University of California Irvine scientists has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy with the goal to develop communication systems based on thoughts, not on speech.
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What you say in a conversation — whether it’s on a first date, a job interview — may be less important than how you say it. But the cues that may decide the outcome can be so subtle that neither person in the conversation is consciously aware of them. Whether or not you get the job, or the other person’s phone number, is very strongly influenced by unconscious factors such as the way one person’s speech patterns match the other’s, the level of physical activity as people talk, and the degree to which one person sets the tone — literally — of the conversation.

These subtle cues provide “honest signals” about what’s really going on and strongly predict the outcome, according to research by the MIT Media Lab’s Alex Pentland and his colleagues. Read the rest of this entry »

First attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is undergoing today, 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of the start-up is available through Eurovision.
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General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University have announced a new Collaborative Research Lab (CRL) and a renewed commitment to work jointly on technologies that will accelerate the emerging field of autonomous driving, looking to future achievement for  the driverless vehicle (UGV, ANV: Automatic Navigation Vehicle).
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Scientists at Tufts University under contract with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will develop chemical robots that will be so soft and squishy that they will be able to squeeze into spaces as tiny as 1 centimeter, then morph back into something 10 times larger, and ultimately biodegrade.
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Scientists from the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology have developed a model showing that our solar system goes through the plane of the galaxy every 35-40 million years. This is accompanied by comets hurtling into the inner solar system, coinciding with mass life extinctions on Earth. The researchers estimate that we are now in one of the predicted collisions’ period.
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The project is based on a controversial theory that may gain traction in light of new findings described in a leaked NASA memo about the May 12 earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, when NASA caught early signs of China quake. The researchers hope to create a global network of roughly 20 satellites that would scan for telltale activity that some scientists (and old wives) say precedes large earthquakes.
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Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin. The scientists, from Europe and the USA, say that their research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, provides evidence that life’s raw materials came from sources beyond the Earth.
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Network coding, a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. army, breaks the rules by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials.
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Abu Dhabi broke ground on Masdar City, the world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste, car-free city, including door to door driverless public transport. Masdar CEO Dr. Sultan Al Jaber announced a total development budget for the city of $22 billion.
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