Scientists Looking for the Force Finally Put CERN's Large Hadron Collider to Good USe

CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn sites web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter, which could bring us closer to understanding how the Universe works:
Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force." The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics--but no one's ever found it.

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In theory, when physicists turn on the tons of machinery inside the Akira-like LHC 17-mile-long ring in 2008, they will be able to produce the Higgs boson. Observing it could confirm many physicist predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model, which is a physics theory that aims to describe how elementary particles interact with each other. It's either that or destroy the planet. We can go either way (actually, although it was a joke, CERN just wrote back saying that they don't want to destroy the planet. Thankfully, Jeff Vader doesn't work there.)

The existence of the Higgs particle, also called the God Particle, has only been predicted so far. It was first proposed by University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs in 1965, after coming from a walk on the mountains. If confirmed by the LHC, it could bring scientists closer to the Grand Unified Theory, "which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces."

The Force can also explain why the fourth, gravity, is weak compared to the other three: electromagnetism, strong force, and weak force. I guess the strong force is the good one and the weak force is really the Dark Side. I don't know. I'm lost now, so I'm just going to list other of the cool stuff that the LHC will produce: strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.

Now, the only question left after they discover the real Force that bind us all is: do they have a canteen at the LHC? And if so, is it run by Jeff Vader or Mr. Stevens? [CERN, Wikipedia, National Geographic via The Force.net — all photos copyright CERN and Flickr]

Yes, again. Because I can't have enough of that clip.

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World’s Most Compact Neurosurgical Microscope with Horizontal Optics

Leica Microsystems has made a significant appearance in the history of optics design by the introduction of horizontal optics technology. The optics carrier is so compact that the surgeon naturally adopts a healthy working posture, this allows hours of fatigue-free work. The Leica M720 OH5 supports the surgeon as he works; he can see more and see better, work even more safely and generally benefit from the perfect ergonomics. Neurosurgeons will love this gadget.
Individually adjustable components for optimal cooperation : No two people are the same. Thanks to individually adjustable components, the Leica M720 surgical microscope provides optimal ergonomic conditions for concentrated and precise work and an excellent view. The two binocular tubes have a swivel range of 115° and feature the innovative butterfly techniq ue, which enables the eyepieces to be swung to a second viewing plane with a simple hand movement. If desired, the tube can be locked in one of five defined positions simply by pressing the ErgoLock™ button. This improves the ergonomics and the stability, which is a particular advantage when using a mouth switch. The microscope can therefore be matched optimally to both the surgeon and his assistant, irrespective of body height, position of the operating area or the microscope.

Fast, confident and precise focusing :Thanks to the SpeedSpot feature, a simple hand movement focuses the microscope - there is no need to follow the movement through the eyepiece. If the two laser spots overlay, the surgeon can be sure of a razor-sharp image. As a focusing reference, SpeedSpot guarantees a brilliant image at all ports

Innovative optics combined with superb illumination : The Leica M720 OH5 surgical microscope ideally combines original Leica APO OptiChrome Optics and a 300 Watt xenon illumination system to give the surgeon a steady clear and sharply focused image for the entire duration of the operation.

As working distance decreases, the maximum possible light intensity value is reduced: The working distance-controlled BrightCare feature ensures that the light intensity does not surpass safety levels. The magnification-controlled illumination diameter AutoIris automatically matches the illuminated area to the field of view. This prevents heating of tissue outside the surgeon’s field of observation.

Mobile and modular - today and tomorrow : The patented mobility concept of the Leica OH5 stand is based on the proven OH4 system. Thanks to its magnificent reach, it offers the surgeon and the whole operating team a level of maneuverability unattained by competitor products. The system is remarkable for its precise and harmonious balance of maneuverability and extremely easy movement.

Leica M720 OH5 at a glance :
NEW Horizontal Optics Technology
Premium Leica M720 optics with APO OptiChrome™ technology
True overhead design for superior reach and clearance
Leica Butterfly-Binoculars
ErgoLock™ - Built in locking device to hold main surgeon’s binocular tube fixed
SpeedSpot™ - Dual laser focusing device for fast, precise microscope positioning
BrightCare™ - Safety technology for safer illumination levels
AutoIris™ - Built-in, automatic, zoom-synchronized illumination field diameter
HDMD™ - Compact, high-definition (HD) recording system
OpenArchitecture™ for IGS Integration

The system is remarkable for its precise and harmonious balance of maneuverability and extremely easy movement. Operating techniques change, who knows what the future may bring? Leica Microsystems’ principle of OpenArchitecture and modular design provides the latitude for unforeseen adaptations and new accessories.Product Page

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Bionic Contact Lenses

Is bionic vision in your future? It might be if engineers can perfect a contact lens filed with electronics. As this ScienCentral News report explains, engineers have demonstrated how to put electronics inside a contact lens.

Super Contacts

You’ve seen the TV shows and movies, someone implanted with electronic devices that give them super human powers, including super vision. In reality, the best we can do is a set of binoculars, or strap-on night vision goggles. But that all could change as engineers work to supercharge contact lenses.

“If you look at the structure of a contact lens,” says Babak Parviz, University of Washington assistant professor of eleectrical engineering, “ more or less it’s just a polymer that … does vision correction.”

Since the group was already working on incorporating micron-scale devices onto unconventional substrates including plastics, he says, “we saw the opportunity to integrate these on a contact lens.”

Parviz adds that much of the micro technology that would have to fit on a contact lens is already available and says, “To look at the semi-conductor industry and what we have in opto-electronics and micro machines, we already have a lot… (but) one thing we have not done is to put those things on a contact.”
Parviz imagines a whole list of things a supercharged contact lens might do, explaining, “I can see this exponentially growing and having many, many applications; from lenses that are quote-unquote intelligent and can help the user who’s had a cataract surgery to see better, to amplified vision, to all sorts of gaming applications and interfacing with your iPod and lots of things.”
Parviz says reaction to the the lens has been good; that imaginations are excited and that people are volunteering to test it now. However, he cautions that his group so far has only demonstrated that the electronic circuits can be assembled in a contact and that the contact so far appears safe when tested on a rabbit. At this point they have not yet even powered up the lens, so operational models are still some time away.

But the bionic contact’s biggest contribution might not be in looking out, but looking in. “We see the eye not only as our window to the outside world, but actually a window into the body also,” explains Parviz. He says, “A lot of biomarkers of interest do actually show up on the surface of the eye.

