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Image: Wikipedia

Issue no. 4, 2012 Published: Feb 10, 2012
Stock trading 'fractures' may warn of next crash
Transplant jaw made by 3D printer claimed as first
LARES 'mirror ball' sat will test Einstein's theory
Four telescope link-up creates world's largest mirror
Mind control could be future of warfare
Extinct human's genome placed on internet
Obstacles help worm speed through water maze

Stock trading 'fractures' may warn of next crash
Might a fleeting and little understood aspect of stock market dynamics hold the key to warding off financial crashes? That is the tantalising suggestion to emerge from a group of physicists who have been studying stock movements. The study is the first to focus on an ultra-fast feature of market dynamics that the team calls a 'fracture'. Fractures happen when the price of a stock briefly shoots up or down, often before returning to its original level. They take place so quickly that they can be invisible to any human following the price. If fractures are a source of instability, computerised trading algorithms may be to blame. Use of these algorithms, which make automated trades in milliseconds, has mushroomed in recent years. Experts fear that one or more out-of-control algorithms could cause a crash, as may have happened in the so-called Flash Crash of May 2010. The research is based on price logs from over 60 different markets collected by Nanex, a company that sells streaming market data. The team trawled through the data and found that fractures are remarkably common - 18,520 took place between 2006 and 2010. Intriguingly, the number of daily fractures increased about a week before the stock market crash of September 2008, and also before a sudden but smaller crash in May 2010, which is still not fully understood. The researchers think that the build-up of fractures can in some cases destabilise the entire market, much as the accumulation of tiny cracks can lead to catastrophic failures in structures such as aircraft wings. The link between fractures and stock market crashes requires further investigation, but suggests it might be possible to build an early-warning system based on the rate at which fractures occur.
New Scientist / arxiv.org/abs/1202.1448 Feb 09, 2012	back to top

Transplant jaw made by 3D printer claimed as first
A 3D printer-created lower jaw has been fitted to an 83-year-old woman's face in what doctors say is the first operation of its kind. The transplant was carried out in June in the Netherlands, but is only now being publicised. The implant was made out of titanium powder - heated and fused together by a laser, one layer at a time. Technicians say the operation's success paves the way for the use of more 3D-printed patient-specific parts. The surgery follows research carried out at the Biomedical Research Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium, and the implant was built by LayerWise - a specialised metal-parts manufacturer based in Belgium. The implant is a complex part - involving articulated joints, cavities to promote muscle attachment and grooves to direct the regrowth of nerves and veins. However, once designed, it only took a few hours to print. Once completed, the part was given a bioceramic coating. The team said the operation to attach it to the woman's face took four hours, a fifth of the time required for traditional reconstructive surgery. The woman was able to go home after four days. Her new jaw weighs 107g, just over a third heavier than before, but the doctors said that she should find it easy to get used to the extra weight.
BBC News Feb 06, 2012	back to top

LARES 'mirror ball' sat will test Einstein's theory
You don't have to be big to challenge Einstein. A pocked ball just 36 centimetres wide is the latest space probe tasked with measuring general relativity, one of the cornerstones of modern physics. The Laser Relativity Satellite, or LARES, is a tungsten sphere with reflectors mounted in 92 holes punched into its surface. It is due to launch on a new ESA rocket called Vega, designed to cheaply launch payloads of less than 2500kg. The launch window opens on 13 February. LARES's orbit will be tracked by bouncing ground-based lasers off the reflectors. General relativity states that gravity arises from the curvature of space and time. If this is true, Earth should drag space-time around with it as it spins, slightly perturbing the orbits of satellites. Though general relativity is the accepted theory of gravity, it might break down if measured with greater accuracy. The beleaguered Gravity Probe B satellite achieved an accuracy within 19% of the expected orbit change; earlier satellites got within 10%. Researchers hope to achieve 1% with LARES.
New Scientist Feb 08, 2012	back to top

Four telescope link-up creates world's largest mirror
Astronomers have created the world's largest virtual optical telescope, linking four telescopes in Chile so that they operate as a single device. The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory form a virtual mirror of 130m in diameter. Linking all four units of the VLT will give scientists a much more detailed look at the Universe than previous experiments using just two or three telescopes to create a virtual mirror. The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry. In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on Earth. Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope's spatial resolution and zooming capabilities. The VLT is one of several telescopes in the Atacama Desert set up by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ESO is an international research organisation headquartered in Munich, Germany, and sponsored by 15 member countries.
BBC News Feb 03, 2012	back to top

Mind control could be future of warfare
Wars of the future might be decided through manipulation of people's minds, concludes a report this week from the UK's Royal Society. It warns that the potential military applications of neuroscience breakthroughs need to be regulated more closely. 'New imaging technology will allow new targets in the brain to be identified, and while some will be vital for medicine, others might be used to incapacitate people,' says Rod Flower of Queen Mary, University of London, who chairs the panel that wrote the report. The report describes how such technology is allowing organisations like the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to test ways of improving soldiers' mental alertness and capabilities. It may also allow soldiers to operate weaponry remotely through mind-machine interfaces. Other research could be used to design gases and electronics that temporarily disable enemy forces. This potentially violates human rights, through interference with thought processes, and opens up the threat of indiscriminate killing. The panel highlights the time that Russian security forces ended a hostage siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002 by filling the venue with fentanyl, an anaesthetic gas. Along with the perpetrators, 125 hostages died. The Chemical Weapons Convention is vague about whether such incapacitants are legal. Ambiguities like this must be ironed out, say the panellists.
New Scientist Feb 07, 2012	back to top

Extinct human's genome placed on internet
Scientists have reconstructed the entire genome of an extinct type of human from a 30,000-year-old finger bone, and made it available on the internet. The discovery of the finger in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia was announced in 2010, and a draft version of the genome created. This showed that this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans that have become known as Denisovans. Together with the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans. It appears that human occupation at the site started up to 280,000 years ago, while the finger bone was found in a layer, which has been dated to between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. Now, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology team has developed new techniques which have allowed them to sequence every position in the Denisovan genome about 30 times over, using DNA extracted from less than 10 milligrams of the finger bone. This allows even the small differences between the copies of genes that this individual inherited from its mother and father to be distinguished. It is the first high-coverage, complete genome sequence of an archaic human group. Biologists hope to be able to use the genome to discover genetic changes that were important for the development of modern human culture and technology, and which enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world. It is also expected to reveal new aspects of the history of Denisovans and Neanderthals.
TG Daily Feb 08, 2012	back to top

Obstacles help worm speed through water maze
Think twice before challenging a nematode to an obstacle course. The nimble microscopic worms can race through a maze of pegs at nine times their free-swimming speed. Researchers from New York University let worms loose in water mazes where the spacing of pegs varied. Then they created mechanical simulations of a worm's motion, using the same layout of obstacles, which were compared to the real-life behaviour. The team found that a worm's strokes closely resembled those in the models. When the amplitude of a wiggle closely matched the spacing in the maze, a worm would be propelled faster as it bumped into obstacles. Wider spacing would cause a worm to swim slower despite a faster wiggle rate. The findings suggest that physical forces, and not just sensory input, play a significant role in helping a worm navigate. The team will now be testing the worms in complex obstacle courses that are more similar to the sediment in their natural environment. The work could provide insight into the wiggly motion of sperm and the lifecycle of malaria.
New Scientist Feb 08, 2012	back to top