Magnetic breakthrough may have significant pull

Northeastern University researchers have designed a super-strong magnetic material that may revolutionize the production of magnets found in computers, mobile phones, electric cars and wind-powered generators. …

“State-of-the-art electric motors and generators contain highly coercive magnets that are based on rare-earth elements, but we have developed a new material with similar properties without those exotic elements,” said coauthor Don Heiman, a physics professor in the College of Science.

Heiman’s work aligns with Northeastern’s existing expertise in this area. The university’s Center for Microwave Magnetic Materials and Integrated Circuits, for example, works to develop next-generation microwave materials and device solutions for radar and wireless communication technologies for U.S. defense and commercial industries.

For this study, the team of researchers, including undergraduates Tom Cardinal and Thomas Nummy and graduate student Steven Bennett, found that the compound manganese gallium can be synthesized on the nanoscale to produce a coercive field that rivals materials containing rare-earth elements, which are considerably more expensive to process and mine.

The need to develop low-cost magnetic materials is at an all-time high. Last year, China, which has cornered the market on the supply of the rare earth elements, purposely reduced production by 40 percent to drive up prices throughout the rest of the world.

As Heiman put it, “The government would be in a bind if it had to rely on China to produce hybrid cars and wind generators.”

He presented the team’s research in November in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the 56th Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials. Representatives of Toyota, LG Electronics and hard-drive manufacturers Seagate and Hitachi Global were particularly interested in the findings. …

via Magnetic breakthrough may have significant pull.

‘Ancient man built homes with bones’

Neanderthals were more intelligent than you thought. The so-called primitive cavemen built homes out of mammoth bones, a new study has revealed.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 44,000-year-old Neand-erthal building that was constructed using the bones from mammoths. The circular building, which was up to 26 feet across at its widest point, is believed to be earliest example of domestic dwelling built from bone.

Neanderthals, which died out around 30,000 years ago, were initially thought to have been relatively primitive nomads that lived in natural caves for shelter.

The new findings, however, suggest these ancient human ancestors had settled in areas to the degree that they built structures where they lived for extended periods of time, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The analysis by a team at the Museum National d’Histories Naturelle in Paris also found that many of the bones had been decorated with carvings and ochre pigments.

Laëtitia Demay, an archaeologist who led the research, said: “It appears that Neanderthals were the oldest known humans who used mammoth bones to build a dwelling structure. This mammoth bone structure could be described as the basement of a wooden cover or as a windscreen. Neanderthals purposely chose large bones of the largest available mammal, the woolly mammoth, to build a structure. The mammoth bones have been deliberately selected — long and flat bones, tusks and connected vertebrae — and were circularly arranged.

“The use of bones as building elements can be appreciated as anticipation of climatic variations. Under a cold climate in an open environment, the lack of wood led humans to use bones to build protections against the wind.”The bone structure was found near the town of Molodova in eastern Ukraine on a site that was first discovered in 1984. It was constructed of 116 large bones including mammoth skulls, jaws, 14 tusks and leg bones.

Inside at least 25 hearths filled with ash were also discovered, suggesting it had been used for some time.

via ‘Ancient man built homes with bones’ | The Asian Age.

How bacteria break a magnet

Magnetotactic bacteria bend their chains of magnetosomes (red) before cell division.

Bacteria that contain an internal compass face an unusual challenge when they come to divide: snapping their internal magnets in two. A report1 in the December issue of Molecular Microbiology explains how one species generates the force to separate magnetic nanoparticles and apportions them equally between daughter cells.

Richard Blakemore first described magnetotactic bacteria — which can orient themselves in line with Earth’s magnetic field — in the 1970s2. The magnets probably help oxygen-averse marine bacteria to navigate waters and sediments where the levels of chemicals such as oxygen and sulphide change quickly with depth, says Dirk Schüler, a microbiologist at the Ludwig–Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, who led the study1.

Bacteria build their compasses from tiny organelles called magnetosomes, which contain crystals of magnetite (Fe3O4) and and/or greigete (Fe3S4) other magnetic minerals. No single magnetosome produces a magnetic field strong enough to align a bacterium to Earth’s magnetic field, so the organelles gather together in a chain to form a stronger magnet.

When cells divide, however, they must create enough force to sever their magnets. …

the researchers discovered that cytoskeletal proteins yank the magnetosome chain towards the centre when cell division begins, ensuring that the magnets are shared equally.

via How bacteria break a magnet : Nature News & Comment.

British scientists unravel Stonehenge riddle

Scientists in Britain have at long last unravelled the riddle about the origin of the Stonehenge rocks, pinpointing their source to north Pembrokeshire.Geologists Robert Ixer from the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales suggest the stones came from Craig Rhos-y-Felin, in north Pembrokeshire.The discovery paves the way for better understanding of how and why the stones were transported to the Wiltshire monument.

via British scientists unravel Stonehenge riddle.

