Science & TechnologyS


Sun

COROT directly sees 'Sun-quakes' in other stars for the first time

Star interior
© CNESStar interior
Sounding the Sun through a technique similar to seismology has opened a new era for understanding the Sun's interior. The COROT satellite has now applied this technique to three stars, directly probing the interiors of stars beyond the Sun for the first time.

Display

Google reads brain waves to measure ads on YouTube

Google, along with MediaVest are releasing information about ad quality determined by reading brain waves and psychological responses to ads on video content. This is an interesting idea, and for the most part, it seems like it could be a very accurate way to measure how ads are perceived by viewers.

Yaakov Kimelfeld of MediaVest and Leah Spalding of Google presented in a webinar this morning to share these results. The goal was to measure the impact of YouTube overlay advertisements on attention levels, emotional engagement, and other psychological metrics.

Satellite

Mysterious Cyclones Seen at Both of Saturn's Poles

Saturn's cyclone
© NASA
Saturn boasts cyclones at each of its poles that dramatically outpower Earth-roving hurricanes, new images reveal.

The Cassini spacecraft - a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency - recently peered below what had previously appeared to be isolated cumulus clouds at the planet's south pole.

"What looked like puffy clouds in lower resolution images are turning out to be deep convective structures seen through the atmospheric haze," Cassini imaging team member Tony Del Genio said in a press release.

"One of them has punched through to a higher altitude and created its own little vortex."

Attention

X-rays emitted from ordinary Scotch tape

Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.
Image
© Associated PressThis UCLA Laboratory of Low Temperatures and Acoustics, shows an image of an x-ray made with Scotch tape superimposed on a hand on top of a vacuum chamber with a roll of Scotch tape mounted on ball bearings inside.

Syringe

MPs vote to allow human-animal hybrids



MPs have voted to push back the boundaries of science by allowing radical embryo research including the creation of human-animal hybrids.

Following a landmark Commons vote, Britain will become one of a handful of countries in the world to encourage ground-breaking research by implanting human cells into an egg taken from an animal, usually a rabbit.

Pro-life MPs warned that the step could lead to the creation of half-human, half-ape "humanzees" or "minotaurs" - a claim denied by the Department of Health.

Hybrids - called "admixed embryos" by the scientific community - are banned in at least 21 countries, but scientists believe that they could be used to find cures for dozens of serious conditions, from heart disease to dementia.

Info

'Magnetic Death Star' Fossils: Earlier Global Warming Produced A Whole New Form Of Life

An international team of scientists has discovered microscopic, magnetic fossils resembling spears and spindles, unlike anything previously seen, among sediment layers deposited during an ancient global-warming event along the Atlantic coastal plain of the United States.
giant
© California Institute of TechnologyA typical "giant" spearhead-shaped crystal is only about four microns long, which means that hundreds would fit on the period at the end of this sentence. However, the crystals found recently are eight times larger than the previous world record for the largest bacterial iron-oxide crystal.

The researchers, led by geobiologists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and McGill University, describe the findings in a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Fifty-five million years ago, Earth warmed by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit after huge amounts of carbon entered the atmosphere over a period of just a few thousand years. Although this ancient global-warming episode, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), remains incompletely explained, it might offer analogies for possible global warming in the future.

Sherlock

Ancient Bone Tool Sheds Light On Prehistoric Midwest

A prehistoric bone tool discovered by University of Indianapolis archeologists is the oldest such artifact ever documented in Indiana, the researchers say.
awl, fashioned from a piece of deer bone,
© University of IndianapolisThis awl, fashioned from a piece of deer bone, has been radiocarbon dated to 10,400 BP, making it the oldest organic implement yet documented in Indiana. It was discovered by University of Indianapolis students in 2003.

Radiocarbon dating shows that the tool - an awl fashioned from the leg bone of a white tail deer, with one end ground to a point - is 10,400 years old.

The find supports the growing notion that, in the wake of the most recent Ice Age, the first Hoosiers migrated northward earlier than previously thought. Sites from the Paleoindian and Early Archaic eras are more common in surrounding states such as Illinois and Ohio, which were not as heavily glaciated as Indiana.

"Indiana has been such a void," said Associate Professor Christopher Schmidt, director of UIndy's Indiana Prehistory Laboratory and president of the Indiana Archeology Council. "This bodes well for the future."

Pills

Scientists may soon be able to erase fear and trauma from your mind

Scientists are a step closer to being able to wipe the mind clean of painful memories, a deveolpment that will offer hope to those with a fear of spiders or who are trying to bury traumatic experiences.

Scientists find drug to banish bad memories
How to wipe a bad memory
Fear circuits can be tweaked to make us braver


Neurobiologists believe they will soon be able to target and then chemically remove painful memories and phobias from the mind without causing any harm to the brain.

Info

Physicists Find New State Of Matter In 'Transistor': Huge Implications For New Electronic Devices

McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices.
computer chip
© iStockphoto/Julie MacphersonThe number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip has been doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore’s Law. But there are limits, experts say.

Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore's Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible.

This discovery, and other similar efforts, could help the electronics industry once traditional manufacturing techniques approach these quantum limits over the next decade or so, the researchers said. Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth. Their results were published in the October issue of the journal Nature Physics.

Telescope

NASA's Spitzer tries to unravel mysterious comet explosion

Washington: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has deeply observed comet Holmes to find out why it suddenly exploded in 2007.

Observations taken of the comet by Spitzer deepen the mystery, showing oddly behaving streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the nucleus of the comet.
The data also offer a rare look at the material liberated from within comet Holmes' nucleus, and confirm previous findings from NASA''s Stardust and Deep Impact missions.

"The data we got from Spitzer do not look like anything we typically see when looking at comets," said Bill Reach of NASA''s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

"The comet Holmes explosion gave us a rare glimpse at the inside of a comet nucleus," he added.

Every six years, comet 17P/Holmes speeds away from Jupiter and heads inward toward the sun, traveling the same route typically without incident.