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Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences. The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear. The study was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience. Monkey hear, monkey see Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time. But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time — too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories. Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of v...

MIT developing super-realistic image system - MIT News Office : "By producing '6-D' images, an MIT professor and colleagues are creating unusually realistic pictures that not only have a full three-dimensional appearance, but also respond to their environment, producing natural shadows and highlights depending on the direction and intensity of the illumination around them."

"In the race to implement new energy sources, farms have an advantage: lots of manure. A large chicken farm north of Beijing is taking advantage of this fact by using its chicken manure to generate power and heat. And this isn’t just a small-time farm..."

Traditional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, can detect the major anatomical features of the brain and is often used to diagnose strokes and brain tumors. But advances in computing power and novel processing algorithms have allowed scientists to analyze the information captured during an MRI in completely new ways. read more | digg story

Drawing inspiration from the simple design of the human eye, Illinois engineers have invented a new kind of eyelike camera that avoids some pitfalls of ordinary cameras and could lead to a host of novel devices based on flexible electronics.The electronic eye made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University collects light on a curved screen resembling a retina, in contrast to digital cameras that use lenses to focus images on a flat sheet of light detectors. A curved surface reduces the need for multiple lenses and cuts down on distortion that comes from projecting the light on a flat surface.That allows for a compact camera with low distortion and a wide field of view, much like a natural eye, according to a study published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.Making curved arrays of electronics is far tougher than it sounds, experts say. Until now, nearly all complex electronics have been etched on flat wafers, with even sli...

#5.The Theory: Quantum EntanglementThe Crazy Part:The part where you jiggle an electron on one side of the universe and an invisible force traverses millions of light years and smacks another electron into wiggling instantaneously, which is about a million years faster than is technically possible without time travel. #4.The Theory:EvolutionThe Crazy Part: The part where the family tree of every living creature on Earth collides at a single point on a single day in the past, making you related to Hitler as well as every insect you’ve ever killed.. #3.The Theory: The Copenhagen InterpretationThe Crazy Part: The part where the furniture in your house behaves differently when you’re not around. #2.The Theory: The Many Worlds TheoryThe Crazy Part: The part where you realize that somewhere in some parallel universe you just died while reading this sentence. #1.The Theory: The Universe Is BigThe Crazy Part: The part where the Universe isn’t just bigger than you can possibly comprehend, but a...

Scientists have created the world's thinnest balloon, made of a single layer of carbon just one atom thick.The fabric that the balloon is made of is leakproof to even the tiniest airborne molecules. It could find use in "aquariums" smaller than a red blood cell, through which scientists could peer at molecules, researchers suggested.The balloon is made of graphite, as found in pencils, which is made of atom-thin sheets of carbon stacked on top of each other known. The sheets are known as graphene.Graphene is highly electrically conductive, and scientists are feverishly researching whether it could find use in advanced circuitry and other devices."We were studying little graphene trampolines, and by complete accident, we made a graphene sheet over a hole. Then we started studying it, and saw that it was trapping gas inside," said researcher Paul McEuen, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.By experimenting further with bubbles made of graphene, McEuen...

In 2006, Andrew Jordan, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, together with Alexander Korotkov at the University of California, Riverside, spelled out how to exploit a quantum quirk to accomplish a feat long thought impossible, and this week a research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara has tested the

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have devised a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever thought possible, potentially opening doors to new technology in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers and optical computers.Optics researchers succeeded previously in passing light through gaps 200 nanometers wide, about 400 times smaller than the width of a human hair. A group of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang devised a way to confine light in incredibly small spaces on the order of 10 nanometers, only five times the width of a single piece of DNA and more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers."This technique could give us remarkable control over light," said Rupert Oulton, research associate in Zhang's group and lead author of the study, "and that would spell out amazing things for the future in terms of what we could do with that light." read more | digg story

An international team of scientists has discovered seven -- and perhaps eight -- dwarf galaxies orbiting Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way. read more  |  digg story

In 'A Floating Chernobyl?,' Popular Science reports that two Russian companies plan to build the world's first floating nuclear power plant to deliver cheap electricity to northern territories. The construction should start next year for a deployment in 2010. The huge barge will be home for two 60-megawatt nuclear reactors which will work until 2050... if everything works fine. It looks like a frightening idea, don't you think? But read more for additional details and pictures of this floating nuclear power plant.

