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Harvard creates brain-to-brain interface, allows humans to control other animals with thoughts alone

Sebastian Anthony
Extreme Tech
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 07:45 UTC
Human to Animals Interface
© Extreme Tech
Researchers at Harvard University have created the first noninvasive brain-to-brain interface (BBI) between a human... and a rat. Simply by thinking the appropriate thought, the BBI allows the human to control the rat's tail. This is one of the most important steps towards BBIs that allow for telepathic links between two or more humans - which is a good thing in the case of friends and family, but terrifying if you stop to think about the nefarious possibilities of a fascist dictatorship with mind control tech.

In recent years there have been huge advances in the field of brain-computer interfaces, where your thoughts are detected and "understood" by a sensor attached to a computer, but relatively little work has been done in the opposite direction (computer-brain interfaces). This is because it's one thing for a computer to work out what a human is thinking (by asking or observing their actions), but another thing entirely to inject new thoughts into a human brain. To put it bluntly, we have almost no idea of how thoughts are encoded by neurons in the brain. For now, the best we can do is create a computer-brain interface that stimulates a region of the brain that's known to create a certain reaction - such as the specific part of the motor cortex that's in charge of your fingers. We don't have the power to move your fingers in a specific way - that would require knowing the brain's encoding scheme - but we can make them jerk around.
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Info

Say hello to life-sized holograms

Nic Halverson
Discovery News
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 08:16 UTC
Holograms
© HoloVision
From Princess Leia's evocation and Star Trek's Holo-Deck, to Marty McFly ducking holographic sharks in Back To The Future II and the resurrection of Tupac Shakur, holograms are never far from the zeitgeist of pop culture.

However, Provision - a leader in the commercialization of 3-D holographic displays - wants to take the fiction out of science fiction and up the ante with HoloVision, a display touting life-sized holograms.

"Imagine a human-sized, floating hologram projected from a 3-D display," claims Provision. "The hologram requires no special glasses, no virtual reality goggles and literally hovers in air standing next to you!"
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Sherlock

Hacker Barnaby Jack's cause of death could remain unknown for months

Amanda Holpuch
The Guardian
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:42 UTC
Image
© Isaac Brekken/APBarnaby Jack demonstrates an attack on two automated teller machines during the 2010 Black Hat technology conference.
Celebrated hacker who infiltrated implanted medical devices and ATMs was found dead Thursday in San Francisco

The San Francisco medical examiner's office has said it could be several months before the cause of death for acclaimed hacker Barnaby Jack is released.

Jack, who was born in New Zealand, was famous for hacking implanted medical devices and ATMs. He was found dead in San Francisco on 25 July.

A San Francisco police department spokesperson told the Guardian Jack was found dead by "a loved one" in an apartment in the city's Nob Hill neighborhood and that no foul play was suspected.

Jack lived in San Francisco, where he worked as the director of embedded security research at security firm IOActive. The company said Jack was survived by his mother and sister in New Zealand and his girlfriend in California.

"This is an extremely sad time for us all at IOActive, and the many people in our industry that Barnaby touched in so many ways with both his work and vibrant personality," IOActive CEO Jennifer Steffens said in a statement. "But as a personal friend of Barnaby's for many years I know he'd want sadness to quickly turn to celebration of his life, work and the tremendous contributions he's made spanning well beyond his widely acclaimed professional accomplishments."
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Info

Evidence of serious disease may be found via saliva test

Rebekah Eliason
RedOrbit
Tue, 30 Jul 2013 16:59 UTC
Saliva Test
© Thinkstock
A recent study from Malmo University's Faculty of Odontology discovered serious illnesses, such as cancer, leave evidence of their existence in saliva. This new information could lead to future tests that allow for early detection of diseases by using a simple saliva sample.

Professor Bjorn Klinge, of the Department of Periodontology said, "An early diagnosis has significant implications for both patients and healthcare."

In previous studies it was discovered mouth and throat disease can be detected through salivary samples. One study also found a saliva sample detected the autoimmune disease Sjogren's Syndrome, which affects four million US adults.

Certain illnesses, such as growth of certain tumors, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, contain an inflammatory component. Klinge and his colleagues have shown diseases with the inflammatory element possibly leave traces of it in saliva.

Klinge explained, "We have successfully linked the secretion of substances in patient saliva to these illnesses." He also described how this important discovery could have a monumental effect on the future of medical examinations. "Instead of having to visit the doctor, patients will be able to swab the inside of their mouth with a cotton bud and send it away for analysis. If the test shows signs of illness, the patient will be called in to a doctor."
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Comet

Comet ISON: Is potential 'Comet of the Century' already fizzling out?

Mike Wall
SPACE.com
Tue, 30 Jul 2013 11:00 UTC
ISON_1
© NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURAThe Hubble Space Telescope captured this view of Comet ISON, C/2012 S1 (ISON), on May 8, 2013 as it streaked between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars at a speed of about 48,000 mph.
It doesn't look like Comet ISON will live up to the considerable hype, one researcher says.

