Sometime before the end of this year, skydiver Felix Baumgartner intends to climb into a capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon, rise 23 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, open the capsule door, and jump out. On the 120,000-foot free fall-the longest ever attempted-he will face temperatures as low as -70°F and speeds of more than 700 miles an hour, becoming the first person to accelerate through the sound barrier without a craft. At the outset of the project, dubbed Stratos by its sponsor, Red Bull, no high-altitude full-pressure suit had ever been built specifically to withstand this kind of controlled free fall. Engineers at the David Clark Company, which builds full-pressure suits for NASA and the Department of Defense, spent four years developing one. Baumgartner's jump will be the first live trial at Mach speeds.

Suit: It has four layers. The outer layer is made of Nomex, a fire-retardant material that will also act as an insulator. Under the Nomex is a mesh restraint, which holds a gas-filled bladder. The innermost layer is a breathable liner. Once pressurized, the suit will become rigid. Its vertical orientation will help Baumgartner maintain delta position (head down, feet up) throughout his free fall-crucial if he is to avoid a flat spin.

Pressure System: To avoid decompression sickness, hypoxia and tissue damage-all risks associated with drastic changes in atmospheric pressure-Baumgartner will be breathing pure oxygen, and his suit will maintain an internal pressure of 3.5 psi. As he falls, an aneroid valve and a pair of diaphragms will regulate the suit's internal pressure. When he hits 35,000 feet, it will depressurize, giving him greater mobility.

Chest Pack: The technology hub of the suit, the chest pack contains a voice transmitter and receiver; a high-definition video camera with a superwide 120-degree view; an accelerometer; an inertial-measurement unit that reports pitch and angle; and twin sets of lithium-ion batteries, one to power the visor's de-icing system and one to power the chest pack itself.

G-Meter: The jump will begin in the stratosphere, where falling objects, less hindered by air density and friction, tend to spin. But a violent spin could whirl Baumgartner into a G-force-induced loss of consciousness, called G-loc, and even rattle him to death. As a precaution, he will wear a G-force meter on his wrist. If it reads 3.5 or more Gs for a period of six seconds, the meter will trigger the release of a three-foot drogue parachute designed to stabilize spins.

Face Shield: When Baumgartner exits the capsule, the temperature will be -10°F. But by the time he drops to 60,000 or 70,000 feet, where the upper atmosphere begins to reflect heat from the sun, it could plummet to -70°. To prevent his breath from crystallizing on the inside of his faceplate, which would obscure his vision, engineers bonded 110 extremely thin heating wires to the plastic-composite shield.

Parachute System: Baumgartner will carry three parachutes with him: a drogue, a main chute and a reserve. The main and reserve chutes are Baumgartner's usual nine-cell and seven-cell designs but, for additional stability, are 2.5 times as large. He will have four release handles-two red and two yellow-that he can pull in different situations. For example, the red handle on the right side of his chest releases the main chute and jettisons the drogue; the yellow handle on that same hip cuts the main chute free so the reserve can deploy without tangling. If he goes into a spin and can't pull his arms toward his body, he can deploy the drogue by tapping a release ring on the suit's left index finger.

Scientists scrutinizing Cassini imagery have stumbled on a strange find - evidence of half-mile-sized snowballs perforating one of Saturn's rings, creating miniature contrail-like streams in the ring's shape. The pictures answer a mysterious question about the F ring, Saturn's oddest ring.

Unlike some of the wider, stately rings, the narrow F band has lots of dynamic features, including channels, ripples and snowballs formed by the nearby tiny moon Prometheus. Scientists didn't know what happened to the snowballs after they were created, however, and assumed they were destroyed along the way. These trails paint a more complete picture, proving that some of the snowballs survive to wreak their own havoc on the ring structure. This in turn gives a clearer picture of the little moon's impacts on Saturn's rings.

Along with answering an interesting planetary science question, this finding is a feat of image analysis. Cassini has been snapping amazing photos for years now, but often they depict large structures or Art Deco images of moons. To find these F ring disturbances, the imaging team looked through 20,000 images.

