The quality isn't the best, but it doesn't need to be; it's still absolutely breathtaking. This is an alien's-eye view, my friends, seen for the very first time. Amazing. [Bad Astronomy via Neatorama]

When mosquitoes bite you, it's not their mouth that hurts you: their ultra-fine proboscis dips beneath the skin, and then a muscle squeeze-relax motion draws blood out of it. The new needle, made of titanium alloys for strength, has a tiny microelectricalmechanical pump that mimics the mozzy, and can work to extract blood or pump in drugs. It's also just 60 microns across, versus 900 microns of a conventional syringe. The team hopes to commercialize the product, but they've got a few technical hurdles to overcome before we can all worry less about having an injection. [NewScientist]

Dr Jason Kring, from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, is pressing Nasa to investigate sex in space, and possibly even zero-g pregnancy. Apparently there are potential issues like excessive sweating and low blood-pressure effects that might affect zero-g sex, as well as potential difficulties with the pill (like some other medications) which may not work as well in space.

He's also arguing for private spaces to be planned into crew quarters on the next Moon missions. Like drinking and eating, he points out that sex is a basic human function and "It doesn’t make sense to assume that these men and women are going to have no thoughts of it for three years." That's an approximate timescale for a round-trip mission to Mars.

His suggestion, in an upcoming Nasa publication is that, like polar explorers, crew members should take a colleague as a temporary lover. Can you predict Nasa's fun-killing response? "We don't study sexuality in space." [The Telegraph]

By repeating the process, and varying the agitation rates and the shape and size of the tissue bricks, structures like branches and cubes can be built up. The team has also built very complex structures that resemble blood vessels running through tissue, and know that yet more complex and "realistic" structures are possible.

While this is a technology in its infancy, it has advantages over current tissue-engineering techniques (which rely on a sort of "top-down" system, tying cells to a polymer mould) in that it has the potential to emulate natural repeating units in organs like the liver, pancreas, heart-muscle and so on. There are plenty of challenges before we can, for example, grow artificial pancreatic tissue, but this is a pretty amazing start. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Technology Review]

The retardant it's dropping consists of ammonium sulfate or ammonium polyphosphate with attapulgite clay thickener or diammonium phosphate with a guar gum derivative thickener, colored with ferric oxide to mark where it's been dispersed. Not only is it non-toxic, but after the fire is out it'll act as a fertilizer to promote new growth. Be thankful one doesn't have to buzz by your house, and be sure to visit The Big Picture for a lot more incredible photos from the recent CA wildfires. [The Big Picture; Wikipedia]

The algorithms the team develops will allow hovering 'bots like STARMAC to navigate, deal with collisions or avoidance and even to work as a team, sharing info on their environment and navigating around each other.

That has all sorts of cool implications for things like future automated search and rescue drones, able to search large areas efficiently and quickly. But it also means spy 'bots. And when you've watched the video, you'll have to agree that the way the things move reminds you of the flying cameras in (insert name of sci-fi movie of your choice). [Danger Room]

Luckily one man could create the perfect sphere. And he could do it by hand.

Achim Leistner was an optical engineer from the Australian Center for Precision Optics, pulled out of retirement to create two perfect spheres.

Another team started by creating a pure batch of silicon-28, spun in ex-Soviet centrifuges that were once used for uranium. Then in Germany, a team grew a pure crystal from the silicon, which was sliced into blocks and sent to Leistner.



Leistner and his crew used two spinning rotors to grind the spheres by hand—a process that took several months to complete. Their resulting spheres were accurate in smoothness to 0.3 nanometers and curvature to 60 to 70 nanometers. New Scientist explains that if these spheres were increased to Earth proportions, you'd see smoothness deviations of only 12 to 15 mm and roundness variation of 3 to 5 meters.

For the full remarkable story, be sure to hit the link. [NewScientist]

Jacob Whitehill, who is leading the team from the Machine Perception Laboratory, reckons that it could put an end to confused students during lectures. "If I am a student dealing with a robot teacher and I am completely puzzled and yet the robot keeps presenting new material, that's not going to be very useful to me," he said. "If, instead, the robot stops and says, 'Oh, maybe you're confused,' and I say, 'Yes, thank you for stopping,' that's really good."

