Trap Lightning in a Block
“To create beautiful electrical-charge patterns like this, you could use a giant particle accelerator. But shag carpeting will also do just fine. Watch how Lichtenberg figures are made in our amazing video. A Lichtenberg figure being created by a tap from a nail. In just a few hundred nanoseconds, electrons trapped in plastic exit suddenly as a bright, branching spark.”
Read more at PopSci (Thanks DG)
How an ancient printer can spill your most intimate secrets
“Researchers have devised a novel way to recover confidential messages processed in doctors’ offices and elsewhere by analyzing the sounds made when documents are reproduced on dot-matrix printers.
This so-called side-channel attack works by recording the “acoustic emanations” of a confidential document being printed, and then processing it with software that translates the sounds into words. The method recovers as much as 95 per cent of the printed words when an attacker has contextual knowledge about the text being printed, such as the words included in a medical prescription or a living-will declaration. Up to 72 per cent of the text can be recovered when no context is known.
The attack, which so far works only on English text, was carried out under what the researchers described as “realistic — and arguably even pessimistic —– circumstances,” in which there was no shielding from ambient noise such as that made by people chatting in a nearby waiting room. Despite the wide availability of inkjet and laser printers, about 60 per cent of doctors in Germany continue to use dot-matrix devices. About 30 per cent of banks in Germany do so as well, according to the researchers.
Countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Austria require carbon-copy-capable dot-matrix printers to be used for printing prescriptions for narcotics, they said.”
Read more at The Register (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Invisibility Cloak Made From Silk
“For thousands of years people have worn shimmering silk to stand out in a crowd. Within the next few years people could wear silk to become invisible in a a crowd.
For the first time ever, scientists have created an invisibility cloak made from silk, and coated in gold.
The new metamaterial, as invisibility cloaks and their kin are technically called, only works on relatively long terahertz waves (a region of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and infrared light), but the Boston-area scientists who developed the technology think that silk could work as an invisibility cloak at much smaller wavelengths, even in the visible range.
The research could lead to a wide range of optically unique materials for use in biomedicine or defense.
“This is an unusual angle for a metamaterial because of silk’s ability to interface with the human body,” something that no other metamaterial is currently capable of, said Fiorenzo Omenetto, a scientist at Tufts University who, along with colleagues at Boston University, helped develop the silk-based metamaterial and detail their new research in the journal Advanced Materials.
“On the sensing side it gives you a platform that is very adaptable.”"
Read more at Discovery News (Thanks Steve)
The Invisible Man
Liu Bolin is an artist known in his native China as “the invisible man” for his series of photographs where he paints himself to blend into the background. These are real photographs, not digital manipulations!
(He’s just in front of the closest tyre!)
See more at Woody’s Place (Thanks Katherine)
Happy people are ‘more creative’
Outgoing people in a good mood are significantly more creative than people who keep themselves to themselves, according to a new study. University of Portsmouth psychologist Lorenzo Stafford discovered that extrovert people in a good mood are the most creative thinkers because they have more of the “happiness chemical” dopamine. Introverts are no more creative whether they are in a good or neutral mood, the study found.
Dr Stafford said his results showed personality and mood play a vital role in creativity. Extroverts are likely to be more successful because a higher than average level of the chemical floods the brain at even higher doses when a person is in a good mood, according to Dr Stafford. “The more outgoing a person is, the more active their dopamine system is and a positive mood increases dopamine activity even further in many parts of the brain,” he explained. “It’s effectively a combination of these two things I would suggest leads to greater activity in certain areas of the brain controlling mental ability. “This is interesting in itself because it demonstrates that it is the combination of the extrovert personality-type in a positive mood which encourages more creative performance, and not simply positive mood alone.”
Dopamine occurs naturally in the brain and affects a range of behaviour including mood, sleep, reward, learning and movement.
Read more at Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Brain chip break-through
“Dr. Naweed Syed has made the brain come to life on a microchip.
He and a University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine team of eight, in collaboration with the National Research Council, have developed a silicon chip that monitors the subtle signals of living individual brain cells and keeps them alive for up at least two days.
Only snail brain cells have been used, but in a couple months, Syed will target cells from epileptic patients. “We want to get the seizure-causing tissue removed in surgery, test the impact of drugs on those cells, and find a better drug for the patient,” he explained.
Once the process is fully automated hundreds of cells could be tested simultaneously.”
“Dr. Naweed Syed was the first to connect brain cells to a silicon chip, a major step in controlling artificial limbs, correcting memory loss, impaired vision and more. Now, he’s leading the U of C biomedical engineering strategy.