So, if you could have a contact lens that could sample what’s happening on the surface of the eye, detect various targets, molecules of interest, and relay the information out wirelessly, what you can do is to continuously monitor the health situation of a person.” Such continuous monitoring in a hospital might lessen the need for blood samples; at home a diabetic might get an instant warning when blood sugars go to high or low.

Unlike its fictional counterpart that is somehow hard wired into the body, Parviz envisions some sort of wireless communication between the contacts and some device controlling it.

Anybody who has soldered electronic components together may wonder, how can all these electronics be put into a contact lens in a manner that is safe to go in an eye? Parviz says they avoid the heat and caustic chemicals of traditional electronic assembly by employing an element of self assembly. He says, “So what we do is that we make all of the components that we need to assemble into the contact lens independently…they come as a powdered… collection of components and then later on we self assemble those onto a contact lens to form our own system.”

One big challenge the engineers face is how to get power to run the electronics. Right now they’re exploring using coils that harvest radio frequency energy. Andrew Lingley, a graduate student in Parvaz’ lab, is working through the engineering problems. He says, “The idea is somewhat similar to transferring power to a speaker. So, in a speaker you have a coil of wire and you run a current through that wire. And, it sets up a magnetic field that is transferred to the moveable part of the speaker.” In his experiments he has a large coil that creates a magnetic field. When the lens is inside that magnetic field, the coils in the lens generate electrical current.

The research was presented in January 2008 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Technology Gap Innovation Fund from the University of Washington.

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A Lead on the Ark of the Covenant

The Ark of the Covenant is carried into the Temple

When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.
As Indiana Jones's creators understood, the Ark is one of the Bible's holiest objects, and also one of its most maddening McGuffins. A wooden box, roughly 4 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft., perhaps gold-plated and carried on poles inserted into rings, it appears in the Good Book variously as the container for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25:16: "and thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee"); the very locus of God's earthly presence; and as a divine flamethrower that burns obstacles and also crisps some careless Israelites. It is too holy to be placed on the ground or touched by any but the elect. It circles Jericho behind the trumpets to bring the walls tumbling down. The Bible last places the Ark in Solomon's temple, which Babylonians destroyed in 586 BC. Scholars debate its current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem's Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London's Temple tube station?

Parfitt, 63, is a professor at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies. His new book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (HarperOne) along with a History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Colleagues laughed at him for backing the claim; in 1999, a genetic marker specific to descendents of Judaism's Temple priests (cohens) was found to appear as frequently among the Lemba's priestly cast as in Jews named Cohen. The Lemba — and Parfitt — made global news.

Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa."

That story, by Parfitt's estimation, is partly true, partly not. He is not at all sure, and has no way of really knowing, whether the Lemba's ancestors left Jerusalem simultaneously with the Ark (assuming, of course, that it left at all). However, he has a theory as to where they might eventually have converged. Lemba myth venerates a city called Senna. In modern-day Yemen, in an area with people genetically linked to the Lemba, Parfitt found a ghost town by that name. It's possible that the Lemba could have migrated there from Jerusalem by a spice route — and from Senna, via a nearby port, they could have launched the long sail down the African coast. As for the Ark? Before Islam, Arabia contained many Jewish-controlled oases, and in the 500s AD, the period's only Jewish kingdom. It abutted Senna. In any case, the area might have beckoned to exiled Jews bearing a special burden. Parfitt also found eighth-century accounts of the Ark in Arabia, by Jews-turned-Muslims. He posits that at some undefined point the Lemba became the caretakers of the Ark, or the ngoma.

Parfitt's final hunt for the ngoma, which dropped from sight in the 1940s, landed him in sometimes-hostile territory ("Bullets shattered the rear screen," of his car, he writes). Ark leads had guided him to Egypt, Ethiopia and even New Guinea, until one day last fall his clues led him to a storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes.

Parfitt thinks that whatever the supernatural character of Ark, it was, like the ngoma, a combination of reliquary, drum and primitive weapon, fueled with a somewhat unpredictable proto-gunpowder. That would explain the unintentional conflagrations. The drum element is the biggest stretch, since scripture never straightforwardly describes the Ark that way. He bases his supposition on the Ark's frequent association with trumpets, and on aspects of a Bible passage where King David dances in its presence. Parfitt admits that such a multipurpose object would be "very bizarre" in either culture, but insists, "that's an argument for a connection between them."

So, had he found the Ark? Yes and no, he concluded. A splinter has carbon-dated the drum to 1350 AD — ancient for an African wood artifact, but 2,500 years after Moses. Undaunted, Parfitt asserts that "this is the Ark referred to in Lemba tradition" — Lemba legend has it that the original ngoma destroyed itself some 400 years ago and had to be rebuilt on its own "ruins" — "constructed by priests to replace the previous Ark. There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses."

Well, perhaps a little doubt. "It seems highly unlikely to me," says Shimon Gibson, a noted biblical archaeologist to whom Parfitt has described his project. "You have to make tremendous leaps." Those who hope to find the original biblical item, moreover, will likely reject Parfitt's claim that the best we can do is an understudy. Animating all searches for the Ark is the hope — and fear — that it will retain the unbridled divine power the Old Testament describes. What would such a wonder look like in our postmodern world? What might it do? Parfitt's passionately crafted new theory, like his first, could eventually be proven right. But if so, unlike the fiction in the movies, it would deny us an explosive resolution.

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Scientists Measure What It Takes to Push a Single Atom

An illustration of the tip of an atomic force microscope, in brown, measuring the force it takes to move a cobalt atom, the yellow sphere, on a crystalline surface.

I.B.M. scientists have measured the force needed to nudge one atom.
About one-130-millionth of an ounce of force pushes a cobalt atom across a smooth, flat piece of platinum.

Pushing the same atom along a copper surface is easier, just one-1,600-millionth of an ounce of force.

The scientists report these minuscule findings in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

I.B.M. scientists have been pushing atoms around for some time, since Donald M. Eigler of the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., spelled “IBM” using 35 xenon atoms in 1989. Since then, researchers at the company have continued to explore how they might be able to construct structures and electronic components out of individual atoms.

Knowing the precise forces required to move atoms “helps us to understand what is possible and what is not possible,” said Andreas J. Heinrich, a physicist at Almaden and an author of the new Science paper. “It’s a stepping stone for us, but it’s by no means the end goal.”

