Fabricated future: The sceptic's guide to 3D printing

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TIME magazine names Obama 2012 person of the year

NEW YORK: Time magazine on Wednesday named the recently re-elected US President Barack Obama as its person of the year for 2012 -- the second time it has accorded him this honor.

The venerable American news magazine said the United States is in the midst of huge cultural and demographic changes and Obama is "both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America."

The magazine noted that Obama was the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win more than 50 per cent of the vote in two straight elections and the first since 1940 to be re-elected despite a jobless rate above 7.5 per cent.

Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney soundly in November's election to win a second four year term.

"In 2012, he found and forged a new majority, turned weakness into opportunity and sought, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union," said Time, which named Obama person of the year in 2008 when he became America's first black president.

- AFP/ck

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YouTube looks back at 2012 with eye on Sandy, Syria

A look back at Superstorm Sandy.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

YouTube, like its parent company Google before it, has taken a look back at the 2012 that was.

YouTube's year in review centers mainly on news and news-related topics. The company announced today that 7,000 hours of news-related videos were uploaded to its site each day. Superstorm Sandy was a popular, if sobering, topic on YouTube this year, with 39,000 videos related to it showing up on the video site in just one week. A video of an exploding substation caused by the Superstorm reached over 4 million views in just 24 hours.

Moving to the U.S. Presidential Election, YouTube revealed that videos tagged "Obama" or "Romney" were viewed 2.7 billion times, and the candidates' debates nabbed 27 million cumulative views.

Some other highlights from YouTube's Year In Review:

• Videos related to the Syrian protests were viewed 200 million times.


• The Associated Press hit a cumulative 1 billion video views.


• A whopping 8 million people were watching YouTube at the same time when Felix Baumgartner made his record-setting leap from the edge of space.


• Over 10,000 videos were uploaded and tagged with the term "Pussy Riot" -- a female-only Russian band that was sentenced to prison for alleged "hooliganism."


• Trayvon Martin was the subject of 19,000 YouTube videos.

YouTube's year in review comes just a week after the company's parent company, Google, released its Zeitgeist 2012. The death of Whitney Houston proved to be Google's top search term for 2012, followed by music video phenom Gangnam Style and Superstorm Sandy.

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Race Is On to Find Life Under Antarctic Ice

A hundred years ago, two teams of explorers set out to be the first people ever to reach the South Pole. The race between Roald Amundsen of Norway and Robert Falcon Scott of Britain became the stuff of triumph, tragedy, and legend. (See rare pictures of Scott's expedition.)

Today, another Antarctic drama is underway that has a similar daring and intensity—but very different stakes.

Three unprecedented, major expeditions are underway to drill deep through the ice covering the continent and, researchers hope, penetrate three subglacial lakes not even known to exist until recently.

The three players—Russia, Britain, and the United States—are all on the ice now and are in varying stages of their preparations. The first drilling was attempted last week by the British team at Lake Ellsworth, but mechanical problems soon cropped up in the unforgiving Antarctic cold, putting a temporary hold on their work.

The key scientific goal of the missions: to discover and identify living organisms in Antarctica's dark, pristine, and hidden recesses. (See "Antarctica May Contain 'Oasis of Life.'")

Scientists believe the lakes may well be home to the kind of "extreme" life that could eke out an existence on other planets or moons of our solar system, so finding them on Earth could help significantly in the search for life elsewhere.

Lakes and rivers are buried beneath Antarctica's thick ice (enlarge).

Illustration courtesy Zina Deretsky, NSF

While astrobiology—the search for life beyond Earth—is a prime mover in the push into subglacial lakes, so too is the need to better understand the ice sheet that covers the vast continent and holds much of the world's water. If the ice sheet begins to melt due to global warming, the consequences—such as global sea level rise—could be catastrophic.

"We are the new wave of Antarctic explorers, pioneers if you will," said Montana State University's John Priscu, chief scientist of the U.S. drilling effort this season and a longtime Antarctic scientist.

"After years of planning, projects are coming together all at once," he said.

"What we find this year and next will set the stage for Antarctic science for the next generation and more—just like with the explorers a century ago."

All Eyes on the Brits

All three research teams are at work now, but the drama is currently focused on Lake Ellsworth, buried 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) below the West Antarctic ice sheet.

A 12-person British team is using a sophisticated technique that involves drilling down using water melted from the ice, which is then heated to 190 degrees Fahrenheit (88 degrees Celsius).

