COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State University engineers have invented a radar system that is virtually undetectable, because its signal resembles random noise.

The radar could have applications in law enforcement, the military, and disaster rescue.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/noiserad.htm

Canadian scientists have developed a low-intensity ultrasound based device that can regrow bones and teeth.

Geoengineering involves changing our environment to suit human needs better. This article looks at ways geoengineers have thought about reducing global warming by not reducing greenhouse gasses, but by proactively doing something about it. Some pretty far out ideas, such as floating white plastic islands in oceans, space mirrors and lacing the atmosphere with sulphur are brought up. Science is starting to look at these options more seriously and trying to get funds for them at a small scale.

Our faces express our emotions – apparently there are around 20 key facial movements expressed around 24 facial feature points, which betray our emotions. By scanning these points intelligently, and detecting things such as facial form, computers can read the emotions of those using them.
Ideas posited in the article: websites advertising products directed at the emotional state, detecting boredom or sleepines in cars and helping people with Asperger’s syndrome (difficulty in recognising emotions and facial expressions).

2 gravity wave detectors have been switched on, trying to prove and discover waves posited by Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

The Americans have a huge isolated lab called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) run by a few people from the LSU and California Institute of Technology in the middle of Livingston Parish, LA.

Britain and Germany have their Geo 600 Detector in Hannover, run by scientists from Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham and Hannover Universities.

Apparently there’s also a similar experiment in Japan, but I couldn’t find the links to that.

Using an arsenal of rockets, artillery and aircraft, China will try to blast the clouds out of the sky, a meteorologist told a Beijing magazine, through a technique which falls under the umbrella of “cloud seeding.”

“We can turn a cloudy day into a dry and sunny one by shooting the clouds less intensively than when we make rain,” head meteorologist Mian Donglian for the Beijing municipal weather bureau told Time Out.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/06/05/china.rain/index.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344

The aim is to create a sealed reactor that can be delivered to a site, left to generate power for up to 30 years, and retrieved when its fuel is spent. The developers claim that no one would be able to remove the fissile material from the reactor because its core would be inside a tamper-proof cask protected by a thicket of alarms

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344

The 100 megawatt version is expected to be 15 meters high by 3 meters wide, and weigh 500 tonnes. A 10 megawatt version is expected to weigh less than 200 tonnes. To obtain the desired 30 year life span, the design calls for a moveable neutron reflector to be placed over a column of fuel. The reflector’s slow downward travel over the column would cause the fuel to be burned from the top of the column to the bottom. Because the unit will be sealed, it is expected that a breeder reaction will be used to further extend the life of the fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR

Read up on your ‘small nuclear power reactors’ : see “Liquid Metal cooled Fast Reactors”
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.htm

The Erasmus University has studied the costs of leading an unhealthy life, and discovered (duh) that allthough smokers cost more to care for, they lead lives which are on average 10 years shorter than non-smokers, so they cost society less.

Only for a few minutes, but they can talk and move about a bit. No telling what the long term effects are, but they have to be better than staying asleep hooked to life support. The drug activates dormant parts of the brain around the damaged tissue, causing a sleepy waking period.

The USAF is playing around with alternative fuels to fly their planes with, as the amount they use anually accounts for half of the total US governmental useage of fuel. By mixing coal with normal fuel they have something that will decrease their reliance on normal petrol.

This New Scientist report is very sad if it’s true – apparently the banana’s we eat can’t reproduce themselves, and the trees that make them are being attacked by a lethal funghus. So pretty soon, no more banana’s from India!

So if you want to get really REALLY fucked, drink this!

Turns out that air ionisers purify by putting out smog. So much so that they would cause a stage 2 alert in a major city.

It seems that the dust covering the moon is oxygen rich, and all you need to do to release it, is to heat it to high temperatures.

Well, we’ve been creating antimatter for quite some time now, but it’s slow to make, dangerous stuff and we have no real idea what to do with it!

But now NASA has come up with a great idea – lets power spacecraft with it. Sounds cool if they can get it to work…

Not that I know how to turn a black hole off, for best results, but if I can capture the emissions from a black hole, I should be able to know everything that ever went into it. So for my next trick: turn the globe inside out as my pinhole black hole computer project gets out of hand.

Don’t you love things quantum?

It turns out that there’s a whole controversy going on about wind farms, which deliver ‘green’ energy.

The BBC has a story listing 10 objections to wind farms, more than half of which are bunkum, but it turns out that one of the major problems they produce is RADAR clutter, which creates false positives (aircraft being spotted when they really are just a wind farm) or misses the aircraft completely. They are working on ways to negate this effect by putting filters on the RADARs and also by changing the design and placement of the wind turbines to lower their RCS and RADAR interference. Good studies with pretty pictures 🙂

They’ve grown a slime on a chip and forced it to grow in the shape of the bot thus encasing it entirely and finding some way of translating it’s movements to the movements of the robot. This makes it a ‘living’ robot. Currently it’s a bit boring as it moves away from light and moves towards food and it ends around there as far as I can make out, but cool in a disgusting sort of way 🙂

Works on pigs! For at least 2 1/2 hours… well done, maybe we can do this to soldiers on the battlefields?

Which can mimic nuclear explosions – necessary due to the test ban treaties. Extreme science in the UK!

They last longer and go 4 times as fast as conventional ion thrusters (for spacecraft). The theory behind ion propulsion is also explained quite well in this article. To infinity – and beyond!

Explained as an epic rhyming poem.

How do objects and images move? Why do animals move? What is motion? […]

This site publishes a free physics textbook that tells the story of how it became possible, after 2500 years of exploration, to answer such questions. The book is written to be entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification.

Coolest thing I’ve seen all week.

You can download it by chapter or grab the whole 40 MB pdf in one go.

http://www.motionmountain.net/

Direct from The Life Aquatic, two of our heroes have gone and built this ship, which capsises in order to be stable in the water to do research where stability is needed.

They actually put serious money in this!