Want to know if you are ugly? There is an app for that...

Are you ugly? Here is the iPhone Ugly Meter app.

Via CNET: 

An application that makes its goal to tell you how ugly you are is riding high in Apple's App Store.

Ugly Meter, which has been around for quite some time, has suddenly found itself threatening Angry Birds Space for the top spot in Apple's App Store. For a period of three weeks recently, the application topped China's listing of top iPhone apps, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. As of this writing, it's in second place in the U.S. store.

Ugly Meter first made headlines last year after raising concerns among anti-cyberbullying organizations. The application allows users to snap an image of their face, and then scans it for symmetry, contours, and other elements to determine how good- (or bad-) looking a person is. Ratings are handed out on a scale of 1-10, and include some not-so-nice quips about a person's looks.

Video: Aerovel Flexrotor UAV first transition

Office of Naval Research sponsored Flexrotor vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) advances.

ARLINGTON, Va.—Part helicopter, part airplane, the Office of Naval Research(ONR)-sponsored Flexrotor vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enters the next development phase April 30 in delivering improved maritime surveillance capability.

The contract awarded today is for the flight controls component. During this phase, Aerovel Corp. will advance Flexrotor’s capability with an upgraded propulsion system to transition from vertical to cruising flight and to land in crosswinds and high winds. The aircraft’s first major milestone was in August 2011, when it successfully transitioned from horizontal to vertical flight and back again.

How can a star get kicked out of the galaxy?

Astronomers have found 16 "hypervelocity" stars that have been kicked out of the galaxy.

It's very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy.

In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core.

So far astronomers have found 16 of these "hypervelocity" stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy's gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still inside the galaxy.

Now, Vanderbilt astronomers report in the May issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core. They selected these stars based on their location in intergalactic space between the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy and by their peculiar red coloration.

"These stars really stand out. They are red giant stars with high metallicity which gives them an unusual color," says Assistant Professor Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who conducted the study with graduate student Lauren Palladino.

Can intense light prevent or treat heart attacks?

A new study suggests intense light is good for people with bad hearts. Does this mean hospitals will install tanning beds?

ScienceDaily — There are lots of ways physicians might treat a patient after a heart attack -- certain resuscitation methods, aspirin, clot-busters and more. Now University of Colorado medical school researchers have found a new candidate: Intense light.

"The study suggests that strong light, or even just daylight, might ease the risk of having a heart attack or suffering damage from one," says Tobias Eckle, MD, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology, cardiology, and cell and developmental biology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "For patients, this could mean that daylight exposure inside of the hospital could reduce the damage that is caused by a heart attack."

What's the connection between light and a myocardial infarction, known commonly as a heart attack?

The answer lies, perhaps surprisingly, in the circadian rhythm, the body's clock that is linked to light and dark. The circadian clock is regulated by proteins in the brain. But the proteins are in other organs as well, including the heart. Keep on reading...

Video: Robotic spider weaves web at MIT Media Lab

Robotic spider weaves web at MIT Media Lab.

It’s not eight-legged (yet), but the Mediated Matter Group from MIT Media Lab is training a robot to weave web-like architecture, similar to the way a silkworm creates cocoons or a giant, metal black widow spider will capture humans for sport. It’s called CNSILK (Computer Numerically Controlled Silk Cocoon Construction).

Video: 12 thousand teens from all over the world compete in robotics competition

Robotics competition is a slam dunk

Missing person alert for 10,000 year-old skeleton

Someone has stolen the skeleton of one of the first humans to inhabit the Americas.

One of the first humans to inhabit the Americas has been stolen – and archaeologists want it back.

The skeleton, which is probably at least 10,000 years old, has disappeared from a cenote, or underground water reservoir, in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

In response, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico City has placed "wanted" posters in supermarkets, bakeries and dive shops in and around the nearby town of Tulum. They are also considering legal action to recover the remains.

The missing bones belong to a skeleton dubbed Young Man of Chan Hol II, discovered in 2010. The cenote in which it was found had previously yielded another 10,000-year-old skeleton – the Young Man of Chan Hol, discovered in 2006.

Evidence of 14,000 year-old human activity found in Chile

14,000 year-old stone tools found in Chile.

University archaeologists found 14,000-year-old knives while studying elephant ancestors.

Archaeologists and anthropologists excavating a site in the south of Chile have uncovered stones that are believed to have been used as tools by humans 14,000 years ago.

Scientists from Universidad Católica de Temuco and Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) were able to determine these were tools because they exhibit the marking congruent with ancient knives and cutting utensils.

“There are rock detachments from a simple, intentional blow that demonstrate that they were doctored, and that means this is a product of a human being. It lets us postulate that cultural diversity was present in this epoch,” UACh archaeologist Efe Ximena Navarro told El Mostrador.

The discovery occurred near Osorno by accident while paleontologists were studying the fossilized remains of gomphotheres, ancestors of modern elephants presumed to have been hunted by human communities in the area.

The artifacts provide some of the oldest evidence of human existence in the Americas.

Video: Recent Mass UFO Sightings

Recent Mass UFO Sightings

Vdeo: Majorana particles are scientists' best chance to create subatomic supercomputers that could store as many pieces of information as there are particles in the universe

Via Reuters:

Majorana particles are scientists' best chance to create subatomic supercomputers that could store as many pieces of information as there are particles in the universe.

Scientists develop handheld flashlight that kills bacteria instantly

Scientists develop handheld flashlight that kills bacteria instantly.

(PHYSORG)- A group of Chinese and Australian scientists, including CSIRO, have developed a handheld, battery-powered plasma-producing device that can rid skin of bacteria in an instant. The handheld plasma flashlight could be used in ambulance emergency calls, natural disaster sites, military combat operations and many other instances where treatment is required in remote locations.

