Tag: Science & Technology

LONDON (TIP): In a breakthrough, scientists have developed the world’s first ‘porous’ liquid that can potentially be used to capture harmful carbon emissions to prevent them from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast in UK, along with colleagues at the University of Liverpool and other international partners, invented the new liquid and found that it can dissolve unusually large amount of gas, which are absorbed into the `holes’ in the liquid. The research could pave the way for many more efficient and greener chemical processes, including the procedure known as carbon capture -trapping carbon dioxide from major sources, for example a fossil-fuel power plant, and storing it to prevent its entry into the atmosphere.

“Materials which contain permanent holes, or pores, are technologically important. They are used for manufacturing a range of products from plastic bottles to petrol,” said Stuart James of Queen’s School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

“However, until recently, these porous ma terials have been solids.

What we have done is to design a special liquid from the ‘bottom-up’ -we designed the shapes of the molecules which make up the liquid so that the liquid could not fill up all the space,” James said. “Because of the empty holes we then had in the liquid, we found that it was able to dissolve unusually large amounts of gas,” he said. “A few more years’ research will be needed, but if we can find applications for these porous liquids they could result in new or improved chemical processes,” James said.

Astronomers working at the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) have discovered a giant radio galaxy that is dying. The galaxy was discovered using the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located in Kohad,located in the Pune district. It is located in the constellation Cetus and is about nine billion light-years away. The newly discovered galaxy has been given the scientific name ‘J021659-044920’ and emits powerful radio waves. The galaxy has an end-to-end extent of 4 million light-years. Radio galaxies measuring less than a million light years are common, but those of this size are extremely rare. The fact that the galaxy is in the process of dying has made this an extremely rare find.

A radio galaxy is a galaxy that produces radiation that falls in the radio-frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is argued that the reason for such radiation is the presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This black hole drives massive jets of hot plasma in diametrically opposite directions which eventually give rise to radio lobes. Under some rare circumstances, the black hole at the center may stop producing the jet. When this happens, the radio lobes fade away due to lack of replenishment, followed by the loss of energy. This loss is caused by the emission of radio waves and the transfer of energy to photons from the cosmic microwave background. The image of J021659-044920 shows that the jet has stopped and the radio lobes are starting to fade away.

Low frequency radio telescopes like the GMRT are used to study dying radio objects. The GMRT is the world’s largest radio telescope operating at low frequencies. it is an array of 30 fully steerable, 45-meter diameter antennae that are spread over a 30 kilometer region around Khodad. It is built and operated by the NCRA of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research since 2002. For their analysis, the team combined the observations of the GMRT with previous observations made using international ground and space based telescope facilities. Using data from multiple telescopes that span the electromagnetic spectrum, researchers were able to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the physical conditions around the galaxy.

NEW YORK (TIP): Google Maps is getting disconnected. With an update for Android phones, you’ll be able to search nearby businesses and get driving directions, including turn-by-turn voice prompts, even if your internet connection is spotty or non-existent.

Google says a version for iPhones will come soon. The feature is ideal if you’re trying to leave an underground parking garage or a remote national park. It’s also great if you’re travelling abroad and want to conserve on expensive data plans. Google is also targeting users in emerging markets, where cellular speeds are slower and prices are higher relative to typical incomes.

Mapping apps included with Windows Phone have long had this feature, but Windows has a tiny market share compared with iPhones and Android. Offline mapping is also available with some third-party apps, including Nokia’s Here.

Google Maps has had a limited offline feature. It lets you save a small region ahead of time, but it’s the equivalent of displaying a paper map in a phone app. You can’t use it for navigation and other tasks we’ve come to expect in digital maps.

With the new version, you’ll be able to do most of what you can do now.

You’ll need to download databases ahead of time, preferably when you have a Wi-Fi connection. To do so, start by searching for a location, such as a city. Then pinch in or out to select what area you want to download. Larger areas will give you more flexibility for navigation, but they also take up more storage. As you change your selection, you’re told how large the file is and how much storage on the phone you have left.

Once you download an area, Google will periodically refresh the data with new businesses and road changes. By default, that’s done only when you’re on Wi-Fi.

What you won’t get with offline mapping is traffic information. Once you’re back online, Google Maps might suggest a detour if there’s unusual backup ahead. You also won’t get photos and user reviews for businesses. But you do get contact information, hours and an overall user rating.

For directions, the feature initially works only with driving. It’s not yet available for walking, biking or public transit — so you might still be stuck in subway stations.

SAN FRANCISCO (TIP): Facebook launched a check-in feature to let people know that friends in Paris were safe after a series of bombings and shootings in the French capital killed at least 120 people on Friday.

The “Paris Terror Attacks” safety check let people signal whether they were out of harm’s way, then notified all those they know at the leading social network.

“Quickly find and connect with friends in the area,” a message at the Facebook Safety Check page read. “Mark them safe if you know they’re OK.”

The feature also allowed people to check which friends listed as being in Paris had not yet checked in as safe.

“We are shocked and saddened by the events unfolding in Paris,” a Facebook spokesman told AFP.

