows are also important for filtering and trapping sediment, improving water quality and helping sustain migratory waterfowl, according to the NCC.

The conservancy hopes the survey of more than 445 hectares of the Pugwash River Estuary will give conservationists a better idea of the amount and the health of eel grass beds in the area.

Craig Smith, program manager for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, said the project is designed to help track how eel grass is surviving against an "increasing and significant threat."

"Eel-grass meadows are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world," said Smith.

"Their slippery, grass like leaves provide numerous benefits to coastal environments and we are creating a baseline dataset of eel-grass in the estuary to help detect future changes."

Alien green crab, which likely originated in the Mediterranean, were first introduced to New Jersey in 1817. By the 1950s, green crab had found their way north to waters off southern Nova Scotia.

In recent years, they have rapidly expanded their range around Cape Breton, north to Prince Edward Island the Magdalen Islands of Quebec and into even colder waters around Newfoundland.

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Canadian telecom bundling deals should be easier to understand, watchdog says

The deal seemed so good, it was impossible to pass up.

At least that's what Patrisha D'Croix thought when she received a promotional offer from Bell last December.

D'Croix says she signed up for a 12-month deal which included a cable, internet and telephone package for $91.03 a month. There was no upfront fee and a small one-time installation charge.

"Obviously, I jumped on it," D'Croix told the CBC.

But when the bills started coming in, D'Croix says she quickly realized this was no deal.

"My last bill was for $309. Then I got another one for $412. There's not a single bill here that's $91.03."

D'Croix says she called customer service to try to get the billing problems sorted out. But she said no one could resolve the issue. And those bills kept coming in ... and adding up.

"You can't get anybody. Bell is so huge. I mean it's Bell Media, Bell this, Bell that. There's no way to fight them," she said.

D'Croix says she paid Bell what she thought she owed according to that promotional offer she signed up for. When the bills kept coming, she stopped paying and cancelled her service.

According to D'Croix, Bell then sent her a disconnection notice.

That was back in June. D'Croix says she still gets calls from a collection agency.

Bell Billing History and Disconnection Notice (PDF)
Bell Billing History and Disconnection Notice (Text)

On mobile? Click here to see D'Croix's bill and disconnection notice

Bell turned down our requests for an interview, but did respond with a written statement. It says D'Croix did sign up for the deal, but says she added a lot of extras that ended up costing her a lot more.

D'Croix says she thought it was all part of the deal.

According to Albert Lee from Bell media relations, D'Croix's bills also grew when a termination fee was added.

"A $150 early termination fee was also applied to the account when Ms. D'Croix cancelled her services before the end of her contract term," said Lee.

Bell Statement (PDF)
Bell Statement (Text)

On mobile? Click here to read full statement from Bell Media Relations

More than 12,000 complaints relate to contracts, billing

Howard Maker, Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) in Canada, works to resolve complaints between consumers and service providers.

Maker says D'Croix's story is all too familiar.

"Her story is like the story of many other Canadians. They signed up for something. They didn't get what they thought they were getting," he said.

As commissioner for complaints for telecommunications services, Howard Maker is calling on telecom companies to make offers easier for consumers to understand. (CBC)

In fact, more than three quarters of the complaints the CCTS receives about Canadian service providers are contract- and billing-related.

That's 12,000 Canadians in the last year alone who believed they were buying one thing, only to find they've signed up for something different.  

And Maker says those who go through the process of filing a complaint represent only a fraction of the number of Canadians having the same problem.

"I think weak service providers can always do better. We see many complaints in which confusion, misinformation about the terms of the arrangement between the service provider and the customer result in the complaint.

"Clearly, there's more work to be done on that front."

Next week, the CCTS will release a detailed list of Canada's most-complained-about service providers. But the independent organization gave us a sneak peak at what it found.

The latest numbers show that of six service providers, the one with the most complaints in the last year is Bell.

---

2013-2014 percentage of complaints by telecom service provider

Bell Canada: 32.20%

Rogers Communications Inc.: 20.98%

Fido (Rogers): 7.98% 

Virgin Mobile Canada (Bell): 7.19% 

Telus Communications Co.: 5.76%

Wind Mobile: 4.50%

Source: Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services

---

"Our advice to customers is to make sure that they fully understand and that they've read whatever information is available and that if they have any questions, that they make sure they ask before the sign on the dotted line," Maker said.

Maker says consumers should first try and resolve the issue through the service provider and make sure to document those conversations.

If there's no resolution, consumers can file a complaint through the CCTS. The organization outlines how to do that on its website: www.ccts-cprst.ca.

The CCTS says it has a track record of resolving almost 90 per cent of complaints it receives. Its service is free.

---

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Go Public is an investigative news segment on CBC TV, radio and the web.

We tell your stories and hold the powers that be accountable.

We want to hear from people across the country with stories they want to make public.

