© YouTube/NPG Press
How do you solve a problem like gravity? According to researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex, with 64 miniature loudspeakers.
Science & Technology
How do you solve a problem like gravity? According to researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex, with 64 miniature loudspeakers.
Eastern coyote, also known as a coywolf
Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.
The interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers pushed into southern Ontario and cleared the animal's habitat for farming and killed a large number of the wolves that lived there.
Researchers at MIT have come up with a way to use WiFi signals to see behind walls, and map a room in 3-D. By reflecting the signal, it can also locate the movements of people or objects in the room. The Daily Mail reports:
Using a wireless transmitter fitted behind a wall, computer scientists have developed a device that can map a nearby room in 3D while scanning for human bodies.
Using the signals that bounce and reflect off these people, the device creates an accurate silhouette and can even use this silhouette to identify who that person is.
The device is called RF Capture and it was developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
The RF Capture device transmits wireless signals that travel through a wall and reflect off a person's body back to the device.
[...]
Since only a small number of body parts reflect the signal back at any given point in time, the device monitors how these reflections vary as someone moves and walks.
© rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org
Omura's whale
Omura's whale
Previously, no living Omura's whales had been observed in the wild, according to the study published in the Royal Society Open Space journal.
Researchers confirmed that they are tracing the first-detected living population of Omura's whales.
Salvatore Cerchio, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, along with his colleagues, started their observations eight years ago, and until 2011, their search was in vain.
© n/a
Self-driving buses are coming to America. The Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon, California will be the first place in the U.S. to use French robo-buses to ferry passengers around.
Perhaps the best place for autonomous vehicles to start out is in this kind of training ground, although given the safety record of Google's self-driving cars, the training might be for us humans in getting used to them. It's hard to argue that preset routes and low speeds aren't ideal for an introduction to driverless vehicles, and that's just what the Easymile company specializes in.
© NASA
Equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days are all hallmarks of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Halloween is the fourth cross-quarter day of the year.
Equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days are all hallmarks of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Halloween is the fourth cross-quarter day of the year.
In other words, in traditional astronomy, there are eight major seasonal subdivisions of every year. They include the March and September equinoxes, the June and December solstices, and the intervening four cross-quarter days.
In modern times, the four cross-quarter days are often called Groundhog Day (February 2), May Day (May 1), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31).
© NASA / Reuters
In addition to the global threat to humanity, it poses another, quite real risk to Australia: extra UV radiation and sunburn on the continent where over 45,000 people are expected to die from skin cancer in 2015.
This year, the hole reached 28.2 million square kilometers: four times the size of Australia or the size of Russia and Canada combined.
© MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intellegence Laboratory
The team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what's happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they've been busy developing the technique, and now they've unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.
Not only that, the team's technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group's website.
© HO/AFP/Getty Images
This 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
This 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
After studying ancient ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, researchers at Lund University in Sweden found that the two solar storms hit Earth more than 1,000 years ago - the "red crucifix" storm in AD 774/775 and another in AD 993/994.
The study follows the work of researchers in 2012, when they found traces of a rapid increase of radioactive carbon in tree rings from those time periods. The 774/775 event corresponded with a text in an ancient Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which referred to a "red crucifix" appearing in the heavens after a sunset.
© HO/AFP/Getty Images
This 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
This 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
The warning is expected to last from 12:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST, Thursday afternoon.
Officials said that the warning is the result of a coronal mass ejection from the sun that happened around 10:19 p.m. EST on Wednesday as noted by radio signatures.
Comment: A good farmer knows what his livestock is up to at all times. Constant connectivity and smart technology is not benevolently bestowed upon us to make life more convenient. We're being corralled.