DARPA's Programmable Matter Project: 3D Shapeshifting?

http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=1964&zoneid=263

Zakin envisions programmable matter in this way: In the future a soldier will have something that looks like a paint can in the back of his vehicle. The can is filled with particles of varying sizes, shapes and capabilities. These individual bits can be small computers, ceramics, biological systems—potentially anything the user wants them to be. The soldier needs a wrench of a specific size. He broadcasts a message to the container, which causes the particles to automatically form the wrench. After the wrench has been used, the soldier realizes that he needs a hammer. He puts the wrench back into the can where it disassembles itself back into its components and re-forms into a hammer. “That is the essence of programmable matter,” he says.

WEB RESOURCESDARPA

Programmable Matter program: www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/physci/newphys/program_matter/index.htm

DARPA Chemical Robots program: www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/materials/multfunmat/chembots/index.htm

DARPA Chemical Communications program: www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/physci/newphys/chemcom/index.htm

Cosmic close-up: Sensational images of Saturn show the ringed planet in incredible detail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1172205/Saturn-close-Sensational-cosmic-images-bring-ringed-planet-life.html

Blind man demonstrates 'blindsight' phenomenon by navigating obstacle course

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5385633.ece

The man, known only as TN, was blinded by strokes on both sides of his brain which left him unable to see and devoid of any activity in the brain regions that control vision. He uses a stick to detect obstacles, and has to be guided around buildings. However, TN was known to exhibit blindsight, a strange ability some blind people have to detect things that they cannot see.

The Top 5 Scientific Discoveries of 2008

http://mytechnologyworld9.blogspot.com/2008/12/top-5-incredible-science-discoveries-of.html

Science is mostly an incremental process, a slow peeling of the onion to offer small glimpses of understanding. But over time, scientists remove enough layers to expose stunning truths about nature.
This year offered some intriguing revelations along these lines. Below are the top 5.

Army Eyes Invisibility Cloak

After two years of rapid scientific progress, the U.S. Army is getting closer to mastering man-made "meta-materials" that can bend light around an object, according to one military researcher.

Okay, seriously. According to Dr. Richard Hammond from the Army Research Office, the military is two or three years away from being able to manufacture devices using meta-materials that allow "unprecedented extreme control over the flow of light." And not just that: in theory the materials could deflect radar and other sensors, too.

American Physicists warned not to debate global warming

The Register

Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. But what is it about the piece that is so terrible, that like Medusa, it could make men go blind?

It's an article that examines the calculation central to climate models. As the editor of the APS's newsletter American Physics Jeffrey Marque explains, the global warming debate must be re-opened.

Physicists have 'solved' Mystery of Levitation

Telegraph UK

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Magnetic Fields (vid)

Animate Projects

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Crowds 'Pick Leaders to Follow'

Telegraph

People in crowds behave just like sheep, scientists claim, by blindly following one or two people who seem to know where they are going.

Like ants, humans are easily led

The team, led by Prof Jens Krause, conducted a series of experiments in which volunteers were told to walk randomly around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions.The results published today show that it takes a minority of just 5 per cent of what they called "informed individuals" to influence the direction of a crowd of a minimum of 200 people. The remaining herd of 95 per cent follow without realising it.

Indian DNA links to '6 Founding Mothers'

Yahoo News

NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.

Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.

This DNA is found in the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. Unlike the DNA found in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed along only by the mother. So it follows a lineage that connects a person to his or her mother, then the mother's mother, and so on.

Heated 'Hobbit' Debate Takes New Turn with Thyroid Theory

Guardian UK

The bitter scientific squabble over the true identity of the fossil hobbit has taken another acrimonious turn. An analysis by Australian researchers suggests the diminutive creatures were not members of a new species at all, but suffered from a congenital thyroid deficiency that stunted their growth.