The first drilling attempt began on December 12, but was stopped at almost 200 feet (61 meters) because of technical problems with the sensors on the drill nozzle.

Drilling resumed on Saturday but then was delayed when both boilers malfunctioned, requiring the team to wait for spare parts. The situation is frustrating but normal due to the harsh climate, British Antarctic team leader Martin Siegert, who helped discover Lake Ellsworth in 2004, said in an email from the site.

After completing their drilling, the team will have about 24 hours to collect their samples before the hole freezes back up in the often below-zero cold. If all goes well, they could have lake water and mud samples as early as this week.

"Our expectation is that microbes will be found in the lake water and upper sediment," Siegert said. "We would be highly surprised if this were not the case."

The British team lives in tents and makeshift shelters, and endures constant wind as well as frigid temperatures. (Take an Antarctic quiz.)

"Right now we are working round the clock in a cold, demanding and extreme location-it's testing our own personal endurance, but it's worth it," Siegert said.

U.S. First to Find Life?

The U.S. team is drilling into Lake Whillans, a much shallower body about 700 miles inland (1,120 kilometers) in the region that drains into the Ross Sea.

The lake, which is part of a broader water system under the ice, may well have the greatest chances of supporting microbial life, experts say. Hot-water drilling begins there in January.

Among the challenges: Lake Whillans lies under an ice stream, which is similar to a glacier but is underground and surrounded by ice on all sides. It moves slowly but constantly, and that complicates efforts to drill into the deepest—and most scientifically interesting—part of the lake.

Montana State's Priscu—currently back in the U.S. for medical reasons—said his team will bring a full lab to the Lake Whillans drilling site to study samples as they come up: something the Russians don't have the interest or capacity in doing and that the British will be trying in a more limited way. (Also see "Pictures: 'Extreme' Antarctic Science Revealed.")

So while the U.S. team may be the last of the three to penetrate their lake, they could be the first to announce the discovery of life in deep subglacial lakes.

"We should have a good idea of the abundance and type of life in the lake and sediments before we leave the site," said Priscu, who plans to return to Antarctica in early January if doctors allow.

"And we want to know as much as possible about how they make a living down there without energy from the sun and without nutrients most life-forms need."

All subglacial lakes are kept liquid by heat generated from the pressure of the heavy load of ice above them, and also from heat emanating from deeper in the Earth's crust.

In addition, the movement of glaciers and "ice streams" produces heat from friction, which at least temporarily results in a wet layer at the very bottom of the ice.

The Lake Whillans drilling is part of the larger Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, first funded in 2009 by the U.S. National Science Foundation with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

That much larger effort will also study the ice streams that feed and leave the lake to learn more about another aspect of Antarctic dynamism: The recently discovered web of more than 360 lakes and untold streams and rivers—some nearing the size of the Amazon Basin—below the ice. (See "Chain of Cascading Lakes Discovered Under Antarctica.")

Helen Fricker, a member of the WISSARD team and a glaciologist at University of California, San Diego, said that scientists didn't begin to understand the vastness of Antarctica's subglacial water world until after the turn of the century.

That hidden, subterranean realm has "incredibly interesting and probably never classified biology," Fricker said.

"But it can also give us important answers about the climate history of the Earth, and clues about the future, too, as the climate changes."

Russia Returning to Successful Site

While both the U.S. and British teams have websites to keep people up to date on their work, the Russians do not, and have been generally quiet about their plans for this year.

The Russians have a team at Lake Vostok, the largest and deepest subglacial lake in Antarctica at more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) below the icy surface of the East Antarctic plateau.

The Vostok drilling began in the 1950s, well before anyone knew there was an enormous lake beneath the ice. The Russians finally and briefly pierced the lake early this year, before having to leave because of the cold. That breakthrough was portrayed at the time as a major national accomplishment.

According to Irina Alexhina, a Russian scientist with the Vostok team who was visiting the U.S. McMurdo Station last week, the Russian plan for this season focuses on extracting the ice core that rose in February when Vostok was breached. She said the team arrived this month and can stay through early February.

Preliminary results from the February breach report no signs of life on the drill bit that entered the water, but some evidence of life in small samples of the "accretion ice," which is frozen to the bottom of the lake, said Lake Vostok expert Sergey Bulat, of the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, in May.

