World's Greatest Sportsperson?

Is it possible to work out which living athlete is the best? Mathematician Rob Eastaway, co-author of The Hidden Mathematics of Sport, investigates.

The case for Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar is certainly strong. His international career has spanned an astonishing 22 years, during which time he has never been dropped from the Indian Test side.

The "Little Master" has scored more runs and notched up more international hundreds than anyone else in the history of the game, although cricket fans will always be compelled by Donald Bradman's famous 99.94 batting average. And it's not just that he has scored more, it's the huge margin by which he tops the table.

Longevity and the accumulation of trophies is certainly an important factor in making greatness, but it is surely not the only one. After all, if you're only looking at durability at the top, then Tendulkar is outstripped by US golfer Tom Watson, who has been a serious challenger in the Open since 1975.

The trouble is, there are so many statistical ways to measure greatness.

One is to pick out those sportsmen and women who for a period of time are in a different class from their peers. The goal-scoring feats of Lionel Messi make him a candidate, but statistical measurements of footballers are always tricky, not least because it can be hard to disentangle one player's performance from the contributions of his team mates.

Champion of champions?

• Sachin Tendulkar - achieved 99 centuries in international cricket
• Usain Bolt - world record and Olympic record holder in the 100m, the 200m and the 4×100m relay
• Tom Watson - five-time Open winner, challenged at the top level since 1975
• Phil "The Power" Taylor - won a record 15 world darts championships
• Jenny Thompson - won more swimming medals and gold medals than any woman in Olympic history

The feats within individual sports are easier to assess, and in terms of quantum leaps, can anyone rival Usain Bolt?

The 100 metre sprint is the pinnacle of athletics where the world records normally mean shaving 1/100th of a second off the previous best time. Yet Bolt has broken that record not just once but three times, and in his most recent, mathematicians reckoned he could have knocked more than a tenth of a second off the record time had he not slowed up at the finish because his shoelace was undone.

Great sportsmen are head and shoulders ahead of the competition. In Bolt's case it's head, shoulders and a couple of strides too.

Or you can take a look at a sport's world rankings. Every sport uses a different system for rankings its members, but all of them are based on some form of objective, mathematical model.

To identify the world's greatest, why not look at which sportsman has managed to spend the longest amount of time as world number one. Tiger Woods managed to be top of the golf rankings for over 10 years, before his recent fall from grace. By this measure, though, there's a British sportsman who pips Tiger for the title.

Phil "The Power" Taylor has had an almost unbroken position as world number one in darts since 1998. And yes, darts is now officially a sport.

We can of course let the market decide. If a sportsman earns a lot of money, it must reflect his global appeal and success.

David Beckham, surely a great, has earned tens of millions over his career.

Yet on this score, the world's greatest sportsmen at the moment could be Alex Rodriguez. He's paid around $30m (£18m) per year, and that's before all the product endorsements. He plays baseball.

But can he really be called the world's greatest when his name barely registers in public consciousness outside his own country?

Of course greatness also depends on many things that are hard to measure - charisma, style and an ability to hit the headlines, for example.

With all this complex and sometimes conflicting data, perhaps we should put our trust in the wisdom of crowds.

Despite the diverse and often ill-informed opinion of the public, put enough people together and they often manage to come up with the right answer.

And if we ask the crowd who is the greatest sportsman, I think I know who'll come out top. Sachin Tendulkar.

Why? He would win by sheer weight of population. There are over a billion people in India who have little sporting interest other than cricket. And a billion people can't be wrong - can they?

Source: BBC

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11 year old calls Police for forced labor

A boy of 11 called a German police emergency line to complain of "forced labour" after his mother told him to help clean the home.

Police say the boy from Aachen, who has not been identified, spoke to an officer via the 110 number.

They say he complained: "I have to work all day long. I haven't any free time."

His mother told the officer the boy had kept threatening to call them, having repeatedly complained of having to do housework during the school holidays.

A transcript of the conversation, printed in local newspapers, revealed the officer asking the boy to describe the kind of "forced labour" he was doing.

The boy replied that he had to clean the home and terrace, it said.

Asked if he knew what forced labour was, the boy said he did, and the police officer asked to speak to his mother, who at that stage was standing next to him.

She explained he had called after being asked to pick up paper from the floor, adding: "He plays all day long and when told to tidy up what he's done, he calls it forced labour."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14533749

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Itsy bitsy bar code bikini

(Reuters) - Soccer teams have home and away shirts,tennis and golf stars have clothes and gear with sponsored logos, but if you're a female beach volleyball star there's not a lot of costume real estate to hire out to the marketing folks.

