Month: May 2013

WASHINGTON (TIP): Astronomers have discovered a never-before-seen cluster of hydrogen clouds strewn between two nearby galaxies, Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33). The researchers speculate that these rarefied blobs of gas – each about as massive as a dwarf galaxy – condensed out of a vast and as-yet undetected reservoir of hot, ionised gas, which could have accompanied an otherwise invisible band of dark matter.

The astronomers detected these objects using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). “We have known for some time that many seemingly empty stretches of the Universe contain vast but diffused patches of hot, ionised hydrogen,” said Spencer Wolfe of West Virginia University in Morgantown.

“Earlier observations of the area between M31 and M33 suggested the presence of colder, neutral hydrogen, but we couldn’t see any details to determine if it had a definitive structure or represented a new type of cosmic feature. “Now, with high-resolution images from the GBT, we were able to detect discrete concentrations of neutral hydrogen emerging out of what was thought to be a mainly featureless field of gas,” Wolfe said.

Astronomers are able to observe neutral atomic hydrogen, which is referred to as HI (H and the Roman numeral one), because of the characteristic signal it emits at radio wavelengths, which can be detected by radio telescopes on Earth. Though this material is abundant throughout the cosmos, in the space between galaxies it can be very tenuous and the faint signal it emits can be extremely difficult to detect.

A little more than a decade ago, astronomers had the first speculative hints that a previously unrecognised reservoir of hydrogen lay between M31 and M33. The signal from this gas, however, was too faint to draw any firm conclusions about its nature, origin, or even certain existence. Last year, preliminary data taken with the GBT confirmed that there was indeed hydrogen gas, and a lot of it, smeared out between the galaxies.

New and more thorough studies of this region with the GBT revealed that the hydrogen gas was not simply in the form of wispy streamers, as would be expected by the interactions of two galaxies in a gravitational ballet. Instead, a full 50 per cent of the gas was conspicuously clumped together into very discrete and apparently self-gravitating blobs that – apart for their lack of stars – would be dead ringers for dwarf galaxies.

The GBT was also able to track the motion of these newly discovered clouds, showing that they were travelling through space at velocities similar to M31 and M33.

NEW YORK(TIP): Stuck in traffic jam? Use your car’s flying button. Seriously! US scientists have designed a gen-next flying car capable of taking off vertically and flying completely on its own — and it could be on the roads within a decade. An ambitious US engineering company has released images of the flying car, the four-passenger TF-X, and it won’t require a pilot’s licence to operate.

The Terrafugia TF-X flying car can take off vertically and has a flying range of 805km. Once airborne, the two propellers fold back and propulsion is handled by an engine mounted behind the cockpit, ‘New York Daily News’ reported. Everything from take-off, to flying, and eventual touch-down at the chosen destination will be handled automatically by the Terrafugia.

The manufacturers claim the TF-X is a plug-in hybrid. Electric motors handle road driving, and assist during takeoff and landing. Terrafugia claims its road-legal and highly automated flying car could be on the road (and in the air) within 8- 12 years.

The TF-X’s vast array of sensors and GPS monitors make flying to a destination as simple as punching in an address in current satellite-navigation devices. The TF-X calculates the total distance, and determines whether there is suitable fuel range.

NEW YORK (TIP): Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out. Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a DIY sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the website Kickstarter. The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

WASHINGTON (TIP): More than a good eye! Researchers, including an Indian-origin scientist, have developed a new ‘smart’ robot that can analyse and learn about new objects on its own. The two-armed mobile robot called HERB can ‘discover’ more than 100 objects in a home-like laboratory, including items like computer monitors and plants.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute built digital models and images of objects and loaded them into the memory of HERB – the Home-Exploring Robot Butler – so the robot could recognise objects that it needs to manipulate. With the team’s implementation of HerbDisc, the robot could discover these objects on its own. With more time and experience, HerbDisc gradually refines its models of the objects and begins to focus its attention on those that are most relevant to its goal – helping people accomplish tasks of daily living.

The robot’s ability to discover objects on its own sometimes takes even the researchers by surprise, said Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics and head of the Personal Robotics Lab, where HERB is being developed. In one case, some students left the remains of lunch – a pineapple and a bag of bagels – in the lab when they went home for the evening.

The next morning, they returned to find that HERB had built digital models of both the pineapple and the bag and had figured out how it could pick up each one. “We didn’t even know that these objects existed, but HERB did,” said Srinivasa, who jointly supervised the research with Martial Hebert, professor of robotics.

“That was pretty fascinating,” said Hebert. Discovering and understanding objects in places filled with hundreds or thousands of things will be a crucial capability once robots begin working in the home and expanding their role in the workplace.

CAPE CANAVERAL (TIP): A recently discovered comet, dazzlingly bright even though it is still almost as far away as Jupiter, is racing toward a November rendezvous with the sun, officials said on Tuesday. If it survives the encounter — and that’s a big if — the comet may be visible even in daylight in Earth’s skies at the end of the year. Discovered by amateur astronomers in September 2012, Comet ISON is about to reach the outer edge of the asteroid belt, located some 280 million miles (451 million km) from Earth, said William Cooke, lead scientist at Nasa’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The comet is shedding dust from its nucleus at a rate of more than 112,000 pounds (50,802 kg) per minute, the result of heating by the sun, observations from Nasa’s Swift telescope show. That level of activity is unusual for a comet still so far away from the sun. It could spell its doom. Preliminary measurements made with the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured an image of the comet that was released on Tuesday, indicate Comet ISON’s body is no more than 4 miles (6.4 km) in diameter.

