Scientists Unravel Mysteries of Intelligence

FRIDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- It's not a particular brain region that makes someone smart or not smart.

Nor is it the strength and speed of the connections throughout the brain or such features as total brain volume.
Instead, new research shows, it's the connections between very specific areas of the brain that determine intelligence and often, by extension, how well someone does in life.
"General intelligence actually relies on a specific network inside the brain, and this is the connections between the gray matter, or cell bodies, and the white matter, or connecting fibers between neurons," said Jan Glascher, lead author of a paper appearing in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "General intelligence relies on the connection between the frontal and the parietal [situated behind the frontal] parts of the brain."
The results weren't entirely unexpected, said Keith Young, vice chairman of research in psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Temple, but "it is confirmation of the idea that good communication between various parts of brain are very important for this generalized intelligence."


General intelligence is an abstract notion developed in 1904 that has always been somewhat controversial.
"People noticed a long time ago that, in general, people who are good test-takers did well in a lot of different subjects," explained Young. "If you're good in mathematics, you're also usually good in English. Researchers came up with this idea that this represented a kind of overall intelligence."
"General intelligence is this notion that smart people tend to be smart across all different kinds of domains," added Glascher, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of humanities and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Hoping to learn more, the authors located 241 patients who had some sort of brain lesion. They then diagrammed the location of their lesions and had them take IQ tests.
"We took patients who had damaged parts of their brain, tested them on intelligence to see where they were good and where they were bad, then we correlated those scores across all the patients with the location of the brain lesions," Glascher explained. "That way, you can highlight the areas that are associated with reduced performance on these tests which, by the reverse inference, means these areas are really important for general intelligence."
"These studies infer results based on the absence of brain tissue," added Paul Sanberg, distinguished professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa. "It allows them to systemize and pinpoint areas important to intelligence."
Young said the findings echo what's come before. "The map they came up with was what we expected and involves areas of the cortex we thought would be involved -- the parietal and frontal cortex. They're important for language and mathematics," he said.
In an earlier study, the same team of investigators found that this brain network was also important for working memory, "the ability to hold a certain number of items [in your mind]," Glascher said. "In the past, people have associated general intelligence very strongly with enhanced working memory capacity so there's a close theoretical connection with that."

Article from Yahoo.
Hillary Maruwa Feb 26, 2010

Microsoft shuts down global spam network

Microsoft has won court approval to shut down a global network of computers which it says is responsible for more than 1.5bn spam messages every day.
A US judge granted the firm's request to shut down 277 internet domains, which it said were used to "command and control" the so-called Waledac botnet.
A botnet is a network of infected computers under the control of hackers.
The firm said that closing the domains would mean that up to 90,000 PCs would stop receiving orders to send out spam.
A recent analysis by the firm found that between 3-21 December "approximately 651 million spam e-mails attributable to Waledac were directed to Hotmail accounts alone".
It said it was one of the 10 largest botnets in the US.
Machines in a botnet have usually been infected by a computer virus or worm. Typically, users do not know their machine has been hijacked.
Microsoft said that although it had effectively shut down the network, thousands of computers would still be infected with malware and advised people to run anti-virus software.
The court order was part of what was called "Operation b49".
Along with intelligence organisation Shadowserver, the University of Washington and security firm Symantec, Microsoft managed to get a court in Alexandria, Virginia, to force Verisign, which manages the .com domain, to temporarily switch off the domains.
Microsoft said it was the result of months of investigation and described it as a legal first.
"This action has quickly and effectively cut off traffic to Waledac at the .com or domain registry level, severing the connection between the command and control centres of the botnet and most of its thousands of zombie computers around the world."

Article from BBC

Hillary Maruwa Feb 26, 2010

Solar Panel Productivity Boosted by Origami

Computer simulations of 3-D solar panels. The one on the left consists of 64 flat, triangular, double-sided panels; the one on the right is a simplified version. Credit: Jeffrey Grossman et al.

Solar panels nowadays are flat, but folding them in origami-like ways could help dramatically boost the amount of power they could generate, scientists say.

