Wow, someone just stumbled upon this image of a UFO over Cape Town, Africa using Google Earth! What else haven’t we found out there, maybe monsters in the oceans?
I know what I’m doing this evening.
Unexplained-mysteries.com writes:
It isn’t clear what the object is or if it is a genuine image, further analysis suggests a second UFO may be present in the upper left however it isn’t as clear. Has Google caught something unexplained with its cameras or is there a more down to earth explanation ?
Now, this gives a new meaning to “living art”! Let’s try to get one of these pieces into the Museum Of The Weird, it would be right at home “living” among our other oddities! Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
Wired.com writes:
When artist Oron Catts has to murder a living sculpture he has painstakingly raised by hand, he doesn’t really mind: He can always grow a fresh one. Catts, cofounder of the SymbioticA Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, is known for culturing living cells into a variety of shapes (like Extra Ear, above). But since the cells, which feed on a slurry of nutrients and fetal-cow serum, are not part of a body with an immune system, they’re vulnerable to disease and infection; they must be kept in sterile glass or plastic chambers to maintain proper pH and temperature. When an exhibition ends, Catts sometimes opens the habitat and lets onlookers dispatch the sculpture with the poison of their bacteria-laden touch. Fifteen years ago, Catts was lucky to find a biologist willing to teach him the techniques needed to make his works. These days, SymbioticA offers residencies and workshops to artists who focus on the living world the way others blow glass or make prints. One of Catts’ pieces is slated for resurrection in China this summer. Life goes on and on.
Ready to go: The Terrafugia Transition has finally been declared road legal, and it could be in U.S. garages as early as next year. It was first developed in 2009, but has faced years of hold-ups
It’s been cleared to take to the skies for more than a year – but that’s not much use when you’re supposed to be able to drive it, too.
But now the flying car has at least been declared officially road legal.
It means the Terrafugia Transition could be in U.S. garages as early as next autumn, after two years of delays.
It may not be the world’s first flying car, but its makers say it is the first to have wings that fold up automatically at the push of a button.
It costs $200,000 – about the same price as a Ferrari – and can be reserved online for what Terrafugia describes as a ‘modest’ $10,000 deposit.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has officially announced the Transition, called a ‘roadable aircraft’ by its makers, can now be legally driven on America’s roads.
It granted the vehicle special dispensations, which allow it to use airplane-style plastic windows instead of the safety glass usually used in cars, as it would be too heavy.
Innovative: The Transition 'roadable aircraft' costs $200,000, and can be reserved for a $10,000 depositReady for lift-off: It takes just 30 seconds for the Transition to convert from a car into a plane
The polycarbonate windscreens can withstand the impact of birds, so they won’t fracture.
The administration has also granted Terrafugia permission to use heavier-grade tyres, which are not normally allowed on multi-purpose vehicles.
It’s the second hurdle the Transition had to overcome before it could go on sale, after the Federal Aviation Administration ruled last year it could fly with its current weight, 110lbs over the normal legal limit for light sport aircraft category.
Terrafugia had originally hoped to deliver its first production vehicles as early as this year, but after problems with suppliers it has had to delay the release date to late 2012.
(Reuters) – If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.
A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.
“I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so,” de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain’s Royal Institution academy of science.
“And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today.”
De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular “maintenance,” which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.
De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.
He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.
“The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic,” he explained.
CHALLENGE
Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.
To date, the world’s longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.
Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.
We’ve seen our fair share of Iron Man suits in the past, but this is the first time that we see the “pre” Iron Man suit from the Iron Man series (the one tony stark made on the cave)
The suit was made by 25 year old Wang Xiao kang, he became a huge fan of the series after the movie came out in 2008. He works at ZTE the huge Multi National Telecommunications company out of China. He spent nearly 3,000 yuan (about $460) and spent 3 months in construction time until he finally finished the realistic Iron man Suit.
Wang Xiao, claims that he’s not very good with DIY equipment, and he started to learn how to do just about everything from Google searches, he found forums that talked about props, and he began to search for behind the scenes of the iron man movies to learn how they did the parts.
World first: Ecci's creators say it is the most advanced robot ever created with tendons, muscles, bones, a brain and the visual capability of a human
It looks like a stripped-down version of Star Wars character C-3PO.
But this robot is science fact not fiction – and one of the most advanced in the world.
Ecci, as it has been named, is the first ever robot to have ‘muscles’ and ‘tendons’, as well as the ‘bones’ they help move. All made of a specially developed plastic.
And most advanced of all, it also has a brain with the ability to correct its mistakes – a trait previously only seen in humans.
Developed by a team of scientists at the University of Zurich, Ecci, is short for Eccerobot. Ecce in Latin means Lo or Behold.
The robot uses a series of electric motors to move the joints the tendons are connected to.
And a computer built into the brain of Ecci allows him to learn from his mistakes.
