Lab Builds a Fully Functioning Artificial Small Intestine

7/07/2011 02:45:00 PM Research 1 Comment

Small Intestine in LAB(ready for implant)

California researchers have created a tissue-engineered small-scale small intestine in mice, a breakthrough for regenerative medicine and a step toward growing new intestines for humans. The process re-creates all the layers of cells that make up a functioning intestine.
New small intestines grew on the scaffold, the researchers say, and they had all the constituents of a normal intestine. The new intestines “contained the most essential components of the originals,” according to the news release.

The research could someday be used to treat various intestinal disorders, including a particular gastrointestinal disease that affects premature babies, according to Children’s Hospital. An engineered replacement organ would conceivably last much longer than a transplant, if one is even available.

via Science Daily]

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Stuxnet - A cyber Nuclear Weapon

6/29/2011 12:38:00 PM Research, Science 1 Comment

Stuxnet - A cyber Warhead

The Stuxnet computer virus, created to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme, was the result of collaboration between at least one Western power and the Israeli secret service, a British cyber security expert has found.A highly sophisticated computer worm that has spread through Iran, Indonesia and India was built to destroy operations at one target: possibly Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Experts had first thought that Stuxnet was written to steal industrial secrets -- factory formulas that could be used to build counterfeit products. But Langner found something quite different. The worm actually looks for very specific Siemens settings -- a kind of fingerprint that tells it that it has been installed on a very specific Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) device -- and then it injects its own code into that system.


When Stuxnet finally identifies its target, it makes changes to a piece of Siemens code called Organizational Block 35. This Siemens component monitors critical factory operations -- things that need a response within 100 milliseconds. By messing with Operational Block 35, Stuxnet could easily cause a refinery's centrifuge to malfunction, but it could be used to hit other targets too, Byres said. "The only thing I can say is that it is something designed to go bang

A study of the spread of Stuxnet by Symantec showed that the main affected countries in the early days of the infection were Iran, Indonesia and India:
CountryInfected computers
Iran 58.85%
Indonesia 18.22%
India 8.31%
Azerbaijan 2.57%
United States 1.56%
Pakistan 1.28%
Others 9.2%

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The Real Shape of the Earth- (forget 6th grade Earth shape)

4/05/2011 05:58:00 PM Space 3 Comments

Giant potato in space.

And yet, the information in this model is the sharpest view we have of how gravity varies across the Earth.
The globe has been released by the team working on Europe's Goce satellite. It is a highly exaggerated rendering, but it neatly illustrates how the tug we feel from the mass of rock under our feet is not the same in every location. Gravity is strongest in yellow areas; it is weakest in blue one.


Scientists say the data gathered by the super-sleek space probe is bringing a step change in our understanding of the force that pulls us downwards and the way it is shaping some key processes on Earth.Chief among these new insights is a clearer view of how the oceans are moving and how they redistribute the heat from the Sun around the world - information that is paramount to climate studies.

Those interested in earthquakes are also poring over the Goce results. The giant jolt that struck Japan this month and Chile last year occurred because huge masses of rock suddenly moved. Goce should reveal a three-dimensional view of what was going on inside the Earth.

"Even though these quakes resulted from big movements in the Earth, at the altitude of the satellite the signals are very small. But we should still seem them in the data," said Dr Johannes Bouman from the German Geodetic Research Institute (DGFI).

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Ooops ... Your" Horoscope Star" has been changed

1/27/2011 05:58:00 PM Uncategorized No Comments

ZODIAC SIGN changed

The field of astrology, which is concerned with horoscopes and the like, felt a major disruption from astronomers, who are concerned with actual stars and planets. The astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society found that because of the moon's gravitational pull on Earth, the alignment of the stars was pushed by about a month.



"When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it's really not in Pisces," noted Parke Kunkle, a member of the group's board. Your astrological sign is determined by the position of the sun on the day you were born, so that means everything you thought you knew about your horoscope is wrong.

