Hmmm.
The technical details of air-to-air missiles are extremely complicated, but the concept is simple — destroy your target before the target destroys you.
One way to improve the odds is to add an air-breathing ramjet engine to give the weapon a boost. That’s the design philosophy behind the Meteor, a 419-pound rail-launched MiG killer which entered service for the first time with the Swedish air force on July 11.
Stockholm’s agile, delta-wing Gripen fighters carry the missiles.
Nice.
Who’s calling the shots now? After nearly four years on the job, NASA’s Curiosity rover is finally making certain scientific decisions on its own. The Martian explorer now picks some of the rock targets to blast with the laser on its ChemCam instrument.
A software upgrade known as AEGIS allows the rover to make key decisions when Mars is out of sync with Curiosity’s handlers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, delivering more data in less time. It’s the first time a robot has been able to choose such science targets autonomously on any planetary mission.
“Time on Mars is valuable and we get more data this way and we get the data much faster,” said AEGIS team member Raymond Francis, a scientific applications software engineer at JPL.
Want to build stuff for Space; well you may need to move from earth to a spacelab. I can see the job ads “want to see and experience other planetary worlds; live for adventure, see space; sleep near Mars, etc.”
Any robust future in space will almost certainly require a way to build there — and that future might not be as far out as you think!
I never get tired of hearing more information on this research.
A synthetic genetic circuit programmed into an attenuated Salmonella enterica subspecies can be used to systemically deliver an anti-tumor toxin into mice with cancer. The circuit allows the bacterial cells inside a tumor to synchronously self-destruct by lysis, releasing the toxin directly in the tumor.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a strategy for using synthetic biology in therapeutics. The approach enables continual production and release of drugs at disease sites in mice while simultaneously limiting the size, over time, of the populations of bacteria engineered to produce the drugs.
“This impressive study represents a big step towards one of the great dreams of synthetic biology: rationally programming cells, in this case bacteria, to exhibit complex, dynamic, and beneficial behaviors in a host organism,” Michael Elowitz, whose Caltech lab builds synthetic genetic circuits and who was not involved in the work, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
Interesting article on toddler memories. I was actually speaking with my mother on Sat. and shared with her 3 distinct memories that I had before age 3. One in the crib seeing my grandmother, second was my first rocking horse, and 3rd was 2 pet birds.
She (my mom) thought that I would have remember building a step staircase out of my grandmother’s drawers of her 6ft chest, and climbed up to sit on top of the chest so that I could throw down my grandmother’s powder on the floor. They saw a cloud of smoke from the powder coming out of the room; and found me.
Just sharing because I am always amazed at how brain sensory and memories work.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t remember anything from your life before the age of three. This phenomenon, first dubbed by Sigmund Freud as “infantile amnesia,” occurs in many different species, yet why it happens remains a mystery.
Who wants a Quantum Hologram?
Scientists from Warsaw were able to produce a hologram of a photon. Hopefully, this method may be used to produce holograms of more complex objects and further understand quantum mechanics.
Physicists from the University of Warsaw believe that they may have achieved “the impossible.” They were able to create a hologram of a single particle of light. Previously, scientists believed that the fundamental laws of physics did not allow this, and to that end, their breakthrough allows physicists to further study quantum holography (which may give us a new way to peer into the heart of quantum phenomena).
To break this down a bit, holography takes advantage of classical interference, a phenomenon where two waves meet and form a new wave. However, property of photons called “phases” does not allow classical interference because the phases constantly fluctuate. The physicists instead used quantum interference wherein the photons’ wave functions interact.