Details of the plasma flashlight have been released today in a study published by the Institute of Physics Publishing's Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

The flashlight is driven by a 12 volt battery and doesn't require any external generator or wall power. It also doesn't require any external gas feed or handling system. The device itself is fitted with resistors to stop it heating up and making it safe to touch.

In the study, the plasma flashlight effectively inactivated a thick biofilm of one of the most antibiotic and heat-resistant bacteria, Enterococcus faecalis – a bacterium which often infects the root canals during dental treatments.

Results showed that the plasma not only inactivated the top layer of cells, but penetrated deep into the very bottom of the layers to kill the bacteria.

On second glance, those new scary North Korean rockets are fake

Experts say the new missiles North Korea showed off at a recent parade are poorly crafted fakes. They have liquid and solid boosters mixed on the same rocket.

Astronomy Pic of the Day: Aurora Over Venus - 24 April 2012

Aurora Over Venus - 24 April 2012

We were treated to an absolutely stunning aurora display on the morning of the 24th of April 2012.

Snail pattern lava flows found on Mars

Snail pattern lava flows found on Mars.

(PHYSORG)- High-resolution photos of lava flows on Mars reveal coiling spiral patterns that resemble snail or nautilus shells. Such patterns have been found in a few locations on Earth, but never before on Mars. The discovery, made by Arizona State University graduate student Andrew Ryan, is announced in a paper published April 27, 2012, in the scientific journal Science.

The new result came out of research into possible interactions of lava flows and floods of water in the Elysium volcanic province of Mars.

"I was interested in Martian outflow channels and was particularly intrigued by Athabasca Valles and Cerberus Palus, both part of Elysium," says Ryan, who is in his first year as a graduate student in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Philip Christensen, Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences at ASU, is second author on the paper.

"Athabasca Valles has a very interesting history," Ryan says. "There's an extensive literature on the area, as well as an intriguing combination of seemingly fluvial and volcanic features." Among the features are large slabs or plates that resemble broken floes of pack ice in the Arctic Ocean on Earth. In the past, a few scientists have argued that the plates in Elysium are in fact underlain by water ice.

Who is up for mind-controlled robots?

Mind-controlled robots offer potential of new technology for disabled.

Potential new treatment for stroke discovered

Potential new treatment for stroke discovered. Researchers find compound capable of increasing the generation of new nerve cells

Stanford University School of Medicine neuroscientists have demonstrated, in a study to be published online April 24 in Stroke, that a compound mimicking a key activity of a hefty, brain-based protein is capable of increasing the generation of new nerve cells, or neurons, in the brains of mice that have had strokes. The mice also exhibited a speedier recovery of their athletic ability.

These results are promising, because the compound wasn't administered to the animals until a full three days after they had suffered strokes, said the study's senior author, Marion Buckwalter, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences. This means that the compound works not by limiting a stroke's initial damage to the brain, but by enhancing recovery.

This is of critical significance, said Buckwalter, a practicing clinical neurologist who often treats recently arrived stroke patients in Stanford Hospital's intensive care unit.

"No existing therapeutic agents today enhance recovery from stroke," Buckwalter said. "The only approved stroke drug, tissue plasminogen activator, can bust up clots that initially caused the stroke but does nothing to stimulate the restoration of brain function later." Furthermore, to be effective, tPA has to be given within four and a half hours after a stroke has occurred, she added. "In real life, many people don't get to the hospital that quickly. They may live alone or have their stroke while sleeping, or they and the people close to them didn't recognize the stroke's symptoms well enough to realize they'd just had one."

Looking for an alternative, Buckwalter chose to focus on a compound called LM22A-4, which had shown promise in previous research. LM22A-4 is a small molecule whose bulk is less than one-seventieth that of the brain protein it mimics: brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a powerful and long-studied nerve growth factor. BDNF is critical during the development of the nervous system and known to be involved in important brain functions including memory and learning.

Time LapseVideo: Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45.

A man  filmed his daughter every week, from birth up until she turned 12 years old.


Lotte Time Lapse: Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. from Frans Hofmeester on Vimeo.

Astronomy Pic of the Day: Sombrero Galaxy

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

ScienceDaily — While some galaxies are rotund and others are slender disks like our spiral Milky Way, new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show that the Sombrero galaxy is both. The galaxy, which is a round elliptical galaxy with a thin disk embedded inside, is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of the two different types. The findings will lead to a better understanding of galaxy evolution, a topic still poorly understood.

Online Tool Maps Out U.S. Election Politics

Election Watch is a cool online tool for following U.S. politics. 

(PHYSORG)- The US presidential election dominates the global media every four years, with news articles, which are carefully analyzed by commentators and campaign strategists, playing a major role in shaping voter opinion. Academics have developed an online tool, Election Watch, which analyses the content of news about the US election by the international media.

A paper about the project by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory will be presented at 13th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Avignon, France.

Election Watch automatically monitors political discourse about the 2012 US presidential election from over 700 American and international news outlets. The information displayed is based, so far, on 91,456 articles.
The web tool allows users to explore news stories via an interactive interface and demonstrates the application of modern machine learning and language technologies. After analysing news articles about the 2012 US election the researchers have found patterns in the political narrative.

The online site is updated daily, by presenting narrative patterns as they were extracted from news. Narrative patterns include actors, actions, triplets representing political support between actors, and automatically inferred political allegiance of actors.

The site also presents the key named entities, timelines and heat maps. Network analysis allows the researchers to infer the role of each actor in the general political discourse, recognising adversaries and allied actors. Users can browse articles by political statements, rather than by keywords. For example, users can browse articles where Romney is described as criticising Obama. All the graphical briefing is automatically generated and interactive and each relation presented to the user can be used to retrieve supporting articles, from a set of hundreds of online news sources.