It turns out that astrology has had issues from its inception. (Aside from the fact that it tries to link personality traits with positions of the stars.) Ancient Babylonians had 13 constellations, but wanted only 12, so threw out Ophuchicus, the snake holder. Libra didn't even enter the picture until the era of Julius Caesar.

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17. (Yep, this one is new — read all about the Ophiuchus way of life here)
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.

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Laser Missile Destroyer(An Unseen Destroyer)

1/26/2011 04:31:00 PM Research No Comments

Laser Missile Destroyer


It’s unclear which is the bigger news coming out of the Office of Naval Research; the fact that the Navy’s Free Electron Laser (FEL) program has demonstrated an injector capable of producing the necessary electrons to fuel a megawatt-class laser beam, or the fact that a next-generation future weapon under development by the military is months ahead of schedule. Both are good news for the Navy, which might begin lasing threats out of the sky sooner than it anticipated.

Development of the FEL program has been a large undertaking for the Navy, which has invested at least $163 million in a new kind of variable-wavelength laser weapon that should be effective at sea, where moisture and aerosols in the air can severely limit the effectiveness at lasers at certain wavelengths.

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New Split-Cycle Engine Design -To Improve Fuel Economy By 50 Percent

1/25/2011 07:45:00 PM Research No Comments

New Split-Cycle Engine Design -To Improve Fuel Economy By 50 Percent



Split cycle engines—engines that split the functions of a normal four-cycle piston into two separate but adjacent and complementary pistons—have never been able to match the efficiency and overall function of traditional internal combustion engines, but a new design could change all that. By tweaking the standard split-cycle design with new features like a compressed air tank that captures wasted energy from the system, the Scuderi Group claim not only to have matched the efficiency of the standard four-cycle engine, but to have far surpassed it.

The Scuderi Group’s design has drawn interest from nine major carmakers, the company says, but has yet to prove the technology in real world prototype tests. But in computer simulations that install a Scuderi engine in a 2004 Chevy Cavalier, the split-cycle engine shows to reduce fuel consumption by 25 to 36 percent, translating roughly to a 50 percent improvement in overall fuel economy.

The engine does so by tweaking old split-cycle designs to be more efficient and to trap wasted energy so that it can be fed back into the system. Traditional four-cycle engines have four piston strokes: a down-stroke that pulls air into the cylinder, a compression up-stroke that compresses air (and fuel) in the cylinder, a combustions stroke in which the fuel and air is ignited and turned to kinetic energy, and another up-stroke in which the exhaust is cleared from the cylinder.

$50 million engine: It took Scuderi Group most of the $65 million it’s raised so far to develop just one engine, the prototype shown here. It’s a split-cycle two-cylinder engine, in which one cylinder compresses air and the other combusts a fuel-air mixture. 

Credit: Scuderi

A split-cycle engine distributes those functions between two cylinders one cylinder handles the intake and compression strokes, then that compressed air is fed through a connecting tube into the second cylinder where it is combusted and expelled (this is demonstrated in the video below). Scuderi further improved on this design by adding an auxiliary compressed-air storage tank and by changing the the point at which combustion happens in the second cylinder (conventional engines ignite the gas just before the piston hits its peak on the up-stroke, but he Scuderi ignites just as the piston begins its down-stroke).

How does all this translate into better efficiency? First, the change in combustion timing gives the piston better leverage on the crankshaft, improving efficiency when the engine is working at low speeds. Further, a separate compressed air tank siphons off the air intake that isn’t used for combustion. When the tank is full, the air inside is used to drive the engine, allowing the compression piston to stop compressing air for a period until the storage tank is spent, saving even more fuel.

