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UPI NewsTrack Science and Technology News
(UPI Science News Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) ISPs said joining anti-piracy effort
NEW YORK, March 15 (UPI) -- Major U.S. Internet service providers will voluntarily begin helping the entertainment industry fight online piracy starting in July, an industry official said.
Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, called the policy, dubbed a "six-strikes" plan, one of the most effective anti-piracy efforts ever launched in the United States, Digital Trends reported Thursday.
In a "gradual response" program ISPs will monitor the Web activity of their customers, and if a subscriber is found to be downloading copyrighted content, will send an "educational" notice saying such activity has been detected from IP addresses linked to the customer's account.
If copyright infringing activity continues after several subsequent notices, the ISP reserves the right to throttle Web access speeds or cut off a subscriber's Internet access altogether, Sherman said.
"Each ISP has to develop ... infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said in New York this week, required "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice."
"Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network," he said. "Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."
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Asteroid to make close Earth visit
PARIS, March 15 (UPI) -- An asteroid approaching Earth in 2013 will get closer than the orbits of many satellites, highlighting a need to monitor such hazards, European scientists say.
An amateur team discovered the unusual asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA14, Feb. 22 as it flew by Earth at about seven times the distance of the moon, the European Space Agency reported Thursday.
However, on its next flyby, Feb. 15, 2013, it is predicted to pass Earth at less than 15,000 miles, closer than many commercial satellites, the ESA said.
"This is a safe distance, but it is still close enough to make the asteroid visible in normal binoculars," Detlef Koschny of the ESA's Space Situational Awareness office said.
While an impact with Earth has been ruled out as a possibility on the asteroid's next fly-by, astronomers will use its near approach for additional study and to calculate the gravitational effects on it of Earth and the moon.
"We will also be keen to see the asteroid's resulting orbit after the next close approach in order to compute any future risk of impact," Koschny said.
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Norway wants historic polar ship returned
OTTAWA, March 15 (UPI) -- Norway says it will appeal to a Canadian review board in an effort to return a sunken ship used by explorer Roald Amundsen from Canada to Norway.
Amundsen was using the ship, the Maud, to sail through the Northeast Passage between 1918 and 1920 but was unable to launch an expedition to the North Pole from there.
The ship was sold to the Hudson's Bay Co., renamed the Baymaud, and was used as a warehouse and radio station before partially sinking in Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, northern Canada, in 1930.
Norway bought the ship back for $1 in 1990 and received a permit to take it back to Norway but the permit has since expired, the BBC reported Thursday.
An application for another permit was denied in December by the Canadian Border Services Agency, which said the ship is important to the nation's heritage.
A Norwegian project called Maud Return Home wants the wreck towed back to Norway for display as part of a museum near Oslo. Project backers said they appealed to the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board in Ottawa to overturn the agency's decision.
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Squids' giant eyes seen as defense aid
DURHAM, N.C., March 15 (UPI) -- Giant squid have giant eyes -- among the biggest in nature -- for defending themselves from sperm whales, their biggest enemy, a U.S. researcher says.
"They're most likely using their huge eyes to spot and escape their predators, sperm whales," Duke University biologist Sonke Johnsen says of the animals' basketball-sized orbs.
Johnsen was part of a team that modeled, both physically and biologically, how and why a squid uses such a big eye, and found the design and size of the eye give squid the ability to see approaching sperm whales as they disturb bioluminescent organisms in deep ocean waters, a Duke release reported Thursday.
The team found the large eyes collect more light compared to animals of similar size but with smaller eyes. That's critical for detecting low light differences such as the bioluminescence stimulated by large animals such as approaching sperm whales, Johnsen said.
Bigger eyes mean seeing more of the faint light and predicting the predator's approach, she said.
"It's the predation by large, toothed whales that has driven the evolution of gigantism in the eyes of these squid," Johnsen said.
Copyright 2012 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.
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