Star Trek style 'tractor beam' created by scientists

A real-life "tractor beam", which uses light to attract objects, has been developed by scientists.

It is hoped it could have medical applications by targeting and attracting individual cells.

The research, published in Nature Photonics and led by the University of St Andrews, is limited to moving microscopic particles.

In science fiction programmes such as Star Trek, tractor beams are used to move much more massive objects.

It is not the first time science has aimed to replicate the feat - albeit at smaller scales.

In 2011, researchers from China and Hong Kong showed how it might be done with laser beams of a specific shape - and the US space agency Nasa has even funded a studyto examine how the technique might help with manipulating samples in space.

The new study's lead researcher Dr Tomas Cizmar, research fellow in the School of Medicine at the University of St Andrews, said while the technique is very new, it had huge potential.

He said: "The practical applications could be very great, very exciting. The tractor beam is very selective in the properties of the particles it acts on, so you could pick up specific particles in a mixture."

"Eventually this could be used to separate white blood cells, for example."

Usually when microscopic objects are hit by a beam of light, they are forced along the direction of the beam by the light photons. That radiation force was first identified by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1619 when he observed that tails of comets always point away from the Sun.

Nonprofit group Mars One seeks astronauts to colonize Mars in 2023

A nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands is making plans to establish a human settlement on Mars in 2023 and is in need of astronauts to train and prepare for the mission.

Anyone on Earth can apply if basic requirements are met. Mars One released its application criteria on Tuesday, which includes, among other virtues, "a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust. Candidates must also be adaptable, curious, creative, resilient, and resourceful. Also, they must be at least 18-years-old. No maximum age has been set.

The selection process will commence during the first half of 2013. Mars One experts and viewers of a "global, televised program" will choose from the applications. Those selected will be assembled into teams of four. At least six teams are supposed to be ready to launch in September 2022.

Extreme Life Forms Might be Able to Survive on Eccentric Exoplanets

Eccentric Habitable Zones

While Earth and the other planets in our solar system travel around the sun in near-circular orbits, planets in other systems can have more comet-like orbits in which the distance from the planet to star varies. Such orbits, termed eccentric, would cause the planet to move in and out of the habitable zone. A habitable zone, shown in green here, is defined as the region around a star where liquid water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, could potentially be present. Earth always remains in its habitable zone.

The hypothetical planet is depicted here moving through the habitable zone and then further out into a long, cold winter. During this phase of the orbit, any liquid water on the planet will freeze at the surface; however, the possibility remains that life could, in theory, hibernate beneath the surface.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have discovered a veritable rogues' gallery of odd exoplanets -- from scorching hot worlds with molten surfaces to frigid ice balls.

And while the hunt continues for the elusive "blue dot" -- a planet with roughly the same characteristics as Earth -- new research reveals that life might actually be able to survive on some of the many exoplanetary oddballs that exist.

"When we're talking about a habitable planet, we're talking about a world where liquid water can exist," said Stephen Kane, a scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "A planet needs to be the right distance from its star -- not too hot and not too cold." Determined by the size and heat of the star, this temperature range is commonly referred to as the "habitable zone" around a star.

Kane and fellow Exoplanet Science Institute scientist Dawn Gelino have created a resource called the "Habitable Zone Gallery." It calculates the size and distance of the habitable zone for each exoplanetary system that has been discovered and shows which exoplanets orbit in this so-called "goldilocks" zone. The Habitable Zone Gallery can be found at www.hzgallery.org . The study describing the research appears in the Astrobiology journal and is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2429 .

Software helps print video game characters in 3D

Science and techno world topic: Technology

Software that helps turn video game characters into real-life figures using a 3D printer has been developed by Harvard computer scientists.

The software analyses animated 2D characters

 on screen before they are printed 

The team developed a tool that identifies ideal locations for a real-world figure's joints.

Computer figures created without constraints of the physical world make it difficult to print them.

But a lawyer said that if the technology gets on the market, copyright issues could arise.