That's why British beach volleyball stars Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney will be sporting a teensy weensy high tech bar code on their itsy bitsy bikini bottoms when they compete in a high profile London tournament this week.

The Olympic pairing -- ranked 26th in the world -- will have a Quick Response (QR) code on their costumes at the Visa FIVB Beach Volleyball International, an intercontinental women's volleyballexhibition.

When photographed on a smartphone, the QR matrix barcode directs users straight to a specific website, in this case a site owned by online sports betting company Betfair.

The barcode, part of a sponsorship deal with Betfair, will be printed on the back of the bikini bottoms, where advertisers think it will attract the most attention.

"There is huge interest in beach volleyball and we want to ensure that our advertising campaign is seen and remembered by as many sports fans as possible," Betfair's Andy Lulham said in a statement.

"As far as we're aware this is the first time QR codes have been used in in-play sports advertising and what better way to test its effectiveness than by putting them on one of the places that is likely to get photographed the most."

The tournament, which is part of the official 2012 London Olympic Games sports testing programme, takes place in Horse Guards Parade, London, the ceremonial grounds which hosts the Trooping of the Colour each year on the Queen's birthday.

This venue will host the 2012 London Olympic Games beach volleyball tournament in a temporary arena which will be built next year and have a capacity of 15,000.

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Earth in Antimatter Belt?

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

'Abundant source'

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place - at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they "annihiliate" in a flash of light.

The band is "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

"Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism," he told BBC News.

"Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced."

Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

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Flowing Water on Mars?

The dark 'tendrils', emerging from rocky Martian outcrops, are signs of flowing water, say Scientists

Striking new images from the mountains of Mars may be the best evidence yet of flowing, liquid water, an essential ingredient for life.

The findings, reported today in the journal Science, come from a joint US-Swiss study.

A sequence of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show many long, dark "tendrils" a few metres wide.

They emerge between rocky outcrops and flow hundreds of metres down steep slopes towards the plains below.

They appear on hillsides warmed by the summer sun, flow around obstacles and sometimes split or merge, but when winter returns, the tendrils fade away.

This suggests that they are made of thawing mud, say the researchers.

"It's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but they appear when it's still too cold for fresh water.

Salty water

"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said planetary geologist and lead author Professor Alfred McEwen of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona.

Saltiness lowers the temperature at which water freezes, and water about as salty as Earth's oceans could exist at these sites in summer.

"This could be the first flowing water," said Professor McEwen. This has profound implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.

"Liquid water is absolutely essential for life, and we've found life on Earth in pretty much every moist niche," said Dr Lewis Dartnell, astrobiologist at University College London, who was not involved in the study.

"So perhaps there could be hardy microbes surviving in these short periods of summer meltwater on the desert surface of Mars."

This was echoed by an expert on life in extreme environments, Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland, also not involved in this study: "Their results are consistent with the presence of large and extensive underground salty lakes on Mars."

"This is an exciting possibility for those of us studying salt-loving (halophilic) micro-organisms here on Earth, since it opens the possibility that these kinds of hearty bugs may also inhabit our neighbouring planet," he said.

"Halophilic microbes are champions at withstanding the most punishing conditions, complete desiccation and ionising (space) radiation."

For geologist Joe Levy of Portland State University, a specialist in Antarctic desert ecosystems, who did not contribute to this work, they represent "a truly tantalising astrobiological target".

These small and mysterious tendrils could then be the best place to look for Martian life. Professor McEwen says that "for present-day life, these are the most accessible sites".

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14408928

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Multiverses in 'bubbles'?

The idea that other universes - as well as our own - lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these "bubble universes" may have left marks on our own.

This "multiverse" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.

The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from our Universe's formation.

'Mind-blowing'

The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.

But Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe”

George EfstathiouUniversity of Cambridge

"I'd heard about this 'multiverse' for years and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not testable," Dr Peiris told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that you can test for all these other universes out there - it's just mind-blowing."

Dr Peiris' team first proposed these disc-shaped signatures in the CMB in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and the new work fleshes out the idea, putting numbers to how many bubble universes we may be able to see now.

Crucially, they used a computer program that looked for these discs automatically - reducing the chance that one of the collaborators would see the expected shape in the data when it was not in fact there.

The program found four particular areas that look likely to be signatures of the bubble universes - where the bubbles were 10 times more likely than the standard theory to explain the variations that the team saw in the CMB.

However, Dr Peiris stressed that the four regions were "not at a high statistical significance" - that more data would be needed to be assured of the existence of the "multiverse".

