I n theory, Le Zinc, a new French restaurant near the National Cathedral, should belong on every bistro lover’s checklist. A leading Washington architect, Olvia Demetriou, is responsible for transforming the former Sushi Sushi into a dining spot that would look at home in Paris. And chef David Ashwell spent seven years at the esteemed Marcel’s in the West End before moving on to helm its casual offshoot, Brasserie Beck, downtown. Save for Two Amys, the popular pizzeria across the street from Le Zinc, this part of Cleveland Park is not a restaurant destination. The neighborhood could use a flavor boost. Read full article > >

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Tom Sietsema: Le Zinc restaurant review

Suggestions of possible a breach of the cosmic speed limit, set by Einstein’s theory of relativity, are being met with skepticism.

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Evidence of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Puzzles Scientists

GENEVA — One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity — that nothing can go faster than the speed of light — was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world’s foremost laboratories. European researchers said they clocked an oddball type of subatomic particle called a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit. Read full article > >

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Breaking the cosmic speed limit: Scientists clock particle going faster than speed of light

Results from the Large Hadron Collider have all but killed the simplest version of a theory that physicists had hoped would update the current model of sub-atomic physics.

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LHC puts supersymmetry in doubt

Metro takes plenty of heat from bus riders, who complain that older buses break down too often and wheelchair lifts don’t work properly. But on Tuesday, transit officials showed off a new hybrid-electric bus that — in theory — is supposed to solve some of those problems. The “ New Flyer Xcelsior XDE40 ” is an updated version of Metro’s diesel buses, some of which are 15 years old. The new buses are supposed to break down less frequently and be more fuel efficient, saving more than a gallon of gas per mile. Some of Metro’s older buses break down every 3,000 to 4,000 miles, officials said. On average, a single Metrobus drives about 100 miles a day. Read full article > >

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Metro adding more hybrid-electric buses to its fleet

On top of questions about accountability, Montgomery County’s mismanagement of its fleet of take-home cars has also left officials scrambling to unravel troublesome tax issues. Some employees have essentially treated government cars as a fringe benefit but might not have reported that extra income on their tax returns, county officials and tax experts said. Employees who have used government cars for private purposes or failed to properly reimburse the county for the cost of their commutes should, in theory, send the Internal Revenue Service amended returns and a check to cover unpaid taxes, tax experts said. Read full article > >

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Take-home cars in Montgomery County a taxing concern

A technique using neutrons can probe Newton’s theory of gravity at the microscopic level, and may give hints of exotic physics, researchers say.

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Gravity probed at quantum level

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell doesn’t think much of what Donald Trump is doing with all this birther stuff and his fake run for the 2012 Republican nomination for president. And neither do I. We said as much on O’Donnell’s show “The Last Word” on Friday night. In fact, I went a step further and did something I’d done once before when talking about the persistent and long-debunked conspiracy theory that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen: I showed his birth certificate on live television.

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Donald Trump (Birther-N.Y.) needs to get serious

Bang Goes The Theory’s Jem Stansfield explains how pent-up energy between tectonic plates can cause a tsunami when it is eventually released.

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VIDEO: How earthquakes trigger tsunamis

An unpopular theory that modifies gravity appears to outperform the theory that invokes dark matter, in studies of galaxies with few stars and lots of gas.

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Gassy galaxies defy dark matter

An unpopular theory that modifies gravity appears to outperform the theory that invokes dark matter, in studies of galaxies with few stars and lots of gas.

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Gassy galaxies defy dark matter

