Now, tools to keep tab on kids’ digital lives

When her children were ready to have laptops of their own, Jill Ross bought software that would keep an eye on where they went online. One day it offered her a real surprise. She discovered that her 16-year-old daughter had set up her own video channel. Using the camera on her laptop, sometimes in her bedroom , she and a friend were recording mundane teenage banter and broadcasting it on YouTube for the whole world to see.

For Ross, who lives outside Denver , it was a window into her daughter's mind and an emblem of the strange new hurdles of modern-day parenting. She did not mention it to her daughter; she just subscribed to the channel's updates. The daughter said nothing either; she just let Mom keep watching. "It's a matter of knowing your kids," Ross said.

Parents can now use an array of tools to keep up with the digital lives of their children, raising new quandaries . Is surveillance the best way to protect children? Or should parents trust them to share if they are scared or bewildered by something online?

The answers are as varied as parents themselves. Still, the anxieties of parenting in the digital age have spawned a mini-industry , as start-ups and established companies market new tools to track where children go online, who they meet there and what they do. Because children are glued to smartphones, the technology can allow parents to track their physical whereabouts and even monitor their driving speed. If, a few years ago, the emphasis was on blocking children from going to inappropriate sites on the family computer, today's technologies promise to embed Mom and Dad — and occasionally Grandma — inside every device that children are using, and gather intelligence on them wherever they go.

A smartphone application alerts Dad if his son is texting while driving . An online service helps parents keep tabs on every chat, post and photo that floats across their children's Facebook pages. And another scans the Web in case a child decides to try a new social network that the grown-ups have not even heard of yet.

This car can drive itself through jam

LONDON: It may sound like a James Bond movie stuff, but engineers have developed an advanced car which they say can drive itself on just the press of a button, providing much-needed relaxation to the motorist stuck in heavy traffic jams.

When the traffic jam ends and the car reaches 30mph, the auto-pilot — called "Traffic Jam Assist" — hands control of the vehicle back to the refreshed driver.

The revolutionary technology , developed by engineers at US auto major Ford, is expected to be available on several of its models within five years. Prototypes are being tested at Ford's European research and advanced engineering centre in Germany and in the US, the Daily Mail reported. Experts said its widespread adoption could help speed up traffic caught in jams by up to 37% and reduce journey times by 20% by helping cars keep pace more efficiently with the flow of the traffic. The technology works using a camera and radar behind the rear-view mirror which scans the road ahead by picking out the white lines marking the lane, plus any other traffic.

Signals are then sent to the "brains" of the system in a computer central processing unit or "black box" . Once a jam is detected, the car uses a voice command to ask the driver if they want to switch to Traffic Jam Assist.
If the answer is yes, then the car assumes command — braking to stop a collision with the car in front or to slow down to meet its speed, and then accelerating to keep up with the flow of cars in front when they move off.
It will even recognize a car that "cuts in" ahead of the vehicle in front and take appropriate braking action needed.

The system is designed only for motorways, but coping with the problems of urban traffic is just a matter of time, Ford bosses said.

Pim van der Jagt, MD of Ford's Aachen operation, said: "The car will stay in the middle of the lane even when the motorway takes a curve. It will accelerate, brake and steer itself in a jam." PTI

Charismatic Megaparticles Might Hint at Dark Matter, and Much Besides

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Charismatic Megaparticles Might Hint at Dark Matter, and Much Besides

