Two rocket-powered competitive aircraft took off together Saturday to showcase the Rocket Racing League's new aerial muscle machine as it kicks off a 2010 World Exhibition Tour.The league unveiled its new Mark III X-racer rocket plane in the high-flying event, which was part of the QuikTrip Air & Rocket Racing Show in Tulsa, Okla. Beginning this year and stretching into 2011, the Rocket Racing League will conduct a series of demonstrations at air shows across the country.
Graphene Films Clear Major Fabrication Hurdle by Staff Writers
Berkeley CA (SPX) Apr 13, 2010
Graphene, the two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, is a potential superstar for the electronics industry. With freakishly mobile electrons that can blaze through the material at nearly the speed of light - 100 times faster than electrons can move through silicon - graphene could be used to make superfast transistors or computer memory chips. Graphene's unique "chicken wire" atomic structure exhibits incredible flexibility and mechanical strength, as well as unusual optical properties that could open a number of promising doors in both the electronics and the photonics industries.
By Leonard DavidSPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnistposted: 20 April 201006:18 pm ET
The United States Air Force plans to launch its first robotic X-37B space plane Thursday on a mission that is a forerunner of things to come. A second mini-space plane is already under contract and is projected to be launched next year.
New details regarding the mini-space plane and its upcoming Thursday liftoff atop an Atlas 5 booster were discussed today during a U.S. Air Force-held media press briefing.
The X-37B vehicle's history stretches back to the late 90s, with NASA kick-starting the project. It was later picked up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and ultimately found a home within the Air Force. The project is now under the wing of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office
(Reuters) - A brain implant made partly of silk can melt onto the surface of the brain, providing an "intimate" connection for recording signals, researchers reported on Sunday.
Health
Tests of their device showed the thin, flexible electrodes recorded signals from a cat's brain more accurately than thicker, stiff devices.Such devices might help people with epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and even help operate artificial arms and legs, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials.
John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University in Boston made the electrode arrays using protein from silk and thin metal electrodes.
The silk is biocompatible and water-soluble, dissolving into the brain and leaving the electrodes draped over its contours, the researchers reported.They tested them on cats who were anesthetized but whose eyes were functioning. The electrodes recorded the signals from the eyes of the cats as they were shown visual images.
"These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain," said Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the study.
"They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders."For instance, such a sensitive electrode could detect a seizure as it starts and deliver pulses to counter it. Brain signals might be routed to prosthetics for people with spinal cord and other injuries.
Silk is also transparent, strong and flexible, and it is possible to control the rate at which it dissolves.
Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy
* 13:13 14 April 2010 by Stephen Battersby, Glasgow
There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.
"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.
The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists.
It certainly does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from supernovae: they usually get brighter over a few weeks and then fade away over months, with the spectrum of the radiation changing all the while. The new source has hardly changed in brightness over the course of a year, and its spectrum is steady.
Vatican Official Declares Extraterrestrial Contact Is Real
by Richard Boylan, Ph.D
Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a theologian member of the Vatican Curia (governing body), and an insider close to the Pope, has gone on Italian national television five times, including recent months, to proclaim that extraterrestrial contact is a real phenomenon. Balducci provided an analysis of extraterrestrials that he feels is consistent with the Catholic Church's understanding of theology. Monsignor Balducci emphasizes that extraterrestrial encounters "are NOT demonic, they are NOT due to psychological impairment, they are NOT a case of entity attachment, but these encounters deserve to be studied carefully." Since Monsignor Balducci is a demonology expert and consultant to the Vatican , and since the Catholic Church has historically demonized many new phenomena that were poorly understood, his stating that the Church does not censure these encounters is all the more remarkable.
Balducci revealed to a visiting American professional that the Vatican is closely following this phenomenon quietly. My informant originally surmised that the Vatican is receiving much information about extraterrestrials and their contacts with humans from its Nunciatures (embassies) in various countries. But subsequent information indicated that the Monsignor has gotten his cases from other sources. Monsignor Balducci is a member of a group which acts as consultants to the Vatican on various matters concerning humans in possible contact with supernatural beings. As such, the matter of extraterrestrial encounters would fall within their purview, and possibly as well the spiritual significance of the emerging general realization of extraterrestrial contact.
Parallel information from National Security Council scientist Dr. Michael Wolf , a member of the NSC's SSG subcommittee for managing the UFO phenomenon, as well as from noted author and Vatican expert Father Malachi Martin, suggests that the Vatican is concerned that it will have a major doctrinal updating situation on its hands when extraterrestrial contact becomes authoritatively announced by world governments over the next several years.
Spider silk research could lead to new super-materials
Making bricks from straw may soon be possible and even desirable after scientists found spider silk could make ordinary materials stronger than steel.
Researchers found that spider silk employs a unique crystal structure that converts an otherwise weak material into one stronger and less brittle than steel or ceramics.
They believe in future it may be possible to copy spider ingenuity to create new classes of materials that are both incredibly flexible and strong out of cheap, ordinary elements.
Theoretically, they could even be made from wood, straw or hemp, say the scientists.
Carbon-based materials made the same way would be even stronger than spider silk.
A key property of spider silk is its combination of strength and "ductility" – its ability to bend or stretch without breaking.
Most man-made materials, in contrast, sacrifice strength for ductility. Ceramics, for instance, are strong yet brittle.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, studied the fundamental properties of spider silk using computer models to simulate its structure.
We may even have to simply ground the excess in many cases. Needless to say this technology if it succeeds will be a complete revolution of the global economy as we can expect these devices to be placed everywhere including trains and ships. It will also be swift. Both this technology and the polywell are amenable to early mass production since no radioactive shielding is needed.
U.S. scientists say they have created the world's smallest superconductor -- a sheet of four pairs of molecules less than one nanometer wide.
The Ohio University-led study is said to provide the first evidence that nanoscale molecular superconducting wires can be fabricated and used for nanoscale electronic devices and energy applications.
