Mini Drones Built To Kill

Assassin Drone Aerovironment's new "Anubis" project sounds eerily similar to the Switchblade drone, seen here Aerovironment

Air Force's Flying Assassin Robot Enters Final Development Stage -- Popular Science

The deadly drone could find and dispatch single-person targets, with "very low collateral damage"

Missile strikes by Predators, Reapers, or other aerial drones usually result in messy explosions on the ground. Now the never-ending but perhaps futile quest to attain zero collateral damage may take another step forward, with a small micro-drone missile that can kill individual targets from afar. A new $1.18-million, Phase-III Air Force contract (Phase III is typically the final development phase) for the "Anubis" drone has been awarded to the firm Aerovironment, Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog reports.

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Can The iPad Tablet Be As Successful As The Apple iPhone?

The iPhone and iPod Touch (collectively) are the fastest-adopted gadget ever. Apple has sold many, many more iPods over the years, but the music players took about two years to pick up steam, as the chart shows. How will the iPad tablet fare? Source: Morgan Stanley / Art: Rich Clabaugh, Staff for The Christian Science Monitor

From Christian Science Monitor:

The iPhone and iPod Touch are the fastest-adopted gadgets in consumer-tech history. Apple hopes that with the iPad tablet, lightning will strike twice.

In about a month, Apple will release its much-anticipated iPad tablet. This new device falls somewhere in between a smart phone and a laptop – small enough to tote around town without exhausting your shoulders, but big enough to feel like you’re reading a magazine instead of staring at a playing card.

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"Hobbit" Skeleton Challenges Evolution

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From CBS News:

18,000-Year-Old Fossils of Dwarf Cavewoman in Indonesia Raises Doubt Whether All Evolutionary Answers Lie in Africa.

(AP) Hunched over a picnic table in a limestone cave, the Indonesian researcher gingerly fingers the bones of a giant rat for clues to the origins of a tiny human.

This world turned upside down may once have existed here, on the remote island of Flores, where an international team is trying to shed light on the fossilized 18,000-year-old skeleton of a dwarf cavewoman whose discovery in 2003 was an international sensation.

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Probe May Have Found Cosmic Dust

Photo: Stardust landed back on Earth in January 2006

From The BBC:

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.

A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.

The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis.

But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.

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New DNA Technique Gives Names To The Unknown Dead

We can now identify more of those lost
(Image: Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty)

From New Scientist:

RARE snippets of genetic material locked inside fragments of bone and teeth can help identify people who die at war or sea, even when little remains of their bodies. But often there simply isn't enough DNA to be sure. A new technique, recently used to identify the Titanic's "unknown child", could make it easier for bereaved families to get a positive ID.

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What Cyberwar?

Tic-Tac-Toe's Not On The List! via PC Museum

U.S. Cybersecurity Czar Says "There Is No Cyberwar" -- Popular Science

Howard Schmidt wants U.S. cybersecurity efforts to refocus on education, information sharing, and better defense systems

Obama's new cybersecurity czar doesn't much like the term "cyberwar," calling it a "terrible metaphor" and a "terrible concept." But just in case his dislike of the term didn't get through, Howard Schmidt flat-out stated that "there is no cyberwar" during a Wired interview at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

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Senate Bill Proposes Extending The Shuttle Program By Another Two Years

Blast Off, Cash Off? Courtesy of NASA

From Popular Science:

In an attempt to shorten the gap between the end of the Space Shuttle and the deployment of its replacement, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) has introduced a bill that would extend the life of the Shuttle by two years. The bill directly contradicts the White House's space policy, which favors a rapid decommissioning of the Shuttle, followed by an emphasis on the private sector to maintain support of the International Space Station (ISS).

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For A Long Life, Smile Like You Mean It

Duchenne or not Duchenne? (Image: Archive Holdings Inc./Getty)

From The New Scientist:

If you want to live to a grand old age, then smile – and make sure you mean it. Pro baseball players in the 1950s who genuinely beamed in their official photographs tended to outlive more sullen-looking sportsmen and those who put on fake smiles.

Players from the US major league with honest grins lived an average of seven years longer than players who didn't smile for the camera and five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly, conclude Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

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Why Do Nice Girls Fall For Bad Boys?

A touch of evil can bring fitness benefits. Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale (2006).
Photograph: Reuters

From The Guardian:

Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on readers' problems. This week: bad boys.

From a nice girl, aged 37
Dear Carole, Why do girls – even nice girls – fall for bad boys, even when the girls in question are 37 and should know much better? My friends and I don't understand ourselves.

Carole replies:
The "dark triad" of human behaviour consists of narcissism (or self-obsession), psychopathy (including callous, impulsive, thrill-seeking, risk-taking behaviour) and Machiavellianism (exploitative, manipulative and deceitful behaviour). Bad boys exhibit dark triad traits and their behaviour, according to one theory, is genetic, meaning they are unlikely to change their ways.

