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Affordable Self-Driving Car Tech Aims To Become Ubiquitous Within Three Years

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Illustration of Mobileye technology that measures following distance

Mobileye on YouTube

It's not made by Google.

Google's self-driving car sure sounds appealing, but it's expensive. So another company altogether is looking to get the same capabilities for less.

A New York Times reporter recently took a ride in an Audi A7 equipped with cheaper-and more commercializable, the tech's maker says-versions of self-driving technology. The story offers a look at Israel-based Mobileye Vision Technologies, which is responsible for the intelligent autopilot that's already in cars today, such as Volvo's bicyclist-avoiding system.

Mobileye is currently selling its third generation of technology, the New York Times reported. It uses video cameras instead of the Google Car's exponentially pricier lidar. Later this year, Mobileye plans to sell a system that is able to take control during stop-and-go traffic.

Times reporter John Markoff tested a prototype self-driving system that Mobileye hopes will be ready for sale in 2016. Compared to the Google car, which Markoff tested in 2010, Mobileye tech seems more limited and less trustworthy, he writes. But it's much more likely to be the tech that car owners will use themselves in the next few years.

[New York Times]

    



Who Was H.M.? Inside The Mind Of The Amnesiac Who Revolutionized Neuroscience

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A botched lobotomy left 27-year-old Henry Molaison unable to form new memories. This is how Molaison's personal tragedy became science's gain.

My friend's father was a neurosurgeon. As a child, I had no idea what a neurosurgeon did. Years later, when I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at McGill University, this man reentered my life. While reading articles on memory in medical journals, I came across a report by a doctor who had performed a brain operation to cure a young man's intractable epilepsy. The operation caused the patient to lose his capacity to establish new memories. The doctor who coauthored the article was my friend's father, William Beecher Scoville. The patient was Henry.

This childhood connection to Henry's neurosurgeon made reading about the "amnesic patient, H.M." more compelling. Later, when I joined Brenda Milner's laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Henry's case fell into my lap. For my PhD thesis, I was able to test him in 1962 when he came to Milner's lab for scientific study. She had been the first psychologist to test Henry after his operation, and her 1957 paper with Scoville, describing Henry's operation and its awful consequences, revolutionized the science of memory.

I was trying to expand the scientific understanding of Henry's amnesia by examining his memory through his sense of touch, his somatosensory system. My initial investigation with him was focused and brief, lasting one week. After I moved to MIT, however, Henry's extraordinary value as a research participant became clear to me, and I went on to study him for the rest of his life, forty-six years. Since his death, I have dedicated my work to linking fifty-five years of rich behavioral data to what we will learn from his autopsied brain.

When I first met Henry, he told me stories about his early life. I could instantly connect with the places he was talking about and feel a sense of his life history. Several generations of my family lived in the Hartford area: my mother attended Henry's high school, and my father was raised in the same neighborhood where Henry lived before and after his operation. I was born in the Hartford Hospital, the same hospital where Henry's brain surgery was performed. With all these intersections in our backgrounds and experiences, it was interesting that when I would ask him whether we had met before, he typically replied, "Yes, in high school." I can only speculate as to how Henry forged the connection between his high-school experience and me. One possibility is that I resembled someone he knew back then; another is that during his many visits to MIT for testing, he gradually built up a sense of familiarity for me and filed this representation among his high-school memories.

Henry was famous, but did not know it. His striking condition had made him the subject of scientific research and public fascination. For decades, I received requests from the media to interview and videotape him. Each time I told him how special he was, he could momentarily grasp, but not retain, what I had said.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recorded our 1992 conversation for two radio programs, one devoted to memory, the other to epilepsy. A year earlier, Philip Hilts had written an article about Henry for the New York Times, and later made him the focus of a book, Memory's Ghost.

Scientific papers and book chapters were written about Henry, and his case is one of the most frequently cited in the neuroscience literature. Open any introductory psychology textbook and you are likely to find somewhere in its pages a description of a patient known only as H.M., next to diagrams of the hippocampus and black-and-white MRI images. Henry's disability, a tremendous cost to him and his family, became science's gain.

Henry would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefited science and medicine.During his life, the people who knew Henry kept his identity private, always referring to him by his initials. When I gave lectures about Henry's contributions to science, I always encountered intense curiosity about who he was, but his name was revealed to the world only after his death in 2008.

