Transferring thoughts, feelings, emotions, or one person invoking some sort of biological response in another, one that can be measured using modern day medical equipment like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), was the subject of a 2006 study published by several researchers in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, titled Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis.

The study found that distant intentionality (DI), which is defined as sending thoughts at a distance (telepathy) from a 'sender' is actually correlated with an activation of certain brain regions of the 'receiver.'

The study used eleven "healers" who do work in this area, and 11 other people who did not claim to be healers, but had some sort of special connection with the healer.

In an experiment that could portend a real-life Planet of the Apes situation, scientists spliced human genes into the fetus of a monkey to substantially increase the size of the primate's brain. And it worked.

Researchers from Germany's Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany and Japan's Central Institute for Experimental Animals introduced a specifically human gene, ARHGAP11B, into the fetus of a common marmoset monkey, causing the enlargement of its brain's neocortex. The scientists reported their findings in Science.

The neocortex is the newest part of the brain to evolve. It's in the name — "neo" meaning new, and "cortex" meaning, well, the bark of a tree. This outer shell makes up more than 75 percent of the human brain and is responsible for many of the perks and quirks that make us uniquely human, including reasoning and complex language.

The ground beneath our feet might seem solid, but Earth's tectonic plates are always shifting. Sometimes, they even disappear. In a study published last month in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, researchers announced new evidence in favor of one such missing plate, dubbed the Resurrection plate after Alaska's Resurrection Peninsula. The Resurrection plate has long been a subject of controversy among geologists, who debate whether the Pacific Ocean once sported an extra plate that slid beneath what is now northern Canada 40 to 60 million years ago.

Using a technology called mantle tomography — akin to a CT (computerized tomography) scan of Earth's mantle — a team of geologists identified a rock slab under the crust of northern Canada that could be a remnant of the Resurrection plate. They then used 3D imaging technology to unfold and raise this "Yukon slab" back to the surface while winding back the geological clock. They found the Resurrection plate neatly plugged a gap between two known plates, the Kula and the Farallon, and also aligned with volcanic belts along the coasts of Alaska and Washington that typically form at plate boundaries.

The tomography technique used to resurrect the Resurrection plate could be a useful tool for finding other disappeared plate boundaries, according to the authors. These rediscovered boundaries could, in turn, help identify new volcanoes and mineral deposits and even refine models of past climate.

Below you can find a selection of some objects for which we recently made follow-up observations at the "Osservatorio Salvatore di Giacomo, Agerola, ITALY" (MPC code L07; Observers E. Guido, A. Catapano, F. Coccia) while they still were on the NEOCP list. More details about the telescope, the magnitude, number of images & exposition, asteroid speed & PA etc. are on the images. Click on each image for a bigger version. All the processing has been made with TYCHO software by D. Parrott.

2020 VX5 (neocp designation C3WZUQ2) is an Apollo-type asteroid discovered by G96 Mt. Lemmon Survey on November 15, 2020. This asteroid has an estimated size of 55 m - 120 m (H=23.4) and it had a close approach with Earth at about 29 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.074 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 1950 UT on 11 Nov. 2020.

There have been several updates appended to this page as of 2020-11-16, please see below.

It's here. It happened. Did you notice?

I'm speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.

On modern versions of macOS, you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn't realize this, because it's silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you're offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn't hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone's apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.

Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:

Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash

A shop in Japan has enlisted a robot to ensure customers are wearing masks, as the country prepares for a possible third wave of coronavirus infections.

Robovie, developed by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, is able to pick out customers who aren't wearing masks and politely ask them to cover up. It can also intervene when they fail to socially distance while queuing up to pay.

The trial, which began last week at the club shop of Cerezo Osaka, a professional football team, will run until at least the end of the month.

Robovie's developers, who are behind a host of robotic innovations, hope the experiment will reduce close contact between shoppers and staff, adding that they believe most people will feel less embarrassed by being asked to cover up by a robot than by a fellow human being.

