When a snowball melts, you can tell it has achieved a liquid state when the frigid water drips through your fingers. But if you could follow the melting process, driven by the heat of your hand, from its very first moments – the first trillionth of second, would you be able to point to the exact moment the snowflake crystals disorder into liquid H2O?

That’s the challenge facing researchers using the Sub-Picosecond Pulse Source (SPPS) to probe the activities of materials on ultrafast timescales. SPPS makes intense x-ray pulses lasting quadrillionths of a second (femtoseconds), enabling researchers to directly monitor the earliest atomic changes during melting with ultrafast x-ray diffraction.

Posted 12/08/05 8:46 AM Read Article

It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.

The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

Posted 12/08/05 8:46AM Read Article

A "mysterious" force is baffling scientists and making biological species evolve

"Only one Force, Love, links and makes infinite worlds alive" Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

The Pioneer 10 and 11, launched more than 30 years ago, appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system www.newsforthesoul.com/02feb/2-2-37.htm The strange behaviour of the Pioneers had been tracked using the giant dishes of Nasa's Deep Space Network. By the time the two spaceships had swept beyond Pluto, scientists noted there were persistent anomalies in their trajectories. Every time they looked the Pioneers were in the wrong place.

Posted: 11/29/05 2:02 PM Read Article

Aeronautical engineers had previously “proven” that bees cannot fly. So Michael Dickinson, an insect flight expert and colleagues at Caltech in Pasadena, California, US, decided to investigate the forces actually at work during honeybee flight.

Posted: 11/29/05 2:01 PM Read Article

Physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated for the first time the entanglement of two objects not merely in one aspect of their quantum natures, such as spin, but in a multitude of ways.

Entanglement is the quantum affinity between or among particles (such as atoms or photons) in which the measurement of some property for one particle automatically and instantaneously determines the corresponding property of the other particle.

[This article is about the many modes (see Russell) of Sympathetic Oscillation.]

Posted: 11/23/05 7:35AM Read Article

Physicists in France have developed a new way form of "touch-screen" technology that relies on detecting the sound waves that are produced when a solid object is tapped by a finger (Appl. Phys. Lett. 87 204104). The technology could be used to make virtual keyboards and intelligent shop windows, and may also have applications in security and education.

When the surface of a solid object is tapped, sound waves reverberate through it. Different points on the surface produce slightly different sounds because the acoustic waves travel along different paths. Each point on the surface therefore has a unique acoustic "signature". Now, Ros Kiri Ing and Nicolas Quieffin of Sensitive Object, a new company based near Paris, together with Stefan Catheline and Mathias Fink of the University of Paris VII, have shown that this signature could be exploited in a new variation on traditional touch screens.

Posted: 11/14/05 6:28AM Read Article

Meditation alters brain patterns in ways that are likely permanent, scientists have known. But a new study shows key parts of the brain actually get thicker through the practice.

Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception -- the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for example.

Posted: 11/13/05 11:45 AM Read Article

Legends say that ancient levitators were able to rise above the ground up to 90 cm

Gods in Oriental Mythology had a special ability. They could fly. However, ordinary mortals could master the unique art of flying too. For example, Indian Brahmans, yogis, hermits and fakirs could rise and float in the air.

Posted: 11/10/05 5:05AM Read Article

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday.

Posted: 11/07/05 5:02AM Read Article

Death is only an interchange station between the two worlds

Every person at some point of his life questions himself what comes next after the physical death. Is everything to finish with the last breath or does the soul go on living?

Posted: 11/07/05 5:01 AM Read Article

Like fireflies and pendulum clocks, nano-oscillators synchronize their behavior 

Like the flashing of fireflies and ticking of pendulum clocks, the signals emitted by multiple nanoscale oscillators can naturally synchronize under certain conditions, greatly amplifying their output power and stabilizing their signal pattern, according to scientists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology.

[If these guys ever read Keely's Laws of Harmony and some old (pre-1900) books on Music Theory they would know what they were writing about. I believe that this article, which is all about sympathetic vibration and its referred research, vindicates Keely. This is probably the most important scientific research going on out there at this time because as we know sympathy is LOVE.DP]

Posted: 11/03/05 6:47 AM Read Article

THE uncanny ability of blind people to "sense" unseen objects has been demonstrated for the first time in sighted volunteers whose vision was blanked out by scientists.

