The Great Beyond

An intrepid bid by a group of Romanians to get to the moon via balloon has ended in failure, at least for now.

The non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) really does want to reach the lunar surface using a balloon. As ever, I'm obliged to point out that this is no joke, nor is it an act of pure insanity—balloons can be used to hoist a rocket above much of the atmosphere and thus save fuel. The US experimented with this strategy in the 1950s but eventually abandoned it in favour of more traditional concrete and steel launch pads.

ARCA is taking the rocket-balloon concept (known officially as a "rockoon") a step further by using the system to hoist a series of rocket motors tied together by cable. This "nunchuck staging" saves them the trouble of dealing with complicated staging rings and fairings, but it hasn't been tried before, so far as I can tell.

Unfortunately, the rocket never got a chance to prove itself. The Romanians got as far as loading a prototype of their moon-balloon rocket onto the Constanta, a Romanian naval frigate, which took the entire crew out to the launch site in the Black Sea. Yesterday, they attempted to fill the balloon with hot air, but shortly after they started, they ran into a snag. The "inflation arms" used to fill the balloon became entangled in the balloon itself. One-by-one the arms had to be cut, and by late afternoon the entire operation was abandoned (the balloon uses heat from the sun to gain altitude, so a night launch isn't an option).

So dreams of flying the old red-gold-and-blue on the moon are delayed for now. But I'm willing to guess that ARCA will try again. Until then, we can all enjoy an inspirational video showing how their system is supposed to work:

And more photos of the launch attempt are here.

ARCA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 17, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has dethroned Los Alamos' Roadrunner to become the most powerful computer in the world, according to new rankings by the TOP500 project.

Jaguar, which runs simulations on climate change, supernovae and new energy technologies, clocked in at 1.75 petaflops — 1,750 trillion calculations per second — after receiving a major upgrade from quad-core to six-core processors. The performance smoked Roadrunner’s 1.04 petaflops — down from the system's 1.105 petaflops in June after being reconfigured. Roadrunner, which runs simulations of nuclear weapons and is used for classified research, became the first computer to break the petaflops barrier in June 2008. (TOP500)

Roadrunner still has some bragging rights over Jaguar: it’s the fourth most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. Jaguar is far behind at number 41.

Continue reading "Jaguar devours Roadrunner" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 16, 2009
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App-tastic! An on-line inventory of products that use nanotechnology has now been translated to the iPhone. Ever wondered what nanotechnology is being used for right now? The answer's generally quite mundane - as evidenced by the number of nano-enabled badminton racquets , socks and suncream products in the inventory. “The really cool part – if you come across something that isn’t in the inventory that you think should be, you can simply take a photo and email it to us directly from the app,” explains Andrew Maynard, who works at the Project for Emerging Nanotechnologies.

Perhaps the next step might to link the inventory with one of the many apps that read barcodes … so you could scan a product and get instant feedback on its nano-ness.

The app doesn’t appear to be on the Android system, as yet.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on November 13, 2009
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Over at the New York Times is an interesting story about solar panels and the European Parliament. I kid you not.

The story tells us about some proposals, proposed by the Swedish EU presidency government in the summer, that would see solar panel manufacturers subject to European hazardous waste legislation, that previously they were exempt from.

The problem is cadmium, a toxic metal that is used to make some photovoltaic cells.

The NYT story also mentions a mysterious European Parliament committee that is “expected in coming days to propose a way of keeping pressure on solar companies to come up with alternatives to cadmium telluride.”

This is interesting news indeed, and Greentech Media has picked up on it, although details are still sparse about the committee and its proposals. But the message seems to be that First Solar, seen as a success in the solar arena, will be in serious trouble if cadmium is banned in Europe.

I remember a while ago talking to quantum dot manufacturers Nanoco, spun out of Manchester University, who are trying to turn away from cadmium – but there the question is one of knowing the markets: in Japan, where quantum dots are likely to be used for TV screens and other display applications, cadmium is a big no-no. Mining in Japan led to long term cadmium release into water causing itai-itai disease, symptoms of which include brittle bones.

So, while a cadmium ban may be bad for solar panel makers in Europe, this might signal a need for electronics manufacturers world wide to try and turn away from making products that contain these toxic elements in the first place.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 11, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Any day now, the non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) will launch a high-altitude balloon with a rocket tied to the bottom from a ship in the Black Sea.

Actually its three rockets tied in what one reader creatively describes as "nunchuck staging". When the balloon reaches altitude, the first of the string of rockets will fire, carrying a small probe on a short suborbital trip. If all goes well, this proof-of-concept mission will pave the way for a launch balloon-based moon launch.

It's an unusual, some might argue slightly crazy, approach to rocketeering. But Bogdan Sburlea, ARCA's Project Manager, thinks it will work. He graciously agreed to answer some questions about this unorthodox proof-of-concept rocket, known as Helen.

How are you planning on attaching the Helen’s stages together? Will you use cable? Rope?

We will use cables of different diameters, the cable from the balloon to the first stage being the thickest.

How will you separate each stage when it has finished firing?

Actually, the separation will not take place after the previous stage finished firing. We will have about two seconds of simultaneous firing for stage one and two and later on for stage two and three. There are two reasons. The first is to avoid chaotic tensions in the cables. Firing the next stage before the previous stage shuts down means that there will be no moment in time when the tension in the cable becomes zero. The second reason is to avoid a collision between the stages.

Yes, the previous stage will become unstable during these few moments and will alter its trajectory. It will be enough to avoid a collision with the next stage. For separation, we use a pneumatic system for stages two and 3.

Are you worried that pendulum motion (swinging from side-to-side) might cause the rocket to become unstable?

This is not a concern for us, we modelled it and it works. If we are talking about the risks, that's a different story. There are associated risks with many critical activities, but we hope that we covered everything.

How high do you hope the rocket will carry the test vehicle? Will it go into orbit?

No, it will not. This is just a test. We need to check the launch from the water, the usage of world's largest solar balloon, not to mention the stabilization method and the strange position of the stages. We've got enough things to test; reaching orbit is not an objective for this launch.

How much have you spent developing the Helen? Who is paying?

We decided not to disclose the budget for the moment. There are many sources for the current budget, sponsorships and donations.

Do you have popular support in Romania?

Yes, we do. Many people are interested in what we do.

What will you do if the launch fails?

We will continue. Did SpaceX quit after the first failure? Or after the second failure?

Do you really think it will work?

Yes, we do. We have a huge advantage by being a small, private company: we can afford to test this.

When do you hope to get to the moon?

Before Google Lunar X Prize ends. We will do our best.

If you haven't seen it already (and chances are if you're a regular reader, you have), here's a video showing the Helen's flight plan:

Continue reading "EXCLUSIVE: Romania's lunar ballooners speak!" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 04, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

A new understanding of one of nature’s most complicated eyes could lead improvements in a huge range of modern electronic devices, according to a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Nicholas Roberts, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues have worked out how the ‘quarter-wave plates’ in the eyes of mantis shrimp work.

As you may have guessed, a quarter-wave plate rotates the plane of polarization of a light wave by a quarter. Crucially, they can convert between linearly polarized light and circularly polarized light, something that makes them useful for DVD players, CD players, and camera filters.

“Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye,” says Roberts (press release). “It really is exceptional, outperforming anything we humans have so far been able to create.”

Shrimp eyes use cleverly designed cell membranes rolled into collections of tubes to make their quarter wave plates and to help them see polarized light (as well as twelve colours as opposed to human eyes, which have a rather paltry three colour palette), the authors report.

Study author Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland says shrimp also reflect circular polarized light off their bodies.

“They have a cuticle on their skin that reflects it,” he told ABC. “They’re talking to each other with a secret light channel.”

Now we’re closer to understanding how shrimp eyes work, we may be able to use their advanced optics to make better electronics, using liquid crystals to mimic them, say the authors.

This is undoubtedly very cool science, but won’t we just be downloading our movies and games by the time they get this working for DVDs?

Image mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) / Roy Caldwell.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 26, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

The first findings from an ancient Greek town that was swallowed by the sea around 3,000 years ago have come to light.

A joint Greek and British team of archaeologists and divers have been surveying the submerged town of Pavlopetri, just off the coast of southern Greece, and have turned up shards of pottery and other remains dating from as long ago as 3500 BC – which dates the town to the Bronze Age, and makes it over 1000 years older than the team previously thought.

“We got late Neolithic pottery, which dates to about 3500 BC, which is earlier than anything else that was found on the site before,” says Jon Henderson of the University of Nottingham, one of the underwater archaeologists working on the project. “And we’ve got a full sequence [of remains] up until about 1000BC. So it looks like it was occupied for a very long period of time.”

The submerged site was also bigger than it was when originally discovered and mapped by hand in the 1960s. “The sand has moved since the 60s,” says Henderson. “There’s 9000 m2 of new buildings.” The site is now thought to cover an area of around 30,000 m2.

Nature reported on the expedition when it began in May this year.

Since then the team, led by Henderson and his team at Nottingham and a Greek team under the direction of Elias Spondylis from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, have digitally mapped much of the site and lifted some remains from the surface. As the project continues they hope to map the site in more detail and start to excavate some of the buildings.

Image: Jon Henderson

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 19, 2009
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NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge got underway in the Southern Hemisphere on Friday last week, with a DC-8 plane flying the first of a series of missions to measure Antarctic ice.

Although ice can and is measured from satellites there will be a gap in NASA’s measurements after ICESat-I comes to the end of its life this year and before the start of ICESat-II in 2014. To plug this gap the space agency is stepping up with a six-year programme of ice-measuring plane flights.

“The DC-8 flew two parallel tracks along the coast, one just offshore over the floating ice shelf, and one just inland. By measuring on either side of the “grounding line” between the floating ice and the ice on land, scientists can determine the rate at which this near-shore part of the ice shelf is melting,” says NASA.

The plane is too large for Antarctic runways so it launched from Chile at 9:11 local time and flew south to the Getz Ice Shelf.

Although Friday’s flight is being reported as the start of Operation Ice Bridge, the very first OIB flights were actually made in April in the Northern Hemisphere.

Image top: OIB logo.
Image lower: view from the plane.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 19, 2009
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The Nikon-sponsored ‘Small World’ photography competition has unvield another set of truly stunning images of the world.

In first place is this shot, by Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. It shows the male sex organ of the thale cress.

Continue reading "Small World: Big pictures" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 09, 2009
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Ok so normally we'd just defer to Danger Room on all things defensive, but this was so cool we had to put it up.

For a couple of years now Boeing has been working on its Advance Tactical Laser. In a nutshell this thing is supposed to fit on a C-130 aircraft and be able to burn a 10cm hole in a target up to ten kilometres away.

What kind of laser could do that? It's called a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL), and according to this nifty US Patent by Boeing, it basically works by combining excited oxygen molecules with iodine. When the oxygen collides with the iodine, it excites the atom's outer electrons, causing them to emit light at 1.315 mu.m (infrared).

The COIL laser is designed to deliver hundreds of kilowatts of power—enough juice apparently to burn a hole in (or at least singe) the top of this truck (see right). This video isn't so hot, but if you watch the longer version on DR, you can see that the laser was fired from the air. So basically this thing is close to being operational.

By the way, a larger version of a the same kind of laser is being put into Boeing's Airborne Laser, which, sooner or later, is going to be used to shoot down ballistic missiles as they launch.

Danger Room has pointed out just how incredible (and creepy) this sort of weapon is. As you can see, the infrared laser light is invisible to the human eye. Special operations is envisioning all sorts of clever ways to use it to secretly knock out distant targets, or even immolate individual insurgents. It's the ultimate in stealthy, surgical strike capability.

But don't hold out hope for a hand held version. The COIL takes up a lot of room. And because it's chemical, it can only used about a hundred times before it has to be reloaded. Finally, the laser releases a toxic mix of gases like iodine, chlorine, fluorine, and hydrogen. All-in-all, it's not something you'd probably want to carry in your pocket, even if it would fit.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 05, 2009
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We’ve previously brought to your notice the work of Jonathan Chase, aka Oort Kuiper, in the form of his ‘Astrobiology Rap’.

Now he’s back with a new song about genes…

[Hat tip: pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about Science XXVI: ‘I don’t mean trousers’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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Nature’s announcement of a new journal has been exciting comment this week, mainly because the new publication will feature an open access route.

Nature Communications will be the first online-only Nature-branded journal, but it is the ability of scientists to pay an ‘article processing charge’ to make their papers open access that has generated most interest.

As Steven Inchcoombe, Nature Publishing Group’s managing director, explained to The Scientist:

Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy over the past twelve months. At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access making experimentation with new business models more viable.

The new journal aims to publish papers in biological, chemical and physical sciences that “represent advances of significant interest to specialists within each field”.

Not everyone is impressed by the NPG announcement though.

On the Science Insider blog, Patrick Brown comments thus:

After brilliant and courageous editors and staff at PLoS had the cojones and vision to make high-quality, truly open-access scientific publication affordable and accessible to any scientist with a constructive contribution to communicate, and in doing so, prove the cynics at Science and Nature wrong, it’s deliciously ironic to see the craven NPG, years later, skulking around the open-access world looking for a way to pick up a few bucks.

Nature Communications starts accepting submissions in October 2009, with a first issue scheduled to go online in April 2010.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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A blind listening test at a forestry conference suggests that foresters, at least, prefer a modern violin made from fungus-treated wood to an original Stradivarius.

Last year Francis Schwarze of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in St Gallen published results suggesting that treating wood with fungus might help recreate the unusually low density that prevailed when Antonio Stradivari carved his legendary instruments.
(Nature News, 16 June 2008)

Schwarze teamed up with luthiers (violin-makers) to build violins with the treated wood, along with some control copies made from untreated wood. At a blind competition in the German city of Osnabrück on 1 September this year, 180 attendees of a German forestry conference (Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen) rated the test violins and an original Stradivarius played by British violinist Matthew Trusler (World Radio Switzerland, 1 September 2009). One of the fungus-treated violins, called "Opus 58" garnered 90 votes for the best sound, with the Strad second at 39, according to a press release.

Blind violin identification is notoriously difficult: In a BBC test in 1974, experts were only able to correctly identify 2 of 4 instruments, and confused a modern instrument with a Stradivarius. Schwarze noted that the fungus treatment might make violins which sound like Strads, at least to foresters, for as little as 25,000 Swiss francs (World Radio Service, 10 September 2009).

Photo: The 5 violins in the competition. By Egmont Seiler.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 15, 2009
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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the keystone text for evolutionary theory; now you can see how the book itself evolved, thanks to Ben Fry.

Fry is the director of information design company Seed Visualization and he has constructed a rather wonderful graphic that shows the changes in the book over its six editions.

“We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished,” writes Fry. “In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.”

Fry’s other scientific information design projects include a redesign of genetic code diagrams and illustrations of the relationships between different genomes. He was also behind the rather cool Nature HapMap cover.

His Traces graphic allows to you not just to watch the changes accumulate as time passes – and editions are published – but also to see where words and passages have been added into the text (image left).

“The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating,” says Fry. “Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”

Traces uses text from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, run by John van Wyhe.

Hat tip: Flowing data

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 07, 2009
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Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:

(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)

Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:

Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions

And in between came everybody else:

Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)

Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)

World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)

Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)

These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.

You can read our coverage here.

Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 02, 2009
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Robotic fish – probably the best small robotic fish you’ve ever seen – have been made by clever engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can even see a video of them doing their thing.

The fish, about 30 cm long, are ancestors descendents of robotuna – a giant autonomous robotic fish also made at MIT in the 1990s.

The difference is that these fish are much simpler – they are small and powered by a single motor, unlike robotuna’s six motors, and made from just 10 parts. All these parts are encapsulated in a flexible rubber casing that is moved by a motor sending a wave along the body. They're small size will apparently make them more able to swim into small crevices.

And they can certainly swim well. I’m just a bit concerned about how useful they are. They're being developed apparently to go places where other autonomous robotic fish can’t go. Maybe I’m way out of touch, but I wasn’t aware that this was a major problem.

"The fish were a proof of concept application, but we are hoping to apply this idea to other forms of locomotion, so the methodology will be useful for mobile robotics research - land, air and underwater - as well," said Valdivia Y Alvarado, whose PhD thesis was devoted to the little robotic critters (press release).

But wait a minute, my scepticism may be short lived. I am behind the times after all. Only in March this year, a robotic carp was unveiled by researchers at Essex University, UK. Five of the monstrous 1.5 metre-long robotic carp are scheduled to be released into Spanish waters, equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out pollution.

The MIT group claims that fleets of their robofish could be deployed to inspect pipelines, lakes, rivers and boats. Whatever they’re used for, you can’t escape the fact that robo fish are actually quite cool. Maybe they’ll become the next rubber duckie.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 25, 2009
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Posted for Mico Tatalovic

The prospect of gigantic, flexible LEDs screens has been raised by a new paper, published this week in Science. The paper describes a process for making ultra-thin LEDs that can simply be stamped onto other materials such as glass, plastics and rubber.

Currently, organic LEDs, so named as they are made out of thin carbon-based materials, are used in cheap portable systems such as mobile phones. Much brighter and more robust inorganic LEDs, made out of made out of gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, are commonly used for video billboards but they cannot flex and are difficult to assemble.

“So what we were trying to do really is combine some of the advantages of the processing of the organic devices, with the robustness and brightness of the inorganic,” says study author John Rogers, of the University of Illinois (press release).

The team has now developed a process that could lead to mass production of tiny inorganic LEDs in such a way to allow them to be embedded onto other, flexible materials – this will allow bright, durable inorganic LEDs to become as cheap and flexible as organic LEDs.

“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated and assembled,” says Rogers (press release 2).

Some funding for the research came from Ford, who wanted to make flexible brake lights for their cars, notes Reuters.

Image: Photo by D. Stevenson and C. Conway, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 21, 2009
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France’s national library has been forced to deny rumours that it has sold out to Google over digitization, and thus ended protracted resistance to perceived cultural imperialism.

“Following a news item published Tuesday 18 August in La Tribune, the [Bibliothèque Nationale de France] wishes to clarify that it has not signed an agreement with Google for the digitization of its collection,” says the library (pdf).

However, it adds that, “The Library has never ruled out a private partnership that would be consistent with the strategy of the Ministry of Culture regarding digital content.”

The BNF has been seen as “spearheading resistance” to Google’s digitisation of books and it championed an alternative European digital library that might be more suitable to non-English speaking countries.

The Tribune claimed yesterday that the BNF had capitulated to the American search engine. Other papers in France and abroad have followed up the story, with Le Figaro saying, the BNF had been “seduced by Google”.

French literary blogger Pierre Assouline declared, “It will thus have taken four years for the library to pass from resistance to collaboration.”

A library spokesperson told the Times the library has not abandoned its own digitization project, but would use Google to do the work faster and cheaper than it would be able to do itself.

Whether this approach will be acceptable to the French public after the sensationalist headlines die down remains to be seen...

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
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You can pretty much kiss civilisation goodbye in the event of a zombie outbreak, according to a new mathematical modelling study by Canadian researchers.

Led by Robert Smith?, of the University of Ottawa, the team modelled a variety of scenarios using techniques that would be familiar to those studying more plausible pandemics. (And yes, the question mark is part of his name.)

A basic model using three classes of person – zombies, susceptible to infection, and ‘removed’ – found coexistence with the undead was impossible and following a short outbreak, “zombies will likely kill everyone”.

The researchers went on to model for a cure and quarantine, as well as the potential for counterattacks to eradicate the zombie threat. Things still do not look good for humanity, they report in their paper When Zombies Attack!

“A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly,” they write in the new book Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.