Three-dimensional printers, which create objects layer-by-layer using materials such as plastic, wood or chocolate, are not new.

They have been used to print toys, jewellery, car parts and even artificial limbs.

But printing cartoon or computer games characters is more of a challenge, said Moritz Bacher, one of the researchers.

"In animation you're not necessarily trying to model the physical world perfectly; the model only has to be good enough to convince your eye," he said.

"You can make a character so anatomically skewed that it would never be able to stand up in real life, and you can make deformations that aren't physically possible."

When did modern culture begin?

Science and techno world topic: Culture

Researchers have found new evidence of modern culture's beginnings in a cave in South Africa. These findings may indicate that 'modern behavior as we know it' has existed for longer than previously thought. 

JOHANNESBURG

Poisoned-tipped arrows and jewelry made of ostrich egg beads found in South Africa show modern culture may have emerged about 30,000 years earlier in the area than previously thought, according to two articles published on Monday.

Border Cave in South Africa was occupied by humans for tens of thousands of years.  

The findings published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" show that the 44,000-year-old artifacts are characteristic of the San hunter-gatherers. The descendants of San people live today in southern Africa, so the items can clearly be traced forward to modern culture, unlike other archaeological finds, researchers said.

South African researcher Lucinda Backwell said the findings are the earliest known instances of "modern behavior as we know it." Backwell said the discovery reinforces the theory that modern man came from southern Africa.

The carbon dating on the items shows that traces of the San culture may have existed earlier than the previous estimate of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, the journal said.

Uganda Ebola outbreak: patients flee hospital amid contagion fears

Science and techno world topic: Health

The Ebola virus causes hemorrhagic fever, an acute disease characterised by high fever and bleeding into the skin. 

Ebola outbreak in Uganda claims at least 14 lives as health officials battle to stem spread of deadly virus

Terrified patients fled from a hospital in western Uganda as soon as news broke that a mysterious illness that killed at least 14 people in the region was Ebola, one of the world's most virulent diseases.

Ignatius Besisira, a member of parliament for Buyaga East County in the Kibaale district, said people had at first believed the unexplained deaths were related to witchcraft. "Immediately, when there was confirmation that it was Ebola … patients ran out of Kagadi hospital (where some of the victims had died)," he told the Guardian. "Even the medical officers are very, very frightened," he said.

Government officials and a World Health Organisation representative confirmed the Ebola outbreak at a news conference in Kampala on Saturday. "Laboratory investigations done at the Uganda Virus Research Institute ... have confirmed that the strange disease reported in Kibaale is indeed Ebola haemorrhagic fever," they said in a joint statement.

100 Year Starship: An interstellar leap for mankind?

Science and techno world topic: Future

Is a Pentagon plan for a spaceship travel outside our solar system a crackpot idea, or a visionary blueprint for reaching the stars?

When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science.

For those who might dismiss Sarfatti as a crank, he is quick to point out that he is not interested in debating the reality of little green men, but rather whether the existence of UFOs might prove that the technology required for interstellar travel is possible. “It’s the physics that interests me,” says Sarfatti, who received his PhD in the subject from the University of California.

Termites' crystal backpacks help them go out with bang

Science and techno world topic: Biology

Ageing workers assist soldiers in defending

their colony 

A species of termite has been found to inflict more damage on its enemies as it ages.

When defending their colony, some termites "explode", releasing chemicals that injure intruders.

A previously unknown crystal structure has been discovered that raises the toxicity of their chemical weapons.

As worker termites grow older, they become less able to perform their duties.

Yet this newly discovered structure allows ageing workers to better defend their colony. The research was published today in Science.

When faced with a threat, many termite species employ a type of altruistic suicide known as "autothysis" in order to deter attackers.

In a few species, workers join "soldier" termites in the defence of their colony and perform these acts of suicidal defence.

However, a twist to this system has been discovered in a species from French Guiana.

