Science & TechnologyS

Bad Guys

Pentagon wants a 'neural interface' that brings mind-controlled tech to troops

pentagono
The Defense Department's research arm is working on a project that connects human operators' brains to the systems they're controlling-and vice versa.

The idea of humans controlling machines with their minds has spun off sci-fi blockbusters like "Pacific Rim" and entire subgenres of foreign film, but while today skyscraper-sized fighting robots exist only on the big screen, the Pentagon is building technology that could one day make them a reality.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is selecting teams to develop a "neural interface" that would both allow troops to connect to military systems using their brainwaves and let those systems transmit back information directly to users' brains.

Comment: Further reading:


Telescope

Earth-based telescope takes image of Neptune sharper than Hubble

neptune high def
© ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)
An incredible super-sharp image of planet Neptune has shown just how far earthbound telescope technology has come, producing an image quality that rivals that of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The crisp, clear photo was made possible because of a new system of lasers installed in the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile.

The MUSE/GALACSI adaptive optics system allows the telescope to correct the effects of atmospheric turbulence and create sharper spatial images.

The newly released photo of Neptune demonstrates the telescope's greater capabilities, showing that it is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those taken by Hubble, a telescope that orbits the earth.

Comment:


Blue Planet

New magnetic anomaly map helps reveal Antarctic continent

magnetic field map antarctica
© Golynsky et al/American Geophysical UnionNew magnetic anomaly map of the Antarctic continent and surrounding oceans.
The most comprehensive magnetic map of Antarctica ever produced was published online this week in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The new map - which includes 3.5 million line-kilometers of magnetic anomaly data collected over the past 50 years - sheds new light on the structure and evolution of the Antarctic continent and its surrounding oceans.

Antarctica's remoteness and harsh conditions make it a supremely challenging environment for researchers who study the continent. For geoscientists, however, research is particularly tough because the rocks they seek to understand are buried deep beneath the thick ice sheet that blankets the continent.

Map

Google to string trans-Atlantic undersea cable from France to Virginia

google building
© Reuters
Google says it will string a trans-Atlantic cable from France to Virginia.

The web giant said in a statement this week that the undersea cable will land stateside in Virginia Beach. It's expected to become operational in 2020.

Google said the project will better serve customers with an expanded network. Internet traffic across the Atlantic is among the busiest.

The cable will also support growth of Google Cloud. And it will land in relative proximity to Google's planned data center in northern Virginia.

Comment: See also: Microsoft, Facebook laying massive cable across the Atlantic ocean


Mars

Stunning side-by-side video of Mars shows how the planet-wide dust storm has transformed the surface of the red planet

Incredible footage has revealed the planet wide transformation occurring on Mars
Incredible footage has revealed the planet wide transformation occurring on Mars, as a dust storm continues to ravage its surface.
Staggering new Nasa footage has revealed the planet-wide transformation occurring on Mars, as a dust storm continues to ravage the surface of the entire planet.

The stunning images comes courtesy of the Mars Color Imager instrument strapped to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which maps the entire planet each day.

Dust storms that circle the entire planet appear on Mars every six to eight Earth years, which equates to three to four years on the red planet.

Astronomers still don't understand why or how these storms form and evolve. They hope to learn more about the phenomenon by studying the current conditions.

Amateur skygazers back here on Earth are able to witness the effect the storm is having on the red planet, armed with relatively inexpensive hobbyist telescopes.


Fire

Wildfires make extreme air pollution much worse in northwestern USA

Wildfire
© CNN.com
Smoke from blazes ravaging western states is counteracting clean air improvements

The northwestern United States has become an air pollution hot spot - literally.

Air quality in states from Nevada to Montana is worse than it was 30 years ago on the days with the most extreme air pollution. Bigger and more frequent wildfires that spew plumes of fine particulate matter into the sky are largely to blame, researchers report July 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By contrast, the rest of the country has seen decreasing trends in similar smog and haze over the last three decades. Legislation such as the Clean Air Act, which mandates air quality standards and the regulation of vehicle and factory emissions of particulate matter, is making a difference, says study coauthor Daniel Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Bothell.

But the increase in lung-clogging particulate matter from wildfires shows how the effects of climate change - which is, in part, driving the worsening fires - can counteract those gains, Jaffe says.

Brain

Trump's memory test publicity could skew results for others

Trump/Dr. Jackson
© Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump and Dr. Ronny Jackson
Familiarity with the exam may help people score better, masking early dementia symptoms

When President Donald Trump took a mental test as part of his physical in January, the results called attention to far more than his fitness for office. (He passed with a perfect score, according to his physician.) It put a test commonly used to catch early signs of dementia in the spotlight. That publicity could lead to missed diagnoses, researchers warn July 16 in JAMA Neurology.