“While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

This research paper is not a totally academic exercise; Smith et al note that their models may seem unlikely (as the dead can return to life), but they could have applications for those modelling allegiance to political parties or diseases that lie dormant for some time.

“If you look at it in a more realistic way, zombies are about the same as any other major infectious disease, they get out and we try to eliminate them,” study author Joe Imad told Canwest News. “Modelling zombies would be the same as modelling swine flu, with some differences for sure, but it is much more interesting to read.”

Given our worldwide success in acting quickly and in a unified manner to stop the spread of swine flu, I’m going to redouble work on that bunker under the Nature office.

Image: photo by rumikel via Flickr under creative commons

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 17, 2009
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Humans harnessed fire to improve their tools much earlier than we’d thought, according to a new report in Science (doi:10.1126/science.1175028).

Though our forebears cooked with fire some 800,000 years ago, the consensus so far was that people hadn’t used fire to heat-treat materials until around 25,000 years ago. The new finding pushes that back at least 45,000 years.

“Our illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophisticated manner," says the lead author Kyle Brown, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. [Press release from Arizona State University, Brown's other affiliation]. “We’ve shown that, at least 72,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier, modern humans had an understanding of how fire and heat could transform the materials around them to suit their needs.” [Science News].

Researchers spent six years looking for the same type of silcrete rock that they found in tools at Pinnacle Point, a Middle Stone Age site on the South African coast. It wasn’t until they happened across such a piece of silcrete embedded in ash that they realised that they could get the deep red, glossy and brittle silcrete such as the one found in tools by putting regular silcrete in fire. They estimate that stones were heated to around 300 degrees Celsius, probably by cooking them under fire in a process that could last for up to 40 hours. This resulted in stones that were easier to shape into tools by using other rocks, and that could be used as knives, hunting weapons or for exchange for other goods.

"I think heating stones is the dawn of human engineering. One of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we can take the things in our landscape and adapt them. We can engineer them to fit our needs." Brown told the BBC.

Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Image: Kyle Brown/South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on August 14, 2009
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With a combination of luck and fancy imaging techniques, geographers have snapped the first shots of an ancient Roman city.

The coastal city of Altinum was bustling in the early CE and possibly late BCE (Wikipedia). In the 5th to 7th centuries CE, historians believe the Barbarians raged through the city and the inhabitants fled to Venice, so Altinum is thus seen as a grandfather of sorts to Venice. But besides historical records and a handful of artifacts, little is known about the town’s structure, as it was dismantled to build Venice, repeatedly flooded, and is now blanketed by fields of soy and maize. (Despite the headlines on some reports (Spiegel, Times Online), the city was never actually “lost” — people knew it was there, they just didn’t know what it looked like.)

But in 2007, researchers at Padua University caught a break: a severe drought that stressed the overlying crops. That’s a blessing for them because it exaggerates differences in the crops’ health — vegetation doesn’t grow well over soil with stones, bricks or compacted soil, but does slightly better over depressed features like pits and canals. By photographing the area at both visible and near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to pick out these differences and compile a map of the city’s urban structure.

They discovered that Altinum was pretty much your standard ancient Roman city, with a basilica, theater, emporia, forum, encircling walls, and a decent network of streets and canals. The authors end their half-page (including references) Science article by concluding that Romans had "successfully exploited the amphibious environment several centuries before the city of Venice started to emerge.”

Other coverage:
Venice "Ancestor" City Mapped for First Time: National Geographic
Ancient Roman City Rises Again: ScienceNOW

Image: Realvista 2007, Telespazio S.p.A.

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 31, 2009
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Professional swimmers have been getting themselves in a right tizzy recently over what to wear.

A second generation of high-tech body suits has sent swimming times tumbling less than a year after records were smashed at the Olympics by those wearing similar garments. Some think science has created a monster in these new polyurethane suits and the world’s governing body has just banned them.

British Olympic-medal winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington called the new suits “technological doping”. “Why would I wear a suit just to improve my performance,” said Adlington, who wears previous generation suit the Speedo LZR, which claims to be “4% faster in starts, sprints and turns”.

So what is the science of the suit?

Continue reading "Swimsuit science shenanigans" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 30, 2009
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New reports, but same old message from the carbon capture and storage (CCS) crowd: high costs and regulatory uncertainty still hamper the technology reaching commercial scale.

A study by the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council says that between $1 billion and $3 billion of local and national government support for the technology will be required every year after 2015, when full-scale projects are supposed to take over from the first wave of demonstration plants. The province is among the world’s keenest: it has already announced a $2 billion investment towards three CCS pilot projects to be built by 2015.

Last week, researchers from Harvard’s Belfer Center released a paper on the ‘realistic’ costs of carbon capture, which reckons that first (most expensive) plants will add 10 cents per kWh to electricity prices, and that each ton of captured CO2 will cost between $120 and $180. That figure is higher than widely-cited estimates[pdf] from consultancy McKinsey, which put initial costs at €60-90/tCO2 avoided. And both of these are way higher than the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide on the European Trading Scheme, currently around €14.

Meanwhile in the UK, the winners of a 400MW demonstration plant competition were supposed to be announced in the summer this year, but the timetable has slipped back. The UK’s carbon capture and storage association, an industrial lobby group, has repeated its message that the country is slipping behind others. [Bloomberg]

At least one more small demonstration project opened this week, as Doosan Babcock started up a pilot oxyfuel combustion burner in Renfrewshire, Scotland. It burns coal in pure oxygen, rather than air, producing a waste stream of almost pure carbon dioxide gas and water, from which it's easier to trap carbon dioxide.

But the Financial Times points out that Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe 30 MW pilot plant, which began operation last September, has yet to bury underground any of the 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide its plant has captured. That is because in June Germany put off a legal framework to govern CCS storage “due to concerns from local officials,” the FT says. As its reporter Joshua Chaffin sums up: “Even if CCS backers can solve the technical and financial puzzles, they may still face a more daunting challenge: winning public acceptance.”

Image: Vattenfall

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on July 28, 2009
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When you’re stuck at a field station in the Arctic you clearly can’t do science all the time. So researchers from the Toolik Field Station in Alaska have constructed what they claim is the “Northernmost Tribute to Michael Jackson”, by recreating his ‘Thriller’ video.

The NJ Star-Ledger proclaims itself impressed given “they only had three rehearsals” and that “Arctic researchers are not generally known for their rhythm”.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 08, 2009
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New images of the Great Beyond’s volcano of the year (to date): Sarychev Peak in the Russian Kuril Islands.

Although not quite on a par with the awesome shot from last week (see: Picture post: BOOM!) this double act show the impact of an eruption like the one that Sarychev experienced beginning 12 June. The ‘before’, top, was taken 26 May while the ‘after’, below, is from 30 June.

Acquired by the ASTER instrument that graced this blog yesterday, these false-colour images show vegetation as red, water as dark blue, and bare rock as brown / gray. The white patches are either ice or clouds.

NASA notes:

The most striking difference between these two images is the cap of new volcanic rock coating the northwestern half of the island in June 2009. While vegetation on the rest of the island appears lush, little or no vegetation remains on the northwestern end. A close look at the top image also reveals that the recent volcanic activity appears to have expanded the island’s coastline on the northwestern end.

Hat tip: Eruptions blog

Image: created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS/ASTER Science Team

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The most hotly awaited science song of they year, nay, the decade, has arrived. Buzz Aldrin has released his rap!

Recently the New York Times reported that Aldrin had been in a rap session with Snoop Dogg. It transpires that Aldrin and Mr Dogg do not actually rap together, rather the latter has produced the former’s song.

You can see the full video on the Funny or Die website.

While this is unlikely to go down as a classic, the making of video that accompanies it has some choice moments. “I have only two passions, space exploration and hip hop,” declares Buzz ‘Doc Rendezvous’ Aldrin.

Perhaps the best part though is where Aldrin discusses Gill Scott-Heron’s seminal ‘Whitey On the Moon’, a tirade against spending money on spaceflight when there is so much poverty on Earth.

“Me and Gill are cool now,” says Doc Rendezvous. “I explained to him we came in peace for all mankind and he backed off.”

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about science XXII: Aldrin raps his Rocket Experience " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2009
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The new Top 500 supercomputer list is out, and it looks remarkably like the previous one, in that it charts a continuing exponential growth in the aggregate power of the worlds top computers. Awesome technological achievement – but no great surprise. As The Register puts it in a headline “World Yawns at Petaflops”.

The yawning is helped by the fact that the number one and number two computers this time round are the same as they were last time round: the US Department of Energy’s Roadrunner, at Los Alamos, and its Jaguar, at Oak Ridge.

But if you want to get geeky on the topic there are some possibly interesting details and trends to see in the data that the Top 500 lists creators make available in a variety of helpful formats.

Continue reading "Getting geeky with supercomputers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 24, 2009
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UPDATE: Some are now questioning the maths behind this analysis. See: John Graham-Cumming, Times.

It is widely acknowledged that humans are very bad at making up random numbers. If we weren’t we wouldn’t have invested so much time in developing random number generators.

Now some work by political scientists Bernd Berber and Alexandra Scacco, of Columbia University, suggests that fact hasn’t reached certain key individuals in Iran. As the country struggles with the violent aftermath of its recent hotly contested election, Berber and Scacco say the results of that election seem highly suspicious.

They used the results published by the Ministry of the Interior and examined the last two digits of the votes reported for the four main candidates.

“The numbers look suspicious,” they report in the Washington Post.

Continue reading "‘Iran’s election was fixed,’ say number crunchers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 22, 2009
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Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist behind the first widely-used taxonomy of plants and animals, faced a problem modern biologists confront all the time: too much data. His solution was simple, says science historian Staffan Mueller-Wille: Linnaeus invented index cards.

“Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus’ use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille (press release).

He says Linnaeus first sorted his ideas onto individual sheets of paper so they could be shuffled, and years later shrank the size of his notepaper to make them easier to handle.

Mueller-Wille, of the University of Exeter, will be chatting about his ongoing research into how Linnaeus invented his famous taxonomy on 4 July at an outreach event organized by the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK.

More
Mueller-Wille and colleague Sara Scharf published a working paper [pdf]on the topic with the London School of Economics in 2007.

Image: wikipedia

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 18, 2009
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It is hard to avoid using the phrase “scientists have discovered ….” But here we go again: Scientists have discovered a way to make concrete last for 16,000 years.

This is not, as on first inspection it might seem, the environmental nightmare it sounds like. What Matthieu Vandamme from the Université Paris-Est and Franz-Josef Ulm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done is work out why concrete creeps, or gradually deforms over time.

The answer is published in PNAS this week and appears to be the way that calcium-silicate-hydrate crystals rearrange themselves at the nanoscale.

This process can’t be stopped, the researchers say, but can be slowed. Slowed so that concrete will last 16,000 years, says GreentechMedia.

So what is creep? Well, according to Ulm, it’s like chewing gum. Gum will stretch and compress if a constant force is applied, Science News tells us, and this, says Ulm is what concrete does, but at a much larger scale.

The hope for creep-free concrete in future is now in the hands of nanoengineers who with the help of this latest research might be able to come up with an additive that slows the creep right down.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 16, 2009
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News of 'the world's first scientific experiment on Twitter' has received some media pickup today. The trial starts tomorrow, conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman together with New Scientist.

Wiseman, who works at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, says the study will examine the psychic ability of 'remote viewing' - the idea that one can see an object without being shown or told what it is. He'll tweet from a location, then offer five photo options; tweeters have to guess which of the five he is actually in. The trial will be repeated four times using different locations (3pm, Tuesday to Friday this week).

Although rigorous scientific experiments have been conducted into remote viewing before (with no evidence found for the ability), this isn't one of them. The choice of Twitter pretty much guarantees that, as Wiseman readily concedes in conversation, though not in his quoted press comments.

Continue reading "Twitter science" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 01, 2009
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Here’s a story to bring music to your ears. Computer scientists in the UK have allowed instrument makers to build a horn specified by Bach to be played in a particular ditty of his, but an instrument that has since never been heard of.

The work, supported by the UK’s engineering and physical sciences research council (EPSRC) has allowed the lituus to be made. This is a long, thin horn that Bach specified for one particular cantata, ‘O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht’ (BWV 118)’ written in 1736-37. Swiss conservatoire, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, contacted Murray Campbell from the acoustics & fluids group, in the University of Edinburgh’s school of physics and astronomy with the hope that he could remodel the lost instrument

“It’s called ‘Bach’s forgotten horn’ because Bach specified this in this particular cantata but nobody knows what he meant. There were no instruments known to have been around in Leipzig in Bach’s time which were called lituuses, no lituus player appear on any rolls of musicians, no one knows what exactly he meant,” says Campbell.

Campbell’s PhD student Alistair Braden did the modelling based on fragments of information from the Swiss musicians about what the lituus might have sounded like, or looked like. Braden used optimisation software that he developed to get to the final design, a blueprint to give to the instrument makers.

The result was a long, wooden horn that is apparently difficult to play.

The BBC has a story with an audio clip of the whole piece, lituus and all.

Image: EPSRC

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 01, 2009
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The Google search engine offers a predictive function, where it will suggest things you might be looking for in advance of you completing your query. As these are at least partially based on what other people have been searching for, can they provide some insights into the way science is perceived on the interwebs? The Great Beyond investigates.

Initial results are not promising. There seems to be widespread skepticism of evolution for a start. This page is from the US version of Google:

Continue reading "Predictive search and science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 07, 2009
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Via Wired, The Great Beyond has learned of a baffling cultural crosswire.

Car insurance fan and rock star Iggy Pop is apparently making a new jazz-influenced album called Preliminaires, based on the work of a science-obsessed agent provocateur of French literature.

Continue reading "Iggy Pop’s cloning project" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 06, 2009
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Last week Nature’s Lucas Laursen exposed a Facebook network of stem cell scientists that was not all it seemed. Over 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists have had their identities purloined to create a fake network of people linked to stem cell science.

One of the few real people in the network was Forbes science editor Matthew Herper, who accepted a seemingly authentic friend request from a fake version of Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss. Now Herper has written a piece for Forbes entitled, ‘I Was Impersonated On Facebook’.

“My trip from Facebook to fakebook began in February when I got a friend request from Rick Weiss, the former Washington Post science writer. I'd admired Weiss' work for years and was thrilled to speak on a panel with him in Madison, Wis.; I accepted the request immediately,” he says.

Read the full article here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 27, 2009
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Following hot on the heels of the theft of computer data on America’s most advanced fighter plane, President Obama’s cybersecurity advisor has called for more to be done in safeguarding information.

Melissa Hathaway, acting senior director for cyberspace, is leading a review into the issue of cybersecurity which the New York Times says “is simply the opening round in what may become a bruising political battle over how much control should be exercised and over which agencies of the government will take command of computer security”.

The review will likely be made public at the end of the month but Hathaway, speaking at the RSA 2009 conference in San Francisco, said cybersecurity was “one of the most serious challenges of the 21st Century”. She called for public and private organisations to come together with individuals to secure the internet (BBC).

“A few hours south of here, there are creative Hollywood writers and actors who have imagined and produced stories that capture the essence of the problem, including: Matthew Broderick in War Games, Robert Redford in Sneakers, Sandra Bullock in The Net, and Bruce Willis in Live Free and Die Hard. These and other movies present the types of issues that we should care about and solve together,” Hathaway told the conference (remarks from The Atlantic).

Continue reading "Cybersecurity: Matthew Broderick, Robert Redford, Sandra Bullock, Bruce Willis and now … Barack Obama" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2009
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Back in the day, Chinese scientists like Wen Ho Lee had to come to the US to be accused of stealing secrets. More recently, a US researcher is awaiting sentencing in America for sharing technology with his Chinese student. But the world is changing fast, and today's Wall Street Journal has an incredible story of how the Chinese are now being accused of stealing US technology from the comfort of home.

The Journal article details how hackers have stolen terabytes (that's TERABYTES) of data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a US$300 billion project that is the Pentagon's costliest development programme ever. The attackers infiltrated contractor computers during 2007 and 2008 and siphoned off sensitive details about the design and electronics systems of the aircraft. The most sensitive data were kept on a secure Pentagon server and appear to be safe, but the hackers made off with mounds other stuff. It's not even clear what they managed to steal: the infiltrators encrypted the data that they siphoned off, leaving Air Force forensic teams stumped.

Like many cyber attacks, the espionage appeared to originate in China. Of course nobody knows for sure that Chinese nationals were behind the attacks, but that hasn't stopped speculation that, once again, the Chinese have gotten hold of the US's most sensitive secrets. The Chinese Embassy in Washington called those allegations "a product of the Cold War mentality" and said that they were meant to "fan up China threat sensations."

Lockheed Martin Chief Financial Officer Bruce Tanner says, via the Washington Post, "To our knowledge there's never been any classified information breach." He went on to say, "Like the government, these attacks on our systems are continuous, and we do have stringent measures in place to both detect and stop these attacks."

Image: USAF/Lockheed Martin

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on April 21, 2009
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If you haven’t yet voted, there’s still time to pick your favourite NASA Image of the Day from the 50 finalists.

Will you pick Antarctic warming trends or Fall Colours in Pennsylvania? Maybe you lean more towards the giant designs carved by Nazca in the Peruvian desert? Or a view of Earth from Saturn?

My vote is going to this 2002 image. Can you guess what it is? Answer below the fold. Voting ends April 27.

Continue reading "NASA’s 50 greatest photos " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 20, 2009
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The song that originally inspired the start of this Songs About Science Series now has a sequel.

Back in the depths of time, the Bio-Rad company decided to promote one of its products with the inspired PCR Song. Now, via chemistry-blog.com, we’ve been made aware of the follow up: the GTCA song.

If you want more head over to Bio-Rad for different versions, outtakes and more.

Below the fold: songs about metrics and charts.

Continue reading "Songs about science XIX: back to our roots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 17, 2009
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Today’s science song is what the office’s young person tells me is a ‘rap’ that has been ‘dropped’ by Chicago- based BinoWhite, where the rapper and his ‘crew’ threaten to “kick your arse with science”.

Mr White describes his ditty as, “An educational song, with violence.”

(Warning: video contains swearing some may find offensive.)

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

As ever – below the fold is Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVIII: ‘What up Einstein, you as smart as people think you are.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 15, 2009
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UPDATE – Current Nature editor Philip Campbell’s tribute, John Maddox 1925–2009, is now on our website:

It was with great sadness that I and my colleagues at Nature learned of the death on Sunday of Sir John Maddox — or 'JM', as his colleagues always referred to him.

There was puzzlement, too. Yes, John had been looking frail recently, but, well, this was JM — the perpetually restless, irresistible, unstoppable force. The editor who conducted some gatherings with 'shock and awe' as some recall. The 'man with a whim of iron' as others used to call him. And the man who survived countless cigarettes and glasses of red wine, many consumed late into the night as he wrote the week's Editorials at the last possible moment.

As Walter Gratzer, of King’s College, London, wrote recently, “John Maddox brought an old-fashioned Nature into the modern age from the mid-1960s.” (History of Nature feature.)

A full appreciation from Nature will follow shortly. Meanwhile, here is what the world is saying.

Without too much trouble I could probably fill blogs for a month with tales of John: of waiting at the typesetter while he finished an editorial way beyond deadline; of a plan to visit Mexico together when we wined and dined the very attractive press attache at the Mexican Consulate; of how he regularly set fire to his waste-paper basket. Of being sent to the wine bar with a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Thames. Of him disappearing on a Friday night and saying, as the door closed, that he wanted a thousand words from me by Monday for the following week’s issue – on anything I pleased. Of many cases of exasperation and irritation, and many more acts of kindness.

- Henry Gee, Nature editor

He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal.