Over the course of decades, during which I worked with Henry, it became my mission to make sure that he is not remembered just by brief, anonymous descriptions in textbooks. Henry Molaison was much more than a collection of test scores and brain images. He was a pleasant, engaging, docile man with a keen sense of humor, who knew that he had a poor memory and accepted his fate. There was a man behind the initials, and a life behind the data. Henry often told me that he hoped that research into his condition would help others live better lives. He would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefited science and medicine.

Memory is an essential component of everything we do, but we are not consciously aware of its scope and importance. We take memory for granted. As we walk, talk, and eat, we are not aware that our behavior stems from information and skills that we previously learned and remembered. We rely constantly on our memory to get us through each moment and each day. We need memory to survive-without it, we would not know how to clothe ourselves, navigate our neighborhoods, or communicate with others. Memory enables us to revisit our experiences, to learn from the past, and even to plan what to do in the future. It provides continuity from moment to moment, morning to evening, day to day, and year to year.

Through Henry's case, we gained insights that allowed us to break memory down into many specific processes and to understand the underlying brain circuits. We now know that when we describe what we had for dinner last night, or recite a fact about European history, or type a sentence on a keyboard without looking at the keys, we are accessing different types of memory stored in our brains.

Henry helped us understand what happens when the ability to store information is missing. He retained much of the knowledge he had acquired before his operation, but in his daily life afterward, he depended heavily on the memories of those around him. His family members, and later the staff at his nursing home, remembered what Henry had eaten that day, what medications he needed to take, and whether he needed a shower. His test results, and medical reports, and the transcripts of his interviews, helped preserve information about his life that he could not retain. Of course, none of these resources could substitute for the capacities Henry had lost. For memory does more than just help us survive-it influences our quality of life and helps shape our identity.

Excerpted with permission from Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. by Suzanne Corkin. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013.

    


Robot Sees Into The Future To Pour You A Beer

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"Yes, I predict you will want a beer in the near future."

We've seen some pretty talented robot bartenders, but we still have to go to them for a drink. What kind of a future is this? Can't the robot come and pour us a beer by now?

Sure! But that's not quite as easy as just having a robot walk (or roll) over and pour a beer into a glass. If you, say, move the glass at the last minute (not cool, dude, but okay), the robot could keep right on pouring. No, a great robot server needs to be able to look slightly into the future.

Using the PR2 robot, which seems to be a quick learner and has already done some beer-retrieving work in the past (sidenote: we want one), a Cornell team at the Personal Robotics Lab has taught the machine to predict human interactions, then base its own actions on what people are most likely to do. So, armed with a Microsoft Kinect, the Cornell 'bot determines what's in its frame, then draws on a video archive showing how humans will usually interact with certain objects.

Maybe, for example, the robot is planning on pouring you a beer. The robot sees you, a book, and a glass-then it sees you reaching out your hand. The robot, based on a set of algorithms, can pause and wait to see if you go for the book or the glass, and if you do go for the glass, wait until you put it back to fill you up.

Although that is clearly the most important function, the robot can do some stuff besides pouring beer. In the video here, you can see it predict when someone is heading to the fridge, then eagerly route them off and open the door for them.

So far, the inventors report, the robot has a pretty decent success rate: 82 percent correct when looking ahead one second, 71 percent for three seconds, and 57 percent for 10 seconds. Not too bad, even though that's a bummer for the unlucky few who got their beer spilled because of incorrect predictions.

    


These Are The 100 Most Endangered Species In The World

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The Rare Snub-Nosed Monkey

Wikimedia Commons

The most endangered species on the planet might come as a surprise.

From the spammily named BestCollegesOnline comes a pretty excellent interactive tool to check out the 100 most endangered species in the world--before they're gone. The list includes plants and fungi as well as animals, and you can sort the list by location, type, or habitat, in case you were particularly curious about creatures that live in the air above Oceania.

The most endangered species in the world may come as a surprise: it's nothing famous, like the giant panda or Amur leopard, but instead the forest coconut, native to Madagascar. It's estimated that there are fewer than ten adult forest coconut trees left, so, um, yeah, sounds pretty endangered.

Check out the rest of the interactive list here.