"The F ring has a circumference of 550,000 miles, and these mini-jets are so tiny they took quite a bit of time and serendipity to find," said Nick Attree, a Cassini imaging associate at Queen Mary, University of London.

The images show 500 separate cases where small fragments punch through the F ring, according to researchers at NASA and Queen Mary. The objects drag icy ring particles behind them, creating little distortions and jets in the rings. Check it out below, and watch a narrated view of the images at bottom.

Here's a longer version, narrated by professor Carl Murray at QMUL.

Even though giant companies like Lockheed and General Dynamics produce the majority of U.S. military hardware, the Department of Defense still turns to small businesses for some of its more speculative, futuristic programs. Uniforms that detect the exact place and type of wound, computer targeting for air-to-air machine guns and non-lethal mini-drone missiles are just some of the new technologies the DoD hopes to farm out this year to more boutique firms.

The Small Business Innovation Research program released its latest slate of solicitations yesterday. These solicitations represent a peek into what the U.S. Armed Forces imagine for their future. And based on this latest bunch of requests, the military anticipates a future force of digitally integrated soldiers operating an ever-more-versatile array of robots.

For the human soldiers who have yet to get replaced by robots, the solicitations describe a new era of smart uniforms that monitor the health of the wearer. The new uniforms would have integrated sensors woven into the fabric, and when the soldier gets hit, the sensors would detect the location of the wound, the damage done and even the kind of weapon used in the attack. Medics arriving on scene would get the wounded soldier's vital signs and wound diagnosis from the uniform, allowing them to skip a preliminary hands-on assessment and deliver targeted first aid. Meanwhile, the clothing would immediately notify the commander that a soldier had gone down, allowing officers to monitor casualties in real time.

The solicitation imagines a civilian use for this technology as well, with regular clothing managing "heart/muscle monitoring for athletes, vitals measurements for babies, and blood sugar levels for Type I and Type II diabetics."

To transition from todays' "many operators, one drone" model to a future "one operator, many drones" model, the DoD is looking for richer drone control interfaces and more autonomy from the robots. One Navy solicitation requests a new kind of visualization software that more closely resembles StarCraft than Call of Duty, presenting variables like ammo and fuel levels, location and system status from multiple drones in an easy-to-understand fashion. Meanwhile, another solicitation details the need for better automation of air-to-air machine guns, allowing for more accurate dogfighting with less human input.

The Army, on the other hand, is in the market for smaller, less complex, less deadly drone weaponry. In one of their solicitations, the Army requests a new, non-lethal warhead for a man-portable kamikaze drone. The drone would launch out of a bazooka like a rocket, and then loiter in the air above the battlefield. An operator on the ground controls the drone until it finds a target, at which point the drone turns into a missile and non-lethally strikes. If the military applications of a non-lethal drone missile seem few and far between, don't worry, since the solicitation helpfully notes that "commercial applications might include, but are not limited to: crowd control for local law enforcement; border protection for Homeland Security; or temporary incapacitation of non-violent criminals for local SWAT teams and/or law enforcement."

Of course, why a SWAT team would need a hybrid drone/missile to incapacitate a non-violent criminal is anyone's guess.

Is dark matter in danger? A few days after scientists said there's no dark matter near our sun, a team of researchers in Germany now says there's no dark matter in our galactic neighborhood. The team found a vast structure of globular clusters and satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way in a smooth, evenly distributed pattern. Most models of galactic distribution and evolution require the gravitational effects of dark matter, but in this model, it doesn't seem to exist.

Examining a wide range of astronomical source data, the team assembled what they're calling a new picture of our cosmic neighborhood. Companion galaxies, star clusters and loose gases are all properly aligned with the galactic disk, according to the team, led by Marcel Pawlowski at the University of Bonn.

