UFO Forces Closure of Chinese Airport

From Live Science:

They're baaaaaack! A Chinese airport reportedly had to divert passenger jets to prevent them from colliding with a UFO earlier this month.

The airport in Baotou, Inner Mongolia kept three flights from Shangai and Beijing circling overhead and shut down for an hour on Sept. 11 until the mysterious bright lights had vanished.

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Strong Magnets With Printed Poles Have Endless Engineering Applications

From Popular Mechanics:

The Brilliant Idea: Magnets printed with multiple poles, opening the door to myriad applications.

Larry Fullerton set out to invent a self-assembling magnetic toy that would fuel his grandchildren’s passion for science. Instead, he invented a way to manipulate magnetic fields that redefines one of the fundamental forces of nature.

Fullerton’s breakthrough tramples the long-held assumption that magnets have two opposing poles, one on each side. He found that if he used heat to erase a magnetic field, he could then reprogram material to have multiple north and south poles of differing strengths. “People look at magnets as having a north pole and a south pole. That limits your thinking,” he says. “I came along from the field of radar and said, ‘Hey, that’s not a magnet—it’s a vector field!’”

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Micro-Engraved Lenses Give Perfect Vision To Both Near- And Far-Sighted Eyes

Bifocals (Old.) Frank C. Müller

From Popular Science:

Near-sighted? Far-sighted? Middle-sighted? It doesn't matter--this "scratched" lens has you covered.

An inability to see both near and faraway objects isn't uncommon, but the classic solution--bifocals--is hardly cutting-edge. I mean, thanks, Ben Franklin, but how about something more modern? A new type of engraved lens, invented by an Israeli researcher, allows the eye to see perfectly whether the object is nearby or in the distance, without adjusting perspective. No matter your vision, these lenses claim to provide perfect clarity.

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Wind Farms Can Affect Local Weather Patterns

One of the solutions would be changing the rotor design

From The BBC:

Wind farms, especially big ones, generate turbulence that can significantly alter air temperatures near the ground, say researchers.

As turbines often stand on agricultural land, these changes could in turn affect crop productivity.

In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team says the impact could be reduced by changing rotor design.

Another option would be to site farms in areas with high natural turbulence.

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See The Future With A Search

Image: Eye candy: This visualization shows the connections between different places, companies, and people, following a search using Recorded Future. Credit: Recorded Future

From Technology Review:

A Web startup demos a "predictive" search engine.

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company's search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past.

The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works.

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Eyes-On, Glasses Off, With Toshiba's Glasses-Less 3D TV

From CNN:

(CNET) -- Ceatec doesn't officially start until tomorrow, but Toshiba is already getting the lion's share of the buzz here on the show floor, with its Glasses-less 3D TV.

The device was announced last night, and people flocked to the demonstration in a dark makeshift theater today, where the wait was nearly an hour early this morning. The reason? Because finally, mercifully, a TV maker has come up with a way to watch 3D at home without those ridiculous plastic glasses.

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British University Scientists Win Nobel Prize For Physics For Discovery Of Atom-Thick Carbon Layer 200 Times Stronger Than Steel

The Swedish academy of sciences in Stockholm announces the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics today

From The Daily Mail:

* Graphene could lead to new super-fast electronics
* Bonds between carbon atoms are the strongest in nature
* Scientist: I'll just muddle on as before after win

Two British-based scientists have shared the Nobel Prize for physics for their discovery of a new material that is only an atom thick and which could change the future of electronics.

Russian-born Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both from Manchester University, today won the prize for their 'groundbreaking experiments' with graphene - a microscopic flake of carbon.

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Stuxnet: Fact Vs. Theory

From CNET:

The Stuxnet worm has taken the computer security world by storm, inspiring talk of a top secret, government-sponsored cyberwar, and of a software program laden with obscure biblical references that call to mind not computer code, but "The Da Vinci Code."

Stuxnet, which first made headlines in July, (CNET FAQ here) is believed to be the first known malware that targets the controls at industrial facilities such as power plants. At the time of its discovery, the assumption was that espionage lay behind the effort, but subsequent analysis by Symantec uncovered the ability of the malware to control plant operations outright, as CNET first reported back in mid-August.

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The Language That Lovers Share Is A 'Window' Into The State Of Their Relationship

From The Telegraph:

Couples develop their own language of love that ebbs and flows depending on the state of their relationship, scientists believe.

Those deeply in love speak and write alike, mimicking and repeating words and phrases that each other use.

But if the relationship sours then the common language breaks down and they begin to sound more like strangers again.

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Dinosaurs Significantly Taller Than Previously Thought, Research Suggests

Photo: Dinosaur bones have rounded ends with rough surfaces that mark where blood vessels fed large amounts of cartilage in the joint. The cartilage could have added 10 percent or more to the height of a dinosaur. (Credit: Casey Holliday/University of Missouri)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2010) — It might seem obvious that a dinosaur's leg bone connects to the hip bone, but what came between the bones has been less obvious. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri and Ohio University have found that dinosaurs had thick layers of cartilage in their joints, which means they may have been considerably taller than previously thought. The study is being published this week in the journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science).