- PZ Myers, Pharyngula

One of the toughest adversaries I’ve ever wrangled with is Sir John Maddox. He was hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.

- John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology

As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

- The Times

It was a mark of his skilled editorship that Nature could publish a paper on, say, the Loch Ness monster without sacrificing its authority.

“He took command of Nature in a big way,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said. “He had a tremendous grasp of science in the full range, from physics to biology to public affairs as they affected the world of science.”

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Britain’s astronomer royal, called Mr. Maddox “a dominant figure,” adding that “he helped establish Nature’s status internationally and built it up by developing supplements to increase its coverage.” After retiring as editor in 1995, he assumed an influential elder statesman role, acting, Mr. Rees said, “as a general guru of science and scientific policy.”

- NY Times

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she [his daughter, Bronwen Maddox] says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

- Scientific American

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Would you Adam and Eve it? Robot scientists - named Adam and Eve - could soon be after your research jobs.

According to a new paper in Science, an autonomous robot can conduct its own experiments and has now come up with its first results. Ross King, of Aberystwyth University, and his colleagues report that their robo-researcher ‘Adam’ has “generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation”.

The team set Adam to work finding genes for “orphan enzymes”. These are as-yet undiscovered genes for enzymes thought to catalyze reactions that occur in yeast. King told the Times:

Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult for human scientists, but easy for robot scientists. Yeast is well understood. It’s been studied for over 100 years. We knew this enzyme must be there, but we didn’t know where.

Continue reading "Rise of the machines" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 03, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Video games might improve your eyesight, according to a paper published by Nature Neuroscience.

Daphne Bavelier, of the University of Rochester in New York, and colleagues found that study subjects who played action video games (either Unreal Tournament 2004 or Call of Duty 2) had improved ability to detect small changes in shades of gray on a uniform background, so-called ‘contrast sensitivity’. Those who played a more sedate game (The Sims 2) showed no improvement.

“Unfortunately, contrast sensitivity is one of the aspects of vision that is most easily compromised,” says Bavelier (Independent). “This problem affects thousands of people worldwide, including those with professional activities requiring excellent eyesight, and ageing populations, along with individuals who are clinically evaluated for vision problems such as amblyopia.”

The new study suggests playing certain video games might help with contrast problems. After 50 hours of playing the action-game group had improved their ability to see shades of gray by 43%.

“[Contrast sensitivity function] improvements are typically brought about by correction of the optics of the eye with eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery,” the researchers write. “We found that the very act of action video game playing also enhanced contrast sensitivity, providing a complementary route to eyesight improvement.”

Gary Rubin, of the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology, told the BBC, “Contrast sensitivity is a very basic visual function, and usually they are more difficult to alter in adulthood. This is a small study, showing a small effect, but it was carefully done, and merits further investigation.”

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 30, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A BBC documentary is claiming that the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra may have been at least part-African, rather than Greek.

The claim hinges on a skeleton that maybe Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, who some suspect was murdered on the orders of her sister. The remains were found at a tomb called ‘The Octagon’ in Ephesus, Turkey.

Continue reading "Cleopatra: maybe African, maybe not" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 16, 2009
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The recent rash of songs about science continues, with this example reaching us via Deep Sea News. At this rate I’m going to have to expand my knowledge of Roman numerals.

The New York Times informs us that, “The rapper on the left is Derrick Davis, a junior at Stanford. The rapper on the right is Tom McFadden, an instructor in the human biology program there.”

This is not the only example from these rapping researchers. Check out the awesome song about cane toads, I Just Want a Function.

Equally good are I'm going going back back to plasma membrane, Wanna be a... Scholar?, and Hi, Meiosis.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVII: gene regulators mount up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Journals should be routinely checking papers they publish for signs of plagiarism, a team of American researchers is demanding.

In a commentary paper published in Science the team headed by Harold Garner, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, report their checking of similar citations in the Medline database. They found 212 pairs of articles with “signs of potential plagiarism” using a computer programme called eTBLAST.

“We have just started to scratch the surface, we anticipate finding hundreds to thousands more cases. It is definitely the tip of the iceberg,” says Garner (Globe and Mail).

Garner previously used the same programme on Medline to find duplicate citations and found thousands of cases of potential plagiarism. Writing in Nature in January 2008 Garner and fellow researcher Mounir Errami wrote:

We find it odd that automated text-matching systems are used regularly by high schools and universities, thereby enabling us to hold our children up to a higher standard than we do our scientists. In our view, it would be fairly simple to fold these tools into electronic-manuscript submission systems, making it a ubiquitous aspect of the publication process.

Now they are again pushing the issue in their new piece, and reporting the responses of editors and authors of both the original paper and the suspected plagiarism.

Continue reading "Putting plagiarists on the back foot" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 06, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The clever people at MIT have come up with rather excellent video of DNA transcription utilising one of the greatest inventions of the last 100 years: the humble Lego brick.

Another video along similar lines has been made for translation.

Of course, one Lego-based science video is never enough. Below the fold are some more internet Lego-science hits.

[Thanks to Mike for pointing us to this.]

Continue reading "Video: Lego DNA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A German group named after a famous heretic has decided to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday by campaigning to have the Ascension Day public holiday renamed ‘Evolutionstag’ (Evolution Day).

Ascension Day is when many Christians celebrate supposed return of Jesus to heaven, it normally falls in May. As Spiegel notes in its coverage of the campaign, most holidays in Germany have Christian roots, although a third of the population is atheist.

The Giordano Bruno Foundation, which is behind Evolutionstag, says it is time for a secular holiday. (Bruno advocated heliocentrism and was burned as the stake in 1600, although many believe this was more to do with his unorthodox views of god than his astronomy musing.)

To spread their message they’ve made this song.

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about Science XV: You can’t fool the children of evolution" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 27, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s a double bill on today’s edition of songs about science. First up, the Nano Song.

This is the UC Berkeley entry in the American Chemical Society’s ‘What is Nano?’ contest. "We put a lot of work into making something we hoped would be accessible and enjoyable for everyone we know who doesn't spend their life studying nanoscience," says Patrick Bennett, the scientist who directed the video, told Wired.

The next item for your delectation is the welcome return of Richard Alley, who some of you may remember for his “musical review about the problem of scarce resources” set to the tune of Proud Mary and others may remember for his glacial calving work. Via the Highly Allochthonous blog comes this geological reworking of ‘Ring of Fire’.

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about Science XIV – Nano vs Fire" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 26, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As it gears up to build another generation of nuclear plants, Britain is expecting to close down its £470 million facility at Sellafield which converts plutonium waste into new nuclear fuel, The Guardian reckons. The plant, which was launched 10 years ago and is the only one in the country, was supposed to help use up plutonium recovered from nuclear waste by turning it into MOx fuel (mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium). It’s never been a success, reprocessing less than 3 tonnes of fuel a year since it started, and being dogged by embarrassing technical problems.

According to a strategy document recently published by Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is wondering what to do with plutonium:

NDA have reviewed SMP [the Sellafield MOx plant] and do not believe that it provides either the capacity or longevity to be used for the UK civil stockpile and the recycle options that NDA has considered assumed that plutonium is either sold direct or that MOx is fabricated in a new plant.

Industry sources say that means curtains for the old MOx plant, The Guardian says, though the NDA says it hasn’t made a formal recommendation yet.

Continue reading "Britain's pox on MOx" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on February 17, 2009
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A group of UCLA scientist think they may have answered a question that has baffled the most powerful military machine on Earth: where is Osama bin Laden?

“In informal conversations in the Geography Department at UCLA, we began to ask ourselves if the biogeographic theories we use every day – theories that predict how plants and animals distribute themselves over space and over time – employed in conjunction with publicly available satellite imagery, could shed some light on this question,” write Thomas Gillespie and colleagues in the MIT International Review.

“… By bringing these methodologies to bear, it is our hope that a long overdue debate might bring bin Laden back to the fore of the public consciousness – and possibly to justice.”

Combining facts about his behaviour and last known whereabouts with satellite images, the researchers narrow down his possible location to three building in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar. "If he's still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now," says Gillespie (press release).

Kim Rossmo, of Texas State University in San Marcos, told USA Today he was not entirely convinced.
“It’s important to think outside the box, and this is an innovative idea worth more pursuit,” says Rossmo. “However, the authors are much too certain of their conclusions. The idea of identifying three buildings in a city of half a million — especially one in a country the authors have likely never visited — is somewhat overconfident.”

Continue reading "UCLA researchers ‘locate bin Laden’ " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 17, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that they can do no science till their giant particle smasher is fixed, the Large Hadron Collider scientists are finding other ways to keep people interested.

Sergio Cittolin, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, has been sketching the different elements of his equipment “in the style of Leonardo da Vinci”.

Although they seem to have only appeared on the CERN website at the end of January, some of these drawings were originally featured in Physics World last year. They also grace the CMS website and are too cool not to share here.

Dan Brown fans will surely be thrilled to find two of their author’s interests combined.

[Hat tip: Alexis Madrigal]

More below the fold.

Continue reading "The LHC, Da Vinci style " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 10, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As part of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast George Hrab has recorded this ditty about how big numbers get for those working in space science.

You ponder the universe and a look comes 'cross your face You try to fathom distances of all the stuff in space But you can't wrap the bacon of your mind around the fig Of all the terms required to describe how big is big

“Far” (mp3).

UPDATE - Video now on YouTube

[Hat tip: Bad Astronomy.]

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs
Songs about science XI: Charlie Darwin
Songs about science XII: Shubin’s song

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 06, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Iran’s announcement that it has successfully put a satellite in orbit has successfully triggered the fear in many.

The satellite is named Omid (Hope), and according to Reuters is for research and telecoms. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, commented, “Iran’s satellite technology is for purely peaceful purposes and to meet the needs of the country.”

However France, American and UK are already expressing concerns about Iran’s apparent space-ability, mainly because the technology used could also be used to make ballistic missiles (BBC).

Continue reading "Iran’s Sputnik" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 03, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks Google, now I’ve got that annoying song Under the sea from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head.

You can do the same, just by taking a look at Google Earth’s latest addition. (Check out Climate Feedback last year on Google Earth's climate-related updates). It’s a very cool update that allows you to scoot around under the sea, and take a look at the sea floor, or at least a representation of it based on seismic data. Can you guess what it’s called? Google marketing people have done themselves proud this time, yes, it’s called Google Ocean!

This Very. Exciting. News. has set the internet alight with stories about the project.

Sylvia Earle, oceaneer extraordinaire introduces the project in a video neatly slotted in at the Guardian, and a great quote of hers is highlighted by Deep Sea News: “Anyone can discover in a few minutes what took me 50 years to understand.” DSN are in turn highlighting the Google Ocean live blogging epic by Danny Sullivan.

The application allows you to spin the globe round, take your pick of underwater treasure you want to find, and zoom in (or dive down) to check out how the land lies. It’s neat, and the Googlers have added tidbits of information about some of the features you might see.

The data has come from a load of research institutes, and the EU is also claiming a stake in the project.

Take a peek, but look out for the vampire squid, apparently lurking there somewhere…

Image: screenshot from Google Earth/Ocean/Mars/Sky/Etc

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on February 03, 2009
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America is getting a new university. A rather strange sounding university.

Based at NASA’s Ames facility in California, the Singularity University has been inspired by the writing of ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil. This summer students – who may number 30 or 120 – will start work at the university, which is backed by Google (who else) to the tune of $1 million.

“Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges,” says the institution’s website.

Continue reading "A singular university" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 03, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Emma Marris

You might recall a neat site we profiled last July that ranked journals not by citations but by value for money—the eigenfactor.

Well the team behind the eigenfactor have not rested on their laurels. Instead, they have teamed up with data visualization whiz Moritz Stefaner of Well-formed data to make super-sexy looking visualizations of how and how much journals and fields cite one another, which journals are the best value, and how a given journal's importance has risen and fallen over time.

See them in all their glory at well-formed.eigenfactor.org and read Stefaner's notes on how he approached the project at his blog.

Carl Bergstrom, the lead player in the eigenfactor team, says the intended audience is curious scientists as well as data-visualization enthusiasts. "What we are experimenting with here is how good algorithms and good data can combine with intelligently designed and aesthetically beautiful ways of displaying that data."

Bergstrom left all the aesthetic decisions, such as which colours to use, strictly to Stefaner. "Moritz is the designer," he says. "I shouldn't be allowed to do these things. My wife could tell you that."

Meanwhile, in other impact-factor news, Public Library of Science ONE has recently announced (registration required) that it will add a grab-bag of "alternative impact data" from Scopus, user ratings, press coverage and the like to each article. The Scientist quotes Peter Binfield, the journal's managing editor, as saying "Our idea is to throw up a bunch of metrics and see what people use."

Update: Carl Bergstrom has asked us to make the following clear: "We also rank by citations. We just have additional features that let you take price into account. But the basic Eigenfactor scores as visualized at the new site are purely citation-based, and independent of price." Apologies for any confusion. Ed.

Image: citation patterns for Nature (click for larger version).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 29, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A new world record has been set for solar cell efficiency, or so we are told by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Germany. They have revealed a triple-junction cell that has a conversion efficiency of 41.1% (press release).

Solar cell efficiencies are notoriously hard to pin down. Claims are often made, but not considered ‘official’ until they are independently verified by a recognised body. A quick search online, for example led me to a claim from a consortium that includes the University of Delaware of a cell with 42.8 % efficiency.

So what’s the real answer? And do these incremental advances mean anything?

Continue reading "Baffling solar cell efficiencies are broken" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 19, 2009
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The ever-vocal Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, based in Washington, DC, is the latest organisation to produce a report bemoaning the lack of regulation of engineered nanoparticles in commercial products (press release).

This time, the US Food and Drug Administration are under fire for not being up to the task. The report “A hard Pill to Swallow: Barriers to Effective FDA Regulation of Nanotechnology-Based Dietary Supplements” pulls no punches, kicking off in the summary with the following: “This paper addresses the issue of whether FDA is equipped to meet the emerging regulatory challenge of dietary supplements that use engineered nanomaterials. The short answer is no.”

The three main problems the report authors, William Schultz from legal practice Zuckerman Spaeder and his colleague Lisa Barclay, identify include:

1. FDA does not have the capacity to identify nano-based dietary supplements that are being developed and marketed, unless manufacturers submit to the pre-market notification process for new dietary ingredients.
2. To the extent that FDA is aware of nano-based dietary supplements, it has little regulatory authority over them.
3. Even if it were granted increased regulatory authority, FDA lacks the scientific expertise and resources to effectively regulate nanomaterials in supplements.

Continue reading "Nanotech regulatory woes continue" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 14, 2009
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The proportion of videos on YouTube concerned with performing animals and feats of dance has declined very slightly this month. The reason for this is that Nature has launched its very own channel, bringing you all that is best in science.

Where else can you watch items on genome analysis of the duck-billed platypus and new interpretations of the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism alongside whale evolution and mega-impacts on Mars? Nowhere, that’s where.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 17, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Researchers have released a map showing where in the US you are most likely to die in a natural disaster. Such acts of God do not, of course, smite the country evenly.

The survey, published in the International Journal of Health Geographics yesterday, puts the worst mortality statistics in the South, thanks to tornadoes and other deadly weather. Heat waves and droughts made the northern Great Plains another danger zone.

Heat and drought were, in fact, the country's biggest killers, accounting for 19.6% of all hazard deaths in 1970-2004. Close behind were other forms of severe weather - thunderstorms, blizzards, and such like.

Continue reading "The most hazardous states in the union" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 17, 2008
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Brits and Kiwis got curious about the Large Hadron Collider this year, according to newly released search stats from Google. But nobody else did.

After a press-sweeping September debut - and an almost immediate breakdown from which rumours are still rippling - "large hadron collider" was the 6th-fastest-rising search term of 2008 in the UK, and came in 10th in New Zealand (fastest rising = largest increase in searches since 2007). It didn't make the top 10 list in any other country.

The LHC-equivalent 6th fastest riser for the US was "fox news"; for Canada it was "free movies".

No other science term made it onto the lists - unless you count "earth day", which was 4th for Hong Kong googlers (followed, for reasons opaque to me, by "alexander graham bell", "marc chagall", and "diego velasquez"). In Australia "underbelly" was 10th, but disappointingly, it's a popular TV show, not an epidemic of seedy corruption.

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 10, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you believed some of the more sensationalist headlines, you might think that a commentary paper published in Nature yesterday was urging everyone to go out and source illegal drugs to boost their brain function.

Sample headlines include ‘Let all pop pills for brain, experts urge’ and ‘Uppers for everyone, scientists say’. Admittedly, that is catchier than the title of the article in question: ‘Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy’.

“The article, while libertarian in spirit, is absolutely not saying: ‘use these drugs, everybody’,” says Philip Campbell, one of the paper’s authors and editor of Nature.

“My advice is to avoid taking such drugs unless you have been prescribed them. It is a serious felony to sell such drugs off-prescription in the US; in the UK, Ritalin, for example, is a class B drug, so that un-prescribed possession is punishable by prison and a fine. Furthermore, these drugs have undergone no clinical trials for use by healthy people. And they do have side-effects.”

Continue reading "The ethics of brain boosting" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 08, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

French scientists today announced plans to clone black truffles and grow them in a lab (Financial Times).

Marking the start of truffle season, the French region of Corrèze launched a three-year plan that it hopes will revive supplies of the precious fungus - which fetches €1,000 ($1,265) per kilo at market but is harvested less and less. FT reports:

Their goal is to unlock the secrets of black truffle production - the soil, climate or the trees - and hopefully revive an endangered industry by producing a more consistent crop.

The project will involve culturing cloned truffles together with tree saplings in rows of sterile test tubes until they form their crucial symbiotic relationship, a process that can take up to a year. Once the pair is established they will be planted out to mature naturally.

The Times and the Telegraph pick up the story (the latter in a close paraphrase of the FT).

Says Jacques Pebeyre, an octogenarian author and truffier known as France's 'truffle king', "I am not against helping nature." But, he adds, "we need to know how good these [cloned] truffles will be. In the end it all depends on that" (FT).

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 04, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The University of Bath has unveiled the latest iteration of what may be the first robot that can both jump and roll.

PhD student Rhodri Armour’s ‘Jollbot’ could be useful for space exploration, says the university, as it is simpler than a legged design and can overcome larger obstacles than a similar sized wheeled vehicle could achieve (press release, 2005 meeting presentation).

“Others in the past have made robots that jump and robots that roll; but we’ve made the first robot that can do both,” says Armour. “Before jumping, the robot squashes its spherical shape. When it is ready, it releases the stored energy all at once to jump to heights of up to half a metre.”

Jollbot was previous announced in a 2007 paper, when Armour told PhysOrg, “For earth-bound uses, there are a variety of other possible applications that involve locomotion over random or rough terrain. Typically these would involve exploration and could occur in places such as volcanoes, caverns, mountainous regions, or more structured rough environments such as urban areas with stairs and other obstacles. Other applications could be for entertainment, such as tourist guides.”

Of course, if Jollbot does go into space it may meet some very similar things already out there...

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 04, 2008
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A clever camera setup in a Swedish neuroscience lab produces the sensation of swapping bodies with a mannequin or, perhaps even more uncannily, with a cognitive neuroscientist, according to a paper in PLOS One(press release).

This is not a major new finding, but rather – as Reuters notes - a high-tech extension of an old trick in which subjects are made to perceive a rubber hand is their own. The paper describes the technique:

Two CCTV cameras were positioned on a male mannequin such that each recorded events from the position corresponding to one of the mannequin’s eyes. A set of head mounted displays ... connected to the cameras was worn by the participants, and connected in such a way that the images from the left and right video cameras were presented on the left and right eye displays, respectively, providing a true stereoscopic image. Participants were asked to tilt their heads downwards as if looking down at their bodies. Thus, the participants saw the mannequin’s body where they expected to see their own.

