The swirling Arabesque ceramic tiles used in medieval Islamic mosaics and architecture were produced using geometry not understood in the West until the 1970s, a new study suggests.
The inlaid patterned tiles grace the walls of many structures worldwide, in patterns of mind-boggling intricacy called "girih." Historians have always assumed that medieval architects meticulously developed the patterns with basic tools.
But manuals written by the architects to share tricks of the trade actually include model tiles - like geometrical tracings - that helped lay out the complex "girih" designs [image] on a large scale, researchers discovered recently. The efficient system eventually allowed artisans to produce "quasicrystalline" wall patterns - a concept that was discovered by Western mathematicians just three decades ago.
Paul Rincon
BBC NewsFri, 23 Feb 2007 09:44 UTC
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| ©Livermore National Laboratory
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| Stages in the penetration of an aluminium target by the Solid State Heat Capacity Laser (SSHCL). The time between frames is 167 milliseconds.
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A laser developed for military use is a few steps away from hitting a power threshold thought necessary to turn it into a battlefield weapon.
DNA, perhaps the oldest data storage medium, could become the newest as scientists report progress toward using DNA to store text, images, music and other digital data inside the genomes of living organisms.
In a report scheduled for the April 9 issue of ACS' Biotechnology Progress, a bi-monthly journal, Masaru Tomita and colleagues in Japan point out that DNA has been attracting attention as perhaps the ultimate in permanent data storage.
Data encoded in an organism's DNA, and inherited by each new generation, could be safely archived for hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers state. In contrast, CD-ROMs, flash memory and hard disk drives can easily fall victim to accidents or natural disasters.
Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists.
Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists.
Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that "learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner".
The 2.3m euros scheme will last for three years.
Relatively calm weather was the standard forecast for the Sun, which is near the end of another 11-year solar cycle, but raging solar storms just spotted at its south pole now tell a different story.
At the start of a solar cycle, sunspots-regions on the Sun marked by cooler temperatures and intense magnetic activity-tend to appear near the poles and move towards the equator as the cycle concludes.
Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.
ScentaFri, 23 Feb 2007 12:42 UTC
That's the conclusion of research by University of Leeds exercise physiologist Dr Harry Rossiter.
Dr Rossiter measured the metabolic rates of modern athletes rowing a reconstruction of an Athenian trireme, a 37m long warship powered by 170 rowers seated in three tiers.
Using portable metabolic analysers, he measured the energy consumption of a sample of the athletes powering the ship over a range of different speeds to estimate the efficiency of the human engine of the warship.
By comparing these findings to classical texts that record details of their endurance, he realised that the rowers of ancient Athens - around 500BC - would had to have been highly elite athletes, even by modern day standards.
THE survival techniques of West African chimpanzees have revealed that the first human weapons may have been developed by women.
The use of spears and axes to hunt and kill is commonly thought to have been pioneered among humanity's ancestors by males, but research has indicated weapons may have been a female invention that compensated for their lesser size and strength.
XinhuaFri, 23 Feb 2007 11:00 UTC
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside the solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres, NASA announced Wednesday.
The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated.
Half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures, scientists have warned.
Losing this linguistic diversity will be a blow not only for cultural studies but also for cognitive science, they say. The only option is to record and catalogue these languages before they disappear for good, say the researchers, who gathered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, Washington, to issue the warning.
Some 6800 "unique" languages are thought to exist today. But social, demographic and political factors are all contributing to the rapid disappearance of many mother tongues.