In the experiment, Dr. Heinrich and his collaborators at Almaden and the University of Regensburg in Germany used the sharp tip of an atomic force microscope to push a single atom. To measure the force, the tip was attached to a small tuning fork, the same kind that is found in a quartz wristwatch. In fact, in the first prototype, Franz J. Giessibl, a scientist at Regensburg who was a pioneer in the use of atomic force microscopes, bought an inexpensive watch and pulled out the quartz tuning fork for use in the experiment.

The tip vibrates 20,000 times a second until it comes into contact with an atom. As the tip pushes, the tuning fork bends, like a diving board, and the vibration frequency dips.

A single atom does not roll, and even a perfectly smooth surface is not perfectly smooth. Instead, the atom rests in small indentations in the lattice, in effect like an egg in an egg carton. The resistance — what becomes friction when multiplied by millions and billions of atoms — comes from the energy needed to rearrange the bonds between the cobalt atom and surface.

When the tip pushes hard enough, the atom hops, almost instantaneously to the next indentation. “It’s not smooth,” said Markus Ternes, another Almaden scientist working on the research. “It’s faster than we can detect.”

From the changes in the frequency of the tuning fork vibrations, the scientists calculated the force that the tip applied to the cobalt atom.

Copper is less sticky than platinum, because of differences between the underlying bonds, and hence allowed the greater ease is pushing the cobalt atom along.

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5 Things I Didn’t Know about Poop

I have poop on the brain today. Someone gave my 6-month old son Jack a copy of Everyone Poops even though we’re nowhere near that stage yet. Still, it’s a fascinating book, and got me thinking about how little I know about poop. While the following facts aren’t found in Gomi’s book, they’re still pretty nifty.

1. Bird poop is white because birds can’t pee. Their kidneys work like ours do, but instead of producing urine, birds excrete a white paste. The paste, along with what comes out of the intestines, unites and is excreted through the bird’s cloaca, a multi-purpose hole which means sewer in Latin. And, yes, by multi-purpose, I mean they even mate through it.

2. Many dogs eat poop. This I know because, sadly, my dog used to eat his own poop on occasion. What I didn’t know was that eating poop has a name: coprophagy, and is, of course, more popular with dung beetles than dogs. If your dog eats his/her own feces, one way to discourage the behavior (other than immediately cleaning up after your dog) is to douse the poop with hot sauce or vinegar.


3. The reason why some poops float is because they have a lot of gas in them. Rather than coming out as flatulence, the gas gets stuck in the poop and forces it to the surface of the water. If there’s a lot of fat in your diet, likewise your poop might float.

4. Cavemen were better equipped to chew and digest many plants and vegetables. They had larger molars and longer digestive tracts better at handling foods rich in indigestible cellulose, like, er, corn, for instance. Evolution has worked against our ability to chew and digest corn, which is why when some kernels get swallowed whole they appear in poop.

5. The word poop comes from the Middle English word poupen or popen, which used to be the root of the word we now call a fart. Clearly poop has onomatopoeic origins.

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McCain Scores Zero on National Environmental Scorecard

Members of Congress who were seriously ill or died during their term did better than John McCain on the 2007 National Environmental Scorecard just released by the League of Conservation Voters.

McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single crucial environmental vote scored by the organization. Carl Pope, Executive Director of Sierra Club, had this to say:

Every other Member who received a zero from LCV last year at least had the temerity to show up and vote against the environment and clean energy time after time. And unlike John McCain, I doubt any of them would claim to be environmental leaders or champions on global warming.

The other Senators to score zero with McCain were: Roberts of Kansas, Vitter of Louisiana, Cochran of Mississippi, Bond of Missouri, Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Cornyn of Texas.

Something tells me we'll be hearing a lot more about energy security from candidate McCain, and a lot less about global warming.

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Georgia to Invade Tennessee Over Water

I don’t know how many of you knew this, but the City of Atlanta has been subject to what has politely been called an “extreme” drought recently.
This has occasionally been comical, such as when the University of Georgia essentially asked 90,000 attendees of its homecoming football game to obey the “if it’s brown, flush it down…” maxim. It’s occasionally been sad, such as the protracted legal battle with downstream states Florida and Alabama over who got to use water from Georgia reservoirs. It’s even occasionally been terrifying, such as that day in October when the countdown until the pipes ran dry was a mere ninety days.

As one might imagine, this has all been of some concern to the state government, who have sought to protect Atlanta against a future water crisis of this magnitude in their own ways—I smirked when Governor Sonny Purdue led a prayer for rain on the state capitol steps—but the most recent attempt has been beyond the pale.

Two weeks ago two Republican lawmakers, Sen. David Shafer and Rep. Harry Geisinger, proposed that Georgians simply invade their northern neighbor and take their water.

Citing a survey from the 1800s, they claim that the state border has crept southward in an incorrect manner and advocate restoring the pre-1818 state lines. The obvious reason for this is the millions of gallons of water in the Tennessee River, one mile north of the present border.

Tennessee, for their part, seems to take this about as seriously as I do. They have offered to wrestle for the river, play a football game over it, or at the least not let it go without a fight. Georgia, on the other hand, has already passed the bill and broke out into song while doing so. Get your popcorn ready…

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The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was

"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes."

It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.

Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes."

The University of Sydney team's analysis differs from previous calculations because they were more discerning with their data selection. "We used data from pulsars: stars that flash with a regular pulse," Professor Gaensler explains. "As light from these pulsars travels to us, it interacts with electrons scattered between the stars (the Warm Ionised Medium, or WIM), which slows the light down.

"In particular, the longer (redder) wavelengths of the pulse slow down more than the shorter (bluer) wavelengths, so by seeing how far the red lags behind the blue we can calculate how much WIM the pulse has travelled through.

"If you know the distance to the pulsar accurately, then you can work out how dense the WIM is and where it stops - in other words where the Galaxy's edge is.

"Of the thousands of pulsars known in and around our Galaxy, only about 60 have really well known distances. But to measure the thickness of the Milky Way we need to focus only on those that are sitting above or below the main part of the Galaxy; it turns out that pulsars embedded in the main disk of the Milky Way don't give us useful information."

Choosing only the pulsars well above or below us cuts the number of measurements by a factor of three, but it is precisely this rejection of data points that makes The University of Sydney's analysis different from previous work.

"Some colleagues have come up to me and have said 'That wrecks everything!'" says Professor Gaensler. "And others have said 'Ah! Now everything fits together!'"

