I have no idea why I converted the number of this week’s Carnival of Space into binary, except that I did a ternary conversion on Twitter recently and it was fun.

Yes, I’m a dork. But you laughed, so you are too.

In summer 2008, DISCOVER set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic bits that might now be an intractable mess in the middle of the ocean. With appearances in newspapers, magazines, and even “Good Morning America,” the Pacific patch became the newest target for environmental hand-wringing, and raised questions over whether it would even be possible to clean up. However, the ocean currents that cause the Pacific gyre don’t just happen in the North Pacific. Scientists at the Sea Education Association just finished a two-decade-long study of the North Atlantic and found similarly sad results.

The team dragged nets half-in and half-out of the water to take a trash census. The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic — off the coast of the U.S. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface [BBC News]. Like the Pacific gyre, the Atlantic one—located mostly between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—contains a dizzying number of small plastic pieces that used to be bags, bottles, and other consumer products. Lead researcher Kara Lavendar Law says it’s difficult to compare the two, but researchers in both places collected more than 1,000 pieces during a single tow of a net [The New York Times].

This similarity is no surprise, according to ocean researchers Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins. Both gyres are areas of little to no ocean currents, surrounded by strong ocean currents that prevent trash from escaping once it arrives. Worldwide, there exist five major oceanic gyres and it is hypothesized by Eriksen and Cummins that all of these gyres will collect marine debris, much in the same way that the North Pacific does [Huffington Post]. You can see the locations in the above image. The North Atlantic gyre that SEA studied also contains the Sargasso Sea, so the plastic is mixed up with the seaweed that grows there.

Most depressingly, reports from the Pacific gyre indicate that fish are beginning to ingest the plastic as pieces get smaller and smaller. And Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the Pacific patch in the 1990s, says cleaning up so many pieces spread out so far would be an impossibly difficult and expensive task. Besides, if people don’t stop throwing away plastic, it wouldn’t do much good.

Related Content:
80beats: Ships Set Sail to Examine the Vast Patch of Plastic in the Pacific Ocean
The Intersection: Voyage to the Vast Island of Garbage
DISCOVER: The World’s Largest Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
DISCOVER: The Dirty Truth About Plastic
DISCOVER: Think You Can Live Without Plastic?

Image: NOAA

An Italian court in Milan has just convicted three Google executives of criminal charges. The court found them liable for an online video that they did not appear it, film, or have any role in posting, and which the company promptly removed when complaints about it were raised. The Italian court, however, still held them responsible for the video and sentenced them to suspended six-month sentences. Experts say the case sets a dangerous precedent, and could dramatically restrict online content in Italy.

Thousands of people post videos each hour on YouTube and Google Video, and various court cases have questioned whether Google, which owns YouTube, is liable for every video that infringes on someone’s copyright or is deemed offensive to its viewers. Google has argued that it’s only liable if offensive material stays up on its site despite complaints against it, and says that if the company takes complained-about videos down, it has no legal liability–like the rules it faces under U.S. law. Italy apparently disagrees.

The case pertains to a video that was posted to Google Video in 2006 showing four youths in Turin bulling a 17-year old who suffers either from Down Syndrome or autism (reports vary). The video received 12,000 views before the Italian police brought it to Google’s notice. The company immediately took it down, and Google then helped the cops find the person who uploaded it, resulting in the identification (and school expulsion) of the four bullies. But the Google executives, who include David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, and George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer, were charged and convicted for criminal defamation and a failure to protect the privacy of the bullied teen.

Google plans to appeal the conviction but worries that it sets a bad legal precedent–none of the accused directly handled the video, and the video had been removed after Google received complaints; however, the prosecutors claim that Google should never have allowed the video to be posted in the first place [Mashable].

In a post on its corporate blog, Google wrote that this conviction attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built, and argued that the person who uploaded the offensive video was responsible for its content. The company declared: If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear [The Official Google Blog].

