Heroes and Legends Before Superman

Man of Steel 

 

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a... well, you know the rest. Everyone does, because everyone knows Superman.

The man of steel is the first and most iconic superhero of all time. But before Superman came a long line of heroes in fiction who used their superhuman strength for a larger cause.

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Transparent Solar-Cell Screen Charges Phone

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shone down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year.

Sunpartner isn’t the first to think mobile phones should use solar power to charge themselves. A few years ago, several cell phone manufacturers tried putting solar cells on the back of phones—like the Samsung Crest and the Sharp Solar Hybrid. Turns out, though, that people weren’t inclined to put phones face down on the table—they missed alerts, and were worried about scratching the screen. And solar cells on the back of cell phones never caught on widely.

Putting solar cells on the front of a mobile phone is harder, because today phone fronts are virtually all display. Startup Ubiquitous Energy, a spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing a technology that makes the solar cells themselves transparent by using materials that only absorb infrared and ultraviolet light and let visible light pass through. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are taking a similar approach, while researchers at the University of Cambridge are weaving solar cells into organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, where they can capture light leaked from the edges of the OLED elements as well as from outside the phone.

These technologies still appear to have a ways to go. SunPartner is taking a lower tech approach it believes will get to the mass market much sooner. The company is using stripes of standard thin-film solar cells alternating with transparent film. It then adds a layer of tiny lenses that spread the image coming from the screen to make the opaque stripes disappear as well as to concentrate the rays coming in from the sun. (See illustration, below.)

SunPartner’s Matthieu De Broca, visiting Silicon Valley as part of the French Tech Tour, says that the company’s current prototypes are 82 percent transparent; future versions should hit 90 percent transparency. The company has 30 patents on its technology so far. Putting the panel and related electronics needed to convert the voltage from the display costs adds about US $2.30 to the cost of each phone, De Broca said.

The technology doesn’t replace the wall charger; mobile device users can still count on plugging their phone in at night. It does, De Broca said, extend the battery life about 20 percent in normal use. And it can infinitely keep up with the phone’s modest power drain when it is idling in normal daylight. The SunPartner Group, founded by optician Joel Gilbert and businessman Ludovic Deblois, is currently working with three mobile device manufacturers to develop prototypes and expects the first models integrating the technology to be on the market in early 2014. Nokia is reportedly one of those companies.

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Valentina Tereshkova: First Woman in Space

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, 1963, Valeriy Bykovsky was in Earth orbit. He’d been up a little under a day, safely inside his Vostok 5 capsule, when he gained a companion: Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok 6. The two cosmonauts’ joint mission was similar to the joint Vostok 3/4 mission that had flown the previous August, but this mission had a twist. Tereshkova was the first woman in space. On Sunday, she’ll be celebrating the 50 year anniversary of this historic feat.

ANALYSIS: First Woman in Space Wants to Go to Mars

Towards the end of 1961, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet space program’s Chief Designer and mastermind behind the nation’s earliest space triumphs, was looking for a new first in space. Having already launched Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into orbit, he needed something new to maintain the Soviets’ lead over America in space. One idea he had was to launch a woman. A female cosmonaut would send the message that the Soviet Union valued its citizens equally and give little girls throughout the nation the belief that they, too, could go into space some day.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party Korolev’s idea, and on February 16, 1962, five experienced parachutists became the first all female cosmonaut training group.

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Among them was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker and avid skydiver. But more importantly, she was an outspoken supporter of the communist party who had worked throughout her life – she began helping her widowed mother support their family at the age of 10 – within the Communist system to achieve great things. She was, like Yuri Gagarin before her, the picture of success in the Soviet Union.

Tereshkova spent three days in space aboard Vostok 6, strapped to her ejection seat inside the seven-and-a-half foot wide pressurized cabin. She was wearing an SK-2 space suit similar to the SK-1 suit Gagarin wore on his mission. It was, for a spacesuit, a comfortable design, designed to be pressurized only in an emergency situation where the cabin pressure was lost.

The joint mission between Vostoks 5 and 6 was similar to that between Vostoks 3 and 4. Neither spacecraft could change its orbit or properly maneuver in space, but they were launched such that they came within 3 miles of one another in orbit. Tereshkova swears that she could actually see Bykovsky in Vostok 5 during their brief close pass; as the mission wore on the spacecraft drifted further apart in their orbits. The bulk of their remaining time in space saw Tereshkova and Bykovsky run a series of biomedical experiments while learning to live and work in microgravity.

PHOTOS: 7 Extreme Female Explorers

Tereshkova’s mission ended after 48 she’d completed orbits in a little under 70 hours. She used manual controls to hold Vostok steady while firing the rocket engine to slow her capsule and begin the fall back through the atmosphere. After re-entry, Tereshkova tapped into her parachutist past and ejected from the falling spacecraft to land by her own parachute on June 19.

While Tereshkova has been lauded since her flight as a trailblazer for women in space – and indeed, she’s been an advocate of both women’s rights and space exploration in her post-cosmonaut career – it’s worth remembering that her flight was based in politics.  Then again, so was the decision to launch men into orbit.

Image: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova practices eating in flight simulations for launch into space. Credit: Corbis

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World Population May Reach 11 Billion By 2100

The world's population could reach 11 billion by the year 2100, according to a new statistical analysis.

That represents 800 million more people than was forecast in 2011. Most of that increase comes because birth rates in Africa haven't dropped as fast as projected.

"The fertility decline in Africa has slowed down or stalled to a larger extent than we previously predicted, and as a result the African population will go up," said study co-author Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, in a statement.

Ever increasing

The United Nations reported that the population hit 7 billion in October 2011. That's an amazing increase from the mere 5 million people who lived on the planet in 8000 B.C. or the 1 billion who were alive in 1805.

The huge surge in population is expected to cause mega-city populations to swell, which could worsen environmental problems and overcrowding.

Right now, Africa's population stands at 1.1 billion, but that is expected to increase four-fold, to 4.2 billion, by 2100.

Rest unchanged

The rest of the world is unlikely to see big changes from the past estimate. Europe may see a slight dip in population, because it continues to have a below-replacement birth rate, meaning more people are dying than being born.

The new analysis used a more sophisticated method for estimating life expectancy, updated fertility forecasting methods and new population data.

The model predicts that the population will likely reach between 9 billion and 13 billion by 2100. By contrast, the U.N.'s population estimates assume the average birth rate may vary by up to 0.5 children per woman, which results in a large range for the world's population at the end of the century, between 7 billion and 17 billion.

The findings suggest that experts should redouble their efforts to curb population growth in Africa, Raftery said.

"These new findings show that we need to renew policies, such as increasing access to family planning and expanding education for girls, to address rapid population growth in Africa," Raftery said in a statement.

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Stunning Space Photos of the Week (June 9-14)

The Long March-2F rocket carrying China's manned Shenzhou-10 spacecraft blasts off from the launch pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, northwest China's Gansu Province, on June 11, 2013. Crew Nie Haisheng, Zhang Xiaoguang, and Wang Yaping docked with China's prototype space station two days later on June 13.

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Amelia Earhart Plane Search Turns Up New Clue

A sonar anomaly that researchers suspect might possibly be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's aircraft is a straight, unbroken feature uncannily consistent with the fuselage of a Lockheed Electra, new analysis of the sonar imagery captured off a remote Pacific island has revealed.

Examined by Oceanic Imaging Consultants, Inc. (OIC) of Honolulu, Hawaii, the new data processing showed that the imagery released last month by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), was incomplete and somewhat misleading because of "ping drops."

Basically, sonar pings that were not continuously recorded by the intake system, due to a number of technical deficiencies, created the illusion of a break in the linear nature of the anomaly.

“The good news is that, when corrected, the imagery of the anomaly -- although less complete -- looks even more interesting than it did in the initial distorted version,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, said in a statement.

“It's looking more and more like it might be the Electra,” he told Discovery News.

Last month TIGHAR, which has long been investigating Earhart's last, fateful flight, released a grainy image of an "anomaly" resting at a depth of about 600 feet in the waters off Nikumaroro island, an uninhabited tropical atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati which was the target of TIGHAR's underwater search in 2012.

Located distinctly apart from the debris field of the SS Norwich City, a British steamer that went aground on the island's reef in 1929, the anomaly appeared to fit TIGHAR’s theory about where the Electra may have come to rest.

The legendary aviator was piloting this two-engine aircraft when she vanished on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR during 10 expeditions have suggested that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island's smooth, flat coral reef.