We used a short rod to repetitively stroke the participant’s abdomen, which was out of view, in synchrony with identical strokes being applied to the mannequin’s abdomen in full view of the participant.

Continue reading "Swap my bod" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 03, 2008
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Posted for Declan Butler

How would nature do it? That's the premise of the field of biomimetics or biomimicry, which draws on designs and materials that lifeforms have evolved over the course of millions of years.

Now Autodesk, the industry leader in Computer Aided Design software and the maker of Autocad, has got together with Janine Benyus naturalist and founder of the Biomimicry Institute in Missoula Montana. Together they’ve created a free online database called Ask Nature, where they hope to compile nature's solutions to design and engineering challenges, for creators of all stripes to draw on for inspiration.

“This free database is the only public-domain online library of its kind in the world, where architects, designers and engineers can search for and study nature’s solutions to design challenges – learning, for example, how organisms filter air and water, gather solar energy, and create non-toxic dyes and glues,“ they say.

Continue reading "AutoNad? -- Nature Aided Design " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 03, 2008
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Via the Ocean Engineering blog, comes an amazing video.

The dangers of swimming too fast and not looking where you’re going are ably illustrated by this swordfish (or possibly marlin), found wedged into a blow out preventer on the Atwood Eagle oil rig. Not to worry though fish fans, a friendly underwater robot comes along to rescue it.

“This is an example of the things that make the offshore oil industry fun,” says the Peripatetic Engineer blog.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 25, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week Google put the photo archives of Life magazine online, and in the process put up some of the best science photos I’ve seen for some time.

As Life has retained the copyright we can’t put them up here, but have a look at some of the Nature team favourites and feel free to add any of your own favourites below.

Paracutin Volcano in San Juan, Mexico, 1945

Roald Amundsen on his South Pole expedition, 1911

Weather ballon experiment, Antarctica, 1951

Astronomers use the McDonald Observatory telescope, 1948

Einstein & Oppenheimer in Princeton, 1947

Julian Huxley looking confused in Canada, 1955

Soviet space animals in 1961

An American chemist at an unknown research lab in 1946

Warning: browsing the Life photo archive may become addictive.

UPDATE - More science Life photo favourites:
Gorgeous physics photos from the LIFE archives – Symmetry Breaking
Kicking it Old School - Cosmic Variance

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 24, 2008
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A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus.

Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun – rather than the Earth – as the centre of the solar system.

“The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from the skull and a bone from Frombork,” she says (AFP).

Polish police have used the skull to create a reconstruction of how its owner might have looked. This, says AFP, “bore a striking resemblance to portraits of the young Copernicus”.

More coverage
Polish tests 'confirm Copernicus' – BBC
16th-century skeleton identified as Copernicus – Guardian

See also
No choppin' Chopin, says Poland

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 21, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Television might be about to get geekier.

The US National Academy of Sciences has created an initiative that will link TV and movie directors with scientists and engineers to incorporate more accurate science content into entertainment: the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

"By building strong connections between the entertainment and science communities, we're hoping to provide an important service to both Hollywood and the viewing public,” says NAS president Ralph Cicerone (press release). Cicerone says he thinks initiative should allow the public to get involved in the latest advances in science, technology and medicine through television and film.

More and more shows are incorporating science into their content, especially forensic investigation and medical shows like CSI and ER. Films like A Beautiful Mind and Mission Impossible are also heavy on science and technology while Star Trek and the like use the fundamental principles of science to push the frontiers into science fiction.

Continue reading "Getting better science on screen" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2008
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Recently, Dwayne Rooke, the chef at the Davis Station science base in Antarctica, was seriously injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident and had to be evacuated to Tasmania. This was no mean feat.

A ski-eqipped LC-130 Hercules transport plane was dispatched from McMurdo station, which is across the continent and now experiencing nasty spring weather. A temporary sea ice runway was prepared at Davis station for the rescue and penguins were kept off of it. The day after the plane arrived at Davis, it left again for Tasmania (NSF press release, Australian Antarctic Division press release, article from The Age).

When Werner Herzog went to Antarctica to make Encounters at the End of the World he was a bit disappointed at how mundane life at the bottom of the world seemed. Stations are often dirty and scruffy. But science at the end of the world has not yet become a tame affair.

Continue reading "Antarctic mishaps" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 07, 2008
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

A 16-year-old frozen mouse carcass made headlines yesterday when scientists announced the rodent was the first frozen animal to be cloned. In a paper published online by PNAS, Teruhiko Wakayama of RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues report that they were able to produce healthy clones from the rodent’s frozen brain cells.

Frozen cells have been cloned before but those cells were specially treated with chemicals that helped protect them from the damaging effects of freezing. Wakayama’s paper is the first to successfully clone a frozen animal that was, from what I can tell, pretty much just placed in a paper box and plunked straight into a –20ºC freezer in the early 1990’s.

The authors are excited about the possibility of using the technology to resurrect the woolly mammoth from carcasses frozen in Arctic tundra, but acknowledge the possible technological leap between using a 16-year-old and a 40,000-year-old frozen body. (I won’t pretend to understand the obsession with the woolly mammoth, but have acknowledged that the obsession is very real ever since I learned there is a black market for woolly mammoth parts run, at least in part, by the Russian mafia.)

Continue reading "Clones of the dead: A mouse now, Ted Williams later?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A scientist has seen his research become an internet hit after a video of his work was set to the Benny Hill theme music.

David Scholnick, who works at Pacific University in America, was using a treadmill to assess the health of shrimps. Healthy shrimps should run fast, unhealthy shrimps should run slower.

“The healthy shrimp ran and swam at treadmill speeds of up to 20 metres per minute for hours with little indication of fatigue,” he says (Daily Mail). “[A] shrimp dealing with an infection is less active and limited in its ability to migrate, find food, and avoid being eaten. As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was amazing to see how well they performed.”

Then someone leaked a video of the running shrimp onto the internet. This was way back in 2006 so it’s not quite clear why a number of newspapers are covering this story now. Still, the video is amusing enough to be its own justification.

The video of the running shrimp has become a smash hit, with many versions being set to music. Embedded above is one of the most popular, with over half a million people watching it since November 2006.

“'So many people have logged on to see it which I suppose is kind of funny - I guess people are fascinated,” Scholnick told the Mail. “I guess people find the prospect of watching a shrimp exercise on a treadmill amazing.”

More shrimp videos
Shrimp vs The Final Countdown
Shrimp vs Curtis Mayfield
Dub shrimp
Shrimp vs Justin Timberlake
Shrimp vs Dragonforce
Animals on treadmills round up

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2008
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Posted for Declan Butler

The pair of 800 pound gorillas that are Microsoft and Google are shaking the cages of convention in traditional disease research. This week, the charity arms of both - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its Sergey and Larry counterpart Google.org - announced millions of dollars for blue skies research, along the lines of the US military's DARPA whose motto has been to support “revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use.” Likewise, Google and Microsoft are trying to attract new blood and ideas, for medical payoffs in the fields of detecting, preventing, treating, and controlling killer diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and pandemic flu.

Today, Microsoft announced the 104 winners, from 22 countries and six continents (see graphic below), of a competition in novel ideas for global health (list of winners). “Projects cover a wide range of innovation, including a “mosquito flashlight” to prevent malaria transmission by disrupting wavelengths, self-destructing TB cells, and studying anti-infective properties of the eye to help prevent HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease,” the company says in a press release.

Continue reading "Wacky races" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Large Hadron Collider has already been fired up and it has already broken. Yesterday the giant particle physics experiment was also formally inaugurated as Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from across the world met at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

In an obligatory nod to the world’s financial woes, Fillion said, “The financial crisis that is currently raging shows us the most destabilising face of globalisation. But the LHC is an example of its most promising aspect.” (AFP.)

Of course the machine is not working at the moment, after a massive amount of liquid helium leaked from its cooling system. This fact could hardly be glossed over and Raymond Orbach, US undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, told AP, “Frankly it was a surprise that it worked the first time without a glitch.”

However Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, added, “I have no doubts they'll get back into operation within three to four months.”

The Daily Telegraph is among papers to note that those attending the reception were treated to a banquet of ‘molecular cuisine’: “molecular egg curdle and ice-cream mixed with liquid nitrogen, created by two of the world’s best chefs Ettore Bocchia of Italy and Ferran Adria, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Spain”.

Liquid nitrogen? Let’s hope that none of that leaked...

Image: CERN control room / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2008
Categories: Financial Crisis, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ingredients

Malaria parasite (or other organism of your choice)
Butter
Flour
Sugar
Eggs

Method

Sequence your chosen organism’s genetic code.
Submit your genome sequence to Nature.
Ensure your paper is given pride of place on the cover of that journal.
Make your cake.
Put said cover of Nature onto your cake.

Et voila. Your Nature cake should now look something like this...

Thanks to the authors behind the recent Plasmodium vivax paper for sending us these photos of their brilliant cake. Below the fold: the team with their tasty, tasty cover.

Continue reading "How to bake a Nature cake" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2008
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This strange contraption is the result of a collaboration between Australian artist David Rogers and US Geological Survey scientist Andy Michael. The ‘seismic art installation’ displays Californian earth quakes in real time by shaking its three-metre high steel rods.

The Parkfield Interventional EarthQuake Fieldwork (PIEQF) exhibit receives data on all earthquakes above magnitude 0.1, of which there are around 40 in the Golden State every day.

Michael and Rogers say they hope the work will help people accept and understand the risks posed by earthquakes.

“The Parkfield installation embodies the extra dimension that art brings to science, helping to visualize what's going on below the surface in a way science can't on its own,” says Michael (press release). “David’s art brings earthquakes that happen under California every day to the surface and makes them real and visible for all to see. His work gives everyone a deeper appreciation for how the earth works, and why they need to prepare for the inevitable large and damaging earthquakes.”

If you can’t make it out to Parkfield you can watch on the webcam (note that PIEQF ‘sleeps’ from 9.30 in the evening to 6.30 in the morning).

More pictures below the fold.

Continue reading "Shake it! Earthquake art comes to California" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 16, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Warwick University expects more than 200 human body parts to arrive next week. You might think that wasn’t out of the ordinary, but this time there’s a twist.

The institution’s medical school has purchased “plastinated” teaching aids costing £400 000 from the controversial Gunther von Hagens. Von Hagens, who works out of Guben, Germany, is famous for carting exhibitions of preserved and carefully chopped up dead folks around the world, occasionally displaying them riding dissected horses or playing chess (press release).

Warwick’s anatomy students will be under strict orders on how to handle the expensive flesh, which should stay in one piece (or however many pieces are intended) for about a decade, according to the university press office. Head of department Peter Abrahams, apparently trotted around the workshops of various suppliers, testing their embalmed bits before agreeing to the deal with Dr Death (as von Hagens is weirdly proud to be known).

The Telegraph just published a profile of von Hagens and his German factory, with its blood-red floors and 150-odd workers, who boast jobs as peculiar as preparing Santa Claus’s lungs.

Intriguingly, the obsessive anatomist was once sold by East Germany to West Germany (West Germany purchased the release of about 30,000 political prisoners from East Germany - Times), and 8,000 people have volunteered to have their corpses dunked in a bath of acetone, injected with silicone rubber and then cured by him or his craftsmen.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4613780.ece

More coverage
University buys £400k body parts – BBC
University buys body parts – PA

Image: Von Hagens with students and parts

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 15, 2008
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Something strange is happening with Google News. Those of you who are avid checkers of the science and technology home page may notice that an unexpected item has made its way into the listings.

Alongside the masses of IT news and the occasional science story the mysterious and top-secret Google algorithms seem to think horoscopes now count as science.

Yesterday UPI’s ‘Your Daily Horoscope’ was the second science story at a little after nine (image). Today the LA Times’ horoscope nestled neatly between news of Microsoft R&D spending and cheap DNA sequencing (image).

Is someone at Google having a laugh?

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 07, 2008
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Wow, here’s an invention I never realised we needed: The world’s fastest barcode reader.

But I'm just showing my ignorance – today I have learned that barcodes are used much more widely than just at the supermarket checkout.

Yes, barcodes are one of the underpinning infrastructure technologies of our society. Sorting things out everywhere from shops to post rooms to blood banks. Current readers use either a mechanically scanned laser – the reflected light bounces back and gives the reading – or an optical scanner that takes a picture of the barcode. The scan rates of these lasers is about 100 – 1000 scans per second, and require the use of mechanical scanners and lots of optical-to-electrical converters.

But if that’s not fast enough for you, check out this paper in Applied Physics Letters (paper, press release)by Keisuke Goda and colleagues at UCLA. They use a fancy laser technique, where a laser pulse has the barcode’s image mapped onto it, and this in turn is mapped onto another waveform that is read with great speed by a single, stationary, optical-to-electrical converter. The limiting step is the speed of the laser pulse.

They reckon they can get a bar code reader that scans at a rate of 25 MHz – 10,000 times faster than the old methods Goda says, and in future this speed could be even faster. They say that faster and faster readers are needed by industry. PI Bahram Jalali explains: " "Eliminating the CCD camera and the mechanically steered mirrors from bar code scanners can prove valuable in applications that demand high-throughput bar code reading, such as industrial monitoring and retail supply line management."

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 03, 2008
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Posted for Ashley Yeager

Hold on to those solar panels or they might show up on eBay. As energy prices soar and consumers turn to the Sun for their power, opportunistic thieves are cashing in on the new market by dismantling and reselling solar panels.

"I wouldn't say it's pervasive, but it's going on," California Solar Energy Industries Association executive director Sue Kateley told the Contra Costa Times in August. According to UK paper the Guardian a rash of thefts in California has led one wag to coin the term ‘grand theft solar’

California is the US leader for solar panel installations, with 33,000 across the state, the New York Times and the Guardian report. It’s no surprise, then, that California is also the US market leader for solar panel thefts. Note that figures are hard to come by and cases have been reported in Oregon, Minnesota and even in Africa.

On 22 September, in fact, the South African Sowetan reported that police caught an off-duty officer in Thohoyandou, Limpopo possessing solar panel band cutting equipment and suspected stolen property. Similar property thefts were reported by The New Vision Online, a Ugandan Web site.

Continue reading "‘Grand theft solar’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 26, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The catchily titled ‘2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge’ has rolled around again. The winning entries are published in this week’s issue of Science and can also be seen on the NSF website.

Pictured here are the suction cups of the Loligo pealei squid, captured by Jessica Schiffman and Caroline Schauer of Drexel University. That’s the image they captured, not the squid. This was given an Honorable Mention in the Photography category and probably would have won if it wasn’t the stuff of nightmares.

More below the fold.

Continue reading "Picture special: squid suckers, cancer close ups and more" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 26, 2008
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This year saw the 58th Meeting of Nobel Laureates descend on the island of Lindau, Germany. The meetings are supposed to allow young scientists to meet the giants of their field.

Nature sent a film crew to the island to make the first ever Nature documentary. Starting from October 3rd you can see five interviews in which students question Nobel Laureates David Gross, George Smoot, Gerardus t’Hooft, John Hall and William Phillips.

If you can’t wait there’s a teaser trailer already available here.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2008
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Via Andrew Revkin’s DotEarth blog we meet Richard Alley of Penn State, aka The Singing Climatologists. This is ‘Rollin’ to the Future’, described by Alley as “a musical review about the problem of scarce resources”.

Revkin says:

Besides being a lead author on several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Alley led one of the groups that first discerned in Greenland’s ice layers how the climate has seen extraordinary jogs in temperature, particularly shortly after the end of the last ice age. ... Now he’s moving into multimedia communication on climate, and earth sciences more generally, not just with video, but with a guitar.

For our younger readers, this is what he’s referencing although this version is clearly better.

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 15, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The media feeding frenzy that is the British Association Festival of Science has kicked off. Katrina Charles is there for Nature and has thus far enlightened us about fossilised forests in Illinois coal mines and why science in science fiction films is a bit silly.

There’s far more to cover than one person alone can manage. Here’s a round up of the rest...

Continue reading "BA Festival of Science round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 09, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Steinn Sigurðsson’s Dynamics of Cats blog this rather excellent piece of Friday-fodder has surfaced. Philosopher of science Santiago Ginnobili and his colleague Christián Carlos Carman have constructed this awesome demonstration of the power of epicycles.

For those of you not au fait with ancient cosmology, epicycles are a way of explaining the motions of planets using only perfect circles. Assuming planets moved in perfect circles did not explain what was seen in the sky, so astronomers added secondary and tertiary circles, smaller and smaller, to try and create patterns which agreed with observation.

In theory any curve can be constructed using this method, if you’re prepared to add enough circles.

This exercise appears to be tied up with ideas of refutability and falsification in science, but to be honest my language skills aren’t up to translating philosophy of science papers in other tongues. Just enjoy the video for now.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 05, 2008
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Posted for Natasha Gilbert

Tests carried out on the two mummified foetuses found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun are beginning to yield results.

Research presented at the pharmacy and medicine in ancient Egypt conference at Manchester University, UK, earlier this week show the children could have been twins despite one being much larger than the other.

The results add weight to suggestions that the stillborn foetuses were the teenage Pharaoh’s children, and is due to be published in the journal Antiquity in January 2009.

Last month, Egyptian scientists announced they were to conduct DNA paternity testing on the foetuses. The results are due December. The foetuses were found by Howard Carter when he discovered the King Tut’s tomb in 1922, but very little has been found out about them since.

Continue reading "Tut’s tots could be twins" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 05, 2008
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A solar powered plane has set a new record over the desert of Arizona, staying aloft for 83 hours and 37 minutes. Importantly, this means it stayed up for three nights.

The Zephyr beat a previous official world record for unmanned flight of 30 hours set by the Global Hawk plane in 2001 and also beat its own previous unofficial record of 54 hours. As this Zephyr flight does not meet all the requirements of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale the record remains unofficial, notes the BBC.

Although it might eventually be used for research purposes such as earth observation, those most likely to see the Zephyr first used commercially are those unfortunate enough to be in war zones. Its manufacturer QinetQ is a mainly military engineering company that was spun out of the British military a few years ago.

“In addition to setting a new unofficial record, the trial is a step towards the delivery of Zephyr's capability for joint, real-time, battlefield persistent surveillance and communications to forces in the field at the earliest opportunity,” says Simon Bennett, managing director of QinetiQ’s Applied Technologies business (press release).

Previously on Nature
Solar power: A flight to remember
Solar powered flight at night

More news coverage
Wired
AP

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 26, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Tim Sands

News rampage, that is. The world’s press has gone into something of a frenzy over a report in New Scientist of a robot guided by “rat brains” – more accurately rat neurons in a dish.

This is just a small sample from around the globe: Wired, News.com.au, India Times, Telegraph.

This experiment is somewhat different from the monkey-brain controlled robotic arm described in Nature in May and the earlier robots controlled by whole monkey and lamprey brains. In these new experiments the response of disembodied rat neurons in a dish were used to control a free-roaming robot called Gordon.

Continue reading "Rodent-guided robot rampage" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 15, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Sat-Nav in a wristwatch, pretty high-tech? Apparently, not necessarily. Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.

This nifty device, which provides scrolling directions for multiple locations*, is one of 50 weird and wonderful labour-saving devices that have gone on display at the British Library.

It is not clear if this device can also provide traffic updates.

Other gadgets, some of which the Daily Mail provides pictures for, on display include:

The two handled self-pouring teapot (1886)
Clockwork burglar alarm (1852)
Grenade to put out fires (1890)
Mechanical page-turner (1890)
The automatic nose hair cutter (1920)

And according to the Telegraph there are also "Go no further" honeymoon garters.

