Mars Wobbles Created Climate Swings

New images of rock layers at Mars' surface have given scientists evidence of climate swings on ancient Mars that were driven by the wobbling of the red planet's axis — the same mechanism that causes Earth's ice age cycles.

Precession of the wibble.

Synthetic DNA assembly.

Scientists have discovered a more efficient way of building a synthetic genome that could one day enable them to create artificial life.

Get a life - any life.

Can I see that again ?

A team of scientists from the University of Washington have published a report in which they demonstrated that they can regenerate a specific type of neuron of a mammal’s inner retina.

Go science.

He's beside his Virtual self.

"....virtual reality experiments show the brain can be tricked into believing it's outside the body."

"....researchers said subjects felt as if they were being poked in the chest—outside of their body.

“This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants," Ehrsson said. "It felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many of them giggled and said ‘Wow, this is so weird.’”

"..."We've shown the body and self is somehow separate in the brain.."

Also available in pill form.

Can you Be me now ?

Scientists now have manipulated people's perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a "humanoid body," experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other's body.

neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements.

However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.

So for now it is still safe to hide as furniture.

Ping !

And so it goes.

Quantum Dot Solar Panels

Eventual theoretical higher efficiencies of 63 %.

Power Dressing

DARPA offers $1Million for wearable power supply.

Flexi-boat debuts.

Using technology developed by Conti's El Cerrito Marine Advanced Research Inc., the WAM-V is "a new class of watercraft ... that delivers a radically new seagoing experience."

It has twin hulls, like a catamaran, connected to each other and a control cabin by four metal legs. The legs ride on titanium springs -- like shock absorbers -- that allow the WAM-V to adjust to the surface of the water -- to flex like knees.

Nice clear wake in the middle for waterskiing too.

Can you see me now ?

A microchip the width of a pencil eraser shows promise in eye repair.

The microchip implant replaces the dead rods and cones. The implant is dotted with several thousand micro-photodiodes, which react to light and produce small electrical impulses in parts of the eye’s retina.

“The good thing about this device that we’re using is that it doesn’t have any wires to it," Narfstrom told LiveScience. "So it’s like a small disk that is very inert and not so traumatic to the eye that we slide into the retina.”

Hyper-resolution, multi spectrum with night vision overlay available for christmas 2012.

Hands On and On Interface

Most excellent multi-touch sensing screen computer interface.

More detailed presentation video here.

I knew all those childhood piano lessons would finally payoff.

Exoskeleton Weight Lifting

Roidless powerup.

Nanoscale Fibre Optics

"Scientists have created a tiny cable -- much thinner than a human hair -- through which they can transmit visible light, potentially paving the way for improvements in solar energy, computing and medicine.

It could lend itself to miniature electrical circuitry and microscopic light-based switching devices for optical computing. It also could have medical applications such as retinal implants for people with the eye disease macular degeneration or detecting single molecules of pathogens in the body......

"You can envision making chips that can move light around -- basically convey information at the speed of light rather than using electronics. So it's optics for the manipulation of information rather than electronics."

Mmmm...speed of light.

Can you see me now ?

"For the first time ever, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have developed a material with a negative refractive index for visible light.

Ames Laboratory senior physicist Costas Soukoulis, working with colleagues in Karlsruhe, Germany, designed a silver-based, mesh-like material that marks the latest advance in the rapidly evolving field of metamaterials, materials that could lead to a wide range of new applications as varied as ultrahigh-resolution imaging systems and cloaking devices."

Seeing really isn't believing after all.

Cancer Fighter Patented

A group of researchers claim that they are patenting a possible cure for cancer involving nothing more than sugar and short-chain fatty acid combination.

The Johns Hopkins researchers cautioned that their double-punch molecule, described in the December issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, has not yet been tested on animals or humans.

"For a long time, cancer researchers did not pay much attention to the use of sugars in fighting cancer," Department of Biomedical Engineering postdoctoral fellow said. "But we found that when the right sugar is matched with the right chemical partner, it can deliver a powerful double-whammy against cancer cells."

That's that then....next..Flying Cars please.

3D Sketching

Simple, fast ... intuitive. Carry on.

Warp Factor Mr Zulu

Siemens has achieved a transmission speed of 107 gigabits per second over a single optical fiber.

They have developed a new transmission and receiving system that is able to process data directly before and after its conversion into optical signals using electrical processing only.

Current systems handling very high data rates have to split signals into multiple lower data-rate signals and later reconvert them from optical to electrical, a process that adds to costs and reduces network capacity.

107-gigabits-per-second transmission could send two DVDs in a second.

Fully immerisve scratch and sniff VR still on track.

The Walls have eyes.

prism 200 is a handheld through-wall radar, which has been designed to be used by police, special forces or the emergency services.

It provides quick and covert intelligence on the movement and location of people in a room or building - without the need for invasive sensors.

Stealth ninja gear now mandatory.

Nano Tools

By manipulating carbon nanotubes inside scanning electron microscopes, 21st-century nanosmiths have begun crafting a suite of research tools, including nanotweezers, nanobearings and nano-oscillators.

To design the nanoknife, the NIST and CU scientists welded a carbon nanotube between two electrochemically sharpened tungsten needles.
In the resulting prototype, the nanotube stretches between two ends of a tungsten wire loop.

For those hard to get places.

Can You See Me Now ?

A consortium of 11 European countries have approved 57 million euros (74.1 million dollars) to fund the design of what will be the world's greatest optical telescope.

The so-called Europe Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is budgeted at between 800 million and a billion euros (1.04-1.3 billion dollars).

A design approved by more than 250 ESO astronomers at a four-day meeting in Marseille, southern France, at the start of the month calls for an optical/infrared telescope with a 42-metre (136.5-feet) -diameter composite mirror, the largest in the world. The mirror will comprise 906 hexagonal segments, each 1.45 metres (4.7 feet) in size. Their light will be channelled to an "adaptive optics" system, chiefly comprising a smaller mirror whose shape can be distorted by tiny actuators and helps to correct for image fuzziness that occurs when light passes through Earth's atmosphere.

If all goes well, the E-ELT will start operations in 2018, and will be more than 100 times more sensitive than the present-day largest optical telescopes, led by the 10-metre (32.5-feet) Keck telescope in Hawaii.

It could hugely advance knowledge of planets around other stars, the earliest moments of the Universe, "super-massive" black holes and enigmatic phenomena called dark energy and dark matter.

The initial design sketched for the telescope was an OWL ("OverWhelmingly Large") design with a 100-metre (325-feet) mirror. But this was scaled back in 2005 because it was too costly and too complex to build on ESO's budget timescale.

My wish list now to include Inferometry Array of Space based OWLS.