The team's results were presented in January this year at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

About Professor Bryan Gaensler:

Professor Gaensler is a graduate of the University of Sydney and a former Young Australian of the Year. After working at the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University he was lured back to Australia on prestigious Federation Fellowship. One of the world's leading astronomers, his research interests include studying the essential role that magnetic fields play in the generation of turbulence and large-scale structures, the production of high-energy cosmic ray particles, and the formation of the first stars and galaxies.

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Rogue Spy Satellite Blast

Video of Spy Satellite Getting Shot Down

Watch as General Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and apparently Jack Bauer's older brother) shows how the Aegis missile launches and successfully destroys the rogue spy satellite. This is a huge success for the Pentagon and the anti-missiles system that was first conceived in the mid-80s as part of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Specially after many critics were saying it wasn't going to work.

The mission was simple. At 10:26PM EST, a standard missile 3 carrying a kinetic warhead was launched northwest of Hawaii from the USS Lake Eire, a Ticonderoga Class missile defense cruiser. 24 minutes later, at 10:50, the Joint Space Operations Center at the Vandenberg Air Force base confirmed the breakup of the satellite at 153 nautical miles above the Earth from a direct hit.

While they can't confirm completely the destruction of the tank, which was needed to release the toxic fuel that may have posed a danger to us Earthlings, the Pentagon has declared the mission a complete success and with good reason. Some experts criticized the plan as probable failure during the past days, with the argument that the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System being developed by the US Missile Defense Agency, wasn't designed to do this and, therefore, it wasn't going to be able to hit the target and destroy it effectively.

Their reasons were three: first, the kinetic warhead, launched in a long range standard missile 3, a isn't designed to destroy targets by explosion but by the sheer force of multiple impacts. While this is enough to destroy other incoming missiles, the critics said that this wasn't going to be enough to destroy the much larger satellite. Second was the speed of the target, which was traveling at double the speed of the missiles which are the usual target of the Aegis. And third, the tracking system, which wasn't originally designed to operate in high orbits.

The video, however, shows that the direct kinetic hit has completely obliterated its target. Now the world can rest at peace. Until A542B, that asteroid ten times bigger than Texas, finally arrives. [Wikipedia, Defense Tech Org and BBC]

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Amazing Feb 20 lunar eclipse - see our photo gallery of totality!

[updated 2/21/2008] -- The Moon roared into the constallation Leo in a fiery orange lunar eclipse Feb 20.

We've posted this latest images from penumbra to totality in a gallery of more from this celestial event every few minutes, from the onset of the first penumbral shadows at 7:36 pm ET to totality, just after 10 pm ET.

Ongoing coverage

GALLERY: Images of the eclipse as-it-happened

See images and time-lapses from different regions throughout the night AND watch archived video of our webcast of last year's lunar eclipse, featuring segments on eclipse science, mythology, and our future on the Moon.

Favourable weather

Wednesday night's total lunar eclipse not only happened at a decent hour of the early-to-mid evening for us viewers across North America (unlike other passes in recent years), it also included a close encounter with the planet Saturn.

No, the Moon wasn't set to collide with the great ringed world (Saturn is about a billion km from Earth and our Moon), but Saturn did appear near our neighbour in space, as it turned an eerie orange in the Earth's shadow.

VIDEO: Watch the archive of our LIVE webcast of the March 3, 2007 lunar eclipse

Add a favourable weather forecast (though some cities will have been clouded over, few cities in mid and eastern North America were expecting solid cloud on the night of Feb 20.

Eclipse 101

This colour is the result of the last remnants of sunlight still able to refract around the Earth to the Moon. However, much more red light than blue makes it past the blocking Earth to hit the lunar surface.

An eclipse all night on the East Coast

From the vantage point of much of Eastern North America, viewers could see the eclipse from just after diner - when the Earth's shadow started to creep across the face of the full Moon at 8:43 pm ET - to just after midnight.

Unlike last summer's early morning lunar eclipse on August 28 (pictured at left), viewers in Eastern North America won't have to chase the Moon down into the horizon to catch a last glimpse of the dwindling event.

For Easterners - and in-fact almost all of North America - the February 20 Moon got and remained fully eclipsed for a generous 51 minutes.

Viewing guide (archive version)

The February 20 eclipse appears in the east.

Depending on your location, the Moon will be in various stages of rising, though the actual eclipse happens simultaneously

You'll start to see the lighter part of the Earth's shadow (penumbra) creep across the Moon at 7:36, totally covering the Moon by 8:43 pm ET

The much darker umbral shadow of the Earth will start to turn the Moon orange or even red starting around 9 pm ET and reach total eclipse at 10:01 pm ET

The Moon will stay bathed in this eerie dim glow until 10:50, when our local natural satellite will begin to emerge from the umbra, then the penumbra

The Saturn encounter

Throughout the night, viewers could see the Moon flanked by two bright points of light: One of which is the 1.4 magnitude star Regulus, while the other is Saturn - a yellow 0.2 magnitude gem 3.5 degrees above and to the left of the Moon as viewed from North America. Regulus, Saturn, and the Moon will more-or-less formed a triangle in the sky during the eclipse.

Those with a keen eye may have noticed the Moon moving across this 'background' star and planet much farther away.

See you in 2010!

If you weren't able to catch this celestial rush hour event, the next easily-visible total lunar eclipse won't happen over North America again for almost three years - in December of 2010.

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US missile hits 'toxic satellite'

The US has successfully struck a disabled spy satellite with a missile fired from a warship in waters west of Hawaii, military officials say.

Operatives had only a 10-second window to hit the satellite - USA 193 - which went out of control shortly after it was launched in December 2006.

Officials were worried its hydrazine fuel could do harm, but it is not yet known if the fuel tank was destroyed.

The controversial operation has been criticised by China and Russia.

On Thursday, China called on the US to provide more information about the mission.

Russia suspects the operation was a cover to test anti-satellite technology under the US missile defence programme.

The US denies the operation was a response to an anti-satellite test carried out by China last year, which prompted fears of a space arms race.

Precision needed

The BBC's Jonathan Beale in Washington says this operation was hugely ambitious.

The operation went ahead hours after the space shuttle Atlantis landed, removing it as a safety issue for the military.

The satellite - believed by some commentators to be a radar imaging reconnaissance satellite - was passing about 130 nautical miles (250km) over the Pacific.

Graphic of how the satellite was hit

Earlier the military said it would use an SM-3 missile fired from the cruiser USS Lake Erie, which is posted on the western side of Hawaii along with the destroyers USS Decatur and USS Russell.

