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One-man flying space hopper could become the 'air car' of the future

It might look like as space hopper surrounded by model helicopters, but the 16-rotor E-Volo is an entirely new kind of helicopter - which can hover motionless in the air without input from the pilot.

Its bold engineer, Thomas Senkel, took the machine on its first manned flight this week - lasting 1 minute 30 seconds.

It's not the first electric helicopter flight - but this is a new kind of machine, steered simply by joystick, with the pilot sitting above the rotors. Senkel says it could revolutionise transport.

The three inventors claim their flying machine could be used for inspecting pipelines, as an air ambulance or for taking aerial photographs - as well as just for fun.

Once they have solved the problem of how to keep it in the air for longer - and support more people - Senkel hopes it might replace helicopters for good. More

DNA: The next big hacking frontier

Imagine computer-designed viruses that cure disease, new bacteria capable of synthesizing an unlimited fuel supply, new organisms that wipe out entire populations and bio-toxins that target world leaders. They sound like devices restricted to feature-film script writers, but it is possible to create all of these today, using the latest advances in synthetic biology.

Just as the personal computer revolution brought information technology from corporate data centers to the masses, the biology revolution is personalizing science.

In 2000, scientists at a private company called Celera announced that the company had raced ahead of the U.S. government-led international effort decoding the DNA of a human being. Using the latest sequencing technology, plus the data available from the Human Genome project, Celera scientists had created a working draft of the genome. These efforts cost over $1 billion, combined. More

Prototype passenger spaceship poised for launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A prototype passenger spaceship developed by privately owned Space Exploration Technologies arrived in Florida on Sunday for launch on a practice cargo run to the International Space Station, officials said on Monday.

Liftoff of the Dragon capsule aboard the company's Falcon 9 rocket is targeted for as early as December 19, although the final launch date will be set by NASA, which is sponsoring the flight, said Bobby Block, vice president for communications for Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The mission will mark the third flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and the second for a Dragon capsule, which is designed to fly first cargo and later crew to the space station, among other missions.

With the retirement of the space shuttles this summer, NASA is dependent on partner countries to deliver cargo and to ferry astronauts to the orbital outpost, a $100 billion project of 16 nations that orbits about 225 miles above the planet. More

Meteorites: Tool kits for creating life on Earth

Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, came to Earth on meteorites. New research, published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that certain nucleobases do reach the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, by way of certain meteorites, and in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought.

Extensive research has shown that amino acids, which string together to form proteins, exist in space and have arrived on our planet piggybacked on a type of organic-rich meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites. But it has been difficult to similarly prove that the nucleobases found on meteorite samples are not due to contamination from sources on Earth.

The research team, which included Jim Cleaves of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, used advanced spectroscopy techniques to purify and analyze samples from 11 different carbonaceous chondrites and one ureilite, a very rare type of meteorite with a different type of chemical composition. Two of the carbonaceous chondrites contained a diverse array of nucleobases and compounds that are structurally similar, so-called nucleobase analogs.

Especially telling was the fact that three of these nucleobase analogs are very rare in terrestrial biology. What's more, significant concentrations of these nucleobases were not found in soil and ice samples from the areas near where the meteorites were collected. More

The 'Prius of bicycles' switches gears by reading your mind

Parlee Cycles's new bike looks ordinary enough, but the helmet gives it away. Plastic tentacles reach down from the headgear, pressing metal sensors against the cyclist's scalp.

This snug but comfortable helmet has a secret power. It reads minds.

Its array of neurotransmitters sends signals to a smart phone attached to the bicycle's handlebars, which then connects to the gear system. With a little training, a cyclist can change gears with a thought. One kind of brain wave commands the bike to downshift; another causes it to shift up.

"Sounds kind of crazy, right?" says Patrick Miller, senior creative engineer at Deeplocal, the company responsible for the digital end of this Prius X Parlee bicycle (PXP). "We underestimated how magical it would feel to shift with your mind."

PXP is a joint venture of Deeplocal; Parlee Cycles, a bike manufacturer that handcrafts carbon-fiber bikes; and Toyota, maker of the Prius hybrid car. More

Australian Aborigines: stargazers 20,000 years ago

Australia this week provided the world with an example of scientific excellence that has had a profound impact on how mankind understands the universe.

No, we're not talking about the Nobel Prize for physics, jointly awarded to Aussie scientist Brian Schmidt and his American colleagues, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for their research into supernovae.

Rather, a ring of waist-high boulders that could pre-date Britain's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids, suggest that Australia's ancient Aborigines not only studied the stars, but had a deep understanding of astronomy.

The stone arrangement, situated in the southern state Victoria not far from Melbourne, is known by its Aboriginal name Wurdi Youang. More

Kindle makes for heavy reading

One of the original selling points of Amazon's Kindle was that the device weighed no more than the average paperback. In the brave new world of the e-reader, bibliophiles could load their gadgets with the complete works of Proust, Tolstoy and Dickens without fear of spraining their wrists on their way to work.

So imagine the consternation among gadget fans when it emerged this week that the Kindle actually weighs more when it is fully loaded with books.

John Kubiatowicz, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, tackled this vital question for the New York Times. He explained that e-readers store data by trapping electrons, and while the number of electrons in the gadget's memory does not change, it takes more energy to hold them in place than to leave them roaming free. How much more energy? Around a billionth of a microjoule for each bit of data stored.

Working from Einstein's famous equation, which states that energy and mass are equivalent, Kubiatowicz worked out how much the weight of a Kindle might change as the books built up. He compared an empty four-gigabyte Kindle with a full one, in which half the electrons were trapped, requiring an extra 17 microjoules of energy. More

Genetic research confirms that non-Africans are part Neanderthal

Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa, according to an international team of researchers led by Damian Labuda of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. The research was published in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," says Dr. Labuda. His team places the timing of such intimate contacts and/or family ties early on, probably at the crossroads of the Middle East.

Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Meanwhile, early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. The question on everyone's mind has always been whether the physically stronger Neanderthals, who possessed the gene for language and may have played the flute, were a separate species or could have interbred with modern humans. The answer is yes, the two lived in close association. More

Kepler Mission Discovers “Tatooine-like” Planet

Kepler mission scientists announced the first confirmed circumbinary planet ( a planet that orbits a binary star system). The planet in question, designated Kepler-16b has been compared to the planet Tatooine from the Star Wars saga.

Would it be possible for someone like Luke Skywalker to stand on the surface of Kepler-16b and see the famous “binary sunset” as depicted in Star Wars?

Despite the initial comparison between Kepler-16b and Tatooine, the planets really only have their orbit around a binary star system in common. Kepler-16b is estimated to weigh about a third the mass of Jupiter, with a radius of around three-quarters that of Jupiter.

Given the mass and radius estimates, this makes Kepler-16b closer to Saturn than the rocky, desert-like world of Tatooine. Kepler-16b’s orbit around its two parent stars takes about 229 days, which is similar to Venus’ 225-day orbit. At a distance of about 65 million miles from its parent stars, which are both cooler than our sun, temperatures on Kepler-16b are estimated in the range of around -100 C.

The team did mention that Kepler-16b is just outside of the habitable zone of the Kepler-16 system. Despite being just outside the habitable zone, the team did mention that it could be possible for Kepler-16b to have a habitable moon, if said moon had a thick, greenhouse gas atmosphere. More

Hackers Build Cheap Spy Drone that Rivals CIA Predator

LAS VEGAS (Hollywood Today) 8/10/11 – Hackers have built a DIY flying drone that can launch remote attacks which astounded attendees at the Black Hat/Defcon meet here.

The hackers built their drone for about $6,000, while the CIA coughs up about S4.5 million each for their Predator drones. Though it doesn’t fire a pair of Hellfire missiles like the CIA models, the hacker drone has some serious teeth.

