PERSONALITY TEST

PERSONALITY TEST Choose an icon that speaks to you the most. Don't think about it too hard. Read the answer below... Let us know what you got! 

1. You are a generous and moral (not to confuse with moralizing) person. You always work on self-improvement. You are very ambitious and have very high standards. People might think that communicating with you is difficult, but for you, it isn't easy to be who you are. You work very hard but you are not in the least selfish. You work because you want to improve the world. You have a great capacity to love people until they hurt you. But even after they do. . . you keep loving. Very few people can appreciate everything you do as well as you deserve. 

2. You are a fun, honest person. You are very responsible and like taking care of others. You believe in putting in an honest day's work and accept many work-related responsibilities. You have a very good personality and people come to trust you easily. You are bright, witty and fast-thinking. You always have an interesting story to tell. 

3.You are a smart and thoughtful person. You are a great thinker. Your thoughts and ideas are the most important. You like to think about your theories and views alone. You are an introvert. You get along with those who likes to think and learn. You spend a lot of time, thinking about morality. You are trying to do what is right, even if the majority of society does not agree with you. 

4. You are perceptive and philosophical person. You are a unique, one soul of your kind. Next to you there's no one even slightly similar to you. You are intuitive and a bit quirky. You are often misunderstood, and it hurts you. You need personal space. Your creativity needs to be developed, it requires respect of others. You are a person who clearly sees the light and dark sides of life. You are very emotional. 

5. You are self-assured and in charge. You are very independent. Your guiding principle in life is 'I'll do it my way.'. You are very self-reliant and know how to stay strong for yourself and the people you Love. You know exactly what you want and are not afraid of pursuing your dreams. The only thing you demand from people is honesty. You are strong enough to accept the truth. 

6. You are kind and sensitive. People relate to you very well. You have many friends and you love helping them. You have this warm and bright aura that makes people feel good when they are around you. Every day, you think about what you can do to improve yourself. You want to be interesting, insightful and unique. More than anybody else in the world, you need to love. You are even ready to love those who don't love you back. 

7. You are happy and unflappable. You are a very sensitive and understanding person. You are a great listener who know how to be non-judgmental. You believe that everybody has their own journey in life. You are open to new people and events. You are highly resistant to stress and rarely worry. Normally, you are very relaxed. You always manage to have a good time and never lose your way. 

8. You are charming and energetic. You are a fun person who knows how to make people laugh. You live in a state of harmony with the universe. You are spontaneous and enthusiastic. You never say no to an adventure. Often, you end up surprising and even shocking people. But that's just how you are. . . You always remain true to yourself. You have many interests and if something proves of interest to you, you will not rest until you acquire a profound knowledge of this area. 

9. You are optimistic and lucky. You believe that life is a gift and you try to achieve as much as possible and put this gift to the best use possible. You are very proud of your achievements. You are ready to stick by the people you care about through thick and thin. You have a very healthy approach to life. The glass is (at least) half full for you. You use any opportunity to forgive, learn, and grow because you believe that life is too short to do otherwise.

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Scientists detect water around a hot Jupiter

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of a research team that has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. The team, including scientists from California Institute of Technology, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Arizona, applied a sophisticated Doppler technique to the infrared to directly detect the planet and demonstrate the presence of water in its atmosphere. The discovery is described in the March 10, 2014 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The planet, named tau Boo b, orbits the nearby star tau Boötis and belongs to a class of exotic planets called "hot Jupiters" that are not found in our solar system. A hot Jupiter is a massive extrasolar planet that orbits very close to its parent star. Unlike our Jupiter, which is fairly cold and has an orbital period of about 12 years, tau Boo b orbits its star every 3.3 days and is heated to extreme temperatures by its proximity to the star. Under these conditions, water will exist as a high temperature steam. While hot Jupiters are found to be relatively common in the Galaxy, the origin and nature of these planets remain the subject of intense research.