But it is not yet known how successful the operation was - the missile needed to pierce the bus-sized satellite's fuel tank, containing more than 450kg (1,000lbs) of toxic hydrazine, which would otherwise be expected to survive re-entry.

The Pentagon said confirmation that the fuel tank has been hit should be available within 24 hours.

US officials said without an attempt to destroy the fuel tank, and with the satellite's thermal control system gone, the fuel would now be frozen solid, allowing the tank to resist the heat of re-entry.

If the tank were to land intact, it could leak toxic gas over a wide area - harming or killing humans if inhaled, officials had warned.

Debris

Officials expect that over 50% of the debris will fall to Earth within the first 15 hours after the strike - or within its first two revolutions of Earth.

USA 193 lost control a few hours after launch on a Delta II rocket

Left to its own devices, about half of the spacecraft would have been expected to survive the blazing descent through the atmosphere, scattering debris in a defined "corridor" which runs across the Earth's surface.

Professor Richard Crowther, a space debris expert with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), said that if struck with the missile, about 25% of USA 193 is likely to survive the fall to Earth.

"The smaller the debris is the more likely you are to get burn-through. So if you fragment something before re-entry, less mass will survive to hit the Earth," he told BBC News.

Russian suspicion

But Russia's defence ministry has effectively branded the US operation a cover for testing an anti-satellite weapon.

The Russian defence ministry argued that various countries' spacecraft had crashed to Earth in the past, with many using toxic fuel on board, but that this had never before merited "extraordinary measures".

A spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing, Liu Jianchao, said China was concerned about the "possible damage to security in outer space and to other countries".

"We demand that the US... swiftly brief the international community with necessary data and information in time, so that relevant countries can take preventative measures," he said.

Last year, China carried out a test using a ground-based ballistic missile to destroy a satellite in space, prompting international alarm and fears of a space arms race.

On Tuesday, a US State Department spokesman stressed that the action was meant to protect people from the hazardous fuel and was not a weapons test.

The US government has also denied claims that the main aim of the operation was to destroy secret components on USA 193.

Officials say classified parts would be burned up in the atmosphere and, in any case, that would not be a reason for shooting down the satellite.

SATELLITE DESTRUCTION 1 SM-3 missile launched from a US Navy cruiser in Pacific Ocean 2 The three-stage missile headed for collision location, where the relative "closing" speed was expected to be 10km/s (22,000mph) 3 Satellite came in range at altitude of 247km (133 nautical miles), close to edge of Earth's atmosphere 4 Missile made contact with satellite with objective of breaking fuel tank, freeing hydrazine into space 5 Much of the debris will burn up but an as yet unknown amount is expected to be scattered over hundreds of kilometres

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Nanotechnology Is Morally Unacceptable

Posted by Ben Worthen

If you don’t have a super-fast, super-small computer in a few years, blame the moral majority. It turns out that most Americans find nanotechnology, the scientific field most likely to produce such a breakthrough, morally unacceptable.

Tinkering with atoms and molecules could lead to a computing breakthrough

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin who are studying people’s attitudes towards nanotechnology, an emerging scientific field that involves manipulating molecules and atoms. They found that just 29.5% of the 1,000-plus Americans surveyed said they thought nanotechnology research was morally acceptable.

Our first reaction was that 70% of people must not know what nanotechnology is – President Bush, who has openly relied on moral views to shape his scientific agenda, has made nanotechnology one of his scientific priorities, after all. And Dietram Scheufele, the U of W professor who led the survey, agrees to a point. People’s understanding of what nanotechnology is hasn’t advanced much over the last few years, he tells the Business Technology Blog. “So people rely on mental shortcuts,” lumping nanotechnology in with other new technologies like stem cell research and genetically modified foods, he tells us. The same people who object to those fields – often on religious reasons – object to nanotechnology. (Incidentally, the heathen Europeans are just fine with nanotechnology.)

What’s noteworthy, Schuefele tells us, is that the objections are contained to the field itself, not the breakthroughs it could lead to. Overwhelming majorities across religious backgrounds supported the benefits of nanotechnology, anything from computers the size of a pin to stain-resistant pants. “Most people have very little objection to building a better computer,” Schuefele says. They’d just prefer a different way to get there.

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College student fights his own cancer

DURHAM, N.C. - Usually, he just finds a way to move faster, to cram more into the day. But some things cannot be rushed, and that is one of the hardest parts.



Josh Sommer waits for the test tubes to warm up to 37 degrees Celsius, for the centrifuge to spin them around, then for the cells inside to settle properly to the bottom. Last year, one batch took three excruciating months to get right.

This cinderblock laboratory inside a Veterans hospital research building is not where the 20-year-old Duke University junior expected to spend much of his college career. He came to Duke to study environmental engineering, not biology.

But for what Josh now needs, a million things need to be done, and running these cultures is one of them. So he is here, growing and nurturing cells, one small but vital part of an effort to help others understand the genetic mechanisms that make them misfire.

So he is patient, because a mistake could set the project back a week, and thousands of lives are at stake.

One of them is his.

___

Freshman year starts blissfully. It begins with a 10-day camping trip in the Smoky Mountains. He is surrounded by new, smart friends. When classes start, the conversations spill out into the quad afterward.

The terrible headaches come over Christmas break. Josh undergoes testing before returning to school.

His mother, Simone, gets the phone call at her home in Greensboro. A doctor herself, she takes the news from a fellow physician calmly, clinically. Then she hangs up and goes to pieces, as any parent would.

She gets in the car and drives to campus with Josh's dog Dassi. Josh is on his way to the climbing wall when his cell phone rings. "I'm in Durham and we need to talk," Simone tells him.

He is puzzled, then remembers the recent MRI. His heart thumps. When he meets her at the dorm, she is holding back tears.

A cancer diagnosis is devastating, whatever the type. Nearly 220,000 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, 178,000 of breast cancer, 154,000 of colorectal cancer.

Chordoma — the cancer Josh learns he has — is a one-in-a million disease. Just 300 people get the terrible news each year, not even one per day. It strikes all ages, at different spots along the spinal column. The tumors can be removed, but the cancer is relentless. Chemotherapy doesn't work. Life expectancy is around seven years.

The MRI shows Josh's tumor is in a tough spot, in a bone inside his skull. It extends onto his brain stem and wraps around several arteries. There are two surgeries, then weeks of recovery in the hospital. He and Simone pass the time reading whatever they can about the disease.