Kate Sheppard reports from South Dakota : A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus–a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.  The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion–even if she wanted one. Jensen has a fascinating explanation for the actual intentions of the law: When I asked Jensen what the purpose of the law was, if its target isn’t abortion providers, he provided the following example “Say an ex-boyfriend who happens to be father of a baby doesn’t want to pay child support for the next 18 years, and he beats on his ex-girfriend’s abdomen in trying to abort her baby. If she did kill him, it would be justified. She is resisting an effort to murder her unborn child.” Right. It’s not like there are already such laws on the books in South Dakota,  or anything : 22-16-34. Justifiable homicide–Resisting attempted murder–Resisting felony on person or in dwelling house. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is. No, I think Adam Serwer pretty much  has this right . You have a state that is not so much concerned about terror as they concerned about terror practiced against a particular class of people: This bill essentially legalizes terrorism, with the intent of reducing the number of abortion providers by forcing them to operate under the threat of state-sanctioned murder. In keeping with recent efforts by Republicans to limit a woman’s ability to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, the legalized terrorism portion of the bill is merely the most sensational institutional barrier being erected. As with the national GOP’s effort to redefine rape while defunding women’s health services, devoting full attention to that particular proposal avoids all the other South Dakota bills that seek to make it more difficult for women to have abortions. I was thinking about this in reference to Donald Trump’s sudden, and surely heartfelt, transformation from pro-choice to pro-life. Whereas everyone “likes” babies, no one “likes” abortion.  Moreover, pregnancy in our society is not seen with the clearest eyes. When we think of pregnancy we do not think of constant, prolonged, intensive labor which burdens virtually every organ of the body. We think of baby-showers, glowing skin and bundles of joy. It is almost as if the work of making a human being is really no work at all. A man ejaculates, and the rest is romantic comedy. Starring J-Lo, of course.  Thus for the professional demagogue, abortion is the softest of targets. For the rest of us, it’s a microsm to our inability to cope with the grotesque beauty of life itself. No one “likes” to gain weight. No one likes being inflated with noxious gas. No one “likes” waking up not sure of which end to stick in the toilet bowl. No one “likes” back and knees injuries sustained from their cheer-leading days summoning themselves back into being. But everyone likes cheering for a bundle of joy. Everybody loves babies, but no one wants to labor. Under such thinking, the spectacle of public servants claiming to protect life through the legal killing of doctors is as disturbing as it is predictable. As an aside, I want to specifically thank Amanda Marcotte for writing about this. I have long been pro-choice, but the formulation of pregnancy as actual work was not one I was deeply familiar with, nor was it one whose implications I’d much grappled with. I don’t know that the point is original to her, but I would hate to be credited with it in any way. It’s a deep point, and one that isn’t said enough. But it, is no way, original to me.

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Terrorism and Magical Thinking

