Who is up for a Bionic Eye?

Prototype Bionic Eye implanted...

ScienceDaily — In a major development, Bionic Vision Australia researchers have successfully performed the first implantation of an early prototype bionic eye with 24 electrodes.

Ms Dianne Ashworth has profound vision loss due to retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited condition. She has now received what she calls a 'pre-bionic eye' implant that enables her to experience some vision. A passionate technology fan, Ms Ashworth was motivated to make a contribution to the bionic eye research program.

After years of hard work and planning, Ms Ashworth's implant was switched on last month at the Bionics Institute, while researchers held their breaths in the next room, observing via video link.

"I didn't know what to expect, but all of a sudden, I could see a little flash...it was amazing. Every time there was stimulation there was a different shape that appeared in front of my eye," Ms Ashworth said.

Professor Emeritus David Penington AC, Chairman of Bionic Vision Australia said: "These results have fulfilled our best expectations, giving us confidence that with further development we can achieve useful vision. Much still needs to be done in using the current implant to 'build' images for Ms Ashworth. The next big step will be when we commence implants of the full devices."

Raw video: Koala hitches ride in canoe

Raw video: Cuddly creature swims to boat for comfy ride down creek in Australia

Good News: 2 ounces of chocolate per week can reduce men's stroke risk by 17%

Two ounces of chocolate per week can reduce men's stroke risk by 17%.

Researchers writing in the journal Neurology found that of more than 37,000 men followed for a decade, those who ate the most chocolate – typically the equivalent of one-third of a cup of chocolate chips – had a 17 per cent lower risk of stroke than men who avoided chocolate.

The study is hardly the first to link chocolate to cardiovascular benefits, with several previous ones suggesting that chocolate fans have lower rates of certain risks for heart disease and stroke, like high blood pressure.

"The beneficial effect of chocolate consumption on stroke may be related to the flavonoids in chocolate," wrote Susanna Larsson, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who led the study.

Another study she conducted last year found similar results for women.

Flavonoids are compounds that act as antioxidants and may have positive effects on blood pressure, cholesterol and blood vessel function, according to studies.

Cool Video: Easy way to separate yolk from egg white

This is how cool people separate yolk from egg white.

NASA's Kepler mission finds circumbinary system orbiting two suns

Multiple planets orbiting two suns...

ScienceDaily — Coming less than a year after the announcement of the first circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered multiple transiting planets orbiting two suns for the first time. This system, known as a circumbinary planetary system, is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

This discovery proves that more than one planet can form and persist in the stressful realm of a binary star and demonstrates the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy.

Astronomers detected two planets in the Kepler-47 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other every 7.5 days from our vantage point on Earth. One star is similar to the sun in size, but only 84 percent as bright. The second star is diminutive, measuring only one-third the size of the sun and less than 1 percent as bright.

"In contrast to a single planet orbiting a single star, the planet in a circumbinary system must transit a 'moving target.' As a consequence, time intervals between the transits and their durations can vary substantially, sometimes short, other times long," said Jerome Orosz, associate professor of astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the paper. "The intervals were the telltale sign these planets are in circumbinary orbits."

Cool Video: Robot Swagger

Given the fact this DARPA robot has a real swagger I thought it would be rude not to give him a soundtrack. I do not own the video or music but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.

Great Slow Motion Video: BAT SENSE - by Nature Video (How do bats find water?)

This stunning slow motion footage shows how bats use echolocation to find water. We know how bats echolocate to hunt insects, but this is the first study to show how they recognise large, flat objects like ponds. Moreover, by testing young bats that had never encountered a pond or river before, the researchers showed that bats seem to have a built-in ability to recognize these important features of their environment. Read the original research paper here: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v1/n8/full/ncomms1110.html

230 million year bug found in piece of Amber

Credit: University of Göttingen/A. Schmidt

Scientists find 230 million year bugs encased in amber.

(Phys.org)—An international team of scientists has discovered the oldest record of arthropods—invertebrate animals that include insects, arachnids, and crustaceans—preserved in amber. The specimens, one fly and two mites found in millimeter-scale droplets of amber from northeastern Italy, are about 100 million years older than any other amber arthropod ever collected. The group's findings, which are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pave the way for a better evolutionary understanding of the most diverse group of organisms in the world.

