A pair of stars in the third-closest star system to the Sun has been discovered by an astronomer — the closest star system discovered since 1916.
The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.
The star system, named “WISE J104915.57-531906″ (discovered in a map by… read more
Researchers in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory at the University of Illinois in collaboration with German scientists have been using bioinformatics techniques to probe the world of proteins for answers to questions about the origins of life.
Proteins are formed from chains of amino acids and fold into three-dimensional structures that determine their function. According to crop sciences professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, very little is known about… read more
At a panel discussion at SXSW Monday, Defense Distributed (DEFCAD) founder Cody Wilson unveiled that DEFCAD is working on plans to expand its efforts beyond just firearms to any controversial object users feel like uploading, including grenades and patented ones, VentureBeat reports.
Cody:
Can 3D printing be subversive? If it can, it will be because it allows us to make the important things — not trinkets, not lawn gnomes,… read more
At the SXSW Interactive Festival, Timothy Jordan, Google’s Senior Developer Advocate, showed off how you navigate Google Glass and how apps like Gmail, the New York Times, and Evernote work on the glasses, ABC News reports.
The glasses have a small screen visible over your right eye. The right arm of the glasses, which contains the computing parts (processor, RAM, etc.), is equipped with a… read more
Research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine has revealed key features in proteins needed for life to function on Mars and other extreme environments.
The researchers, funded by NASA, studied organisms that survive in the extreme environment of Antarctica.
They found subtle but significant differences between the core proteins in ordinary organisms and Haloarchaea, organisms that can tolerate severe conditions such as… read more
As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account, MIT Technology Review reports.
At the RSA security conference in San Francisco last month, Mayank Upadhyay, a principal engineer at Google, said that using personal hardware to log in would remove the dangers of… read more
At Microsoft Research’s annual technology demo day this week, researchers showed off a tool called Viral Search that attempts to measure virality in its more literal sense. That means not overall traffic over time, but the mechanics by which it passes from person to person over many generations, MIT Technology Review reports.
The software looked at 1.4 billion Tweets over the course of a year… read more
An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.
Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — some of the key chemical ingredients for life — in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.
“A fundamental… read more
Columbia University researchers have developed a new “plug-and-play” method to assemble complex cell microenvironments in a scalable, highly precise way to fabricate tissues with any spatial organization or interest — such as those found in the heart or skeleton or vasculature.
The lock-and-key technique can be used to build cellular assemblies using a variety of shapes that lock into templates like LEGO building blocks, according… read more
Engineers at Stanford University have developed a prototype single-fiber endoscope that is as thin as a human hair, with a resolution four times better than previous devices of similar design.
The “micro-endoscope” is a significant step forward in high-resolution, minimally invasive bioimaging, with potential applications in research and clinical practice. Micro-endoscopy could enable new methods in diverse fields ranging from study of the brain to early cancer… read more
A team of sleep researchers led by UC Riverside psychologist Sara C. Mednick has confirmed the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process.
Those discoveries could lead to new sleep therapies that will improve memory for aging adults and those with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia.
Earlier research found a correlation between sleep spindles —… read more
Traditional methods of fMRI analysis systematically skew which regions of the brain appear to be activating, potentially invalidating hundreds of papers that use the technique, according to Stanford School of Medicine researchers.
Pictures of brain regions “activating” are by now a familiar accompaniment to any neurological news story (including some in KurzweilAI — see Editor’s note below). With functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, you can see… read more
A new section in Lockheed Martin’s LM Tomorrow, a free app for iPad users, explores quantum physics in an interactive, easy-to-understand format. The LM Tomorrow app received the gold-level “W3 Award” in 2012 for creative excellence on the web.
The Quantum Theory section draws on expanding research into the potential of quantum computing to solve challenges ranging from designing lifesaving new drugs to instantaneously… read more
An open-access report published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society last week details China’s advances in creating a next-generation Internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West, New Scientist reports.
At the root of the problem are “two major gaps in the architecture of the Internet”, according to a report from the… read more
MIT researchers are developing a new system called DBSeer that should help solve problems with cloud-computing services, such as inefficient use of virtual machines, pricing of cloud services, and diagnosis of application slowdowns.
For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations.… read more