This newly-discovered organizational structure is huge - it starts around 33,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, and reaches 1 million light years. As the companion galaxies and clusters move about the Milky Way, they shed material like stars and gas, which forms long tails around their cosmic trajectories. These trailers also follow the galactic plane, the researchers say. Something is responsible for this organization, but the German team says it isn't dark matter. They have a few ideas, including that the Milky Way collided with another galaxy 11 billion years ago, and the current companions are just debris following the galactic gravitational field.

"We were baffled by how well the distributions of the different types of objects agreed with each other," said Pavel Kroupa, professor of astronomy at the University of Bonn, in a news release.

Dark matter is said to make up 23 percent of the mass-energy of the universe, much more than regular, baryonic matter that we can see. Its existence is inferred partly by its effects on galaxy distribution and galaxy cluster evolution. But the Milky Way's satellite galaxies don't trace a dark matter pattern, Pawlowski said in a blog post. He also notes that nobody has been able to find a dark matter particle yet, despite a slew of efforts around the world in all sorts of interesting configurations. Maybe they're not finding it because it isn't there?

Here's the problem, though: Galaxy rotations (among other phenomena) cannot be explained by existing physics without something like dark matter. It fits the equations so well, it's become pretty much accepted theory. But if we can't find it - and if the structures that are supposed to help prove its existence can't do that, either - then we'll have to come up with something else.

"Our very understanding of space-time and matter are now at stake," Pawlowski said.

The paper is in press at the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

[via PhysOrg]

Oil companies look for oil where they think it might be most abundant, so doesn't it make sense to seek wind power in the places where the wind is most abundant? An MIT spin out called Altaeros Energies seems to think so. Not content to harvest wind energy from atop a static tower just a few hundred feet tall, Altaeros has demonstrated an aerostat wind turbine that can be lofted up 1,000 feet from a trailer, no tower necessary.

Tested last month in Maine, the 35-foot scale prototype of Altaeros's Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) was lofted into the air under its own power, via a helium-filled inflatable shell that borrows its design from aerostats. Completing a full automated cycle, it was launched from a towable trailer, climbed to 350 feet, produced power at its apogee, and then descended automatically.

The AWT is actually designed to go much higher, up to 1,000 feet or more where winds are stronger and more consistent. Once up there, it can remain in place for extended periods of time, sending power back to the ground via its tethering cables. It hasn't completed full testing yet, but its portable and rapidly deployable nature seems well suited to needs ranging from military to humanitarian to the simple need for a quick, temporary source of relatively consistent power anywhere off the grid. See it fly below.

A new multilayered nanocoating could make future clothes more than just stain-resistant - they'll be stain-offensive, actively sloughing off dirt and gunk to protect the fabric underneath. Instead of merely repelling water or grease, clothing will push them away.

Tong Lin and colleagues at the Australian Future Fibres Research and Innovation Centre at Deakin University wanted to use layer-by-layer (LbL) deposition to form a stable coating of silica nanoparticles. The method alternates positively and negatively charged layers of a material. Previous research has used LbL for sensors and other devices, but the deposition process can be unstable, breaking down in acidic or alkaline environments. To stabilize their compound, Lin and colleagues blasted it with ultraviolet radiation. This anchors the nanoparticles onto the cotton fabric. The method can work with almost any organic substrate, they say. So that means things like wool, coconut or hemp clothing could be waterproofed, too.

The result is a superhydrophobic coating that successfully withstood assault from acids, bases, soaps and solvents and lasted through 50 washing machine cycles. It's more water-repellent than car wax or Teflon, according to the American Chemical Society. This is partly because of the angle of attack on the deposited fabric.

To measure this, the researchers used a scanning electron microscope and a camera at 30 fps to record the action of water droplets. Depending on the number of layers, the contact angles (angle at which droplets reach the surface) reached 152 to 158 degrees, the researchers say. By contrast, Teflon's contact angle is 95 degrees.

The new material is described in the ACS journal Langmuir.

NASA's J-2X rocket engine is on the test stand and ready for its second round of tests, building on last year's successful test-firings that by some metrics were the most successful rocket engine firings NASA has ever undertaken. The J-2X will provide upper-stage power propelling NASA's next-gen Space Launch System (SLS) from the upper atmosphere out into deep space after the first stage is jettisoned.

