The seasons change on Saturn's moon Titan...

 Credit: Cassini-Huygens DISR



The seasons change on Saturn's moon Titan...

ScienceDaily — Detailed observations of Saturn’s moon Titan have now spanned 30 years, covering an entire solar orbit for this distant world. Dr Athena Coustenis from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France has analysed data gathered over this time and has found that the changing seasons of Titan affect it more than previously thought. Dr Coustenis will present these results at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid on Friday 28th September.

Explains Dr Coustenis, “As with Earth, conditions on Titan change with its seasons. We can see differences in atmospheric temperatures, chemical composition and circulation patterns, especially at the poles. For example, hydrocarbon lakes form around the north polar region during winter due to colder temperatures and condensation. Also, a haze layer surrounding Titan at the northern pole is significantly reduced during the equinox because of the atmospheric circulation patterns. This is all very surprising because we didn’t expect to find any such rapid changes, especially in the deeper layers of the atmosphere.”

Looming budget "sequestration" will cripple science...

 "Sequestration" will cut research and development by an estimated 8.4%...

Via PHYSORG:

The looming "sequestration," across-the-board budget cuts that were never really meant to happen, could cripple key areas of science by slashing federal investment in research and development by an estimated 8.4 percent between now and 2017. That is not good for science, but it is also bad for an economy whose growth is driven by advances in science and technology.

At a time when federal R&D funding has already declined 10 percent in real dollars since 2010, indiscriminate spending cuts would further stall essential studies, with potential impacts on medical research, food safety, energy independence, national security, and efforts to come to grips with climate change. There are few aspects of modern life that are not touched by science, and the federal role in promoting innovative research across diverse fields must not be compromised.

Consider some of the benefits to date: NASA's many spinoff technologies have included a robotic arm that helps surgeons perform less-invasive surgeries, a device that stabilizes heart-transplant patients until a donor can be found, and sensors for detecting chemical warfare agents. Other federally funded research has given rise to the Google search engine, liquid-crystal displays, magnetic storage drives, and global positioning systems. The Human Genome Project, which cost the federal government $3.8 billion between 1990 and 2003, or $5.6 billion in 2010 dollars, has generated an economic payoff of $796 billion, according to a study by Battelle Memorial Institute. Advances resulting from the project have encompassed human health, agriculture, forensics, veterinary medicine, and more. Read more here...

Scientists Measure A Black Hole....

How big is the event horizon of a black hole?

ScienceDaily — The point of no return: In astronomy, it's known as a black hole -- a region in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Black holes that can be billions of times more massive than our sun may reside at the heart of most galaxies.

Such supermassive black holes are so powerful that activity at their boundaries can ripple throughout their host galaxies. Now, an international team, led by researchers at MIT's Haystack Observatory, has for the first time measured the radius of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy -- the closest distance at which matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.

The scientists linked together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a telescope array called the "Event Horizon Telescope" (EHT) that can see details 2,000 times finer than what's visible to the Hubble Space Telescope. These radio dishes were trained on M87, a galaxy some 50 million light years from the Milky Way. M87 harbors a black hole 6 billion times more massive than our sun; using this array, the team observed the glow of matter near the edge of this black hole -- a region known as the "event horizon."

"Once objects fall through the event horizon, they're lost forever," says Shep Doeleman, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. "

It's an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you're not coming back." Doeleman and his colleagues have published the results of their study this week in the journal Science....

Using the technique, Doeleman and his team measured the innermost orbit of the accretion disk to be only 5.5 times the size of the black hole event horizon. According to the laws of physics, this size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole -- the first direct observation to confirm theories of how black holes power jets from the centers of galaxies. Keep on reading...

Video: Take a ride on the world's oldest roller coaster...

The world's oldest roller coaster

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Scientists create elusive element 113...

Scientists create elusive element 113... Via MSNBC:

Scientists in Japan think they've finally created the elusive element 113, one of the missing items on the periodic table of elements. Element 113 is an atom with 113 protons in its nucleus — a type of matter that must be created inside a laboratory because it is not found naturally on Earth. Heavier and heavier synthetic elements have been created over the years, with the most massive one being element 118, temporarily named ununoctium. But element 113 has been stubbornly hard to create. After years of trying, researchers at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan said Wednesday they finally did so. On Aug. 12, the unstable element was formed and quickly decayed, leaving the team with data to cite as proof of the accomplishment.