Gillespie and his team believe the two became castaways and eventually died on the island, which is some 350 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island.

The anomaly is made up of two features -- an object that is high enough to be casting a shadow, and a "tail" of what might be either skid marks or scattered debris.

In the corrected sonar imagery, the object that is casting a shadow is estimated to be at least 34 feet long and arrow-straight.

“Long straight lines are rare in nature and especially in coral. The probability that we have a man-made object has gone up significantly,” Gillespie said.

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6 Traditions Born in the Marketing Department

Robert Kennedy wears the George Washington Medal awarded to him as National Father of the Year, in 1960.

Among the weary and cynical, Father's Day is one of those American traditions sometimes called Hallmark Holidays. The term refers to holidays and celebrations that are primarily commercial in nature. They exist so that people will feel obligated to buy gifts for other people. Think Sweetest Day, Grandparent's Day or Secretaries' Day (now called Administrative Professionals' Day, thank you very much.)

In the United States, Father's Day is believed to have originated as response to Mother's Day, a holiday that itself began earnestly enough as a way to honor those who had lost children to war. But by the 1930s, both Mother's Day and Father's Day had become thoroughly commercialized, promoted by the greeting card industry and groups like the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers.

In fact, many enduring traditions actually have their origins in the boardrooms and marketing departments of America. Here's a sampling.

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DNews: Can Cops Really Prove You're High?

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Huge Earth-Passing Asteroid 'Entirely New Beast'

A big asteroid that flew past Earth last month belongs to a new category of space rock, scientists say.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon sailed within 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) of Earth on May 31, making their closest approach to our planet for at least the next two centuries. New radar images captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are revealing just how unique this binary asteroid is, researchers say.

“Asteroid QE2 is dark, red, and primitive — that is, it hasn’t been heated or melted as much as other asteroids," Arecibo's Ellen Howell said in a statement. "QE2 is nothing like any asteroid we've visited with a spacecraft, or plan to, or that we have meteorites from. It's an entirely new beast in the menagerie of asteroids near Earth." (Potentially Dangerous Asteroids (Images))

The 1,000-foot-wide (305 meters) Arecibo dish and NASA's 230-foot (70 m) Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif., tracked 1998 QE2 as it approached Earth last month, then kept following the near-Earth asteroid as it receded into the depths of space.

The resulting radar images have helped researchers take 1998 QE2's measure. The dark, cratered main asteroid is 1.9 miles (3 km) wide, and it has a 2,500-foot (750 m) moon that orbits it once every 32 hours.

"QE2's moon is roughly one-quarter the size of the main asteroid," Patrick Taylor, also of Arecibo, said in a statement. "Similarly, our moon is also approximately one-fourth the size of our planet."

Studying the moon and its orbit should help scientists determine the mass of the main asteroid, which in turn will shed light on the object's composition, researchers said.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered in August 1998 by astronomers working with MIT's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program in New Mexico. The space rock completes one lap around the sun every 3.8 years.

There was never any danger of 1998 QE2 hitting Earth during last month's flyby, scientists say. If it had hit us, the damage would have been severe; researchers think that any asteroid bigger than 0.6 miles (1 km) is capable of inflicting damage on a global scale, primarily by altering the planet's climate.

1998 QE2 is one of roughly 10,000 near-Earth asteroids that have been spotted to date. The total population of close-flying space rocks is thought to exceed 1 million.

Arecibo's observing campaign of 1998 QE2 came to end on Thursday (June 13), observatory officials said.

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Helicopter Bike Achieves Lift Off!

One of the great things about bikes is that you can ride them virtually anywhere. You can weave between cars at stoplights, jump the curb for a short cut or slash across someone’s lawn if need be. But sometimes the traffic’s too thick, police ticket you for riding on the sidewalk and homeowners shake their fists from the porch, if not reach for their shotgun. If only there was a helicopter bike that could fly above the fray.

VIDEO: Why Gravity Fluctuates On The Moon

Wait, now there is, compliments of three Czech companies — Technodat, Evektor and Duratec — that teamed up to make an electric bicycle-helicopter hybrid. Equipped with six battery-powered propellers housed in four frames, the 220-pound bike was demoed this week at the Letnany exhibition in Prague and landed safely after a five-minute, remote-controlled flight.

Sadly, the prototype rig isn’t quite capable of saddling a human, so a dummy was used instead. However, creators said they hope to do away with the remote controls and stick a real human on-board this fall.

“Our main motivation in working on the project was neither profit nor commercial interest, but the fulfillment of our boyish dreams,” project member Alex Kobylik told Czech news site Ceske Noviny.

BLOG: Raise Edible Insects With Kitchen Terrarium

Don’t count on seeing the bike on the streets or in the air anytime soon. Besides only existing as a prototype, it reportedly cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, to say nothing of the red tape it would have to go through just to be street legal. Until then, check out video of the flying bike here.

via Gizmodo

Credit: Stanislav Zbynek, CTK

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6 Astronaut Questions: An Astrodad's Perspective

Astronaut Leroy Chiao, Expedition 10 commander and NASA International Space Station (ISS) science officer, before climbing aboard Soyuz TMA-5 spacecraft Oct. 5, 2004, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a dress rehearsal of launch day activities.

Leroy Chiao served as a NASA astronaut from 1990-2005. During his 15-year career, he flew four missions into space, three times on space shuttles and once as the copilot of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. On that flight, he served as the commander of Expedition 10, a six-and-a-half-month mission. Dr. Chiao has performed six spacewalks, in both U.S. and Russian spacesuits, and has logged nearly 230 days in space. Chiao is also the father of twins, a girl and a boy, age 6. Discovery News' space producer Ian O'Neill spoke with him recently to discuss his hopes for the future of spaceflight and how his unique experiences in space shaped him as a father.

Ian O'Neill: The first question that came to mind is, obviously, have your twins expressed any early interest in following daddy's career path as an astronaut?

Leroy Chiao: I've really tried not to push them at all toward the direction I've chosen or anything like that. My wife and I agree that the plan should be, and is, to expose them to as many things as we can and then let them choose and figure out what they have a passion for and encourage them to go their own direction.

At different times my son has said "I wanna be an astronaut," but really most of the time he's thinking about other things. He's actually had a real fascination for the work medical doctors do. So if I had to guess right now, I'd say he's gearing himself toward that. He's really fascinated about the body and what the organs do. My daughter is also more focused on medicine, but lately she's been more interested in ballet! So they're kind of all over the place, which is exactly what they should be doing at this age.

But generally, I think the best thing any parent can do is to expose kids to as many things as possible and then let them figure out what gets them excited and what they have a passion for.

Being an astronaut is great, I've certainly had wonderful experiences and I'm fortunate to have had those experiences. But I know that being an astronaut makes people on the ground worry about you, so if they were to choose my profession, I would worry about them even though I didn't worry about myself.

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Medici Children Suffered From Rickets

The children of the wealthy and powerful Medici family suffered from rickets as result of malnutrition and prolonged indoor life, a new paleopathological study has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Pisa made the discovery after analyzing nine skeletons taken from under the floor of the Medici Chapels in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence.

The children’s bones were found in 2004 after the discovery of a secret entrance in the intact tomb of Giangastone (1671–1737), the last Grand Duke of the clan that dominated the Florentine Renaissance.

“The removal of a marble disc in the floor of the chapel, initially considered only a simple floor decoration, displayed a secret opening with a small stone stair leading to a hidden crypt,” palaeopathologist Valentina Giuffra, Gino Fornaciari and colleagues of Pisa and Siena Universities, wrote in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

In the crypt, a large sarcophagus contained the remains of Giangastone, while on the floor lay eight coffins and several scattered bones — the result of the Arno flooding of 1966. The ninth coffin was found in a nearby tomb.

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Analysis of the bones revealed that the children’s ages ranged from newborn to about 5 years old. Six out of nine showed the classic signs of rickets, such as curved arms and bow legs — a consequence of trying to crawl or walk on pathologically soft bones.

One of the children clearly identified, Filippo (1577-1582), the seventh child of Francesco I and Giovanna of Austria, also known as Don Filippino, had a slightly deformed skull. According to the researchers, rickets was the culprit.

A skeletal disorder characterized by a lack of vitamin D, rickets is usually associated with poor children living in heavily polluted cities where exposure to sunlight is limited.

