Wireless device sends power through armoured doors
“Scientists in the UK have developed technology that allows power to be transmitted wirelessly through several inches of steel.
The developers, at BAE Systems, say the device could be used to send power and communications signals through submarine hulls or armoured doors.
The device uses very high frequency acoustics – essentially converting the signal into sound waves.
The company has started environmental tests on the technology.
These should ensure, it says, that it will be able to survive the 25-year lifespan and extreme conditions required on the outer hull of a submarine.
Currently the system is still at demonstration stage, but the developers claim that it could eventually help save millions of pounds currently spent adapting submarine hulls for the necessary communications equipment.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks Tracey)
Vaccine patch may replace needles
“A vaccine patch could cut out the need for painful needles and boost the effectiveness of immunisation against diseases like flu, say US researchers. The patch has hundreds of microscopic needles which dissolve into the skin. Tests in mice show the technology may even produce a better immune response than a conventional jab. Writing in Nature Medicine, the team of researchers said the patch could one day enable people to vaccinate themselves.
Each patch, developed by researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, contains 100 “microneedles” which are just 0.65mm in length. They are designed to penetrate the outer layers of skin, dissolving on contact.
To test the technology, the researchers loaded the needles with an influenza vaccine. One group of mice received the influenza vaccine using traditional hypodermic needles and another group were vaccinated with the patch. Patches that had no vaccine on them were applied to a third group of mice. Three months down the line the team found the patch appeared to produce a more effective immune response in mice, then infected with the flu virus, than a standard vaccination.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The Rainforest Experience At The Parrot Zoo
As most of you know, Derren has a love for parrots and is the patron of the Parrot Zoo Trust.
The Parrot Zoo have just received planning permission to construct the Rainforest Experience, an amazing all weather development, allowing anyone at anytime to experience the creatures that live in the Rainforest set within the Parrot Zoo who recently received the honour of being within the top 100 visitor attractions to visit in the UK, this will no doubt enhance what is already a superb facility.
The proposed development incorporates a large open-plan landscaped interior with a series of enclosures for a variety of animal species. Giving a totally unique educational experience showing the different levels of a rainforest and the creatures that live within, offering the Parrot Zoo the availability to diversify into alternative animals creating an overall better experience.
Visit the Parrot Zoo Website where you can find out more information about the above project, sponser parrots and also make a donation to support ‘The Rainforest Experience’ project. (Thanks @_Craigy)
Businessman launches manly cupcakes line
“A businessman has opened his own cake-making business called the Butch Bakery, specialising in manly cupcakes.
David Arrick, who lost his job as a Wall Street lawyer in 2008, came up with the idea after conducting some market research.
Arrick told Sky News: “That’s how Butch Bakery was born, I thought they are all very feminine and pink and a lot of them are frilly with jelly beans and sprinkles, and I thought I wanted to do something very different, and I decided to do something with a masculine bent to it and that’s how I came up with the idea.
“I think that we eat with our eyes first before our stomachs and I think that it’s got to be visually appealing, and I wanted something that was going to have an impact from the beginning, right when you see it.
“The response has been overwhelming, all around the world, media response from all around the world, I get orders from all around the world from as far away as Australia as a matter of fact.”
Flavours of cupcakes available include beer, salted caramel and whisky.
Arrick added: “We’ve got a great banana, peanut butter with crushed bacon, so if you think about it, it’s kind of like the Elvis sandwich, you know, peanut butter, bacon, and banana, we’ve got a cupcake that has that.”"
Read more at Digital Spy (Thanks @cheekymonkey13)
Mind-controlled prosthetic arm
An Austrian amputee is the first in Europe to be fitted with a new-generation mind-controlled prosthetic limb that moves and feels like a real arm, receiving commands from the brain and sending input back.
Via Reuters (Thanks @nettmac)
Twitter and Scientology: Don’t use the ‘S’-word
“When he walked past a Scientology centre on a trip to London last year, a councillor from Cardiff cannot have expected that his reaction would end up fuelling another big hoo-hah over free speech on the internet.
Nor that it would end up with him being hauled up in front of his council’s ethics committee.
