What's blue and white, squiggly and suddenly appears in the sky?
If you know the answer, pop it on a postcard and send it to the people of Norway, where this mysterious light display baffled residents yesterday.
Speculation was increasing today that the display was the result of an embarrassing failed test launch of a jinxed new Russian missile.
The Bulava missile was test-fired from the Dmitry Donskoi submarine in the White Sea early on Wednesday but failed at the third stage, say newspapers in Moscow today.
This emerged despite earlier reports denying a missile launch yesterday. Even early today there was no formal confirmation from the Russian Defence Ministry.
The light appears to be unconnected with the aurora borealis, or northern lights, the natural magnetic phenomena that can often be viewed in that part of the world.
Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to 12 minutes before disappearing completely.
Onlookers describing it as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it' and 'a shooting star that spun around and around'.
Yesterday a Norwegian defence spokesman said the display was most likely from a failed Russian test launch.
The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky.
Tromsō Geophysical Observatory researcher Truls Lynne Hansen agreed, saying the missile had likely veered out of control and exploded, and the spiral was light reflecting on the leaking fuel.
But last night Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area.
A Moscow news outlet quoted the Russian Navy as denying any rocket launches from the White Sea area.
Norway should be informed of such launches under international agreements, it was stressed.
However this morning media reports claimed a missile had indeed been launched from the White Sea. Test firings are usually made from the White Sea, close to the Norwegian Arctic region.
Kommersant newspaper reported today that a test-firing before dawn on Wednesday coincided with the light show in the northern sky.
It also emerged today that Russia last week formally notified Norway of a window when a missile test might be carried out.
This included a seven hour period early on Wednesday at the time when the lights were seen.
The submarine Dmitry Donskoy went to sea on Monday, ahead of the test, and some reports suggest the vessel is now back in port.
A Russian military source said today that 'the third stage of the rocket did not work'.
The Russian Defence Ministry, with characteristic secrecy, has so far been unavailable for comment.
A Bulava missile is fired from a submarine in this undated file photo. Russia has yet to confirm if a similar test launch was behind the mystery lights seen over Norway yesterday
The Bulava, despite being crucial to Russia's plans to revamp its weaponry, is becoming an embarrassment after nine failed launches in 13 tests, prompting calls for it to be scrapped.
In theory, it has a range of 5,000 miles and could carry up to ten nuclear weapons bound for separate targets.
A previous failure in July forced the resignation of Yury Solomonov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology which is responsible for developing the missile.
However, he is now working as chief designer on the jinxed project.
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm yesterday morning.
Totto Eriksen, from Tromsø, told VG Nett: 'It spun and exploded in the sky,'
He spotted the lights as he walked his daughter Amalie to school.
He said: 'We saw it from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. It was absolutely fantastic.
'It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally down the heavens.
'It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain, but then came something completely different.'
Celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard said he had never seen anything like the lights.
He said: 'My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor, but it has lasted far too long.
'It may have been a missile in Russia, but I can not guarantee that it is the answer.'
Air traffic control in Tromsō claimed the light show lasted 'far too long to be an astronomical phenomenon'.
So what is it? Aliens?A Rocket? A Spaceship? The end of the earth( even though that is supposed to be in 2012 it could early right?) either way its something werid and there are videos all over the internet about it so if you don't believe the pictures( which i certainly didn't) watch the video it can pretty much make a believer out of anyone. The only thing for certain is that it was big, half of norway saw it and that it disappeared. It could be anything from a black hole to a relapse in space and time, WHO KNOWS? It's a mystery and I doubt we will ever find out exactly what it was.
Naked mole rats are unique in many ways. For one, they're the only mammals with a hive mind, obeying their queen as if they were ants. Also, they feel no pain, an adaptation still not fully understood. But most importantly for us, they are the only animals that don't get cancer.
And now, a new study by scientists at the University of Rochester, New York, explains at last why these horrific animals, of all of the world's creatures, are immune to cancer.
According to the scientists, the mole rat's cells express a gene that tells cells to stop dividing. The gene, called p16, forms a second ring of defense against cancer. Most mammals, including humans, only have one gene, p27, protecting cells from cancer. And while most cancers know a way around p27, p16 stops them cold.
