The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet, says Misha Glenny, a visiting professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and the author of DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops… read more
Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory‘s National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target.
Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than… read more
Over the past few years, some researchers have been adding a bit of down time to their study protocols, Nature News reports. While subjects are still lying in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners, the researchers ask them to try to empty their minds. The aim is to find out what happens when the brain simply idles. And the answer is: quite a lot.
Some circuits… read more
The invention of the motion picture enabled visual storytelling and at a mass scale unimaginable before.
The equivalent to that moment is happening right now with the advent of wearable computing. These wearable technologies like Google’s glasses that project information right where a person is looking will have the same effect on smartphones and computers as… read more
Outlawing psychoactive drugs amounts to the worst case of scientific censorship in modern times, leading scientists have argued.
UN conventions on drugs in the 1960s and 1970s have not only compounded the harms of drugs but also produced the worst censorship of research for over 300 years. This has set back research in key areas such as consciousness by decades and effectively stopped the investigation of promising… read more
Washington State University researchers have developed a new drug candidate that dramatically improves the cognitive function of rats with Alzheimer’s-like mental impairment.
Their compound, which is intended to repair brain damage that has already occurred, is a significant departure from current Alzheimer’s treatments, which either slow the process of cell death or inhibit cholinesterase, an enzyme believed to break down a key neurotransmitter involved in… read more
“We’re looking for bold, creative individuals who want to join us and be a part of shaping the future of Glass,” says the Google Glass team.
“We’d love to make everyone an Explorer, but we’re starting off a bit smaller. We’re still in the early stages, and while we can’t promise everything will be perfect, we can promise it will be exciting.”
“Using Google+… read more
DARPA’s Cheetah robot — already the fastest legged robot in history — just broke its own land speed record of 18 miles per hour (mph), clocked at 28.3 mph for a 20-meter split.
In the process, Cheetah also surpassed another very fast mover: runner Usain Bolt. According to the International Association of Athletics Federations, Bolt set the world speed record for a human in 2009 when… read more
There may be 100,000 times more wandering “nomad planets” in the Milky Way than stars, and some may carry bacterial life, according to a new study by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC).
If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist,” said Louis Strigari, leader of… read more
A space rock several hundred meters across is heading towards our planet and the last-ditch attempt to avert a disaster — an untested mission to deflect it — fails.
This fictional scene of films and novels could well be a reality one day. So the European Space Agency (ESA) is appealing for research ideas to help guide the development of a U.S.-European asteroid deflection mission… read more
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have identified a novel mechanism by which a type of low-carb, low-calorie diet — called a “ketogenic diet” — could delay the effects of aging: the compound β-hydroxybutyrate (βOHB), a “ketone body” that is generated during a prolonged low-calorie or ketogenic diet.
Blocking oxidative stress
While ketone bodies such as βOHB can be toxic when… read more
Researchers at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute have identified a genetic program that promotes longevity of roundworms (nematodes) in cold environments — and this genetic program also exists in warm-blooded animals, including humans.
“This raises the intriguing possibility that exposure to cold air — or pharmacological stimulation of the cold-sensitive genetic program — may promote longevity in mammals,” said… read more
Have you ever wished you could just draw a object in the air and have it magically printed out?
WoobbleWorks has created 3Doodler (a Kickstarter project), the world’s first “3D printing pen” to do just that.
As you draw, it extrudes ABS plastic (the material used by many 3D printers) in the air or on surfaces — no software or computers required.
The… read more
Computer scientists Computer scientists Lior Shamir and Jane Tarakhovsky of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan have developed a program that analyzes paintings in a manner similar to how expert art historians perform their analysis, and conducted an experiment that showed that machines can outperform untrained humans in the analysis of fine art.
In the experiment, the researchers used approximately 1, 000 paintings of 34 well-known artists, and let the computer… read more