"Amber is an extremely valuable tool for paleontologists because it preserves specimens with microscopic fidelity, allowing uniquely accurate estimates of the amount of evolutionary change over millions of years," said corresponding author David Grimaldi, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Invertebrate Zoology and a world authority on amber and fossil arthropods. Globules of fossilized resin are typically called amber. Amber ranges in age from the Carboniferous (about 340 million years ago) to about 40,000 years ago, and has been produced by myriad plants, from tree ferns to flowering trees, but predominantly by conifers. Even though arthropods are more than 400 million years old, until now, the oldest record of the animals in amber dates to about 130 million years. The newly discovered arthropods break that mold with an age of 230 million years. They are the first arthropods to be found in amber from the Triassic Period.

Video: Remembering the legendary Neil Armstrong

A former astronaut remembers Neil Armstrong.

Is it possible to learn while asleep?

Is it possible to learn while asleep? The answer is a qualified yes...

Is sleep learning possible? A new Weizmann Institute study appearing today in Nature Neuroscience has found that if certain odors are presented after tones during sleep, people will start sniffing when they hear the tones alone – even when no odor is present – both during sleep and, later, when awake. In other words, people can learn new information while they sleep, and this can unconsciously modify their waking behavior.

Sleep-learning experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. For one thing, one must be sure that the subjects are actually asleep and stay that way during the "lessons." The most rigorous trials of verbal sleep learning have failed to show any new knowledge taking root. While more and more research has demonstrated the importance of sleep for learning and memory consolidation, none had managed to show actual learning of new information taking place in an adult brain during sleep. Prof. Noam Sobel and research student Anat Arzi, together with Sobel's group in the Institute's Neurobiology Department in collaboration with researchers from Loewenstein Hospital and the Academic College of Tel Aviv – Jaffa, chose to experiment with a type of conditioning that involves exposing subjects to a tone followed by an odor, so that they soon exhibit a similar response to the tone as they would to the odor. The pairing of tones and odors presented several advantages. Neither wakes the sleeper (in fact, certain odors can promote sound sleep), yet the brain processes them and even reacts during slumber. Moreover, the sense of smell holds a unique non-verbal measure that can be observed – namely sniffing. The researchers found that, in the case of smelling, the sleeping brain acts much as it does when awake: We inhale deeply when we smell a pleasant aroma but stop our inhalation short when assaulted by a bad smell. This variation in sniffing could be recorded whether the subjects were asleep or awake. Finally, this type of conditioning, while it may appear to be quite simple, is associated with some higher brain areas – including the hippocampus, which is involved in memory formation.

Video: Bigfoot in Ohio clear video of the creature 2012

 Bigfoot is carrying a stick?

The first man to walk on the moon, former Astronaut Neil Armstrong, died today at the age of 82

“That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”



Reuters reported:

Former U.S. astronaut, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, has died at the age of 82, U.S. media reported on Saturday.

Armstrong underwent a heart-bypass surgery earlier this month, just two days after his birthday on August 5, to relieve blocked coronary arteries.

As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the moon’s dusty surface, Armstrong said: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Video: 4 UFOs Caught By Mars Curiosity?

4 UFOs Caught By Mars Curiosity? As always you decide.

Sunbathing may be healthy...for bugs

Most experts don't recommend sunbathing for humans, but it may be good for bugs...

Via PHYSORG:

Sunbathing may be healthy – at least for one group of North American insects that apparently uses the activity to fight off germs, Simon Fraser University scientists have found.

Western Boxelder bugs (WBB), found largely in B.C. interior regions, are known to group together in sunlit patches and while there, release monoterpenes, strong-smelling chemical compounds that help protect the bugs by killing germs on their bodies.

Researchers previously thought the compounds had a role in reproduction or defending the bugs against predators. But their latest study found that the compounds were emitted when the bugs were in sunshine – in effect, sunbathing – and weren't used for communication or other purposes.

According to the researchers, sunlight appears to activate the biosynthesis of the compounds in the bugs, described as highly gregarious creatures. The chemicals then physically encase fungal spores on the bugs' body surface and set off a chain of events that ultimately protect them from germ penetration.

Their findings are published in the August issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis it Applicata. Keep on reading...

Scary Video: AIDS-like illness strikes Asia, US

Mystery disease damaging immune systems does not appear to be contagious.

Where does self-awareness lie in the brain?

Scientists though they had self-awareness narrowed down to three areas of the brain. Now they are not so sure...

ScienceDaily — Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to "know thyself" as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self.

Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex.

However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this theory by showing that self-awareness is more a product of a diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain -- including other regions -- rather than confined to specific areas.

