Astronauts Take a Break From Busy Space Mission

From Space.com:

Astronauts took a hard-earned break from work aboard the International Space Station Friday as they hit the midpoint of a busy mission to boost the outpost's science gear and supplies.

The 13 astronauts aboard the docked station and shuttle Discovery had a half-day off from their joint mission, time enough to gaze down at their home planet or simply enjoy flying in weightlessness.

"Sometimes, you've just got to look out the window and enjoy the view," shuttle astronaut Jose Hernandez told reporters in a televised interview this week. "It's just breathtaking and I can't describe it with words. It's just indescribable."

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Chemical Neurowarfare

From Ryan Sager - Neuroworld:

Imagine a future where the Iranian regime didn’t need to spend weeks in the streets beating, killing, and jailing protesters to put down the reform movement. Imagine in this future that the beatings would be replaced with something gentler, but ultimately more sinister: non-lethal, weaponized drugs designed to decrease aggression and increase trust.

That’s the future imagined and fretted over in an opinion piece (non-gated, samizdat version here) and editorial (PDF) in the current issue of Nature.

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My Comment: Chemical weapons .... but with a twist. This is a fascinating article, and probably more real than we think.

This reminds me of an article that was published in The Telegraph last year titled .... Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs'.

50 Things That Are Being Killed By The Internet

The web is changing the way we work, play and think Photo: REUTTERS

From The Telegraph:

The internet has wrought huge changes on our lives – both positive and negative – in the fifteen years since its use became widespread.

Tasks that once took days can be completed in seconds, while traditions and skills that emerged over centuries have been made all but redundant.

The internet is no respecter of reputations: innocent people have seen their lives ruined by viral clips distributed on the same World Wide Web used by activists to highlight injustices and bring down oppressive regimes

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Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

This is an impression of a "spin spaghetti" of Dirac strings.
(Credit: HZB / D.J.P. Morris & A. Tennant)

From Science Daily:

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.

Results of their research are being published in the journal Science.

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Your Brain Is Organized Like a City

Brains and cities, as they get bigger, do so based on similar mathematical rules. Image credit: Credit: Rensselaer/Mark Changizi

From Live Science:

A big city might seem chaotic, but somehow everything gets where it needs to go and the whole thing manages to function on most days, even if it all seems a little worse for the wear at the end of the day. Sound a bit like your brain?

Neurobiologist Mark Changizi sees strikingly real similarities between the two.

Changizi and colleagues propose that cities and brains are organized similarly, and that the invisible hand of evolution has shaped the brain just as people have indirectly shaped cities. It's all driven by the need for organization and efficiency, the researchers say.

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A Giant Fingerprint On Mars: High Res Camera Reveals Details Just 3ft Across On Red Planet

(Click Image To Enlarge)
Planet print: This picture was taken in a crater near Fan in the Coprates Region of Mars. The giant fingerprint-like shape was created by possible evaporites - sediments formed by the evaporation of water

From The Daily Mail:

This striking range of dunes and craters appears to form a giant cosmic fingerprint on the surface of the Red Planet.

Scientists believe the undulating ground reveals global climate changes that took place on Mars over the past few million years.

The area is in the Coprates region, a large trough that forms part of the Valles Marineris - a system of canyons stretching thousands of miles along Mars' equator.

The whitish areas could be evaporites - mineral sediments left behind when salt water evaporates. Such deposits would be of great interest as they indicate potential habitats for past martian life.

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Astronauts Continue Rigging ISS For Science

From Aviation Week:

The 13 astronauts and cosmonauts on the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station took some time off Friday before plunging into preparations for the third and final spacewalk of the docked portion of their mission.

Halfway through the 13-day STS-128 mission, the two crews had accomplished two of their most important tasks - delivering NASA astronaut Stott as the replacement for Tim Kopra, also of NASA, on the space station crew, and swapping out a depleted ammonia-tank with a fresh unit containing 600 pounds of fresh coolant.

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Prehistoric Hand Axes Older Than Once Thought

Oldest Old World Tools A collection of prehistoric stone hand axes appears above. When first discovered, most researchers thought that the hand axes were made between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. However, a new study contends that they are in fact much older -- possibly the oldest hand axes in Europe. Michael Walker

From Discovery News:

Sept. 3, 2009 -- Europe's Stone Age has taken an edgy turn. A new analysis finds that human ancestors living in what is now Spain fashioned double-edged stone cutting tools as early as 900,000 years ago, almost twice as long ago as previous estimates for this technological achievement in Europe.

If confirmed, the new dates support the idea that the manufacture and use of teardrop-shaped stone implements, known as hand axes, spread rapidly from Africa into Europe and Asia beginning roughly 1 million years ago, say geologist Gary Scott and paleontologist Luis Gibert, both of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.

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Quantum Computer Slips Onto Chips

From the BBC:

Researchers have devised a penny-sized silicon chip that uses photons to run Shor's algorithm - a well-known quantum approach - to solve a maths problem.

The algorithm computes the two numbers that multiply together to form a given figure, and has until now required laboratory-sized optical computers.

This kind of factoring is the basis for a wide variety of encryption schemes.

The work, reported in Science, is rudimentary but could easily be scaled up to handle more complex computing.

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How 20 Popular Websites Looked When They Launched

1. Google.com - launched in 1996

From The Telegraph:

From Google to youtube, from craigslist to flickr - how some of today's biggest sites looked back in the early days of their existence.

Remember the days when the word Google was not interchangeable with internet? Or when every site seemed to have a Netscape icon on it? Or when Flash was still something you cleaned your floor with? Then you were clearly using the web in the mid to late 1990s when pages were rudimentary affairs containing lists of links and information.