Video: Auroras, dazzling lightning displays seen from the International Space Station

Awesome Timelapse look at Earth's wonders

Want a better brain? Try physical exercise...

Experiments show exercise is linked to healthier brains.

Via NY Times:

The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.

So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. [...]

“Only one thing had mattered,” Rhodes says, “and that’s whether they had a running wheel.” Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice... Read more here...

Man is an evolutionary success because we are carnivores?

There is a link between being carnivores and successful evolution.

ScienceDaily — Carnivory is behind the evolutionary success of humankind. When early humans started to eat meat and eventually hunt, their new, higher-quality diet meant that women could wean their children earlier. Women could then give birth to more children during their reproductive life, which is a possible contribution to the population gradually spreading over the world. The connection between eating meat and a faster weaning process is shown by a research group from Lund University in Sweden, which compared close to 70 mammalian species and found clear patterns.

Learning to hunt was a decisive step in human evolution. Hunting necessitated communication, planning and the use of tools, all of which demanded a larger brain. At the same time, adding meat to the diet made it possible to develop this larger brain.

"This has been known for a long time. However, no one has previously shown the strong connection between meat eating and the duration of breast-feeding, which is a crucial piece of the puzzle in this context. Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births, to be shortened. This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution," says Elia Psouni of Lund University.

She is a developmental psychologist and has, together with neurophysiologist Martin Garwicz (also in Lund) and evolutionary geneticist Axel Janke (currently in Frankfurt but previously in Lund) published her findings in the journal PLoS ONE.

Four new species of freshwater purple crab found in Philippines

Four new species of freshwater purple crab found in Philippines.

(PHYSORG)- Four new species of freshwater crab, bright purple in colour, have been discovered in the biologically diverse but ecologically-threatened Philippines, the man who found them said Saturday.

The tiny crustaceans burrow under boulders and roots in streams, feeding on dead plants, fruits, carrion and small animals in the water at night, said Hendrik Freitag of Germany's Senckenberg Museum of Zoology.

Found only in small, lowland-forest ecosystems in the Palawan island group, most have purple shells, with claws and legs tipped red.

"It is known that crabs can discriminate colours. Therefore, it seems likely that the colouration has a signal function for the social behaviour, e.g. mating," Freitag told AFP by email on Saturday.

Pentagon tests hypersonic vehicle at 20 times the speed of sound

Reportedly, the skin started peeling off.

The results are in from last summer’s attempt to test new technology that would provide the Pentagon with a lightning-fast vehicle, capable of delivering a military strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour.

In August the Pentagon's research arm, known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, carried out a test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of traveling at 20 times the speed of sound.

The arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket made by Orbital Sciences Corp.

After reaching an undisclosed altitude, the aircraft jettisoned from its protective cover atop the rocket, then nose-dived back toward Earth, leveled out and glided above the Pacific at 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20.
The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for about 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg.

But it was ended about nine minutes into flight for unknown reasons. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but officials didn’t provide much information on why the launch failed.

UFO over France UFO captured on cam over France

What is it? These strange orbs were filed over France.

Hundreds of thousands of infected computers will lose Internet this summer

Click here to see if you are one of the infected.

(AP) -- For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

Video: NASA brings 'Earthrise' to everyone

Agency recreates what first astronauts to photograph our planet might have seen. This video is very nice. NASA has plenty of time for this now that we are hitchhiking with the Russians.

Scientists revive 19th century treatment for Parkinson's disease

Credit: A.S. Kapur, G.T. Stebbins, and C.G. Goetz

The vibration chair actually helped Parkinson's disease patients significantly, but it is thought to be a placebo effect.

ScienceDaily — In the 19^th century, Jean-Martin Charcot, the celebrated neurologist, developed a "vibration chair," to relieve symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Charcot reported improvements in his patients, but he died shortly thereafter and a more complete evaluation of the therapy was never conducted. Now, a group of neurological researchers at Rush University Medical Center have replicated his work in a study to see if Charcot's observation holds true against modern scientific testing.

Results from the study indicate that while vibration therapy does significantly improve some symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the effect is due to placebo or other nonspecific factors, and not the vibration. The findings are published in the April issue of Journal of Parkinson's Disease.

"We attempted to mimic Charcot's protocol with modern equipment in order to confirm or refute an historical observation," explains lead investigator Christopher G. Goetz, MD, director of the Parkinson's disease and Movement Disorders Center at Rush. "Both the treated group and the control group improved similarly, suggesting other factors had an effect on Parkinson's disease motor function."

Charcot's patients told him that during long carriage rides or train journeys, uncomfortable or painful symptoms of Parkinson's disease seemed to disappear, and the relief lasted quite some time after the journey. He developed a chair that mimicked the continuous jerking of a carriage or train. Keep on reading...

Dawn gets extra 40 days to explore Vesta

 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



Dawn gets extra 40 days to explore Vesta.

(Phys.org) -- NASA's Dawn mission has received official confirmation that 40 extra days have been added to its exploration of the giant asteroid Vesta, the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt. The mission extension allows Dawn to continue its scientific observations at Vesta until Aug. 26, while still arriving at the dwarf planet Ceres at the same originally scheduled target date in February 2015.

"We are leveraging our smooth and successful operations at Vesta to provide for even more scientific discoveries for NASA and the world." said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This extra time will allow us to extend our scientific investigation and learn more about this mysterious world."

The extension will not require any new funding, and will draw on financial reserves that have been carefully managed by the Dawn project. The flexibility provided by the spacecraft's use of efficient ion propulsion system allows it to maintain its originally planned Ceres arrival.

The extension allows for extra observations at Dawn's current low-altitude mapping orbit (average altitude 130 miles or 210 kilometers), which will now last until May 1. Read more here...

