First Mars-Goers Should Prepare For a One-Way Trip

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 23, @02:53PM

from the buy-round-trip-tickets-to-slip-past-tsa-though dept.

Luminary Crush writes with this excerpt from PhysOrg about the permanance of leaving Earth for Mars, at least for early travelers:"The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. '[the distance and difficulty is why you should] send people there permanently,' Aldrin said. 'If we are not willing to do that, then I don't think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.'"On the other hand, maybe they'll catch a ride back with Carrie-Anne Moss.

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Exercise Gives Longer Life For People With Heart Disease

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2008) — Exercising once a week can help prolong life expectancy for people with heart disease according to a new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

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Interactive Mirror dazzles onlookers, never lies

by Tim Stevens, posted Oct 23rd 2008 at 11:09AM

It was just a month ago that Alpay Kasal of Lit Studios was impressing us with LaserGames, beaming all sorts of fun, interactive visuals on the wall. Now, with a few tweaks, he's turned that projector around and made a two-way mirror into a sort of digital portal. "Interactive Mirror" uses the same basic mouse emulation as LaserGames -- it seems to lack multi-touch but offers some interesting ideas, like showing how a custom T-shirt would look if you were wearing it. That's potentially useful, but its primary function seems to be inducing childish wonderment in your friends. If the wide-eyed participants in the video below are any indication, it seems to do that quite well.

Check these cools pics of the Hot Sun

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html

X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 22, @02:12PM

from the unusual-circumstances dept.

Maximum Prophet writes"When I was in High School, I built an X-Ray machine that (probably) didn't produce any X-Rays. I used an old vacuum tube and high voltage. Little did I know that simple triboluminescence would have enough energy to do useful work."The catch: you'll need to peel your tape in a vacuum, and have the x-ray film at the ready.

Throwing Light On The Dark Side Of The Universe

ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2008) — Although we may believe humans know a lot about the Universe, there are still a lot of phenomena to be explained. A team of cosmologists from the University of the Basque Country are searching for the model that best explains the evolution of the Universe.

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Impacts Of Climate Change On Lakes

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2008) — Climate change will have different effects on lakes in warmer and colder regions of the globe. This is the conclusion reached by Japanese and German researchers following studies of very deep caldera lakes in Japan.

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Voters Swayed By Candidates Who Share Their Looks

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 23, @12:23AM

from the govern-by-proxy dept.

iandoh writes"Stanford researchers have found that voters are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features. In three experiments, researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked with cheap, easy-to-use computer software to morph pictures of about 600 test subjects with photos of politicians. And they kept coming up with the same results: For the would-be voters who weren't very familiar with the candidates or in perfect lockstep with their positions or political parties, the facial similarity was enough to clinch their votes."

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Inside the World's Most Advanced Planetarium

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 22, @10:21PM

from the laser-floyd-will-never-be-the-same dept.

notthatwillsmith writes"Earlier this month, the most technologically-advanced digital planetarium in the world opened in San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. The new Morrison Planetarium's 75-foot screen replaces the traditional Zeiss projector with an array of 6 high-resolution DLP projectors arrayed around the edge of the theater, which are powered by three very different, but interesting computing clusters. The three clusters allow for projection of traditional planetarium shows, playback of ultra-high resolution movies, and display of anything from current atmospheric conditions on Earth to a (greatly accelerated) trip to the farthest reaches of the universe, all rendered in real-time on an 8800 sq. ft. dome. Maximum PC went on a behind the scenes tour with the engineers who built the systems that do everything from run the planetarium lights to the sound systems to the tech behind the screen to show you how it works and what it's like to drive, well... the universe."

SMART pulls the cloth off multitouch table for school kids

by Samuel Axon, posted Oct 22nd 2008 at 10:07PM

Determined to make us jealous that our kids' childhood experiences are more marvelous than ours, SMART Technologies will tomorrow unveil the SMART Table, a primary education "interactive learning center" (we'd rather call it Surface Jr.). It'll be available Spring of next year, and will work out of the box with learning applications that can be operated by any number of kids and all their fingers. Other classroom multitouch devices are on the horizon, but most of them are a little further from market than this Canadian contraption, which includes custom lesson plans, gesture support and a (touted but unspecified) wide viewing angle. At $8,000 we're not sure it's an option for public schools whose budgets only have room for essentials, but if you work at a school that's totally loaded with cash and think the kiddos would dig this, feel free to look at SMART's short promotional vid after the break.

The Walking House

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 23, @04:25AM

from the baba-yaga-eat-your-heart-out dept.

What is 10' tall, has six hydraulic legs, and is powered by the wind and solar panels? The prototype pod house built by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the help of MIT, N55 built the pod over a two-year period at a cost of £30,000. Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods. One of the designers says, "This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living." It won't be long now until the Japanese makeHowl's Moving Castle.

Scientists Erase Specific Memories In Mice

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 23, @07:57AM

from the where's-the-cheese dept.

