Sunil Reddy M

Five Reasons Why Green Tech Has Such a Tough Time In America

The U.S. has long been a leader in green technologies. It has also long been a leader in fumbling that lead. Look at the historical record:

• Charles Brush built what is considered the first automatic wind turbine for generating electricity. The turbine, built in 1888 in Ohio, had a 50-foot diameter and 144 blades. The industry has since trimmed turbines down to three blades. It has also gone overseas. While the U.S. has more installed wind capacity than anyone else, the only top U.S. wind manufacturer remains General Electric: they got into the business by buying the wind division of disgraced, defunct Enron. One of the most promising U.S. startups is Nordic Windpower, located in Berkeley by way of Sweden. Read the rest of this entry »

Startup Aims to Bring Useless Farmland Back to Life

The company is developing crops that tolerate salty soils.

Around the world, a billion acres of agricultural land lay abandoned. In the United States, 15 million acres of cropland falls under this category. Decades of repeated irrigation and declining water quality have made much of this once-productive land too salty to support plant growth. Among the strategies to put this land back to use is to develop crops that can tolerate high-salinity soils. Read the rest of this entry »

The German Solar Experiment

The government sets a premium price on solar and other alternative power sources. The policy offers lessons in ways to encourage the use of renewable energy. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar’s Great Leap Forward

Suntech CEO Zhengrong Shi made China a powerhouse in photovoltaic technology–and became a billionaire in the process. His next ambition: to make solar power as cheap as conventional electricity.

To see the future of solar power, take an hour-long train ride inland from Shanghai and then a horn-blaring cab trek through the smog of Wuxi, a fast-growing Chinese city of five million. After winding through an industrial park, you will arrive at the front door of Suntech Power, a company that in the few years since its founding has become the world’s largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar panels. Read the rest of this entry »

A Simpler Route to Plastic Solar Cells

A new method will reduce the cost and complexity of manufacturing.

A simplified process for printing polymer solar cells could further reduce the costs of making the plastic photovoltaics. The method, which has been demonstrated on a large-area, roll-to-roll printing system, eliminates steps in the manufacturing process. If it can be applied to a wide range of polymer materials, it could lead to a fast and cheap way to make plastic solar cells for such applications as portable electronics, photovoltaics integrated into building materials, and smart fabrics. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar panels are cheap enough to become a major component of green energy

The United States has supported research into photovoltaics for almost 40 years, recently with a 30 percent investment tax credit. Japan instituted incentives in the 1990s, when photovoltaics cost at least five times as much as residential electricity. In the new millennium, Germany instituted incentives an order of magnitude larger. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams

AM I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too. Read the rest of this entry »

New Quantum Theory Separates Gravitational and Inertial Mass

Why acupuncture aids spinal recovery

Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it’s not due to improvements in their energy flow or “chi”. Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation.

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell

LATE at night on a sultry evening, I watch intently as the predator senses its prey, gathers itself, and strikes. It could be a polecat, or even a mantis – but in fact it’s a microbe. The microscopic world of the single, living cell mirrors our own in so many ways: cells are essentially autonomous, sentient and ingenious. In the lives of single cells we can perceive the roots of our own intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

Light-Trapping Nanoparticles boost solar power’s prospects

In 1995, finishing her undergraduate degree in physics, Kylie Catchpole decided to take a risk on a field that was nearly moribund: photovoltaics. “There was a sense that I might have difficulty ever being employed,” she recalls. But her gamble paid off. In 2006 Catchpole, then a postdoc, discovered something that opened the door to making thin-film solar cells significantly more efficient at converting light into electricity. It’s an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Concrete: Storing carbon dioxide in cement

Making cement for concrete involves heating pulverized limestone, clay, and sand to 1,450 °C with a fuel such as coal or natural gas. The process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: making one metric ton of commonly used Portland cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of it. The 2.8 billion metric tons of cement produced worldwide in 2009 contributed about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, is trying to eliminate those emissions with a cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide than is released during its manufacture. It locks away as much as 100 kilograms of the greenhouse gas per ton. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar Fuel

Designing the perfect renewable fuel.

When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass–corn or switchgrass or algae? “What we wanted to know,” Afeyan says, “is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?” Read the rest of this entry »

New Life for Old Tires

The process involves freezing old rubber and shattering it into small particles–resulting in new, low-cost materials.

Of the nearly 300 million tires discarded in the United States each year, more than half end up either as landfill or are burned for fuel in cement kilns and in other industries.

