Nice!
Our skin is our largest organ. A gateway between our brain and the rest of the world.
Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what’s going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.
University of Tokyo scientist Takao Someya is making that scene a reality.
The next time that you decide to run barefoot in the rain, etc. there is a health benefit that you’re receiving in the form of enhancing your brain.
FRIDAY, May 13, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Runners who want to boost their brain function should consider taking their running shoes off, new research suggests.
The study found that after running barefoot, participants saw improvements in working memory, or the ability to recall or process information. Running in shoes, however, didn’t result in the same advantage, researchers said.
“The little things often have the greatest impact. This research shows us that we can realize our cognitive potential and enjoy ourselves at the same time,” said study leader Ross Alloway in a University of North Florida (UNF) news release.
Theoretical chemists at Princeton University have pioneered a strategy for modeling quantum friction, or how a particle’s environment drags on it, a vexing problem in quantum mechanics since the birth of the field. The study was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (“Wigner–Lindblad Equations for Quantum Friction”). “It was truly a most challenging research project in terms of technical details and the need to draw upon new ideas,” said Denys Bondar, a research scholar in the Rabitz lab and corresponding author on the work.
Researchers construct a quantum counterpart of classical friction, a velocity-dependent force acting against the direction of motion. In particular, a translationary invariant Lindblad equation is derived satisfying the appropriate dynamical relations for the coordinate and momentum (i.e., the Ehrenfest equations). Numerical simulations establish that the model approximately equilibrates. (© ACS)
Quantum friction may operate at the smallest scale, but its consequences can be observed in everyday life. For example, when fluorescent molecules are excited by light, it’s because of quantum friction that the atoms are returned to rest, releasing photons that we see as fluorescence. Realistically modeling this phenomenon has stumped scientists for almost a century and recently has gained even more attention due to its relevance to quantum computing.
So, the US Military has developed a way to eliminate bad memories/ PTSD and another method to restore memories. Wish the US Government would make their minds up on this one — LOL.
A scientist in DARPA’s biological technologies offices explains how the agency is developing implants that could bring back memories.
US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.
Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.
Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.
The Ghouta attack highlighted two things: one, that the world would be a better place if we could annihilate all chemical weapons. Two, that we really don’t have a safe method of doing so. “The Cape Ray did a great job achieving its objective, which was to demilitarize Syria’s chemical weapons,” said Dr. Tyler McQuade, a chemist and program manager at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “The downside is, the weapons had to be transported a long distance, and we did the demilitarization on the Mediterranean. If anything had gone wrong, it could have been really horrible for the local environment.”
Excellent read about future Commerce in Space — could we see an Amazon or a HomeDepot in space?
In space there are no service stations to pull into and get replacement parts for your satellite. Nor is there a towing service if a satellite is in the wrong orbit, a construction contractor to help you build structures, or a “Space Depot” for those who wish to “do-it-themselves” on orbit. In other words, we still operate within a first-generation space industrial enterprise, i.e. all commerce is on Earth, and we only focus on bits (data) coming from monolithic things that go up (i.e., satellites), which eventually die or just come down with no chance of repair or reuse.
Today the commercial space industry focuses exclusively on applications that support launching science, exploration, military, or established earth-bound data communication or delivery services, focusing data to/from space. The lack of technology to support or “markets” to enter has resulted in nebulous, unconsolidated and without-a-critical-mass investment in space-based infrastructure, industrialization, space resources (survey and process maturation) and global utility creation and delivery applications in space. However, all that may finally be changing.
Space applications that are not solely data driven are becoming real. Asteroid mining, fuel depots and commercial space stations are all being actively pursued by companies around the world, as examples of different types of revenue-generating endeavors outside of data-driven end use. These missions and their spacecraft will require greater upkeep, maintenance, repair, and consumable restoration. Consequently, “services” are now being talked about and pursued, executed from one space platform to another. The most talked-about “service” event is providing either consumables (fuel) or failure remediation to satellites on orbit, referred to as “servicing”. However, a handful of companies are seeking to break the shackles that today’s satellites are stuck with at launch, and go well beyond “servicing” into modifying and even constructing new space platforms, on orbit.
Coming clean on the story around the XS-1 Spaceplane. Hmmm; US Government coming clean; really?
ORLANDO, Fla. – Here’s a phrase that’s not repeated everyday in the space community:
“You’ve heard Elon’s comments … we want to go beyond that,” Brad Tousley, the head of the tactical technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said May 15.
Elon, of course, is Elon Musk, the optimistic, and some say visionary, founder of SpaceX with plans of eventually colonizing Mars. After landing three first-stage rockets, Musk has said SpaceX would inspect the rockets with plans to later re-fly most of them. [DARPA’s XS-1 Military Space Plane Concept in Pictures].
A new form of light which makes fiber optics more secure. Los Alamos has been key player in this space due to their work on the Quantum Internet.
In a breakthrough that has the potential to alter our understanding of the fundamental nature of light, scientists from the Trinity College Dublin School of Physics and the CRANN Institute in Ireland have discovered a never before seen new form of luminescence.
Lead author Paul Eastham attests to how exciting this finding is, saying in a statement that this very fundamental property of light that has always been thought to be constant can, in fact, change.
One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum.