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Cheap DNA Sequencing Will Drive A Revolution In Health Care

Credit: Leonard Lessin / Photo Researchers, Inc.

From Technology Review:

The dream of personalized medicine was one of the driving forces behind the 13-year, $3 billion Human Genome Project. Researchers hoped that once the genetic blueprint was revealed, they could create DNA tests to gauge individuals' risk for conditions like diabetes and cancer, allowing for targeted screening or preëmptive intervention. Genetic information would help doctors select the right drugs to treat disease in a given patient. Such advances would dramatically improve medicine and simultaneously lower costs by eliminating pointless treatments and reducing adverse drug reactions.

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Methane Escaping From Arctic Faster Than Expected And Could Stoke Global Warming, Warn Scientists

Photo: Researcher Katey Walter lights a pocket of methane on a lake in Siberia showing just how explosive the greenhouse gas is

From The Daily Mail:

The potent greenhouse gas methane, is bubbling out of the frozen Arctic much faster than expected and could stoke global warming.

Methane had become trapped in the permafrost over time and now 8million tonnes of it is seeping out due to rising temperatures, researchers said today.

'Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap,' Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, said in a statement.

She co-led the study published in today's edition of the journal Science.

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The Growing Cyberterrorism Threat

FBI Director Warns Of 'Rapidly Expanding' Cyberterrorism Threat -- Washington Post

SAN FRANCISCO -- FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III warned Thursday that the cyberterrorism threat is "real and . . . rapidly expanding."

Terrorists have shown "a clear interest" in pursuing hacking skills, he told thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. "They will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders, with an eye toward combining physical attacks with cyberattacks," he said.

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More News on The FBI's Concerns Over Cyberterrorism

FBI director warns of growing cyber threat -- Reuters
Mueller to Cybersecurity Experts: The FBI Wants You -- Tech News World
Mueller: cyberterrorism threat is real -- Federal News Radio
FBI Director on cyber threats: We can't do it alone -- ZDNet
Finger Pointing Begins In Cyber Attack Wars -- 24/7WallSt

Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: Heaviest Known Antinucleus Heralds New Frontier In Physics

The diagram above is known as the 3-D chart of the nuclides. The familiar Periodic Table arranges the elements according to their atomic number, Z, which determines the chemical properties of each element. Physicists are also concerned with the N axis, which gives the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The third axis represents strangeness, S, which is zero for all naturally occurring matter, but could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars. Antinuclei lie at negative Z and N in the above chart, and the newly discovered antinucleus (magenta) now extends the 3-D chart into the new region of strange antimatter. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2010) — An international team of scientists studying high-energy collisions of gold ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has published evidence of the most massive antinucleus discovered to date.

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Runaway Toyotas: What's The Real Risk?

From Live Science:

Toyota, the world's top-selling automaker, recently announced a recall of up to ten million of its vehicles over reports of sudden uncontrollable acceleration. But it's not clear exactly what the problem is.

Some suspect sticking gas pedals, others believe it's a computer glitch. Whatever's causing it, the problem can be deadly. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Toyota recalls are linked to at least 50 reported fatalities.

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Towns Go Gaga For Google

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New Era For Internet Security Amid Increased Attacks

From The BBC:

Internet security techniques must adapt to keep up with the rising tide of net attacks say officials.

The issue is top of the agenda at the world's biggest security conference hosted by vendor RSA.

Recent incidents such as the high-profile attacks on Google in China have highlighted the new challenges.

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Massive Spanish Botnet Busted, But Hacker Mastermind Remains Unknown

From Discover Magazine:

Spanish authorities announced this week that they shut down what appears to be the largest botnet ever discovered.

The Mariposa botnet, which first appeared in 2008, was a network of nearly 13 million virus-infected PCs, remotely operated by thieves stealing private information from computers in half the Fortune 1000 companies and 190 countries. Though three men are now in custody, worries over the bot are far from over.

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The Future For UAVs In The U.S. Air Force

MQ-Mb multirole fighter prepped for a precision strike mission

From The Popular Mechanics:

When the Air Force recently mapped out a game plan to 2047, its report contained a big surprise: Fewer pilots and more robotic planes acting on their own. Will the airman-centric service accept a future with fewer cockpits? And are we ready for UAVs that can fire their weapons without human permission?

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With Artificial Photosynthesis, A Bottle of Water Could Produce Enough Energy To Power A House

Potential Energy Cells? shrff14, via Flickr.com

From Popular Science:

One of the interesting side effects of last year's stimulus bill was $400 million in funding for ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. And in this week's first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he put that stimulus money to use by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.

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Knowing The Mind Of God: Seven Theories Of Everything

Getting inside the mind of God (Image: John Lund/Getty)

From New Scientist:

The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God".

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