Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “Industry experts claim the market for vintage whiskey has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit made just a few years ago. Now researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have developed a method that can pinpoint the date a whiskey was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. ‘”It is easy to tell if whiskey is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature,” says Dr. Tom Higham, deputy director of the facility. Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere rise around the world so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Whiskey extracted from antique bottles is sent to the laboratory where scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the carbon-14 in the sample. In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950. “So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we’ve tested than real examples of old whiskey,” says Higham.'”

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New super-sensitive microwave detectors from the National Institute of Standards and Technology may soon tackle the question of what happened immediately following the big bang. “The new experiment will begin approximately a year from now on the Chilean desert and will consist of placing a large array of powerful NIST sensors on a telescope mounted in a converted shipping container. The detectors will look for subtle fingerprints in the CMB [cosmic microwave background] from primordial gravitational waves–ripples in the fabric of space-time from the violent birth of the universe more than 13 billion years ago. Such waves are believed to have left a faint but unique imprint on the direction of the CMB’s electric field, called the “B-mode polarization.” These waves — never before confirmed through measurements — are potentially detectable today, if sensitive enough equipment is used.”

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Every designer uses Photoshop. Even if you’ve been using it for over 10 years, you’ll still find new tricks and different ways to do things. Refine the way you work and speed through repetitive tasks. The following tips are intended for interactive designers.

Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times about how various services offered by cable companies affect their spending and their revenue. As it turns out, a lot of the cost increases and investment needs are coming from television and video services rather than internet connectivity. The scramble for high-def and rising licensing fees for programming seem to be the biggest headaches for Comcast and Time Warner right now. Quoting: “By all accounts, Web video is not currently having any effect on the businesses of the cable companies. Market share is moving among cable, satellite and telephone companies, but the overall number of people subscribing to some sort of pay TV service is rising. (The government’s switch to digital over-the-air broadcasts is providing a small stimulus to cable companies.) However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels started to feel any pain from downloads. As the sour economy and the Web start putting more pressure on the cable companies, they may be forced to consider breaking up the big bundles of channels they now insist that consumers buy and instead offer individual channels or smaller groups of channels on an à la carte basis.”

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