Research into solar or photovoltaic panels thus far have kept them flat largely to prevent them from casting any shadows that might diminish the amount of light they could harvest. Two-dimensional panels are also far easier to install on rooftops and are well suited to standard large-scale fabrication techniques.
Still, three-dimensional solar panels could in principle absorb more light and generate more power than a flat panel of the same area footprint, which could prove useful in circumstances where the available space is limited. The idea is that any light that might normally reflect unused off a solar panel surface could then get trapped on another panel.
"This was a fully 'bio-inspired' idea," said researcher Jeffrey Grossman, a theoretical physicist at MIT. "I was hiking up at Lake Tahoe in California and noticing the shapes of trees, and wondering, 'Why do they have a given shape over another?'"


Solar panel evolution


To investigate the optimal shape a 3-D panel might take in order to harvest the most light, scientists used a "genetic algorithm" to evolve solar panels in a computer simulation.
The model they developed randomly generated jumbles of flat, triangular double-sided solar panels and analyzed which generated the most power as a virtual sun moved across the sky. The best ones were then "mated" together for "offspring" that combined features of each with "mutations" that varied their structures. This process was then repeated for up to millions of generations, all in order to see what might evolve.
Assuming a roughly 1,075 square foot area (100 square meters), flat solar panels would generate roughly 50 kilowatt-hours daily. In comparison, the best 3-D structures the researchers came up with — jagged clusters of 64 triangles — could harvest more than 60 kilowatt-hours daily if the devices were 6.5 feet high (2 meters) and up to 120 kilowatt-hours daily if the designs was roughly 33 feet high (10 meters).

Since these jagged clusters would likely prove unwieldy to use, the scientists explored a simplified version they dubbed "the funnel," resembling a square box whose sides each caved in at the middle, a design that generates nearly as much energy as the best evolved structures.
"I originally thought that such structures would only be useful in situations where area is at a premium — for example, roof-tops," Grossman said. "Lately, though, we have been exploring more and more directions for ideas that may make 3-D structures more appealing than flat panels even when area is not limited."

No movable parts

For instance, 3-D solar panels could be as easy to implement as flat ones while generating more energy – for instance, by taking advantage of light reflected off the ground, Grossman said. Two-thirds of the cost of a panel for residential or commercial rooftop installation is due to the module and installation costs, not the cost of the silicon or other material that converts solar power to electricity. One could imagine shipping 3-D panels flat and then opening them up like origami for use.
Also, with 3-D solar panels, the way their components are set up, they generate power evenly throughout the day. To achieve the same with flat panels, one has to arrange them on systems that track the movement of the sun across the sky, "which is a big bummer, since you really don't want any moving parts sitting on your rooftop," Grossman said. "Anything that moves can break easily with time and needs more maintenance."
"I'm excited about the fact that such a seemingly simple idea could help lower the cost of solar power," Grossman added. The researchers are now teaming up with experimentalists to build prototypes of their computer-generated designs.


The scientists detailed their findings online February 16 in Applied Physics Letters

Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa Feb 25, 2010

Brain Activity Measured While Flies Fly

Researchers insert a dye-filled glass electrode (pink) into a fruit fly's brain as the fly is flapping its wings. The electrode and the brain are immersed in saline (colored blue). Credit: Gaby Maimon and Michael Dickinson/Caltech

In a freaky fruit fly experiment, scientists have used electrodes to measure the brain activity of the tiny insects while flapping their wings for the first time. When the animals began to fly, neurons in the visual region of the brain ramped up activity abruptly, they found.

Though fruit fly brains are tiny, packing just 300,000 brain cells, the findings have implications for understanding brain changes in larger animals. For comparison, an average human brain has about 100 billion neurons.
"Our work on Drosophila [fruit flies] is of general interest because sensory neurons in many species — including birds, rodents, and primates — change their response strength depending on the behavioral state of the animal, but why these changes in sensitivity take place is not entirely clear," said study researcher Gaby Maimon of Caltech.
The research was published Feb. 14 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Past recordings of neural-cell activity in fruit flies involved animals that had been stuck or glued down. Working with such a small brain can be a challenge in itself, but Maimon and colleagues wanted to keep the fly alive and active.

"The challenge was to be able to gain access to the brain in a way that didn't compromise the animal's ability to fly, or to perform behavior," said study researcher Michael Dickinson of Caltech. "We couldn't just rip the brain out of the body and put it into a dish."