The collection is provided by Maurice Collins, “a retired businessman from Muswell Hill, London, who has cherry-picked 50 must-have items from his collection of 1,400 historic gadgets to show off at the British Library Business and Intellectual Property Centre”, says the Daily Mail.

For more retro-futurism check out yesterday's post: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

*ok, you have to scroll it yourself and change the paper reel for different directions, it was the 20s!

Image: BL

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 15, 2008
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On the front page of wikipedia today you may have noticed a small item about WRNY, “an AM radio station ... started by Hugo Gernsbacks Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines”.

These magazines started up over a hundred years ago in April 1908 with the first edition of Modern Electrics, which later became Modern Electrics and Mechanics. Gernsbacks continued with The Electrical Experimenter in 1913, which became Science and Invention in 1920.

“Not only did this fill America’s proto-geeks with dreams of wireless and electrical power machinery, it published Gernsback's hard-SF novel Ralph 124C 41 + and arguably foreshadowed the entire genre of technically oriented science fiction,” says the Magazine Art website.

Ok, we’ve missed the anniversary in April but this was too good not to bring to your attention: the Magazine Art website has a complete cover gallery of these magazines. If you have any time on your hands have a browse and see how the future looked back in the last century.

Cover gallery for Modern Electrics on MagazineArt.com
Cover gallery for Electrical Experimenter on MagazineArt.com

Image: January 1920 issue of Electrical Experimenter from MagazineArt.com

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 14, 2008
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Following on from Polish rejection of attempts to analyse the DNA of Chopin, a woman who says she is the daughter of Salvador Dali has started another testing debate.

A woman identified in the Daily Telegraph as Pilar A says the artist is her father but initial DNA testing on skin and hair from his iconic moustache has proven inconclusive. She has called in the lawyers and says she may even try to exhume Dali’s remains, having not been satisfied with the response of his estate to her attempts to establish paternity.

Pilar A says more DNA testing has been done by the estate, but she has not been told of the results by the estate, controlled by Dali’s friend Robert Descharnes. However Robert Descharnes’s son is quoted as saying that the doctor undertaking the paternity test told him verbally there was no Dali link to Pilar A (the Telegraph calls the son Richard; El Mundo calls him Nicolas).

And, proving beyond doubt that internet language translation cannot be trusted, ABC Spain (via Google language tools) provides us with this appropriately surrealist gem as the intro of their coverage:

Only ‘you lack the mustache’ (of the Salvador Dalí, which hedgehogs into the sky), confesses that he told Robert Descharnes-friend and collaborator of genius ampurdanés for forty years-nothing else see it.

Image: Dali, by Roger Higgins via Wikimedia and the Library of Congress

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 12, 2008
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Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have launched a test of ‘air-purifying’ concrete.

Titanium dioxide in the bricks helps sunlight convert nitrogen oxides into “harmless nitrate”. When the rains come this then washes the bricks clear (press release). It’s not clear if the amount of nitrate being produced would be a pollution problem, as is the case with nitrates in agriculture.

The bricks are based on Japanese technology (possibly this tech) which has been further developed by the Twente researchers, says the university. One road in the town of Hengelo will be paved with the eco-bricks and another with normal bricks. The researchers will monitor pollution on both roads.

This isn’t the first set of air-scrubbing concrete out there. The idea has popped up in Italy, where it featured at the Venice Biennale.

Want to know more? Check out this paper from Belgian researcher Anne Beeldens: An environmental friendly solution for air purification and self-cleaning effect: the application of TIO2 as photocatalyst in concrete (PDF).

Image: U Twente

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Tim Sands

At the risk of turning The Great Beyond into a celebrity gossip sheet, which extravagantly-masked leader is currently having paternity tests conducted on two children suspected of being his offspring?

This is the widely reported news that Egyptian scientists are conducting DNA paternity tests on two foetuses found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The stillborn foetuses were found by Howard Carter when he discovered the tomb in 1922 and have remained in storage ever since, having never been put on display or studied (AP).

It has always been assumed that the children were his, DNA testing should settle matter (and lay to rest questions over his fertility).

The testing is part of a larger program to test the relations between hundreds of Egyptian mummies. This is of immense interest to Egyptologists as the precise identity of Tutankhamun’s parentage is unclear.

Continue reading "Tut’s tots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
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An unintended consequence of electric and hybrid cars was reported earlier this year: these environmentally-friendly cars are a danger because they don’t make enough noise. But now Lotus Engineering have come up with a way to add 'vroom' to a hybrid car.

The main concern with these quiet cars has been for the vision impaired, but children and distracted pedestrians, as well as cyclists, are also at risk. According to the Daily Mail “A study at the University of California found that a petrol or diesel car could be heard 36ft away but a Prius was not heard until it was 11ft from blindfolded volunteers.”

So to increase the noise Lotus have outfitted a Toyota Prius “with a waterproof speaker near the radiator that blares simulated yet realistic engine sounds to let pedestrians” (Wired).

Continue reading "Giving hybrids a voice" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 07, 2008
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Nature’s virtual island in Second Life will tomorrow play host to Jeff Marlow, of Imperial College London. Jeff is part of the European ExoMars team that is aiming to put a life-seeking rover on the Red Planet that will put sedentary solvent-sniffer Phoenix to shame.

Tomorrow he is delivering the next Nature Second Life lecture, anyone interested in Mars should check it out.

ExoMars: Europe’s Next Step in the Search for Life on Mars, kicks off tomorrow at 6pm BST (10am PDT).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 04, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

England’s Neolithic artists had something of an abstract bent. While our continental artists were making human and animal representations 5,000-odd years ago British artists were carving convoluted lines and patterns into rocks, using other rocks as tools.

English Heritage, a government-funded body, has been cataloguing the carvings in the Northumberland region and has just released an online catalogue of them. It is also expanding this regional survey across the UK and hopes to add to the new carvings already discovered.

“There are many theories as to what rock art carvings mean,” says Kate Wilson, English Heritage’s inspector of ancient monuments (press release, Times news story). “They may have played a role in fire, feastings and offering activities, or been used as ‘signposts’, or to mark territory. They may have a spiritual significance.”

And according to Wilson, England’s rock-carvers may not be so different to their fellow artists after all. “The fact that these carved symbols developed in diverse and dispersed cultures across the world lend weight to arguments that these simple designs – and the urge to create them – are somehow hard-wired into the human psyche,” she says.

More pictures below the fold and on the England’s Rock Art website.

Continue reading "Picture post: England’s ancient rock art" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 04, 2008
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Any of you scuba divers? And any of you ever seen any insects down there? Nope, thought not. And why? Because of maths.

Insects manage to survive under water by forming a thin bubble around themselves to trap air and let them breathe. Mathematicians John Bush and Morris Flynn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have looked closely at all the factors that control the stability of the bubble and have done the sums to work out the limits on the insects’ sub-aquabatics. (paper and press release)

There’s a maximum depth that insects can dive to before the bubble pops, around 30 metres. But there’s also a minimum depth above which the bubble becomes unstable.

Even though these insects, like the water boatman, could dive deep deep down, they typically don’t bother – it’s dark, cold and there’s not much to eat – but plenty of things to eat them.

Continue reading "Boating bugs breathe by building bubbles" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 01, 2008
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A famous 16th-century warship sank because its crew spoke a different language to its captain, says a researcher who has been looking at the crew’s skulls.

The Mary Rose was the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy before it sank, probably because water flooded in through open gun ports. The last words of its captain Admiral George Carew were of his crew: “I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule.”

Now Hugh Montgomery, a medical researcher at University College London, says he has found that many of the crew were Spanish, and may not have understood the order to close the gun ports. By looking at teeth from the shipwreck Montgomery and colleagues found their composition suggests they come from people who grew up in the Mediterranean.

“The analysis of the teeth suggests the men grew up in a warm climate, probably somewhere in southern Europe,” says Montgomery (Independent). “It’s also known that at this time Henry VIII was short of skilled soldiers and sailors and was trying to recruit mercenaries from the Continent.”

The claims will feature on a TV documentary next week.

Headline watch
Que? Spanish crew's lack of English sank the Mary Rose – The Times
Was Henry VIII's Mary Rose lost in translation? – Reuters
All at sea: Mary Rose sank because foreign sailors couldn't understand their commander's orders – Daily Mail

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 01, 2008
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The historic codebreaking centre that gave birth to the modern computer and provided vital assistance to the Allies in the Second World War is falling into ‘rack and ruin’, scores of computer scientists warned today. They say Bletchley Park needs cash, and fast.

In a letter to the London Times they write:

Although there has recently been some progress in generating income, without fundamental support Bletchley Park is still under threat, this time from the ravages of age and a lack of investment. Many of the huts where the codebreaking occurred are in a terrible state of disrepair.

Continue reading "Bletchley Park risks ‘rack and ruin’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 24, 2008
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My colleague Katharine Sanderson recently wrote about how poor regulation was hindering scientists’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Now Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has a nice example of the sort of toys scientists may miss out on if legislation doesn’t get sorted out.

Dragonfly mimic DelFly Micro weighs just 3 grams and measures just 10 cm across but still manages to carry a camera. According to the university it can fly for three minutes at up to 5 metres a second.

“In a few years time, the new objective of the project, the DelFly NaNo (5 cm, 1 gram) will have been developed,” says the press release. “The Micro is an important intermediate step in this development process. A second objective for the future is for the DelFly to be able to fly entirely independently thanks to image recognition software.”

Maybe in a few years time those legislative problems will have been sorted out as well and we can start doing some science with these things.

Continue reading "Dutch researchers create miniature flying ‘dragonfly’ " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 23, 2008
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Posted for Emma Marris

The Eigenfactor website has some cool new tools.

For those not au currant with this metric, I will explain. The Eigenfactor, developed by a group out of the University of Washington led by Carl Bergstrom seeks to rank journals not just by impact but by value for money.

First, the influence of a journal is determined by a method that the group describes as more Google than Thompson ISI. Then this influence is multiplied by a measure of how many articles appear in each journal and how much each journal costs.

The result is a ranked list of which journals offer most influential content for the least money, and is one of a new crop of alternate impact factors (see our piece on SCImago Journal & Country Rank database) The fact that Nature is ranked as the top science journal by Eigenfactor in no way influences our interest in the tool…I swear.

Continue reading "Exploring the Eigenfactor" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 22, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Purdue University has announced that two allegations of research misconduct made against Rusi Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering, have been upheld by an investigative committee. Ten other allegations were not upheld.

This is the latest chapter in a long saga, sparked by Taleyarkhan’s claim that he can produce tabletop fusion reactions in deuterated acetone by bombarding tiny bubbles in the liquid with sound waves. But the scientist has been dogged by controversy ever since.

According to the Purdue University press release, the report has been accepted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the funding agency that referred several misconduct allegations to Purdue.

Joseph L. Bennett, Purdue vice president for university relations, says that Taleyarkhan has 30 days to appeal. "Any decision on sanctions by the university based on the committee's conclusions will come after the appeal process," Bennett says.

Posted by Mark Peplow on July 18, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Amber Dance

California is battling its more than 300 wildfires with a little help from NASA.

Ikhana, NASA’s $20 million remote-controlled plane, is touring the fires from above to collect temperature data. The plane’s autonomous modular sensor works like a digital camera with filters to pick up visible light as well as thermal signals. It can detect temperatures from ½ to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The plane transmits data to scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, who overlay temperature information on maps from Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The data reaches firefighting coordinates in minutes.

This image shows a portion of Monterey county last Tuesday afternoon; the yellow spots are fires, with red and purple showing burned areas. See more fire images from Ikhana and satellites at NASA. Another flight is scheduled for today [Tuesday].

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called the plane a “superstar,” “one of the most exciting new weapons in our firefighting arsenal.” (San Francisco Chronicle). Last week the drone identified a hotspot headed straight for the northern California town of Paradise, and that information allowed firefighters to head off the blaze and save the town.

Image: NASA/Google

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 15, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aircraft emissions are the current bête noir of the climate change world. So as one of the world’s biggest aersopace trade shows kicks off the plane people are busily showcasing their green credentials.

Although the actual percentage of carbon dioxide emissions made up by flights is small compared to some industries, it’s become a big issue.

At the Farnborough show, where aircraft manufacturers are hawking their wares, airlines observers are predicting a “damp” show. Recession, rumours of recession and increasing raw material costs (and non-raw material costs, too – clever composites aren’t getting cheaper…) mean a spiffy new aircraft is a hard sell. Reuters says this year’s event “may feel more like a wake” than previous shows, at which Boeing and Airbus have competed to show off massive orders for their aircraft.

Still, with high oil prices and increasing political pressure, there’s never been a better time to get a green-sheen on your planes. So that’s what some manufacturers are doing.

Continue reading "Airshow woe in a low-carbon climate" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 14, 2008
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A giant airship could make it less environmentally damaging to undertake logging, mining and drilling in remote areas, according to the Boeing Corporation.

It says the boringly titled JHL-40, developed with Canadian company Skyhook, will be able to run 40-tonne loads into remote regions without the need to build roads and will “reduce the carbon footprint of the industrial projects it supports” (press release). This has an obvious attraction as road building is often cited as a devastating consequence of commercial activities in, for example, the Amazon.

“SkyHook is what we describe in our industry as a game-changer,” says Dave Koopersmith, a Boeing vice president (Wall Street Journal).

The airship will use just enough helium to carry its own weight, leaving the lift from its four helicopter rotors to deal with cargo. It could find use in the Arctic, forested regions, and in taking equipment to drilling rigs at sea.

Although it’s getting a lot of coverage, no one seems to be asking the obvious question: by making individual projects in remote regions easier don’t we encourage more of them?

Image: Boeing image by Joe Naujokas

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 10, 2008
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It’s being claimed that a cherished Italian myth was shattered yesterday when the final blow was delivered to the origin story of Rome’s most famous statue, the Lupa Capitolina.

Experts have been chipping away for some time at claims that an iconic bronze showing a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus dates back to the 5th Century BC. The Romulus and Remus parts of the statue had already been dismissed as later works and doubts about the Lupa have been raised due to the method used to create it, which wasn’t thought to be known in the 5th century BC.

Yesterday Adriano La Regina, a former heritage official in Rome, said 20 tests had demonstrated that it was definitely a 13th century creation in an article in La Repubblica. La Regina says that the analysis was conducted last year, but the results were never published.

According to his article a battery of tests proves the 13th century date of the statue.

The Guardian and the Independent highlight his statement that radiocarbon tests were used in their coverage. Can you radiocarbon date bronze? It would seem unlikely to me but I’m open to correction in the comments. Anyway Rome e-magazine Eternally Cool notes that La Regina also says thermoluminescence tests were performed, which seems more feasible.

As previously noted on the Great Beyond and in the pages of Science though, the “lupa” that raised Romulus and Remus was probably not a wolf but a “very prosperous sex worker”.

Image: via Wikipedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 10, 2008
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General Motors is claiming it will soon have the largest rooftop solar power array in the world on top of one of its factories in Spain.

When work finishes in 2008 the roof of GM’s Zaragoza car factory will be covered in 186,000 square metres of solar panelling, generating up to 12 megawatts of power.

“The Zaragoza project demonstrates proof that GM is actively accelerating our efforts to be part of the solution to the environmental issues and challenges facing our world,” says Gary Cowger, one of the company’s vice presidents.

According to Reuters the solar panels will cut emissions by 6,700 tonnes per year. AFP says the plant produces 480,000 vehicles a year.

The EPA thinks the average family car puts out 5,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. So at a very rough guess these panels will offset the emissions of 1,300 GM drivers of the 480,000 a year it provides cars for.

At least they’re trying though.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 09, 2008
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Scientists have given octopuses Rubik’s cubes in an attempt to determine if they have a favourite tentacle, or if they are octidextrous (a word that seems to have been invented specifically for this story).

According to a number of British papers around 25 octopuses at aquariums across Europe will be given toys and visitors will be asked to record which arm they are using to play with them, using a diagram showing the arms as R1, R2, R3, R4 and L1, L2, L3, L4.

“Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms,” says Claire Little, of the Weymouth Sea Life Centre (Independent). “Many animals have been shown to favour a certain arm so we will see if octopuses can be added to that list.”

According to Little, the findings could help make life in captivity more pleasant for these intelligent, (and occasionally shark eating), animals. “They are very susceptible to stress, so if they do have a favourite side to be fed on, it could reduce risk to them,” she says (Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail).

No one has suggested that any of the octopuses will actually solve the puzzle, but there’s a very slim chance they might. At the risk of re-igniting the now dormant ‘Echinoderms or Molluscs’ blog war, show us a starfish that can do that…

Images: Octopus – Corbis / Rubik’s cube – photo by Culture-Culte via flickr and under Creative Commons

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 07, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

The plague of algae that has overwhelmed China’s Olympic sailing venue shows no sign of abating. Since first featuring on the Great Beyond on June 27 things seem to have got worse, if anything.

Now over 10,000 people are toiling away on the shore at Qingdao (Xinhua). .“We’re working nine-hour days. I’ve been here six days, and still more and more of it keeps coming," one of them told the BBC.

The BBC also says China “blames the sea for being too salty, the sun for being too hot”. One Chinese official notes that the algae isn’t all bad, saying “The Japanese eat it”.

“We have been working here five days with an average 14 working hours every day. About 3,200 tons of algae are cleared away each day. We are confident in cleaning up the sea before July 15,” says Liu Shuntang, a deputy director of the clean-up campaign (China Daily, with great photos).

Algae isn’t all they have to worry about though...

Continue reading "More natural woes plague China Olympics" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 04, 2008
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A huge warship deemed too-toxic to be broken up in India is to be dismantled in the UK.

The Clemenceau is a 238 metre long, 32,700 ton aircraft carrier, formerly the pride of the French Navy. She will be taken to Teesside and dismantled alongside the controversial US ‘ghost fleet’ by Able UK Limited (press release).

Given the furore around the asbestos-ridden US ships arrival off the coast of England a few years ago, it seems likely that some people are going to be up in arms about the already-controversial Clemenceau.

Continue reading "Toxic ship sails for UK" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 02, 2008
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In a little over 50 days a land speed record may be broken on the salt flats of Utah. In an unusual twist though the Inspiration car will not attempt to beat the jet-powered Thrust SSC’s 1,200 km per hour.

This is a steam-powered record attempt.

Officially unveiled yesterday after years of development, Inspiration will use liquefied petroleum gas to turn a tonne of water into steam, hopefully powering it up to 280 km per hour. Currently the record stands at 230 kmph.

The Guardian thinks it’s a ‘flying kettle’. Popular Mechanics says it’s ‘Jules-Verne-meets-Batmobile’. And of course, there is an eco-aspect to this. The people behind the project say:

With growing public concern about the buildup of toxic and smog producing gasses produced by internal combustion engines, a trend is emerging toward more ecologically friendly technologies for such sectors as public and private transportation. ...

With these issues in mind, the decision was made to create a vehicle that would set a new land speed record, incorporating new technologies to bring excitement to the arena of ecologically friendly technologies. In the process of setting the land speed record it is hoped that additional attention to green vehicle technologies will be generated.

“I’m not saying we're all going to be driving steam cars but the technology could have other uses,” says engineer Matt Candy (Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 26, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A student in America has worked out how to turn his face into a remote control.

PhD student Jacob Whitehill, of UC San Diego, used facial recognition technology to monitor the expressions of test subjects watching video lectures. By detecting confusion, he believes, lectures can be slowed or even replayed over difficult sections.