In the experiment, researchers gave cancer to a mole rat cell. However, unlike similarly altered mouse cells, the cancerous mole rat cell didn't engage in the non-stop proliferation associated with cancer.
Naked mole rats were already known for their extreme longevity, living much longer than other similarly sized rodents. This was thought to result from their ability to massively slow down their metabolism during times of privation, but this immunity to cancer almost certainly also contributes to their long lifespans.
Some other mole rat facts: their lips are behind their front teeth, they breathe mostly through their skin, and acid doesn't really burn them. I don't know what planet these things are from, but if they're helping cure cancer, I'm glad they're here.
Imagine that. They are ugly ,gross, disgusting but yet the hold the key to a illness the reeks across our planet. Imagine the cure for cancer. A truly amazing action and to free some many people from the grip of cancer would be a wondrous occurrence. Even if they don't find the exact cure right away I think its safe to say we taking steps into the right direction.
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Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have conducted a basic chemistry experiment in what is perhaps the world's smallest test tube, measuring a thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
The nano-scale test tube is so small that a high-power electron microscope was required to see the experiment.Made from a thin shell of carbon, the test tube was stuffed with a thread-like crystal (a nanowire) of germanium with a tiny particle of gold at its tip.
The researchers heated the test tube and watched as the gold melted at the end of the nanowire, much like any solid crystal heated above its melting temperature in a glass test tube.
"The experiment is relatively simple," said chemical engineer Brian Korgel, whose laboratory conducted it. "Essentially, we observe well-known phenomena, like melting, capillarity and diffusion, but at a much, much smaller scale than has been possible to see before."
Such experiments provide new fundamental insights about how nanomaterials behave, and might be used to create new technologies, from better solar cells to unprecedentedly strong yet light-weight materials to higher performance optical displays and computing technologies.
Korgel and graduate students Vincent Holmberg and Matthew Panthani conducted the experiment, which was reported in the Oct. 16 edition of Science.
During the experiment, the nanowire melted as the temperature rose, but its shape was retained because the carbon test tube maintained its shape.
"In these very small structures, the phase behavior (like its melting temperature, etc.) can be different than bulk materials and can be size-dependent," Korgel said. "Therefore, if the structure changes when the phase change happens, then the result becomes very difficult to interpret and in fact, may not even represent the true behavior of the system."
The carbon test tube, however, provided a rigid container for studying what happens when materials are heated and melted at the nanoscale.
Funding for the research came from the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Holmberg received support from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation and the National Science Foundation for a Graduate Research Fellowship.
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welll i'll tell you to be able to melt anything at all is a feat for humankind. And to melt at this scale thats a is feat of the world. By this people will be able to discover more a on a level preivously undiscovered. Who will know what we will find on thsi level its new world, or atleast in my opinion. It is a new discovery that could help every aspect of human life. The good thing about the undiscoveried frontier is that we can go anywhere and it will always be someplace new that can give us something we didn't have before weither it is an experiance or a cure. And that is real beauty.
The layout....
The colors...
the clickable links
and we can't forget the presentation of the photograph's themselves are remarkable on Lara jade's site.
CLICK TO DISCOVER just how amazing it is.
I have always found that flash is a beautiful way to make a website interactive, it can truely be magical if all the correct elements are in place. I guess it also helps that her photography is wonderful as well and helps to make the website even more creative and inspiring. The only thing i wish was that her links were a little more interesting such as the link in the beginning before you even enter her page. Also I love that sounds that come with hovering over certain things. I'm always wanted to make a flash website since i find they are always more visually stimulating then a just click and go. And rightly so! Would you rather just click on a link or would you rather click on a click that fades away. Personally I find that the fade away link grabs my attention and holds is longer then just a clicky boring link.( to bust on clicky links is just my own preference)
I mean check her out! that takes talent, the lighting, the makeup, and the expression and message all are there in one place beautifully arranged to a kind of surreal perfection. But none the less it is beautiful and her website is just as wonderful as her photographs.
Future humans may look back on this mind-controlled stabbing robot as a forerunner to battle mechs and Gundams. But the one-armed stabber failed to win out in the latest Robo-One competition held in Toyama, Japan over the weekend.