Lehigh Technologies of Tucker, GA, has developed a process for rejuvenating discarded rubber that could open up new recycling opportunities. If the company’s technology catches on, it could carve out a billion-dollar market for high-performance recycled rubber. Read the rest of this entry »

A mobile-based agro advisory sys­tem for potato farmers

Bhushan G. Jagyasi, 30, has developed mKRISHI, a mobile-based agro advisory sys­tem for potato farmers.

Bhushan G. Jagyasi, a scientist with the Tata Consultancy Services Innovation Labs in Mumbai, has been engaged in a rich array of research areas in the fields of distributed detection, signal process­ing, wireless sensor networks, and mobile phone-based sensor networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms

A vast series of earth mounds on the eastern coast of South America may be living landscape fossils of a forgotten civilization’s agriculture.

People raised the mounds between 1,000 and 700 years ago in order to create cropland in terrain that is flooded for half the year, and parched for the other half. New insect ecosystems formed on the mounds, further enriching the soils and keeping them fertile for centuries, long after their human stewards had vanished. This lost agricultural system could be a model for modern farmers, according to a new study. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar-Powered Desalination

Saudi Arabia’s newest purification plant will use state-of-the-art solar technology.

Saudi Arabia meets much of its drinking water needs by removing salt and other minerals from seawater. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine. Saudi Arabia’s national research agency, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), is building what will be the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji. Read the rest of this entry »

Accessing Medical Images on Mobiles

Sriram Kannan, has created a created a system for accessing medical images on mobile phones.

Globally, every five seconds someone goes blind from diabetic retinopathy, infant retinopathy of prematurity, eye can­cer and other diseases. The majority of these are preventable, if screened regu­larly. Read the rest of this entry »

How your brain remembers the future

IT’S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. “The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again,” says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK. Read the rest of this entry »

Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens

The first continuous monitoring system for glaucoma hits the European market.

Glaucoma is the second most common cause of blindness, and without constant vigilance it can prove a very difficult disease to manage. But a Swiss biotech company has developed a monitoring system that allows physicians to keep track of their patients’ symptoms over 24 hours. Sensimed’s “Triggerfish” system consists of a contact lens with embedded sensors that can pick up subtle physical changes in a patient’s eye, and then wirelessly transmit that data to a receiver worn around his neck. Read the rest of this entry »

A Solution to Help Farmers

Rikin B. Gandhi, 28, has developed a solution to help farmers adopt better farmer practices through locally produced videos of sustainable agriculture techniques.

Farmers in rural India now have something to smile about, courtesy Rikin Gandhi. An aeronautical and astronautical engineer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., Gandhi is the founder of Digital Green which disseminates targeted agricultural information to farmers at a reasonable cost using participatory video and mediated instruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Remote controlled system for power tillers

Remote Power For the Fields

A bachelor in electronics and communication from Visveswaraiah Technological University, Karnataka, Prajwal Kumar specializes in robotics and automation. He has recently developed a remote controlled system for power tiller. Farmers have to walk along with the power tiller to control its direction. However, now the electronics remote control device can enable the farmers to operate his power tiller without even getting into the field. It ain’t just this. His other inventions include tree-climbing and harvesting robots, paddy field weeding machine, industrial inspections robots, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Read the rest of this entry »

Prostate Cancer Results in 15 minutes

In an office park in Woburn, MA, a volunteer presents his fingertip for a quick finger stick. A phlebotomist wicks up the small drop of blood with a specially made square of plastic, then snaps the plastic into a credit-card sized microfluidics cartridge and feeds it into a special reader. Fifteen minutes later, the device spits out the volunteer’s prostate specific antigen (PSA) level, a protein used to monitor the return of prostate cancer after treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Federal funds could help 15 gigawatts of solar projects

A massive $1.37 billion loan guarantee that the U.S. Department of Energy granted to Brightsource Energy last week could help clear the way for over 15 gigawatts of solar projects in California, and could be the key to launching a new solar thermal industry in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Wave Energy Scales Up: Tidal projects will generate 1.2 GW

Scotland hopes to ride the next renewable energy wave. Site leases for several big wave and tidal power projects were awarded last week by the U.K. government, concluding a two-year bidding process that elicited strong interest from major utilities and energy entrepreneurs. The awards open the way for six wave energy projects and four tidal energy systems around Scotland’s Orkney Islands that could collectively generate up to 1.2 gigawatts, exceeding the U.K.’s 700-megawatt target for the bidding round. This is an immense scale for an industry that so far has installed only pilot projects involving a handful of small devices. Read the rest of this entry »

The Time-Reversed Laser to See the Light

There’s no question that lasers are cool devices. They work because in certain materials, the passage of a photon past an atom can trigger the release of another photon which goes on to release more photons and so on. This chain reaction generates an exponential increase in the number of photons, a key characteristic of lasing materials. Read the rest of this entry »

Laser Security for the Internet

Scientist Invents a Digital Security Tool Good Enough for the CIA – And for You

A British computer hacker equipped with a “Dummies” guide recently tapped into the Pentagon. As hackers get smarter, computers get more powerful and national security is put at risk. The same goes for your own personal and financial information transmitted by phone, on the Internet or through bank machines. Read the rest of this entry »

Mom and dad, stop stifling me – it’s damaging my brain

Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids’ freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.

Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders – which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex.

To investigate the link, Kosuke Narita of Gunma University, Japan, scanned the brains of 50 people in their 20s and asked them to fill out a survey about their relationship with their parents during their first 16 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

Read the rest of this entry »

How the human brain works

Super Velcro : Reusable Superglue

A novel adhesive is extremely strong, and its stickiness is reversible.

General Motors researchers have made an extremely strong adhesive that comes apart when heated. The adhesive is 10 times stickier than Velcro and the reusable gecko-inspired glues that many research groups have been trying to perfect.

The polymers in the glue bond to each other within minutes when they are initially heated. Thus, when two pieces of the adhesive materials are heated, they stick together strongly. Once stuck, it takes a lot of force to peel the polymers away from each other, but they come apart easily when heated again. The researchers were able to attach and pull apart the polymers twice before losing one-third of the adhesive strength, according to a Langmuir paper published online. Read the rest of this entry »

Gasifying Biomass with Sunlight

A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production.

Sundrop Fuels, a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims. Read the rest of this entry »

A 50-Watt Cellular Network

Solar-powered base stations can link up remote rural areas.

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloom Reveals New Fuel Cells

Its 100-kilowatt modules have been sold to Google, eBay, and Walmart.

The up-to-now secretive startup Bloom Energy took the wraps off its technology this week, unveiling a fuel-cell system that the company claims can run on a variety of fuels and pay for itself in three to five years via lower energy bills. Read the rest of this entry »

Biofuels from Saltwater Crops

A research project will make jet fuel without wasting fresh water or farmland.

A project in the Middle East aims to make jet fuel from saltwater-tolerant crops grown in the desert. Researchers at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates are starting a two-square-kilometer demonstration farm that will combine fish and shrimp farming with the cultivation of mangrove trees and salicornia, a plant with oil-rich seeds that can be converted into fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation

Cheaper Solar, Without Better Cells

Costs could drop 30 percent with other improvements.

Quantum World

If successful scientific theories can be thought of as cures for stubborn problems, quantum physics was the wonder drug of the 20^th century. It successfully explained phenomena such as radioactivity and antimatter, and no other theory can match its description of how light and particles behave on small scales.

But it can also be mind-bending. Quantum objects can exist in multiple states and places at the same time, requiring a mastery of statistics to describe them. Rife with uncertainty and riddled with paradoxes, the theory has been criticised for casting doubt on the notion of an objective reality – a concept many physicists, including Albert Einstein, have found hard to swallow. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving the ‘unconscious’ a voice

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work. Read the rest of this entry »

The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird

We are confronted by many mysteries, from the nature of dark matter and the origin of the universe to the quest for a theory of everything. These are all puzzles on the grand scale, but you can observe another enduring mystery of the physical world – equally perplexing, if not quite so grand – from the comfort of your kitchen. Simply fill a tall glass with chilled water, throw in an ice cube and leave it to stand.

The fact that the ice cube floats is the first oddity. And the mystery deepens if you take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the water at various depths. At the top, near the ice cube, you’ll find it to be around 0 °C, but at the bottom it should be about 4 °C. That’s because water is denser at 4°C than it is at any other temperature – another strange trait that sets it apart from other liquids. Read the rest of this entry »

Made-to-Order Heart Cells

Stem cell advance will help drug development.

Last month, Madison, WI-based Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) began shipping heart cells derived from a person’s own stem cells. The cells could be useful to researchers studying everything from the toxicity of new or existing drugs to the electrodynamics of both healthy and diseased cardiac cells.

CDI’s scientists create their heart cells–called iCell Cardiomyocytes–by taking cells from a person’s own blood (or other tissue) and chemically reversing them back to a pluripotent state. This means they are able to grow or can be programmed to grow into any cell in the body.

Watch Video >> Read the rest of this entry »

Media Moves Online

Technology has torn down the walls between different communications media. Magazines produce video clips, while television news stations post written articles online. The technologies that are driving this media convergence are network connections, powerful mobile devices, clever interfaces, and easy-to-use software.