Submit your story ideas to Kathy Tomlinson at Go Public

Follow @CBCGoPublic on Twitter

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High fidelity 2.0: How your favourite music could sound even better

If you look at your average television, it's obvious that picture quality has become significantly better over the years.

We've gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray in relatively short order. With every leap, the promise and delivery of higher quality video put the previous generation to shame. More importantly to the manufacturers, it has made the old technology obsolete.

So why hasn't that happened with audio?

In the 1950s and '60s, the talk was all about "hi-fi" (or high-fidelity) sound, but since then, consumer audio has put convenience over quality. From cassette tapes to compact discs to MP3s, the push has been to fit more songs onto a device while shrinking the audio itself.

But at least one major manufacturer is trying to expand the sound, so to speak.

Through a new campaign called Hi-Res Audio, Sony has been touring music festivals and university campuses doing listening tests. It's a push to promote not only richer audio, but better playback equipment.

"With Hi-Res Audio, we saw a huge opportunity," says Karol Warminiec of Sony Canada, "because artists are getting tired of having their music shown to the masses in low-resolution format. They put in so much time and effort and it's always compressed."

'Lossy' files

The idea back in the "hi-fi" era was to make the sound reproduction as faithful as possible to the original recording. The focus was on expanding the frequencies played back, reducing the distortion and noise and being able to power the equipment to get the best out of the sound.

Decades later, audio experts say an entire generation has grown up on basic headphones and lower-end players.

When we talk about music formats nowadays, we're generally referring to MP3s. Though the technology was created decades ago, it rose to popularity in the iPod generation.

Sony's MDR-10BT headphones are part of a broader campaign by the company to make consumers appreciate richer audio. (Sony)

​

To sound engineers and audiophiles, the MP3 is known as a "lossy" file format, because it removes information through compression, which affects the final product, says Ian Colquhoun, founder of Axiom Audio, an Ontario company that engineers and manufactures sound equipment.

"In order to get the file size down," says Colquhoun, "you can digitally remove information that someone who wrote an algorithm assumes you're not really going to notice is gone."

But Colquhoun notices. "Even from one piece of music to another, if it is removing information, it is certainly audible."

The compression that occurs with MP3s has been advantageous in that it enables you to fit hundreds of songs on a device. It also helped deliver those songs quickly to hungry consumers in the age of slow home internet.

But it isn't that way anymore. Hard drives are bigger and cheaper and internet speeds are faster.

"I think that if we look at the file compression algorithms like MP3, they were born out of necessity in the early days of digital," says Andrew Welker, research and development manager at Axiom.

But nowadays, there's "very little need for that sort of file compression."

Feeling the difference

Welker believes that people who grew up with MP3s would in fact notice a difference between a song on an iPod and a higher-resolution file on more robust playback equipment that hearkens back to the hi-fi era.

"I think if you polled 100 people and put them through a basic listening test and asked their opinions on two versions of the same file, I think most people would be able to pick out the difference and say that the uncompressed one was better."

Sony is hoping to tap into this idea. The company's Hi-Res Audio line includes the MDR-10BT headphones, which support uncompressed files and boast a frequency range reproduction of 5 Hz to 40,000 Hz.

To put that into perspective, human hearing – in the prime age of life – can only hear between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz.

Even when the biology doesn't support it, Sony claims people can tell and have been getting a good response from their tests.

"It's not that they can hear something different, but they can feel it," says Sony's Warminiec. "Even though the human ear can't pick up those frequencies, the sound waves apply a different pressure."

He says that in the last decade, consumers have been "reprogrammed" in how they listen to music.

"We've gotten into this kind of 'good enough' society where it's convenient, it's easy, accessible," he says. "Our challenge [at Sony] is to go and show people this is what music can really sound like."

'Nice marketing'

Some experts in the world of sound research, however, disagree with that basic premise.

Neil Young's Pono digital music player is part of a trend of giving music lovers better-quality audio. (Pono Music)

"It's nice marketing, but doesn't make much sense," says Bernhard Grill of Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute, one of the largest research organizations in Europe.

At Fraunhofer, Grill was part of the team that created the MP3 decades ago, and admits that at the time, "there was an urgent need to make the files as small as possible. The modems were just so incapable compared to today."

But he says one of the problems was that "people were [creating and recording music] with bad tools," which "unfortunately ruined the reputation of MP3."

Grill says a properly created MP3 can reproduce everything accurately, and that an uncompressed file would do little to improve it.

"The real issue is the loudspeaker and the room acoustics. That will make a real difference in the sound experience."

While the uncompressed versus compressed debate will continue in audiophile forums for years to come, it isn't stopping the push forward. From Sony's new line to Neil Young and his crowdfunded Pono music player, many say the time is right for a better listening experience.

Welker acknowledges that high-fidelity audio isn't necessarily sexy, but with the help of recording artists, engineers and hardware companies, it could become the new normal.

