Mars Rover Ascends To Level Ground

"The rover is back on flat ground," an engineer who drives it, Paolo Bellutta of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced to the mission's international team of scientists and engineers.

Opportunity used its own entry tracks from nearly a year ago as the path for a drive of 6.8 meters (22 feet) bringing the rover out over the top of the inner slope and through a sand ripple at the lip of Victoria Crater. The exit drive, conducted late Thursday, completed a series of drives covering 50 meters (164 feet) since the rover team decided about a month ago that it had completed its scientific investigations inside the crater.

More HERE.

Artificial Bone Blends Into Tendons

Engineers at Georgia Tech have used skin cells to create artificial bones that mimic the ability of natural bone to blend into other tissues such as tendons or ligaments. The artificial bones display a gradual change from bone to softer tissue rather than the sudden shift of previously developed artificial tissue, providing better integration with the body and allowing them to handle weight more successfully.

They created the tissue by coating a three-dimensional polymer scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that encodes a transcription factor known as Runx2. They generated a high concentration of Runx2 at one end of the scaffold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no transcription factor on the other end, resulting in a precisely controlled spatial gradient of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibroblasts uniformly onto the scaffold.

More HERE.

Defition: Schüfftan process

A movie special effect named after its inventor, Eugen Schüfftan (1893–1977). He placed a plate of glass at a forty-five-degree angle between the camera and the miniature buildings. He used the camera's viewfinder to trace an outline of the area into which the actors would later be inserted onto the glass. This outline was transferred onto a mirror and all the reflective surface that fell outside the outline was removed, leaving transparent glass. When the mirror was placed in the same position as the original plate of glass, the reflective part blocked a portion of the miniature building behind it and also reflected the stage behind the camera.

More HERE.

Czech firm plans giant wind farm

Czech power firm CEZ is to build what it says will be Europe's largest onshore wind farm, in a 1.1bn-euro ($1.6bn; £886m) project.

The wind farm is set to have a generation capacity of 600 megawatts and will be located in Romania.

Construction of the wind farm will start in September and it is due to begin operating in 2009.

More HERE.

'Formula Zero' race

The world's first international hydrogen-powered motorsport race was held in Rotterdam this weekend. Dubbed the Formula Zero championship, the contest pitted teams from five countries against each other in a zero-emissions go-kart race. Each team's entry was powered by a commercial fuel cell that produces electricity from hydrogen.

A Dutch team won the endurance event, while a Spanish team clinched the award for fastest lap.

Founded by Dutch motorsport enthusiasts Godert van Hardenbroek and Eelco Rietveld, Formula Zero is already recognised by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, the world's motorsport governing body. The championship consisted of several events, with teams from the UK, US, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium competing for the top honour: zeroth place.

More HERE.

Doing things that don't make sense

...he held what looked like a huge yellow clockwork key over my skull. Then he pressed a button, and the key's "transcranial magnetic stimulation" induced a small current in my brain. One of my fingers moved.

He shifted the position of the key slightly and pressed the button again. A different finger moved. If he had ramped up the current in his magnets and found the right place on my skull, he could have moved my arms or legs. It was like being someone else's puppet, and I didn't like it one bit.

More HERE.

Cattle shown to align north-south

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Wild deer also display this behaviour - a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

More HERE.

'Queen' Guitarist Publishes Astrophysics Thesis

The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar.

Brian May's thesis examines the mysterious phenomenon known as Zodiacal light, a misty diffuse cone of light that appears in the western sky after sunset and in the eastern sky before sunrise. Casual observers can best see the light two to three hours before sunrise as they look east, and many people have been fooled into seeing it as the first sign of morning twilight.

May's work focuses on an instrument that recorded 250 scans of morning and evening Zodiacal light between 1971 and 1972. The Fabry-Perot Spectrometer is located at the Observatorio del Teide at Izana in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. The completed thesis appears as the book "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008).

More HERE.

Scan 3D images on the cheap

3D3 Solutions’ FlexScan3D lets you use an ordinary LCD projector and digital camera to help produce wireframes that can be imported into 3D computer graphics programs for use in art, animation, or rapid prototyping. Scans take just seconds, and can measure complex surfaces with an accuracy of +/- .01 inches and over 1 million points per scan.

More HERE.

Solar plane makes record flight

A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft.

The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight.

The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground.

More HERE.

Definition: Topology

Unlike geometry, topology is not concerned with metric properties such as distances between points. Instead, topology involves the study of properties that describe how a space is assembled, such as connectedness and orientability.

