First man on moon Neil Armstrong dead at 82, RIP Commander
(Reuters) - U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, who took a giant leap for mankind when he became the first person to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 82, his family said on Saturday.
Armstrong died following complications from heart-bypass surgery he underwent earlier this month, the family said in a statement, just two days after his birthday on August 5. As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the dusty surface, Armstrong said: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." |  |
BM refuses to return Parthenon fragments
The British Museum has refused a request by the director of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Mr. Demetrios Pantermalis, to return fragments of sculptures from the Parthenon to Greece.
Demetrios Pantermalis said he had made a proposal on the issue at a UNESCO meeting in June and that talks would be held in Athens in the coming weeks. “I proposed an arrangement to colleagues from the British Museum, involving pieces, hands, heads, legs that belong to bodies from the Parthenon sculptures and can be reattached,” Pantermalis told Skai Radio. “The proposal has been accepted in principle, we will have a discussion in the autumn,” he said. |  |
Egypt's Istabl Anter rescued
The rich Islamic site of Istabl Antar in Old Cairo is saved from urban encroachment, though late in the day
Serenity has returned to the rich Islamic site of Istabl Antar in Al-Fustat area in Old Cairo after almost a month of uproar and turmoil. Early this month an armed gang led by wealthy residents of the area invaded the four feddans wide archaeological site, covered the excavation area with sand and began to bulldoze it. The gang divided the land and distributed it among its members in parcels of approximately 800 square metres each. Every member surrounded his part with blocks of stones in order to separate it from the others and started to built mud brick houses. |  |
Ancient city disappearing brick by brick
Mahasthangarh, Bangladesh - When Abdus Sattar built his house in Mahasthangarh village in northern Bangladesh, he used materials that once laid the foundations of one of the world's oldest and greatest cities.
“I just shovelled into the ground, got these bricks and used them in my new house,” Sattar, 38, said. “All three rooms of the house were made of the old bricks we found here within the village boundary.” Mahasthangarh sits on what was once the ancient city of Pundranagar, built 2,500 years ago and, at its height, a renowned seat of learning whose monasteries attracted monks from China and Tibet and trained them to spread Buddhist teachings across south and east Asia. |  |
Hundreds of racing pigeons vanish in 'Bermuda triangle' of birds
Pigeon racers are mystified after hundreds birds disappeared in an area dubbed they have now dubbed the Bermuda Triangle.
Only 13 out of 232 birds released in Thirsk , North Yorkshire, on Saturday by a Scottish pigeon racing club made it back to Galashiels, Selkirkshire. It follows a summer on which hundred more have vanished in the same area. Keith Simpson, of the East Cleveland Federation, said pigeon racers across the region had all suffered massive losses since the season started in April - with many losing more than half of their birds. |  |
Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror
A robot named Nico could soon pass a landmark test - recognising itself in a mirror.
Such self-awareness would represent a step towards the ultimate goal of thinking robots. Nico, developed by computer scientists at Yale University, will take the test in the coming months. The ultimate aim is for Nico to use a mirror to interpret objects around it, in the same way as humans use a rear-view mirror to look for cars. |  |
Fish play video game in new behaviour study
Researchers have used a video game projected into a fish tank to study the behaviour of predatory bluegill sunfish.
The team at Princeton University developed a simulation based on the type of prey favoured by the species. The simple "game" featured red dots which moved and swarmed in different ways against a translucent screen. They found that the fish were less likely to try to attack the dots when they moved in a group formation. |  |
Most Neanderthals Were Right-Handed Like Us
Right-handed humans vastly outnumber lefties by a ratio of about nine to one, and the same may have been true for Neanderthals. Researchers say right-hand dominance in the extinct species suggests that, like humans, they also had the capacity for language.
A new analysis of the skeleton of a 20-something Neanderthal man confirms that he was a righty like most of his European caveman cousins whose remains have been studied by scientists (16 of 18 specimens). Dubbed "Regourdou," the skeleton was discovered in 1957 in France, not far from the famous network of caves at Lascaux. |  |
Earliest Mammals May Have Been Egg-Layers After All
Despite evidence that the earliest examples of creatures such as mammals and reptiles gave birth to live young, they actually may have laid eggs, a scientist argues.
"These eggs are probably out there, but nobody has looked hard enough for them or they have not been recognized," says University of Bonn, Germany, paleobiologist P. Martin Sander, who details his analysis in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.
"These eggs are probably out there, but nobody has looked hard enough for them or they have not been recognized," says University of Bonn, Germany, paleobiologist P. Martin Sander, who details his analysis in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.
This 3D-Printed Exoskeleton Could One Day Turn You Into a Cyborg
For years, the military has worked on exoskeletons to help turn soldiers into heavy-lifting cyborgs. Now with the first civilian exoskeleton manufactured using a 3-D printer, the budding robosuit industry may someday get a little more DIY. If the military gets in on the trend, it means that soldiers could one day make their own combat exoskeletons using desktop computers.
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Hacking humans: Building a better you
Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.
Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving? |  |
DNA used to encode a book and other digital information
A team of researchers in the US has successfully encoded a 5.27 megabit book using DNA microchips, and they then read the book using DNA sequencing. Their experiments show that DNA could be used for long-term storage of digital information.
George Church and Sriram Kosuri of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and colleagues, encoded Church’s book “Regenesis” of around 53,400 words into DNA sequences, along with 11 images in JPG format and a JavaScript program. This is 1,000 times more data than has been encoded in DNA previously. |  |
How offshore wind turbines could be more efficient
A Cambridge University study suggests that offshore wind farms could be 100 per cent more efficient in terms of energy payback if manufacturers embraced new methods for making the structures that support the turbines.
As wind farms are increasingly sited offshore rather than on land, and installed at water depths of up to 40 metres, a Cambridge University engineer is urging the wind power industry to look again at the design of the heavy supporting towers and foundations used out at sea in order to improve the energy payback achieved |  |
Self-charging battery both generates and stores energy
Renewable energy technologies generally consist of two distinct processes: energy generation (using sources such as coal, solar, wind, etc.) and energy storage (such as batteries). These two processes are always accomplished through two separate units, with the first process converting the original form of energy to electricity, and the second process converting electricity to chemical energy. Now for the first time, engineers have demonstrated that energy can be generated and stored in a single device that converts mechanical energy directly to chemical energy, bypassing the intermediate step of electricity generation. The device basically acts as a hybrid generator-battery unit, or in other words, a self-charging power cell.
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The Soviets' First Space 'Rendezvous'
On Aug. 15, 1962, Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich landed 295 miles from one another in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. The pair had just returned from a landmark mission that secured a new record for the Soviet Union in space: they were the first two cosmonauts to fly together and meet in orbit.
The idea came from Sergei Korolev's, the Soviet Chief Designer and mastermind behind the program's early successes. He designed missions to follow an unwritten rule that every flight had to be better than the last -- longer, do more science, or achieve some goal that would advance the Soviet space program overall. That's why after Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit on April 12, 1961, Gherman Titov followed with a full day in space on August 6. |  |
Pieces of Amelia Earhart's Plane Located?
Pieces of Amelia Earhart's plane might have been located in the depths of the waters off Nikumaroro island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to a preliminary review of high-definition video taken last month at the uninhabited coral atoll believed to be Earhart's final resting place.
Carried out by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 75 years ago, the underwater search started on July 12 and relied on a torpedo-shaped Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). |  |
Despite Good Intentions, a Fresco in Spain Is Ruined
MADRID — A case of suspected vandalism in a church in a northeastern village in Spain has turned out to be probably the worst art restoration project of all time.
An elderly woman stepped forward this week to claim responsibility for disfiguring a century-old “ecce homo” fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns, in Santuario de la Misericordia, a Roman Catholic church in Borja, near the city of Zaragoza. Ecce homo, or behold the man, refers to an artistic motif that depicts Jesus, usually bound and with a crown of thorns, right before his crucifixion. |  |
Antarctica warmth 'unusual, but not unique'
The recent Antarctic Peninsula temperature rise and associated ice loss is unusual but not unprecedented, according to research.
Analysis of a 364m-long ice core containing several millennia of climate history shows the region previously basked in temperatures slightly higher than today. However, the peninsula is now warming rapidly, threatening previously stable areas of ice, the study warns. The work is reported in Nature journal. |  |
Britain visited by one UFO a month but MoD rules they pose no threat
It is official at last: Britain is not at risk from unidentified flying objects.
Those who have long feared an invasion from Mars or further afield can relax – at least, that is, if they believe the Ministry of Defence. An end has been ordered to all official investigations of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, after the ministry ruled they do not pose a threat to the nation’s security. It comes as the head of UK Air Traffic Control admitted the country is visited by around one unidentified flying object a month. |  |
Space elevator ideas rising again
The space elevator concept has had its ups and downs — but this year, it looks as if the concept's proponents are definitely trying to push the “up” button again.
There’s a new Kickstarter project, aimed at setting the stage for a lunar space elevator. Space-elevator backers are trying to restart a competition for ultra-strong tethers. And a Japanese company has pledged to get the thing built … by 2050. |  |
Curiosity's Powerful Laser Pulse Kick-Starts Search for Evidence of Life
Much to the delight of NASA/JPL's Mars Science Lab team, the laser instrument has fired nearly 500 shots so far that have produced strong, clear data about the composition of the Martian surface. "The spectrum we have received back from Curiosity is as good as anything we looked at on Earth," said Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary scientist Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team.
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Why Are People Not on Mars?
The uneventful nine-month, 150,000,000-mile journey of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, which also goes by the whimsical name Curiosity, ended with a harrowing 7-minute landing in Gale Crater. Getting the fourth Mars Rover into space was a piece of cake compared with setting it back down. Curiosity will explore Gale Crater for one Martian year (687 Earth days) to 1) look for evidence of extraterrestrial life and to 2) evaluate the habitability of the planet.
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