Both results are considered tentative because of the size of the sample and how they were retrieved. In addition, sampling water from the very top of Lake Vostok is far less likely to find organisms than farther down or in the bottom sediment, scientists say.

"It's like taking a scoop of water from the top of Lake Ontario and making conclusions about the lake based on that," said Priscu, who has worked with the Russians at Vostok.

He said he hopes to one day be part of a fully international team that will bring the most advanced drilling and sample collecting technology to Vostok.

Extreme Antarctic Microbes Found

Some results have already revealed life under the ice. A November study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that subglacial Lake Vida—which is smaller and closer to the surface than other subglacial lakes—does indeed support a menagerie of strange and often unknown bacteria.

The microbes survive in water six times saltier than the oceans, with no oxygen, and with the highest level of nitrous oxide ever found in water on Earth, said study co-author Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center.

"What Antarctica is telling us is that organisms can eke out a living in the most extreme of environments," said McKay, an expert in the search for life beyond Earth.

McKay called Lake Vida the closest analog found so far to the two ice and water moons in the solar system deemed most likely to support extraterrestrial life—Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus.

But that "closest analog" designation may soon change. Life-forms found in Vostok, Ellsworth, or Whillans would all be living at a much greater depth than at Lake Vida—meaning that they'd have to contend with more pressure, more limited nutrients, and a source of energy entirely unrelated to the sun.

"Unique Moment in Antarctica"

The prospect of finding microscopic life in these extreme conditions may not seem to be such a big deal for understanding our planet—or the possibility of life on others. (See Antarctic pictures by National Geographic readers.)

But scientists point out that only bacteria and other microbes were present on Earth for 3 billion of the roughly 3.8 billion years that life has existed here. Our planet, however, had conditions that allowed those microbes to eventually evolve into more complex life and eventually into everything biological around us.

While other moons and planets in our solar system do not appear capable of supporting evolution, scientists say they may support—or have once supported—primitive microbial life.

And drilling into Antarctica's deep lakes could provide clues about where extraterrestrial microbes might live, and how they might be identified.

In addition, Priscu said there are scores of additional Antarctic targets to study to learn about extreme life, climate change, how glaciers move, and the dynamics of subterranean rivers and lakes.

"We actually know more about the surface of Mars than about these subglacial systems of Antarctica," he said. "That's why this work involves such important and most likely transformative science."

Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt, the just-retired president of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, an international coordinating group, called this year "a unique moment in Antarctica."

"There's a growing understanding of the continent as a living, dynamic place—not a locked-in ice desert—and that has created real scientific excitement."

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Australia a Model for Successful Gun Control?

If there is one country that best represents the possibility of cutting gun crime by increasing gun control, it is Australia.

In 1996, 28-year-old Martin Bryant finished his lunch in a café in the seaside resort of Port Arthur and pulled out a semi-automatic rifle. In the first 15 seconds of his attack, he killed 12 and wounded 10. In all, he shot more than 50 people in six locations, killing 35. The worst mass shooting in Australia's history capped a violent decade of mass shootings that killed nearly 100 – and Australians had had enough.

Only 12 days later, Prime Minister John Howard – a conservative who had just been elected with the help of gun owners – pushed through not only new gun control laws, but also the most ambitious gun buyback program seen in recent memory.

The laws banned assault rifles, tightened gun owner licensing, and created national uniform registration standards. Howard knew they might be unpopular among some of the same voters who helped put him into office -- during one particularly hostile public town hall, he wore a bulletproof vest.

But something extraordinary happened: the laws tapped into public revulsion at the shooting and became extremely popular. And they became extremely effective.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

In the last 16 years, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia has fallen by more than 50 percent. The national rate of gun homicide is one-thirtieth that of the United States. And there hasn't been a single mass shooting since Port Arthur.

"It's not that we are a less violent people and that you are a more violent people," says Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney who runs GunPolicy.org, which tracks gun violence and gun laws across the world. "It's that you have more lethal means at your disposal."

But it wasn't just the new laws that made Australia safer. The gun buyback program collected nearly 650,000 assault weapons and 50,000 additional weapons – about one sixth of the national stock. Fewer guns on the street helped severely reduce the likelihood that guns could be used for a mass shooting.

"Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of gun owners simply, voluntarily gave up guns that they did not need to give up," Alpers told ABC News. "You could not be a gun owner during that period and not feel terribly persecuted, terribly under threat from public opinion. The commentaries were vicious."

