Science & TechnologyS


Info

Linking The Brain: Crucial Insights On Anvil

Suraj Saraf
Central Chronicle - Madhya Pradesh
Sat, 15 May 2010 00:12 UTC
Can people's moral judgement be altered by disrupting a part of the brain? Possible, says a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

"During the transmission two people are hooked up to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. After the first person's computer recognizes the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to other person's PC." "It is not telepathy", Dr. James said. "There is no conscious thought forming in one person's head and another conscious thought appearing in other person's mind".

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists were able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have major implications for judges and juries.

Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disrupted activity in the right temporietal junction or TPJ, which is usually highly active when we think about what we believe the outcome of a particular act will be. The researchers disrupted the TJP by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp and got study participants to read a series of scenarios posing moral conundrums.
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Bad Guys

Police Loading Up on Military Technology

William Maclean
The Vancouver Sun
Fri, 14 May 2010 23:55 UTC
Undercover police spot a suspected suicide bomber apparently about to attack a crowd: They alert a commander, explaining the evidence is inconclusive.

Does the commander neutralize the threat by shooting dead a possibly innocent man, or go for an arrest, thereby alerting the man, who then explodes a device? The clock ticks unforgivingly.

From New York and London to the mountains of Afghanistan, the gizmos used by special forces and police to try to solve terrifying dilemmas such as these are increasingly similar, a trend driven in part by security companies seeking new markets.

While the crossover of gadgetry between military and civilian authorities is not new, its greatly expanded scale and variety is.
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Info

Planets in Nearby System are Off-Kilter, Measurements Show

Ron Cowen
Science News
Fri, 14 May 2010 14:56 UTC
Like bugs glued to a phonograph record, the solar system's planets all orbit the sun in nearly the same plane. A new finding shatters the notion that planetary systems around other stars all have a similarly flattened arrangement. Newly reported measurements reveal that the two outermost planets known to circle a nearby sunlike star called Upsilon Andromedae are wildly misaligned, orbiting the star in different planes separated by 30 degrees.

The observations include ground-based measurements of the back-and-forth motion, or wobble, of Upsilon Andromedae due to the tug of its orbiting planets. But most critical were Hubble Space Telescope observations that tracked the two-dimensional motion of the star as it pirouetted across the sky, orbiting the center of mass of its planetary system.

The new measurements are the first to accurately determine the angle between the orbits of two extrasolar planets circling a sunlike star, says Barbara McArthur of the University of Texas at Austin. She and her colleagues describe the findings in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal. The researchers are also scheduled to describe their study May 24 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Miami.
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Chalkboard

Mechanism Found That Prepares the a Newborn's Brain for Information Processing


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:44 UTC
Image
© Unknown
With their French colleagues, researchers at the University of Helsinki have found a mechanism in the memory center of newborn that adjusts the maturation of the brain for the information processing required later in life.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain cells in the brain of a newborn are still quite loosely interconnected. In the middle of chaos, they are looking for contact with each other and are only later able to operate as interactive neural networks.

Many cognitive operations, such as attention, memory, learning and certain states of sleep are based on rhythmic interactions of neural networks. For a long time the researchers have been interested in finding the stage in the development of the brain in which the functional characteristics and interconnections are sufficiently developed for these subtle brain functions.
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Satellite

Space Station Rainbow


Space Weather
Fri, 14 May 2010 11:37 UTC
On May 12th, the International Space Station passed high over Queensbury, New York, where John E Cordiale was waiting ... with a prism. When the bright light of the streaking spacecraft passed through the glass, it spread into all the colors of a rainbow:

Image
© John E Cordiale
"This is an 18 sec exposure on my Nikon D200," says Cordiale. "For the objective prism, I used a Takahashi Meteor Spectrograph."

The ISS shines by reflected sunlight--just like the raindrops that reflect sunlight in the aftermath of a terrestrial thunderstorm. That's why the "space station rainbow" looks so familar. Same sun, same colors.
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Satellite

Incredible 3D Space Station - No Glasses Required!


Space Weather
Fri, 14 May 2010 11:28 UTC
Image
© Theirry Legault
Imagine a giant spaceship, a 750,000-lb behemoth as wide as a football field with solar wings that dwarf a modern airliner. Robotic arms are busy working around its exterior, careful to avoid a number of smaller spacecraft attached to docking ports. This amazing ship glides across the night sky--and suddenly jumps toward you in startling 3D!

Brace yourself, it's about to happen. First, look at the image below and cross your eyes; merge the two space stations into a single 3D object. Click HERE to watch to set the scene in motion (DivX required).

"I made the movie on April 24th when the International Space Station passed over my home in France," says Theirry Legault. Setting adjacent video frames side by side provided the 3D effect. "All you have to do is squint."

Legault, who is legendary among astrophotographers for his extraordinary shots of spacecraft and other things, recorded the flyby through a 10" Meade ACF telescope on a modified Takahashi EM-400 mount. The trick, he says, was using a green laser to pinpoint the ISS and a custom-made double joystick to track the spacecraft as it glided across the sky.
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Meteor

Asteroids Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula


Space Daily / JPL
Fri, 14 May 2010 11:19 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLAThis image from WISE shows the Tadpole nebula.
A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by.

The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image, seen as a line of yellow-green dots in the boxes near center. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by, as highlighted in the boxes near the upper left (the larger boxes are blown-up versions of the smaller ones).

But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image - two satellites orbiting above WISE (highlighted in the ovals) streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. The apparent motion of asteroids is slower than satellites because asteroids are much more distant, and thus appear as dots that move from one WISE frame to the next, rather than streaks in a single frame.
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Eye 1

The real Avatar: body transfer turns men into girls

Wendy Zukerman
New Scientist
Thu, 13 May 2010 10:52 UTC
Last time you checked you were a conservatively dressed, 28-year-old man. But you look down and notice that you now have the legs of a 10-year-old girl and appear to be wearing a skirt.

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Satellite

Maiden voyage for first true space sail

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Wed, 12 May 2010 10:37 UTC
ICARUS'S wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. Here's hoping a similar fate doesn't befall his namesake, the solar sail due to be unfurled by Japan's aerospace exploration agency (JAXA) next week. If all goes to plan, it will be the first spacecraft fully propelled by sunlight.

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Satellite

Venus orbiter to fly close to super-rotating wind

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 14 May 2010 10:33 UTC
Image
© Akihiro IkeshitaFlying close to the wind
Talk about flying close to the wind. A Japanese interplanetary spacecraft will begin its travels to Venus next week, to get the clearest ever view of massive gusts in the planet's atmosphere.

The Venus Climate Orbiter, called AKATSUKI, aims to find out why blistering winds zip around the planet at speeds of up to 400 kilometres per hour. The upper clouds can circle the planet in four days or even less, and no one knows why. The effect is called "super-rotation", because the bulk of the atmosphere is rotating much faster than the planet itself. Venus takes 243 Earth days to make one rotation.

To investigate, AKATSUKI will move roughly in sync with the winds during part of its orbit, so it can track a patch of atmosphere for about 24 hours at a stretch. Five cameras will snap the planet at different wavelengths. "By combining the images from these cameras we can develop a three-dimensional model of the Venus atmosphere," says mission scientist Takeshi Imamura. This will be the first time such measurements have been taken on a planet other than Earth, he adds.
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