“Diagnosis of a metabolic disease linked to vitamin D deficiency would appear unexpected in children brought up at the court of a Renaissance high social class family like the Medici of Florence,” the researchers observed.

Rather than from defects in the metabolism, the disease originated from the Medicis’ desire to protect their offspring, raising them according to the highest social standards for their times.

NEWS: Low Vitamin D Linked to Schizophrenia

“During the Renaissance, a common opinion prescribed that children were not to be weaned before the second year of life; for this reason, among the elite classes, wet nursing was a very widespread practice,” the researchers wrote.

Indeed, the Medici princes were never weaned until they were at least 2; starting from eight to nine months, woman’s milk was integrated with paps made of soft bread and apples. Cereals and breast milk are known to supply little vitamin D, while fruit contains none.

“With prolonged breast-feeding, vitamin D deficiency is highly expected to rise, in particular if the other main risk factor, inadequate sunlight exposition, is associated with a diet based on maternal milk,” the researchers said.

They added that two hours per week is the required minimum period of exposure to sunlight for infants if only the face is exposed — something the Medici children did not enjoy.

At that time, skin color was a way to distinguish the upper class from peasants engaged in field work.

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“A pale ivory skin was considered a sign of health and elegance,” the researchers wrote.

Kept indoors in large palaces where the opportunity of sunlight exposure was significantly reduced, the Medici children were also wrapped in many heavy layers. In keeping with the Renaissance customs, infants were heavily swaddled, leaving very little skin exposed.

Even two newborns showed signs of rickets, although they should have received vitamin D from their mothers through the placenta.

Rickets may have been the cause of death for these children or may have contributed to worsening other problems present at birth.

According to the researchers, the mothers also had a vitamin D deficiency. Heavy makeup, to prevent skin exposure to sunlight, and repeated childbearing — Eleanor of Toledo bore 11 children in 14 years — might have been the cause for their low-level vitamin D.

The researchers noted that the disease still strikes modern populations with cultural habits similar to the one adopted by the Medicis.

“A high incidence of rickets has been observed in modern sunny countries, such as Iran and Israel, where the same cultural practices, that is avoidance of sunlight and prolonged breast-feeding, documented for the Renaissance Medici family, are diffused,” the researchers concluded.

Image: Don Filippino had a slightly deformed skull. Rickets was responsible for the condition. Credit: University of Pisa

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Radioactive Mountain Yields Rare-Earth Digs

Red state or blue state, liberal or libertarian, Americans share an addiction to rare-earth elements imported from China.

Green technologies such as electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels and fluorescent light bulbs rely on rare-earth metals. The military depends on rare earths for guided missile systems, satellites and unmanned drones. NASA's spacecraft carry powerful rare earth magnets to Mars and outer space. The magnets also miniaturized iPads, computers and high-tech headphones.

China controls 95 percent of the world's rare-earth supply. The key to this monopoly isn't an abundance of rare-earth deposits, but its expertise in processing ore into oxides and pure metal. The ore tends to carry uranium and thorium, the most radioactive element on the planet, and extracting the metal is typically a long, multistage process involving toxic chemicals.

"We know where the deposits are. Having them end up in your iPhone is not a straight or simple process," said Brad Van Gosen, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver.

A few years ago, China showed its power, and cut the supply of rare earths to a trickle. The move sent the United States and other countries scrambling to end their reliance on China. Prices soared, drawing new investors and mining companies into the rare earth market. Now, the United States has one new mine nearly finished and two more in the permitting stages. But the crucial element in escaping China's rare-earth rule isn't new mines, it's rebuilding the expertise and infrastructure to process the finicky metals, experts say.

In 2010, China spiked the cost of rare-earth elements when it started restricting exports and charging foreign companies higher prices. The price bubble sparked a worldwide frenzy to escape China's control. A new Australian-owned processing plant just opened in Malaysia. Others are planned in Canada, Europe and Africa. Several companies are also trying to develop an American supply for rare earths, some with support from the Department of Defense. (Infographic: Energy-Critical Elements to Watch)

"The rare earths are very much strategic metals, and particularly very much of strategic importance to the defense industry," said Curt Freeman, president of Avalon Development Corp. in Fairbanks, Alaska, a mining consulting firm. "There's a queasy feeling in Congress and the Department of Defense," he said.

In the United States, California's Mountain Pass mine reopened in 2010 and is expected to start producing light rare-earth elements this year. The mine was once the world's biggest producers of rare earths, but shut down in 2002 because of environmental problems and falling prices. Another mine is proposed in Wyoming, by Canadian company Rare Element Resources, but faces opposition from local residents.

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Prehistoric-Looking Horses Roaming China's Plains Again

In the harsh desert steppe of far northwestern China five prehistoric-looking Przewalski's horses, once classed as extinct in the wild, emerge from the endless plains.

The horses -- named after a Russian officer and explorer who spotted them around 1880 -- bear a striking resemblance to those depicted in European cave paintings, with short necks, spiky manes and a yellow hue.

They graze calmly on a few strands of straw as the wind whips across the vast, open landscape.

"These ones here, they can be approached. The others will run away as soon as you get within 300 yards of them," says Sun Zhicheng, an official at the 1.6-million-acre West Lake national nature reserve.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Przewalski's horses once roamed as far as Western Europe.

But as the centuries passed, climatic change reduced their habitat and the remainder were so widely hunted, mainly for food, that they were classified as extinct in the wild in 1960 -- although a living specimen was later found in Mongolia.

But a few survived in European zoos, and now efforts are under way to reintroduce them to the wild.

The Chinese project near Xihu in Gansu province faces daunting challenges -- freezing winters, sweltering summers and limited supplies of food and water.

According to Chinese legend, Sun says, the animals were discovered two millennia ago by an exiled criminal around the oasis of Dunhuang, a crossroads on the Silk Road.

"A man had been convicted and banished from Dunhuang. While he was walking near a lake he saw one of these horses.

"He made a mannequin and put it on a path the horse would follow. One day he took the place of the mannequin, and he was able to catch the horse to offer it to the emperor.

"The man then lied to the emperor Han Wudi, saying the horse had sprung out of a spring. And he called it a heavenly horse. The emperor loved the horse so much that he wrote a poem about it."

In 1986 China purchased 18 of the horses from the United States, Britain and Germany and has since bred them in captivity, with their numbers growing to more than 70.

Starting in 2010, carefully selected batches have been released into the reserve.

"Now there are 27, 16 females and 11 males," says Sun. "We even registered the birth of a foal in July 2011, a new success in our reintroduction process."

But very few animals can endure an environment as hard and dry as Gansu's desert steppe.

Przewalski's horses require daily access to water that is within a 30-kilometre (20-mile) range and does not freeze in winter. They also need 22 pounds of dry food per day, relatively close to the water.

In a region that receives less than 1.5 inches of rain per year, many of these conditions could become problems, says Sun.

The reserve is taking back-up measures to improve the horses' chances.

"We have increased the water supply by expanding 10 wells. At a later point we are thinking of bringing water from the river.

"In winter we have to break the ice so that the horses can drink."

The horses eat grasses and certain plant species, says reserve employee Lu Shengrong, but when vegetation becomes sparse in winter-time, they will be fed dry alfalfa, straw, black beans and corn.

Of the 2,000 or so Przewalski's horses that now exist worldwide, about a quarter are part of efforts to reintroduce them to the wild, says Claudia Feh, a biologist doing similar work in Mongolia, where several hundred have been released.

The worst threat they face, she says, are ordinary horses, which can infect them with disease or crossbreed with them, diluting the gene pool.

"The biggest enemy is the domesticated horse," Feh says.

Przewalski's horses have "a very narrow genetic base" as all living members of the species are descended from just 13 or 14 individuals, she says.

"They are going to disappear genetically if we do not prevent crossbreeding."

For any wild population to survive long-term, or even 50 years, it must be 1,500 strong, Feh says.

"That goal is far away," she adds. "This is a species that is still rather fragile."

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Supermileage Vehicle Gets 1,300 MPG

Usually we look at the most efficient vehicles on the market out there and think anything over 50 miles per gallon would be awesome. But we’ve obviously been aiming too low because college students made one that gets more than 1,300 mpg.

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The vehicle was created by a group from Brigham Young University competing in the recent SAE Supermileage Competition in Marshall, Mich. The event tasks technology and engineering students to construct a fuel-efficient vehicle for one person powered by a small four-cycle engine. College teams then run their vehicles along a specific course and the one with the best design and highest miles per gallon wins.

