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Issue no. 29, 2010 Published: Sep 17, 2010
Europe plans large lunar lander
Discovery offers hope of saving sub-Saharan crops from devastating parasites
Artificial 'skin' materials can sense pressure
Bad breath sniffer to hunt for life on Mars
Carbon nanotubes twice as strong as previously thought
Study: Playing action games improves decision making
Pi record smashed as team finds two-quadrillionth digit
Facebook rival Diaspora opens up to developers
Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race

Europe plans large lunar lander
Europe is pressing ahead with plans to send a sophisticated, unmanned spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. EADS Astrium has been awarded a EUR 6.5m contract by ESA to do further detailed design work on the mission. The 700-800kg robot would be aimed at the lunar south pole, using automated systems to guide itself into a gentle, precision landing. Once down, it would release a small rover to trundle across the surface. Recent spacecraft observations have indicated that some polar craters on the Moon probably hide vast reserves of ice deep in their shadows. The new study is being led by the German division of EADS Astrium. The feasibility work conducted in industry, known as a Phase B1 study, will elaborate the lander's key specifications, and initiate some component development and testing. These investigations will inform the fully costed mission proposal, which will go before Europe's space ministers for final approval in 2012. If the politicians like the concept and decide to fund it, the robot could leave Earth on a Soyuz rocket before the decade's end.
BBC News Sep 16, 2010	back to top

Discovery offers hope of saving sub-Saharan crops from devastating parasites
Each year, thousands of acres of crops are planted throughout Africa, Asia and Australia only to be laid to waste by a parasitic plant called Striga, also known as witchweed. It is one of the largest challenges to food security in Africa, and a team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Toronto have discovered chemicals and genes that may break Striga's stranglehold. When crops grow, their roots release a plant hormone called strigolactone. If the soil contains Striga seed, it will use the released strigolactone as a cue to germinate and infect the crop plants. Once connected to the crop, the Striga plant kills the crop by sucking out its nutrients. The scientists used a model genetic plant system called Arabidopsis to screen 10,000 compounds and identify a set of five chemicals, designated cotylimides, which increase the accumulation of strigolactone in plants. They also found related chemicals that decrease strigolactone levels. Then they screened for mutants of Arabidopsis that were resistant to cotylimides and identified mutants that made less strigolactone. These mutants identified genes that regulate strigolactone levels in plants.
PhysOrg / Nature Chemical Biology Sep 10, 2010	back to top

Artificial 'skin' materials can sense pressure
New artificial 'skin' fashioned out of flexible semiconductor materials can sense touch, making it possible to create robots with a grip delicate enough to hold an egg, yet strong enough to grasp the frying pan, say researchers at the University of California Berkeley. The team found a way to make ultra tiny 'nanowires' from an alloy of silicon and germanium. Wires of this material were formed on the outside of a cylindrical drum, which was then rolled onto a sticky film, depositing the wires in a uniform pattern. Sheets of this semiconductor film were then coated with a layer of pressure-sensitive rubber. Tests showed the material was able to detect a range of force, from typing on a keyboard to holding an object. A second team at Stanford University in California used a different approach, making a material so sensitive it can detect the weight of a butterfly resting on it. Their sensors were made by sandwiching a precisely moulded, highly elastic rubber layer between two electrodes in a regular grid of tiny pyramids. When this material is stretched, the artificial skin measures the change in electrical activity. Eventually, the teams hope artificial skin could be used to restore the sense of touch in people with prosthetic limbs, but scientists will first need a better understanding of how to integrate the system's sensors with the human nervous system.
ABC News / Reuters / Nature Materials Sep 12, 2010	back to top

Bad breath sniffer to hunt for life on Mars
If there is life on Mars, we might smell it before we see it. A chemical involved in bad breath and flatulence in humans could lead us to alien microbes on the Red Planet. The sulphur-containing molecule methyl mercaptan is naturally produced in significant quantities on Earth only by microbes, including some that make their pungent presence known in the human body. NASA's next Mars rover is highly sensitive to the smelly chemical, which could betray the presence of Martian microbes. The instrument in question is the Tunable Laser Spectrometer, which will fly on the Curiosity rover - set to land on Mars in 2012. TLS was designed to analyse the carbon isotopes in Mars's methane to search for signs that the gas has a biological origin. But the isotope tests might produce ambiguous results, so finding methyl mercaptan would help bolster the case for Martian microbes. TLS should be able to detect the gas at concentrations below 100 parts per billion, according to tests on a similar spectrometer. The rover should be able to detect the biomarker gas at concentrations below 100 parts per billion The researchers are also planning to check TLS's sensitivity to other gases produced by terrestrial microbes, like ethane.
New Scientist Sep 16, 2010	back to top