Researchers out voter fraud by using statistical methods...

Researchers analyzed election results in Russia and found evidence of voter fraud.

(Phys.org)—A team of Austrian researchers has applied a new statistical method in looking at elections in various countries and the ways that some of them might be influenced by fraud, and have found, as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that two recent elections stood out as likely suspect, one in Uganda and one in Russia. Traditionally, to detect voter fraud, statisticians have looked at voting patterns that appear to adhere to a certain constant (ten, hundred, etc) indicating that whole blocks of votes were cast for a certain candidate. The downside to such a method is that the best it can offer is an indication that there might have been some irregularities in an election, but nothing definitive, which is far too little to go on to spout claims of fraud. To get around that problem the new team instead focused on areas of regional voting. The idea is that if a certain small region has a very high voter turnout and virtually all of the votes from that area are for just one candidate, it's probably due to some serious ballet stuffing (and likely destruction of votes for the other party) which of course tends to skew the results. If a sufficient number of regions are able to show such numbers, it becomes possible to alter the outcome of the election, and that is what the researchers found when looking at the elections held in Uganda last year and in Russia earlier this year. Read more here.

Did life sprout on distant planets and crash to Earth?

Did life sprout on distant planets and crash to Earth? 


Via PHYSORG:

(Phys.org)—Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research from Princeton University, the University of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in Spain. The researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high probability that life came to Earth—or spread from Earth to other planets—during the solar system's infancy when Earth and its planetary neighbors orbiting other stars would have been close enough to each other to exchange lots of solid material. The work will be presented at the 2012 European Planetary Science Congress on Sept. 25. The findings provide the strongest support yet for "lithopanspermia," the idea that basic life forms are distributed throughout the universe via meteorite-like planetary fragments cast forth by disruptions such as volcanic eruptions and collisions with other matter. Eventually, another planetary system's gravity traps these roaming rocks, which can result in a mingling that transfers any living cargo. Read more here.

Video: The first emotional moment of "Halo 4"

Video: The first emotional moment of "Halo 4"

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A robot to assist homebound residents from Toyota

New robot from Toyota will help the homebound...

(Phys.org)—Toyota has unveiled a new single-arm robot to assist homebound residents with limited mobility. The 70-pound robot's arm has a two-fingered gripper and telescopic body to complete fundamental house tasks that would otherwise be impossible for the patient to complete. The Toyota prototype is called the HSR, which stands for Human Support Robot, to help those with limited arm and limb movements. The company announced HSR's debut on Sept. 21. HSR goes to work to fetch items, open curtains, and pick up items from the floor or on top of tables and high counters. The Toyota robot can be controlled using a graphical user interface via tablet PC.

The HSR also responds to voice commands. The tablet can be worn on HSR's head. The resident would in turn talk to other family members or a caregiver via Skype or another voice service. The robot's telescopic body enables it to pick items from the floor or on top of high counters; the body has heights of 2.7 to 4.3 feet and an arm length of 2.5 feet. It can hold an object that weighs up to 2.6 pounds. Read more here.

Video: Coolest tips, tricks of Apple's IOS 6

Coolest tips, tricks of Apple's IOS 6
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Cancer research to get a Moon Shots Program

Scientists think we are on the verge of making dramatic progress in the cure of cancer. They are launching an unprecedented effort to dramatically accelerate the pace.

ScienceDaily — The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announces the launch of the Moon Shots Program, an unprecedented effort to dramatically accelerate the pace of converting scientific discoveries into clinical advances that reduce cancer deaths.

Even as the number of cancer survivors in the US is expected to reach an estimated 11.3 million by 2015, according to the American Cancer Society, cancer remains one of the most destructive and vexing diseases. An estimated 100 million people worldwide are expected to lose their lives to cancer in this decade alone. The disease's devastation to humanity now exceeds that of cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, HIV and malaria -- combined.

The Moon Shots Program is built upon a "disruptive paradigm" that brings together the best attributes of both academia and industry by creating cross-functional professional teams working in a goal-oriented, milestone-driven manner to convert knowledge into tests, devices, drugs and policies that can benefit patients as quickly as possible.