Video: How Tupac was brought 'back to life'

Technology allows famous rapper who died in 1996 to perform on stage at music festival in California.

Scientists restore damaged heart material in mice

Credit: Gladstone Institutes

Scientists restore damaged heart material in mice. Scar-forming cardiac cells are turned into beating heart muscle.

ScienceDaily — Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes just announced a research breakthrough in mice that one day may help doctors restore hearts damaged by heart attacks -- by converting scar-forming cardiac cells into beating heart muscle.

These scientists previously transformed such cells into cardiac muscle-like cells in petri dishes. But Gladstone postdoctoral scholar Li Qian, PhD, along with researchers in the laboratory of Deepak Srivastava, MD, has now accomplished this transformation in living animals -- and with even greater success. The results, which may have broad human-health implications, are described in the latest issue of Nature, available online April 18.

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death. Annually in the United States alone, the nearly 1 million Americans who survive a heart attack are left with failing hearts that can no longer beat at full capacity.

"The damage from a heart attack is typically permanent because heart-muscle cells -- deprived of oxygen during the attack -- die and scar tissue forms," said Dr. Srivastava, who directs cardiovascular and stem cell research at Gladstone, an independent and nonprofit biomedical-research institution. "But our experiments in mice are a proof of concept that we can reprogram non-beating cells directly into fully functional, beating heart cells -- offering an innovative and less invasive way to restore heart function after a heart attack."

In laboratory experiments with mice that had experienced a heart attack, Drs. Qian and Srivastava delivered three genes that normally guide embryonic heart development -- together known as GMT -- directly into the damaged region. Within a month, non-beating cells that normally form scar tissue transformed into beating heart-muscle cells. Within three months, the hearts were beating even stronger and pumping more blood.

Have billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets?

Have billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets?

(Phys.org) -- New research suggests that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets that once roamed interstellar space. The nomad worlds, which were kicked out of the star systems in which they formed, occasionally find a new home with a different sun. This finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system.

To reach their conclusion, Perets and Kouwenhoven simulated young star clusters containing free-floating planets. They found that if the number of rogue planets equaled the number of stars, then 3 to 6 percent of the stars would grab a planet over time. The more massive a star, the more likely it is to snag a planet drifting by.

They studied young star clusters because capture is more likely when stars and free-floating planets are crowded together in a small space. Over time, the clusters disperse due to close interactions between their stars, so any planet-star encounters have to happen early in the cluster's history.

Rogue planets are a natural consequence of star formation. Newborn star systems often contain multiple planets. If two planets interact, one can be ejected and become an interstellar traveler. If it later encounters a different star moving in the same direction at the same speed, it can hitch a ride.

A captured planet tends to end up hundreds or thousands of times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun. It's also likely to have a orbit that's tilted relative to any native planets, and may even revolve around its star backward. Keep on reading...

GOES animation of the severe weather outbreak from space

Via YouTube:

NASA has just released an animation of visible and infrared satellite data showing the development and movement of the Great Plains tornado outbreak, using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite. There were more than 135 reports of tornadoes and 124 different warnings over April 14-15, 2012.

Raw video: Spectacular flare erupts off sun

Stunning solar explosion captured by NASA cameras

solar flare, video, Sun, NASA,

6,500 BC farming site discovered in Europe

Credit: University of Cincinnati

6,500 BC farming site discovered in Europe.

ScienceDaily — University of Cincinnati research is revealing early farming in a former wetlands region that was largely cut off from Western researchers until recently. The UC collaboration with the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project (SANAP) will be presented April 20 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).

Susan Allen, a professor in the UC Department of Anthropology who co-directs SANAP, says she and co-director Ilirjan Gjipali of the Albanian Institute of Archaeology created the project in order to address a gap not only in Albanian archaeology, but in the archaeology in Eastern Europe as a whole, by focusing attention on the initial transition to farming in the region.[...]

The findings show that Vashtëmi, located in southeastern Albania, was occupied around 6,500 cal BC, making it one of the earliest farming sites in Europe. The location of early sites such as Vashtëmi near wetland edges suggests that the earliest farmers in Europe preferentially selected such resource-rich settings to establish pioneer farming villages.

New treatment for prostate cancer gives 'perfect results' 90% of the time

Via The Telegraph:

It is hoped the new treatment, which involves heating only the tumours with a highly focused ultrasound, will mean men can be treated without an overnight stay in hospital and avoiding the distressing side effects associated with current therapies.

A study has found that focal HIFU, high-intensity focused ultrasound, provides the 'perfect' outcome of no major side effects and free of cancer 12 months after treatment, in nine out of ten cases.

Traditional surgery or radiotherapy can only provide the perfect outcome in half of cases currently.

Experts have said the results are 'very encouraging' and were a 'paradigm' shift in treatment of the disease.

It is hoped that large scale trials can now begin so the treatment could be offered routinely on the NHS within five years.

Tornado Video: Massive twin tornadoes seen forming in Oklahoma, US

Massive twin tornadoes seen forming in Oklahoma, US (video)

Tornado Video,

Video: Tornado devastates Thurman, Iowa

Small Iowa town devastated by tornado. 75% of the town was destroyed.

Shameful: Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP in two years

How can Microsoft consider dropping support for one of their products that is still running on 47% of computers?

(PHYSORG)- Microsoft is counting down the days until it is through with the Windows XP operating system for personal computers.

The US software titan used a blog post to remind the world that in two years it will no longer support the generations-old operating system that people have clung to despite the releases of successors Vista and Windows 7.

"We want to acknowledge the two-year countdown to the end of Windows XP and Office 2003 support," said Microsoft marketing director Stella Chernyak.

Is this the future of high-tech motorcycles? UNO Development Video

Is this the future of high-tech motorcycles?

Who is up for a crab-puter?

