It would be interesting to have a head to head game. Concentration against concentration. To the more powerful mind go the spoils.

Poor inyerface wants to play too.

Poor inyerface wants to play too.

calling all meatheads

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hunting and gathering has a profound impact on animals and plants, driving an evolutionary process that makes them become smaller and reproduce earlier, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Their study of hunting, fishing and collecting of 29 different species shows that under human pressure, creatures on average become 20 percent smaller and their reproductive age advances by 25 percent.

The human tendency to seek large "trophies" appears to drive evolution much faster than hunting by other predators, which pick off the small and the weak, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force," said Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's an ideal recipe for rapid trait change."

In virtually all cases, human-targeted species got smaller and smaller and started reproducing at younger ages -- making populations more vulnerable.

Regulations meant to protect the young may in fact be helping drive this unnatural process, Darimont said.

"Hunters are instructed not to take smaller animals or those with smaller horns. This is counter to patterns of natural predation, and now we're seeing the consequences of this management," he said.

People who take in the caffeine equivalent of three cups of brewed coffee (or seven cups of instant) are more likely to hallucinate, a new study suggests.

The researchers found that people with a caffeine intake that high, whether it came from coffee, tea, chocolate or caffeinated energy drinks or pills, had a three-times-higher tendency to hear voices and see things that were not there than those who consumed the equivalent of a half-cup of brewed coffee (or one cup of instant coffee).

Though most people who drink loads of coffee are not known to hallucinate seriously, when these types of experiences interfere with daily functioning, they are considered to be psychotic.

Seven cups of instant coffee contain a total of 315 milligrams of caffeine, according to data used by the researchers. That translates to about six cups of strong tea, nine colas, four Red Bulls and about one-and-a-half cups of coffee at a boutique cafe.

The explanation could be that caffeine has been found to exacerbate the physiological effects of stress. When under stress, the body releases a stress hormone called cortisol. More of this hormone is released in response to stress when people have recently had caffeine.

This extra boost of cortisol may link caffeine intake with an increased tendency to hallucinate, said study leader Simon Jones, a graduate student at Durham's Psychology Department.

A cliff located in the eastern part of Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars, is seen in this image taken by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express and made available July 14, 2008. (ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/G.Neukum/Handout/Reuters)

WASHINGTON – A surprising and mysterious belch of methane gas on Mars hints at possible microbial life underground, but also could come from changes in rocks, a new NASA study found. The presence of methane on Mars could be significant because by far most of the gas on Earth is a byproduct of life — from animal digestion and decaying plants and animals.

Past studies indicated no regular methane on Mars. But new research using three ground-based telescopes confirmed that nearly 21,000 tons of methane were released during a few months of the late summer of 2003, according to a study published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

"This raises the probability substantially that life was there or still survives at the present," study author Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told The Associated Press.

The Mars belch is similar to what comes out of the waters near Santa Barbara, Calif., which comes from decaying life in the sea floor. Microbes in the Arctic and other extreme Earth environments that don't use oxygen still release methane and they have been examples of the type of life astronomers look for on other planets.

Two major geological causes of those changes are volcanic molten rock and the mixture of water, carbon dioxide and other chemicals deep underground. The molten rock explanation would have meant higher levels of sulfur dioxide, which haven't been seen, Mumma said. And the underground reaction would involve fracturing and fissures and plugged cracks; those could be there, but haven't been noticed yet, Pratt said.

There is a very slight chance that the methane came from comets or asteroids hitting Mars, but it is unlikely, said Sushil Atreya, a professor of atmospheric and space sciences at the University of Michigan, who also spoke at the press conference.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A new light-bending material has brought scientists one step closer to creating a cloaking device that could hide objects from sight.

Beyond possible military applications, it also might have a very practical use by making mobile communications clearer, they said on Thursday.

"Cloaking technology could be used to make obstacles that impede communications signals 'disappear,'" said David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the study published in the journal Science.

He said the new material is easier to make and has a far greater bandwidth. It is made from a so-called metamaterial -- an engineered, exotic substance with properties not seen in nature.

Metamaterials can be used to form a variety of "cloaking" structures that can bend electromagnetic waves such as light around an object, making it appear invisible.

In this case, the material is made from more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass material arranged in parallel rows on a circuit board.