So the team tethered the fruit fly so that its head was clamped into place while its wings were free to flap. Then, the scientists sliced off a patch of the hard cuticle covering the insect's brain and placed the electrodes onto neurons in the visual region of the brain.

Beneath the hood, a fruit fly's brain looks kind of like a white blob, Dickinson told LiveScience.

"These cells basically help the fly detect when its body posture changes," Dickinson said. "The signals from these cells are thought to control tiny steering muscles that then change the pattern of wing motion and bring the animal back into equilibrium."

A visual display of moving stripes made the fly think it was on the move, either walking or flying – which was set off by a puff of air that got the fly's wings flapping. The electrical activity of the visual brain cells roughly doubled when in flight, they found. The activity boost suggests this visual system is extra sensitive when the animal has taken wing.
"What this really tells us, at least with respect to this visual system, is that the fly's brain is in a different state when it's flying than when it's quiescent, when it would just be walking on the ground," Dickinson said.
Next, the team hopes to figure out what is behind the extra sensitivity and its purpose for the fruit flies.

Article from Livescience
Hillary Maruwa Feb 20, 2010

Bill Gates and the 'nuclear Renaissance'

(CNN) -- Say you were to give Bill Gates a really great present -- like the ability to cure crippling diseases or to pick all U.S. presidents for the next 50 years.

Gates would like those gifts, sure.
But you wouldn't have granted his one, true wish.
The Microsoft-founder-turned-philanthropist said at a recent speech in California that, more than new vaccines for AIDS or malaria or presidential selection power, what he really wants is clean energy at half its current cost.
To do that, he said, we'll need new technology.


Gates -- a father of the personal computer and quite the tech powerhouse -- said one of the brightest hopes for clean, cheap power is a new form of nuclear power plant that reuses waste uranium from existing nuclear reactors.
It's kind of like radioactive recycling, and, on its face, can sound like a miracle.
Gates actually described energy innovation in those terms: To prevent famine, poverty and the hardship that will come with global climate change we need "energy miracles," he said at the TED Conference in Long Beach.
Some nuclear scientists and critics say the nuclear technology Gates highlighted is misguided, naive and expensive.Others, like Craig Smith, a nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Gates is helping put the world on the verge of a "nuclear Renaissance" that could provide cheap power for everyone in the world -- forever.

"There's a new enthusiasm not only in the United States but, I think, worldwide for the use of nuclear energy," Smith said.
Smith's argument is bolstered by the fact that President Obama on Tuesday announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for a new nuclear power plant.
The proposed project, to be located in Burke County, Georgia, would be the first nuclear power plant built in the United States in three decades.


How it works


Most nuclear power plants today use radioactive elements like uranium to create nuclear fission and then produce electricity.
One problem: That reaction leaves behind uranium waste. To make matters worse, the United States hasn't identified a safe place to store the waste from the country's 104 nuclear reactors in the long term.
That's where the technology promoted by Gates comes in.
Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars in a Bellevue, Washington, company called TerraPower, according to TerraPower CEO John Gilleland.
TerraPower is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.
This has a number of potential benefits, Gilleland said. Among them:


• The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.


• The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.


• The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.


• The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."


Gilleland said it's not a matter of if the technology works.
"It's going to work -- for sure," he said. "The question will be precisely how well and how economically. But right now there are lots of people in the world who think it could begin to see common application in the 2020s."


'Pie-in-the-sky'


Others scoff at the idea.
Gates is looking for a "silver bullet" technology to fix the world's climate problems, but no such technology exists, said Thomas B. Cochran, a nuclear physicist and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group that opposes new nuclear power plants.
"The idea that Gates is going to throw some money at a couple of guys that think they've got a new idea and this is gonna blossom into something that really works is a pretty low probability," he said.
Cochran compared Gates' call for investment in nuclear technology that would reuse uranium to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. It's a scam, he said.
Researchers have been working on similar, utopian ideas for more than 60 years, he said, and with no tangible result.
Action needs to be taken now to blunt the effects of climate change, he said; and new nuclear power technologies will take too long to develop and will be too expensive.
"If you're trying to address climate change mitigation, this is not the way to go in any case because it's too far into the future," he said.