The Moon Shots Program takes its inspiration from President John Kennedy's famous 1962 speech, made 50 years ago this month at Rice University, just a mile from the main MD Anderson campus. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade ... because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win," Kennedy said.
"Generations later, the Moon Sh

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Emotional memories can be erased from the brain

Fear memories can be removed from the brain.

ScienceDaily  — Newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain. This is shown by researchers from Uppsala University in a new study now being published by the academic journal Science. The findings may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear.

Thomas Ågren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain.

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

In the study the researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. In order to activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any accompanying shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture. For a control group, the reconsolidation process was allowed to complete before the subjects were shown the same repeated presentations of the picture.

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Did Neanderthals wear feathers like Native Americans?

 Neanderthals cared about their appearance?

(Phys.org)—Using objects obtained for the express purpose of adornment is a trait found only in humans, though some have speculated that our early cousins, the Neanderthals, might have done so as well. Some prior research has shown that some groups of them might have used eagle claws as a type of jewelry, while others have suggested they might have tied feathers together and worn them as a headdress, such as native Americans did. But, until now, no clear evidence had been presented to give credence to such theories. In this new effort a group made up of researchers from several different countries looked at the available evidence regarding wing bones and determined that it appears likely that Neanderthals did, as they report in their paper in PLoS ONE, use long wing feathers as a means of adornment. 

Finding evidence that supports the notion that Neanderthals used feathers to adorn themselves is more than a simple matter of interest, doing so also offers evidence that indicates that the hominins possessed a higher degree of intelligence than has been assumed; and if that is the case, the question of why they died out as we prospered becomes even more difficult to answer. 

To find evidence of feather adornment, the researchers first looked at the massive amount of data that has been collected on both birds and Neanderthals, specifically regarding their geography and whether birds with long feathers even lived in the areas where Neanderthals roamed. In all, they studied data from 1,699 sites across Eurasia and found that there was indeed a correlation and that there appeared to be a lot of raptor and corvid species living in the same areas as Neanderthals. Keep on reading...

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Scientists find oldest known weapon

Scientists find a 300,000 year old spear.

Archeologists from the University of Tübingen have found eight extremely well-preserved spears – an astonishing 300,000 years old, making them the oldest known weapons anywhere. The spears and other artifacts as well as animal remains found at the site demonstrate that their users were highly skilled craftsmen and hunters, well adapted to their environment – with a capacity for abstract thought and complex planning comparable to our own. It is likely that they were members of the species homo heidelbergensis, although no human remains have yet been found at the site.

The project is headed by Prof. Nicholas Conard and the excavations are supervised by Dr. Jordi Serangeli, both from the University of Tübingen's Institute of Prehistory, which has been supporting the local authority's excavation in an open-cast brown coal mine in Schöningen since 2008. They are applying skills from several disciplines at this uniquely well-preserved site find out more about how humans lived in the environment of 300,000 years ago.

The bones of large mammals – elephants, rhinoceroses, horses and lions – as well as the remains of amphibians, reptiles, shells and even beetles have been preserved in the brown coal. Pines, firs, and black alder trees are preserved complete with pine cones, as have the leaves, pollen and seeds of surrounding flora.

Video: Missile test triggers UFO reports...

Video: Missile test triggers UFO reports...

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Strange spherical rock formations on Mars baffle scientists...

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Stuart Atkinson

Strange spherical rock formations on Mars baffle scientists...

A strange picture of odd, spherical rock formations on Mars from NASA's Opportunity rover has scientists scratching their heads over what exactly they're looking at.

The new Mars photo by Opportunity shows a close-up of a rock outcrop called Kirkwood covered in blister-like bumps that mission scientists can't yet explain. At first blush, the formations appear similar to so-called Martian "blueberries" -- iron-rich spherical formations first seen by Opportunity in 2004 -- but they actually differ in several key ways, scientist said.


"This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission," said rover mission principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in a statement.

"Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects. Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars."

The new photo by Opportunity is actually a mosaic of four images taken by a microscope-like imager on its robotic arm, and then stitched together like puzzle pieces by scientists on Earth.

New steel surface allows liquids to boil without bubbling...

