Science & TechnologyS


Eye 2

Northrop Grumman-Led Team Awarded Contract to Develop Electronic Binoculars That Use Brain Activity to Detect Threats


Northrop Grumman Corp
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:18 UTC
An academic and industrial consortium led by Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been awarded the first phase of an advanced research contract to develop a panoramic day/night optical system that will utilize human brain activity to detect, analyze and alert foot-soldiers to possible threats.

Awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program, or CT2WS, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense's effort to address a key mission need and represents a significant leap forward in technology from that available today.

Comment: Feel safe yet?

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Ark

Students catalog tepee rings where ancient tribes lived

Lorna hackeray
The Billings Gazette
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:08 UTC
Looters and collectors got there first in almost every case, but enough evidence may remain in the hundreds of tepee rings that cover Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area to fill information gaps 10,000 years wide.
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Hourglass

Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Dr Chris Lintott
BBC
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:22 UTC
A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.
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Telescope

NASA set to launch gamma-ray observatory

Sandra Frederick
News Journal Online
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:10 UTC
On any given night, the naked eye can see a dark sky peppered with stars as the moon beams brightly back at Earth. Look closer and it is easy to pick out constellations -- the Little Dipper and nearby, the Big Dipper -- and perhaps, the international space station taking a sweep across the United States.

But as much as we can envision the night sky here on Earth, there is another unseen one in deep space -- the gamma ray version where no human eye can scan its contents.
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Display

Computer Literacy Tests: Are You Human?

Lev Grossman
Time
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:13 UTC
Every web surfer, in the course of his or her browsing, has been forced to stop and perform this weird little task: look at a picture of some wavy, ghostly, distorted letters and type them into a box. Sometimes you flub it and have to retype the letters, but otherwise you don't think about it much. That string of letters has a name; it's called a CAPTCHA. And it's a test. By correctly transcribing it, you have proved to the computer that you are a human being.

Image
©Peter J. Ahlberg
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Bug

Honeybee Dance Breaks Down Cultural Barrier


Science Daily
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:32 UTC
Asian and European honeybees can learn to understand one another's dance languages despite having evolved different forms of communication, an international research team has shown for the first time.

Image
©Su et al. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002365.g001
The yellow circle indicates the Acc queen. Blue and green arrows indicate Aml and Acc workers, respectively. The mixed-species colony was organized as follows: we put two sealed Aml brood frames with about 5,000 pupae into a healthy Acc colony containing two frames, honey, pollen, brood, ~5,000 workers and one queen. The mixed-species colony had around 5,000 workers each of Acc and Aml after 12 days.
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Info

Why Cells Starved Of Iron Burn More Glucose


Science Daily
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:26 UTC
Duke University Medical Center scientists have found a mechanism that allows cells starved of iron to shut down energy-making processes that depend on iron and use a less efficient pathway involving glucose. This metabolic reshuffling mechanism, found in yeast cells, helps explain how humans respond to iron deficiency, and may help with diabetes research as well.
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Telescope

Mars lander struggles to get dirt into onboard lab

Dan Whitcomb
News Daily
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:45 UTC
NASA scientists struggled on Monday to process the soil that the Phoenix Mars Lander scooped from the Red Planet's surface, finding that the Martian dirt was too clumpy to sift into the spacecraft's onboard laboratory.

The scientists called it an important day last week when the Phoenix's robotic arm scraped its first, cup-sized sample from the planet's surface, but since then have been unable to get any of the clotted soil through a screen into the lander's Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA).

"What we've found is although we had an awful lot of dirt on that screen virtually none of its has made it down into the oven," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is overseeing the TEGA experiments.

The mission is searching for signs of water or conditions that could sustain life on Mars.
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Info

Brain Pathway That Shuts Down Seizures Identified


Science Daily
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:37 UTC
Researchers at the University of Iowa and the Veterans Affairs Iowa City Health Care System have uncovered a brain pathway that shuts down seizures.

The multidisciplinary team of scientists pieced together information from clinical observations made in the first half of the 20th century with knowledge from modern genetics and molecular biology to show that an acid-activated ion channel in the brain reacts to a drop in pH (increased acid) in a way that shuts down seizure activity.

The link between low pH in the brain and seizure termination was first hinted at nearly 80 years ago when clinical experiments showed that breathing carbon dioxide, which makes brain tissue more acidic, helps stop epileptic seizures. Subsequent studies in the 1950s found that seizures themselves reduce brain pH. However, it was the modern discovery of an acid-activated ion channel (ASIC1a) in the brain that provided the key to the UI discovery, which is reported in Nature Neuroscience Advance Online Publication on June 8.

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Info

'Cursus' Is Older Than Stonehenge


Science Daily
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:07 UTC
A team led by University of Manchester archaeologist Professor Julian Thomas has dated the Greater Stonehenge Cursus at about 3,500 years BC - 500 years older than the circle itself.

Cursus antler pick
©University of Manchester
The recently discovered antler pick used to dig the Cursus.

They were able to pinpoint its age after discovering an antler pick used to dig the Cursus - the most significant find since it was discovered in 1723 by antiquarian William Stukeley.

When the pick was carbon dated the results pointed to an age which was much older than previously thought - between 3600 and 3300 BC - and has caused a sensation among archeologists.

The dig took place last summer in a collaborative project run by five British universities and funded by the Arts and Histories Research Council and the National Geographic Society.

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