Human Travel Patterns Surprisingly Predictable

Human beings are creatures of habit, and new data shows that we may be less spontaneous than previously thought. In a study detailed this week in the journal Nature, researchers from Northeastern University, in Boston, used cellphone signals to demonstrate that human travel patterns are similar among individuals and conform to a simple mathematical model.

“We were surprised by some of the aspects of the study,” says lead author Marta González. “There is a lot of similarity between the behavior of people.”

The study analyzed human motion by monitoring cellphone records and tracking each phone’s signal as it moved from one phone tower to the next. They used the data to come up with a probability equation for describing human movement. The results could have implications for urban planning, traffic monitoring, and the spread of disease, all of which rely on human travel.

Full story HERE.

Bionic hand wins top tech prize

The world's most advanced, commercially available, bionic hand has clinched the UK's top engineering prize. The i-LIMB, a prosthetic device with five individually powered digits, beat three other finalists to win this year's MacRobert award. The technology has been fitted to more than 200 people, including US soldiers who lost limbs during the war in Iraq.

The device started life in Scotland in 1963 as part of a project to help children affected by Thalidomide. The complex device finally went on sale in July 2007. It is produced by a company called Touch Bionics based in Mid Calder, Livingston.

Full story with VIDEO HERE.

Dead Zones Grow in the Gulf of Mexico

Each spring, the cycle of death begins anew. Nitrogen and phosphorus, leached from fertilizer, pass from farmland into streams, from streams into rivers—the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Susquehanna—and then, finally, into some of the country's great bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay. There the chemicals collect each summer, spawning the growth of algae, which deplete the water of oxygen and lead to ghostly aquatic wastelands. Marine life, if mobile enough, will swim away; the rest will suffocate and die.

Scientists have monitored the growth of these so-called dead zones since the late 1970s. They have tried to promote policies to reduce their size, without much success. Last summer, the dead zone along the Gulf of Mexico coast spanned nearly 8,000 square miles— its third-largest occurrence on record and roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Full story HERE.

School Of Robofish Communicate With Each Other

ScienceDaily (Jun. 9, 2008) — In the world of underwater robots, this is a team of pioneers. While most ocean robots require periodic communication with scientist or satellite intermediaries to share information, these can work cooperatively communicating only with each other.

Over the past five years Kristi Morgansen, a University of Washington assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, has built three Robofish that communicate with one another underwater. Recently at the International Federation of Automatic Control's Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles she presented results showing that the robots had successfully completed their first major test. The robots were programmed to either all swim in one direction or all swim in different directions, basic tasks that can provide the building blocks for coordinated group movement.

This success in indoor test tanks, she said, will eventually provide the basis for ocean-going systems to better explore remote ocean environments.

Full story HERE.

Sun goes longer than normal without producing sunspots

BOZEMAN -- The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.

That's good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology, but it became a point of discussion for the scientists who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University. Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about "Solar Variability, Earth's Climate and the Space Environment."

The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual.

Full story HERE.

Livermore researchers use carbon nanotubes for molecular transport

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Molecular transport across cellular membranes is essential to many of life’s processes, for example electrical signaling in nerves, muscles and synapses.

In biological systems, the membranes often contain a slippery inner surface with selective filter regions made up of specialized protein channels of sub-nanometer size. These pores regulate cellular traffic, allowing some of the smallest molecules in the world to traverse the membrane extremely quickly, while at the same time rejecting other small molecules and ions.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are mimicking that process with manmade carbon nanotube membranes, which have pores that are 100,000 times smaller than a human hair, and were able to determine the rejection mechanism within the pores.

Full story HERE.

Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas

from BOINGBOING.net -
"Does standing up a lot during the day reduce susceptibility to colds? Go ahead and doubt it; I did. But Roberts has data to back it up, and while it would be foolish to believe that standing up a lot during the day would eliminate colds across an entire population -- foolish, that is, without experiments to prove it -- Roberts' own practice of standing up a lot has a lot more empirical back-up than many of the more "sensible" things we naively believe.

"Here's anther one: for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

"The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food."

More HERE.

Stupid flies live longer

Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger at the University of Lausanne said Wednesday they had discovered a "negative correlation between an improvement in a fly's mental capacity and its longevity."

"In other terms, the more the fly becomes intelligent, the shorter its lifespan," the scientists said.

This is most probably because the increase in neural activity weakens the fly's life-support systems, they speculated.

Full story HERE.

Micro-fossils discovered in harshest environments on Earth

IN CLOSE-UP, they look like something out of a 1950s B-movie. Colonies of fossilised creatures, dubbed "hairy blobs", have been discovered in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The find may turn out to be crucial for spotting signs of extraterrestrial life in rocks on other planets.

Kathleen Benison, a geologist at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, led a team that studied the sediments formed by acidic and very salty lakes in modern day Western Australia, and those deposited around 250 million years ago in North Dakota. It is very difficult to survive in such a tough environments and few signs of life have ever been found in these sorts of lakes.

Full story HERE. More HERE.

Giant telescopes could be built from Moon dust

Dust – often thought of as an impediment to lunar exploration – could be put to good use to build giant telescopes on the Moon – perhaps some large enough to fill entire craters, says a team of US researchers. The team, led by Peter Chen of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, has devised a simple method to create a concrete-like substance using a mixture of carbon nanotubes, epoxy and a crushed rock material that NASA uses as a stand-in for Moon dust.

Using the mixture, they built a 30-centimetre disc. Then they added more liquid epoxy to its surface and spun it, coating it with aluminium in a vacuum. They believe the process could be scaled up to produce 20- to 50-metre-wide telescopes on the Moon. That would be useful, says Chen, since the limited fuel and cargo capacities of rockets make it unfeasible to launch large mirrors or telescopes to the Moon. "By this technique, we are no longer restricted by how much a rocket can carry," Chen said.

Full story HERE.