"Animals with bigger brains are not necessarily more intelligent," according to Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary's Research Centre for Psychology and University of Cambridge colleague, Jeremy Niven. This begs the important question: what are they for?
Swindon, that quintessentially Middle England town, hardly seems like a radical place. Yet it is at the forefront of a technological revolution that looks set to sweep the country. For the local council has announced plans to give all its 186,000 residents free wireless (Wi-Fi) access to the internet.
About 1,400 access points will be installed on lampposts across the town, creating an electronic mesh which will allow internet connections to be made anywhere within Swindon's boundaries - even in the street, the pub or a park.
On June 18, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission lifted off aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, FL. With a body designed by Northrop Grumman and instruments designed by NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC), the spacecraft succeeded in sending an impact module slamming into the moon's southern Lunar crater Cabeus.
A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.
It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.
The LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, has been under repair for more than a year because of an electrical failure in September 2008.
Now, excitement and mysticism are building again around the $10 billion machine as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) gears up to circulate a high-energy proton beam around the collider's 17-mile tunnel. The event should take place this month, said Steve Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology.
It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time. But scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat.
My dad used to say technology is advancing so quickly that, by the time a product reaches market, it is already obsolete. Moreover, if you wait just a little longer, you can pay a lot less. The sequencing of the human genome takes the advancement of technology, and its fast reduction in cost, to an entirely new level.
NASA alerts International Space Station crew of nearing Russian Cosmos space debris that might force astronauts to sleep in Soyuz module. NASA informed the crew of the ISS (International Space Station) that the spacecraft could be menaced Nov. 6 by a piece of Russian Cosmos space debris. The time of closest approach is 10:48 p.m. EST.
NASA said the timing of available tracking data has made it too late to do a maneuver, but better tracking data will be available later on Nov. 6. When the data becomes available, options to have the crew sleep in Soyuz module will be discussed.
Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has now recorded some more down-to-Earth signals. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial lightning storms.
The flashes occurred just before, during and immediately after lightning strikes, as tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network.
Biologists can tell a lot about how living things evolved by rooting around in their genes, comparing snippets of DNA from supposedly related — or unrelated — species. This only works, of course, if catalogs of those DNA snippets exist, which they largely don’t yet. But such catalogs could exist in the not-too-distant future. That is, of course, if a consortium of researchers gets its way — and a boatload of money.