There isn't much. The massive apparatus of medical research — pharmaceutical companies, foundations, universities, government agencies — is utilitarian. High-prevalence diseases are at the front of the line, rare ones like chordoma usually at the back.

But then, a stroke of good fortune. It turns out that the only researcher in the country with a grant to study chordoma happens to be at Duke, working in a VA lab across the street from campus.

They meet Michael Kelley in his office on a Sunday. They talk about the research and where it might go next. Kelley says he's willing to proceed, but he'll need things like equipment and staff to work in his lab.

Well, Josh says, you can put me to work.

___

He hasn't taken a biology class since ninth grade, but catches on quickly. In high school, a national newspaper named him to a top-20 academic all-star team for the whole country.

It's an odd experience, trying to nurture cells to help others figure out how to kill them. As he learns more and more about chordoma, Josh tells his mom the science fascinates him. He just wishes it wasn't life and death.

Josh isn't the first person to work in a lab to find a cure or treatment for his own disease. A cystic fibrosis victim named Jeff Pinard has done work on the genetics of his affliction. A Tulane medical student named Andy Martin studied a cancer called sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma, which is even rarer than chordoma.

They're uplifting stories. But Josh sometimes worries they distract people from the urgent reality. Andy died in 2004. Josh has become friends with a local 12-year-old with advancing chordoma. He knows what the disease does.

"I guess the way I look at it is that there will be a time for every disease when one can in essence outrun their disease," Josh writes in a late-night e-mail to a reporter who had been spending time with him.

"For Andy his disease was too fast and the science too slow." For Jeff, "science has just barely outpaced his disease. I hope to be in Jeff's category rather than Andy's."

By fall, Josh is back on campus and working in Kelley's lab. He has realized that this won't be enough. He and Simone know something much bigger is needed.

In their research, they discover something surprising: The biggest obstacles to a cure aren't necessarily scientific ones. They're human.

Numerous researchers at Duke, in Boston and in Europe are ready to work on chordoma, but don't have the cell lines they need. Meanwhile, the tumors needed to produce those lines are just being thrown away by the surgeons who remove them.

Doctors aren't talking to one another. Various neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons, and others have experience removing chordoma and trying to treat it. But the groups have never sat down and compared notes.

Funding is certainly scarce. But there is also no basic infrastructure, not even a database of the disparate patients and doctors treating chordoma to organize a clinical trial.

Chordoma doesn't need another lab assistant. It needs a field marshal.

Josh and Simone are well-suited to work as a team. Simone raised Josh alone; when he was in high school, they both became mysteriously ill with what turned out to be a debilitating toxic mold infection, which forced them to move and forced Simone to give up her medical practice.

Josh responded by helping design a new way to assess mold contamination (work that made him a semifinalist in the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse science competition). He and Simone traveled to Washington to speak at press conferences and lobby Congress for tougher mold legislation (Josh says it's impossible to say whether there is any connection between the mold and his cancer).

The campaign failed, but they had learned to persuade, to organize, to talk their way past receptionists, to ask for what they needed.

"I think it was my mom's way of coping — you see a problem that can be fixed and you do something about it," Josh says.

___

These days, Josh still works in Kelley's lab several days a week, but has cut back his hours. His focus now is the Chordoma Foundation, which he and his mother founded to push every aspect of chordoma research.

Last spring in Maryland, they sat in a room with dozens of scientists they had brought together to talk about chordoma, the first ever such meeting.

A "BioBank" is in the works, to help gather tumor material and ship the most promising cell lines to researchers who need them.

At Duke alone, Josh has helped recruit at least a half-dozen labs — in fields like radiology, oncology, and genetics — into the chordoma effort. More are ready to start if they can get the cell lines they need.

"For the foundation to go out and say, 'At 3 o'clock Wednesday afternoon someone's having a biopsy and we need to capture that information,' it's tremendous," says Neil Spector, another cancer researcher at Duke and the VA whom Josh enlisted to work on chordoma. "I've been approached by a lot of people who have diseases who are desperate and say, 'Can you help find a cure for this disease or that disease?' but really don't have an idea of what it takes." Josh and Simone, he says, have done their homework.

The challenge is to prod the research bureaucracy to catch up with the evolving conceptions of cancer itself. Experts like Spector increasingly see the differences between cancers in molecular terms, not based on where they occur in the body. That boosts the argument that research on rare cancers like chordoma could be more broadly useful.

"If you were to ask me two years ago I would have said maybe a decade, seven years if we're lucky," Kelley says, when asked about the prospects for effective treatments. "That timeline I think has been shortened a lot. We're going to understand the genetic changes that occur in chordoma in the next year."

The next step is to see if any known compounds — even drugs already in use — might show progress against those genetic defects. The foundation recently arranged for a cell line to be exposed to a battery of 2,000 substances in the library of FDA-approved compounds at the National Institutes of Health. It's a shot in the dark, but a start. With luck, something already on the pharmacy shelf will match up. If not, drugs will have to be developed from scratch, and that will take longer.

___

Josh's health is good, but he knows the future is uncertain.

"The opportunities at Duke are just astounding and we are making rapid progress," he says. "But a lot of times I feel like it's not fast enough."

Every day is a race, and it is exhausting. He and Simone have raised $300,000 in a few months — en route, they hope, to $3 million over the next few years.

When a recent philanthropy competition on the social networking Web site Facebook.com promised $10,000 to groups that attracted the most total donors, Josh barnstormed Duke's campus, hitting sorority meetings and big lecture classes, offering free doughnuts and pizza to anyone who would make a donation. Altogether, the contest netted $25,000 for the foundation.

"The weeks feel like days," he says. "Time is just flying by. I feel like we can never do enough. I'd like to somehow cram 48 hours into 24 hours. You prioritize and try to make the most of the time you have."

He lives in a dorm, greets friends on campus, acts like a regular student. But he isn't. His friends still belong to the carefree world he remembers from freshman year. Josh is terribly grown-up. He is getting the best education of any of them but would gladly trade it if he could.

Duke has given him the semester off from classes as part of a pilot public service project. He misses the giddy intellectual excitement of that first semester. But classes that won't help him get chordoma cured just take up precious time.

"For me, being here now has turned into a way to save my life," he says, "and save the lives of lots of other people."

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The World’s Most Evil Fish Invades Britain

The list of fish that can make men curse with fear has up to this point pretty much been limited to very large sharks.

Add another one to the list: the giant snakehead.