The motivating insight behind topology is that some geometric problems depend not on the exact shape of the objects involved, but rather on the way they are put together. For example, the square and the circle have many properties in common: they are both one dimensional objects (from a topological point of view) and both separate the plane into two parts, the part inside and the part outside.

One of the first papers in topology was the demonstration, by Leonhard Euler, that it was impossible to find a route through the town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) that would cross each of its seven bridges exactly once. This result did not depend on the lengths of the bridges, nor on their distance from one another, but only on connectivity properties: which bridges are connected to which islands or riverbanks.

More HERE.

Intel: wireless power

Intel on Thursday showed off a wireless electric power system that analysts say could revolutionize modern life by freeing devices from transformers and wall outlets.

Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the California firm's annual developers forum in San Francisco.

Electricity was sent wirelessly to a lamp on stage, lighting a 60 watt bulb that uses more power than a typical laptop computer.

More HERE.

Microbattery built by viruses

"To our knowledge, this is the first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process," wrote MIT professors Paula T. Hammond, Angela M. Belcher, Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues.

Further, the technique itself "does not involve any expensive equipment, and is done at room temperature," said Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering.

More HERE.

Aboriginal children 'can count without numbers'

The study found that four to seven-year-olds from two Aboriginal communities have an "innate system" to count with, even though their languages only have normal words for one, two, few and many.

"Recently, an extreme form of linguistic determinism has been revived which claims that counting words are needed for children to develop concepts of numbers above three," said Professor Brian Butterworth of UCL.

"That is, to possess the concept of 'five' you need a word for five," he said, adding that evidence from numerate societies as well as Amazonians whose language does not have counting words have been used to support the claim.

"However, our study of Aboriginal children suggests that we have an innate system for recognising and representing numerosities... and that the lack of a number vocabulary should not prevent us from doing numerical tasks," he said.

More HERE.

Robot with a biological brain

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre array of 60 electrodes.

This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

More HERE.

Plastic Spin Transistors

University of Utah physicists successfully controlled an electrical current using the "spin" within electrons – a step toward building an organic "spin transistor": a plastic semiconductor switch for future ultrafast computers and electronics.

The study also suggests it will be more difficult than thought to make highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) using organic materials. The findings hint such LEDs would convert no more than 25 percent of electricity into light rather than heat, contrary to earlier estimates of up to 63 percent.

More HERE.

Newly detected air pollutant mimics damaging effects of cigarette smoke

"Free radicals from tobacco smoke have long been suspected of having extremely harmful effects on the body," Dellinger said. "Based on our work, we now know that free radicals similar to those in cigarettes are also found in airborne fine particles and potentially can cause many of the same life-threatening conditions. This is a staggering, but not unbelievable result, when one considers all of diseases in the world that cannot currently be attributed to a specific origin."

More HERE.

Key Photosynthesis Step Replicated

"The breakthrough came when we coated a proton conductor, called Nafion, onto an anode to form a polymer membrane just a few micrometres thick, which acts as a host for the manganese clusters."

"Normally insoluble in water, when we bound the catalyst within the pores of the Nafion membrane, it was stabilised against decomposition and, importantly, water could reach the catalyst where it was oxidised on exposure to light."

This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of carbohydrates as in plants.

"Whilst man has been able to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for years, we have been able to do the same thing for the first time using just sunlight, an electrical potential of 1.2 volts and the very chemical that nature has selected for this purpose," Professor Spiccia said.

More HERE.

Flexible nanoantenna arrays capture solar energy

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.

The new approach, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each interlocking spiral "nanoantenna" is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair.

Because of their size, the nanoantennas absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. Nanoantennas can take in energy from both sunlight and the earth's heat, with higher efficiency than conventional solar cells.

More HERE.

New bacterial species found in human mouth

A brand new species of bacteria has been found by scientists among the hundreds which thrive in our mouths. The bug, named "Prevotella histicola" by its discoverers at King's College London, is thought to contribute to gum disease and tooth decay.

Every millilitre of saliva is a cocktail of millions of bacteria, half of them unknown. The finding may help scientists understand the changes in bacterial activity that lead to mouth problems.

Professor William Wade, from the Dental Institute at King's College London, found three strains of the new organism lurking within the flesh lining the mouth, and the name "histicola" reflects this, meaning "inhabitant of tissues" in Latin.

More HERE.

Why conservatives are happier than liberals

The exuberance displayed by Barack Obama's supporters might make Republicans look like geriatric chess enthusiasts, but a new survey suggests that conservatives are happier than liberals - and offers one reason why. Liberals, claim New York University psychologists Jaime Napier and John Tost, have a tougher time rationalising social and economic inequality than conservatives.