The research team studied data collected at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph instrument. Because a hot Jupiter is too close to its star to separate the planet's light from that of the star, the researchers adapted a Doppler technique previously used to detect low mass-ratio spectroscopic binary stars. Application of this method to tau Boo b, however, posed a huge challenge, because the infrared radiation from the star is more than 10,000 times greater than that of the planet. The analysis software to extract this minute planetary signal was developed by Chad Bender, a Penn State member of the team, while he was a National Research Council Associate at NRL.

By comparing the molecular signature of water to the combined light spectrum of the planet and star, the scientists were able to measure the motion of the planet as it orbits the star and establish the presence of water vapor in the planet's atmosphere. The team also determined that the planet is six times more massive than Jupiter.

Dr. John Carr, a researcher in NRL's Remote Sensing Division and co-author on the paper, said, "The detection of water vapor in tau Boo b is an exciting and important step in understanding the composition of these exotic planets. Our result also demonstrates the power of this technique for measuring water and other molecules in the atmospheres of planets, giving us a new tool to study the nature and evolution of extrasolar planets."

Prior to this, scientists have reported detections of water for just a few other extrasolar planets. Most of these used the transit method, which requires a special orientation that causes the planet's orbit to pass in front of its star, as viewed from Earth. Alternatively, if a planet is sufficiently far away from its parent star, imaging techniques can be used to measure the composition of the atmosphere. However, most extrasolar planets do not fit into these two categories. The development of this new technique for exoplanets provides a means to learn about the atmospheres of this population of planets.

This work is ongoing, with plans to further examine the physical properties and composition of this hot Jupiter's atmosphere. The research team is also applying this technique to search for water and other molecules in several other hot Jupiter exoplanets.

Source: Phys.org

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Computers see through faked expressions of pain better than people

A joint study by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto has found that a computer system spots real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can.
The work, titled "Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions," is published in the latest issue of Current Biology.

"The computer system managed to detect distinctive dynamic features of facial expressions that people missed," said Marian Bartlett, research professor at UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation and lead author of the study. "Human observers just aren't very good at telling real from faked expressions of pain."

Senior author Kang Lee, professor at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, said "humans can simulate facial expressions and fake emotions well enough to deceive most observers. The computer's pattern-recognition abilities prove better at telling whether pain is real or faked."

The research team found that humans could not discriminate real from faked expressions of pain better than random chance – and, even after training, only improved accuracy to a modest 55 percent. The computer system attains an 85 percent accuracy.

"In highly social species such as humans," said Lee, "faces have evolved to convey rich information, including expressions of emotion and pain. And, because of the way our brains are built, people can simulate emotions they're not actually experiencing – so successfully that they fool other people. The computer is much better at spotting the subtle differences between involuntary and voluntary facial movements."

"By revealing the dynamics of facial action through machine vision systems," said Bartlett, "our approach has the potential to elucidate 'behavioral fingerprints' of the neural-control systems involved in emotional signaling."

The single most predictive feature of falsified expressions, the study shows, is the mouth, and how and when it opens. Fakers' mouths open with less variation and too regularly.

"Further investigations," said the researchers, "will explore whether over-regularity is a general feature of fake expressions."

In addition to detecting pain malingering, the computer-vision system might be used to detect other real-world deceptive actions in the realms of homeland security, psychopathology, job screening, medicine, and law, said Bartlett.

"As with causes of pain, these scenarios also generate strong emotions, along with attempts to minimize, mask, and fake such emotions, which may involve 'dual control' of the face," she said. "In addition, our computer-vision system can be applied to detect states in which the human face may provide important clues as to health, physiology, emotion, or thought, such as drivers' expressions of sleepiness, students' expressions of attention and comprehension of lectures, or responses to treatment of affective disorders."

Source: Phys.org

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Device may restore speech to people on breathing tubes

Doctors in the Netherlands say they've found a potentially important new use for a simple old device—the "electronic voice box." It may help hospitalized patients who've lost the ability to speak because they need tubes down their throat to help them breathe.

The electronic voice box, or "electrolarynx," was first developed in the 1920s. It's a cylinder, about the size of an electric shaver that vibrates at one end. It's been used almost exclusively to help people who've lost their ability to speak because their vocal cords have been surgically removed, often after cancer.

