Science & TechnologyS


Battery

An Intelligent System Helps Elderly Or Memory-impaired To Remember Everyday Tasks


Science Daily
Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:17 UTC
A team of researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) has created a system with Artificial Intelligence techniques which notifies elderly people or people with special needs of the forgetting of certain everyday tasks. This system uses sensors distributed in the environment in order to detect their actions and mobile devices which remind them, for example, to take their keys before they leave home.

An elderly lady is about to go to bed. She goes into her room, sits down on the bed, takes off her slippers and turns off the light. Suddenly, before getting into bed, a small alarm goes off and a mobile device reminds her that she has not taken her tablets.
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Mutation Rate in Humans Measured by Direct Sequencing


Xinhua
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:29 UTC
DNA
© Unknown
An international research team has reported the first direct measurement of the general rate of genetic mutation at individual DNA letters in humans.

The team, including 16 Chinese and British scientists, published its findings in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology.

"If we say the mutation drives human evolution as an ongoing train, now we finally get its speed measured," said Dr. Xue Yali, a Chinese scientist working in the British Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the first author of the team's research paper.

The team sequenced the same piece of DNA -- 10,000,000 or so letters or 'nucleotides' from the Y chromosome -- from two men separated by 13 generations, and counted the number of differences. Among all the nucleotides, they found only four mutations.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists Unearth 5,000-Year-Old "Cathedral" in Britian


Newspost Online
Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:00 UTC
A team of archaeologists has unearthed a Neolithic "cathedral" - a massive building of a kind never before seen in Britain, which go back nearly 5,000 years, easily predating the Egyptian pyramids.

According to a report in The Press and Journal, the "cathedral", at 82 ft long and 65 ft wide, is placed between two of Orkney's most famous Neolithic landmarks, the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness.

Even the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness would have seemed quite small in the presence of the cathedral-type building, which would have stood on the spot that has now been excavated.

Nick Card, from the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, who is leading the dig, said the building was effectively a cathedral for the north of Scotland.
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Sherlock

Bulgaria Archaeologists find 14th Century Medallion with Christ


Sofia News Agency
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:00 UTC
Medallion
© Narodno DeloA unique medallion with Christ Pancrator was discovered by archaeologists near Varna.
Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered a unique glass medallion with Christ Pantocrator at the excavated fortress of Kastritsi near Varna.

The archaeological team is led by Valentin Pletnyov, head of the Varna Regional History Museum.

The medallion, which is dated back to the 14th century, the later period of the Second Bulgarian State (1186-1396), is an extremely rare find. It was discovered in the wooden floor of one of the large buildings in the fortress Kastritsi, which is close to the Euxinograd palace on the Black Sea coast.

Pletnyov said the medallion was made of copper enamel, i.e. a type of glass produced in Byzantium after the 13th century. The medallion has a diameter of 4 cm, and shows Christ Pantocrator holding the Gospel, and giving a blessing with his other hand. Nothing of this kind has ever been discovered in Bulgaria so far.
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Camera

Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for first time

Claire Bates
DailyMail.co.uk
Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:46 UTC
Image
© IBMThe delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule has been imaged with an atomic force microscope
It may look like a piece of honeycomb, but this lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule.

Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.

'This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,' lead researcher Leo Gross said.

The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen.

To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.
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Rocket

Chandrayaan-1: ISRO loses contact, claims mission 'over'


Times of India
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:26 UTC
Image
© Graphic courtesy Satish Dhawan Space Centre
Bangalore: Ten months after it was launched, India's maiden moon mission the ambitious Chandrayaan-1 came to an abrupt end on Saturday after ISRO lost communication with the spacecraft, cutting short the dream odyssey that was expected to last two years.

"The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft," Project Director of the Chandrayaan-1 mission M Annadurai said.

However, he said: "It (Chandrayaan-1) has done its job technically...100 per cent. Scientifically also, it has done almost 90-95 percent of its job".