"As soon as people can hear something better, they're going to want to reproduce that in their homes. It's an exposure thing."

22.11 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bats nearly wiped out in Eastern Canada by deadly fungus

Don't be afraid of bats this Halloween. Be afraid for them, warn biologists tracking a disease that has nearly wiped out the airborne mammals in Eastern Canada.

The little brown bat, northern myotis and tri-coloured bat have been "functionally extirpated" by white-nose syndrome in some areas of eastern Canada, said Graham Forbes, a biologist at the University of New Brunswick and a member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada subcommittee.

In New Brunswick, it's estimated about 99 per cent of little brown bats have died. Nova Scotia was hit hard last winter and the syndrome has now spread to Cape Breton, Forbes said.

First documented in New York in the winter of 2006, the disease surfaced in Canada in 2010. It has since been confirmed in 25 U.S. states and in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia.

It hasn't yet reached Manitoba but has been detected further west every year, Forbes said.

"It's spreading," he said.

The population of brown bats in New Brunswick dropped to 22 this spring, down from 7,000 in 2011, due to white-nose syndrome. (CBC)

"One extra concern is if it jumps across and gets into the western populations. Hopefully that won't happen, but I think I'll be surprised if it doesn't happen."

The disease is caused by a fungus that grows over the bats' faces while they hibernate in winter.

The fungus grows in cold weather, and it hits while bats are most vulnerable, hibernating in caves and old mines through the winter. Experts believe the fungus was introduced in North America by a visitor from Europe, where it has existed for some time and where bats have developed resistance.

The disease has been expanding at an average rate of 200-250 kilometres per year, according to the Canadian Wildlife Health Co-operative.

There is currently no cure or containment for the syndrome, and without one, it is expected that the entire Canadian population of bats will be affected within 12 to 18 years, the group said.

'Endangered' listing recommended

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada recommended almost a year ago that the federal environment minister designate the little brown bat, northern myotis and tri-colored bat endangered under the Species at Risk Act.

In an emailed statement, an Environment Canada spokesman declined to say when the minister planned to make a decision about whether to list the bats as endangered.

Specks of white fungus can be seen on the wings and ears of a bat with white-nose syndrome found dead in New Brunswick. (Courtesy of Karen Vanderwolf, New Brunswick Museum)

"Officials continue to gather and assess information with the objective of supporting decisions based on the best information available," wrote Danny Kingsberry.

The statement noted federal, provincial and territorial governments have prepared a national plan to respond to white-nose syndrome, and Environment Canada has provided $330,000 in research funding to the Canadian Wildlife Health Co-operative.

One major hurdle for biologists is the dearth of knowledge about bats. It wasn't until the disease began devastating the species that many realized how little they knew.

In British Columbia, the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada recently completed a survey of bats in the pristine Flathead River valley in southeast corner of the province.

Disease may soon breach Manitoba

Cori Lausen, a bat specialist with the society, said they are preparing for the disease to breach Manitoba and then the continental divide.

"We have to find our hibernacula to save our bats," she said.

"We know surprisingly little about what our bats do in the winter. Part of the urgency right now is to figure out where they're going in the winter... It's a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack. We've got so much ground to cover."

It's just a matter of time before the syndrome arrives in the West, she said. In B.C., the Flathead River valley is likely the first area it will appear.

The valley is shared with Alberta, which has protected it in the Waterton Lakes national park, and Montana, which has designated Flathead Lake state park.

A recent four-day "bio-blitz" with scientists from the Royal British Columbia Museum found seven species in the valley. Another three are likely to be present, based on acoustic tests, Lausen said.

There is some promising research underway in the U.S., including a study of a naturally occurring bacteria that appears to slow the growth of the fungus.

But recovery will be slow, Forbes said. Bats produce only one offspring per year.

"The time it will take for the population to recover could be many, many years and in the interim some places might go down," he said.

"There might be a few around but they're no longer really part of the ecosystem. We call that functionally extirpated." 

22.11 | 0 komentar | Read More

High fidelity 2.0: How your favourite music could sound even better

If you look at your average television, it's obvious that picture quality has become significantly better over the years.

We've gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray in relatively short order. With every leap, the promise and delivery of higher quality video put the previous generation to shame. More importantly to the manufacturers, it has made the old technology obsolete.

So why hasn't that happened with audio?

In the 1950s and '60s, the talk was all about "hi-fi" (or high-fidelity) sound, but since then, consumer audio has put convenience over quality. From cassette tapes to compact discs to MP3s, the push has been to fit more songs onto a device while shrinking the audio itself.

But at least one major manufacturer is trying to expand the sound, so to speak.

Through a new campaign called Hi-Res Audio, Sony has been touring music festivals and university campuses doing listening tests. It's a push to promote not only richer audio, but better playback equipment.

