'We do understand there's a downside to this'

Worrying news from Georgia, America, where boffins report that they have developed robots which are able to "deceive a human".

"We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," says Ronald Arkin, interactive-computing prof at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Ark boffins say 'black hole' net events already common

International computer boffins are warning that the internet may "collapse" at some point within the next decade. They propose the use of a new routing method based on hyperbolic geometry, and have devised what they call a "hyperbolic atlas" of the entire net to aid in this plan.

"There is a layer in the ice with a great abundance of diamonds," said co-author James Kennett, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at UC Santa Barbara. "Most exciting to us is that this is the first such discrete layer of diamonds ever found in glacial ice anywhere on Earth, including the huge polar ice sheets and the alpine glaciers. The diamonds are so tiny that they can only be observed with special, highly magnifying microscopes. They number in the trillions."

This discovery supports earlier published evidence for a cosmic impact event about 12,900 years ago, Kennett explained. He said that the available evidence in the Greenland ice is consistent with this layer being at or close to this age, although further study is needed.

Researchers from the University of Maine led the expedition to Greenland in 2008. Co-authors on the study, besides Kennett and the team from Maine, include scientists from many universities and research entities. James Kennett's son, Douglas J. Kennett, of the University of Oregon, is one of the 21 scientists who contributed to the report.

Last year, the Kennetts reported the discovery of nanosize diamonds in a layer of sediment exposed on Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara. They published this information with numerous co-authors in two papers last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Science magazine.

According to James Kennett, the Greenland results also contradict a recent study questioning the presence of nanodiamonds in a layer of this age.

Kennett explained that the layer containing nanodiamonds on Santa Rosa Island, as well as those in the Greenland ice sheet - both supporting a cosmic impact event - appear to closely correspond to the time of the disappearance of the Clovis culture, the earliest well-established and well-accepted human culture living across North America. The event also corresponds with the time of extinction of many large animals across North America, including mammoths, camels, horses and the saber tooth cat.

The shock waves caused as comets hit the early Earth could have helped promote the formation of amino acids and the early building blocks of life, say US researchers.

It is thought that amino acids and short peptides played a significant role in the chemical evolution that resulted in life on Earth, but researchers have historically disagreed on how these chemicals got here in the first place.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University have now run theoretical simulations of shock compressions that mimic the conditions created when a comet hits the Earth, which suggest that the ingredients for life on Earth could have been delivered from space.

Comets are made of dust, ice and compressed gases. The ice is predominantly water, but is also known to contain small molecules that promote bacterial growth - prebiotic molecules - such as carbon dioxide, ammonia and methanol.

Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.

"Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems," said John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science and lead author of a paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE.

"We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides."

Around the world on Sept. 11th, sky watchers marveled as Venus and the Moon converged for a beautiful close encounter. In South Africa, it was a full-fledged occultation. "The Moon passed directly in front of Venus, completely covering the planet," reports Kerneels Mulder. "I was lucky enough to capture a series of images as Venus re-appeared from behind the Moon in broad daylight."

Going boldly where no scientists have gone before, a group of Australian researchers have developed a working model of a tractor beam like Star Trek's fictional mass mover.

The tractor beam prototype developed by a team at Australian National University is so far able to move only tiny glass particles about 1.5 metres, but the researchers expect to soon stretch that distance to about 10 metres.

After that, the sky's the limit.

The tractor effect is created when a hollow laser beam is directed at a particle. The laser heats up the area around the particle, but the particle itself stays cool and starts drifting inside the hollow beam.

As more heat is introduced under and to the sides of the subject, the glass particle is forced up the hollow laser tube. Speed and direction can be changed by altering the intensity of beam's brightness.

Using computer simulations of brain-like networks, researchers from Germany and Japan have discovered why nerve cells transmit information through small electrical pulses. The process not only allows the brain to process information much faster than previously thought, but also single neurons are already able to multiply, opening the door to more complex forms of computing.

When nerve cells communicate with each other, they do so through electrical pulses -- so-called action potentials. For decades, the accepted idea was that they simply sum up the tiny potentials generated by the incoming pulses and emit an action potential themselves when a threshold is reached. For the first time, Moritz Helias and Markus Diesmann from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan) and Moritz Deger and Stefan Rotter from the Bernstein Center Freiburg (Germany) now explain what exactly happens right before a nerve cell emits a pulse.

The research appears online in PLoS Computational Biology, published by the Public Library of Science.

WAPA - Russia has launched a program to build a powerful, multi-purpose airship that will certainly cause many UFO reports. This time, though, the words "Flying saucer" are not inappropriate at all.

The first such aerostate is officially named "Aerostatic thermoballasted vehicle": simply "Locomoskyner", after its manufacturer LocomoSky. A prototype flying saucer (presented at "MAKS 2009 air show") was seven meters (23 feet) in diameter and was able to transport 20 kg (44.4 lbs) of cargo. The company, however, plans to produce aircraft with a cargo-carrying a passenger capacity of up to 11,000 people and up to 600 tons of cargo. It will be able to hover, perform a vertical landing, move in a straight line with speeds close to 100 kmph, turn around and will need no special ground-based facilities to land.

Washington - Students who cheat in high school and college are highly likely to fit the profile for subclinical psychopathy - a personality disorder defined by erratic lifestyle, manipulation, callousness and antisocial tendencies, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. These problematic students cheat because they feel entitled and disregard morality, the study found.

Cheating, a perennial concern for educators, "has been facilitated by new technologies," said Delroy Paulhus, PhD, who led the research. "At the same time, cheating may seem more apparent because we can more effectively detect it." Because it's hard or even dangerous to try to reform a psychopathic person, he recommends blocking cheating using other means.

College students who admitted to cheating in high school or turned in plagiarized papers ranked high on personality tests of the so-called Dark Triad: psychopathy, Machiavellianism (cynicism, amorality, manipulativeness), and narcissism (arrogance and self-centeredness, with a strong sense of entitlement). Of the three dark personality types, psychopathy was most strongly linked to cheating. These findings appear in the September Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Students were spurred to cheat by two motivations, the research found: First, they sought to get the grades to which they felt entitled; second, they either didn't think cheating was wrong or didn't care.

The first of three studies at the University of British Columbia surveyed 249 second-year college students who, without having to share their identities, filled out take-home personality tests that looked at the Dark Triad and psychology's "Big Five" core traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness.

Also anonymously, students were asked whether they had cheated on high-school tests or handed in essays copied from someone else. (Questions specifically referred to high school to allay concerns about admitting to cheating at the university.)

Each of the Dark Triad variables went hand in hand with cheating at a high level of statistical significance. The more likely students were to have cheated, the higher they ranked on the psychopathy scale, followed by Machiavellianism and narcissism.