One of the most visible manifestations of the new technology is the rise of “we media,” or citizen journalism, which enables all kinds of people to post anything they want online (see “Mainstream News Taps Into Citizen Journalism“). Several companies, including TypePad, WordPress, and Vox, offer blog platforms that can be used as is or customized with plug-in software to support sophisticated media sites. Sites like YouTube and Blip.tv similarly make it easy to share video content. Read the rest of this entry »

Dow Chemical readies easy-to-install solar roofs

Dow Chemical is moving full speed ahead to develop roof shingles embedded with photovoltaic cells. To facilitate the move, the U.S. Department of Energy has backed Dow’s efforts with a $17.8 million tax credit that will help the company launch an initial market test of the product later this year.

In October 2009, the chemical giant unveiled its product, which can be nailed to a roof like ordinary shingles by roofers without the help of specially trained solar installers or electricians. The solar shingles will cost 30 to 40 percent less than other solar-embedded building materials and 10 percent less than the combined costs of conventional roofing materials and rack-mounted solar panels, according to company officials. Read the rest of this entry »

Will 3-D Make the Jump from Theater to Living Room?

Glasses-free 3-D television is still a long way from the market.

Television manufacturers and content producers started out the year pushing 3-D television hard, hoping to ride the wave of success enjoyed by the 3-D movie Avatar. Though glasses-free 3-D is still some ways away, manufacturers hope to entice consumers with a flurry of products that make the best of the difficulties with bringing 3-D content to the small screen.

Producing a 3-D television that doesn’t require glasses is “impractical for the foreseeable future,” says Peter Fannon, vice president of corporate and government affairs for Panasonic. Read the rest of this entry »

China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans

The machine will use an unfashionable chip design.

It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as “Godson”) family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China’s last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server. Read the rest of this entry »

A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2

A copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners.

When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals. Read the rest of this entry »

Rising Sun: India’s Solar Power Initiatives Are Shining Brighter

Farooq Abdullah, India’s Union minister for new and renewable energy, is a busy man these days. Over the past few months, as the Copenhagen climate summit neared, he has been speaking at seminar after seminar on renewable energy which, most of the time, have been on solar energy. He has also been inaugurating projects, from the launch of a new solar lantern to the commissioning of a solar steam system at a temple kitchen to cook food for 20,000 pilgrims each day. All over India, solar power has found its day in the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

A Pivot Irrigator With a Difference

Developed by a Pune-based engineer, the solar machine saves energy and time while irrigating large stretches of land.

When rains failed all of a sudden last year after having started on a promising note in June, the researchers at the National Research Centre for Onion and Garlic in Rajgurunagar went into a tizzy.

The soy bean crop that had been planted in 4.5 acres of land at the center was at risk of failure. What came to their rescue was a solar-powered pivot irrigator, developed by Pune-based Padmakar Kelkar, an engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by choice. Kelkar’s innovation saved the entire soy bean crop that was almost on the verge of getting wiped out. Read the rest of this entry »

Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Build Strong Bones

Don’t wait for that dreaded bone-weakening disease to strike. The good news: you can reverse bone losses with diet, exercise and medication

I woke up one morning with a nagging pain in my upper back. When a few weeks of rubbing balm didn’t help, I consulted an orthopaedic doctor.

He learnt after asking me a few questions—and so did I—that I had all along been getting too little calcium in my diet. A bone mineral density test soon afterwards shocked me: I had osteopenia, or early-stage osteoporosis that can lead to full blown osteoporosis if left untreated. I’d always believed osteoporosis—a disease where bones weaken and become porous and brittle—afflicted only the elderly. Read the rest of this entry »

Drowned cities: Myths and secrets of the deep

Deep Secrets

The idea that great cities, rich in forgotten knowledge and treasure, lie hidden beneath the sea holds immense appeal. Scarcely a year goes by without someone claiming to have found Atlantis. But what’s really out there under the waves?

Jo Marchant looks at some of the sunken towns and cities discovered worldwide, and separates the facts from the myths. Read the rest of this entry »

Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers Are Both Awesome and Hilarious

Can one species be transmuted into another just by swapping their blood? What are those funny little things swimming in my water? Did this Einstein guy get his math right?

Those are a few of the questions addressed in a trove of history-making papers published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and released in their entirety to celebrate the 350th birthday of the world’s oldest scientific body. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory

Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories, suggest Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up. Read the rest of this entry »

Penguins Evolving Faster Than Thought

The evolutionary march of the penguins happened in double time, according to new genetic calculations.

