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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
China aims to send craft to Mars in 200 days with electric thrusters
Post Date: 2015-06-15 00:34:30 by Tatarewicz
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China is looking to develop an "interstellar" weapon based on electric thruster technology to send a spacecraft to Mars in just 200 days, according to a report from the official Xinhua news agency. Electric propulsion is still regarded as relatively weak but is still strong enough to propel humans into space at significantly lower costs than traditional propulsion systems, which is why the technology is regarded by the international aerospace community as the way of the future. China has developed this technology by itself as other parties such as the United States, Russia, the European Union and Japan are all keeping their research confidential. The development has reached a ...
Fourth test of China's WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle confirmed
Post Date: 2015-06-15 00:26:58 by Tatarewicz
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Want... A fourth test of China's ultra high-speed hypersonic glide vehicle for nuclear delivery called the WU-14 was carried out by the People's Liberation Army last week, Bill Gertz, senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon, wrote in an article published on June 11. Gertz said the test was conducted on June 7. As this is the the fourth test of the WU-14 in the past 18 months, US intelligence analysts believe the PLA has set a high priority on the development of the vehicle. The first WU-14 test is understood to have taken place on Jan. 9, 2014, followed by further tests on Aug. 7 and Dec. 2. All four tests have been conducted at the same facility in western China, the report ...
Higher carbon dioxide reduces plants' ability to absorb nutrients
Post Date: 2015-06-13 07:18:30 by Tatarewicz
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Wheat is among the many plants whose ability to absorb nitrogen is negatively affected by increased carbon dioxide in the air. GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 12 (UPI) -- Increased carbon dioxide in the air decreases plants' ability to absorb nitrogen, even in plants whose growth has not been affected by the change, according to a new study. The University of Gothenburg study found the effect widely held true in field studies in eight countries and on four continents in crops, grasslands and forests. "The findings of the study are unequivocal," said Johan Uddling, a senior lecturer at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, in a ...
Four easy tips to make your batteries last longer
Post Date: 2015-06-13 06:24:46 by Tatarewicz
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ScienceAlert... Here are a few things you can do to make your lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries last longer, whether they be used in an electric car, a large home installation - such as Tesla’s newly announced Powerwall - or in your portable device, such as a smartphone or laptop. These tips will focus primarily on extending the lifespan of Li-ion batteries, so they don’t need to be replaced as often. But if you are looking to maximise running time just for this very moment, possibly at the expense of having to replace the battery earlier, there are some added tips at the end. Tip 1: Use it or lose it It is important to remember that batteries degrade not only during use, but also ...
Armata Designers: This May be the First Unmanned Drone Tank
Post Date: 2015-06-12 23:55:47 by Tatarewicz
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Sputnik... Russia's new Armata tank is a highly touted combat vehicle that is expected to form the backbone of the country's military for years to come, and its designers say it may one day be able to operate autonomously on the battlefield. The tank was unveiled in April ahead of Russia’s World War II Victory Day 70th anniversary parade, and its designers claim it is 20 years ahead of anything in the West. Why May China and India Need Russia’s Armata Super Tank? The Armata does sport some impressive specs, including state of the art weaponry, a remote control turret, and outer armor that explodes on impact to prevent shells from reaching the crew inside. The tank's ...
Engineer creates origami battery, for five cents
Post Date: 2015-06-12 06:57:49 by Tatarewicz
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Origami batteries like this one, developed by Binghamton University researcher Seokheun Choi, could one day power biosensors for use in remote locations. Credit: Jonathan Cohen, Binghamton University Photographer Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, can be used to create beautiful birds, frogs and other small sculptures. Now a Binghamton University engineer says the technique can be applied to building batteries, too. Seokheun "Sean" Choi developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper, he writes in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy. The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based ...