Scientists use the swarming behavior of soldier crabs to design new computers.

(Phys.org) -- A team of scientists from Japan and England have hit the high mark in exploring and testing unconventional forms of computation. They have built and tested a computer using crabs. This is a computer in which the information carriers are swarming creatures, namely, soldier crabs. In their paper, “Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate,” authors Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Yuta Nishiyama, and Andrew Adamatzky describe what others are already referring to as the crab-puter.

The scientists were interested to see if they could adapt a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls, to work with swarms of crabs.

“To expand the family of unconventional spatially extended computers, we studied the swarming behavior of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae and found that compact propagating groups of crabs emerge and endure under noisy external stimulation. We speculated that swarms can behave similarly to billiard balls and thus implement basic circuits of collision-based computing,” they stated.

The researchers found that when two swarms of crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. Their reference to billiard balls is noteworthy, in that computer scientists E. Fredken and T. Toffoli in the 1980s -- explorations of unconventional forms of computing have been going on for some time -- set out to see if a computer built with billiard balls could work.

In an article explaining the earlier billiard-ball concept, Technology Review said, “The idea is that a channel would carry information encoded in the form of the presence or absence of billiard balls. This information is processed through gates in which the billiard balls either collide and emerge in a direction that is the result of the ballistics of the collision, or don’t collide and emerge with the same velocities.” Keep on reading...

Video: Former astronauts and NASA employees blast NASA's climate change stance

Well, it's not like they are rocket scientists. Oh, wait a minute...

Has life already been discovered on Mars?

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Some scientists now believe Viking mission soil analysis proved life exists on Mars.

The Curiosity rover is currently on its way to Mars, scheduled to make a dramatic landing within Gale Crater in mid-August and begin its hunt for the geologic signatures of a watery, life-friendly past. Solid evidence that large volumes of water existed on Mars at some point would be a major step forward in the search for life on the Red Planet.

But… has it already been found? Some scientists say yes.

Researchers from universities in Los Angeles, California, Tempe, Arizona and Siena, Italy have published a paper in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS) citing the results of their work with data obtained by NASA’s Viking mission.

The twin Viking 1 and 2 landers launched in August and September of 1975 and successfully landed on Mars in July and September of the following year. Their principal mission was to search for life, which they did by digging into the ruddy Martian soil looking for signs of respiration — a signal of biological activity.

The results, although promising, were inconclusive.

Now, 35 years later, one team of researchers claims that the Viking landers did indeed detect life, and the data’s been there all along.

Active soils exhibited rapid, substantial gas release,” the team’s report states. “The gas was probably CO2 and, possibly, other radiocarbon-containing gases.” Keep on reading...

Baboon learns first step of reading

Dan the baboon has learned to recognize words.

(PHYSORG)- Dan the baboon sits in front of a computer screen. The letters BRRU pop up. With a quick and almost dismissive tap, the monkey signals it's not a word. Correct. Next comes, ITCS. Again, not a word. Finally KITE comes up.

He pauses and hits a green oval to show it's a word. In the space of just a few seconds, Dan has demonstrated a mastery of what some experts say is a form of pre-reading and walks away rewarded with a treat of dried wheat.

Dan is part of new research that shows baboons are able to pick up the first step in reading - identifying recurring patterns and determining which four-letter combinations are words and which are just gobbledygook.

The study shows that reading's early steps are far more instinctive than scientists first thought and it also indicates that non-human primates may be smarter than we give them credit for.

"They've got the hang of this thing," said Jonathan Grainger, a French scientist and lead author of the research.

Baboons and other monkeys are good pattern finders and what they are doing may be what we first do in recognizing words.

It's still a far cry from real reading. They don't understand what these words mean, and are just breaking them down into parts, said Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at the Aix-Marseille University in France. Keep on reading...

Feel Good Video: Paralyzed husky's new lease on life

Owner equips Ume the dog with custom wheels so he can move around freely.

Who is up for advanced dinosaur overlords?

According to new research, the possibility of advanced reptilian life forms have evolved on other planets. 

ScienceDaily — New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs -- monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans -- may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe. "We would be better off not meeting them," concludes the study, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.[...]

"Of course," Breslow says, "showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did." He adds: "An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them."

Video: Thin plastic material absorbs force of blast from IED explosions

The newest modern armor is a thin piece of plastic that began it's history as running shoe material.


Thin plastic shields soldiers from IED explosions

Interesting: You look bigger holding a gun

New research finds people look bigger when they are holding a gun. They look 10 feet tall if the gun is pointed at you.

UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns.

The research, which publishes today in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise.

"There's nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do," said Daniel Fessler, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. "Danger really does loom large — in our minds."

Researchers say the findings suggest an unconscious mental mechanism that gauges a potential adversary and then translates the magnitude of that threat into the same dimensions used by animals to size up their adversaries: size and strength.

"We've isolated a capacity to assess threats in a simple way," said Colin Holbrook, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in anthropology and co-author of the study. "Though this capacity is very efficient, it can misguide us."

The study is part of larger project funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research to understand how people make decisions in situations where violent conflict is a possibility. The findings are expected to have ramifications for law enforcement, prison guards and the military.

"We're exploring how people think about the relative likelihood that they will win a conflict, and then how those thoughts affect their decisions about whether to enter into conflict," said Fessler, whose research focuses on the biological and cultural bases of human behavior. He is the director of UCLA's Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers who explore how various forms of evolution shape behavior.

For the study, the UCLA researchers recruited participants in multiple rounds using classified advertisements on the websites Craigslist and MechanicalTurk. In one round, 628 individuals were asked to look at four pictures of different hands, each holding a single object: a caulking gun, electric drill, large saw or handgun. Keep on reading...

Science and Enlightment: The Transit of Venus (Video)

This video on the the historical importance of the "Transit of Venus"is excellent.