Meet "Patient R"

The conclusions came from a rare opportunity to study a person with extensive brain damage to the three regions believed critical for self-awareness. The person, a 57-year-old, college-educated man known as "Patient R," passed all standard tests of self-awareness. He also displayed repeated self-recognition, both when looking in the mirror and when identifying himself in unaltered photographs taken during all periods of his life.

"What this research clearly shows is that self-awareness corresponds to a brain process that cannot be localized to a single region of the brain," says David Rudrauf, co-corresponding author of the paper, published online Aug. 22 in the journal PLoS ONE. "In all likelihood, self-awareness emerges from much more distributed interactions among networks of brain regions." Keep on reading...

From iRobot and DARPA: The inflatable robot arm... (video)

AIRarm Inflatable Robotic Arm

Video: HDR Photography with Trey Ratcliff

Tech Take: Photographer Trey Ratcliff's tips on doing High Dynamic Range photography

New paper claims Humans and Neanderthals mated 47,000 to 65,000 years ago

New paper claims Humans and Neanderthals mated 47,000 to 65,000 years; about the time Humans migrated from Africa. ago

Two years ago the analysis of the Neanderthal genome revealed modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA, implying our ancestors mated with Neanderthals at some point in the past. Scientists only found genetic traces of Neanderthals in non-African people, leading to the conclusion that Neanderthal-human matings must have occurred as modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world. A new paper (PDF) posted on arXiv.org puts a date on those matings: 47,000 to 65,000 years ago—a time that does indeed correspond with human migrations out of Africa.

Sriram Sankararaman of Harvard Medical School and colleagues—including Svante Pääbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard’s David Reich—investigated the timing of the matings in part to verify that the trysts even happened at all. That’s because there’s an alternative explanation for why up to 4 percent of non-African human DNA looks like Neanderthal DNA. It’s possible, the researchers explain, that the ancestral species that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals had a genetically subdivided population—in other words, genetic variation wasn’t evenly distributed across the species.  ... Keep on reading...

New insulating material so light it is called "liquid smoke"

Credit: NASA

New aerogel materials are going to have a revolutionary impact.

ScienceDaily — A major improvement in the world's lightest solid material and best solid insulating material, described in Philadelphia August 19, may put more of this space-age wonder into insulated clothing, refrigerators with thinner walls that hold more food, building insulation and other products.

The report, on development of a new flexible "aerogel" ― stuff so light it has been called "solid smoke" ― was part of the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Mary Ann B. Meador, Ph.D., explained that traditional aerogels, developed decades ago and made from silica, found in beach sand, are brittle, and break and crumble easily. Scientists have improved the strength of aerogels over the years, and Meador described one of these muscled-up materials developed with colleagues at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

"The new aerogels are up to 500 times stronger than their silica counterparts," Meador said. "A thick piece actually can support the weight of a car. And they can be produced in a thin form, a film so flexible that a wide variety of commercial and industrial uses are possible."

Video: Rover 'Curiosity' begins exploration of Mars

Rover 'Curiosity' begins exploration of Mars

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity zaps it's first rock

  NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity zaps it's first rock.

(Phys.org) -- Today, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars, using the beam from a science instrument to interrogate a fist-size rock called "Coronation."

The mission's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, hit the fist-sized rock with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second.

The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the target.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation -- lots of signal," said ChemCam Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

Amazing Video: Most intelligent Mimic Octopus in the world (with sub)

Most intelligent Mimic Octopus in the world (with sub)



Palua Travel and Dive Photolog:

The octopus grows to about 2 feet in length and primarily lives in the seas of Southeast Asia. It impersonates at least 15 different species (including sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish, brittle stars, giant crabs, sea shells, stingrays, jellyfish, sea anemones, and mantis shrimp) as means of evading or becoming a seeming predator of its own predators.

There are now instructions for how to mine and asteroid

Google's Larry Page, filmmaker James Cameron, and X-Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis want to mine asteroids. Popular Mechanics writes step-by-step instructions.

STEP 1 - GET PROSPECTING

To mine an asteroid, a company like Planetary Resources first has to find one that promises a good return on investment. But asteroids don't glitter like stars. They are small, dark, and easily obscured by the distorting effect of Earth's atmosphere. The best way to hunt for them is with a telescope floating in space. At the Bellevue, Wash., headquarters of Planetary Resources, chief engineer and company president Chris Lewicki is assembling the components of the first privately owned space telescope, the Arkyd 100 series.