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Bedbugs Q&A: Everything You Need To Know (And More)

Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, observes bedbugs he keeps in jars and feeds with his own blood. Courtesy of AMNH/LSorkin.

From Live Science:

After decades of apparent absence, bedbugs are back with a vengeance. The bugs have returned to U.S. cities, infesting hotels, schools, apartments, homes, stores and offices. The tiny bloodsuckers are known to leave red, itchy marks on their victims, as well as a social stigma.

But where did bedbugs come from, what harm do they really cause, and why the sudden resurgence?

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Instant Expert: Rebuilding Human Minds

Memory Lost, Memory Gained koppillustration.com

From Popular Science:

Scientists hope to strengthen aging brains by tweaking the behavior of DNA.

Age-related memory loss—the kind where you remember friends from decades ago but can’t remember your grandchildren—is largely a mystery, but a class of com-pounds used to treat cancer has given neuroscientists clues to its molecular underpinnings. Scientists also suspect that the compounds responsible for this insight, called histone deacetylase inhibitors, could significantly slow memory loss—perhaps for years. (Two drugs used now to treat memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease work only for a short time.)

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Is This Apple Ap Going To Help Terrorists?

Threat: Security experts have slammed a £2 phone app which gives specific details about in-flight aircraft

Phone App That Tracks Planes 'Is Aid To Terrorists Armed With Missiles' - -The Daily Mail

A mobile phone application costing less than £2 which tracks the precise location of passenger aircraft in the sky is a serious terrorist threat and should be banned, according to a security expert.

The Plane Finder AR app for the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android allows users to point their phone at the sky and see the position, height and speed of nearby aircraft. It also shows the airline, flight number, departure point, destination and even the likely course.

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My Comment: Yup .... we found the enemy and it is us.

The Slippery Slope To Obesity

Not a good start (Image: Wade/Getty)

From New Scientist:

REWARD pathways in the brains of overweight people become less responsive as they gain weight. This causes them to eat more to get the same pleasure from their food, which in turn reduces the reward response still further.

Eric Stice, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues used fMRI brain scans to monitor 26 obese or overweight volunteers as they sipped either a tasty milkshake or a flavourless liquid resembling saliva. They compared the effect of both drinks on brain activity in the dorsal striatum, a key part of the brain's reward circuitry. Six months later, they retested the volunteers.

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Oldest High-Altitude Settlements Discovered

The Ivane Valley in Papua New Guinea appears covered in mist in this photo. Click to enlarge this image. Glenn Summerhayes and Andrew Fairbairn

From Discovery News:

The remains of fires, stone tools and food surface at six campsites dating back up to 49,000 years.

The world's oldest known high-altitude human settlements, dating back up to 49,000 years, have been found sealed in volcanic ash in Papua New Guinea mountains, archaeologists said Friday.

Researchers have unearthed the remains of about six camps, including fragments of stone tools and food, in an area near the town of Kokoda, said an archaeologist on the team, Andrew Fairbairn.

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Dolphin Species Attempt 'Common Language'

A Guyana dolphin leaps to escape the attention of a bottlenose dolphin

From The BBC:

When two dolphin species come together, they attempt to find a common language, preliminary research suggests.

Bottlenose and Guyana dolphins, two distantly related species, often come together to socialise in waters off the coast of Costa Rica.

Both species make unique sounds, but when they gather, they change the way they communicate, and begin using an intermediate language.

That raises the possibility the two species are communicating in some way.

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Video: Robots Now Guarding Nevada Nuke Site

From The Danger Room:

Citizens of Nevada, you can now relax. The Nevada National Security Site, home to tens of millions of cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste — and location of over a thousand Cold War nuclear weapons tests — is now being guarded by robots. The first of a planned trio of Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems, or MDARS, is currently patrolling some of the more remote sections of the 1,360 square mile facility.

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My Comment: The Terminator movies do not seem like science fiction anymore.

Study Identifies More Than A Million Ocean Species

Photograph: British Antarctic Survey

From The Guardian:

The Census of Marine Life is finally complete after a decade of work by 2,700 scientists from 80 countries.

It is the culmination of a decade of work by 2,700 scientists from 80 countries, who went on more than 540 expeditions into the farthest reaches of the most mysterious realm on the planet – the world's oceans.

Today, the US$650m Census of Marine Life (COML) project announced the culmination of its work, concluding that the deep is home to more than a million species – of which less than a quarter are described in the scientific literature.

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Mission To Search For Alien Life In Outer Atmosphere

Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph:

Life from outer space could be surviving on the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere, according to scientists who are to launch a mission to search for bacteria that could be living there.

In science fiction films the search for aliens involves travelling across the galaxy to planets millions of miles away.

But scientists believe they could be close to discovering alien life forms much closer to home – on the outer fringes of Earth's atmosphere.

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Geology: A Trip To Dinosaur Time

From Nature News:

A project to drill a 10-kilometre-deep hole in China will provide the best view yet of the turbulent Cretaceous period. Jane Qiu reports.

The rock columns on the table are not much to look at. More than a metre long, 10 centimetres in diameter and mostly made up of oil shale and sandstone, they are a dull greyish green. But these, says Wang Chengshan, a geologist at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, "are not ordinary rocks".

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