It’s an interesting and clever design, but while Scuderi does have a prototype engine completed these fuel economy improvements currently exist in computer models only, and there are no guarantees that they will translate into real savings on the road. Moreover, it’s not clear that the Scuderi engine’s savings will be able to compete with improvements in the gas-electric hybrid and EV engines automakers are already making. With automakers trying to move—albiet, slowly—toward whole new kinds of power plants, a redesigned conventional internal combustion engine may have missed its opportunity to be a true game-changer.
http://www.scuderigroup.com/prototype/

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Trees Used as Street Lights

11/24/2010 04:29:00 PM gadgets 1 Comment

Trees Used as Street Lights:


Taiwanese researchers have come up with the elegant idea of replacing streetlights with trees, by implanting their leaves with gold nanoparticles. This causes the leaves to give off a red glow, lighting the road for passersby without the need for electric power. This ingenious triple threat of an idea could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, without sacrificing the safety that streetlights bring.

As many good things do, this discovery came about by accident when the researchers were trying to create lighting as efficient as LEDs without using the toxic, expensive phosphor powder that LEDs rely on. The gold nanoparticles, shaped like sea urchins, put into the leaves of Bacopa caroliniana plants cause chlorophyll to produce the reddish luminescence.

In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. The next steps are to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other biomolecules.

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Largest Rocket Lifts Largest (SPY)Satellite Ever Into Space

11/24/2010 02:41:00 PM Space 1 Comment

Largest Rocket Lifts Largest Satellite Ever Into Space, Where It Will Spy on US Enemies

A behemoth spy satellite blasted into space Sunday night aboard the country’s biggest heavy-lift rocket, the second satellite launched by by the National Reconnaissance Office in the past three months. Stats on the megasat are classified, but the NRO boasted this fall that it would be the biggest satellite in the world.

Government officials won’t confirm what the satellite is for, but NROL-32’s huge antenna would make it possible to eavesdrop on enemy communications, as the BBC says. Satellite watchers believe it hosts sensitive radio receivers and an antenna spanning 328 feet across, nearly five times the size of the largest commercial antenna ever launched.

“This mission helps to ensure that vital NRO resources will continue to bolster our national defense,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Ed Wilson, commander 45th Space Wing, after the launch. It had been delayed two days because of a temperature sensor glitch.United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, launched the satellite aboard a Delta IV Heavy rocket. It was only the fourth launch for the Heavy since its 2004 debut, which launched a small demonstration satellite. It involves three boosters that provide 2 million pounds of thrust to send 13-ton payloads to geostationary orbit. The other two satellites were also secret spy payloads.



Last week, Boeing announced the successful launch of SkyTerra 1, which has a 72-foot-wide antenna reflector, the largest on a commercial satellite. The previous record was TerraStar-1’s 60-foot antenna.

Specs on the country's military and spy satellites are classified, but NRO director Bruce Carlson, a retired Air Force general, said at a conference in September that NROL-32 would be the biggest satellite in the world.

He added that the current plan for NRO satellite missions “is the most aggressive launch campaign that the National Reconnaissance Office has had in 20 years, almost a quarter of a century,” according to Space.com.

Satellite watchers told SpaceFlightNow and NASAspaceflight blogs they believe the payload is an electronic signals intelligence satellite; there are four already in orbit. ELINT satellites known as Mentor or Advanced Orion have been in service since 1995.

Delta IV Launch

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Top 10 Scientific Discoveries

11/14/2010 11:27:00 PM Science No Comments

1. Our Oldest Ancestor, "Ardi"

With her long, elegant fingers, 4-ft. frame and a head no larger than a bonobo's, it's hard not to feel a certain fondness for little Ardi, the oldest skeleton of a prehuman hominid ever found. Painstakingly pieced together from more than 100 crushed fossil fragments unearthed in Ethiopia, this female specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi, for short) lived 4.4 million years ago and had remained anonymous until 1992, when her fragments were first discovered. After 17 years of research, a team of scientists led by Tim D. White from the University of California, Berkeley, published a comprehensive analysis of Ardi in October, in a series of articles in the journal Science. Among the team's revelations: Ardi was surprisingly unchimplike despite being the earliest known descendant of the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps. Also, she was capable of walking on two feet despite living in an area of woodland and forest — a finding that downplays the importance of open grasslands to the evolution of human bipedalism.