The 44-pound spacecraft will be smaller and simpler than any government-funded space telescope. The $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope has a 94-inch-diameter primary mirror; Arkyd's mirrors will be 9 inches wide. Hubble has a wide field of view, as well as other instruments to scan objects in distant space. Arkyd needs only to look in our own solar system for targets. Being small saves money: Rockets carrying larger sats could also haul these telescopes as secondary payloads, decreasing launch costs.

Read more: How to Mine an Asteroid - Popular Mechanics

Lab creates battery that can last 20 years

Finally, a 20 year battery.

(Phys.org) -- Florida-based City Labs says it has created an adult’s thumb-sized, battery, NanoTritium, that can last 20 years or more in the most extreme conditions, such as extreme temperature and vibrations.

City Labs requested defense contractor Lockheed Martin to test their batteries, which were confirmed to operate as specified and to be resistant to extreme temperatures (-50°C to +150°C), and extreme vibration and altitude. The power cell generates electricity using a layer of the radioactive-element tritium, mounted onto a semiconductor. The City Labs’ battery produces nanowatts of power; it is not strong enough to power a cell phone or laptop. This is a low-power battery that can run micro-electronics, anywhere that is hard, dangerous or expensive to reach.

Applications include implants such as pacemakers as well as devices in industry (sensors on deep-water oil drills) and defense. This is further described as a commercially-viable “betavoltaic” power source, meaning it’s powered by a radioactive element. Whereas normal batteries are powered by chemical processes, the NanoTritium is powered by physical processes of the benign radioisotope, tritium. The makers point out that tritium is already used in exit signs and divers’ watches. Read more here...

Video: Apps help down syndrome boy communicate

Apps help down syndrome boy communicate

US emissions of carbon dioxide fall to a 20-year low this year

US emissions of carbon dioxide fall to a 20-year low this year. It's the economy?

Via PHYSORG:

US emissions of carbon dioxide blamed for climate change fell in 2011 and have slipped to a 20-year low this year as the the world's largest economy uses more natural gas and less coal, data shows.

The surprise drop from the world's second biggest emitter comes despite the lack of legislation on climate change but it was unclear if the change marked a trend or would be enough to meet goals on fighting global warming.

Official data showed that energy-related US carbon emissions fell by 2.4 percent in 2011 from the previous year.

The decline did not fully track the broader economy as the United States posted growth in 2011, whereas the last time emissions declined was in 2009 during a contraction in the economy.

In the first three months of 2012, US carbon emissions from energy use were down by almost eight percent from the same period last year, marking the lowest level for the quarter since 1992, the Energy Information Administration said.

Cool Video: How to Synchronize Metronomes;)

How to Synchronize Metronomes;)

Heartache: Pan-Fried Meat Increases Risk of Prostate Cancer

Can pan fried chicken increase risk of prostrate cancer?

ScienceDaily — Research from the University of Southern California (USC) and Cancer Prevention Institute of California (CPIC) found that cooking red meats at high temperatures, especially pan-fried red meats, may increase the risk of advanced prostate cancer by as much as 40 percent.

Mariana Stern, associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, led analyses for the study, "Red meat and poultry, cooking practices, genetic susceptibility and risk of prostate cancer: Results from the California Collaborative Prostate Cancer Study." The study, which is available online in the journal Carcinogenesis, provides important new evidence on how red meat and its cooking practices may increase the risk for prostate cancer.

Previous studies have emphasized an association between diets high in red meat and risk of prostate cancer, but evidence is limited. Attention to cooking methods of red meat, however, shows the risk of prostate cancer may be a result of potent chemical carcinogens formed when meats are cooked at high temperatures.

Fail: U.S. Air Force says unmanned jet lost over Pacific Ocean

Hypersonic aircraft's test flight fails

Global oceans get a grade

Global oceans get a passing score.

Via PHYSORG:

Using a new comprehensive index designed to assess the benefits to people of healthy oceans, scientists have evaluated the ecological, social, economic, and political conditions for every coastal country in the world. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature, show that the global ocean scores 60 out of 100 overall on the Ocean Health Index. Individual country scores range widely, from 36 to 86. The highest-scoring locations included densely populated, highly developed nations such as Germany, as well as uninhabited islands, such as Jarvis Island in the Pacific.