A study of DNA from ancient and modern Adélie penguins suggests that scientists may have miscalculated the rates at which genetic clocks tick off evolutionary time in other species as well. A team of researchers collected mitochondrial DNA from penguins currently living in rookeries in Antarctica and from bones of penguins that had lived in the same spot as long as 44,000 years ago. Analysis of the DNA reveals that the penguins are evolving on a molecular scale two to six times faster than standard calculations indicated, the team reports in the November Trends in Genetics. Read the rest of this entry »

Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists

On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song. Read the rest of this entry »

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow’s weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals

Umbrella or sunscreen? Flood or drought? The secret of flawless weather forecasting turns out to be surprisingly simple

WE’VE all watched those vast heaps of cotton wool float across the sky. Lofted and shaped by updrafts of warm air, cumulus clouds mesmerise with their constantly changing shape. Some grow ever taller, while others wither and die before our eyes. All bear witness to the ceaseless roiling of the ocean of air we call the atmosphere.

About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of such clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu

Six months ago, swine flu emerged as a massive threat to global health. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but our timeline explains how the origins of the H1N1 pandemic go back more than a century

1889

Prior to 1889, the main flu virus circulating in humans has been from the H1 family. But this year, a new strain of H2 flu emerges in Russia and spreads around the world, killing about 1 million people. Afterwards, H2 replaces H1 in humans. Such replacements seem to be a regular feature of flu pandemics. Read the rest of this entry »

Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic

The decline was rapid. I got my first pair of glasses aged 9, and by my mid-teens could no longer read the title on the cover of New Scientist at arm’s length. With my mum’s eyes just as bad, I always assumed that I’d inherited my short-sightedness from her and that I could do little to stop my vision from becoming a little blurrier each year.

Around the same time, however, rates of short-sightedness, or myopia, were rising to epidemic proportions around the world. Today, in some of the worst-affected countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, around 80 per cent of young adults are myopic, compared to only 25 per cent a few decades back. Read the rest of this entry »

Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning

Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has now recorded some more down-to-Earth signals. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial lightning storms.

The flashes occurred just before, during and immediately after lightning strikes, as tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network. Read the rest of this entry »

Serendipity: Out of the Blue Islands Seen From Space

Islands are some of the most beautiful, peaceful, violent, desolate and unique places on Earth. While experiencing a tropical island from its sandy beaches, or a volcanic island from its towering peaks is wonderful, experiencing them from above can be inspiring as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about

WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.

In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing – and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering. Read the rest of this entry »

Instant Expert: Mental Health

When the heart breaks down, it beats erratically or not at all. A bone can chip or snap. But when the complex network of neurons in our brain malfunctions, the result can be a near-endless variety and combinations of mental illnesses.

It’s normal to sometimes be sad, happy, anxious, confused, forgetful or fearful, but when a person’s emotions, thoughts or behaviour frequently trouble them, or disrupt their lives, they may be suffering from mental illness. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 450 million people worldwide are affected by mental, neurological or behavioural problems at any time. Read the rest of this entry »

Forecasting Financial Crashes: The Ultimate Experiment Begins

If a new technique for predicting crashes really works, a bold new experiment will measure how well.

Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved

Genetic analysis of the now-extinct Falkland Islands Wolf has answered a biological riddle that caught the attention of a young Charles Darwin, and helped shape his understanding of evolution.

During his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin observed that the wolves — like his now-famous finches — varied widely in size between different islands, suggesting that the traits of species were not immutable, but changed over time in response to their environments. Read the rest of this entry »

An App so You’ll Never Forget

A language-learning application that’s already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company’s algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis. Read the rest of this entry »

Birds Use Light, Not Magnetic Field, to Migrate

A cell in the eye may be worth two in the beak, at least when it comes to a migratory bird’s magnetic compass. In European robins, a visual center in the brain and light-sensing cells in the eye — not magnetic sensing cells in the beak — allow the songbirds to sense which direction is north and migrate correctly, a new study finds. The study, appearing Oct. 29 in Nature, may improve conservation efforts for migratory birds. Read the rest of this entry »

Butterflies Use Antenna GPS to Guide Migration

Scientists have finally located the 24-hour clock that guides the migration of monarch butterflies. Instead of being in the brain where most people expected, it turns out the circadian clock is located in the butterflies’ antennae.

Every fall, monarchs make an impressive 2,000-mile trek south, using the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration. Now, researchers have located this special GPS system, but it’s not what everyone expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence Explained

Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability.