The rocket is currently on the A-2 Test Stand at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where it could begin firings today if everything goes smoothly. The test will continue throughout the year as engineers explore the J-2X's envelope in simulated high-altitude, low-atmospheric-pressure conditions.

In its first round of testing last year, the J-2X reached 100 percent power in only four tests and achieved a full, 500-second flight duration burn in only eight tries--faster than any U.S. rocket engine has ever hit those benchmarks. But it still has a ways to go before it can start powering spacecraft (and people) into space. Built on the backbone of the heritage J-2 engine that launched astronauts to the moon during the Apollo era, the J-2X has some new features, like a novel hydrogen-cooled main engine novel different even from that on the space shuttle rockets.

As such, extensive testing is needed before the J-2X and the SLS can go anywhere. And while it's something of a bummer that NASA isn't regularly rocketing skyward right now, it is fairly awesome to watch a brand new heavy-lift rocket--the first new liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket engine rated to carry humans built in four decades--come together piece by piece. I mean, look at that engine. Badass, no?

[PhysOrg]

A list of current entities permitted by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly unmanned aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace says one thing very clearly: if you fear the drones, stay the hell out of Texas. The Washington D.C. area as well, for that matter. The list of Certificates of Authorization, obtained by civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, shows that even as the FAA scrambles to open up the U.S. airspace to commercial drones over the next three years, there are already quite a few of them in the sky.

Much of the list is unsurprising. Several of the COAs are granted to military branches, defense contractors or technology development agencies like DARPA, or educational institutions like the University of North Dakota or Texas A&M University. Others are perhaps more unexpected: the Ogden Police Department in Utah and law enforcement in both Houston and Arlington, in Texas. Or the City of Herington, Kan. (though the COA list doesn't specify whether it's the police department or some other city agency in this case).

What the COA list doesn't include is what kind of drone each certified entity is flying or what each drone's purpose is. Moreover, it's clear from the numbers that some entities have more than one COA. There are just 60 universities, government and law enforcement agencies, contractors, etc., on the COA list. Yet there are about 300 active COAs, according to the FAA.

If you're trying to puzzle out who has what drones and why from this recent reluctant release of documentation (EFF had to file a lawsuit against the FAA after it failed to respond to its Freedom of Information Act request for the COA list), your job is about to become vastly more difficult. The latest FAA budget passed by Congress requires the FAA to integrate drones into the national airspace at an accelerated rate, specifically fast-tracking drone clearance for first responders, who should be able to get clearance to fly small drones relatively easily starting sometime next month.

The bill requires full unmanned aerial system integration for commercial purposes by September 2015. Click through to EFF for a Google Map overlaid with the COA data to find the drones nearest you.

[EFF]

For decades, researchers have argued over the existence of the G-spot, a supersensitive spongy organ on the front vaginal wall that many women report causes vaginal, rather than clitoral, orgasms. Now, a cosmetic surgeon in Florida says he's finally found the G-spot in a dissected cadaver, but rather than settling the question of the G-spot once and for all, the new findings are kicking off a new round of debate.

Adam Ostrzenski, a gynecological surgeon who specializes in cosmetic procedures in St. Petersburg, Florida, published his headline-grabbing study today in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. In it, he describes finding the organ during a dissection of an 83-year-old female cadaver in Poland.

Ostrzenski describes the G-spot as a bluish, grape-like mass housed in a small, see-through sac inside the front wall of the vagina. The mass measured a third of an inch long, but when he excised it from the sac, the G-spot unraveled to a length of over an inch. He found the organ after examining several layers of tissue from the vaginal wall of a woman who had died from a head injury the day before. Ostrzenski had hypothesized that the G-spot would be buried deeper than where common surgical procedures are conducted on the vagina, since it had never been encountered during those operations, and his findings appear to support that conclusion.