“If I am a student dealing with a robot teacher and I am completely puzzled and yet the robot keeps presenting new material, that's not going to be very useful to me,” says Whitehill (press release). “If, instead, the robot stops and says, ‘Oh, maybe you’re confused,’ and I say, ‘Yes, thank you for stopping,’ that’s really good.”

In a paper to presented at an upcoming conference he reports that his system predicts subjects' self-reported difficulty scores correctly 42% of the time. It’s not quite so good at preferred viewing speed, with only 29% accuracy on this.

Only eight people were involved in the pilot study, where Whitehill confirmed results from previous research showing that people blink less during difficult parts of the lecture. So there’s a lot of work left to do, but Whitehill believes his system could be trained to react to individual users’ expressions.

Are Californian students really too lazy to use a remote? Any readers from that demographic are welcome to comment on this question below.

More
Video of the face-mote
Whitehill’s work on automatic attractiveness detection and its online dating potential
“Developing a Practical Smile Detector”

Image: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2008
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Rock music is bad for art, according to Russian researchers.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, says concerts in the nearby Winter Square have damaged the sculptures housed in his museum, and possibly the building itself too.

According to the Independent, Piotrovsky was so concerned that he reached an agreement with the Rolling Stones to keep the noise down when they played in the square last year. The paper says he was “distressed” when Paul McCartney’s 2004 concert shook the museum’s windows (and maybe also by the fact he played some Wings numbers, but that’s my speculation).

According to a currently unpublished three-year study from the museum, every 10 concerts above 82 decibels “add an extra year” to the life of the work, say both the Daily Telegraph and the Independent (in suspiciously similar sentences – below the fold). In terms of artificial aging, rather than expanding lifetime, presumably.

Rock concerts can easily top 100 decibels and many places that host them have sculptures: the Independent cites Somerset House and Knebworth in the UK. Before we once again blame the evils of the world on rock music though, it’s worth noting a performance off Wagner can top 90 decibels.

Continue reading "Bringing the house down" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 23, 2008
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If you thought watching snooker on a black and white TV was hard, imagine what it’s like for a doctor trying to spot cancer in the brain. So it’s a great step forward that researchers have worked out how to make MRI scans in colour.

At the moment the medical scans come only in black and white and use magnetic ‘contrast agents’ to improve the image. Obviously you can colour them in afterward with the hi-tech equivalent of a box of crayons but this isn’t hugely helpful.

However, in this week’s Nature Gary Zabow and colleagues in the US detail new contrast agents that can be tuned to produce different signals on an MRI scan by changing their shape. These agents could also be modified to ‘tag’ particular cells or tissues (research paper, press release).

Continue reading "Medical scans get a splash of colour" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 19, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Forgive us for only just having noticed this but the Encyclopaedia Britannica has done something of a U-turn.

Having railed against user input, they’re now coming over all Wiki on us. As Silicon Valley’s The Mercury News notes, “Soon you, your family, friends - and even that nut case down the street - can publish in the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“By inviting a larger range of people to contribute and collaborate, we can produce more coverage,” says Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas.

According to Wired there will now be three type of content, entries from Britannic experts, user generated content, and the official encyclopaedia which will use elements of both.

In 2005 a Nature investigation found Wikipedia surprisingly close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 18, 2008
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Having recently come across Wordle, a “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text”, I wondered what would happen if you ran scientific things through it.

This is what happens. [Hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley.]

This is the entirety of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (text from Darwin Online). Below the fold is the human genome.

Click on any image for a larger version.

Continue reading "In the beginning was the word..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 17, 2008
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UPDATE: The first edition Copernicus went for $2.2 million. Dalton’s book went for a bargain $18,750.

If you want to grab yourself a piece of science history you better get to New York on the double. Some of the most important books ever published are coming up for auction today.

Christie’s in New York is selling off the Richard Green library of what is, with amazing understatement, called ‘Important Scientific Books’. Described by the auction house as ‘a physician and amateur astronomer’, Green started collecting scientific books in the 70s. Boy did he build up a good collection (press release pdf).

The star of the show is a first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, described by Christie’s as “arguably the finest copy in private hands”. With no hyperbole, this can be described as one of the most important books ever published, and the finest exploration ever of the phrase “the world doesn’t revolve around you, you know”.

The NY Times notes in a June 10 article:

Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

If you’ve got between $900,000 and $1,200,000 it could be yours. If that’s a bit rich for you a second edition is estimated to go for between $60,000 and $80,000.

More highlights below the fold.

Continue reading "Super science books sale" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 17, 2008
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NASA is a step closer to the spacesuits astronauts will wear on the moon in 2020. On Friday it announced that Houston-based company Oceaneering International would be making its suits.

The contract, worth up to $745 million, is for two configurations of the space suit (press release, news coverage).

“Configuration One will support dynamic events such as launch and landing operations; contingency intra-vehicular activity (IVA) during critical mission events; off-nominal events such as loss of pressurization of the Orion crew compartment; and microgravity EVAs for contingency operations,” says NASA. “... While preparing to walk on the moon, the astronauts will construct Configuration Two by replacing elements of Configuration One with elements specialized for surface operations.”

As The Hartford Courant notes, this means NASA is “abandoning Hamilton Sundstrand as its spacesuit supplier after more than 40 years”. Hamilton is based in Hartford.

“We were very deeply hurt that we did not get the contract,” the paper quotes Donald Rethke, a Hamilton consultant, as saying. “To me, it’s the end of an era.”

The world’s fashion writers have yet to comment on the suits but we think configuration one is the look to go for: pleasingly retro, aggressively functional and flattering looks make it the must-have this season. By contrast configuration two ticks all the fashion no-no boxes: bulky, makes even super-fit astronauts look fat, has a terrible rucksack accessory and is a truly awful blue colour.

Shown left: configuration one (Image: NASA)
Shown right: configuration two (Image: NASA)

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 16, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems internet fraudsters have tired of pretending to be African despots and Spanish lottery syndicates. Now they’re pretending to be academics.

Into various Nature inboxes has popped the following message:

I am Dr. Robert Pasteiner, the head of department of clinical pharmacology and director of research, at the University of London. I write to solicit your assistance in a project of mutual benefit.

In February 2003, a research grant of (US$58.5 Million) was given to my department, with me, leading a team of other clinical pharmacologists, by the pharmaceutical society of United Kingdom, to conduct a research on Vector-borne diseases in Scotland and Ireland. The research has since been concluded (specifically in May 2006) we only spent US$36.2 Million, leaving a total balance of US$22.3 Million.

An under-spend of 38% on a government research project? Our hard-nosed reporter smells a rat on this one. Read on for our exclusive interview with Dr Pasteiner...

Continue reading "Scammers get scientific" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 02, 2008
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It turns out that the mysterious circle of giant stones that stand in the south west of England are, and have always been, tombstones. This latest news from Stonehenge has picked up loads of coverage since the announcement by Mike Parker Pearson and National Geographic, yesterday.

Continue reading "So that's what Stonehenge is for..." »

Posted by on May 30, 2008
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Swiss inventors have unveiled an amazing jumping robot, which they claim could explore inaccessible areas on other planets or help rescue missions here on Earth. Inspired by the grasshopper, the 7 gram robot can jump 27 times its body size, 1.4 meters (Daily Telegraph, MSNBC).

“This biomimetic form of jumping is unique because it allows micro-robots to travel over many types of rough terrain where no other walking or wheeled robot could go,” says Dario Floreano, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (press release). “These tiny jumping robots could be fitted with solar cells to recharge between jumps and deployed in swarms for extended exploration of remote areas on Earth or on other planets.”

A tiny battery powers an equally tiny motor that tensions springs. These then power the robot’s jumps. The robot, which appears not to be named at the moment, is being presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation today in Pasadena.

More highlights from the conference below the fold.

Continue reading "Crazy robots go wild in California" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 22, 2008
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Japanese inventor Gennai Yanagisawa is planning a flight of his one-man helicopter in the city of Vinci, Italy later this month. The flight will honour Leonardo da Vinci, who Yanagisawa credits as the inspiration for his device.

“The concept of my helicopter comes from Italy, and I’ve always wanted to fly it in da Vinci’s birthplace,” Yanagisawa told AP. “I’m very excited.”

Although AP says his GEN H-4 is the world’s smallest helicopter, Yanagisawa actually claims on his website that it is the smallest co-axial helicopter (one with two contra-rotating rotors, rather than a tail rotor). There’s a great gallery of images of the Inspector Gadet-esque device on his website too, along with a history of the device.

More crazy flying below the fold, including this man:

Continue reading "Did people learn nothing from Icarus?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 16, 2008
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The strange links between different senses have been demonstrated again, this time by a new study showing that a car sounds louder when it’s painted red.

Researchers in Germany asked 16 people to rate the perceived loudness of the sound of an accelerating car played through headphones. Noises were accompanied by one of four pictures of an Aston Martin V8 coloured red, blue, dark-green or light green.

In the latest issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America they report that “it seems that in most cases the sounds associated with images of red or dark-green vehicles were rated louder than those combined with light-green or blue ones”.

The differences are small: around 1 dB and with a maximum observed difference of 3 dB. But they were statistically significant, which supports similar previous findings with trains, say Daniel Menzel, of the Technische Universitat Munchen, and colleagues.

They suggest in their paper, fairly reasonably, that people probably associate some colours with sports cars – such as red and dark (“British racing”) green – and so subconsciously expect them to be louder. They do not say that this will now lead to the of-so-boyish pranksters who present the BBC’s Top Gear devising a competition for the loudest paint job. But you just know that it will…

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 13, 2008
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A new virtual telescope has been launched by Microsoft, to rival Google Sky. In a similar fashion, users of the free WorldWide Telescope can whiz around a collection of ground- and space-based observatory data.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (press release).

This product has been in the works for a while. Way back in 2001, Jim Gray of the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center wrote in Science, “Our goal is to make the Internet act as the world's best telescope--a World-Wide Telescope.”

Microsoft is releasing the WorldWide Telescope as a tribute to Gray, who went missing while sailing off the coast of California last year (SF Chronicle, Reuters, or see Wired's definitive piece on the search for Jim Gray).

Continue reading "Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 13, 2008
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We’ve just been sent a link to this rather excellent dinosaur game. This was closely followed by a slight drop in office productivity.

As creator Richard Grillotti told ShackNews in an interview last year, “I started sketching and I sketched dinosaurs. ... All of a sudden that sprung up. ‘Dinosaurs! And you’ve got to escape this wall of doom! Cool, that sounds fun.’”

It is fun. Can you outrun the extinction while munching on pesky mammals seeking to overthrow your cold-blooded (probably) dynasty?

Apologies for the headline, I couldn’t resist.

Image: screen grab of Dino Run

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 13, 2008
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Check out these maps highlighting where all the neurotic people live in the United States (and the extroverts, and the most agreeable people, etc), as published in Richard Florida's latest column (Boston Globe). The result is fascinating in a water-cooler kind of way. Look! All the neurotic people are in New York! Those open to new experiences cluster in California, etc. etc.

But we at Nature are left wondering exactly how these maps were made… It doesn’t say in the article how precisely how the data was collected, or if there might be a bias, for example, due to people living in cities being more involved in the study than others. It also doesn’t say whether the maps have been normalized for population density, though we hope they have. Okay, this is a column: you don't expect that kind of detail in a column. But then where can you get it? (I can't find a paper on the subject... Richard - help us out!)

The five personality traits highlighted are standard in psychology; you can take a test to assess your personal scores in these five traits online here (warning: you need to agree to a few conditions and it’ll take a while).

Florida is a regular columnist and “professor of business and creativity” at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The field he is exploring here is that of ‘psychogeography’, which seems to be an emerging trend in social sciences.

Posted by Nicola Jones on May 07, 2008
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There’s a great story today in the LA Times about US lawmakers and their cars.

According to journalist Richard Simon, “a little-noticed amendment to last year’s energy bill ... requires House members who lease vehicles through their office budgets to drive cars that emit low levels of greenhouse gases”.

This means the big, gas-guzzling monsters beloved of true Americans are out, and the cuddly, slightly-eco-friendlier models beloved of Europeans, Hollywood actors and hippies are in.

The best part of Simon’s story though is the quotes...

Continue reading "Keep your damn eco-cars, say US politicians" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 01, 2008
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A humongous – though technically only colossal -- squid is about to be dissected live over the internet.

This rare example of a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was frozen when it was pulled out of the sea early in 2007. Now researchers at Te Papa museum in New Zealand are defrosting it in preparation for its autopsy.

“They’re incredibly rare - this is probably one of maybe six specimens ever brought up,” says Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at the museum (BBC).

Continue reading "Live super-size squid autopsy" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 28, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We’ve covered the UK ‘physics funding crisis’ before, which might lead to a number of facilities including the Jodrell Bank telescope closing.

Now someone has written a song about it. ‘The Jodrell Bank Song’ by The Astronomers, produced by local radio station Silk FM, was released on Monday.

“When the Science and Technology Facilities Council announced plans to cut back the funding for Jodrell Bank the world was outraged,” says the group’s website, which also contains interviews regarding the Jodrell Bank site. “The future of the famous Lovell telescope and the e-Merlin project is now in doubt. Without funding, the site cannot continue to operate.”

Hat tip: The Guardian

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2008
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A new front has opened up in sport’s war on drugs. Contestants in Spanish bullfights are to be subjected to dope testing if they ‘behave strangely’ during bouts.

We’re not talking about the matadors here.

According to Spanish paper El Mundo, dope testing of bulls has taken place occasionally before, but new procedures at the San Isidro festival will see more testing, with the actual work carried out by an official lab for the first time. Scientists will be looking for either steroids or tranquilisers.

“The first give the bull more resistance, and may mask a limp or a small injury so the animal passes preliminary inspection,” Mirat Fernando, a vet with the Regional Public Health Laboratory told the paper. “... And tranquilizers are used to change the behaviour of the bull.”

Making bulls more docile is not something that goes down well with fans. The Daily Telegraph notes that some are already saying recent bulls have been rather too meek.

An investigation into doping began in 2002 after some bulls “appeared to behave strangely”, but it was inconclusive (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph).

The San Isidro event in Madrid is regarded as one of the most prestigious in the bullfighting calendar. Fines of up to 60,000 euros may be imposed on those who drug their bulls.

Image: detail from photo of a bullfight in Granada / via Wikimedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2008
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A number of headlines today will surprise those who thought an iceberg sank the Titanic. ‘Low-grade rivets sank Titanic, claim scientists’, says one example.

What Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Timothy Foecke are actually claiming is that duff rivets used to hold bits of the ship together meant it sinking faster than it should have done. If the Titanic’s builder had used better materials, they argue, it would have stayed afloat longer after hitting the ’berg, allowing rescuers to arrive.

In their new book McCarty and Foecke say that builder Harland and Wolff used iron rather than steel rivets for key sections of the bow and stern. The bow is where the iceberg hit and Foecke tells the New York Times that damage “ends close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel”.

Foecke also says the iron used was not rivet quality, based on documents from Harland and Wolff and from analysis of rivets recovered from the wreck.

Continue reading "Riveting science from the Titanic" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2008
Categories: Chemistry, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The first excavation inside Stonehenge since 1964 is taking place right now. This is, of course, a great excuse to claim we soon know the truth of the mysterious stones.

The point of the latest dig is to work out when stones were first placed on the site, in a ‘Double Bluestone Circle’ of which no trace remains. The current iconic set of stones was re-erected later than this original circle and it is hoped that carbon dating, presumably of organic material found in the excavations, could indicate when the stones first arrived on site (English Heritage dig website).

“The bluestones hold the key to understanding the purpose and meaning of Stonehenge,” says Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. “Their arrival marked a turning point in the history of Stonehenge, changing the site from being a fairly standard formative henge with timber structures and occasional use for burial, to the complex stone structure whose remains dominate the site today.”

And dig scientist Geoffrey Wainwright confidently declares, “We will be able to say not only why but when the first stone monument was built.”

Of course journalists will be fervently hoping he’s wrong about the "why" part...

Continue reading "Stonehenge dig a threat to journalists " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 02, 2008
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It’s easy to get paranoid when you’re writing about news stories on April 1st. However this one seems legitimate: scientists have discovered that we’re far more paranoid than generally believed.

They know because they’re watching you. Not really. What researchers led by Daniel Freeman did was monitor subjects sent on a virtual reality tube ride (some of you may call that a subway or a metro journey).

Freeman, a psychiatry researcher at the King’s College London, found most people found their virtual fellow commuters either friendly or neutral. But a significant proportion, going on for 40%, were a little paranoid.

You can watch a video of the journey on the BBC’s version of this story. I’d be pretty paranoid if I was on this tube – the passengers are freaky.

Continue reading "Paranoia stalks London’s Underground" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
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A surprising number of quite dramatic stories today – one big round-up post will have to do for them all.

Dextre, the Canadian space agency’s new robot, is meant to be helping construct the ISS. Instead it’s making outlandish demands:
In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at ‘Dextre the Magnificent.’ Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

Virgin and Google are going to Mars. They want YOU to join them (if you can score highly enough on their selection questionnaire that is).

Continue reading "A chemist, a physicist, and a biologist walk into a bar" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics, Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world’s earliest sound recording has been successfully played back, nearly 150 years after it was created.

In 1860, roughly two decades before Edison’s phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville scratched a recording of French folk song Au Claire de la Lune onto paper blackened by smoke using his phonautograph.

Well, it’s supposed to be Au Claire de la Lune and my colleagues insist it sounds like it. To me it sounds like a recording of an owl being played underwater on a particularly cheap pair of speakers. It’s so bad that the newsreader on the BBC’s Today programme couldn’t stop laughing, even though her next item was an obituary.

Make up your own mind: here’s the 1860 recording.

Regardless of the quality, it’s still pretty amazing that the recording could be played back. To do this Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni, of historians’ group First Sounds, took high resolution scans of the piece of paper and then produce a digital version playable with a virtual stylus (press release). The New York Times has probably the best article on the topic. It’s well worth a read.

Image: a phonautograph / Library and Archives Canada

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 28, 2008
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Crockett and Tubbs just don’t cut it anymore, so Miami police could soon be deploying hovering drones to keep an eye on the locals.

The slightly disturbing Micro Air Vehicle weigh 6 kg and are “capable of vertical takeoff and landing with transition to sustained high-speed flight”, according to their manufacturer Honeywell. Miami/Dade police are clear to use the drones after the Federal Aviation Authority granted them an airworthiness certificate last month (press release).

“Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes,” police department spokesman Juan Villalba told Reuters. MAVs could be used by SWAT teams dealing with hostage taking, he added.

Not everyone is happy though.

Continue reading "Miami prepares for police drones" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2008
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A retired American professor has succeeded in triggering an investigation into her claims to own a patent on technology vital to a host of modern technologies.

Gertrude Neumark Rothschild claims a veritable rogues’ gallery of modern electronics companies have infringed her patent on LEDs in products including “mobile devices, instrument panels, billboards, traffic lights, HD DVD players (e.g., Blu-ray disc players [sic]), and data storage devices”, according to a statement from the US International Trade Commission.

The ITC, a federal body which looks after US trade issues, voted to investigate the claim last week. In total, 30 companies are involved, including Nokia, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. Rothschild has already settled a similar claim against Philips (Forbes).

If Rothschild is successful in her claim products from these companies could be banned from the US.

ARS Technica notes:

There’s little to indicate that Dr. Rothschild has decided to launch such an endeavor as a means of commemorating her imminent octogenarian status. This isn't the first time, however, that the good doctor has filed suit against major companies she felt were engaged in patent infringement. She previously filed suit against both Toyoda Gosei and Philips Lumined over their alleged infringement of US Patent No. 4,904,618 ("Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors") and 5,252,499 ("Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation"). The suits were eventually settled out of court.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2008
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The much hyped Tesla electric sports car finally went into full production this week. This year’s batch of the $100,000 vehicles is already sold out (press release, news coverage).