Four ways China can counter US X-47B UCAV: Sina Military
Post Date: 2015-06-11 20:27:32 by Tatarewicz
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Want... China has four ways to counter the United States Navy's US Navy's X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), says the Beijing-based Sina Military Network. Developed by Northrop Grumman, the X-47B is said to provide the US with a major advantage over that offered by traditional fighter jets. The UCAV conducted its maiden flight in 2011 before completing ground tests and commencing test flights in 2013. In-flight refueling tests began at the start of this year. Even when taking mid-air refueling in account, fighter jets only have a range of about 1,500 nautical miles but their combat range is actually much lower as pilot fatigue needs to be factored in, restricting missions ...
First baby born from ovary tissue frozen during mother’s childhood
Post Date: 2015-06-11 05:35:55 by Tatarewicz
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A team of Belgian doctors have managed to restore fertility in a 27-year-old woman using a piece of ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen when she was 13. This is the first time this procedure has worked with non-adult tissue, offering new hope for women who are infertile as a result of medical treatments during their childhood. The case study has been published in the journal Human Reproduction. "This is an important breakthrough in the field because children are the patients who are most likely to benefit from the procedure in the future," said lead author, researcher and gynaecologist Isabelle Demeestere, in a press release. "When they are diagnosed with diseases ...
Iranian scientists unveil domestically made surgery robot
Post Date: 2015-06-11 05:22:41 by Tatarewicz
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PressTV... Iranian scientists have unveiled the first domestically made high precision remote surgery robot. Avicenna, specifically designed to carry out laparoscopic operations, was unveiled during Iran's Second International Innovation and Technology Exhibition (INOTEX 2015) on Tuesday. “This robot is an advanced remote surgery system that operates with a monitor and two robotic arms,” said Farzam Farahmand, the director of the Avicenna project. He added that the Iranian robot can also be used “for abdominal and prostate surgery” with a surgeon controlling the arms and viewing the operation via the monitor. “Operations carried out with this device ...
Congress Didn't Notice the FBI Creating a 'Small Air Force' for Surveillance Excessive executive branch secrecy and the legislatureÂ’s oversight failures
Post Date: 2015-06-10 07:31:22 by Ada
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A small plane flies near Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia. The plane is part the FBI's fleet of surveillance aircraft, which are primarily used to target suspects under federal investigation. Such planes are capable of taking video of the ground, and, in rare occasions, can sweep up certain identifying cellphone data.Andrew Harnik / AP Last week, Americans learned that even as the NSA collected information on their telephone and Internet behavior, the FBI was using fictitious companies to secretly operate what the AP called “a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cell phone surveillance technology.” The ...
China’s big biotech bet starts to pay off
Post Date: 2015-06-10 05:57:12 by Tatarewicz
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JapanTimes... SHANGHAI/LONDON – Years of pouring money into its laboratories, wooing scientists home from overseas and urging researchers to publish and patent is starting to give China a competitive edge in biotechnology, a strategic field it sees as ripe for “indigenous innovation.” The vast resources China can throw at research and development — overall funding more than quadrupled to $191 billion in 2005-13 and the Thousand Talents Program has repatriated scientists — allow China to jump quickly on promising new technologies, often first developed elsewhere. These efforts were illustrated vividly in April — not without controversy — when scientists ...
Can Scientists Think?
Post Date: 2015-06-09 09:30:44 by Ada
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Euclid Cannot Explain a Hamburger On the Unz Review I find a piece by Razib Khan, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist? His answer, yes, is inarguable since, as he points out, many good scientists are religious (Newton, a Christian, by most accounts did pretty fair work.) But why should it be necessary to ask such a luminously foolish question? Because we live in luminously foolish times. Mr. Khan cites, not approvingly, a scientist who wanted to have another dismissed from his position for being an evangelical Christian. Why? Well, you see, the manner of thinking of religious people renders them incapable of science. This makes sense only in terms of bitter hostility to religion. ...