The first combat robot controlled by neural signals arrived as the brainchild of Taku Ichikawa, a fourth-year student at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. Its techniques for beating opponents comprise walking forward, rotating right, and using its single arm for stabbing
Mainichi Daily News
Novelty aside, the mind-controlled robo-gladiator can only carry out three commands such as walking forward, rotating right and using its arm to make stabbing attacks. Ichikawa tried to compensate for the control scheme's limitations by installing onboard sensors that allow the robot to automatically get up from a fall, or open its clamp-like fingertips to menace approaching enemies.
It's still a long ways from the responsive mobile suits or combat exoskeletons of science fiction, which may explain why a more conventionally controlled robot bested the competition. The combat tournament featured 32 robots fighting in 3-minute rounds, where robots that were knocked over three times were eliminated.
The ultimate robot champion featured walking and rolling capabilities along with double-fisted clamps and deployable blade-like flaps. Turning itself into a mobile walking chair for a nearby person just became the icing on the cake.
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What do I think? WELL its awesome and scary all at the same time. The possiblities that is opens up is a huge hole that can be filled with many many MANY discoveries!! It's all a bit overwelhming really, its intimadating but at the same time image if there was a robot that could be used to perform a complex surgery and in the doctors mind he knows all the right things how to do it but his earm spams or something? the surgery could be in jeopardy! So if there was a robot that was control by the doctor's mind there would be no room to mess up!=]
Never mind facial masks and exfoliating scrubs, skin takes care of itself. Stem cells located within the skin actively generate differentiating cells that can ultimately form either the body surface or the hairs that emanate from it. In addition, these stem cells are able to replenish themselves, continually rejuvenating skin and hair. Now, researchers at Rockefeller University have identified two proteins that enable these skin stem cells to undertake this continuous process of self-renewal.
The work, published in Nature Genetics, brings new details to the understanding of how stem cells maintain — and lose — their status as stem cells and are able to specialize into various types of cells. It also further dissects a ubiquitous Rube Goldberg-like pathway whose molecular gears and levers play an important role in activating stem cells to divide and transform into tissue-making cells.Lead researcher Elaine Fuchs, head of the Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, and first author Hoang Nguyen, a former postdoc in the lab, worked with mice engineered to lack the proteins TCF3 and TCF4, which reside in the nucleus of skin stem cells, where they bind to DNA to turn genes off that would otherwise cause the stem cells to differentiate. They found that without TCF3 and TCF4, all of the layers of the mice’s skin still develop properly, but they cannot be maintained.
“The epidermal stem cells — one of the types of stem cells in the skin — lose their capacity to self-renew and replace skin cells that have died,” says Nguyen, who is now an assistant
professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “We show that the epidermis cannot be maintained long-term without these two proteins. And that’s what we see in the Petri dish as well as our skin-grafting experiments.”
The TCF proteins (there is a family of four) are found in many stem cells of the body. Their ability to turn genes on depends on signals they receive from their molecular environment that result in the stabilization of a partner molecule called β-catenin.
Fuchs, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor at Rockefeller, and Nguyen have now learned that TCF3 and TCF4 can also work in skin stem cells by keeping off genes when nuclear β-catenin is not around. “In the hair follicles, TCF3 and TCF4 are required to maintain the stem cells as stem cells when β-catenin is not around, but when β-catenin is there, hair growth is activated,” says Fuchs. “In the skin epidermis, TCF3 and TCF4 apparently maintain the epidermal stem cells all by themselves, without β-catenin.”
“If the TCF proteins always act through β-catenin in the skin, then you would always see the same failures whenever β-catenin or TCF3 and TCF4 are missing,” says Nguyen. “But you don’t. The epidermis seems to rely more on TCF3 and TCF4 while hair follicles require TCF3 and TCF4 and β-catenin. This means that there is an arm of this pathway that has never been explored.”
Although the finding is new for mammalian stem cells, it has parallels in other organisms, including worms. “TCFs have ancient origins and the worm field has long believed that TCFs have functions that are not dependent upon β-catenin,” says Fuchs. The parallels between worms and mammalian skin opens new avenues of research into regenerative therapies that could illuminate how to trigger skin growth for burn victims or hair growth for those suffering from hair loss.
“Skin stem cells hold great promise for regenerative medicine,” says Fuchs. “And the more we know about what makes a stem cell a stem cell and the different cocktail of molecules that give these cells their properties, the more sophisticated we can be about understanding their basic biology and using them for the benefit of society.”