But the author of a review of studies published earlier this year on the mysterious erogenous zone says Ostrzenski's organ isn't the G-spot -- and that there probably is no G-spot as we know it. Yale urologist Amichai Kilchevsky and colleagues looked at 96 papers on the topic published since the 1950s, when German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg first described a sensitive area in the anterior vagina. Kilchevsky concluded that despite six decades of study, there wasn't enough evidence to support the existence of a G-spot, and that the erogenous zone that triggers women's vaginal orgasms is probably just an extension of the clitoris inside the body. He says there are major problems with the new study, including that it was a single dissection of a woman whose "genito-urinary" history was unknown, and that no physiologic testing of the specimen was conducted to determine if it played any role in arousal. "I don't think this study takes us any closer to finding the G-spot," he says. Ostrzenski included pictures of the organ in his paper, but Kilchevsky thinks they are more likely to depict "clitoral bodies" or a vaginal gland not involved in arousal, like those that secrete lubrication.

Ultimately, the debate over the existence of the G-spot could turn out to be a matter of semantics. After all, even if the arousal center inside the vagina is just an extension of the clitoris, couldn't we still call it the G-spot? "Absolutely," Kilchevsky answers. "My contention is simply that there isn't a distinct anatomical entity called the G-spot. If you want to call an extension of the clitoris the G-spot, that's fine."

Later today I'll be talking with Dr. Ostrzenski about his findings and what he thinks about the backlash. Look my interview with him tomorrow.

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Chicago. Follow Jen on Twitter (@jenabbasi) and email her at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.

Society must make two big leaps in order to enable truly self-driving cars. The first is technological. Engineers need to improve today's cars (which can warn a driver that he's drifting out of his lane) beyond current Google and Darpa prototypes (which maintain the lane on their own) to the point where automobiles can edge forward through a construction zone while their owners sleep inside.

The technological leap will be good for everyone. Machines are incredibly reliable. Humans are not. Most car crashes are caused by human error (a 2004 World Health Organization report put the figure at 90 percent). As safety technologies like antilock brakes and traction-control systems have taken hold, the number of fatal accidents has dropped 35 percent between 1970 and 2009, even though cars drive more than a trillion miles farther annually. "Robots have faster reaction times and will have better sensors than humans," says Seth Teller, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT. "The number of accidents will never reach zero, but it will decrease substantially." Don't think of self-driving cars as a convenience-they're a safety system.

The other leap that society has to make is from driver liability to manufacturer liability. When a company sells a car that truly drives itself, the responsibility will fall on its maker. "It's accepted in our world that there will be a shift," says Bryant Walker Smith, a legal fellow at Stanford University's law school and engineering school who studies autonomous-vehicle law. "If there's not a driver, there can't be driver negligence. The result is a greater share of liability moving to manufacturers."

The liability issues will make the adoption of the technology difficult, perhaps even impossible. In the 1970s, auto manufacturers hesitated over implementing airbags because of the threat of lawsuits in cases where someone might be injured in spite of the new technology. Over the years, airbags have been endlessly refined. They now account for a variety of passenger sizes and weights and come with detailed warnings about their dangers and limitations. Taking responsibility for every aspect of a moving vehicle, however-from what it sees to what it does-is far more complicated. It could be too much liability for any company to take on.

The government could step in, though. In a few instances, federal law has overridden state law to protect the public. Under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, for example, vaccine makers have special protection. Consumers can file injury claims through a dedicated office of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and vaccine makers pay out without admitting fault. The act seeks to protect the small number of people hurt by vaccines while encouraging vaccine makers to keep producing the drugs, because to prevent disease an unvaccinated person must be surrounded by thousands of vaccinated ones. Autonomous technology is similar: It won't make us safer until it's in most vehicles. Maybe it deserves special treatment to get it on the road.

Dolby Laboratories announced a new audio system this week, called Dolby Atmos, that the company calls "an entirely new viewing experience for theatergoers." It's kind of a next-generation surround sound, blanketing the theater with sound--instead of coming from typical left and right channels, sound will come from as many directions as there are speakers, including above and below. That means footsteps will emanate from the ground, and realistic raindrops will patter above your head--and since it supports 64 speakers, sound could come from anywhere.

