Science News
Scientists just smashed the distance record for quantum teleportation
By Rachel Feltman
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have broken the quantum teleportation record in a big way. In a paper published this week in Optica, they report successfully transferring information from one photon to another across over 60 miles of fiber-optic cable -- four times the distance of the previous record.
What's all that mean? Most of us hear the word "teleportation" and think of "Star Trek," but quantum teleportation is very real -- and slightly less exciting.
It relies on something called quantum entanglement -- what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." When close subatomic particles become entangled, they become linked forever -- even if they're taken very far apart from each other. When one of those particles transmits its quantum data to the other, it's essentially teleporting itself.
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More than 9,000-year-old decapitated head discovered in Brazil
Skull is oldest known to have been severed in the Americas
By Bruce Bower
A human skull found in a Brazilian rock-shelter represents the oldest known case of decapitation in the Americas, researchers report September 23 in PLOS ONE.
Radiocarbon dating places the skull at between 9,127 and 9,438 years old, says a team led by André Strauss of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. That’s at least 4,000 years older than previous evidence of severed heads in South America and at least 1,000 years older than reported decapitation cases in North America. The skull might even be the oldest instance of decapitation in the world, Strauss says.
Excavation of a small pit in the rock-shelter in July 2007 produced the skull. A pair of severed hands covered the skull’s face. Incisions on one of six human neck bones in the pit denoted where the individual’s head had been cut off.
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Technology News
Bloodhound car aiming for land speed record unveiled
By Jonathan Amos
The design team behind the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car has put its near-complete vehicle on show in London.
Some 8,000 people are expected to come and view it in Canary Wharf on Friday and Saturday.
Bloodhound has been built to smash the current land speed record of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by another British car, Thrust SSC, in 1997.
The new machine is due to start running next year on a special track that has been prepared for it in South Africa.
The aim at first will be to do 800mph (1,287km/h). But the goal eventually is to push the record above 1,000mph (1,610km/h). This could happen in 2017.
It has taken eight years of research, design and manufacturing to get to this stage.
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Men's Wearhouse founder looks to marry tech and tuxes
After being ousted from the suit retailer, George Zimmer is recreating himself as a tech entrepreneur. He's launched two startups this year, including tuxedo rental site Generation Tux.
by Ben Fox Rubin
After losing a power struggle with his board, George Zimmer in 2013 was fired from Men's Wearhouse after founding the suit retailer more than 40 years ago.
He's now back with a startup called Generation Tux, an online tuxedo and suit rental firm that puts him in competition with his old company.
"People want to know if there's any revenge. Not really," Zimmer said in an interview Tuesday, after unveiling his new venture at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference last week. "We're too busy trying to create what we have to worry about them."
Zimmer, whose grey beard and deep voice have been key parts of Men's Wearhouse TV commercials for decades, will help bring Generation Tux plenty of attention. He's also experienced in building up a rental service. Men's Wearhouse, which acquired rival Jos. A. Bank after ousting Zimmer, rents out more tuxes than any other company in the US and generates more than $400 million in revenue annually. Zimmer's hope is to take rentals -- a highly profitable part of Men's Wearhouse's business model -- and focus a company only on that.
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Environmental News
Tiny carbon-capturing motors may help tackle rising carbon dioxide levels
University of California - San Diego
Machines that are much smaller than the width of a human hair could one day help clean up carbon dioxide pollution in the oceans. Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have designed enzyme-functionalized micromotors that rapidly zoom around in water, remove carbon dioxide and convert it into a usable solid form.
The proof of concept study represents a promising route to mitigate the buildup of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas in the environment, said researchers. The team, led by distinguished nanoengineering professor and chair Joseph Wang, published the work this month in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
"We're excited about the possibility of using these micromotors to combat ocean acidification and global warming," said Virendra V. Singh, a postdoctoral scientist in Wang's research group and a co-first author of this study.
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Garden birds: Feeding brings blackcaps to the UK
By Victoria Gill
Putting out birdfeed in Britain's gardens is shifting the migration of one particular winter visitor, the blackcap, scientists say.
Researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology used data from a 12-year garden bird survey in their study.
This revealed that many blackcaps from Central Europe had shifted their winter migration, partly because of the supply of garden food in Britain.
The findings are published in the journal Global Change Biology.
"This is the first time that we've shown that feeding birds actually influences the distribution of a bird species across a whole country," lead researcher Dr Kate Plummer told BBC News.
