Solar Powered Aircraft

The solar-powered Zephyr aircraft developed by the UK defence and technology firm QinetiQ has completed the longest-lasting unmanned flight.

The Zephyr has ultra-light wings, and flew for three-and-a-half-days in a test flight above the Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

The project's technical director, Chris Kelleher, says the solar plane charges its batteries for night flight and could stay aloft for months on end.

Watch the video here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7575158.stm

Black hole star mystery 'solved'

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7574255.stm

Astronomers have shed light on how stars can form around a massive black hole, defying conventional wisdom.

Scientists have long wondered how stars develop in such extreme conditions.

Molecular clouds - the normal birth places of stars - would be ripped apart by the immense gravity, a team explains in Science magazine.

But the researchers say stars can form from elliptical discs - the relics of giant gas clouds torn apart by encounters with black holes.

They made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant gas clouds being sucked into black holes like water spiralling down a plughole.

"These simulations show that young stars can form in the neighbourhood of supermassive black holes as long as there is a reasonable supply of massive clouds of gas from further out in the galaxy," said co-author Ian Bonnell from St Andrews University, UK.

Ripped apart

Their findings are in accordance with actual observations in our Milky Way galaxy that indicate the presence of a massive black hole, surrounded by huge stars with eccentric orbits.

The simulations, performed on a supercomputer - and taking over a year of computing time - followed the evolution of two separate giant gas clouds up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, as they fell towards the supermassive black hole.

The simulations show how the clouds are pulled apart by the immense gravitational pull of the black hole.

The disrupted clouds form into spiral patterns as they orbit the black hole; the spiral patterns remove motion energy from gas that passes close to the black hole and transfers it to gas that passes further out.

This allows part of the cloud to be captured by the black hole while the rest escapes.

In these conditions, only high mass stars are able to form and these stars inherit the eccentric orbits from the elliptical disc.

These results match the two primary properties of the young stars in the centre of our galaxy: their high mass and their eccentric orbits around the supermassive black hole.

"That the stars currently present around the galaxy's supermassive black hole have relatively short lifetimes of [about] 10 million years, which suggests that this process is likely to be repetitive," Professor Bonnell explained.

"Such a steady supply of stars into the vicinity of the black hole, and a diet of gas directly accreted by the black hole, may help us understand the origin of supermassive black holes in our and other galaxies in the Universe."

50 Years of NASA in Pictures

To the Moon and beyond

Nasa is celebrating 50 years of space exploration - which has taken the American space agency up into the Earth's orbit, on to the Moon, and deep into our Solar System.

That journey has produced many iconic images - from the Apollo moon landings, to the space shuttle missions, and the colourful pictures beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Here, space writer and historian Piers Bizony recalls some of Nasa's defining moments:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7530327.stm

Digging Humanity's Origins

Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind -- and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/louise_leakey_digs_for_humanity_s_origins.html?utm_source=SubscriberMail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=This%20week%3A%20Stories%20of%20our%20shared%20humanity&utm_term=&utm_content=a8967cacaf064dc4a34d87e96237120b

Louise Leakey is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity’s past in East Africa. In 2001, Leakey and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, the 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, at Lake Turkana -- the same region where her father, Richard, discovered the "Turkana Boy" fossil, and near Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leakey, discovered the bones of Homo habilis.

In August 2007 Louise and Meave, both National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, dug up new H. habilis bones that may rewrite humanity's evolutionary timeline. We imagine that we evolved from apes in an orderly progression from ape to hominid to human, but the Leakeys' find suggests that different species of pre-humans actually lived side by side at the same time for almost half a million years.

"[The] upper jaw bone of Homo habilis dates from 1.44 million years ago. This late survivor shows that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived side by side in eastern Africa for nearly half a million years."

Tribute to Merrin and MVGROUP.org

Source1: http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-community-mourns-as-tracker-founder-passes-away-080513/

BitTorrent Community Mourns as Tracker Founder Passes AwayWritten by enigmax on May 13, 2008 Last month, TorrentFreak had the pleasure of interviewing Merrin, the founder of the 150,000 member MVGroup tracker. It is with great sadness that we bring the news that after a long struggle against increasing health problems, Merrin has passed away, aged just 31.
During April, TorrentFreak interviewed Merrin after his site was shutdown in error following a blunder by an anti-piracy outfit. Despite this setback, Merrin appeared full of optimism for the future so it’s particularly sad that we hand over to ‘Eazbak’ from MVGroup to bring us tragic news:

“It is with a heavy heart that I write this, Merrin the founder of MVGroup.org passed away suddenly on Monday 5th May. He had been ill for sometime but the extent of his illness was not known to the staff , his family or his personal friends. His passing will leave an enormous void at MVGroup.