So What do you think? I know what I think! Its awesome!! I'm all for it! While some may say knowledge is a burden rather then a blessing I think differently! Think about what we've combated in the thirst for knowledge. Stem cells are always such a hot topic I wont be surprised if people comments badly about this article. But no matter what you really can't deny this advancement in human society has greatly impacted us in so many ways. So Embrace knowledge and live!!!
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Quantum computers are coming – just don't ask when
WHATEVER happened to quantum computers? A few years ago, it seemed, it was just a case of a tweak here, a fiddle there, and some kind of number-crunching Godzilla would be unleashed upon us. Just as digital processors changed our lives in ways hard to imagine a few decades ago, the monstrous information processing power of individual atoms and electrons would mean that computing - and the world - would never be the same again.
We're still waiting. In 2007, a Canadian company called D-Wave unveiled what it claimed was a quantum computer that could solve a sudoku puzzle, but there remains deep scepticism whether it is truly a quantum computer. Meanwhile, we seem stuck with the conventional, "classical" computers that rattle and purr away on our desks, toggling currents of electrons in billions of silicon transistors to produce the numbers, words and images that frame our lives.
Paradise lost? No - merely postponed. Progress might have been slower than many quantum evangelists were predicting a decade or so ago, but after a quiet few years quantum computing is back with a vengeance. "The rate of progress has been dramatic," says David Wineland, a quantum-computing specialist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. The stage is now set, he and others claim, for the quantum computer to change our lives in the 21st century just as radically as its classical, digital counterpart did in the 20th.
The premise behind a quantum computer is simple - provided you swallow the unpalatable quantum truths that underlie it. One is that objects such as atoms and electrons are not confined to being either this or that, as the objects of our everyday macroscopic world are; they can be both this and that at the same time. They might, for instance, be spinning clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously, or adopt two different energy states at once. This is known as superposition.
What's more, these ambiguous quantum characters can club together so that what you do to one affects the others. This is the phenomenon of entanglement or, if you're Einstein, "spooky action at a distance". Together, the characteristics of superposition and entanglement make for a computer of awesome power.
Take a classical computational bit such as a transistor current. It can adopt one of two states: 0 (off) or 1 (on). Not so its quantum counterpart, the qubit. Superposition means a single qubit can simultaneously be 0 and 1, giving you twice the information storage capacity right from the start. Then entanglement kicks in, allowing further bits to share their superposed states in a common pool. The result is that computing power grows exponentially with the number of qubits. While three classical bits are needed to store the number 7, three qubits can store all eight numbers from 0 to 7 simultaneously (see diagram). Just a few hundred qubits could store more numbers than there are thought to be atoms in the universe.
That kind of processor is still a way away. The current record for qubit manipulation is held by practitioners of the ion-trap technique, which uses oscillating electric fields to hold atomic ions in place, like eggs in a box, chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero. Information is encoded in each ion's energy state. Whereas computing in a conventional processor is done by switching transistor currents on and off, the qubits are manipulated by firing a carefully designed laser pulse at the ions to put them into a particular superposition state.
Ions or dots?
In August this year, Wineland's group at NIST reported a milestone achievement. Taking two ions, they used a series of carefully calibrated laser pulses to perform some simple computations with them and read out the results. They could also move the ions around the processor without losing the information encoded on them, and repeat the process. In other words, their system does everything that a basic conventional computer should do (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1177077).
The team has also managed some, but not yet all, of these feats with arrays of eight or nine trapped ions. There should now be no problem, in principle, with scaling things up to the hundreds or even thousands of qubits that would be necessary to make a useful computer - it is just a question of acquiring more practice in the art of qubit manipulation. "It's hard to imagine that we won't someday be able to control these things to create a useful device," Wineland says.
Over the past couple of years, however, the tried-and-tested ion-trap approach has acquired a competitor. It takes the form of dots of aluminium about one-third of a millimetre across, each of which contains billions of atoms. When chilled to extremely low temperatures, the momentum of these atoms is severely reduced. According to the quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle, the more restricted an atom's momentum is, the more smeared out is its location in space, and it becomes impossible to tell where one atom ends and the next one starts. The result is a dot that behaves as if it were one giant superatom within which electrons flow freely, encountering no electrical resistance.