Ostracus writes"It sounds like science fiction, but scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely. After exposing mice to emotionally powerful stimuli, such as a mild shock to their paws, the scientists then observed how well or poorly the animals subsequently recalled the particular trauma as their brain's expression of CaMKII was manipulated up and down. When the brain was made to overproduce CaMKII at the exact moment the mouse was prodded to retrieve the traumatic memory, the memory wasn't just blocked, it appeared to be fully erased."

US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 22, @03:44PM

from the but-counting-commences-thursday dept.

longacre writes"If you thought online voting in America was a distant pipe dream (nightmare?), think again: the nation's first Internet-based voting system goes online this Friday, just days after the release of the Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security we discussed yesterday. In the first real world run of the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program, election officials from Okaloosa County, Florida have set up kiosks in Germany, the UK and Japan where 600-700 absentee voters — mostly military personnel — are expected to cast ballots. Security experts still have many questions, of course, particularly on the potential for interception of voting data while it travels across oceans (via 'secure VPN'), the security of the kiosks ('hardened laptops' with no hard drives and other sensitive components disabled) and the security of the three data centers (one of which is itself housed overseas, in Barcelona, Spain), not to mention the fact that Florida doesn't exactly have a stellar recordwhen it comes to vote counting. Florida's Dept. of State also has a fairly detailed outline of ODBP's components and processes [PDF]."

Weird news: Man-eating fish evolves from water burials

by JOSH LOPOSER
Oct 10th 2008 @ 3:00PM

Filed under: Plants and Wildlife

It sounds like something straight out of a low-budget horror film, but scientists on the India-Nepal border fear that years of disposing of bodies in the Great Kali River has created a monster. The creature, a type of giant catfish called a "goonch," is thought to be targeting live prey after years of feeding on the remains of burnt bodies, tossed into the river after ritual funeral pyres. Biologist Jeremy Wade is investigating the sensational story for a documentary TV show in Britain.

Wade believes that these giant freshwater fish are behind local legends in which a monster has grown large on a diet of human remains and is now responsible for snatching unsuspecting bathers. Through his research, Jeremy has built a case for the idea that these giant fish, rather than crocodiles, are the likely culprits. Wade actually caught one of these fish that weighed in at 161lbs (73kg). Wow, that's one catfish that I'm not willing to eat with a side of tartar sauce. Here's a safer, more eco-friendly, burial at sea option.

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Tiger attacks on the rise, linked to climate change

by JOSH LOPOSER
Oct 22nd 2008 @ 10:00AM

Filed under: Plants and Wildlife

Last week, I found a story aboutman-eating catfish evolved from improper burials techniques -- pretty much a perfect premise for a horror movie. Well, apparently those giant bottom feeders aren't the only creatures sent to punish mankind for their trespasses against the environment. Now, scientists in India fear that tiger attacks may be on the rise due to habitat loss at the hands of climate change and a decline in prey animals like crocodiles. 

They say that tigers in India's wildlife preserves are turning on humans because coastal erosion and rising sea levels are shrinking the tigers' habitat. These tigers live on a series of small islands called the Sundarbans on the border between India and Bangladesh -- an area that scientists say has lost 28% of its habitat in the last 4 decades. While portion of that was tiger habitat, the greatest percentage was habitat for their prey. As the mangroves decline and become more salty, prey is becoming scarce -- making livestock and humans potential targets. Over the past 6 months, tiger attacks have claimed the lives of 7 fisherman in the surrounding area.

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Generation raised with black and white TV dreams in monochrome

by Nilay Patel, posted Oct 22nd 2008 at 8:13AM

This one's pretty wild -- recent research in the UK finds that people who grew up in the era of black and white media dream in monochrome about a quarter of the time, while those of us raised with color TV almost always dream in full-on Technicolor. The research suggests that exposure to media between the ages of three and 10 is when the switch is set, since that's when the ability to dream kicks in -- which means we're suddenly terrified our kids are going to wind up dreaming in heavily-compressed SD stretched to the wrong aspect ratio, buffering endlessly before failing out due to a missing plugin. Here's to the future.

Stem Cells From Fat Create Beating Heart Cells

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 22, @01:05AM

from the for-the-love-of-god-montressor dept.

Amenacier writes"Melbourne scientists recently discovered that stem cells isolated from human fat could be made to turn into beating heart muscle cells when cultured with rat heart cells. This discovery may lead to the use of fat stem cells in repairing cardiac damage, or fixing such cardiac problems as holes in the heart. It is proposed that culturing the stem cells with rat heart cells allows them to differentiate into heart muscle through signals from the rat cells. In the future it may be possible to inject/transplant the stem cells into the damaged area and have them naturally differentiate into the type of cell required, with only the natural stimuli provided by surrounding cells, without any danger of rejection by the body. Quoting: 'The next step is to implant the human heart cells onto the damaged heart of a laboratory rat to see whether they repair the heart. Then they would be trialled in higher species such as sheep and pigs before human applications could be considered. Clinical application could be five years away ...'"The Age has a multimedia treatment (Flash) of the discovery.