Currently, the Navy has 129 ships with 430 gas-turbine engines that burn $2 billion of fuel annually

The U.S. Navy is working on new technology for its gas-turbine engines in order to decrease fuel consumption without sacrificing performance.

The answer, according to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), is equipping current gas-turbine engines with Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE) technology. These engines could not only efficiently provide propulsion for Navy planes and ships, but also create electricity for an all-electric propulsion system.

The Navy currently uses gas-turbine engines that are based on the Brayton thermodynamic cycle, where air is compressed, combined with fuel, combusted at a constant pressure and expanded. This allows for propulsion or generating electricity, just like the RDEs. However, the Brayton cycle is less efficient than the detonation cycle.

The Chandra X-ray Telescope has puzzled astronomers with the discovery of abnormally high temperatures at the core of the Milky Way.

A news release announcing this image of the center of the Milky Way stated that the X-ray spectrum of the gases is consistent with a cloud of "hot gas" that varies from 10 million degrees Celsius to as much as 100 million degrees. This result was unexpected and difficult to explain.

According to consensus opinions, shock waves from supernova explosions are the most likely explanation for heating the 10 million degree gas, but no one can explain how the 100 million degree gas is heated. "Ordinary" supernova explosions are not sufficiently powerful, and heating by high-energy particles produces the wrong X-ray spectrum.

Another Chandra image of the star cluster Trumpler 14 shows about 1600 stars and a diffuse glow from hot multimillion degree X-ray producing gas. Any material that has a temperature of millions of degrees is not a gas - it is a plasma.

Brain's code for visual working memory deciphered in monkeys -- NIH-funded study.

The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object.

Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, a grantee of NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and colleagues, report their findings Nov. 1, 2012, online, in the journal Science Express.

"This work demonstrates, for the first time, that there is information about short term memories reflected in in-sync brainwaves," explained Gray.

"The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain. This study provides more evidence that large scale electrical oscillations across distant brain regions may carry information for visual memories," said NIMH director Thomas R. Insel, M.D.

Following our team's detection of a fragmentation event with comet 168P/Hergenrother on October 26, 2012, we requested via the Faulkes Telescope Education project that further observations be taken. Today, two UK Schools using the Faulkes Telescope kindly assisted in obtaining additional observations for us. The two schools (Queens College and the Dollar Academy) performed follow-up observations of this comet on 2012, Nov. 2.4, remotely through the 2m, f/10 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of Faulkes Telescope North (Haleakala).

Stacking of 26 R-filtered exposures, 35-sec each, obtained remotely, from the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on 2012, Nov. 2.4, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD, under good seeing conditions, confirms the presence of a secondary nucleus, or fragment, now placed about 3.3" in PA 165 with respect to the main central condensation of comet 168P. This fragment is now fainter, compared to our previous Oct. 26.4 detection, having R magnitude about 18.7; its diameter is still about 2", but now it appears more diffuse, without a clear central condensation (this hampers a precise determination of its photocenter). This fragment appears to have developed its own tail, nearly 4" long in PA 113 (about parallel to the main tail originating from the central condensation of 168P).

Below you can see our rendition of today imaging session. Through some image processing, the tail of the fragment became easily visible.

The strange behaviour of spacecraft as they fly past Earth has astrophysicists scratching their heads. Now space scientists are developing a mission that could measure the phenomenon in detail

Last year, physicists solved one of the great problems in modern space science--the Pioneer anomaly. This leaves them free concentrate on another myserious phenomenon associated with spacecraft trajectory.

Space scientists first become aware of it in 1990 when NASA's Galileo spacecraft swung past Earth en route to a gravitational slingshot towards Jupiter.

As they examiend the data afterwards they discovered that the spacecraft's speed suddenly jumped by 4 mm per second during the flyby.

The change attracted little attention at the time. But when a similar thing happened during flybys of the NEAR, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft, astrophysicists began to sit up and take notice.

Nobody knows what could cause a sudden step change in momentum. But the prospect that this may be new physics has attracted an increasingly interested group of astrophyscists. We've looked at various explanations on this blog here, here and here.