"We need the solutions now. The focus on research and development ought to be on improvements in near-term applications, not these pie-in-the-sky reactor concepts that won't be deployed for decades."
Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an environmental and public-safety group, said the timeline is too slow.
The technology could be ready for testing in 20 years and ready for commercial use 20 years after that, Gates said in California.
"Our belief is that we need to make near-term carbon emissions reductions -- and in that sense, this doesn't help," Mariotte said.
"It diverts resources away from technologies that do work."


Optimism


Others applaud Gates, one of the richest men in the world, for taking on a big problem like climate change with gusto and optimism.
"Look, I think this is the backing of a creative and innovative reactor concept," said Smith, the nuclear engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"That is a very good thing -- to allow people to stretch their minds and come up with new concepts."
It's unclear where the best clean-energy technology solutions will come from, Smith said, but many varieties of next-generation nuclear tech are under development, and the U.S. government has invested in several.
Ted Quinn, a former president of the American Nuclear Society and a consultant for the nuclear industry, said it's important for the United States to find a valuable use for nuclear waste.
"This is like an ultimate design that can burn a different type of fuel than we burn today. This burns the part of the fuel that we can't burn," he said of the Gates-backed project. "It helps the fuel cycle issues."
In his remarks in California, Gates said there will be no easy fix for climate change.
He encouraged optimism, along with heavier investment in solar, wind, battery and nuclear technologies.
That's the only way he will get his biggest wish, he said. "We have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline."

Article from CNN.
Hillary Maruwa  Feb 17, 2010

why advetrised broadband speeds lag behind reality

Downloading music from the Internet, streaming video or even browsing most websites nowadays requires fast broadband Internet connections such as a digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable. But slower-than-advertised connection speeds caused by growing network congestion and artificial restrictions by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have left broadband consumers frustrated at times, and for good reason.

 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced in September that actual broadband speeds lag behind advertised speeds by as much as 50 percent to 80 percent. The FCC defines broadband as being at least 768 kilobits per second (Kbps) for download speeds.

 One kilobit is equal to one thousand bits, and 8 bits equal 1 byte. As a point of reference, downloading a 5 megabyte (MB) file such as a music mp3 with a 768Kbps connection takes about 52 seconds.

 Upload speeds typically have less priority and run slower for broadband connections.

 Fact is, advertised broadband speeds typically represent best-case scenarios, or maximum speed limits. It's certainly possible to reach advertised speeds if all conditions are right, but people are only setting themselves up for disappointment if they expect a guaranteed high speed at all times when they buy into ISP plans.

 "It's like asking the local government to guarantee a certain speed when you commute to work," said Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota who studies Internet economics. "They can widen the street and try to synchronize the light, but [speed] guarantees are impossible."






The bottlenecks

 Myriad problems out of your control — beyond your computer — can slow data transfer speeds, even if you have a DSL, cable or fiber optic connection with advertised speeds of tens or hundreds of megabits per second (Mbps).

 With DSL, Internet users who live far from the line's point of origin, or central node, can experience slower speeds than people who live near a node.

 Network congestion between an Internet user and the ISP nodes can also make for sluggish connection speeds — peak usage occurs when many at-home users crowd on, typically from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

 Even if there's no congestion, data transfer speeds depend on many factors outside of the control of any one ISP. For instance, a website receiving too many hits from online visitors may suffer from lag because its server cannot handle the load. Visiting a website being hosted by a server halfway across the world can also mean slower loading speeds.

 "What your ISP handles is just a small piece of the puzzle," Odlyzko told TechNewsDaily.

 ISPs can certainly take steps to improve broadband speeds, such as building the infrastructure to support more Internet users and managing network congestion better. They could also tone down advertising that may currently mislead customers, Odlyzko noted.

 ISPs face lawsuits

 The failure of broadband to reach promised speeds has led to more than just complaints. In 2005, unhappy customers of AT&T's DSL service filed a lawsuit in a St. Louis Circuit Court. That lawsuit gained class-action status in December 2009, and could potentially affect thousands of customers in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

One part of the St. Louis lawsuit notes that AT&T puts artificial caps on the connection speeds of some customers. Comcast also uses the practice of bandwidth caps to limit the amount of data that customers can download per month, based on preventing heavy Internet users from hogging networks and causing congestion.

The idea of restricting heavy Internet users has some basis in lopsided usage patterns. According to the FCC, about 1 percent of users drive 20 percent of Internet traffic, and 20 percent of users drive up to 80 percent of traffic.