Gun advocates hold up Australia's example as a reason to try similar laws in the United States, following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But Australians' willingness to give up their guns suggests a fundamental difference between Australia and the United States' gun cultures – and why Australia could be looked at for inspiration, rather than a model.

In the U.S., the founding fathers wrote gun ownership into the country's bedrock documents. Gun owners have long seen their weapons as a sign of freedom.

"But Australians are predisposed toward not having guns," Alpers argues. "We take it for granted that you license the gun owner and you register the firearm. Just as you do with a car. In the United States, everything went in the different direction."

So gun control advocates urge the Obama administration to look at certain steps Australia took – but not necessarily reproduce them.

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How an ancient Egyptian code unmasked a cannibal star

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SMRT Alpha appointed to operate retail space at S'pore Sports Hub

SINGAPORE: The Singapore Sports Hub has appointed SMRT Alpha to lease and operate 41,000 square metres of commercial retail space at the Singapore Sports Hub.

This new joint venture is a partnership between subsidiaries of SMRT and NTUC FairPrice.

The retail mall and waterfront area will feature a variety of indoor and alfresco food and beverage outlets.

For shoppers, the mall will offer a wide range of stores and amenities.

Tenants will also include a FairPrice Xtra hypermarket at the mall, providing affordable daily essentials and groceries, as well as sportswear and sporting equipment, catering to the needs of the residents and shoppers in the area.

The Singapore Sports Hub will be opened and fully operational in April 2014.

- CNA/lp

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Microsoft, Motorola over $100 million apart on patent fees

Microsoft and Motorola can't come close to an agreement on how much the software giant should pay for the right to use the Google-owned company's patents.

In court filings released yesterday and obtained by Reuters, Microsoft indicated that it would be willing to pay as much as $502,000 per year to license Motorola's H.264 patents. The company would also pay as much as $736,000 for Motorola's 802.11 wireless technology.

Motorola, meanwhile, had a much different take. That company has stuck to its guns, saying that a simple fee wasn't enough, and Microsoft should be required to pay a percentage of the selling price of the allegedly infringing products to Motorola. The royalty on H.264 technology should be 2.25 percent, amounting to between $100 million and $125 million per year in fees, Motorola argued, according to Reuters. The mobile company wants a royalty payment of 1.15 percent to 1.73 percent for its Wi-Fi patents, potentially earning it tens of millions of dollars more each year.

Microsoft and Motorola have been deadlocked on what they believe are fair royalty payments over the software giant's use of the mobile company's patents. Microsoft argues that the H.264 patents, which relate to video technology, as well as the Wi-Fi patents, should be offered at a fair rate because they are standard-essential intellectual property. In order for companies to license standard-essential patents, they must request fees that are considered fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND).

Microsoft has been outspoken about its belief that Motorola is acting unfairly with its 2.25 percent royalty request. In a blog post in February, Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said that Motorola wants $22.50 in royalties for each Windows-based laptop sold on the open market. Those laptops, he said, rely on 50 H.264 patents from Motorola. However, in order to get H.264 onto laptops, Microsoft needs to license over 2,300 patents from 29 other companies that also own some intellectual property related to the technology. Altogether, those companies charge "2 cents for use of more than 2,300 patents."

Motorola has also charged that the
Xbox violates its patents.

Motorola and Microsoft last month held a trial over patent royalties. The court is expected to deliver a final verdict on how much Microsoft will have to pay next year. The same court attempted to have Microsoft and Motorola solve the royalty issue out of court, but the companies couldn't come to an agreement.

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GRAIL Mission Goes Out With a Bang

Jane J. Lee

On Friday, December 14, NASA sent their latest moon mission into a death spiral. Rocket burns nudged GRAIL probes Ebb and Flow into a new orbit designed to crash them into the side of a mountain near the moon's north pole today at around 2:28 p.m. Pacific standard time. NASA named the crash site after late astronaut Sally Ride, America's first woman in space.

Although the mountain is located on the nearside of the moon, there won't be any pictures because the area will be shadowed, according to a statement from NASA' Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Originally sent to map the moon's gravity field, Ebb and Flow join a long list of man-made objects that have succumbed to a deadly lunar attraction. Decades of exploration have left a trail of debris intentionally crashed, accidentally hurtled, or deliberately left on the moon's surface. Some notable examples include:

Ranger 4 - Part of NASA's first attempt to snap close-up pictures of the moon, the Ranger program did not start off well. Rangers 1 through 6 all failed, although Ranger 4, launched April 23, 1962, did make it as far as the moon. Sadly, onboard computer failures kept number 4 from sending back any pictures before it crashed. (See a map of all artifacts on the moon.)