The recent surge in home foreclosures, for instance, is due to poor economic choices on the part of borrowers, a conservative might think. Liberals, on the other hand, seethe at predatory lenders and lax government regulation of the mortgage industry. The result: conservatives mix a martini and hit the country club, while liberals write angry letters and stage protests.

Of course, American political views aren't so binary, yet the happiness divide seems to be real. Previous studies, including a 2006 survey from Pew Research Center have found the same general trend, much to the delight of conservative pundits like George Will, who noted that "liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed."

More HERE.

Giant Retailers Look to Sun for Energy Savings

In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market

have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale. One reason they are racing is to beat a Dec. 31 deadline to gain tax advantages for these projects.

So far, most chains have outfitted fewer than 10 percent of their stores. Over the long run, assuming Congress renews a favorable tax provision and more states offer incentives, the chains promise a solar construction program that would ultimately put panels atop almost every big store in the country.

The trend, while not entirely new, is accelerating as the chains seize a chance to bolster their environmental credentials by cutting back on their use of electricity from coal.

More HERE.

Researchers correct decline in organ function associated with old age

"Our study showed that functions can be maintained in older animals so long as damaged proteins continue to be efficiently removed — strongly supporting the idea that protein buildup in cells plays an important role in aging itself," says Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo. "Even more important, these results show that it's possible to correct this protein 'logjam' that occurs in our cells as we get older, thereby perhaps helping us to enjoy healthier lives well into old age."

More HERE.

Compressor-free Refrigerator

"This is the first step in the development of an electric field refrigeration unit," says Qiming Zhang, distinguished professor of electrical engineering. "For the future, we can envision a flat panel refrigerator. No more coils, no more compressors, just solid polymer with appropriate heat exchangers."

Other researchers have explored magnetic field refrigeration, but electricity is more convenient.

Zhang's approach uses the change form disorganized to organized that occurs in some polarpolymers when placed in an electric field. The natural state of these materials is disorganized with the various molecules randomly positioned. When electricity is applied, the molecules become highly ordered and the material gives off heat and becomes colder. When the electricity is turned off, the material reverts to its disordered state and absorbs heat.

More HERE.

Complex decision? Don't sleep on it

Neither snap judgements nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to new research.

The finding debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is superior for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car. If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006).

More HERE.

BBC's 'Horizon' program HERE.

New metamaterials bring invisibility cloaks 1 step closer

Shown is a schematic and two scanning electron microscope images with top and side views of a metamaterial developed by UC Berkeley researchers. The material is composed of parallel nanowires embedded inside porous aluminum oxide. As visible light passes through the material, it is bent backwards in a phenomenon known as negative refraction.

More HERE.

Galaxy Zoo's blue mystery

Nearly a year ago, astronomers at several universities recruited citizen scientists to help them catalog distant galaxies that had recently been photographed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A high-school physics teacher in the Netherlands who was participating in this project, known as Galaxy Zoo, appears to have scored a major coup. She brought a weird blue object to the attention of the professional zookeepers, according to a cosmologist associated with the zoo.

That novelty appears to be a quasar whose intense radio emissions have been fueling star births.

More HERE.

Battery-Powered Airplane Makes Its Debut

Take your everyday metal moni motoglider, trick it out with a custom battery pack and you've got the ElectraFlyer C, a small electric airplane that debuted at the AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, last week.

The plane, which received its airworthiness certificate in April, features a 5.6 kWh lithium battery with a projected life cycle (the number of times it can be depleted and recharged) of 1,000 cycles. The battery has a max weight of 78 pounds and can be custom-built to fit the available space in an airplane. It provides juice for a motor driving a 45-inch superlight PowerFin propeller made of a foam core surrounded by an outer shell of carbon fiber and glass fabric.

More HERE.

Quantum-"Uncollapse" Hypothesis Verified

Most scientists have believed that the instant a quantum object was measured it would "collapse" from being in all the locations it could be, to just one location like a classical object. Andrew Jordan proposed that it would be possible to weakly measure the particle continuously, partially collapsing the quantum state, and then "unmeasure" it, causing the particle to revert back to its original quantum form, before it collapsed.

Jordan's hypothesis suggests that the line between the quantum and classical worlds is not as sharply defined as had been long thought, but that it is rather a gray area that takes time to cross.

More HERE.