I was asked to write something here about Merrin, but to be honest I just can’t face it, the thought of doing so is just too painful. So I’ll simply add an abridged version of a post Merrin made at MVGroup some time long, long ago, it will give you a much better insight into who he was and what he was all about than anything I could have written.”

How did MVGroup start and what are our aims, hmm, perhaps a potted history is in order.
Summer 2001 was when I did my first rip, it wasn’t MVGroup back then it was just under my tag. Went well, was released onto the edonkey network with some success. It happened to be Walking With Beasts. I had been given the DVD’s as a present. I always made a point of watching what I could on BBC on tv, but realised after the reaction I got to my first release that there was very little of this kind of thing floating around on the net back then. Don’t get me wrong, I love ST or 24 as much as the next person but I knew that I wanted to give something back to the community that I had taken from for so long. The best way to do this seemed to be to me to release the things that I enjoyed, but couldn’t find, working on the principle that if I liked them there had to be more people out there that did too.

MVGroup was formed in about October of 2002. I talked DarkRain (Vittorio in those days, hence MVGroup, MVGroup also being a tag we had affected once or twice on game rips we had done) into helping me out with rips and supplying DVD’s, we were initially nothing more than a loose association releasing rips on FileNexus.

We then started to generate a bit of interest and we were given (alright I nagged the FN admins) our own section to call home on the FN forums.

Myself and DarkRain had drifted further apart both in real-life and online and MVGroup was looking like it was about to die from lack of time, interest, and releases. It was at this point that I, for want of something better to do, decided that maybe I would put some of our old releases out using the Bitttorrent protocol rather than ed2k. I quickly put a few releases out that way and generated some interest from the BT community. My interest re-piqued I realised that there was no way of releasing on BT using our sections on either FN or FTi that we had by now. The answer was our own webpage.
I got to work on a simple HTML based site on my ISP webspace, that was enough to relight DarkRain’s interest in MVG too and we started cranking releases out again on both BT and ed2k. Funnily enough it didn’t take long before my ISP were getting unhappy with a p2p site on their space. It was then that this current site started to evolve. I decided I better learn how to use proper website tools like php and sql db backends etc. The whole site was put together to a first usable state in about 24 hours straight by just myself lol, that was a day and a no mistake..
Then we started recruiting like-minded individuals that would help us to release and spread the material that we were now known for.
So, what are we trying to achieve, well it isn’t notoriety, it isn’t fame, it isn’t anything other than a sincere desire to make sure that as many people as possible have their horizons broadened by the quality material that we release.
After all we do have a tagline ‘An education in p2p’
….and it ain’t just there because it’s snappy.
So what of the future of the MVGroup tracker? m06166, a close friend of Merrin, explains: “There will be no closing down and no major changes are intended. We will not change the policy of MVGroup of sharing knowledge with the world without ratios for free. Ever.”
The final word from Eazbak: “Our mission now is to make sure that Merrin’s legacy continues, not just this year or the next but for as long as we can possibly do so, the staff is united, we have DVDs ready to rip, files ready to seed, watch out for an MVGroup tagged file on a tracker near you soon!”
Anyone wishing to pay their respects may do so here (registration needed, tracker signups open)
In memory of Merrin - 1976-2008

Source2: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-blunder-shuts-down-bittorrent-tracker-080422/

