A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft. The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight. The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground. Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance
You wouldn’t begrudge the creators of what is probably the most perfectly flat mirror ever a moment of vanity. But rather than studying their own reflections, the Spanish scientists hope to use it to create a new type of microscope
The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world’s poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don’t have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10
Magpies can recognise themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don’t have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways
Dr Richard Harrington thought he was buying just an interesting curio when he paid £20 for the fossilised insect encased in amber. But it turned out to be a long extinct type of aphid which became trapped in the resin as it seeped from a tree millions of years ago. It has now been named after Dr Harrington, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Entomological Society, who specialises in aphids. He bought the fossil on the internet auction site from a man in Lithuania
Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here’s the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a higher cognitive
producer, like the brain’s superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences
Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive may no longer be the exclusive domain of science fiction writers, with two physicists from Baylor devising a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. Associate Professor Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy have come up with a novel idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. A starship could warp
space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it. By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds
An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen — touted as the clean, green fuel of the future — cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale
One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger, called Gobero, was discovered by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, during a dinosaur-hunting expedition. It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush
The way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers, scientists believe. Just as bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes, says the University of London team. This geographic profiling
works so well in bees, the scientists say future experiments on the animals could now be fed back to improve crime-solving
In the ever-growing desire to product smaller, less costly yet more powerful and faster computers and storage devices, researchers today said they are looking at a way to use self-growing fabrics that will let manufacturers build nano-sized high resolution semiconductors and arrays that answer that craving said
Researchers have devised an inexpensive way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources. The technology, developed at the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, is the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials
To most of us it has always seemed obvious that an octopus has eight arms. But experts have now revealed that this assumption is wrong — as two of their long tentacle-like limbs are in fact legs. A study by scientists at Sea Life centres across Europe found that the invertebrates move across the sea bed using their two rearmost limbs, leaving the other six free for the important business of feeding. Researchers who observed the creatures in action found they push off with the legs
and then employ the other tentacles to pump themselves along. The study, the largest of its type carried out, was designed to show if octopuses favoured one side or the other. But it found that octopuses are ambidextrous, though many seem to favour their third arm from the front to eat with
In the warm, bubbling pools of Mono Lake in California, scientists have isolated a bacterium that fuels itself on arsenic
A huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers. Applying the brakes could be the metamaterials
that may make it possible to create invisibility cloaks. The net’s speed limit comes about not in transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations. Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast speeds
Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have recently designed a contact lens prototype with a built-in pressure sensor using a novel process that etches tiny electrical circuits within a soft polymer material. The new development could help glaucoma patients to measure their current risk factor, thus replacing the current methods which require the constant visit of a clinician
In about 30 percent, the coils of their DNA carry a glitch, one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn’t sink in
Scientists have taken another step toward the goal of rendering objects invisible using high-tech cloaks that redirect light. Researchers for the first time demonstrated that a new material can bend visible light the wrong way in three dimensional tests. It builds on research that cloaks objects in the microwave wavelength
In the latest twist on electronics, Japanese scientists said on Thursday they have developed a rubbery material that conducts electricity, a finding that could be used to make devices that bend and stretch. The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts. Sekitani’s team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity
Tingrui Pan and Hailin Cong, researchers at UC Davis, have designed a contact lens that keeps tabs on glaucoma all by itself. And they’re working up to one that dispenses medication automatically, too. Their smart
lenses are fitted with an organic polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which is commonly used in biological applications. Since glaucoma develops as a result of raised pressure inside the eye, the goal of the lenses is to detect that intraocular pressure and mark warning signs
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