LONDON (TIP): The world’s first vaccine to help control symptoms of autism has been developed. The vaccine was created by Canada’s University of Guelph researchers for gut bacteria common in autistic children which will help control symptoms of autism. More than 90% of children with autism spectrum disorders suffer from chronic and severe gastrointestinal symptoms of which 75% suffer from diarrhea. The scientists have now developed a carbohydrate-based vaccine against the gut bacteria Clostridium bolteae which is known to play a role in gastrointestinal disorders. The bacteria often shows up in higher numbers in the gastric tracts of autistic children than in those of healthy kids. Researchers Brittany Pequegnat and Guelph chemistry professor Mario Monteiro believe toxins and/or metabolites produced by gut bacteria may be associated with symptoms and severity of autism, especially regressive autism. Publishing their finding in the journal Vaccine, they said, “Little is known about the factors that predispose autistic children to C bolteae. A vaccine would improve current treatment. This is the first vaccine designed to control constipation and diarrhea caused by C bolteae and perhaps control autism-related symptoms associated with this microbe.”

WASHINGTON (TIP): Hear my voice, I’m Graham Bell! Telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell’s voice has been identified for the first time on a wax disc recording from 1885, researchers claim. Bell’s voice was recorded on to the disc on April 15, 1885 at his Volta laboratory in Washington. On the wax-disc recording, the inventor of the telephone says: “Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.” The inventions of Bell — most famously the telephone but also the methods of recording sound — have allowed many people to hear each other’s voices for more than 130 years. Until now, no one knew what the inventor himself sounded like. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, through a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has identified Bell’s voice for the first time.

LONDON (TIP): Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against “killer robots” urged. The weapons, which could be ready for use within the next 20 years, would breach a moral and ethical boundary that should never be crossed, said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, of the “Campaign To Stop Killer Robots”.

“If war is reduced to weapons attacking without human beings in control, it is going to be civilians who are going to bear the brunt of warfare,” said Williams, who won the 1997 peace prize for her work on banning landmines. Weapons such as remotely piloted drones are already used by some armed forces and companies are working on developing systems with a greater level of autonomy in flight and operation.

“We already have a certain amount of autonomy,” said Noel Sharkey, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield. “I think we are already there. If you asked me to go and make an autonomous killer robot today, I could do it. I could have you one here in a few days,” he told reporters. But the technology is a long way off being able to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian. “The idea of a robot being asked to exercise human judgment seems ridiculous to me,” Sharkey told Reuters. “The whole idea of robots in the battlefield muddies the waters of accountability from my perspective as a roboticist,” he added.

No intention
The British government has always said it has no intention of developing such technology. “There are no plans to replace skilled military personnel with fully autonomous systems,” a ministry of defense spokesman told Reuters. “Although the Royal Navy does have defensive systems, such as Phalanx, which can be used in an automatic mode to protect personnel and ships from enemy threats like missiles, a human operator oversees the entire engagement,” the spokesman added.

But the organizers of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots say Britain’s rejection of fully autonomous weapons is not yet watertight. “We’re concerned that there is a slide towards greater autonomy on the battlefield and unless we draw a clear line in the sand now, we may end up walking into acceptance of fully autonomous weapons,” said Thomas Nash, director of non-governmental organization Article 36.

Rapid advancements in technology have allowed countries such as the United States, China, Russia, Israel and Germany to move towards systems that will soon give full combat autonomy to machines, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. “We think that these kinds of weapons will not be able to comply with international humanitarian law,” Steve Goose, Human Rights Watch executive director, told Reuters.

NEW YORK (TIP): Researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, have identified genes which help female mice and some other mammals delay the onset of pregnancy. Unlike in humans, the remarkable ability, known as embryonic diapause, is a temporary state of suspended animation that occurs when environmental conditions are not favourable to the survival of the mother and the newborn. A new study, published in the journal Open Biology, reveals the molecular mechanism responsible for pausing and resuming a pregnancy. After an egg is fertilized, it forms a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, which implants in the wall of the mother’s uterus, ‘LiveScience’ reported. However, in diapause, the blastocyst is prevented from implanting and preserved in an dormant state until pregnancy resumes. How this process occurred was a mystery till now.

Researcher Sudhansu Dey, from Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation, and colleagues were studying the process of embryo implantation in mice when they noticed that a gene called MSX1 was very active just before implantation. They began to suspect that it might play a role in diapause, Dey said. Researchers used hormones to induce pregnancy delays in mice, mink and Tammar wallabies to investigate further. During this delayed state, Dey’s team measured how active the MSX1 gene and other related genes were in generating protein-making instructions. They imaged tissue from the animals to see where the gene was active. Finally, they tested whether these genes were being made into proteins. Researchers found that the MSX genes were more active when pregnancies were delayed, and found this was true for all three animals. The results show that MSX genes, which are part of an ancient family of genes, have been preserved over much of evolutionary time, and play an important role in delaying pregnancy under harsh conditions, Dey said. He wants to know whether the same genes may enable delayed pregnancies in other animals and if it could have implications for humans.