Anti-Piracy Blunder Shuts Down BitTorrent TrackerWritten by enigmax on April 22, 2008 A large BitTorrent tracker dealing only in documentaries has been shutdown after an anti-piracy company wrongfully identified content being tracked by the site. The 150,000 member site, which has had just “one mildly upset” copyright-related email in 4 years of operation, is moving to a new host
During the last few days, TorrentFreak has been getting emails asking why the MVGroup tracker is down. It’s fairly normal to get lots of emails when when any of the high profile trackers goes down but the number of worried people around our inbox and on various forums seemed surprisingly high for a small tracker dealing only in documentaries. Well, I thought it was fairly small - turns out MVGroup has an amazing 150,000 members. So where has it gone?
The tagline for MVGroup is “An Education in P2P”, so TorrentFreak caught up with the tracker admin Merrin for a quick history lesson. Turns out that some anti-piracy company got it wrong - again. Who needs an education now?
TF: Please give us a little background on MVGroup before we find out why you were shutdown.
Merrin: MVGroup started with one aim in mind, an aim to fill a gap that I noticed 5 or 6 years ago on the Internet. A lack of availability of good quality educational material. We are here to give those that can’t get it, access to all the knowledge they need. A sort of video wiki of documentaries I suppose. Starting on ed2k we branched into torrents as they became popular and now I suspect that thanks to the wonderful staff and members over the years, we are getting close to being the biggest - and we hope best - free, no ratio, documentary site on the web.
TF: No ratios is great! How does this operate? Do you have seeding issues?
Merrin: We have torrents that are over 4 years old still going due to an adoption scheme where members choose a series and the seed upon request, the rest is on trust.
TF: Lots of fans have been emailing and starting forum threads, all worried about your sudden disappearance. What happened?
Merrin: Ok, the simple fact is that the whole thing is a cockup - by both a movie studio and our host/datacenter. The studio said (I suspect a bot trawling torrent dumpsites) that we were tracking a movie called “The Eye” - we obviously don’t carry that kind of thing. Never have done.
TF: So why the confusion?
Merrin: What we did have however was a documentary series also called The Eye.
TF: If it was case of mistaken identity, why is the site still down?
Merrin: The sudden shutdown is down to our host, who panicked, so basically we were taken down for the wrong reasons. Not very fair, but the host got paranoid, so we have had to move anyway. We have now found a new host and have more powerful server, for the same outlay financially.
TF: MVGroup has a good reputation and is known for being careful and considered with the material indexed by the tracker, with no mainstream movies, music or any type of warez. Do you get any takedown requests?
Merrin: As the modern MVGroup of 4+ years operation, we haven’t had more than one mildly upset email, and in fact have had a producer and writer of a series we torrented actually linking to us from his homepage.
TF: Do you have a message for the worried fans, currently hanging out in TorrentFreak’s inbox waiting for news?
Merrin: The main thing here is that we will be back, we have all our data, and nothing has been lost, the donations are safe, we’re safe and we’ll hopefully be up again in a day or two. We’re doing basic installs on the new server as we speak.
TF: Thanks for talking to us today, we’ll be over to MVGroup for our next lesson in a day or two.
For those interested in checking the site out, signups will be open with no invite needed.

Avalanche Effect Demonstrated In Solar Cells

"Researchers at TU Delft (Netherlands) and the FOM (Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) have found irrefutable proof that the so-called avalanche effect by electrons occurs in specific semiconducting crystals of nanometer dimensions. This physical effect could pave the way for cheap, high-output solar cells. Solar cells currently have relatively low output, typically 15%, and high manufacturing costs. One possible improvement could derive from a new type of solar cell made of semiconducting nanocrystals and could theoretically lead to a maximum output of 44%, with the added benefit of reducing manufacturing costs. In conventional solar cells, one photon can release precisely one electron. However, in some semiconducting nanocrystals, one photon can release two or three electrons, hence the term 'avalanche effect.' This effect was first measured by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in 2004, and since then the scientific world had raised doubts about the value of these measurements. This current research does in fact demonstrate that the avalanche effect can occur."

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news131027836.html
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/26/2319219

Hat Tip: Krishna Kowlgi

Solar Cell that looks like a leaf

It looks almost natural... the "leaf" is a prototype solar cell which uses organic substances rather than silicon compounds. This approach may result in cheaper, flexible solar panels, but currently they are less efficient than conventional cells. This one was unveiled at Japan's Environment Fair.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/sci_nat_enl_1211964605/html/1.stm

The universe on a string.....

In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein's notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. (This mind-bending theory may soon be put to the test at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/251

Bacterial Signal Processing !!

Source: http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/the-future-digital-signal-processing-isnt-so-digital

The future of digital signal processing isn't so digital

Imagine fungi processing audio signals, E. Coli storing images, and DNA acting as logic circuits. It’s possible, and in some cases, it’s already happened. In any event, performing digital signal processing using organic and chemical materials without electrical currents could be the wave of the future -- or so argue Sotirios Tsaftaris, research professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Aggelos Katsaggelos, Ameritech Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in their recently published “point of view” piece in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)

Digital signal processing uses mathematics and other techniques to manipulate signals like visual images and sound waves after those signals have been converted to a digital form. This processing can enhance images and compress data for storage and transmission, and such processing chips are found in cell phones, iPods, and HD TVs.

But over the past 10 years, scientists and engineers around the world have experimented with performing signal processing using different materials. In their piece, Tsaftaris and Katsaggelos describe these experiments while stirring the engineering community towards “a possible not-so-electronic future” of digital signal processing.

For example, scientists and engineers have shown that certain chemicals, when mixed in a solution, don’t react until light is projected through them. So if you project light through a transparency image, these chemicals can record the image. When the chemicals are stimulated by light and controlled by the acidity of the mixture, basic image transformations like contour enhancement can happen.

But such processing tasks extend beyond chemicals to organic materials. Artist/scientist Cameron Jones found that out after he used audio CDs as substrates to grow fungi. He put the fungi-laced CDs in a CD player and found that the optically recorded sound was distorted by the fungi -- and the fungi growth patterns were dependent on the optical grooves recorded on the CD.