They are not the first scientists to propose that the so-called hobbit, which was found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, was a sick human. But they are the first to suggest an environmental contribution to the disease. They believe the hobbit's diet was low in iodine and selenium. "Dwarf cretinism is the result of severe iodine deficiency in pregnancy in combination with a number of other environmental factors," said Dr Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne. "Our research suggest these fossils are not a new species but rather the remains of human hunter-gatherers that suffered from this condition."

Fluorescent Pig Has Glowing Piglets

(Full Article-Reuters)

Lab freakology has reached a new level.

A fluorescent pig in China has reportedly given birth to “piglets that share their mother’s transgenic characteristic after she mated with an ordinary pig,” according to Reuters.

LHC's $6 Billion Journey to the Beginning of Time

(Full Article-Daily Galaxy)

The events taking place today at CERN's Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland are in many ways far more exciting than Brown's novel, as one of the world's largest assembled teams of scientists attempt to discover what is considered the “Holy Grail” of particle physics, the Higgs Boson, and rec-create the conditions that existed a few seconds after the Big Bang and the creation of our universe.

The New, Real "Minority Report": How the U.S. Gov't Aims to Catch Criminals That Haven’t Yet Committed a Crime

(Full Article)

The Department of Homeland Security has announced the development of futuristic sounding technology with a bizarre “Minority Report” twist. The criminals they’re looking for haven’t committed a crime yet.

The program called Project Hostile Intent is part of the Human Factors Division of the DHS. DHS says that they need a way to detect possible “future” terrorists without a criminal past and with no known ties to terrorist organizations and therefore do not appear in any government databases. The technology will use advanced biometric technology in an attempt to “read minds” of people in public places, like airports.

Snorting a Brain Chemical could Replace Sleep

(Full Article-WIRED)

In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery's first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.

Largest Diamond in the Galaxy Discovered

(Full Article-NewsLaunches.com)

Astronomers have discovered the largest diamond in the galaxy located at a distance of 50 light years from earth in the Constellation Centaurus. The space diamond is virtually an enormous chunk of crystallized carbon, 4,000 kilometers in diameter which makes up ten billion trillion trillion carats or five million trillion trillion pounds comparatively the largest diamond found on earth weighs just 546 carats. Scientists believe that the diamond is the heart of an extinct star that used to shine like the Sun. Astronomers have already dubbed the space diamond as Lucy in a tribute to the Beatles song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.’ Lucy, also known as BPM 37093, is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

Researchers Get Embryonic Stem Cells from Skin

(Full Article)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A third team of researchers has found a way to convert an ordinary skin cell into valued embryonic-like stem cells, with the potential to grow batches of cells that can be directed to form any kind of tissue.

Dr. George Daley of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston and colleagues got their skin cells from a volunteer, whereas the other two teams of researchers who have accomplished the feat got theirs from commercially available cells grown in labs -- a seemingly small difference, but one Daley says shows it is feasible to get cells from any volunteer.

Humans are still evolving - and it's happening faster than ever

(Full Story)

Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found.

The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed.

"The widespread assumption that human evolution has slowed down because it's easier to live and we've conquered nature is absolutely not true. We didn't conquer nature, we changed it in ways that created new selection pressures on us," said anthropologist Dr John Hawks, who led the study.

Consensus Shattered As Major Scientific Study Says Global Warming Is Natural

(Full Story)

The so-called scientific consensus that global warming is man-made has been shattered with the release of a major new study backed by three universities which concludes that climate change over the past thirty years is explained by natural factors and that attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are irrelevant.

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that temperature fluctuations over the past three decades are not consistent with greenhouse model predictions and more closely correlate with solar activity.

The report dismisses attempts to reverse global warming by reducing carbon emissions as ineffective and pointless.

Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies

(Full Story)

This warping of time apparently does not result from the brain speeding up from adrenaline when in danger. Instead, this feeling seems to be an illusion, scientists now find.

Instead, such time warping seems to be a trick played by one's memory. When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.

Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."