A lot of people prefer to store information in their mobile phones instead of keeping it in their heads, a new study from Kaspersky Lab reports; thus the loss or breakdown of a mobile phone can be a disaster for modern people.

While mobile phones and other devices are increasingly essential in our lives and often the main place we store all our information and manage our daily schedules, Kaspesky lab has published a study attempting to uncover how modern technologies affect human memory skills.

Kaspersky lab surveyed 6,000 users aged 16 and older in eight European countries. The results showed that 49 percent of UK respondents do not remember their parents' telephone numbers, 57 percent haven't memorized the number for their place of work, 71 percent of parents can't dial their children off the top of their head, and 87 percent don't know the number of their children's schools by heart. On the other hand, 47 percent can recite the phone numbers they had when they were between age 10 and 15, likely before devices had such large memories.

For decades, researchers in the genetics field have theorized that the protein spools around which DNA is wound, histones, remain constant in the brain, never changing after development in the womb. Now, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered that histones are steadily replaced in brain cells throughout life - a process which helps to switch genes on and off. This histone replacement, known as turnover, enables our genetic machinery to adapt to our environment by prompting gene expression, the conversion of genes into the proteins that comprise cellular structures and carry signals in the brain.

This new concept, described in a study led by researchers in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and at the Laboratory of Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics, The Rockefeller University, was published today in the journal Neuron.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

In his new book published on 2 July, The Runes of Evolution, the University of Cambridge academic builds on the principle of convergent evolution - that different species will independently evolve similar features, with the comparison of the camera eye of an octopus and a human eye a favourite example - and argues it will not just took place on Earth.

"An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought," he told The Independent. "The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

"The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement."

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John's College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth's.

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered the largest and brightest set of rings from X-ray light echoes ever observed. These extraordinary rings, produced by an intense flare from a neutron star, provide astronomers a rare chance to determine how far across the Milky Way galaxy the star is from Earth.

The rings appear as circles around Circinus X-1, a double star system in the plane of our galaxy containing a neutron star, the dense remnant of a massive star pulverized in a supernova explosion. The neutron star is in orbit with another massive star, and is shrouded by thick clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Circinus X-1 is also the source of a surprisingly powerful jet of high-energy particles.

"It's really hard to get accurate distance measurements in astronomy and we only have a handful of methods," said Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who led the study. "But just as bats use sonar to triangulate their location, we can use the X-rays from Circinus X-1 to figure out exactly where it is."

The light echo shows that Circinus X-1 is located about 30,700 light years from Earth, and settles the difference in results published in prior studies. The detection and characterization of the rings required the unique capabilities of Chandra -- the ability to detect fine details combined with sensitivity to faint signals.

That's the sound of a caterpillar chewing on a leaf. But the real surprise is what happens next: the plant reacts to the noise by churning out chemicals that repel predators.

The discovery was made in 2014, by researchers Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft from the University of Missouri.

It's been known for a while that sounds can affect the way plants germinate, and the expression of some of their genes, says Appel. "But just why plants were sensitive to airborne sound was a mystery".

Self-preservation is as good an evolutionary strategy as you get, so the pair set out to test whether plants were able to respond to the miniscule vibrations caused by having their leaves chewed.

Belgian Blue cattle are hulking animals that provide unusually large amounts of prized, lean cuts of beef, the result of decades of selective breeding. Now, a team of scientists from South Korea and China says that it has created the porcine equivalent using a much faster method.

These 'double-muscled' pigs are made by disrupting, or editing, a single gene — a change that is much less dramatic than those made in conventional genetic modification, in which genes from one species are transplanted into another. As a result, their creators hope that regulators will take a lenient stance towards the pigs — and that the breed could be among the first genetically engineered animals to be approved for human consumption.

Jin-Soo Kim, a molecular biologist at Seoul National University who is leading the work, argues that his gene edits merely speed up a process that could, at least in principle, occur through a more natural route. "We could do this through breeding," he says, "but then it would take decades."

The world's first sensitive prosthetic leg, which simulates the feelings of a real limb, was revealed by Austrian scientists today.

The limb, developed by Professor Hubert Egger of the FH Upper Austria (University of Applied Sciences), allows wearers to tell which surface they are walking on and dramatically improves amputee's balance and coordination.

The development could wipe out the phenomenon of phantom pain, where amputees can experience severe discomfort as the brain receives no neural feedback from their missing limb.

A two-stage process was used to fit the limb to its first user, Austrian amputee Wolfgang Rangger, who lost his right leg to a blood clot and has been testing the limb for the past six months.

AFP reported that surgeons first rewired working nerve endings from Rangger's stump to healthy thigh tissue close to the surface of the skin. These nerves were then connected via stimulators in the prosthesis shaft to a foot which was equipped with six sensors.

A machine on an assembly line grabbed a worker and thrust him against a metal slab, causing lethal injuries.

The tragedy occurred at a plant belonging to German automaker Volkswagen (VW) in Baunatal, on Monday.

A 21 year old man, who is not an employee of the plant, was assembling the robot for a new motor production line, according to the Local.de. His Meissen-based company had built the machine for the automaker.

He was the only person in the proximity of the machine. Other workers were standing in the outer area. The robot grabbed the man and threw him against a metal slab. He suffered a severe blow to the chest area and died in hospital.

VW spokesman Heiko Hillwig said that human error is to blame for the incident, according to the Associated Press. He said that the machine is programed to grab auto parts and manipulate them. It operates in a restricted area of the plant.

The factory at Baunatal, 100 kilometers north of Frankfurt, is the second largest for the Volkswagen brand. It doesn't make vehicles, but assembles components for other plants.

boingboing, July 1st

A Volkswagen rep told the paper that the robot "was not one of the new generation of lightweight collaborative robots that work side-by-side with workers on the production line and forgo safety cages," and had no known technical defect.

It's highly likely your friends could spot you in a crowd, even if your face were obscured or your back turned. Rather eerily, a recent report revealed that your friends aren't the only ones who can pick you out in a sea of people—Facebook can, too.

In fact, Facebook's algorithms can accurately identify an individual user from among 800 million pictures—in less than five seconds—98% of the time.

Using its artificial intelligence lab—a rather Orwellian acquisition for a social media platform—Facebook researcher Yann LeCun wanted to determine if the same algorithms already used for facial recognition could be adjusted to scrutinize other cues. LeCun, an expert in computer vision and pattern recognition who came to Facebook in 2013, explained that identifying cues—like body type or the way a person stands—could be taken into consideration by the technology the way humans already do.

It's a well-known fact that no two fingerprints are the same - but apparently no two "smellprints" are the same, either. Scientists have discovered a way to characterize our sense of smell, and the unique labeling may reveal genetic information about us.

Every human has about six million smell receptors of around 400 different types. The distribution of those receptors varies from person to person, resulting in unique senses of smell - referred to by the study's researchers as the "olfactory fingerprint."

The study, conducted by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested 89 participants on how strongly 28 odors matched 54 adjectives. Those adjectives included "nutty," "pleasant,""lemony," "masculine,""fishy,""citrus," and "sour," among others.

Based on those descriptions, the researchers developed a complex mathematical formula for determining how similar any two odors are to one another in the human sense of smell.