A Trip Through The Universe - “For You To Enjoy And Share With Friends” - Another trip through the Universe travelling at the speed of light. Again it gives you the perspective of actually tiy we are and how vast the Universe actually is. The Milky Way is a huge city of stars, so big that even at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to travel across it. Beyond our own galaxy lies a vast expanse of galaxies.
Black belts' white matter shows how a powerful punch comes from the brain Brain scans have revealed distinctive features in the brain structure of karate experts, which could be linked to their ability to punch powerfully from close range. Researchers from Imperial College London and UCL (University College London) found that differences in the structure of white matter – the connections between brain regions – were correlated with how black belts and novices performed in a test of punching ability. Karate experts are able to generate extremely powerful forces with their punches, but how they do this is not fully understood. Previous studies have found that the force generated in a karate punch is not determined by muscular strength, suggesting that factors related to the control of muscle movement by the brain might be important. The researchers tested how powerfully the subjects could punch, but to make useful comparisons with the punching of novices they restricted the task to punching from short range – a distance of 5 centimetres.
V Motion Project – Part I: The Instrument | Custom Logic Web Blog Overview The Motion Project was a collaboration between a lot of clever creative people working together to create a machine that turns motion into music. The client for the project, Frucor (makers of V energy drink), together with their agency Colenso BBDO, kitted-out a warehouse space for this project to grow in and gathered together a group of talented people from a number of creative fields. Producer Joel Little (Kids of 88, Goodnight Nurse) created the music, musician/tech wiz James Hayday broke the track down and wrestled it into Ableton, and Paul Sanderson of Fugitive built the tech to control the music with the help of Mike Delucchi. I also helped with the music side of the tech and built the visuals software with motion graphics warlocks Matt von Trott and Jonny Kofoed of Assembly. The Instrument Unfortunately, this control and flexibility comes at a price… the system has a significant lag. Two Hearts Beat as One Below is my highly technical drawing of the instrument. Up next..
World's First Urban Algae Canopy Produces Oxygen And Fuel Every Day It works as a roof, or window that grows its own shading. The Urban Algae Canopy is a bio-electric glass structure, in which water flows through and microalgae grows. When the sun shines, the single celled algae photosynthesize and multiply to create shade. The real upside to this, though, is that one tent produces as much oxygen as 40,000 square meters of woodland, AND 330 pounds of biomass every day. Biomass is, essentially, plant or animal material that is broken down. Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Diagram of a proposed current generation of a Starship Enterprise. Credit: BuildTheEnterprise.org In Star Trek lore, the first Constitution Class Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites.” Size comparisons of buildings to the proposed USS Enterprise. Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule, and almost every other imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. “It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. A detailed schedule of building the Enterprise.
Future - Science & Environment - Drake equation: How many alien civilizations exist? Are we alone? It is a question that has occupied mankind for centuries. Today, we live in an age of exploration, where robots on Mars and planet-hunting telescopes are beginning to allow us to edge closer to an answer. While we wait to establish contact, one technique we can use back on Earth is an equation that American astronomer Frank Drake formulated in the 1960s to calculate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations may exist in the Milky Way galaxy. It is not a rigorous equation, offering a wide range of possible answers. Until ground-based observations, space telescopes and planet-roving robots uncover any tell-tale signs of life, what better way to speculate on how many intelligent alien civilizations may exist than to explore the universe with our interactive version of the equation.
Bonobo genius makes stone tools like early humans did - life - 21 August 2012 Video: Watch this bonobo go to all ends to get food Kanzi the bonobo continues to impress. Not content with learning sign language or making up "words" for things like banana or juice, he now seems capable of making stone tools on a par with the efforts of early humans. Eviatar Nevo of the University of Haifa in Israel and his colleagues sealed food inside a log to mimic marrow locked inside long bones, and watched Kanzi, a 30-year-old male bonobo chimp, try to extract it. While a companion bonobo attempted the problem a handful of times, and succeeded only by smashing the log on the ground, Kanzi took a longer and arguably more sophisticated approach. Both had been taught to knap flint flakes in the 1990s, holding a stone core in one hand and using another as a hammer. Perhaps most remarkable about the tools Kanzi created is their resemblance to early hominid tools. Do Kanzi's skills translate to all bonobos? More From New Scientist Promoted Stories Recommended by
Artificial cells evolve proteins to structure semiconductors A marine sponge that produces silicon dioxide fibers (credit: Hannes Grobe, AWI/Wikimedia Commons) University of California, Santa Barbara scientists have applied genetic engineering to create proteins that can be used to create electronics. They’ve used the tools of molecular biology and principles of evolution to find proteins that can make new structures of silicon dioxide, commonly found in computer chips, and titanium dioxide, often used in solar cells. The new silica-forming protein, named silicatein X1, could even make folded sheets of silica-protein fibers. The work demonstrated that directed evolution of a mineral-producing protein could create materials with never-before seen structures. The next challenge is to learn how to change the selection pressures to evolve a specific property, such as semiconductor performance. Directed evolution is not limited to these silica-forming proteins, as other organisms have proteins to make interesting materials too. Ref.: Lukmaan A.
untitled Scientists Confirm that Plants Talk and Listen To Each Other, Communication Crucial for Survival When a South African botanist Lyall Watson claimed in 1973 that plants had emotions that could be recorded on a lie detector test, he was dismissed by many in the scientific community. However, new research, published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, has revealed that plants not only respond to sound, but they also communicate to each other by making "clicking" sounds. Using powerful loudspeakers, researchers at The University of Western Australia were able to hear clicking sounds coming from the roots of corn saplings. Researchers at Bristol University also found that when they suspended the young roots in water and played a continuous noise at 220Hz, a similar frequency to the plant clicks, they found that the plants grew towards the source of the sound. "Everyone knows that plants react to light, and scientists also know that plants use volatile chemicals to communicate with each other, for instance, when danger - such as a herbivore - approaches," Dr.
Sacrificing sleep to study can lead to academic problems Regardless of how much a high school student generally studies each day, if that student sacrifices sleep in order to study more than usual, he or she is more likely to have academic problems the following day. Because students tend to increasingly sacrifice sleep time for studying in the latter years of high school, this negative dynamic becomes more and more prevalent over time. Those are the findings of a new longitudinal study that focused on daily and yearly variations of students who sacrifice sleep to study. The research was conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and appears in the journal Child Development. "Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," says Andrew J. Fuligni, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and a senior scientist at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, who worked on the study. Source : Society for Research in Child Development
Training Cells to Perform Boolean Functions? It's Logical - 05/29/2012 When either FRB and FKBP or GID1 and GAI linked up, the cell’s membrane developed ruffles easily visible under a microscope. Inoue lab Johns Hopkins scientists have engineered cells that behave like AND and OR Boolean logic gates, producing an output based on one or more unique inputs. Study leader Takanari Inoue, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and member of the Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences’ Center for Cell Dynamics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explains that many researchers are striving to mimic devices in everyday use by engineering new qualities into biological materials, including biomolecules and cells. At the heart of both the biological and the more everyday silicon-based variety of computers are Boolean logic gates, which produce responses that vary depending on what type and how many inputs they receive. “People like to have speedy computation,” Inoue says.
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