Hackers could use them to to intercept all wifi traffic and steal credit card numbers, fly above corporations to steal intellectual property and other data from a network, as well as launch denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle attacks. They could also transmit a cell phone jamming signal to frustrate an enemy’s communications.

A drone could also be used to single out a target, using the target’s cellphone to identify him in a crowd, and then follow his movements. And it would be handy for drug smuggling, or for terrorists to trigger a dirty bomb. Guess you can’t get these at Radio Shack, though security researchers Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins did almost that. They went to an army surplus store, and built the rest with existing easily-found technology. More

Massive asteroid hurtling towards Earth (but don't worry, scientists say it will just miss us)

A massive asteroid will fly within the moon's orbit narrowly missing Earth later this year.

The space rock, called YU55, will hurtle past our planet at a distance of just 201,700 miles during its closest approach on November 8.

That is closer to Earth than the moon, which orbits 238,857miles away on average. With a width of some 400metres and weighing 55million tons, YU55 will be the largest object to ever approach Earth so close.

Nasa spokesman Don Yeomans said: 'On November 8, asteroid YU55 will fly past Earth and at its closest approach point will be about 325,000kms away.

'This asteroid is about 400 metres wide - the largest space rock we have identified that will come this close until 2028.'

Despite YU55's close proximity to Earth, its gravitational pull on our planet will be 'immeasurably miniscule'. More

Are Google’s Driverless Cars Legal?

Google's project to design driverless vehicles raised several questions about the future of driving. But it also raised a more topical question: Are Google's heavily-modified driverless vehicle prototypes even legal? We found out.

Researchers have been working on driverless vehicles since the late 1970s; European governments spent nearly $1 billion in the 1980s and '90s on automated vehicles, including a Mercedes sedan that passed other vehicles on the German autobahn in 1995 at speeds of 110 mph without human input.

In revealing its project Sunday, Google said it had racked up nearly 140,000 miles in its vehicles on public roads, including the Pacific Coast Highway and famous spots such as San Francisco's twisty Lombard Street. The computing giant says it alerted local law enforcement officials whenever testing took place.

According to California officials, there are no laws that would bar Google from testing such models, as long as there's a human behind the wheel who would be responsible should something go wrong. Google says its test vehicles always have at least three passengers: a driver behind the wheel and two technicians to monitor the software and systems. More

Researchers Announce a Breakthrough on HIV/AIDS Treatment

For the first time, researchers have shown that a cell-based therapy for HIV/AIDS can reduce the amount of virus in infected people. The breakthrough—big news for researchers, who have struggled for decades to create vaccines and cell-based therapies for HIV—was announced on Sunday at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago. To date, the sole treatment for HIV has been multidrug regimens that prolong life but never eliminate the virus.

Sangamo BioSciences of Richmond, California, says it has found a way to protect the T cells that HIV attacks first, so they can live to fight another day. The approach entails temporarily stopping a patient's antiretroviral therapy and removing T cells carrying the CD4 receptor. This surface protein is the doorway by which the virus gains entry into the cell. The collected T cells are exposed to zinc finger nuclease, an enzyme designed to remove the gene for a coreceptor of CD4 called CCR5. The cells are then reinfused into the patient. Once they're back in the body, the new study shows, the cells persist and travel in the body just like normal T cells. More

This is what astronomers call a "fluffy" spiral galaxy

Actually (if you insist on being technical about it), astronomers refer to it as a "flocculent" spiral galaxy, but it means pretty much the same thing. Seriously, look it up.

This recent picture of spiral galaxy NGC 3521, snapped through the lens of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope, captures in stunning detail a flocculent galaxy's most distinguishing features: long, patchy, and irregular spiral arms that take on a distinctively wooly appearance when photographed from 35 million light years away — much like they do here.

Residing in the constellation of Leo and spanning about 50,000 light-years, the ESO says that NGC 3521 is close enough and bright enough that it can easily be spotted with a small telescope, like the one used by British astronomer William Herschel when he discovered the galaxy in the 18th century. More

Judging penis size by comparing index, ring fingers

Penis length cannot be determined by how big his hands or feet are -- those and other supposed indicators have been widely discredited for years. But now a team of Korean researchers has produced what may be a more reliable guide: the ratio of the length of his index finger to that of his ring finger. The lower that ratio, the longer the penis may be, the researchers wrote Monday in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

Dr. Tae Beom Kim, a urologist at Gachon University in Incheon, Korea, and his colleagues studied 144 men over the age of 20 who were undergoing urological surgery for conditions that do not affect the length of the penis. One member of the team carefully measured the lengths of the index and ring fingers on the subject's right hand before surgery -- left hands are thought to be more variable. A second team member then measured penis length immediately after the subject had been anesthetized. The length was measured both when the penis was flaccid and when it had been stretched as much as possible. Stretched length is thought to correlate to erect length, the team wrote. The team found that, in general, the lower the ratio of the lengths of the two fingers, the longer the stretched length of the penis. More

Aptera refunds deposits, future unclear

Those who have been waiting for their Aptera electric cars since 2008 are in for more bad news: The Carlsbad, Calif.-based company is returning all deposits made by customers who signed up to buy the Aptera 2e all-electric car or the 2h hybrid model.

Aptera rose to prominence in the green-car world by entering the Automotive X Prize in 2008. The company's two-seat, three-wheel commuter vehicle was claimed to get 300 mpg, at a price of less than $30,000.

The vehicle was said to be headed toward production in December of that year. But, in late 2009, the car still had not been produced, a result of money troubles and engineering changes. The company readjusted and estimated the vehicle would be available in 2010.

Now, Aptera says it is returning deposits because of a problem with its credit-card processor, which is designed for transactions to be completed in a six-month window-- far exceeded by the prolonged production time of the vehicle.Aptera issued a statement last week saying, in part: “Reservation-holder contact information will be moved to our newly created VIP database and used to provide you with exclusive information about future happenings at Aptera. More

Time need not end in the multiverse

GAMBLERS already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all.

It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1 hour. Upon waking, you will have no idea how long you have just slept.

The dealer smiles: would you like to bet on heads or tails? Knowing it's a fair coin, you assume your odds are 50/50, so you choose tails. But the house has an advantage. The dealer knows you will almost certainly lose, because she is factoring in something you haven't: that we live in a multiverse.

The idea that our universe is just one of many crops up in a number of physicists' best theories, including inflation. It posits that different parts of space are always ballooning into separate universes, so that our observable universe is just a tiny island in an exponentially growing multiverse. More

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sensory Deprivation Tanks

On Fringe, a sensory deprivation tank can activate your mental powers and even open a gateway to another universe. But what can floating in a dark warm tank do for you in real life? And why would people even want to do such a thing?

The sensory deprivation tank — a temperature-regulated, salt-water filled, soundproof, lightproof tank that can isolate its occupant from numerous forms of sensory input all at once — has gone by many names over the years, but its overall design and purpose have remained largely unchanged: to find out what your brain does when it's shoved into a box all by itself and left alone for a while. Here's the complete lowdown on sensory deprivation tanks.

Back in the old days, if you wanted to experience sensory deprivation you wore a blindfold or stuck your fingers in your ears like everybody else. But that all changed in 1954, when neuroscientist John C. Lilly dared to question what would happen if the mind was deprived of as much external stimulus as possible.

In the original deprivation tank, you were suspended in 160 gallons of water with everything but the top of your head completely submerged. A nightmarish-looking "black-out" mask, similar to the ones pictured here, supplied you with air and blocked any light from reaching your eyes. The water and air temperature were kept at the same temperature as your skin, roughly 34 degrees celsius. More

NASA's Mars Rovers Are Great at Finding Meteorites!

NASA's two Mars Rovers have found some spectacular meteorites. On Earth, the only humans who are as successful at finding meteorites are professional meteorite hunters. Are meteorites that abundant on Mars or are these Rovers simply lucky?

