Science & TechnologyS


Radar

The Russians engineer an ATV that can 'walk on water'

Máté Petrány
Truck Yeah!
Wed, 10 Feb 2016 13:22 UTC
Russia’s SHERP ATV
Russia’s SHERP ATV
Would you like to go wherever the hell you want? Using its self-inflated tires, Russia's SHERP ATV can give you that pleasure. It will climb over obstacles as tall as 27.5 inches, swim with ease, turn like a tank and look awesome in any situation for only $49,000 worth of Rubles.

The SHERP is Alexei Garagashyan's brilliant invention. It weighs just 2,866 pounds dry, so while it might only have a 44.3 horsepower 1.5 liter Kubota V1505 four-cylinder diesel linked to a five-speed manual, it will still do 28 mph on land, or 3.7 mph in water, depending on the wind. It will also crawl at up to 9.3 mph in first gear.

With its giant custom tires and the skid-steer, it can also turn in its own length, which is 11 feet. And as long as the trees ahead are at least 8.2 feet apart, this crazy two seater will find a way through them.
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Wolf

Dialects found to distinguish wolf species

Richard Farrell
Discovery News
Tue, 09 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
wolves howling
© Time Davis/Corbis
Wolf species have distinctive howling repertoires that function like dialects, finds the biggest study ever done on canid howling.

A research team from the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and India ran more than 2,000 different recorded howls from 13 canid species and subspecies (the canid family includes wolves, jackals, and domestic dogs) through a software algorithm that boiled them down to 21 howl types (depending on pitch and other characteristics).

They found that different wolf species use the howl types in ways that are specific to them. Timber wolves, for example, use a preponderance of low, flat howls, as opposed to higher vocals used by red wolves.

The scientists said their findings could aid in conservation efforts. For example, while most of the vocal dialects they studied were distinct enough between species to prevent confusion, a few were so similar that they could help fuel interbreeding between different species.

Comment: Also see Wolves identify each other by howl

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Galaxy

Hundreds of undiscovered galaxies found behind the Milky Way

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Tue, 09 Feb 2016 13:06 UTC
Hidden Galaxies
© ICRARAn annotated artist's impression showing radio waves travelling from the new galaxies, then passing through the Milky Way and arriving at the Parkes radio telescope on Earth (not to scale).
Our Milky Way may be beautiful, but it sure can ruin our view of the cosmos.

Now, astronomers have just taken a peek behind the mess of stars and dust to find a veritable galactic zoo in a previously unexplored region of space. But we're not talking about just one or two galaxies; researchers have applied a new survey technique using the Australia-based Parkes radio telescope to find hundreds of undiscovered galaxies.

"The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," said Lister Staveley-Smith, of The University of Western Australia and International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

A total of 883 galaxies have been identified within 250 million light-years from Earth, a third of which have never been seen before. They are all located in the "Zone of Avoidance", a region of space usually inaccessible to telescopes beyond the Milky Way's galactic bulge.
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Igloo

Mini ice age could be unleashed by a medium-sized asteroid strike

Mike Wall
Live Science
Tue, 09 Feb 2016 12:13 UTC
Asteroids headed toward Earth
© ESA/P. CarrilArtist's illustration of asteroids headed toward Earth.
A strike by a medium-size asteroid could change Earth's climate dramatically for a few years, making life difficult for people around the world, a new study suggests.

Such an impact on land (as opposed to at sea) could cause average global temperatures to plunge to ice age levels and lead to steep drops in precipitation and plant productivity, among other effects, researchers said.

"These would not be pleasant times," Charles Bardeen, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said in December during a presentation at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
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Binoculars

Trees have social networks too

Sally McGrane
New York Times
Fri, 29 Jan 2016 18:53 UTC
Trees
© Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times“When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.” PETER WOHLLEBEN
In the deep stillness of a forest in winter, the sound of footsteps on a carpet of leaves died away. Peter Wohlleben had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. "These trees are friends," he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a gray sky. "You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That's so they don't block their buddy's light."

Before moving on to an elderly beech to show how trees, like people, wrinkle as they age, he added, "Sometimes, pairs like this are so interconnected at the roots that when one tree dies, the other one dies, too."
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Sun

Human cognitive function may be influenced by the seasons


New Scientist
Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
seasonal memory
© Dck Clevastam/PlainpictureDo seasons affect memory?
To everything there is a season - and your brain is no exception.

