Google invades Space !

Internet boss Google unveiled a new feature to its popular Google Earth application on Wednesday, allowing users to view the night sky above and zoom in on far-away constellations and planets.

The Sky application allows users to view and navigate through 100 million stars in far away galaxies, all depicted in high-resolution images.

The application labels which stars make up the constellations, shows users what they might be able to see from their own backyards with the naked eye or small telescopes and includes images from the Hubble space telescope.

It also displays the phases of the moon, the positions of the planets for now and up to two months in the future, offers virtual tours through different galaxies and details the different stages of a star's life cycle.

"Sky is a very cool new feature for anyone who has ever looked up at the sky and wanted to know more," said Sally Ride, a former astronaut. "I think this is a great tool for satisfying that curiosity."

Carol Christian of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who helped develop the application, said she hoped the new program would encourage more people to learn about space.

"Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available," she said.

"Anyone interested in exploring the wonders of our universe can quickly see where the stunning objects photographed by Hubble actually dwell in the heavens," she added

"Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone's home computer."

The interface and navigation of the new feature are similar to those on the current Google Earth function, which allows users to drag, zoom and search their way around the planet.

To access the new feature, users need to download the latest version of Earth, available on the website from Wednesday.

The application was created by Google engineers stitching together images from sources such as the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Google launched its Earth application in 2005, allowing people to zoom in on satellite images of almost any point around the world. The program has since been downloaded more than 200 million times.

Source : The Sydney Morning Herald

Lucent technologies-Bell Labs Innovations

This is a video about Lucent technologies describing its achievements in the field of Science and technologies

New Development : Bendable Battery

It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources."We would like to scale this up to the point where you can imagine printing batteries like a newspaper. That would be the ultimate," Robert Linhardt a professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI said in a telephone interview.The development is reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike other batteries, Linhardt explained, it is an integrated device, not a combination of pieces. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow.Students at the school in Troy, N.Y., were the inspiration for the work, said Linhardt, whose students were working on methods to dissolve paper and cast it into membranes for use in dialysis machines. Meanwhile, students of Pulickel Ajayan in RPI's materials science department were trying to make carbon nanotube composites using polymers. The two groups got together and realized they could use paper instead of polymers and combine the two projects.Then came Omkaram Nalamasu's students, also at RPI, who said the project—a thin sheet black on one side and white on the other—looked like an electrical device. And over about 18 months, the groups developed the projects, into a battery, a capacitor, which stores electricity and a combination of the two. Ajayan sees potential uses in combination with solar cells, perhaps layers of the paper batteries that could store the electricity generated until it is needed, he said in a telephone interview.Perhaps it could be scaled up and shaped into something like a car door, offering moving electrical storage and power when needed. That might be an expensive proposition, however, cautioned Peter Kofinas, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland."The advantage of a flexible device would be that you could roll it in a film or a sheet. However, carbon nanotubes are very expensive," said Kofinas, who was not involved in the research."So from the commercial standpoint, this would be very expensive if you want to make a large sheet out of this material," he said via e- mail. In addition, he said, "It does not look like it performs better than currently available batteries and supercapacitors in the market."Because of its flexibility, however, it does have potential, Kofinas said.The research was funded by the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research and the National Science Foundation.

Intelligence in Dust?

Scientists have discovered that inorganic material can take on the characteristics of living organisms in space, a development that could transform views of alien life.
An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.

A similar rethinking of prospective alien life is being undertaken by the National Research Council, an advisory body to the US government. It says Nasa should start a search for what it describes as “weird life” - organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth.
The new research, to be published this week in the New Journal of Physics, found nonorganic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA. The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter. It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation.
Professor Greg Morfill, of the Max Planck institute of extra-terrestrial physics, said: “Going by our current narrow definitions of what life is, it qualifies.
“The question now is to see if it can evolve to become intelligent. It’s a little bit like science fiction at the moment. The potential level of complexity we are looking at is of an amoeba or a plant.
“I do not believe that the systems we are talking about are life as we know it. We need to define the criteria for what we think of as life much more clearly.”
It may be that science is starting to study territory already explored by science fiction. The television series The X-Files, for example, has featured life in the form of a silicon-based parasitic spore.
The Max Planck experiments were conducted in zero gravity conditions in Germany and on the International Space Station 200 miles above earth.
The findings have provoked speculation that the helix could be a common structure that underpins all life, organic and nonorganic.

