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New Gigantic Tornado Spotted on Mars

Mars Tornado
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UAA Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) high was captured winding its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14, 2012 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its height, the plume is little more than three-quarters of a football field wide (70 yards, or 70 meters).
Last month, we were excited to share an image of a twister on Mars that lofted a twisting column of dust more than 800 meters (about a half a mile) high. We now know that's nothin' - just peanuts, chump change, hardly worth noticing.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now spotted a gigantic Martian dust devil roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, churning through the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) captured the event on March 14, 2012. Scientists say that despite its height, the plume is just 70 meters (70 yards) wide.

Yikes! After seeing trucks thrown about by the tornadoes in Dallas yesterday, it makes you wonder how the MER rovers and even the Curiosity rover would fare in an encounter with a 20-km high twister.

Robot

A Robot With a Human Skeleton

ECCEROBOT
© BBCECCEROBOT, The First Anthropomimetic 'Bot.

Over at BBC, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has examined what he's calling the world's first anthropomimetic robot--a robot that mimics in extremely high anatomical detail the movements and construction of the human body.

The robot, named ECCEROBOT, possesses artificial analogs of human bones, muscles, and tendons that endow it with human-like motions and--perhaps someday--will imbue it with human-like intelligence.

Captured for a BBC show titled "Horizon: The Hunt for AI" (it airs tonight at 9 p.m., for any of our across-the-pond readers who may be interested), ECCEROBOT--for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot--serves three purposes.

The first, of course, is to prove out the creation of a truly anthropomimetic robot. The second: figure out how to control it. But thirdly (and most interestingly), ECCEROBOT serves to explore how having a human-like physical form could influence human-like cognitive features.

Info

Secret Life of Plants: Scientists Discover Plants Can Talk

Talking plants
© Geffen Company Talking plants sounds like something from a science-fiction film, but WA researchers have discovered it's the real deal.

Plants that respond to sound and "click" to communicate with each other?

It's not science fiction, according to research released by the University of Western Australia.

"Everyone knows that plants react to light, and scientists also know that plants use volatile chemicals to communicate with each other: for instance, when danger - such as a herbivore - approaches," UWA researcher Monica Gagliano said.

"I was working one day in my herb garden and started to wonder if maybe plants were also sensitive to sounds - why not? - so I decided as a scientist to find out."

Dr Gagliano, along with professor Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol in the UK and professor Stefano Mancuso at the University of Florence in Italy, found that the roots of young plants emitted and reacted to particular sounds.

Bulb

The brain is wired in a 3D grid structure, landmark study finds

cerebral pathways
© Van J. Wedeen, et al./ScienceNeighborhood structure of cerebral pathways. A curved sheet of interwoven orthogonal pathways

The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's white-matter connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables - folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric," explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.

"This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species."

Question

Dramatic Rise In US Twin Birthrates: Study

Twins
© redOrbit

One in every 30 babies born in the United States in 2009 was a twin, a dramatic increase from the one-in-53 babies born a twin in 1980, a new study finds.

Researchers attribute the rise in twin birth rates, in part, to the growing number of women having children at older ages, and the expanding availability of fertility treatments.

"Prior to 1980, the incidence of U.S. twin births was stable at about 2 percent of all births, but it has risen dramatically in the past three decades," said Barbara Luke, a researcher at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine's Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology.

While the increase in twin birth rates held true for mothers of all ages, the largest increase was seen among women aged 30 and older.

"Older maternal age accounts for about one-third of the rise, and two-thirds is due to the increased use of fertility treatments," including both assisted reproductive technologies and ovulation stimulation medications.

Meteor

Telescopes Team Up to Form 5,000-Mile-Wide Mega-Scope

Image
© SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy ProductionsArtist's impression of the SKA dishes.
Radio telescopes in Australia and South Korea have linked up for the first time, forming a mega-instrument roughly 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) across.

The transcontinental scope should have roughly 100 times more resolving power than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, researchers said. It continues Australia's astronomy partnership with Asia; the country has also made similar linkups with Japan and China over the years.

"This is another step in Australia's ongoing collaboration with Asia in the field of radio astronomy," Philip Diamond, astronomy chief at Australia's national science agency, known as CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), said in a March 15 statement.

