It was a month ago that Russia put the Bion-M craft filled with 45 mice, 15 newts, snails, gerbils as well as some plants and microflora in orbit at about 575 kilometres above Earth. The capsule has now returned to Earth.

The research was conducted to get insights into how bodies adapt to weightlessness “so that our organisms survive extended flights“. The primary focus was to learn how microgravity affects organisms’ skeletal and nervous systems as well as muscles and hearts. The capsule stored the animals inside five containers that automatically opened in orbit and closed when it was time to return, and it was equipped with some measuring devices and other equipments.

Not all the animals have survived the experiment, apparently due to “the stresses of Space“. The majority of the mice did not survive, but that was expected by the scientists. But equipment failure leading to the death of all the gerbils was not expected.

The Russian media is praising the research as a success and as a mission which has not yet been conducted by any other country. Russia previously sent mice to space back in 2007 for a duration of 12 days.

The mission is part of Russia’s goal of sending manned flights to Mars. Their plan is to start setting up a base on the Moon by 2030 for flights to the Red Planet.

What do you think of this mission? Was it necessary to send so many animals into a very deadly situation or were there better ways to go about it?

[Source]

[Image Source]

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The Meshworm robot is able to move along nearly any surface the same way that a worm does; it scrunches up its body, then it extends it. This crawling motion is referred to as peristalsis and while it may not be very fast, it does allow it to navigate through tough terrain where wheels or legs may not work.

There is a coil that wraps around the soft body and by sending an electric current through this coil, it squeezes the body and thus extends it. When this is released, sections of the body scrunch back up and through this repeated motion, the Meshworm silently moves along. What’s more, the body is made up primarily of soft materials, allowing the Meshworm to survive abuse by way of mallet and even getting stepped on. It’s an autonomous robot to boot.

It’s easy to consider what some of the military applications could be for the phallic-like robot, but the researchers have a broader vision. They’re considering next-generation endoscopes, for example, as well as for implants and prosthetics.

[Source]

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And that’s why researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering are working on something that they call “rubber band electronics.” These electronics can stretch to over 200% of their original size, all while retaining a suitable level of functionality and conductivity. They achieved this by stretching a highly porous 3D structure (polydimethylsiloxane or PDMS) to three times its original size. They then filled the pores with EGaIn liquid metal. That allows for consistent electrical flow, even when the material is “excessively stretched.”

Current “stretchable” electronics are only able to stretch about 50%, so this over 200% stretch would be a monumental breakthrough in the field. There are “many potential applications [that] require a device to stretch like a rubber band,” said researcher Yonggang Huang. “With that level of stretchability we could see medical devices integrated into the human body.”

[Source]

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More specifically, warfare could easily slip into the realm of neurological warfare, in case it hasn’t already done so. An enemy is much easier to defeat when he’s hallucinating about bugs crawling all over his body. Similarly, biological and chemical warfare in the form of drugs could have the ramifications of impaired judgement, perception, or all kinds of other things in your adversary.

And it’s not like the military would be necessarily adverse to using something on their own soldiers too. Drugs that increase alertness and reduce the perception of fatigue could prove quite useful (albeit possibly kinda scary). They discuss blocking memories, which could be effective for PTSD victims. The Royal Society also talks about “neural interface systems” (NIS) that would allow weapons to be controlled by the human mind.

By identifying active military research into neuroscience, the Royal Society paints a future of warfare influenced by neuroscience applications as a very real possibility. As well as neuroscience’s massive potential for benign medical applications, the Royal Society is seeking to raise awareness among the scientific community of “hostile” applications.

Check out the video below for more. That mind-reading computer could very well be the next logical step.

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A research team from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario has teamed up with scientists from the Medical University of Graz in Austria. In their study, they found that cell phone use is linked to lower sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. Ironically, cell phone usage seems to also increase the overall level of testosterone in the body. And ya, it’s killing bees too.

“Our findings were a little bit puzzling,” says Rany Shamloul, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Queen’s University in Canada and a co-author of the study. “We were expecting to find different results, but the results we did find suggest that there could be some intriguing mechanisms at work.”

So, your Android and iPhones could be making you puff out your chest, but your little soldiers are getting injured as a result. And it’s not like you’re producing too many reinforcements either. While there is more circulating testosterone, there is a lower level of luteinizing hormone. LH plays a big role in the reproductive system. The lesson for today is, if you have any plans to reproduce, it may be a good idea to limit your cell phone use and perhaps not keep it so close to the family jewels.

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Let’s say you drive a car. Every few months you have to change the oil. You can do this yourself or you can take it in to a shop. In either case, you have to discard the old oil and that’s not good for the environment. Scientists at Cambridge, though, may have a better solution.