Thanks to the waybackmachine internet archive, we're still able to see some of the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 pioneers looked in their earliest incarnations.

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AT&T Customers Speak Out Over Poor Service

From ZDNet:

Following yesterday’s piece on how the iPhone (or, more specifically, iPhone users) are strangling the AT&T network, I’ve been hit by a deluge of emails from customers giving me their side of the story.

It’s not a pretty picture for AT&T. Here’s just a small selection of quotes I received:

“I can’t even get service at my own home.”

“MY iPhone drops calls at least 5 times a day, sometimes 5 times on the same attempted conversation.”

“I live in Boulder but feel like I live in the middle of Montana where I can only get service by hiking the local hill.”

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Super-Fast Computers Of The Future

Prof. Anatoly Zayats from Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Nanostructured Media. (Credit: Image courtesy of Queen's University, Belfast)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2009) — Computers which use light to process large amounts of data faster than ever before are just one of many groundbreaking potential applications of a new £6 million research programme at Queen’s University Belfast and Imperial College London, launched September 1, 2009.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is funding the two universities to establish a world-leading research programme on the fundamental science of so-called ‘nanoplasmonic devices’.

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Tipping Points: What Wall Street and Nature Have in Common

From Live Science:

When a big change is coming – be it in ocean circulation patterns, wildlife populations, or even the global economy – it is often heralded by telltale signs, scientists have found.

In many man-made and natural systems, conditions reach a tipping point when a major transition occurs and the system shifts from one state to another. Now researchers say they can begin to predict these tipping points by searching for universal early warning signs.

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It's Official! Why Chatting To A Pretty Woman Is 'Bad For A Man's Brain'

Tongue-twisted: Men performed less well in brain function tests after a few minutes in company of a pretty woman (posed by models)

From The Daily Mail:

It is an experience that turns many chaps into an awkward, mumbling wreck.

Now scientists have confirmed that being in the presence of a pretty woman really does scramble the male brain.

A study has revealed that men who spend just a few minutes in the company of an attractive female perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function.

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'Optical Computer' Performs First Ever Calculation

Professor Jeremy O'Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics (left) and Jonathan Matthews
Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

An 'optical computer' which uses light particles rather than traditional circuitry has performed the first ever calculation, as scientists hope it could pave the way for a computer smaller and faster than anything seen before.

Scientists have hailed the step, despite the calculation taking longer than a schoolchild.

The optical quantum chip uses single particles of "whizzing" light which could eventually pave the wave for a "super-powerful quantum computer".

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The Singularity And The Fixed Point -- A Commentary

From Technology Review:

The importance of engineering motivation into intelligence.

Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil have hypothesized that we will someday soon pass through a singularity--that is, a time period of rapid technological change beyond which we cannot envision the future of society. Most visions of this singularity focus on the creation of machines intelligent enough to devise machines even more intelligent than themselves, and so forth recursively, thus launching a positive feedback loop of intelligence amplification. It's an intriguing thought. (One of the first things I wanted to do when I got to MIT as an undergraduate was to build a robot scientist that could make discoveries faster and better than anyone else.) Even the CTO of Intel, Justin Rattner, has publicly speculated recently that we're well on our way to this singularity, and conferences like the Singularity Summit (at which I'll be speaking in October) are exploring how such transformations might take place.

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China Cracks Down On Stem Cell Tourism

From New Scientist:

Chinese and European researchers have today published ethical guidelines aimed at discouraging Chinese doctors from offering patients unproven or sham treatments based on stem cells.

The authors hope the move will reinforce legal curbs on stem cell treatments introduced on 1 May by China's ministry of health.

The launch follows new allegations of fraud in stem cell research, and the arrest of individuals in Hungary allegedly offering bogus treatments.

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New Hope For Aids Vaccine As Scientists Find 'Achilles Heel'

From Times Online:

The search for an HIV vaccine has taken a major step forward with the discovery of a potential Achilles heel of the virus that causes Aids.

Two powerful antibodies that attack a vulnerable spot common to many strains of HIV have been identified, improving the prospects for a vaccine against a virus that affects an estimated 33 million people and kills over 2 million each year.

The discovery is important because it highlights a potential way around HIV’s defences against the human immune system, which have so far thwarted efforts to make a workable vaccine. The hope is that a vaccine that stimulates the production of these antibodies could remain effective against HIV even as the virus mutates.

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Money Woes Likely To Hobble NASA's Planned Moon Mission

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — NASA, whose successes helped cement America's reputation as the world's technological leader, is facing a series of money woes that could thwart its hopes of remaining the globe's leader in space exploration.

A blue-ribbon presidential panel is expected to advise the White House later this month that returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, as former President George W. Bush proposed, is financially impossible under NASA's $18.7 billion budget.

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1000 MPH or Bust: Behind the Scenes With Supersonic Car Tech

(Illustration by Curventa)

From Popular Mechancis:

A series of successful rocket tests in the Mojave desert recently marks another step in the development of a car built to reach 1000 mph. The British team Bloodhound Supersonic Car (SSC) is comprised of some legendary land speed experience. Richard Noble was the man behind the Thrust SSC—the car that set the current land speed record. And the man that will slide behind the wheel of the Bloodhound is Andy Green, the former fighter pilot who holds the land speed record for the fastest diesel vehicle in the world (just over 350 mph, back in 2006). We met with the team recently to get a sense of the scope of the Bloodhound project and the challenges that lie ahead on the road to 1000 mph.

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