Determining whether a score of 60 is better or worse than one would expect is less about analysis and more about perspective. "Is the score far from perfect with ample room for improvement, or more than half way to perfect with plenty of reason to applaud success? I think it's both," said lead author Ben Halpern, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara. "What the Index does is help us separate our gut feelings about good and bad from the measurement of what's happening."

The Ocean Health Index is the first broad, quantitative assessment of the critical relationships between the ocean and people, framed in terms of the many benefits we derive from the ocean. Instead of simply assuming any human presence is negative, it asks what our impacts mean for the things we care about.

"Several years ago I led a project that mapped the cumulative impact of human activities on the world's ocean, which was essentially an ocean pristine-ness index," said Halpern, who is a researcher at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), as well as UCSB's Marine Science Institute. He also directs UCSB's Center for Marine Assessment and Planning. "That was and is a useful perspective to have, but it's not enough. We tend to forget that people are part of all ecosystems –– from the most remote deserts to the depths of the ocean. The Ocean Health Index is unique because it embraces people as part of the ocean ecosystem. So we're not just the problem, but a major part of the solution, too."

Robots suffer from sexism...

 

New German study says even androids are not immune

Did modern humans and Neanderthals really interbred?

Image credits: macroevolution.narod.ru

Don't be so sure that modern humans and Neanderthals at some point interbred.

ScienceDaily — New research raises questions about the theory that modern humans and Neanderthals at some point interbred, known as hybridisation. The findings of a study by researchers at the University of Cambridge suggest that common ancestry, not hybridisation, better explains the average 1-4 per cent DNA that those of European and Asian descent (Eurasians) share with Neanderthals.

The study was published Aug. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the last two years, a number of studies have suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals had at some point interbred. Genetic evidence shows that on average Eurasians and Neanderthals share between 1-4 per cent of their DNA. In contrast, Africans have almost none of the Neanderthal genome. The previous studies concluded that these differences could be explained by hybridisation which occurred as modern humans exited Africa and bred with the Neanderthals who already inhabited Europe.

However, a new study funded by the BBSRC and the Leverhulme Trust has provided an alternative explanation for the genetic similarities. The scientists found that common ancestry, without any hybridisation, explains the genetic similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans. In other words, the DNA that Neanderthal and modern humans share can all be attributed to their common origin, without any recent influx of Neanderthal DNA into modern humans.

Video: Incredible X-Ray Photography by Nick Veasey

Incredible X-Ray Photography by Nick Veasey

A Flight Through the Universe, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

A Flight Through the Universe, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Monster python found in Everglades...

University of Florida photo by Kristen Grace/Florida Museum of Natural History

Monster python found in Everglades...

Via PHYSORG:

University of Florida researchers curating a 17-foot-7-inch Burmese python, the largest found in Florida, discovered 87 eggs in the snake, also a state record.

Scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus examined the internal anatomy of the 164.5-pound snake Friday. The animal was brought to the Florida Museum from Everglades National Park as part of a long-term project with the U.S. Department of the Interior to research methods for managing the state's invasive Burmese python problem. Following scientific investigation, the snake will be mounted for exhibition at the museum for about five years, and then returned for exhibition at Everglades National Park.

"This thing is monstrous, it's about a foot wide," said Florida Museum herpetology collection manager Kenneth Krysko. "It means these snakes are surviving a long time in the wild, there's nothing stopping them and the native wildlife are in trouble."

Krysko said the snake was in excellent health and its stomach contained feathers that will be identified by museum ornithologists. Burmese pythons are known to prey on native birds, deer, bobcats, alligators and other large animals.

New NASA lander crashes and burns

 Photo: NASA

NASA may have successfully landed a rover on Mars, but the new test model planetary lander Morpheus crashed and burned here on Earth. Morpheus is the so called "green" lander.

Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars 350 million miles (563 million kilometers) away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in the state of Florida just seconds after liftoff.

The spider-like $7 million spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames.

NASA spokeswoman Lisa Malone said it appears that the methane-and-liquid oxygen powered lander is a total loss. Nobody was hurt in the unmanned experiment and the flames were put out, she said.

In a statement, NASA said it was probably more a mechanical failure than some type of control issue.

Morpheus is a prototype for a cheap, environmentally friendly planetary lander. Thursday was the first time it had been tested untethered in a free flight. It had performed about 20 flights at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it was designed and made, but it was always tethered to a crane, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries said.

Nighttime flying saucer over Spain (clear video)

Chinese lanterns?