The findings suggest "blindsight", which has been observed in blind people whose eyes function normally but who have suffered damage to the brain's visual centre, is a real and not imagined phenomenon.

Posted: 11/03/05 4:53AM Read Article

The speed of light waves in vacuum, 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), and denoted as c, remains the absolute speed limit for transferring matter, energy, and usable signals (information). However, a wave property known as group velocity can surpass c while still complying fully with the theory of special relativity, since it is not involved in transferring information, matter, or energy.

Posted: 10/28/05 2:59AM Read Article

Traveling at the speed of light, a laser pulse could circle the earth several times in one second. In contrast, the sonic/ultrasonic "clicks" of a dolphin under the sea can only travel a single mile in that same second. The speed of ultrasound in water is about 1,500 m/s, some 200,000 times slower than the speed of light in a vacuum (known as c). The speeds of sound in most plastics are also some 5 orders of magnitude shy of c. So it may be hard to believe that by sprinkling in some small plastic beads, water can be made to support ultrasonic pulses with speeds faster than light. Not only can ultrasound pulses outrun light in this watery mixture, they can also propagate in negative time, apparently reaching a more distant point before a closer one. How is this possible? What does it mean? How does it fit within the known laws of physics? In the remainder of this article we will attempt to answer these questions.

Posted 10/28/05 2:59 AM Read Article

There has been a recent tendency to apply Schroedinger's wave equation to macroscopic domains, from Bose-Einstein condensates in neutron stars to planetary orbits. In these applications a hydrodynamical interpretation, involving vortices in some 'fluid' medium is often given. The vortex picture appears surprising in light of more traditional interpretations of Schroedinger's equation, and indeed often appears to rely on ad hoc analogies. The purpose of this letter is to examine the vortex hypothesis in light of a simple, transparent mathematical framework. We find that Schroedinger's equation implies waves can be vortices also for a class of wave functions. Vortices occur in pairs that perform a sort of quantum computation by collapsing into either 0 or 1. Vortices collapsing to 0 ('0-vortices') are longer-lived, and their ratio to 1-vortices is discussed.

Posted: 10/26/05 5:51AM Read Article

Quantum dot mixture takes LED lighting to a new level

The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork.

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

Posted: 10/22/05 7:12AM Read Article

A scanning system inspired by bats could spell the end of airport metal detectors, according to the European Space Agency. It is based on the principles of echolocation, the technique bats use to hunt in the dark. Named Tadar, after the Brazilian Tadarida bat, it uses millimetre waves to scan for concealed weapons, and can detect non metallic objects as easily as metallic ones.

Posted: 10/18/05 3:36AM Read Article

In the first-ever study of metal nanoparticles' interaction with HIV-1, silver nanoparticles of sizes 1-10nm attached to HIV-1 and prevented the virus from bonding to host cells. The study, published in the Journal of Nanotechnology, was a joint project between the University of Texas, Austin and Mexico Univeristy, Nuevo Leon.

Scientists are also studying other uses for silver nanoparticles. "We're testing against other viruses and the 'super bug (Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus).' Our preliminary results indicate that silver nanoparticles can effectively attack other micro-organisms," Yacaman said.

Posted: 10/16/05 7:41AM Read Article

Electric fields have been used to produce vortex rings in pure water in an experiment in Sweden. The electric field breaks up the water molecules and the protons released in this process cause the rings to form. Using an optical microscope, the Swedish team observed that the vortex rings consist of water swirling around in very fine circles with diameters ranging from 10 to 50 microns (figure 1). Moreover, more than one vortex can form at higher voltages.

Posted: 10/16/05 7:39AM Read Article

Big Bang Theory is Dead

Abstract. Earlier, we presented a simple list of the top ten problems with the Big Bang. [[1]] Since that publication, we have had many requests for citations and additional details, which we provide here. We also respond to a few rebuttal arguments to the earlier list. Then we supplement the list based on the last four years of developments ñ with another 20 problems for the theory.

