Next generation drones

The maiden flight of a revolutionary drone aircraft that can stay in the air for four days at 65,000 feet is just days away.



The Phantom Eye, made by Boeing's secretive Phantom Works division, is powered by hydrogen and is designed to carry out surveillance and reconnaissance missions while remaining at high altitude. It will produce only water as a by-product.



Its inaugural flight will take place at Edwards Air Force Base in California and is expected to last between four and eight hours.



The maiden flight of a revolutionary drone aircraft that can stay in the air for four days at 65,000 feet is just days away.



The Phantom Eye, made by Boeing's secretive Phantom Works division, is powered by hydrogen and is designed to carry out surveillance and reconnaissance missions while remaining at high altitude. It will produce only water as a by-product.



Its inaugural flight will take place at Edwards Air Force Base in California and is expected to last between four and eight hours.

'It is a perfect example of turning an idea into a reality. It defines our rapid prototyping efforts and will demonstrate the art-of-the-possible when it comes to persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.



'The capabilities inherent in Phantom Eye's design will offer game-changing opportunities for our military, civil and commercial customers.'

'It is a perfect example of turning an idea into a reality. It defines our rapid prototyping efforts and will demonstrate the art-of-the-possible when it comes to persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.



'The capabilities inherent in Phantom Eye's design will offer game-changing opportunities for our military, civil and commercial customers.'

Scientists found that women can smell when a man is horny

Do you, or someone you know, feel like you have an "intuition" about people? Can you sense when they're scared, or attracted to you, even if they're doing everything they can to hide it? Well, there's a good chance your "intuition" comes from that thing on your face between your mouth and your eyes.

It's all about smell. Scientists found that women can smell when a man is horny -- the experiment was as simple as getting some men sexually aroused, collecting their sweat and having women smell it. The women's brains were being scanned by an MRI at the moment they smelled the sweat samples, and sure enough, the horny sweat made their brains light up.If you're a dude and reading that makes you feel anxious, there's more bad luck coming. Your date can probably also smell your fear, and so can the guy at the table next to you. This was discovered in another experiment that was conducted in a similar way. They collected sweat from people of both sexes as they watched either scary or funny movies. Women were able to successfully identify which was the fear-sweat and which was the "laughing at Rob Schneider" sweat. Men didn't do quite as well, but still were able to identify both male fear and female joy from bodily fluids alone.

CIt's caused by a class of chemical signals, unoriginally called chemosignals, that are found in human sweat, tears and possibly other fluids. The extent to which chemosignals affect humans in day-to-day life is still under debate: It's hard to measure this kind of thing accurately, because a lot of the time the influence of chemosignals is subconscious.

 That's what's so weird about it -- even though the MRI showed different parts of the women's brains working depending on which sweat they smelled, in every case the subjects claimed they couldn't tell the difference. Yet, when made to guess which was which (fear sweat vs. happy sweat, horny sweat vs. normal sweat), they were able to pick correctly (at least, at a rate better than chance). So it appears that a lot of what you just "sense" about people is nothing more than picking up chemicals in their fluids.

And make no mistake, these psychic nose-messages do affect us: Sweat collected from men about to go skydiving was shown to activate the "fear" sections in brains of people exposed to it. Women exposed to male fear-sweat also rated neutral faces as more "fearful" than when they were sniffing sweat unassociated with terror. 

And get this -- the military is funding research into automated emotion detection systems that use chemosignals to detect suspiciously anxious people in public places. To picture the future, imagine a robot nose sticking into a human armpit, forever.

Earth's gold and platinum

All the world's gold and platinum ore came from outer space after a mammoth meteorite shower battered the Earth more than four billion years ago, scientists revealed today.



Researchers also discovered there is enough gold and platinum in the Earth's core to plate the surface of the globe with a layer of priceless bling four metres thick.



These huge gold deposits appeared during the Earth's formation when molten iron sank to its centre, dragging with it vast quantities of precious metals.This left the Earth lacking gold and platinum until a cataclysmic meteor shower bombarded the earth 200 million years later.

A staggering 20 billion billion tonnes of meteorite matter, including gold and platinum, slammed into the earth during the 200million-year-long shower.

Geologists at the University of Bristol have discovered this mammoth meteorite shower replenished the earth's lost reserves of precious metals.



Rock samples found in Greenland - which were formed at the Earth's formation - contained a marginally higher ratio of the tungsten isotope 182W compared to more modern rock.

