NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

World's Smallest Valentine Made of Gold Atoms

Lots of people would love to get a valentine of gold. PhD student Alina Bruma, under the supervision of Dr. Ziyou Li at the U.K.'s University of Birmingham has made the world's smallest, at just five-by-three-and-a-half nanometers.

Using an electron microscope, Bruma arranged gold and palladium atoms on a carbon film. The atoms tended to be sort of amorphous and random at room temperature, but when heated to 200 to 300 degrees Celcius (392 to 572 degrees Fahrenheit), they started to form regular patterns.

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Controlling the temperature in a particular pattern produces different shapes, such as a heart.

The team at Birmingham has done this before, but unlike last year's effort, this valentine was more stable due to better control of the heating process.

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There's more to this then giving atomic valentines, of course; one could use this technique to arrange atoms to react with chemicals in a very specific way, or build entire structures atom-by-atom. 

In the meantime it's a great Valentine's Day gift for your special physicist.

Via University of Birmingham Nanoscale Physics Laboratory, PhysOrg

Image: University of Birmingham, Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory

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Giant Interactive Heart Beats in the City

Finally, those who say they ♥ NY have a chance to prove it. This year, in honor of Valentine's Day, a giant interactive sculpture in the middle of New York City displays just how much love there is in the heart of the city.

For the past several years, the Times Square Alliance has selected an architect to design a heart sculpture for the area to celebrate the lovey-dovey annual holiday. Past hearts included one glowing with apropos pink neon lights, an enormous sculpture from large blocks of ice and a 10-foot wide installation with pairs of rotating red fabric-covered loops held up by volunteers.

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This year's sculpture, called Big♥NYC, was unveiled this week. This time, the heart is 10 feet tall and made from 400 transparent vertical acrylic tubes lit by LEDs inside a large square base. Appearing to float inside is a red heart made of light. This glowing box also reflects the bright signs around it in Times Square at night.

Next to the sculpture, a silver console with a heart decal invites visitors to "Touch Me" -- probably one of the few times it's okay do that in Times Square. One person touching the console sets the heart beating. The more people who join hands with or kiss the person touching the decal, the faster the heart beats and the brighter it gets. No one's saying exactly how this works, probably because it's more magical that way.

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"More people, more love, more light," the sculpture's site reads. Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture and design group that has offices in New York and Copenhagen created the sculpture with help from Brooklyn-based fabrication studio FLATCUT_ and the media design firm Local Projects

Although the commercial onslaught of Valentine's Day usually inspires me to make fake gagging gestures like an eight-year-old during the kissy-kissy part of the movie, sweet interactive tech can win me over. Big♥NYC remains ready for love at 46th and Broadway through February 29.

Photo: The Big♥NYC installation in Times Square. Credit: Ka-Man Tse for the Times Square Alliance

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Men Don't Read Online Dating Profiles

Every year, more people search online dating sites to find their next Valentine. A new study shows that how you catch a potential date's eye might depend on your gender. Researchers used eye tracking technology to follow people's eye movements as they perused online profiles. The results show that men spend 65 percent more time looking at photos than women. Women, on the other hand, spent 50 percent more time than men actually reading the profiles.

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AnswerLab, a consumer research company, ran the study in one day at a coffee shop in San Francisco, Calif. The study asked 39 patrons who identified themselves as interested in dating the opposite sex to take part in the study. Participants, 18 women and 21 men, looked at dating profiles from Match.com and eHarmony.com on a laptop.

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The researchers collected data using the Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker, a new, portable model of eye tracker. The device works by shining an infrared light at the eye, creating reflections which are, in turn, recorded by a camera. Using the recorded pattern of reflections, the program calculates the angle between the cornea and pupil, which is used to calculate the angle of the gaze. Combining the angle of the gaze and the distance between the eyes and the screen leads to accurate tracking of the eye's movements.

Although you might not know it, your eyes are constantly moving, making quick adjustments to take in details. Only the very small, central portion of the eye, called the fovea, is capable of really seeing details. As you look at something complicated, like a dating profile, with different text elements, photos and advertisements, your eyes make rapid movements so the fovea can briefly focus on each of the different elements that catch your eye's attention. Each tiny focusing event is called a fixation.

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Because the eyes make this tiny movement when we study objects or read, the eye-tracking systems can figure out what we looked at, precisely, and for how long. The image above shows the gaze fixations of a man in the first 10 seconds that he looked at the profile, which totalled more than 200 fixations.

Image: AnswerLab

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Best First Date Questions

Your new Valentine is across the table, dinner has arrived and you ask your most burning question: “Do you like the taste of beer?” If the answer is yes, your odds of getting lucky are better than not –- 60 percent better even.

