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Belgian Doctors Carry Out Country's First Face Transplant

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© Agence France-Presse/Nicolas Maeterlinck A person holds a reproduction of a patient's skull with prosthesis at a press conference on the first facial composite tissue allotransplantation in Belgium, at the Ghent University hospital, in Ghent. Belgian surgeons have successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the 19th in the world, doctors announced Saturday.
Belgian surgeons have successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the 19th in the world, doctors announced Saturday.

Officials at the University Hospital of Ghent said a team of 65 surgeons and medical staff had performed the 20-hour operation a week earlier on a Belgian man with a severely mutilated face.

"He's fine, he's doing very well after six days," surgical team leader Phillip Blondeel told Belgian television. "He's already swallowed a little water."

Blondeel said the patient, whose name was not disclosed, was already able to speak, surpassing doctors' expectations.

"We didn't think he would be able to speak so soon."

The patient had been missing skin around the central part of his face, as well as lips, facial muscles and nerves.

The operation brings to 19 the number of face transplants carried out worldwide. The first was a partial face transplant on Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire in 2005.

Belgium is the third European country after France and Spain to have carried out the operation.

Beaker

Genetic Scientists Create Freakish Monster Ants with Huge Heads and Jaws

A supersoldier next to a normal ant
© Alex Wild/PAA supersoldier next to a normal ant.
Nightmarish 'supersoldier' ants with huge heads and jaws have been created by activating ancient genes.

Scientists believe the monster ants may be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago.

Scientists say they can create the supersoldiers at will by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone - the larvae then develop into supersoldiers rather than normal soldier or worker ants.

Supersoldier ants can occur naturally in the wild, but only rarely. In the deserts of America and Mexico, their job is to protect the colony from raids by invading army ants.

The supersoldiers use their enormous heads to block the nest entrance and attack any enemy ants that get too close.

R2-D2

Japan Plans Massive Investment in Futuristic Robot Farm

robots
© Flickr user ricardodiaz11
Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami, the government said Thursday.

Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.

Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare (600 acre) site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said.

The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around four billion yen ($52 million) over the next six years, a ministry official said.

Sherlock

Rare Moon mineral found in Australia

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© AFP Photo/Stan Honda
A mineral brought back to Earth by the first men on the Moon and long thought to be unique to the lunar surface has been found in Australian rocks more than one billion years old, scientists said Thursday.

Named after Apollo 11's 1969 landing site at the Sea of Tranquility, tranquillityite was one of three minerals first discovered in rocks from the Moon and the only one not to be found, in subsequent years, on Earth.

Australian scientist Birger Rasmussen said tranquillityite had "long been considered as the Moon's own mineral" until geologists discovered it, by chance, in rock from resources-rich Western Australia.

"In over 40 years it hadn't been found in any terrestrial samples," Rasmussen, from Curtin University, told AFP.

When the Moon samples first came back Rasmussen said they were considered to be "extremely precious" and had been subjected to intense, detailed study when -- ironically -- their contents were "right here all the time."

Display

Code, Scan, Trade and Profit: A New Wave of Computer Enabled Insider Trading

computer trading graphic
© n/a
A new Wall St. scam.

Rumors are circulating about a new Wall St. research service scam that goes like this...

Research reports are written with both recommendations and coded phraseology that enables pre-market manipulation.

The way it works - a report that gives recommendations also contains coded phraseology that programs trading bots on the exchange that 'read' the report and make various trades. Certain word, symbol and number combinations in the report are picked up by the bots who put on the trades based on the coded info.

In the following research report - the report spells out a recommendation - that will make the trades put on as the result of the previous report profitable.

Let's say in January, the research says "We love tech. and big pharma" but hidden in the report is coded info that was picked up by trading bots who went long Co. X.

The following report recommends Co. X, making those pre-trades profitable (while containing new coded messages for the trading bots in anticipation of the next report).

This 'research' service is sold to traders for a hefty fee. It's inside info that is virtually impossible to detect available to a firm's best clients on a regular basis.

Simply buy the service and enable your computer software that 'reads' the research to pick up the code that will trigger what trades will be profitable when the next report is published.

Attention

Scientists Claim They Made Event Invisible

Think of all the things you wish you'd never seen happen.

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© Chris Matyszczyk/CNETSo this is me juggling a ball, while reciting Shakespeare.
Your auntie making that speech at Thanksgiving dinner about birds, bees, and Bieber. Your lover accusing you of infidelity with an alien. Every last minute of From Justin to Kelly.

Well, now some very clever Cornell people want to offer you hope, mingled with fact.

Research published in Nature magazine, helpfully translated by the Associated Press, declares that these scientists successfully managed to time-cloak an event--so that, to naked and disbelieving eyes, it never happened.