Whitehill gave a German grammar lesson in his lab—ja, ja, das is fantastich!—and recorded it using video-conferencing software in an effort to understand the facial expressions used by people as they learn and process new information. Nods from the students generally meant understanding of the subject, while a frown or puzzled look means, "Wassee on about?"

There's a video of Jacob and his fabulous zapper face in action here, and the team's findings are being presented today at the 2008 IEEE International Workshop on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for Human Communicative Behavior Analysis. [Science Daily via Neatorama]

The House of Representatives just passed bill H.R. 6063, directing NASA to come up with plans for a cheap mission to send a craft to the Apophis asteroid to attach a tracking device. Apophis is on route to come closer to Earth than geostational satellites in 2029, and if it smacked into the planet we'd be a little bit screwed.

In addition to paying close attention to Apophis, the bill requires the Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy to come up with a policy for notifying Federal agencies and other emergency response groups of an impending near-Earth object threat. Hopefully they'll come up with better plans than whatever it is they have enacted for natural disasters now, because their track record doesn't really inspire confidence. [KurzweilAI]

The team demonstrated their prototype at the recent CHI08 human factors in computing conference. It seems like a natural progression of the ebook device, and has gone down well with test readers. The main complaint seems to be the weight of the prototype makes it tricky to use: and that's something easily fixed in a commercial variant. In fact, if Kindle2 was something like this, I may even be tempted to take my book collection into the digital realm, in the same way as my CDs and DVDs. [NewScientist]

Yikes. To make you feel better, might I suggest revisiting the adorable bionic puppy? [Environmental Graffiti via io9]

Jacob Whitehill, a computer science Ph.D. student from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, has created a program that allows him to control the speed of a video via his facial expressions, the first step towards controlling robots via faces.

In the pilot study, the facial movements people made when they perceived the lecture to be difficult varied widely from person to person. Most of the 8 test subjects, however, blinked less frequently during difficult parts of the lecture than during easier portions of the lecture, which is supported by findings in psychology.

One of the next steps for this project is to determine what facial movements one person naturally makes when they are exposed to difficult or easy lecture material. From here, Whitehill could then train a user specific model that predicts when a lecture should be sped up or slowed down based on the spontaneous facial expressions a person makes, explained Whitehill.

Bring on the robotic professors! [Physorg via KurzweilAI.net]

In their technique, the researchers first stored an image (for example, the number “2”) in a light pulse. When that light pulse hits a gas of atoms, it is strongly absorbed, and excites the atoms. But when a second light beam is aimed at the gas, it drives the atoms to a unique quantum state, and causes the first pulse to pass through the vapor. This phenomenon is called electromagnetically induced transparency.

As previous experiments have shown, when the second light beam is shut off while the first pulse is inside the vapor, the first pulse can be completely stopped (and be temporarily stored inside the vapor). Then, by starting up the second beam again, the first pulse can be recovered.

OK, so we're only talking about the image retaining its shape for a few microseconds, but still, it's pretty sweet. Hopefully they'll perfect this tech and put it into the next version of the Happy Vappy. I'm ready and willing to test it out. [PhysOrg]

[The Big Picture]

By filming the resulting jets of foam, and doing some Scanning Electron Microscope analysis, they've ruled out chemical interactions, and have discovered it's to do with the surface roughness of the Mentos, the sugariness of the drink and how quickly the mints sink.

These factors all affect formation of carbon-dioxide bubbles: the spikes on the Mentos aid micro-bubble formation (see mint ones on the SEM image on the left, fruit on the right); non-sugary Diet Coke works best as it's got lower surface tension; and the dense Mentos sink quickly, creating bubbles at the base of the bottle that cause spontaneous formation of other bubbles higher up. All that results in very rapid bubble-formation, and that then causes the satisfying squirt of brown goo from the bottle neck.