For the competition, teams were each given about 20 grams of fuel. To give you an idea, that’s like taking one decent sip from a water bottle. They were also required to have drivers who weighed at least 130 pounds, or had to add weight to make up the difference.

BYU’s team constructed a fish-shaped vehicle with an aerodynamic and modular design. It also sports a high compression engine and thermoformed windows to maximize visibility for the driver, who has to recline to steer. In all the whole thing weighs 99 pounds, according to the university.

The big catch? The top speed was a blazing…25 miles per hour. ”We’re not the hare,” team member Eric Wardell said in a BYU video about the vehicle. “This is definitely a tortoise car.” Ultimately the team placed second to the Penn State team, which got 1,290 mpg but had a higher design score.

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle Has Wings

Even though the BYU car is slow and its performance was limited to the Eaton Corporation’s proving grounds, the insane fuel economy underscores the relationship between speed and efficiency. That’s something for highway drivers to keep in mind the next time we feel the urge to leave other cars in the dust. The tortoise really does win.

Photo: The BYU vehicle at the SAE Supermileage Competition in Marshall, Michigan. Credit: Brigham Young University

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Fab Abs? Ancient Fossil Fish Had Em!

Palaeontologists have discovered an ancient fossil fish that shows surprising signs of having abdominal muscles, previously thought to have only developed in land animals.

Mapping the oldest fossilized vertebrate muscles ever seen -- in Gogo fish thought to be 380 million years old -- researchers worked out the position of the muscles and the orientation of the muscle fibers.

The fossil fish, found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, are enclosed in limestone nodules and are known for their exceptional preservation.

"The muscles in the abdomen cavity that we found weren't expected because even in living fish their main mode of propulsion is of course to flap their tails to left and right so all the muscles are sitting on the side of the body," said Gavin Young from Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences.

"What's interesting is when we found these muscles and did some comparisons, the only comparable muscles are in... land animals," he added to AFP.

He said the question now was whether these muscles had the same function as abdominals seen in land animals.

In the study published in Science, the researchers prepared and analyzed the muscles in a small number of specimens from three different species.

"(The ancient fish) have already revealed soft tissues such as nerve and muscle cells, the oldest known vertebrate embryos, and even a preserved umbilical cord," Young said.

The latest study went further and mapped the musculature of the ancient fish for the first time, possible after researchers realized that soft tissues had been preserved in some of the specimens, though it was being destroyed in the earlier process of acid etching the skeletons.

Curtin University associate professor Kate Trinajstic, a chief investigator on the ANU-based research into early vertebrate evolution, said the team had been "stunned to find that our ancient fossil fishes had abs!"

"Abdominal muscles were thought to be an invention of animals that first walked onto the land but this discovery shows that these muscles appeared much earlier in our evolutionary history," she said.

Abdominal muscles in humans serve a number of functions, including protecting the internal organs, providing postural support, and for movement.

The first Australian expedition to collect Gogo fossil fish in the Kimberley was conducted in 1970.

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It's a Bird, It's a Plane!: Superman Through Time

Henry Cavill is that latest actor to wear the iconic Superman "S" on his chest. The British actor will don the cape, and violate all kinds of laws of physics, in the new Warner Brothers release "Man of Steel." He's next in a line of acting Supermen that stretches back into the late 1940s. Let's take a look back at Superman, and his friends and enemies, through the years.

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DNews: 3 Biggest Daredevil Fails Ever

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Sonic Fabric Recycles Cassette Tapes

Tape cassettes seem are like endangered species: not often seen in the wild and on their way to extinction. Conceptual artist Alyce Santoro has come up with a way to use the tape, appeal to fashion and create a whole new way of making music at the same time.

Self-Healing Tech of the Future

She mixed strips of the old 1/8-inch audio tape with polyester fibers to create a material called “sonic fabric.” The tape and polyester are woven together on a loom — fittingly, older technology seems to work better on audio tape. The audio tape retains its magnetization, which means it can play sounds. The tape, Santoro told DNews, is actually new — it comes from a company that makes audiobooks.

“Hearing” the fabric requires running a cassette player’s tape heads across the clothing. The tape heads pick up the patterns of the magnetic fields on the tape and makes a sound. The original recording cannot be heard because the tape has been woven in with other material. Instead, one hears a kind of warbling tone.

Santoro didn’t stop there. She posted a YouTube video that shows how to take apart an old Sony Walkman and make it into a player. (It involves detaching the tape head and inserting a piece of wood under the “play” button, so the head faces outward). One design on her website even has the Walkman built into a glove, which would “play” the clothes as the wearer runs her hands across them. In 2003 she made a “percussion suit” for Jon Fishman, of the band Phish, who played it at one of the band’s live shows.

Mixtape Returns With A Modern Twist

Then there’s putting specific sounds on the tape. Rather than deal with the randomness of salvaged cassettes, Santoro designed fabrics that have specific tones recorded on them, such as 131.6 hertz, or C-sharp.

Fashion, recycling, and a little 80s nostalgia – you can’t beat that.

via CNN

Credit: Photo courtesy Alysa Santoro

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Daredevils Through History

Even monks can be adrenaline junkies.

An early pioneer in aviation and clearly seeking an adrenaline rush, Abbas Ibn Firnas, a 9th century inventor living in Cordoba, Spain, built a homemade glider and launched himself from a tower in the then-Moorish city. His flight was largely successful, in that he glided briefly over Cordoba before taking a hard landing that left him with an injured back.

Still, though, accounts of Ibn Firnas' short flight were well documented and, as a result, word of the feat spread. As professor Salim al-Hassani, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, told CNN in 2010, Ibn Firnas' glider design even inspired Leonardo da Vinci centuries later.

His flight allegedly inspired another unlikely daredevil in the 11th century, a monk known as Eilmer of Malmesbury (illustrated here), who jumped off the summit of a tower on Wiltshire Abbey and glided a distance of two football fields. Historic accounts of the connections between the two flights are sketchy, but it's plausible that Crusaders could have brought news of Ibn Firnas' attempt back home with them.

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DNews: How Your Brain's Internal Clock Works

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Stem Cell Discovery Could Help Regrow Fingers

Mammals can regenerate the very tips of their fingers and toes after amputation, and now new research shows how stem cells in the nail play a role in that process.

A study in mice, detailed online today (June 12) in the journal Nature, reveals the chemical signal that triggers stem cells to develop into new nail tissue, and also attracts nerves that promote nail and bone regeneration.

The findings suggest nail stem cells could be used to develop new treatments for amputees, the researchers said. [Inside Life Science: Once Upon a Stem Cell]

In mice and people, regenerating an amputated finger or toe involves regrowing the nail. But whether the amputated portion of the digit can regrow depends on exactly where the amputation occurs: If the stem cells beneath the nail are amputated along with the digit, no regrowth occurs, but if the stem cells remain, regrowth is possible.

To understand why these stem cells are crucial to regeneration, researchers turned to mice. The scientists conducted toe amputations in two groups of mice: one group of normal mice, and one group that was treated with a drug that made them unable to make the signals for new nail cells to develop.

They found that the signals that guided the stem cells' development into nail cells were vital to regenerating amputated digits. By five weeks after amputation, the normal mice had regenerated their toe and toenail. But the mice that lacked the nail signal failed to regrow either their nails or the toe bone itself, because the stem cells lacked the signals that promote nail-cell development. When the researchers replenished these signals, the toes regenerated successfully.

In another experiment, the researchers surgically removed nerves from the mice toes before amputating them. This significantly impaired nail-cell regeneration, similar to what happened to the mice that lacked the signals to produce new nails. Moreover, the nerve removal decreased the levels of certain proteins that promote tissue growth.

Together, the results show that nail stem cells are critical for regrowing a lost digit in mice. If the same turns out to be true in humans, the findings could lead to better treatments for amputees.

Other animals, including amphibians, can also regenerate lost limbs. For example, aquatic salamanders can regrow complete limbs or even parts of their heart — a process that involves cells in their immune system. By studying these phenomena in other animals, it may be possible to enhance regenerative potential in people, the researchers said.

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Plastic Bags Fool Turtles Into Hunting Them

Plastic bags in the ocean can look just like a jellyfish or other gelatinous creature, fooling loggerhead turtles into hunting them.

This case of mistaken identity, documented in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE, reveals how our garbage can hurt marine wildlife. Even if a turtle doesn’t ingest the bag, the effort to explore and grab it wastes the turtle’s energy and time.

