Found Stuff

Announcing the Blogger app for iOS

2011-09-08T13:04:00.000-07:00

Posted to Reader from Google:

Announcing the Blogger app for iOS: Today we’re excited to announce the new Blogger app for iOS. With the Blogger app, you can write a new blog post and publish it immediately or save it as a draft right from your iOS device. You can also open a blog post you've been working on from your computer and continue editing it while you're on-the-go. Your blog posts are automatically synced across devices, so you’ll always have access to the latest version.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and the Blogger app makes it easy to add photos either by choosing from the gallery or taking a new photo right within the app. You can also add labels and location to provide more details about the post.

Download the Blogger app today for iOS versions 3.2 and above in the App Store. Although the user interface is only available in English at this time, the app supports blog posts written in all languages. If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can download the Blogger app for Android from the Android Market.

Posted by Chang Kim, Product Manager

The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa located in Bakersfield, California, USThe stones of Racetrack Playa leave trails of movement, yet no one has ever seen them move

2011-09-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa located in Bakersfield, California, US

The stones of Racetrack Playa leave trails of movement, yet no one has ever seen them move

Baby Planet

2011-03-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

For the first time ever, scientists believe they've detected the birth of a new world around a distant sun-like star.

If confirmed, the discovery, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, would provide scientists with the earliest view yet of how short-lived discs of material around young stars clump together in the early stages of planetary formation.

Astronomers studying T Chamaeleontis (T Cha), a faint star 350 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Chamaeleon, detected a large gap in a disc of material around the star. They then found a small object in the disc which may be the cause of the gap.

The finding is detailed in two papers in the current edition of the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Johan Olofsson from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of one of the papers says the star was targeted because it's comparable to the sun, but aat just seven million years old it's still near the beginning of its life.

"Earlier studies had shown that T Cha was an excellent target for studying how planetary systems form, but this star is quite distant and the full power of the Very Large Telescope was needed to resolve very fine details and see what is going on in the dust disc," Olofsson says.

Scientists know planets form out of the discs of material around young stars, but theory says the transition from dust disc to planetary system is rapid and few objects are caught during this phase.

This is the first time a forming planet has been found in one of these transitional discs, although planets in more mature discs have been seen before.

Nuria Huelamo from the Centro de Astrobiologia, in Spain, and lead author of the second paper says the gap in the disc was the smoking gun: "We asked ourselves: could we be witnessing a companion digging a gap inside its protoplanetary disc?"

After careful analysis they found the clear signature of an object located within the gap in the dust disc, about one billion kilometers from the star. That's slightly further out than Jupiter lies from our sun.

This is the first detection of an object much smaller than a star within a gap in the planet-forming dust disc around a young star.

Baby Planet

ANIMALS SAID TO HAVE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES

2010-10-11T06:55:00.001-07:00

Animals (not just people) likely have spiritual experiences, according to a prominent neurologist who has analyzed the processes of spiritual sensation for over three decades.

Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain -- areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals' experiences.

"Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences," Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.

"Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences," added Nelson, author of the book "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain," which will be published in January 2011.

The finding is an extension of his research on humans, which has been published in many peer-reviewed journals. A Neurology journal study, for example, determined that out-of-body experiences in humans are likely caused by the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness.

"In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth's gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch," he said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain."

Other mammals also probably have near-death experiences comparable to those reported by certain humans, he believes. Such people often say they saw a light and felt as though they were moving down a tunnel.

The tunnel phenomenon "is caused by the eye's susceptibility to the low blood flow that occurs with fainting or cardiac arrest," he said. "As blood flow diminishes, vision fails peripherally first. There is no reason to believe that other animals are any different from us."

Nelson added, "What they make of the tunnel is another matter."

The light aspect of near-death experiences can be explained by how the visual system defines REM (rapid eye movement) consciousness, he believes.

"In fact," he said, "the link between REM and the physiological crises causing near-death experience are most strongly linked in animals, like cats and rats, which we can study in the laboratory."

Mystical experiences -- moments that inspire a sense of mystery and wonderment -- arise within the limbic system, he said. When specific parts of this system are removed from animal brains, mind-altering drugs like LSD have no effect.

Since other animals, such as non-human primates, horses, cats and dogs, also possess similar brain structures, it is possible that they too experience mystical moments, and may even have a sense of spiritual oneness, according to Nelson.

Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, also believes animals have spiritual experiences, which he defines as experiences that are nonmaterial, intangible, introspective and comparable to what humans have.

Both he and primatologist Jane Goodall have observed chimpanzees dancing with total abandon at waterfalls that emerge after heavy rains. Some of the chimps even appear to dance themselves into a trance-like state, as some humans do during religious and cultural rituals.

Goodall wondered, "Is it not possible that these (chimpanzee) performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe? After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. What is it, this water?"

"Perhaps numerous animals engage in these rituals, but we haven't been lucky enough to see them," Bekoff wrote in a Psychology Today report.

"For now, let's keep the door open to the idea that animals can be spiritual beings and let's consider the evidence for such a claim," he added.

"Meager as it is, available evidence says, 'Yes, animals can have spiritual experiences,' and we need to conduct further research and engage in interdisciplinary discussions before we say that animals cannot and do not experience spirituality."

Review of "Bad Universe"

2010-08-31T20:22:00.000-07:00

Image by thebadastronomer via Flickr

We recently watched "Bad Universe" on the Discovery Channel, hosted by Phil Plait. The first show was about asteroids and how they might threaten Earth, and what could be done about them. Phil Plait was quite interesting, even though he kept wanting to press the "fire" button on the gadgets. :)

Although the show did dramatize asteroid collisions, it did not focus on that aspect too much, like many other science shows do. Instead, it analyzed different types of asteroids, and how their makeup affects efforts to redirect their path. It also analysed the effects of impact at different distance, using a scale model explosion. I was not aware of the Hiroshima measuring scale!

I will watch this show again. I'd even watch this particular episode again. It was quite entertaining, brilliant, and informative.

Antivaxxers take note: vaccines stop polio outbreak in Tajikistan | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

2010-08-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

From the Discover: Bad Astronomy blog
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

=================

This is wildly good news! Through Vaccine Central I learned that a major polio outbreak in Tajikistan has been stopped!

How? Through vaccination.

Yup. The first reports of polio were confirmed in April — 413 of them. However, that ended in late June, when no new cases were reported. That is credited to the thousands of doctors and nurses who not only vaccinated at least 97% of the children in each region of the mountainous country, but also flooded the area with multi-lingual informational leaflets, posters, and banners.

And they succeeded! With no new reports, it appears this outbreak was stopped cold.

And with the AVN in Australia getting hammered repeatedly in the press, I can now have some hope that the movement here in the United States, spearheaded by Jenny McCarthy, will die off as well. Vaccinations work, and they save a lot of lives.

Antivaxxers take note: vaccines stop polio outbreak in Tajikistan | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

New Legal Decisions Will Impact Net Neutrality and Startups

2010-04-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

New Legal Decisions Will Impact Net Neutrality and Startups:

Two important legal decisions were made this week that could have significant impact on technology startups.

On Tuesday, a U.S. Federal Appeals Court determined that the FCC had overstepped its regulatory authority in demanding that Comcast cease its 'throttling' of peer-to-peer service users. And on Wednesday, the U.K. House of Commons approved the 'Digital Economy Bill', which grants sweeping regulatory power to the British government, including the ability to block websites and punish consumers and companies who are found to violate copyright law.

The Federal Appeals Court decision calls into question the reach of the FCC, and raises questions about the future of a number of policy plans for the Obama Administration, including the National Broadband Plan. Austin Schlick writes on the broadband plan's official blog that several recommendations from the plan may be impacted, including 'supporting robust use of broadband by small businesses to drive productivity, growth and ongoing innovation; lowering barriers that hinder broadband deployment; strengthening public safety communications; cybersecurity; consumer protection, including transparency and disclosure; and consumer privacy.'

The British bill has seen widespread opposition from numerous sectors, including Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, and some are contending that it will have a chilling effect on startups in the UK.

Both of these decisions point to the high stakes involved with securing 'net neutrality' - both for consumers and businesses alike. Although there is by no means unanimity on what, if any, role governments should have in regulating technology ideas and infrastructure, few would disagree that startups benefit from a climate that fosters technological and business innovation. Furthermore, all businesses, not merely ones in the technology sector, are becoming dependent on quick access to the Internet for their ability to develop, deliver and distribute their services to customers.

Fred Wilson argues in a post on his blog today that perhaps it is time to reframe the terms of the debate, moving away from the phrase 'net neutrality' and instead to argue on behalf of 'internet freedom.' He writes 'Internet Freedom is about sustaining the era of permissionless innovation that has characterized the first fifteen years of the commercial Internet in this country and brought us thousands of new big profitable companies, millions of jobs, and a vast array of new services and devices that have changed our lives and made them better.'

As courts, legislatures, and agencies try to create policies around digital technologies, how will new startups be effected?

New, Ancient Way Of Making Oxygen Discovered

2010-03-26T16:05:00.001-07:00

Dutch bacteria have a previously unknown method to produce oxygen. The process uses methane and nitric oxide, it might predate the development of photosynthesis by hundreds of millions of years, and it could allow life to survive on other planets.

Three natural methods of oxygen production were known before this study. The best known and most common is photosynthesis, in which plants, algae, and some bacteria convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars, which releases oxygen as a waste product. The other two methods are the creation of oxygen from chlorates in bacteria cells and the conversion of reactive oxygen materials using enzymes.

The newly discovered process is used by a microbe found in nearly oxygen-free canals and ditches in the Netherlands, although its particular strain was first discovered in caves in Australia. In the presence of methane gas and nitrites, the microbes broke down the nitrites into nitric oxide, which they then split into nitrogen and oxygen. The oxygen was then used to burn the methane for energy, and the nitrogen was released as a waste product.

The researchers at The Netherlands at the Radboud University in Nijmegen are confident this is what the microbes are doing, but they're less certain how the microbes are doing it. There is some thought an enzyme of some sort is involved, but there are hundred of proteins whose properties are still unknown that could be directing the expression of the enzyme. As such, the exact mechanics of this new oxygen-creating process remain poorly understood, although it's definitely unlike anything seen before.

The researchers are also excited about the potential wider implications of this discovery. Primordial bacteria might have used this method to create oxygen on the early pre-photosynthesis Earth, when the atmosphere was rich in methane and poor in oxygen. This process may also shed new light on the mechanics of methane cycles.

But perhaps most intriguingly, this new process provides a potential method for life to exist on oxygen-low, methane-heavy environments like those of the planets and moons of the outer solar system. In fact, this method would not require there to be any free oxygen in the atmosphere at all - as long as there was sufficient methane and nitrites, that would actually be more than enough for microbes using this process to survive, even thrive.

http://io9.com/5502298/new-ancient-way-of-making-oxygen-discovered

Dark matter could meet its nemesis on Earth

2010-03-03T21:58:00.001-08:00

A SPINNING disc may be all that is needed to overturn Newton's second law of motion - and potentially remove the need for dark matter.

The second law states that a force is proportional to an object's mass and its acceleration. But since the 1980s, some physicists have eyed the law with suspicion, arguing that subtle changes to it at extremely small accelerations could explain the observed motion of stars in galaxies.

The key is to cancel out the acceleration of Earth's rotation, its orbit round the sun, and the orbit of the sun round the galactic centre. The basic idea was first proposed in 2007, when Alex Ignatiev calculated that the accelerations all cancel out for a millisecond at two particular points on Earth's surface, twice a year. That makes the experiment possible in theory, but not feasible.

Now, De Lorenci's team has figured out that a spinning disc can reproduce the effect any time and anywhere on Earth. Their calculations show that if the disc is positioned accurately and its speed precisely controlled, the acceleration at specific points on the disc's rim would cancel out the accelerations produced by the motion of the Earth and the sun.

If the second law is correct at all accelerations, a measuring device mounted on the rim should register no anomalous force at these points. However, if MOND is correct, the device should feel an aberrant kick. "We are able to control the conditions to produce the MOND regime in any place at any time," says De Lorenci.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527493.900-dark-matter-could-meet-its-nemesis-on-earth.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Transgenic mice could solve the obesity epidemic

2010-03-03T21:55:00.001-08:00

By tweaking an enzyme in mice, researchers expected to get rodents with low cholesterol, but fatty livers. Instead they found a switch which might be a weight loss miracle.

The researchers from the University of Alberta bred a mouse lacking a single enzyme that's associated with fat metabolism — triacylglycerol hydrolase (TGH). TGH is partly responsible for releasing triglycerides from the liver where they go on to form very low-density lipoproteins (VLDLs), which are considered "bad" cholesterol. The scientists thought that breeding a mouse deficient in TGH would have fewer VLDLs, and instead found the mice that not only had lower cholesterol, but also system wide metabolic improvement — seemingly without downside.