Something new spotted on Sun

Credit: NASA/STEREO/SDO/NRL

NASA Spacecraft Spots new feature on the Sun.

ScienceDaily — One day in the fall of 2011, Neil Sheeley, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did what he always does -- look through the daily images of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

But on this day he saw something he'd never noticed before: a pattern of cells with bright centers and dark boundaries occurring in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. These cells looked somewhat like a cell pattern that occurs on the sun's surface -- similar to the bubbles that rise to the top of boiling water -- but it was a surprise to find this pattern higher up in the corona, which is normally dominated by bright loops and dark coronal holes.

Sheeley discussed the images with his Naval Research Laboratory colleague Harry Warren, and together they set out to learn more about the cells. Their search included observations from a fleet of NASA spacecraft called the Heliophysics System Observatory that provided separate viewpoints from different places around the sun. They describe the properties of these previously unreported solar features, dubbed "coronal cells," in a paper published online in The Astrophysical Journal on March 20, 2012 that will appear in print on April 10.

The coronal cells occur in areas between coronal holes -- colder and less dense areas of the corona seen as dark regions in images -- and "filament channels" which mark the boundaries between sections of upward-pointing magnetic fields and downward-pointing ones. Understanding how these cells evolve can provide clues as to the changing magnetic fields at the boundaries of coronal holes and how they affect the steady emission of solar material known as the solar wind streaming from these holes.

"We think the coronal cells look like flames shooting up, like candles on a birthday cake," says Sheeley. "When you see them from the side, they look like flames. When you look at them straight down they look like cells. And we had a great way of checking this out, because we could look at them from the top and from the side at the same time using observations from SDO, STEREO-A, and STEREO-B." Keep on reading...

Ancient Greece and the 'World's first computer' (video)

'World's first computer' found among artifacts in Greece. The ancient findings are now on display. (video)

Ancient Greece and the 'World's first computer' (video)

Which come first? The chicken or the egg? Age old question answered.

Here is the answer to the age old question of which came first the chicken or the egg?

(PHYSORG)- In the second report of our Egg Cetera series on egg-related research, let’s begin with the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Armed with knowledge of evolution, the answer is straightforward. Eggs came first.

Dinosaurs, the animal group that includes birds and their ancestors, laid eggs. This means that the ancestors of birds laid eggs long before chickens came about. Because we know so much about the evolution of life on Earth, this answer now seems obvious. But without fossils, and without understanding how evolution works, we could have got it wrong.

My research focuses on the evolution of dinosaurs, and what that tells us about the evolution of the many distinctive features of birds, such as hollow air-filled bones, warm-bloodedness, feathers and flight.

Archaeopteryx, which lived 150 million years ago, shows a mosaic of bird-like features such as feathery wings, alongside distinctly non-birdy features such as teeth and a long bony tail. Fossil remains of archaeopteryx were first found in 1861. However, until recently, there was no consensus about where, evolutionarily speaking, birds came from. Scientists were confident that, among today’s animals, they formed a group with crocodiles, but how they fitted in with the vast diversity of extinct groups was not clear.

The idea that birds are descendants of dinosaurs was first proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, but received little support until discoveries of the bird-like dinosaur Deinonychus (Jurassic Park’s ‘Velociraptor’) by John Ostrom in the 1960s. More recent discoveries include dinosaur fossils from China, preserved in ancient lake beds, complete with feathers.

Many features thought to be characteristic of birds have an ancient evolutionary history. For example, ‘pneumatic’ air-filled bones first appeared in Late Triassic dinosaurs, 200 million years ago, and were common in saurischians like Tyrannosaurus rex and Diplodocus.

We can also look at the evolution of eggs from the earliest fossil evidence right up to the egg we might eat for breakfast today. Like crocodiles and some turtles, birds lay hard-shelled eggs, enclosed by a calcitic, mineralised layer. These are unlike the primitive, leathery eggs of lizards, snakes, many turtles, and egg-laying mammals such as the platypus. Bird eggs also have a number of unique features not found in other reptile eggs. They form long shapes, not spheres, and they taper towards one end rather than being symmetrical. Furthermore, birds incubate their eggs directly using body heat, and they ovulate and lay one egg at a time, whereas crocodiles and other reptiles have two functional oviducts.

Video: UFO Caught From Airplane - Seoul, South Korea - April 07, 2012

UFO Caught From Airplane - Seoul, South Korea - April 07, 2012

Who is up for drug resistant malaria?

A new species of malaria parasite is resistant to the front line treatment for malaria.

ScienceDaily  — Evidence that the most deadly species of malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is becoming resistant to the front line treatment for malaria on the border of Thailand and Myanmar was reported in The Lancet April 5.This increases concern that resistance could now spread to India and then Africa as resistance to other antimalarial drugs has done before. Eliminating malaria might then prove impossible.

The study coincides with research recently published in Science in which researchers in south east Asia and the USA identify a major region of the malaria parasite genome associated with artemisinin resistance. This region, which includes several potential candidate genes for resistance, may provide researchers with a tool for mapping resistance.

Both studies, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health, follow reports in 2009 of the emergence of artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in western Cambodia, 800km away from the Thailand-Myanmar border where the new cases of resistance have been observed. Resistance to artemisinin makes the drugs less effective and could eventually render them obsolete, putting millions of lives at risk.

According to the World Malaria Report 2011, malaria killed an estimated 655,000 people in 2010, mainly young children and pregnant women. It is caused by parasites that are injected into the bloodstream by infected mosquitoes. Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for nine out of ten deaths from malaria. Keep on reading...

Report: Israeli bio-technical company develops cancer vaccine that works on 90% of cancers

 prostate cancer cells

Report: Israeli bio-technical company develops cancer vaccine that works on 90% of cancers.

