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Japanese researchers said Wednesday they had used stem cells to restore partial mobility in a small monkey that had been paralysed from the neck down by a spinal injury.

"In nineteenth‐century America, there was no such person as a "professional scientist." There were professionals and there were scientists, but they were very different. Professionals were men of science who engaged in commercial relations with private enterprises and took fees for their services. Scientists were men of science who rejected such commercial work and feared the corrupting influences of cash and capitalism. Professionals portrayed themselves as active and useful members of an entrepreneurial polity, while scientists styled themselves as crusading reformers, promoters of a purer science and a more research‐oriented university. It was this new ideology, embodied in these new institutions, that spurred these reformers to adopt a special name for themselves-"scientists." One object of this essay, then, is to explain the peculiar Gilded Age, American origins of that ubiquitous term. A larger goal is to explore the different social roles of the professional and the scientist. By attending to the particular vocabulary employed at the time, this essay tries to make clear why a "professional scientist" would have been a contradiction in terms for both the professional and the scientist in nineteenth‐century America. "

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal - only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope - can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

Catch a first-time glimpse at smart technology that will put android helpers in the home, network commuters and entire cities to the Web, and bring us entertainment systems that can virtually make dreams come true. Advances in artificial intelligence are creating machines with near human-like mental agility. Intelligence will be embedded everywhere - even in our clothing, thanks to smaller, more powerful computers. Soon, we will be able to build computers with artificial intelligence and processing power that rivals the human brain. Intelligence will be everywhere, in our clothing, our vehicles and homes. Intelligent robots will serve us - until they don't feel like doing so anymore. And what happens then…?

In the context of technology the only way out is through. Global society is dependent on artificially inflated energy resources-i.e. oil-that are directly leading us toward total collapse. Technology is being used to most efficiently maximize wealth of the largest corporate conglomerates at the expense of the social fabric and a living environment. The biosphere is in fact collapsing. The technology exists to solve our technical problems but the solutions do not seem like they will be effectively put to use. The power structures concentrating money off the status quo are too entrenched. Each human is called on to become more aware.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated "virtual" realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren't living in-or even existing because of-a simulation?

Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer from Taiwan with huge factories in China, generates about 40 percent of the global consumer electronics revenue by creating things like iPhones and computer components on giant assembly lines staffed by humans. Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings), but by all accounts, the core of the problem (the work) remains "repetitive, exhausting, and alienating." Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2011) - Spanish researchers have designed what they believe to be a new type of magnetic cloak, which shields objects from external magnetic fields, while at the same time preventing any magnetic internal fields from leaking outside, making the cloak undetectable.

64% of college students in a global survey said that if forced to choose, they would opt for having an internet connection rather than a car. 40% said the internet is more important to them than dating, going out with friends, or listening to music. The Cisco Connected World Technology Report draws on surveys of some 1,400 students in 14 countries.Source: Is the Internet a Fundamental Human Necessity?

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

One way to change something big is to get people really riled up about how you've changed something small. Repaint the boat, and let them to argue about that. By the time they've realized that green is no worse than blue, they won't have the energy to wonder whether it was a smart idea for you to set sail for Australia.

Multiple Discovery is a very thorough study of independent simultaneous discovery in the history of science and technology. It seems that there is almost no instance of a great discovery or invention that was not discovered independently and simultaneously. In addition to a careful historical study, Lamb and Easton present a theory to explain multiple discovery, which they call evolutionary realism.

May 4, 2011: Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity.Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B)."The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov of the University of Rochester have found that human cells undergoing oxidative stress caused by environmental chemicals or routine cellular processes produce a protein (SIRT6) that stimulates cells to repair DNA double-strand breaks, thought to be associated with premature aging and cancer. The team first measured levels of SIRT6 in stressed cells, then treated a second group of stressed cells with a drug that deactivates the protein. DNA repair in the second group stopped, confirming SIRT6′s role.  The team also found that SIRT6 acts in concert with another protein, called PARP1, to make the repairs. Furthermore, the team found that increased levels of SIRT6 lead to faster DNA repair. They suspect that the protein acts as a "master regulator," coordinating stress and DNA repair activities. Ref.: Zhiyong Mao, Christopher Hine, Xiao Tian, Michael Van Meter, Matthew Au, Amita Vaidya, Andrei Seluanov, and Vera Gorbunova. SIRT6 Promotes DNA Repair Under Stress by Activating PARP1. Science 17 June 2011: 1443-1446. [DOI:10.1126/science.1202723]

The studies found:People who perceive their car as a reflection of their self-identity are more likely to behave aggressively on the road and break the law.People with compulsive tendencies are more likely to drive aggressively with disregard for potential consequences.Increased materialism, or the importance of one's possessions, is linked to increased aggressive driving tendencies.Young people who are in the early stages of forming their self-identity might feel the need to show off their car and driving skills more than others. They may also be overconfident and underestimate the risks involved in reckless driving.Those who admit to aggressive driving also admit to engaging in more incidents of breaking the law.A sense of being under time and pressure leads to more aggressive driving.

Anonymous uses its skills to extract user information from darknet websites specializing in child pornography. Tuesday, after hacking into Lolita City, a darknet website used by pedophiles to trade in child pornography, Anonymous released usernames and other information of 1,589 pedophiles trading in kiddie porn. The move comes after the group managed to take down more than 40 pedophile websites last week which were swapping images through the Tor anonymization network. A darknet website is a closed private network of computers used for file sharing. Darknet websites are part of the Invisible Web, sometimes called the Deep Web, containing content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines. Yesterday Pastebin release, Anonymous enthusiasts explain the technical side of how they were able to locate and identify Lolita City and access their user data base. In a prior Pastebin release, Anonymous offers a timeline of events detailing the discovery of the hidden cache of more than 100 gigabytes of child porn associated with Lolita City.