ISRO chief Madhavan Nair on Saturday virtually admitted that the Chandrayaan-I moon mission could be over, saying it is a "pretty difficult" situation.
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Better Earth

Balmy water once bathed Mars rock claimed to host life

David Shiga
New Scientist
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:44 UTC
Image
© NASAIn 1996, researchers suggested that microscopic rod-like structures in a Martian meteorite called ALH84001 were the fossilised remains of tiny bacteria. Although most researchers now doubt the claim, since the structures can be made inorganically, a new study suggests the rock was once bathed in water at the right temperature to support life as we know it.
A 1996 claim of fossilised microbes in a meteorite from Mars has yet to be confirmed, but a new analysis does suggest the rock's Martian environment had the conditions conducive to life.

Researchers led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, caused a sensation 13 years ago when they proposed that a chunk of Mars rock found in Antarctica, called ALH 84001, contained possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, including complex carbon-based molecules and some microscopic objects shaped like bacteria.

But the claim was never widely accepted. Other scientists countered that the shapes were ambiguous and that the complex carbon-based molecules could have been produced without life, since they are also found in chunks of asteroids that fall to Earth as meteorites, for example.

And some argued that the carbon in the meteorite could have been deposited in very harsh conditions, involving water at more than 150 °C. Even the hardiest known terrestrial microbes die above about 120 °C.

But a new analysis suggests the water involved was cool enough to allow for life, which at least keeps open the possibility of fossilised life in the meteorite. The study was led by Paul Niles of NASA Johnson. Neither he nor any of the other team members were part of the 1996 life claim.
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Popcorn

Flashback NASA plans to move Earth away from the sun

Robin McKie
The Observer
Sun, 10 Jun 2001 12:07 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot.

All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system.

This startling idea of improving our interplanetary neighbourhood is the brainchild of a group of Nasa engineers and American astronomers who say their plan could add another six billion years to the useful lifetime of our planet - effectively doubling its working life.

'The technology is not at all far-fetched,' said Dr Greg Laughlin, of the NASA Ames Research Center in California. 'It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth. We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and manoeuvring.'

Comment:
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert Einstein


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Chalkboard

New Study Suggests The Brain Predicts What Eyes In Motion Will See


Science Daily
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:20 UTC
When the eyes move, objects in the line of sight suddenly jump to a different place on the retina, but the mind perceives the scene as stable and continuous. A new study reports that the brain predicts the consequences of eye movement even before the eyes take in a new scene.

The study, "Looking ahead: The perceived direction of gaze shifts before the eyes move," published in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's peer-reviewed Journal of Vision, asked subjects to shift their eyes to a clock with a fast-moving hand and report the time on the clock when their eyes landed on it. The average reported time was 39 milliseconds before the actual time. As a control task, the clock moved instead of the eyes, and the reported arrival times averaged 27 milliseconds after the actual time.
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Acoustic tweezers can position tiny objects

A'ndrea Elyse Messer
Penn State
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:16 UTC
Image
© Tony Jun Huang, Jinjie Shi, Penn StateDynamic patterning of polystyrene beads (diameter of 1.9 μm) through "acoustic tweezers" technology. The wavelength of the applied standing acoustic wave was 200 micrometers and the power intensity was 2,000 watts per meter squared.
University Park -- Manipulating tiny objects like single cells or nanosized beads often requires relatively large, unwieldy equipment, but now a system that uses sound as a tiny tweezers can be small enough to place on a chip, according to Penn State engineers.

"Current methods for moving individual cells or tiny beads include such devices as optical tweezers, which require a lot of energy and could damage or even kill live cells," said Tony Jun Huang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. "Acoustic tweezers are much smaller than optical tweezers and use 500,000 times less energy."

While optical tweezers are large and expensive, acoustic tweezers are smaller than a dime, small enough to fabricate on a chip using standard chip manufacturing techniques. They can also manipulate live cells without damaging or killing them.

Acoustic tweezers differ from eyebrow tweezers in that they position many tiny objects simultaneously and place them equidistant from each other in either parallel lines or on a grid. The grid configuration is probably the most useful for biological applications where researchers can place stem cells on a grid for testing or skin cells on a grid to grow new skin. This allows investigators to see how any type of cell grows.
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