Nighttime flying saucer over Spain (clear video)

Nocturnal UFO Sighting. Flying Saucer over Spain. August 7th, 2012.

Filmed over Cala de Finestrat, Spain. August 7th, 2012.

Will the next super spy be a robotic worm? (video)

Via YouTube:

Researchers built a soft-bodied robot worm that wriggles using artificial muscles and can withstand being beaten with a hammer.

Mars rover Curiosity snapped picture of aftermath of its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing

  Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars rover Curiosity snapped picture of aftermath of its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing.

Via PHYSORG:

Space enthusiasts have been abuzz for days over whether the Mars rover Curiosity captured an extraterrestrial crash. On Friday, NASA declared the mystery solved.

Seconds after the car-size rover parked its six wheels in an ancient crater, a tiny camera under the chassis snapped a picture revealing a smudge on the horizon. The feature disappeared in a later photo.

Was it dirt on the camera lens or a spinning dust devil? It turned out Curiosity spotted the aftermath of its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance.

It "was an amazing coincidence that we were able to catch this impact," said engineer Steve Sell of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5 billion mission.

The nuclear-powered rover landed in Gale Crater near the equator Sunday night to study whether environmental conditions could have favored microbes. Its ultimate target is a mountain looming from the crater floor where mineral signatures of water have been spied.

Amazing video captures magical-looking sun storm

Quasicrystals came from outer space...

Quasicrystals came grom outer space...

ScienceDaily — Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space.

Writing in IOP Publishing's journal Reports on Progress in Physics, Paul J Steinhardt and Luca Bindi reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have been found in an environment that does not have the extreme terrestrial conditions needed to produce them, therefore strengthening the case that they were brought to Earth by a meteorite. Furthermore, their findings reveal that the samples of quasicrystals were brought to the area during the last glacial period, suggesting the meteorite was most likely to have hit Earth around 15 000 years ago.

"The fact that the expedition found more material in the same location that we had spent years to track down is a tremendous confirmation of the whole story, which is significant since the meteorite is of great interest because of its extraordinary age and contents," said Steinhardt.

Video: "Hiriko" fold-up urban vehicle

Video: Mars bears striking resemblance to Earth in new pics

Evidence that planet(Mars) can support life?

Google's fleet of self-driving cars passes 300k miles

Someday, we will all have self-driving cars...

(Phys.org) -- Google has just released an update on its blog boasting about how its fleet of self-driving cars which the company has designed and is operating on public roads, have collectively racked up over 300,000 miles of driving operations, with nary a single accident, at least while being driven by the computer. In the same announcement the company acknowledges that its autonomous vehicles still have a long way to go before being sold as a consumer product.

Google is not saying just how many of those miles have been driven on public roads versus those driven on its private track, but it’s likely a lot due to its fleet having legal access in Nevada. Last year the state issued a license to one of the vehicles.

Google’s aim in building self-driving cars is to replace human drivers with a computer, because humans have proven to be so fallible. Company head Eric Schmidt has been quoted recently as saying that his goal in creating self driving cars is to bring down the number of traffic fatalities due to human error, most particularly, by those who have been drinking alcohol based beverages, noting that some thirty five thousand people are killed in such accidents each year in the United States alone.

Is Human immortality possible by 2045?

Russian scientists ask world's billionaires to fund research involving avatars (video)

First color image from Curiosity rover

It looks dusty on Mars.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Image of the Day: First View of Mars from Curiosity

one of the first views from NASA's Curiosity rover on August 5, 2012.

Video: Buckyballs motor

 My Buckyballs motor

Live Video Stream o NASA's Mars Rover 'Curiosity' landing

 Live Video Stream o NASA's  Mars Rover 'Curiosity' landing


Streaming video by Ustream

Antarctica once had palm trees

52 million years ago Antarctica had palm trees.

Via PHYSORG:

An international research team has discovered an intense warming phase around 52 million years ago in drill cores obtained from the seafloor near Antarctica.

Given the predicted rise in global temperatures in the coming decades, climate scientists are particularly interested in warm periods that occurred in the geological past. Knowledge of past episodes of global warmth can be used to better understand the relationship between climate change, variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the reaction of Earth's biosphere.

