Science & TechnologyS


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10 Profound Innovations Ahead

Jeremy Hsu
LiveScience
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:52 UTC
Today's world looks increasingly like the future. Robots work factory assembly lines and fight alongside human warriors on the battlefield, while tiny computers assist in everything from driving cars to flying airplanes. Surgeons use the latest technological tools to accomplish incredible feats, and researchers push the frontiers of medicine with bioengineering. Science fiction stories about cloning and resurrecting extinct animals look increasingly like relevant cautionary tales.

But even the best of science and technology has yet to solve climate change and famine, or conquer disease. More and more people live on a planet with shrinking resources, which leads to political strife and conflict. Here, we examine some of the hottest areas where researchers hope to forge a better tomorrow.
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Telescope

The Stars behind the Curtain

Henri Boffin
European Southern Observatory
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:42 UTC
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© ESOESO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.
NGC 3603 is a starburst region: a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula's extended clouds of gas and dust. Located 22 000 light-years away from the Sun, it is the closest region of this kind known in our galaxy, providing astronomers with a local test bed for studying intense star formation processes, very common in other galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great distance from us.
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Magnify

The Behavior of Silver Nanotextiles During Washing

Paul Eubig, DVM & Wendy Hessler
Environmental Health News
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:29 UTC
Silver nanoparticles used as antimicrobials in fabric can leach out of clothes as they are being washed. One brand lost over half of its silver content from the fabric with just two washings. The discovery raises questions about potential affects of human and environmental exposures.

Comment: For more information about the issues surrounding Nanotechnology read the following articles on SOTT:

Scientists Scared as Nanotechnology and Nanoparticles Become Common in Consumer Products

Big Risk for Nanotechnology as Some Carbon Nanotubes May Cause Asbestos Related Diseases

Australian food firms pushed to come clean on nano-ingredients

Alert over the march of the 'grey goo' in nanotechnology Frankenfoods

Food Industry 'Too Secretive' Over Nanotechnology

Australia - Regulate nanotechnology industry

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Magnify

New Neutron Studies Support Magnetism's Role in Superconductors


ScienceDaily
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:00 UTC
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© DOE/Oak Ridge National LaboratoryA simulation of the nature of the spin excitations in a superconducting material's structure. Studies performed at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory support theories that magnetic properties play an important role in high-temperature superconductivity.
Neutron scattering experiments performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory give strong evidence that, if superconductivity is related to a material's magnetic properties, the same mechanisms are behind both copper-based high-temperature superconductors and the newly discovered iron-based superconductors.

The work, published in a recent Nature Physics, was performed at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) along with the ISIS Facility at the United Kingdom's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

High-temperature superconducting materials, in which a material conducts electricity without resistance at a relatively high temperature, have potential for application to energy efficient technologies where little electricity is lost in transmission.
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Arrow Down

Ex-finance minister says Russia is 40 years behind developed nations in high-tech sector


Associated Press
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:45 UTC
The architect of Russia's 1990s privatizations have given a sobering assessment of the country's present and future in the high-tech world, warning that Russia faces an "innovate-or-degrade" choice.

Anatoly Chubais, a former finance minister who now runs the state-owned corporation for the development of the nascent high-tech sector, said "We have to admit: We have fallen very far behind."
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Rocket

Iran fires satellite carrier into space


Press TV
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:41 UTC
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© IAOLive transmission from the Kavoshgar 3 rocket as it leaves earth's atmosphere. The biological capsule (bottom left) carried a rat, two turtles and worms into space.
Iran on Tuesday test-fired the Kavoshgar 3 satellite carrier, sending its third explorer - with living organisms onboard - into space.

The Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket, carrying an experimental capsule, transfers telemetric data, live pictures and flight and environmental analysis data.

The Iranian Aerospace Organization (IAO) says live video transmission and the mini-environmental lab will enable further studies on the biological capsule - carrying a rat, two turtles and worms - as it leaves earth's atmosphere and enters space.

In February 2008, Iran became the 11th country to have acquired space-related technology by blasting Kavoshgar 1 into space.

The second Kavoshgar, which carried a space-lab and a restoration system, was launched in November 2008. The Kavoshgar 3 rocket is an updated version of the previous models.
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Robot

Computers that understand how you feel

Steve Jones
The Daily Telegraph
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:28 UTC
Computers feel?
© GETTYNow computers can sense the mood of their users. Already they can identify smiles, frowns and blushes.
Robots can now pick up the mood of their users, and can even tell if they're drunk.

Many people have commented on the contrast between Tony Blair's urbane comments to last week's Chilcott Enquiry and his physical unease in its first minutes as manifest in blinks, foot-tapping, crossed legs, and soon. Body language - non-verbal communication - is a valuable clue to innerfeelings (a truth, or half-truth, that men's magazines often use when advising their readers how to tell whether a young lady might be interested in body language of another kind).

Their claims are dubious, but now science is getting in on the act. It began with Darwin, whose 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and other Animals showed how blushes, smiles, raised eyebrows and the like add spice to the banal messages of the spoken word.

Now, computers can sense the mood of their users. Already they are able to identify smiles and frowns and even blushes (a subject of much interest to Darwin, who devotes many pages to it). Their programs generate well over a million combinations of facial expressions and head position and, on a good day (or with an expressive face) can. nine times out of ten, correctly identify looks of fear, sadness, happiness, anger disgust and surprise. They even do better than humans in differentiating the expression of a puzzled person from that of a drunk.
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Magnify

Long lost theory on Silbury Hill is uncovered

Nigel Kerton
Gazette & Herald
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:22 UTC
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© UnknownSilbury Hill
Letters that lay undiscovered in national archives for more than 230 years suggest that Silbury Hill, the enigmatic man-made mound that stands between Marlborough and Beckhampton, may have originally be constructed around some sort of totem pole.

Historians have uncovered in the British Library in London letters written in 1776 that describe a 40ft-high pole which once stood at the centre of Silbury Hill. Europe's largest man-made mound.

The letters detail an 18th century excavation into the centre of the man-made mound, where archaeologists discovered a long, thin cavity six inches wide and about 40ft deep.
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Laptop

How HTML5 Will Revolutionize the Web

Dan Hope
TechNewsDaily
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:16 UTC
There's a lot going on behind all the images, video and information on the Internet.

All the things we see when browsing the Web are powered by a special coding language called HTML. This language has been the foundation of the Internet for decades, but it isn't static. The Internet is about to experience another evolution in HTML that will have benefits for everyone who uses it.
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Info

New 'Underwater Plane' To Explore Ocean Depths


TechNewsDaily
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:09 UTC
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A new "underwater plane" will plunge wealthy riders down into the ocean depths for a hefty fee.

U.K. company Virgin Limited Edition recently announced the Necker Nymph, a three-person "aero-submarine" that can dive to depths of 36,000 feet - which is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

The Necker Nymph vehicle is designed and built by San Francisco-based Hawkes Ocean Technologies and is based on the company's DeepFlight series of submersibles
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