The researchers hypothesized that removing the TGH would mean the more fat would build up in the liver, as the mechanism by which the fat was released was missing. Instead of getting tiny rodent foie gras, the triglycerides were burned almost immediately rather than being stored, and the liver compensated by synthesizing less fat. The rodents ate more, but also expended more energy, and showed no change in body weight compared to their normal cousins.

The interesting thing? Drugs already exist to block TGH in the human body. While more research needs to be done about the systemic effects of blocking TGH, how specific these drugs are, and if diet alters the way the liver functions in these mice, but it's an important step towards understanding how the body deals with fat and cholesterol. Who knows, we may even get a drug that helps you lose weight without utterly horrible side effects.

http://io9.com/5482969/transgenic-mice-could-solve-the-obesity-epidemic

Old star is 'missing link' in galactic evolution

2010-03-03T21:50:00.001-08:00

A newly discovered star outside the Milky Way has yielded important clues about the evolution of our galaxy. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 280,000 light-years away, the star has a chemical make-up similar to the Milky Way's oldest stars, supporting theories that our galaxy grew by absorbing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks. Some recent studies had questioned the link between dwarf galaxies and the Milky Way, citing differences between the chemistry of their stars. But the differences may not be so big after all, according to new research published in Nature. "It was a question of finding the right kind of star, and doing that required some new techniques," says Josh Simon , an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution and a member of team that confirmed the star's telltale chemistry. Using earlier techniques, he says, "it was very difficult to recognize exactly which stars were the key ones to study."

"This star is likely almost as old as the universe itself," said astronomer Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Nature paper reporting the finding.

In addition to the star's total metal abundance, researchers also compared the abundance of iron to that of elements such as magnesium, calcium, and titanium. The ratios resembled those of old Milky Way stars, lending more support to the idea that these stars originally formed in dwarf galaxies.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/03/03/old.star.missing.link.galactic.evolution?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eScienceNews%2Fpopular+%28e%21+Science+News+-+Popular%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Losing Your Hands Makes It Harder To See Nearby Objects

2010-02-13T09:15:00.000-08:00

It turns out that you need more than just your eyes to see things that are right in front of you. Neuroscientists have found that we can't accurately judge the distance of nearby objects without also using our hands.

The area within arm's length - in other words, the area with which we can directly interact - is called the "action space." Previous research had indicated that the brain judges distance within the action space in terms of the hands.

However, it had not been confirmed whether the hands merely help our brains better understand spatial positions or if they are actually required to figure out where objects in the action space are.

To test this question, a research team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah Hospital-Mount Scopus tested a group of people who had had their hands amputated to see how their visual perception of nearby objects had been affected. The volunteers were told to focus on a screen where a cross was projected in the center. On either side were squares of variable distance from the cross. The subjects were asked to judge which of the two squares was farther away.

The results reveal that hand amputations affect visuospatial perception. When the right square was slightly farther away from the center, participants with right-hand amputations tended to perceive it as being at the same distance from the center as the left square; this suggests that these volunteers underestimated the distance of the right square relative to the left. Conversely, when the left square was farther away, left-hand amputees perceived both squares as being equally far away from the center — these participants underestimated the left side of near space.

Interestingly, when the volunteers were seated farther away from the screen, they were more accurate in judging the distances, indicating that hand amputations may only affect perception of the space close to the body.
http://io9.com/5468247/losing-your-hands-makes-it-harder-to-see-nearby-objects

Weight scale for atoms could map 'island of stability'

2010-02-13T09:11:00.001-08:00

Hunting for the universe's heaviest atoms just got a little easier, thanks to a new technique that directly measures the mass of elements heavier than uranium. The method could help find an "island" of unusually stable elements that is thought to extend beyond the current end of the periodic table.

Uranium, which contains 92 protons, is the heaviest element known to occur in nature. But researchers have synthesised a number of even heftier elements, with as many as 118 protons.

These extreme atoms are quite short-lived – many fall apart just milliseconds after they are created. But nuclear theorists suspect that a class of 'super-heavy' atoms, boasting the right combination of protons and neutrons, could have lifetimes of decades or longer (see Hunting the biggest atoms in the universe).

Elements in this so-called island of stability could act as powerful nuclear fuel for future fission-propelled space missions. They might also be exhibit useful new chemical properties. Element 114, for example, has shown hints that it behaves like a gas at room temperature even though it should be a member of the lead family on the periodic table.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18510-weight-scale-for-atoms-could-map-island-of-stability.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

'Space diver' to attempt first supersonic freefall

2010-02-13T09:01:00.001-08:00

A "space diver" will try to smash the nearly 50-year-old record for the highest jump this year, becoming the first person to go supersonic in freefall. The stunt could help engineers design escape systems for space flights.

On 16 August 1960, US Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger made history by jumping out of a balloon at an altitude of some 31,333 metres. "I stood up and said a prayer and stepped off," he recalled (see Space diving: The ultimate extreme sport).

Since then, many have tried to break that record but none have succeeded – New Jersey native Nick Piantanida actually died trying in 1966. Now Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner has announced he will make the attempt, with help from Kittinger and sponsorship from the energy drink company Red Bull.

He will face extreme peril. He should reach supersonic speeds 35 seconds after he jumps, and the resulting shock wave "is a big concern", the project's technical director, Art Thompson, said at a press briefing on Friday. "In early aircraft development, they thought it was a wall they couldn't pass without breaking apart. In our case, the vehicle is flesh and blood, and he'll be exposed to some extreme forces.

"The jump height is above a threshold at 19,000 metres called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. "If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film," Thompson explained. "It's just seconds until death."

To protect himself, Baumgartner will wear a more flexible version of the airtight, pressurised spacesuit currently used aboard the space shuttle (see Future spacesuits to act like a second skin). That will let him bend to achieve the standard, belly-down skydiving position needed to decelerate.

Red Bull would not reveal the cost of the project. And though it says it will launch this year from North America, it has not yet specified a date or launch site. This uncertainty depends in part on finding the ideal weather conditions for the flight, Thompson said.

By showing that a person can safely return to Earth from that speed and altitude, the "Stratos" mission team hopes to show that astronauts might survive with similar systems if they needed to bail out of spacecraft.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18427-space-diver-to-attempt-first-supersonic-freefall.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Research shows two gay parents are better than a songle straight one

2010-01-27T18:26:00.000-08:00

Anti-gay marriage activists have argued vigorously that children need a mother and father. Now a new research study shows that kids do need two parents — but that gender doesn't matter.

The research, which also speaks to the issue of gay adoption, is summarized in the lead article of the new Journal of Marriage and Family. Scholars, at USC and New York University, looked at a range of existing studies, including research on gay and lesbian parents, finding that it's ideal if a child is raised by two parents who are "responsible, committed, stable," but that the gender doesn't cause radical differences.

Sociologist Timothy Biblarz of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences says in a release about the study:

Significant policy decisions have been swayed by the misconception across party lines that children need both a mother and a father. Yet, there is almost no social science research to support this claim. One problem is that proponents of this view routinely ignore research on same-gender parents. The bottom line is that the science shows that children raised by two same-gender parents do as well on average as children raised by two different-gender parents. This is obviously inconsistent with the widespread claim that children must be raised by a mother and a father to do well.

Full scientific article available via Journal of Marriage And Family

http://io9.com/5458304/research-shows-two-gay-parents-are-better-than-a-single-straight-one

Glitter-sized solar photovoltaics

2009-12-28T22:05:00.001-08:00

Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used. The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing. 100 times less silicon generates same amount of electricity

“Eventually units could be mass-produced and wrapped around unusual shapes for building-integrated solar, tents and maybe even clothing,” he said. This would make it possible for hunters, hikers or military personnel in the field to recharge batteries for phones, cameras and other electronic devices as they walk or rest.

For large-scale power generation, said Sandia researcher Murat Okandan, “One of the biggest scale benefits is a significant reduction in manufacturing and installation costs compared with current PV techniques.”

Each cell is formed on silicon wafers, etched and then released inexpensively in hexagonal shapes, with electrical contacts prefabricated on each piece, by borrowing techniques from integrated circuits and MEMS.

Solar concentrators — low-cost, prefabricated, optically efficient microlens arrays — can be placed directly over each glitter-sized cell to increase the number of photons arriving to be converted via the photovoltaic effect into electrons. The small cell size means that cheaper and more efficient short focal length microlens arrays can be fabricated for this purpose.

High-voltage output is possible directly from the modules because of the large number of cells in the array. This should reduce costs associated with wiring, due to reduced resistive losses at higher voltages.

Clock Turned Back on Aging Muscles, Researchers Claim

2009-10-02T08:15:00.001-07:00

Scientists have found and manipulated body chemistry linked to the aging of muscles and were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself, they said today.

The study involved a small number of participants, however. And the news is not all rosy.

Importantly, the research also found evidence that aging muscles need to be kept in shape, because long periods of atrophy are more challenging to overcome. Older muscles do not respond as well to sudden bouts of exercise, the scientists discovered. And rather than building muscle, an older person can generate scar tissue upon, say, lifting weights after long periods of inactivity.

"Our study shows that the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals," said study leader Irina Conboy of the University of California, Berkeley. "This provides promising new targets for forestalling the debilitating muscle atrophy that accompanies aging, and perhaps other tissue degenerative disorders as well."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/clockturnedbackonagingmusclesresearchersclaim

Bell Labs breaks optical transmission record, 100 Petabit per second kilometer barrier

2009-09-30T09:59:00.001-07:00

Alcatel-Lucent today announced that scientists in Bell Labs, the company’s research arm, have set a new optical transmission record of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer (equivalent to 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer).

This transmission experiment involved sending the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. This is the highest capacity ever achieved over a transoceanic distance and represents an increase that exceeds that of today’s most advanced commercial undersea cables by a factor of ten. To achieve these record-breaking results the Bell Labs researchers made innovative use of new detection techniques and harnessed a diverse array of technologies in modulation, transmission, and signal processing

High speed optical transmission is a key component of Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage Network architecture, key elements of which have already been selected by leading service providers.

http://www.physorg.com/news173455192.html

Scientists Cure Color Blindness In Monkeys

2009-09-17T12:25:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2009) — Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.

"We've added red sensitivity to cone cells in animals that are born with a condition that is exactly like human color blindness," said William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center. "Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we've shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. That's extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone diseases that really are blinding."

About five weeks after the treatment, the monkeys began to acquire color vision, almost as if it occurred overnight.

"Nothing happened for the first 20 weeks," Neitz said. "But we knew right away when it began to work. It was if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to colors that had been invisible to them."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090916133521.htm

On Demand Books Turns Google's eBook Archive Back Into Paperbacks

2009-09-17T12:23:00.001-07:00

When you think about Google Books, chances are that you are thinking about eBooks and searching books on your desktop. Starting today, however, On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, will have access to Google's vast library of public domain books, and bookstores that buy an Espresso Book Machine will be able to provide on-demand printing services for any of these close to 2 million books in Google's repository.

The Espresso Book Machine can print out about 145 pages per minute at a cost of about 1 cent per page. The machine itself costs around $10,000 (ed: $100,000). On Demand Books argues that this device can revolutionize the distribution of books by decentralizing the marketplace for the distribution of books and can give libraries and bookstores a potentially unlimited inventory in their shops. In its press release about today's agreement with Google, On Demand Books likens its machine to "an ATM for books."

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_demand_books_turns_googles_public_domain_book_a.php
http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h7wxlKuKJFNcU_QllAW_0PYVgQEA

In One Study, a Heart Benefit for Chocolate

2009-09-16T10:47:00.001-07:00

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: September 14, 2009

In a study that will provide comfort to chocoholics everywhere, researchers in Sweden have found evidence that people who eat chocolate have increased survival rates after a heart attack — and it may be that the more they eat, the better.

The scientists followed 1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack. Each filled out a standardized health questionnaire that included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months. Chocolate contains flavonoid antioxidants that are widely believed to have beneficial cardiovascular effects.

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive. The results are reported in the September issue of The Journal of Internal Medicine.

Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in their risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who indulged twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduced risk of dying from a subsequent heart event. The beneficial effect remained after controlling for intake of other kinds of sweets.

But before concluding that a box of Godiva truffles is health food, chocolate lovers may want to consider some of the study’s weaknesses. It is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so cause and effect cannot be definitively established. The scientists did not ask what kind of chocolate the patients ate, and milk chocolate has less available flavonoid than dark chocolate. Finally, chocolate consumption did not reduce the risk for any nonfatal cardiac event.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15choc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Fighting to Allow College Education at $99/Month

2009-09-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

Higher education is ready to be re-invented and this re-invention should not be delayed for two decades.

