Super-Small Microphone Detects Motion Of Air Particles To Pinpoint Gunfire In Battle

The Microflown via Dvice

From Popular Science:

Wait, don't call it a microphone -- it's an acoustic vector sensor.

Between the yelling of sergeants, the rumble of jet engines, and the deafening pop of gunfire, a soldier's sense of hearing rapidly deteriorates in the heat of battle. Luckily, the Dutch company Microflown has designed a special microphone that can do a soldier's listening for him. By measuring the mechanical movement of individual air particles, as opposed to sound waves as a whole, the device can not only pinpoint the origin of sniper fire or approaching aircraft, but detail their make and model, as well.

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Cruise-Ship Disaster: How Do 'Rogue Waves' Work?

From Time Magazine:

It was like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie. On March 3, a sudden wall of water hit a cruise ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea off the northeastern coast of Spain, killing two people, injuring 14 and causing severe damage to the vessel.

According to Louis Cruise Lines, the owner of the vessel, the Louis Majesty was hit by three "abnormally high" waves, each more than 33 ft. (10 m) high, striking in clear weather and without warning. "We heard a loud noise, and it was the wave that hit us," Claudine Armand, a passenger from France, told the Associated Press Television News. "When we came out of [our room], we saw the wave had flooded everything."

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Decision-Makers Betrayed By Their Wide Eyes

Dither no more (Image: Adam Hart-Davis/SPL)

From New Scientist:

WHY can't teachers keep a secret? Because their pupils give them away. It turns out that when people make decisions, their pupils dilate, a subtle cue that could be used to predict a person's intentions, or even converse with people with locked-in syndrome.

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Most Extreme White Dwarf Binary System Found With Orbit Of Just Five Minutes

Graphic of HM Cancri. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Warwick)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 9, 2010) — An international team of astronomers has shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also the smallest known binary. The binary system is no larger than 8 times the diameter of the Earth which is the equivalent of no more than a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

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Even A 3-Year-Old Understands The Power Of Advertising

From Live Science:

Having the "right" brand of jeans or the latest gadget isn't just an annoying trait of teenagers (not to mention their parents). New research found that even preschoolers are brand-conscious and can recognize kiddie brand logos and products.

"Children as young as three are feeling social pressure and understand that consumption of certain brands can help them through life," said lead researcher Anna McAlister of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Findings like this show us that we need to think about materialism developing in very young children."

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How To Save And Share Ridiculously Large Files

From CNET:

A few years ago it was a big deal to find a place that would let you share 1 gigabyte of files.

Things change, though. Bandwidth keeps growing, and the cost of Web storage keeps shrinking. That's good news for people looking to share increasingly large files, be it an HD video recording or an archive of several files that tops out at over a gig.

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Drinking Alcohol Could Help Women Stay Slim

The best drink for keeping the pounds off was red wine, but all four types of tipple included in the study -- red or white wine, beer and spirits -- showed similar results. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

A glass a day could keep excessive weight gain at bay.

Women who drink a couple of glasses of red wine, beer or spirits a day are better at keeping the pounds off than women who do not drink at all, according to a study published Monday.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston asked more than 19,000, average-weight U.S. women aged 39 or older how many alcoholic beverages they typically drank in a day, and then tracked the women for around 13 years.

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Grrr… What's 'Step Away From The Bone' In Dog?

From The New Scientist:

The canine phrase book has collected its first entries. Dogs understand the meaning of different growls, from a rumble that says "back off" to playful snarls made in a tug-of-war game.

Proving that animal vocalisations have specific meanings – and what they could be – is challenging. In 2008, Péter Pongrácz, a behavioural biologist at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, monitored dogs' heart rates to show that they seem to notice a difference between barks aimed at strangers and those directed at nothing in particular. Now he has gone a step further and shown that dogs respond differently to different vocalisations.

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Could The Mono Lake Arsenic Prove There Is A Shadow Biosphere?

California, USA --- Rock Formations in Mono Lake. (Micha Pawlitzki/Corbis)

From Times Online:

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out.

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

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A Computer That Processes Faster Than The Speed of Light

Pushing the Limits of Physics Exceeding the speed of light opens one up to all kinds of theoretical problems, but two Austrian researchers claim there's no reason we can't build a computer that processes information at superluminal speeds.

From Popular Science:

How fast is too fast? According to the laws of physics, the speed of light is a good boundary, as going beyond it opens you up to all sorts of paradoxes and space-time phenomena that are usually the stuff of sci-fi. But a couple of researchers in Austria have come up with a way to compute information faster than the speed of light.

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How Safe Is Your Cell Phone?

Illustration by Jane Hong for TIME

From Time Magazine:

It takes a little extra work to get in touch with Andrea Boland. The Maine state representative answers e-mails and lists her business and home phone numbers on the Web. But unlike many politicians surgically attached to their BlackBerrys, she keeps her cell switched off unless she's expecting a call. And if she has her way, everyone in Maine — and perhaps, eventually, the rest of the U.S. — will similarly think twice before jabbering away on their mobiles.