    


How Tracking The Faces Of Sleepy Truck Drivers Could Save Your Life

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Drowsy Driver

Courtesy Seeing Machines

Fatigue causes up to 65 percent of truck accidents within the mining industry.

Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction mining equipment, will start selling eye- and face-tracking technology to keep sleepy truck drivers from getting into accidents.

Driver Safety Solution consists of a camera that tracks a driver's eye behavior, including pupil size and blink frequency, and where their mouth is located. When it senses the driver has fallen asleep or is looking away from the road and not paying attention, it activates audio alarms and seat vibrations to bring their focus back. An infrared camera in the truck cab allows the camera to analyze a driver's eyes through glasses or in the dark.

If DSS senses a driver has entered microsleep, a short sleep period that only lasts a few seconds, it will also alert support staff, who will have access to video footage of the driver's eyes and data about their behavior from a GPS and accelerometer in the truck. Often people don't even realize they fell asleep after experiencing a microsleep, making it especially dangerous for drivers.

The firm that developed the technology, Seeing Machines, is one of many companies looking to combat ">driver fatigue. Unlike similar systems, DSS doesn't require the driver to wear special glasses, and doesn't need to be calibrated for each new driver.

Newmont Mining, a Colorado-based gold producer, told the BBC that Driver Safety Solution reduced accidents due to driver fatigue by as much as 90 percent in a pilot study. According to Caterpillar's data, drowsy commercial truck drivers cause 1,200 deaths and 76,000 injuries a year on U.S. highways. In the surface mining industry, fatigued driving causes up to 65 percent of accidents.

[BBC News]

    


Supercomputer Creates Atom-By-Atom Model Of HIV Virus Shell

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Atomic Model of an HIV Capsid

Courtesy of TCBG-UIUC

The envelope in which HIV keeps its genetic material gets an unprecedentedly detailed look.

The human immunodeficiency virus' capsid is both a shield and an open backdoor. Located in the center of every HIV particle, the capsid protects the virus' load of genetic material. Once the virus has entered a human cell, the capsid is programmed to come apart in an orderly way, kicking off the virus' takeover of the cell.

Yet the capsid may be vulnerable to certain drugs, which researchers are now studying as potential treatments. (No current HIV drugs target the capsid.) "The timing of the opening of the capsid is essential for the degree of virulence of the virus," Klaus Schulten, a physicist at the University of Illinois, said in a statement. "This is where we could perhaps best interfere with HIV infection."

Schulten was part of a team that has, for the first time, modeled the HIV capsid's structure at the atomic level. Scientists already knew a lot about the proteins that form the HIV capsid, but hadn't been able to learn details such as exactly how many proteins make up the capsid until now. The new model requires an enormous amount of computing power, which wasn't available until recently; simulations of all 64 million atoms in the capsid ran in the University of Illinois' Blue Waters supercomputer, which can sustain 1-petaflop performance during calculations.

Shulten and his team, including biologists, physicists and disease researchers from several U.S. universities, hope their model will help others design drugs that mess with the capsid somehow.

The researchers discovered that the capsid is mostly composed of 216 hexagon-shaped proteins fitted neatly next to one another like cells in a honeycomb. Meanwhile, 12 strategically placed pentagon-shaped proteins create sharp corners in the capsid, forming it into a narrow cone. Previous studies had suggested that those pentagons made the capsid's corners, but this study helped confirm that's true.

The team also ran some simulations that showed what kind of disruptions to the capsid's structure make it unable to form correctly or reproduce at a high rate.

To check their model, the team compared their results with data about the HIV capsid that they and other scientists had previously discovered, including information about the capsid's distinctive shape. The model fits well with already available data, the modelers wrote in a paper they published today in the journal Nature.

There's something very cool about getting to see, so accurately, something that's so small it can't even have color-viruses are much smaller than the wavelengths of light. For some, however, seeing the structure of HIV may be especially potent. Luke Jerram is an artist in the U.K. who makes glass sculptures of microbes. He's made an HIV particle before, and received this letter from an anonymous fan in 2009:

Dear Luke,
I just saw a photo of your glass sculpture of HIV.
I can't stop looking at it. Knowing that millions of those guys are in me, and will be a part of me for the rest of my life. Your sculpture, even as a photo, has made HIV much more real for me than any photo or illustration I've ever seen. It's a very odd feeling seeing my enemy, and the eventual likely cause of my death, and finding it so beautiful.
Thankyou.
    