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and "catastrophic" for universities.

StraighterLine is offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. It offers as many courses as you want for a flat rate of $99 a month.

If the USA and other countries truly cared about effectively educating the people, increasing the productivity of economy, then legislative efforts would be made to breakdown the barriers to effective and affordable online education. Funding could be provided to help educational institutions to transition to a new world where they are less land/building intensive and where they have less of an undergraduate cash cow. Some inferior institutions would be shutdown.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/far-more-important-than-freeing-music.html
http://www.straighterline.com/

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

2009-09-14T10:08:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) — Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material.

Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However there are several theories that predict the existence of monopoles. Among others, in 1931 the physicist Paul Dirac was led by his calculations to the conclusion that magnetic monopoles can exist at the end of tubes – called Dirac strings – that carry magnetic field. Until now they have remained undetected.

In this work the researchers, for the first time, attest that monopoles exist as emergent states of matter, i.e. they emerge from special arrangements of dipoles and are completely different from the constituents of the material. However, alongside this fundamental knowledge, Jonathan Morris explains the further meaning of the results: "We are writing about new, fundamental properties of matter. These properties are generally valid for materials with the same topology, that is for magnetic moments on the pyrochlore lattice. For the development of new technologies this can have big implications. Above all it signifies the first time fractionalisation in three dimensions is observed."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163725.htm

Children With Autism Use Alternative Keyboard

2009-09-02T07:38:00.001-07:00

The OrbiTouch keyboard. (Credit: Blue Orb)

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2009) — Autism can build a wall of poor communication between those struggling with the condition and their families. While a personal computer can help bridge the divide, the distraction and complexity of a keyboard can be an insurmountable obstacle.

Using a unique keyboard with only two "keys" and a novel curriculum, teachers with Project Blue Skies are giving children with autism the ability to both communicate and to explore the online world.

The Project Blue Skies curriculum is based on the functions of the OrbiTouch, which allows a user to input letters, symbols and any other command by independently manipulating two computer-mouse shaped grips forward, back, diagonally and to the sides.

Teachers guide the students and monitor their progress, ultimately helping the kids better communicate with their families. While the primary goal of Project Blue Skies is to help people with autism develop stronger social skills, McAlindon is working with partners to start integrating standard coursework into the program.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090831080957.htm

Quantum amnesia gives time its arrow

2009-09-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

No going back (Image: Mike Kemp/Getty)

NOTHING in the fundamental laws of physics says that time should only move forwards. Yet we never see any reversal of time - in the form of a shattered egg that suddenly reassembles, say, or an ice cube that forms from a pool of tepid water. Now a new study suggests that the arrow of time is the result of quantum-mechanical amnesia that erases any trace that time has moved backwards.

Our sense of time is captured by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any closed system - from particles in an isolated box to the entire universe - can only become more disordered. The measure of this disorder, known as entropy, can only increase.

In the world of large-scale objects, increasing entropy is associated with the flow of heat, which always goes from a hot object to a colder one. Change in entropy can also be described as a flow of information: the higher the entropy of a system, the less information it contains.

In the quantum world, a box full of particles gains entropy – and loses information – when it becomes more entangled with the outside world.

An outsider who observes the box may become more entangled with it. This entanglement – which involves the loss of information in the particles – increases the information available to the observer.

n this context, the unceasing growth of entropy, and hence the second law of thermodynamics, may be just an illusion, an artefact of quantum mechanics, says Lorenzo Maccone of MIT.

The laws of quantum mechanics are time-symmetric, which means that time can flow both forwards and backwards. "But if you analyse [the laws] carefully, you'll see that all the processes where things run backwards can happen, but they don't leave any trace of having happened," he says.

The work also doesn't yet explain a bigger mystery – why the universe was born as such a uniform soup of matter and energy, which has a very low entropy, says Sean Carroll of Caltech. Because entropy is in some measure the probability of a particular configuration, the universe's low entropy initial state is considered extraordinarily unlikely.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327234.700-quantum-amnesia-gives-time-its-arrow.html

Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots

2009-09-02T07:30:00.001-07:00

An illustration of the I-SWARM robot: (1) solar cell, (2) IR-communication module, (3) an ASIC, (4) capacitors, (5) locomotion module. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, explain that their building approach marks a new paradigm of robot development in microrobotics. The technique involves integrating an entire robot - with communication, locomotion, energy storage, and electronics - in different modules on a single circuit board. In the past, the single-chip robot concept has presented significant limitations in design and manufacturing. However, instead of using solder to mount electrical components on a printed circuit board as in the conventional method, the researchers use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit board is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot.

The resulting robots are very small, with their length, width, and height each measuring less than 4 mm. The robots are powered by a solar cell on top, and move by three vibrating legs. A fourth vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor. As the researchers explain, a single microrobot by itself is a physically simple individual. But many robots communicating with each other using infrared sensors and interacting with their environment can form a group that is capable of establishing swarm intelligence to generate more complex behavior. The framework for this project, called I-SWARM (intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation) is inspired by the behavior of biological insects.

Images of the robots showing their size proportional to various objects. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

http://www.physorg.com/news170678733.html

Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last

2009-08-28T15:58:00.001-07:00

Thanks to specialised microscopes, we have long been able to see the beauty of single atoms. But strange though it might seem, imaging larger molecules at the same level of detail has not been possible – atoms are robust enough to withstand existing tools, but the structures of molecules are not. Now researchers at IBM have come up with a way to do it.

The earliest pictures of individual atoms were captured in the 1970s by blasting a target – typically a chunk of metal – with a beam of electrons, a technique known as transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

Leo Gross and his colleagues at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, modified the AFM technique to make the most detailed image yet of pentacene, an organic molecule consisting of five benzene rings (see picture).

The molecule is very fragile, but the researchers were able to capture the details of the hexagonal carbon rings and deduce the positions of the surrounding hydrogen atoms.

One key breakthrough was finding a way to stop the microscope's tip from sticking to the fragile pentacene molecule because of attraction due to electrostatic and van der Waals forces – van der Waals is a weak force that operates only at an intermolecular level.

The team achieved this by fixing a single carbon monoxide molecule to the end of the probe so that only one atom of relatively inactive oxygen came into contact with the pentacene.

The image is "astonishing", says Oscar Custance of Japan's National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba. In 2007, his team used AFM to distinguish individual atoms on a silicon surface, but he acknowledges that the IBM team has surpassed this achievement. "This is the highest resolution I have ever seen," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html

The Time to Unlearn is Now!

2009-08-27T13:30:00.001-07:00

This is the latest iteration of famous "Shift Happens" video with a focus on social media. If nothing else, it should serve as a reminder of to all of us why we must constantly unlearn. Enjoy!

Social Media Revolution

http://www.unlearning101.com/fuhgetaboutit_the_art_of_/2009/08/the-time-to-unlearn-is-now.html

Agile robots, dexterous robots

2009-08-27T09:46:00.001-07:00

Forget about clumsy, lumbering robots.
Think fast, precise, and acrobatic.

Robotic hand
BigDog

http://metamodern.com/2009/08/27/agile-robots-dexterous-robots-with-videos/

Artificial life will be created 'within months'

2009-08-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

Scientists are only months away from creating artificial life, it was claimed yesterday.

Dr Craig Venter – one of the world’s most famous and controversial biologists – said his U.S. researchers have overcome one of the last big hurdles to making a synthetic organism.

The first artificial lifeform is likely to be a simple man-made bacterium that proves that the technology can work.

But it will be followed by more complex bacteria that turn coal into cleaner natural gas, or algae that can soak up carbon dioxide and convert it into fuels.

They could also be used to create new vaccines and antibiotics.

The prediction came after a breakthrough by the J Craig Venter Institute in Maryland.

Researchers successfully transferred
the DNA of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it and then transferred it into another bacterial cell.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1208047/Life-order-Man-organisms-months-say-biologists.html?ITO=1490

Found: first amino acid on a comet

2009-08-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

An amino acid has been found on a comet for the first time, a new analysis of samples from NASA's Stardust mission reveals. The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space.

Amino acids are crucial to life because they form the basis of proteins, the molecules that run cells. The acids form when organic, carbon-containing compounds and water are zapped with a source of energy, such as photons – a process that can take place on Earth or in space.

Previously, researchers have found amino acids in space rocks that fell to Earth as meteorites, and tentative evidence for the compounds has been detected in interstellar space. Now, an amino acid called glycine has been definitively traced to an icy comet for the first time.

"It's not necessarily surprising, but it's very satisfying to find it there because it hasn't been observed before," says Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author of the new study. "It's been looked for [on comets] spectroscopically with telescopes but the content seems so low you can't see it that way."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628

First Steps Toward A Machine-Controlled Human Cell

2009-08-12T14:58:00.001-07:00

A semipermeable membrane encloses each of your cells, selectively allowing molecules in and out. And now, scientists have figured out how to use nanowires to control the mechanism that makes your cells permeable, thus creating a computer-regulated cell.

A team led by Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists Nipun Misraa and Julio A. Martinez worked on the discovery, and their results were published earlier this week in PNAS. According to a release about the research:

[The researchers] created a biomechanical hybrid in which nanowires are coated in a lipid bilayer-the same type of membrane that envelopes cells and controls the passage of molecules in and out of the cell. The authors incorporated gated channels in this membrane, and used molecular transport through these channels to trigger an electric signal. The researchers show that the nanowire circuit can be used to make the channels open and close as they would in a biological cell. Although their work is currently in an early stage, later versions of the nanowire technology could find applications in biosensing, neuroscience, and medicine.

There are two things that are very exciting about this early-stage research. One, it means that cellular membranes could be incorporated into computerized devices that are designed to respond to molecules in the environment. Essentially, you could have a cellular sensor at the end of a nanowire.

http://io9.com/5335779/first-steps-toward-a-machine+controlled-human-cell

Pacific Biosciences Real Time DNA Sequencing $100 Genomes releasing 2013

2009-08-12T09:16:00.001-07:00

Pacific Biosciences has a Single Molecule Real-Time (SMRT) DNA sequencing, due to be released commercially in 2010 and could enable $100 genome sequencing in 15 minutes in 2013.

The second generation real time DNA reader in 2013 is the one that is expected to hit the $100 genome sequencing price. They will release a product in 2010 but it will not be that cheap.

Instead of inspecting DNA copies after polymerase has done its work, SMRT sequencing watches the enzyme in real time as it races along and copies an individual strand stuck to the bottom of a tiny well. Every nucleotide used to make the copy is attached to its own fluorescent molecule that lights up when the nucleotide is incorporated. This light is spotted by a detector that identifies the color and the nucleotide -- A, C, G, or T.

By repeating this process simultaneously in many wells, the technology hopes to bring about a substantial boost in sequencing speed. "When we reach a million separate molecules that we're able to sequence at once … we'll be able to sequence the entire human genome in less than 15 minutes," said Turner.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/pacific-biosciences-real-time-dna.html

Immortality improves cell reprogramming

2009-08-11T09:37:00.001-07:00

Specialized adult cells made 'immortal' through the blockade of an antitumour pathway can be turned into stem-like cells quickly and efficiently.

The findings — which should make it easier to generate patient-specific cells from any tissue type, including certain diseased cells that have proved difficult to transform — suggest that cellular reprogramming and cancer formation are inextricably linked.

The studies also shed light on the mechanism of tumour formation, says study author Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a developmental biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and at the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain. Because it's now clear that p53 has a key role in both nuclear reprogramming and cancer development, Izpisúa Belmonte says, tumours can be thought of as cells that acquire more and more stem-cell-like characteristics — such as the ability to keep reproducing themselves forever. "If you connect the dots, you can say that cancer is really a de-differentiation problem," he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090809/full/news.2009.809.html

Artificial brain '10 years away'

2009-07-23T07:46:00.001-07:00

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

"It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," he said.

The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column - repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

"It's a new brain," he explained. "The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

"It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ."

And that evolution continues, he said. "It is evolving at an enormous speed."

"It's a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest - how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees," he said.

"But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Major Genetic Differences Between Blood And Tissue Cells Revealed

2009-07-17T10:25:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. Their results appear in the July issue of the journal Human Mutation.

This discovery may undercut the rationale behind numerous large-scale genetic studies conducted over the last 15 years, studies which were supposed to isolate the causes of scores of human diseases.

