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Spy Device? One-way sound machine created

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:00 UTC
acoustic circulator
© Science/AAAS
An acoustic circulator, which makes one-way sound transmission possible.
Scientists have created a one-way sound machine.

The device, called an acoustic circulator, breaks the fundamental principle that sound, and other types of waves, are a two-way street.

The findings, published today (Jan. 30) in the journal Science, could lead to the sound equivalent of a one-way mirror. With such a device, people can hear someone talking, but they themselves cannot be heard.

Wave nature

All waves - whether visible light, sound, radio or otherwise - have a physical property known as time reversal symmetry. What that means is that a wave sent one way can always be sent back.

"If I am able to talk to you, you should be able to talk to me back," said study co-author Andrea Alù, an electrical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin.

For radio waves, researchers figured out how to break this rule using magnetic materials that set electrons spinning in one direction. The resulting radio waves detect the difference in the material in one direction versus the other, preventing reverse transmission. As a result, transmission towers can broadcast the top 40 hits, without having the radio waves bounce back.
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Bizarro Earth

Current spike in atmospheric methane mirrors Ice Age climate change events


ScienceDaily
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:24 UTC
Ice cores are essential for climate research, because they represent the only archive which allows direct measurements of atmospheric composition and greenhouse gas concentrations in the past. Using novel isotopic studies, scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring In Antarctica (EPICA) were now able to identify the most important processes responsible for changes in natural methane concentrations over the transition from the last ice age into our warm period.

Ice Cores Study
©Gerald Traufetter
Dr. Hubertus Fischer cutting an ice core at Kohnen Station, Antarctica.

Comment: Update 30/01/2014

With all these 'winter wildfires' breaking out in the US, Norway and Tibet, we wonder if increased methane levels play a role.

More on methane:

Melting permafrost methane emissions: The other threat to climate change

Study says methane a new climate threat

Scientists Find Frozen Methane Gas Deposit

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Comet 2

Major increase in asteroid activity sees MIT astronomers 'upgrade' solar system from 'stable' to 'dynamic' - Time to revive the Nemesis Twin Sun theory?

Lee Rannals
redOrbit.com
Thu, 30 Jan 2014 04:43 UTC
Image
© Armagh Observatory
All observed asteroids by 2010. The green are those in stable orbits... but more and more of them are turning red, potentially on earth-crossing orbit...
Scientists from MIT and the Paris Observatory claim that rogue asteroids are more common than previously thought.

Previously, scientists believed that asteroids were static and remained near the sun. However, observations in the last decade have revealed that asteroids show up in unexpected places in space.


Comment: Yeh, like being discovered right as they fly past or into us!


"That [theory] has been completely turned on its head," Francesca DeMeo, who did much of the mapping as a postdoc in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, said in a statement. "Today we think the absolute opposite: Everything's been moved around a lot and the solar system has been very dynamic."

Researchers developed a map that charts the size, composition and location of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the solar system. The new maps suggests the early solar system could have undergone dramatic changes before the planets laid claim to their current alignment.

Comment: What if it's not "early" pin-balling of asteroids?... What if it's repetitive pin-balling of asteroids, knocked in by an as-yet-to-be-discovered Twin Sun? What if the reason they've discovered a "river of asteroids" recently is because a river of asteroids is currently streaming into the inner solar system? What is it's not a question of "pin-balled asteroids" having had an impact on Earth, but "pin-balled asteroids" CURRENTLY having an impact on Earth?

Notice anything about fireball activity in our skies lately?

Goldilocks is in for a fright; something wicked this way comes...



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Question

Echoes of the Edenic Curse: Neanderthals gave us disease genes

Paul Rincon
BBC News
Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:27 UTC
Image
© SPL.
Gene types that influence disease in people today were picked up through interbreeding with Neanderthals, a major study in Nature journal suggests.

They passed on variants involved in type 2 diabetes, Crohn's disease and - curiously - smoking addiction.

Genome studies reveal that our species (Homo sapiens) mated with Neanderthals after leaving Africa.

But it was previously unclear what this Neanderthal DNA did and whether there were any implications for human health.

By screening the genomes of 1,004 modern humans, Sriram Sankararaman and his colleagues identified regions bearing the Neanderthal versions of different genes.

That a gene variant associated with a difficulty in stopping smoking should be found to have a Neanderthal origin is a surprise.

It goes without saying that there is no suggestion our evolutionary cousins were puffing away in their caves.

Instead, the researchers argue, this mutation may have more than one function, so the modern effect of this marker on smoking behaviour may be one impact it has among several.
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Galaxy

Steady pace of new star formation may be explained by river of hydrogen flowing through space


Science Daily
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 21:55 UTC
Astronomers have discovered what could be a never-before-seen river of hydrogen flowing through space. This very faint, very tenuous filament of gas is streaming into the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 and may help explain how certain spiral galaxies keep up their steady pace of star formation.

Using the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomer D.J. Pisano from West Virginia University has discovered what could be a never-before-seen river of hydrogen flowing through space. This very faint, very tenuous filament of gas is streaming into the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 and may help explain how certain spiral galaxies keep up their steady pace of star formation.
hydrogen river astronomy
© D.J. Pisano (WVU); B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); Palomar Observatory – Space Telescope Science Institute 2nd Digital Sky Survey (Caltech); Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
This composite image contains three distinct features: the bright star-filled central region of galaxy NGC 6946 in optical light (blue), the dense hydrogen tracing out the galaxy’s sweeping spiral arms and galactic halo (orange), and the extremely diffuse and extended field of hydrogen engulfing NGC 6946 and its companions (red). The new GBT data show the faintly glowing hydrogen bridging the gulf between the larger galaxy and its smaller companions. This faint structure is precisely what astronomers expect to appear as hydrogen flows from the intergalactic medium into galaxies or from a past encounter between galaxies.
"We knew that the fuel for star formation had to come from somewhere. So far, however, we've detected only about 10 percent of what would be necessary to explain what we observe in many galaxies," said Pisano. "A leading theory is that rivers of hydrogen -- known as cold flows -- may be ferrying hydrogen through intergalactic space, clandestinely fueling star formation. But this tenuous hydrogen has been simply too diffuse to detect, until now."

Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, typically maintain a rather tranquil but steady pace of star formation. Others, like NGC 6946, which is located approximately 22 million light-years from Earth on the border of the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus, are much more active, though less-so than more extreme starburst galaxies. This raises the question of what is fueling the sustained star formation in this and similar spiral galaxies
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Info

New theory suggests way to teleport energy long distances

Bob Yirka
Phys Org
Tue, 28 Jan 2014 17:46 UTC
Teleportation
© Physical Review A
Schematic diagram of (a) vacuum state quantum energy teleportation (QET) protocol and (b) long- distance squeezed-state QET.
A trio of researchers at Tohoku University in Japan, led by Masahiro Hotta, has proposed a new way to teleport energy that allows for doing so over long distances. In their paper published in Physical Review A, the team describes a theory they've developed that takes advantage of the properties of squeezed light or vacuum states to allow for "teleporting" information about an energy state, allowing for making use of that energy - in essence, teleporting energy over long distances.

On television shows such as Star Trek, people are moved from one location to another via teleportation, where the people (or objects) are not literally sent - instead their essence is reestablished in another local, giving the illusion of movement. In real life, nothing like that exists, though scientists have begun using the term teleportation to describe the results of entanglement experiments - where two entangled particles are joined somehow despite no apparent connection between them. Changes to one particle happen automatically to the other. Scientists have broadened their experiments to include light and matter, and more recently, energy.
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Info

At least 20% of Neanderthal DNA is in humans

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
Wed, 29 Jan 2014 12:04 UTC
Neanderthal
© Neanderthal Museum (Mettmann, Germany)
A girl goes nose-to-nose with a Neanderthal statue in Germany. Ancient DNA research is increasingly revealing the genetic links between modern humans and our extinct ancestors, including Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans.
At least one-fifth of the Neanderthal genome may lurk within modern humans, influencing the skin, hair and diseases people have today, researchers say.

Although modern humans are the only surviving human lineage, other groups of early humans used to live on Earth. The closest extinct relatives of modern humans were the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago. The ancestors of modern humans diverged from those of Neanderthals between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago.

Recent findings revealed that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of modern humans when modern humans began spreading out of Africa perhaps about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, although some research suggests the migration began earlier. About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of anyone outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin.

However, scientists reasoned that the Neanderthal DNA found in one person might not be the same Neanderthal DNA of someone else.

"If you are 2 percent Neanderthal and I'm 2 percent Neanderthal, we might not have the same Neanderthal DNA between us," said study lead author Benjamin Vernot, a population geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We might have inherited different portions of the Neanderthal genome.

This logic suggested a significant portion of the Neanderthal genome might survive within the genomes of present-day humans. Past calculations suggested that anywhere from 35 to 70 percent of the Neanderthal genome could exist in modern people.
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2 + 2 = 4

Pentagon, scientists closing in on rapid DNA technology

Ray Locker and Kendall Breitman
USA Today
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 15:36 UTC
Image
© PhotoDisc
Researchers are closing in on the final steps of a new system to analyze human DNA in 90 minutes instead of the two to three weeks it now takes, according to interviews with Pentagon and industry officials.

Such a dramatic cut in the amount of time to get a DNA sample has huge ramifications for law enforcement, war crimes investigations and immigration, said Chris Asplen, the executive director of the Global Alliance for Rapid DNA Testing.

"When it comes to solving crime (not proving it in court but actually using DNA to find the killer, rapist, burglar, etc.) the value of DNA as an investigative tool is directly proportional to the speed at which it can be leveraged in any given investigation," Asplen said.

Pentagon researchers expect to finish evaluating prototypes of the Accelerated Nuclear DNA Equipment (ANDE) system by June, said Jenn Elzea, a Pentagon spokeswoman. The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice are also investigating prototypes, she said.
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Eye 1

Why is Facebook's App asking to read your text messages?

Chris Gayomali
Fast Company
Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:47 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Over the last month or so, a few keen-eyed Android users may have been startled by some peculiar permission requests when they tried to update their Facebook app. One request asks to "read your text messages (SMS or MMS)."

That's not exactly the kind of language users are likely to find reassuring, especially after recent allegations that Facebook has been scanning private messages within the social network. So, Facebook is currently on a PR offensive to calm user fears. "We realize that some of these permissions sound scary," writes Facebook. "So we'd like to provide more info about how we use them ... If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via text message."
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Magnet

Bizarre magnetic particle revealed in ultra-cold lab experiment

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Wed, 29 Jan 2014 12:06 UTC
Magnetic Monopole
© Heikka Valja
An illustration of magnetic monopole.
Bizarre magnetic behavior that was predicted by a famous physicist more than 80 years ago has finally been demonstrated in the lab, according to a new study.

The behavior of an electron in response to a magnetic monopole, or a solitary magnet with just a north pole, has been demonstrated in an ultra-cold material that mimics a natural magnetic system. And the monopole and electron system behaves just as English physicist Paul Dirac predicted it would in 1931.

Though the new experiment, described today (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature, doesn't prove that such monopoles exist outside the lab in other magnetic systems, it could help physicists know what to look for in nature, said study co-author David Hall, a physicist at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
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