Smith said the goal was not to make something visible disappear. Cloaking, he said, can occur anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum.

"Humans 'see' using visible light, which has wavelengths just under a micron (a millionth of a meter). But cell phones and other wireless devices 'see' using light that has a wavelength on the order of many centimeters," Smith said in an e-mail.

He said objects can block the "view" of these devices, making mobile phone communications more difficult.

"You might have two or more antennas trying to 'see' or receive signals, one being blocked by the other," he said. "You could imagine adding cloaks that would make one antenna invisible to the next, so that they no longer interfered."

Smith said the notion of a device that makes objects invisible to people is still a distant concept, but not impossible.

"This latest structure does show clearly there is a potential for cloaking -- in the science fiction sense -- to become science fact at some point," he said.

I wonder how that relates to the wages and production of industrial workers. I've seen the complaint made that production has been going up even as wages are stagnant. Are those robots taking human jobs or holding down wages, or do they just increase productivity to everyone's advantage?

Air Force: More unmanned aircraft than manned in 2009

How important have unmanned aircraft become to the US military? Well how's this: the Air Force says next year it will acquire more unmanned aircraft than manned.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Norman Seip this week said the service is "all in" when it comes to developing unmanned systems and aircraft.

"Next year, the Air Force will procure more unmanned aircraft than manned aircraft," the general said. "I think that makes a very pointed statement about our commitment to the future of [unmanned aircraft] and what it brings to the fight in meeting the requirements of combatant commanders."

Seip said the Air Force currently has 85% of its unmanned air force deployed in Southwest Asia operations and 15% stateside to train pilots and for operational test and development. The Air Force is doing all it can to speed up the UAS pilot training process, he added.

Published reports note that the Air Force wants to produce 300 unmanned aerial vehicle pilots over the next three years because they're badly needed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The service has 27 unmanned aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan at any time, but it wants to almost double those patrols by 2012, according to the mysantantonio.com Web site.

Additionally, he said, teams at the Air Warfare Center at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., are developing countermeasures for potential enemy use of unmanned aerial systems.

The use of unmanned aircraft is exploding in the military and commercial communities. Federal agencies such as the DHS, the Department of Commerce, and NASA alone use unmanned planes in many areas, such as border security, weather research, and forest fire monitoring. Researchers at the Teal Group said in their 2008 market study estimates that UAV spending will more than double over the next decade from current worldwide UAV spending of $3.4 billion annually to $7.3 billion, totaling close to $55 billion in the next ten years. The forecast also indicates that the US could account for 73% of the world's research and development investment unmanned flight in the next decade.

death machines

cool

mindless killing machines

turn it on, crack a beer

celebrate

you never have to see your kill

how wonderful

just call em terrorists and sleep well

you never have to see your kill

how wonderful

just call em terrorists and sleep well

HONG KONG (Reuters) – South Korean scientists may have found a way to remove dangerous heavy metals such as lead from blood by using specially designed magnetic receptors.

The receptors bind strongly to lead ions and can be easily removed, along with their lead cargo, using magnets, they wrote in an article in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a leading chemistry journal.

"Detoxification could theoretically work like hemodialysis: the blood is diverted out of the body and into a special chamber containing the biocompatible magnetic particles," they wrote in a statement.

"By using magnetic fields, the charged magnetic particles could be fished out. The purified blood is then reintroduced to the patient."

Lead is a dangerous heavy metal and is especially toxic to children. Safe and effective detoxification processes are especially important.

The South Korean team, lead by Jong Hwa Jung at the Gyeongsang National University's department of chemistry, managed to remove 96 percent of lead ions from blood samples using these magnetic particles.

Exposure to lead in developed countries is mostly a result of occupational hazards, from lead used in paint and gasoline. Outside of occupational hazards, children sometimes fall victim to lead poisoning. A child who swallows large amounts of lead may develop anemia, muscle weakness and brain damage.

Where poisoning occurs, it is usually gradual, with small amounts of the metal accumulating over a long period of time.

A species of dung beetle has ditched its excrement-eating ways in favor of millipedes. And the beetle shows no mercy, often decapitating the leggy insect before devouring it, a new study finds.

Called Deltochilum valgum, the dung beetle is the first of its kind to show exclusively predatory behavior, taking down and consuming millipedes rather than eating primarily dung or a mixture of dung and other foods.

