Discovery Brings New Type Of Fast Computers Closer To Reality

Alex High and Aaron Hammack adjust the optics in their UCSD lab. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called “excitons” that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.

Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team’s demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit—an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices—capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.

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Evidence For Stone Age Multitasking

A researcher heats experimental adhesive. Credit: Lyn Wadley

From Live Science:

Modern parents, teenagers, and executives are all masters of multitasking, but people who lived 70,000 years ago may have shared that talent. Stone blades found in Sibudu Cave, near South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, bear traces of compound adhesives that once joined them to wooden hafts to make spears or arrows.

Our distant ancestors discovered that mixtures of plant gum and red ocher or fat, heated carefully over a fire, made the superglue of their day, say Lyn Wadley and two colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. So how is that evidence of multitasking?

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US Life Expectancy Lags Due To Cigarettes

From Future Pundit:

In political debates over health care the fact that the United States lags many other industrialized countries in average life expectancy is sometimes blamed on how health care is funded in the US. But John Tierney of the New York Times reports that once the lifestyles of Americans are adjusted for America's health care system comes out looking pretty good in terms of its effects on longevity.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis.

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How To Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas To 16,000 Feet

From Wired Science:

After a 17-mile trek up to a plateau in the Chilean Andes, scientists installed the first of 66 giant antennae on the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope this week.

The antenna, which weighs about 100 tons and measures 40 feet in diameter, was carried to its operations site at 16,400 feet by a massive, custom-built transporter. Eventually, the antenna will be linked with dozens of others to form a single, enormous telescope. Scientists hope the extremely dry air on the Chajnantor Plateau will help ALMA study some of the coldest and most distant objects in the observable universe.

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Scientists Announce Trove of Fragile New Species In Mekong

The Cat Ba leopard gecko, discovered in 2008, found in the Cat Ba Island National Park in northern Vietnam. Thomas Ziegler / WWF / Epa

From Time Magazine:

Right now, bird-eating frogs with fangs wait for their prey in the streams of eastern Thailand. Technicolor geckos scurry up trees on the Thai-Malaysian border, and ruby-red fish — previously only found in the Ukrainian ornamental fish trade — are swimming in the rivers of Burma. These are three of the 163 species discovered by various researchers in the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia last year, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) announced on Sept. 25.

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LHC Gets Warning System Upgrade

Cern has spent about 40m Swiss Francs (£24m) on repairs to the LHC

From The BBC:

Engineers hope an early warning system being installed at the Large Hadron Collider could prevent incidents of the kind which shut the machine last year.

The helium leak last September, which resulted from a "faulty splice" between magnets, has delayed the start of science operations by more than a year.

Officials aim to re-start the collider, known as the LHC, in mid-November.

The vast physics lab is built inside a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

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France-Size Shark Sanctuary Created -- A First

The world's first shark sanctuary will protect the declining fish in waters off the tiny island republic of Palau (above, a gray reef shark in Palau), the country's president announced on September 25, 2009. Photograph by Tim Laman/NGS

From National Geographic:

The world's first shark sanctuary will protect the declining fish in waters off the tiny island republic of Palau, the country's president said today.

Johnson Toriboing announced the creation of a shark haven without commercial fishing during an address before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

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Cyber Security Experts Learn From Ant Tactics

From The Telegraph:

Scientists have worked out a new way to defend computers from cyber attackers - by studying ants.

Watching how they behaved when a colony was under threat, gave programmers inspiration for a new weapon against infections known as worms and viruses.

Ants use "swarming intelligence" to deter intruders. When one ant detects a threat, he is soon joined by many others to overwhelm their opponent.

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Will Amazon Open The Kindle To Developers?

From CNET:

We're heading into the holiday buying season, which means the introduction of new gadgets and the media's annual anointment of the season's hottest tech toy. Plenty of pundits think electronic book readers will sell briskly this year, which got us thinking: Will Amazon update its Kindle e-book reader in time for the holidays?

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British Museum's Aztec Artefacts 'As Evil As Nazi Lampshades Made From Human Skin'

Showstopper: A turquoise mask which probably represents the sun god Tonatiuh

From The Daily Mail:

Ten minutes into the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition, devoted to the last Aztec ruler before the Spanish Conquest, you come across a statue of an eagle with a cavity in its back. The cavity, you will discover, was designed to hold the hearts of the victims of human sacrifices.

This detail, for me, obliterates any observation about whether the sculpture is otherwise well crafted. Similarly, I don't care whether a Nazi lampshade fashioned from human skin is beautifully made or not. And the same concern blocks out a lot of one's interest in this exhibition.

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Peruvian Glacial Retreats Linked To European Events Of Little Ice Age

University of New Hampshire master's student Jean Taggart '09, coauthor of a new study published in this week's Science, takes samples from a glacial moraine in southern Peru. (Credit: Joe Licciardi)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — A new study that reports precise ages for glacial moraines in southern Peru links climate swings in the tropics to those of Europe and North America during the Little Ice Age approximately 150 to 350 years ago. The study, published this week in the journal Science, "brings us one step closer to understanding global-scale patterns of glacier activity and climate during the Little Ice Age," says lead author Joe Licciardi, associate professor of Earth sciences at the University of New Hampshire. "The more we know about our recent climate past, the better we can understand our modern and future climate."

