People are quicker when reacting that when initiating

Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights.

Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform “planned actions”.

In a gun-free experiment, described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they studied the speed of these two types of movement.

The work aims to answer why the first to draw his gun in a shoot-out was often the one to get shot.

But, as well as unpicking some of the mythology of the American West, the scientists say their results may be useful for diagnosing and helping people with Parkinson’s disease.

Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other. Each was secretly given instructions of how long to wait before pushing a row of buttons.

“There was no ‘go’ signal,” said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research.
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Nasa accepts Spirit Mars rover ’stuck for good’

The US space agency (Nasa) has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap.

The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed.

Nasa says Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet just over six years ago, will now live out its remaining days as a static science station.

The robot geologist has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past.

“Spirit has encountered a golfer’s worst nightmare – the sand trap that no matter how many strokes you take, you can’t get out of it,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars exploration programme at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC.

“But this is not a day to mourn Spirit; this is not a day of loss at this point. Spirit will continue to make contributions to science.”

Like a ‘polar bear’

The robot’s predicament has been exacerbated by the failure of two of its six wheels. Without the additional traction, the agency now accepts that further efforts to try to escape the soft soil will be fruitless.
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Digital piracy hits the e-book industry

(CNN) — When Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel “The Lost Symbol” hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, smartphones and Apple’s much-anticipated “tablet” boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

“It’s fair to say that piracy of e-books is exploding,” said Albert Greco, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That’s more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
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Cern Large Hadron Collider machine restarts

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has been re-started after a hiatus of 14 months.

Engineers have now made two stable proton beams circulate in opposite directions around the machine.

If all continues to go well, the team might even try to increase the collider’s energy to record-breaking levels this weekend.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel built about 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.

The experiment is designed to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Among other things, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.

Dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate the particles at the speed of light have had to be replaced after faults developed just days after the collider was inaugurated last year.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.
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Science to ’stop age clock at 50′

Science to ’stop age clock at 50′

Half of babies now born in the UK will reach 100, thanks to higher living standards, but our bodies are wearing out at the same rate.

To achieve “50 active years after 50″, experts at Leeds University are spending £50m over five years looking at innovative solutions.

They plan to provide pensioners with own-grown tissues and durable implants.

New hips, knees and heart valves are the starting points, but eventually they envisage most of the body parts that flounder with age could be upgraded.
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‘Magnetic electricity’ discovered

Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a “magnetic current” like electricity.

The phenomenon, dubbed “magnetricity”, could be used in magnetic storage or in computing.

Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges.

Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a “north” and “south” pole.
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Paperweight

A lightweight battery that could be used to identify and track objects

MANY an engineer has dreamed of making a battery as light, thin and flexible as paper. Such a device would dramatically trim the weight and dimensions of whatever it powered. Now Albert Mihranyan of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues have built a battery that is, in essence, made of paper. It is lightweight and slim, and although still unsuitable for everyday use, could be employed to trace products supplied to shops or baggage passing through airports.

Batteries work by electrochemistry. Each contains two electrodes (an anode and a cathode) immersed in an electrolyte. A lithium-ion battery, the sort that powers mobile phones and laptop computers, typically has an anode made of carbon, a cathode made of lithium cobalt oxide and an electrolyte of a lithium salt in an organic solvent. When the battery is being charged, electrons are pumped into the cathode. That forces lithium ions to move away from it and into the anode. When the battery is being used, drawing the current pulls the lithium ions out of the anode and back to the cathode.
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Wi-fi ‘to get a whole lot easier’

The world of wi-fi is to become a whole lot easier thanks to a major technology upgrade, says an industry group.

The Wi-Fi Alliance said it would soon finish work on a new specification called Wi-Fi Direct.

It will let wi-fi devices like phones and laptops connect to one another without joining a traditional network.

The Wi-Fi Alliance – whose members include Intel, Apple and Cisco – hopes devices with the new technology will be on the market by the middle of 2010.

Owners of devices without Wi-Fi Direct will be able to upgrade through a software download, says the technology consortium.

The Wi-Fi Alliance’s marketing director, Kelly Davis-Felner, told BBC News: “This is going to be a quick and convenient way to use wi-fi in future to print, synch, share and display.

“The consumer is going to experience this as a very easy-to-use mechanism that will be quite seamless.”
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Winning ways

Prizes for optical fibres, charge-coupled devices, ribosomes and telomeres

HOW do you look through a window that is 100km thick? That, in essence, was the question facing Charles Kao in 1966. For working out the answer, Dr Kao has been awarded part of this year’s Nobel prize for physics. Besides being thick, the window was narrow: it was an optical fibre. Dr Kao’s prize is a belated recognition of his contribution to the telecommunications revolution of the past few decades. But better late than never.

The rest of the physics prize goes almost as belatedly to Willard Boyle and George Smith who, in 1969, ushered the charge-coupled device (CCD) into being, paving the way for the digital camera. The chemistry prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for working out the structure of ribosomes—the parts of living cells that translate genetic information into proteins. And the physiology prize went to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres, the DNA caps that stop the ends of chromosomes either unravelling or sticking to one another.
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What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
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