Dr. Naweed Syed’s “brain on a chip” discovery is a major step towards integrating computers with human brains to help people control artificial limbs, monitor people’s vital signs, correct memory loss or impaired vision. “We want to harness the innovation taking place here by putting people from different disciplines in a place where they will bump into each other on a daily basis and work together on novel ideas,” Syed says.”
Read more at Metro News and Ucalgary (Thanks Duncan)
Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans
“A couple arrive at a fancy restaurant and they’re offered the wine list. This establishment only has two bottles on offer, one costing £5 and the other costing £25. The second bottle seems too expensive and the diners select the cheaper one. The next week, they return. Now, there’s a third bottle on the list but it’s a vintage, priced at a staggering £1,000. Suddenly, the £25 bottle doesn’t seem all that expensive, and this time, the diners choose it instead.
Businesses use this tactic all the time – an extremely expensive option is used to make mid-range ones suddenly seem like attractive buys. The strategy only works because humans like to compare our options, rather than paying attention to their absolute values. In the wine example, the existence of the third bottle shouldn’t matter – the £25 option costs the same amount either way, but in one scenario it looks like a rip-off and in another, it looks like a steal. The simple fact is that to us, a thing’s value depends on the things around it. Economists often refer to this as “irrational”.
But if that’s the case, we’re not alone in our folly. Other animals, from birds to bees, make choices in the same way. Now, Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman from the University of Sydney, have found the same style of decision-making in a creature that’s completely unlike any of these animals – the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. It’s a single-celled, amoeba-like creature that doesn’t have a brain.
Physarum spends most of its life as a large mat called a ‘plasmodium’, which is a single cell that contains many nuclei. The plasmodium searches for food by moving along like an amoeba and sending out a network of tendrils. Its search patterns are very sophisticated for a brainless organism. A Japanese group found that if they placed the mould among food sources arranged like Tokyo’s urban centres, it created a network that closely resembled Tokyo’s actual railway system. The slimy network was optimised to transport nutrients to the main plasmodium.
Scientists have long since discovered that you can run simple decision-making experiments with Physarum by presenting it with several food sources and seeing how it behaves. Typically, the plasmodium touches all the potential meals and then either ‘decides’ to move towards one, or splits itself among many.”
Read more at Discover
How Brilliant Computer Scientists Solved the Bermuda Triangle Mystery
“Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.
According to two research scientists the mystery of vanished ships and airplanes in the region dubbed “The Bermuda Triangle” has been solved.
Step aside outer space aliens, time anomalies, submerged giant Atlantean pyramids and bizarre meteorological phenomena … the “Triangle” simply suffers from an acute case of gas.
Natural gas—the kind that heats ovens and boils water—specifically methane, is the culprit behind the mysterious disappearances and loss of water and air craft.
The evidence for this astounding new insight into a mystery that’s bedeviled the world is laid out in a research paper published in the American Journal of Physics.
Professor Joseph Monaghan researched the hypothesis with honor student David May at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The two hypothesized that large methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor might account for many, if not all, of the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft at specific locales around the world.
Researcher Ivan T. Sanderson identified these mystery areas during the 1960s. Sanderson described the actual shape of these regions as more like a lozenge rather than a triangle. Some of the more famous spots include an area in the Sea of Japan, the North Sea, and of course the infamous “Bermuda (or Devil’s) Triangle.”
Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.”
Read more at Salem News (Thanks DG)
The Fun Theory
The Fun Theory site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better. We’ve blogged some of the videos in the past, but be sure to check out the full collection over at http://thefuntheory.com/.
Below is ‘The Scratch Mat’.
“Most people enter a building without cleaning their shoes, often resulting in dirt all over the floor.
Could this nuisance be removed by making the activity fun to do? We think so.”
http://thefuntheory.com/ (Thanks @sureality)
Supernova ejects material asymmetrically
“A team of astronomers based in Europe has obtained a three-dimensional view of the innermost material released by a supernova – something never before seen. The researchers discovered a turbulent environment where stellar material is being ejected in a highly asymmetric fashion.
The subject of the study is Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), located in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Due to its proximity to the Milky Way, SN 1987A has caused a flurry of astronomical interest since it first appeared in 1987. It has been the basis for several remarkable observational “firsts”, including the detection of neutrinos released when its core collapsed, direct exploration of the radioactive elements present during the blast, and it revealed insights into how dust is formed during a supernova explosion.
This latest research, led by Karina Kjaer of Queen’s University, Belfast, looks at the geometry of the supernova blast. Kjaer worked with colleagues from the European Southern Observatory and Stockholm University, Sweden, to image the aftermath of the star’s explosion. This was done using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) fitted with SINFONI (Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared). This equipment allowed the team to obtain detailed analysis of SN 1987A through use of its very high resolving ability and light filtering system.”
Read more at Physics World (Thanks @MiniOptimus)