The answer to this question has a lot to do with the environment of the two planets. The surface of Earth has an environment that is rich in oxygen and moisture - both of which are rapidly destructive to iron meteorites. A meteorite that lands on Earth's surface would rust away in a blink of geologic time. Mars, however, has very little oxygen and moisture in its atmosphere and surface soils. Meteorites that land on Mars can remain in excellent condition for millions - or even billions - of years. Mars is the perfect place to hunt for meteorites. More

Breakthrough: Electronic circuits that are integrated with your skin

A team of engineers today announced a discovery that could change the world of electronics forever. Called an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), it's basically an electronic circuit mounted on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements of your body.

EES is a leap forward for wearable technologies, and has potential applications ranging from medical diagnostics to video game control and accelerated wound-healing. Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman, who worked on the discovery, tell io9 it's a huge step towards erasing the divide that separates machine and human.

Coleman and Rogers say they developed EES to forego the hard and rigid electronic "wafer" format of traditional electronics in favor of a softer, more dynamic platform.

To accomplish this, their team brought together scientists from several labs to develop "filamentary serpentine" (threadlike and squiggly) circuitry. When this circuitry is mounted on a thin, rubber substrate with elastic properties similar to skin, the result is a flexible patch that can bend and twist, or expand and contract, all without affecting electronic performance. More

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so.

HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward.

After Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers. More

Dawn probe has date with asteroid

The US space agency says its Dawn probe should now be in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. The robotic satellite will be spending a year at the 530km-wide body before moving on to the "dwarf planet" Ceres.

New pictures on Dawn's approach to Vesta show the giant rock in unprecedented detail.

The asteroid looks like a punctured football, the result of a colossal collision sometime in its past that knocked off its south polar region.

Confirmation that Dawn is safely circling the rock should come on Sunday (GMT) when the probe is due to return data on its status. Vesta was discovered in 1807, the fourth asteroid to be identified in the great belt of rocky debris orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. More

Researchers Unearth 'First Gay Caveman'

The first known "gay caveman" has been unearthed in a dig outside Prague, researchers believe. Archeological team members based their conclusion on the fact that the male body was interred in a ritualistic way reserved for females. "We know people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," said the lead archaeologist. "Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation—homosexual or transsexual," she added.

The body dates to as long ago as 2900 BC, reports the Telegraph, and was buried with the head pointing east and surrounded by domestic jugs.

Men at the time were buried facing west and surrounded by weapons and tools. "What we see here doesn't add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms," said the team leader. Another researcher classified it as "one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a 'transsexual' or 'third gender' grave." More

NASA to focus on deep space exploration with new spacecraft

NASA has decided to use designs originally planned for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle as the basis for a new transportation system that will carry U.S. astronauts into deep space in the future, NASA chief Charles Bolden said.

"As we aggressively continue our work on a heavy lift launch vehicle, we are moving forward with an existing contract to keep development of our new crew vehicle on track," Bolden said on Tuesday.

The Orion vehicle, which resembles the legendary Apollo spacecraft, was part of the Constellation program meant to return U.S. astronauts to the Moon and bring them to Mars.

The program was folded by the current Obama administration in 2010, but Lockheed Martin continued work on the Orion project to develop a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). More

Atlas Gives Scientists New View of the Brain

Scientists funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen unveiled a $55 million computerized atlas of the human brain Tuesday, offering the first interactive research guide to the anatomy and genes that animate the mind.

A project of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, the online atlas offers researchers a powerful new tool to understand where and how genes are at work in the brain. That could help them find new clues to conditions rooted in the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease, autism and mental-health disorders like depression.

"Until now, a definitive map of the human brain at this level of detail simply hasn't existed," said Allan Jones, the nonprofit institute's chief executive. "For the first time, we have generated a comprehensive map of the brain that includes the underlying biochemistry."

The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy. More

Teen hipsters discover joys of analog photography

SAN FRANCISCO--Carolyn LaHorgue might seem like the type of teenager who would embrace digital technology. She designed her own Web site, is a Facebook aficionado, and is planning to study media and communications at New York University this fall.

Yet the 17-year-old, who lives just north of San Francisco, totes around an artifact right out of the 19th century: an analog camera that uses actual film. "It represents the individualist lifestyle," LaHorgue says.

LaHorgue is not alone. Teenagers are leading a kind of backward transition, leaving digital devices behind, at least temporarily, for technology their grandparents pioneered.

Classic film cameras, such as Holga, Diana, Minolta, and Nikon, are being chosen over smaller-than-your-fist digital point-and-shoots on the theory that it's cool to struggle with manual aperture settings. Or it's rebellious to scope out the best lighting for a shot. More

After Earth: Why, Where, How, and When We Might Leave Our Home Planet

Earth won’t always be fit for occupation. We know that in two billion years or so, an expanding sun will boil away our oceans, leaving our home in the universe uninhabitable—unless, that is, we haven’t already been wiped out by the Andromeda galaxy, which is on a multibillion-year collision course with our Milky Way. Moreover, at least a third of the thousand mile-wide asteroids that hurtle across our orbital path will eventually crash into us, at a rate of about one every 300,000 years.

Indeed, in 1989 a far smaller asteroid, the impact of which would still have been equivalent in force to 1,000 nuclear bombs, crossed our orbit just six hours after Earth had passed. A recent report by the Lifeboat Foundation, whose hundreds of researchers track a dozen different existential risks to humanity, likens that one-in-300,000 chance of a catastrophic strike to a game of Russian roulette: “If we keep pulling the trigger long enough we’ll blow our head off, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be the next pull.”

Many of the threats that might lead us to consider off-Earth living arrangements are actually man-made, and not necessarily in the distant future. More

New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.

However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.

The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy. More

Are Earthlings From Mars?
New Tool May Reveal Your Alien Ancestry

It's possible that the family tree of all life on Earth has its roots on Mars — and a new device could put that theory to the test in a few years, researchers say.

Researchers are developing an instrument that would search through samples of Martian dirt, isolating any genetic material from microbes that might be present — bugs that are living or that died relatively recently, within the last million years or so. Scientists could then use standard biochemical techniques to analyze any resulting genetic sequences, comparing them to what we find on Earth.

"It’s a long shot,” said MIT researcher Chris Carr, who's working on the life-detecting device, in a statement. "But if we go to Mars and find life that’s related to us, we could have originated on Mars. Or if it started here, it could have been transferred to Mars." More

World's smallest computer watches you — from within

Researchers recently unveiled the first complete millimeter-scale computing system that is about the size of the letter "N" on the back of a penny (or about the same size as the letter in this sentence).

This tiniest computer to date is a prototype of an implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients. Key to this unit linking up with other computers to form wireless sensor networks is a compact radio that needs no tuning to find the right frequency.

One day, these Lilliputian computers could track pollution, monitor structural integrity, perform surveillance, or make virtually any object smart and traceable.

"When you get smaller than hand-held devices, you turn to these monitoring devices," said David Blaauw, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan who is working on the new tiny computer. More

Comet-hunting spacecraft shuts down after 12 years

DENVER — NASA ordered its comet-hunting Stardust probe to burn its remaining fuel on Thursday, setting off a sequence that shut down the spacecraft after a 12-year career.

Stardust had finished its main mission in 2006, sending particles from a comet to Earth. It took on another job last month, photographing a crater on an asteroid.

It accomplished one last experiment on Thursday, firing its thrusters until its last hydrazine fuel was gone. The length of that burn, a little under 2 1/2 minutes, will tell engineers exactly how much fuel was left so they can see how accurate their calculations were.

That in turn will help with the design and operation of future probes. Spacecraft don't carry fuel gauges because they don't work in zero gravity.

Engineers gave Stardust the order to begin its final burn at 4:41 p.m. MDT. Once the fuel was gone, the probe lost its ability to keep its antennas pointed toward Earth, and the control room lost radio contact at 5:33 p.m. More

ZX81: Small black box of computing desire

Packing a heady 1KB of RAM, you would have needed many, many thousands of them to run Word or iTunes, but the ZX81 changed everything.