Posted: 10/14/05 4:06AM Read Article

Physicists in France have demonstrated the Hall effect with phonons - vibrations of a crystal lattice - for the first time. The effect shows up as a temperature difference across a sample when a heat current is passed along the sample and a magnetic field is applied at right angles to both these directions (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 155901).

The classic Hall effect occurs when an electric current flows through a conductor in a magnetic field. If the current and magnetic field are at right angles to each other, the Lorentz force deflects the electrons to one side and a Hall voltage builds up in the direction that is at right angles to both the current and the magnetic field. It has been assumed that the Hall effect could not exist for phonons because they are not charged.

Posted: 10/13/05 6:31AM Read Article

Corrected [contrubuted by Prof. Dr. Fedor Mitschke]: Researchers at the University of Rostock in Germany have made the world's first molecules of light pulses, which might allow a significant increase in the data transfer rate of fiber optical systems. The molecules are built of temporal solitons, pulses of light that do not dissipate or easily lose their shape like most other types of pulses. Solitons are useful for transmitting information because the signals can travel over long distances without degrading.

Solitons are waves that can have characteristics similar to material particles, like electrons and billiard balls. Although molecules made from spatial solitons have been demonstrated before, the researchers claim that this is the first time anyone has made temporal solitons stick together to form structures analogous to molecules.

Posted: 10/13/05 6:35AM Read Article

At the University of Arizona, a psychology laboratory devotes its time to investigating "dynamic info-energy systems" and a "survival of consciousness hypothesis." University of Virginia cardiologists have been studying whether heart patients enter "transcendental environments" in the operating room. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist colleague compiles records of alleged "transmigration" events from around the world.

Translation? At two of America's best universities, professors and doctors are studying the existence of the soul, near-death experiences and reincarnation.

Posted: 10/12/05 6:45AM Read Article

The Tillsonburg News — Telepathy, hypnosis, amazing powers of prediction, walking on water - such phenomena defy belief when people claim to possess them. However, they all exist in nature - not in people, but in animals.
John Downer made a film about the strange secrets of the world of nature and the film won him worldwide awards some 15 years ago for showing the strange power of animals. Knowledge has moved on in leaps and bounds since he made the film.
“Many things that scientists dismissed then are now accepted as fact,” said Downer.

Posted: 10/12/05 6:43AM Read Article

Traub and Maiman demand that the existence of psychic phenomena be proven in their scientific labs. It is comparable to the great apes studied by Jane Goodall: Great apes will not perform in the lab the same as they performed for her in their natural setting; she studied them in their world and learned much hidden from the labs. Ditto for psychic phenomena. In applying the tool of scientific method, experiential evidence triumphs over skeptic opinion every time.

Posted: 10/11/05 6:36 AM Read Article

Drivers are fighting rising gasoline prices by buying "flex" or "flexible fuel" cars that slurp more alcohol.

Alcohol made from sugar cane is becoming the fuel of choice in Brazil, and other countries - so much so that global sugar prices hit a seven-year high this week.

Regular car engines will run fine on a 10 percent blend of alcohol and gasoline. But by using computer sensors that adjust to whatever mix is in the tank, flex car engines run on either ethanol, gasoline, or any combination of the two. And they have been roaring out of dealerships here since Volkswagen sold the first TotalFlex Golf in March 2003.

Posted: 10/11/05 5:52 AM Read Article

Physicists in Australia have slowed a speeding laser pulse and captured it in a crystal, a feat that could be instrumental in creating quantum computers.

The scientists slowed the laser light pulse from 300,000 kilometers per second to just several hundred meters per second, allowing them to capture the pulse for about a second.

The accomplishment marks a new world record, but the scientists are more thrilled that they were able to store and recall light, an important step toward quantum computing.

Posted: 10/06/05 4:58AM Read Article

Using organosilicon compounds, West's team has developed a generation of rechargeable lithium ion batteries with lifetimes more than twice as long as current medical device batteries.

Posted: 10/04/05 7:33AM Read Article

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Sherry Dean has a secret she's been keeping from her drivers since March — their Upshur County school buses are running on an alternative fuel made of vegetable oil and diesel.