The Atmos system is one of a crop of next-gen audio technologies--it's very similar to SRS Labs's Multi-Dimensional Audio, or MDA, which was shown off at this year's CES. (Our friends at Sound + Vision have some more info on that.) The idea is that new sound mixes will include metadata that serves as directional cues for each object, so the specific mix of speakers won't really matter--that sound of a doorbell ringing won't come from the rear left channel, it'll just have data instructing it to come from a location to the back and left. Then some post-processing will send the sound out to the specific speaker in each particular setup best suited to comply with that direction. That means you can get much more specific with sounds, useful for new setups that could have dozens of individual speakers, since the post-processing will decide which speaker the sound should come from.

And there will be dozens of speakers in some higher-end Atmos (or MDA) setups, especially in movie theaters. Why not put speakers in the ceiling, the floor, every corner, every wall? That's slightly less useful for home theaters, but it would certainly eliminate the problem of having a 5.1 receiver and wanting a 7.1 setup. Just add more speakers!

The audio company Harman, which is behind lines like Harman-Kardon and JBL, is already on board to create new Atmos systems, and Dolby hopes they can begin pushing Atmos out to movie theaters later this year.

A new type of nano-structured glass can bounce water and dirt off its surface, cleaning itself and preventing fogging, according to MIT researchers. It eliminates glare, too, allowing light to penetrate with pure clarity. It could be used for anything from solar panels to future car windshields to new gadget screens.

The superhydrophobic glass shares some properties with the super-waterproof fabric coating we learned about this week, and it, too, is a feat of nano-engineering. But instead of a waterproof coating, it earns its special properties through a special etching process. Kyoo-Chul Park, Hyungryul Choi and colleagues drew inspiration from nature, including zebra plants, which contain conical structures that repel water. They developed a method to embed an array of steeply angled cones on the surface of glass.

Using techniques from the semiconductor industry, the team coated a glass surface with several layers of material that they then etched away according to a specified pattern. The nanostructured cones are 200 nanometers at the base and about a micron high.

Initially, it's water-loving, but a simple vapor deposition process renders the material hydrophobic, the researchers say. The coating is not only completely transparent, but reduces glare, too. To test its waterproof capabilities, the team poured a droplet of water on the surface, filmed it with a Phantom high-speed camera and watched it form an almost perfect spherical bead.

There are plenty of applications for such a self-cleaning, water-repelling surface, not the least of which is solar panels, which are only as effective as they are clean and clear. Dirt and crud can block the photovoltaic cells' ability to capture sunlight, and the reflective properties of glass direct some sunlight away from the cells, especially when the sun is at a sharp angle relative to the glass. But this new surface coating would eliminate all those problems, the researchers say.

The paper was just accepted for publication in the journal ACS Nano.

[via MIT News]

The biggest digital camera in the world, both in terms of physical size and giga-capacity, just won an early approval from the U.S. Department of Energy, which is funding the project. The camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will now proceed to a detailed engineering and design phase, another step toward the start of construction in two years.

From its perch in the Chilean Andes, the LSST will make a survey of the entire sky every three nights, snapping the equivalent of 800,000 8-megapixel images and gathering 30 terabytes of data every night. The camera required to do this is a 3-ton monster, capable of capturing an area 49 times the size of the moon in a single image. Its deep, wide-field images will capture anything from near-Earth asteroids to the properties of dark matter and dark energy.

The most recent decadal survey of astronomical priorities placed the LSST at the top of the list, with astronomers anticipating many detailed returns from a telescope that will spot new phenomena in near real-time. It will take images in five or more bands of the light spectrum, from 400nm to 1060nm (visible to infrared light).

Now that it's achieved "Critical Decision 1" status, the camera project can start a formal design and building phase, following a specific budget and time frame. The DOE and the National Science Foundation are sharing the cost of the entire telescope project, with the DOE funding the camera portion. The telescope is supposed to start construction by 2014.

