King Tut, depicted here by a gold funerary mask, was a frail pharaoh, according to a new DNA study. Tutankhamun was beset by malaria and a bone disorder—and possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins, researchers say. (Read the full story: "King Tut Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred, DNA Shows.")Released Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding the 14th-century B.C. pharaoh, including how he died and who his parents were."He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots," said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tübingen. "Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk."

Microsoft Research who brought us some wonderful technologies such as the incredible Photosynth continue to impress with a much improved web mapping application integrated with the company's new Bing search engine. During the TED 2010 conference, Microsoft engineer Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed the new Bing augmented reality maps showing real-time registration of video taken with a smart phone and street-view type maps. He showed how the live video can be overlayed over the static images and additional information about the area can be accessed via a Web interface. Much of this is made possible because of the advanced computer vision technology that has been developed in the past decade at Microsoft Research. The Seadragon technology is the back-end that makes it possible to manipulate such vast amounts of data in real-time. Microsoft has also integrated Photosynth and Worldwide telescope into their maps product. You are probably wondering what does this have to do with robotics other than the fact that it is a very impressive application? I can imagine robots using Bing maps to keep localized within a city. One of the most difficult and important problem in robotics is that of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Bing maps solve the mapping problem and the new vision techniques (with a bit of help from GPS) can be used to solve the localization problem. The registered video can be used by a robot to localized itself when it goes out to buy your weekly groceries.  You can watch the 10-minute demo below; I bet that it won't be long before Microsoft makes these new features available to us all for free.

Everyone knows holograms from their everyday life, for instance the ones applied to credit cards as security indicators. Unlike a photography of an object which only records the amplitude of the light wave coming from the object, the hologram also includes local information about the light wave's phase. In appropriate lighting, the initial wave front is reconstructed in proper phase and the spectator has a three dimensional sensation of the object. But it is not this characteristic of holography that is central when it comes to the imaging of small structures, but the fact that for the recording of a hologram no lenses are required at all. In order to conduct research on nanometer scaled objects, light of an equally small wave length is needed (soft X-rays). The only lenses working in this wave spectrum (so-called Fresnel zone plates) are very sophisticated in design and still yield a quality of imaging one scale inferior then lenses for visible light. The modus operandi of recording holograms without the use of lenses is to superimpose the light wave having radiated the object at the time of recording with a reference wave having a known and stable (coherent) phase.

The AVATAR script reveals some background about the AVATAR world including sex, drugs and suicide. But lots happens before the movie's events take place and producer Jon Landau says James Cameron wants to write a prequel novel: "Sigourney teaching at the schoolhouse. Jake on Earth, and his back-story and how he came here, and Tommy, Jake's brother." The possibilities are endless. Cameron could flesh out the Na'vi beyond the movie's "noble redskin" stereotypes and even show something besides evil white guys and noble blue guys, but could just as easily blast right-wing critics. Or explain how unobtainium really got its name. Or write himself in as a Na'vi character. The good news: Cameron hopes to have the book done by the end of the year.

The Care-O-bot® research initiative aims at making Care-O-bot® 3 available as high-tech research platform. The main objectives to reach this goal are to provide a common open source repository for the hardware platform provide simulation models of hardware components provide remote access to the Care-O-bot® 3 hardware platform

The aptly-named StickyBot is a gecko-like robot that can climb smooth surfaces using its feet, which are covered in small, dry rubbery hairs (called setae on the gecko) which provide enough surface tension for dry adhesion. While the original StickyBot has 4 toes per foot, the team at Stanford has created the SB2 which has only 2 toes per foot while still retaining its climbing ability.

The marriage of high performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for making lab-on-a-chip technologies more practical. Microfluidics, the ability to manipulate tiny volumes of liquid, is at the heart of many lab-on-a-chip devices. Such platforms can automatically mix and filter chemicals, making them ideal for disease detection and environmental sensing. The performance of these devices, however, is typically inferior to larger scale laboratory equipment. While lab-on-a-chip systems can deliver and manipulate millions of liquid drops, there is not an equally scalable and efficient way to detect the activity, such as biological reactions, within the drops.

The goal of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is to achieve higher data rates through more efficient transmission, and thus improving the cellular phone user experience by enabling powerful new devices. The changes required in this technology present new challenges for base station vendors and their suppliers. Supporting 4G systems efficiently requires a number of innovations in DSP design; these innovations are moving the industry toward SoC architectures to support such systems. This paper will explore how TI's new architecture enables the key features in 4G systems.

No currently accepted scientific theory makes use of the notion of causality. Scientists may interpret some math equations involved in a scientific theory to denote causality—but unlike, say, “force” or “attraction”, causality is not really part of the formal language of modern science. Roughly, causality consists of “predictive implication, plus assumption of a causal mechanism.” Predictive implications are part of science: science can tell us “If X happens, then expect Y to happen with a certain probability.” But science cannot tell us whether X is the “cause” of Y, versus them both habitually being part of some overall coordinated process.

