A technique that confuses clothes moths about their sexuality has made a dramatic difference to the storage of ballet and opera costumes at Covent Garden
The inherent weirdness of quantum physics may act to prevent the paradoxes which seem possible with the conventional view of time travel
Activity surrounding Kryptos, the cryptographic puzzle at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, continues to surge. Elonka Dunin who runs a comprehensive Kryptos site, told The Guardian that she used to see 500 visitors a day but recently got 30,000 visits in 24 hours. Of course, interest in cracking Kryptos skyrocketed once it was revealed that The Da Vinci Code dustjacket references the puzzle and that it’s part of the plot of Dan Brown’s next bestseller, The Solomon Key — via BoingBoing
What has been claimed as Europe’s oldest civilisation has been discovered by archaeologists across the continent. The report says more than 150 large temples, constructed between 4800 BC and 4600 BC, have been unearthed in fields and cities in Germany, Austria and Slovakia, predating the pyramids in Egypt by some 2,000 years. The network of temples, made of earth and wood, were constructed by a religious people whose economy appears to have been based on livestock farming
Researchers in Israel say they have succeeded in growing a date palm from a seed that is 2,000 years old. The seed was unearthed during an excavation of the ancient mountain fortress of Masada 30 years ago and is thought to be the oldest seed ever germinated
An Israeli inventor has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water like the gills of a fish
Japanese scientists are attempting to explore the centre of the Earth. Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below. The team wants to retrieve samples from the mantle, six miles down, to learn more about what triggers undersea earthquakes, such as the one off Sumatra that caused the Boxing Day tsunami
A Carnegie Mellon engineer is in the early stages of adding legs to a camera-in-a-pill that doctors currently use to see inside the intestine. Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is putting a three-footed system through its paces in pig intestines — via BoingBoing
First there was the printing press, around 1452. Then, in 1799, there was lithographic printing. And now, in 2005, there’s bacterial printing. The new technique allows live bugs to be pressed onto solid surfaces at very precise distances from each other and in a variety of patterns. The aim is to explore how bacteria influence each other at various distances. Understanding how they operate will help efforts to develop new ways to thwart their attacks on the human body
A particle accelerator is being used to reveal the long-lost writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, work hidden for centuries after a Christian monk wrote over it in the Middle Ages. Highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre were used last week to begin deciphering the parts of the 174-page text that have not yet been revealed
A new monkey species has been found in the highland forests of Tanzania. The monkey was discovered almost simultaneously by two research teams on separate mountain ranges and is the first new African monkey to be found in more than 20 years. It also instantly becomes one of the rarest and most critically endangered primates on Earth
Pedro Luna, an archeologist from the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in the southern city of Cuzco has announced that builders have found the fossil of a giant armadillo — which lived up to 2 million years ago and would have been the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — in southern Peru — via Beyond the Beyond
South Korean scientists say they have made stem cells tailored to match the individual for the first time. Each of the eleven new stem cell lines that they made were created by taking genetic material from the patient and putting it into a donated egg. The resultant cells were a perfect match for the individual and could mean treatments for diseases like diabetes without problems of rejection — via Warren Ellis
The densest materials known have been made to levitate on a pool of liquid air. The trick may one day be used to separate precious minerals, metal and gems from rock and soil
Fluff is a composting material made from recycled household garbage that can also be extruded into posts, timbers and other construction materials. It uses undifferentiated household waste and processes it into pathogen free
Fluff in 30 minutes. Composite Products of America extrudes the Fluff into 8″ x 8″ tongue and groove posts or landscaping timbers for the building of retaining wall or small one room structures. There is even a bench made of extruded fluff currently located in the Tennessee State Capital Building — talk about adding waste to the government — via BoingBoing
Giant Microbes have new designs.
They’ve introduced TB, The Clap and, my favourite, The Pox.
I think I need more giant microbes
Researchers at the University of Essex are using Linux and tiny embedded computer modules to build fleets of unmanned aircraft that fly in flocking formations like birds, while performing parallel, distributed computing tasks using Bluetooth-connected Linux clustering software. The Gridswarm project includes model trainers that can fly 120mph, while a parallel Ultraswarm project uses co-axial helicopters. A prototype of the later is believed to the world’s smallest flying web server. The aircraft will run Linux on embedded computing modules from Gumstix — via Slashdot
Carnegie Institution researchers have learned to produce 10-carat, 12mm thick diamonds at rates of about 100µm per hour, which in the diamond business is blazingly fast. These aren’t industrial diamonds either, but gem-quality stones. The goal is to create a 300 carat diamond in whatever shape they want — via Science Blog
A Japanese research team has developed a fuel cell that runs on blood without using toxic substances, opening the way for use in artificial hearts and other organs. The biological fuel cell uses glucose, a sugar in blood, with a non-toxic substance used to draw electrons from glucose, said the team led by Matsuhiko Nishizawa, bio-engineering professor at the graduate school of state-run Tohoku University
A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already ten times more efficient than current nuclear batteries — and has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient
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