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Researchers have discovered how to let bacteria control the movement and behavior of a robot, just like what the brain does to the human body. ... Scientists from Virginia tech developed bacteria that can control a robotic car. The robot’s “brain” was replaced with bacterial community, enabling the car to move towards the food sources. The bacteria in the robot’s brain send biochechemical signals to machine’s processor to move its mechanical body. The bacteria were bioengineered to emit green or red signals depending on the condition they found in their environment. Under repeated observations, the scientists noticed that the robot...

Explanation: A new chapter in space flight began this week in 1950 July with the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida: the Bumper V-2. Shown above, the Bumper V-2 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers, higher than even Space Shuttles once flew. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper V-2 was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper V-2 rockets carried small...

The latest data downloaded from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggests that mountains of nitrogen ice thousands of feet high have evaporated into Pluto's atmosphere since the dwarf planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, and hundreds of tons of that gas escape into space each hour. New images of Pluto meanwhile show land forms that suggest heat is rising beneath the surface, with troughs of dark matter either collecting or bubbling up between flat segments of crust. Scientists discussed the findings Friday in their second major release of data collected when the $700 million New Horizons mission made a historic pass...

Towering mountains of water ice rise up to 3500 meters tall on Pluto, above smooth plains covered in veneers of nitrogen and methane ice, NASA’s New Horizons team announced today. The discovery, along with the finding that parts of the dwarf planet’s surface are crater-free and therefore relatively young, points to a place that has been geologically reworked in the recent past. “It could even be active today,” said John Spencer, a New Horizons team member at Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, at a press conference today at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel,...

In auto racing parlance, NASA engineers put the "pedal to the metal" during a July 17 test of its Space Launch System (SLS) RS-25 rocket engine at Stennis Space Center. During a 535-second test, operators ran the RS-25 through a series of power levels, including a period of firing at 109 percent of the engine's rated power. Data collected on performance of the engine at the various power levels will aid in adapting the former space shuttle engines to the new SLS vehicle mission requirements, including development of an all-new engine controller and software. Four RS-25 engines will use the...

Because perturbation theory doesn’t work, it is very hard to predict the consequences of the strong force. One thing we do know is that the binding energy of the strong force which holds the quarks together inside them is responsible for almost all of the mass of protons and neutrons, and hence almost all of the mass of you. Calculations on supercomputers (such as the DiRAC facility in the UK) use “lattice” methods to make calculations when perturbation theory doesn’t work. These involve approximating the space-time continuum by a lattice of discrete points and events; they are now able to...

Explanation: It took 9.5 years to get this close, but you can now take a virtual flight over Pluto in this animation of image data from the New Horizons spacecraft. The Plutonian terrain unfolding 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) below is identified as Norgay Montes, followed by Sputnik Planum. The icy mountains, informally named for one of the first two Mount Everest climbers Tenzing Norgay, reach up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface. The frozen, young, craterless plains are informally named for the Earth's first artificial satellite. Sputnik Planum is north of Norgay Montes, within Pluto's expansive, bright, heart-shaped...

Are you reading this because you chose to? Or are you doing so as a result of forces beyond your control? http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130924-how-belief-in-free-will-shapes-us After thousands of years of philosophy, theology, argument and meditation on the riddle of free will, I'm not about to solve it for you in this column (sorry). But what I can do is tell you about some thought-provoking experiments by psychologists, which suggest that, regardless of whether we have free will or not, whether we believe we do can have a profound impact on how we behave. The issue is simple: we all make choices, but could...

An overnight thunderstorm dropped 1½ to 2 inches of snow on the summit of Hawaii's tallest peak in July. Cameras at Mauna Kea’s summit showed some snow still on the ground midday Friday. Mauna Kea Weather Center forecast meteorologist Ryan Lyman says it should be melting quickly. …

Opalescent pools full of carbon dioxide have been found at the site of the second biggest volcanic eruption recorded in human history. The eruption in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Santorini wiped out the Minoan civilisation living along the coast in 1600 BC. The newly discovered pools were found forming at a depth of 250m. They is a series of interconnected white pools that have high concentrations of CO2 and scientists say they could shed light on future volcanic eruptions and answer questions about deep sea carbon storage. An international team of scientists used sophisticated underwater exploration vehicles...

