Robotics

While it may not be quite up to Tony Stark's standards, DARPA's Warrior Web suit has the advantage of being real. DARPA has revealed photos and video of an early prototype of its Warrior Web project. Warrior Web is a flexible exoskeleton suit that uses only 100 Watts of power. The goal is to reduce the injuries and fatigue that result from a soldier carrying a typical 100 pound load for extended periods of time. DARPA hopes the exoskeleton will boost the soldier's endurance and carrying capacity. The DARPA Warrior Web program page provides this description:The Warrior Web program seeks to develop the technologies required to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by dynamic events typically found in the warfighter’s environment. The ultimate program goal is a lightweight, conformal under-suit that is transparent to the user (like a diver’s wetsuit). The suit seeks to employ a system (or web) of closed-loop controlled actuation, transmission, and functional structures that protect injury prone areas, focusing on the soft tissues that connect and interface with the skeletal system.The current prototypes are part of what's know as "Task A" and embody only certain key elements of the final design. Warrior Web Task B, which begins this fall, will attempt to integrate all the Task A technologies into a single suit. For more, visit the Warrior Web Program website or read on to see a video of the Task A prototype suit in action.

Research teams from UW-Milwaukee and the University of York investigating the properties of ultra-thin films of new materials are helping bring quantum computing one step closer to reality. An on-going collaboration between physicists from York and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA, is focusing on understanding, tailoring and tuning the electronic properties of topological insulators (TI) - new materials with surfaces that host a quantum state of matter – at the nanoscale. Subject: Computer Science

The temperature in the permafrost on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic is nearly as cold as that of the surface of Mars. So the recent discovery by a McGill University led team of scientists of a bacterium that is able to thrive at –15ºC, the coldest temperature ever reported for bacterial growth, is exciting. The bacterium offers clues about some of the necessary preconditions for microbial life on both the Saturn moon Enceladus and Mars, where similar briny subzero conditions are thought to exist. Subject: Biology & Aging

As the human body fine-tunes its neurological wiring, nerve cells often must fix a faulty connection by amputating an axon — the "business end" of the neuron that sends electrical impulses to tissues or other neurons. It is a dance with death, however, because the molecular poison the neuron deploys to sever an axon could, if uncontained, kill the entire cell. Subject: Brain & Behavior

Researchers at Lund University have succeeded in preventing very early symptoms of Huntington's disease, depression and anxiety, by deactivating the mutated huntingtin protein in the brains of mice. "We are the first to show that it is possible to prevent the depression symptoms of Huntington's disease by deactivating the diseased protein in nerve cell populations in the hypothalamus in the brain. This is hugely exciting and bears out our previous hypotheses," explains Åsa Petersén, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Lund University. Subject: Health & Medicine

Rebecca Vitsum told CNN anchor she was atheist during live interview. Behind her were ruins, a tangled mess where structures once stood. Cradled in her arms, the mother's 19-month-old son played with a snatched microphone, unfazed by the chaos swirling around him. And in front of Rebecca Vitsmun stood CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who—after asking her about the decision that saved her and her son's lives—had one more question: "I guess you got to thank the Lord, right?" he asked. "Yeah," she mumbled, smiling and looking down. Subject: Atheism & Religion

In a remote fishing community in Venezuela, a lone fisherman sits on a cliff overlooking the southern Caribbean Sea. This man—the lookout—is responsible for directing his comrades on the water, who are too close to their target to detect their next catch. Using abilities honed by years of scanning the water's surface, he can tell by shadows, ripples, and even the behavior of seabirds, where the fish are schooling, and what kind of fish they might be, without actually seeing the fish. Subject: Brain & Behavior

Everybody who has tried to stack oranges in a box knows that a regular packing of spheres in a flat layer naturally leads to a hexagonal pattern, where each sphere is surrounded by six neighbours in a honeycomb-like fashion. In an article just published on-line in PNAS, researchers from Wageningen University report an exception to this rule: when small, micrometer-sized particles are placed on a curved oil-water surface, they arrange in a square pattern, as on a chessboard. Subject: Technology

"Crazyism" about the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence must be among the core truths about the mind. In my central article on the topic, I develop the view by defending two subordinate theses: universal bizarreness and universal dubiety. Subject: Brain & Behavior

With this new view of a spectacular stellar nursery ESO is celebrating 15 years of the Very Large Telescope—the world's most advanced optical instrument. This picture reveals thick clumps of dust silhouetted against the pink glowing gas cloud known to astronomers as IC 2944. These opaque blobs resemble drops of ink floating in a strawberry cocktail, their whimsical shapes sculpted by powerful radiation coming from the nearby brilliant young stars. Subject: Astronomy/Cosmology