"With Hi-Res Audio, we saw a huge opportunity," says Karol Warminiec of Sony Canada, "because artists are getting tired of having their music shown to the masses in low-resolution format. They put in so much time and effort and it's always compressed."

'Lossy' files

The idea back in the "hi-fi" era was to make the sound reproduction as faithful as possible to the original recording. The focus was on expanding the frequencies played back, reducing the distortion and noise and being able to power the equipment to get the best out of the sound.

Decades later, audio experts say an entire generation has grown up on basic headphones and lower-end players.

When we talk about music formats nowadays, we're generally referring to MP3s. Though the technology was created decades ago, it rose to popularity in the iPod generation.

Sony's MDR-10BT headphones are part of a broader campaign by the company to make consumers appreciate richer audio. (Sony)

​

To sound engineers and audiophiles, the MP3 is known as a "lossy" file format, because it removes information through compression, which affects the final product, says Ian Colquhoun, founder of Axiom Audio, an Ontario company that engineers and manufactures sound equipment.

"In order to get the file size down," says Colquhoun, "you can digitally remove information that someone who wrote an algorithm assumes you're not really going to notice is gone."

But Colquhoun notices. "Even from one piece of music to another, if it is removing information, it is certainly audible."

The compression that occurs with MP3s has been advantageous in that it enables you to fit hundreds of songs on a device. It also helped deliver those songs quickly to hungry consumers in the age of slow home internet.

But it isn't that way anymore. Hard drives are bigger and cheaper and internet speeds are faster.

"I think that if we look at the file compression algorithms like MP3, they were borne out of necessity in the early days of digital," says Andrew Welker, research and development manager at Axiom.

But nowadays, there's "very little need for that sort of file compression."

Feeling the difference

Welker believes that people who grew up with MP3s would in fact notice a difference between a song on an iPod and a higher-resolution file on more robust playback equipment that hearkens back to the hi-fi era.

"I think if you polled 100 people and put them through a basic listening test and asked their opinions on two versions of the same file, I think most people would be able to pick out the difference and say that the uncompressed one was better."

Sony is hoping to tap into this idea. The company's Hi-Res Audio line includes the MDR-10BT headphones, which support uncompressed files and boast a frequency range reproduction of 5 Hz to 40,000 Hz.

To put that into perspective, human hearing – in the prime age of life – can only hear between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz.

Even when the biology doesn't support it, Sony claims people can tell and have been getting a good response from their tests.

"It's not that they can hear something different, but they can feel it," says Sony's Warminiec. "Even though the human ear can't pick up those frequencies, the sound waves apply a different pressure."

He says that in the last decade, consumers have been "reprogrammed" in how they listen to music.

"We've gotten into this kind of 'good enough' society where it's convenient, it's easy, accessible," he says. "Our challenge [at Sony] is to go and show people this is what music can really sound like."

'Nice marketing'

Some experts in the world of sound research, however, disagree with that basic premise.

Neil Young's Pono digital music player is part of a trend of giving music lovers better-quality audio. (Pono Music)

"It's nice marketing, but doesn't make much sense," says Bernhard Grill of Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute, one of the largest research organizations in Europe.

At Fraunhofer, Grill was part of the team that created the MP3 decades ago, and admits that at the time, "there was an urgent need to make the files as small as possible. The modems were just so incapable compared to today."

But he says one of the problems was that "people were [creating and recording music] with bad tools," which "unfortunately ruined the reputation of MP3."

Grill says a properly created MP3 can reproduce everything accurately, and that an uncompressed file would do little to improve it.

"The real issue is the loudspeaker and the room acoustics. That will make a real difference in the sound experience."

While the uncompressed versus compressed debate will continue in audiophile forums for years to come, it isn't stopping the push forward. From Sony's new line to Neil Young and his crowdfunded Pono music player, many say the time is right for a better listening experience.

Welker acknowledges that high-fidelity audio isn't necessarily sexy, but with the help of recording artists, engineers and hardware companies, it could become the new normal.

"As soon as people can hear something better, they're going to want to reproduce that in their homes. It's an exposure thing."

22.12 | 0 komentar | Read More

Unmanned SpaceX cargo craft splashes down in Pacific Ocean

The unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule returned to Earth Saturday afternoon carrying nearly 1,500 kilograms of cargo and science samples from the International Space Station.

The craft splashed down approximately 480 kilometres from the coast of Baja, Calif, in the Pacific Ocean at 3:39 p.m. ET.

The Dragon arrived at the ISS Sept. 23 on its fourth resupply mission to the space outpost. It carried almost 2,300 kilograms of supplies needed for 255 different experiments currently ongoing aboard the ISS. 

Nasa says Dragon is the only cargo vehicle servicing the space station that can return cargo and scientific experiments back to Earth for post-flight analysis.