You Can Eat Off The Floor (Of The International Space Station)

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Testing for Bacteria

NASA

Freeze-dried food seems pretty sterile but still!

A new paper, enticingly titled "Rapid culture-independent microbial analysis aboard the international space station (ISS) stage two: quantifying three microbial biomarkers," seeks to answer the most pressing question in space: can you eat off the floor?

The ISS team used what's called a Lab-on-a-Chip Application Development--Portable Test System (LOCAD-PTS). The LOCAD-PTS is a handheld tester for various kinds of bacteria and fungi, used specifically for the ISS. There are a few ways to use it; you can either use a sheet of agar (sort of like extremely firm jello) and press it to a surface for awhile, then allow to incubate for a few days, or you can simply use a dry swab on the surface and then mix with ultra-clean water provided especially for this purpose.

LOCAD-PTS tests done with that second option, which is what the ISS folks did here, are super quick: results pop up on the screen after only about 15 minutes. A description of the test, from NASA:

The lightweight system has three different types of cartridges for detecting endotoxin, a marker of gram-negative bacteria; glucan, a type of fungi; and lipoteichoic acid, a marker of gram-positive bacteria. The category of gram-positive bacteria includes multiple pathogens, specifically the well-known Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, making the identification of these bacteria important for crew health.

So, how did the ISS fare? Really well! The paper notes that "most surfaces used by the station crew are relatively free of microbial molecules," though the sites of heavy contact (like handles and the exercise station) have a bit more bacteria than other parts. But even those are fairly clean; NASA notes that they're "very satisfied with the results."

So can you eat astronaut ice cream off the floor of the ISS? Yep! Maybe don't eat it off the seat of the stationary bike, though. That might make you puke.

[NASA]

    


10 Improvised Weapons Made By Syrian Rebels

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Syrian Hell Cannon

an improvised artillery piece used by Syrian rebels.

Ahrar Al-Shamal Battalions, via Brown Moses

Necessity is the mother of destruction.


Click here to enter the gallery

Syrian rebels have developed all sorts of crazy weapons to fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They have fashioned weapons from PlayStation controllers, rope, fertilizer, and the explosive material of unexploded bombs. That taste for DIY weaponry could end--or at least slow down--now that the European Union is ending an arms embargo that stanched the flow of weapons to Syrian rebels. The lifted embargo is expected to give rebels access to better weapons. Here, we look back at 10 of the Syrian rebels' most intriguing home-grown weapons.

    



Redesigned Gmail Wants To Show You The Email You Actually Give A Crap About

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New Gmail Tabs

Google

Rolling out today, a redesigned Gmail organizes your messages, and learns what you want on your screen.

If you're a Gmail fan, you probably like the clean interface, or maybe the priority inbox feature, which lets you choose the kind of mail you want to see up-front. Now, with a new Gmail redesign rolling out today, Google is trying to impose even more order on a crowded inbox.

Instead of sending you the usual stream of mail and giving you options to filter it (what Gmail does right now) the service can automatically sort your mail into five different categories.

Those are:

  • Primary: Your usual, run-of-the-mill mail, with everything together in one spot.
  • Promotions: Groupons! And other assorted stuff Gmail terms deals.
  • Social: "Hi! Someone posted something on your Facebook wall." That sort of thing, and other social-networking updates.
  • Updates: Apparently these are like life updates. Get a receipt or a bill or some other statement, and it goes here. (It's the indoors-y, adult type to social's fun, outgoing friend, if you will.)
  • Forums: If you get an update from an online forum or subscribe to some newsletter-type thing, you can get updates on it here.

There are five tabs at the top, one for each of these categories. Just click on the tabs to switch between the different mail streams.

The obvious question here is: How smart is it at sorting? Am I going to get Nigerian princes in all of my forum updates? We can't say for sure yet, but Google says the new inbox will learn through algorithms, and get better at sorting (and adapting to your preferences) over time. So, although Twitter updates are probably easily categorized as social, if your Blade Runner fan forum pings (JUST FOR EXAMPLE) get caught in the promotions tab, you can drag those emails to the correct category, and Gmail will start putting all of them there. If you want to do something a little counterintuitive--like put those Twitter messages in "forums"--you can teach it that, too.

