Science fiction breaks free from fantasy

Renowned physicist Dr Michio Kaku says that the world of science fiction may be closer to reality than fantasy.

So if you thought that invisibility cloaks, time travel and teleportation were for the silver screen only, think again.

Dr Kaku is a theoretical physicist and the co-founder of string field theory, a branch of string theory, often referred to as “the theory of everything”.

In his recent published book, Physics of the Impossible, he considers the phenomena of science fiction, including time travel and invisibility.

He was shocked to find that almost all of them were consistent with the known laws of physics.
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Genetic advance raises IVF hopes

Researchers have found a potential way to correct an inherited disorder affecting thousands of women.

Working on monkeys, they transferred genetic material needed to create a baby from a defective egg to a healthy one, resulting in healthy births.

The US work, featured in the journal Nature, raises hopes of a treatment enabling women with defective eggs to have a child without using donor eggs.

However, the child would have a small number of genes from a “third parent”.
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Freaky news about your brain may change your mind

(CNN) — Space. Sound. Smell. Humans constantly process a slew of variables in their surroundings. According to new research, the wiring of the brain may be even more complex than we knew.

These studies, while small, suggest avenues of research that could change the way we think about our perception of the world:

Lost? You’re not walking straight

Have you ever been lost in the woods and felt as if you were going in circles? New research in the journal Current Biology suggests that, in fact, people do tend to walk in circles if they do not have a reference point such as the sun.
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South Korean rocket fails to reach full orbit

SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) — South Korea’s space program suffered a blow Tuesday after a satellite launched from its first space rocket failed to reach proper orbit, a science official said.

“All aspects of the launch were normal, but the satellite exceeded its planned orbit and reached an altitude of 360 kilometers,” said Ahn Byung-man, the minister of science and technology. The satellite should have separated at about 302 kilometers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

The cause of the failure was not immediately known. Korean experts were working with Russian scientists, who provided the technology for launch, to determine the reason, Ahn said.

The Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 lifted off from the Naro Space Center on the southern coast about 5 p.m. (4 a.m. ET) Tuesday.
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Microsoft to smarten cheap phones

Microsoft has unveiled new technology that will allow standard, non-”smart” phones to run applications such as Facebook or Twitter.

Designed for emerging markets, the OneApp software can be downloaded just like a new ringtone.

Rather than an application store like those offered by many manufacturers and networks, OneApp will offer a standard set of apps decided by operators.

Storage for the apps will be maintained by the operators, rather than users.
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Why Racial Profiling Persists in Medical Research

While the rest of the country wrangled over the behavior of police officers in the wake of the Henry Louis Gates arrest last month, some scientists were pulling out their hair over racial profiling of a different kind: that perpetrated by medical researchers. Experts within the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races — a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists.

The controversy resurfaced in July with the publication of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) in which researchers analyzed more than 19,000 patients who participated in clinical trials involving treatments for a variety of cancers. The paper found that all other factors being equal, black patients had on average a significantly lower cancer survival rate than whites. Given that all patients were participating in the same clinical trials, the authors said, there was no difference in terms of access to care. Researchers said also that even after adjusting for patients’ socioeconomic status, the survival gap between black and white patients remained for three of the cancers studied: breast, ovarian and prostate. “There is a considerable difference in the statistics. Something big is going on among people who are getting equal care,” says lead author Kathy Albain, a breast and lung cancer specialist at Loyola University’s cancer center. That something, the authors concluded, must be some unknown biological or genetic factor that differs by race.
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40 years of Unix

The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new – largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore’s Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines.

Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod.

Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.

Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE pulled the plug on an ambitious project to create an operating system called Multics.
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The plastic sausage machine

A new factory can turn almost any plastic into a useful product

DESPITE efforts to recycle plastic, mountains of the stuff still end up in dumps and landfills. The problem is that plastic bottles, lids, punnets, film and the like must not only be clean, but must also be sorted into their various types, if recycling them is not to be prohibitively expensive. Recently, though, a factory has opened which changes those calculations. It is the first to be capable of taking mixed plastic waste, even dirty waste, and turning it into an environmentally friendly substitute for plywood.

Most plastics are made by coaxing the carbon-containing compounds found in oil into long molecules called polymers. If a plastic is made from one type of polymer, it can be usually be washed and shredded into pellets that can be reused. But when different polymers—and contaminants such as food residue, bits of glue and shards of metal—are mingled, the resulting recycled plastic may contain flaws that cause it to tear or break.
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DNA ‘organises itself’ on silicon

Shapes of DNA have been used to enhance the production of circuits for next-generation computer chips.

Researchers reporting in Nature Nanotechnology have now shown how to get engineered “DNA origami” to self-organise on silicon.

The origami can be designed to serve as a scaffold for electronic components just six billionths of a metre apart.

Making chips with components closer together leads to smaller devices and faster computers.
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Nasa assembles Ares test rocket

The US space agency has completed the assembly of its Ares I-X rocket ahead of a test flight scheduled for October.

The Ares I rocket is a key component of Nasa’s next-generation space transportation system.

The agency will use Ares I to launch the Orion capsule – the spacecraft to be used for human space missions after the space shuttle retires.

The unmanned test version of the rocket is standing in the vehicle assembly building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center.
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