Preventing liquids from bubbling while boiling...

(Phys.org)—The research, which is the first of its kind, has identified a specially engineered steel surface that allows liquids to boil without bubbling.

"This would be advantageous for use in industrial situations such as nuclear power plants, where vapour explosions are best avoided, or where gentle heating is desirable" said Professor Derek Chan, from the University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

The study suggests that the new surface could also be applied to other situations that involve the transfer of heat, such as reducing fogging and preventing ice or frost formation on windows.
"Our results show the potential of using this textured surface to control heating and cooling events that affect the formation of frost on windows and ice on the control surfaces of aircrafts or even refrigeration units," he said.

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Woolly mammoth cloning moves closer to reality

In our lifetimes, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned. Researchers may have moved the ball cl;oser to the goal line.

Via The Telegraph:

Well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments have been discovered deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organiser has said.

Russia's North-Eastern Federal University said an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 328 feet (100 meters) underground during a summer expedition in the northeastern province of Yakutia.

Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments but not living cells.

Mr Grigoryev told the online newspaper Vzglyad it would take months of research to determine whether they have indeed found the cells.

"Only after thorough laboratory research it will be known whether these are living cells or not," he said, adding that would take until the end of the year at the earliest.

Jupiter gets smacked with giant asteroid... (video)

Did Jupiter just take one for the planet Earth?

On Monday, Jupiter took a massive hit from a meteor, which was spotted by amateur astronomers based in the US—and if previous evidence is anything to go by, it could have saved Earth from a massive collision in the process.

Dan Peterson of Racine, Wisconsin, was gazing at Jupiter on Monday when he saw a bright, white flash on the surface of the planet. When he posted his observation online, another astrophotographer, George Hall, discovered he'd unknowingly captured the massive explosion on video.

Turns out it was probably a meteor striking the surface of the planet—and you can watch the video below....

Western scrub jays conduct funerals?

 Wikimedia Commons

Western scrub jays summon other Western scrub jays when a member of thier species dies.

ScienceDaily — Western scrub jays summon others to screech over the body of a dead jay, according to new research from the University of California, Davis. The birds' cacophonous "funerals" can last for up to half an hour.

Anecdotal reports have suggested that other animals, including elephants, chimpanzees and birds in the crow family, react to dead of their species, said Teresa Iglesias, the UC Davis graduate student who carried out the work. But few experimental studies have explored this behavior.

The new research by Iglesias and her colleagues appears in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

Western scrub jays live in breeding pairs and are not particularly social birds.
"They're really territorial and not at all friendly with other scrub-jays," Iglesias said.

Working in the backyards of homes in Davis, Calif., Iglesias set up feeding tables to encourage visits from the jays. Then she videotaped their behavior when she placed a dead jay on the ground. She compared these reactions with the birds' behavior when confronted with a dead jay that had been stuffed and mounted on a perch, a stuffed horned owl, and wood painted to represent jay feathers.

On encountering a dead jay, prostrate on the ground, jays flew into a tree and began a series of loud, screeching calls that attracted other jays. The summoned birds perched on trees and fences around the body and joined in the calling. These cacophonous gatherings could last from a few seconds to as long as 30 minutes.

New hope for deadly form of lung cancer (video)

New study offers hope to people with lung cancer

Brightest thing in nature does not get color from pigment...

Pollia condensata fruit uses structural color to get it's brilliant appearance.

(Phys.org)—The 'brightest' thing in nature, the Pollia condensata fruit, does not get its blue colour from pigment but instead uses structural colour – a method of reflecting light of particular wavelengths- new research reveals. The study was published today in the journal PNAS.

Most colours around us are the result of pigments. However, a few examples in nature – including the peacock, the scarab beetle and now the Pollia condensata fruit – use structural colour as well.

Fruits are made of cells, each of which is surrounded by a cell wall containing cellulose. However, the researchers found that in the Pollia condensata fruit the cellulose is laid down in layers, forming a chiral (asymmetrical) structure that is able to interact with light and provide selective reflection of only a specific colour. As a result of this unique structure, it reflects predominately blue light.

Want to see a frog in zero gravity? (video)

Your NASA tax dollars at work...

Frogs in Space

FBI spending $1 billion on facial recognition technology...