BLOG: How Turtles Got Their Shells

Tomoko Narazaki and colleagues from the University of Tokyo outfitted the loggerhead turtles with 3D loggers and crittercams, which enabled the scientists to record all of the turtle action as the animals swam in open water.

Narazaki and his team discovered that the turtles rely on sight, rather than on sound or smell, to find and move toward gelatinous prey, such as jellyfish and other organisms. That’s bad news for the turtles, because a plastic bag looks just like a jellyfish when the bags are submerged in water.

That’s hard to imagine, but the bags tend to lose their shape and take on a more tubular form when submerged. As they float downward in the water, the plastic undulates, making the bag look just like a living, moving jellyfish. I’ve seen this before myself, and the resemblance is uncanny.

The discovery also suggests that loggerhead turtles may rely on jellyfish and similarly textured prey for food more than was previously theorized. Because these squishy organisms aren’t exactly jam packed with nutrients, they serve more as a snack for the turtles. But the turtles seem to go after them quite often during their swimming trips, and particularly during oceanic migrations.

Because of their Jello-like texture, such foods are easy for the turtles to digest, not bogging them down when they have to keep moving. At other times, the turtles tend to go after hard-shelled prey, such as mollusks.

VIDEO: Millions of Turtles Killed Due to Bycatch

Loggerhead turtles are endangered. It’s a shame to see them, and other turtles, having to deal with our trash seemingly every minute of their lives. Watch as this turtle has to swim through all kinds of discarded waste.

We can help by choosing reusable cloth or other natural material bags instead of plastic. Certain cities around the country, such as Berkeley, already have laws in place that help to limit plastic bag use.

Other litter eventually washes into open water areas, home to species already struggling due to human hunting, habitat loss and other human-caused problems.

Image: Loggerhead turtle from the study outfitted with a 3-D logger; Credit: Tomoko Narazaki/Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo

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'Escape Tunnel' Found at Nazi Death Camp

Traces of an escape tunnel have been uncovered at the site of an infamous Nazi death camp in Poland, according to news reports.

Archaeologists say the passageway, found 5 feet (1.5 meters) below the surface, spanned 32 feet (10 m) and reached beyond the barbed-wire border surrounding the extermination camp at Sobibor, The Telegraph reported.

"We were excavating near where the sonderkommando barrack was and we came across two rows of buried barbed wire," Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek was quoted as saying by The Telegraph. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel. It was about as wide as a human, and we are 99 percent certain that it was an escape tunnel." (8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries)

Sobibor was operated in German-occupied eastern Poland between 1942 and 1943. Estimates for the number of people killed there range from 167,000 to upwards of 250,000. Virtually all of the victims were Jews and most were gassed upon arrival. Some prisoners were spared immediate death and kept in the work units known as the sonderkommando, forced to help in the gas chamber operations and the disposal of bodies.

The researchers digging at the site reportedly don't have any evidence that the newly discovered escape tunnel was ever actually used. Prisoners at Sobibor did, however, stage an uprising in October 1943. Six-hundred prisoners revolted and managed to kill nearly a dozen of their guards. Many of the 300 laborers who broke out of the extermination camp were eventually captured and killed, and only 50 escapees are believed to have survived the war.

After the uprising, Nazi officials leveled the camp and covered its traces. That makes work difficult for archaeologists trying to understand the site.

"The area we were excavating has been disturbed and plundered many times over the years since the war," Yoram Haimi, an Israeli archaeologist who is also investigating the camp, was quoted as saying by Haaretz. "It's a mess containing human bones, human ash, glass, pieces of metal and a lot of waste."

Excavations have been underway at Sobibor for more than a decade. In addition to the escape tunnel, the team has reportedly found a crematorium, human skeletal remains, and dozens of artifacts including eye glasses, jewelry and sobering personal items, like a Mickey Mouse pin, that seem to have belonged to children.

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Chinese Spacecraft Docks with Station Prototype

Three Chinese astronauts Thursday entered a space module after carrying out a successful docking maneuver, state media said, two days after the launch of the country's longest manned space mission.

The astronauts entered the Tiangong-1 space module at 0817 GMT, almost three hours after their spacecraft Shenzhou-10 had linked up with the space laboratory in an "automated docking", Xinhua said, citing the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

PHOTOS: An Awe-Inspiring Space Station Odyssey

The three -- who include China's second woman in space -- are spending 15 days in orbit as the country's ambitious space program reaches another milestone.

The docking procedure was the fifth to take place between Shenzhou-type spacecraft and the space module, Xinhua said.

Two automated operations were carried out by the unmanned Shenzhou-8 in 2011 and both an automated and manual docking by the manned Shenzhou-9 in 2012.

ANALYSIS: Time for the U.S. to Partner with China in Space?

Last year's manual docking, China's first, tested a technique that is needed to be able to construct a space station, which China aims to do by 2020.

Beijing sees the multi-billion-dollar space program as a symbol of its growing global stature and technical expertise, and of the ruling Communist Party's success in turning around the fortunes of the once poverty-stricken nation.

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10 Surprising Facts About Patents

Former farm fields are replaced by high tech industry growth in the San Jose area in California.

Almost 2/3 of U.S. patents are developed by people living in just 20 metro areas, which are home to 1 in 3 Americans. From 2007 to 2011, the places with the highest number of patents per capita are: San Jose (computer hardware and peripherals), Burlington, Vt. (semiconductor devices), Rochester, Minn. (computer hardware), Corvallis, Ore. (semiconductors), Boulder, Colo. (communications), Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (semiconductors), Ann Arbor, Mich. (motors, engines and parts), San Francisco and Oakland (biotechnology), Austin, Texas (computer hardware) and Santa Cruz, Calif. (computer hardware).

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Board This Plane at the Train Station

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling in Switzerland, then you know how absolutely convenient and predictable it is. Planes, trains and buses are almost always on time with impressive accuracy.

Now Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne wants to combine at least two forms of transportation into one ultra-convenient, speedy and timely way to get from point A to point B. Their Clip-Air concept consists of a modular train/plane craft that would allow passengers to take a train to London (or any other major hub), where an aircraft would pick up the train car and fly it to Rome or Paris or Geneva. You get the gist. Essentially, the system merges the flexibility of rail travel with the speed of flight.

BLOG: Massive Airship Off to a Flying Start

The airplane part of Clip-Air has a wing, engines, cockpit, fuel and landing gear. It can carry up to three fuselages, which begin as train cars and can be mixed and matched as needed. For example, those train cars could carry cargo or up to 450 passengers — first class or coach. That’s as many passengers as three Airbus A320s, but with half the engines. Not only does that save money on fuel, but it also saves on maintenance and crew and management expenses. And despite Clip-Air’s apparently larger size, it’s still able to operate from existing airports.

For folks in Paris, a model of the Clip Air will be on display at the Normandy Aerospace stand at the Paris Air Show from June 17 to 19. See a video here.

via Gizmag

Credit: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

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Men Force Women Into Menopause

Menopause, with its dreaded hot flashes, sleep problems and more, now comes with at least one conciliation for women: It’s all men’s fault, according to new research.

Human male preference for younger women has actually stacked the Darwinian deck against continued fertility in older women, concludes the study, published in the latest issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

“I think male-driven sexual selection, the male sex drive, has been a major factor driving sexual selection in humans,” co-author Rama Singh told Discovery News, adding that if “there were no preference against older women, women would be reproducing like men are for their whole lives.”

Singh, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University, conducted the research with colleagues Richard Morton and Jonathan Stone. They used computer simulation to mathematically model how genes change over time among mating pairs and others in a given population.

“Mating preference in males for younger females relaxed selection on older females,” co-author J.R. Stone, associate director of McMaster’s Origins Institute, told Discovery News.

In short, these older gals tend to be dumped or ignored in favor of younger women, who in theory have better genes and can, because of their age and energy, possibly reproduce more, keeping the male’s lineage going.

Women, of course, don’t just drop dead after menopause. The forces of natural selection seek only the survival of the species through individual fitness. They protect fertility in women while they are most likely to reproduce, but after that period, they cease to quell the genetic mutations that ultimately bring on menopause and a possible host of other potential health problems, such as increased risk for heart attack and stroke.

Human, and killer whale, females, who also go through menopause, often live long lives after their baby-producing days are done. They even continue to increase the propagation of their genes during later life.