Although electric vehicles have been around for some time, the humble British milkfloat for example, they have up to now been slow, short range or merely comical. By contrast the Tesla does 0-60 in under 4 seconds, can travel over 300 km and looks like something you wouldn’t die of embarrassment if you were spotted in.

Whether this marks the real arrival of the electric car is far from clear however. And the Tesla is in no way ‘zero emission’, as the company claims...

Continue reading "Tesla roadster: dawn of the electric age or misfire?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2008
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In perhaps the weirdest computer developments of the year so far, a team of US scientists have managed to hack into a pacemaker. They not only hacked in but managed to mess around in ways that you really wouldn’t want them messing if it was your heart the device was stuck in (read the research paper pdf).

Technically the device they hacked wasn’t just a pacemaker, but an ‘implantable cardioverter defibrillator’, which not only sets a beat but can shock a heart back to the right rhythm. In the US over 100,000 people have such devices (AP).

“Using our own equipment (an antenna, radio hardware, and a PC), we found that someone could also turn off or modify therapy settings stored on the ICD,” write the researchers in a series of FAQs.

“Such a person could render the ICD incapable of responding to dangerous cardiac events. A malicious person could also make the ICD deliver a shock that could induce ventricular fibrillation, a potentially lethal arrhythmia.”

The researchers however insist there is nothing to worry about, they are merely highlighting a loophole that needs to be looked at.

Continue reading "Hacking the heart" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 12, 2008
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Entries in this year’s Wellcome Image Awards go on display tomorrow in London (here). The annual award for images created by scientists has thrown up some truly remarkable winners this year.

My favourite: Annie Cavanagh’s fly standing on sugar crystals.

“I think it’s really important to express science for the public in an artistic fashion so that they relate to something that they think is beautiful as well as scientific,” says Cavanagh, who works for the School of Pharmacy, part of the University of London.

More images from the collection – which will also go on show in Tokyo later this year – below the fold. One criticism: it would be nice to have a little more detail from the artists on how these amazing images were created.

Continue reading "Are you ready for your close up?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2008
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Are you getting bored of these yet? Below the fold, a slight change of emphasis as we shift from songs about science to songs by scientists. Richard Feynman demands orange juice and the British Antarctic Survey come over all creative.

Continue reading "Songs about science part V: singing scientists" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 06, 2008
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Sweeeet. Two researchers from the United States have uncovered what happens in brain of a jazz pianist when he or she goes off on an improvisational spree. And it looks as if all inhibitions are switched off in the name of music.

Charles Limb and Allen Braun put jazz musicians in an MRI machine and got them to play things they already knew on piano and to improvise. They then subtracted the results for memorized tunes from the results from improvisation, which should reveal only the parts of the brain used when riffing.

Cool fact: Limb and Braun had to create a special piano with no metal parts that could be used inside the MRI machine’s powerful magnetic fields (pictured below).

Creative juices flowing not only shut down the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to self-censoring, but also fired up the medial prefrontal cortex, linked to self expression (research paper).

Continue reading "This is your brain on jazz" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 05, 2008
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If you are reading this blog as a distraction from submitting research for publication, it’s your lucky day. Martijn Schuemie and Jan Kors of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have come up with a tool to make life easier.

Rather than racking your brain to decide which journal is most likely to publish your work, their computer program – called Journal/Author Name Estimator or Jane –will take a paper’s title or abstract and tell you where to take it.

“With an exponentially growing number of articles being published every year, scientists can use some help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work,” Schuemie and Kors explain in a paper from the Bioinformatics journal.

Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, who is also academic editor-in-chief at PLoS Biology, reckons Jane is “freaky and cool” (blog). Over on Nature Network one of our editors, Maxine Clarke, is not so enthused:

I think it is possibly quite counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published.
...
I just tried out Jane and was advised to submit my paper to the Saudi Medical Journal—the abstract I used had nothing to do with medicine, and why Saudi I have no idea!

Continue reading "Picker produces paper publication proposals" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2008
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The Null Hypothesis blog has just hosted an entire (albeit entirely virtual) festival of songs about science.

Pick of the bunch: Jonny Berliner’s bleak analysis of cosmology, ‘Dark Matter,’ is great. Just download the whole thing though, it’s all well worth a listen.

On show here, another track featured on festival, Professor Science performing ‘Sweet Home Apparatus’, an ode to the Golgi apparatus. Someone needs to organise this festival in the real world...

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2008
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Reports this week announced that researchers have ‘solved the mystery’ of how Maya Blue was made (National Geographic News, New York Times), off the back of a paper published in the journal Antiquity. The vivid pigment, which was painted on human and other sacrifices, has been a focus of interest for decades. Although the main ingredients of the pigment – indigo and clay – have long been known (see this 1966 paper in Science), archaeologists have wondered about the details of how, when and where it was made.

The paper describes the study of a particular pot of incense in which researchers discovered flecks of clay and indigo. The slow-burning incense resin provided the heat needed to create the paint, and, according to LiveScience, might have been a key ingredient in binding the other ingredients together. The bowl was then chucked into a sinkhole thought to be a portal to the spirit world. The location and the incense suggest that “the production of the ancient Maya blue was based on the performance of the religious rituals” (The Chicago Tribune). Although the find may not be too surprising, the bowl appears to be the first artefact to show evidence of the pigment production process.

The recipe behind Maya Blue also made news in 2002 (National Geographic). That team patented a number of ‘Maya Blue’ recipes in 2006, including one that involved a combination of indigo, clay, and resin.

Posted by Nicola Jones on February 29, 2008
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It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, at least until science got involved. Rather than powering your floor lamps by nasty, carbon footprint increasing mains electricity why not use gravity?

That’s what Virginia Tech student Clay Moulton thought. So he designed the Gravia, a metre high lamp powered by a slowly falling weight that users would lift to the top. As the weight falls, the theory goes, it can be used to power LEDs – producing 600-800 lumens, about the same as a 40-watt bulb over a period of four hours (press release).

Although it hasn’t been built, Gravia even came second in a Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Websites praised it.

Then people started crunching the numbers…

One person noted on a Slashdot discussion:

The drop is 58" according to the plan [core77.com]. This gives about 0.022W at 100% efficiency.
For reference, the highest efficiency LEDs that I know of get 131 lumens per watt. If we're generous and allow them 150 lumens/watt, they still need 4W of power. This would require a drop of 255 metres using the 50lbs of weights he claims. Since we can't really go above 1.5m high, we'll need almost 4 tonnes of weights.

Later some estimates of the number creep up to 24 tonnes (ZD Net). It doesn’t seem likely this light is going to be in your shops anytime soon. We’re expecting a statement from Virginia Tech soon…

Read the university response in full below the fold.

Continue reading "Heavy work for green light" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 21, 2008
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The latest installment of our occasional series celebrating songs about science comes via the Green Gabbro blog (a gabbro is a type of rock). Geologist Maria Brumm has a rundown of love songs for geoscientists.

Sadly, she finds “As it turns out, geological love songs are hard to find - and when you do find them, they’re likely to be depressing (or else they’re a ‘hot lava’ orogeny). Plate tectonics for some reason always moves us apart, never together.”

Here’s one of her selections, Uncle Tupelo performing their song New Madrid:

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 19, 2008
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As hundreds of movies have gleefully told us, our eventual subjugation by robots is inevitable. According to a new interview with Ray Kurzweil we’ll be helping by implanting them into our own brains (BBC).

Founder of the Kurzweil Technologies company, Kurzweil is a futurologist who has actually got things right in the past including when computers would beat humans at chess. So his claims may stand a closer look. As well as speculating that we will soon be embedding nano-robots into our bodies, he thinks machines themselves will achieve ‘human level intelligence’ by 2029.

“We’re already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. … We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told the BBC.

Even though he apparently counts Alien and The Matrix as among his favourite movies, he added this caveat: “But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”

Mind you if those robots want to get up to our level they’re going to have to get serious. The latest one to come to the Great Beyond’s attention monitors your brainwave patterns and does an interpretive dance based on the results (that’s the video above, in case you were wondering). It’s part of an exhibition entitled BRAINWAVE: Common Senses, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (featured recently in Nature; subscription required).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 19, 2008
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Oh boy. A woman in California is paying $150,000 to have her recently deceased dog cloned.

By a member of Hwang Woo-suk’s research team.

And the dead mutt is called Booger.

Oh boy.

According to media reports the dog is being cloned by a company called RNL Bio. Their website has links out to all the media reports but no press release (at least in English, Korean readers please correct me on this).

The Korea Times says RNL Bio will deliver the cloned pit bull to Bernann McKinney, Booger’s former owner, in February next year. Booger was apparently particularly precious to McKinney as he saved her life after another dog bit off her arm (Daily Mail).

Continue reading "$150,000 for that doggie in the window" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 18, 2008
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If we’re lucky, this image of Carl Sagan may soon be adorning letters from America. The Sagan Appreciation Society has launched a petition to create a stamp honouring the astronomer and this is one of the proposed designs.

“As Carl was America's science populariser, it seems fitting that he be bestowed with a populist kind of honour,” say Patrick Fish, Sagan Appreciation Society founder. “Carl wasn't just an astronomer, physicist and the world's pre-eminent science teacher. He was arguably the first exo-biologist, one of the fathers of global-warming awareness, a peacemaker, and a brilliant author who could make science sound like poetry.”

Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, says in the Ithaca Journal, “Carl was an avid stamp collector as a boy, and we treasure the albums he made then. They’re filled with his handwritten notes in the margins — perhaps the earliest evidence of his passion for the diversity of Earth’s cultures. So this particular tribute to Carl would have held special significance for him, as it does for me.”

The society plans to submit the petition and designs to the US Postal Service’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which recommends about 25 new subjects a year for commemorative stamps.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 15, 2008
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Somewhere off the coast of Puerto Rico a silent robot is flying under the sea. Launched by researchers at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution the robot glider has now been at sea since December and crossed the 4,000 metre deep Virgin Islands Basin over 20 times.

Eventually oceanographer Dave Fratantoni envisages fleets of gliders, all collecting scientific data and beaming it back to researchers. “Gliders can be put to work on tasks that humans wouldn’t want to do or cannot do because of time and cost concerns. They can work around the clock in all weather conditions,” he says (press release).

Unlike previous designs, which relied on batteries, the new type ‘Slocum’ glider* is environmentally friendly. Its power comes from differences in sea temperatures.

LiveScience has the best explanation of how this works:

When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle.

The glider then uses this energy to change its buoyancy, becoming denser to glide into the depths, becoming less dense to glide back to the surface.

Continue reading "Success for wax powered robot sea glider" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 11, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK government will no longer use goats to test submarine escape procedures, it has been announced.

Goats were being used by the Ministry of Defence to investigate the risk of submariners getting decompression illness – the dreaded ‘bends’ – after bailing out of submarines. Goats’ respiratory systems are apparently similar enough to humans’ to make the experiments worthwhile.

Animal rights campaigners have previously complained about the experiments.

“The testing programme was aimed at improving the accuracy of the information relating to the likely probability and consequence of decompression illness following escape from a submerged submarine in varying depths and internal submarine pressures,” said defence minister Derek Twigg in a written statement to Parliament. “This requirement has now been achieved, and the review has concluded that the remaining associated areas of uncertainty in submarine escape and rescue relate to events that are considered highly unlikely, and do not therefore need to be addressed by means of animal testing.”

According to a ministry official the goats were put in decompression chambers rather than actually submerged. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too,” the official told the Guardian.

This would mean they were not placed in the frankly awesome submarine escape training tower which the Royal Navy sometimes lets divers play in (video).

The story was also picked up by the Daily Telegraph, AP, BBC)

Other goat news: rare Himalayan goats facing death because of heavy snow (Hindustan Times, AFP, Reuters).

Image: USDA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 07, 2008
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Who knew that penguins have hot heads and sloths have cold noses? Some quirks of animal body heat have now been captured in a strangely compelling set of photos taken at London Zoo.

The pictures were taken by Steve Lowe, described in the press release as an amateur photographer, although I don’t know many of those who carry around thermal imaging equipment (well, there’s the serial killer in Red Dragon, but he hardly counts). They are quite cool, and the UK press has welcomed the opportunity to put more cute animals on their pages (Guardian, Telegraph, Times, BBC).

“While these amazing pictures may be more reminiscent of something from the Tate Modern, they give us a unique perspective on how animals regulate their body temperatures,” says David Field, zoological director. “Thermal imaging technology can also be used in veterinary diagnostics such that infected areas will sometimes appear very hot.”

They can also reveal why animals indulge in some of their more laughable behaviour, he says in the Independent: “Everyone makes fun of flamingos standing on one leg, but you can see that it's a brilliant way of staying warm while staying upright.”

Full photo gallery from London Zoo

All images: courtesy of Steve Lowe.
Top: Mexican red-kneed bird eating spider
Middle left: sloth (with cold nose)
Middle right: South African black-footed penguins
Bottom: flamingos

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 06, 2008
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my country the cost of train tickets regularly exceeds the average speed of the trains. So I get unreasonably excited by announcements like this: a 360 kilometre per hour train has been unveiled in France.

France is already the one country that can give Japan a run for its money in the train stakes so this new machine could make travelling in Europe even more pleasant. The first customer for this new machine though is not France at all but in Italy (press release).

Of course you are obliged to nod to climate change in any transport story these days so the train’s manufacturer Alstom says the new rolling stock uses 15% lower energy consumption than its main competitors. If it runs in France it will be running on nuclear electricity anyway.

Continue reading "All hail the super train" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 05, 2008
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Last week the fragility of the internet was exposed by massive outages in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent. After two high speed data cables from Europe to Asia were cut some countries lost 70% of their capacity for internet traffic. Iran seems to have lost all of its connection.

Some initial reports said the problem was just with one cable. Now at least three are down and it hasn’t taken much for the internet conspiracy theories to get going.

Initially blame was placed on a ship’s anchor for severing two lines – FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe4. However the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said right after the cuts happened that the cables were over two kilometres away from each other, meaning one ship is unlikely to have caused both breaks (press release 1). Now the ministry says no ships were even in the area where the cables were cut (press release 2).

Continue reading "Internet cable cuts continue" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 05, 2008
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Bats in the United States are dying from a mysterious disease at such a rate that they face extinction.

“What we’ve seen so far is unprecedented. Most bat researchers would agree that this is the gravest threat to bats they have ever seen,” says Alan Hicks, leader of a New York Department of Environmental Conservation investigation into the problem (press release).

In some caves more than 90% of resident bats have succumbed to ‘white nose syndrome’, named after the fungus that covers the noses of some victims. Bats suffering from the problem seem to have run through their fat reserves months before they should be emerging from hibernation, says the DEC.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this is that the syndrome has now reached the abandoned mine where half of New York’s endangered Indiana bats hibernate. “There are an awful lot of bat people, even a month ago before we had half of this bad news, all saying the same thing. We’ve never seen anything like it, and we’re all scared,” Hicks told Bloomberg.

Some are already drawing parallels with the colony collapse disorder that is devastating US bees.

There’s a great piece on this in Schenectady’s Daily Gazette.

Image: DEC

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 31, 2008
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Maximum respect to the clever people at Wired who have decoded the secret messages in Craig Venter’s new synthetic chromosome. Released last week, the genome contained “watermark” sequences to differentiate it from the genomes of natural examples of Mycoplasm genitalium to prove it was truly synthetic.

It’s hard to write a catchy message using just the four letters found in DNA; but every DNA sequence can be translated into a lists of amino acids (give or take the odd stop codon), and each amino acid has a one letter symbol. 20 amino acids thus allow you to write pretty much anything you might want to, if you’re willing to use some creative spelling.

Here’s Wired’s reading of the watermarks

VENTERINSTITVTE
CRAIGVENTER
HAMSMITH
CINDIANDCLYDE
GLASSANDCLYDE

Authors on the paper in Science included Venter, Hamilton Smith, John Glass, Clyde Hutchison and Cindi Pfannkoch.

Wired thinks it is disappointing, although perhaps not unexpected, that the team went for personal glory over something more profound. But signing your work is hardly an ignoble act. What do you want: “The eagle has landed”? “We come in peace for all mankind”? “One small step for a Ham”? I’m just grateful they didn’t insert the number of their patent application in roman numerals...

My boss points out that Wired has a track record in messages encoded in gene sequences.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 29, 2008
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Recently the Great Beyond featured a whole post of science related songs. Now another one has popped into my inbox.

Although this isn’t a new song and it’s about maths rather than science, today is a Friday. This seems reason enough to give a post over to the genius that is The Klein Four Group’s ‘Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)’

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 25, 2008
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A sign language dictionary of science terms has been created to help deaf children by researchers in Scotland.

“The scientific vocabulary for deaf children has developed simply because we needed it. People realised that there weren’t enough deaf teachers in schools and that finger spelling doesn’t work for complex subjects. You have to be able to understand the English first and then the concept and that can all be very difficult,” Rachel O’Neill, of the University of Edinburgh, told The Times.

The paper says the “simple but descriptive gestures” brought “gasps of recognition” from deaf children and their teachers when they were demonstrated last week. Videos of the terms have all been made available online.

They are brilliantly direct, and even those with no grasp of sign language (such as me) can understand terms such as air resistance. If this proves difficult there are explanatory videos in sign language alongside.

Image: Alamy

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 21, 2008
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A genetically modified carrot delivers 41% more calcium to the body, Texas scientists have shown. Kendal Hirschi and colleagues had previously engineered the carrots to have a two-fold higher calcium content, but it was unclear whether consumption of this marvel of science actually increased the amount of calcium in the body of the eater.

Now, in a paper that should shortly appear in PNAS, they report that people who ate 100g of their ‘super carrots’ absorbed 41% more calcium than those who ate boring old normal carrots. This could help to treat osteoporosis, notes the briefest press release ever.

Whether these carrots will overcome consumer scepticism about GM foods remains to be seen. “Much more research needs to be conducted before this would be available to consumers,” admits Hirschi (BBC).

“As far as I know, this is the first time any one has taken a GMO and done human feeding studies to shown enhanced health effects. I think consumers will have a better impression of GMO foods if more studies like this are initiated,” Hirschi adds in an online Google comment.

Continue reading "All hail the super carrot!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 16, 2008
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Previously we’ve featured songs about giant isopods and Tom Lehrer’s take on Wernher Von Braun. Now - following the inspired ‘Scientists for Better PCR’ song shown here - it seems time to tackle the whole issue of songs about science.

While the PCR song has lyrics that are both informative and hilariously earnestly delivered, it is an advert and therefore cannot really be accorded top prize. So we have rounded up the best science music we can find for your listening pleasure below the fold.

Continue reading "Songs about science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 14, 2008
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The Federal Aviation Authority has uncovered what would seem to be a fairly major flaw in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Apparently a passenger with a laptop and a bit of cunning could hack into the plane’s crucial systems.

According to the FAA the problems stems from the fact that the entertainment systems on the 787 are connected to the pilots’ computers. Needless to say they’ve asked for some changes to be made before they certify the plane as safe, to prevent someone turning their laptop’s flight simulator into the real thing.

The possible flaws came to light in the Federal Register – a giant list of memos from US government agencies (read the entry in question). Experts say the problem is real, and therefore pretty scary.

In the Times, David Learmount, safety editor of Flight International, says, “The FAA is obviously very concerned about this. It’s not the kind of organisation that fires shots across the bows if it doesn’t think it was needed.”