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NASA: Space Shuttles Could Fly Longer With Extra Funds

From Space.com:

WASHINGTON – The chief of NASA's space shuttle program said Tuesday that the agency could technically continue to fly its three aging orbiters beyond their planned 2010 retirement if ordered to do so by President Barack Obama and lawmakers. All it would take would be the extra funding needed to pay for it.

Space shuttle program manager John Shannon said NASA spends about $200 million a month on its space shuttle program. That's about $2.4 billion a year that would be required to keep the shuttle flying beyond their 2010 retirement date, he said.

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Did 'Midwife Molecule' Assemble First Life On Earth?

Forming a double helix prevents the RNA from going round in circles
(Image: Laguna Design/SPL)

From New Scientist:

The primordial soup that gave birth to life on EarthMovie Camera may have had an extra, previously unrecognised ingredient: a "molecular midwife" that played a crucial role in allowing the first large biomolecules to assemble from their building blocks.

The earliest life forms are thought by many to have been based not on DNA but on the closely related molecule RNA, because long strands of RNA can act as rudimentary enzymes. This would have allowed a primitive metabolism to develop before life forms made proteins for this purpose.

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New HIV Hiding Spot Revealed

From Science:

Powerful anti-HIV drugs have come tantalizingly close to eradicating the virus from people, driving the blood level of HIV so low that standard tests cannot detect it. But no one has been cured: the virus comes roaring back in everyone who stops taking the drugs. A new study has identified one of HIV's main hideaways, raising intriguing possibilities about how to remove it.

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Exposure To Letters A Or F Can Affect Test Performance

A new study finds that seeing the letter A before an exam can improve a student's exam result while exposure to the letter F may make a student more likely to fail. (Credit: iStockphoto/Stacey Newman)

From New Scientist:

Science Daily (Mar. 9, 2010) — Seeing the letter A before an exam can improve a student's exam result while exposure to the letter F may make a student more likely to fail.

The finding is published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology in March 2010.

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13 Crazy Earthquake Facts

From Live Science:

1. Earth has been more seismologically active in the past 15 years or so, says Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science & Technology. Not all seismologist agree, however.

2. San Francisco is moving toward Los Angeles at the rate of about 2 inches per year — the same pace as the growth of your fingernails — as the two sides of the San Andreas fault slip past one another. The cities will meet in several million years. However, this north-south movement also means that despite fears, California won't fall into the sea.

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DARPA Seeks Prosthetics Directly Controllable Through Brain Implants

Military Amputees Brian Frasure, a clinical prosthetist and world-class athlete, speaks to the audience on the last day of the Military Amputees Advances Skills Training workshop at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Sgt. Sara Wood/U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

Artificial limbs have advanced quite a bit since the days of the pirate peg leg, but not nearly enough for DARPA. The Pentagon agency has kicked off a new phase of its "Revolutionizing Prosthetics" program that sets the hefty goal of creating a fully-functional human limb directly controlled by the brain within five years, according to Wired's Danger Room.

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More States Propose Internet Sales Taxes

From CNET:

Jeremy Bray received an e-mail message this morning with an unwelcome surprise: Amazon.com told him it had canceled its affiliate program, which provides small payments for referring customers, for everyone in the state of Colorado.

The reason? A state law, which Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week, slaps onerous new restrictions on large out-of-state sellers like Amazon, which said it has no choice but to end its marketing program in response.

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How To Reboot Your Corpse

Photo: Could you go on ice now and be revived around 2050? iStockphoto

From Discovery News:

Thousands of bodies are already cryonically frozen, waiting for faster computers and medical advances that will undo their cause of death.

What is death? Over the centuries, the line dividing life and death has moved from the cessation first of breathing, then of the heartbeat, and finally of brain activity. But cryogenic methods first contemplated in science fiction may push the line even further. The idea is to freeze legally dead people in liquid nitrogen in the hope of regenerating them at some future date.

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Now This Is One Big Boat

The Oasis of the Seas off Fort Lauderdale, Fla., one recent evening.
Barbara P. Fernandez for The Wall Street Journal

What It Takes to Keep a City Afloat -- Wall Street Journal

In One Day, the World's Largest Cruise Ship Prepares to Set Sail, with 700 Tons of Supplies, 80,000 Beers, and One Bagpiper

How do you keep more than 6,300 people fed, housed and having the time of their life while floating in the middle of the ocean?

The Oasis of the Seas—the world's largest cruise ship—aims to accomplish that feat nearly every week. Almost five times as large as the Titanic, it has a population during its seven-day Caribbean sailings that is larger than many American small towns—more than 8,600 when it is fully booked and including staff. The Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. ship, which first set sail last December, is almost as long as five Airbus A380 airplanes, or about four football fields. It has 24 restaurants and its own leafy "Central Park." During the weeklong sailings, about 700 tons of new supplies are needed, all loaded aboard each Saturday. Guests consume about 20 gallons of maraschino cherries and 80,000 bottles of beer.

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