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Franklin discovery: Searchers consider 'winter dive' to explore Erebus further

Searchers who found one of the lost vessels of the ill-fated Franklin expedition are so eager to get back to their discovery they are thinking about diving through the Arctic ice next spring to get a closer look at the well-preserved wreck of HMS Erebus.

"We're exploring that possibility as we're very anxious to get back," says Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archeologist for Parks Canada.

Searchers discovered British explorer Sir John Franklin's reinforced 19th-century wooden warship in the Queen Maud Gulf in early September.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, shown in the Illustrated London News published on May 24, 1845, left England that year under the command of Sir John Franklin and in the search of the Northwest Passage. (Illustrated London News/Getty Images)

But winter was rapidly closing in across Nunavut, and after only 12 hours taking pictures and video of the sunken British vessel, underwater archeologists had to pack up and sail out of the Arctic before freeze-up.

The search team has every intention of going back to the site next summer — along with continuing the quest to find the other lost Franklin expedition ship, the HMS Terror.

But if there's a way to get back to Erebus sooner — and Harris certainly hopes there is — divers could be going through the ice next April in an attempt to unravel more of the mystery of what exactly happened to Franklin and his crew of 128 men as they tried to find the long-sought Northwest Passage.

"It's not something we routinely do," Harris says of what would be considered winter diving.

"It's not particularly complex, but it would mean that we'd be diving with surface-supplied diving equipment, not scuba, for safety."

They would also have to set up an ice camp and rely more on air support — whether it's helicopters or Twin Otters. And the Parks Canada team would likely be working more closely with divers from the Royal Canadian Navy.

Lots of expertise

While winter diving to explore a shipwreck is rare, it's not unprecedented.

Last spring, Jonathan Moore, one of the members of the Franklin search team, worked with the Navy at the Nunavut wreck site of the HMS Breadalbane.

That 19th-century merchant ship sank near Beechey Island in 1853 while trying to get supplies to others looking for Franklin and his lost expedition.

Canadian Armed Forces divers working on the sea ice near Gascoyne Inlet, Nunavut, spent six days in April 2014 using remotely operated underwater vehicles to capture footage from the merchant ship Breadalbane, which sank in the High Arctic in 1853. (Master Seaman Peter Reed/CFB Shearwater, N.S.)

"The ice camp was set up by the navy, and their fleet diving unit deployed a remotely operated vehicle to get imagery and data on the Breadalbane at a depth of 90 metres, quite a challenging wreck site to work on, so yes, there's definitely precedent," Harris said.

"There's certainly a lot going on in the Canadian Arctic, and we have a lot of expertise that we can tap into."

One of the questions now is whether that technical expertise can tap into the kind of private-public sector partnership that helped find the Franklin ships.

"I'll be in a listening mode and a position to offer help, but I think this is exciting for Parks [Canada] because they are really going to be able to build off navy capacity in this case," says Jim Balsillie, the co-founder and former chairman of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion who was heavily involved in the Franklin search.

Balsillie helped start the Arctic Research Foundation, which refitted a fishing boat now known as the Martin Bergmann research vessel, which helped in the search.

Whether or how the foundation might support a winter dive hasn't been determined, but Balsillie says he is ready for suggestions.

"We will respond to Parks' lead and the navy's request in any way, shape or form we can be of help," says Balsillie, who views the foundation's involvement in the Franklin search as a "multi-year, probably multi-decade" project.

Done responsibly

Harris also sees the exploration of the Erebus wreck as a multi-year project, and one that must be done responsibly and systematically.

"There's still quite a bit of work to do there," he says.

"What makes it kind of difficult is the wreck is covered with a blanket of kelp.

Searchers wonder what clues HMS Erebus might offer around the fate of Sir John Franklin, who was at the helm of HMS Erebus when it left England in 1845 with HMS Terror amid great optimism that they could find the Northwest Passage and sail to China. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images )

"You have to be there firsthand to be able to poke in under the kelp fronds that cover the upper deck to be able to identify some features."

Still, what Harris has been able to see so far has left him spellbound by the potential to unravel some of the many questions that have hung over the ill-fated Franklin expedition since the mid-1800s.

"Every dive we made was just a discovery from beginning to end, and you could scarcely take it all in. Everywhere you looked there was something new and really quite remarkable."

Now, underwater archeologists are reviewing the hundreds of photographs and a couple hours of video they were able to take in September.

They are carefully plotting and planning their next moves in investigating what Harris describes as a "rather complex structure" that is overall "quite remarkably well-preserved."

One of the challenges is to determine how divers can get inside the wreck.

John Geiger, president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, holds an iron fitting called a davit from a Royal Navy ship, the key piece of evidence that led to the discovery of HMS Erebus in Queen Maud Gulf. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

"A couple of us had the opportunity to drop down between the exposed deck beams and have a look around, but we weren't penetrating below the decks at all.

"We were just kind of having a look and that tells us there's a lot of room inside the forward half of the ship," says Harris.