Therefore, modern rock must have come from a meteorite shower which proves today's gold and platinum deposits came from outer space.

Dr Matthias Willbold and Professor Tim Elliott, of the Bristol Isotope Group in the School of Earth Sciences, led the research.

Dr Willbold said: 'Extracting tungsten from the rock samples and analysing its isotopic composition to the precision required was extremely demanding given the small amount of tungsten available in rocks.

'In fact, we are the first laboratory world-wide that has successfully made such high-quality measurements.

'Our work shows that most of the precious metals on which our economies and many key industrial processes are based have been added to our planet by lucky coincidence when the Earth was hit by about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material.'

The metals from these earth-shattering meteorites were stirred into the planet's mantle by gigantic convection processes.

These later emerged in newly formed continents, concentrated in the ore deposits which are mined today.

The research, published in Nature, was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.







--

Rakesh babu R

Keep eating junk food

It may come as a surprise to takeaway lovers, but scientists have found  people don't keep eating junk food just because it is tasty., Instead they found we are such creatures of habit that once we have associated a place with a certain kind of food, like popcorn at the cinema, we will keep eating it - even if it's stale., Researchers from the University of Southern California devised a test to see what causes us to overeat.,  They gave people about to enter a cinema a bucket of just-popped fresh popcorn, or stale week-old popcorn., Moviegoers who didn't usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn because it just didn't taste good.



But those who said they typically had popcorn at the movies ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale.



In other words, for those in the habit of snacking at the movies, it made no difference whether the popcorn tasted good or not.



Co-author Wendy Wood from USC, said: 'People believe their eating behaviour is largely activated by how food tastes. Nobody likes cold, spongy, week-old popcorn.



'But once we've formed an eating habit, we no longer care whether the food tastes good. We'll eat exactly the same amount, whether it's fresh or stale.'



The study, in the current issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, has important implications for understanding overeating and the conditions that may cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.



Lead author David Neal said: 'When we've repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and makes us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present.'





The researchers also gave popcorn to a control group watching movie clips in a meeting room, rather than in a cinema.



In the meeting room, a space not usually associated with popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good. Outside of the cinema context, even habitual movie popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn, demonstrating the extent to which environmental cues can trigger automatic eating behaviour.



'The results show just how powerful our environment can be in triggering unhealthy behaviour,' Mr Neal said.



'Sometimes willpower and good intentions are not enough, and we need to trick our brains by controlling the environment instead.'



In a further experiment, researchers found they could also disrupt eating habits by asking participants to eat the popcorn with their non-dominant hand.



This caused them to pay more attention to what they were eating and so ate much less stale popcorn.



'It's not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the environments in which they typically overeat,' Miss Wood said.



'More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters to actively disrupt the established patterns of how they eat through simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat.'

Freedom to draw on paper

Wacom is the undisputed leader in making tools that allow freehand art to become digital graphics. However, Wacom tablets don't replicate the same feel as sketching on a pad of paper. After all, pen (or pencil) and paper is more for fluid and portable than a bulky Wacom tablet.



However, with Wacom's new Inkling, digital artists can now have the best of both worlds. Using a pen and a receiver, your penstrokes on any piece of paper can be captured and uploaded to your computer for use with graphics applications like Photoshop or Illustrator.



"Inkling's inspiration comes from a desire to give artistic people the freedom to draw on paper and to provide an easy way to transition the drawings to digital media," said Don Varga, Director of Professional Products at Wacom Technology Services Corp.



Inkling uses a wireless receiver that can be attached to any standard paper or sketchbooks. As you sketch, the receiver captures a likeness of the sketch and stores it digitally. The ballpoint pen uses Wacom's pressure sensing technology to detect how hard the pen is being pressed to the paper while sketching. Sketches can be opened with the included Inkling Sketch Manager software to edit, delete or add layers, but many users will likely export layered files directly to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, or even Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. Files can be saved in JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, SVG and PDF formats for use with other applications.



According to Varga, "Inkling's support of raster based applications such as Adobe Photoshop, as well as vector based applications such as Adobe Illustrator, will provide users with options for incorporating their preliminary sketches into further developed work."



Inkling will be available in mid-September online at Amazon and the Wacom Store for a $199.  Since it bridges the gap between freehand sketching and digital drawing, Inkling may soon become the perfect companion for digital artists. Get a closer look at Inkling below.