Tech Suki

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16358

.. A previous study had looked at using fMRI scans of parts of the brain linked to shape identification to correctly guess the a viewed image from a series of stock images.  Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist who led the current effort, describes this previous work as similar to “the magician’s card trick where you pick a card from a deck, and he guesses which card you picked. The magician knows all the cards you could have seen.”

The new study expands this approach greatly by also scanning parts of the brain used for general classifications like “person”, “car”, or “building”.  Utilizing Bayesian probabilistic math, researchers armed with a database of over 6 million possible results and the new scans were able to go beyond identification into the realm of reconstruction, coming up with an image corresponding to what the person was thinking of, after an initial calibration to adjust for mental differences.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7543089.stm

BBC News – Nasa’s Kepler planet-hunter detects five worlds.

Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope has detected its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our Solar System.

DailyTech – Nanoparticle Combination Painkiller to Save Lives at Home and on the Battlefield.

Morphine + special new drug + polymer nanoparticles = a lifesaver.
With injury, chronic or sudden, comes pain.  The severity of pain can cause a variety of detrimental effects and dangers.  One of the most common pain-relievers, used both on battlefields and in hospitals at home, is Morphine.

Morphine is a powerful pain reliever, but it has the unfortunate side effect of lowering blood pressure and depressing normal breathing.  Both effects can cause a shortage of oxygen in the blood stream, a potentially deadly stress on an already injured patient.  Typically in a hospital setting the effects are controlled with an antimorphine agent such as Naloxone, but on the battlefield, without the extensive monitoring equipment of a hospital, this becomes a dangerous art.

Now researchers at the University of Michigan have devised both a new drug and a new delivery system that promises to help control these side effects and bring safer, more effective pain relief to hospitals and to our soldiers serving overseas.

The new drug, a Naloxone derivative, transforms into Naloxone, only when blood oxygen levels dip to low, indicating the Morphine is interfering with breathing.  Describes Baohua Huang, Ph.D., the study’s first author and a research investigator at the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute and in Internal Medicine (MNIMBS), “When respiratory distress is too severe, that will trigger release of Naloxone, the antagonist (morphine-suppressing) drug. When the oxygen blood levels go up, that will stop the action of the antagonist drug and more morphine will be available.”

DailyTech – Mission Success: NASA Announces “Significant” Amount of Moon Water Discovered.

The Shepherding Rocket then flew through the over 350 tons of excavated material, relaying readings back to Earth, before making its own crash-landing on the Lunar surface.  After a month of analysis, NASA announced the results at a triumphant press conference at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Francisco, California.

Describes NASA scientist Anthony Colaprete, “I’m here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit; we found a significant amount.”

He says an estimated dozen two-gallon buckets of water (in other words, approximately 24 gallons of water) was detected in the excavated debris — a significant amount of water.  This provides the most compelling evidence to date in thelong running debate over whether the Moon has water frozen in its rocky soil.  The composition was analyzed using spectrometers onboard the tailing rocket.

DailyTech – Commercial Plasma Rocket Reaches 200 KW, an Important Milestone .

Developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz, the engine could change a lot about how we interact with space.  The new rocket, driven by plasma, is able to use cheaper fuels like neon, argon, or hydrogen, while providing finer control over thrust and specific impulse — two key parameters that determine a rocket’s movement and speed.  The new rocket is also much safer and more reliable than traditional chemical rockets, reducing the risks associated with space flight.

The engine exhausts plasma, a fourth state of matter along with solids, liquids, and gases.  Plasma is essentially ionized gas.  It is typically created via either low pressure or extremely high heat (10,000° C or more).  Plasma consists of a mix of electrons and positively charged gas ions.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Engineering Earth ‘is feasible’.

A UK Royal Society study has concluded that many engineering proposals to reduce the impact of climate change are “technically possible”.

Such approaches could be effective, the authors said in their report.

But they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Suggestions range from having giant mirrors in space to erecting giant CO2 scrubbers that would “clean” the air.

Such engineering projects could either remove carbon dioxide or reflect the Sun’s rays away from the planet.

Of the two basic geo-engineering approaches, the report concluded that those involving the removal of carbon dioxide were preferable, as they effectively return the climate system closer to its pre-industrial state.

But the authors found that many of these options were currently too expensive to implement widely.

This included “carbon capture and storage” methods, which require CO2 be captured directly from power plants and stored under the Earth’s surface.