“Communication is critical in these moments both for people there and for their friends and families anxious for news.”

The death toll in the “unprecedented” series of attacks across Paris climbed through the night.

Police said around 100 people were killed at the Bataclan music venue in eastern Paris alone, where one witness said an attacker yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest). (Source :AFP)

A Rice anthropologist has identified a new species of extinct antelope that once roamed what is present-day India during the late ice age 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, reports Rice News

August Costa, adjunct lecturer in anthropology and principal investigator of the study, and his colleagues at Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History discovered Sivacobus sankaliai, a member of an extinct family of Asian antelopes related to modern waterbucks. The finding was published in the June issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The researchers found that antelope — whose fossils have never been unearthed in the area before — persisted for more than a million years than previously thought and were of an Asiatic variety, unlike waterbucks, which today are found only in Africa.

“The fossil postdates the last known waterbuck-like antelope in Asia by nearly a million years and demonstrates how little is known of late ice-age animal community in southern Asia,” Costa said.

The antelope fossil was discovered by Costa’s team after a large piece of boulder broke free from a cliff above Gopnath Beach and fell to the beach. A horn was protruding from the cement-like sediment, and Costa was struck by the uniqueness of such a find. This was unlike anything they had come across in the area.

“New species are often identified when various characteristics observed in a specimen are judged as unique,” Costa said. “In this case, the anatomy of the skull we found was different from what had been found in much older fossils in northern India.”

Time and space also play an inherent role in many species determinations within the field of paleontology, Costa said. “In this case, the skull was similar enough to be grouped within the known Indian genus Sivacobus, but different enough to designate a new species,” he said.

While the discovery of a new species is exciting in its own right, the new fossils recovered at the seaside Gopnath site could also help reshape scientists’ understanding on how humans first colonized South Asia.

“For a very long time, researchers have had one idea of how early modern humans dispersed, and this challenges that,” Costa said. “This helps support the theory that ancient peoples used the coastline as a highway to move rapidly across southern Asia.”

Artifacts found at the site, including various animal bones, fossils and stone tools, help paint a very different picture of what the environment looked like thousands of years ago. Land that ancient people and animals would have traversed is now underwater, and the excavation area is now a desert region bordering the Gulf of Khambhat.

“The fossil comes from a unique site setting representing a lost world, now a mostly submerged landscape,” Costa said. “It is correlated with stone artifacts, indicating human presence nearby.”

Costa said this is significant because the fossil site has a high potential to yield early human remains, which would put him one step closer to his ultimate goal.

“This work will hopefully illuminate the origins of modern people in a nation, which constitutes a geographical missing link to the story of human evolution,” he said. “If confirmed, this research would show that early humans settled India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe and help support an emerging picture of the earliest settlement of Eurasia.”

The research was supported by a Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Science Foundation and the Leakey Foundation.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Scientists are developing new technologies that will allow computers to recognise non-verbal commands like gestures, body language and facial expressions.

For most people, using a computer is limited to clicking, typing, searching, and, thanks to Siri and similar software, verbal commands.”Compare that with how humans interact with each other, face to face -smiling, frowning, pointing, tone of voice, all lend richness to communication,” the researchers said. The new project titled Communication through gestures, expression and hared perception’ aims to evolutionise everyday interactions between humans and computers. “Current humancomputer interfaces are still everely limited,” said Pro essor Bruce Draper, from Colorado State University, who is leading the project. “First, they provide essentially one-way communication: users tell the computer what to do. This was fine when computers were crude tools, ut more and more computers re becoming our partners and ssistants in complex tasks. Communication with computers needs to become a two-way dialogue,” said Draper.

The team has proposed cre ating a library of what are called Elementary Composable Ideas (ECIs). Like little packets of information recognizable to computers, each ECI contains information about a gesture or facial expression, derived from human users as well as a syntactical element that constrains how the information can be read.

To achieve this, the researchers have set up a Microsoft Kinect interface. A human subject sits down at a table with blocks, pictures and other stimuli. The researchers try to communicate with and record the person’s natural gestures for concepts like `stop’ or,
`huh?’.

“We don’t want to say what gestures you should use,” Draper said. “We want people to come in and tell us what gestures are natural. Then, we take those gestures and say, OK, if that’s a natural gesture, how do we recognise it in real time, and what are its semantics? What roles does it play in the conversation? When do you use it?When do you not use it?” he said.

According to the project proposal, the work could someday allow people to communicate more easily with computers in noisy settings, or when a person is deaf or hard of hearing, or speaks another language.

LONDON (TIP): British archaeologists have discovered a 6,000year-old `eco-home’ close to the iconic prehistoric Stonehenge monument. The shelter -in a hollow left behind by a fallen tree -at Blick Mead was used over a 90-year period from 4336 BC, archaeologists believed. They said the minimalist property close to Stonehenge dates from between 4336BC to 4246BC, making it about 6,000 years old.

Archaeologist David Jac ques, said: “They … used the stump of the tree, about three metres high, as a wall.”