Robert Folmer of the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center gave people with chronic tinnitus transcranial magnetic stimulation as part of a study. Participants found their symptoms decreased by about a third. (Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center ) ================================================================================================= Imagine dealing with stresses of every day, juggling the demands of family life and deadlines at work, with a constant ringing in your ears? That's just what millions of Americans who suffer from tinnitus face. Hope could be on the way. New research by the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Oregon Health & Science University found that a noninvasive technique involving...

Northwest region is 72 years overdue for next big earthquake, experts sayOne of Oregon’s top earthquake experts predicts the “really big one” will wipe out the entire Northwest. In fact, the area’s FEMA director said everything west of I-5 “will be toast”. Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, says there will be 6 minutes of shaking when the 'really big' quake hits. (KOIN) Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, says there will be 6 minutes of shaking when the ‘really big’ quake hits. (KOIN) In The New Yorker article “The Really Big...

Explanation: Icy world Charon is 1,200 kilometers across. That makes Pluto's largest moon only about 1/10th the size of planet Earth but a whopping 1/2 the diameter of Pluto itself. Charon is seen in unprecedented detail in this image from New Horizons. The image was captured late July 13 during the spacecraft's flight through the Plutonian system from a range of less than 500,000 kilometers. For reference, the distance separating Earth and Moon is less than 400,000 kilometers. Charonian terrain, described as surprising, youthful, and varied, includes a 1,000 kilometer swath of cliffs and troughs stretching below center, a 7...

A "close pass" by orbiting junk has forced the International Space Station's crew to scramble into its attached Soyuz capsule. It is the fourth time in ISS's 15 years that a collision risk has prompted such precautions. Three astronauts briefly fled the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday as a fragment of a former Soviet weather satellite flew by. They sheltered in a Soyuz spacecraft, which normally transports crew members to and from Earth. A space industry source quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax claimed that US space monitors had spotted the space junk "very late." That had left...

Explanation: A 50 mile (80 kilometer) trip across Pluto would cover the distance indicated by the scale bar in this startling image. The close-up of the icy world's rugged equatorial terrain was captured when the New Horizons spacecraft was about 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) from the surface, 1.5 hours before its closest approach. Rising to an estimated 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) the mountains are likely composed of water ice. Suggesting surprising geological activity, they are also likely young with an estimated age of 100 million years or so based on the apparent absence of craters. The region pictured is near...

What grows quickly, is packed with protein, has twice the nutritional value of kale and tastes like bacon? The answer, according to scientists at Oregon State University, is a new strain of seaweed they recently patented. Dulse is a form of edible seaweed that grows wild along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines. It’s harvested and commonly used by people in dried form as a cooking ingredient or nutritional supplement. But OSU researchers say the variety they’ve developed can be farmed and eaten fresh, with the potential for a new industry for Oregon. …

<p>To the north of California's famous San Andreas fault is a less known, but possibly more deadly, fault line. The Cascadia subduction zone runs some 700 miles from northern California to Vancouver.</p> <p>In a deeply reported article for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz tells the tale of how this fault lies dormant for periods of 243 years, on average, before unleashing monstrous tremors. The Pacific Northwest is 72 years overdue for the next quake, which is expected to be between 8.0 and 9.2 in magnitude.</p>

Diagram illustrating the inferred mode of fossilization of microorganisms in clitellate cocoons, exemplified by a common medicinal leech (reproductive stages modified from Sims). (a) Two leeches mate; (b) a cocoon is secreted from the clitellum; (c) eggs and sperm are released into the cocoon before the animal retracts and eventually deposits the sealed cocoon on a suitable substrate (d). Insets depict enlargements of the inner cocoon-wall surface showing how spermatozoa and microbes become encased in the solidifying inner cocoon wall. Credit: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0431 ============================================================================================= (Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members from institutions in Sweden, Argentina and Italy,...

Things without bones don’t fossilize that well. This includes sperm and worms, and most definitely worm sperm. But scientists have now discovered fossilized sperm from a worm-like creature in Antarctica that is 50 million years old, as revealed in a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters.

Artist's impression showing a newly discovered Jupiter twin gas giant orbiting the solar twin star, HIP 11915. The planet is of a very similar mass to Jupiter and orbits at the same distance from its star as Jupiter does from the Sun. This, together with HIP 11915's Sun-like composition, hints at the possibility of the system of planets orbiting HIP 11915 bearing a resemblance to our own Solar System, with smaller rocky planets orbiting closer to the host star. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser ============================================================================================ Astronomers have used the ESO 3.6-metre telescope to identify a planet just like Jupiter orbiting at the...