"I wanted to run it without my drivers or mechanics knowing," she said. "That way I can have a true feeling for how it's doing."

So far, the results have been "great."

Posted: 10/02/05 5:46AM Read Article

CHARLESTON, South Carolina -- A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors.

The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90 percent accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences.

That compares with polygraphs that range from 80 percent to "no better than chance" at finding the truth, George said.

Posted: 09/29/05 6:05AM Read Article

That is one of the conclusions of a Southampton University project scoping out the feasibility of microgrids for power generation and distribution.

Microgrids are small community networks that supply electricity and heat.

Posted: 09/26/05 7:08 AM Read Article

Room Temperature Plasma

A good low-temperature plasma source must be able to work at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Moreover, it should be hand-held and must not "arc" and heat up while operating. The new device developed by Laroussi and Lu consists of two electrodes, each made of a thin copper ring attached to the surface of a glass disk: the disk is about 2.5 centimetres across and has a small hole at its centre. These electrodes are then inserted into a dielectric tube and are separated by a gap that can be varied between 0.5 and 1 centimeter.

When helium gas is injected into the tube and short (less than one microsecond) high-voltage pulses are applied to the electrodes, a discharge is ignited in the gap between the electrodes. This produces a plasma plume that is ejected through the hole in the outer electrode. The plume can be up to 5 centimetres long, with the length depending on the flow rate of the helium and the size of the voltage pulses. The plume remains at room temperature and can be touched by bare hands.

Posted: 09/23/05 6:09AM Read Article

Smaller than a DVD player - small enough to sit comfortably under the hood of any truck or car - it could be big enough to solve the world's greenhouse gas emission problems, at least for the near future. In fact, it could make the Kyoto protocol obsolete. Basically, the H2N-Gen contains a small reservoir of distilled water and other chemicals such as potassium hydroxide. A current is run from the car battery through the liquid. This process of electrolysis creates hydrogen and oxygen gases which are then fed into the engine's intake manifold where they mix with the gasoline vapours.

Posted: 09/23/05 6:08AM Read Article

Secrecy Power Sinks Patent Case 

When New England inventor Philip French had his epiphany 15 years ago, he didn't dream it would lead to an invention that would be pressed into service in a top-secret government project, or spawn an epic court battle over the limits of executive power. He was just admiring a tennis ball.

The device is interesting on its own, but the broader legal legacy of the invention may be more important. In a little-noticed opinion this month, a federal appeals court ruled against the Crater Coupler patent holders and upheld a sweeping interpretation of the controversial "state secrets privilege" -- an executive power handed down from the English throne under common law that lets the government effectively kill civil lawsuits deemed a threat to national security, even if the state is not a party to the suit.

Posted: 09/21/05 7:15AM Read Article

Are you curious about the sound of pi? What sort of tune is the Dow Jones Industrial Average singing today? How does redwood DNA translate into an environmental symphony?

Music professor Jonathan N. Middleton and a team of students from the mathematics and computer science departments at Eastern Washington University have created a computer program and Web site that allows you to find out. It's available at http://musicalgorithms.ewu.edu/.

In essence, the interactive program uses various algorithms to convert sequences of numbers into sounds—musical notes of varying pitch and duration. A visitor to the Web site simply follows the step-by-step directions, making decisions along the way that affect what's heard in the end. Numbers go in, music comes out.

Posted: 09/20/05 7:49AM Read Article

IT MIGHT not knock Coldplay or Kanye West off the top of charts, but physicists who say they have cracked the riddle of "singing" sand dunes are compiling a CD of sand music. The team say their new theory allows them to predict the notes that different dunes will make.

Posted: 09/18/05 5:31 AM Read Article

The tendency for certain floating things to clump under the action of surface tension---things such as Cheerios cereal bits in your breakfast bowl, bubbles in a glass of beer, pepper flakes on water, even strands of hair up against a washbasin---has important potential engineering implications, such as for the design of self-assembling circuits and devices.

[These folks might want to read up on The Bjerknes Effect:
http://www.svpvril.com/bjerknes.html ]

Posted: 09/17/05 6:50AM Read Article

Sounds from typing on computer keyboards are distinctive enough to be decoded, allowing security breaches caused by "acoustic snooping," researchers say.

