Science & TechnologyS


Cell Phone

Nokia Envisions Magnetic Tattoo to Feel Smartphone Vibrations

Magnetic Tattoo
© NokiaFigures from a Nokia patent filing showing how a magnetic tattoo could transmit smartphone vibrations.

Today's best smartphones still can't alert human owners about an incoming call or text without either annoyingly loud rings or vibrations that can go unnoticed. That's why Nokia would let smartphone owners feel the vibrations on their skin through a magnetic tattoo.

The touch-based twist on cellphone alerts surfaced in a Nokia patent filing reported by UnwiredView.com. If the tattoo idea ever became reality, it could mean an end to the days when a silenced cellphone means missing calls and text messages during a movie or music concert.

Smartphone owners could specify their mobile devices to send out patterns of magnetic pulses as shorthand Morse code for different phone alerts, according to the Nokia patent filing. A series of short, strong pulses might let the owner know about messages from a certain friends, while a weaker series of long pulses might signal that the phone's battery is running low.

The skin tattoo's ink could contain permanent magnets ranging from iron to magnetite. It could even use rare earth elements - such as neodymium - used as powerful magnets for hybrid car motors and computer hard drives.

Better Earth

Earth's protective bubble hasn't burst

Image
© ESAArtist's impression of the solar wind shaping the magnetospheres of Venus and Earth.
For the first time, the loss of atmospheric ions from Earth and Mars has been observed during the same solar wind stream. In a new study, data from ESA's Cluster and Mars Express spacecraft, which orbit the Earth and Mars respectively, have been used to compare the outflow of oxygen ions when the planets were aligned. The study's findings reaffirm the importance of the Earth's magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from the solar wind, which had been questioned in recent years.

Venus, Earth and Mars formed from the same material, but they have evolved in different ways so that they now look more like distant relations than siblings. While the atmosphere on Venus is much denser than on Earth, hiding the planet's surface from view at visible wavelengths, Mars only has a tenuous atmosphere.

Their differences can be partly explained by their varying distances from the Sun, with Venus' closer proximity causing a runaway greenhouse effect. For many years, scientists had also assumed that the Earth's magnetic field plays a crucial role in protecting atmospheric particles from being swept away by the solar wind. Mars, on the other hand, is at the mercy of the solar wind because its dynamo stopped working about four billion years ago.

Satellite

Beam of Neutrinos Used to Send Messages

Neutrinos cannot replace our use of electromagnetic waves yet because of the need for expensive, high-tech equipment
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© University of Rochester

University of Rochester and North Carolina State University researchers have found a way to send messages using a beam of neutrinos, which could eventually eliminate the need for cables or satellites.

Dan Stancil, lead author of the study and professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, along with Kevin McFarland, a physics professor at the University of Rochester, and a team of researchers, have successfully sent a message through 240 meters of stone using a beam of neutrinos.

Using neutrinos to communicate wireless messages is not a new idea. Neutrinos are ideal for this task because they are capable of penetrating pretty much any obstacle in their way. They can do this because of their neutral charge and lack of mass, which allows them to not be affected by magnetic attractions or gravity. They can pass through entire planets without being affected while electromagnetic waves, which are used by cell phones, radios and televisions today, are blocked by many objects like water and mountains.

Meteor

Near-Earth Object Search Gets More Money

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© NASA / GSFC
The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) has just been awarded an additional $4.1 million, in funds from the American space agency. The money will be used to improve the effort's ability to discover near-Earth objects that could pose a risk to our planet.

Based at the University of Arizona in Tucson (UAT), the CSS is constantly scanning the night sky in search of indications that asteroids or meteorites are heading this way. Lately, astronomers have begun warning governments that they would do well to invest in planetary defense systems.

There is currently no way of deflecting an asteroid on final approach to Earth, so the best hope we have of surviving such a potential encounter is to act with plenty of time to spare. In turn, this implies discovering the potential threat well in advance.

By awarding these new funds, NASA has taken a much-needed step in this direction. With this monetary influx, the CSS will be upgraded and capable of conducting surveys until 2015.

Last year alone, astronomers working with this survey were able to discover 586 asteroids, which is the equivalent of nearly two thirds of all near-Earth objects discovered last year around the world.

The CCS was even able to track an asteroid as it was heading towards Earth. It kept tabs on the space rock until it entered Earth's atmosphere, and then crashed somewhere in the northern parts of Sudan.

Bomb

Bt Toxin Kills Human Kidney Cells

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A new study shows that low doses of Bt biopesticide CryA1b as well as the glyphosate herbicide, Roundup, kill human kidney cells. The Bt biopesticide conferring insect resistance and the glyphosate tolerance trait tied to the use of glyphosate herbicides account for almost all the GM crops grown worldwide. Bt crops already constitute 39 % of globally cultivated genetically modified (GM) crops, yet this is the first study that provides evidence on the toxicity of Bt protein in human cells.