A series of black-and-white snapshots is splayed across the screen, each capturing a thin slice of my brain. The gray-scale pictures would look familiar to anyone who has seen a brain scan, but these images are different. Andrew Frew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses a cursor to select a small square. Thin strands like spaghetti appear, representing the thousands of neural fibers passing through it. A few clicks of the cursor and Frew refines the tract of fibers pictured on the screen, highlighting first my optic nerve, then the fibers passing through a part of the brain that’s crucial for language, then the bundles of motor and sensory nerves that head down to the brain stem. Read the rest of this entry »

Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health

A Seattle company is developing rapid tests for thousands of proteins.

With $30 million in recent financing, a Seattle-based company has launched operations to develop and market inexpensive tests for thousands of blood proteins, offering a comprehensive picture of the health of all the body’s organs. The Seattle startup, called Integrated Diagnostics, is developing cheap diagnostics that work in minutes and could be used to detect diseases at early, more treatable stages. The company’s technology has been in development for the past nine years in labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The company hopes to provide tests for early diagnosis of neurological disorders and other diseases. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants Know Their Relatives — And Like Them!

Unlike many human brothers and sisters, plant siblings appear to do their best to get along, sharing resources and avoiding competition.

In a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings, scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings — other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant — using chemical cues given off during root growth. And it turns out mustard plants won’t compete with their brethren the way they will with strangers: Instead of rapidly growing roots to suck up as much water and minerals as possible, plants who sensed nearby siblings developed a shallower root system and more intertwined leaves. Read the rest of this entry »

Future of shopping

Look at those production values and the sound design as one of the majors horns in.

Source: Posted by Bruce Sterling for Wired.

Indian Teen Pays it Forward by Teaching His Peers

What did you do with your free time when you were sixteen? I didn’t have access to the World Wide Web yet (that was about two years away), but that was probably when I was playing NES and enjoying my hand-me-down Toyota Corolla. (I just checked to be sure, and even Doom was a couple years away. Now I feel old.) Sixteen-year-old Americans now, of course, have higher-resolution ways of wasting time, even as their “free” time has shrunk somewhat over the past few decades. But I bet when they’ve got nothing to do, a lot of them are still playing videogames, enjoying the new-found freedom of driving and hanging out with friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Wires Inserted Into Human Brain Reveal Speech Surprise

A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.

Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.

“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »

Commercializing Garbage to Ethanol

Startup Coskata has opened a “semi-commercial” ethanol plant to demonstrate its technology.

A startup that is developing a process to convert a wide range of materials, including wood chips and garbage, into ethanol has moved a step closer to commercializing the technology. Today Coskata, located in Warrenville, IL, is unveiling what it calls a “semi-commercial” plant that will be used to demonstrate that its technology can work at a commercial scale. Read the rest of this entry »

Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map

Vast amounts of the clean-burning fossil fuel have been discovered in shale deposits, setting off a gas rush. But how it will affect our energy use is still uncertain.

The first sign that there’s something unusual about the flat black rocks strewn across the shore of Lake Erie comes when Gary Lash smashes two of them together. They break easily and fall into shards that give off the faint odor of hydrocarbons, similar to the smell of kerosene. But for Lash, a geologist and professor at nearby SUNY Fredonia, smashing the rocks is a simple trick designed to catch the attention of a visitor. The black outcroppings that protrude from the nearby bluff onto the narrow beach are what really interest him. Read the rest of this entry »

Electron-beam emitters could save millions of tons of C02 emissions

Electron-beam emitters that are one-hundreth the size and cost of conventional electron emitters could usher in a wide array of new uses for the devices that could dramatically cut the energy use of industrial processes. Advanced Electron Beams (AEB), a Wilmington, MA, startup, has developed a small, low-powered electron emitter that is the size of a microwave oven, compared to the conference-room equipment now needed for electron-beam processes.

“We think AEB is the most cutting-edge industrial-efficiency technology that we’ve seen in the 10 years we’ve been doing clean-tech investing,” says Charles McDermott of RockPort Capital Partners. In August, RockPort and several other venture capital firms announced the investment of $14.2 million in AEB. Read the rest of this entry »

Biofuel from Sewage

Qteros forms a partnership to use sewage as a feedstock for making ethanol.

These days, more and more companies are finding that sewage is a veritable “black gold.” In recent years, sewage sludge has been mined for electricity, fertilizer, fish food, and gasoline. Now two companies have partnered up to turn sewage into ethanol. While others have worked to produce ethanol from municipal solid waste, sewage from wastewater has been a relatively unmined ethanol source. Read the rest of this entry »

The Human Genome in 3-D

New technology reveals how DNA molecules pack themselves inside a cell nucleus.