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Medical News
Team links two human brains for question-and-answer experiment
University of Washington
Imagine a question-and-answer game played by two people who are not in the same place and not talking to each other. Round after round, one player asks a series of questions and accurately guesses the object the other is thinking about.
Sci-fi? Mind-reading superpowers? Not quite.
University of Washington researchers recently used a direct brain-to-brain connection to enable pairs of participants to play a question-and-answer game by transmitting signals from one brain to the other over the Internet. The experiment, detailed today in PLOS ONE, is thought to be the first to show that two brains can be directly linked to allow one person to accurately guess what's on another person's mind.
"This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that's been done to date in humans," said lead author Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology and a researcher at UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
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Man walks again after years of paralysis
BioMed Central
The ability to walk has been restored following a spinal cord injury, using one's own brain power, according to research published in the open access Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation. The preliminary proof-of-concept study shows that it is possible to use direct brain control to get a person's legs to walk again.
This is the first time that a person with complete paralysis in both legs (paraplegia) due to spinal cord injury was able to walk without relying on manually controlled robotic limbs, as with previous walking aid devices.
The participant, who had been paralyzed for five years, walked along a 3.66m long course using an electroencephalogram (EEG) based system. The system takes electrical signals from the participant's brain, which then travel down to electrodes placed around his knees to create movement.
Dr. An Do, one of the lead researchers involved in the study, from University of California, Irvine, USA, says: "Even after years of paralysis the brain can still generate robust brain waves that can be harnessed to enable basic walking. We showed that you can restore intuitive, brain-controlled walking after a complete spinal cord injury. This noninvasive system for leg muscle stimulation is a promising method and is an advance of our current brain-controlled systems that use virtual reality or a robotic exoskeleton."
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Space News
North Korea's space race: Satellite launch imminent, official says
By Will Ripley and Tim Schwarz, CNN
Pyongyang (CNN)It looks like the Starship Enterprise from the outside, a futuristic complex surrounded by landscaped gardens in a quiet residential area of Pyongyang. This is North Korea's newly opened satellite control center.
CNN had been given an exclusive interview with the senior officials who run it, though the front door is as close as we're permitted to get.
Just weeks before a major national holiday widely thought to be a target date for the reclusive nation's first rocket and satellite blast-off in nearly three years, two senior directors of the National Aeronautical Development Association (NADA) tell us a launch is "imminent" and final preparations are underway to send rockets and "multiple satellites" into space.
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Sublime Surprise: Rosetta's Comet Cycles its Ice
by Irene Klotz
Scientists have discovered an unexpectedly regular cycle of ice formation and depletion on the surface of a comet, a pattern tied to an orbital dance of shadow and sunlight.
Play Video
Rosetta's 10-Year Gravity Fling to Catch a Comet
As gobsmackingly cool as it is to land on a comet AT ALL, the Rosetta craft's journey just to catch up to the flying rock was mind boggling in its own right. Trace explains the dizzying physics and helpful assist from gravity that made it possible.
Measurements taken by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, currently orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, show that ice builds up when a particular region of the comet is in shadow. The ice then transitions, or sublimates, to gaseous water vapor when that region shifts into sunlight.
“We observed this cycle for several comet rotations … We were surprised to see so clearly the appearance and disappearance of the ice due to temperature and illumination conditions,” planetary scientist Maria Cristina De Sanctis, with the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
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Odd News
Artificial intelligence takes over Barbie's brain
By Anthony Cuthbertson
A prototype for Mattel's ubiquitous Barbie doll has been developed that incorporates advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to allow it to process human speech, and even answer profound questions like: "Do you believe in God?" The new Hello Barbie, unveiled to The New York Times ahead of its November launch, will combine AI software with a microphone, WiFi and speech-recognition capabilities in order to communicate through more than 8,000 lines of pre-recorded dialogue.
Through the speech-recognition software, key words are used to trigger certain responses from the Hello Barbie. For example, "good", and "fantastic" would cue the doll to say phrases like: "Great, me too!" The toy is also able to remember answers − such as being told a relative has died − in order to draw upon them for future interactions or avoid such topics altogether.
At its current level, the Hello Barbie is reportedly not sophisticated enough to pass the Turing Test − the threshold that machine intelligence can pass itself off as human intelligence. However, that's not to say it couldn't fool a six-year-old child.
"It is very hard for [young children] to distinguish what is real from what is not real," said Doris Bergen, professor of educational psychology at Miami University in Ohio.
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