But Councillor John Dixon’s mistake was to go on Twitter and say this:
“I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”
Somehow this was spotted by a member of the organisation and in due course a complaint was made to the Ombudsman for Public Services in Wales.
The watchdog has partially upheld the complaint; to be more precise, it has found there is a case to answer under the code of conduct for councillors and has passed the matter on to Cardiff City Council’s Standards and Ethics Committee.
So it seems Councillor Dixon has joined the growing list of politicians who have found that careless tweets can damage their careers. 1-0 to the Scientologists, then?
Not so fast. When news of the case erupted on Twitter this morning, it rapidly became a cause celebre – or rather a cause for mockery of Scientologisty.
Prominent members of the Twitterati – a crowd which includes many who are free-thinkers sceptical about religion in any form – started retweeting Councillor Dixon’s original remark. Very rapidly, the term #stupidscientology became a trending topic on Twitter.
Now there are all sorts of lessons one could draw from this affair – about the dangers of social networking for politicians, the perils of taking on Twitter, the advisability of spending many hours and presumably a lot of public money investigating whether the word “stupid” is sufficiently offensive to constitute a breach of a code of conduct.
But, rather than face being hauled up in front of an ethics committee myself, I think I will allow you to draw your own conclusions.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @scratchndsniff)
Dogs in space: a cosmonaut’s best friend
“A space suit for canine adventurers is one of the highlights in a new exhibition at the National Space Centre in Leicester.
One day you’re sniffing a lamppost behind the Kremlin, the next you’re an integral part of a top-secret programme sending dogs to boldly go where no dogs have gone before.The search criteria weren’t strict. No particular breed was targeted, instead placid mongrels were rounded up from Moscow’s streets. There was one stipulation however; the stray had to be female. That would ensure that designing the suit would be “simpler”.
But simple it isn’t. “It’s a very strange-looking contraption,” admits Kevin Yates, space communications manager at the National Space Centre in Leicester. “The clear helmet is shaped like a dog’s head, with laces to tie it up like a giant boot around the body.”
This canine high-altitude pressure suit was created by the Soviets in the late 50s at the height of the space race. Dogs were strapped into the nose of a rocket before being fired 80km up, then returning to earth by parachute. “After being released from their suits, film footage shows the dogs running around, excited to see their owners,” says Yates, “whereas it’d scare the living daylights out of most people.”"
Read more at the Guardian (Thanks Tracey)
Plants Can “Think and Remember”
“When it comes to light, scientists have found that plants can “think” and “remember” in ways very similar to our own nervous system:
In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond.
And the response, which took the form of light-induced chemical reactions in the leaves, continued in the dark.
This showed, they said, that the plant “remembered” the information encoded in light.
“We shone the light only on the bottom of the plant and we observed changes in the upper part,” explained Professor Stanislaw Karpinski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland, who led this research.”
Read more at Neatorama
Why it’s increasingly difficult to make discoveries
“If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be almost trivial.
Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a 10,000-member team that runs a multibillion dollar atom smasher. It takes ever more money, more effort, and more people to find out new things.
But until recently, no one actually tried to measure the increasing difficulty of discovery. It certainly seems to be getting harder, but how much harder? How fast does it change?
This type of research, studying the science of science, is in fact a field of science itself, and is known as scientometrics. Scientometrics may sound self-absorbed, a kind of inside baseball for scientists, but it matters: We spend billions of dollars annually on research, and count on science to do such things as cure cancer and master space travel, so it’s good to know what really works.”
Read more at Boston.com
Brightest star explosion seen blinds satellite
“The brightest explosion of a star ever seen temporarily blinded a satellite set up to watch such events, astronomers said on Wednesday. The gamma-ray burst and explosion of X-rays that followed came from a star that died 5 billion years ago, far beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, NASA and British scientists said. It took this long for the radiation to reach the Swift orbiting observatory.
The bright X-ray burst blinded Swift on June 21, and the observatory’s software ignored it as if it were an anomaly, the astronomers said. “The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented,” Neil Gehrels, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.
Gehrels said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since it started looking for them in 2005. “Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be,” Gehrels said.”"
Read more at The Montreal Gazette (Thanks Tracey)