It didn't do colour, it didn't do sound, it didn't sync with your trendy Swap Shop style telephone, it didn't even have an off switch. But it brought computers into the home, over a million of them, and created a generation of software developers.

Before, computers had been giant expensive machines used by corporations and scientists - today, they are tiny machines made by giant corporations, with the power to make the miraculous routine. But in the gap between the two stood the ZX81.

It wasn't a lot of good at saving your work - you had to record finished programming onto cassette tape and hope there was no tape warp. It wasn't even that good at keeping your work, at least if you had the 16K extension pack stuck precariously into the back. More

New Photos of Mercury From NASA's Messenger Probe

NASA's Messenger spacecraft acquired this image of Mercury's horizon as the spacecraft was moving northward along the first orbit during which MDIS camera instrument was activated, which occurred on March 29, 2011. Bright rays from Hokusai can be seen running north to south in the image. The right side of this image is about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) in extent. More

Archaeologists Discover Saber-Toothed Vegetarian

Surprised scientists have discovered the remains of a saber-toothed vegetarian. The leaf-crunching animal - about the size of a large dog - lived 260 million years ago in what is now Brazil, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Its upper canine teeth were nearly 5 inches long.

Such large teeth are more often the mark of a meat-eating animal, used to capture and kill prey.

The enormous canines were likely used by the plant-eating animals to fight each other or protect against predators, said research leader Juan Carlos Cisneros of the University of Piaui in northeastern Brazil.

For example, they might have fought for territory, resources or females, like the modern musk deer, which also have a pair of large, tusklike teeth, he said via email. More

Found: New Evidence of Ice Volcanoes on Titan

Saturn’s moon Titan has lakes on its surface and a thick atmosphere, but there’s one more way this cold, distant world is like the Earth: It appears to have volcanoes—though they’re a little chillier than Eyjafjallajökull.

Scientists have long suspected and presented some evidence that Titan could have these features, and this week at the American Geophysical Union meet-up, researchers presented a finding from the Cassini spacecraft that they say is the best evidence yet of a Titanic volcano.

“We finally have some proof that Titan is an active world,” said geophysicist Randolph Kirk of the U.S. Geological Survey, who presented the findings.

The place is called Sotra. It may have the look of an Earth volcano—a 3,000-foot-tall mountain with a crater in the middle—but this mountain isn’t erupting with liquid hot magma. The surface of Titan is nearly -300 degrees F, and the cryovolcano could be erupting water ice and ammonia. More

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's the army's latest spy drone

A pocket-sized spy drone disguised as a hummingbird has been unveiled by a major Pentagon contractor measuring just 16 centimetres and weighing less than an AA battery.

The mini spy plane can fly up to 11 miles an hour and took five years to develop at a cost of $4million.

Army chiefs hope to use the drone’s tiny camera to spy on enemy positions in war zones without arousing detection and eventually deploy it into both rural and urban environments.

Experts hope the drone, which can fly just by flapping its wings, compared with current models which rely on propellers, will eventually be able to swoop through open windows and perch on power lines.

The demonstration by AeroVironment – one of the world’s biggest drone suppliers – lasted eight minutes and saw the new creation fly through a door into an building and out again, and withstand winds of five miles per hour. More

From Cave Paintings to the Internet: 50,000 years of Information Technology

Found on all corners of the globe and still in use among non-literate societies today, pictographs tell stories, leave instructions and depict local life. A significant step towards language and art, pictographs served humans need for communication for thousands of years. More

Progress on tablet computer for developing nations

Everybody is trying to grab a piece of the tablet action at the gadget geekfest known as the Consumer Electronics Show.

Among them, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, whose mission is to bring low-powered, low-cost devices to the developing world.

They have just launched a hybrid computer that turns into a tablet, but plan to release a dedicated device by 2012.

The new $165 (about £106) XO-1.75 laptop will start shipping after the summer to countries around the world to bring school children into the computer age. Its precursor cost around $199 (about £128) and OLPC says around two million have now been distributed.

The big challenge with the new laptop was to reduce power consumption. OLPC chief technology officer Ed McNierney told BBC News they have slashed the wattage from five watts to two by using low powered ARM-based chips from Marvell technology. More

Oxygen on Saturn's Moon

The Cassini mission has collected an impressive body of data from Saturn and it's many moons and rings. Evidence collected in 2008 seemed to suggest that its second moon, Rhea (about half the size of our own moon) may have a tiny ring structure of its own.

Follow-up observations showed that this discovery was mistaken and that these rings do not exist, but did reveal something just as interesting:

An atmosphere rich in oxygen. The chemistry is complex and scientists are still sifting through the mountain of information, but this is what Cassini team scientist Ben Teolis thinks is happening: Based on its density, Rhea seems to be composed of three parts water to one part rock.

Because of its cold location so far from the Sun, this water is frozen into ice. Now, solar radiation trapped by Saturn's magnetic field gets whipped around and accelerated into Rhea, and this causes breaks the water molecules down into hydrogen and oxygen. More

Early Humans Settled in Britain 800,000 Years Ago

Early humans migrating out of Africa adapted to freezing climes more than 800,000 years ago, far sooner than previously thought possible, according to a landmark study released Wednesday.

A trove of flint tools found near Happisburgh in the eastern English county of Norfolk marks Homo sapiens' earliest known settlement in a location where winter temperatures fell below zero degrees Celsius (minus 32 degrees Fahrenheit).

The discovery implies our ancestors some 26,000 generations ago survived climates like those of southern Sweden today, perhaps without the comforting benefit of fire or clothes, the study says.

Until now, almost every archaeological site testifying to habitation across Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene period, 1.8 million to 780,000 years ago, has been below the 45th parallel, suggesting a natural temperature barrier to further northward expansion. More

Scientists Trap Elusive Antimatter

It powered the Starship Enterprise's warp drive and almost blew up the Vatican in Dan Brown's novel "Angels & Demons." But antimatter is no longer confined to the realm of far-fetched fiction. Scientists have now discovered how to capture and contain matter's elusive and exotic counterpart.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland detail how they caught 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen -- the simplest type of antimatter -- and stored them for about two-tenths of a second. Sci-fi geeks or mad papal aides shouldn't celebrate yet, however.

"[Thirty-eight atoms is] an incredibly small amount," said Rob Thompson, head of physics and astronomy at Canada's University of Calgary and one of the paper's 42 co-authors. "Nothing like what we would need to power 'Star Trek's' Starship Enterprise or even to heat a cup of coffee." More

The Love Neuroscientist

Love is celebrated as a many-splendored thing, while lust is commonly regarded as downright primitive. Leave it to a Frenchwoman to discover that sexual desire is actually quite brainy. Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, uses brain scans to examine the divine madness of love and the blinding imperative of lust. Her goal: illuminating how these two forms of attraction work by mapping out which brain regions are active when we experience them. Her findings counter the assumption that desire is a simple animal urge motivated primarily by biochemistry and evolutionary directives.

Working with her frequent collaborator, psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, Ortigue has found that lust involves complicated cognitive processing. Love, too, is not quite what we thought. Both romance and desire, she says, may be expressions of a “top-down” process in which intellect rules over instinct, not the other way around. Love may even make you smarter, by helping your brain process information more quickly. More

Huge Ocean Likely Covered More Than a Third of Mars 3.5 Billion Years Ago

It took NASA a few decades, several probes, and a whole lot of money to find hard evidence for the existence of water on the surface of Mars. But timing is everything. Had the agency been looking for water on the Red Planet a few billion years earlier, all they would've needed was a telescope. A new CU-Boulder analysis of the Martian surface has concluded that a massive ocean covered as much as a third of the planet around 3.5 billion years ago.