2. The Human Epigenome, Decoded

The decoding of the human genome nearly a decade ago fueled expectations that an understanding of all human hereditary influences was within sight. But the connections between genes and, say, disease turned out to be far more complicated than imagined. What has since emerged is a new frontier in the study of genetic signaling known as epigenetics, which holds that the behavior of genes can be modified by environmental influences and that those changes can be passed down through generations. So people who smoke cigarettes in their youth, for example, sustain certain epigenetic changes, which may then increase the risk that their children's children will reach puberty early. In October, a team led by Joseph Ecker at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., studied human skin and stem cells to produce the first detailed map of the human epigenome. By comparing this with the epigenomes of diseased cells, scientists will be able to work out how glitches in the epigenome may lead to cancers and other diseases. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, is a giant leap in geneticists' quest to better understand the strange witches' brew of nature and nurture that makes us who we are.

3. Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness

Modern science already offers ways to enhance your mood, sex drive, athletic performance, concentration levels and overall health, but a discovery in September suggests that truly revolutionary human enhancement may soon move from science fiction to reality. A study in Nature reported that a team of ophthalmologists had injected genes that produce color-detecting proteins into the eyes of two color-blind monkeys, allowing the animals to see red and green for the first time. The results were shocking to most — "We said it was possible, but every single person I talked to said, 'Absolutely not,' " said study co-author Jay Neitz of the University of Washington — and raised the possibility that a range of vision defects could someday be cured. That's a transformative prospect in itself, but the discovery further suggests that it may be possible to enhance senses in "healthy" people too, truly revolutionizing the way we see the world.

4. A Robot Performs Science

By any standard, it was an elementary discovery — the identification of the role of about a dozen genes in a yeast cell. But what made this finding a major breakthrough was the unlikely form of the scientist: a robot. In April, "Adam," a machine designed at Aberystwyth University in Wales, became the first robotic system to make a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input. Robots have long been used in experiments — their vast computational power assisted in the sequencing of the human genome, for example — but Adam was the first to complete the cycle from hypothesis to experiment to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention. Interviewed after Adam's experiment appeared in Science, inventor Ross King argued that artificial intelligence had almost limitless scientific potential — and that a computer would one day make a discovery akin to Einstein's special theory of relativity. "There isn't any intrinsic reason why that wouldn't happen," he said. "A computer can make beautiful chess moves, but it's not doing anything special. In my view, that's what's going to happen in science."

5. Breeding Tuna on Land

In Australia, a tankful of southern bluefin tuna — regal, predatory fish prized for their buttery sashimi meat — began to spawn, and they didn't stop for more than a month. "People said, 'It can't be done, it can't be done,' " said Hagen Stehr, founder of Clean Seas, the Australian company that operates the breeding facility. "Now we've done it." Scientists believe that the breeding population of the highly migratory southern bluefin has probably plummeted more than 90% since the 1950s. Others have gotten Pacific bluefin to spawn and grow in ocean cages, but by coaxing the notoriously fussy southern bluefin to breed in landlocked tanks, Clean Seas may finally have given the future of bluefin aquaculture legs.

6. Water on the Moon

There is water on the moon, scientists stated unequivocally in November. Gallons of it. On Oct. 9, NASA used a rocket to punch a hole about 100 ft. across the moon's surface, then measured about 25 gal. of water vapor and ice in the resulting debris. Some scientists speculated that there may be enough water in the craters of the moon's poles to sustain future colonies of astronauts. Others said the ice could hold a historical record of the solar system. NASA said the first priority was to figure out where the water came from and measure how much of it there is. Meanwhile, the discovery had a more immediate and widespread impact among the rest of us: the rekindling of an old thrill. In 2009, the moon, our recently neglected neighbor, regained her mystery.