Except for cancer, samples of diseased tissue are difficult or even impossible to take from living patients. Thus, the vast majority of genetic samples used in large-scale studies come in the form of blood. However, if it turns out that blood and tissue cells do not match genetically, these ambitious and expensive genome-wide association studies may prove to have been essentially flawed from the outset.

Schweitzer is optimistic that this discovery may lead to new treatments for vascular disease in the near to medium term.

"The timeline might be five to 10 years," he said. "We have to do in-vitro cell culture experiments first, prove it in an animal model, and then develop a molecule or protein which will affect the mutated gene product. This is the first step, but it's an important step."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131449.htm

The Mysterious Lizards Who Swim In Sand

2009-07-16T12:29:00.001-07:00

When the tiny lizard known as the sandfish moves through sand, it literally dives under the surface of the ground as if swimming. Now physicists have figured out how they do it - and want to build sandfish robots.

Georgia Tech physicist Daniel Goldman and his team observed the sandfish as they swam through sand, using X-rays and tiny sensors placed in the sand that measured how grains were displaced as the lizards moved through them. One thing they discovered right away was that the sandfish were indeed "swimming" - they tucked their legs up next to their bodies and moved in an undulatory wave like fish through water. Another interesting finding was that the lizards could go slightly faster in tightly-packed sand, as long as they varied the frequency of the wave created by the movement of their bodies. Their work is published today in Science.

There are implications for this research that go beyond understanding how lizards move through sand. Goldman and his team think it could help roboticists in designing rescue bots that could worm their way through collapsed rubble. It would also be useful for creating surveillance robots that can swim invisibly under sand, tracking enemy locations or even recording conversations that take place outdoors in sandy regions.

http://io9.com/5316290/the-mysterious-lizards-who-swim-in-sand

Scientists Discover Light Force with 'Push' Power

2009-07-14T07:59:00.001-07:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.

The team previously discovered an "attractive" force of light and showed how it could be manipulated to move components in semiconducting micro- and nano-electrical systems—tiny mechanical switches on a chip. The scientists have now uncovered a complementary repulsive force. Researchers had theorized the existence of both the attractive and repulsive forces since 2005, but the latter had remained unproven until now. The team, led by Hong Tang, assistant professor at Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, reports its findings in the July 13 edition of Nature Photonics's advanced online publication.

"This completes the picture," Tang said. "We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component."

The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels.

Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. "We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer," Tang said.

These light forces may one day control telecommunications devices that would require far less power but would be much faster than today's conventional counterparts, Tang said. An added benefit of using light rather than electricity is that it can be routed through a circuit with almost no interference in signal, and it eliminates the need to lay down large numbers of electrical wires.

http://www.physorg.com/news166711942.html

Facebook growth

2009-07-02T09:57:00.001-07:00

It’s been just under 90 days since Facebook announced it has crossed the 200 million active user mark. Today, that number is somewhere around 240 million, perhaps even close to 250 million. If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 4th largest population in the world.

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,00 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the last three quarters, its growth rate seems to have again significantly increased in recent weeks to around 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day based on data we are tracking from Facebook’s advertising tools.

If Facebook continues at this rate, it could reach 300 million active users by November. Keep in mind, however, that as has been the case for most of the last year, about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States. Nevertheless, Facebook still grew at an 8% monthly clip in the US in May, up to nearly 70 million active users today.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/02/facebook-now-growing-by-over-700000-users-a-day-updated-engagement-stats/

The Value of Real Disease Cures and Inexpensive Tests

2009-07-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

A blog makes a point that the healthcare funding battles are like generals fighting the last war. The new healthcare should focus on cures and cheap tests.

This site covered the detailed statistics that most of the healthcare costs are focused on the chronic diseases for the sickest 5% of people.

Curing cancer is worth $50 trillion to the USA alone according to a 2006study by Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel of the University of Chicago.

- A 10% reduction in cancer death rates has a value of roughly 5 trillion dollars to current and future Americans
- Reducing cancer death rates by 10% would generate roughly 180 billion dollars annually in value for the U.S. population
- These figures don’t even count any gains from reduced morbidity and improved quality of life
- Gains in longevity from 1970 to 2000 were worth roughly 95 trillion dollars to current and future Americans
- This amounts to a gain of over 3 trillion dollars per year (roughly 25% of annual GDP)
-Value of reducing the death rate by 1/10,000 worth roughly $630 to one person
- This corresponds to a value of a statistical life of $6.3 million

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/value-of-real-disease-cures-and.html

Bad eBay picture

2009-07-01T12:17:00.001-07:00

kettle_1
Originally uploaded by a2brute

Check your photos carefully before posting them!

Carbon Ring Storage for 1,000x Memory Increase

2009-06-29T15:24:00.001-07:00

Attach a couple of cobalt molecules to a ring of carbon and you have the dream memory material.

There's a challenge facing electronics engineers attempting to build magnetic memory that can store data for more than 10 years or so. The density at which this data is stored depends on the size of the magnetic grains used for this process. Engineers have known for some time that they just can't continue to make these grains indefinitely smaller.

But today, Ruijuan Xiao at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, in Dresden, Germany, and a few buddies have worked out how to solve the problem. And get this: their fix doesn't just tweak the density of magnetic data storage. They reckon that they can get an improvement of three orders of magnitude.

What Xiao and co have found is a way to trick cobalt dimers into thinking that they're in a hexagonal close packed structure. Their idea is to attach the dimers to a hexagonal carbon ring such as benzene or graphene. In this scenario, one of the pair of cobalt atoms bonds with the carbon ring, and the magnetic field between the cobalt atoms can be switched by applying a weak magnetic field and a strong electric field.

If they're right, carbon ring storage should allow engineers to access this extraordinary stability, and that could lead to fantastically long-lived memory.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23773/

Cheap fusion power?

2009-06-29T13:22:00.001-07:00

Eric Lerner heads the Focus Fusion Society, which is a charitable organization attempting to create focus fusion technology. He believes that his technique is fundamentally superior to Tri-alpha Energy (Colliding beam fusion in the reverse field configuration) and EMC2 fusion (inertial electrostatic confinement/pollywell fusion) because it results in more of the proton-boron fuel being burned. He is confident that this technology could lead to electricity generation at 2 cents per kilowatt hour. We should know if this technology if feasible or not within the next two years. If it is successful as Lerner hopes, this technology could have a profound impact on the world.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/interview-of-eric-lerner-lawrenceville.html

The amazing vanishing head

2009-06-29T13:16:00.001-07:00

A trick using the eye's blind spot, plus an additional unknown effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7jpJ12lBjg

A Glimpse of the Future MEMS-based Storage: Totally Green & Thumbnail Size

2009-06-24T12:45:00.001-07:00

The University of Twente--Enschede, The Netherlands published newly conferred PhD Mohammed Ghiath Khatib's thesis, "MEMS-based Storage Devices: Integration in Energy-Constrained Mobile System". The new MEMS, (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) discovery will allow video camera batteries to increase their charging life approximately 2-1/2 times, consume 1/5th of the energy of disc storage and store 1-Tb on a postage stamp size device. Dr. Khatib expects this new technology to be available to the public within the next five-years.

http://www.physorg.com/news164963999.html

Intel's Wireless Power Play

2009-06-23T13:29:00.001-07:00

(Ed: Vivat Tesla!) Last Thursday, Intel researchers demonstrated 45 research projects, ranging from ray-tracing algorithms for better animation to organic photovoltaics for flexible solar cells, at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, CA. But the project that received the most attention by far was the demo of a wirelessly charged iPod speaker. The speaker was attached to a copper coil with a 30-centimeter diameter, and it was powered by magnetic fields produced from a second coil, with double the diameter, nearly a meter away.

Intel's wireless power project, first announced at the company's developer forum last August, bears a strong resemblance to a project announced by researchers at MIT in 2007, which was featured as one of the TR10 top emerging technologies of 2008. Similar to the MIT project led by Marin Soljacic and the prototypes developed by the spinoff startup WiTricity, the Intel project uses magnetic fields to transfer energy; the type of radiation shared between the two coils is nonradiative, which means that it's confined to a short distance of less than two meters.

The idea of wireless power transfer is, of course, not new. Physicist Nikola Tesla proposed it in the late 19th century. However, funding for his projects ran out at about the same time that the modern world decided to take a wired approach. And for more than a century, wires have done the job well enough. But with the advent of portable electronics that seem to need constant charging, wireless electricity is coming back in style, and researchers are exploring ways to make it practical. In addition, plug-in electric vehicles are another motivating factor, as plugging in a car (or forgetting to plug one in) is a burden that consumers may not want to bear.

There are still a number of engineering challenges, says Schatz, including finding the best way to shrink the coils, which are made of copper, so that they can be integrated easily into devices of various shapes and sizes. But he suspects that his company's products will be on the market within the next 18 months.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22906/

Bismuth telluride could revolutionize electronics

2009-06-18T07:40:00.001-07:00

Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material (bismuth Telluride) that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.

Bismuth Telluride allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies. Such material could provide a leap in microchip speeds, and even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing industry based on spintronics, the next evolution of electronics.

This magic is possible thanks to surprisingly well-behaved electrons. The quantum spin of each electron is aligned with the electron's motion—a phenomenon called the quantum spin Hall effect. This alignment is a key component in creating spintronics devices, new kinds of devices that go beyond standard electronics. "When you hit something, there's usually scattering, some possibility of bouncing back," explained theorist Xiaoliang Qi. "But the quantum spin Hall effect means that you can't reflect to exactly the reverse path." As a dramatic consequence, electrons flow without resistance. Put a voltage on a topological insulator, and this special spin current will flow without heating the material or dissipating.

Fortunately for real-world applications, bismuth telluride is fairly simple to grow and work with. Chen said, "It's a three-dimensional material, so it's easy to fabricate with the current mature semiconductor technology. It's also easy to dope—you can tune the properties relatively easily."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/bismuth-telluride-could-revolutionize.html

Graphene's electrically tunable bandgap means Accelerated Graphene Electronics Timetable

2009-06-18T07:37:00.001-07:00

Graphene holds the promise of 10-times faster speed than silicon chips, plus the ability to be integrated with exiting semiconductor fabrication techniques. It was thought that 2017 sub-10 nanometer lithography would be needed to bring Graphene into the semiconductor computer roadmap. Professor Feng Wang at UC Berkeley claims to have demonstrated a technology that can electrically tune graphene's bandgap, enabling it to be used for digital transistors long before lithography hits sub-10 nanometer sizes.

The researchers speculated that a new kind of graphene gate array would be possible using the technique to dynamically reconfigure millions of gates, each with both top and bottom electrodes, by retuning their bandgaps on-the-fly.

"All you need is dual gates at all positions, then you could change any location to be either a metal or a semiconductor electrically," said Wang.

Wang used exfoliation to fabricate two parallel graphene monolayers atop each other, then attached gate electrodes to the top and bottom of the bilayers. Electrical connections for the source and drain were made along the edges of the bilayer sheets. By varying the gating voltages on the top and bottom gates independently, the team was able to demonstrate an electrically tunable bandgap that varied between zero (a metal) and 250 milli-electron volts (a semiconductor). That was only a fraction of the size of bandgaps in current semiconductors (germanium and silicon have bandgaps of 740- and 1,200-meV, respectively) but wide enough to fabricate digital circuitry.

(ed. Wow! How about a cellphone that can change its own circuitry based on the program you are running!)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/graphenes-electrically-tunable-bandgap.html

Anti-Recession Fiber Internet for Multi-Trillion Boost to the Economy

2009-06-15T10:13:00.001-07:00

High speed fiber internet is being implemented with greater speed and higher penetration around the world than in the United States. The 5-10+% [700 billion to 1.4 trillion per year initially. A nextbigfuture article that covers many studies that connect broadband to economic stimulus] boost to the GDP that would come from 100+mbps symmetrical access would quickly pay for initial subsidies. Implementation by say Japan means that other countries the United States could also have them by adjusting policies and rules to prevent incumbent companies and groups from blocking successful rollout. The first example is super-broadband. The economic benefits for super-broadband have been shown. It is to the benefit of a economic benefit of country and its people to enable super-broadband (at least 100 mbps both up and down). Having a system set up that slows and prevents this rollout is stupid.

Japan is rolling out 10 gigabit per second (symmetrical, upload and download) fiber internet connections. Speeds up to 160 gigabit per second have been demonstrated and 200+ gigabit per second speed is possible. Wireless speeds of 10 gigabits per second over distances have been demonstrated.