Yet the capping practice has often enraged Web surfers, with 81 percent of U.S. consumers expressing their dislike of capping and metering in a 2008 survey by the International Data Corporation.

For now, the FCC is focused on unveiling its National Broadband Plan that would supposedly ensure that everyone has access to purchasing broadband, now delayed until March. Almost two-thirds of Americans stay connected to the Internet with broadband at home, according to the FCC and surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life project. Just 7 percent of Pew survey respondents said that they still use dialup modems, which represent an extremely slow connection method for today's Internet, which is designed for broadband speeds.

"Ten years ago, people were pretty happy with 56 Kbps modems," Odlyzko said. "These days you can't even do e-mail — Web-surfing with 56 Kpbs modem is really awful."

Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa Feb 14, 2010

tiles that changes color

On a blazing summer day, a black roof gets miserably hot, while a white roof reflects the sun and keeps a home cooler. In winter, the warmth generated by a solar-radiation-absorbing black roof can save energy.
That's well-known and simple enough. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways. Well ...
A team of recent MIT graduates has developed roof tiles that change color based on the temperature. The tiles become white on a hot day and turn black when it's cold outside.
When white, the tiles reflect about 80 percent of the sunlight that hits them. When they are black, they reflect only about 30 percent. The white state could save up to 20 percent of present cooling costs, according to other recent studies on the theory of all this. Savings from the black state in winter have yet to be quantified.
The tiles rely on a polymer similar to that used in hair gels and water, in a solution encapsulated between layers of flexible plastic. When cool, the polymer stays dissolved, letting a black background show through. When warmed, the polymer condenses to form tiny droplets, whose small sizes scatter light and thus produce a white surface, reflecting the sun's heat.


More work is needed to make the setup commercial-ready.
"It's got to stand up to very harsh conditions," said Nick Orf, a member of the team that calls itself Thermeleon (get it?). "Those sorts of tests would have to be done before we'll know if we have a viable product."


Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa Feb, 14 2010

Scientists Freeze Water with Heat

Imagine water freezing solid even as it's heating up. Such are the bizarre tricks scientists now find water is capable of.
Popular belief contends that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Surprisingly, if water lies in a smooth bottle and is free of any dust, it can stay liquid down to minus 40 degrees F (minus 40 degrees C) in what's called "supercooled" form. The dust and rough surfaces that water is normally found in contact with in nature can serve as the kernels around which ice crystals form.
Now researcher Igor Lubomirsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have discovered another way to control the freezing point of water — via what are called quasi-amorphous pyroelectric thin films. These surfaces change their electrical charge depending on their temperature.
When pyroelectic surfaces are positively charged, water becomes easier to freeze, and when they have a negative charge, it becomes harder to freeze.
The researchers saw that supercooled water could freeze as it's being heated, as long as the temperature changes the surface charge as well. For instance, when supercooled water is on a negatively charged lithium tantalate surface, it will freeze solid immediately when the surface is heated to 17.6 degrees F (minus 8 degrees C) and its charge switches to positive.


Curiously, positively charged surfaces inspire supercooled water to freeze from the bottom up, while negatively charged surfaces cause it to freeze from the top down. This likely has to do with how water molecules orient themselves — the negatively charged oxygen atoms in water molecules naturally point toward positively charged surfaces, while the reverse is true with hydrogen atoms.


"The difference between the positive and negative charge was unexpected," Lubomirsky said.
The ability to better control the freezing temperature of supercooled water could be critical for a variety of applications, including the survival of cold-blooded animals, the cryo-preservation of cells and tissues, the protection of crops from freezing, and the ability to understand and trigger cloud formation.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Science.

Article from LiveScience.
Hillary Maruwa Feb 12, 2010

Future Soldiers

The soldiers of the future might controversially boost their brains with drugs and prosthetics, augment their strength with mechanical exoskeletons, and have artificially intelligent "digital buddies" at their beck and call, according to the U.S. Army's Future Soldier Initiative.
The project is the latest attempt from the U.S. Army research lab in Natick, Mass., to brainstorm what soldiers might carry into the battlefield of tomorrow. A special emphasis of its concept is augmenting mental performance.