Unfurled, the human genome would contain approximately six feet of DNA. Amazingly, all of that length is packed into a cell nucleus about three micrometers in diameter–roughly one-third the width of a human hair.

New technology that makes it possible to assess the three-dimensional interactions among different parts of the genome has revealed how these molecules are packed into such a tiny space. The findings could also yield new clues to genome regulation–how specific genes are turned on and off. Read the rest of this entry »

Startup That Builds Biological Parts

Ginkgo BioWorks aims to push synthetic biology to the factory level.

In a warehouse building in Boston, wedged between a cruise-ship drydock and Au Bon Pain’s corporate headquarters, sits Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup that aims to make biological engineering easier than baking bread. Founded by five MIT scientists, the company offers to assemble biological parts–such as strings of specific genes–for industry and academic scientists. Read the rest of this entry »

GE Grabs Gearless Wind Turbines

New direct-drive turbines promise to lower the cost of offshore wind energy.

With a new purchase, GE is betting on an early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain. The acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, has also secured GE a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs–an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it’s more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

A novel gasification process for low-quality coal

The industrial boomtown of Dongguan in southeast China’s Pearl River Delta could soon host one of the country’s most sophisticated power plants, one that uses an unconventional coal-gasification technology to make the dirtiest coal behave like clean-burning natural gas. Its developers, Atlanta-based utility Southern Company and Houston-based engineering firm KBR, announced the licensing deal with Dongguan Power and Chemical Company this month. Read the rest of this entry »

A Web Spider for Everyone

A startup uses PC idle time to crawl Web pages on demand.

As the quantity of information on the Internet continues to grow, so does the question of how to process it all and make it useful. A startup called 80legs, based in Houston, TX, is hoping that an inexpensive, distributed Web crawling service could help startups mine the Web for information without having to build the giant server farms used by major search engines. The company launched this week at DEMO, a conference in San Diego that showcases new companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry.

Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days. Read the rest of this entry »

Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.

“Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” said neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published Wednesday in Neuron. Read the rest of this entry »

An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

After more than fifteen years of planning and more than eight billion dollars in funding, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), science’s groundbreaking effort to unlock the deepest secrets of particle physics, is finally complete. It is truly the grandest experiment of all time — the pinnacle of humanity’s quest for unification. Befitting the pursuit of cosmic grandeur and unity, it is set in a stunning location. Read the rest of this entry »

Schrodinger’s Cat experiment for real

How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things

Gasoline from Vinegar

A process that converts acids from garbage into fuel gets a boost.

A company that has developed a process for converting organic waste and other biomass into gasoline–Terrabon, based in Houston–recently announced a partnership with Waste Management, the giant garbage-collection and -disposal company based in Houston. The partnership could help Terrabon bring its technology to market.

Amid a profusion of new biofuels technologies, this one stands out because it will be relatively easy to scale up for producing millions of gallons of fuel, says James McMillan, the biochemical process R&D group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, who is not connected to the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Catching Fake Meds in a Snapshot

Two-dimensional bar codes could reduce drug counterfeiting in the developing world.

Researchers from New York University have proposed a system for authenticating and tracking drugs distributed in the developing world. The system, called Epothecary, would use cell phone cameras to read two-dimensional bar codes affixed to packages and assigned to distributors and pharmacists. The researchers hope the system can be used to prevent the distribution of counterfeit drugs through legitimate channels.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 10 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit. Some counterfeit meds contain the right ingredients in the right quantities, but others are substandard or even poisonous. Read the rest of this entry »

Augmented Reality: PayPal

PayPal is opening its Platform to Third Party Developers. How will you change the way we pay?

The biggest questions ever asked

New Scientist tackles eight of the deepest challenges faced by science – from reality and consciousness, to free will and death.

1. What is reality?

Can we be sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imaginations, asks Roger Penrose.

WHAT do we understand by “reality”? For those of us who consider ourselves hard-headed realists, there is a kind of common-sense answer: “Reality consists of those things – tables, chairs, trees, houses, planets, animals, people and so on – which are actual things made of matter.” We might tend to include some more abstract-seeming notions such as space and time, and the totality of all such “real” things would be referred to as “the universe“. Read the rest of this entry »

13 more things that don’t make sense

13 Things sent to try us

Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us.  Michael Brooks presents thirteen of the most perplexing. Cracking any one of them could yield profound truths.

Axis of evil

Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern

WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation left over from the big bang? In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil“. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s luck got to do with it? The math of gambling

FIVE years ago, Londoner Ashley Revell sold his house, all his possessions and cashed in his life savings. It raised £76,840. He flew to Las Vegas, headed to the roulette table and put it all on red.