On Wired, network security analyst Mark Loveless says, “This is serious. This isn’t a desktop computer. It’s controlling the systems that are keeping people from plunging to their deaths. So I hope they are really thinking about how to get this right.”

The 787 is Boeing’s newest passenger plane and, thankfully given this news, there are none carrying passengers yet.

Image: 787 / Boeing

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 09, 2008
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A speed boat running on bio-diesel with a net zero carbon-footprint is attempting to beat the round the world record. The current record is 74 days, 23 hours and 53 minutes, Earthrace plans to do it in 65 days.

Yesterday it was announced that the boat will set off from Valencia in March (press release).

“I wanted to do a positive project run on biodiesel and take it round the world. Politicians in Western Europe must be prepared to stand up to the oil industry and be more supportive of the biofuels industry to make sure the production of biofuels is sustainable,” says captain Pete Bethune (AFP).

AFP also has the frankly bizarre claim that Bethune is so committed is to the project that he has undergone liposuction; his fat will be turned into some of the bio-diesel.

Earthrace has already ungone some traumas and it now sports bullet holes from a run in with some suspected pirates (Guardian). During its last attempt a Guatemalan fisherman was killed after a collision with the boat, which moves at an average speed of 40 knots (75 km per hour).

Image: courtesy Jim Burkett

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 19, 2007
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I’ve been waiting for this excuse to blog about Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo collection – the 100th tattoo has gone online. Not that Carl himself has 100 science tattoos; the centenary entry in his collection is from Michelle Vieyra, of the University of South Carolina, who has a tasteful sea turtle and DNA motif (blog post).

The full set ranges from simple neurons to full body entomology pieces. As far as we can make out though Carl is as yet un-inked...

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 11, 2007
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Unsure what gifts to buy the scientist in your life? Check out the Great Beyond’s Great Gifts.

NB: These are pulled from a random trawl of the internet - they're not endorsements and Nature can't vouch for the products.

If you’ve seen anything that should be included here let me know, we’ll update right through to Christmas Eve.
 
 

Continue reading "Christmas gift round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 03, 2007
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Sometimes the headline says it all. Jet-propelled attack heads, victory dances, penguin body armour...

Just watch the video...

The Robo-One competition seems to have both autonomous and remote-controlled robots, the latter of which seems a bit of a cheat to us.

Robot competition has a fine history: check out Nature archive stories about previous comps (subscription needed):
Robolympics contestants shoot for gold
Germany thrashes Japan in RoboCup
Robot car scoops US$2-million prize

Posted by Nicola Jones on December 03, 2007
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The Moon is very much the astronomical body of the moment, with X-prizes up for grabs and a new NASA moon base on the cards. China is also looking to visit, and thinks it might need some additional private funding (Reuters). India has also said it will consider a manned programme and is cooperating with Russia to build an unmanned laboratory there by 2011 (Times of India, Hindu).

Japan’s space agency is getting in on the fun with the first ever high-definition images of an ‘Earth-rise’ – where the Earth appears to be rising over the Moon. Unlike sun-rise on Earth you wouldn’t actually see this from the moon. “[T]he Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that travel around the Moon, such as the KAGUYA and the Apollo space ship,” says the Japan Aerospace Exploration (press release). “The Earth-rise cannot be observed by a person who is on the Moon as they can always see the Earth at the same position.”

They are pretty impressive images, shot from the recently launched Kaguya (or Selene) mission (Nature – subscription required). This mission is proving to be a boon for moon enthusiasts, last week it provided high-definition tv recordings.

Images: JAXA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 14, 2007
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According to some extremely bizarre reports coming out of Japan, scientists have developed a ‘melody road’ to keep drivers focused. Apparently grooves cut into the road produce a melody when cars drive over at the right speed (from the Deputy Dog blog).

Unfortunately this ‘right speed’ is a rather pathetic 45 kilometres per hour. Driving faster sounds like fast forwarding while crawling along at 20 kilometres per hour may make you feel nauseous (Guardian, Sidney Morning Herald). News.com.au says a report on the work, by the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute, has been published in the Japanese Gijutsu Iten Foramu journal

I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t an elaborate spoof but there is a news item video of the road at work on Gizmodo. This features comedy giant notes painted on the asphalt, outbreaks of laughter from the presenter, and what can only marginally be described as a melody.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 13, 2007
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The hydrogen economy is still years away, if it exists at all, but that isn’t stopping researchers finding ways to make the gas on the cheap, and from any range of materials.

The most recent development is in the bacterial arena, with the latest microbial fuel cells able to convert everyday waste into electricity with unprecedented efficiency, according to a paper by Bruce Logan in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academies of America. The process has bacteria chewing up sugars, cellulose or some common acids. During this oxidative process, the electrons released scoot over to an anode, and the protons, that balance this particular equation, go into solution. Normally, oxygen would be added, and would react with the protons and electrons to make water. But leave out the oxygen, and add a bit of oomph in the guise of applied voltage, and hey presto - hydrogen is made.

Logan’s system is an updated version of his previous work, tweaked so that it can work from a range of biomass-derived stuff, even the contents of a salad bar according to the press release.

While most coverage played it straight, and trumpeted the 288% efficiency boasted by Logan, others took greater care in explaining how near, or far, the hydrogen economy is.

Logan’s achievement is certainly impressive. When the system was run with acetic acid, he managed to get 99% of the theoretical efficiency, in terms of hydrogen production. The challenge now, according to one commentator I asked, is to improve the rate of hydrogen production, which for now remains rather sluggish.

By Katharine Sanderson

Image: Microbial electrolysis cell with power supply used to boost the voltage produced by the bacteria / Photograph by Shaoan Cheng, Penn State University

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 13, 2007
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“Children treat nursery robot as human”, according to the Telegraph today.

It sounds a bit over the top, but the sentiment does come directly from a study of a Sony robot (called QRIO) placed in a nursery environment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. The paper tells us: “Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last session, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than a toy.”

The robot – which stands at half-toddler height and was assisted in its actions (dancing, giggling, walking) by a human operator that sent it instructions every few minutes (which sounds like cheating to me, but the researchers say this mainly stopped it from hitting walls) – spent a total of 5 months in a classroom of toddlers. After bouts of “full behavioural repetoire” the kids really bonded with QRIO, say the researchers: they touched it in the way that they touch other kids, with an emphasis on hands and arms, hugged it, put a blanket over it when it ‘went to sleep’ on low batteries, and cried if it fell over.

Well… I have seen toddlers treat inanimate dolls like ‘peers’, and cry when their tamagotchi ‘dies’, despite the fact that these virtual pets consist of an unmoving chunk of plastic whose “full repetoire” of behaviour consists of bleeping.

But, as New Scientist and others point out, these kids did behave differently to QRIO than to an inanimate robot named Robby or other toys, like teddy bears.

It’s hardly surprising for kids to respond more to things that seem to respond to them. But whether they’ll really treat a robot exactly as they do another child, and whether a robot will really ever become an invaluable teaching assistant in the classroom, are debatable.

Apparently other robots have only been able to hold a child’s attention span for less than 10 hours, by telling stories (though I wonder how this compares to the ultimate story-teller, television, which seems to have an endless fascination for kids). By contrast this robot inspired "long-term bonding and socialization" (paper).

"The authors are drawing general conclusions ... beyond what the data alone suggest," technologist and social scientist Nathan Freier told Science – who also host the videos, from which you can draw your own conclusions.

Picture: UCSD / PNAS

Posted by Nicola Jones on November 06, 2007
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Just a few years after the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first ever robot car race ended in a major flop (with all the cars in the 2004 event breaking down), 6 of the 11 finalists in this year’s robotic car challenge successfully navigated city streets complete with intersections, traffic circles and human-driven traffic.

The Carnegie Mellon University-based team earned $2 million (€1.4 million) when their car ‘Boss’ won the Pentagon-sponsored race, which took place over the weekend in the Southern California desert.

AP quotes the Urban Challenge programme manager Norman Whitaker: "They [Carnegie Mellon] did everything right: followed all the speed laws, stopped at the intersections… It was really a phenomenal performance."

But the NY Times highlights the “crashes and traffic jams” that took place; “computer-controlled vehicles, at least to date, have failings that are all too human” they say.

There are pictures on the DARPA website, and video on Silicon.com. Check out our last post on this subject for sites with blow-by-blow coverage.

Posted by Nicola Jones on November 05, 2007
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Completing a 97 kilometre course in six hours of driving doesn’t really seem too onerous does it? Especially when the prizes on offer total $3.5 million. However this race is not open to humans – all the contestants in the DARPA Urban Challenge must be robot cars.

DARPA, which is in charge of hi-tech research for the US military, has now selected 11 finalists for this year’s race. Other robo-racers wannabies were eliminated in a gruelling set of qualifier events that saw cars crash, smash and generally run amok. “Cars” is also pushing it for some of the contenders – one finalist is a 15 ton truck. EE Times thinks the number of finalists is disappointing: around 20 were expected.

To win, cars will have to maintain the same standard of driving needed pass the California DMV road test while completing the course, which will feature 50 non-robot driven cars to avoid. “Vehicles competing in the Urban Challenge will have to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, including robotic vehicles without drivers, and operate safely on the course. The urban setting adds considerable complexity to the challenge faced by the robotic vehicles, and replicates the environments where many of today’s military missions are conducted,” said Norman Whitaker, Urban Challenge Program Manager.

Wired is doing blow-by-blow coverage, as is TG Daily. The Economist has a nice piece on the race with a bit more context.

The far less intricate task of driving through empty desert was won by the robotic car ‘Stanley’ in the 2005 version of the DARPA Grand Challenge (Nature).

Image: DARPA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 02, 2007
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An environmentally friendly version of wacky races has kicked off in Australia, as 38 solar powered cars speed across the continent. The World Solar Challenge set off at the weekend, with teams competing to complete the 3,000 kilometres between Darwin in the north and Adelaide in the south (official website).

The Age reckons the Nuon Solar Team, with three previous wins under its belt, is favorite to win. It also holds the race record – an impressive 29 hours. However at the moment Japan’s Ashiya team is leading, followed by Belgium’s Umicore and Australia’s Aurora (ABC).

There has already been controversy. The University of Michigan is blaming the Stanford Solar Car Team for a crash could have put them out of the race. It’s heartbreaking stuff for Michigan. Before the race the team’s engineering director Alex Curaudeau said, “When the race finally comes, you’re really nervous because you have put an entire two years of your life into this project. It’s like watching your kid grow up; you just want it to succeed.” They do appear to be back up and running now though.

UPDATE – 30/10/07
Apologies for the tardy nature of this update. The winner of the race was indeed the Nuon team.

Michigan finished seventh out of 41 cars after their run in with Stanford (Michigan Daily). Stanford were put out of the race by a tyre blow out which flipped their car. The driver was uninjured (The Stanford Daily).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2007
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Call me old fashioned, but I’ve always thought live rock music should involve feedback, distortion, frequent changes of guitar and the opportunity for witty stage banter provided by the need for the lead guitarist to tune up. Not so axe manufacturer Gibson. Fresh from inventing a digital guitar to do away with distortion they’ve invented a self tuning guitar.

While helpful gadgets that will tell you if you’re out of tune have been around for a while, Gibson have stuck one on an instrument and rigged it up to tiny motors that will tighten or loosen the strings for you. This isn’t actually the first guitar with built in tuning, as Gibson are good enough to admit in the press release they put out on September 21st. Still, after a new write up in Technology Review this kit is getting some attention (Gizmodo, USA Today, Engadget).

While some are keen, others are decidedly not. “Look, I’m lazy, okay? But I'm not too lazy to tune my own goddamn guitar properly. You can spend $900 on this magic thing or you can spend $12 for a friggin’ tuner,” says one blogger.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 03, 2007
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Smoking bans have an unintended consequence, according to research in this week’s BMJ. John Garvey, a medic in Ireland, found that accordions played at traditional music sessions in previously smoke filled pubs were cleaner and possibly sound better as a result of the ban in that country (AFP, LA Times). “One repairer commented that the deposition of dirt could be substantial enough to affect the pitch of the reed,” his letter in the BMJ states.

“It’s a remarkable analogy in that you’ve got an instrument that’s basically performing much the same way as the lung and responding much the same way as the lung,” said Kirby Donnelly, head of environmental and occupational health at Texas A&M’s School of Rural Public Health (Health Day).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 28, 2007
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Scientists in the UK have made a major step in quantum computing by demonstrating that superconducting electrical circuits can be used to send information between two stores of quantum information (AFP, Reuters). The advance is detailed in two papers in this week's Nature – one by Silanpaa and colleagues and the other by Johannes Majer and colleagues.

Silanpaa and co connected their storage mechanisms for quantum information (qubits) via a cavity in which an electromagnetic wave had been established. Majer and co did a similar thing, but using ‘virtual’ photons (“weak perturbations of their cavity's quantum light field” according to an accompanying News and Views article, subscription required). As if quantum computing wasn’t difficult enough, another paper from last week’s Nature is also relevant, one authored by Houck et al. They detailed a ‘single-photon gun’ that can be used to generate and guide photons in an electrical circuit

What does this all mean though? Basically, for quantum computing to work we need to be able to transfer information stored in qubits to other qubits. Previously this had only been done between qubits that were (relatively) close to each other; this work shows it can be done over (relatively) large distances. Here’s what the News and Views piece makes of it all: “these papers represent confident steps towards the ultimate goal of a viable, large-scale quantum computer.”.

Yale, where many of these researchers are based, has a press release on this too.

Image: “coplanar waveguide cavity connecting two superconducting phase qubits at each end” / Michael Kemper

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 27, 2007
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The long-delayed Dawn space probe may finally get off Earth soon (Space.com, AFP, AP). NASA is moving towards a 27th September launch for Dawn, which will visit the rocks Vesta and Ceres in the asteroid belt (press release). After launch the probe will unfurl solar panels 65 feet wide, tip to tip, fire up one of its three ion engines and accelerate away from Earth very slowly (more from NASA). After many delays and threats of cancellation Dawn is finally looking likely to get off the ground (see Nature – subscription required).

Results from Vesta and Ceres may shed light on the process of planetary formation – hence the name Dawn: it is designed to study objects dating from the inception of the Solar System,. These are the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt and details of the differences between them could provide key insights. “In my view, we’re going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system,” said chief engineer Marc Rayman. The Christian Science Monitor goes into detail on Vesta and Ceres, and why they are so important, despite being ‘tiny, planet wannabes’.

If Dawn is successful this will be the first time that a space craft has orbited two bodies in the solar system (excluding the Earth and the Moon). This has been made possible due to the ion engines, which accelerate xenon ions to super-high speeds and spit them out to provide thrust (Dawn info pdf). NASA says at maximum thrust each engine produces “about the amount of force involved in holding a single piece of notebook paper in your hand” and at at maximum throttle it would take Dawn four days to reach 60 miles per hour. Anyone thinking any jalopy can do better should be warned though – after a year Dawn will hit 5,500 miles an hour having burned through only 15 gallons of fuel, according to Reuters.

Image: Artist concept of Dawn / William K. Hartmann courtesy of UCLA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 26, 2007
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The first application to build a new nuclear power reactor since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident has been filed in the United States. Wittily titled energy company NRG Energy wants to build two new reactors in Texas (San Antonio Express, Daily Texan, Dallas Morning News). If things go the company’s way the Advanced Boiling Water Reactors could be online in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“It is a new day for energy in America,” said David Crane, the company’s president and CEO (press release). “... But equally, this announcement heralds a new day for the environment. Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fuelled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions - and most importantly in this age of climate change - no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.”

Not so says Ken Kramer, director of the Austin chapter of the Sierra Club – one of America’s largest environmental groups. He told the Star Telegram that nuclear power still involves significant carbon-dioxide emissions in the mining of uranium and construction of the facilities. The proposed reactors will be on the site of an existing nuclear plant but this is unlikely to make them uncontroversial. Still, the Wall Street Journal reckons this might just be “a nuclear renaissance” and it says regulators are expecting up to 29 applications in the next 15 months.

Image: Artist’s impression of the new units / NRG

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2007
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Since it was coined by Gordon Moore in 1965 the doctrine that holds that the number of transistors that can be put on a computer chip will double every two years has been one of the most oft quoted scientific laws in existence. Now it seems, the end is in sight – Moore himself said this week he thinks the rule will only hold for another few years (Reuters, Wired, The Inquirer). “Another decade, a decade and a half, I think we'll hit something fairly fundamental,” Moore, co-founder of chip-maker Intel, said at a conference on Tuesday.

This ‘something fairly fundamental’ is the laws of physics. IT companies are simply running out of space on chips to put more transistors, according to Reuters. As Nature noted in its coverage of the law’s 40 birthday (subscription required):

If his law is extrapolated to the middle of the twenty-first century, it says that a transistor will be as small as a single atom. ... Even before then, chips will get so small that the insulating films will be too thin to prevent short circuits. And the heat generated by electrical currents in dense circuitry threatens it with meltdown.

Strangely, just days ago another Intel man – chief technology officer Justin Rattner – explained at great length to IT Business why the law was going to be live and kicking for some time yet. Moore has actually predicted the end of his law before (Wired). Even this time Ars Technica thinks it doesn’t really matter anyway – a decade is a loooooong time in technology terms. “My point here is that in 10 to 15 years, Ray Kurzweil may descend bodily from heaven with an all-star cast of futurists to lead us into the Great Beyond ...,” it says in a quote that I’ve included mainly because it contains my blog’s name.

More on Moore’s law.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 20, 2007
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Recognising doctors could be much harder in future. Moves to get rid of the white coat are already progressing in the UK and now it seems MP3 players could replace the venerable stethoscope (Telegraph, AFP, Times, CanWest, The Canadian Press). Using players’ built in microphones is as good if not better for listening to chest sounds than using a stethoscope, according to research from the University of Alberta in Canada.

“The quality, clarity and purity of the loud sounds were better than I have ever heard with a stethoscope,” Neil Skjodt, a respiratory medicine expert from the university, told the European Respiratory Society’s annual congress in Stockholm.

Skjodt was browsing in a store a couple of years ago looking for an electronic microphone and decided to use one built into an MP3 player. “That’s when I had my eureka moment and realized [the microphone from the MP3 player] was far better than anything I was carrying around in my pocket,” he said (CanWest). Another bonus of using digital music players is recordings can be sent to other doctors for a second opinion. This could be useful given previous research suggests some medical students have a “woeful lack of stethoscope skills” (press release, study).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 19, 2007
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Flying a solar powered aircraft at night is clearly not an easy task, but one of the teams working on this intriguing technology now claims to have done it twice on the trot. A report on the BBC, followed up by a company press release, says that Zephyr, a solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has successfully stayed aloft under power for 54 hours while flying out of the White Sands test range in New Mexico. Zephyr, which was developed by the rather absurdly named UK defence contractor QinetiQ, has a wingspan of 18 metres and weighs 30 kilos; it reached an altitude of 17,787 metres during the flight, which was mostly carrried out on autopilot, and carried an unspecified "surveillance payload".

Apparently a solar powered aircraft developed by AC Propulsion stayed up for 48 hours a couple of years ago, but its remote control pilots turned off its motors now and then to conserve power. Zephyr’s lithium sulphur batteries kept it going all night long. Still, the flight apparently will not officially set a new world endurance record, because it was not invigilated by the FAI.

The BBC piece has a lot of context on other teams working with similar technology, not to mention a video of three members of the team launching the UAV by hand. There’s no word as to whether the flight was conceived of as a tribute to the late great Paul MacCready (Economist obituary), a pioneer of solar powered as well as human powered flight. But it probably should have been.

PS: want to build your own photo-reconnaissance UAV? You can! (But not a solar powered one. Yet.)

Image credit: Qinetiq

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 10, 2007
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