Google searches of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute screening test consisting of 30 questions, spiked in the week after news coverage of Trump's physical. Of 190 news articles about his performance identified by the researchers, 53.7 percent included some or all of the test's questions and answers. And 17 percent encouraged readers to see how their mental abilities stacked up against the president's.

That might make it more difficult for clinicians to screen patients for early signs of dementia. Taking the test once increases your score the next time you take it, a phenomenon called a learning effect.

Sun

The silent sun: 3 weeks without sunspots

spotless sun
© Solar Dynamics Observatory HMI ContinuumThe sun on July 17, 2018
The sun has been blank for 21 straight days-a remarkable 3 weeks without sunspots. This is an almost decade-class event. The last time the sun lost its spots for 21 consecutive days was in the year 2009 coming on the heels of an historic solar minimum. With the current stretch of blank suns, solar minimum conditions have definitely returned.

To find an equal stretch of spotless suns in the historical record, you have to go back to July-August 2009 when the sun was emerging from a century-class solar minimum. We are now entering a new solar minimum, possibly as deep as the last one.

Comment: An ominous sign.


Cut

GMO 2.0 - The second great food war is underway

CRISPR
© Rick Dalton/plainpictureWhat we eat could be about to undergo a big change
You have probably heard of CRISPR, the gene-editing technique set to cure diseases and modify our DNA. The real revolution, however, may be in its ability to transform our food. "The biggest impact is going to be in agriculture," Jennifer Doudna, who helped develop the method, told New Scientist earlier this year.

This is because older, cruder techniques make it expensive to develop genetically modified (GM) foods, so they are mostly the domain of big multinationals. In contrast, CRISPR has made genetic tinkering cheap and easy.
"It takes a firm on average 13 years and costs $130 million to launch a GM crop"
"Rather than just four or five large multinationals dominating the market, you're going to have an explosion of companies all over the world innovating and coming up with improved crop varieties," says Tony Moran of US biotech company Cibus.

Comment: CRISPR9 Gene-Editing dangers cause a firefight:

Then we have a cautionary statement from one of the key researchers who helped discover CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna:
"I guess I worry about a couple of things. I think there's sort of the potential for unintended consequences of gene editing in people for clinical use. How would you ever do the kinds of experiments that you might want to do to ensure safety? And then there's another application of gene editing called gene drive that involves moving a genetic trait very quickly through a population. And there's been discussion about this in the media around the use of gene drives in insects like mosquitoes to control the spread of disease. On one hand, that sounds like a desirable thing, and on the other hand, I think one, again, has to think about potential for unintended consequences of releasing a system like that into an environmental setting where you can't predict what might happen."
CRISPR's catch-22: Two new studies warn the gene editing tool can trigger cancer
CRISPR may be far more sophisticated and precise than previous genetic engineering techniques, but precision is no guarantee of safety, as these two studies reveal. There have been many occasions where a genetically engineered (GE) crop has been shown to be unexpectedly toxic or allergenic when the conventional crop had no such issues. The reality is that scientists really don't know what side effects may be produced by DNA tampering. The effects are extremely unpredictable.

Even CRISPR, for all its precision, creates off-target effects. This is a serious concern not only in medicine but also in agriculture. As noted in a recent paper,23 "CRISPR technology is erasing barriers to genome editing and could revolutionize plant breeding." In plants, the potential for unintended effects such as toxicity and allergic potential remain high even with CRISPR technology, for the simple fact that when you alter one or two genes in a genome the side effects ripple through the whole genome.

A new protein could be created in the process that could be toxic or allergenic, or you could change the biochemical pathways of a plant, making it less nutritious or more toxic. Moreover, most GE plants are engineered for the express purpose of either expressing an internal insecticide or to tolerate direct herbicide application. So even if CRISPR technology improves the specificity of the genetic alteration, the toxic effects of herbicides and insecticides in the plant remain an issue.



Airplane

European air giant Airbus unveils solar-powered drone

Zephyr
© AFP/Ben StansallThe Airbus Zephyr has a wingspan of 25 metres and weighs less than 25 kilos.
European air giant Airbus on Wednesday unveiled a solar-powered drone called Zephyr that will fly at a high altitude and fulfil the same functions as a satellite.

The project was presented at Britain's Farnborough airshow, where Airbus revealed that the Zephyr S took off on July 11 for its maiden flight from Arizona in the United States.

"This maiden flight of the Zephyr S aims to prove and demonstrate the aircraft capabilities," Airbus said in a statement.

The High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite (HAPS) has a wingspan of 25 metres (82 feet) and weighs less than 25 kilogrammes (55 pounds).