A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind. Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001. The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone. The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.
US scientists have managed to weigh a cluster of xenon atoms at just a few billionths of a trillionth of a gram, or a few zeptograms - a new record. The atoms' mass is about the same as an individual protein molecule and they were detected using sensitive scales developed by a team at Caltech. The breakthrough may pave the way for sensitive devices that could be used in medical and environmental testing. Details were presented at the annual American Physical Society convention.
From galaxy collisions to star birth: ISO finds the missing link
(Mar 29, 2005)
Data from ISO, the infrared observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA), have provided the first direct evidence that shock waves generated by galaxy collisions excite the gas from which new stars will form. The result also provides important clues on how the birth of the first stars was triggered and speeded up in the early Universe.
New frontier opens in the search for life on other planets
(Mar 29, 2005)
Scientists recently discovered a new frontier in the race to find life outside our solar system. Dying red giant stars may bring icy planets back from the dead. Once-frozen planets and moons may provide a new breeding ground for life as their stars enter the last, and brightest, phase of their lives. Previous ideas about the search for extra-solar life had excluded these regions. An international team of astronomers estimates that the emergence of new life on a planet is possible within the red giant phase.
Number of very high-energy gamma ray sources doubles
(Mar 28, 2005)
Eight new sources of very high-energy gamma rays have been spotted in the Milky Way – doubling the number of such sources known. The discovery may shed light on the origin of mysterious, energetic particles called cosmic rays but it also raises new questions, as two of the sources cannot be traced to any nearby objects. Gamma rays are photons that come in a range of energies. At lower energies, some are produced by super-hot gas falling into black holes. But "very high-energy" (VHE) gamma rays are thought to arise in expanding shells of gas around supernovae and fast-spinning neutron stars called pulsars. Magnetic fields in the shock-fronts bordering these shells strongly accelerate charged particles, causing them to emit VHE gamma rays. Photo: part of the HESS (High Energy Stereoscopic System) in Namibia used to detect the new sources.
Blue Gene/L, the fastest supercomputer in the world, has broken its own speed record, reaching 135.5 teraflops – a trillion calculations a second. That is double the speed it clocked up to take it to the number one spot in the Top 500 supercomputer league. The IBM Blue Gene machine that achieved the new mark is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy (DOE) lab. It did 70.72 teraflops last year to beat Japan's NEC Earth Simulator.
Dinosaur experts have extracted samples of what appear to be soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers tell Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels. In the hotly contested field of dino research, the work will be greeted with acclaim and disbelief in equal measure. What seems certain is that some fairly remarkable conditions must have existed at the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago.
X-rays signal presence of elusive black hole
(Mar 24, 2005)
Peculiar outbursts of X-rays coming from a black hole have provided evidence that it has a mass of about 10,000 suns, which would place it in a possible new class of black holes. The timing and regularity of these outbursts, observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, make the object one of the best candidates yet for a so-called intermediate-mass black hole. Jifeng Liu of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues used Chandra to observe the source in the galaxy Messier 74 (M74), which is about 32 million light years from Earth. They found that it exhibits strong, nearly periodic variations in its X-ray brightness every two hours, providing an important clue to its mass.
The first complete images of Neptune's outer rings to be taken in over a decade show that some parts of them have dramatically deteriorated and one section is close to disappearing altogether. The Voyager 2 spacecraft first photographed the rings in 1989. The images showed four bright arcs in the faint outermost "Adams" ring. These arcs spanned only about one-ninth of the ring in total. In 2002 and 2003, Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues used the 10-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii to look at the ring again. They have now analysed the images and found that all the arcs seem to have decayed, while one arc, called Liberté, has faded considerably since the Voyager observations.
NASA's Spitzer marks beginning of new age of planetary science
(Mar 23, 2005)
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has for the first time captured the light from two known planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. The findings mark the beginning of a new age of planetary science, in which "extrasolar" planets can be directly measured and compared. "Spitzer has provided us with a powerful new tool for learning about the temperatures, atmospheres and orbits of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth," said Dr. Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new study on one of the planets.