The giant snakehead is a carnivorous fish that feasts on pretty much anything in its path, and has caused all manner of destruction in places where it has been introduced. With the recent discovery of the fish in Britain, officials are scrambling to find a possible solution to this dreaded environmental issue.

Maybe you think it’s overstating the problem a bit. After all it’s just a fish, right? Wrong. This is not your everyday fish. For one thing, the giant snakehead can kill you. Female snakeheads have been known to attack and sometimes actually kill human beings who get too close to juvenile fish.

The giant snakehead will eat absolutely everything in a body of water then crawl over land to the next pond or lake. If there’s an infestation near any other bodies of water, those other areas are almost sure to be infested soon because the snakehead can survive four days out of water while it looks for a new home.

The fish is the pinnacle in dangerous and effective invasive species. Officials in the U.S. had to fight an invasion of the fish with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Snipers were placed around invaded bodies of water with shoot on sight orders. Whole lakes were poisoned, wiping out hundreds of other fish in the process, to stop the snakefish from spreading. Even these measures weren’t 100% effective.

So you can imagine the fear when British wildlife officials heard that one of the toothy monsters was hooked by a fisherman in Lincolnshire. According to the Sun newspaper, an environment agency rep said: “The reaction was, ‘Oh s***’.” You know you’re dealing with a serious environmental problem when people from environmental agencies start cursing in newspapers. (It’s probably worth pointing out, however, that the Sun is not exactly known as a hotbed of serious environmental journalism. They’re far more famous for having a daily picture of boobs on their third page.)

Nobody is quite sure how the fish got there. The species is native to South-east Asia, where it is kept in fish ponds or reservoirs as a game fish. They’re apparently quite fun to catch, and they’re also considered quite tasty in China. The species, however, is banned in Britain. It is assumed the fish was a pet that was released in the wild, as that is how the species was introduced in America.

England does have one thing going for it; it’s really cold. The snakehead thrives in warmer water, and the freezing waters in northern England may help take care of the problem before it spirals out of control.

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UCR’s Researchers Discover New Way to Store Information Via DNA

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) – Researchers at UC Riverside have found a way to get into your body and your bloodstream. No, they’re not spiritual gurus or B-movie mad scientists. Nathaniel G. Portney, Yonghui Wu, Stefano Lonardi, and Mihri Ozkan from UCR’s departments of Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Biochemistry, and Electrical Engineering, and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, are just talented when it comes to manipulating DNA.

In their paper, “Length-based Encoding of Binary Data in DNA,” which was published by the American Chemical Society last month, the researchers discovered a system to encode digital information within DNA. This method relies on the length of the fragments obtained by the partial restriction digest rather than the actual content of the nucleotide sequence. As a result, the technology eliminates the need to use expensive sequencing machinery.

Why is this discovery important? The human genome consists of the equivalent of approximately 750 megabytes of data – a significant amount of storage space. However, only about three percent of DNA goes into composing the more than 22,000 genes that make us what we are. The remaining 97 percent leaves plenty of room to encode information in a genome, allowing the information to be preserved and replicated in perpetuity.

Given the size of the DNA fragments (one base pair of DNA is 0.33 nanometers), one could store a large amount of information in a very small space. By storing messages within DNA, organizations can “tag” objects to verify authenticity, as well as to inconspicuously send data to a specific destination. “Already there are several companies using DNA to tag objects that they certify to be original and which then can be very difficult to counterfeit,” says Stefano Lonardi, Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering.

For example, the British company, Redweb Security, has developed something called i-powder that tags DNA and another company called PSA DNA Authentication services tags sports memorabilia.

“What we developed at UCR is a method to encode a message in DNA in a way that does not require an expensive sequencing machine,” notes Lonardi. “The decoding still requires a wet lab procedure, but the experimental procedure is significantly easier.”

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Their Deepest, Darkest Discovery

Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.

The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons -- light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.

"It's very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night," said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. "Nothing comes back to you. It's very, very, very dark."

But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions -- the pinnacle of stealthy technology.

Both advances reflect researchers' growing ability to manipulate light, the fleetest and most evanescent of nature's offerings. The nascent invisibility cloak now being tested, for example, is made of a material that bends light rays "backward," a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.

Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.

"Cloaking is just the tip of the iceberg," said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and an expert in the fledgling field. "With transformation optics you can do many other tricks," perhaps including making things appear to be located where they are not and focusing massive amounts of energy on microscopic spots.

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research "for obvious reasons," said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to "see."

The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said -- able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects -- and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.

But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy's night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.

The Defense Department did not fund development of the new blacker-than-black material, created by Lin and his colleagues. But military officials were among the first to call after a description of the work appeared in this month's issue of the journal Nano Letters, Lin said in an interview.

Substances that absorb every smidgeon of incoming visible light could complement existing stealth coatings that absorb radar waves, Lin said. He and others emphasized, however, that there are also peaceful and more immediate applications for the blackest stuff on Earth.

Solar panels coated with it would be much more efficient than those coated with conventional black paint, which reflects 5 percent or more of incoming light. Telescopes lined with it would sop up random flecks of incidental light, providing a blacker background to detect faint stars.

And a wide array of heat detectors and energy-measuring devices, including climate-tracking equipment on satellites, would become far more accurate than they are today if they were coated with energy-grabbing superblack.

That helps explain why Lin has been fielding queries from solar-energy companies such as SolFocus of Mountain View, Calif., and the European Space Agency.

"The more black the material the better," said Gerald Fraser, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that specializes in fine measurements and industrial standards.

That agency offers scientists a chemical mix it calls "standard black," which for years has been the defining measure of blackness. Photographers and printers use it to calibrate their gray scales. Industrial radiologists use it to calibrate X-ray imaging systems that detect radiation or hidden defects in building materials.

That black reflects about 1.4 percent of incoming visible light, and in recent years it has become somewhat outmoded. In 2003, scientists developed a substance made of nickel and phosphorus that reflected just 0.17 percent of visible light, winning it a Guinness World Records listing and kudos in Time magazine as one of that year's 300 "coolest inventions."

The newest black -- which when held next to something conventionally black, such as a tuxedo jacket, is noticeably blacker -- reflects just 0.045 percent of visible light.

It is made of carbon nanotubes: microscopic, hollow fibers whose walls are just one atom thick. Importantly, the fibers are widely spaced, providing plenty of space to allow light in and almost no surfaces to bounce it back out.