Researchers at the University of California say they were able to feed sound recordings of typing on keyboards into a computer and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 per cent of the keyboard characters entered by typists.

Posted: 09/16/05 4:14 AM Read Article

The latest studies suggest one form of elephant grass would make a productive "energy crop" to be burnt in power stations to generate electricity.

Posted: 09/13/05 10:06AM Read Article

Those practising spiritual meditation were more relaxed and better able to withstand pain than people performing secular meditation, a new study finds

GOD can help you relax, according to a study of meditation. People practising spiritual meditation were more relaxed and better able to withstand pain than those performing secular meditation.

Posted: 09/12/05 6:06AM Read Article

The fatty acid DHA and its natural derivative fight Alzheimer's-related damage, study says

Louisiana State University scientists say they have discovered how the fatty acids found in fish oil help protect the human brain from the type of cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's diseas

Posted: 09/12/05 5:33AM Read Article

SCIENTISTS at Edinburgh University have developed a way of moving an object without touching it, in breakthrough research which could be as revolutionary as the discovery of electricity.

The team of researchers has been able to move objects across flat surfaces and even up a slope with nothing more than a light beam.

Posted: 09/09/05 4:20AM Read Article

Physicists at the University of Innsbruck have demonstrated that atom pairing (molecule formation) in Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) using photoassociation is coherent. Coherent pairing of atoms (locking them into a particular quantum relationship) has been observed before using a tuned magnetic condition---a Feshbach resonance---between the atoms. But molecules made that way are only feebly attached. By contrast the process of photoassociation---i.e. using light to fuse two atoms into one molecule---allows more deeply bound molecule states to be established. The trouble is that the same laser light can also be absorbed to dissociate the molecules rather than only perform its associative task. The counter measure used by the Innsbruck researchers (contact Johannes Hecker Denschlag, 43-512-507-6340, johannes.denschlag@uibk.ac.at) is to create a "dark state" in which the light cannot be absorbed.

Posted: 09/09/05 3:59AM Read Article

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have the universe's coldest substance running in circles.

Posted: 09/07/05 4:56AM Read Article

Physicists in the Netherlands have created artificial crystals made of colloidal particles that could be used to explore the behaviour of ordinary ionic crystals. The team discovered a number of new crystal structures with the system, which could also be useful for applications such as "electronic-ink" (Nature 437 235).

Posted: 09/07/05 4:51AM Read Article

A voice synthesiser powered by thought alone could one day enable severely disabled patients to converse more instinctively.

At least, so thinks Philip Kennedy of Georgia, US, who is developing a brain-activated speech system with backing from the US government's National Institute of Health.

The device builds upon evidence that a specific region of the brain, known as Broca's Area, lights up when

Posted: 09/07/05 4:31AM Read Article

Tracker (SCT), the heart of the biggest physics collaboration in the world, left Oxford today for its new home at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, near Geneva.

At CERN, physicists from around the world are assembling the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will send two counter-rotating beams of particles round an underground ring at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light. When the beams are brought into collision, a shower of new particles will be produced reproducing conditions similar to those immediately after the Big Bang. These will be studied at four detectors around the ring. The largest of these detectors is called ATLAS and at its heart lies the SCT tracking the movements of the charged particles produced in the high-energy collision.

Posted: 09/06/05 7:13AM Read Article

What time is it when the clock strikes half past 62?

Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable standard, Greenwich Mean Time.

Posted: 09/05/05 5:56AM Read Article

Dr Hal Puthoff has been conducting serious scientific research at the frontiers of knowledge for over a quarter of a century.

In 1972, he and colleague Russell Targ, while researching lasers at the Stanford Research Institute, were asked by Edgar Mitchell to test the alleged psychic abilities of Uri Geller. Their paper caused something of a storm when it was published in the science journal Nature. The paper and relevant articles are linked to the bottom of this page.

Posted: 09/04/05 2:59AM Read Article

ESP experiments may be unusual, but the method is rigorous even if the results are varied, says Oli Usher

The lights dim. The relaxing sounds of waves crashing on a beach give way to silence. Then the soft porn appears on the screen in front of me. This is not a re-enactment of the fantasies of a teenage boy. Rather, it is a demonstration of serious research into the telepathic transmission of emotions going on at what may well be Britain's oddest lab: the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU) at the University of Edinburgh.