Here's how your phone can harvest its own radio waves to boost battery
Post Date: 2015-06-08 01:16:28 by Tatarewicz
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ScienceAlert... The feeling of anxiety over how long your smartphone battery is going to last is one that's familiar to most of us, but a team from the Ohio State University in the US has come up with an unusual source of extra power: radio waves emitted by the devices themselves. In tests, the researchers were able to boost battery life by as much as 30 percent. While systems already exist to harvest power from ambient electromagnetic energy sources (such as radio waves), until now the technology has been limited in size and scope. In this case, because the radio waves are captured at source - almost as soon as the smartphone emits them - they produce a more powerful charging effect ...
Sword-wielding robot beats Japanese master samurai
Post Date: 2015-06-07 23:20:37 by Tatarewicz
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KITAKYUSHU, Japan, June 7 (UPI) -- Engineers in Japan have built an industrial robot capable of perfectly executing the moves of a samurai master. In a recent exhibition, the robot, named Motoman-MH24, out-dueled its teacher Isao Machii (an actual samurai master). Researchers at Yaskawa Electric Corporation trained their sword-wielding creation to slice and dice with the precision of Machii, essentially uploading the master's human genius onto the robot's software. In a recent video released by the company, Motoman can be seen bisecting fruit with one fell swoop of the katana. Researchers tracked Machii's movements the same way video-game makers film and copy the athletic ...
Robotics craze in China may fizzle in two years
Post Date: 2015-06-07 22:46:40 by Tatarewicz
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Want... One hot category amid the stock market rally in China is robotic firms, though the hype cannot mask the industry's underlying deficiencies, reports the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly. The industry owes its glow to the strong support of government policy. The "China manufacturing 2025" program, just rolled out by the State Council, designates robotics as one of the 10 key sectors for priority development. The goal is to become one of the world's manufacturing powers by 2025. After the program came out, prices of more than 10 robotic stocks surged to the daily ceiling the next day. Chinese firms have been scrambling to produce robots to tap the huge domestic ...
Shanghai master's student controls cockroaches with 'brain link'
Post Date: 2015-06-07 03:05:01 by Tatarewicz
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Want... The technology by which people control other beings through a brain link featured in the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar may be closer to realization than you might think, according to a report in the Shanghai Morning Post cited by Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po. Li Guanghua, a graduate student at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has successfully managed to control the movements of a live cockroach using a human brain, under the direction of his advisor Zhang Dingguo. The cockroach was directed by the person controlling it to walk in an S and a Z pattern. Signals from the human brain are transmitted to the brain of cockroach, allowing the human to ...
Bee populations face another threat: aluminum
Post Date: 2015-06-06 03:29:45 by Tatarewicz
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KEELE, England, June 5 (UPI) -- Researchers have found high concentrations of aluminum in bee populations, suggesting contamination by the silver-gray metal could be partially responsible for the insect's decline. Aluminum is one of the most abundant contaminants in nature. And previous studies have shown bees fail to actively shy away from aluminum-tainted flower pollen. Researchers hypothesized that significant amounts of aluminum might result in neurological problems among the bees -- an inability to forage, or find one's way back to the colony. To see if bees were accumulating high amounts of aluminum over the course of their lifecycle, researchers in England collected pupae ...
Harnessing the power of community to drive an energy revolution in Japan
Post Date: 2015-06-06 01:52:54 by Tatarewicz
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Japan Times... SAGAMIHARA, KANAGAWA PREF. – Watch Kazuaki Hashimoto chopping firewood for the following winter on a baking day at the end of April, and you may be forgiven for thinking he leads a rather old-fashioned lifestyle. But Hashimoto, who recently moved from a house with an air conditioner and electric heater in each room to an energy-efficient house with a single wood stove, is at the forefront of a distinctly cutting-edge movement: living off-grid. Hashimoto and his wife Haruko are the latest household in this lush valley in the Fujino district of Sagamihara to install an off-grid system devised by Fujino Power, a local group seeking to educate citizens about energy and ...