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Doesn't this article blow your mind a little bit? It's difficult to understand but when you do its nearly crystal clear. Look how far Technology has come. Imagine a quantum computer? Steven Hawking has some competition in quantum computation! So what does this mean? Well I think its a step toward a quantums sciences rather with just regular science. Biology and Chemistry will never be the same once this comes out. Is that good or bad?
Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks. If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. “The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source,” said computer science professor Marc Levoy. Computer science graduate student Andrew Adams, who helped design the prototype of the Stanford camera (dubbed Frankencamera,) imagines a future where consumers download applications to their open-platform cameras the way Apple apps are downloaded to iPhones today. When the camera’s operating software is made available publicly, perhaps a year from now, users will be able to continuously improve it, along the open-source model of the Linux operating system for computers or the Mozilla Firefox web browser. From there, the sky’s the limit. Programmers will have the freedom to experiment with new ways of tuning the camera’s response to light and motion, adding their own algorithms to process the raw images in innovative ways. Frankencamera at minimal cost Levoy’s plan is to develop and manufacture the “Frankencamera” as a platform that will first be available at minimal cost to fellow computational photography researchers. In the young field of computational photography, which Levoy helped establish, researchers use optics benches, imaging chips, computers and software to develop techniques and algorithms to enhance and extend photography. This work, however, is bound to the lab. Frankencamera would give researchers the means to take their experiments into the studios, the landscapes, and the stadiums. Yet another idea is to have the camera communicate with computers on a network, such as a photo-hosting service on the Web. Imagine, Levoy says, if the camera could analyze highly-rated pictures of a subject in an online gallery before snapping the shutter for another portrait of the same subject. The camera could then offer advice (or just automatically decide) on the settings that will best replicate the same skin tone or shading. By communicating with the network, the camera could avoid taking a ghastly picture.
Of course users with Frankencameras would not be constrained by what is already known. They’d be free to discover and experiment with all kinds of other operations that might yield innovative results because they’d have total control. "Some cameras have software development kits that let you hook up a camera with a USB cable and tell it to set the exposure to this, the shutter speed to that, and take a picture, but that’s not what we’re talking about," says Levoy. "What we’re talking about is, tell it what to do on the next microsecond in a metering algorithm or an autofocusing algorithm, or fire the flash, focus a little differently and then fire the flash again — things you can’t program a commercial camera to do."
Another algorithm that researchers have achieved in the lab, but no commercial camera allows, is enhancing the resolution of videos with high-resolution still photographs. While a camera is gathering low-resolution video at 30 frames a second, it could also periodically take a high-resolution still image. The extra information in the still could then be recombined by an algorithm into each video frame. Levoy and his students plan to implement that on Frankencamera, too.For example, among the most mature ideas in the field of computational photography is the idea of extending a camera’s “dynamic range,” or its ability to handle a wide range of lighting in a single frame. The process of high-dynamic-range imaging is to capture pictures of the same scene with different exposures and then to combine them into a composite image in which every pixel is optimally lit. Until now, this trick could be done only with images in computers. Levoy wants cameras to do this right at the scene, on demand. Although the algorithms are very well understood, no commercial cameras do this today. But Frankencamera does.
Durham, NC -- A team led by scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering has demonstrated the first working "invisibility cloak." The cloak deflects microwave beams so they flow around a "hidden" object inside with little distortion, making it appear almost as if nothing were there at all.
Cloaks that render objects essentially invisible to microwaves could have a variety of wireless communications or radar applications, according to the researchers.
The team reported its findings on Thursday, Oct. 19, in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science. The research was funded by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
The researchers manufactured the cloak using "metamaterials" precisely arranged in a series of concentric circles that confer specific electromagnetic properties. Metamaterials are artificial composites that can be made to interact with electromagnetic waves in ways that natural materials cannot reproduce.
The cloak represents "one of the most elaborate metamaterial structures yet designed and produced," the scientists said. It also represents the most comprehensive approach to invisibility yet realized, with the potential to hide objects of any size or material property, they added.
Earlier scientific approaches to achieving "invisibility" often relied on limiting the reflection of electromagnetic waves. In other schemes, scientists attempted to create cloaks with electromagnetic properties that, in effect, cancel those of the object meant to be hidden. In the latter case, a given cloak would be suitable for hiding only objects with very specific properties.