Via Ynet News:

Vaxil BioTherapeutics, a biotechnical company based in Ness Ziona, near Tel Aviv, has produced a ground-breaking therapeutic vaccine for cancer patients which could prevent about 90% of cancers from coming back.

Vaxil was founded in 2006 by Dr. Lior Carmon and the vaccine is now in clinical trials at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. The vaccine could be available as early as 2017 to administer on a regular basis, not only to help treat cancer but in order to keep the disease from recurring.

The vaccine is being tested against a type of blood cancer, ‘multiple myeloma’. If the substance works as hoped, its platform technology, VaxHit could be applied to 90% of all known cancers, including prostate and breast cancer, solid and non-solid tumors.

“In cancer, the body knows something is not quite right but the immune system doesn’t know how to protect itself against the tumor like it does against an infection or virus. This is because cancer cells are the body’s own cells gone wrong,” says Julian Levy, the company’s CFO. Keep on reading...

Where are all the aliens?

Star Trek First Contact with Vulcans (April 5, 2063)


With as many exoplanets as is now postulated, where are all the aliens?

Via Universe Today:

According to Star Trek lore, it is only 51 years until humans encounter their first contact with an alien species. In the movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” on April 5, 2063, Vulcans pay a visit to an Earth recovering from a war-torn period (see the movie clip below above.) But will such a planet-wide, history-changing event ever really take place? If you are logical, like Spock and his Vulcan species, science points towards the inevitability of first contact. This is according to journalist Marc Kaufman, who is a science writer for the Washington Post and author of the book “First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for life Beyond Earth.” He writes that from humanity’s point of view, first contact would be a “harbinger of a new frontier in a dramatically changed cosmos.”


What are some of the arguments for and against the likelihood of first contact ever taking place and what would the implications be?

“One argument against first contact is from those who say there is no other life in the Universe,” said Kaufman, speaking to Universe Today via phone, “and with that is the Fermi paradox, which says that if there is so much life out there, why hasn’t it visited us yet? That was first posited back in the 1950’s and with everything we’ve learned since then, it seems rather presumptuous and Earth-centric to say that because no one has come to Earth, there is no life out there.”

Kaufman argues the Universe is so vast, the number of exoplanets is so huge – with the number of exoplanets in habitable zones now gaining in numbers almost daily – and we now understand that all the makings for the building blocks of life are out in space, so it defies logic to argue there is no other life out there.

Another argument against first contact states there might be microbial life elsewhere in the Universe, but it is not intelligent. “This is where the Fermi paradox comes in even more,” Kaufman said. “It certainly is true — as far as we know — that no intelligent life has made contact with Earth. But when you look at the amount of time we’ve been a technologically advanced society, it has only been a few hundred years. In the vastness of time, that is a pitifully small amount of time – truly nothing.”

In the immensity of cosmological time, Kaufman said, it is quite possible that microbial life emerged and evolved a billion years ago on another world and we missed coinciding with it, as civilizations could have come and gone. Keep on reading...

Who is up for an Alligator Roundup in Missouri?

Missouri Authorities In Alligator Roundup

Video: NASA scientists pick best night for star watching in April

April brings meteor showers for star gazers. It's April 21st!

Study: Invasive heart test, left ventriculography, being dramatically overused

The invasive heart test, left ventriculography, is being dramatically overused.

(Medical Xpress)- An invasive heart test used routinely to measure heart function is being dramatically overused, especially among patients who recently underwent similar, more effective tests, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

"This adds both risk to the patient and significant extra cost," said first author of the study Ronald Witteles, MD, assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and program director of Stanford's internal medicine residency training program, who called the rates of unnecessary use "shockingly high."

The procedure, called left ventriculography or left ventriculogram, was developed 50 years ago to assess how well the heart functions by using a measurement method called "ejection fraction" — the percentage of blood that gets squeezed out with each heartbeat. The investigators found that it is routinely performed as an add-on procedure during a coronary angiogram, a separate heart-imaging test, at an extra cost of $300.

Over the years, several less-invasive and often superior methods of measuring ejection fraction have emerged, such as echocardiograms and nuclear cardiac imaging, making the use of left ventriculography questionable at times, the study states.

The study appears online this month in the American Heart Journal.

Several years ago when Witteles was a cardiac fellow, he and his colleagues noticed a great deal of variation in whether cardiologists would order the procedure, often in similar patient cases, he said. This seemingly arbitrary use of left ventriculography led to the idea for this study.

Researchers first set out to determine exactly how often the procedure was conducted. They examined a national database of about 96,000 patients enrolled in Aetna health benefits plans in 2007 who underwent a coronary angiogram during that year. The data showed left ventriculography was performed 81.8 percent of the time whenever an angiogram was done — a surprisingly high rate, Witteles said. Keep on reading...

Is The Common Pesticide, Imidacloprid, Killing Bee Colonies?

flickr

A new study provides a link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

ScienceDaily— The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

The authors, led by Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides "convincing evidence" of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.

The study will appear in the June issue of the Bulletin of Insectology.

"The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated," says Lu. "And it apparently doesn't take much of the pesticide to affect the bees. Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment."

Pinpointing the cause of the problem is crucial because bees -- beyond producing honey -- are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of the crop species in the U.S., including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and livestock feed such as alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses, experts estimate. Keep on reading...

Ape for apps (video)

Orangutans play with iPad.

Orangutans, the iPad's wildest users (video)

Video: New class of medical devices so small they travel through the blood stream

 Fantastic Voyage is one step closer to reality.

New Study: Flavonoids Protects Men Against Parkinson's Disease

Why you should drink your green tea and eat your broccoli.

ScienceDaily — Men who eat flavonoid-rich foods such as berries, tea, apples and red wine significantly reduce their risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to new research by Harvard University and the University of East Anglia.