"You could look forward and see the ship's galley stove. You could see the forward hatchway going down into the hold."

Among the questions, could Erebus reveal anything further about the fate of Franklin himself?

"You don't know at this point. The potential is almost limitless," says Harris, noting that preservation conditions on an Arctic shipwreck can be "astoundingly favourable to the survival of organic materials, even including paper."

Maybe there will be journals from crewmen, with handwritten accounts sealed up tight in a satchel.

Will there be human remains? (None have been spotted so far.)

Will there be anything that helps settle the questions around whether lead poisoning or botulism played a significant role in the sad demise of Franklin's men?

Will there be clues that reveal whether Erebus drifted on its own to where it was found, or whether it had been re-manned, after the ships that had been beset by ice for two years and abandoned in 1848 off King William Island?

Maybe there will be evidence that reveals what the men were trying to do if they did indeed re-man the ship and navigate it into the Queen Maud Gulf.

"Were they just trying to get closer to the mainland so they could proceed on foot? Did they still hold out a forlorn hope of one day navigating to the Beaufort Sea?" Harris wonders.

"Hopefully time will tell."

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High-tech cars becoming more vulnerable to hackers

As high-tech features like adaptive cruise control, automatic braking and automatic parallel parking systems make cars smarter, it's also making them more vulnerable to hackers — a risk that an automotive security researcher says carmakers appear to be ignoring.

"There's no culture of security," said Chris Valasek, director of vehicle security research at the computer security consulting firm IOActive, in a keynote speech at the SecTor IT security conference in Toronto this week.

That's a concern, he said, because of the potential damage that can be caused by a remotely hijacked car.

"Unlike regular PCs, if your car is breached, there's a chance for physical loss and not just financial loss," he said. "Smashing your car into a pole or braking and starting a traffic jam are things that aren't easily fixed."

'Right now, security seems like an afterthought' for car manufacturers, says Chris Valasek, director of vehicle security research at the IT security consulting firm IOActive. (Emily Chung/CBC)

In recent years, security researchers at the University of Washington showed they could hack a car and start it either via the systems used for emissions testing or remotely using things like Bluetooth wireless connectivity or cellular radio to start the car.

Others showed they could hack a car remotely via a cellular-based car alarm system to unlock the doors and start the engine.

Valasek himself and his research partner Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, have been starting to experiment with remote attacks after demonstrating that a laptop inside the car can be used to disable brakes and power steering and confuse GPS and speedometers.

He said that while there have been no attacks on the public so far, he expects that to change as the growing popularity of high-tech features in cars drastically increases the number of potential targets available to would-be car hackers.

"Technology is driving auto sales," he said, pointing out that GM commercials in the U.S. tout their cars' Wi-Fi capabilities.

On Thursday, Ford announced new technology available starting 2015 that will detect pedestrians using radar and camera technology and automatically apply the brakes.

Already, automatic braking systems and adaptive cruise control that speed up or slow down the car in response to the vehicle in front of you are installed in "way more cars than you think," Valasek said in an interview following his talk.

He suggests that it's not too early for national leaders and others who might face targeted attacks to think about the security risks of their car's technological features.

"The average consumer doesn't have much to worry about, but …  as these become more and more ubiquitous within all vehicles, we do potentially see public attacks."

Insecure technology built into cars, required by law

In his talk, Valasek showed how the design of in-car networks makes them vulnerable to hacking. The communication between software and braking and steering systems is designed so that if the system receives a message that it understands, telling it to apply the brakes, for example, it will comply.

"It doesn't ask where it came from and doesn't ask who sent it."

Researchers have shown that such messages can be sent via other systems in the car that don't directly control the car, such as its Bluetooth connections, remote keyless entry or infotainment systems. Those could, in turn, be used to indirectly hijack the car's control systems.

The challenge is that the insecure messaging systems found in cars are generally standardized and required by law for purposes such as emissions testing, Valasek said.

Chris Valasek and his research partner Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, have been starting to experiment with remote attacks after previously demonstrating that a laptop inside a car can be used to disable brakes and power steering and confuse GPS and speedometers. (YouTube)

Meanwhile, he added, car manufacturers generally say little about what they are doing to mitigate the risks of systems like that.

As far as he knows, they haven't developed any means to detect attacks.

Toyota has said it protects its cars with a firewall, but Valasek said similar simple solutions have proven ineffective at protecting PCs.

He's also concerned that car manufacturers lack a system for distributing security patches or upgrades to cars, other than sending customers a letter by mail and asking them to drive to a shop for service. He suggested that asking customers to do that "after a 10-hour work day and picking up the kids and walking the dog" isn't going to work.

Valasek likened car manufacturers to throwbacks from a previous era in information technology who haven't learned from the past mistakes of software makers.

"Right now," he said, "security seems like an afterthought." Part of that may be simply a lack of transparency and a reluctance of carmakers to talk about security, he acknowledged.