“The bacteria reacted to the recorded information, and the audio track was ‘processed’ by the grown fungus,” Tsaftaris says. “That is essentially bacteria signal processing.”

Using bacteria to process signals has even spurred a competition -- the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where undergraduate students compete to design biological systems that can perform simple computations. In 2005, a group modified E. coli cells to react to light, and the students created a layer of that bacteria that could perform edge detection of an image -- a basic processing task.

Tsaftaris’s and Katsaggelos’s research includes studying the use of DNA for digital signal processing. DNA strands can be used as input and processing elements, and, it turns out, DNA is an excellent data storage medium. Digital samples can be recorded onto DNA, which can be kept in a liquid form in test tubes to save space. That DNA can also be easily replicated using common laboratory techniques, and such a database could be easily searchable, no matter how large it is.
“It becomes a very attractive solution,” Tsaftaris says.

Though science is still years away from this possibility, engineers have created useful algorithms in their pursuit of the technology. Such algorithms have been used, for example, to better detect disease. But Tsaftaris hopes for a day when organic digital signal processing will allow for the implementation of the so-called “fast Fourier transform” -- a widely-used method of extracting useful information from sampled signals that Tsaftaris calls the “holy grail” of DNA signal processing.

“The cost and delivery time of DNA synthesis is being reduced exponentially, this making data input elegant and economical,” Tsaftaris and Katsaggelos write in the paper. But in the meantime, “don’t forget to feed the bacteria that nurture your precious jazz collection.”

Science Express Train Chugs across India..

Source: http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7335967.stm

Science Express train draws the crowds
By Prachi Pinglay BBC News, Mumbai

Jostling and rushing and pushing are characteristic features on trains in the overcrowded city of Mumbai. And it was no different on platform number 13 at the city's main railway station Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) except that the visitors here were school students. They were waiting to board "The Science Express", an Indo-German mobile science exhibition set on a train.

Twelve of the train's coaches display exhibits while the 13th coach has been turned into a "kids' lab" where children can participate in basic chemical experiments. The train was flagged off from the Indian capital Delhi in October last year. So far, it has travelled through 41 cities, Mumbai (Bombay) being its 42nd destination.

'Mentors'

It has covered far flung areas like Nagaland in the north-east and Jammu as well as many prominent cities. At the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, more than 20,000 guests were expected each day on the sparkling white train. Once on board, they can look at different aspects of science - from global warming to evolution of man, from potential sensors in cars to functions of human brain to the biggest bacteria in the world.

Organisers say they expect more than 200 children will participate in lab experiments everyday. Deployed on the train are science educators and "mentors" who assist the children in their experiments. And students on board seemed to be enjoying the attention.
Wearing gloves, aprons, glasses and holding tubes and containers at eye level, the children performed experiments for about half an hour.

"We have not done something like this before. Some experiments are part of our syllabus and it is fun to do this stuff," Pratik Kubal, a 16-year-old student of Gurukul School from north Mumbai said. Puja Singh, one of the "mentors" said, "I love interacting with children. Sometimes I make chemical compounds sound like characters from a story. I tell them this chemical is a hero and that one is a villain.

"They will first fight and then make up and then it would be a new compound. It is great fun when you see a happy, surprised look on their faces."

Huge response

Viral Makwana - a science educator from the western state of Gujarat - who has travelled with the train since its inception says this has been a rare experience. "No matter where you go, children are the same. They ask similar questions and express similar emotions. They may look different but their curiosity is the same."

Mr Makwana says in smaller towns, children are also curious about the city life. "They asked me questions like how is Delhi or Mumbai? Do you live like us, they ask? And I have to tell them about our lives here."

RY Vaidya, one of the sponsors of the exhibition, says, "More than 1.2 million visitors have already been aboard. This will make students interested in science and chemistry. Most of the schools do not have such facilities like interactive displays and models."

Mr Vaidya says the train has generated tremendous response at all the places where they have stopped. In Patna, capital of the eastern Bihar state, a record 350,000 visitors turned up in one single day.

"We were travelling in an auto rickshaw in Patna and we asked our driver what were the places to visit. He took us to the Science Express train. It was a heart warming experience to know that it was reaching the masses."

Nokia Morph Concept

Morph is a concept demonstrating some of the possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. Morph can sense its environment, is energy harvesting and self cleaning. Morph is a flexible two-piece device that can adapt its shape to different use modes. Nanotechnology enables to have adaptive materials yet rigid forms on demand. It is also featured in the MoMA online exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind". It has been a collaboration project of Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center.
Here's a 6 min demonstration of the concept:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs&feature=related

More on the topic can be found here:
http://www.nokia.com/A4852062