As with other Gmail roll-outs, it's designed to be there if you want it there. Users can select to use all five of the category tabs, or none of them. (New users signing up for Gmail after the switch will start automatically with social and promotions tabs. The folks who've already minutely customized their priority inboxes will have to opt in to the new design.) It's also possible to switch back to Gmail Classic if you're not feeling the new digs.

Along with that, a new mobile Gmail redesign based around the tabs system is coming to Android and iOS "within the next few weeks," according to Google's Gmail blog.

[Gmail Blog]

    


Bill Could Shift Research Focus From Climate Change To 'Weather Forecasting'

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Hurricane Sandy Imaged Using NOAA's GOES-13 Satellite

NOAA/NASA

Which will better protect people and property?

A new bill, still in its early drafts, may require the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to shift some of its research toward weather forecasts-and potentially away from studies of global warming and oceans, Climate Central reported.

The bill tackles a couple of issues that news reports have found in the wake of recent disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado. First is the U.S. National Weather Service's slow weather forecasts. For example, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicted Sandy's damaging path a week in advance, Climate Central reported, while the National Weather Service wasn't certain where Sandy would make landfall until three or four days before the storm hit. The second is the U.S.' weather satellite coverage. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's satellites are aging, but their replacements are running behind schedule and over budget.

The bill is far from legislation and is still open to revisions. Meanwhile, it offers a look at what its drafters, the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Environment, want for the U.S. agency that both runs the National Weather Service and is a major player in global warming research.

Subcommittee Chairman Chris Stuart (R-Utah) told Climate Central that weather predictions, which include storm predictions, could "protect lives and property" and that's why the budget should shift money from weather to climate. Experts Climate Central contacted warned against taking too much away from climate research, which helps governments and businesses prepare for the long run.

[Climate Central]

    


What You're Listening To On Facebook, Visualized

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Watch the popularity of music rise and fall in your city.

Mapping Music on Facebook from Facebook Stories on Vimeo.

Facebook's open graph protocol, a sort of integration of all of the information on Facebook, mostly sits in the background. You listen to a song on Spotify, it posts to Facebook, your friends like and comment--and all of those actions and reactions is part of the open graph. Stamen Design took some of that public data--not all of it is public, but much of it is--and made the Beatquake, a sort of visualizer of music data on Facebook.

Beatquake shows the popularity of songs in specific geographic locations, so you can see how individual songs blow up in different places. It's beautiful and odd, watching personal taste on a large, rhythmic scale like this.

Read more about the project here.

    


Eating Yogurt Does Weird Things To Your Brain

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Yogurt e Lamponi

Diego Cosenza

How and why are tougher questions.

Does what you eat affect your body more, or your mind? Can you just chow down on Big Macs as far as the brain goes, and be pretty much set? Or is there a deeper connection between thinking and food?

A new UCLA study that's one part gross to three parts fascinating has an idea: gut bacteria. Animals have been shown to have their minds altered by gut bacteria--is it the same for humans?

Yogurt contains probiotics, a kind of "good" gut bacteria that may have health benefits. Researchers wanted to test out the relationship between probiotics and brain function, so they took three groups of 12 women each and fed one of the groups (the lucky group) yogurt with probiotics, one group a yogurt-like dairy product, and one group nothing. The idea was to show that what happens in humans' guts directly affects their brains.

During the study, the yogurt group got the probiotic goodness twice a day, every day for four weeks. Before and after that four-week session, all 36 women in the study got fMRI scans. In both fMRI sessions, the women had their brains scanned at rest and during "emotion-recognition task": in this case, they were shown frightened or angry faces and told to match the emotions to other frightened or angry faces. (Which sounds stressful. Perhaps yogurt could help.) Tasks like that are a measurement of activity in certain brain regions, and similar links have been found between gut changes and emotion recognition in animals, so this was a test to see if the process extended to humans.

Turns out it did, but not necessarily in the positive way you'd anticipate with a healthy food like yogurt: during the task, the women who ate the real yogurt actually had decreased activity in the part of the brain that regulates body sensations. But, in the resting brain scan, the women also showed increased connectivity in the periaqueductal gray region and the pre-frontal cortex, which affects cognition.

So what's yogurt doing to your brain?