A good deal of used oil is just disposed of, but the University of Cambridge researchers have developed a more effective strategy for something called pyrolysis. Right now, that process is used to heat up the used oil to a high temperature in the absence of oxygen. This breaks it down.

However, the heating process isn’t terribly efficient at producing liquids and gases that can be converted into fuel. By adding a microwave-absorbent material before heating the oil with microwaves, though, they found that the used oil was heated more evenly and converted almost 90% of the old stuff into usable gasoline and diesel.

No, this still isn’t an ideal solution — the gas and diesel is still being burned away in a conventional vehicle of some kind, rather than in a “greener” vehicle — but it sure beats discarding the used oil altogether. It’s like reusing by recycling. Now we need to work on reducing too.

9Read (PDF Link)]

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Researchers in Germany have found that the brain discards information one bit per active neuron per second. It looks like the old adage “in one ear and out the other” has some solid science behind it.

The brain codes information in the form of electrical pulses, or spikes. Each one of the brain’s 100 billion neurons act as receivers and transmitters. When a spike enters a neuron, an electrical discharge, or action potential, forms on the neuron’s cell membrane. The neuron will give an electrical input to its neighbour only if the potential exceeds a certain value. Therefore, an activity pattern is quickly lost or “forgotten” through tiny changes. This means the signal transmission in the brain is extremely chaotic, as much depends on the performance on individual neurons.

The findings indicate that the brain’s main switching centre, the cerebral cortex, is specifically tailored to process brief snapshots of the outside world. Whether those brief snapshots get retained is a completely different story altogether… what were we talking about again?

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Researchers at the University of Technology in Sydney have come up with an interesting solution for devices like the Apple iPad. In effect, you can rest your fingers on the screen of the tablet without accidentally typing anything. That’s the biggest problem with the virtual keyboard on the iPad (and other products like it); you touch it, you type it, but you don’t get the clickity-clack of a physical button. But the full QWERTY keyboard is “liquid” insofar that it follows your fingers. No matter where you rest your four fingers, that half of the keyboard will be there. The “fluid” keyboard adjusts to your specific physiology too, since people have different size hands and slightly different finger positioning.

The LiquidKeyboard won’t give you that “sense of where keys are relative to others” like how a physical equivalent would, but it’s probably closer than the rigid layout of a standard tablet’s virtual keyboard.

[GizMag via UTS]

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Remember how touchscreen passwords can be lifted and all that? No matter how good a password you think you’re setting, it might not be good enough. However, your face is your face.

We’ve already seen the concept of facial recognition in laptops, webcams, and even the Xbox 360 Kinect peripheral. It’s only a natural progression to bring it to phones too. That’s how the Nokia N900 came into the picture at the University of Manchester in the UK.

The prototype “quickly locks and tracks 22 facial features in real time” using the front-facing camera on the N900. This “Active Appearance” modeling was developed by the Mobile Biometrics project. Check out the video and see for yourself whether face-tracking is the future of smartphone verifications.

Face Verification (2008-Present) Dr. Philip A. Tresadern [University of Manchester]
Nokia N900 does real-time face tracking for verification (video) [Engadget]

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BlackBerry

The rumor of this phone has been floating around for quite some time now, it’s good to see that Research in Motion has finally made the official announcement. The phone you may have once known as the BlackBerry Pearl 9100 has now been revealed to the world as the BlackBerry Pearl 3G.

Just as the iPhone 3G added 3G connectivity to the original iPhone, the Pearl 3G does much the same. The BlackBerry Pearl line from RIM has been lacking in the high-speed department for far too long, so that’s a major improvement for the compact candybar. There’s no flip version yet of the Pearl 3G, though I suspect RIM will do that at some point too. Announced at the WES conference this week, the BlackBerry Pearl 3G is doing something a little different compared to previous Pearl phones too. Yeah, there’s a version with the expected SureType keyboard, but there’s another version with a standard T9 numeric keypad too. I guess people want bigger buttons; me, I’d rather have a real QWERTY keyboard. Then again, I guess QWERTY fans are more inclined to nab a Curve or a BlackBerry Bold instead. The rumor of a QWERTY Pearl is still out there, so it could happen.

Rounding out the specs for the Pearl 3G are triband HSDPA, 802.11n Wi-Fi support, 3.2MP camera, microSD expansion, and a 360 x 400 display. RIM will be offering in several “lustrous colors” including black and white. The expectation is that versions will be made available (in May) for both AT&T and T-Mobile with the appropriate 3G bands in to, as well as Rogers and Telus in Canada.

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