The CU researchers are by no means the first to suggest that Mars was once home to large oceans, but their research does lend a lot of credence to earlier assertions to that effect, assertions that have been challenged repeatedly over the years. The study is the first to mash up a huge body of data collected by NASA and ESA missions over the last decade. That data suggests Mars at one point had a hydrological cycle not too different from our own, including cloud formation, groundwater accumulation, and precipitation.

The ocean -- which likely covered about 36 percent of the planet and contained 30 million cubic miles of water, about ten times less than Earth's oceans -- was fed by at least 52 river deltas which were in turn fed by countless river valleys and tributaries. Half of those deltas were at similar elevations, most likely marking the ocean's boundaries. More

Anthropologists adopt a more favorable view of Neanderthals

Scientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and quite different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past.

The latest revision involves Neanderthals who lived in southern Italy from about 42,000 to 35,000 years ago, a group that had to face fast-changing climate conditions that required them to adapt.

And that, says anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore, is precisely what they did: fashioning new hunting tools, targeting more-elusive prey and even wearing identifying ornaments and body painting.

Traditional Neanderthal theory has it that they changed their survival strategies only when they came into contact with more-modern early humans. But Riel-Salvatore, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver writing in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, says that was not the case in southern Italy. More

Secret Mini-Shuttle Lands in California

The Orbital Test Vehicle, also known as the X-37B, touched down at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, becoming the first U.S. vehicle to make an autonomous runway landing from space.

The former Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle accomplished the feat in 1988, following the sole spaceflight of the Soviet shuttle program.

The military won't say what the X-37B was doing during its seven-plus months in space, but officials were satisfied enough to reiterate their intention to launch a second X-37B vehicle in the spring of 2011.

Before the X-37B's launch on April 22, the program manager at the time said the primary purpose of the flight was to test the vehicle as a platform for experiments.

It is not known if the space plane carried anything in its small cargo hold.

"We are very pleased that the program completed all the on-orbit objectives for the first mission," program manager Lt. Col. Troy Giese said in a statement. More

Chunk of original earth found

Imagine you suddenly discovered part of your umbilical cord was still attached. Scientists just did that for the planet Earth.

What's been found is a clear sign that beneath the crust in northern Canada there is a chunk of pristine, undisturbed rock from the time when Earth was nothing but molten rock.

The evidence comes in the form of lava rocks that, themselves, are a mere 60 million years old. But these rocks contain an early Earth mixture of helium, lead and neodymium isotopes which suggest the mantle rock beneath the crust that yielded them is a virgin pocket of Earth's original material.

That pocket had survived for 4.5 billion years under Baffin Island without being mixed by plate tectonics or erupted onto the surface. More

'Renewable Girls' calendar strives to make solar power sexy

'Renewable Girls' is a new 2011 calendar that strives to make solar power sexy by pairing scantily clad ladies with various solar technology.

The calendar was shot by New York photographer Giacomo Fortunato and, according to Renewable Girls, "aims to widen solar's cultural appeal."

Addressing critics who find the approach distasteful, Renewable Girls founder John B. says, "Some tree huggers fear that degrading solar by exploiting woman will alienate potential adopters. Advertising industry experts, on the other hand, have found beautiful women to be remarkably successful in selling everything from gas guzzlers to designer hand bags.

Since when has solar been too clean to take a bubble bath with the most basic of desires?" More

Stone Age Color, Glue 'Factory' Found

The Stone Age version of successful businessmen like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might have been involved in the color and glue trade.

A once-thriving 58,000-year-old ochre powder production site has just been discovered in South Africa. The discovery offers a glimpse of what early humans valued and used in their everyday lives.

The finding, which will be described in the Journal of Archaeological Science, also marks the first time that any Stone Age site has yielded evidence for ochre powder processing on cemented hearths -- an innovation for the period. A clever caveman must have figured out that white ash from hearths can cement and become rock hard, providing a sturdy work surface.

The map was created using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that has been circling the moon since June 2009. The orbiter measured the height of the surface by sending billions of laser pulses towards the surface and measuring the time it took for the pulses to return. The method is precise enough it would have been able to detect a small house if there were one, Head said. More

Moon Crater Map Reveals Early Solar System History

The first complete topographic map of the moon and its craters has revealed details of billions of years of bombardment by asteroids, and the early history of our solar system. Among other things, the map confirms theories of an onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely evaporated any water present on Earth at the time.

“Ever since the surface of the moon could be photographed, scientists have counted craters on the moon and tried to decipher the projectile-bombardment rate and the geological history of the moon,” said geologist James Head of Brown University, lead author of the study in Science Sept. 16. “But until now we’ve had uneven or low-resolution coverage.”

The map was created using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that has been circling the moon since June 2009. The orbiter measured the height of the surface by sending billions of laser pulses towards the surface and measuring the time it took for the pulses to return. The method is precise enough it would have been able to detect a small house if there were one, Head said. More

Eyeborg: Canadian replaces eye with video camera

When Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence was a kid, he would peer through the bionic eye of his Six Million Dollar Man action figure. After a shooting accident left him partially blind, he decided to create his own electronic eye. Now he calls himself Eyeborg.

Spence's bionic eye contains a battery-powered, wireless video camera. Not only can he record everything he sees just by looking around, but soon people will be able to log on to his video feed and view the world through his right eye.

Spence and his collaborators -- Kosta Grammatis, John Polanski, Martin Ling, Phil Bowen, and camera firm OmniVision -- managed to get a prototype working last year. Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of 2009. Now the group is developing a version that offers a clearer picture. More

Driving the world’s cheapest car: The 2011 Tata Nano CX

People love the idea of super-cheap transportation. Two generations ago, Volkswagen captured the world's attention with the Beetle (known originally as “the people's car), but when people finally drove it they realized it was more than just a cheap car. It was inexpensive, yes, but entirely fun to drive.

India’s Tata Motors picked up on the people’s car idea several years ago. Motorbikes and pedal bikes are the go-to transportation options for millions in India, which presented an opportunity. But with the average price of a new car in the U.S. hovering around $30,000, an inconceivable sum in the developing world, Tata would have to do something very different -- the tiny Nano was the result.

It's currently on sale in India at a cost in rupees of about $2,500. That sound you hear is over a billion people cheering because they can now envision themselves owning transportation they don't have to pedal. More

Could 'Goldilocks' planet be just right for life?

Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right.

Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water.

The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere. It's just right. Just like Earth.

"This really is the first Goldilocks planet," said co-discoverer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The new planet sits smack in the middle of what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, unlike any of the nearly 500 other planets astronomers have found outside our solar system. And it is in our galactic neighborhood, suggesting that plenty of Earth-like planets circle other stars. More

I-5 to become the nation's first electric highway?

Starting this fall, you're likely to see a new breed of road sign along Interstate 5 for electric vehicle drivers looking for a spot to plug in and recharge.

With help from a $1.32 million federal grant, the state Transportation Department plans to turn Interstate 5 into the nation's first "electric highway" with enough charging stations so electric vehicles can make the entire 276-mile trip from the Canadian border to the Oregon state line, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced Monday.

State officials are trying to gear up for the large infusion of electric vehicles expected over the next few years. The Nissan Leaf will debut in December along with a large deployment of charging infrastructure in Seattle and four other regions around the country as part of The EV Project, a federal study into the needs and driving habits of electric vehicle drivers. More

Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body

Scientists have transferred men's minds into a virtual woman's body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others.

In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even see their new body and clothes.

The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.

Men who took part in the experiment reported feeling as though they occupied the woman's body and even gasped and flinched when she was slapped by another character in the virtual world. More

A New Way to Find Earths

A team of astronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars.

The group, led by Dr. Gracjan Maciejewski of Jena University in Germany, used Transit Timing Variation to detect a planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth in the system WASP-3, 700 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra. They publish their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Transit Timing Variation (TTV) was suggested as a new technique for discovering planets a few years ago. Transits take place where a planet moves in front of the star it orbits, temporarily blocking some of the light from the star.