The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved it's true: The brain's wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making. A brain-imaging study reported in the current Science examines 'framing,' a hot topic among psychologists, economists and political hucksters. Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London. De Martino and colleagues asked 20 men and women to undergo three 17-minute brain scans while being asked to gamble — or not — with an initial pot of English pounds worth about $95. When told they would 'keep' 40% of their money if they didn't gamble, the volunteers chose to gamble only 43% of the time. Told they could 'lose' 60% of the money if they didn't g...

A device which may pave the way for robotic hands that can replicate the human sense of touch has been unveiled. US scientists have created a sensor that can "feel" the texture of objects to the same degree of sensitivity as a human fingertip. The team says the tactile sensor could, in the future, aid minimally invasive surgical techniques by giving surgeons a "touch-sensation". The research is reported in the journal Science. "If you look at the current status of these tactile sensors, the frustration has been that the resolution of all these devices is in the range of millimetres," explained Professor Ravi Saraf, an engineer from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, US, and a co-author of the paper. "Whereas the resolution of a human fingertip is about 40 microns, about half the diameter of a human hair, and this has affected the performance of these devices."

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...

Physicists working in the United States believe they have cracked an important problem facing man-made nuclear fusion, touted as the cheap, safe, clean and almost limitless energy source of the future. In fusion, atomic nuclei are fused together to release energy, as opposed to fission -- the technique used for nuclear power and atomic bombs -- where nuclei are split. In a fusion reactor, particles are rammed together to form a charged gas called a plasma, contained inside a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak by powerful magnetic coils A consortium of countries signed a deal last year to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France as a testbed for an eventual commercial design. But many experts have been shaking their heads at the many challenges facing the ITER designers. One of them is a phenomenon called edge localised modes, or ELMs. These are sudden fluxes or eddies in the outer edge of the plasma that erode the tokamak's inner wa...

Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found. The mammals are able to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities. St Andrews University researchers studying in Florida discovered bottlenose dolphins used names rather than sound to identify each other. The three-year-study was funded by the Royal Society of London. Dr Vincent Janik, of the Sea Mammal Unit at St Andrews University, said they conducted the research on wild dolphins. He said: "We captured wild dolphins using nets when they came near the shore. "Then in the shallow water we recoded their whistles before synthesising them on a computer so that we had a computer voice of a dolphin. "Then we played it back to the dolphins and we found they responded. This showed us that the dolphins know each other's signature whistle instead of just the voice. "I think it is a very exciting discovery becaus...

What Is the Universe Made Of? In recent decades, scientists have discovered that the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets, even human beings, accounts for only 5 percent of everything in the universe. The rest belongs to dark matter and dark energy, phenomena that scientists are just now learning about. What is dark matter made of and where does it reside? What is dark energy? Researchers hope to find answers. What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? In the 17th century, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes declared that mind and body are entirely separate, leaving the debate over the nature of consciousness to other philosophers. Today scientists are challenging that notion with a view that consciousness arises from the properties and the organization of neurons in the brain. Experimental work to unravel those properties and processes has only just begun. "If the results don't provide a blinding insight into how consciousness arises from tangles...

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science. They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish. The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world. Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. Zooplankton are tiny marine animals. Many live on floating plants (phytoplankton), and many are in turn eaten by fish, mammals and crustaceans. One of the aims of the Census of Marine Zooplankton (CoMZ), part of CoML, is to provide a global inventory of these tiny organisms which will help scientists look for changes induced by climate variations or other factors "The deep ocean below 1,000m (3,300ft) is rarely sampled," observed Peter Wiebe from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, le...

An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests. It's not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said. El Ninos boost rainfall in the southern United States and western South America and bring dry weather or even drought to Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the western Pacific. As for the Pacific food chain near the equator, the slowdown might reduce populations of tiny plants and animals up through the fish that eat them, because of reduced nutrition welling up from the deep, said the author, Gabriel Vecchi. Vecchi, a visiting scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Princeton, N.J., and colleagues present their results in Thursday's issue of the...

Tsunami warnings were issued for Fiji and New Zealand after a massive earthquake measuring about 7.8 in magnitude shook the southern Pacific Ocean. The quake's epicenter was about 153 kilometers (95 miles) off the coast of Tonga, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It struck Thursday at 4:26 a.m in Tonga (Wednesday at 1526 GMT). The geological center stressed that "it is not known that a tsunami was generated" by the quake. "This warning is based only on the earthquake evaluation," it said. On the island of Fiji, to the west of Tonga, several people contacted by CNN reported no damage. One local journalist said he felt a tremor, but said the local seismologists had recorded a much weaker quake. David Applegate, senior science adviser for the USGS, told CNN the earthquake was likely to affect only "a relatively small population." "So far, we've got five responses in four city areas on the islands of Tonga, with intensities ranging from fai...