Posted: 09/02/05 6:40 AM Read Article

A study by Stanford University scientists Brian Knutson and Camelia Kuhnen highlighted two specific areas of the brain: the dopamine producing nucleus accumbens, which pumps when pleasure is on the horizon, and the anterior insula, which becomes active when a person gets anxious.

Posted: 09/02/05 6:34 AM Read Article

Particles that exist only fleetingly help make everyday matter magnetic

IN THE world of particle physics, there is no such thing as nothing. Particles of matter, and their anti-matter counterparts, are forever flitting in and out of existence. Theorists have predicted that the presence of such transient visitors has little effect on everyday life. However, a group of experimental physicists has just shown this view to be mistaken.

Posted: 09/02/05 6:27 AM Read Article

Results showed that the microbes in about a half a liter of rumen fluid – fermented, liquefied feed extracted from the rumen, the largest chamber of a cow's stomach – produced about 600 millivolts of electricity. That's about half the voltage needed to run one rechargeable AA-sized battery, said Ann Christy, a study co-author and an associate professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State University.

Posted: 09/01/05 6:36 AM Read Article

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.

Posted: 08/31/05 3:10 AM Read Article

SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animal is unique among mammals in its ability to regrow its heart, toes, joints and tail.

The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate.

Posted: 08/31/05 3:09 AM Read Article

Hydrogen (indirectly) from Light

Researchers shed more light on conversion of water to hydrogen gas
 
Chemists are several steps closer to teasing hydrogen fuel from water using man-made molecular devices that collect electrons and use them to split hydrogen from oxygen.

Electrons are negatively charged particles that allow atoms to react and form bonds. Karen Brewer, professor of chemistry, announced at last August's ACS meeting that her group was able to use light to initiate electron collection and deliver the electrons to the catalyst site where they can be used to reduce water to hydrogen. "Light energy is converted to chemical energy," Brewer said.

Posted: 08/30/05 2:55 AM Read Article

A tiny robot called the "Bat-Bot" can use echolocation just like flesh-and-blood bats to distinguish one type of plant from another -- something most of us couldn't do with a guidebook and magnifying glass.

Although Bat-Bot doesn't fly, it's a major step forward in using sonar or sound waves in the air, and an important development for autonomous or self-navigating robots.

Posted: 08/29/05 6:22 AM Read Article

Mind and Machines

Gender matters as well. Men tend to get results that match their intent, although the degree of the effect is often small. Women tend to get a bigger effect, but not necessarily the one they intend. For example, they might intend to direct balls in the random cascade machine to fall to the left, but they fall to the right instead. Results are also greater if a male and female work together, but same-sex pairs produce no significant results.   Pairs of the opposite sex who are romantically involved produce the best results -- often seven times greater than when the same individuals are tested alone. Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist and the lab's manager, said the results in such cases often reflect the two gender styles. The effects are bigger, in keeping with what the female alone would tend to produce, but more on target, in keeping with what the male alone would produce.

Posted: 08/27/05 7:10 AM Read Article

"Suppose we scan someone's brain and reinstate the resulting 'mind file' into a suitable computing medium," asks Raymond Kurzweil. "Will the entity that emerges from such an operation be conscious?" Asking that question is a good way to start an argument, which is exactly what we intend to do right here.

Posted: 08/27/05 6:40 AM Read Article

Fluoridation going down?

Eleven EPA employee unions representing over 7000 environmental and
public health professionals of the Civil Service have called for a
moratorium on drinking water fluoridation programs across the country,
and have asked EPA management to recognize fluoride as posing a serious
risk of causing cancer in people. The unions acted following
revelations of an apparent cover-up of evidence from Harvard School of
Dental Medicine linking fluoridation with elevated risk of a fatal bone
cancer in young boys.

Posted: 08/26/05 4:52 AM Read Article

The development and verification of automotive Stirling engine (ASE) component and system technology is described as it evolved through two experimental engine designs: the Mod I and the Mod II.