Internet analysts say the Italy conviction implies that Google must start pre-screening all videos uploaded to YouTube before allowing them to go live–or at least it must start doing so in Italy if the convinction stands. That site sees more than 20 hours of video being posted every minute worldwide, which would make the screening process if not entirely impossible, then extremely cumbersome and expensive.

This isn’t the first time Italy has cracked down severely on a tech company. Its tax authorities have demanded that eBay should hand over information about its customers relating to goods sold on the site between 2004 and 2007; Yahoo was fined €12,000 last year after Milan’s public prosecutor demanded information about private emails sent by suspected criminals; and the Italian interior ministry has required Facebook to hand over personal information about users who created groups said to “glorify” Mafia bosses, and again last October over a group said to promote the violent death of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister [Guardian].

Related Content:
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: Google Taught Me How to Cut My Own Hair
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter

Image: Flickr/Manfrys

Here is a question for the ages: who would win in a Treknobabble fight, Wil Wheaton or Sheldon Cooper?

My first thought was that Sheldon might trip up because he is so well-versed in physics that it might actually impede his ability to analyze Trek science. However, we know that his analysis of comic books is fearsome in its depth and grasp of minutiae.

Wil, on the other hand, ate my lunch when I attacked him over Trek physics. In fact, I still haven’t forgiven him. So I should add the obligatory CURSE YOU WIL WHEATON!

Which makes me think that perhaps I should side with Sheldon, if only because we have both been bested by Wil. But sadly, in this case, my skepticism has me at an impasse. I simply don’t know.

So, BABloggees, what say you? Would the Enterprising young Wheaton outmaneuver the Big Banger Sheldon? Perhaps we’ll find out soon enough.

Tip o’ the nacelle to Francis Fletcher.

Augmented reality, the blending of real-life environments with computer generated imagery, has provided a bunch of creative applications, including a virtual tattoo. Now, the same technology can be used to identify virtual strangers.

A new app called Recognizr, developed by the Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe, lets you find out more about a person–including what social networks they are on and in some cases their phone numbers–simply by pointing your camera-phone at them (see video below). The app works by mashing up the latest in facial recognition software, cloud computing, and augmented reality.

But before privacy advocates storm the offices of The Astonishing Tribe, we should note that the app only works on people who have opted in to the system. People have to sign onto this service, submit a profile, and upload a picture to be picked up by Recognizr. So you needn’t scramble to delete all your pictures on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, since Recognizr works only by mining information off its own database.

Describing how the app works, PopSci writes:

Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s mug and sends it across a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition … and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

The app will work with iPhones and phones running on the Android operating system.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Science, Not Fiction: Seeing The Future, Literally
Discoblog: One Small Step Closer to Superhuman Cyborg Vision
Discoblog: Will the Laptops of the Future Be a Pair of Eye Glasses?

Image: Recognizer

Dinosaurs and explosives—science stories don’t get much cooler than this.

Researchers in Utah have excavated two complete and two partial skulls of a dino called Abydosaurus mcintoshi, a 105-million-year-old sauropod, which the scientists think might have descended from the brachiosaurus family. “It is amazing. You can hold the skull in your hands and look into the eyes of something that lived a very long time ago” [USA Today], says paleontologist Brooks Britt, co-author of the study that appeared in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Click through the photo gallery for more pictures from the dig, and for the whole story.

Image: Brigham Young University

A new website by NASA features videos, images, and articles about climate change. A Warming World has been designed to help all of us understand what warming means and how it impacts our world. Here’s a sample:

Each year, scientists at NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.

Everyone is linking to this Guardian article collecting advice from fiction writers. My favorite list comes from Richard Ford — not that I necessarily agree with every rule:

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can ­possibly help it.

There’s an entire blog devoted to listing the daily routines of writers. It’s a funny business — the people who do it can’t imagine doing anything else, but they still rely on all sorts of gimmicks to keep their work flowing smoothly. Maybe that’s part of the difference between styling one’s self as a writer and actually writing.