3D Printer Could Build Moon Bases
“An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building.
The D-shape printer can create a building four times faster than it could be built by conventional means, and reduces the cost to half or less. There is little waste, which is better for the environment, and it can easily “print” curved structures that are difficult and expensive to build by other means. Dini is proving the technology by creating a nine cubic meter pavilion for a roundabout in the town of Pontedera.
The printer can be moved along horizontal beams and four vertical columns, and the printer head is raised by only 5-10 mm for each new layer. The printer is driven by a computer running CAD software and prints at a resolution of 25 dpi (dots per inch). The completed material resembles marble, is stronger than concrete, and does not need iron reinforcing. The printing process can successfully create internal curves, partitions, ducting, and hollow columns.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, Berber)
How much can we remember?
“Remembering an 11-digit telephone number is hard enough for most of us. Yet one of the current record-holders for a feat of memory, Chao Lu of China, was able to accurately recite 67,890 digits of pi from memory in 2005. But is that a mere drop in the ocean compared to the brain’s true capacity?
Our ability to absorb information is vast. In 1986 Thomas Landauer, then at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, looked at studies of how much visual and verbal information subjects stored while examining images and text, and how quickly they forgot it. This led him to estimate that the average adult stores around 125 megabytes of this type of information in their lifetime – enough to store the contents of 100 books the length of Moby Dick.
Accurately memorising a long string of digits in the correct order is a more demanding task than memorising ad hoc facts about a text or a picture. To discover the limit of the length of a single memory, it may be more informative to consider the techniques used by the memory champions.
Many of them use a mnemonic method. Before starting to memorise a number, they associate a person or object with each four-digit number from 0000 to 9999. The digits of pi can then be translated into a sequence of these people and objects, which the memoriser links by making up a story. This helps add interest to the random sequence of numbers and pegs down the memory.
Lu takes roughly 1000 hours to memorise 40,000 digits. Assuming this rate would apply no matter how big the memory feat, someone who started memorising a number at the age of 20 and spent 12 hours a day at it, every day, would be able to remember around 8,760,000 digits by their 70th birthday.”
Read more at New Scientist
Briton ‘Gets Chinese Accent After Bad Migraine’
“A British woman has suddenly started speaking with a Chinese accent after suffering a severe migraine, she said in comments quoted by British media Tuesday.
Sarah Colwill believes she has Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) which has caused her distinctive West Country drawl to be replaced with a Chinese twang, even though she has never even visited the country.
The 35-year-old from Plymouth, southwest England, is now undergoing speech therapy following an acute form of migraine last month which reportedly left her with a form of brain damage.
‘I moved to Plymouth when I was 18 months old so I have always spoken like a local. But following one attack, an ambulance crew arrived and they said I definitely sounded Chinese,’ she said.
‘I spoke to my stepdaughter on the phone from hospital and she didn’t recognise who I was. She said I sounded Chinese. Since then, I have had my friends hanging up on me because they think I’m a hoax caller.’
Colwill added: ‘The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down. My voice has started to annoy me now. It is not my voice.’”
Read more at Yahoo News (thanks, SonOfSam)
Can we fly safely through volcanic ash?
“If airlines and aircraft makers did not understand the economic case for Fred Prata’s invention a week ago, they will now.
Since 1991 the atmospheric physicist has been developing a sensor to warn pilots about volcanic ash clouds up to 100 kilometres ahead of their plane so they can thread a safe path around it. But despite successful ground tests (see image), he has not been able to secure the funding to test it in the air.
With an estimated 6.8 million passengers grounded by airborne ash cloud from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and millions of pounds at stake, serious questions are being asked about the technological shortcomings of the current approach to protecting flights.
Ever since a Boeing 747 temporarily lost all four engines in an ash cloud in 1982, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has stipulated that skies must be closed as soon as ash concentration rises above zero. The ICAO’s International Airways Volcano Watch uses weather forecasting to predict ash cloud movements, and if any projections intersect a flight path, the route is closed.
But although it is certain that volcanic ash like that hanging over northern Europe can melt inside a jet engine and block airflow, nobody has the least idea about just how much is too much. After a week of losing millions every day, airlines are starting to ask why we can’t do better.”
