[H]ardNews 7th Edition - More Blair Tech

Supersensitive Disk Drives:

Being able to move electrons from one place to another more efficiently translates to more sensitive electronics that can read information packed more closely on disk drives. Researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo have made their ballistic magnetoresistance device 33 times more sensitive by shrinking its electrical contact from 40 nanometers to as small as one nanometer. A nanometer is the length of 10 hydrogen atoms.

Home-office tax fallacies:

The deduction is sometimes abused because it can save you a lot of money. Say you have a 1,500-square-foot home with a 150-square-foot office. Because the office is 10% of the home’s total space, you can deduct 10% of the year’s mortgage interest and taxes (or rent payments), insurance and other utilities. You can also deduct the square footage of a workspace that’s not a dedicated room, such as a corner of the den or bedroom. Even better, office furniture, equipment, business telephone and fax/data lines, and the business calls made on them, are often fully deductible.

Cosmic Dust:

The inner Solar System is suffused with a vast cloud of 'interplanetary dust.' This dust cloud is visible with the naked eye as the zodiacal light - a triangular glow rising above the horizon shortly after sunset or before sunrise. The picture to the right shows the zodiacal light together with comet Hale-Bopp. During each passage by the Sun, a typical comet loses roughly 1 m of surface material, composed of ices and dust, forming dust and ion tails millions of miles in length.

Brain Imaging Study:

Human intelligence is like a mental juggling act in which the smartest performers use specific brain regions to resist distraction and keep attention focused on critical pieces of information, according to a new brain imaging study from Washington University in St. Louis. People with higher fluid intelligence use specific brain regions to help focus their attention and resist distraction during a difficult mental task. "Some people seem to perform better than others in novel, mentally-demanding situations, but why?" asks Jeremy R. Gray, Ph.D., co-author of the study to be posted Feb. 18 in an advance online issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. "Presumably, people are using their brains differently, but how? "