Five telescopes were involved in the new linkup. Three of them are Australian, two in the state of New South Wales and one near Hobart, in Tasmania. The two Korean scopes are in the capital, Seoul, and Ulsan, a city in the southeast of the country, researchers said. [The World's 10 Biggest Telescopes]

Comment: And there's this one: Global Network Of Telescopes Simulates 6,000-mile Wide Telescope


Sun

Rare Venus Transit of Sun Occurs in June

Mark your calendars! On June 5-6, a rare celestial event called a transit of Venus will take place, and it won't be repeated in your lifetime.

During the transit, Venus will pass directly in front of the sun from Earth's perspective, appearing as a small, slowly moving black dot. The last time this happened was in June 2004, but the next one won't take place until December 2117. This is the last chance for anyone alive today to see the rare celestial sight.
Image
© Imelda B. Joson and Edwin L. AguirreWatching the tiny silhouette of the planet Venus slowly cross the face of the sun doesn’t evoke the same drama and excitement as experiencing a total solar eclipse, but what makes a transit so unique is its rarity and historical significance.

Cell Phone

Gadget lets cops track cellphones

Image
© Unknown
Why would the well-heeled suburb of Gilbert, Ariz., spend a quarter of a million dollars on a futuristic spy gadget that sounds more at home in a prime-time drama than a local police department?

The ACLU caused a stir Monday with its extensive report of cellphone surveillance by local police departments, which routinely request location information and other data from cellphone providers, often under vague legal circumstances.

But one bit of information provided by Gilbert officials suggests that cops sometimes try to cut out the middle man. Buried in the 380 public records requests sent by the ACLU is a response from Gilbert which indicates that the town purchased a device that allows it to track cellphones on its own for $244,195.
"The Gilbert Police Department obtained a $150,000 grant from the State Homeland Security Program," the agency wrote to the ACLU in response to a public records request. "These funds, along with $94,195 of R.I.C.O monies, were used to purchase cell phone tracking equipment in June 2008 (total acquisition cost of $244, 195)."

Nuke

Nuclear Powered Drones Planned by US

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© unkA US Air Force Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
The US has reportedly drawn up plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered drones capable of carrying more missiles or surveillance equipment and flying over more remote regions of the world for months.

"It's pretty terrifying prospect," said Chris Coles of Drone Wars UK, which campaigns against the increasing use of drones for both military and civilian purposes.

"Drones are much less safe than other aircraft and tend to crash a lot. There is a major push by this industry to increase the use of drones and both the public and government are struggling to keep up with the implications," he added.

The blueprints for the new drones have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories - the US government's principal nuclear research and development agency - and defense contractor Northrop Grumman.

Info

A Reality Check for Personal Genomes

Genetic Predictions
© N.J. Roberts et al., Science Translational MedicinePredictions. In a modeling study, the portion of people with a disease who would have tested positive for a genetic risk varied by illness.

Chicago - B iomedical researchers talk about the day not too far off when DNA sequencing will be so cheap that everyone will have their genome sequenced and carry the results around on a flash drive. People will learn about their personal disease risks, helping their doctors and them prevent or treat these illnesses. But a new study throws cold water on the notion that whole-genome sequencing will be very useful for the average person.

Hopes for genomic medicine have grown in the past few years as researchers raced to track down DNA behind common diseases. These so-called genome-wide association studies have turned up hundreds of genetic markers linked to diseases such as cancer and diabetes. But the risks associated with such markers are usually quite low - often just a fraction higher than for people without the marker. Still, many scientists have hoped that once they found all the genetic markers for a disease, including rare ones that confer higher risk, the total risk carried by some individuals would be high enough - say, two times the normal risk - to merit taking preventive measures.

But the new study suggests that even if all the disease risk markers can be found, the genetic risk for most people will still be relatively low. This conclusion emerges from a study by cancer geneticists Victor Velcelescu, Bert Vogelstein, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. They began by gathering existing data sets on diseases in thousands of twins, mostly in Europe. They assumed that identical twins have the same genetic risk of developing a specific disease. After examining 24 actual diseases in the twins, the researchers constructed a model that assumes each individual carries a certain "genometype," or total genetic risk, for each disease. Then they looked at how these risks would vary across the population.