"By incorporating complex material properties, our cloak allows a concealed volume, plus the cloak, to appear to have properties similar to free space when viewed externally," said David R. Smith, Augustine Scholar and professor of electrical and comp
uter engineering at Duke. "The cloak reduces both an object's reflection and its shadow, either of which would enable its detection."
The team produced the cloak according to electromagnetic specifications determined by a new design theory proposed by Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London, in collaboration with the Duke scientists. The scientists reported that theoretical work in Science earlier this year.
The principles behind the cloaking design, though mathematically rigorous, can be applied in a relatively straightforward way using metamaterials, said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department.
"One first imagines a distortion in space similar to what would occur when pushing a pointed object through a piece of cloth, distorting, but not breaking, any threads," Schurig said. "In such a space, light or other electromagnetic waves would be confined to the warped 'threads' and therefore could not interact with, or 'see,' objects placed inside the resulting hole."
The researchers used a mathematical description of that concept to develop a blueprint for a cloak that mimics the properties of the imagined, warped space, he said.
"You cannot easily warp space, but you can achieve the same effect on electromagnetic fields using materials with the right response," Schurig continued. "The required materials are quite complex, but can be implemented using metamaterial technology."
While the properties of natural materials are determined by their chemistry, the properties of metamaterials depend instead on their physical structure. In the case of the new cloak, that structure consists of copper rings and wires patterned onto sheets of fiberglass composite that are traditionally used in computer circuit boards.
To simplify design and fabrication in the current study, the team set out to develop a small cloak, less than five inches across, that would provide invisibility in two dimensions, rather than three. In essence, the cloak includes strips of metamaterial fashioned into concentric two-dimensional rings, a design that allows its use with a narrow beam of microwave radiation. The precise variations in the shape of copper elements patterned onto their surfaces determine their electromagnetic properties.
The cloak design is unique among metamaterials in its circular geometry and internal structural variation, the researchers said. All other metamaterials have been based on a cubic, or gridlike, design, and most of them have electromagnetic properties that are uniform throughout.
"Unlike other metamaterials, the cloak requires a gradual change in its properties as a function of position," Smith said. "Rather than its material properties being the same everywhere, the cloak's material properties vary from point to point and vary in a very specific way. Achieving that gradient in material properties was a fairly significant design effort."
To assess the cloak's performance, the researchers aimed a microwave beam at a cloak situated between two metal plates inside a test chamber, and used a specialized detecting apparatus to measure the electromagnetic fields that developed both inside and outside the cloak. By examining an animated representation of the data, they found that the wave fronts of the beam separate and flow around the center of the cloak.
"The waves' movement is similar to river water flowing around a smooth rock," Schurig said.
Moreover, the observed physical behavior of the cloak proved to be in "remarkable agreement" with that expected based on a simulated cloak, the researchers said.
Although the new cloak demonstrates the feasibility of the researchers' design, the findings nevertheless represent a "baby step" on the road to actual applications for invisibility, said team member Steven Cummer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.
The researchers said they plan to work toward developing a three-dimensional cloak and further perfecting the cloaking effect.
Although the same principles applied to the new microwave cloak might ultimately lead to the production of cloaks that confer invisibility within the visible frequency range, that eventuality remains uncertain, the researchers said.
"It's not yet clear that you're going to get the invisibility that everyone thinks about with Harry Potter's cloak or the Star Trek cloaking device," Smith said.
To make an object literally vanish before a person's eyes, a cloak would have to simultaneously interact with all of the wavelengths, or colors, that make up light, he said. That technology would require much more intricate and tiny metamaterial structures, which scientists have yet to devise.
Collaborators on the study included Jack Mock and Bryan Justice of Duke; John Pendry of Imperial College London; and Anthony Starr of SensorMetrix in San Diego, Calif. Pendry's research is supported by the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
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So do you think this going to become the newest christmas gift by 2020? haha well atleast I think harry potter fans will be happy! I know I will be! Imagine an real inviablity cloak? come on don't you think they will be selling millions? I smell an investment! atleast it could pay of college tuition =] wonderful! besides that I think it great that they will be able to use this to save solidgers lives, while it may not be world peace its coming closer to means of peaceful negoitaion and less casulties.