"It's mostly been used in the past. It's something I saw when I was a student. I saw a patient who was able to talk with the device and it made a huge impression on me," said Dr. Armand Girbes, an intensive care physician at VU University Medical Center, in Amsterdam.

The device came to mind again when a patient's wife recently came to Girbes to say that her husband, who was on a mechanical ventilator after lung surgery, was frustrated because he couldn't speak. Girbes searched the hospital to dig up the only electrolarynx they still had.

"I tried it myself. I put it on my neck," he said.

After a few minutes of practice, which Girbes said felt a little bit like lip-synching, he used his mouth and tongue to form words without actually trying to make the sounds himself—and he was able to produce intelligible words.

His 59-year-old patient got the hang of it just as quickly.

"I still remember the first thing he said to his wife: He said 'Hello, my dear.' That was very moving to hear from a patient who was critically ill in intensive care," Girbes said.

He reported his success in the March 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"I think it's an interesting idea," said Dr. Lindsay Reder, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She was not involved in the patient's case.

"A lot of these patients who are intubated are also on sedation medication because it's not the most comfortable thing," Reder said.

For his part, Girbes said a side benefit of using the electrolarynx in ventilated patients is that they might need less sedation (because of reduced stress). Delirium and oversedation are major problems for patients in intensive care units.

Reder said that's an interesting theory, but one that requires more research to prove for certain.

"I think it's something we'd obviously need to do more of it in a controlled way to know if it's widely applicable, but I do think it's an interesting thing from a quality-of-life and quality-of-care standpoint," she said.

Source: Phys.org

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Scientists Discover Why Dark Chocolate Is So Good For You In Most Delicious Research Project Ever

Chocolate: can't live without it.



Now you have a scientific excuse to dive into your daily chocolate fix: researchers have found the reason dark chocolate is so healthy for you.

Research presented at the 247th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society reveals that microbes in the gut consume the chocolate and convert it into heart-healthy anti-inflammatory compounds.

"We found that there are two kinds of microbes in the gut: the ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones," Maria Moore, one of the study's researchers, explained.

"The good microbes, such as Bifidobacterium and lactic acid bacteria, feast on chocolate. When you eat dark chocolate, they grow and ferment it, producing compounds that are anti-inflammatory."

Inflammation has been linked to heart disease and stroke although, according to the American Heart Association, "[e]xactly how inflammation plays a role in heart attack and stroke remains a topic of ongoing research."

Before grabbing the nearest chocolate bar or scooping a bowl of chocolate ice cream, it's important to note that the health benefits are directly linked to cocoa powder and not a sugar- and milk-laden chocolate bar; lead researcher John Finleyrecommends sprinkling a little cocoa powder on top of oatmeal.

He also noted that combining dark chocolate with fruits like pomegranates and açaí could reap even more health benefits.

Source: SCI

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Eyes are windows to the soul—and evolution

Why do we become saucer-eyed from fear and squint from disgust?These near-opposite facial expressions are rooted in emotional responses that exploit how our eyes gather and focus light to detect an unknown threat, according to a study by a Cornell University neuroscientist.

Our eyes widen in fear, boosting sensitivity and expanding our field of vision to locate surrounding danger. When repulsed, our eyes narrow, blocking light to sharpen focus and pinpoint the source of our disgust.

The findings by Adam Anderson, professor of human development in Cornell's College of Human Ecology, suggest that human facial expressions arose from universal, adaptive reactions to environmental stimuli and not originally as social communication signals, lending support to Charles Darwin's 19th century theories on the evolution of emotion.

"These opposing functions of eye widening and narrowing, which mirror that of pupil dilation and constriction, might be the primitive origins for the expressive capacity of the face," said Anderson. "And these actions are not likely restricted to disgust and fear, as we know that these movements play a large part in how perhaps all expressions differ, including surprise, anger and even happiness."

Anderson and his co-authors described these ideas in the paper, "Optical Origins of Opposing Facial Expression Actions," published in the March 2014 issue ofPsychological Science.