All print journalism now trails an Internet shadow: the digital version, a Platonic reflection consisting of what might have been if you could have elaborated, footnoted, and linked far beyond the margins of the lines on the page. On paper, the limits of space — of word counts and ad/edit ratios and the cost of printing and distribution — exist in an inverse relationship to the extensibility of online prose. In broadcast media, where the limiting factor is time, you encounter a similar kind of extensibility whenever Jon Stewart winds up a Daily Show interview segment with a frustrated unwillingness to stop, announcing that the conversation will continue off the air and “we’ll throw the whole thing up on the Internet.” Information in general wants to be free, but online text, with a nominal distribution cost approaching zero, really is free, and every time I commit my professional words to paper these days, I immediately begin scheming to scoop up the words and ideas and connections that were left on the cutting-room floor, and reconstitute them online. For the March issue of The Atlantic , I contributed a report on startling innovations in 3D audio as developed by Edgar Choueiri, a professor of applied physics at Princeton University. (Read ” What Perfection Sounds Like .”) In this post, I’d like to unpack the Internet shadow of this particular article of mine by presenting a few notes on useful background information and context that travels in the slipstream of the finished product, along with some deleted scenes from my encounter with Professor Choueiri. The recent and increasingly chastened hysteria over visual 3D movies and TV has its counterpart in a parallel gold rush to commercialize 3D audio. My dispatch on a very specific something new under the hi-fi sun points toward overarching questions about the general state of audio innovation, and this assignment sent me into the heart of those fascinating inquiries. My experience, ears, judgment, and research convince me that Edgar Choueiri’s 3D audio algorithms and playback system represent a dramatic improvement in the spatial realism and virtual sound-staging of stereo. It’s an achievement whose novelty and pleasurable impact justifies the hyperbole of the article’s title. (Ideally, his sound filter requires recordings of an actual soundstage and ambience; it doesn’t work at all with mono recording, and it provides only a variable degree of improvement in some dubiously engineered pop concoctions, where the spatial location of voices and instrumentals is simulated at a mixing board by a technique called “pan-potted mono.”) It’s important, however, to stipulate that Choueiri’s Pure Stereo is a culmination of research on crosstalk cancellation conducted by a far-flung community of engineers over many years. Science is never wholly original. One of the trickiest challenges of science and technology journalism is how to accurately characterize innovative achievement in a clear and distinctive light, while giving due consideration to the wider range of work in the field. Putting one guy’s beautiful solution in bold relief risks obscuring the surrounding network of colleagues (and competitors) along with the deep bibliography of research that stands behind any truly significant breakthrough. One crucial predecessor of Choueiri’s is Ralph Glasgal, whose earlier work on crosstalk cancellation and ambience simulation has proceeded under the rubric of Ambiophonics. Glasgal’s website is an illuminating resource. Bob Carver, an ingenious and storied pioneer of audio design, made a somewhat Ahab-like stab at an analog solution to 3D audio some 40 years ago, and dubbed his technology Sonic Holography . (Choueiri has a vintage Carver Sonic Holography Generator Model C-9 in his gear rack at his Princeton lab.) Another hotspot in audio science is the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the U.K.’s University of Southhampton. Choueiri’s decision to focus on 2-channel stereo 3D was based in part on the Southhampton lab’s successful implementation of crosstalk cancellation with six speakers. The recent and increasingly chastened hysteria over visual 3D movies and TV has its counterpart in a parallel gold rush to commercialize 3D audio. Princeton’s 3D audio technology will doubtless become available to consumers soon, but it’s just one player in a proliferating 3D sound multiverse. The industry sent out an important signal last year with the establishment of the 3D Audio Alliance (3DAA) , a trade group devoted to pooling knowledge and creating technical standards. ( This recent episode of TWiT’s Home Theater Geeks podcast is devoted to the 3DAA launch, featuring Alan Kraemer of SRS Labs, Inc. , a leading purveyor of “advanced audio enhancement.”) Hearing Choueiri’s 3D audio demo was even more exciting for me than the sometimes thrilling cinema 3D of Avatar . It might be worth betting that 3D audio has a better prospect for success in the near future than a thousand James Camerons breaking the fourth wall on screens everywhere. One of the reasons you don’t hear much about genuine audio innovation is that the audiophile press practices a blatant silo journalism, narrowly focused on refinement rather than advancement. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with refinement; in the right circumstances it creates a valuable and highly significant species of progress. Gadgets like the brilliant new HRT iStreamer mean that iPhones and iPads can now become uncompromising high-end audio source components. Cheap digital storage removes any practical barrier to playing uncompressed high-definition audio files. The vinyl resurgence is not a purely nostalgic exercise: improvements in cartridges, turntables, and phono amps lets us hear the full sonic potential of old LPs that vintage gear could never reveal. A well-designed 21st century amplifier with mid-20th century vacuum tubes can seduce the ear for perfectly up-to-date reasons . But refinement is for connoisseurs, not pioneers and creators. Nothing puts the baroque artisanal excesses of hi-fi in perspective faster than spending time with hard-headed audio engineers in the recording industry or researchers at university audio labs, where experiment and the scientific method trump silly gold-plated luxe. Reading about high-quality audio would be much more fun if news from these scruffy studio boffins, pro gear vendors, and bleeding-edge psychoacoustic academicians became a steady part of the conversation. Born in Lebanon in 1961, Choueiri was an Apollo-age science and audio geek, the only 13-year-old in the country with a quadrophonic sound system. The relatively primitive level of spatial music reproduction has been a blind spot in audio journalism, despite never-ending hype about hi-fi that sounds like the real thing. Now engineers and physicists like Choueiri, who can harness the mathematics of wave theory and write powerful audio software algorithms, are about to give us all wonderful new sonic gifts. While we wait for Choueiri’s Pure Stereo to arrive, a closely related and equally mind-boggling digital signal-processing technology is already available from Smyth Research . Rather than 3D audio through loudspeakers, Smyth’s Realiser A8 system provides headphone listeners with sound that is indistinguishable from playback through loudspeakers. The system’s ability to emulate exact room and speaker configurations is said to be uncanny, defeating everything that seems unnatural about listening. Stereophile’s Kal Rubenstein was suitably agog. “I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote in a detailed review . “For the first time in my life, headphone listening was not only convincing but enjoyable.” When I left Choueiri in Princeton, he was immersed in the next stage of his research. For true stereo (including his Pure Stereo), you have to listen in a delimited “sweet spot” between the two speakers. Choueiri is now working on an extension of his 3D filter that will work with a multi-speaker array to produce what he calls “the holy grail — multiple sweet spots.” Meaning two, three, four or more listeners in a room could hear the same spatially realistic sound at the same time — a profound boon for social listening and home theater watching with a group. UPDATE: Choueri has just announced that on January 25th he successfully produced three distinct sweet spots “using a special non-conventional loudspeaker technology in combination with my optimized XTC filters.” He added, “The extension to more sweet spots is relatively trivial.” Finally, a few notes about Choueiri himself, a fascinating character worthy of an in-depth profile. Born in Lebanon in 1961, Choueiri was an Apollo-age science and audio geek, the only 13-year-old in the country with a quadrophonic sound system. He sketched rooms with walls made of loudspeakers, and tape-recorded a message admonishing his future 30-year-old self to be devoting his life to the science of space exploration. When civil war broke out in 1975, he went abroad to study in France and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and stayed on to become a full professor and director* of the university’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. (In 2009, Choueiri wrote an excellent article for Scientific American, “New Dawn for Electric Rockets” [ PDF link ], about the history, state of the art, and cutting edge of plasma and electric rockets. The magazine also posted an accompanying video produced by Space Channel France.) Choueiri is a seriously committed audiophile, and his home setup features a vintage Studer master reel-to-reel tape recorder/player*, a monster VPI turntable, and a home-brewed version of his Pure Stereo filter. His ability to produce, in his listening room, a just slightly less amazing quality of 3D audio than his laboratory setup is a testament to the promise of universal accessibility his work offers. (You can even get a serious inkling of that sound via this video posted at the Princeton 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics Laboratory website.). His remarkable music collection includes hundreds of vintage classical and jazz releases (including the very first commercially available stereo recording of a major performance, a pair of March 1954 sessions with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony playing Also Sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben ), and a fantastic archive of second-generation master tapes. He played one of those masters, from an unreleased Bob Dylan session in March 1970: it was astonishingly vivid, especially with the help of the Pure Stereo filter. Choueiri’s intensive work on 3D audio has had one slightly melancholy outcome. Audio used to be his hobby, a way to relax, now it’s come to be a part of his professional life. So he’s now learning magic. __________________________________________________________________ This post originally stated that Professor Choueiri was the founder of the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory and that his home featured an Ampex tape deck. We regret the error. Image: Taylor Callery.