So far this method has been used to detect a number of planets and is being deployed by the Kepler and Corot space missions in its search for planets similar to the Earth. More

Anguish Of Romantic Rejection May Be Linked To Stimulation Of Areas Of Brain Related To Motivation, Reward And Addiction

Breaking up really is hard to do, and a recent study conducted at Stony Brook University found evidence that it may be partly due to the areas of the brain that are active during this difficult time.

The team of researchers, which included Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor of social and health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and former graduate students Greg Strong and Debra Mashek looked at subjects who had a recent break-up and found that the pain and anguish they were experiencing may be linked to activation of parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.

"This brain imaging study of individuals who were still 'in love' with their rejecter supplies further evidence that the passion of 'romantic love' is a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion" the researchers concluded, noting that brain imaging showed some similarities between romantic rejection and cocaine craving. "The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that romantic love is a specific form of addiction." More

Bionic British Cat Gets Faux Paws

LONDON -- Oscar the cat may have lost one of his nine lives, but his new prosthetic paws make him one of the world's few bionic cats.

After losing his two rear paws in a nasty encounter with a combine harvester last October, the black cat with green eyes was outfitted with metallic pegs that link the ankles to new prosthetic feet and mimic the way deer antlers grow through skin. Oscar is now back on his feet and hopping over hurdles like tissue paper rolls.

After Oscar's farming accident, which happened when the 2 1/2-year-old-cat was lazing in the sun in the British Channel Isles, his owners, Kate and Mike Nolan, took him to their local veterinarian. In turn, the vet referred Oscar to Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic surgeon in Eashing, 35 miles southwest of London. More

Hey Good Lookin': Early Humans Dug Neanderthals

Be careful whom you call a Neanderthal. You may be one yourself. Or at least you may have Neanderthal ancestors.

That's the conclusion of a study being released Thursday that examined DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones more than 35,000 years old.

There's little question that modern humans and Neanderthals bumped into each other once upon a time.

"The archaeological record shows they overlapped between about 30,000 and 80,000 years ago," says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School.

There was some fossil evidence that they may have done more than shake hands in passing, but the initial genetic evidence suggested otherwise. More

Stem-Cell Dental Implants Grow New Teeth In Your Mouth

The loss of a tooth is a minor deformity and a major pain. Although dental implants are available, the healing process can take months on end, and implants that fail to align with the ever-growing jawbone tend to fall out. If only adult teeth could be regenerated, right?

According to a study published in the latest Journal of Dental Research, a new tissue regeneration technique may allow people to simply regrow a new set of pearly whites.

Dr. Jeremy Mao, the Edward V. Zegarelli Professor of Dental Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, has unveiled a growth factor-infused, three-dimensional scaffold with the potential to regenerate an anatomically correct tooth in just nine weeks from implantation.

By using a procedure developed in the university's Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, Dr. Mao can direct the body's own stem cells toward the scaffold, which is made of natural materials. Once the stem cells have colonized the scaffold, a tooth can grow in the socket and then merge with the surrounding tissue. More

Astronomers Find Super-Earth Using Amateur, Off-the-Shelf Technology

Astronomers announced that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable of finding almost-Earth-sized planets in warm, life-friendly orbits.

The discovery is being published in the December 17 issue of the journal Nature. A super-Earth is defined as a planet between one and ten times the mass of the Earth.

The newfound world, GJ1214b, is about 6.5 times as massive as the Earth. Its host star, GJ1214, is a small, red type M star about one-fifth the size of the Sun. It has a surface temperature of only about 4,900 degrees F and a luminosity only three-thousandths as bright as the Sun. More

New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls

A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.

The contraption, inspired by a beetle that can hold on to a leaf with a force 100 times its weight, uses the surface tension of water to make an adhesive bond, but it does so with a creative twist.

It could be used to create sticky shoes or gloves, researchers said today.

The device consists of a flat top plate riddled with tiny holes, each just a few hundred microns (a millionth of a meter) wide. A bottom plate holds water. In between is a porous layer. A 9-volt battery powers an electric field that forces water to squeeze through the tiny holes in the top layer. More

Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises

The Sun's irregular activity can wreak havoc with the weak sat-nav signals we use.

The last time the Sun reached a peak in activity, satellite navigation was barely a consumer product.

But the Sun is on its way to another solar maximum, which could generate large and unpredictable sat-nav errors.

It is not just car sat-nav devices that make use of the satellite signals; accurate and dependable sat-nav signals have, since the last solar maximum, quietly become a necessity for modern infrastructure.

They are used for high-precision surveying, docking ships and they may soon be used to automatically land commercial aircraft. More

Layers in a Mars Crater Record a History of Changes

Near the center of a Martian crater about the size of Connecticut, hundreds of exposed rock layers form a mound as tall as the Rockies and reveal a record of major environmental changes on Mars billions of years ago.

The history told by this tall parfait of layers inside Gale Crater matches what has been proposed in recent years as the dominant planet-wide pattern for early Mars, according to a new report by geologists using instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"Looking at the layers from the bottom to the top, from the oldest to the youngest, you see a sequence of changing rocks that resulted from changes in environmental conditions through time," said Ralph Milliken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This thick sequence of rocks appears to be showing different steps in the drying-out of Mars." More

Ancient Greenland hunter reveals genetic secrets

Meet Inuk, a 4,000-year-old Arctic hunter. He lived in Greenland, ate a lot of seafood, and appears to have died young. And he is the first ancient human to have his genome almost completely reconstructed in a project that an international research team jokingly likens to "waking the dead."

Inuk will not be coming back to life, they say, but his genome, reconstructed from a tuft of his thick dark hair, provides a glimpse into his life and insight into ancient migrations across the Arctic.

Inuk, which means "man" or "human" in Greenlandic, had dark skin, brown eyes, type A+ blood, "shovel-shaped" front teeth, dark hair with a tendency to baldness and dry earwax, the team, led by Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, reports in the journal Nature. More

Hobbyist Shoots Earth From Edge of Space With Used Camera From eBay

A typical space shuttle mission flies 200 miles above the earth's surface and returns beautiful pictures on the way, but it involves 1,500 people, puts six or seven astronauts at risk and costs, depending on who's doing the counting, close to half a billion dollars.

Robert Harrison got some pretty good pictures too. He did it with a weather balloon, a used digital camera he picked up on eBay and some duct tape.

"I thought I was going to get some nice pictures," said Harrison, a computer engineer from the British town of Highburton, West Yorkshire, "but I didn't realize I'd see the curvature of the earth, the blue band of the atmosphere and the blackness of space." More

Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic

It's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last May's Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster? More

Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time

A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it."

That's because layers mean everything to the environmentally-friendly construction process called Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, and its operation sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

"You start with a drawing of the part you want to build, you push a button, and out comes the part," said Karen Taminger, the technology lead for the Virginia-based research project that is part of NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program.

She admits that, on the surface, EBF3 reminds many people of a Star Trek replicator in which, for example, Captain Picard announces out loud, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot." Then there is a brief hum, a flash of light and the stimulating drink appears from a nook in the wall. More

Europe's conquering heroes? Likely farmers

The conquerors who spread their seed across Europe in ancient times were prosperous farmers who imported their skills from the Middle East, researchers reported.

A study of the Y chromosome -- passed down with very little change from father to son -- suggests that the men of Europe are descended from populations that moved into Europe 10,000 years ago from the "Fertile Crescent", which stretches from Egypt across the Middle East into present-day Iraq.

"Maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer," Dr. Patricia Balaresque of Britain's University of Leicester said in a statement. More

Are Earth's Oceans Made Of Extraterrestrial Material?

Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre (CNRS / ENS Lyon / Université Claude Bernard) suggests that water was not part of the Earth's initial inventory but stems from the turbulence caused in the outer Solar System by giant planets. Ice-covered asteroids thus reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets.