"There are a lot of materials that are very absorbing of light so that once the light gets in, very little is reflected. That is not the big issue," said John Pendry, a physics professor at Imperial College London. "The big issue is persuading the light to go in there in the first place" -- something the New York team accomplished by spacing the nanotubes so widely.

While Lin and his colleagues, including Pulickel Ajayan, now at Rice University, pursue applications for their superblack, Pendry and others are hoping to go further by perfecting complete invisibility. The big difference is that a superblack object, even if invisible to the eye, still casts a shadow behind it, while an object shielded by an invisibility cloak does not.

Pendry pioneered much of modern thinking about how to attain full invisibility using "metamaterials" -- substances engineered to manhandle light. Ordinary matter, such as glass or water, slows and bends light as it passes through. Metamaterials contain bits of metal or other substances embedded in precise patterns to make the light bend in an opposite direction from normal paths.

"In a sense you have some negative space," Pendry said. "The light appears to go backward in space."

The first generation, metamaterial "cloaks" are not thin and flexible like Harry Potter's imagined version but are inches thick and solid, resembling canisters, making them able to hide a stationary object but not a moving person. But the science is progressing quickly, physicist Schurig said.

To make a thin, flexible metamaterial cloak, Schurig said, "is technically challenging but not fundamentally impossible." And although no cloak can yet make objects fully invisible to the human eye, he added, it may not be long before scientists can bend the visible spectrum enough to make an object hard to see.

That object might be found "if you know what you are looking for," Schurig said. "But if you're just scanning, then partial invisibility may allow something to go unnoticed."

There is a flip side to the emerging ability to manipulate light, scientists say. "Think anti-cloaking," said Shalaev, the engineering professor. "Instead of excluding light from an object, you can concentrate light in a small area."

Normally, light cannot be squeezed into a space smaller than its own wavelength, he said, but transformation optics create the possibility of accomplishing just that -- packing loads of energy into a vanishingly small space. Such beams could pack a destructive punch, or could be tamed to serve as ultrasensitive needlelike probes, able to detect even a single molecule of some substance of interest.

Pendry added a cautionary note about invisible cloaks, making a real-life distinction from the stuff of fiction: People inside them will not be able to see out. By definition, if no light is bouncing off them, none can reach their eyes, either. "You'd have to use signals other than light to communicate," Pendry said.

Asked for an example of what would work, he paused for a moment.

"You could always talk to them," he said.

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Left-handers 'better in fights'

If you find yourself in a fight, you'd better hope it's not against a left-hander - scientists have found they often have the upper hand.

Opponents simply do not expect a left-hook.

The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases.

But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat.

The team saw that left-handers had the advantage in sports such as fencing, tennis and baseball.

They said that Western interactive sports such as these can be classed as "special cases of fights - with strict rules, including the "prohibition of killing and intentionally wounding the opponent".

This led them to speculate the same advantage may persist in more aggressive contexts, such as war, so societies which are more violent would have a higher frequency of left-handers.

Skill range

The researchers analysed data for eight traditional societies; the Kreyol people of Dominica, the Ntimu of Cameroon, the Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso, the Baka of Gabon, Inuit people and the Eipo people of Irian Jaya, New Guinea.

They looked at homicide-rates and the frequency of left-handedness, and found they appeared to be linked.

The Dioula were found to have a homicide rate equivalent of one hundredth of a death per 1,000 people per year, and a left-handedness rate of just 3%.

But the Eipo had around three homicides per 1,000 people and a left-handedness rate of 20%.

Chris McManus, a professor of psychology at University College London who has made a study of the pros and cons of left-handedness, said it was true that left-handers did have an advantage in a fight.

"It's the same advantage as you see with tennis players, baseball players and cricketers.

But he added: "The question is whether that advantage in fights then goes on and dominates the rate of left-handedness in societies.

"And I think the answer is 'no it doesn't'. The explanation must be much more complex than that."

Professor McManus said the more likely explanation for the persistence of left-handedness was the need for individuals with a range of qualities and skills within societies.

He added that the French study had also examined too few people, raising concerns over its conclusions.

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Masters of disguise: Secrets of nature's 'great pretenders' revealed

A gene which helps a harmless African butterfly ward off predators by giving it wing patterns like those of toxic species, has been identified by scientists who publish their findings today (20 February 2008).

The mocker swallowtail butterfly, Papilio dardanus, is unusual because it emerges from its chrysalis with one of a large number of different possible wing patterns and colours. This is different from most butterfly species which are identified by a common wing pattern and colour. Furthermore, some of the different patterns that the mocker swallowtail exhibits mimic those of poisonous species, which affords this harmless insect a valuable disguise which scares off predators.

Biologists are interested in finding out exactly how wing pattern is determined in the mocker swallowtail, because they believe that understanding how these different mimic patterns evolved may shed new light on whether such evolutionary changes occur in small gradual steps, or sudden leaps.

In the 1950s scientists realised there must be a genetic 'switch' controlling which of the numerous possible wing patterns is expressed in each individual mocker swallowtail, but until now the location and identity of the genes involved have remained a mystery.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows how a team of biologists used molecular tags and DNA sequencing in order to pinpoint the part of its genetic code that determines wing pattern and colour. Their study suggests that a developmental gene called 'invected', which was already known to be involved in the early embryonic development of butterflies, is behind the allocation of different wing patterns in mocker swallowtails.

Professor Alfried Vogler of Imperial College London's Department of Life Sciences and the Natural History Museum, one of the authors on the paper, explains, however, that further investigation is needed to figure out exactly how this gene works.

"We've taken a big step here towards identifying exactly how this fascinating insect species is endowed with such a wide variety of extremely useful wing patterns. However, identifying the area of the genome involved in this process is just the first step - we now need to look in more detail at the differences in the invected gene, and another gene located next to it, to find out exactly how they produce the different forms," he said.

He goes on to emphasise the significance of studying the mocker swallowtail, saying: "You could argue that there would be little point in a species which slowly evolved to mimic a poisonous butterfly over the course of generations - the disguise is only useful if full and complete. This could suggest the possibility of sudden leaps in evolution occurring in this species, which would be an incredibly exciting discovery - by studying the changes in gene sequences we will find out if this happened or not."

The mocker swallowtail is found in sub-Saharan Africa and has a wingspan of between three-and-a-half, and four-and-a-quarter inches. Only females of the species exhibit the wing patterns that mimic other butterflies. All the males are yellow, with black markings and have the typical tails of most swallowtail butterflies.

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