An international team led by scientists from the Goethe University and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, Germany, has discovered an intense warming phase around 52 million years ago in drill cores obtained from the seafloor near Antarctica — a region that is especially important in climate research. The study published in the journal Nature shows that tropical vegetation, including palms and relatives of today's tropical Baobab trees, was growing on the coast of Antarctica 52 million years ago. These results highlight the extreme contrast between modern and past climatic conditions on Antarctica and the extent of global warmth during periods of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Video: Will black hole telescope reveal clues to the universe?

Berkeley scientists finish calibrations on new space scope.

Is the belief nothing can escape a black hole wrong?

If you thought nothing could escape a black hole, you might be wrong.

(Phys.org) -- The journal Science is running a series of Reviews and Perspectives on the current state of knowledge and theories regarding black holes, written by leaders in the field. Some discuss what is believed to happen if two black holes collide, others describe what happens as binary stars are sucked up by black holes and whether intermediate size black holes really exist as new evidence is indicating. Yet another by doctoral fellow Rubens Reis, discusses a lucky break that allowed scientists to listen to the “cry” of the last bits of some matter just before being consumed by another black hole. But generating the most interest perhaps, is an article by Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a theoretical physicist, who argues that one of the most basic beliefs about black holes, namely, that nothing can ever escape it’s gravitational pull, is wrong, but only sort of.

It was Einstein’s theory of relativity that got everyone believing that because the gravity of a black hole is so great, it’s not possible for anything to escape once it passes the event horizon, or point of no return. Witten says that while the theory is right, of course, it’s only right in a certain respect, because it violates the laws of thermodynamics, which say that if a reaction is possible then there is always supposed to be an opposite reaction. Applied to black holes, it suggests that if something can be consumed, then it ought to be able to be un-consumed as well. This whole idea is backed up by something Stephen Hawking came up with back in 1974, where he suggested that certain quantum particles should be able to escape a black hole, but that they would be too small for anyone to detect. He called the process Hawking radiation, and sure enough, no one has ever been able to detect them.

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Video: X-RHex robot uses a tail to always land on its springy feet

Tail Assisted Dynamic Self Righting

Unexpected: Alzheimer's molecule A-beta unexpectedly reverses paralysis in mice with multiple sclerosis

A-beta molecule offers hope of new treatment for multiple sclerosis.

ScienceDaily — A molecule widely assailed as the chief culprit in Alzheimer's disease unexpectedly reverses paralysis and inflammation in several distinct animal models of a different disorder -- multiple sclerosis, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have found.

This surprising discovery, which will be reported in a study to be published online Aug. 1 as the cover feature in Science Translational Medicine, comes on the heels of the recent failure of a large-scale clinical trial aimed at slowing the progression of Alzheimer's disease by attempting to clear the much-maligned molecule, known as A-beta, from Alzheimer's patients' bloodstreams. While the findings are not necessarily applicable to the study of A-beta's role in the pathology of that disease, they may point to promising new avenues of treatment for multiple sclerosis.

The short protein snippet, or peptide, called A-beta (or beta-amyloid) is quite possibly the single most despised substance in all of brain research. It comes mainly in two versions differing slightly in their length and biochemical properties. A-beta is the chief component of the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and serve as an identifying hallmark of the neurodegenerative disorder.

A-beta deposits also build up during the normal aging process and after brain injury. Concentrations of the peptide, along with those of the precursor protein from which it is carved, are found in multiple-sclerosis lesions as well, said Lawrence Steinman, MD, the new study's senior author. In a lab dish, A-beta is injurious to many types of cells. And when it is administered directly to the brain, A-beta is highly inflammatory.... Keep on reading...

Surprise: Coral reefs grow rapidly in sediment-laden marine environments

 Credit: University of Exeter

Coral reefs grow rapidly in sediment-laden marine environments.

Via PHYSORG:

Rapid rates of coral reef growth have been identified in sediment-laden marine environments, conditions previously believed to be detrimental to reef growth. A new study has established that Middle Reef – part of Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef – has grown more rapidly than many other reefs in areas with lower levels of sediment stress.

Led by the University of Exeter, the study by an international team of scientists is published today in the journal Geology. Middle Reef is located just 4 km off the mainland coast near Townsville, Australia, on the inner Great Barrier Reef shelf. Unlike the clear waters in which most reefs grow, Middle Reef grows in water that is persistently 'muddy'. The sediment comes from waves churning up the muddy sea floor and from seasonal river flood plumes. The Queensland coast has changed significantly since European settlement, with natural vegetation cleared for agricultural use increasing sediment runoff. High levels of sediment result in poor water quality, which is believed to have a detrimental effect on marine biodiversity.