That's according to Christian Rudder of OkTrends, the official blog of well-known dating site OkCupid, which regularly compiles observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions. In their latest analysis, they offer "The Best Questions For A First Date." Because the bottom line is that when you're on a first date, you may want to know some important information about the person sitting across from you, but may feel it's too early in the relationship to ask. For example, Do you have a decent job? What's your political leaning? Do you believe in God?

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What Rudder found from analyzing some 776 million answers to 275,294 match questions in OkCupid's database is that the answers to some very innocent questions correlate to deeper, more meaningful questions.

So first, Rudder explored the database for appropriate and non-invasive first-date questions that are casal enough but tell you more. Are clams alive? is not one of those questions, but here's a good one: Would you prefer good things happened, or interesting things?

Next, Rudder correlated the answers to deeper questions with those to the shallow questions.

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Besides looking for the best question to ask when wondering whether someone will have sex on the first date, these predictions included:

• If you want to know if you and your date have long-term potential, ask Do you like horror movies?, Have you traveled in a foreign country alone?, or Would you enjoy “chucking it all” to live on a sailboat for a year? If they answer yes, long-term potential is there.
• If you want to know if you and your date have the same politics, ask whether he or she prefers people to be simple or complex. OkTrends found a likelihood of swinging 2:1 conservative, or 2:1 liberal, respectively from this one answer, which also predicted, perhaps unsurprisingly, a few responses to other political questions.
• If you want to know if your date is religious, ask whether spelling and grammar are important. Mistakes seem to bother people who are at least slightly religious almost 2:1 less.

Whatever you're out there looking for today, OkTrends is there to tell you “the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep.”

Photo: Vintage Images/Getty Images

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Does Online Dating Work?

Can you put a price on love? For online dating site Match.com, the answer is yes – about $50 million.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Match acquired competitor OkCupid for that sizable cash sum. The acquisition indicates that the online dating industry is successful not only romantically, but also financially when it brings together business relationship seekers.

In fact, the Internet has become one of the most popular places for people to meet, according to the 2010 large-scale survey How Couples Meet and Stay Together.

"(Online dating) definitely works," said Reuben J. Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York, who collaborated on the survey. "We estimate that 23 percent of the couples in the U.S. who met in the two years from 2007 to 2009 met online. More people meet online now than meet through school, work, church, bars, parties, et cetera."

These online avenues have opened up an eligible dating pool particularly for certain groups that might not have as many offline romantic opportunities.

"Online dating is used most by subpopulations that don't have a great number of potential partners available to meet in their everyday life," Thomas told Discovery News. "This can include people in their 30s and 40s, populations that are largely already coupled, or minority sexualities."

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 However, sites like Match, OkCupid and eHarmony aren't necessarily bringing more people together overall.

"The rate of partnering doesn't seem to be changing," Thomas said. "When we look at data on women's sexuality over the past few decades, they seem to be no more likely to be in a relationship now than before."

Rather, the statistics indicate that they've evolved into replacements for offline social dating outlets. 

At the same time, some people remain distrustful of all those glowing online dating profiles promising the perfect guy or gal, despite nearly a quarter of American adult couples meeting online these days.

And in reality, what you see online probably isn't exactly what you'll get offline.

Rutgers communications assistant professor Jennifer Gibbs has studied online dating patterns and has noticed that people feel a tug-of-war between creating ideal profiles to stand out from the crowd or building more accurate profiles that risk getting lost in the enormous online dating market.

"I think we do the same thing in the real world when we write a resume or in a job interview, you try to embellish and exaggerate the positive sides and mask the negative qualities," Gibbs said.

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Some online daters try to game the system slightly by fudging their ages or weight to prevent getting filtered out in demographic searches as well. And certainly, minor "flaws" can become magnified online, compared to real world interactions.

"When you meet someone face to face you might not know exactly how old they are, but online you might develop these stringent criteria, like 'if you're 35, I'll date you, but if you're 36, forget it'," Gibbs explained.

On the flip side, putting too much stock into someone with a seemingly perfect online profile and with whom you have an easy Web rapport can also lead to offline disappointment. Researchers refer to that tendency to idealize people based on the bits and pieces of information they share online as the "hyperpersonal effect."

"There's been some research that's found the longer people communicate online before meeting face to face, the more like the first date is to result in rejection because they build up this fantasy persona of this person that might be hard to live up to," Gibbs said.

So while statistically online dating certainly works, with more than 10 million American couples as proof, it's important to grasp the difference between what Gibbs calls online "relationshopping" and offline "relationshipping."

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Essentially, online dating sites provide a marketplace to easily shop around and find interesting people to meet, but building lasting relationships requires more offline maintenance.

"Online dating sites are all about bringing people together, and sometimes it forms this illusion that with a few clicks of the mouse you can find your soul mate," Gibbs said. "But really, that's just the first step, and to get to know the person there's a process of developing a relationship."

And Gibbs would know. The communications researcher met her husband on Match.com.

Photo: CJ Burton/Corbis

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