The African continent is slowly separating into several large and small tectonic blocks along the diverging East African Rift System, continuing to Madagascar - the long island just off the coast of Southeast Africa - that itself will also break apart into smaller islands.

These developments will redefine Africa and the Indian Ocean. The finding comes in a new study by D. Sarah Stamps of the Department of Geosciences for the journal Geology. The breakup is a continuation of the shattering of the supercontinent Pangea some 200 million years ago.

Rest assured, though, this isn't happening anytime soon.

"The rate of present-day break-up is millimeters per year, so it will be millions of years before new oceans start to form," said Stamps, an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech College of Science. "The rate of extension is fastest in the north, so we'll see new oceans forming there first."

Using one of the telescopes of the project "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (ATLAS), in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, astronomers detected an extremely close passage of an asteroid yesterday, Saturday, November 14, and when analyzing its orbit, they They noticed that the space rock had its closest approach the day before, that is, on Friday, the 13th.

The asteroid has been dubbed "2020 VT4," reported the International Astronomical Union.

"It is estimated that this space rock passed only 238 miles above the Pacific Ocean, making it the asteroid to pass closest to Earth without disintegrating in our atmosphere," said Eddie Iriarry of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC).

The educational entity clarified that it was a relatively small asteroid, between 16 to 36 feet (5 to 11 meters) in diameter.

London - Imagine a world where you move around in your own personal sound bubble. You listen to your favorite tunes, play loud computer games, watch a movie or get navigation directions in your car — all without disturbing those around you.

That's the possibility presented by "sound beaming," a new futuristic audio technology from Noveto Systems, an Israeli company. On Friday it will debut a desktop device that beams sound directly to a listener without the need for headphones.

The company provided The Associated Press with an exclusive demo of the desktop prototype of its SoundBeamer 1.0 before its launch Friday.

The listening sensation is straight out of a sci-fi movie. The 3-D sound is so close it feels like it's inside your ears while also in front, above and behind them.

Noveto expects the device will have plenty of practical uses, from allowing office workers to listen to music or conference calls without interrupting colleagues to letting someone play a game, movie or music without disturbing their significant others.

The lack of headphones means it's possible to hear other sounds in the room clearly.

The technology uses a 3-D sensing module and locates and tracks the ear position sending audio via ultrasonic waves to create sound pockets by the user's ears. Sound can be heard in stereo or a spatial 3-D mode that creates 360 degree sound around the listener, the company said.

In 2018, a new aurora-like discovery struck the world. From 2015 to 2016, citizen scientists reported 30 instances of a purple ribbon in the sky, with a green picket fence structure underneath. Now named STEVE, or Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, this phenomenon is still new to scientists, who are working to understand all its details. What they do know is that STEVE is not a normal aurora - some think maybe it's not an aurora at all - and a new finding about the formation of streaks within the structure brings scientists one step closer to solving the mystery.

"Often in physics, we build our understanding then test the extreme cases or test the cases in a different environment," Elizabeth MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explains. "STEVE is different than the usual aurora, but it is made of light and it is driven by the auroral system. In finding these tiny little streaks, we may be learning something fundamentally new in how green auroral light can be produced."

These "tiny little streaks" are extraordinarily small point-like features within the green picket fence of STEVE. In a new paper for AGU Advances, researchers share their latest findings on these points. They suggest the streaks could be moving points of light - elongated in the images due to blur from the cameras. The tip of the streak in one image will line up with the end of the tail in the next image, contributing to this speculation from the scientists. However, there are still a lot of questions to be answered - determining whether the green light is a point or indeed a line, is one extra clue to help scientists figure out what causes green light.

"I'm not entirely sure about anything with respect to this phenomenon just yet," Joshua Semeter, a professor at Boston University and first author on the paper, said. "You have other sequences where it looks like there is a tube-shaped structure that persists from image to image and doesn't seem to conform to a moving point source, so we're not really sure about that yet."