"My PhD student, Thomas Bourguignon, was studying termite community ecology and collecting species when, casually, he found something really special," Prof Yves Roisin from the Free University of Brussels told BBC News.

Save time with these three Chrome extensions

Science and techno world topic: PROBLEM SOLVER

Navigate around and between Web pages without clicking, browse faster by loading your next pages automatically, and get a big preview of thumbnail images when you mouse over them.

What makes someone choose one browser over another? Often people use whichever browser is closest at hand: Internet Explorer in Windows and Safari on Macs.

Lots of folks choose Firefox because of the browser's many useful add-ons. But the best reason to go with one browser over another is speed. In my experience, no browser is faster than Google Chrome.

There's no easier way to start an argument among geeks than to claim one browser is the speed champ. If you look hard enough you can find a reliable study naming each of the most popular browsers the fastest.

Of the many browser test results the "real-world" benchmarks reported last August by Compuware's Gomez division seem most trustworthy. 

When it comes to browsing, the only thing better than fast is faster. Here's a quick look at three Chrome extensions that let you spend less time waiting for pages to load.

Give your mouse clicker a break

Add the Click-free Browsing extension to Chrome and put your clicking finger on ice. The program places six arrow icons along the right edge of the browser window. Hover your mouse over them to page up, page down, go to the top or bottom of the page, go back, or go forward.

Navigate around the page or between recent pages

without clicking via icons added to Chrome by the

Click-free Browsing extension.

When you hover over a link, an arrow icon appears nearby. Move the pointer to the arrow to open the link without pressing the mouse button. You might think the arrow icon would cause you to follow links inadvertently, but the icon is far enough from the mouse pointer that accidental hovers are unlikely. Sliding the pointer quickly over the icon won't open the link, either; it doesn't open until the pointer pauses over the icon.

It takes only a few minutes to get used to the Click-free Browsing arrow icons in the Chrome window. It would be preferable that the page-up and page-down arrows scroll rather than hop a page at a time because sometimes the information wanted to be seen was right at the top or bottom edge of the page.

You can reposition the program's arrow icons, change the speed of various actions, and make other changes to the add-on via its Options window, which is shown below. (To access the options, click Wrench > Tools > Extensions and look for the Click-free Browsing entry.) Pressing Ctrl while hovering lets you open the link in a new tab, go two pages back or forward, and take the action without delay.

Higgs: What was left unsaid

Science and techno world topic: Future, Physics.

Everybody was wowed by the recent discovery of a Higgs-like particle, but how many people really understand what was discovered.

So that’s it, search over, Higgs boson found. Almost 50 years after physicist Peter Higgs first theorised it was out there, public elementary number one has finally been captured in the data from two detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. Case closed. Champagne popped. Boson nova danced.

If only. That handily simplified and heavily fictionalised telling of the tale has helped transform a spectacular scientific success story into one that is also global front page news. Without it the 4 July announcement might not have generated such a frenzy of coverage and so many claims about it being a historic milestone for our species. One particle physicist only half jokingly told me that in future the date may come to be celebrated as Higgs Day, rather than anything to do with American independence.       

Don’t get me wrong. What has happened at Cern represents a magnificent accomplishment; big science at its biggest and boldest. And it’s fantastic that it has been perceived and received as being of such importance. It’s just that there is more to the story from the very beginning right through to the, probably false, ending. 

For starters, as Peter Higgs himself acknowledges, he was just one of several scientists who came up with the mechanism which predicted the particle which bears his name, but the others rarely get a mention*. As to the finish – well, as small children are fond of saying, are we there yet? There is very strong evidence that the LHC teams have found a new elementary particle, but while this is exciting it is far less clear that what they’ve detected is the fabled Higgs.   If it is, it seems curiously lighter than expected and more work is needed to explain away the discrepancy. If it’s not, then the experimentalists and theorists are going to be even busier trying to see if it can be shoehorned into the current Standard Model of particle physics. Either way, it’s not exactly conclusive.