The finds are being shown to UN heritage experts, who are currently visiting Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle that has puzzled scholars for centuries. Archaeologists are concerned a planned 2.9 km tunnel being considered for the nearby A303 main road will damage the site.

Discoveries have also shown stones were warmed up by the Mesolithic Period inhabitants and used in a hearth to emit heat in the earthy snug. Jacques, a senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham, has worked at Blick Mead for over a decade, making a number of discoveries about the inhabitants. The tree stump created a wall height similar to a “modern bungalow”.

“They’ve draped probably animal skins or thatch around the basin and connect ed it to a post so it’s a very com fortable snug little place,” Jac ques was quoted as saying by the BBC. The wooden wall o the hollow was lined with flints and the large earthy pi created by the tree root lined with cobbles and decorated with “exotic” stones from out side the area. “There are some clever and sophisticated thi ngs going on, the hot stones that they put into this little type of alcove wouldn’t have been on fire,” said Jacques.

Scientists have created the blackest material ever made, so dark that it can absorb almost all light that hits it. The researchers, who were inspired by a completely white beetle, hope that the superblack material could help develop better and more efficient solar panels or completely change the way that they are made.

The material absorbs 99% of light, at all angles, making it 26% darker than carbon nanotubes, which are the darkest material before known. The ideal thing to absorb energy would be a dark material that “absorbs radiation and at all angles and polarisations”, the researchers write. That aim is probably impossible, but scientists still aspire to create ever darker materials. The study was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

People who have seen record-breaking dark materials say doing so is “strange” and “alien” as it is so dark that the eye can’t comprehend it, and instead just sees an unending abyss.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Earthquakes can change elastic properties of the Earth’s crust up to 6,000 kilometres away, altering its ability to withstand stresses for up to a few weeks, a new study has found.

The research demonstrates that the Earth is a dynamic and interconnected system, where one large earthquake can create a cascading sequence of events thousands of kilometres away, researchers said.

“Earthquakes can fundamentally change the elastic properties of the Earth’s crust in regions up to 6,000 kilometres away, altering its ability to withstand stresses for a period of up to a few weeks,” said Kevin Chao, a postdoc in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a member of a research team led by Andrew Delorey at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

When a surface wave from an earthquake some way off passes through another fault region, it changes the balance between the frictional properties that keep the surfaces locked together, the elasticity that allows the crust to withstand strain, and the stress state that can cause it to fail, Chao said.

“When surface waves pass through, all of these properties rearrange and change. If a fault with high stress is ready to fail, it will accumulate more stresses in the fault, meaning an earthquake could occur at any time,” Chao said.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers have developed a pocket-sized device that plugs into a smartphone and can detect early warning signs of asthma attacks.

The device, Wing, is a sensor that works with a companion app to accurately measure two important lung functions: FEV1 (how much air you can exhale in one second) and Peak Flow (how fast you can exhale).

Using Wing consistently over time can help users visualise lung function, detect environmental and medication triggers that can cause symptoms, and know when to take action before asthma or related attacks occur, according to scientists at US-based Sparo Labs.

Wing plugs in via the headphone jack and draws its power from the smartphone, so there is no charging or batteries necessary, ‘Gizmag’ reported. The accompanying app allows users to both monitor and collect readings, while also being able to share them securely with a physician through its cloud-based, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant system. Sparo Labs said Wing can help monitor and manage a variety of lung conditions other than asthma, including COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), CF (cyctic fibrosis) chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and pulmonary fibrosis.

The days of receiving continuous annoying Candy Crush invites may become a thing of the past, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has promised Facebook users freedom from the annoying Candy Crush game invites.

Speaking at a Townhall Q&A session at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed: “We are working on a solution to stop receiving Candy Crush requests.”

“This is where these Q&As are really useful because I actually saw this question because it was the top voted question on the thread,” Zuckerberg said.

“So I sent a message to the person who runs the team in charge of our developer platform and I said by the time I do this Town Hall Q&A, I think it would be good if we had a solution to this problem.”

“We hadn’t prioritised shutting that down because we just had other priorities,” he said. “But if this is the top thing that people care about then we’ll prioritise that and we’ll do it. So we’re doing it.”

Facebook has not yet announced how and when the changes will be made.

As of now, users can turn off the notifications by going to their notification box and clicking ‘x’ next to the Candy Crush icon when they get a request. However, this only disables the notifications and their friends can still send the invites to play the game.

New technology created at Oregon State University can boost the bandwidth of Wi-Fi systems by about 10 times, using LED lights to transmit information.

The technology uses ordinary LED room lights to transmit data around the house.

There’s a new king of the apps that utterly destroy the performance on your phone: Snapchat.

Online security company AVG Technologies analyzed data from over a million Android users, and found that Snapchat’s use of your camera, data, GPS, and more combined to make it the number one overall performance drain.

The app dethroned previous performance drain heavyweights like Facebook and Spotify. And it definitely explains why Snapchat sucks your battery life down so fast.

Though this analysis didn’t take iOS users into account, it’s probably not a rosy picture on that front either.