"Finding just four patches is not necessarily going to give you a good probability on the full sky," she explained to BBC News. "That's not statistically strong enough to either rule it out or to say that there is a collision."

Dr Peiris said that data from the Planck telescope - a next-generation space telescope designed to study the CMB with far greater sensitivity - would put the idea on a firmer footing, or refute it. However, the data from Planck cannot be discussed publicly before January 2013.

George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, called the work "the first serious attempt to search for something like this... from the methodology point of view it's interesting".

He noted that the theories that invoked the multiverse were fraught with problems, because they dealt in so many intangible or immeasurable quantities.

"My own personal view is that it will need new physics to solve this problem," he told BBC News. "But just because there are profound theory difficulties doesn't mean one shouldn't take the picture seriously."

Dr Peiris said that even if these bubble universes were confirmed, we could never learn anything further about them.

"It would be wonderful to be able to go outside our bubble, but it's not going to be possible," she explained.

"They're born close together - that's when the collision happens - and this same inflation happens between the bubbles. They're being hurled apart and space-time is expanding faster than light between them."

But Professor Efstathiou said the search was inherently worth it. He explained: "It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we have actually made physical contact in another universe. It's a long shot, but it would by very profound for physics."

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Earth had two moons!!

Once upon a time, the sky above Earth may have held two moons — until they smashed into each other to create the lunar body we know today. Such a collision early in the solar system's history could explain why the moon is lopsided, and why its far side looks so different from the face we can see, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

Round as it may seem from our vantage point, the moon in fact bulges on one side: the far side, which is packed with high, jagged mountains. That's a more severe surface than the smooth side we see, filled with basins of volcanic rock.

The moon was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, after a Mars-sized body slammed into the molten Earth and flung a ring of debris into space. Much of that debris coalesced into a rocky satellite, which was roughed up about half a billion years later by a barrage of asteroids and other interplanetary material, leaving scars in the form of craters.

But at what point the moon became lopsided, and how, is still unclear.

Some scientists speculated that the moon's internal dynamics pushed material around. Others wondered whether the mountains were created by debris ejected from a freshly smashed crater.

Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at UC Santa Cruz, had a different idea. Researchers knew that space debris could theoretically get stuck around one of the moon's Lagrangian points, places in space where the gravity of the moon and Earth cancel each other out. In those areas, the debris could coalesce to form another moon, but it would remain stable only for a short time before the sun's gravity threw it off course.

So Asphaug and colleague Martin Jutzi of the University ofBern in Switzerland designed a model in which a moonlet about one third as wide as the moon maintained a stable orbit around the Earth for tens of millions of years, until it floated from its Lagrangian point into the moon's path.

The moonlet would have crashed head-on with the larger lunar body, but the collision would have happened over roughly three hours at relatively slow speeds of about 4,500 to 6,700 miles per hour,the scientists calculated. At that rate, the material in the moonlet would splat onto the moon rather like a ball of mud hitting a surface. The rocky peaks on the far side of the moon are remnants of that impact, Asphaug said.

The force of the collision would have pushed the moon's internal magma sea over to the near side, which could explain why the visible half is rich in potassium, uranium and other elements, Asphaug and Jutzi wrote in Nature.

"It's a really new idea that puts a completely different take on the origin of the lunar dichotomy," said Robin Canup, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the study.


By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
Source:  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-two-moons-20110804,0,845053.story

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Internet Explorer story a bogus...

A story which suggested that users of Internet Explorer have a lower IQ than people who chose other browsers appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

A number of media organisations, including the BBC, reported on the research, put out by Canadian firm ApTiquant.

It later emerged that the company's website was only recently set up and staff images were copied from a legitimate business in Paris.

It is unclear who was behind the stunt.

The story was reported by many high profile organisations including CNN, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and Forbes.

Questions about the authenticity of the story were raised by readers of the BBC website who established that the company which put out the research - ApTiquant - appeared to have only set up its website in the past month.

Thumbnail images of the firm's staff on the website also matched those on the site of French research company Central Test, although many of the names had been changed.

The BBC contacted Central Test who confirmed that they had been made aware of the copy but had no knowledge of ApTiquant or its activities.

Research claims

ApTiquant issued a press release claiming that it had invited 100,000 web users to take IQ tests and matched their results with the type of browser they used.

It also supplied extensive research data.

The results claimed to show that Internet Explorer users were generally of lower intelligence.

The BBC sought alternative views for the original story, including Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory, who said: "I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."

No-one on ApTiquant's contact number was available for comment.