They say they did it by interrupting the light flow in such a way that the light experiences a change of pace. The idea was to see whether they could change the pace of that light flow sufficiently for a security camera to have simply not registered that it had happened.

Control Panel

Scientists Hide Gold with 3D "Invisibility Cloak"

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© Warner Bros. Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak.
German scientists have created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves.

The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could in the future make it possible to make large objects invisible, but for now the researchers said they were not keen to speculate on possible applications.

"For now these...cloaking devices are just a beautiful and exciting benchmark to show what transformation optics can do," said Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Transformation optics use a class of materials called metamaterials that guide and control light.

In their study, Ergin and his colleagues used photonic crystals with a structure that looks like piles of wood to make an invisibility device, or cloak.

Control Panel

New Invisibility Cloak Allows Object to "See" Out Through the Cloak

"Many groups have been working devices that make objects invisible," Che Ting Chan tells PhysOrg.com. "Most of these devices, however, encompass the object to be cloaked." Chan, a scientist at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, believes that it is possible to create a cloaking device that would be able to render an object invisible without encompassing it.

"With the devices that encompass the object," Chan continues, "the cloaked subject is 'blind'. It can't 'see' out through the cloak. We can't see the object, but the object can't see us, either. We wanted to create a conceptual design that would let the object 'see' out through the cloak while hiding it from sight." Along with Yun Lai, Huanyang Chen and Zhao-Qing Zhang, Chan believes that this could be accomplished. Their ideas are published in Physical Review Letters: "Complementary Media Invisibility Cloak that Cloaks Objects at a Distance Outside the Cloaking Shell."

Right now, such a device exists only theory. "We haven't built the device," Chan says, "but we have shown mathematically how it could work. It is a very specific description of the materials needed. If you have the time and resources, we think it could be done." He points out that it might have interesting possibilities in a number of fields where invisibility might be desirable.

Magnify

Macroscopic Invisibility Cloak Made from Natural Birefringent Crystals

Making things invisible is certainly appealing to most people - including scientists and magicians. Invisibility cloaks have existed only in movies and science fictions until 2006 when Pendry and Leonhardt independently pointed out ways to scientifically realize them [1, 2]. Transformation optics, the enabling theoretical tool to make this happen, works by optically compressing a spatial region to leave out a niche that cannot be accessed by light, while keeping its outer boundary intact so nothing seems to have happened when light exits the cloak.

This new research field has witnessed rapid progresses. Soon after the theoretical proposal, the first experimental demonstration of invisibility was shown at microwave frequencies in 2007 [3], and within 2 years, invisibility has reached Near-Infrared, the frequencies normally used for optical communications [4, 5]. These milestone works show that invisibility has become more a reality than fiction. However, all those invisibility cloaks were made from artificially engineered structures with subwavelength feature size, the so called metamaterials. At optical frequencies, the nano- and micro- fabrication of metamaterials limited the achievable invisibility cloak to a few wavelengths.

Recently two independent teams (including us at University of Birmingham, Imperial College London and Technical University of Denmark) have succeeded in scaling up the invisibility cloak to hide things of macroscopic scale [6, 7]. While previous works on optical invisibility have focused on non-uniform isotropic artificial media, we utilize uniform, anisotropic medium to construct the invisibility cloak. Specifically, our invisibility cloak was made from natural birefringent crystals, and therefore they can be easily scaled up to hide things at least thousands of times bigger than optical wavelengths. In addition, the cloaks work in the visible range, therefore the cloaking effect can directly be seen with our naked eyes.

Magnify

Physicists Scale Up Invisibility Cloaks Using Natural Crystals

Physicists from the University of Birmingham, with colleagues at Imperial College, London, and Technical University of Denmark, have demonstrated an 'invisibility cloak' that can hide a three-dimensional object, centimetres in dimension, large enough for the cloaking area to be visible to the human eye, according to research published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The scientists have shown that they are able to hide an object that is much bigger than those cloaked by other research groups. Previous studies have demonstrated cloaking by using a metamaterial - a fabricated composite with optical properties not found in nature - which limits the size of the cloaking region, while the team from UK and Denmark have used a natural crystal called calcite, which has enabled them to hide a larger object.

Calcite is a transparent mineral with birefringent or double-refraction properties, which means that light enters the calcite and splits into two rays of different polarizations travelling at different speeds and in different directions.

The team has been able to cloak larger objects because it has employed a cloaking design that did not require inhomogeneous material properties, as all the previous works did. This demonstration was performed, both in the air and in a container of liquid, by using two triangular pieces of calcite glued together, placed on a mirror. The size of the cloaking area is not limited by the technology available, only by the size of the calcite crystal.