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Facebook fact-checker says more work is needed to curb fake news
Facebook knows its platform is awash with fake news, and since December 2016 -- after facing criticism about its failure to stem the spread of fake news in the run-up to the presidential election -- the company has been working with a number of fact-checking firms in a bid to review and debunk false information on the site. One such firm, UK fact-checking charity Full Fact, has now released a report outlining its work and findings from the first six months of its partnership with the tech giant.
Invisibility cloak upgraded to bend infrared light, not to mention our minds
The fabled cloak of invisibility was once considered impossible for modern science, chilling out with perpetual motion up in the clouds, but these days scientists are tilting at blurry windmills with a modicum of success several times a year. The latest advance in theory comes to us from Michigan Tech, which says it can now cloak objects in the infrared spectrum. Previous attempts using metallic metamaterials could only bend microwave radiation, the study claims, but using tiny resonators made of chalcogenide glass arranged in spokes around the object (see diagram at left) researcher Elena Semouchkina and colleagues successfully hid a simulated metal cylinder from 3.5 terahertz waves. While it's hard to say when we might see similar solutions for visible light, even a practical application of infrared cloaking could put your night vision goggles to shame, or perhaps block covert objects from being detected by those newfangled terahertz x-rays.
3D invisibility cloak fashioned out of metamaterials
Those HDTV manufacturers did tell us that 3D was going to be everywhere this year, didn't they? Keeping up with the times, scientists investigating potential methods for rendering physical objects invisible to the human eye have now moved to the full three-dimensional realm. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has developed a photonic metamaterial that can make things disappear when viewed from all angles, advancing from previous light refraction methods that only worked in 2D. It sounds similar to what Berkeley researchers developed not too long ago, and just like Berkeley's findings, this is a method that's still at a very early stage of development and can only cover one micrometer-tall bumps. Theoretically unlimited, the so-called carpet cloak could eventually be expanded to "hide a house," but then who's to say we'll even be living in houses by that time?
Dateline - add a linear calendar to your Mac's desktop
I love simple utilities, and Dateline certainly fits that bill. This small application puts a linear calendar on your screen that shows a dot on the current date, and will jump to a given date in iCal if you double-click it. That's pretty much the full extent of what Dateline does, but in this case simplicity equals elegance. Considering its functionality, Dateline contains a reasonably complete set of preferences that control how it is displayed. You can choose the colors and opacity for each visual element, the size of the overall date line, the window level (as Gruber points out, setting this to Desktop icons seems to be the most reasonable setting), whether or not to show the month's name, and the option to hide the app's icon in the dock. After trying it for only a couple minutes, Dateline immediately went into my list of applications that automatically open at login.
Like Thought Updates Opacity
Do you spend part or all of your time creating resolution-independent graphics for the Web? If you do, then you're probably familiar with Opacity. It's a powerful tool for creating icons or other graphic elements that are designed for viewing on a screen rather than on paper.The developer of Opacity, Like Thought, LLC, is now shipping version 1.1 of their app. Opacity 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5.2 and has a redesigned interface with a new grid and dynamically generated images in the toolbar. To make life easier for new users of Opacity, Like Thought also added a "How To" screencast and four new templates.The biggest addition to Opacity 1.1 is support for SVG vector graphics for the Web. Opacity creates reusable workflows called factories, which now support such cool features as gamma stripping in PNG images, automatic uploading to Web sites using Cyberduck, and multi-page PDF images.If you own Opacity 1.0, this is a free upgrade. A demo is available for download, and you can purchase Opacity for $89.
Japanese researchers invent completely transparent material
In a breakthrough that could benefit fields as diverse as networking, photography, astronomy, and peeping, science-types at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research have unveiled their prototype of a glass-like material that they claim to be 100% transparent. Unlike normal glass, which reflects some of the incoming light, the new so-called metamaterial --composed of a grid of gold or silver nanocoils embedded in a prism-shaped, glass-like material -- uses its unique structural properties to achieve a negative refractive index, or complete transparency. Although currently just a one-off proof-of-concept (pictured, under an electron microscope), mass-produced versions of the new material could improve fiber optic communications, contribute to better telescopes and cameras, or lead to the development of completely new optical equipment.