Boosting the mind

One contentious way science and technology might help provide the upper hand in warfare is through mind-enhancing drugs or prosthetics for a soldier's body or brain, the initiative suggested. These could yield dramatic improvements in soldier performance and provide a tremendous edge in combat, it noted, but would require the Army to grapple with very serious and difficult ethical issues.
Soldiers might have knowledge presented to them via augmented reality systems that superimpose data on their view of their surroundings and virtual reality systems that immerse them in computer simulated environments.
With the aid of head or wrist displays and data gloves, they could view remote areas of the battlefield through sensors, operate robots with spoken commands or gestures, and receive new training in critical skills whenever and wherever they want or need.
To handle the glut of data, each soldier might be paired with his or her own personal intelligent agent, sidekicks which the initiative nicknamed a "digital buddy."
These programs could sift through information to alert soldiers to vital details, provide reminders as memory joggers, monitor levels of ammunition and other supplies for automated calls for resupply, communicate with other "digital buddies" to better weave soldiers into teams, and even adapt to an individual soldier's personality, strengths and weaknesses.
 Suits of the future



An exoskeleton fitted onto a soldier's lower body might grant him or her superhuman strength and endurance, customizable "wearable robots" that would effortlessly carry gear such as heavy weapons, armor and shields, or tools to cut through obstacles for emergency search and rescue operations.
Two different teams are competing to build such exoskeletons, one backed by Raytheon, the other by Lockheed Martin.
Body armor might incorporate chain mail fabricated from carbon nanotubes or other materials engineered at the scale of nanometers or billionths of a meter. Such armor could be flexible and protect against blast effects such as shrapnel, amputation and burns, as well as against cuts and rifle rounds.
Future headgear might not only incorporate audio and video units and radio transceivers, but also sensors to keep track of brain activity. These, along with other devices on the body to monitor heart rate, hydration levels and other data, might help leaders track a soldier's mental and physical status to help determine how fit he or she is for duty and see if medical or psychological intervention is warranted.
Face recognition systems might also be added to headgear, useful at checkpoints or for acquiring targets, while automatic translator systems might not only help soldiers understand languages but also nonverbal cues. Transparent visors might also be embedded with carbon nanotube arrays to help absorb any blinding laser attacks. Headgear could also support laser rangefinders, infrared target illuminators, GPS and maps.
In much the same way, the uniforms of the future might also be antimicrobial, blast-protective, flame-resistant, bug-repellant, toxin-sensing and -fighting, to some extent self-cleaning, capable not only of sensing wounds but also perhaps also managing them, and laced with technologies such as piezoelectrics, textile-integrated batteries and electrically conductive fibers that help them generate, store and harvest power and serve as communication networks. If soldiers feel too hot or cold, they might even carry around their own lightweight, low-power climate control systems.
All this gear might get its power from a small generator that could quietly convert liquid fuel directly into electricity for days.


The uncertain future


There is unfortunately no sign from the center as to when, if ever, any of these ideas might actually see use in battle.
The concept was originally named the Future Soldier 2030 Initiative, suggesting this might be how soldiers looked two decades out. However, the project dropped the date from its title in December.

Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa. Feb 2, 2010

Next Generation Supersonic Passenger Aircraft

The 21st century will become the age of supersonic passenger aircraft.



Sooner or later, travelers will use supersonic passenger jets just as they use the jumbo jets of today. What can we do to make this happen sooner?


This article introduces the research now underway at JAXA to make supersonic travel a new option for the commercial traveler.
 
If we travel faster than sound, we'll get to where we're going sooner.
Large passenger aircrafts such as the B (Boeing) 747, what we fondly call "jumbo jets," take us to destinations all over Japan and the rest of the world. Though fast and convenient, jumbo jets still take many hours to reach distant lands such as the United States and Europe. Travelers have no choice but to sit and wait, with nowhere to move their bodies. If we could fly at much higher speeds, the hours of in-flight confinement would be drastically reduced. Flying would be far more convenient and comfortable.

But engineers run into problems when they try to design aircrafts that travel faster than sound. The jumbo jets today normally fly slightly slower than the speed of sound. If an aircraft flew faster than sound, the shock waves from the aircraft would reach the ground and cause strong noises like thunder called a "sonic boom". The sonic boom by an aircraft as big as a jumbo jet would have enough power to cause damage on the ground. The windows of buildings might even shatter.