Catastrophic Failures in Science Then and Now
Post Date: 2015-06-05 08:27:56 by Ada
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A catastrophic failure in science is said to occur when a long-established theory that has been embraced by learned advocates is discovered to be at odds with the part of the world it is supposed to explain. In other words, when a view of the world maintained by conventional wisdom is contradicted by the facts of life, polite society is due for a shock of disappointment or worse. It is especially catastrophic if the unmasking occurs long past the point where it is obvious that the predictions of the theory diverge wildly from dependable and repeated observations of indisputably identical quantities. A historical example of such a catastrophe comes from the annals of physics. This experience ...
HARVARD, SYRACUSE RESEARCHERS CAUGHT LYING TO BOOST OBAMA CLIMATE RULES
Post Date: 2015-06-05 08:08:40 by Ada
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E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency. In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal- fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage. Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university- affiliated ...
Your genes influence when you have your first child, study finds
Post Date: 2015-06-05 06:48:09 by Tatarewicz
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ScienceAlert... In modern society, more and more women are ignoring their biological clocks and having babies whenever suits us best, but new research has shown that our genes do still play a role in when we have our first babies. In fact, human females are actually evolving to become fertile younger and younger. After analysing the DNA of almost 7,000 women in the UK and the Netherlands, researchers have found that around 15 percent of the variation in the age women have their first child, and 10 percent of the difference in the number of children they have, can be attributed to genetics. This is the first study to look at both unrelated women as well as female twins, and it aimed to ...
Why are 95% of people who live to 110 women? You're as old as your stem cells
Post Date: 2015-06-05 05:27:14 by Tatarewicz
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ScienceDaily... Human supercentenarians share at least one thing in common--over 95 percent are women. Scientists have long observed differences between the sexes when it comes to aging, but there is no clear explanation for why females live longer. In a discussion of what we know about stem cell behavior and sex, Stanford University researchers Ben Dulken and Anne Brunet argue that it's time to look at differences in regenerative decline between men and women. This line of research could open up new explanations for how the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone, or other factors, modify lifespan. It's known that estrogen has direct effects on stem cell populations in female ...
Amazing Video - Can save the Planet!
Post Date: 2015-06-04 23:59:06 by HAPPY2BME-4UM
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This is TOO simple .. Published on May 3, 2015 WOW! This is So Amazing! It can save our Planet! ~ Soul Detox: Peace, Happiness, Life Purpose Your views on this are ridiculous. Something like this would make a massive change to our planet. There is literally a fucking island floating out in the pacific made from 100% plastic. We are filling our land daily with thousands of tonnes of plastic all over the world. All of this is killing our marine life and damaging to the environment, how do you see such a positive thing and say meh, its not good enough, the overall process still produces co2. Unless you live on a farm that you run, grow and harvest your own food, have your own solar power ...
Scientists may have worked out how life evolved from building blocks on Earth
Post Date: 2015-06-03 06:56:53 by Tatarewicz
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scienceAlert... The conditions that led to the first organisms evolving from the Earth's 'primordial soup' of chemicals around 3.6 billion years ago are pretty mysterious, but scientists have just found a major clue that could explain how life originated on our planet. According to new research, before the evolution of RNA and DNA, simple protein chains known as peptides would have arisen from the boiling stew of amino acids - the building blocks of proteins - that formed shortly after Earth was created. The new research contradicts one of the leading hypotheses on how life arose, known as the 'RNA world' hypothesis. This suggests that RNA molecules - which are made ...
Researchers develop method to grow artificial limbs
Post Date: 2015-06-03 02:26:35 by Tatarewicz
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Utilizing the limb of a deceased rat, new muscles and veins were grown before the limb was successfully implanted into a living rat. A suspension of muscle progenitor cells is injected into the cell-free matrix of a decellularized rat limb, which provides shape and structure onto which regenerated tissue can grow. BOSTON, June 2 (UPI) -- Utilizing a method that has been used to successfully regenerate organs, researchers have regrown rat forelimbs and shown evidence that the same method could be used for the limbs of primates. Researchers at Mass. General Hospital used limbs from deceased rats, stripping cells from the vascular and nerve matrix, and regrew muscles, veins and arteries. ...
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