Science & TechnologyS


Pills

Motorola reveals stomach-acid tablet which turns your entire body into a walking authentication token

Madison Ruppert
Endthelie.com
Sun, 02 Jun 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© AllThingsD video
Regina Dugan, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and current head of Google-owned Motorola's research division, introduced a prototype "vitamin authentication" tablet which turns your entire body into a walking authentication token.

"We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA," Dugan said. Indeed, DARPA has been involved in everything from weaponized hallucinations to tiny spy computers to military human enhancements to automated drone-borne targeting and tracking systems to linking rat brains over the internet and much more.

Forget traditional usernames and passwords, this technology unveiled at D11 uses a tiny stomach acid-powered tablet to produce an 18-bit signal which can be detected by outside devices and used for authentication.

Dugan also showed off wearable electronic tattoos produced by a company called MC10, in partnership with Motorola, which serve a similar function.

The rationale behind these technologies, according to Dugan, is the annoyances caused by traditional authentication.

"Authentication is irritating," Dugan said. "After 40 years of advances in computation, we're still authenticating basically the same way we did years ago."
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Sun

Do 'magnetized plasma super-tornadoes' heat Sun's atmosphere?

Lawrence LeBlond
redOrbit.com
Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00 UTC
son
© Photos.com
An international team of researchers have discovered enormous tornadoes in space, more than a thousand miles wide, that could quite possibly be heating the surface of the Sun to more than a million degrees centigrade, a finding that has possible implications for clean Earth energy.

These super tornadoes - which are thousands of times larger and immensely more powerful than anything seen on Earth - twist at speeds beyond 6,000 miles per hour within the Sun's atmosphere.

The discovery may explain why the atmosphere around the Sun is much hotter than its surface, which has puzzled scientists previously. They believe the solar tornadoes carry energy from the energy reservoir below the Sun's surface (the convection zone) to the outer atmosphere in the form of magnetic waves.

The scientists, who estimate that there are as many as 11,000 of these supermassive twisters swirling above the Sun's atmosphere, are hoping that these magnetic tornadoes could form a basis for clean reactors here on Earth. This could be a major step forward in the field of plasma-astrophysics, according to the scientists.

Comment: Update June 3, 2013: The original video published with this article was a brief excerpt from a Weather Channel TV program on solar tornadoes speculating about what it might be like if one of these were to take place on Earth. Since there is no evidence that such a thing has ever happened, we decided instead to replace it with the above explanatory content on the real and documented solar tornadoes.

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Evil Rays

Geomagnetic storm of an "unknown source"


Spaceweather.com
Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:11 UTC
A G2-class (Kp=6) geomagnetic storm is in progress following the arrival of an interplanetary shock wave on May 31st. The source of the shock is not known; it might have been a minor CME that left the sun without drawing attention to itself. The impact sparked auroras across many northern-tier US states. This photo, for instance, comes from Christopher Griffith in Baxter, Minnesota:
Image
© Christopher Griffith
"I wasn't expecting to see any lights, but right before the midnight it broke loose and the sky lit up," says Griffith. "Sadly the clouds quickly filled in my little window, and the auroras were gone. Just thankful for what I got so see!" Elsewhere in the USA, auroras were sighted as far south as Colorado, Maryland, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska.
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Snow Globe

400-year-old frozen moss brought back to life in scientist's lab

Sheila Pratt
Edmonton Journal
Tue, 28 May 2013 05:30 UTC
Image
© Shaughn Butts , Edmonton JournalUniversity of Alberta Professor Catherine La Farge has grown moss from a 400-year-old specimen discovered frozen under an Arctic glacier.
In Arctic summers, Catherine La Farge camps out at the toe of the Teardrop glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada's North.

The University of Alberta biologist has watched the ice retreat, up to four metres a year now, giving her an unprecedented view of what was entombed under the ice for 400 years - old rocks, mud, and her specialty, ancient moss.

One day, walking along the edge of the ice, La Farge noticed some of the moss had a greenish tinge. That gave her a hunch - could there be life in that old moss after all?

In an amazing experiment, La Farge found the frozen moss was able to revive itself though it had been buried since the Little Ice Age (1550-1850). Her study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is shaking up some basic assumptions about land plants.

In the past, when scientists occasionally came across plant material previously frozen under an Arctic glacier, they assumed the plant material was dead. Discoloured and lifeless, it certainly looked like it was.
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Info

Russians find mammoth carcass with liquid blood


News Daily
Thu, 30 May 2013 12:07 UTC
Russian scientists find mammoth carcass with liquid blood, raising hopes for cloning

Russian researchers say they have discovered a perfectly preserved woolly mammoth carcass with liquid blood on a remote Arctic island, fueling hopes of cloning the Ice Age animal.

They say the frozen remains of a female mammoth were so well-preserved that blood was found in ice cavities when they were broken up.

Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the Mammoth Museum who led the expedition, said Thursday the carcass was preserved because its lower part was stuck in pure ice. He said the find could provide scientific material for cloning a mammoth.

Wooly mammoths are thought to have died out about 10,000 years ago. Scientists have deciphered much of the animals' genetic code from their hair, and some believe it's possible to clone them if living cells are found.

Source: Associated Press
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Fireball 5

NASA identifies 28 new asteroid families


Press Trust India
Thu, 30 May 2013 14:38 UTC
Asteroids
© WISEAstronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have identified 28 new families of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

An asteroid family is formed when a collision breaks apart a large parent body into fragments of various sizes. Some collisions leave giant craters. For example, the asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere was excavated by two large impacts.

Other smash-ups are catastrophic, shattering an object into numerous fragments. The cast-off pieces move together in packs, travelling on the same path around the Sun, but over time the pieces become more and more spread out.

"We're separating zebras from the gazelles," said Joseph Masiero of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study.

"Before, asteroid family members were harder to tell apart because they were travelling in nearby packs. But now we have a better idea of which asteroid belongs to which family," Masiero said in a statement.
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Fireball 2

NASA radar reveals asteroid 1998 QE2 has its own moon


Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA
Thu, 30 May 2013 14:27 UTC
1998 QE2
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSRFirst radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 were obtained when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth.
Pasadena, California -- A sequence of radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 was obtained on the evening of May 29, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth, which is 15.6 lunar distances.

The radar imagery revealed that 1998 QE2 is a binary asteroid. In the near-Earth population, about 16 percent of asteroids that are about 655 feet (200 meters) or larger are binary or triple systems. Radar images suggest that the main body, or primary, is approximately 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) in diameter and has a rotation period of less than four hours. Also revealed in the radar imagery of 1998 QE2 are several dark surface features that suggest large concavities. The preliminary estimate for the size of the asteroid's satellite, or moon, is approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide. The radar collage covers a little bit more than two hours.

The radar observations were led by scientist Marina Brozovic of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Fireball 4

Alberta couple's retirement project shakes up debate about ancient impact from space

Scott Sutherland
Geekquinox
Wed, 29 May 2013 19:16 UTC
Impact Event
© Getty, YDB Research GroupThere's new evidence of a comet impact 13,000 years ago.
Some retirees golf. Some dream of buying a boat and sailing the world. Anton and Maria Chobot spent 30 years of their retirement digging up artifacts of the Clovis culture on their property near Buck Lake, Alberta, and now, they may have provided some of the evidence needed to settle a long debate in the science community.

Roughly 13,000 years ago, something touched off the 'Big Freeze' - a 1,300-year-long cold snap formally called the Younger Dryas stadial - that caused major climate changes and droughts.

These have been blamed for the extinction of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and also the downfall of the ancient Clovis culture. However, what that something was has been debated for years.

One idea that's proven popular over the years is that a meteorite or comet struck the planet, somewhere around what is now Hudson Bay. However, if something big enough to melt the Laurentide ice sheet had hit the planet there should have been some indication of it, in the form of a crater, or shocked and melted rocks, or 'impact spherules'. And, until recently, the evidence was lacking.
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Info

This bacterium-sized bunny could be the future of bionic brains

Rose Pastore
PopSci
Wed, 29 May 2013 16:30 UTC
Microscopic Bunny
© Yuya Daicho, Terumasa Murakami, Tsuneo Hagiwara, and Shoji MaruoMicroscopic bunny created with a new type of conductive resin.
Scientists in Japan have created a new material that can be shaped into complex, conductive 3-D structures. Get ready for your custom brain electrodes.

The rabbit sculpture above is the size of a typical bacterium and is made of a new type of resin that has exciting implications for bionic implants. Developed by researchers in Japan, the resin allows scientists to mold highly conductive, complex 3-D structures at the microscopic level.

The scientists began with a problem: In order to make a tiny resin sculpture into an electrode (which, for example, could be implanted into the brain to treat epilepsy), scientists bake it at high temperatures, which turns its surface into carbon. The "carbonizing" process makes the resin more conductive, but it also wrecks the sculpture's shape, warping it into more of a blob (not so good if you're trying to create a delicate, precise medical implant).
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Laptop

Advanced biological computer developed


sciencedaily.com
Wed, 29 May 2013 14:41 UTC
Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations. The breakthrough might someday create new possibilities in biotechnology, including individual gene therapy and cloning.

Image
© Giovanni Cancemi / FotoliaMicroprocessor with DNA (illustration). Scientists have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations
The findings appear today (May 23, 2013) in Chemistry & Biology(Cell Press).

Interest in such biomolecular computing devices is strong, mainly because of their ability (unlike electronic computers) to interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.
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