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Notes on the Search for Startling Innovations in 3D Audio

Written by Joyce Bedi, a senior historian at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, this post was originally published on the National Museum of American History’s  “O Say Can You See?” blog . It is republished here with permission. See more posts from and about the Smithsonian . Tools Never Die … Do They? If “matter can neither be created nor destroyed,” as the ancient Greek philosophers first postulated, can the same principle be applied to technology? Kevin Kelly, founding editor of  Wired , thinks it can. In his new book,  What Technology Wants , Kelly asserts that “[a] close examination of a supposedly extinct bygone technology almost always shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it.” NPR’s Robert Krulwich recently debated this theory with Kelly, and asked readers of his blog to submit examples of extinct technologies, hoping to refute Kelly’s argument (see  “Tools Never Die. Waddaya Mean, Never?” ). Questions about where technology comes from, and where it might go, have long gripped historians. In  The Evolution of Technology , for example, George Basalla writes that “any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already in existence” and that “each new technological system emerges from an antecedent system” (pp. 45, 49). Some technologies, then, should endure at least until they become elements of something else. Also, as technologies evolve, the “old” and the “new” often coexist for significant periods of time. Horses and cars shared city streets, video didn’t kill the radio star, and we’re still waiting for the paperless office to become a reality. Sometimes, too, a technology that seems outmoded in one part of the world makes sense in another. In  The Shock of the Old , historian David Edgerton writes about transferred technologies that “appear … disappear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries” (p. xii). He cites, for example, the persistence of carrier pigeons as a communications tool used by the police in parts of India from the mid-1940s until the 1990s. As an illustration of how technologies can ebb and flow, he describes the mechanization of farming in Cuba during the Soviet era, followed by the resurgence of ox-powered farm equipment when the steady stream of machinery and supplies to Cuba ended with the breakup of the Soviet bloc. Similarly,  Edward Tenner outlines  the continuing innovations in draft-animal equipment made by Amish farmers — and the global export market they have created as tractor fuel prices have soared. With apologies for a painful tool analogy, I think that historians see the history of technology and invention as less like a table saw and more like a clothes dryer. There are few straight cuts; instead, things tumble around and bump into each other in sometimes unexpected ways. But what do you think? Is Kevin Kelly right? Does the Sears  Craftsman lifetime tool warranty  apply to all technologies? We invite you to post your thoughts in the comments section below. Images: 1. This woodworker so closely linked his identity with his trade that he chose to be photographed with his tools, 1860s; 2. Machinist’s tool chest, 1860s; 3. Cabinetmaker’s tool chest, about 1818. More from the “O Say Can You See?” Blog : Smithsonian Celebrates COBOL’s 50th Anniversary With New Site Taking Care of Your Personal Archives How Does the Smithsonian Collect Artifacts?

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Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star

A Yale law professor argues that under President Obama the current war on terror still betrays the principles of “just war” theory.

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The War Presidents