The FBI is spending $1 billion on facial recognition technology. Is this good news or scary?

(Phys.org)—The good news is that the FBI is crawling out of the fingerprint age. They are moving up into a $1 billion project that will enable criminal searches and accurate identifications using updated technologies including a range of biometrics. The bad news, at least for privacy advocates, is one and the same. Privacy groups are asking, biometrics, at what price? How will they be used and who is to guarantee against their abuse? Nonetheless, the FBI is set to witness significant improvements to their existing fingerprint identification services, and there is an ambitious title behind their resolve, the $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. Eventually this program is to encompass facial recognition, iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification. 

The new undertaking will also store latent and rolled fingerprints and palm prints. The FBI has been pilot testing a facial recognition system where agents will seek to match up existing mugshots with faces in crowd photos; and in the reverse they will compare images of interest from security cameras with the repository of shots in their database. An algorithm would perform an automatic search and return a list of potential hits for an officer to sort through and use as possible leads for an investigation. Another advancement on the books is the ability to accept and search for photographs of scars, marks, and tattoos. 

According to the FBI's Jerome Pender, in February 2012, the state of Michigan successfully completed an end-to-end Facial Recognition Pilot transaction and is submitting facial recognition searches to the CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services Division). Pender said that MOUs (Memorandums of Understanding) have been executed with Hawaii and Maryland, and South Carolina, Ohio, and New Mexico are engaged in the MOU review process for Facial Recognition Pilot participation. Kansas, Arizona, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Missouri, he said, are also interested in Facial Recognition Pilot participation... Read more here...

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Can exploding stars contribute to global warming?

According to University of Aberdeen astrophysicist, Dr Charles Wang,

"There is a direct correlation between star explosions and the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere."

(Phys.org)—

One of the universe's greatest unexplained mysteries – why stars explode – could be explained by a particle similar to the Higgs boson. The theory developed by University of Aberdeen astrophysicist, Dr Charles Wang, will be tested at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in December and was announced at the British Science Festival today.

If proven, it could also help in the prediction of global warming in the future, given the impact star explosions have on the Earth's atmosphere.

Dr Wang said: "There is a direct correlation between star explosions and the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.

"When a star explodes a massive amount of cosmic rays enter the atmosphere affecting the weather in space by making it cloudier. "More clouds in space leads to the Earth's atmosphere being cooler. "Global warming could therefore be connected to stars exploding in our skies less frequently.

"We cannot control the explosion of stars, but if we can understand the process by which it happens we could potentially better predict when and where these explosions will take place and as a result make predictions on how the Earth's climate could change in the decades to come."

NASA's Voyager turned 35 this week

 After 35 years, voyager is still going...

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The Sun is behind Mars climate

 Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS



The Sun drives mars climate change.

ScienceDaily— On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation.

The results are published in the scientific journal, Icarus.

The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which can be seen in cliffs and valley slopes and we have known about these layers for decades, since the first satellite images came back from Mars. The layers are believed to reflect past climate on Mars, in the same way that Earth's climate history can be read by analysing ice cores from the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica.

Solar insolation on Mars has varied dramatically over time, mainly due to large variations in the tilt of Mars's rotational axis (obliquity) and this led to dramatic climate variations on Mars. For years people have tried to link the solar insolation and layer formation by looking for signs of periodic sequences in the visible layers, which can be seen in the upper 500 meters. Periodic signals might be traceable back to known variations in the solar insolation on Mars, but so far it has been unclear whether one could find a correlation between variations in insolation and the layers.

Kindle Fire HD looks like a hit this Christmas...

At $199, this could be a stocking stuffer...

(PHYSORG) Amazon's new Kindle Fire HD boasts a much more vibrant screen than the original tablet that came out about a year ago. That makes buying movies and TV shows to watch on the device a lot more appealing.