In the past, scientists had seen the beetle grasping live millipedes. But they weren't sure if the species specialized in exclusive millipede eating. So Trond Larsen of Princeton University in New Jersey and his colleagues set up traps in a rainforest in Peru that were baited with various foods, including dung, live millipedes, dead millipedes, injured or uninjured millipedes, fungus and carrion.

D. valgum was attracted only to the millipede traps, preferring the live, injured millipedes over dead ones.

The discovery is detailed this week in the journal Biology Letters.

Out of nearly 40 millipede attacks observed, the researchers saw one successful kill and found seven dead millipedes killed by beetles. Three of the killed millipedes had been decapitated. Overall, the beetles tended to take down millipedes much larger than themselves - While a D. valgum is under a half inch (7.2 to 8 mm, or the width of its front wings), the millipede meals had body lengths of nearly 1 to 4 inches (25 to 110 mm).

Here's how the millipede massacre played out: The dung beetle first grasped the millipede's body with its mid and hind legs. The hind legs of D. valgum are elongated and more curved than that of other dung beetles. The beetle wrapped these spindly legs tightly around the millipede's body.

Once grasped, the millipede either coiled up its body or flailed about. When flailing subsided, the beetle chomped into a joint between the millipede's body segments. The beetle then pried upward with its head, while sawing and prying at the same joint with so-called foretibial teeth.

During the directly observed kill, the force of such prying severed the millipede's head from the rest of its body.

The beetles didn't dine on site, instead, preferring to drag the dead millipedes to another location.

"After moving of a killed millipede, beetles pried apart the rest of its body into several smaller pieces and placed their head entirely inside the segments, apparently feeding," Larsen and his colleagues write.

The researchers noted minor adaptations to the beetle's body led to large behavioral changes. Such adaptations likely evolved as a result of competition with relatives (80 or more dung beetle species can reside in the same geographic area).

The head changed. While most dung beetles sport broad heads to help them push and mold dung balls, D. valgum has a narrow, elongated head for feeding on the innards of millipedes. And instead of using its hind legs for dung-ball rolling, D. valgum uses a more curved hind leg for grasping and pulling a captured millipede.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – Acupuncture prevents headaches and migraines but faked treatments when needles are incorrectly inserted appear to work nearly as well, German researchers said on Wednesday.

Their findings suggest the benefits of acupuncture may stem more from people's belief in the technique, said Klaus Linde, a complementary medicine researcher at the Technical University in Munich, who led the analysis published in the Cochrane Review journal.

"Much of the clinical benefit of acupuncture might be due to non-specific needling effects and powerful placebo effects, meaning selection of specific needle points may be less important than many practitioners have traditionally argued," he said in a statement.

Several studies have shown both treatments may stimulate the release of hormones known as endorphins, which can relieve stress, pain and nausea.

When it came to migraines, the needles beat drugs but faked treatments worked too, the researchers said. For less severe headaches, acupuncture worked just slightly better than sticking the needles randomly, the researchers said.

Needles, not technique, may be acupuncture key



Acupuncture is a powerful placebo.

inyerface would probably mop the floor with most of us.

Needles, not technique, may be acupuncture key



Acupuncture is a powerful placebo.

Photo of a new species of climbing fish, Lithogenes wahari. Credit: S. Schaefer

A previously unknown species of climbing catfish has been discovered in remote Venezuela, and its strange traits are shaking the evolutionary tree for these fish.

The newfound catfish, Lithogenes wahari, shares traits with two different families of fish - Loricariidae (armored catfishes) and Astroblepidae (climbing catfishes). It has bony armor that protects its head and tail, and a grasping pelvic fin that helps it to climb vertical surfaces such as rocks.

These characteristics in L. wahari suggest to ichthyologists Scott Schaefer of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Francisco Provenzano of the Universidad Central de Venezuela that the common ancestor of the Loricariidae and Astroblepidae probably could grasp and climb rocks with its tail and mouth. Fish in both families, as well as the new catfish, have sucker mouths.

"The fish was so strange in morphology that it did not fit into any taxonomic category that we were aware of," Schaefer said.

The new samples of L. wahari confirmed that the species is a member of a group that bridges two catfish families. Bony plates on its head and tail, plus other features, link the species to the Loricariidae, the widespread and successful family of fully armored catfishes.