There is no societal or technological reason to settle for lesser connection speed targets.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/anti-recession-fiber-internet-for-multi.html

The Physical Basis of Atomically Precise Manufacturing

2009-06-15T09:53:00.001-07:00

by Eric Drexler on June 12, 2009

The section below, adapted from a longer work, discusses the physical basis for understanding atomically precise fabrication systems: first, a very general class of systems, and second, the specific characteristics of high-throughput systems of a kind several technology levels above where we are today. (In my previous post, “A Telescope Aimed at the Future” I said a bit about science, modeling, and as-yet-unimplemented technologies.)

Regarding next-stage objectives for laboratory research and the trajectory of technology development, I’ve previously discussed:

Current understanding of potential systems for atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is based on long-established science, not on speculations regarding new or poorly understood physical phenomena. Molecular machinery in biological cells demonstrates the fundamental physical principles and operations that enable APM.

(ed: an outline follows in the document -- please follow the link)

http://metamodern.com/2009/06/12/the-physical-basis-of-atomically-precise-manufacturing/

Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual

2009-06-11T14:46:00.001-07:00

On 20th July 1969, US astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon. But it had taken 400,000 men and women across the United States to put him and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin there. Achieving technical miracles and overcoming bureaucratic battles, daunting setbacks and tragedies, Apollo’s engineers and scientists worked out how to transport human beings and their home comforts across a quarter of a million miles of hostile space, to live and work on the surface of an unexplored alien world.

The fact that all this was achieved before the age of micro-computers, mobile phones and the internet, when slide rules were still in every engineer’s top pocket, is even more exceptional. The seven million engineered parts invented to fly a single mission all had to work perfectly.

Forty years on, the reality of just how difficult it was to achieve a lunar landing in the mid-20th century is recounted in Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual. Presented in the successful Haynes Manual format with original NASA technical illustrations and stunning archive photographs- some previously unpublished, the down-to-earth text takes the reader behind the scenes to look at every aspect of the Apollo 11 mission, from the raw fire-breathing power of the Saturn V rocket to the development of the astronauts’ space suits. Unique ‘how it works’ and ‘how you fly it’ guides give an insight into launch procedures, ‘flying’ and landing the Lunar Module, walking on the Moon, and the Earth re-entry procedure. A fascinating book, Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual chronicles the audacity of the engineers who dared to dream that such a voyage was possible and then made it happen.

http://www.haynes.co.uk/Press/Releases_HTML/090601_ApolloPR_haynes_press_release.htm

Popular Giant Star Shrinks Mysteriously

2009-06-11T12:17:00.001-07:00

A massive red star in the constellation Orion has shrunk in the past 15 years and astronomers don't know why.

Called Betelgeuse, the star is considered a red supergiant. Such massive stars are nearing the ends of their lives and can swell to 100 times their original size before exploding as supernovae, or possibly just collapsing to form black holes without violent explosions (as one study suggested).

Betelgeuse, one of the top 10 brightest stars in our sky, is a popular target among backyard skywatchers and was the first star ever to have its size measured, and even today is one of only a handful of stars that appears through the Hubble Space Telescope as a disk rather than a point of light. It was the first star (besides our sun) to have its surface photographed (by Hubble).

In 1993, measurements put Betelgeuse's radius at about 5.5 astronomical units (AU), where one AU equals the average Earth-sun distance of 93 million miles, or about 150 million km. Since then it has shrunk in size by 15 percent. That means the star's radius has contracted by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

"To see this change is very striking," said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size." (Townes won the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the laser and the maser, a microwave laser.)

"But we do not know why the star is shrinking," said Edward Wishnow, a research physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. "Considering all that we know about galaxies and the distant universe, there are still lots of things we don't know about stars, including what happens as red giants near the ends of their lives."

http://www.livescience.com/space/090609-betelgeuse-measurements.html

Getting a theory of everything by ditching tenet of physics

2009-06-11T08:57:00.001-07:00

Every article on quantum gravity begins the same way. On the one hand we have quantum mechanics—excellent at describing the very small and intrinsic lumpiness of the universe—and on the other hand we have general relativity—excellent at describing gravity, but it relies on a smooth universe. At some point the two meet, and just like Manchester United supporters and Liverpool fans, they just don't get along. Luckily for the universe, tire irons haven't been deployed to settle this incompatibility.

A pair of unrelated papers, which appeared in Physical Review Letters, and a News and Views article in Nature Physics all indicate that progress is occurring, but it is coming at the expense of a long-cherished tenet of physics, called the Lorentz Invariance.

Until recently, the general consensus was that string theory was the great hope, but physicists have been rocked by the discovery that string theory still requires a bunch of fine-tuned values to get to the universe we observe.

This depressing state of affairs has led to reappearance of the anthropic principle, which, while begin very deep and meaningful, also finds itself in the embarrassing position of stating the bleeding obvious. Which leads us nicely to a paper by one Petr Hořava, brought to my attention and nicely explained in the Nature Physics News and Views article. Hořava takes advantage of a recent finding that, in quantum mechanics, the universe behaves as if it has four dimensions at larger scales, but this can be reduced to two dimensions as the scale is reduced. This implies that space and time may be fractal in nature—not a new idea, but it's always nice to have evidence to support the idea.

To summarize the reduction procedure, space and time are treated separately, which would normally cause all sorts of problems in quantum mechanics. However, by treating space and time differently as well as separately, the infinities in the quantum mechanics equations vanish, and gravity behaves as it should.

Interestingly, space remains the same in all directions, while time does not. This appeals to me, because it points to fabric of the universe supplying time with a preferred direction. One of the downsides, though, is the failure of Lorentz invariance.

To understand why physicists might be loath to give up Lorentz invariance, let's take a quick look at it. A key idea, going way back to Galileo is that all accurate observations are equally valid and must agree. A simple example of this is cars on a motorway. I am cruising along at 120km/h but, to me, my car appears to be standing still. An overtaking car appears to me to be traveling at 20km/h, while a person on the side of the road will see speeds of 120km/h and 140km/h. Now, although we all disagree on the speed of each car, we can, given some information, understand each other's results and reach an agreement. These sorts of transformations, based on Lorentz invariance, are a key part of physics and are founded on a certain conception of space and time.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/getting-a-theory-of-everything-by-ditching-tenet-of-physics.ars

Free-floating black hole may solve space 'firefly' mystery

2009-06-11T08:24:00.001-07:00

A wandering black hole may have torn apart a star to create a strange object that brightened mysteriously and then faded from view in 2006, a new study suggests. But more than three years later, astronomers are still at a loss to explain all the features of the strange event.

The object, called SCP 06F6, was first spotted in the constellation Bootes in February 2006 in a search for supernovae by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object flared to its maximum brightness over about 100 days, a period much longer than most supernovae, which do so in just 20 days.

Further analysis of the object's spectrum in 2008 offered no more clues: SCP 06F6 seemed to resemble no known object, and astronomers couldn't even say whether the event originated in the Milky Way or beyond.

Examining the work over coffee, Boris Gaensicke of the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, and colleagues noticed that dips in the object's light spectrum looked familiar. They resembled those created when light passes through a relatively cool area that is rich in carbon. "These wiggles are basically the fingerprints of carbon molecules," Gaensicke says.

Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.

Such flares brighten and dim with the same leisurely pace seen in SCP 06F6, and they also produce X-rays with a similar brightness to those the team found at the location of the firefly-like event.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17262-freefloating-black-hole-may-solve-space-firefly-mystery.html

A Telescope Aimed at the Future

2009-06-10T09:46:00.001-07:00

Our time in history is unique in that physical knowledge and computational methods enable partial understanding of technology levels
above our own — and in some areas, far above. Because we
understand the universal physical laws that govern matter and energy,
we understand the physical laws that will govern the material
structures of future technologies.

Our time is also unique in that growing computational capacity can
enable us to simulate systems that have not yet been built: New
aircraft typically fly as expected, new computer chips typically
operate as expected. These same capabilities can also be used to
simulate systems that cannot yet be built. These systems
include some of the products and processes that will be enabled by
higher levels of technology. Indeed, in semiconductor technology, a
company must design chips before they can be made, or lose to its
competitors.

Using computational simulation this way is like the earlier use of
telescopes to view planets that spacecraft could not yet reach. Like a
telescope, it does not provide a detailed picture — that is the
role of spacecraft. But like a telescope, it can identify potential
targets and help engineers plan how to reach them. And likewise, the
easiest targets to see are not necessarily the easiest targets to reach.

http://metamodern.com/2009/06/09/a-telescope-aimed-at-the-future/

"Web 2.0": English Gets Its Millionth Word

2009-06-10T09:30:00.001-07:00

English contains more words than any other language on the planet
and added its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global
Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how
often words are created.

The site estimates the millionth English word, "Web 2.0" was added
to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET. The term refers to the
second, more social generation of the Internet.

The site says more than 14 words are added to English every day, at the current rate.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/10/million.words/index.html

Six Ways that Google Wave is Going to Change Your Business, Career and Life

2009-06-09T12:54:00.001-07:00

Google recently announced their most ambitious project to date called Google Wave. According to Google, Wave is “what email would look like if it was invented today.”

If you haven’t made time to watch the one hour video, I’d highly recommend you do so today.

And please -- click through and read this article in its entirety.

1. Extensions

Google is making it easy to augment the power of Wave by writing Wave Extensions.
These are similar to Firefox Add-ons and they fall into two areas:
Robots and Gadgets.

2. Embedding APIs

Google has created a huge API to Wave, but one of the really interesting parts is the ability to embed a Wave
into any web page. A great example of how this could be used with
blogging. You can create a Wave and then publish it to your blog. Then
whenever someone comments on the blog post, it appears as a reply to
you Wave in your Wave client - no need to visit the site.

3. Collaboration

The separation between documents and emails will be completely
removed with Waves. This is because Waves can be edited by more than
one person. A great example would be taking notes for a meeting.

4. Open Source

Google doesn’t intend to ‘own’ Wave. They have open-sourced the technology and created the Wave Federation Protocol.

5. Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Wave is written entirely in Google Web Toolkit.
GWT allows you to write HTML 5 web apps in Java, which are then
cross-compiled into optimized JavaScript. If you want to learn more,
this video explanation is very helpful.

6. Playback

The increased collaboration that possible with Wave might actually
make it confusing for someone to be added to a Wave after a lot of
editing and replies have been made. Enter ‘Wave Playback. The
best way to explain it is by jumping to minute 13:00 on the Wave introduction video.

http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/six-ways-that-google-wave-is-going-to-change-your-business-career-and-life/

Radio-controlled bullets leave no place to hide

2009-06-09T11:47:00.001-07:00

A RIFLE capable of firing explosive bullets that can
detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers
hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings.

The
US army has developed the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative
to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken
cover and can't be targeted by direct fire. "This is the first
leap-ahead technology for troops that we've been able to develop and
deploy," says Douglas Tamilio, the army's project manager for new weapons for soldiers. "This gives them another tool in their kitbag."

The
rifle's gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to calculate the exact
distance to the obstruction. The soldier can then add or subtract up to
3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier
and explode above or beside the target.

As the 25-millimetre round is fired, the gunsight
sends a radio signal to a chip inside the bullet, telling it the
precise distance to the target. A spiral groove inside the barrel makes
the bullet rotate as it travels, and as it also contains a magnetic
transducer, this rotation through the Earth's magnetic field generates
an alternating current. A patent
granted to the bullet's maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the
chip uses fluctuations in this current to count each revolution and, as
it knows the distance covered in one spin, it can calculate how far it
has travelled.

The
rifle would allow a soldier faced with a sniper firing from a window to
take a distance measurement to the window, add a metre, fire through
the window, and have the round detonate 1 metre inside the room. The
same method could be used to fire behind a wall or over a trench.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227116.900-radiocontrolled-bullets-leave-no-place-to-hide.html

US team create carbon nanotube ultra-memory

2009-06-08T15:39:00.001-07:00

US researchers have demonstrated a form of nanotube archival memory
that can store a memory bit for a billion years, and has a theoretical
trillion bits/square inch density.

The researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California
(UC) Berkeley were led by physicist Alex Zettl. They built a prototype
device based on a nanoscale iron particle, about 1/50,000th the width
of a human hair, moving along a carbon nanotube like a shuttle.

By applying an electric current, the iron particle shuttle could be
made to move inside the nanotube either away from or towards the
current source. When the current was turned off the particle was, as it
were, frozen in position. By applying the current in a timed pulse the
particle could be made to move a fixed 3nm distance in steps. The speed
of movement could be altered by varying the applied bias voltage.

The researchers say that placing the shuttle either side of the
mid-point along the length of the nanotube can constitute a digital one
or zero. A transmission electron microscope showed the shuttle moving -
there is a video showing this accessible here.
In a practical device the shuttle position could be read via detecting
the axial electrical resistance of the nanotube by small voltage
pulses. This is sensitive to the physical location of the enclosed
nanoparticle shuttle and the pulses do not alter the state of the
shuttle.

