Month: May 2016

(credit: Tobias Helfrich)

After a decades-long battle, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (the supreme German Constitutional Court) has overturned a ban on a song that used a two-second sample of a Kraftwerk recording.

In 1997, music producer Moses Pelham used a clip from 1977 release Metall auf Metall (Metal on Metal) in the song Nur mir (Only Mine) performed by Sabrina Setlur.

Lead singer of Kraftwerk, Ralf Huetter, sued Pelham, and in 2012 the electropop pioneer won his case for copyright infringement in Germany's Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), gaining damages and a block on Nur mir. However, in today’s judgment, the eight judges of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the lower court did not sufficiently consider whether the impact of the sample on Krafwerk might be “negligible.”

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast has hit a roadblock in its attempt to get a big tax break that Oregon legislators wrote specifically for Google Fiber.

It looked like Comcast had won a few months ago when Oregon's Public Utility Commission ruled 3-0 that Comcast's gigabit service qualifies the company for the tax exemption. But the exemption still needed to be certified by the state Department of Revenue, and last week the department refused to do so.

The department "ruled Comcast ineligible for the tax break, at least for this year," The Oregonian reported. "The department declined to disclose its reasoning, citing taxpayer confidentiality, and referred questions to Comcast. Comcast said any information would have to come from the Revenue Department."

(credit: kaboompics)

Late last week, headlines blared that a new, $25 million, years-long government study had finally found a clear connection between cellphone radiation and tumors in rats—striking fear in the hearts of gadget lovers worldwide. The finding—if true—would suggest we’re headed for an upsetting uptick in cancer incidence and death. Mobile phones, after all, are ubiquitous and many among us have a near religious devotion to them if not an unhealthy codependence.

Luckily for us, the study does not provide that clear link.

The study, which was not properly peer reviewed—despite what some outlets have reported—is chock full of red flags: small sample sizes, partially reported results, control oddities, statistical stretches, and a slim conclusion. In short: “there is nothing in this report that can be regarded to be statistically significant,” Donald Berry, a biostatistics professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, told Ars. “The authors should have used the “black box warning.”

Enlarge / Mars' northern ice cap. (credit: ESA/DLR/FU-Berlin)

Earth has a climatic pacemaker driven by subtle patterns in its orbit. The shape of its orbit shifts slightly, the tilt of its axis bobs up and down, and that axis wobbles like a top. Add up the way all that movement affects the distribution of sunlight in the high latitude Northern Hemisphere, and you get a predictable succession of glacial and interglacial periods.

Mars has orbital patterns that affect its climate, too. In fact, Mars’ orbital cycles swing to greater extremes than Earth’s. For example, Mars’ current axial tilt is about 25°, but it has varied within a range of 18° to 48° over the past 10 million years. Those orbital changes have influenced its climate as well.

On Earth, the “ice ages” resulted in a transfer of water from the ocean into growing continental ice sheets. On Mars, the changes cause transfers of water ice from the polar caps to lower latitudes, where it forms thin layers and possibly even glaciers. When conditions tilt back the other way, ice disappears from lower latitudes and the polar caps thicken again.