Published April 4 in the journal Neurology®, the findings add to the growing body of evidence that regular consumption of some flavonoids can have a marked effect on human health. Recent studies have shown that these compounds can offer protection against a wide range of diseases including heart disease, hypertension, some cancers and dementia.

This latest study is the first study in humans to show that flavonoids can protect neurons against diseases of the brain such as Parkinson's.

Around 130,000 men and women took part in the research. More than 800 had developed Parkinson's disease within 20 years of follow-up. After a detailed analysis of their diets and adjusting for age and lifestyle, male participants who ate the most flavonoids were shown to be 40 per cent less likely to develop the disease than those who ate the least. No similar link was found for total flavonoid intake in women.

The research was led by Dr Xiang Gao of Harvard School of Public Health in collaboration with Prof Aedin Cassidy of the Department of Nutrition, Norwich Medical School at UEA. Keep on reading...

Amazing Video: Earth’s Oceans Wriggling With Durable, Beautiful Currents

 This visualization of the Earth’s ocean currents is beautiful and hypnotic.

Meet Robo Jellyfish

Is there anything that cant be made into a robot?

Was T. Rex Warm and Fuzzy?

A new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China had a downy coat.

(PHYSORG)- The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex.

With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side.

The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.

If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction.

"People need to start changing their image of T. rex," said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

Much smaller dinosaurs with primitive feathers have been excavated in recent years, but this is the first direct sign of a huge, shaggy dinosaur. Scientists have long debated whether gigantic dinosaurs lost their feathers the bigger they got or were just not as extensively covered.

The new tyrannosaur species, Yutyrannus huali, is described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Its name is a blend of Latin and Mandarin, which translates to "beautiful feathered tyrant." Keep on reading...

Google Self-Driving Car Takes Blind Man To Taco Bell (Video)

Google released a video of a test drive by a blind man.

Via YouTube:

We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, we wanted to share one of our favorite moments. Here's Steve, who joined us for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it's also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met.

Google Self-Driving Car Takes Blind Man To Taco Bell (Video)

Your Flying Car Is Here!

The Dutch have unveiled a flying car that will hit the market in 2014.

(PHYSORG)- Is it a flying car or a driving aircraft? Either way, the Personal Air and Land Vehicle, or PAL-V for short, has just proved it can handle the skies as well as the highway, both at up to 180 kilometres (112 miles) per hour, its Dutch developers said Tuesday.

The PAL-V is a gyrocopter that can fly as far as 500 kilometres (315 miles) at an altitude of up to 4,000 feet (1,200 metres).

When it lands, it tucks away its rotor-blades and turns into a road-legal three-wheeled vehicle with a range of 1,200 kilometres.

"In future, you will be able to drive from home to the airport, take off, land and then drive to your destination in one go," said Robert Dingemanse, chief executive of the company, also called PAL-V.

In development since 2008, the first commercial models of the arrow-shaped PAL-V are expected to go on sale in 2014 at 250,000-300,000 euros ($330,000-$400,000), Dingemanse told AFP. Keep on reading...

Wild Tornado Video From Texas (Video)

Had to pull over to keep from getting blown away!


Tractor trailers fly!
 

Video: What Mass Effect Taught Us About Aliens

The Mass Effect universe is packed full of Aliens, but where are all of our real-life extraterrestrial buddies at?

Use of fire by human ancestors pushed back to one million years ago

 Credit: R. Yates



Use of fire by human ancestors pushed back to one million years ago.

An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

"The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life," said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project and director of U of T's Archaeology Centre.

The research will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 2.

Ocean warming has been going on for 100 years

Ocean warming has been going on longer than previously thought.

ScienceDaily — A new study contrasting ocean temperature readings of the 1870s with temperatures of the modern seas reveals an upward trend of global ocean warming spanning at least 100 years.

The research led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego physical oceanographer Dean Roemmich shows a .33-degree Celsius (.59-degree Fahrenheit) average increase in the upper portions of the ocean to 700 meters (2,300 feet) depth. The increase was largest at the ocean surface, .59-degree Celsius (1.1-degree Fahrenheit), decreasing to .12-degree Celsius (.22-degree Fahrenheit) at 900 meters (2,950 feet) depth.

The report is the first global comparison of temperature between the historic voyage of HMS Challenger (1872-1876) and modern data obtained by ocean-probing robots now continuously reporting temperatures via the global Argo program. Scientists have previously determined that nearly 90 percent of the excess heat added to Earth's climate system since the 1960s has been stored in the oceans. The new study, published in the April 1 advance online edition of Nature Climate Change and coauthored by John Gould of the United Kingdom-based National Oceanography Centre and John Gilson of Scripps Oceanography, pushes the ocean warming trend back much earlier.

"The significance of the study is not only that we see a temperature difference that indicates warming on a global scale, but that the magnitude of the temperature change since the 1870s is twice that observed over the past 50 years," said Roemmich, co-chairman of the International Argo Steering Team. "This implies that the time scale for the warming of the ocean is not just the last 50 years but at least the last 100 years." Keep on reading...

Amazing Video: Enormous Cone Head Of Paracas Peru: Lost Human History Returns

Enormous Cone Head Of Paracas Peru: Lost Human History Returns

Video: Google Announces The Return Of Morse Code

Getting rid of the QWERTY keyboard...

Sand Flea Urban Robot Can Jump 30 Feet Into The Air (Video)

The Sand Flea urban reconnaissance robot has the amazing ability to do a controlled 30 foot vertical jump. 

Via YouTube:

Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings. Current development of Sand Flea is funded by the The US Army's Rapid Equipping Force. For more information visit www.BostonDynamics.com.

Sand Flea Jumping Robot (Video)