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Children Who Get Spanked Have Lower IQs

From Live Science:

Spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, but new research suggests it can do more harm than good to their noggins. The study, involving hundreds of U.S. children, showed the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others.

"All parents want smart children," said study researcher Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire. "This research shows that avoiding spanking and correcting misbehavior in other ways can help that happen."

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Photon 'Machine Gun' Could Power Quantum Computers

Entangled photons can now be controlled (Image: Dan Talson/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

THERE is a simple rule of computing that holds true even in the weird quantum world: increase the number of units of information available and you boost computing power. Raising the number of quantum bits, or qubits, carries an even greater reward – every additional qubit doubles the computing power.

But raising the number of qubits has proven tricky because of the difficulty of reliably producing entangled particles. Now a team has designed a system that should fire out barrages of entangled photons with machine-gun regularity.

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10 Wonders To Visit Before They Disappear

Credit: Ralph Clevenger/Corbis

From Cosmos:

As global warming sets in, some of the world's wonders may not wait around for you to experience them. Here are the top 10 places you need to visit before the climate changes.

EXPERIENCING is believing. It's one thing to marvel at a documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, and quite another to immerse yourself in the silent beauty and colourful diversity of the world's largest reef system.

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The Tech Behind Surrogates's All-Robot World

Director Jonathan Mostow with a surrogate used in the film to show buyers the mechanics of their potential proxies.

From Popular Mechanics:

PM's Digital Hollywood sits down with Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow to discuss the unexpected challenges of filming a world where everyone looks like a perfect robot. Plus, a chronology of movie androids.

When robot stand-ins populate the world in a movie—as they do in Touchstone Picture’s Surrogates, out Sept. 25—­every character in the frame has to look perfect. And that turned into a headache for director Jonathan Mostow. “Usually you hire background actors off the street,” he says. “We were flying in models.”

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Self-Regulated Morphine Delivery For Wounded Warfighters

Safer Pain Relief Wounded soldiers could soon administer their
own morphine without watchful medics U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

DARPA-funded nanotech drug automatically regulates its morphine dose on the battlefield

Medics still use morphine to relieve the pain of wounded soldiers on the modern battlefield, but have to watch out for morphine reducing breathing and blood pressure to dangerous levels. That may all change with a DARPA-backed combination drug that has successfully limited morphine delivery when it detects low blood oxygen levels.

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Mars Probe Watches Water-Ice Fade

Water-ice is seen to fade over time in this 12m crater within Arcadia Planitia

From The BBC:

Large deposits of nearly pure water-ice may lurk just below the Martian surface, much nearer the equator than previously thought, suggest new images.

The pictures acquired by a Nasa orbiter show white material exposed by fresh meteorite impacts fading over time - behaviour expected of ice on Mars.

An onboard instrument also detected the tell-tale chemical signature of water.

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Satellite Images Of The Second Iranian Nuclear Site

The overall view of the Iranian site. The mountain under which the site is built is to the lower right of the image. (Credit: GeoEye satellite image/IHS Jane's analysis)

GeoEye Gives Look At Iranian Nuclear Site -- Deep Tech/CNET

Satellite imagery company GeoEye has released a photo of what it says is the controversial and underground Iranian uranium enrichment site that came to light last week.

The photo, taken Saturday, shows the facility at a military site about 20 miles north-northeast of Qum and 100 miles southwest of Tehran, GeoEye said. An analysis of the photo by IHS Jane's, a defense intelligence consulting firm, said the facility has a primary and several auxiliary entrances, ventilation shafts, a surface-to-air missile site, and quarry and construction equipment.

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My Comment: The imaging is very clear. We also must give them credit for making it public as quickly as they did.

UK Warned As Plague Of Bee-Eating Hornets Spreads North In France

The Asian predatory hornet, Vespa velutina. Photograph: Jean Haxaire/AFP

From The Guardian:

For five years they have wreaked havoc in the fields of south-western France, scaring locals with their venomous stings and ravaging the bee population to feed their rapacious appetites. Now, according to French beekeepers, Asian predatory hornets have been sighted in Paris for the first time, raising the prospect of a nationwide invasion which entomologists fear could eventually reach Britain.

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Fresh Doubts Over Hitler's Death After Tests On Bullet Hole Skull Reveal It Belonged To A Woman

Revealed: The skull with a bullet hole, kept in a Russian archive, is a woman's

From The Daily Mail:

Adolf Hitler may not have shot himself dead and perhaps did not even die in his bunker, it emerged yesterday.

A skull fragment believed for decades to be the Nazi leader’s has turned out to be that of a woman under 40 after DNA analysis.

Scientists and historians had long thought it to be conclusive proof that Hitler shot himself in the head after taking a cyanide pill on 30 April 1945 rather than face the ignominy of capture.

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My Comment: I love a mystery like this one.