The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020. Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is not yet counted and likely to be very significant
British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives. Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby. Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets
A University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs
— via Slashdot
The regeneration of lost body parts has just moved from science fiction to US military policy. Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which will go by the happy acronym AFIRM. According to DOD’s news service, AFIRM will harness stem cell research and technology… to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers
. The government is budgeting $250 million in public and private money for the project’s first five years. NIH and three universities will be on the team
Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population. The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years. This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa
CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has been awarded a private data highway
— a 10 gigabit per second link — across the US by a major internet consortium and a US communications company
A leading contender to replace silicon as the basis for computing has made another step forward. Transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide have been made by UK researchers. They were carved from graphene, predicted by some to one day oust silicon as the basis of future computing
The first draft of a book which changed the world’s attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University’s library. The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime
Talk about a long silence — no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up — or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf. Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the quantal vowel
sounds that underlie modern speech
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics — ruthless legal battles against small farmers — is its decades-long history of toxic contamination
A new form of cloning has been developed that is easier to carry out than the technique used to create Dolly the sheep, raising fears that it may one day be used on human embryos to produce designer
babies
A rare and primitive frog living in a remote Borneo stream has no lungs and apparently absorbs oxygen through its skin. The aquatic frog has evolved backwards, re-acquiring a primordial trait, David Bickford of the National University of Singapore and colleagues reported. Studying the frog could help shed light on how lungs evolved in the first place, they wrote in the journal Current Biology, adding that illegal gold mining in the area may threaten the unique species
Northwestern University researchers have shown that a nano-engineered gel inhibits the formation of scar tissue at the injury site and enables the severed spinal cord fibres to regenerate and grow. The gel is injected as a liquid into the spinal cord and self-assembles into a scaffold that supports the new nerve fibers as they grow up and down the spinal cord, penetrating the site of the injury. When the gel was injected into mice with a spinal cord injury, after six weeks the animals had a greatly enhanced ability to use their hind legs and walk
The next time your children get cavities, they might get tooth regeneration instead of fillings. That’s because materials scientists are beginning to find just the right solutions of chemicals to rebuild decayed teeth, rather than merely patching their holes. Enamel and dentin, the materials that make teeth the strongest pieces of the body, would replace the gold or ceramic fillings that currently return teeth to working order
An embryonic planet detected outside our Solar System could be less than 2,000 years old. The ball of dust and gas, which is in the process of turning into a Jupiter-like giant, was detected around the star HL Tau, by a UK team. Research leader Dr Jane Greaves said the planet’s growth may have been kickstarted when another young star passed the system 1,600 years ago
Luxim has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours — via Slashdot
Hydrogen could be a clean, abundant energy source, but it’s difficult to store in bulk. In new research, materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that tiny carbon capsules called buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter
A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling. Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a voiceless
phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice
From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Japan Steel Works controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak
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