Other calculations suggest a complete archival chip could store a
trillion bits in a square inch in this way. Fascinating stuff, but any
practical usage is still many, many years away.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/shuttle_nanotube_memory/

Revolutionary Ultrasonic Nanotechnology May Allow Scientists To See Inside Patient’s Individual Cells

2009-06-08T14:00:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) —
Revolutionary ultrasonic nanotechnology that could allow scientists to
see inside a patient’s individual cells to help diagnose serious
illnesses is being developed by researchers at The University of
Nottingham.

The new technique would utilise ultrasound technology — more
commonly used to look at whole bodies such as fetal scanners — to
look inside cells. The components of the new technology would be many
thousand times smaller than current systems.

The technology would be tiny enough to allow scientists to see
inside and image individual cells in the human body, which would
further our understanding of the structure and function of cells and
could help to detect abnormalities to diagnose serious illnesses such
as some cancers.

Ultrasound refers to sound waves that are at a frequency too high to
be detected by the human ear, typically 20 kHz and above. Medical
ultrasound uses an electrical transducer the size of a matchbox to
produce sound waves at much higher frequencies, typically around
100-1000 times higher to probe bodies.

The Nottingham researchers are aiming to produce a miniaturised
version of this technology, with transducers so tiny that you could fit
500 across the width of one human hair which would produce sound waves
at frequencies a thousand times higher again, in the GHz range.

Dr Matt Clark of the Ultrasonics Group, said: “By examining
the mechanical properties inside a cell there is a huge amount that we
can learn about its structure and the way it functions. But it’s
very much a leap into the unknown as this has never been achieved
before.

“One of the reasons for this is that it presents an enormous
technical challenge. To produce nano-ultrasonics you have to produce a
nano-transducers, which essentially means taking a device that is
currently the size of a matchbox and scaling it down to the nanoscale.
How do you attach a wire to something so small?

“Our answer to some of these challenges is to create a device
that works optically — using pulses of laser light to produce
ultrasound rather than an electrical current. This allows us to talk to
these tiny devices.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090602134943.htm

Electronic Memory Chips That Can Bend And Twist

2009-06-08T12:40:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — Electronic memory chips may soon gain the ability to bend and twist as a result of work by engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As reported in the July 2009 issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters, the engineers have found a way to build a flexible memory component out of inexpensive, readily available materials.

Though not yet ready for the marketplace, the new device is promising not only because of its potential applications in medicine and other fields, but because it also appears to possess the characteristics of a memristor, a fundamentally new component for electronic circuits that industry scientists developed in 2008. NIST has filed for a patent on the flexible memory device (application #12/341.059).

Electronic components that can flex without breaking are coveted by portable device manufacturers for many reasons—and not just because people have a tendency to drop their mp3 players. Small medical sensors that can be worn on the skin to monitor vital signs such as heart rate or blood sugar could benefit patients with conditions that require constant maintenance, for example. Though some flexible components exist, creating flexible memory has been a technical barrier, according to NIST researchers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090602181953.htm

NIST Physicists Demonstrate Quantum Entanglement in Mechanical System

2009-06-03T16:19:00.001-07:00

BOULDER, Colo.—Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated entanglement—a phenomenon peculiar to the atomic-scale quantum world—in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. The work extends the boundaries of the arena where quantum behavior can be observed and shows how laboratory technology might be scaled up to build a functional quantum computer.

The research, described in the June 4 issue of Nature,* involves a bizarre intertwining between two pairs of vibrating ions (charged atoms) such that the pairs vibrate in unison, even when separated in space. Each pair of ions behaves like two balls connected by a spring (see figure), vibrating back and forth in opposite directions. Familiar objects that vibrate this way include pendulums and violin strings.

The NIST achievement provides insights into where and how "classical" objects may exhibit unusual quantum behavior. The demonstration also showcased techniques that will help scale up trapped-ion technology to potentially build ultra-powerful computers relying on the rules of quantum physics. If they can be built, quantum computers may be able to solve certain problems, such as code breaking, exponentially faster than today’s computers. (For further details, see: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/quantum/quantum_info_index.html.)

"Where the boundary is between the quantum and classical worlds, no one really knows," says NIST guest researcher John Jost, a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder and first author of the paper. "Maybe we can help answer the question by finding out what types of things can—and cannot be—entangled. We’ve entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it’s the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller."

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/jost/jost_060309.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.4779

The Origin of Artificial Species: Creating Artificial Personalities

2009-05-28T09:03:00.001-07:00

Rity was developed to test the world’s first robot
“chromosomes,” which allow it to have an artificial
genome-based personality. (Right) A representation of Rity’s
artificial genome. Darker shades represent higher gene values, and red
represents negative values. Image credit: Jong-Hwan Kim, et al.
©2009 IEEE.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Does your robot seem to be acting a bit
neurotic? Maybe it's just their personality. Recently, a team of
researchers has designed computer-coded genomes for artificial
creatures in which a specific personality is encoded. The ability to
give artificial life forms their own individual personalities could not
only improve the natural interactions between humans and artificial
creatures, but also initiate the study of “The Origin of
Artificial Species,” the researchers suggest.
The first artificial creature to receive the genomic personality is
Rity, a dog-like software character that lives in a virtual 3D world in
a PC. Rity’s genome is composed of 14 chromosomes, which together
are composed of a total of 1,764 genes, each with its own value. Rather
than manually assign the gene values, which would be difficult and
time-consuming, the researchers proposed an evolutionary process that
generates a genome with a specific personality desired by a user. The
process is described in a recent study by authors Jong-Hwan Kim of
KAIST in Daejeon, Korea; Chi-Ho Lee of the Samsung Economic Research
Institute in Seoul, Korea; and Kang-Hee Lee of Samsung Electronics
Company, Ltd., in Suwon-si, Korea.

“This is the first time that an artificial creature like a robot or software agent has been given a genome with a personality,” Kim told PhysOrg.com.
“I proposed a new concept of an artificial chromosome as the
essence to define the personality of an artificial creature and to pass
on its traits to the next generation, like a genetic inheritance. It is
critical to provide an impression that the robot is a living creature.
With this respect, having emotions enhances natural human-robot interaction for human-robot symbiosis in the coming years.”

As the researchers explain, an autonomous artificial creature - whether a physical robot or software
agent - can behave, interact, and react to environmental stimuli. Rity,
for example, can interact with humans in the physical world using
information through a mouse, a camera, or a microphone, with 47
perceptions. For instance, a single click and double click on Rity are
perceived as “patted” and “hit,” respectively.
Dragging Rity slowly and softly is perceived as “soothed,”
and dragging it quickly and wildly as “shocked.”

To react to these stimuli in real time, Rity relies on its internal
states which are composed of three units - motivation, homeostasis, and
emotion - and controlled by its internal control architecture. The
three units have a total of 14 states, which are the basis of the 14
chromosomes: the motivation unit includes six states (curiosity,
intimacy, monotony, avoidance, greed, and the desire to control); the
homeostasis unit includes three states (fatigue, hunger, and
drowsiness); and the emotion unit has five states (happiness, sadness,
anger, fear, and neutral).

http://www.physorg.com/news161517506.html

How to Use Pulsars for Interstellar Navigation

2009-05-28T08:43:00.001-07:00

The signals from pulsars form a natural GPS system that could locate any object in the galaxy to within a meter.

The Global Position System has revolutionised navigation on Earth. It consists of a network of satellites that each broadcast a time signal. A receiver on Earth can then work out its position in
three-dimensional space by comparing the arrival times of the signals from at least three satellites. But the system cannot help with navigation on an interplanetary scale or beyond.

Today, Bertolomé Coll at the Observatoire de Paris in France and a friend propose an interstellar GPS system that has the ability to determine the position of any point in the galaxy to within a metre.

Their idea is to tune in to the signals from four pulsars: 0751+1807 (3.5ms), 2322+2057 (4.8ms), 0711-6830 (5.5ms) and 1518+0205B (7.9ms), which each generate regular millisecond radio signals.

These form a rough tetrahedron centred on the Solar System.

Why four pulsars? Coll points out that on these scales relativity has to be taken into account when processing the signals and to do this, the protocol has to specify a position in space-time, which requires four signals.

Coll then defines the origin for this system of co-ordinates as 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars. With the co-ordinate system established, any interplanetary spacecraft could then use the signals from these pulsars to determine its position in this co-ordinate system to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to about a metre.

Handy, and cheap too.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23576/

Plugging In $40 Computers

2009-05-26T11:50:00.001-07:00

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter?

Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

All this can be yours for $99 today and probably for under $40 in two years.

“There’s not much in there,” said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell’s chief executive and co-founder, just a few chips and the sort of power supply used to charge a cellphone battery. Because this computer uses chips designed for cellphones, it uses far less power than chips designed for regular computers. Mr. Sutardja envisions an explosion of innovation about to hit home users because of the combination of open-source software and very powerful chips that are becoming available at very low costs.

The first plausible use for the plug computer is to attach one of these gizmos to a U.S.B. hard drive. Voila, you’ve got a network server. CloudEngines, a start-up, has in fact built a $99 plug computer called Pogoplug, that will let you share the files on your hard drive, not only in your home but also anywhere on the Internet.

“This creates a smart data center for the home,” Mr. Sutardja said.

Another application might be to connect a security camera to the Internet, adding enough intelligence to help analyze images to distinguish between a stray dog and a cat burglar.

Ultimately, these computers may well be used in more mainstream devices, especially for home entertainment.

“We wanted to seed the thinking of people in the market place with what you can do with our processors,” Mr. Sutardja said. “Eventually you won’t see the plug. We want this device to be in your TV, your stereo system, your DVD player.”

The plug computer idea is clearly a step in that direction. And it is part of an even broader array of chips designed initially for phones that will add features to many other devices.

Mr. Sutardja talked about the sort of digital photo frame you can now buy for about $50. Add $2 in chips, and it can display high-definition movies, he said. Another $2 adds a camera. And less than a dollar adds several microphones.

“You now have the sort of video conferencing that corporations buy for much more money,” he said.

“The uses of an application processor are endless,” he said. “It is up to smart people to imagine what it can do.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/plugging-in-to-the-uses-of-40-computers/
http://www.plugcomputer.org/

Improving Space Elevators By Having a Rototating Hoop

2009-05-26T11:40:00.001-07:00

By have a rotating hoop for a space elevator then objects sliding along Rotating Space Elevator(RSE) strings do not require internal engines or propulsion to be transported from the Earth's surface into outer space. (H/T Tom Craver)

A previous article had noted that the strength of the space elevator tether and the power of the engines driving the climbers were inter-related in terms of how feasible the space elevator was. By removing the need for powered climbers this could improve the overall feasibility of space elevators.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/05/improving-space-elevators-by-having.html

WolframTones

2009-05-26T10:59:00.001-07:00

Here's a website that lets you generate distinct calculated music. There are a trillion trillion trillion possibilities for the musical composition, or you can influence the style, scale, and instrumentation of the composition.

http://tones.wolfram.com/

A Third Revolution in DNA Nanotechnology

2009-05-24T11:04:00.001-07:00

In a new paper, Shawn Douglas and his colleagues at William Shih’s lab have demonstrated the first systematic method for building multilayer 3D nanostructures of DNA. In his commentary, Tom LaBean calls this “a third revolution in DNA nanotechnology”, following Seeman’s launch of the field and Rothemund’s development of the breakthrough origami technique.

In the authors’ words:

We anticipate that our strategy for self-assembling
custom three-dimensional shapes will provide a general route to the
manufacture of sophisticated devices bearing features on the nanometre
scale.

This paper closely follows the report of 3D structural-DNA technique that demonstrated a way to build closed boxes from single-layer origami sheets (in a sense, the first folded DNA origami). What the new technique adds to the engineering toolkit is a way to bundle DNA helices into sturdier structures, and to use those structures as building blocks for yet larger structures.

This is a further step toward the development of a methodology for building atomically precise self-assembled structures in which DNA forms an addressable framework for organizing other components (nanotubes, quantum dots, proteins…) into functional systems (circuits, sensors, fabrication tools…). Tom LaBean himself has been a pioneer in developing these DNA-based composite systems.

http://metamodern.com/20 09/05/22/a-third-r

evolution-in-dna-nanotechnology/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/abs/nature08016.html

Web 2.0 companies that have flipped or closed

2009-05-21T13:30:00.001-07:00

X = game over

O = flipped

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meg/3527560991/

47 Million Year Old Skeleton Reveals the Missing Link Between Lemurs and Humans

2009-05-20T13:34:00.001-07:00

Meet Ida, the 47 million year old fossil who may represent one of our earliest known ancestors. She's probably the most complete primate fossil ever discovered, and she explains where humans (and lemurs) come from.