This work comes at a time when the French environment and agricultural ministers are seeking an EU-wide ban of Monsanto's MON810 Bt corn variety that is already outlawed in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Greece, and Luxembourg. The EU commission approved this crop in 2009, concluding that it "is as safe as its conventional counterpart with respect to potential effects on human and animal health". In response to their publication the research team raised questions about the safety assessment procedure stating that their findings were a "surprising outcome and this risk was somehow overlooked" in past assessments of such crops[1].

Info

Sweet Victory: When The Science Says The Farm Beats Pharma

Natural versus Processed
© GreenMedInfo

Some of the most powerful medicines provided to us are actually in our kitchen cupboard, "pretending" to be condiments, spices or foods. Some we are too familiar with to readily recognize them for their astounding health benefits, even though we may be consuming them daily.

Honey, for instance, has too many traditional medical uses to name, with at least 60 confirmed and documented in the Western, "science-based" medical model, as well.

Did you know, for instance, that certain honeys have the ability to destroy the much-feared MRSA "super-germs" you may have been hearing about of late? Manuka honey, which comes from bees gathering the nectar from Manuka flowers in New Zealand, has been documented to suppress this form of Staphyloccous auerus, which is known to be resistant to the antibiotic methicillin (MRSA). Here are a few studies on the topic:
  • Healing of an MRSA-colonized, hydroxyurea-induced leg ulcer with honey. J Dermatolog Treat. 2001 Mar;12(1):33-6. PMID: 12171686 View Study
  • Bacteriological changes in sloughy venous leg ulcers treated with manuka honey or hydrogel: an RCT. J Wound Care. 2008 Jun;17(6):241-4, 246-7. PMID: 18666717 View Study
  • Manuka honey inhibits cell division in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. J Antimicrob Chemother. 2011 Nov ;66(11):2536-42. Epub 2011 Sep 7. PMID: 21903658 View Study

Question

Mysterious Objects at the Edge of the Electromagnetic Spectrum

The human eye is crucial to astronomy. Without the ability to see, the luminous universe of stars, planets and galaxies would be closed to us, unknown forever. Nevertheless, astronomers cannot shake their fascination with the invisible.

Outside the realm of human vision is an entire electromagnetic spectrum of wonders. Each type of light--­from radio waves to gamma-rays--reveals something unique about the universe. Some wavelengths are best for studying black holes; others reveal newborn stars and planets; while others illuminate the earliest years of cosmic history.

NASA has many telescopes "working the wavelengths" up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. One of them, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope orbiting Earth, has just crossed a new electromagnetic frontier.


"Fermi is picking up crazy-energetic photons," says Dave Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "And it's detecting so many of them we've been able to produce the first all-sky map of the very high energy universe."

"This is what the sky looks like near the very edge of the electromagnetic spectrum, between 10 billion and 100 billion electron volts."

Cloud Lightning

Lasers Can Be Used to Steer Lightning In Mid-Strike

Lightning
© Owen Zammit via Flickr
Laser light can not only trigger lightning but redirect it, causing it to strike in the same place over and over, according to new research. This means lasers could serve as lightning rods. Because that would be awesome.

Laser lightning rods have been a research subject for several decades, because they could trigger lightning and guide it to a specific place. Firing a laser would create an ionized channel in the atmosphere, which could conduct the lightning to the ground. Laser lightning rods could be an alternative to lightning rockets, according to Aurlien Houard of the Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée in Palaiseau, France, a co-author of this study. Lightning rockets can apparently trigger a lightning strike by bringing a conductive material, like some type of salts, toward the static layer of a thunderhead. But a laser would be easier to control than a rocket.

Magnify

Google Gives Search a Refresh

Amit Singhal
© Associated PressGoogle's Amit Singhal, shown in 2009, sees better matches for queries.
Google Inc. is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today's technology and maintain its dominant market share.

Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

The changes to search are among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.

Info

Did Life on Earth Come From Mars?

Mars
© NASAMars would have been a better host for life to arise than Earth.

Given the same raw materials, Mars would have been a better host for life to arise than Earth, which some scientists believe was too flooded for the chemistry of life to gain a toehold.

Without at least occasional dry land, the chemistry needed to get life started doesn't work very well because the molecules to support genetics, such as RNA, are chemically unstable in many ways, particularly in water.

That raises a problem, because life, at least as we know it today, seems to require water.

"How is it possible that the chemicals that we now have supporting modern life, which is so unstable in water, could have arisen in water?" biochemist Steven Benner, head of the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainsville, Fla., told Discovery News.

The answer could be that life evolved in places that occasionally dried out.

"You can get RNA and its building blocks to be stable in an Earth-like environment, provided you put them into some environment that is deficient in water," Benner said, pointing to a place like Death Valley, where there is intermittent rainfall to provide organic compounds from the atmosphere as well as cycles of dryness.

"If you get building blocks for RNA, you get genetics and you're off to the races. You've got life," Benner said.

But there's a catch.