By George Musser | June 18, 2012 |

At a lecture I went to some years ago, astrophysicist Trevor Weekes compared garden-variety elementary particles to mosquitoes. They are plentiful and easy to find—indeed, they find you. But ultra-high-energy gamma rays, he said, are like elephants. They are fairly rare, but among the greatest of creatures. They often roam in spectacular habitats. Their sheer heft tests the limits of the laws of nature.
I naturally wanted to invite an article for Sci Am about these charismatic megaparticles, but for years I struggled with what the article would say. Although they may be the most powerful electromagnetic radiation known to science—photons with an energy of around a teraelectron-volts (TeV), the kinetic energy of a mosquito concentrated into a single quantum—once you use up all the superlatives in your thesaurus, what was there to say, really? At the time I saw Weekes speak, astronomers had found a grand total of about a dozen celestial sources of TeV gamma rays, and they were the usual suspects: giant black holes and suchlike. Teragammas had revealed nothing about the ecology of the universe which astronomers didn’t already know. They were like animals in a zoo rather than out in the wild: fun to look at before you move onto the baby penguins.
This has all changed in the past couple of years. Observatories have catalogued 136 TeV sources, which is enough to start doing systematic astronomy rather than freak-show physics. They have turned up some striking results, questioning conventional wisdom about pulsars and shedding some light on dark matter.
Blazars, giant black holes that just so happen to be oriented that we are looking down the barrel of the jets they spray out (see picture above), are the largest single category of TeV gamma source outside our galaxy. They are pretty extreme to begin with, but some go all out. They blaze with the intensity of a thousand Milky Way galaxies and can vary in brightness by a factor of five within an hour—a puzzlingly rapid time, too fast even for light to cross from one side of the black hole to the other. “They’re some of the wildest animals in the whole astronomical zoo,” says astrophysicist Chuck Dermer. “The luminosities are just incredible.”
Superlatives aside, last year Christoph Pfrommer, Philip Chang, and Avery Broderick proposed that TeV gammas from blazars play an unappreciated role in heating up intergalactic gas. The injection of thermal energy would prevent the gas from settling into galaxies—especially into small galaxies, whose gravitational fields are too weak to overcome the tendency to dissipate. This may solve one of the most perplexing puzzles in modern cosmology: the fact that dark matter should nucleate lots of miniature galaxies, yet doesn’t seem to do so.
The blazars listed in the TeV catalog are only a small fraction of the ones out there. To our instruments, all the others blur together, forming a diffuse glow spread over the entire sky. In the 1990s, the Compton satellite measured this gamma-ray background up to an energy of 0.1 TeV. Yet when Compton’s successor, the Fermi satellite, went to take a look, the background glow looked so different that it was as if astronomers were seeing it for the first time. The earlier observatory appears to have been miscalibrated at the highest energies.
The upshot is that blazars are not the only things bathing our sky in a diffuse glow of high-energy gammas. Dermer says they account for only about a sixth of the background. The rest must come from pulsars, collisions of cosmic rays produced by supernovae, and maybe the decay or annihilation of dark-matter particles. “We still cannot explain the intensity of the isotropic flux,” says physicist Steve Ritz, one of the leaders of the Fermi project. Astrophysicists gathered to discuss this mystery during a special session of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage last week.
Pulsars are another example of how recent measurements have forced theorists back to the drawing board. By rights, these hyperdense neutron stars should be denuded of very-high-energy gammas. Although the stars might well produce such gammas near their surface, the surrounding magnetosphere should snuff them out, while gammas produced at higher altitudes should be comparatively wimpy. “A lot of people discouraged us from looking at pulsed emissions from pulsars,” recalls gamma-ray astronomer Nepomuk Otte.
So when the MAGIC observatory saw hints of high-energy pulses from the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula, Otte says few paid any attention. But he and his colleagues kept at it and, last year, Fermi and the VERITAS observatory confirmed photons with up to 0.4 TeV. “This has changed the picture that we have of how gamma rays are produced in the Crab pulsar,” Otte says. A new idea is that streams of electrons and positrons are carrying energy into the outer magnetosphere and converting into gammas there. Astrophysicists had known that neutron stars were complicated, but not this complicated.

The biggest wildcards in teragamma astrophysics are so-called dark accelerators. These are TeV gamma sources that astronomers have yet to see any other way; they do not seem to correspond to any star, nebula, or other discernible object. They are tantalizingly marked “UNID” in the database. They might turn out to be known systems such as pulsar nebulae, but there’s always the hope they are dark matter or some other never-before-seen species. “There’s a lot of speculation about them,” Otte says.

To know for sure what’s going on, astronomers need even more than 136 TeV sources. A thousand would be more like it. So they are now planning the next generation of observatory with telescopes scattered over a square kilometer of land. Like the animals of Madagascar, gammas have broken out of their zoo and returned to the wild—with emphasis on the word “wild.”
Blazar image credit: copyright: ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani; Telescope image credit: G. Perez, SMM, IAC

About the Author: George Musser is a senior editor at Scientific American. His primary focus is space science, ranging from particles to planets to parallel universes. He is also the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory. Musser has won numerous awards in his career, including the 2011 American Institute of Physics's Science Writing Award. Follow on Twitter @gmusser.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.