Hard to say. It's a small sample size, and the data doesn't seem to lead to a concrete conclusion about how the bacteria will affect thinking. But the researchers say this was more of a study to see if some kind of relationship existed between the bacteria and thought, which they say they did find. It's more of an open question, now, how that relationship affects how much yogurt you'll want to stock up on.

    


Texas Bill Would Bring Email Privacy Into The 21st Century

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Texas State Capitol

Larry D. Moore, via wikimedia commons

With any luck, the federal government will follow suit.

Electronic communications laws are stuck in the last century. The Texas state legislature yesterday sent a bill to the governor's desk that aims to fix this, updating email privacy protections to reflect modern usage.

The bill, HB 2268, addresses how state search warrants apply to electronic communication and storage. It sets new rules about how and when to issue warrants, including a 10-day window in which the warrant must be executed. It states that police must have a warrant to access data stored in the cloud and clarifies what information can be requested from an electronic communications service provider without notifying the person in question. The text of the bill is deceptive; it spends a lot of time clarifying how warrants work, and on its surface it look like an expansion of power.

But the bill actually limits warrants in Texas for electronic communications, to a much greater extent than federal precedent requires. The relevant law in this case is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was written long before electronic communication became the national default. It is a broadly interpreted law that removes protections from opened emails or unopened emails older than 180 days. This sounds strange to anyone who regularly uses email today, but back in 1986 it must have made sense to a Senate that still had members born before 1910.

This new bill would change that, in Texas at least. Hopefully, this could be the model for a new national law.

Laws are notoriously slow to keep up with electronic communications. Earlier this month, a Department of Justice investigation into AP phone records revealed that metadata, such as the time a call was made and its duration, is not protected by the 4th Amendment. That's a problem stemming from phone law, which protects from warrantless wiretap actual conversation, but not the information generated by the phones and recorded by the telephone companies.

[Ars Technica]

    


Asteroid Mining Company Puts Orbital Telescope On Kickstarter

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Under Construction

Planetary Resources engineers assemble an ARKYD 100 prototype.

Planetary Resources on Kickstarter

A new crowdfunded space telescope promises ordinary citizens the ability to control the 'scope from Earth.

If all goes as planned, you'll soon be able to rent time on a space telescope, funded by individuals over the Internet. Private space company Planetary Resources is looking to crowdfund a telescope that it will then make available to funders, classrooms and visitors to museums such as the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Ordinary folks will be able to take control of the scope to snap cosmic photos, or beam their own images onto the telescope's screen.

Planetary Resources is based in Washington state. The company's primary mission is to develop the technology to mine minerals from asteroids, but this space telescope project is intended simply to make space science accessible to more people, according to the project's Kickstarter page.

The telescope, called Arkyd 100, will be exceptionally small and light compared to bigwigs such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Nevertheless, it should be able to survey for near-Earth asteroids and take photos of features such as nearby galaxies, according to Planetary Resources.

The company hopes to raise $1 million by June 30. Planetary Resources engineers will build and maintain the Arkyd 100. Virgin Galactic, a private spaceflight company, will launch the telescope.

Those who contribute to the Kickstarter campaign are able to earn rewards such as selfies taken with the in-orbit Arkyd 100 or the ability to control what the telescope looks at for, say, 30 minutes. The delivery dates for the rewards suggest Planetary Resources plans to have Arkyd 100 up and running by August 2015.

    


This Bacterium-Sized Bunny Could Be The Future Of Bionic Brains

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Microscopic bunny created with a new type of conductive resin

Yuya Daicho, Terumasa Murakami, Tsuneo Hagiwara, and Shoji Maruo

Scientists in Japan have created a new material that can be shaped into complex, conductive 3-D structures. Get ready for your custom brain electrodes.

The rabbit sculpture above is the size of a typical bacterium and is made of a new type of resin that has exciting implications for bionic implants. Developed by researchers in Japan, the resin allows scientists to mold highly conductive, complex 3-D structures at the microscopic level.

The scientists began with a problem: In order to make a tiny resin sculpture into an electrode (which, for example, could be implanted into the brain to treat epilepsy), scientists bake it at high temperatures, which turns its surface into carbon. The "carbonizing" process makes the resin more conductive, but it also wrecks the sculpture's shape, warping it into more of a blob (not so good if you're trying to create a delicate, precise medical implant).