The Earth's water could therefore be extraterrestrial, have arrived late in its accretion history, and its presence could have facilitated plate tectonics even before life appeared.

The conclusions of the study carried out by Albarède feature in an article published on the 29 October 2009 in the journal Nature. More

Not So Cute: Dolphin Gang-Rape

Ever since Flipper appeared on our screens we’ve known dolphins to be highly intelligent, social creatures with an advanced communication system and the tendency to help humans when in trouble. Many of us have seen them performing tricks in captivity or watched them on television displaying the same manoeuvres in the wild. Some of us have even been lucky enough to swim with one. But how many of us are aware of their slightly less courteous behaviour?

Researchers have been studying the sexual behaviour of dolphins intensely for the last decade, after it was discovered they not only partake in homosexual activity, but also gang-rape and kidnap females who don’t reciprocate their sexual advances. More

Tablet wars: Google looks to take on Apple iPad

As the fanfare over Apple's new iPad reaches a fever pitch, Google is not standing idly by.

The search giant has already unveiled concept designs for its own version of a tablet, though it's unlikely that a Google tablet will hit store shelves until at least 2011.

Developers of Google Chrome OS, an open-source operating system that is set to debut in the second half of 2010, recently posted a mock tablet design on the developers' Web site chromium.org.

The design was actually unveiled two days before Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the world its first glimpse at the iPad. But it wasn't widely noticed until this week. More

Moons Like Avatar's Pandora Could Be Found

The new science fiction blockbuster "Avatar" is set on habitable and inhabited moon Pandora, which orbits the fictional gas giant Polyphemus in the real Alpha Centauri system.

Although life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are staples of science fiction, astronomers have yet to discover any moons beyond our solar system. However, they could be science fact, and researchers might soon not only be able to spot them, but also scan their atmospheres for key signs of life as we know it, such as oxygen and water.

"If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade," said astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Gas giants in our own solar system have many moons, and if the same holds true with alien planets and their moons, "that's a lot of potential habitats," Kaltenegger said. More

Say 'cheese'? No, say 'quantum mechanics.'

Getting a digital camera for Christmas? Before you fire it up to capture Uncle Wally's fateful fifth trip to the punch bowl, take a moment to picture this: You've got a genuine scientific marvel in your mitts. In fact, it took nothing less than two Nobel prizes and a revolution in physics in order for you to point and shoot.

Why? Because to take a filmless picture, your camera or camcorder relies on, um, quantum mechanics. In particular, it exploits the fact -- revealed by Albert Einstein himself -- that a beam of light, which behaves like a wave in some circumstances, acts like a bunch of separate particles in other circumstances. (If that seems infuriatingly contradictory, suck it up. It's just how we do things in this cosmos. Or go complain to the management.) More

The Big Dipper Adds a Star

It's no secret that at community star parties I bring small, squat telescopes specifically to attract little kids in the crowd. And one of my favorite targets is the paired stars Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper's handle.

I tell the kids this is a "star with a secret." With just the slightest optical aid, they can make out both stars, along with an unrelated field star known as Sidus Ludoviciana that lurks nearby, creating a satisfying little triangle.

Then I ask them to train their attention on the brightest of the three, and they quickly realize that Mizar is actually a double star. I cap off my little spiel by noting that each of those two stars is itself double. So one star by eye in the Big Dipper's handle is really six stars. More

Trapped in his own body for 23 years - the coma victim who screamed unheard

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.

Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally. More

Curious Cold War communications

It is still possible to hear so called numbers stations on the airwaves.

The mysterious short-wave stations broadcast a string of apparently random numbers, usually preceded by a well-known folk tune.

It is widely believed that they are run by intelligence agencies sending coded messages to their agents overseas.

The subject has achieved cult status, with many bands using recordings of the stations in their songs.

Simon Mason from Anlaby has written articles and books on the subject. He has also appeared on many radio and television programmes talking about this secretive world. More

Space Sights and Smells Surprise Rookie Astronauts

For rookie astronauts flying aboard the International Space Station, the food is good, the rocket thrusters are loud and there's an odd tang in the air - apparently from outer space.

"It's a very, very different environment than I expected," Discovery shuttle pilot Kevin Ford, a first-time spaceflyer, said from orbit late Friday.

One of things Ford wasn't ready for is the weird smell.

"From the [spacewalks] there really is a distinct smell of space when they come back in," Ford said from the station in a Friday night news conference. "It's like...something I haven't ever smelled before, but I'll never forget it. You know how those things stick with you." In the past, astronauts have described the smell of space as something akin to gunpowder or ozone. More

Is the Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself from the future?

Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.

Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.

The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.

At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one. More

Tapping into Mother Nature's R&D lab

If you want to find the world's savviest engineers, don't go to a laboratory. Go to nature.

San Diego's Qualcomm Inc. did that when it made a reflective display, derived from butterfly wings, that doesn't wash out in the sun and consumes much less power than traditional displays.

This new field of making products from nature's example, known as biomimicry, drew scientists, environmentalists and business executives to the San Diego Zoo this week for a conference on biomimicry Thursday and Friday, sponsored by the zoo and Qualcomm.

The zoo is promoting biomimicry to help its conservation efforts. If humans learn that nature is a treasure trove of engineering solutions perfected over millions of years, then conservation and environmental protection will take on commercial value, the reasoning goes. More

Exoplanets Clue To Sun's Curious Chemistry

A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing "lithium mystery" observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO's successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than "planet-free" stars.

"For almost 10 years we have tried to find out what distinguishes stars with planetary systems from their barren cousins," says Garik Israelian, lead author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. "We have now found that the amount of lithium in Sun-like stars depends on whether or not they have planets." More

Australian scientists plan to regrow breasts after cancer

MELBOURNE – Australian scientists said they were to trial a revolutionary treatment which would allow women to regrow their breasts after cancer surgery.

Doctors from Melbourne's Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery said they had developed an implantable device that uses a woman's own fat cells to grow back breasts following a mastectomy.

"There is a dollop of fat that is put inside a device, a chamber, fed with the blood supply and then this dollop of fat will grow into the space and essentially feel normal to the patient," said lead researcher Phillip Marzella.

Resembling a perforated brassiere cup, Marzella said the chamber would eventually fill with fat as the initial deposit expands because "nature abhors a vacuum". More

Newfound Planet Orbits Backward

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.

A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.

The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.

"I would have to say this is one of the strangest planets we know about," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery. More

Underground City Envisioned in Nevada

Sietch Nevada is a fascinating concept exhibited in Innovative Technologies and Climates at the University of Toronto. Fans of the science fiction novel Dune will immediately recognize this proposal - to build semi-subterranean terraced geometries in the Nevada desert.

"In Frank Herbert’s famous 1965 novel Dune, he describes a planet that has undergone nearly complete desertification. Dune has been called the “first planetary ecology novel” and forecasts a dystopian world without water.

The few remaining inhabitants have secluded themselves from their harsh environment in what could be called subterranean oasises. Far from idyllic, these havens, known as sietch, are essentially underground water storage banks.

Water is wealth in this alternate reality. It is preciously conserved, rationed with strict authority, and secretly hidden and protected," according to the Sietch Nevada project description. More

Tubular Clouds Defy Explanation

These long, crazy-looking clouds can grow to be 600 miles long and can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft even on windless days.

Known as Morning Glory clouds, they appear every fall over Burketown, Queensland, Australia, a remote town with fewer than 200 residents. A small number of pilots and tourists travel there each year in hopes of “cloud surfing” with the mysterious phenomenon. More

Snake with foot found in China

Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

"I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw," said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.

Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.

The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China's West Normal University in Nanchang. More

Evidence Found for Ancient Mars Lake

Several studies in recent years have claimed evidence for shorelines and other features that suggest ancient lakes on Mars. Firm evidence has remained elusive.