7. The Fundamental Lemma, Solved

In 1979 the Canadian-American mathematician Robert Langlands developed an ambitious and revolutionary theory that connected two branches of mathematics called number theory and group theory. In a dazzling set of conjectures and insights, the theory captured deep symmetries associated with equations that involve whole numbers, laying out what is now known as the Langlands program. Langlands knew that the task of proving the assumptions that underlie his theory would be the work of generations. But he was convinced that one stepping stone that needed confirmation — dubbed the "fundamental lemma" — would be reasonably straightforward. He, his collaborators and his students were able to prove special cases of this fundamental theorem. But proving the general case proved more difficult than Langlands anticipated — so difficult, in fact, that it took 30 years to finally achieve. Over the past few years, Ngo Bao Chau, a Vietnamese mathematician working at Université Paris-Sud and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, formulated an ingenious proof of the fundamental lemma. When it was checked this year and confirmed to be correct, mathematicians around the globe breathed a sigh of relief. Mathematicians' work in this area in the last three decades was predicated on the principle that the fundamental lemma was indeed accurate and would one day be proved. "It's as if people were working on the far side of the river waiting for someone to throw this bridge across," says Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at IAS. "And now all of sudden everyone's work on the other side of the river has been proven."

8. Teleportation!

Inching our reality ever closer to Star Trek's, scientists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a meter away. A landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn't quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the first. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating supersecure, ultra-fast computers.

9. The Large Hadron Collider, Revived

It is largest science experiment ever conducted. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, took a quarter of a century to plan and about $10 billion to build. Housed in a 17-mile underground ring, the LHC has been designed to accelerate particles at temperatures colder than that of deep space to a velocity approaching the speed of light. Beset by a series of hiccups and delays, the CERN scientists on Nov. 29 finally recorded a benchmark achievement, powering up a proton beam to an energy of 1.05 trillion electron volts (TeV), overtaking the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois as the world's most powerful accelerator. Eventually the machine will power up to as much as 7 TeV, causing collisions of such high energy that they will re-create the conditions in the seconds after the Big Bang. Amid the by-products of these collisions, physicists will be searching for signs of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which according to current theory is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. Other scientists are hoping for even deeper clues, like confirmation of an ambitious theory called supersymmetry. Let the physics begin.

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'Debugging Day' Infamous Software Bugs

9/15/2010 03:10:00 PM Software Testing No Comments

September 9 was Debugging Day. It's been associated with removing bugs for more than 50 years now but is rarely formally celebrated. So let's start the tradition this year.
some bugs have wreaked disaster, embarrassment and destruction on the world. Some have literally killed people.

It all began with a log entry from 1947 by Harvard University's Mark II technical team. The now-classic entry features a moth taped to the page, time-stamped 15:45, with the caption "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay" and the proud boast, "First actual case of bug being found." (Click on the image for a close-up view of the historic logbook.)

End-of-the-World Bugs

Remember how the world descended into nuclear oblivion on September 23, 1983? No? Well, thank your lucky stars -- this is a tale of bugs so major they could have brought the entire world to a standstill.

Illustration: Lou BeachIt was all averted by the common sense of one individual, who ignored the Soviet early-warning system's faulty reports of incoming missiles and didn't launch a counterattack on the United States.

The warning system set off klaxons at half past midnight on that September morning. Apparently, the U.S. had launched five nuclear missiles toward what the U.S. president had taken to calling "the Evil Empire."

At the time, Lt. Col. Stanislaus Petrov reasoned his way to a decision not to respond: The USSR was in a shouting match with the U.S. about a Soviet attack on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 three weeks earlier, but it was only a rhetorical battle at that stage. Besides, if the U.S. wanted to attack the Soviet Union, would it really launch only five missiles?

Petrov ordered his men to stand down, and 15 minutes later, radar outposts confirmed that there were no incoming missiles. The decision took less than five minutes, it was confirmed within half an hour, and the world remained at peace.

When the early-warning system was later analyzed, it was found to have more bugs than a suburban compost heap -- which meant that although Stanislaus Petrov had saved the world, he'd made a serious error of judgment: He had shown up the incompetence of Soviet programmers.

This was not good for morale, or for the lieutenant colonel. He was cold-shouldered into an early retirement and was largely unsung until May 21, 2004, when a San Francisco-based organization called the Association of World Citizens bestowed its highest honor -- world citizenship -- and a financial reward on him.

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