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Cameras Could Take Night Photos Without a Flash

Whenever you take a picture in the dark there are options: a flash, a longer exposure or digitally enhancing the final image. But sometimes a flash ruins the dramatic lighting, a long exposure is too slow for fast action and editing in Photoshop is too complicated.

 Video: Real Life Iron Man Suits

Help is on the way: a team of scientists led by Andras Kis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found a material that could make cameras five times more sensitive to light, reducing or even eliminating the need for a flash or a long exposure. The material — made from a mix of molybdenum and sulfur — was used to make a single-pixel prototype sensor that only needed 1/25th of a second to expose a nighttime streetscape that other cameras would require 1/5th of a second. The sensitivity of the new sensor is fast enough that moving people didn’t get blurred.

It works because molybdenite is much more sensitive to light than silicon, the other material other digital sensors in cameras are made from.

Fly’s Ears Inspire New, Tiny Microphone

Besides sensitivity, there’s another plus to molybdenite: it’s cheap. Unlike other exotic technologies or semiconducting materials, there’s lots of it around and factories making image sensors out of it won’t need re-tooling.

The work appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Credit: EPFL / Alain Herzog

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The Hunt is on for Habitable Exomoons

Our solar system is full of moons. Of the 8 major planets, 6 of them have at least one natural satellite in tow, and several of those moons are very interesting places. Icy moons in the outer solar system may even be secretly harboring life. But what about moons elsewhere in the galaxy?

The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) is an astronomy project intended to try and find exomoons. And not just any exomoons; the kind of moons that could be a haven for life. While the Kepler telescope has, sadly, been forced into retirement, the data it collected lives on. And there’s a lot of data still to sift though.

GALLERY: Exquisite Exoplanetary Art

The idea of habitable moons is already well known to fans of science fiction. From Star Wars to Prometheus, the idea of a habitable world orbiting a gas giant is quite well ingrained on our collective subconscious. Perhaps this is what inspired the idea back in 2009 that we could look for exomoons with Kepler.

Since then, the idea has come forward in leaps and bounds, and we know of several gas giants within their parent stars’ habitable zones. Some even expect that exomoons may even be the best place to start looking for extrasolar life. The latest development in this story saw a team of astronomers, lead by Harvard-Smithsonian‘s David Kipping, take a closer look at Kepler-22b to try and hone their techniques.

PHOTOS: Top Exoplanets for Alien Life

Kepler-22b is a planet with a 95 percent probability of being in its parent star’s habitable zone. Around 620 light-years away from us, it has a radius about 2.4 times as large as Earth, and is about 10 percent as massive as Jupiter. With that size, it’s most likely to be a gas giant.

Unfortunately, no moon was found around Kepler-22b. If it has any moons at all, they must be smaller than half Earth’s mass. Nonetheless, this was far from a wasted exercise. Planet hunters now have a small arsenal of tools and techniques at their disposal — enough for Kipping and his colleagues to draw the conclusion that if any Earth-like moon is there to be found around similar planets, they will find it.

Planet Kepler-22b was chosen for this search for several reasons. As well as being comfortably in the habitable zone and having been confirmed by Kepler observations, this planet also had radial velocity data available for it, and the observations contain very low noise (take it from me, noise in observations is the bane of an astronomer’s life!).

While no Earth-like exomoons could be found around Kepler-22b, the fact that moons should be very easy to see if they’re there is heartening. What’s more, it’s worth bearing in mind that this does not mean that Kepler-22b has no moons at all. For example, Titan, Saturn’s giant moon, has only 2 percent the mass of Earth.

ANALYSIS: Kepler 2.0: Next-Gen Exoplanet Hunter Approved

Admittedly, we don’t know much about moons elsewhere in our galaxy, nor do we know much about what might make those moons habitable. But it’s a big galaxy out there. If we keep looking, with techniques this sensitive, we’re bound to find something eventually. The important thing is that we’re looking — and we know what we’re looking for.

For anyone interested in the full details, the paper is available from arXiv.

Image: Artists impression of a habitable moon in an extrasolar gas giant system (created using NASA imagery. Credit: Markus Hammonds/supernovacondensate.net

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Colorado Fires Destroy Homes, Thousands Evacuated

Forest fires raged Wednesday across the western US state of Colorado, destroying dozens of houses and forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents.

High temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds have fanned the flames. The worst of the blazes -- the Black Forest Fire -- had as of Tuesday destroyed more than 3,200 hectares (7,900 acres) of land near Colorado Springs.

More than 900 inmates in a correctional facility near the city, the second largest in the state, had to be transferred to another prison.

About 150 firefighters were battling the flames on Wednesday, backed up by 48 helicopters and members of the National Guard.

"This fire spread very rapidly yesterday and moved through areas very quickly and consumed a lot of land," El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told a press conference Wednesday.

"Today, we're going to be focusing a lot on at least cutting some fire lines," Maketa said, adding that nearly 100 homes had been destroyed.

So far, no one had been reported missing, but the sheriff expressed concern about "those locations where people did not evacuate. One of my worst fears is that people took their chances and it may have cost them their life."

Among the other major fires threatening the state, the Royal Gorge Fire, which was less than 10 percent contained on Wednesday, had already consumed more than 1,500 hectares, according to the forest fire website Inciweb.

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DNews: Our Favorite Chris Hadfield Moments

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Floating Robotic Spheres Will Compete Inside ISS

Astronauts tweeting from space has quietly captivated followers for a while now, but when Chris Hadfield’s cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” went viral, the YouTube video seemed to spark a revived interest in just how thrilling it is when space and Earth are bridged by simple, everyday technology.

VIDEOS: Listen To This! X-Rays From Stars Make Music

Appropriate, then, that the European Space Agency (ESA) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are creating Zero Robotics Competition, a tournament where high school students can compete for points by controlling robotic, basketball-sized spheres that will float inside the International Space Station (ISS).

The SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) glide around the ISS via jets powered by compressed gas. Each sphere is equipped with their own power, propulsion and navigation systems, but they lack the programming to make them move.

That job is up to the students, who will be tasked with writing algorithmic instructions to achieve a specific goal. Students will be able to test their codes in online simulations. Winning algorithms will earn competitors a berth in the finals, where they’ll get to witness SPHERES run their tasks live from space.

BLOG: Virtual Reality Platform Treads Into New Territory

U.S. high school students can register here. Participants will be a part of a three-team alliance from various European countries.

Finals will take place in January 2014. The U.S. team will meet at MIT, while the European teams will meet at the ESA’s ESTEC Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

via i09

Credit: MIT

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People Fail to Protect Their Phones From Thieves

Ninety-two per cent of music festival goers are more likely to bring a smartphone to an event than cash or ID, but many fail to guard against loss or theft, an industry survey indicated.

Symantec, maker of Norton security software, quizzed 6,500 adults in 11 countries who have attended big music events at least twice in the last two years to gauge the role of smartphones in their festival-going experience.

"We found that mobile devices have never been more crucial to their (festival) experience," Norton's Internet safety advocate Marian Merritt told AFP in a telephone interview.

One in five said they used their devices to present their admission tickets, and one in 10 reported using their smartphone as a digital wallet to buy festival-related merchandise such as T-shirts.

However, 31 per cent admitted failing to password-protect their smartphones, even if 35 per cent have had their devices stolen, lost or misplaced -- more likely than not on public transport.

Furthermore, among those who downloaded event-specific apps, one in four reported getting deluged with spam afterwards.

Regionally, having a smartphone at a festival was most important in Australia, Brazil, China, Japan and Mexico, Merritt said, while theft was the leading cause of smartphone loss in Brazil, China and Mexico.

North Americans were least cautious when it came to taking precautions such as password protection and special apps to combat malware. Latin Americans were most prudent on that score.

"We're very curious about our customers as they migrate more and more of their behavior to the mobile world," Merritt said, but "we've got to get people to consider the possibility that their phone will be lost or stolen."

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Human DNA Not Patentable: Supreme Court

Naturally occurring human gene sequences cannot be patented but artificially copied and replicated DNA can be, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

"A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring," the court ruled.

The nine justices reviewed a 2012 appeals court decision that allowed a biotechnology company, Myriad Genetics Inc, to patent two genes it found had links to breast and ovarian cancer.

A coalition of associations representing some 150,000 researchers, doctors and patients, asked the nation's top court to overturn the decision, as it stopped them from doing further work and research with the patented genes.

"Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation," said Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Nearly 20 percent of identified human genes are currently under patent, some of which are associated with Alzheimer's disease or other cancers.