A MONKEY sits on a bench, wires running from its head and wrist into a small box of electronics. At first the wrist lies limp, but within 10 minutes the monkey begins to flex its muscles and move its hand from side to side. The movements are clumsy, but they are enough to justify a rewarding slug of juice. After all, it shouldn't be able to move its wrist at all.
A nerve connection in the monkey's upper arm had previously been blocked with an anaesthetic that prevented signals travelling from its brain to its wrist, leaving the muscles temporarily paralysed. The monkey was only able to move its arm because the wires and the black box bypassed the broken link.
The monkey was in Eberhard Fetz's lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. The experiment, performed last year, was the first demonstration of a new treatment that might one day cure paralysis, which is typically caused by a broken connection in the spinal cord. Though much work has focused on using stem cells to regrow damaged nerve fibres, some researchers believe that an electronic bypass like this is equally viable.
The idea is to implant electronic chips in the relevant regions of the brain to record neural activity. Then a decoder deciphers the neural chatter, often from thousands of neurons, to figure out what the brain wants the body to do. These messages must then be relayed - ideally wirelessly - to electrodes that deliver a pulse of electricity to stimulate the muscles into action. Such "brain chips" are already restoring hearing to the deaf and vision to the blind, and helping to stave off epileptic fits, so the idea isn't as far-fetched as it might sound (see "Bionic medicine").
Every step of progress in tackling paralysis has been hard won. One of the early demonstrations that it may be possible emerged in 2003, when José Carmena, then at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, successfully created an interface between brain and machine that allowed his lab monkeys to play a computer game using only their minds.
To gain a juice reward, the monkeys had to move a cursor - initially with a joystick - to hit a target on the computer screen. Beforehand, Carmena and his colleagues had implanted several chips throughout the parietal and frontal lobes of the monkeys' brains - regions known to plan and control movement. Each chip held up to 64 electrodes, which recorded the firing of the surrounding neurons as the monkeys manipulated the joystick.
Once the system had successfully decoded the chatter from the monkeys' neurons, the program stopped responding to the joystick's movement altogether and relied solely on the monkeys' thoughts to control the cursor. Eventually even the animals worked this out and stopped holding the joysticks as they completed the task (PLoS Biology, vol 1, p 42).
Manipulating a cursor on a computer screen is one thing, but whether such brain chips could translate the more complicated tasks of daily life remained an open question until 2004, when John Donoghue and colleagues from Cyberkinetics in Providence, Rhode Island, implanted a 100-electrode chip in the brain of a 25-year-old man known as MN, who had been left paralysed from the neck down by a knife wound.
Over the subsequent nine months, MN successfully used this BrainGate chip to open emails, operate a television and even control a robotic arm (Nature, vol 442, p 164). It was a promising step, but the technology was far from perfect. "Although BrainGate1 worked well in many ways, at times the control was not satisfactory," says Donoghue. And by the end of the trial, fluids from the brain had degraded the chip. The team are now solving these problems, and earlier this year announced the start of a clinical trial for an improved version of the chip.
The ultimate hope for many paralysed people, of course, is to regain movement in their own limbs. Until Fetz's experiment last year, no one had successfully used an implant to bridge a broken connection between the brain and the body. Trials of functional electrical stimulation (FES), in which implanted electrodes directly stimulate muscles into action, had hinted that this might be possible. But these impulses had been activated by external triggers, such as a switch controlled by one of the patient's healthy limbs, and not directly by brain signals.
Not only did Fetz's work demonstrate that the electronics could descramble neural signals and relay appropriate instructions to the limbs using FES, he also showed that the brain makes the job easier than one might expect. Although the motor neurons that connected to the chip did not naturally control the wrist, in a short time they adapted to the task and controlled complex actions (Nature, vol 456, p 639). "All neurons could be used equally well for control regardless of their original association to movement," says team member Chet Moritz.
That could have an important implication for humans hoping to use similar implants in the future. "It underscores the impressive flexibility of the brain in learning to adapt to novel connections, which may play a key role in allowing neural prostheses to be adopted by patients," he says.
So could the same approach work in humans? There seem to be no fundamental obstacles, and Donoghue plans to test the proposition in the new BrainGate trials, using his chip to control a limb using FES. If successful, it will represent a milestone in the development of such treatments.