Hailing from the Middle Eocene (about 47 million years ago), this discovery will help to shed light on the early history of a potential human ancestor. Discovered in the late 1980s, the specimen was divided into two separate parts and sold to different buyers, and wasn't reassembled until 2007.

This new species, now called Darwinius masillae, is named for Charles Darwin, and is believed to exist very close to an evolutionary branch that would eventually lead to modern primates and humans. This specimen in particular is a young female, named Ida, and is so highly preserved that soft tissues and fur impressions were preserved, along with the digestive tract that allowed researchers to discover the last meal that it ingested - fruits and leaves. She also had a broken wrist, which had since healed, and it is believed that she would have been about 9 months old. Alive, she would have weighed around two pounds, and about two feet in length.

This finding is a remarkable one, not only for the high preservation of the fossil, but for the potential implications for paleontologists. A mere twenty million years prior to this is the KT boundary, a major extinction line that saw the demise of the Dinosaurs. With their passing came the rise of the mammals, and a world that looked much like ours today. The location where Ida was discovered is known as the Grube Messel, a World Heritage Site, and 47 million years ago, it was a para-tropical rain forest.

http://io9.com/5261379/47-million-year-old-skeleton-reveals-the-missing-link-between-lemurs-and-humans

A Map of Science

2009-05-20T13:27:00.001-07:00

The image above is a view of an extraordinarily information-dense representation, not just of connections among fields, but of their content. At 13,566,672 pixels, most of the text is readable. I have the printed version and examined it with a magnifying glass.

Under the title “A Map of Science”, it was featured by Nature in 2006. Here’s a description by the developers at informationesthetics.org:

As to what the image depicts, it was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as red and blue circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved lines) were made between the paradigms that shared common members, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms closer to one another when a physical simulation forced them all apart: thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers. Labels list common words unique to each paradigm.

Each “list of common words unique to each paradigm” forms a streaming ribbon in the image above. What the authors call a paradigm, I would call a field, or topical area (such as seismology, organometallic chemistry, cryptology, virology, and stellar dynamics), clustered within broader areas (such as geophysics, chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, and astrophysics).

Chocolate-Fueled Race Car Unveiled By Scientists

2009-05-07T10:59:00.001-07:00

LONDON — Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world's fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers. Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car's size, weight, and performance.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/chocolatefueled-race-car-_n_196861.html

'Racetrack' computer memory could be 100 times faster, cheaper

2009-04-23T12:06:00.001-07:00

Soon your computer and electronic gadgets could be much smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable and even greener thanks to a new form of computer memory technology called racetrack.

Christopher Marrows, a physicist at England's University of Leeds, says racetrack memory, currently under development at IBM, will be a vast improvement over today's leading computer memory technology - hard disk and flash - which each have serious limitations.

Racetrack is showing to be more reliable than hard disks, making consistent computer crashes, well, a distant memory.

And it's cheaper than flash - perhaps 100 times less expensive.

"This technology will allow you to have the best of both worlds - cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders and other devices," says Marrows. "But, more importantly, there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free, like YouTube.com and Gmail.com."

Racetrack, as the name implies, is all about speed - and reliability, since all the parts are static.

Data stored on racetrack moves around on a wire pushed by spiralling magnetics, unlike hard disks in which a motor-operated head, much like a record player, has to move to the data to read it. It's those moving parts that make hard disks, invented by IBM in 1956, susceptible to crashing.

"Hard disks are so good because they are so cheap," says Marrows. "But they are bad because of the moving parts, which wear out or crash."

Flash memory, created by Toshiba in 1980, has its own drawbacks. As a solid-state storage device with no moving parts, it's faster and more reliable than disks, but it has a limited number of erase-write cycles before the memory capacity begins to deteriorate.

The impact of racetrack, which has the durability and speed of flash and the affordability of hard disk, will be enormous, says Stuart Parkin, IBM fellow and inventor of the technology.

"Racetrack will have cheap memory with the possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out," he says.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Racetrack+speeds+memory/1488396/story.html

Earth-Sized Planet Discovered By Scientists

2009-04-21T10:25:00.001-07:00

HATFIELD, England — Scientists have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is close to Earth in size _ far different from the behemoths previously detected, researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists attending a conference in England said that the planet was less than twice the size of Earth. Nearly 350 so-called exoplanets have been found outside our solar system but so far nearly every one has been too close or too far from its sun, making all too hot or too cold to support life.

Massive planets are more likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Planets much smaller than earth are very difficult to detect.

The new planet is the smallest exoplanet yet discovered but it is probably too hot for human life because it sits very close to the sun-like star it orbits, researcher Michel Mayor said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/21/earthsized-planet-discove_n_189433.html

3D Printing and Self Replicating Machines In Your Living Room - Seriously!

2009-04-14T15:49:00.001-07:00

Imagine having a machine for $500 in your living room that can take your computer based specification for a 3D object and print out a plastic replica of the object in a matter of minutes. Imagine furthermore that all of the specifications for the machine are completely open source, completely shareable and modifiable by anyone in the world, and that there is a worldwide community of volunteers working feverishly to support you and anyone else to troubleshoot and improve the machine. Imagine no longer…this machine, called a Reprap, is reality! Best of all, these machines are ultimately designed to self replicate themselves, bringing us within tantalizing reach of a long envisioned era of self replicating machines.

http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/09/3d-printing-and-self-replicating-machines-in-your-living-room-seriously/

Mars has a layer of Ice

2009-04-06T12:29:00.001-07:00

Formed sometime between January and September 2008, this fresh crater has dredged up barely buried water ice and splashed it onto the Martian surface. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this colour close-up image on 1 November 2008. The scene is about 30 metres across. (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Mars has a layer of ice as shallow as a few tens of centimeters below the surface. If the Viking lander had been able to dig deeper it would have found it in the 1970s. Analysis of recent impact craters show the exposed ice, which then is sublimated into the atmosphere.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/mars-has-layer-of-ice.html

Implantable Telescope for the Eye

2009-04-02T09:47:00.001-07:00

A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.

"This is one of the few options for people with end-stage macular degeneration," says Kathryn Colby, an eye surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, in Boston, who helped develop the surgical procedure used to implant the device.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22378/

Microbes turn electricity directly to methane

2009-03-31T09:53:00.001-07:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- A tiny microbe can take electricity and directly convert carbon dioxide and water to methane, producing a portable energy source with a potentially neutral carbon footprint, according to a team of Penn State engineers.

"We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, Penn State. "We may now understand why."

Methanogenic microorganisms do produce methane in marshes and dumps, but scientists thought that the organisms turned hydrogen or organic materials, such as acetate, into methane. However, the researchers found, while trying to produce hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells, that their cells produced much more methane than expected.

"All the methane generation going on in nature that we have assumed is going through hydrogen may not be," said Logan. "We actually find very little hydrogen in the gas phase in nature. Perhaps where we assumed hydrogen is being made, it is not."

Microbial electrolysis cells do require an electrical voltage to be added to the voltage that is produced by bacteria using organic materials to produce current that evolves into hydrogen. The researchers found that the Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells. They report their findings in this week's issue of Environmental Science and Technology.

"We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane," said Logan.

http://www.physorg.com/news157651388.html

DNA-Based Assembly Line for Precision Nano-Cluster Construction

2009-03-31T09:50:00.001-07:00

March 29, 2009

UPTON, NY — Building on the idea of using DNA to link up nanoparticles — particles measuring mere billionths of a meter — scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a molecular assembly line for predictable, high-precision nano-construction. Such reliable, reproducible nanofabrication is essential for exploiting the unique properties of nanoparticles in applications such as biological sensors and devices for converting sunlight to electricity. The work will be published online March 29, 2009, by Nature Materials.

http://www.bnl.gov/cfn/news/PRdisplay.asp?prID=921

A genetic technique successfully treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy in dogs

2009-03-26T11:01:00.001-07:00

An international team of researchers has successfully treated dogs with the canine form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rapidly progressing and ultimately fatal muscle disease that afflicts one out of every 3,600 boys. The researchers used a novel technique called exon skipping to restore partial function to the gene involved in Duchenne. The study, published in Annals of Neurology, gives hope that a similar approach could work in humans.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22327/page1/

Solar Refrigerator: A Counterintuitive Prototype

2009-03-25T14:11:00.001-07:00

The fridge was developed by mechanic engineering students Frederik Knop, Nicolás Ripoll, and Olivier Bernade, the last one a French exchange student.

The prototype is based on adsorption, which Wikipedia explains in the following way:

Absorptive refrigeration uses a source of heat to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling process.[...] The classic gas absorption refrigerator sends liquid ammonia into a hydrogen gas. The liquid ammonia evaporates in the presence of hydrogen gas, providing the cooling. The now-gaseous ammonia is sent into a container holding water, which absorbs the ammonia. The water-ammonia solution is then directed past a heater, which boils ammonia gas out of the water-ammonia solution. The ammonia gas is then condensed into a liquid. The liquid ammonia is then sent back through the hydrogen gas, completing the cycle.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/new-solar-refrigerator-prototype-from-chile.php

Massive young star explodes 'before its time'

2009-03-25T11:52:00.001-07:00

A massive young star seems to have exploded before its time, new Hubble Space Telescope images reveal. The star, the heftiest to have been linked to a supernova explosion, could challenge models of when stellar furnaces end their lives.

Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the Sun end their lives in dramatic explosions when the nuclear furnaces at their cores run out of fuel and collapse into neutron stars or black holes.

The Hubble observations suggest the erstwhile star was a luminous blue variable, a massive star at least 50 times as heavy as the Sun that jettisons most of itself material into space in a series of outbursts. Eta Carinae, wedged between gigantic hourglass-shaped clouds of material that it sloughed off, is a classic example of this kind of star.

That classification was surprising, since luminous blue variables were not expected to explode. Stellar models predict that the stars should evolve further – into other stellar types, shedding all of the hydrogen on their surfaces and most of their mass, before running out of fuel and going supernova.

But "our star when it exploded still had some of its hydrogen envelope. It seems to have exploded before its time," says team member Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University in California.

One possibility, Leonard says, is that the star was actually close to death at its core, and for some reason did not lose all the hydrogen on its surface, appearing 'healthy'.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16823-massive-young-star-explodes-before-its-time.html

Desktop Factory 125ci 3D Printer

2009-03-24T12:33:00.001-07:00

Until now, 3D printers have been large, expensive machines confined to the shops and design departments of major corporations and elite design firms. With the introduction of the Desktop Factory 3D printer, priced disruptively lower than the nearest competitive offering, Desktop Factory becomes the leader in high performance low-cost 3D printing technologies.

http://www.desktopfactory.com/

U.S. engineers find way to build a better battery

2009-03-12T08:48:00.001-07:00

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars.

And because they use older materials in a new way, the batteries could be available for sale in two to three years, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Current rechargeable lithium batteries can store large amounts of energy, making them long-running. But they are stingy about releasing their power, making them discharge energy slowly and require hours to recharge.

Scientists traditionally have blamed slow-moving lithium ions -- which carry charge across the battery -- for this sluggishness.

However, about five years ago, Gerbrand Ceder and a team at MIT discovered that lithium ions in traditional lithium iron phosphate battery material actually move quite quickly.

"It turned out there were other limitations," Ceder said in a telephone interview.

Ceder and colleagues discovered that lithium ions travel through tunnels accessed from the surface of the material. If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, it can quickly deliver a charge. But if the ion is not at the entrance, it cannot easily move there, making it less efficient at delivering a charge.

Ceder and colleagues remedied this by revamping the battery recipe. "We changed the composition of the base material and we changed the way it is made -- the heat treatment," Ceder said.

This created many smooth tunnels in the material that allow the ions to slip in and out easily. "The trick was knowing what to change," he said.

Using their new processing technique, the team made a small battery that could be fully charged in 10 to 20 seconds.

Ceder thinks the material could lead to smaller, lighter batteries because less material is needed for the same result.

And because they simply tinkered with a material already commonly used for batteries, it could be easily adapted for commercial use.

"If manufacturers decide they want to go down this road, they could do this in a few years," Ceder said.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090311/tc_nm/us_batteries_3

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

2009-03-12T08:47:00.001-07:00

When those Apple advertisements tout "there's an app for just about anything," they aren't kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan's App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called "ServersMan@iPhone", the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

The new application was developed by a Japanese operation called FreeBit, a Tokyo-based venture company known for providing its network platform to many VNO/ISPs (virtual network operator/Internet service providers).

Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.

Nanotubes That See Everything

2009-03-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

Carbon nanotubes that respond to visible light might mean better solar cells and artificial retinas

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Livermore, CA, have created the first carbon-nanotube devices that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light. Their work might one day find a range of applications, including in solar cells that absorb more light, tiny cameras that work in very low light, and better artificial retinas.

Other researchers have demonstrated nanotubes that can detect light of specific wavelengths, including ultraviolet light, but never the entire visible spectrum of light. "This is a significant milestone," says George Grüner, a professor of physics and head of the Nano-Biophysics Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the Sandia work.

The light sensor inside a digital camera--known as a charge-coupled device--converts light into an electrical signal because as photons bombard silicon, they create electron holes in the material. In contrast, carbon-nanotube light sensors work in a similar way to biological eyes. The nanotubes are decorated with three kinds of chromophores--molecules that change shape in response to a particular wavelength of light. This change in shape results in a change in the chromophores' orientations with respect to the nanotube that, in turn, changes the electrical conductivity of the nanotube in a way that can be measured to deduce the color and intensity of the light. The Sandia researchers used three different types of chromophores, which respond to either red, green, or blue bands of the visible-light spectrum.

The work is still at an early stage, but nanotube light sensors could have advantages over today's light-sensing chips. Most important, says Sandia researcher Xinjian Zhou, the devices are intrinsically high resolution and small. Their resolution is the same as the diameter of each nanotube--about one nanometer. And because an array of the nanotubes could be very small, light could be focused into a very small area, meaning that future devices would be very sensitive to low light levels. Also, nanotube light sensors could be printed on flexible polymer backings. This could make them cheaper to manufacture and also less irritating to biological tissue--an important consideration for retinal implants.

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

2009-02-09T09:13:00.001-08:00

Find may revolutionize computers

2009-02-03T13:43:00.001-08:00

Scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology have
made a significant breakthrough that could help pave the way for new
generations of smaller, more energy-efficient computers.

The
team, led by Robert Wolkow, has invented the world's smallest quantum
dots, atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons, using a
fraction of the power of current computer technology.

"Roughly
speaking, we predict there could be a 1,000-time reduction in power
consumption with electronic computers built in this new way," said
Wolkow, a physicist at the University of Alberta.

"And they could
be something like 1,000 times smaller in size. So it's reaching the
very limit as far as anyone could imagine of how small things could
get."

The team's work is published in the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, considered the world's premier physics journal.

Current
computers use transistors, which are essentially valves for flowing
streams of electrons around a circuit. In recent years, engineers have
found ways to make these devices smaller, but pushing electrons through
narrow spaces raises the danger of the machines overheating and failing.

"So the problem is no longer how do we make it smaller, it's how do we consume less power," Wolkow said.

Energy in relation

2009-02-02T08:43:00.001-08:00

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/type-iii-kardashev-civilization.html

Klingon Keyboard: for serious Trekkies only

2009-01-27T13:48:00.001-08:00

Are you one of the biggest nerds in the world? If so, you probably know the fake Klingon language from Star Trek.
And maybe you want to write things in this fake tongue. But here you
are stuck with a stupid English keyboard. What to do? Buy a keyboard
with Klingon symbols on it, that's what!

Not only does this keyboard let you type in a made-up language, but
it also connects with a PS/2 cable, something no current computers use.
So to recap: if you're a super nerd with an old computer and you want
to type in Klingon, you can buy this warrior's accessory here.
For the other 99.99999999% of the world, we'll stick to regular
keyboards. And for the precious few of us who might need their Klingon
fix now and then, stick to online Klingon translators.

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/01/klingon_keyboar.php

NASA Successfully Tests First Deep Space Internet

2008-12-12T14:47:00.001-08:00

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called
Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space
images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million
miles from Earth.

"This is the first step in creating a
totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary
Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking
architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in
Washington.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google
Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., partnered 10 years ago to develop this
software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that
differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf
co-designed.

The Interplanetary Internet must be robust to
withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Glitches can
happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms
and long communication delays occur. The delay in sending or receiving
data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the
speed of light.

Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not
assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a
destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded.
Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary
until it can communicate safely with another node. This
store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing
the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not
get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually,
the information is delivered to the end user.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html

Water Vapor Confirmed on Alien Planet

2008-12-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

The unequivocal signature of water vapor has been found on a
planet beyond our solar system.

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope,
astronomers detected
the steamy signature of water vapor in the light coming from a large
exoplanet circling around a star about 63 light-years from Earth.
Though it's not the first sign of water vapor around this planet, it's
the strongest evidence yet.

The planet, HD 189733b, is what's called a "Hot Jupiter" — a boiling,
gigantic gas planet more akin to our own Jupiter or Saturn than to a
terrestrial planet like Earth. It's not a good candidate itself for alien
life, but the successful detection of water vapor here, in the
location and quantities that theorists predicted, bodes well for further
studies of more promising locales for extraterrestrial life.

"It means we're starting to understand these objects a
little bit better than we did when we first started," astrophysicist Adam
Burrows of Princeton University told Wired.com. "It’s a trial run for the
much more detailed investigations that will be possible in the years to come as
we take this stepping stone from giant planets to terrestrial planets."

Though water vapor is thought to be fairly common on planets — even
our own Jupiter has it — the discovery of its presence on another world
is significant and points the way toward future discoveries, scientists
say. Yesterday scientists announced that the Hubble Space Telescope
had found carbon dioxide, which under the right circumstances could be
connected to life, on the same planet. The presence of methane has also
been detected.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/embargoed---wat.html

Proposed Laser ignition Fusion/Fission Hybrid Commercial Power by 2030

2008-12-10T09:18:00.001-08:00

LIFE, an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, is an advanced energy concept under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Conceptual design for a LIFE engine and power plant based on National
Ignition Facility (NIF)-like fusion targets and a NIF-like laser
operating at an energy of 1.4 megajoules (MJ) at a wavelength of 350
nanometers (ultraviolet), with a 2.5-meter-radius target chamber and
with the final optics at a distance of 25 meters from the target. The
National Ignition Campaign will begin during 2009, and ignition and
fusion energy yields of 10 to 15 megajoules (MJ) are anticipated during
fiscal years 2010 or 2011. Fusion yields of 20 to 35 MJ are expected
soon thereafter. Ultimately fusion yields of 100 MJ are expected on
NIF. The LIFE system is designed to operate with fusion energy gains of
about 25 to 30 and fusion yields of about 35 to 50 MJ to provide about
500 megawatts (MW) of fusion power – about 80 percent of which comes in
the form of 14.1 million electron-volt (MeV) neutrons with the rest of
the energy in X-rays and ions. This is an approach which would be as
good as and in some ways superior to liquid flouride thorium reactors.
Improvements in lasers and cost reduction with laser components would
meet the requirements of this project if current trends continue. A
success with aneutronic nuclear fusion such as might occur with Bussard
Inertial electrostatic fusion, dense plasma focus fusion would likely
be superior to this. It would be worthwhile to fund several of these
vastly superior approaches to nuclear fission and fusion for a billion
or few billion each in order to get many multiple trillions of payoff
with a homerun energy success. Even partial success with one of these
approaches could deal with all of the current nuclear waste (unburned
fuel) which would cost tens of billions to store in a place like Yucca
Mountain.

A Computer Program That Taught Itself to Draw the Mona Lisa

2008-12-10T09:16:00.001-08:00

These images represent four steps in one computer program's progress
towards recreating the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent
polygons. Swedish programmer Roger Alsing did this simple weekend
project with genetic programming that resulted in a program that could
generate, on its own, a pretty awesome likeness of the famous painting.
So how did he do it?

He wrote a program that would randomly place shapes on a black
background, and decide whether the abstract pattern looked more or less
like the famous painting. After almost a million tries, the program's
output had evolved to the point where Alsing had the image on the far
right.

http://io9.com/5106124/a-computer-program-that-taught-itself-to-draw-the-mona-lisa

No Neanderthal Ancestors for Modern Humans

2008-12-09T15:24:00.001-08:00

If ancient homo sapiens got it on with their Neanderthal
cousins, there were no children to show for it. Researchers studying
Neanderthal DNA have sequenced half of the Neanderthal genome, and
shoot down the theory that European humans interbred with the
now-extinct species. And the team says the genome has other things to
teach us about Neanderthal life, including their sexual proclivities.

The
research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthology
presented their findings last week at a human evolution conference. The
researchers have compared the Neanderthal genome to that of modern
humans of European and African descent. Because Neanderthals and modern
humans coexisted in Europe, researchers have theorized that European
genomes would have more similarities with the Neanderthal genome than
would African genomes. However, European and African genomes have a
similar number of differences from the Neanderthal genome, suggesting
that modern humans in Europe outbred rather than assimilated the
Neanderthals.

http://io9.com/5105912/no-neanderthal-ancestors-for-modern-humans

Einstein's E=MC2 Finally Proven Right 103 Years Later

2008-11-24T12:15:00.001-08:00

PARIS (AFP) - It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's
celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a
heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre
for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest
supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass
of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and
neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are
bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of
quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95
percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of
mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many
times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic
weapons.

But resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081120/sc_afp/sciencephysicseinstein_081120235605??

Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed

2008-10-29T09:22:00.001-07:00

A nearby solar system bears a striking similarity to our own solar system, raising the possibility it could harbor Earth-like planets.

Epsilon Eridani, located about 10.5 light-years from our sun, is surrounded by two asteroid belts that are shaped by planets, astronomers at SETI Institute and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced today.

But it's the possibility that currently undetected smaller planets could lie within the innermost asteroid belt that make the solar system intriguing to astrobiologists.

"This system probably looks a lot like ours did when life first took root on Earth," said SETI's Dana Backman, lead author of a paper on the 850-million-year-old star that will appear next year in The Astrophysical Journal, in a release.

Back then, the Kuiper Belt of space objects beyond Neptune was much larger. Over time, many of those objects fell into the inner solar system during a period about four billion years ago known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. The barrage of large asteroids pockmarked the rocky planets and possibly created our moon when a large object collided with Earth, expelling a huge amount of material into space.

Epsilon Eridani's evolution could provide insight into how universal these processes are. That's important because our solar system contains a planet — Earth — just far enough from the sun not to be fried but close enough to capture enough energy to support life as we know it. Similar systems
could end up with planets orbiting in the same biological sweet spot.

"Epsilon Eridani looks a lot like the young solar system, so it's conceivable that it will evolve similarly," said astronomer Massimo Marengo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a co-author of the paper.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/nearby-solar-sy.html

Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed

2008-10-29T09:20:00.001-07:00

A nearby solar system bears a striking similarity to our own solar
system, raising the possibility it could harbor Earth-like planets.

But it's the possibility that currently undetected smaller planets could lie
within the innermost asteroid belt that make the solar system intriguing to astrobiologists.

Back then, the Kuiper Belt
of space objects beyond Neptune was much larger. Over time, many of
those objects fell into the inner solar system during a period about
four billion years ago known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.
The barrage of large asteroids pockmarked the rocky planets and
possibly created our moon when a large object collided with Earth,
expelling a huge amount of material into space.

Epsilon Eridani's evolution could provide insight into how universal these processes are.
That's important because our solar system contains a planet — Earth —
just far enough from the sun not to be fried but close enough to
capture enough energy to support life as we know it. Similar systems
could end up with planets orbiting in the same biological sweet spot.

Holographic Television Coming Soon

2008-10-07T09:29:00.001-07:00

We use high-definition television, dark rooms, and surround sound to create an immersive media experience. But for those who want television that more closely resembles the holodeck, there’s good news. A University of Arizona research team has made a significant breakthrough in 3-D displays that could put holographic sets on the market in five to ten years.

A team at the university’s Optical Sciences department, headed by photonics and lasers chair Dr. Nasser Peyghambarian, has created the first rewritable holographic displays that operate from memory:

"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.

The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.

These holographic television would offer multiple types of 3-dimensional viewing experiences:

According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath.

So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall.

It’s still a long way away from the multisensory experience of the holodeck, but it could mean that next decade’s first person shooters will have you sniping aliens from behind your sofa.

http://io9.com/5059828/holographic-television-coming-soon

Two Planets Suffer Violent Collision

2008-09-25T10:36:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — Two
terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300
light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision,
astronomers at UCLA, Tennessee State University and the California
Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the
Astrophysical Journal.
"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin
Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on
the paper. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before.
Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully
mature planetary system."

"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision
would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the
ultimate extinction event," said co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer
at Tennessee State University (TSU). "A massive disk of
infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to
this sad fate."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080923164646.htm