Graham Cluley, senior security consultant at Sophos, examined the source material for the BBC after concerns were raised.

"It's obviously very easy to create a bogus site like this - as all phishers know it's easy to rip-off someone else's webpages and pictures," he said.

Mr Cluley also looked at the pdf file containing the data that many people had downloaded from a variety of sources and said it did not appear to contain malware.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14389430

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Half of European Men King Tut's own

LONDON (Reuters) - Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian PharaohTutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said.

Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfatherAmenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.

The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.

Among modern-day Egyptians this haplogroup contingent is below 1 percent, according to iGENEA.

"It was very interesting to discover that he belonged to a genetic group in Europe -- there were many possible groups in Egypt that the DNA could have belonged to," said Roman Scholz, director of the iGENEA Centre.

Around 70 percent of Spanish and 60 percent of French men also belong to the genetic group of the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

"We think the common ancestor lived in the Caucasus about 9,500 years ago," Scholz told Reuters.

It is estimated that the earliest migration of haplogroup R1b1a2 into Europe began with the spread of agriculture in 7,000 BC, according to iGENEA.

However, the geneticists were not sure how Tutankhamun's paternal lineage came to Egypt from its region of origin.

The centre is now using DNA testing to search for the closest living relatives of "King Tut."

"The offer has only been publicised for three days but we have already seen a lot of interest," Scholz told Reuters.

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Bra chain fail

LONDON (Reuters) - A British attempt to set a new world record for the longest chain of brassiereswas called off after volunteers got the lingerie in a twist. Campaigners at "Bra Chain" hoped to hook together over 100 miles of bras in Worcester, a city in the English West Midlands, to raise money for women's charities and beat the current world record of 166,000 linked brassieres, held by Australia.

Volunteers, or "hookers," aimed to connect 200,000 bras, but were forced to quit at half that number when the undergarments became tangled in the boxes.

"We underestimated the time it would take to get the bras out of their boxes and hooked together - there were bras all over the place," said Launa Walker at Bra Chain.

"It does take a lot of time to assemble bras into a chain and after about nine hours of hooking them up we decided to call it a day," Walker told Reuters.

The organizers say they will attempt another world record bid in the future and are still accepting donations of unwanted bras.

"We are going to try it again -- we've learnt a few tricks of the trade, now all that remains is to set a date," said Walker.

The event was organized in aid of UK women's charities Breakthrough Breast Cancer, the Worcester breast cancer unit and Women's Aid, which supports victims of domestic violence.

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Oxygen in Space

One of astronomy's longest-running "missing persons" investigations has concluded: astronomers have found molecular oxygen in space.

While single atoms of oxygen have been found alone or incorporated into other molecules, the oxygen molecule - the one we breathe - had never been seen.

The Herschel space telescope spotted the molecules in a star-forming region in the constellation of Orion.

The find will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the cosmos, after hydrogen and helium. Its molecular form, with two atoms joined by a double bond, makes life on Earth possible - but this form had never definitively been seen in space.

A 2007 effort from the Swedish Odin telescope, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, claimed a discovery of oxygen in a nearby star-forming region, but the discovery could not be independently confirmed.

One possible location for the missing oxygen is locked onto dust grains and incorporated into water ice.

The team chose a star-forming region in the constellation Orion, believing that oxygen would be "baked off" from the ice and dust in a warmer, more turbulent part of space.

Instruments on the Herschel telescope, sensitive to infrared light, picked up small signatures of the elusive molecular oxygen.

"This explains where some of the oxygen might be hiding," said Paul Goldsmith, principal investigator on the Herschel Oxygen Project.

"But we didn't find large amounts of it, and still don't understand what is so special about the spots where we find it. The Universe still holds many secrets."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14372708

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Are IE users dumber?

Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant.

The study gave web surfers an IQ test, then plotted their scores against the browser they used.

IE surfers were found to have an average IQ lower than people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Users of Camino and Opera rated highest.

The report has sparked anger from IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action.

Researchers gave over 100,000 web surfers a free online IQ test. Scores were stored in a database along with each person's web browser data.

The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an "exceptionally higher" score of over 120.

AptiQuant stressed that using IE doesn't mean you have low intelligence. "What it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer," said AptiQuant CEO Leonard Howard.

The findings have been treated with scepticism by Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory: "They've got IE6 users with an IQ of around eighty. That's borderline deficient, marginally able to cope with the adult world.

"I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."

However, Mr Howard said he didn't feel threatened by a lawsuit: "A win in a court would only give a stamp of approval and more credibility to our report."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14370878

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