Vision may be less important to "seeing" than is the brain's ability to process points of light into complex images, according to a new study of the fruit fly visual system currently published in the online journal Nature Communications.

University of Virginia researchers have found that the very simple eyes of fruit fly larvae, with only 24 total photoreceptors (the human eye contains more than 125 million), provide just enough light or visual input to allow the animal's relatively large brain to assemble that input into images.

"It blows open how we think about vision," said Barry Condron, a neurobiologist in U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, who oversaw the study. "This tells us that visual input may not be as important to sight as the brain working behind it. In this case, the brain apparently is able to compensate for the minimal visual input."

Condron's graduate students, Elizabeth Daubert, Nick Macedonia and Catherine Hamilton, conducted a series of experiments to test the vision of fruit fly larvae after they noticed an interesting behavior of the animals during a different study of the nervous system. They found that when a larva was tethered to the bottom of a petri dish, other larvae were attracted to it as it wiggled attempting to free itself.

The animals apparently saw the writhing motion and were attracted to it, willingly traveling toward it. After several further experiments to understand how they sensed the motion, the researchers learned that the nearly blind animals likely were seeing the action, by wagging their heads side-to-side in a scanning motion to detect it, rather than by only hearing it or feeling vibration or by smelling the trapped larva. This was a surprise because of the very simple and limited vision of fruit fly larvae.

In the film Avatar, humans are linked to genetically engineered bodies so they can communicate more easily with the alien Na'vi. A group of computer scientists in the U.K. is making that a reality - - but with rats.

The team, based at University College London and the University of Barcelona, used a system of movement-tracking software, cameras and laptops, along with a virtual-reality headset. The set-up also included a rat in a pen.

To interact with the rat, a person puts on the VR headset and sees a virtual room. A camera with tracking software picks up the user's movements and duplicates them in a virtual room. Meanwhile another camera looks at the rat. In the virtual room, the (human) user sees another person, which is the avatar of the rat.

As the rat moves, so does its avatar. The tracking software picks up both the movement of the rat around its pen and where its face is pointing and duplicates that in the virtual environment. So the human user sees a person running around the room, with his or her face pointing in the same direction as the rat's is.

Civil liberties fears as eavesdropping agency recruits maths, physics and computing experts to analyse social networks

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest: all of them could be the source of valuable intelligence that the UK's intelligence agencies want to know about - and now government eavesdropping and security agency GCHQ is developing new tools to sift through them for nuggets of useful data.

The Cheltenham-based organisation is recruiting maths, physics and computing experts to devise groundbreaking algorithms that will automatically extract information from huge volumes of speech, text and image content gathered "across the full range of modern communications media".

After you roll your clocks back by an hour this Sunday, you may feel a bit bleary, maybe even disoriented. That's because your body has its own network of tiny, coordinated biological clocks. These clocks are responsible for our circadian rhythms, the roughly 24-hour cycles of physical, mental and behavioral changes that influence sleep patterns, hormone release, body temperature, hunger and more.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health are identifying the genes and proteins that run biological clocks and figuring out exactly how they help keep daily rhythms in synch. This knowledge could aid the development of remedies for a range of clock-related disorders, from insomnia and jet lag to diabetes.

A zoo elephant in South Korea, can speak Korean out loud, researchers say. The pachyderm is capable of saying "hello," "good," "no," "sit down" and "lie down" - all by using its trunk to do the work of lips in a process scientists don't fully understand.

The elephant likely does not understand the actual meaning of what he says, researchers said.

Past reports have suggested both African and Asian elephants were capable of vocal mimicry like parrots. African elephants have been known to imitate the sound of truck engines, and a male Asian elephant living in a Kazakhstan zoo was said to utter sounds resembling Russian and Kazakh, but that case was never investigated scientifically.

Scientists investigating an Asian elephant known as Koshik say the beast can imitate human speech, pronouncing words in Korean, and those who know the language can readily understand Koshik. He accomplished this in a very unusual way - using his trunk stuck inside his mouth. [Watch Koshik Speak Korean]


Elephants cannot use their lips to make sounds like humans do, since their upper lips are fused with their noses to form their trunks. Instead, Koshik somehow controls the sounds coming from him by moving his trunk inside his throat.