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IF YOU can hear; you probably take sound for granted. Without thinking, we swing our attention in the direction of a loud or unexpected sound - the honk of a car horn, say. Because deaf people lack access to such potentially life-saving cues, a group of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon built a pair of glasses which allows the wearer to "see" when a loud sound is made, and gives an indication of where it came from. An array of seven microphones, mounted on the frame of the glasses, pinpoints the location of such sounds and relays that directional information to the wearer through a set of LEDs embedded inside the frame. The glasses will only flash alerts on sounds louder than a threshold level, which is defined by the wearer.

Every minute another person in New Zealand becomes a victim of cybercrime according to a new report which claims there are 556 million victims worldwide every year after the two NRI jailed for a major cyber fraud case revealed in this news blog. The report released by anti-virus company Norton researched 24 countries, including New Zealand, to find out how many people fell victim to crime on the internet as well as the price tag of consumer cybercrime for each country. see more: http://nortonscientificjournal.com/research/

On June 25, the hottest man-made temperature has been recorded in a huge atom-smasher at New York at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit - just 250,000 times hotter compared to the sun's core. This achievement occurred in the particle accelerator RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), a 3.9-kilometer tunnel under New York that researchers use to smash particles into one another to replicate conditions that happened a split-second after the Big Bang. Creating the hot temperature in a controlled environment was done in Brookhaven National Laboratory through colliding gold nuclei with each other at the speed of light. Once the collision of ions happened, the huge amount of energy it emits will melt the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei, turning into a liquid composed of smaller particles called gluons and quarks. At 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, normal matter would usually break down into sub-atomic particles, the gluons and quarks that supposedly composed the earliest plasma that scientist thought resembles the thing that consisted the universe right after the Big Bang happened, 13.7 billion years ago. According to the head of the Brookhaven program, particle physicists formerly thought that quarks and gluons would be in gas form but this new study revealed that it is behaving more like a liquid. And while they already expected to get to such extreme temperatures, they were really surprised of it having an almost perfect liquid behavior. Surprisingly, the liquid could occur at both ends of the spectrum - that is, a similar behavior of the liquid in trapped atom samples has been seen at extremely cold temperatures. "Other physicists have now observed quite similar liquid behavior in trapped atom samples at temperatures near absolute zero, ten million trillion times colder than the quark-gluon plasma we create at RHIC," said the head of Brookhaven's particle and nuclear physics program