Now a University of Colorado at Boulder research team claims "the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars" in a statement released today.

The scientists see signs of "a deep, ancient lake," which would have implications for the potential for past life on Mars. Life as we know it requires water, and while Mars is dry now, if there was abundant water in the past -- as many studies have suggested -- then life would have been a possibility. There is, however, no firm evidence that life does or ever did exist on the red planet.

Researchers estimate the lake existed more than 3 billion years ago. It covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada. More

Study links breastfeeding to high grades, college entry

NEW YORK – Breastfed babies seem more likely to do well at high school and to go on to attend college than infants raised on a bottle, according to a new US study.

Professors Joseph Sabia from the American University and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver based their research on 126 children from 59 families, comparing siblings who were breastfed as infants to others who were not. By comparing siblings, the study was able to account for the influence of a variety of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment.

The study, published in the Journal of Human Capital, found that an additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school grade point averages of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014. More

Happy Trails With a Handy Guide

If a GPS unit talks in the woods, will anybody hear it?

Not my family, apparently. On a recent hike down to Dark Hollow Falls in Shenandoah National Park, I poked haplessly at the gadget slung around my neck, trying to watch a video on the small screen, while my mom and my boyfriend loped along ahead of my dad and me on the trail. My father, meanwhile, was half-listening to the chipper female voice coming from the machine, but mostly he was checking out the scenery, not the screen.

My family and I were at the park for our annual Father's Day getaway, and I roped them into trying out GPS Rangers, which the park introduced last summer. Each paperback-size Global Positioning System device, created by a company named BarZ Adventures, contains recorded tours of four popular hikes: to the top of Hawksbill Mountain, down a hill to Dark Hollow Falls, along a one-mile portion of the Appalachian Trail and on a ramble through Big Meadow. More

Mystery of Giant Ice Circles Resolved

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.

But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it's not aliens — methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.

Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth's rotation that also helps create cyclones.

"Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape," said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth. More

New element named 'copernicium'

Discovered 13 years ago, and officially added to the periodic table just weeks ago, element 112 finally has a name.

It will be called "copernicium", with the symbol Cp, in honour of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

The team of scientists who discovered the element chose the name to honour the man who "changed our world view". More

Robotic Fish To Monitor Pollution

LONDON - A school of mechanical, battery-powered robots in the shape of fish will be released into a Spanish port to help monitor pollution there, scientists said Friday.

The 5-foot-long (1.5-meter-long) robots work by mimicking the swishing movements of a fish's tail, according to University of Essex robotics expert Huosheng Hu, whose team is manufacturing the machines.

He said the robo-fish would be equipped with sensors to monitor oxygen levels in the water, detect oil slicks spilled from ships or contaminants pumped into the water from underground pipes.

The robotic fish will patrol the harbor of Gijon, in northern Spain under a 2.5-million-pound ($3.6 million) grant from the European Union. Hu said Gijon was chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology. More

Lesbian albatrosses and bisexual bonobos have last laugh on Darwin

Charles Darwin argued that sexual preferences can shape the progress of evolution, creating displays, such as the peacock’s tail, that are inexplicable by natural selection alone.

It’s safe to say, however, that he did not anticipate the lesbian albatrosses of Hawaii. Nor bisexual bonobos. Let alone sadomasochistic bat bugs or the gay penguins of New York. Homosexuality is so widespread among some animal species that it can reshape their social dynamics and even change their DNA, according to the first peer-reviewed survey of research on the subject. More

NASA's mission to bomb the Moon

NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet.

The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole.

Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

The attack on the Moon is not a declaration of war or act of wanton vandalism. Space scientists want to see if any water ice or vapour is revealed in the cloud of debris.

Though the Moon mostly a dry airless desert, they believe ice could be trapped in crater shadows near the south pole which never receive any sunlight. If so it could provide vital supplies for a manned moonbase. More

Ultracapacitors can power cars, replace batteries

Forget hybrids and hydrogen-powered vehicles. EEStor, a stealth company in Cedar Park, Texas, is working on an “energy storage” device that could finally give the internal combustion engine a run for its money — and begin saving us from our oil addiction. “To call it a battery discredits it,” says Ian Clifford, the CEO of Toronto-based electric car company Feel Good Cars, which plans to incorporate EEStor’s technology in vehicles by 2008.

EEStor’s device is not technically a battery because no chemicals are involved. In fact, it contains no hazardous materials whatsoever. Yet it acts like a battery in that it stores electricity. If it works as it’s supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. At today’s gas prices, covering that distance can cost $75 or more; the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 45 cents a gallon. And we mean power a car. “A four-passenger sedan will drive like a Ferrari,” Clifford predicts. More

Paleontologists Strike Fossil Gold in Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Carlos Jaramillo is 39 years old but loves to dig in the dirt -- especially the dry, flaky shale formations of Colombia's Guajira province. "If you talk to a paleontologist," he explained, "you're talking to a kid who never grew up."

For the past five years, Jaramillo and his team of paleontologists have been burrowing ground so rich in fossils that they have made the kinds of discoveries that thrill the scientific world. And they still have years of digging ahead of them at this site in the Cerrejon region of northeastern Colombia, a remote and oven-hot place not unaccustomed to drug traffickers and the occasional rebel column. More

Finally - A Cheap Electric Scooter

Here in the United States, the price of battery-powered scooters is hard to justify when compared to its gas-powered brethren.

KLD Technologies wants to change that with scooters it claims offer solid performance and cost about as much as a Vespa.

The scooters feature motors with something KLD Technologies calls nano-crystaline technology to improve efficiency over traditional iron-core motors. The company’s Neue drive eliminates the need for a transmission and will propel the scooters when they arrive in the U.S. next year. More

Extrasolar Planet Might Indeed Be Habitable

Scientists searching for a planet like Earth said they have found the smallest planet ever detected outside the solar system, less than twice the size of our own.

The exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star beyond the solar system, is called Gliese 581e after the star it circles. Because of its relatively small size it is likely rocky, like Earth, as opposed to gas giants such as Jupiter or Saturn, the astronomers said.

"It is the lightest planet detected outside the solar system so far," Dr. Gaspare Lo Curto, an astronomer at the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, told a news conference. More

Ancient DNA reveals some Neanderthals were redheads

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads.

The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig -- extracted, amplified, and sequenced a pigmentation gene called MC1R from the bones of a 43,000-year-old Neanderthal from El Sidrón, Spain, and a 50,000-year-old individual from Monti Lessini, Italy. More

Spain plugs in largest solar-tower power plant

Abengoa Solar of Spain on Monday reported successful tests of its second solar tower in operation, in which the sun's heat is used to make electricity.

The 531-foot solar tower, located near Seville, Spain, features a number of improvements on the first design and has exceeded the anticipated output. Called PS20, the installation is the largest in the world with a capacity of 20 megawatts, enough electricity to supply 10,000 homes, according to the company.

A solar tower configuration uses a field of heliostats, or mirrors, to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver held in the tower. The heat creates steam which turns a turbine to make electricity. The PS20 project has 1,255 of these heliostats, with each heliostat having a surface area of 1,291 square feet. More

Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers. Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

This is a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are. The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One.

Cristina Gomes and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast. She and her team observed the animals as they hunted, and monitored the number of times they copulated. More

Meteorite Scavengers

NASA scientist Steve Chesley got a call at home last October with bracing news: A telescope in Arizona had spotted an SUV-size asteroid that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. He raced to work, ran a computer calculation and saw something he had never seen before: a 100 percent chance of direct impact. He quickly checked to make sure the asteroid was the size advertised. It was. No reason to panic.

Hours later, the asteroid hit the atmosphere over northern Sudan's Nubian Desert and exploded 23 miles up with the force of a thousand tons of TNT. Witnesses saw the fireball and took pictures of the vapor trails in the sky. More

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