But L. wahari also has a specialized pelvic fin that decouples from its body and moves backward and forward independently. This feature - used in combination with a grasping mouth to move like an inchworm up rocks - is otherwise found only in a family of climbing catfish restricted to the Andes, the Astroblepidae. Climbing could be an advantage to these fishes because of the irregular and sometimes high-flow of streams in higher elevations. When the scientists found the new species, the water level was so low that the fish were literally picked off of rocks.

Schaefer and Provenzano think that L. wahari is the third known species in the subfamily Lithogeninae, and that the specialized features shared among the three species confirms their placement within the family Loricariidae at the base of this large radiation of catfishes.

This evolutionary arrangement suggests that the common ancestor to both families probably inhabited upland, rather than lowland, streams of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, where most of the family diversity is currently found.

The paper is published in the journal American Museum Novitates, and the research was supported by the Constantine S. Niarchos Scientific Expedition Fund and the National Science Foundation.

LONDON: Promiscuous behaviour in female cichlid fish may have caused males to evolve speedier, bigger sperm, according to a new study.

When females shop around for sexual partners, sometimes mating with several at once, males must compete, said study co-author Niclas Kolm, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

In this case, male fish that produce faster sperm have a better chance of beating rivals in the race to fertilise the few eggs that females lay.

Furthermore, Kolm and his co-workers found some of the fish produce sperm that have evolved to become larger, more numerous and more long-lived. These are a kind of "super-sperm", said the researchers, who detail their findings this week in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Experts have known for some time that sperm competition plays a role in sexual selection, with larger and faster sperm expected to have the edge over rivals. However, the evidence has remained controversial, said Kolm.

To get a definitive answer the researchers compared sperm from 29 species of African cichlid fishes – a group known for their wide range of sexual behaviours and rapid evolution.

While the females of some species are strictly monogamous, others tend to hedge their bets. When mating, some female cichlids will lay their eggs and then collect them in their mouths, after which the male fertilises them by depositing sperm there.

While monogamous fish will then guard their spawn until they hatch, promiscuous females will shop around to get sperm from several different males. "The quickest and largest sperm were found in these species," said Kolm.

What's more, the team found evidence for the evolution of super-sperm. Previously, scientists believed that sperm production involved a trade-off, where sperm with certain positive traits would naturally lack others, but this latest research seems to suggest they can have it all.

But what about sperm in other animals that cheat? "We believe the results are general across the entire vertebrate kingdom," said Kolm. "Of course, we are very keen to see the effects in primates, especially because they are closer to humans."

Research from the University of San Diego in the U.S. suggests that the sperm of highly promiscuous chimps is faster than more faithful gorillas. Chimps are also known to have larger testes than gorillas.

The findings may even have implications for sperm competition in humans, said Kolm, "we cannot rule out that similar mechanisms may have made humans the way they are today."

In this optical video snapshot, a tetherless microgripper grabs onto a clump of live L929 animals cells placed at the end of a narrow glass capillary tube.

In the not-too-distant future, your surgeon may be someone who -- instead of wielding a scalpel -- injects you with a flock of dust-sized wireless devices that grab and remove infected or damaged tissue in response to chemical signals.

These microgrippers, less than 1/254th of an inch (1/10th of a millimeter) in diameter, have been developed by researchers at John Hopkins University, and tested in biopsy-like procedures with animal tissue. One writer described them as working like a hand: a "palm" surrounded by six "fingers" that can open and close around an object.

The crab-like devices are moved and guided by external magnets, and grab or release in response to non-toxic biochemicals or temperature changes. By contrast, today's generation of microgrippers are physically controlled via thin wires or tubes, which make it difficult to maneuver the devices through convoluted twists and turns.



The microgrippers created at Hopkins have gold-plated nickel, so magnets outside the body can be used to move and guide the devices remotely, over relatively long distances.

The bioengineering project was directed by David Gracias, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the university's Whiting School of Engineering. His lab's focus is on applying the science of miniaturization to the interface between engineered and biological systems.

Results of experiments using the new crop of wireless microgrippers were reported in the online Jan. 12 to 16 Early Edition of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." The lead author of the paper is Timothy Leong, along with Gracias and co-authors Christina Randall, Brian Benson, Noy Bassik and George Stern, all students supervised by Gracias.