Nikki Graziano's intriguing integration of mathematical curves into her photography sparked a Radar discussion about the relationship between mathematics and the real world. Does her work give insight into the nature of mathematics? Or into the nature of the world? And if so, what kind of insight? Mathematically, matching one curve to another isn't a big deal. Given N points, it's trivial to write an N+1 degree equation that passes through all of them. There are many more subtle ways of solving the same problem, with more aesthetically pleasing results: you can use sine functions, wavelets, square waves, whatever you want. Take out a ruler, measure some points, plug them into Mathematica, and in seconds you can generate as many curves as you like. So finding an equation that matches the curve of an artfully trimmed hedge is easy. The question is whether that curve tells us anything, or whether it's just another stupid math trick.

The fortress-like Coptic monastery of St Anthony the Great stands at an oasis spring in the Red Sea Mountains, 155 km (100 miles) south east of Cairo. It was founded in the mid-4th century, on Saint Anthony's burial site. He, along with St Pachomius (the first monk to organise hermits into groups) were two of the first exponents of Christian monasticism, which originated in the Egyptian desert. The Coptic orthodox monastery, presided over by an abbot, is the oldest Christian monastery in the world. The church is one of Egypt's great treasures - some of the wall paintings here date from the 6th and the 9th centuries, and among them is a picture of the founder, St Anthony himself. He lived in a tiny cave, high above the desert, for 40 years soon after AD 300, and the monastery - really a city in the desert - was built in the 360s. Amazingly, the monks who live here still speak Coptic, a language directly descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians.

1,600-year-old St. Anthony's Monastery restoration took eight years to complete. The announcement comes a month after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in over a decade. Amid the renovations, archaeologists discovered the remains of the original monk cells dating to the 4th century.

We describe a practical method for reasoning about realistic concurrent programs. Our method allows global two-state invariants that restrict update of shared state. We provide simple, sufficient conditions for checking those global invariants modularly. The method has been implemented in VCC, an automatic, sound, modular verifier for concurrent C programs. VCC has been used to verify functional correctness of tens of thousands of lines of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform and of SYSGO's embedded real-time operating system PikeOS.

A jellyfish’s lifespan usually ranges from somewhere between a few hours for the smallest species to several months and rarely to a few years for the bigger species. How does the only 4-5 mm long Turritopsis nutricula (let’s call it T’nut) manage to beat the system? Well, T’nut is able to transform between medusa and polyp stage, thereby reverting back from mature to immature stage and escaping death. The cell process is called transdifferentiation, when non-stem cells either transform into a different type of cell or when an already differentiated or specialised stem cell creates cells outside this specialised path.

For some years now, an unorthodox idea has been gaining favor among astronomers. It contradicts old teachings and unsettles thoughtful observers, especially climatologists. "The sun," explains Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC, "is a variable star." But it looks so constant... That's only a limitation of the human eye. Modern telescopes and spacecraft have penetrated the sun's blinding glare and found a maelstrom of unpredictable turmoil. Solar flares explode with the power of a billion atomic bombs. Clouds of magnetized gas (CMEs) big enough to swallow planets break away from the stellar surface. Holes in the sun's atmosphere spew million mile-per-hour gusts of solar wind.

When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond? When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter? Well, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to predict, especially about the future.” But what do experts working on human-level AI think? To find out, we surveyed a number of leading specialists at the Artificial General Intelligence conference (AGI-09) in Washington DC in March 2009. These are the experts most involved in working toward the advanced AIs we’re talking about. Of course, on matters like these, even expert judgments are highly uncertain and must be taken with multiple grains of salt — nevertheless, expert opinion is one of the best sources of guidance we have. Their predictions about AGI might not come true, but they have so much relevant expertise that we should give their predictions careful consideration.

Opus is Octasic's high-performing, ultra low-power, asynchronous DSP technology optimized for basestations, video processing and media gateway solutions. Asynchronous designs deliver similar computing performance to synchronous designs, but use less silicon and less power. No clock tree No state-elements Less sensitive to process and temperature variations

Hardware modifications and gadgets for ZX Spectrum and compatibles

Multisim 11 is the latest version of its circuit simulation software, with specialized editions for both hands-on learning and professional circuit design. The easy-to-use Multisim software delivers a graphical approach that abstracts the complexities of traditional circuit simulation, helping educators, students and engineers employ advanced circuit analysis technology. The academic edition of Multisim 11 incorporates specialized teaching features and is complemented by circuits textbooks and courseware. This integrated system helps educators engage students and reinforce circuit theory with an interactive, hands-on approach to investigating circuit behavior. Multisim 11 Professional helps engineers optimize circuit designs, minimize errors and reduce prototype iterations. When combined with the new NI Ultiboard 11 layout and routing software, Multisim provides engineers a cost-effective, end-to-end prototyping platform. Its integration with NI LabVIEW measurement software also helps engineers define custom analyses to improve design validation…

DSP core licensor Ceva Inc. is due to unveil a software-programmable multimedia video processor architecture at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The multicore architecture, called MM3000, which comes complete with C compilers, power management provision and an RTOS/multithreading scheduler is intended to be able to process any and all video codecs up to the highest resolutions and frame rates currently available as well as future codecs for things like 3-D video.