Engine operation and performance and endurance test results for the Mod I are summarized. Mod II engine and component development progress is traced from the original design through hardware development, laboratory test, and vehicle installation. More than 21,000 hr. of testing were accomplished, including 4800 hr. with vehicles that were driven more than 59,000 miles. Mod II engine dynamometer tests demonstrated that the engine system configuration had accomplished its performance goals for power (60 kW) and efficiency (38.5%) to within a few percent. Tests with the Mod II engine installed in a delivery van demonstrated combined metro-highway fuel economy improvements consistent with engine performance goals and the potential for low emission levels. A modified version of the Mod II has been identified as a manufacturable design for an ASE.

Posted: 08/25/05 6:09 AM Read Article

It seems that placebos have a real physical, not imagined, effect – activating the production of chemicals in the brain that relieve pain, a new study suggests.

Placebos are treatments that use substances which have no active ingredient. But if people are told that what they are being given contains an active painkiller, for example, they often feel less pain – an effect that has normally been considered psychological.

Recent studies, though, suggest otherwise. For example, when a placebo was secretly mixed with a drug that blocks endorphins – the body’s natural painkillers – there was no placebo effect, showing that endorphins are involved in the placebo painkiller process (New Scientist print edition, 26 May 2001, p 34).

Posted 08/24/05 5:48 AM Read Article

Westerners and Easterners see the world differently

Chinese and American people see the world differently – literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.

“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,” he says.

Posted 08/24/05 5:50 AM Read Article

Posted: 08/23/05 1:13 AM Read Article

However in a formal treatment by Einstein the SR [Special Relativity] formalism and later the GR [General Relativity] formalism is seen to arise from three fundamental assumptions:

(1) The laws of physics have the same form in all inertial reference frames.

(2) Light propagates through empty space with a definite speed c independent of the speed of the source or observer.

(3) In the limit of low speeds the new formalism should agree with Newtonian gravity.

We shall see in later sections there is strong evidence that all three of these assumptions are in fact wrong. . . .

But why had all these discoveries [of absolute motion] not emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century when all the clues and theoretical insights had begun to emerge? The explanation is clear in the history books. In response to Michelson's bungled analysis and building upon the many theoretical insights by Fitzgerald, Lorentz, Larmor and others the Einsteins [Albert and his wife Mileva Maric-Einstein] usurped and formalised the work of all these physicists by asserting that absolute motion was without meaning and consequently not observable. The formalism introduced the geometrical spacetime construct which amounted to a truly bizarre reinterpretation of the relativistic effects that Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Larmor had introduced. Eventually the Einstein interpretation came to be accepted over the more physical interpretation that the effects on clocks and rods were real physical effects caused by absolute motion. Indeed in an even more bizarre turn of events it became accepted within physics, as a direct consequence of the Einstein postulates, that the relativistic effects were incompatible with absolute motion. Within a decade or so of the introduction of the Einstein re-interpretation absolute motion had become a banned concept in physics, and still is to this day. By the time Miller's extraordinary interferometer experiments began to produce such dazzling evidence of absolute motion effects the prevailing belief in physics was that absolute motion was mutually exclusive to the various experimentally confirmed relativistic effects. So Miller had to be proved wrong.

— Reginald T. Cahill, "Process Physics: From Information Theory to Quantum Space and Matter"

Posted: 08/22/05 5:54 AM Read Article

Posted: 08/20/05 4:19 AM Read Article

Scientists at the University of Aberdeen have made a major breakthrough towards the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity. Results from studies of a crystal structure of a new chemical compound containing copper and ruthenium have provided valuable insight into the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity. The new results have shown for the first time that the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity (when there is no resistance to the flow of electrical current) is actually coupled to the crystal lattice.

Posted: 08/19/05 5:11 AM Read Article

Physical theories and explanations of paranormal phenomena predate the more formal attempts to render the study of such phenomena a legitimate subject for science. The first formal attempt to study paranormal (psi) phenomena within a scientific framework came in the late nineteenth century as a response to the popular movement in 'modern spiritualism.' After 1930, the remnants of this Spartan scientific movement developed into the science of parapsychology, largely through the experimental efforts of J.B. Rhine and his associates.

