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(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team has removed a major obstacle to engineer quantum systems that will play a key role in the computers, communication networks, and even biomedical devices of the future.

"This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefited from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the "profit as progress" assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how "science values" ("knowledge as progress") may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. "

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

A young man paralyzed by an injury to his spinal cord has regained the ability to stand for short periods, take steps with help and move his legs and feet at will, with the help of an electrical stimulator implanted in his lower back.

Researchers in EPFL's Computer Vision Laboratory developed a computer-based modeling service that generates a 3D image from up to thousands of 2D shots, with all the processing done in the cloud. Since April, the EPFL startup Pix4D has been offering the modeling service with a fourth dimension: time. Now, individuals and small businesses looking for fast, cheap, large-scale 3D models can get them without investing in heavy processing, the company states. With Pix4D, users upload a series of photos of an object, and within 30 minutes they have a 3D image. The software defines "points of interest" from among the photos, or common points of high-contrast pixels. Next, the program pastes the images together seamlessly by matching up the points of interest. Much in the same way our two eyes work together to calculate depth, the software computes the distance and angle between two or more photos and lays the image over the model appropriately, creating a highly accurate 3D model that avoids the time intensive, "point by point" wireframe method. With Pix4D's 3D models, you can navigate in all directions as well as change the date on a timeline to see what a place looked like at different times of the year. The company is collaborating with several drone makers (including another EPFL startup,senseFly) to market their software as a package with senseFly's micro aerial vehicles, or autonomous drones. Pix4D's time element avoids waiting for Google to update its satellite data or for an expensive plane to fly by and take high-resolution photos. Farmers, for example, can now send relatively inexpensive flying drones into the air to take pictures as often as they like, allowing them to survey the evolution of their crops over large distances and long periods of time. And since the calculations are done on a cloud server, the client doesn't need a powerful computer of his or her own.

A unique optical multitouch sensing technology using infrared sensors has been developed by researchers at the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. ZeroTouch allows users to literally draw pictures in midair. It provides zero-force, zero-thickness, high-frame-rate, high-resolution, transparent multitouch sensing. ZeroTouch's new forms of free-air interaction are more precise than the Microsoft Kinect, the researchers said. ZeroTouch was demonstrated at the recent ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, B.C. Ref: Moeller, J. and Kerne, A., ZeroTouch: A Zero-Thickness Optical Multi-Touch Force Field, CHI 2011 Ref: Moeller, J., Lupfer, N., Hamilton, B., Lin, H., Kerne, A., intangibleCanvas: Free-Air Finger Painting on a Projected Canvas, CHI 

"And what if science becomes - or has become - lower-yield? Is that a reason to reconsider funding policies? Rationally, looking at the cost-benefit may already have effects on resource and funding allocations. Is it unreasonable to assume that science will continue to produce large, demonstrable advances and insights of the size and importance of the major breakthroughs?"

I think the comments under the linked article sufficiently refute it.

Researchers at LaserMotive have devised a way to beam lasers to power military bases and drones, possibly helping to save lives, since delivering fuel to battle zones can be a dangerous task in wartime. Although still largely in the R&D stage, laser power beaming has many other potential uses, which include powering vehicles, replacing electric power wiring and transmission lines in difficult places, and even launching rockets into orbit. The beam is about 8 inches wide as it leaves the transmitter - and then spreads wider as it travels. The beam emitter is located at a ground-based unit and operated by a person, who could control it from the same location or remotely from an entirely different place altogether. The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane, or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer. When the laser hits the photovoltaic device, the photons in the light beam are converted to electricity to fly the AUV. Topics: AI/Robotics | Energy | Physics/Cosmology | Survival/Defense

With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, (the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world's largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa-a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world-Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

Cleverbot tricked 59 per cent of people that they were talking to another human - suggesting it has passed the Turing test

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

by Alessandro Tomasi In this article, Georges Bataille's notion of intimacy will be re-interpreted to show that it has a role to play in the evolution of technology. The specifically human form of intimacy can be experienced through the successful adoption of technological devices that have the qualities necessary to fit in and work out in our life context. If they manage to become part of our life, then we experience them as projections of our psychophysical personality, and, as such, they escape our positing, objectifying consciousness. Intimacy can be seen as the organizing principle that shapes the evolution of technology towards an ideal end that promises at least an approximation to the absolute intimacy that is unique to the gods.

Engineers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique to optically modulate the frequency of a laser beam and create a signal that is disrupted significantly less by environmental factors, says Dr. Rainer Martini. The research provides for enhanced optical communications, allowing mobile units not tied to fiber optic cable to communicate in the range of 100 GHz and beyond, the equivalent of 100 gigabytes of data per second. Eventually, the team hopes to extend the reach into the terahertz spectrum. The frequency or amplitude modulation of middle infrared quantum cascade lasers has been limited by electronics, which are barely capable of accepting frequencies of up to 10 GHz by switching a signal on and off.  Marini and his team have developed a method to optically induce fast amplitude modulation in a quantum cascade laser to control the laser's intensity. Their amplitude modulation system employed a second laser to modulate the amplitude of the middle infrared laser, using light to control light. The current detector is only capable of detecting frequencies up to 10 GHz, but Dr. Martini is confident that a new detector will make the system capable of much higher frequencies. With an optical system that is stable enough, satellites may one day convert to laser technology, resulting in a more mobile military and super-sensitive scanners, as well as faster Internet for the masses, says Martini. Ref.: "Optically induced fast wavelength modulation in a quantum cascade laser," Applied Physics Letters, July 7, 2010.

The US Navy has fired a laser gun from one of its ships for the first time. Researchers used the high-energy laser (HEL) to disable a boat by setting fire to its engines off the coast of California.

Source: New York Times - Apr 11, 2011 In their new book, Infinite Reality, Dr. Jim Blascovich and Dr. Jerry Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in virtual-reality laboratories in academia. These psychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on "Jeopardy!" of IBM's Watson computer.

Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes. A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death. Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported in accident reports to assist in evaluating distracted driving laws and programs. They propose creating low-cost roadway measures that alert motorists when they are drifting out of their driving lane. They also propose that all cell phones be banned on the road, even hands-free versions. In another report by The New York Times, police in Syracuse and Hartford have handed out nearly 20,000 tickets for illegal use of a phone while driving - either for texting or use of a handheld phone. According to the federal government, these efforts have had the desired effect: distracted driving has fallen sharply. Their research shows that drivers talking on a phone are four times as likely to get into a crash as those not on a phone, and that the risks for motorists who text are at least twice as high. In Syracuse, handheld cellphone use and texting have each fallen by one-third. In Hartford, handheld cellphone use by drivers fell 57 percent while texting fell by 75 percent, the Times reports. Ref.: Vicki Harper. et al., Distracted Driving: What Research Shows and What States Can Do, GHSA, 2011

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2011) - Inkjet printers, a low-cost technology that in recent decades has revolutionized home and small office printing, may soon offer similar benefits for the future of solar energy.