Carbon nanotubes twice as strong as previously thought
Carbon nanotubes are much bigger in the strength department than anyone ever thought, scientists are reporting. New studies on the strength of these submicroscopic cylinders of carbon indicate that on an ounce-for-ounce basis they are at least 117 times stronger than steel and 30 times stronger than Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests and other products. The findings could expand commercial and industrial applications of nanotube materials. Stephen Cronin and colleagues point out that nanotubes have been renowned for exceptional strength, high electrical conductivity, and other properties. Nanotubes can stretch considerably before breaking. This makes them ideal for a variety of futuristic applications, even, if science fiction ever become reality, as cables in 'space elevators' that lift objects from the Earth's surface into orbit. To resolve uncertainties about the actual strength of nanotubes, the scientists applied immense tension to individual carbon nanotubes of different lengths and widths. They found that nanotubes could be stretched up to 14 percent of their normal length without breaking, or more than twice that of previous reports by others. The finding establishes a new lower limit for the ultimate strength of carbon nanotubes, according to the researchers.
ScienceDaily / ACS Nano Sep 15, 2010	back to top

Study: Playing action games improves decision making
Video game players who enjoy action titles - particularly shooters - are better at making quick, accurate decisions, a University of Rochester study finds. Researchers presented a group of players and non-players with a series of dots. The players were asked to identify the direction of the dots' motion. Tests were varied in difficulty based on the number of dots that were moving in the same direction. They found players were able to make their decisions faster, and more accurately, then those who did not play action games. Researchers say the unpredictability of some shooters and other action games could play a factor in how quickly players can make decisions.
USA Today / Current Biology Sep 16, 2010	back to top

Pi record smashed as team finds two-quadrillionth digit
A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi - and a few digits either side of it. Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0. Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record. The computation took 23 days to complete on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers. The heart of the calculation made use of an approach called MapReduce originally developed by Google that divides up big problems into smaller sub-problems, combining the answers to solve otherwise intractable mathematical challenges. At Yahoo, a cluster of 1,000 computers implemented this algorithm to solve an equation that plucks out specific digits of pi. The pursuit of longer versions of pi is a long-standing pastime among mathematicians. But this approach is very different from the full calculation of all of the digits of pi - the record for which was set in January at 2.7 trillion digits. Instead, each of the Hadoop computers was working on a formula that turns a complicated equation for pi into a small set of mathematical steps, returning just one, specific piece of pi.
BBC News Sep 16, 2010	back to top

Facebook rival Diaspora opens up to developers
The open source Diaspora social networking application has taken its first steps towards a full launch with the release of its source code to the developer community. Diaspora has been designed as a cross-platform social networking client that can remove many of the privacy and security fears that plague users of rival sites such as Facebook. Although only discussed up until now, Diaspora's creators managed to secure enough funding to produce the code for their application, and this week released the code to the community. Screenshots in a blog post show Facebook-like profile pages and what appears to be a simple to use app for sharing photographs and other documents. The developers admit Diaspora is still in its infancy, but argue that getting the source code into the hands of developers is a vital first step. The Diaspora team is busily preparing for a user-friendly alpha release next month which will have Facebook integration, more internationalised features and data portability.
VNUnet UK Sep 16, 2010	back to top

Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race
Broadband is the most modern of communication means, while carrier pigeons date back to Roman times. But this week a race between the two highlighted the low speeds of rural broadband in the UK; the pigeon won. Ten USB key-laden pigeons were released from a Yorkshire farm at the same time a five-minute video upload was begun. An hour and a quarter later, the pigeons had reached their destination in Skegness 120km away, while only 24% of a 300MB file had uploaded. Campaigners say the stunt was being carried out to illustrate that broadband in some parts of the UK is still 'not fit for purpose'. It is not the first time that such a race has taken place. Last year a similar experiment in Durban, South Africa saw Winston the pigeon take two hours to finish a 96km journey. In the same time just 4% of a 4GB file had downloaded. Research commissioned by the BBC last year found that around three million homes in the UK had internet connections of below 2Mbps (megabits per second). The government has committed to delivering a minimum of 2Mbps to every home by 2015.
BBC News Sep 16, 2010	back to top