How to be a better Doctor (or anything else): Focus on and Learn from Mistakes

Everybody makes mistakes. But far too few people take the opportunity to learn from them. We’d all be better people if we did. And for doctors, acknowledging errors could mean the difference between a patient’s life or death.

In a study where doctors were faced with a simulated medical emergency and had to choose from uncertain treatment options, a scenario requiring a certain amount of trial and error, doctors who paid more attention to their mistakes fared much better than those who focused on their treatment successes.

This is a message everybody could benefit from.

The doctors were presented with a situation where a patient had suffered a heart attack and given a simplified six-factor patient history. They then had to choose from two emergency drug treatments.

The key to choosing the right drug was whether the patient had diabetes. One drug had a 75 percent success rate in patients with diabetes and a 25 percent success rate in all other patients. The second drug gave completely opposite results. But the doctors didn’t know this. They had to figure it out from seeing which of their virtual patients lived and which died.

They were given 64 computer simulated trials to learn from, with 10 seconds to select a treatment option for each patient. Results of their treatment were described as either success or failure. Then the same exercise was done as a test: 64 new patients, with no information given to the doctors on whether the treatment succeeded or failed.

Their success rates, their own written accounts, and brain scans taken while the doctors were going through this exercise all provided some very interesting results.

About one-quarter of the doctors eventually found the proper treatment pattern, choosing correctly between 77 and 98 percent of the time. The other doctors did much worse. Based on fMRI scans, which measure changes in blood flow to different parts of the brain, doctors who performed well tended to show high activity in their frontal lobe when treatments failed, while the doctors who performed poorly tended to activate the frontal lobe when a treatment was successful.

The researchers interpret this as meaning that the better performing doctors were focusing more on failed treatments and gradually learning from their mistakes. The poorly performing doctors focused more on successful treatments, with each success confirming what the doctors (falsely) thought they knew about which treatment was better. The researchers term this sort of behavior “success chasing.” It’s what happens when people ignore their mistakes.

via Better Doctors Focus on Mistakes – Neil Wagner – Health – The Atlantic.

Behind I.B.M. s Big Predictions

QUENTIN HARDY – I.B.M. just issued its annual list of five predictions of developments in technology that it thinks will come true in the next five years. …

– Small amounts of energy created by actions like people walking or water moving through pipes will be captured, stored in batteries and used to power things like phones, cars or homes. “You’ll see new ecosystems of generation and capture,” Mr. Meyerson said. “You generate 60 to 65 watts while walking. You could easily use that to power a phone forever.”

– There will be no more passwords, as increasingly powerful phones and sensors will store your personal biometric information, enabling machines to automatically know you are who you say you are.

– Better sensors on and inside the human brain will allow for mental control of objects. Already there are experiments involving moving cursors by thinking, but his prediction is that technology will go further. “You will observe thought patterns, which are highly personal,” he said. “You can use this to better understand stroke, or disorders like autism.”

– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will belong to 80 percent of the world’s population. While this is nearly intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads. A question is: What would this mean for world markets and politics when ordinary people can easily communicate with each other despite speaking different languages?

– Much the way powerful mobile devices store your biometric information and translate your language, personalized information filters and search engines will bring you only the information you want. “This will invert the premise of marketing,” Mr. Meyerson said. The phones “will start to be your advocate, recognizing what is near and dear to you and getting it. Instead of companies speaking to you, you will reach out to companies.”

While I.B.M. is conducting research in all of these areas, it makes neither phones, games nor commercial batteries. Why, then, should it be predicting the advent of such magic-seeming devices for the commercial periphery?…. Few companies in the world will be able to engineer and run it at a large scale, and I.B.M. would almost certainly be one. “With devices like this at the edge of the network, at the core you will need to have machines that can manage 30,000 complex commands a second and yawn,” Mr. Meyerson said. “We’ve spent over $15 billion buying analytics companies in the last five to seven years. It is a huge investment that has given us deep, deep scientific and technical skills that go way beyond the businesses these companies were in.” I.B.M. is said to have over 300 people working just on the advanced math needed to make this much complexity something like a well-integrated whole. If its predictions come true, I.B.M. may need many more people than that.

via Behind I.B.M. s Big Predictions – NYTimes.com.

FDA to throw sperm donor in jail?

FREMONT, Calif., Dec. 19 (UPI) — A California man who has been donating his sperm to women he meets on the Internet for free may face a $100,000 fine or a year in prison for his services.

Trent Arsenault of Fremont has fathered 14 children since he began donating sperm in 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told the man to stop giving away his sperm, or face charges.