ISON has been billed as a potential "comet of the century," with some experts saying it could blaze as brightly as the full moon around the time of its close solar approach in late November. But the comet's recent behavior suggests that such a dazzling show is not in the cards, says astronomer Ignacio Ferrín of the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia.

"Comet ISON has presented a peculiar behavior," Ferrín said in a statement Monday (July 29). "The light curve has exhibited a 'slowdown event' characterized by a constant brightness, with no indication of a brightness increase tendency. This slowdown took place around January 13th, 2013. For 132 days after that date and up to the last available observation, the brightness has remained constant."

Comment: Others have a different view - Rumors of Comet ISON 'fizzling' may be greatly exaggerated

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Info

Einstein's cosmic speed limit still reigns, for now

Clara Moskowitz
LiveSciene
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 15:41 UTC
Speed of Light
© Iscatel/ShutterstockEinstein's theory of special relativity sets of the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second). But some scientists are exploring the possibility that this cosmic speed limit changes.
The speed of light is considered to be the ultimate cosmic speed limit, thanks to Einstein's special theory of relativity. But physicists aren't content to assume this limit without testing it.

That's where a new experiment with electrons comes in. Physicists measured the energy required to change the speed of electrons as they hopped from one orbital to another inside atoms of dysprosium, all while Earth rotated over a 12-hour period. This allowed the scientists to measure that the maximum speed of an electron, which, according to special relativity should be the speed of light, is the same in all directions to within 17 nanometers per second. This measurement was 10 times more precise than previous tests of electrons' maximum speed.

So far, Einstein still comes out on top, and the theory holds. But the researchers hope to follow up the experiment with a more precise trial that might prove capable of poking holes in special relativity. That could actually be a good thing, scientists say, at least in terms of the advancement of physics.

"As a physicist, I want to know how the world works, and right now our best models of how the world works - the Standard Model of particle physics and Einstein's theory of general relativity - don't fit together at high energies," physicist Michael Hohensee of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "By finding points of breakage in the models, we can start to improve these theories."
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Question

Is gravity weirder than we think?

Bob Berman
HudsonValleyAlmanacWeekly
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 18:41 UTC
MOND Theory
© BBC "Low surface brightness" galaxies like F549-1 lend greater precision to the Mond theory's predictions.
We've long known that our Milky Way galaxy will collide with its neighbor Andromeda in about four billion years. But some European astronomers think this is a case of deja vu - that we have collided once before, long ago. This would explain puzzling structures in both our galaxies, and the odd existence of our tiny satellite galaxies like the Magellanic clouds.

But it would mean that dark matter does not exist. And our ideas about how gravity behaves on large scales, is wrong. It would change everything.

In 1930, the brilliant astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that the way groups of galaxies stay together despite their large individual speeds shows that they contain about six times more gravity than can be explained by all their stars, planets, black holes, and everything else.

The way our galaxy spins supports this, too. Some unseen entity that has gravity must dominate the scene everywhere, and we call this dark matter. This is what must be gravitationally pulling us toward Andromeda at 70 mps so that the two of us can overcome the universe's expansion.
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Igloo

Solar Cycle #24: On track to be the weakest in 100 years

David Dickinson
Universe Today
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 17:23 UTC
Sunspots
© Hathaway/NASA/MSFCProjected vs observed sunspot numbers for solar cycles #23 & #24.
Our nearest star has exhibited some schizophrenic behavior thus far for 2013.

By all rights, we should be in the throes of a solar maximum, an 11-year peak where the Sun is at its most active and dappled with sunspots.

Thus far though, Solar Cycle #24 has been off to a sputtering start, and researchers that attended the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division earlier this month are divided as to why."Not only is this the smallest cycle we've seen in the space age, it's the smallest cycle in 100 years," NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center research scientist David Hathaway said during a recent press teleconference conducted by the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Cycle #23 gave way to a profound minimum that saw a spotless Sol on 260 out of 365 days (71%!) in 2009. Then, #Cycle 24 got off to a late start, about a full year overdue - we should have seen a solar maximum in 2012, and now that's on track for the late 2013 to early 2014 time frame. For solar observers, both amateur, professional and automated, its seems as if the Sun exhibits a "split-personality" this year, displaying its active Cycle #24-self one week, only to sink back into a blank despondency the next.
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Sun

Space telescope spots giant 'hole' in the Sun


Yahoo! News
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:14 UTC

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory space telescope spotted an enormous hole in the sun's burning atmosphere. Jen Markham explains the phenomena and why such holes really are surprisingly common.
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Saturn

Just one small dot on the landscape: the spectacular Earth taken from Saturn, 900 million miles away

Michael Zennie
Mail Online
Mon, 22 Jul 2013 13:23 UTC
earth from saturn
A tiny spot: Planet Earth can been seen as just a miniscule star from this enhanced shot of Saturn taken by the NASA spacecraft Cassini nearly 900million miles away
Earth appears as an insignificant-looking pale blue dot below Saturn's majestic rings in a breathtaking new image from the Cassini spacecraft.

The picture was captured on July 19 by the probe's wide-angle camera from a distance of 900 million miles.

Magnifying the image five times reveals not only the Earth but also the moon, a fainter smudge to the right of the planet.
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