If, for example, a movement is causing him to stumble or drop something – the information is studied and analysed to avoid making the same mistake next time.
Learning from its mistakes: The robot has a brain that allows it to analyse data if a movement causes it to stumble or drop something - thereby ensuring it does not happen again
The creation also has the same vision capacity of humans too, despite only having one cyclops style eye.
The scientists now hope their creation will usher in a whole new generation for robots – and could aid development of artificial limbs.
Supatra "Nat" Sasuphan, the world's hairiest child.
Scientists have discovered a genetic mutation responsible for a disorder that causes people to sprout thick hair on their faces and bodies.
Hypertrichosis, sometimes called “werewolf syndrome” is a very rare condition, with fewer than 100 cases documented worldwide. But researchers knew the disorder runs in families, and in 1995 they traced the approximate location of the mutation to a section of the X chromosome (one of the two sex chromosomes) in a Mexican family affected by hypertrichosis.
Men with the syndrome have hair covering their faces and eyelids, while women grow thick patches on their bodies. In March, a Thai girl with the condition got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s hairiest child.
A man in China with congenital hypertrichosis helped researchers break the case. Xue Zhang, a professor of medical genetics at the Peking Union Medical College, tested the man and his family and found an extra chunk of genes on the X chromosome. The researchers then returned to the Mexican family and also found an extra gene chunk (which was different from that of the Chinese man) in the same location of their X chromosomes. [Top 10 Worst Hereditary Conditions]
The extra DNA may switch on a hair-growth gene nearby, resulting in runaway furriness. The best bet for a culprit, wrote study researcher Pragna Patel of the University of Southern California, is a gene called SOX3, which is known to play a role in hair growth.
“If in fact the inserted sequences turn on a gene that can trigger hair growth, it may hold promise for treating baldness or hirsutism [excessive hair growth] in the future, especially if we could engineer ways to achieve this with drugs or other means,” Patel said in a statement.
An American ‘armchair astronomer’ claims he has discovered a strange structure on the surface of Mars while browsing Google.
David Martines was scanning Google Mars when he discovered the long white edifice and has even listed the coordinates (49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W) so others can see it for themselves.
Mr Martines posted a video of the ‘station’ on YouTube which has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
On the video, he talks through the discovery he has named “Bio-Station Alpha”. “It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet (210m) long and 150 feet (45m) wide. It looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” he says.
“It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage — hope it’s not a weapon.
“I don’t know if NASA even knows about this.”
NASA and Google have yet to respond to media inquiries.
Learning all the time: The Lingodroids project at the University of Queensland has developed robots that can create and speak their own language
In the Terminator films it was the moment when machines learned to think for themselves that sparked the downfall of humanity.
If that hypothesis proves to be true then scientists at the University of Queensland might have a lot to answer for.
Their Lingodroid project has developed robots that are creating and speaking their own languages – and increasing their own knowledge in the process.
The robot language has now evolved to a point where they can arrange to meet each other in different places, and even hold polite conversations.
‘Words’ are electronic noises, created using a random number of syllables, which are then assigned to locations. Location names created so far have included ‘kuzo’, ‘jaro’ and ‘fexo’. Each location was around a few metres in size.
To test and develop their language skills the Lingodroids play ‘word’ games in which they arrange to meet in other places, and it has worked successfully in simulations and in a real office.
The robots are creating their own ‘words’ because human languages are so complex and nuanced that the robots found it hard to decipher.
‘Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop,’ project leader Dr Ruth Schulz told the BBC.
‘This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans.’
The Lingodroids themselves are two-wheeled robots, looking not too dissimilar to some vacuum cleaners, which use an onboard camera, sonar and a laser range-finder to map the space around them.
The language, which sounds similar to the keytones on a phone, is actually spoken aloud by the robots using a microphone and speaker.
Games played among them include the go-to, the where-are-we and the how-far game.
In the where-are-we game, the robots map their environment independently by driving around, and then whenever they meet another robot, one gives the area in which they meet a name and both update their vocabulary with the new word.
Sci-fi: In the Terminator series of films the moment when robots learned to speak for themselves that brought catastrophic consequences
In the go-to game, one robot chooses a location, both robots find the place in their own map, and then the navigate to that place independently.
The vocabulary this creates, called a toponymic lexicon, allows the robots to go on to develop ‘words’ for distances and directions.
With their expanded lexicon, the robots were even able to meet each other in places they had talked about but never been together, and to describe places they ‘imagined’ exist outside their own maps.
A planet 20 light years away is the first outside the solar system to be officially declared habitable by European scientists.
The ‘exoplanet’ Gliese 581d has conditions that could support Earth-like life, including possible watery oceans and rainfall, they say.
Yet any future space voyagers landing there would find themselves in truly alien surroundings.
The sky is likely to be murky red, not blue, gravity is twice that of Earth, doubling the weight of anyone standing on the surface, and the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere would almost certainly not be breathable by humans.