It's well known that some people report that their mood is influenced by the seasons. But can the time of year affect other cognitive functions?

To find out, Gilles Vandewalle and colleagues at the University of Liege in Belgium scanned the brains of 28 volunteers while they performed attention and working memory tests at different times of the year. To ensure the results were influenced by the seasons rather than the environmental conditions on the test day, the participants were confined to a lab for 4.5 days prior to the test, exposed to a constant light level and temperature.

Although their test scores didn't change with the seasons, activity in some brain areas showed a consistent seasonal pattern among the volunteers: brain activity peaked in the summer on the attention task and in the autumn on the memory task.
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Info

Bacteria in poop reveals how bears hibernate


Science
Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:03 UTC
Bear
© Cephas/Wikimedia Commons
Does a bear poop in the woods? The answer to such an obvious question is of course "yes." Now, bacteria in that poop is revealing how bears hibernate, BBC reports.
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Magic Wand

Mystery of deep-sea 'purple sock' creature solved


BBC News
Mon, 08 Feb 2016 22:28 UTC
Purple sock creature
© Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
The mystery of a deep-sea creature that resembles a discarded purple sock has been solved, scientists report.

The animal, called Xenoturbella, is so bizarre that for 60 years researchers could not work out what it was - or where it fitted into the family tree. But the discovery of four new species in the Pacific has enabled scientists to conclude that this animal belongs to one of the earliest branches of life.

The study is published in the journal Nature. Lead researcher Prof Greg Rouse, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US, said: "Our nickname for them was purple socks. "So if you think of a sock that you have taken off and thrown on the floor - they literally look like that. "Or a deflated balloon."

Xenoturbella was first described in 1949. The ocean oddity has no eyes, no brain and no gut. Just a small gaping mouth from which food goes in - and then waste comes out. Only one species was known, and it left scientists scratching their heads.

Early genetic tests mistakenly placed the marine "sock" as a mollusc. "But, it turned out they had sequenced the DNA of what it eats," explained Prof Rouse. Other researchers thought that it was a once-sophisticated creature that had got rid of all of its complex features as it evolved.
Sock creature
© Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
The discovery of four new species from the depths of Pacific Ocean has allowed scientists to study this animal more closely. With Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), they have been able to film these creatures for the first time. They include a new large specimen, which is more than 20cm-long, which has been called Xenoturbella monstrosa. And also Xenoturbella churro: named after the sweet, fried Spanish pastry, which it resembles - in an admittedly less appetising way.
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Eye 1

Meet Eyeris: DARPA is developing AI drones that think like humans

Cassius Methyl
Era of Wisdom
Mon, 08 Feb 2016 17:30 UTC
drone power
The Pentagon's "mad scientist" division DARPA is trying to replicate the human brain in a microchip, to equip drones or satellites with the ability to quickly sort intelligence and come to conclusions mid-flight.

Normally data acquired from surveillance drones must be sorted out on the ground manually by"hundreds of human analysts," according to Sputnik. The process of gathering and using intelligence is surely more complex than can be easily explained.

What we know is that if successfully developed, these drones will essentially be flying robots of war armed with artificial intelligence. The microchip is dubbed "Eyeriss."
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Info

Memory cells activated more easily when brain is exposed to new information


Science Daily
Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
granual cells brain
© Burgalossi LabGranual cells in the gyrus dentatus of a rat, seen through a fluorescent microscope (light blue).
Tübingen neuroscientists have succeeded in activating dormant memory cells in rats. Using weak electrical impulses targeted at previously inactive cells in the hippocampus, the researchers induced the cells to recognize the exact place where the impulse had been first administered. In rodents as well as humans, the hippocampus is the brain area responsible for memory. Therefore, the new study by researchers of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) at the University of Tübingen offers insight into the question of how memories are formed within our brains. Their findings are published in Current Biology.

Memory is one of the most important functions of our brain. Not only does it allow us to regale our grandchildren with the exploits of our youth; it is essential for many everyday procedures. Our memory is constantly and immediately active whenever we experience a new thing. For instance, after meeting somebody only once, we still recognise them after hours or days. And even when we go somewhere for the first time -- for instance, the perfume section of a department store, a particular office in a building, or the toilet in a restaurant -- we will usually be able to find our way to the exit without a problem.
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