To solve this problem, the researchers created a new type of resin made with high concentrations of a material called resorcinol diglycidyl ether, which has been used in the past to dilute other resins. The new material, which starts as a light-sensitive liquid, undergoes only minor distortion after baking-which means scientists can now create conductive structures with all the details of the bunny above.

The Japanese team--including physicists and chemists from Yokohama National University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and C-MET--tried various methods to harden their microscopic shapes, including ultraviolet light and laser beams. They found that the latter technique was the most versatile because they could use the laser to draw a shape onto the liquid resin, building it up layer by layer.

In the future, this new method and material could be used to create customized microelectrodes that sit in the brain and send and receive electrical signals to treat disorders like epilepsy, depression, and Parkinson's disease. According to the authors, the discovery could also be used to make microscopic 3-D coils for heating applications.

The study appears today in the journal Optical Methods Express.

(Wondering why it's a rabbit? The researchers were inspired by the classic Stanford Bunny commonly used in computer graphics. Read about it here.)

    



A Generator That Harnesses Energy From Ocean Currents

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Aqua Turbine

Trevor Johnston

A working model of the estimated $5-million device could be ready within a year.

The magic of ocean currents is that they surround every continent on Earth and they run all day, every day. That's what sets this energy source apart from wind, solar, tidal, or wave-all of which are cyclical, meaning that during certain periods they don't produce power.

The ocean-current generator we're planning to build would float 100 to 200 feet below the sea surface. The device is a 65-foot-diameter cylinder shaped to speed up water flow, with propeller blades attached to its frame. As water flows through, it strikes the blades and spins a rotor, which generates electricity. A 17-foot center opening would allow animals to pass through unharmed. We estimate that in the Gulf Stream, a few miles offshore from West Palm Beach, Florida, the five-knot current would turn the blades about eight times per minute, generating about a megawatt of power.

We are designing the turbine to steer itself into the best current so that it generates maximum power, which is principally why our small submersibles manufacturing group, Triton Submarines, is involved. To make the turbine float, we'd create it partly out of syntactic foam, a buoyant material that we can shape easily but won't collapse under high ocean pressures. The device would be tethered to the seafloor with a cable and adjustable straps that lengthen or shorten to move it in response to onboard water current, depth, and power output sensors.

The cable would then transmit power to a seafloor junction box, which would boost the voltage, convert it from AC to DC, and send it to a collection and distribution center onshore. In the future, we imagine an array of anywhere from 15 to 50 generators working together.

Our goal is to produce a $5-million device, which could pay for itself in five or 10 years. With funding, we could have our first working model within a year.

-Patrick Lahey, president of Triton Submarines in Vero Beach, Florida. (Eaton Corporation is handling the electrical transmission, and Eclipse Group leads deployment and maintenance.) As told to Flora Lichtman

    


How It Works: Masdar's Beam Down Optical Tower

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Concentrated Solar Power

AP Photo/ Kamran Jebreili

An experiment in concentrated solar power

The Beam Down Tower at Masdar is a step forward in concentrated solar power (CSP). Unlike other plants, the system reflects sunlight twice, once from the heliostats to the central tower and once from the tower down to a collection platform at the system's base. Because scientists can focus the sunlight at a very small area, they can achieve great heat. They recently concentrated solar energy to 1,100 degrees. The plant is currently only 100 kW, but designers say it could scale up easily.

Concentrate the Sun
Thirty-three heliostats-mirrors arranged in the shape of a parabola-circle the 66-foot tower in three concentric rings. Motors adjust the elevation and angle of the heliostats throughout the day to track the sun and direct the reflected light toward the underside of the tower.

Beam It down
An array of 45 mirrors made to reflect as much solar radiation as possible, also arranged in concentric circles, lines the underside of the central tower. Each ring corresponds to a specific ring of heliostats. When the reflected sun from the heliostats reaches the tower array, the mirrors redirect the light down toward the base of the tower.

Generate power
A ceramic receiver at the base of the tower absorbs the radiation. Researchers at the Masdar Institute measure only radiation at their plant, but in commercial models-like Planta Solar 10 in Spain-the radiation heats a tank filled with molten salt, air, or water. The medium then heats water to produce steam and drive a turbine.

    


Science Journal Says It'll Publish Negative Results For Free

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The File-Drawer Effect

Publication bias is also called the "file-drawer effect" because negative studies get filed away privately instead of publicly published.