Looks of disgust result in the greatest visual acuity—less light and better focus; fearful expressions induce maximum sensitivity—more light and a broader visual field.

"These emotions trigger facial expressions that are very far apart structurally, one with eyes wide open and the other with eyes pinched," said Anderson, the paper's senior author. "The reason for that is to allow the eye to harness the properties of light that are most useful in these situations."

What's more, emotions filter our reality, shaping what we see before light ever reaches the inner eye.

"We tend to think of perception as something that happens after an image is received by the brain, but in fact emotions influence vision at the very earliest moments of visual encoding."

Anderson's Affect and Cognition Laboratory is now studying how these contrasting eyemovements may account for how facial expressions have developed to support nonverbal communication across cultures.

"We are seeking to understand how these expressions have come to communicate emotions to others," he said. "We know that the eyes can be a powerful basis for reading what people are thinking and feeling, and we might have a partial answer to why that is."

Source phys.org

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Big Bang: Einstein's relativity theory backed by new-wave discovery

In the first moment following the Big Bang, scientists believe the universe got very big, very quickly.

On Monday, US astronomers said they had peered further back in time than ever before and detected compelling evidence of this dramatic and rapid expansion, a theory known as ''cosmic inflation''.

''It is somewhat of a mad theory, which was introduced in the 1980s to solve a lot of issues with the way the universe looked,'' said University of Melbourne cosmologist Alan Duffy.
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''This discovery is really the first confirmation that a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe grew enormously,'' he said. ''We're all pretty ecstatic about this result.''

The announcement is also significant because it provides proof for Einstein's final prediction, the theory of general relativity, which predicts a violent event such as the rapid expansion of the universe would create ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

After using a radio telescope at the South Pole, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said it had detected very specific patterns of light, known as B-modes, which were almost certainly caused by very early gravitational waves as a result of cosmic inflation.

''We're very excited to present our results because they seem to match the prediction of the theory so closely,'' said John Kovac, the leader of the BICEP project.

While strong circumstantial evidence existed for gravitational waves, no one had observed them directly, which was why the detection of light patterns left by primordial gravitational waves had astronomers so excited.

If the result was verified it promised to be one of the biggest advances in cosmology in 20 years, comparable to Australian Nobel prize winner Brian Schmidt discovering the expansion of the universe was accelerating. It also had implications for scientist's understanding of quantum mechanics.

University of Sydney astrophysicist Bryan Gaensler said normally the effect of gravitational waves was so small it was extremely difficult to detect.

But the rapid and violent expansion caused by inflation would have set the whole universe ringing with them, he said.

And although these early waves had long disappeared, the theory of inflation predicted they would leave behind a very specific and subtle imprint in the form of B-modes.

Professor Gaensler said scientists had been looking for B-modes for years, but the radio signal they emitted was very faint and travelled from the edge of the universe.

''It's like looking through a really dirty window at something that's thousands of kilometres away,'' he said.

University of Melbourne cosmologist Katie Mack said while the detection of primordial gravitational waves in the early universe was a ''really big deal'' and was consistent with the theory of inflation, their presence alone was not direct evidence of the theory.

''We can't say for sure that those gravitational waves were produced by inflation,'' she said.

But she said their detection was evidence that gravity had quantum mechanical properties, like particles, something physicists suspected but had not seen evidence of.

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A 'chicken from hell' dinosaur: Large feathered dinosaur species discovered in North America

Scientists from Carnegie and Smithsonian museums and the University of Utah today unveiled the discovery, naming and description of a sharp-clawed, 500-pound, bird-like dinosaur that roamed the Dakotas with T. rex 66 million years ago and looked like an 11 ½-foot-long "chicken from hell."
"It was a giant raptor, but with a chicken-like head and presumably feathers. The animal stood about 10 feet tall, so it would be scary as well as absurd to encounter," says University of Utah biology postdoctoral fellow Emma Schachner, a co-author of a new study of the dinosaur. It was published online today in PLOS ONE, a journal of the Public Library of Science.

The study's lead author, Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, says: "We jokingly call this thing the 'chicken from hell,' and I think that's pretty appropriate."