Read more at New Scientist
Rats on junk food pass cancer down the generations
“”Genes may not be the only way cancer passes down the generations. Feeding pregnant rats a fatty diet puts both their daughters and granddaughters at greater risk of breast cancer.
Sonia de Assis of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC and colleagues had discovered that the daughters of pregnant rats fed an unhealthy diet are more likely to develop breast cancer. Now they have shown that even if these daughters eat healthily, their offspring are still at greater risk of disease. Rats don’t normally develop breast cancer, so de Assis had to give the granddaughters a chemical that induces tumours. This put all the granddaughters at increased risk. Crucially, however, rats with grandmothers who ate a fatty diet were even more at risk. Twenty weeks later, half the rats whose grandmothers ate a normal diet developed breast tumours, while 80 per cent of rats with two grandmothers fed a high fat diet got tumours and 68 per cent of the rats with just did one developed cancer.
De Assis, who presented the work at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Washington DC, says a fatty diet may cause “epigenetic” DNA modifications that can be passed on to future generations. If the process also applies to people, genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are linked with breast cancer, may not be the only reason why a family history of breast cancer puts a woman at risk. “We think that there may be other means of transmission that are not genetic that can account for breast cancer,” says de Assis.”"
Read more at New Scientist
Brain-training games don’t work
“Brain-training games are big business. Self-improvement desires render us vulnerable to marketing claims that products will make us thinner, healthier, or in the case of brain-training software, smarter.
Enter science, “the blabber-mouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends”, as Ned Flanders once described it. Until now, there had been scant empirical data on whether or not brain training actually improves your cognitive ability.
Alas, research published today in Nature indicates that the possibility of improving your general cognitive abilities by playing brain-training games is an empty promise. More than 11,000 volunteers were split into three groups: one who played brain-training-type exercises; a second practised more general cognitive tests; and a control group who just pootled around the internet answering random questions. They did this for six weeks, bookended by benchmarking tests of memory, reasoning and other standard tests of cognitive function.
All three groups displayed improvement in the tasks they were performing. But all three groups also showed only small and similar increases in the benchmarking tests, possibly simply the effect of repeating the test. Conclusion? Practising brain-training games will improve your performance on brain-training games, but that effect will not transfer to other aspects of brain function. They will not make you brainier, so you may as well just pootle around on the internet. As lead researcher Adrian Owen says: “You’re not going to get better at playing the trumpet by practising the violin.”"
Read more at The Guardian
Colony Of Microbes ‘As Big As Greece’ Found In Ocean
“A vast carpet of underwater microbes that covers an area as big as Greece has been discovered on the seabed off the west coast of South America. Scientists believe the microbes could be directly descended from some of the earliest life forms to have evolved on Earth.
The discovery is part of a series of astonishing finds made since 2000 as part of the decade-long Census of Marine Life, an international project by more than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries to explore the largely unknown life which inhabits the oceans.
The “microbial mat” lives in a deep layer of seawater that is deprived of both light and oxygen and seems to have survived by “eating” hydrogen sulphide and “breathing” nitrates. It could represent a present-day community of organisms descended from primitive microbes which first evolved about 3 billion years ago, when there was no oxygen on the planet.
Scientists said they were taken aback by the spectacle when the first images of the microbial mat appeared on the television screens from video cameras on board a submersible robot, which had been lowered into the deep ocean to explore the continental shelf off the coasts of Chile and Peru.
‘It was like a big carpet of white grass with filaments sticking out and waving in the water,’ said Victor Gallardo, a Chilean scientist on the expedition. ‘It looks like a carpet lying on the seabed, separating the underlying sediment from the overlying water,’ he added.
Initial tests showed the microbial mat is composed of a community of micro-organisms adapted to growing under extreme hypoxia, when there is little or no oxygen. It is the same kind of conditions that existed before the evolution of the first photosynthetic algae, which were able to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.”
Read more at The Independent
Cats Recognize Face Faster Than Supercomputer
“A cat can recognize a face faster and more efficiently than a supercomputer. That’s one reason a feline brain is the model for a biologically-inspired computer project involving the University of Michigan.