Restore the Gulf

The move is meant to combat publication bias.

You know that "publication bias" in research is bad. Because scientific journals prefer to publish exciting new findings, they tend to reject well done studies that don't have positive results-for example, that certain genes are not correlated with migration in some songbirds.

Over time, continued publication bias has meant that scientific literature isn't exactly a representative picture of all the studies that scientists have performed. Instead, interesting, positive studies are far more likely to get published, leaving out an entire body of knowledge about what doesn't work or what isn't true. This can be especially damaging if a scientist gets a positive finding by chance, one time, and then gets that finding published… but the 20 other scientists who found the opposite don't get their papers published.

Now, one biology journal is trying to purposefully drum up some negative studies. F1000Research is waiving publication fees for negative studies until August 31. The fees are normally between $250 and $1,000, depending on the paper's length, according to the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

F1000Research itself is an unusual journal. It aims to publish papers more quickly than traditional peer-reviewed journals and makes reviews available for anybody to see. The reviews are also signed, while traditional peer review is conducted anonymously, with the reviewers known to the journal editors, but not to the paper writers.

F1000Research has already published the above-mentioned negative bird migration study. We'll see if other scientists answer the call. If they do, F1000Research articles are available to the public for free, so you'll be able to read their work.

    


How To Make Bricks Out Of Dirt

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Climate Control

Because compressed-earth blocks absorb and release heat more slowly than fired bricks, they can keep interiors cooler during the day and warmer at night.

Kevin Hand

Dirt-cheap bricks-just add pressure

Bricks are fairly easy to make, but in the developing world, traditional fired bricks are sometimes weak and crumble-prone, while cement ones are often unaffordable. The Vermeer BP714 is the first compressed-earth-block machine that makes strong air-dried bricks out of dirt. Its bricks don't just exceed U.S. cement-code strength requirements-they're 20 to 30 percent stronger, and cheaper than other machines' too.

The process is simple. An operator mixes dirt with a bit of water and cement and shovels the concoction into the Vermeer. A portion of the mix moves into a chamber hydraulically pressurized by an integrated diesel engine, where steel plates slam 55,000 pounds of pressure upward to squeeze the dirt into a block. To make the bricks strong and uniform, the machine does something unique: Two cylinders slide into the brick, compressing the dirt even further.

The Vermeer can pound out a 7-by-14-by-4-inch block every 15 seconds. And the bricks are the first that can interlock and accept steel reinforcements for earthquake and hurricane zones.

    


Guilt Detection Tests Can Be Beaten

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Whodunnit?

Dreamstime

Good news for the guilty, bad news for law enforcement.

The science of guilt is far from perfect. A new study says tests designed to prove guilt--tests that some law enforcement agencies use regularly--can be fooled. All it takes is a little will power.

Guilt tests rely on the same basic premise: that incriminating memories bring up uncontrollable brain activity. The guilt tests, then, are designed to measure that involuntary brain activity. Event-Related Potential (ERP) is the name of a detection technique in which you place sensors on a suspect's scalp and ask him to distinguish between sets of items sprinkled with details relevant to a crime. The assumption is that the crime-related details will trigger the guilty person's memory--not so with an innocent person.

Here's the thing: it's relatively easy to suppress guilty memories, the new study shows. Researchers at the universities of Kent, Magdeburg and Cambridge, and the Medical Research Council, asked subjects to conduct a mock crime (a fake burglary, for instance). The subjects were then fitted with EEG caps that measured their electrical brain activity and tested on their crime recognition. According to Kent's press release:

Critically, when asked to suppress their crime memories, a significant proportion of people managed to reduce their brain's recognition response and appear innocent.

The results point to a worrisome aspect of the criminal justice system. Says researcher Zara Bergstrom:

Brain activity guilt detection tests are promoted as accurate and reliable measures for establishing criminal culpability. Our research has shown that this assumption is not always justified. Using these types of tests to say that someone is innocent of a crime is not valid because it could just be the case that the suspect has managed to hide their crime memories.

Of course, there is another test for guilt: a fair trial in a fair legal system.

The study,"Intentional retrieval suppression can conceal guilty knowledge in ERP memory detection tests," will be published in the September issue of Biological Psychology.

[EurekAlert]

    


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