Posted: 08/18/05 5:52 AM Read Article

16 August 2005

A physicist in the US has proposed a new way of quantifying the scientific output of individual scientists. Jorge Hirsch of the University of California at San Diego says that the "h-index" - which is derived from the number of times that papers by the scientist are cited - gives an estimate of the "importance, significance and broad impact of a scientist's cumulative contributions." According to Hirsch the h-index "should provide a useful yardstick to compare different individuals" when recruiting new staff, deciding promotions and awarding grants (physics/0508025).

Posted: 08/17/05 2:28 AM Read Article

Study Shows Genetics Influences Choices in Friends, Mates

Aug. 10, 2005 — The reason our friends seem a bit kooky, and our mates may seem strange compared to ourselves, is that opposites attract. Right?

Nope. A large body of research suggests that we pick our friends, as well as our mates, because underneath it all they are very much like us.

Posted: 08/16/05 6:37 AM Read Article

What time is it when the clock strikes half past 62?

Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable standard, Greenwich Mean Time.

Posted: 08/16/05 6:08 AM Read Article

Urine-powered battery developed

Physicists in Singapore have succeeded in creating the first paper battery that generates electricity from urine. This new battery will be the perfect power source for cheap, disposable healthcare test-kits for diseases such as diabetes. This research is published today in the Institute of Physics’ Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Posted: 08/15/05 2:40 PM Read Article

Satanic Science?

Research on living organisms ( mice and ground hogs) revealed that waves from 2 meters to 60 centimeters in length caused hemorrhage of lungs, whereas waves shorter than two meters destroyed brain cells.

Posted: 08/14/05 6:54 AM Read Article

How do you tell just how smart your robot is? Give it a universal IQ test, researchers suggest.

Traditional measures of human intelligence would often be inappropriate for systems that have senses, environments, and cognitive capacities very different from our own.

So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano, have drafted an idea for an alternative test which will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural-language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions.

Posted: 08/13/05 5:02 AM Read Article

ROSEMEAD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 9, 2005--Edison International (NYSE:EIX) subsidiary Southern California Edison (SCE), the nation's leading purchaser of renewable energy, and Stirling Energy Systems today announced an agreement that could result in construction of a massive, 4,500-acre solar generating station in Southern California. When completed, the proposed power station would be the world's largest solar facility, capable of producing more electricity than all other U.S. solar projects combined.

The 20-year power purchase agreement signed today, which is subject to California Public Utilities Commission approval, calls for development of a 500-megawatt (MW) solar project 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles using innovative Stirling dish technology. The agreement includes an option to expand the project to 850 MW. Initially, Stirling would build a one-MW test facility using 40 of the company's 37-foot-diameter dish assemblies. Subsequently, a 20,000-dish array would be constructed near Victorville, Calif., during a four-year period.

Posted: 08/12/05 4:25AM Read Article

ESA -- Thanks to measurements by ESA’s Cluster mission, a team of European scientists have identified ‘micro’-vortices in Earth’s magnetosphere.

Such small-scale vortex turbulence, whose existence was predicted through mathematical models, has not been observed before in space. The results are not only relevant for space physics, but also for other applications like research on nuclear fusion.

Posted on: 08/11/2005 6:20 AM Read Article

Universal Mind Reading Machine

Brain scanning methods are in use to image the pattern of brain activities that can show what the brain was looking at or focusing at.

Classified experiments are on to develop an universal mind reading machine. The specification of the process is clear while the actual making of the computer model is the most complex task human civilization will ever challenge to decipher.
Posted on: 8/10/05 4:29 AM Read Article

Superlens breaks optical barrier

Physicists have built a lens that can image nano-scale objects using visible light

One of the best known properties of light is that it diffracts, bending or spreading around objects that lie in its path. A familiar example is when a collimated beam of light passes through a small aperture in an opaque barrier. If the aperture is large, the light emerges as a beam with the same radius as that of the aperture. But if the size of the aperture is similar to the wavelength of the incident light, the emerging light flares out from the aperture and forms a diffraction pattern whereby the intensity of the transmitted light has a broad central peak.
Posted on: 8/10/05 4:14:00 AM - Read Article