U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can.
Lu previously built a “memristor,” a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now, he has demonstrated that this memristor can connect conventional circuits and support a process that is the basis for memory and learning in biological systems.
A paper on the research is published online in Nano Letters and is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming April edition of the journal.
‘We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain,’ said Lu, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. ‘The idea is to use a completely different paradigm compared to conventional computers. The cat brain sets a realistic goal because it is much simpler than a human brain but still extremely difficult to replicate in complexity and efficiency.’
Today’s most sophisticated supercomputer can accomplish certain tasks with the brain functionality of a cat, but it’s a massive machine with more than 140,000 central processing units and a dedicated power supply. And it still performs 83 times slower than a cat’s brain, Lu wrote in his paper.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, DG)
Get Ready For Decades Of Icelandic Earthquakes
“We’re not quite back to the pre-plane era, but air travel over and around the north Atlantic might get a lot more disrupted in the coming years.
Volcanologists say the fireworks exploding from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland, which is responsible for the ash cloud that is grounding all commercial flights across northern Europe, may become a familiar sight. Increased rumblings under Iceland over the past decade suggest that the area is entering a more active phase, with more eruptions and the potential for some very large bangs.
‘Volcanic activity on Iceland appears to follow a periodicity of around 50 to 80 years. The increase in activity over the past 10 years suggests we might be entering a more active phase with more eruptions,’ says Thorvaldur Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanoes at the University of Edinburgh, UK. By contrast, the latter half of the 20th century was unusually quiet.
Along with increased volcanism, more seismic activity has been recorded around Iceland, including the magnitude-6.1 quake that rocked Reykjavik in May 2008.”
Read more at New Scientist
Dublin
Dublin audiences have a certain mischief about them absent in Belfast, and probably anywhere else I’ve come across. The Grand Canal Theatre was wonderful: it has only been open a few weeks in there, and it is great to play. And a long time coming: the crumbling Olympia has its charm, (it’s a unique experience to perform with rain coming in through a hole in the roof onto the stage), but the new theatre, part of the O2 empire, is a triumph. My voice (thank you for the well-wishes) has become stronger, but I still have to be careful to rest it before and after shows.
The final night in Dublin was not as raucous as I expected. The final night was not the best, (a certain punch was lost in aspects of the second half) , but the crowds each night were marvellous, oddly giggly and very demonstrative. There is another unique aspect to performing there: evenings out start late in that city, and a 7.30 advertised starting time, I was told by locals, is taken as 7.30 for 8. Each night, ready and poised to start the show as 7.30 on the dot, we were still awaiting around 600 people. Each night I eventually walked out around 7.50. I’m not aware of this happening elsewhere, and am unsure whether we should advertise it for 8 next year, or whether that will be taken as an 8.30 start… A curious but somehow fitting idiosyncrasy of that very special city. And the Guinness… oh yes.
Sunday morning we left for an early ferry at 7 am. This is what the rest of the bunch look like at that time:
It was a very long day. We slept a bit on the ferry, and got up only to go and watch an advertised magic show on the deck below. It turned out to be a show for the very young kids who, sensibly, would benefit from the distraction, so we left the cheery chap to do his best with them. Although I did consider standing at the back and staring him out for the whole thing. After hours of intermittent napping and trying to get the internet to work, we poured out, onto a a coach, and then onto a minibus that got us into Cardiff for about 8pm. It was a long, scenic route, punctuated by a stop for truly disastrous fish and chips in Aberystwyth. Here’s Coops and popular new boy Jonas at unnamed café:
It was a long drive after a long ferry-ride: we were exhausted and it was difficult to sleep. Conversations, bleary and hallucinogenic, at one point turned to a hushed discussion of how, if we absolutely had to, we could best kill the driver and dispose of the body. Iain, as we knew, is something of an expert on mass murderers, and much of our solution hinged on whether or not Jennie had anything in her kit which would allow us to grind the driver’s bones down to dust. She didn’t, and he was spared.
Tonight’s show is at St Davids: another concert hall, but another guaranteed very good crowd. I’m being spoilt at the moment. Maybe see you there.
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