Source : TimesOnline

Low Credit for Kenyan Scientist

A Kenyan scientist claimed he was the discoverer of two fossils raising key questions on human evolution and said locals rarely received the credit they deserve for their finds.

Fredrick Manthi Kyalo displayed his discovery, the well-preserved 1.55 million-year-old top of a skull from a Homo erectus, during a press conference at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi.

"I found this particular specimen the day of my birthday," on August 5 2000, he told reporters.

The discovery revealed by the journal Nature yesterday challenges some widely accepted evolutionary theories by suggesting that Homo habilis and Homo erectus coexisted rather than coming one after the other.

"What I want to say is that for a long time, this has been the case (...) that Kenyans are given very low credit. We are here to begin to change that," said Manthi Kyalo.

"This is a row that we are beginning," he added.

The Nature journal said the fossils were discovered by Fred Spoor of University College London and his colleagues.

The discovery in Kenya’s Lake Turkana region was also widely credited to Meave and Louise Leakey, two white Kenyan anthropologists of British origin who headed the paleontological research project.

Manthi Kyalo, who also displayed the other half of the discovery, a 1.44 million-year-old upper jawbone from a Homo habilis much younger than most fossils of this species, cried foul.

"Yes, I’ve been given a low credit for that," he said. "We are here to make the Kenyans aware" that one of them "has found this very important fossil."

The find was described as very significant by the Nature magazine.

"They (the fossils) show that two ancestral human species seem to have lived cheek-by-jowl in the same area, much as gorillas and chimpanzees do today," it said.

Other scientists have contested Nature’s interpretation of the discovery.

Source : Sunday Times

Dynamic Brain Network

A German-led study measuring the human brain's electrical currents has confirmed the theory the mind requires the cooperation of several brain areas.

Human knowledge is definitely not stored in one single brain area, said study leader Thomas Gruber of the University of Leipzig. Access to knowledge results from the cooperation of several brain areas that jointly build a dynamic brain network.

He said the study confirmed recognition of familiar and unfamiliar objects activates a set of distributed brain areas, and -- for the first time -- it measured how brain areas communicate with each other by directed information transfer.

The study showed cooperating brain areas are not just connected, but each area can be engaged either in receiving or sending signals or both.

Until now this has been difficult to investigate, but our analysis suggests that most areas are involved in both during access to object-related knowledge, said first author Gernot Supp of the Max-Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Science.

Source : Imedi News

Chinese Mahjong Game Epilepsy

A study by doctors in Hong Kong has concluded that epilepsy can be induced by the Chinese tile game of mahjong.

The findings, published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal, were based on 23 cases of people who had suffered mahjong-induced seizures.

The report's four authors, from Hong Kong's Queen Mary Hospital, said the best prevention - and cure - was to avoid playing mahjong.

The study led the doctors to define mahjong epilepsy as a unique syndrome.

Epileptic seizures can be provoked by a wide variety of triggers, but one cause increasingly evident to researchers is the playing - or even watching - of mahjong.

This Chinese tile game, played by four people round a table, can involve gambling and quickly becomes compulsive.

Demanding

The game, which is intensely social and sometimes played in crowded mahjong parlours, involves the rapid movement of tiles in marathon sessions.

The doctors conclude that the syndrome affects far more men than women; that their average age is 54; and that it can hit sufferers anywhere between one to 11 hours into a mahjong game.

They say the attacks were not just caused by sleep deprivation or gambling stress.

Mahjong is cognitively demanding, drawing on memory, fast calculations, concentration, reasoning and sequencing.

The distinctive design of mahjong tiles, and the sound of the tiles crashing onto the table, may contribute to the syndrome.

The propensity of Chinese people to play mahjong also deserves further study, the doctors say.

What is certain though, is that the only sure way to avoid mahjong epilepsy, is to avoid mahjong, which for many people is easier said than done.

Source : BBC News, Hong Kong