The screen is such a major improvement that I can't see why you would purchase the upgraded non-HD older model, even if it means saving $40. The new offering brings the new Kindle Fire HD into closer competition with Apple's market-leading iPad, which introduced a higher resolution screen earlier this year. By the numbers, the difference between screens on the new and older model doesn't seem that big. The smaller Kindle Fire HD, with a screen measuring 7 inches diagonally has a screen resolution of 1280 x 800. Last year's 7-inch (178-millimeter) model, and the upgraded version with better innards unveiled Thursday, has a screen with 1024 x 600 pixels. That doesn't come close to the latest iPad, which has a resolution of 2048 x 1536. Nonetheless, this upgrade feels like a big leap for Amazon. It means not seeing any of those annoying pixels, a welcome relief that feels even better when you consider the price. At $199, versus $499 for the latest iPad, I can see this being a popular stocking stuffer this Christmas.

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Quantum teleportation over a record-breaking distance of 143 kilometres

Beam me up!

ScienceDaily — An international research team including several scientists from the University of Waterloo has achieved quantum teleportation over a record-breaking distance of 143 kilometres through free space

The experiment saw the successful teleportation of quantum information -- in this case, the states of light particles, or photons -- between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. The breakthrough is a crucial step toward quantum communications via satellite. 

Unlike the teleportation of solid objects popularized in science fiction, the experiment involved the teleportation of quantum states, an essential pre-requisite of quantum computing, quantum communication and other powerful technologies under development at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at Waterloo. 

The project, led by researchers from Vienna's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, relied on algorithms and equipment developed in Waterloo. Their results were published this week in Nature.

Finally, a mind-controlled robotic leg...

Research into a mind-controlled robotic leg offers hope for spinal cord injury victims.

(Phys.org)—Spinal cord injury victims may be able to look forward to life beyond a wheelchair via a robotic leg prosthesis controlled by brain waves. Individuals with paraplegia due to spinal cord injury who are wheelchair-bound face serious health problems, or in medical terminology, comorbidities, such as metabolic derangement, heart disease, osteoporosis, and pressure ulcers. New research efforts are being directed toward restoring brain-controlled ambulation for those who suffer from spinal cord injuries.

An Do, MD, at the Long Beach Veterans Affairs Medical Center in California and colleagues at the University of California Irvine, have succeeded in connecting a mind-computer interface to a robotic leg. "This finding represents the first successful demonstration of a BCI-controlled lower extremity prosthesis for independent ambulation," say the researchers. They built and tested a prosthetic lower limb that can be controlled in real time by EEG (electroencephalogram) signals fed into a computer. Their work is presented in a paper, "Brain-Computer Interface Controlled Robotic Gait Orthosis: A Case Report," by An H. Do, Po T. Wang, Christine E. King, Sophia N. Chun, and Zoran Nenadic.

Video: Dawn Spacecraft mosaic flyover of Asteroid Vesta

This mosaic is representative of the full data set taken by the Dawn Spacecraft's mission to Vesta, the second most massive asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. This video was released just 5 days before Dawn is scheduled to depart for its journey to Ceres, the largest member and the only Dwarf Planet in the asteroid belt.

Are organic foods a waste of money?

In terms of nutrition, organic foods are not better. They do reduce exposure to pesticide residues.

You're in the supermarket eyeing a basket of sweet, juicy plums. You reach for the conventionally grown stone fruit, then decide to spring the extra $1/pound for its organic cousin. You figure you've just made the healthier decision by choosing the organic product—but new findings from Stanford University cast some doubt on your thinking.

"There isn't much difference between organic and conventional foods, if you're an adult and making a decision based solely on your health," said Dena Bravata, MD, MS, the senior author of a paper comparing the nutrition of organic and non-organic foods, to be published in the Sept. 4 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

A team led by Bravata, a senior affiliate with Stanford's Center for Health Policy, and Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, MS, an instructor in the school's Division of General Medical Disciplines and a physician-investigator at VA Palo Alto Health Care System, did the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of existing studies comparing organic and conventional foods. They did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives, though consumption of organic foods can reduce the risk of pesticide exposure.

Amazing Video: Tree explodes from bolt of lightning, just misses man

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Scientists detect gravitational waves from White Dwarfs

Scientists detect ripples in the fabric of space-time...

(Phys.org)—Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars.

"This result marks one of the cleanest and strongest detections of the effect of gravitational waves," said team member Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). The team discovered the white dwarf pair last year. (White dwarfs are the remnant cores of stars like our Sun.) The system, called SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short), contains two white dwarf stars so close together—one-third of the Earth-moon distance—that they make a complete orbit in less than 13 minutes.

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