These patents are sometimes owned by private companies but also by universities and research institutes concerned with keeping them in the public domain to prevent companies from seizing them.

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Babies Show Sympathy for Bully Victims

Babies may be able to show sympathy before their first birthday, according to a new study in which 10-month-olds preferred the victims rather than the aggressors in a bullying encounter.

The research, published Wednesday (June 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first to find evidence of possible sympathy in children younger than toddlers, the researchers said. Sympathy is the feeling of concern for others.

Because 10-month-olds can't yet express sympathy verbally, Kyoto University researcher Shoji Itakura and colleagues turned to a common tactic in baby-brain research: using simple animations to determine what infants prefer. They showed 40 babies an animation of a blue ball and a yellow cube.

Half of the infants watched a short clip in which the blue ball chased the yellow cube around the screen, hitting it seven times before finally squishing it against a wall. The other half of the group saw the same movements, including the squishing, but the two shapes moved independently without interacting.

In cases where the babies had seen one shape beating up on the other, they overwhelmingly reached for the victim, 16 out of 20 times. In comparison, when the shapes hadn't interacted, the babies' choices were basically random -- nine went for the shape that had gotten squished, and the other 11 went for the nonsquished shape.

Picking the victim

The results could have simply indicated that babies preferred to steer clear of a nasty character, not that they felt sympathy for the bullied one. To rule out that possibility, the researchers conducted a second experiment with 24 babies, also 10 months old. These babies saw a show nearly identical to the first, except there was a third character: a red cylinder. The red cylinder was a neutral presence on-screen, neither bullying nor being bullied.

In some cases, the "bully" and "victim" roles were swapped, so that the yellow cube was the bad guy. After watching the show, the babies were shown a real yellow cube and a real blue ball, and given the chance to reach for one of the objects.

After watching the animation, the babies were again given a choice of two toys. Half could pick between the "victim" shape and the neutral shape, while the other half got to choose between the bullying shape and the neutral shape.

This time, 10 out of 12 babies given the neutral-or-bully option went with the neutral cylinder. Meanwhile, of the 12 given the neutral-or-victim option, 10 picked the victim.

In other words, even when there was no mean character present that a baby might want to avoid, the babies still picked the victim.

It goes too far to call this proof of sympathy, said Kiley Hamlin, an infant cognition researcher at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study. Nevertheless, Hamlin told LiveScience, the findings are "a great first step" in establishing the development of sympathy.

Previously, Hamlin has reported that babies as young as 8 months old prefer to see wrongdoers punished rather than treated nicely.

Brainy babies

Some researchers have raised concerns about the kinds of animations used in infant cognition studies, arguing that babies might be marking their preferences based on extraneous information, like whether one character bounces or moves differently than the others.

Itakura and colleagues aimed to control for those concerns by making sure their character shapes moved with the same speed and consistency.

"They did a great job controlling for things like movement and amount of color on the stage," Hamlin said.

Though more studies will be needed to nail down babies' motivations for preferring victims of aggression, Hamlin said anecdotes suggest that even young babies notice others in distress, and seem bothered by that distress.

"This is a nice way of saying, 'Okay, this is a far more abstract situation, is this something that 10-month-olds are noticing and responding to?" Hamlin said. "It seems to be that case that they are."

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Hubble Discovers Far-Out Baby Planet

Even by celestial standards, the span between a newly found suspected baby planet and its host star is astronomical — 7.5 billion miles, which is about twice as far as Pluto orbits the sun.

To date, no other other extrasolar planet is as far away from its host star as the fledgling world circling TW Hydrae, a small red dwarf located about 176 light-years from Earth.

PHOTOS: Hubble’s Latest Mind Blowing Cosmic Pictures

Scientists are at a loss to explain how the planet, which is believed to be six- to 28 times as big as Earth, could exist. For starters, the host star is only about 8 million years old, which was believed to be too young to support planets. It also is small, about half as massive as the sun.

Computer models show that a planet 7.5 billion miles from its parent star would take 200 times longer to form than a planet positioned about where Jupiter is in our solar system. Jupiter, which took about 10 million years to form, is around 500 million miles from the sun.

PHOTOS: Hubble at 23: Horsehead Nebula in a New Light

The baby planet was detected indirectly from a telltale gap in a 41-billion-mile wide ring of gas and dust circling TW Hydrae. The gap is believed to be due to the growing planet gravitationally sweeping up material that is then incorporated into the planet. Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope for their survey.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Debes (STScI), H. Jang-Condell (University of Wyoming), A. Weinberger (Carnegie Institution of Washington), A. Roberge (Goddard Space Flight Center), G. Schneider (University of Arizona/Steward Observatory), and A. Feild (STScI/AURA)

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Old Space Station Treadmill to be Dumped from Orbit

It’s always a chore when, at home, a big hulking piece of equipment needs to be dumped. Do you break it up and put it in the trash? Try to sell it for space parts on eBay? Refurbish it? Recycle it? Make special arrangements with a hazardous waste company? Leave it in your front lawn in the hope someone might pilfer it?

On the International Space Station, however, the choices for disposing outdated equipment are few, inevitably ending with the ultimate garbage disposal technique: atmospheric reentry.

Space Station Astronauts Log One Million Photos

That’s exactly the fate waiting for the faithful old space station treadmill — a.k.a. the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System, or TVIS — that kept the first 34 astronauts resident in the orbital outpost fit and healthy for the past 12 years. Superseded by the “Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill” (COLBERT) — so named in honor of comedy talk show host Stephen Colbert — the TVIS will be loaded on board the returning Progress M-18M (50P) cargo vehicle. Progress will then detach on July 26 and commence its fiery reentry over the Pacific Ocean.

The TVIS went into operation on November 2000 but it ran its last lap in March 2013, so now it’s just taking up space. Although this piece of kit would likely fetch quite an impressive bid on eBay, the astronauts and cosmonauts have no means of delivering the piece of keep fit kit to any prospective buyer, so they’ll just have to toss it into the atmospheric incinerator with the rest of their junk. Oh well.

via collectSPACE

Image: Keep fit memories: Leroy Chiao, Expedition 10 commander and NASA ISS science officer, equipped with a bungee harness, exercises on the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System (TVIS) in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station (ISS) on April 10, 2005.

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Dead Daddy Guppies Keep Making Babies

From beyond the grave, male Trinidadian guppies continue to reproduce. This isn’t a Father’s Day zombie love story though. Evolutionary biologists recently discovered that female Trinidadian guppies store reservoirs of sperm from long-dead guppy daddies for up to 10 months.

News: Making Babies After Death: Is It Ethical?

Storing sperm could allow these guppy gals to be pioneers, settling new waters and giving birth to genetically diverse offspring. Females swim better than males, so the females can colonize new territory more easily.

“Populations that are too small can go extinct because close relatives end up breeding with each other and offspring suffer from inbreeding,” David Reznick, professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside and leader of the guppy study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said in a press release. “If there are stored sperm, then the real population size is bigger than the number of animals you see. Also, stored sperm can increase genetic variation in other ways.”

Females live for up to two years, compared to the three to four month lifespan of a male. Keeping dead dads’ sperm on tap could allow females to give birth to a blast from the past male color pattern that will have all the other guppy girls going gaga. Female guppies are attracted to males with unusual patterns.

“In addition to learning about sperm storage, this is the first time we are learning about the huge differences in lifespan between males and females,” Reznick said. “If we were to use males to estimate generation time, then these differences mean that lucky females live for three generations. A human equivalent would be for us to have women around who were 90 years old and still very fertile.”

ANALYSIS: Rare ‘Sea Serpent’ Caught on Video

Reznick noted that although long-term sperm storage seems rare in vertebrates, it may be that scientists simply haven’t observed it before. His team’s guppy observations span multiple generations and involve marking and recapturing the fish, as well as analyzing their genetic signatures. Guppy fathers from beyond the grave was an unexpected discovery from this extensive data gathering.

IMAGE: Male (left) and female (right) guppies (Wibowo Djatmiko, Wikimedia Commons)

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Are Languages Shaped By Geography?

The way different languages sound may depend on the geography of the landscape on which they're spoken, new research suggests.

A study of more than 550 languages around the world found that tongues spoken in high-altitude regions contain more sounds called ejective consonants, made with a burst of air, than languages closer to sea level.

Ejectives may be more common in these regions because the sounds are easier to produce there, or possibly because they minimize water loss from the mouth in dry, high-altitude environments, said study author Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami.