Fallen astronaut statue - This 3.5-inch-tall aluminum figure commemorates the 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died prior to the Apollo 15 mission. That crew left it behind in 1971, and NASA wasn't aware of what the astronauts had done until a post-flight press conference.

Lunar yard sale - Objects jettisoned by Apollo crews over the years include a television camera, earplugs, two "urine collection assemblies," and tools that include tongs and a hammer. Astronauts left them because they needed to shed weight in order to make it back to Earth on their remaining fuel supply, said archivist Colin Fries of the NASA History Program Office.

Luna 10 - A Soviet satellite that crashed after successfully orbiting the moon, Luna 10 was the first man-made object to orbit a celestial body other than Earth. Its Russian controllers had programmed it to broadcast the Communist anthem "Internationale" live to the Communist Party Congress on April 4, 1966. Worried that the live broadcast could fail, they decided to broadcast a recording of the satellite's test run the night before—a fact they revealed 30 years later.

Radio Astronomy Explorer B - The U.S. launched this enormous instrument, also known as Explorer 49, into a lunar orbit in 1973. At 600 feet (183 meters) across, it's the largest man-made object to enter orbit around the moon. Researchers sent it into its lunar orbit so it could take measurements of the planets, the sun, and the galaxy free from terrestrial radio interference. NASA lost contact with the satellite in 1977, and it's presumed to have crashed into the moon.

(Learn about lunar exploration.)

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Siblings of Sandy Hook Victims Face Survivor's Guilt

Six-year-old Arielle Pozner was in a classroom at Sandy Hook school when Adam Lanza burst into the school with his rifle and handguns. Her twin brother, Noah, was in a classroom down the hall.

Noah Pozner was killed by Lanza, along with 19 other children at the school, and six adults. Arielle and other students' siblings survived.

"That's going to be incredibly difficult to cope with," said Dr. Jamie Howard, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York. "It is not something we expect her to cope with today and be OK with tomorrow."

READ: Two Adult Survivors of Connecticut School Shooting Will be Key Witnesses

As the community of Newtown, Conn., begins to bury the young victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting today, the equally young siblings of those killed will only be starting to comprehend what happened to their brothers and sisters.

"Children this young do experience depression in a diagnosable way, they do experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Just because they're young, they don't escape the potential for real suffering," said Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist and professor at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Arielle and other survivor siblings could develop anxiety or other emotional reactions to their siblings' death, including "associative logic," where they associate their own actions with their sibling's death, Howard said.

"This is when two things happen, and (children) infer that one thing caused the other. (Arielle) may be at risk for that type of magical thinking, and that could be where survivor's guilt comes in. She may think she did something, but of course she didn't," Howard said.

CLICK HERE for photos from the shooting scene.

Children in families where one sibling has died sometimes struggle as their parents are overwhelmed by grief, Howard noted. When that death is traumatic, adults and children sometimes choose not to think about the person or the event to avoid pain.

Interested in How to Help Newtown Families?

"With traumatic grief, it's really important to talk about and think about the children that died, not to avoid talking and thinking about them because that interferes with grieving process, want their lives to be celebrated," Howard said.

Children may also have difficulty understanding why their deceased brother or sister is receiving so much, or so little, attention, according Briggs.

"I think one of the most challenging questions we can be faced with as parents is how to 'appropriately' remember a child that is gone. So much that can go wrong with that," Briggs said. "You have the child who is fortunate enough to escape, who thinks 'Why me? Why did my brother go?' But if you don't remember the sibling enough the child says 'it seems like we've forgotten my brother.'"

"They may even find themselves feeling jealous of all the attention the sibling seems to be receiving," Briggs said.

Parents and other adults in the family's support system need to be on alert, watching the child's behavior, she said. Children could show signs of withdrawing, or seeming spacy or in a daze. They could also seem jumpy or have difficulty concentrating in the wake of a traumatic event.

"For kids experiencing symptoms, and interfering with ability to go to school, they may be suffering from acute stress disorder, and there are good treatments," Howard said.

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