Canadian cybersecurity expert disagrees

John Proctor, vice-president of global cybersecurity at the Canadian IT consulting firm CGI, disagrees.

"The car companies are actually paying quite a bit of attention to security," he told CBC News.

His company works with Volvo as a "certificates authority" to ensure that people and devices communicating with Volvo vehicles have the right credentials do so — for example, that when they bring their car to the dealer to install a software patch, that it is an authorized computer that talks to the car.

He suggested that car companies have done risk analysis and are designing their vehicles accordingly.

"It comes down to: How secure do they need to be?" 

Proctor suggested the risk is low, given that car hacking demonstrations to date have typically been done "under very, very controlled, almost laboratory-type environments."

He agreed with Valasek that technology is linked to car sales. 

"Could they [manufacturers] make them absolutely secure?" he asked. "Yes. But then that car will not communicate by Bluetooth, it will not communicate to Wi-Fi, your phone won't connect to it and people won't buy it."

Proctor said other car companies have recently been reaching out to CGI to request help in setting up communications security for their vehicles, something he acknowledged is not easy to do.

"To get one of our guys up to speed to do this takes six months."

Valasek himself thinks carmakers' attitudes could be changing. He noted that in September, GM appointed its first cybersecurity chief.

In the meantime, he said, car buyers shouldn't worry too much before choosing a car with automatic braking or other collision avoidance systems.

"The odds of these things saving your ass as opposed to being used against you in an attack are two separate ends. These things will definitely make you safer, not less safe."

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Rogers LTE-Advanced rolls out to boost video streaming

Rogers is boosting the speed of its wireless network by combining different bands of wireless frequencies, a technology called LTE-Advanced.

"It's like putting the highways in a major city together to make a superhighway, allowing more traffic at faster speeds," said Guy Laurence, president and CEO, in a statement announcing the launch of the new technology.

Raj Doshi, executive vice-president of wireless services at Rogers, said data such as streaming video will flow more smoothly.

"Smoother means increased speeds eventually as well as consistency," he said. "And over the course of time, we will be able to combine more highways."

He added that there has been huge growth in the amount of video being streamed over wireless networks using mobile devices over the past two years.

Currently, Rogers's high-speed LTE network runs on three separate bands:

Some phones and tablets can use any of the three bands, but only one at a time.

Starting today, Rogers is combining the 700 MHz and AWS bands so that devices that have both the right hardware and software will be able to use both at the same time.

So far, no devices in Canada are able to take advantage of that capability. But the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will all be able to once they get a software update, Doshi said.

He added that the software is being tested now and will be coming "soon."

When asked what increase in speed can be expected with LTE-Advanced, Doshi wouldn't specify, saying only that it depends on many factors, including the device being used, the number of other users in that area at a given time, and the user's location. The two bands that are being combined are not available simultaneously everywhere.

Rogers is launching LTE-Advanced today in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Windsor, London, Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, Moncton, Fredericton, Halifax and Saint John. It said more markets will follow. The company is the first in Canada to roll out the technology.

LTE-Advanced is already available in regions of some other countries, such as the U.S., South Korea, and the U.K.

Telus would not say whether it plans to roll out LTE-Advanced, and as of 2 p.m. ET, Bell had not yet responded to a request from CBC News.

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Sun turns biggest sunspot in 24 years toward Earth

The sunspot, which is 129,000 kilometres across, is known as active region (AR) 12192. It rotated into view on Oct. 18, NASA says. (NASA/SDO)

The sun is staring us down with a dark spot 10 times as wide as the Earth – the biggest sunspot in more than two decades.

The sunspot, which is 129,000 kilometres across, is known as AR 12192. It rotated into view on Oct. 18, NASA says.

It was clearly visible in many photographs of the Oct. 23 partial solar eclipse.

Sunspots are active regions of the sun where solar explosions called solar flares and coronal mass ejections often erupt. The spots appear dark because they are cooler than other parts of the sun's surface.

Not only is the new giant sunspot is the largest of the current solar cycle that began in 2008, but according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., it is also the largest active region observed on the sun since November 1990.

The sunspot is clearly visible in this image of the partial solar eclipse on Oct. 23, taken by Lloyd Hoffman from his backyard in Lewis Estates, Alta. (Submitted by Lloyd Hoffman)

Since the beginning of the week, the giant sunspot has produced 27 C-class solar flares, nine M-class solar flares and two X-class flares — the most powerful kind, according to spaceweather.com, a website run by NASA's Tony Philips.

However none of the solar flares, which are local eruptions, have been accompanied by a coronal mass ejection – a blast of charged particles that is flung into space and can hit the Earth if pointed in our direction. Those can interact with our atmosphere to trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt power grids and satellite communications, as well as generate beautiful auroras.

