Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference

Trent Perrotto
NASA.gov
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:15 UTC
NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

The news conference will originate from NASA Headquarters' television studio, 300 E St. SW in Washington and carried live on NASA TV.

Media representatives may attend the conference, join by phone or ask questions from participating NASA locations. To RSVP or obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at: trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov by 10 a.m. EST on Nov. 15. Reporters wishing to attend the conference in-person must have a valid press credential for access. Non-U.S. media also must bring passports.
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Sun

Sunspot 1123 Hurls Filament toward Earth


NASA.gov
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 16:47 UTC
Image
© SDO/HMINew sunspot 1123 in the Sun's southern hemisphere is crackling with C-class solar flares.
Coronagraph images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft show a faint coronal mass ejection emerging from the blast site and heading off in a direction just south of the sun-Earth line.

The cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field sometime on Nov. 14th or 15th. High latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras on those dates.
Image
© NASA/SDOThis image from the three and a half hour time lapse movie of the flare and filament event.
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Info

J-Pop Star (and 3-D Hologram) Hatsune Miku Sells Out Stadiums

Terrence O'Brien
Switched
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:00 UTC
Hatsune Miku
© Switched.comHatsune Miku
Hatsune Miku has topped the pop charts in Japan, sold out stadium concerts and become a legitimate cultural phenomenon. The interesting thing is that Miku doesn't exist -- at least not in any traditional sense of the word. Miku is a computer-generated avatar that performs songs with the help of a live band. But unlike say, Gorillaz, a cartoon band that merely serves as the public face of an artistic collective, everything about Miku comes from a computer. She is the product of a company called Crypton Future Media, which synthesizes Miku's voice using Yamaha's Vocaloid software.

Creating the character -- which appears as a girl with blue pigtails and a cyberpunk version of the traditional Japanese school-girl uniform -- was a meticulous process. First, the creators recorded voice actress Saki Fujita making individual phonetic sounds at a specific pitch and tone. Then, they recombined the samples and fed them through the synthesis software to produce an almost endless number of words and sounds. Users can actually purchase a copy of Miku to run on their home PCs, and have her perform songs of their own creation.
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Book

How Reading Rewires the Brain

Greg Miller
Science NOW
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:15 UTC
Image
© S. Dehaene et al./Science Reading lesson. A new study identifies several brain regions (colored areas) that respond more strongly to text in people who can read.
Written language poses a puzzle for neuroscientists. Unlocking the meaning in a string of symbols requires complex neural circuitry. Yet humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years - too short for major evolutionary changes. Instead, reading likely depends on circuits that originally evolved for other purposes. But which ones?

To investigate, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, teamed up with colleagues in France, Belgium, Portugal, and Brazil to scan the brains of 63 volunteers, including 31 who learned to read in childhood, 22 who learned as adults, and 10 who were illiterate. Those who could read, regardless of when they learned, exhibited more vigorous responses to written words in several areas of the brain that process what we see, the group reports online today in Science.

Based on previous work, Dehaene has argued that one of these areas, at the junction of the left occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, is especially important for reading. In literate, but not illiterate, people, written words also triggered brain activity in parts of the left temporal lobe that respond to spoken language. That suggests that reading utilizes brain circuits that evolved to support spoken language, a much older innovation in human communication, Dehaene says.
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Black Cat

Cats' Tongues Employ Tricky Physics

Gisela Telis
Science NOW
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:39 UTC
Image
© Amy DuffieldTricky tongue. Jasper, and all other cats, drink water in a very unusual way.
Cats like to do things their own way - even, it seems, when it comes to drinking. Researchers have discovered that felines have their own style of lapping water. Their tongues perform a complex maneuver that pits gravity versus inertia in a delicate balance.

Surprisingly little is known about the physics of lapping. Dogs and many other animals with incomplete cheeks - who can't seal their mouths like we do to produce suction - lap up water by curling their tongues into a ladlelike shape and scooping up the liquid. Most researchers assumed felines do the same, albeit with much smaller, raspier tongues. But Roman Stocker, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, began to doubt this assumption one morning over breakfast. He watched his cat Cutta Cutta lap water from a bowl and began to wonder if there was more to her dainty drinking than met his eye.
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Sun

Northern Lights and John Lennon


Space Weather
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:10 UTC
A solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic field and stirring up auroras around the Arctic Circle. A beacon of light from the John Lennon memorial Imagine Peace Tower pointed to the display over Reykjavik, Iceland, on Nov 11th:

Image
© Marketa Stanczykova
"The combination of the beacon and the Northern Lights resembled a beautiful flower in the sky--[a nice tribute to Lennon]," says photographer Marketa Stanczykova.

High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras as the solar wind continues to blow.
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Control Panel

Study Provides Evidence for Precognition

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:29 UTC
Image
© Shutter Stock
Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition - knowledge of unpredictable future events - for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."
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Bad Guys

Drones that can see, hear and ... smell?

W.J. Hennigan
LA Times
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:52 UTC
Global Hawk
© Associated Press / John Schwab/U.S. Air ForceAn Air Force Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle lands at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville, California.
Drones have been called the most hotly sought-after weapon system in a generation, but the robotic planes' primary role is to gather intelligence for the military.

The high-powered cameras that are slung underneath the planes allow soldiers on the ground to know what's over a hill or what's happening miles down the road: Spotting ambushes before they happen, noticing bombs along the side of the road, and observing bands of insurgents dug in along the mountainside.

But new sensors are being developed to enable flying drones to "listen in" on cellphone conversations and pinpoint the location of the caller on the ground. Some can even "smell" the air and sniff out chemical plumes emanating from a potential underground nuclear laboratory.
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Bug

Genetically altered mosquitoes released into the wild


New Scientist
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:55 UTC
mosquitoe
© CDC/Phanie/Rex FeaturesNo offspring for you

An outdoor trial of mosquitoes genetically engineered to sabotage Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue fever, has been declared a success by scientists in the field.

The trial is first time genetically modified mosquitoes have been released in the wild. The strategy promises to provide a new weapon against dengue, a disease that infects 50 million people annually and kills 25,000. In the past year, dengue has reappeared in the US for the first time in 65 years, and in southern Europe.

By the end of the six-month trial on a 16-hectare plot, populations of the native insects, which spread the dengue virus had plummeted.

"It's a proof of principle, that it works," says Angela Harris of the Mosquito Control and Research Unit on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, where the trial took place. The MCRU conducted the trial with Oxitec, the company in Oxford, UK, that bred the GM mosquitoes.
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Syringe

Muscle Injury in Mice Repaired with Stem Cell Transplant

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:57 UTC
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© 188.pair.comStem Cells
Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have found that loss of muscle function and mass, which is a result of aging, can be prevented by transplanting certain types of stem cells into the legs of mice.

Bradley Olwin, study leader and professor of CU-Boulder's molecular, cellular and developmental biology department, along with co-authors John K. Hall, Glen Banks and Jeffrey Chamberlain, have discovered that mice with limb muscle injuries can be repaired by injecting muscle stem cells from donor mice into the leg muscle.

Olwin and his team made the discovery by drawing between 10 and 50 stem cells as well as attached myofibers, which are individual skeletal muscles, from healthy three-month old mice, and transplanted the stem cells into three-month-old injured mice. These muscle stem cells were found in populations of satellite cells, which repair and maintain skeletal muscles and are located between muscle fibers and nearby connective tissue.
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