Science & TechnologyS


Magic Wand

Invisibility cloak one step closer, scientists say

Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device.

One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index.

The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.

Key

MBTA Fare Card Hacked, MIT Students Claim

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has obtained a temporary restraining order barring three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from showing what they claim is a way to get "free subway rides for life."

Robot

Military use of robots increases



Robot
©WUSTL News
Robots are increasingly taking over more soldier duties in Iraq and Afghanistan, with predictions that as much as 30 percent of the U.S. Army will be robotic by 2020. WUSTL computer scientists who work on robots say the machines still need the human touch.

War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though - it is Packbot from the iRobot Corporation.

Meteor

Howard Hughes' Nightmare: Space May Be Filled With Germs



Comet
©NASA
Bacteria, known to be capable of thriving in extremely harsh environments, could have traveled through space on comets. If even one microbe survived space travel to Earth, it would be enough to start a colony on our planet.

Fans of extraterrestrial life may have been disappointed when internet-fed rumors of Martian life ended in a NASA press conference on soil composition.

But they can take solace in a newly popular theory that suggests the rest of space may teem with microbes.

This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria.

Crusader

UK: Companies Struggle to Protect Data

A staggering 94 percent of companies admit that they are powerless to prevent confidential data from leaving their company by e-mail, according to a new study from Mimecast.

The survey was carried out by Emedia on behalf of the e-mail management provider, and interviewed 125 IT managers in the United Kingdom.

It found that only 6 percent of respondents were confident that anyone attempting to send confidential information by e-mail out of the organization, would be prevented from doing so.

Meteor

Perseid meteor shower come thither

I always look forward to August.

For one thing, the searing desert heat where I live is almost at an end. For another, the skies are particularly generous with their offerings.

But my favorite reason for enjoying August is that I get to write a word I can use only once a year: "Thither."

It comes up every year around this time because it's when we're approaching the annual Perseid meteor shower. It was the ancient Chinese who first documented this shower in the year 36 and wrote, "more than 100 meteors flew thither in the morning." Of course, they used a corresponding word in Chinese, but you get the idea.

Sherlock

2.5 million-year-old mastodon unearthed in Romania

Miners in Romania have unearthed the skeleton of a 2.5 million-year-old mastodon, believed to be one of the best preserved in Europe, a local official said Friday.

They stumbled on the remains of the mammoth-like animal during excavations in June at a coal mine in the village of Racosul de Sus, around 100 miles (170 kilometers) northwest of Bucharest, according to Laszlo Demeter, a historian and local councilor.

"This is one of the most spectacular finds in Europe," paleontologist Vlad Codrea, who examined the skeleton, told The Associated Press. "For Romania it is unique."

Magnify

Fingerprints Now Used to Find Drugs, Explosives

WASHINGTON - Scientists have found ways to tease even more clues out of fingerprints' tell-tale marks - one in a string of developments that gives modern forensics even better ways to solve mysteries like the anthrax attacks or JonBenet Ramsey's murder.

For example, if a person handled cocaine, explosives or other materials, there could be enough left in a fingerprint to identify them, says chemist R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Frog

The Reason More of Today's Scientists Hire Armed Guards

Over the past three decades, archaeologists, animal behaviors, botanists and others have had to curtail their research, or step right into the conflict, to do their work. It's no longer just about science, it's also about politics, poverty and diplomacy, subjects they don't teach in graduate school.

Image
©Unknown
Meredith F. Small, Live Science's Human Nature Columnist

Magnify

Fingerprint Test Tells What a Person Has Touched

With a new analytical technique, a fingerprint can now reveal much more than the identity of a person. It can now also identify what the person has been touching: drugs, explosives or poisons, for example.

Writing in Friday's issue of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how a laboratory technique, mass spectrometry, could find a wider application in crime investigations.