Direct electrical stimulation of muscles using FES is unlikely to be the final solution, however. This direct approach uses a relatively powerful electric current applied to large areas of tissue, producing fairly clumsy movements. A more elegant method, some claim, is to send the impulse along the existing healthy nerves. That would require smaller local currents, delivered with greater precision, to finer regions of the muscle tissue, which should allow more subtle control.
Coordination
As a bonus, nerve stimulation could simplify some of the demands placed on a brain chip. That's because for many rhythmic activities, such as breathing, walking and crawling, the brain simply sends a command signal and it is the spinal cord's in-built systems that orchestrate the fine movements of each muscle. So if the healthy sections of a damaged spinal cord have retained their ability to control movement, the electronic chip could transmit the brain signal around the broken connection but leave the muscular orchestration to the spinal cord. In this case, a brain chip would just beam the message to a second device implanted in the spine below the break, which would then stimulate the spinal cord.
That could "dramatically simplify the control signals needed from the brain", says Moritz, since for these repetitive tasks the brain chip would just decode and transmit an umbrella command. Such simplification should make the chips less likely to fail - an important consideration when the only way to replace the chips is through invasive surgery - and also reduce their power consumption.
Using this principle in 2002, Vivian Mushahwar, now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, plugged four electrodes into a cat's spinal cord and delivered signals that mimicked the brain's command to walk. Sure enough, the cat made stepping motions.
Simply relaying the messages across a break in this way would not help the worst injuries, however, in which the spinal cord has lost its ability to coordinate muscles. In these cases, to minimise the size of the brain chip, and the burden placed on it, the muscular orchestration would need to come from either the chip implanted in the spinal cord, or an external device that communicates wirelessly with the chips in the brain and the spine.
Calculating exactly which nerves to stimulate and in what pattern is no easy task, but the first demonstration of an artificial "central pattern generator" was reported last year, when Mushahwar and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, successfully tested such a chip on a cat. With coordination coming solely from an external CPG chip connected to a handful of electrodes that stimulated the cat's spine, the animal was able to walk (IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, vol 2, p 212). In this experiment, the team were simply testing the CPG's ability to orchestrate movement as an alternative to FES, so the trigger came from a manual switch and not the cat's brain. The next hurdle will be to use the CPG in conjunction with a neural chip.
While this CPG chip only dealt with the action of walking, in humans an additional external chip might also offload some of the processing from the brain chip for non-repetitive motions like clenching a fist or raising a hand. The brain doesn't necessarily produce an umbrella command for all of these movements, so the neural implant would still need to detect a more complicated signal, but the external chip could at least perform some of the processing to decode and relay these comands to the relevant electrodes.
For many patients, technology like this would only solve half the problem, however. Paralysed people who have lost feeling as well as movement in their limbs would need two-way systems to pass sensations back to their brain. This information could come from artificial sensors, but ideally the chip would read sensations from existing nerves and relay them to chips that stimulate the areas of the brain that process tactile information.
Although work has been slower in this area, there's good evidence it will one day be possible. Carmena, for instance, who is now at the University of California, Berkeley, recently stimulated a rat's brain to feel sensations from some "virtual whiskers", causing it to move as if its own whisker's had really brushed against an object. Similar technology could one day relay tactile information to human brains.
If these advances in brain-chip capability are to be exploited, the researchers still need to ensure that the chips are safe and durable. Biocompatibility, for instance, is a huge challenge, because tissue in the brain can react badly to an implant, killing off the very neurons that the electronics are trying to connect to. Recent efforts suggest a coating of growth hormones might mitigate this problem, while others have shown chips that slowly exude stem cells might also work.
Then there's the problem of powering the devices. Most existing implants - like cochlear implants, for example - are connected to a battery outside the head that can be replaced regularly. The electrodes in the spine and limbs could be powered this way, but it's less practical for a chip deep within the skull. Instead, such chips will need to be recharged by electromagnetic fields generated by a device outside the head, so power consumption will have to be minimal.
One solution might be to offload the more difficult processing to a portable computer outside the body, before passing the information back to the chips that stimulate the nervous system. In this way, Reid Harrison at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has produced a neural chip that uses just 8 milliwatts. That's less than the "standby" LED on the front of a TV set.
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I think this is an amazing discovery! So many people are plagued by with not being able to move and being held in the arms of depression because of it! SO now you can be able to have some range of movement rather then none at all! So this advancement no doubt is stunning and will go out ot help many people!
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