The FDA said Arsenault is violating federal regulations that require blood tests every time a person donates any kind of body tissue or fluid.

“There’s this thought process that they can use somebody they know and it’s OK. But just because you ‘know’ someone, doesn’t mean you ‘know’ them,” said Dr. Mitch Rosen, director of the University of California, San Francisco Fertility Preservation Center. “You’re taking a risk.”

Arsenault said he has been tested at least five times over the past five years, but very few of his donations were given within the seven-day period required by law.

Arsenault contends he’s being targeted by the FDA because he has a Web site that promotes himself and his willingness to donate his sperm.

“What the FDA is doing infringes on reproductive rights. The government is reaching into the bedroom,” Arsenault said. “There’s no precedence for my case. Whatever happens to me kind of sets the future up for all the other people in these situations — the couples plus the donors.”

Arsenault has been tested at least five times over the past five years, but very few of his sperm donations fell within seven days of a blood test. The FDA isn’t suggesting that there’s anything wrong with Arsenault’s sperm, just that he isn’t testing it as often as he should.

Arsenault says that it would be prohibitively expensive for him to get blood tests every time he donated sperm – especially when he’s giving it away for free. But there’s good reason for the testing, fertility doctors say. Even the most trusted friends may not know they have chlamydia, for example. Or be willing to say as much.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/18/BAAA1MD68P.DTL#ixzz1h2Wunlvz

Since there is no food or drug involved, the FDA as most of us imagine its mission has no business in this beyond issuing public warnings. The FDA should be renamed to reflect what it has become: the protection of corporate and health industry profits agency.

Chinese Actor Is Arrested After Changing Name And Spending 13 Years On The Run From Police

A Chinese actor who played a detective in a television drama has been arrested after spending 13 years on the run from the police.

Ji Siguang is accused of attacking a policeman in the city of Qiqihar in northern China with three other men. The officer’s gun was stolen during the assault.

Since then, Mr Ji is alleged to have gone on the run, changed his name to Zhang Guofeng, and built a career as one of China’s most successful character actors.

He has appeared in more than 30 television dramas, including a hugely popular series named Lurk in 2009.

Other roles included a spy in the series The East is Red, 1949, and a Qing-dynasty eunuch in Miracle-working Doctor Dadaogong.

According to China’s state media, Ji Siguang was generally cast in parts with few lines, but was much loved by directors for his loyalty.

Mr Ji was finally tracked by police in southern China where he was filming a new costume drama named Shaolin Tigers in which he portrays a Buddhist monk.

He has reportedly admitted his involvement in the 1998 assault and confessed he had always been scared he would be recognised.

via Chinese Actor Is Arrested After Changing Name And Spending 13 Years On The Run From Police | World News | Sky News.

This kind of story scares, especially when I think of Obama signing the 2012 NDAA, because it could be 100% false. Perhaps this actor actually spoke out against the government at a party, or insulted some official, for example. A government that controls the media and for which there are no checks and balances could make up this story, including his confession, and haul him away to prison forever. Being famous will offer no protection against a corrupt government.

UFOs from a train window

Answer:

Touchless smartphones and TVs could be on sale in 2012

So you’ve lost your TV remote control. Again.

Not to worry, says a tiny Israeli start-up company called XTR3D – soon you’ll be able to flick through channels and adjust the volume using only… your hand.

You’ll just have to turn your palm towards the screen, and zap away without ever getting off the couch.

And no need for under-the-skin electronics or fancy microchips.

Instead, the TV – or rather gesture recognition software installed inside – will “read” your moves and execute appropriate commands, without any need for physically pressing any buttons.

Based in Tel Aviv, XTR3D is one of the developers of such motion capture technology, and it has just received $8m (£5m) investment bound to give “touchless” tech another push – and according to the firm, bring the first motion control smartphone into the market as early as next year.

US electronics giant Texas Instruments is among the investors. …

Ordinary 2D cameras and XTR3D software turn your tablet into a motion-control device

Ultrasound sensors are there for close range “no-look” gesture control – they pick up movements with help of a microphone instead of an optical camera, explains Qualcomm’s director of technology Francis MacDougall.

“One issue the Kinect has is an inability to track close to a device. The default design can track no closer than 50cm – great for TVs but not so good for tablets and smartphones,” says Mr MacDougall.

“So Qualcomm has placed multiple audio sensors – microphones – into their handset designs to isolate the voice location in 3D space while filtering out everything else.

“This technique is extremely low power and can track the hand within one to 15cm of the phone.”

via BBC News – Touchless smartphones and TVs could be on sale in 2012.

I had this idea years ago, that you could one day point at a light and gesture it on or off. Neat.