While the camera design review progresses, work has already started on the telescope's 8.4-meter primary mirror and the telescope's home atop Cerro Pachón in northern Chile.

[SLAC]

Neurons in the brains of pigeons encode the direction of Earth's magnetic field, endowing the birds with an innate internal GPS system, according to a new study. Scientists have long known internal magnetic field receptors exist in many animals - from birds to foxes and possibly even people - but this is the first time someone has tried to explain the brain wiring that can actually use these receptors and provide a sense of direction. They did it by putting some pigeons in the dark and monitoring their brains.

Writing in Science, Le-Qing Wu and J. David Dickman at Baylor College of Medicine cite previous research identifying magnetic receptors in bird beaks, as well as in other areas in other vertebrates. They set out to find the neural network responsible for making sense of those signals.

Working with seven awake pigeons, the researchers used a Tesla coil to cancel out the effects of Earth's magnetic field and induce an artificial one. They put the pigeons in a completely dark room to cancel out any light-polarization effects, which have also been suggested as a mechanism for animals' magnetic navigation capabilities. They also stabilized the birds' heads so they couldn't rely on inner-ear cues to determine their directions.

Then Wu and Dickman turned up the magnetic field, adjusting its magnitude, elevation and other variables. They used a gene marker to identify when neurons were activated, focusing on neural areas that were already good candidates for this type of information processing. Ultimately, they pinpointed 53 neurons in the birds' brain stems that had greatly enhanced activity. What's more, those cells were most sensitive to the magnetic field ranges that correspond to Earth's real ones - 20 micro-Tesla (μT) at the magnetic equator to more than 60 μT at the magnetic poles.

The poles shift over time, however, so the researchers note that these neurons must be somewhat adaptable, either through evolution or brain plasticity.

As for the origin of the signals? Wu and Dickman believe the magnetic information is transmitted to the neurons via the inner ear, although it's also possible that beak and/or retinal receptors are involved.

"[The neurons] encode a geomagnetic vector that could be used by the neural population to computationally derive the bird's position and directional heading," they write. In other words: A neural global positioning system.

Exactly how these cells are used for orientation and navigation is still a mystery, however.

The research appears today at Science Express and will be published in the journal Science.

Transplanting a kidney is a dicey enough proposition at first go, so the fact that Northwestern University doctors have transplanted the same kidney twice is nothing short of remarkable. Working under a set of extenuating circumstances, the surgeons transplanted the kidney twice in two weeks, and the final recipient--the third person to claim ownership of the organ--is reportedly doing well.

The story started with a 27-year-old patient with a conditions known as focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), which causes scar tissue on the part of the kidney that does the actual filtering of waste from the blood, leading eventually to kidney failure. The man received a kidney from his sister, but within days signs of his FSGS began to manifest themselves the new kidney, posing life-threatening complications. The new kidney had to come out--but, doctors thought, why discard an otherwise perfectly good organ when there are so many people on the waiting list for donated kidneys.

Having been in need of an organ donation himself, the man was happy to have the kidney--only briefly his own--passed on to some other person in need of a healthy organ. So after a bit of discussion on issues both ethical and medical, doctors removed the kidney and transplanted it a second time in two weeks to a 67-year-old father of five.

Upon second transplant the kidney regained function almost immediately and even showed reversal of the slight damage caused by the original recipient's FSGS. All said, it's a medical first, but also a revelatory occurrence that reinforces the view that an organ that fails in one body may do just fine in another. The original recipient is awaiting another transplant.

[MedicalXpress]

It's perfectly understandable why commercial shipping vessels are prohibited from carrying arms in international waters. But when it comes to dealing with the threat of piracy, battles that pit water hoses against small arms and RPGs are decidedly one sided. So Japanese companies MTI and Yokoi have teamed to create what they call the "Anti-Piracy Curtain," a system that makes it difficult--and quite intimidating--for anyone to board a ship without the consent of a crew.