Current proposed methods also work very slowly, taking many decades to remove enough carbon dioxide to significantly reduce the rate of temperature rise.

Of the carbon removal techniques assessed, three were considered to have most potential:

1. CO2 capture from ambient air: This would be the preferred method, as it effectively reverses the cause of climate change.

2. Enhanced weathering: This aims to enhance natural reactions of CO2 from the air with rocks and minerals. It was identified as a prospective longer-term option.

3. Land use and afforestation: The report found that land-use management could and should play a small but significant role in reducing the growth of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Some suggestions include: a giant mirror on the Moon; a space parasol made of superfine aluminium mesh; and a swarm of 10 trillion small mirrors launched into space one million at a time every minute for the next 30 years.

The study also said that many of these approaches had huge logistical demands, and it could take several decades for them to be implemented.

But if temperatures rose to such a level where more rapid action needed to be taken, three techniques were considered to have most potential:

1. Stratospheric aerosols: Previous volcanic eruptions have effectively provided case studies of the potential effectiveness of this method.

2. Space-based methods: These were considered to be a potential technique for long-term use, but only if major problems of implementation and maintenance could be solved.

3. Cloud albedo approaches: These include “cloud ships” which would send sea water into the clouds to make them more reflective.

DailyTech – International Space Updates, September 2009.

Japanese companies Mitsubishi and IHI have agreed to join a $21 billion project that aims to create a solar-power generator in space that can send electricity back to Earth.

“It sounds like a science-fiction cartoon, but solar power generation in space may be a significant alternative energy source in the century ahead as fossil fuel disappears,” said Kensuke Kanekiyo, Institute of Energy Economics director told Bloomberg.

The power generator is a 1-gigawatt project that will use four square kilometers of solar panels, though it isn’t expected to be fully functional for 30 years.

DailyTech – Researchers Create World’s Smallest Semiconductor Laser.

The new laser breakthrough may one day usher in a new era in computing power by providing CPU makers with the ability to use light rather than electronic circuitry in processors. The key breakthrough was a method that the researchers devised to squeeze the light into a space smaller than its wavelength and keep the light from dissipating as it moved along.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | We’re all mutants, say scientists.

Each of us has at least 100 new mutations in our DNA, according to research published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists have been trying to get an accurate estimate of the mutation rate for over 70 years.

However, only now has it been possible to get a reliable estimate, thanks to “next generation” technology for genetic sequencing.

The findings may lead to new treatments and insights into our evolution.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Galaxy’s ‘cannibalism’ revealed.

The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.

When an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were “remnants of dwarf galaxies”.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Single molecule’s stunning image.

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers.

The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques – but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

Understanding structure on this scale could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale, particularly electronics or even drugs.

Technology Review: The Smallest Laser Ever Made.

Researchers have demonstrated the smallest laser ever, consisting of a nanoparticle just 44 nanometers across. The device is dubbed a “spaser” because it generates a form of radiation called surface plasmons. The technique allows light to be confined in very small spaces, and some physicists believe that spasers could form the basis of future optical computers just as transistors are the basis of today’s electronics.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | A step closer to ’synthetic life’.

In what has been described as a step towards the creation of a synthetic cell, scientists have created a new “engineered” strain of bacteria.

A team successfully transferred the genome of one type of bacteria into a yeast cell, modified it, and then transplanted into another bacterium.

This paves the way to the creation of a synthetic organism – inserting a human-made genome into a bacterial cell.

DailyTech – Bionanoelectronic Devices Could Speed Up Electronics, Processing.

Mixing living cells with microscopic electronics may yield a new breed of processing power.

Though computer engineers and scientists have been repeatedly breaking speed barriers with new supercomputers, they still pale in comparison to the information processing power of complex biological systems. IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, presently the fastest in the world, has been used to mimic a single part of brain function, the visual cortex, and that’s only a fragment of the information the human body processes at any given moment.

So when researchers look to the future of computing, attempting to mimic bio-functions or combine them with electronics seems like a step in the right direction as far as speed and efficiency are concerned. However, the reality of the situation is not so supportive. Past attempts to merge the two types of systems have not yielded any special results.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists are taking a deeper, or more nanoscopic, look into the idea of cohabitating the living and the inanimate. “With the creation of even smaller nanomaterials that are comparable to the size of biological molecules, we can integrate the systems at an even more localized level,” explains Aleksander Noy, lead LLNL scientist on the bio-electrical project.