The beaked dinosaur's formal name is Anzu wyliei – Anzu after a bird-like demon in Mesopotamian mythology, and wyliei after a boy named Wylie, the dinosaur-loving grandson of a Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh trustee.

Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur – almost making up a full skeleton – were excavated from the uppermost level of the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota – a formation known for abundant fossils of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. The new dinosaur was 11 ½ feet long, almost 5 feet tall at the hip and weighed an estimated 440 to 660 pounds. Its full cast is on display at the Carnegie Museum.

Schachner and Lamanna were joined in the new study and description of three specimens by Hans-Dieter Sues and Tyler Lyson of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

"I am really excited about this discovery because Anzu is the largest oviraptorosaur found in North America," she says. "Oviraptorosaurs are a group of dinosaurs that are closely related to birds and often have strange, cassowary-like crests on their heads." (The cassowary is a flightless bird in New Guinea and Australia related to emus and ostriches.)

Anzu is also "one of the youngest oviraptorosaurs known, meaning it lived very close to the dinosaur extinction event" blamed on an asteroid striking Earth 65 million years ago, Schachner says.

The researchers believe Anzu, with large sharp claws, was an omnivore, eating vegetation, small animals and perhaps eggs while living on a wet floodplain. The dinosaur apparently got into some scrapes.

Source Phys.org

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Table tennis star 'goes head-to-head with high-speed robot' – video

A high-speed robot is purported to go head-to-head with former world number one table tennis star Timo Boll. In a PR video filmed and edited for Kuka Robotics, which specialises in high-end industrial robots, the sportsman is said to be shown losing 6-0 in a fast and furious game until he eventually goes on to win the match by smashing the ball over the top of his opponent

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Counting Craters: YOU Can Help Map the Moon

Left two panels are the full NAC areas analyzed in this study with markings overlaid. Top image shows expert markings, bottom shows volunteer data. Color circles are the individual markings and the white, thicker circles are results from a clustering algorithm. On the right side, four example craters are shown in detail with expert markings (left) and volunteer data (right); the craters are in order of increasing modification / degradation. Captioned below each pair is the number (N) of persons who marked that crater and the mean diameter (D) with standard deviation. Values in parentheses are relative standard deviations.
Crowdsourcing is the 21st century way of solving big problems. We crowdsource answers to our computer problems, funding for our start ups, and even science itself. A new study comparing the accuracy of crater counting from thousands of volunteers with that of experts shows that crowdsourcing science works.

Citizen science is the practice of everyday people helping with science research. It has a long and storied history, from the first people to ask “why?” through the natural philosophers of Newton’s time to the avid amateur astronomers and birders of today. With the advent of new online tools, however, participating in a citizen science project has never been easier.
CosmoQuest is a citizen science website that is building a community of people learning and doing science. It provides a web-interface that allows anyone with an internet connection to explore data from several NASA spacecraft of three worlds in our solar system: the moon, Vesta, and Mercury. As people mark craters and surface features, they all want to know, are we doing a good job?

Stuart Robbins of CU Boulder led the study of crater-counting by the citizen scientists of CosmoQuest and eight expert crater counters with varying levels of experience. Crater counting, it turns out, really is a subjective process, and the experts differ quite a bit from each other when analyzing the same patch of surface with their favorite tools. This gives insight into the history of this science and demonstrates the level of uncertainty in such measurements.

Then, the results of citizen scientists were aggregated and compared to the average of the experts’ counts. Turns out, the volunteers do just as well as the experts! There is an advantage, however, in the nature of crowd-sourcing. A lot of volunteers can map the moon a lot faster than a few researchers.
Why is counting craters so important, anyway? The relative ages of planetary surfaces can be determined by crater counts where, generally, older surfaces have more craters per unit area than younger surfaces. The Moon, unlike Earth, has undergone very little geologic change in its history, so the impact history has been preserved even while most of Earth’s has been erased.

