Kevin's Watch

Avatar wrote:Great. Another way to mess with our minds...

--A

Mighty as those discoveries and creations are, however, they pale into insignificance beside what Nobuyuki Sakai and his colleagues at Yamagata University in Japan have now put on the table. They have discovered how to use a particle accelerator to create a whole new universe.

What they needed was something that would create the bubble, then quickly blow it up into a universe.

And that is what Sakai has just found. The vital part of the new universe-creation tool kit is a magnetic monopole - a strange spherical particle that encapsulates an isolated north or south magnetic field. For would-be universe builders, the big attraction of a monopole is that it has a huge mass concentrated into a tiny volume, with an enormous energy density created by the Higgs field - just like false vacuum bubbles.

Avatar wrote:That was a good book.

--A

Syl wrote:I'm sure there's a better thread for this somewhere around here, but...

Create Your Own Universe

Mighty as those discoveries and creations are, however, they pale into insignificance beside what Nobuyuki Sakai and his colleagues at Yamagata University in Japan have now put on the table. They have discovered how to use a particle accelerator to create a whole new universe.

What they needed was something that would create the bubble, then quickly blow it up into a universe.

And that is what Sakai has just found. The vital part of the new universe-creation tool kit is a magnetic monopole - a strange spherical particle that encapsulates an isolated north or south magnetic field. For would-be universe builders, the big attraction of a monopole is that it has a huge mass concentrated into a tiny volume, with an enormous energy density created by the Higgs field - just like false vacuum bubbles.

For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible.

A paper-like, polymer based rechargeable battery has been made by Japanese scientists.

An Israeli Inventor has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of compressed air tanks. This new invention will use the relatively small amounts of air that already exist in water to supply oxygen to both scuba divers and submarines. The invention has already captured the interest of most major diving manufacturers as well as the Israeli Navy.

Researchers at Japan’s Tsukuba University have developed a Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) that allows anyone who wears it, the “potential to lift up to 10-times the weight they normally could.” It basically works by “figuring out what the wearer’s muscle are doing.”

In wet lab 412C on the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus, Vijay Srinivasan is poking a long, evil-looking needle at a slice of rat brain about half the size of a fingernail. All around him, coils of cable are piled near hulking microscopes. Glass vials and fluid-filled plastic dishes compete for space with spare keyboards and computer chips. The place looks more like a computer-repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

“Watch this,” says Srinivasan, a design engineer working with USC’s Center for Neural Engineering. A thin wire runs between the needle and a tiny silicon chip hooked up to a boxy signal transmitter. He flips a switch, and a series of small waves shimmers across a nearby screen—waves that mean exactly zilch to me. Watch what? I wonder.

Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part.

Ted Berger, Srinivasan’s boss and the mastermind behind the tangle of coils and electrodes, has arranged this demonstration to provide a small but profound glimpse into the future of brain science. The chip’s ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain—a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself.

A suit that began life on the pages of a Marvel comic might soon make its debut in the real world, according to scientists who have worked out how to make a sticky Spider-Man type outfit.

The researchers say it is possible to make clothing that mimics the natural stickiness employed by spiders and geckos, which would allow a person to scurry up the side of a building or hang upside down from the ceiling.

The key, they said, is a type of microscopic Velcro capable of adhering to even smooth surfaces such as concrete or glass, but which can be easily detached, allowing the wearer to move around.