People who 'hear' movement

Individuals with synesthesia perceive the world in a different way from the rest of us. Because their senses are cross-activated, some synesthetes perceive numbers or letters as having colors or days of the week as possessing personalities, even as they function normally in the world. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered a type of synesthesia in which individuals hear sounds, such as tapping, beeping, or whirring, when they see things move or flash. Surprisingly, the scientists say, auditory synesthesia may not be unusual--and may simply represent an enhanced form of how the brain normally processes visual information.

Psychologists previously reported visual, tactile, and taste synesthesias, but auditory synesthesia had never been identified. Caltech lecturer in computation and neural systems Melissa Saenz discovered the phenomenon quite by accident.

More HERE.

Quantum chaos unveiled?

A University of Utah study is shedding light on an important, unsolved physics problem: the relationship between chaos theory – which is based on 300-year-old Newtonian physics – and the modern theory of quantum mechanics.

The study demonstrated a fundamental new property – what appears to be chaotic behavior in a quantum system – in the magnetic "spins" within the nuclei or centers of atoms of frozen xenon, which normally is a gas and has been tested for making medical images of lungs.

Quantum mechanics – which describes the behavior of molecules, atoms electrons and other subatomic particles – "plays a key role in understanding how electronics work, how all sorts of interesting materials behave, how light behaves during communication by optical fibers," Saam says.

"When you look at all the technology governed by quantum physics, it's not unreasonable to assume that if one can apply chaos theory in a meaningful way to quantum systems, that will provide new insights, new technology, new solutions to problems not yet known."

More HERE.

Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa

A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations.

As recently as last year, this subspecies of the world’s largest primate was listed as critically endangered by international wildlife organizations because known populations — estimated at less than 100,000 in the 1980s — had been devastated by hunting and outbreaks of Ebola virus. The three other subspecies are either critically endangered or endangered.

More HERE.

Definition: Astatine

A highly radioactive element has been confirmed by mass spectrometers to behave chemically much like other halogens, especially iodine (it would probably accumulate in the thyroid gland like iodine^[1]), though astatine is thought to be more metallic than iodine. Researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have performed experiments that have identified and measured elementary reactions that involve astatine; however, chemical research into astatine is limited by its extreme rarity, which is a consequence of its extremely short half-life. Its most stable isotope has a half-life of around 8.3 hours.

More HERE.

Plant Parasite 'Wiretaps' Host

A parasitic plant that sucks water and nutrients from its plant host also taps into its communications traffic, a new report finds. The research could lead to new ways to combat parasites that attack crop plants.

Plants often use small RNA molecules as messengers between different parts of the plant. In a paper published in Science in 2001, Sinha's group showed that RNA could travel from a graft into the rest of the plant and affect leaf shape. Plants can also use specific RNAs to fight off viruses.

Picking up these RNA messengers could help the parasite synchronize its lifecycle with that of the host plant, Sinha said.

"It might be important for the parasite to know when the host is flowering, so it can flower at the same time," before the host dies, she said.

More HERE.

Mars lander finds water

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time martian water has been touched and tasted."

More HERE.

Biofilms in fossils

Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research that apparently showed that soft, pliable tissues had been recovered from dissolved dinosaur bones, a major finding that would substantially widen the known range of preserved biomolecules. The finding would also help astrobiologists understand the types of biosignatures that could be used to search for signs of past life on other planets.

But new research challenges that finding and suggests that the supposed recovered dinosaur tissue is in reality biofilm – or slime.

More HERE.

Lensless On-Chip Microscope

Researchers hope that a new kind of small portable microscope may give health workers the ability to quickly and cheaply scan blood for tumor cells and life-threatening parasites.

Scientists shine light onto a liquid sample flowing through a narrow channel. Below the channel are a series of three-micron-wide apertures, or holes, punched through a layer of metal such as gold or aluminum. The light shines through the holes onto a semiconductor chip studded with a series of sensor pixels. Such chips cost about $10 a pop, says Caltech bioengineer and study leader Changhuei Yang.

Objects that float over the apertures block some of the incoming light received by the pixels, which reconstruct an image of the object based on the variations in light intensity across multiple apertures.

More HERE.

Personalized Stem Cells One Step Closer to Reality

Researchers from Harvard and Columbia Universities used skin cells from two patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, to create stem cells and then reprogrammed them to morph into replacement motor neurons.

"It opens doors to making patient-specific stem cell lines," said Dr. Kevin Eggan, principle faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and lead author of a study that was released today in the journal Science. "You can use these cells to make the actual cell type for that person's disease."

More HERE.