"It remains a potent force in both area and complexity and is favourably positioned for generating both geomagnetic and solar radiation storms," said the Space Weather Prediction Center in an update posted online Friday. "Is this a sleeping giant or a region lying in wait to hit us with more fury?"

The centre says its forecasters remain "vigilant" and will be posting regular updates. 

While this sunspot is the biggest in a long time, it's no record-breaker — it is just a third of the size of the biggest sunspot ever recorded, which appeared in 1947, NASA says.

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Ice age settlement found in the Andes at record high altitude

Archeologists have found an ice age settlement so high in the Peruvian Andes that they were surprised ancient humans could survive the low oxygen there.

The 12,400-year-old settlement was found in a cave called the Cuncaicha rock shelter, located nearly 4,500 metres above sea level. That makes it the highest ice age human settlement ever found.

Kurt Rademaker of the University of Maine and Sonia Zarrillo of the University of Calgary were part of an international team that excavated a 12,400-year-old human settlement found nearly 4,500 metres above sea level. (Walter Beckwith)

The site is more than 2,000 metres higher than the famous Inca archeological site Machu Picchu — where travellers already risk becoming ill from altitude sickness — and just 880 metres lower than the Mount Everest base camp in the Himalayas.

The discovery, published online Thursday in the journal Science, suggests that just 2,000 years after arriving in South America, humans had already spread into some extreme environments.

"High altitude was not a barrier to human colonization at least by 12,400 years ago," said Sonia Zarrillo, an adjunct assistant professor of archeology at the University of Calgary, who co-authored a study describing the discovery.

The harsh environment made it a challenging project for the international research team, who braved headaches and exhaustion from low oxygen, freezing temperatures and rugged camping conditions to complete their work.

The Cuncaicha cave shelter was big enough to fit 20 or 30 people and had been occupied multiple times over thousands of years. (Kurt Rademaker/University of Maine)

"This was the hardest archeology I've ever done," Zarrillo said.

Kurt Rademaker, lead author of the study, stumbled upon the Cuncaicha cave while looking for a place to camp for the night during research for his PhD thesis a few years ago. Rademaker "instantly recognized that it was an archeological site," Zarrillo added.

At the time, Rademaker, now a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Maine, was trying to find out where a mineral called obsidian found at archeological sites on the Peruvian coast may have come from.

Excavations at the Cuncaicha rock shelter, which was big enough to fit 20 or 30 people, revealed that it had been occupied multiple times over thousands of years.

Family groups

So far, the artifacts recovered include scrapers, tools used to process animal hides so they could be used to make things like clothing and tents. Zarrillo said that is good evidence that people stayed at the settlement for long periods of time.

Kurt Rademaker, lead author of the study, stumbled upon the Cuncaicha cave while looking for a place to camp for the night during research for his PhD thesis a few years ago. (Walter Beckwith)

"We do tend to think that this was family groups that were there, not just men going up hunting and bringing meat back."

She added that the soot-blackened walls of the cave suggest that campfires burned inside for long periods of time, and there was lots of charcoal and bones from llama-like vicunas and guanacos at the site: "They were sure eating a lot of meat."

The cave is located in a cold and dry area of the Andes that Zarrillo describes as "a moonscape."

"Today if you just saw a picture of the site, you would say, 'Who the heck would want to come up here and why?'"

But the nearby Pucuncho Basin appears to have been a rich, moist hunting ground for animals such as vicunas and guanacos 12,000 years ago, when the climate was just a little bit cooler and wetter.

Genetic adaptation?

Today, the area is used by local Andean herders to graze thousands of llamas and alpacas. The locals have genetic adaptations that allow them to live comfortably at high altitude, such as unusually large lung capacities, high metabolic rates and the ability to carry more oxygen in their blood. Those adaptations were thought to have taken thousands of years to evolve.

The fact that humans were living at these altitudes for long periods of time just 2,000 years after entering South America raises scientific questions.

"Other people have suggested that people could not and did not live at those elevations prior to genetic adaptations occurring," Zarrillo said. "What we're showing is either they were genetically adapted to living up there or it didn't matter."

Zarrillo specializes in identifying edible plants at archeological sites. There are no edible plants growing in the area surrounding the Cuncaicha cave. Nevertheless, Zarrillo found bits of edible roots and tubers from lower elevations. That suggests the Cuncaicha cave dwellers were either trading with other groups or moving to lower elevations at some times of the year.

In the future, the researchers want to learn more about how the ancient cave dwellers interacted with people at other altitudes.

They also hope to be able obtain human remains with DNA from the cave that can be tested for signs of genetic adaptation to high altitude. 

In addition, Zarrillo said, it's possible that there are even older settlements in deeper layers of the cave floor or other sites in the area.

The Pucuncho Basin appears to have been a rich, moist hunting ground for animals such as vicunas 12,000 years ago, when the climate was cooler and wetter. It is still used by local herders to graze their animals today. (Kurt Rademaker/University of Maine)

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