The wheel was spun. The crowd held its breath as the ball slowed, bounced four or five times, and finally settled on number seven. Red seven.

Revell’s bet was a straight gamble: double or nothing. But when Edward Thorp, a mathematics student at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, went to the same casino some 40 years previously, he knew pretty well where the ball was going to land. He walked away with a profit, took it to the racecourse, the basketball court and the stock market, and became a multimillionaire. He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Algorithm Predicts When Species Will Go 404, Not Found

Biologists have figured out the most efficient way to destroy an ecosystem — and it’s based on the Google search algorithm.

Scientists have long known that the extinction of key species in a food web can cause collapse of the entire system, but the vast number of interactions between species makes it difficult to guess which animals and plants are the most important. Now, computational biologists have adapted the Google search algorithm, called PageRank, to the problem of predicting ecological collapse, and they’ve created a startlingly accurate model. Read the rest of this entry »

A Liquid Design for Cheaper Fuel Cells

A platinum-free liquid cathode could cut fuel-cell costs by 40 percent.

Platinum remains the best material for speeding chemical reactions in hydrogen fuel cells, although the scarcity and cost of this element keep fuel cells from becoming more affordable and practical. Most alternative approaches involve simply replacing the platinum in the electrodes. Now a U.K. company called ACAL Energy has overhauled fuel cell design to reduce the amount of platinum used by 80 percent.

In a conventional fuel cell, platinum is embedded in porous carbon electrodes. ACAL’s design replaces this with a solution containing low-cost molybdenum and vanadium as the catalyst. The resulting fuel cell works as well as a conventional one but should cost 40 percent less, the company says. Read the rest of this entry »

Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut Costs

A new strategy could reduce coal plant emissions and cut the cost of solar power.

A project that will add solar power to a coal-fired power plant could reduce the amount of coal required to generate electricity and dramatically cut the cost of solar power.

The approach, announced by Abengoa Solar, based in Lakewood, CO, and Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electrical utility, would make it easier for utilities in sunny states like California to meet impending state renewable-energy requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Astronomers Turn To Omniscopes For Low Cost Observation

Omniscopes promise omnidirectional, omnichromatic astronomy at reasonable cost.

Astronomers want bigger and better telescopes. That’s understandable. But in the world of radio telescopes, there’s a problem looming. Greater sensitivity requires a bigger surface area and the cost for a steerable single-dish telescope grows with area faster than linearly. So really big dishes are just too expensive to build. Read the rest of this entry »

Hammers, Water, Lasers Make Deep Drilling Easier

The process of punching a well hasn’t changed in a century. The search for oil, gas, or water may extend more than 7 miles, but it’s still done with a tricone bit—three grinding cones angled inward and downward, with spinning teeth. This system is effective at crushing and shearing, but every time a bit wears out, engineers have to “trip” the drill: They bring the head to the surface, change it, and send it back down. A lot of drilling time is actually tripping time, which means a project’s cost goes up exponentially with depth. So researchers are developing replacement technologies to reach superheated water for geothermal power or stretch down to previously inaccessible fossil fuel. Here are a few ideas for parts that will be greater than the hole. Read the rest of this entry »

A New Language for Phone Networks

Researchers develop a better way to write applications for peer-to peer cellular networks.

Scientists love the cell phone. Researchers have used the ubiquitous device as a portable polling station, a tracking device, and a sensor. Now, computer scientists want to use mobile phones to exchange data without using the phone’s network, instead of communicating directly with cellular towers, base stations, and the occasional wireless network.

That’s the vision of a group of computer scientists who believe that spreading data virally could open up a whole new manner of applications on peer-to-peer mobile device networks, known more formally as “pocket-switched networks.” Such an ad hoc network–sort of a Sneakernet on steroids–could allow victims of a natural disaster to pass messages from one person to another even if the cell towers are destroyed. In another scenario, visitors to specific locations could have important information forwarded to them via the local folks’ devices. And groups of friends could poll each other on where to eat dinner that night, without using the Internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brilliant Solution: Inventor Creates LED Wrenches

Gone, at last, are the days of bribing your best friend with pizza and beer to hold your flashlight as you tinker (or fumble) with a wrench in the dark recesses of your car. Grab yourself a set of Hi Beam-Light Wrenches and you can use one hand to hold the wrench and the light, leaving your other hand free to hold anything else — including your beer.

San Diego gearhead and inventor Clifford Wright has come up with the brilliant idea of adding LEDs to wrenches, creating a tool that lets you see that damn bolt tucked up behind the starter. It’s one of those simple solutions to a frustrating problem we wish we’d thought of. Read the rest of this entry »