Some people say that we don't need to develop the speed of airliners, which is now fast enough. But flying at higher speeds has various advantages besides those we've already described. One, for example, is the possibility of reducing the incidence of "Economy-class syndrome." Economy-class syndrome is a perilous physical condition caused by sitting for long hours in the same posture in an airline seat. Victims suffer a blood clot in their legs and often have difficulty breathing. If the clot moves higher in the bloodstream, into the lungs or heart, death may even result. The name of the syndrome is actually misleading, as passengers in business class and first class sometimes experience the same thing. Airplane passengers can reduce the risk of economy-class syndrome simply by standing up and stretching their legs every few hours. Even so, shorter flying times might eliminate the risks altogether.
 
Article from JAXA.
Hillary Maruwa Jan 29, 2010

Does Hot water cools faster than Cold water?

Determining whether or not hot water can freeze faster than cold water may seem like a no-brainer. After all, water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. And wouldn’t water hot enough to kill E. coli bacteria (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) take a longer path than cooler water at a fall New England beach (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius) towards a frigid future as ice? While a logical assumption, it turns out that hot water can freeze before cooler water under certain conditions.

This apparent quirk of nature is the "Mpemba effect," named after the Tanzanian high school student, Erasto Mpemba, who first observed it in 1963. The Mpemba effect occurs when two bodies of water with different temperatures are exposed to the same subzero surroundings and the hotter water freezes first. Mpemba’s observations confirmed the hunches of some of history’s most revered thinkers, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, who also thought that hot water froze faster than cold water.

Evaporation is the strongest candidate to explain the Mpemba effect. As hot water placed in an open container begins to cool, the overall mass decreases as some of the water evaporates. With less water to freeze, the process can take less time. But this doesn’t always work, especially when using closed containers that preventevaporated water from escaping.

And evaporation may not be the only reason the water can freeze more quickly. There may be less dissolved gas in the warmer water, which can reduce its ability to conduct heat, allowing it to cool faster. However, Polish physicists in the 1980s were unable to conclusively demonstrate this relationship.

A non-uniform temperature distribution in the water may also explain the Mpemba effect. Hot water rises to the top of a container before it escapes, displacing the cold water beneath it and creating a "hot top." This movement of hot water up and cold water down is called a convection current. These currents are a popular form of heat transfer in liquids and gases, occurring in the ocean and also in radiators that warm a chilly room. With the cooler water at the bottom, this uneven temperature distribution creates convection currents that accelerate the cooling process. Even with more ground to cover to freeze, the temperature of the hotter water can drop at a faster rate than the cooler water.

So the next time you refill your ice cube tray, try using warmer water. You might have ice cubes to cool your drink even sooner

From Live Science.

Hillary Maruwa Jan. 15, 2010

Half plant, half animal - Sea Slug.

A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It's the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.

The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out Photosynthesis - the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

"They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything," said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Pierce has been studying the unique creatures, officially called Elysia chlorotica, for about 20 years. He presented his most recent findings in Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. The finding was first reported by Science News.

"This is the first time that multicellar animals have been able to produce chlorophyll," Pierce told Live Science.

The sea slugs live in salt marshes in New England and Canada. In addition to burglarizing the genes needed to make the green pigment chlorophyll to convert sunlight into energy, just as plants do, eliminating the need to eat food to gain energy.

"We collect them and we keep them in aquarium for months," Pierce said. "As long as we shine a light on them for 12 hours a day, they can survive [without food]."

The researchers used a radioactive tracer to be sure that the slugs are actually producing the chlorophyll themselves, as opposed to just stealing the ready-made pigment from algae. In fact, the slugs incorporate the genetic material so well, they pass it on to further generations of slugs.

The babies of thieving slugs retain the ability to produce their own chlorophyll, though they can't carry out photosynthesis until they've eaten enough algae to steal the necessary chloroplasts, which they can't yet produce on their own.

The slugs accomplishment is quite a feat, and scientists aren't yet sure how the animals actually appropriate the genes they need.

"It certainly is possible that DNA from one species can get into another species, as these slugs have clearly shown," Pierce said. "But the mechanisms are still unknown."

Article from Live Science.

Hillary Maruwa Jan. 14, 2010.