The curtain is a two-pronged anti-piracy attack aimed that aims to make it prohibitively difficult for pirates to pull up alongside a shipping vessel and board it using ladders, the typical method of operation for pirates operating in places like the Horn of Africa. Using the ship's onboard firefighting water pump system, the first countermeasure dumps huge amounts of water off the side of the ship via high-volume nozzles, which soaks anyone below and would fill a pirate skiff with water at a rate of about a centimeter per second, eventually causing the boat to sink or capsize.

The second and more intimidating prong of this forked attack involves the deploying of high pressure hoses down the sides of the ship. Each hose is attached to a sinker weight that keeps the nozzle down near the water's surface, and the restrictive nozzle at the end ensures that the water coming out does so at high-pressure. The result: a long hose belching a stream of stinging high-pressure water while lashing about violently. Several of these deployed down the side of a ship make it difficult to put a ladder up the side of the vessel, much less to climb aboard the ship.

[DigInfo News]

In a case that's somewhat chicken-and-egg, one of the many reasons computer scientists and physicists are pursuing a working quantum computer is to model quantum systems themselves. Modeling some quantum properties for systems even with a just a few dozen particles is impossible on even the biggest conventional supercomputers, and the pursuit of new materials and next-level science requires that we find a way to do so. So it's notable that physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed a quantum simulator can simulate interaction between hundreds of quantum bits.

This isn't the holy grail of quantum computing by any means, but it's an exciting step forward. The NIST simulator is basically a single layer of beryllium ions, hundreds of them stretching across a circular plane less than one millimeter in diameter hovering inside a chamber known as a Penning trap. The quantum bit--or qubit--in this case is the outermost electron of each ion, which acts as the quantum equivalent of the classical bit, the 0 or 1 (or both at the same time, in quantum context).

By cooling the ions to near absolute zero with a laser and then hammering them with carefully timed microwave and laser pulses, the NIST physicists are able to get the electrons to interact in controlled ways that mimic--at least mathematically--complex quantum systems that can't be studied practically in the laboratory. Thus, it's more a quantum system simulator than a true quantum computer, but it's exciting nonetheless. This kind of sim could help physicists model and study extremely complex and amazing theoretical materials, like high-temperature superconductors that could someday move electricity across vast distances in power grids without losing much of it as heat.

The early benchmarking experiments look good for this quantum sim, the NIST reports, though in order to benchmark their creation experiments had to be carried out with relatively weak interactions between electrons since the system had to be simple enough to be confirmed by a classical computer. Here, the physicists bumped up against one of the key problems facing the field of quantum computing.

To check the efficacy of the first quantum computers (or simulators) scientists will need a working quantum computer--a paradox that is going to lead to some fits and starts along the way to building a true quantum computing platform. Early quantum breakthroughs are going to produce the equivalent of algebra problems for which it's impossible to work backwards to check the accuracy of the answer. But hey, this is the bleeding edge of quantum physics and computer science--and certainty is boring anyhow.

[SciGuru]

While we wait for our self-driving cars of the future to autonomously deliver us from gridlock forever, Honda is working to help human drivers reduce traffic in realtime by analyzing the driving patterns of individual vehicles and determine if each one is likely to cause a traffic jam. By analyzing the acceleration and deceleration of individual cars, the technology prods the driver to take steps in realtime that will avoid traffic congestion among trailing vehicles.

The system differs from many current in-car technologies that attempt to help drivers avoid traffic by looking at congestion ahead by instead looking at traffic behind--or traffic that will likely form in the wake of a car exhibiting certain acceleration and deceleration behaviors. Based on this, an color-coded onboard terminal encourages the driver to correct his or her behaviors for smoother driving with the goal of alleviating congestion behind him or her.

It's a kind of pay-it-forward technology--do your best to reduce traffic in your wake, and ostensibly some driver in front of you is doing the same, helping everyone to flow along a bit more smoothly. Early test results showed that the system produces average speed increases of roughly 23 percent while trailing vehicles record an 8 percent fuel efficiency bump by not having to slow and accelerate as often since traffic doesn't back up. On-road testing is slated for May and July of this year in Japan and Indonesia, respectively.

[via PhysOrg]