For years, no military program has sparked more fevered speculation from conspiracy theorists than the mysterious High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. And for years, the Pentagon has been pooh-poohing speculation that the enormous collection of transmitters, radars, and magnetometers in Alaska was some sort of superweapon.But, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may not have been entirely off-base, after all.
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Source: wired.com
Swarms of miniature airplanes that could someday track hurricanes, helping researchers make better predictions about the storms’ course and strength, are being tested in the US.
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed small uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) that link up to form an airborne network, allowing the planes to coordinate their behaviour independently of a central control. And they are working on networking autonomous subs the same way.
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Source: newscientist.com
Imagery could help scientists figure out history of ‘Home Plate’. NASA’s sharpest-eyed orbiter at Mars has spotted the Spirit rover far below, sitting on an enigmatic rock formation nicknamed “Home Plate.”
Such imagery could provide new clues about the plateau’s geological history — and serve as a guide for Spirit’s future sojourns around Home Plate, Ken Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey told msnbc.com on Monday.
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Source: msnbc.msn.com
They are making orange peel plastic and robots that can heal themselves. They are six researchers with six ideas that will one day change the world. Everything from making orange peel plastic to robots that can heal themselves.
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Source: esquire.com
If they weren’t, now they are: PC manufacturer Alienware is releasing two notebooks, the Area-51 m15x and Area-51 m17x, with CARET glyphs on their backs.
And the marketing campaign for them include an “alien” message to decipher with further CARET glyphs and symbols.
So, even though the whole didn’t turn out to be a viral marketing campaign, it was too close to it that it was destined to be used that way.
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Source: forgetomori.com
Those robo-dragonflies may not be the only creatures keeping an eye on you. For many years now intelligence agencies have been looking at drones disguised as birds. These days flapping-wing ‘ornithopters’ are not easy to tell apart from birds
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Source: wired.com
The world’s tiniest radio is a step closer to reality.
US scientists have unveiled a detector thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can translate radio waves into sound.
According to a University of California team, the study marks the first time that a nano-sized detector has been demonstrated in a working radio system.
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Source: bbc.co.uk
Assembling nanomaterials with the help of innocuous viruses could lead to threadlike ¬batteries and photovoltaics that can be woven into clothing.
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Source: technologyreview.com
What you will see here is perhaps the greatest model rocket project ever undertaken in the name of fanboy pseudoscience. (Found via SFSignal.) Polecat Aerospace built a 21-foot reproduction (about one-half scale) of an X-wing and designed it to fly–rocket style–with the aid of four M-class solid rocket engines. It even had radio-controlled pivot wings and dome-spinning R2-D2. And fly it did–for about 10 seconds, before the whole laser-cut birch wood-and-steel design disintegrated and crashed into the desert (in California, not Tatooine).
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Source: techrepublic.com
Virtual characters that meet your gaze just like a human have been developed by speech and cognition scientists in France.
New software lets them to look at scenes and people the way humans do. The goal is to make virtual humans and perhaps humanoid robots easier to relate to. A video (avi format, 44 mbMB) shows one of their characters playing a game that involves looking at cards and a researcher.
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Source: newscientist.com
Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its ‘”HI-MEMS” program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS–a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa)–aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry.
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Source: eetimes.com
Now this is pretty neat!
The world’s first true – a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum – has been created by physicists in the US. But don’t expect it to compete with stage magic tricks. So far it only works in two dimensions and on a tiny scale.
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Source: newscientist.com
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