So now you know: science is fun. [New Scientist]

The patch is a small rubberized gizmo (with a new efficient battery that lasts eight months) and it sticks to your skin and measures your basal body temperature way more accurately than other systems: this temperature rises minutely during ovulation.

When the wireless reader unit gets the info on your temperature change, it then lets you know the best time to try out some baby-making with symbols on its display, or a readout on your PC— it's got a USB connection. Easy peasy, and no pee samples or early wake-ups for manual temp measurements that similar devices require. Human trials are scheduled for next month, and the device may be on sale as soon as the Fall. [Daily Mail via Dvice]

The 10-foot-tall, 26-ton steel ball will spin at a high speed of 80MPH at its equator when it's fully operational. The idea is that our planet gets its magnetic field from the core, a quickly spinning ball of liquid metal, probably liquid iron. Because iron only melts at seriously high temperatures — this is the center of the Earth we're talking about, after all — Lathrop is using liquid sodium instead.

Hopefully, when it's heated up and starts spinning, the liquid sodium will slosh around in some sort of "organized turbulence," with an overall pattern emerging in how it sloshes around. This will make it like a tiny working model of the center of the Earth, giving us a much better understanding of what goes on down there and just how it controls the magnetic field that makes all compasses point to the North Pole. [Neatorama via NPR]

Five years ago, Sirtris president and Harvard professor David Sinclair discovered the molecule resveratrol, which targets the gene activated by restricted calorie diets and extends lifespans. Now, after research has been done on monkeys and other assorted animals, it's nearly time for clinical testing on humans.

The effects of the coming drugs won't be to extend your feeble old age so you're old and helpless for longer. Instead, they'll slow the aging process down completely.

And with every major pharmaceutical company currently pouring money into researching these genes and drugs, the competition is going to be fierce once they hit the market. As Sinclair says, " "It'll be on the market as a diabetes drug. It'll have to sell for $3 or $4 a pill, in order to stay competitive. And once it goes off-patent, companies will be able to make it for pennies. It'll be like aspirin."

Aspirin that keeps you from getting old. Welcome to the future, friends. It's awesome. [Wired Science]

[Animate Projects via Today and Tomorrow via Kottke]

The study used a computer simulation only, not actual physical science. And we don't know whether or not these carbon spheres would necessarily damage the cells they inhabit.

But that's exactly the point, right? While the complete biochemical theories behind these processes is admittedly a bit beyond us, it really seems like while one group is high-fiving that we can deliver drugs directly into cells, another group says, "Shit, this stuff penetrates our cells!"

With such materials already available commercially, it really feels like we haven't done our homework on whether or not our fancy new toys will actually be poisoning our bodies in an irreversible way. Maybe we should take a few steps back before readily adopting even promising materials that we apparently know so little about. [DailyTech]

The device would sense its way in, using MEMS motors to carefully push in multiple electrodes into the brain and detecting electrical activity at their tips. When the system senses an activity spike, the robotic probe would adjust microscopically, and then either stay put or move on to find a better signal. The micro-mechanical part is still in development, but the team says the software side of the device (that would enable it to find the right neurons and adjust the probes locations if signals faded) is all but complete. It uses an algorithm inspired by one the US military uses to track aircraft.

It's heady stuff, but apparently a real Matrix-esque brain probe is a long way away, as even this first-gen version of direct neural interfacing is "far off" from a ready-to-insert in brain device according to Wolf. [Make via Medgadget]

The SnoMotes will use their cameras and sensors to navigate across terrain, and they'll be able to communicate with each other to ensure they collect the necessary research data most efficiently. The trick is getting the system to work in difficult icy white-out conditions, and one possible solution is to allow the robots to "bid" on a particular destination, based on how far away they are from it, and how healthy they are, mechanically and electronically speaking.

Recently unveiled at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and funded by NASA, when functional the robots will be able to collect data in Greenland and Antarctica that will aid research into the effects on ice-masses caused by climate change. [Gizmag]