The John Hopkins Technology Transfer staff has obtained a provisional U.S. patent covering the team's inventions, and is seeking patent protection.

Gracias sees the devices as the first generation of technologies that could eventually result in autonomous micro- and nano-scale surgical tools, inexpensively reproducible on a mass scale, that could help doctors in diagnosing and treating a range of illnesses much less invasively than is possible today.

This optical microscopy image shows a tetherless microgripper holding on to a piece of bovine bladder tissue retrieved from a tissue sample placed at the end of a narrow glass capillary tube.

The T-34 is designed to launch a net over intruders

Two Japanese companies have unveiled a security robot that can be commanded from a mobile phone to hurl a net that traps suspected intruders.

The prototype T-34 was developed jointly by robot firm Tmsuk Co and security firm Alacom Co.

It moves at up to 10km/h (6mph), and can be controlled by someone seeing real-time images on a mobile phone.

The small robot is built on wheels and is equipped with sensors that can detect the movements of intruders.

"Security sensors often set off false alarms but examining the location with the robot will lead to more efficient operations," said a statement from the companies.

Robot: Moving on four wheels at a speed of 10 kmh, the robot is guided by a controller who sees real-time

A functional human tissue made from stem cells. US authorities have approved the first human trials using embryonic stem cells testing a pioneering therapy for paralyzed patients, the FDA said Friday.
(AFP/Riken/File/Yoshiki Sasai)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US authorities have approved the first human trials using embryonic stem cells to test a pioneering therapy to help paralyzed patients regain movement, the FDA said Friday.

"The FDA has granted its clearance for a new drug application of Geron Corp for a phase one clinical trial of an embryionic stem cell based therapy in patients with acute spinal cord injury," FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan told AFP.

"The clearance enables Geron to move forward with the world's first study of a human embryonic stem cell based therapy in man," Geron said.

The goal is to inject cells into the spines of paralyzed volunteers, between seven to 14 days after they are injured, hoping this will prompt the damaged nerve cells to regrow, enabling them to eventually recover feeling and movement.

"This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics -- one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration of organ and tissue function achieved by the injection of healthy replacement cells," said Geron's president Thomas Okarma.

"The neurosurgical community is very excited by this new approach to treating devastating spinal cord injury," said Richard Fessler, professor of neurological surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

"If safe and effective, the therapy would provide a viable treatment option for thousands of patients who suffer severe spinal cord injuries each year."

Researchers at the University of Tokyo created a 5mm tall doll composed of living cells, in an experiment to create 3D living biological structures. It's cute and kinda gross at the same time.

The experiment is supposed to help improve techniques to create bodily organs and tissues with complex cellular structures, which would be useful for regenerative medicine and drug development.

Scientists created the little gingerbread-looking man by cultivating 100,000 0.1mm balls of collagen, each coated with dozens of skin cells and dropping them inside a doll-shaped mold for a day. The doll managed to survive in a culture solution for more than one day.

Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science, said he'll be trying to combine multiple types of cells next to create a complex system that could function as a living organism.

Flipping as fast as two meters per second, the spider looks like a small, unusually fast tumbleweed.

Forget about crawling. A spider discovered in the Sahara Desert moves by doing a series of hand springs across the sand -- and travels surprisingly fast. Bionics experts think the method could be used for future Mars explorer vehicles.

The white spider, which is slightly smaller than a man's palm, takes a running start before hurtling itself forward into a series of front handsprings. Gaining momentum, it quickly reaches a speed of up to two meters (6.5 feet) per second on even ground. It looks like a jet-propelled tumbleweed flying across the desert sand.

This athletic arachnid moves like no other. Two other spider species are known to roll down slopes with the help of gravity. But this one uses handsprings to propel itself along even ground.

The spider seems to like humans. Instead of rolling away, it tends to approach when offered a hand.

Hand-Springing Spider Excites Bionics Experts

Jäger doesn't think Rechenberg's spider rolls in order to save energy, but as a means of defense. He noted that the running start takes energy and that too much rolling can kill it. Indeed, that was how Rechenberg's first rolling spider met its unfortunate end: Trying to capture its motion on film, the scientist spurred it to roll over and over again as sun rose. After several consecutive rolls, the spider laid down and died.