Traditionally, linguists have assumed that geography doesn't play a role in shaping languages, with the exception of vocabulary specific to certain environments or wildlife. A handful of small studies have suggested that languages in warm climates use more vowels than languages in cold climates, but the findings are controversial. [10 Things That Make Humans Special]

Everett set out to investigate how other aspects of geography, namely altitude, might be linked to certain sounds, or phonemes, in a language. Specifically, he looks at ejectives, a class of sounds (not present in English) produced by puffs of air in the mouth as opposed to the lungs. Everett suspected these sounds might be more common at high altitudes, where the lower air pressure would make them easier to produce.

To test this hypothesis, Everett analyzed phoneme data on 567 languages from the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online. He compared the data to the altitudes where the languages were spoken, obtained using geographic mapping software.

Languages containing ejective sounds were found to occur at or near five of the six major inhabited high-altitude regions, including in North and South America, southern Africa and Eurasia, Everett found.

The one exception to this pattern was the Himalayan Plateau — that region was not home to any languages containing ejectives. "It is not particularly surprising that one region should present such an exception," Everett wrote in his paper, "and in fact it strikes us as remarkable that only one region presents an exception."

Languages at high altitudes may have evolved to have ejective sounds because less effort is required to produce these bursts of air in thinner atmospheres, Everett speculates. His basic calculations of the air pressure needed to make these sounds support this explanation.

Alternatively, speaking in ejectives might expel less water vapor from the mouth, allowing water to be conserved in typically dry high-altitude environments, Everett said.

Studies are needed to test these hypotheses. "Understandingly, people will be skeptical," Everett said. But in terms of the link between altitude and ejectives, "the data are overwhelming," he said.

The findings were detailed today (June 12) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Original article on LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bird Apps May Confuse Real Birds

Some experts are warning that cell phone apps that mimic bird calls are too real.

Concerned that birds may misinterpret the sounds as coming from their feathered friends, rather than phones, and responding to them instead of, say, feeding their babies, experts in the United Kingdom are calling the apps “harmful.”

“Repeatedly playing a recording of birdsong or calls to encourage a bird to respond in order to see it or photograph it can divert a territorial bird from other important duties, such as feeding its young…It is selfish and shows no respect to the bird.

“People should never use playback to attract a species during its breeding season,” Tony Whitehead, public affairs officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, told the BBC.

BLOG: Apes Get iPads at National Zoo

Meanwhile, developers of the apps say the sounds are educational and not a cause for concern.

“Just keep the volume low,” Dr. Hilary Wilson, a developer for the Chirp! app, told the BBC, although she admitted it is possible to misuse them. “We urge great caution — birdsong is simply a pleasant sound to human ears, but to birds it is a powerful means of communication.”

NEWS: Birds’ Emergency Calls Signal Friends, Foes

In England, The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 made it an offense to intentionally disturb nesting birds. Brownsea Island, in the county of Dorset, has put up signs warning visitors about using the apps.

Photo: A yellow oriole sits on a branch. Some ornithologists are concerned that sounds from bird call phone apps may be confusing birds in the wild. Credit: iStockPhoto

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Slo-Mo Footage Reveals How Pigeons Make That Clapping Sound At Takeoff

They’re one of the most annoying things about living in a big city, but pigeons — aka the rats of the sky — have developed a pretty clever defence mechanism designed to scare off attackers: a loud and repeated clapping noise that you probably hear when you scare an annoying pigeon into fleeing.

As BBC Earth Productions discovered by studying a pigeon’s takeoff with a high-speed camera, the noise seems to be generated as the bird’s muscular wings and stiff feathers clap together on the upswing. The footage also reveals how graceful a pigeon and almost makes you want to like them, until you remember the mountain of crap on your air conditioner and reach for a broom.

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This Week In Smartphone Software Updates: Telstra, Optus, Vodafone

Wondering when the sweet new versions of Android will land on your device? You’re in luck: each week, Gizmodo Australia will take you through all of the handset updates currently being tested on Australian networks like Vodafone, Telstra and Optus, and tell you when you can expect them on your device.

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 — Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in second-round testing.

• Samsung Galaxy S II — Fix for re-locking issue is approved, now awaiting release by Samsung.

• Sony Xperia TX — Android 4.1.2 Maintenance Release is now in testing.

• Sony Xperia S — Final Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OTA testing is now underway.

• Nokia Lumia 820 — Nokia is preparing Windows Phone PR1.1.7 for testing.

TBA

TBA

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What Happened With The NBN This Week?

What Happened With The NBN This Week? | Gizmodo Australiavar site="gizmodo";var mobile=false;var analytics_id="UA-1772706-1";var dfp_id="1027487";var dfp_fireplace="GIZAU_T-Online_Fireplace";var dfp_leaderboard_top="GIZAU_T-Online_Leaderboard_Top";var dfp_leaderboard_btm="GIZAU_T-Online_Leaderboard_Btm";var dfp_mrec="GIZAU_T-Online_MREC";var dfp_halfpage="GIZAU_T-Online_Skyscraper";var dfp_spotlight="GIZAU_Home_TextAdvertisement";var dfp_tags="asbestos,australian-stories,nbn,what-happened-with-the-nbn-this-week?"; Business Insider Gizmodo Kotaku Lifehacker PopSugar BellaSugar FabSugar ShopStyle   Please wait... Log In Register User Name Log Out GadgetsMobileGeek OutOnlineScienceCamerasComputingGamingEntertainmentSoftwareCarsNews Online Brought to you by ados_addInlinePlacement(5570, 28883, 878).setZone(31640).loadInline(); What Happened With The NBN This Week? Luke Hopewell Today 4:00 PM Share Discuss Bookmark

A storm cloud filled with bad news hung over the National Broadband Network this week, with asbestos fears and the death of a contractor marring the roll-out of the multi-billion dollar fibre network.

NBN Co’s problems started earlier in the week when it was revealed that Telstra contractors who had been performing operations on pits in the west of Sydney had been improperly handling the dangerous cancer-causing substance known as asbestos. Bags of asbestos were reportedly dumped near schools and nearby homes before Telstra and NBN Co were tipped off about the issues.

Telstra has accepted responsibility for the issues before putting an extra 200 qualified workers on to oversee the removal of asbestos. Even the Prime Minister commented on it in Question Time this week.

Coalition Senators used the asbestos scare as a rod to beat NBN Co executive Mike Quigley with during Senate Estimates this week, which is always a colourful exchange.

And sad late-breaking news this week involving the NBN: reports are emerging that a concrete contractor was crushed between two trucks and on an NBN work site in Kiama. The man was fatally injured and pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics. It’s the first and hopefully last fatality involving the National Broadband Network roll-out, and our deepest sympathies go out to the contractor’s family.

Share Tagsasbestosaustralian storiesnbnwhat happened with the nbn this week? Discuss4 Comments | Reply itroll_2s @itroll_2sMay 31, 2013 4:36 pm

"Somebody who got paid by a company to do work for the NBN did bad things without telling anyone? A POX ON THE NBN I SAY! A POX!"

Reply 0
itroll_2s @itroll_2sMay 31, 2013 4:40 pm

That said, dumping asbestos is fkn immoral as hell.

Reply 0
demondownunder @demondownunderMay 31, 2013 5:52 pm

NBNco Contracts developers and allows company's such as syntheo, etc, to manage their own personnel and or subcontracts. It is interesting that NBNco is being held accountable just because it is the public face instead of the contracted companies and or subbies that undertake the work.

It's kinda like blaming an accident on the traffic lights changing too fast, nevermind the fact you were going 200km/h in a 60 zone... nope allll the lights fault. In the same way, responsibility does not fall on telstra, NBNco or even the contracted companies, it falls on the subbies undertaking the work.

If it can be proved they knowingly did such acts, first all existing contracts with them should be annulled, recompense should be paid to all people in the surrounding area of confirmed sites out of the subbies back pocket. A government fund/investment should be set up now to account for future related cases of asbestos related poisoning and there should be a minimum sentence of 1 year jailtime for the subbies and 3 for the management that was on site.

This boils down to human negligence/lack of caring or understanding, and you cannot condemn an entire organisation for the actions of a small group of individuals. That's my take on it.

Reply 1
hypnerotomachia @hypnerotomachiaMay 31, 2013 10:52 pm

It's a bit like the Home Insulation Scheme. If you go and check the court record you will find that it was not the government's fault that someone urinated on a downlight.

Reply 0
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