Though the moon is so familiar to us, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has given us new and deeper insight than we ever had before. The LRO images being analyzed by volunteers have the highest precision available, such that you could see a really tall person making a snow angel! Citizen scientists are mapping craters 35 feet (11 meters) in diameter and larger.

There is still a LOT of moon to cover with over 500 million craters estimated visible on the surface. So really, the science is just getting started over at CosmoQuest. In addition, there are still the asteroid Vesta and the planet Mercury to map there, too, thanks to data from Dawn and MESSENGER.

It doesn’t take a PhD to do science, just as it doesn’t take one to think scientifically about problems in everyday life. For this specific science, all you have to do is watch a short tutorial video and get started. There are deeper levels of involvement, from Hangouts to forums and lesson plans for teachers. And CosmoQuest is just one of many, many citizen science projects out there that range from cosmology to microbiology. It’s a darn big Universe, so it’s good to know that we can explore it together.

Check out the video explainers for this paper: short version | long version

This work is published in the journal Icarus and a preprint will be available soon fromarXiv.org.

Source DNEWS

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Samsung has assistive tech trio for Galaxy Core Advance

Samsung Electronics introduced a trio of accessories on Friday that are designed to help users who are disabled and visually impaired—those with partial or greater loss of vision. Their smartphones can be transformed in this way into tools that enable easier handling of messages and more.

The three newcomers are called the Ultrasonic Cover, Optical Scan Stand, and Voice Label. The three are designed for the Galaxy Core Advance mobile device. Samsung said that the accessories are already available and are offered separately from the device. To be sure, smartphone handling, not to mention struggles reading small-screen text, have been barriers for those with special needs for vision support. Back in December, Samsung had already revealed its intentions of providing an Android smartphone with accessibility options. Assistive technology was on its agenda. The company referred to the Core Advance, which it said would be available early 2014. At the time, it spoke of an Optical Scan which "can automatically recognize text from an image and read it aloud to disabled and visually impaired users."Samsung officially described the three on Friday as the Ultrasonic Cover, which allows users in unfamiliar places to detect obstacles and navigate by sending an alert through a vibration or TTS feedback. "By holding the Cover in front of the user," said the announcement, "it can enhance a visually impaired user's awareness of their surroundings by sensing the presence of a person or object up to two meters away." The Optical Scan Stand positions the device to focus on printed materials; doing so automatically activates the Optical Scan application, which recognizes text from an image and reads it aloud to the user. With the Voice Label, users can make notes and tag voice labels on-the-go. "With NFC technology enabling a seamless connection to their smartphones, users can record, stop and access their notes. This feature can also help a user distinguish how to use electronics by allowing them to record a short explanation."

In the United States alone, approximately 10 million people are blind or visually impaired, though estimates vary. Samsung said the accessories are the result of research and in-depth interviews, resulting in their being specially designed with the needs of specific communities in mind. Among the tech sites responding favorably to Friday's announcement TechCrunch made the point that "these hardware add-ons really show Samsung is committed to provided the best phone experience possible for those who might ordinarily find smartphone operation frustrating."

Source Phys.org

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Keep your heart healthy

Here's the bad news: Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and 49 percent of adults have at least one risk factor for the disease. But the good news is that there are a number of things you can do to keep your heart healthy.

Exercise is a good place to start, said Dr. Judith Mackall, a cardiologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, in Cleveland.

Thirty minutes of exercise a day can provide major benefits for your heart, Mackall said in a medical center news release. If you can't do a single 30-minute workout, divide your exercise into three 10-minute sessions a day. Research shows that this amount ofexercise can improve cholesterol numbers and reduce weight and blood pressurewithin 10 weeks.

Healthy eating is also important, and you should consume at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day as part of a balanced diet, Mackall said. This will reduce your risk of heart disease by helping manage blood pressure and decreasing inflammation.

If you're a smoker, it's time to quit, Mackall said.

"If you smoke, you will knock off seven years of your life," she said. "And if you have cardiovascular disease and you smoke, you'll die 15 years sooner than you would otherwise."

Source phys.org

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EU ready to plug in to 'universal' mobile phone charger

The European Union took another step on Thursday towards the mandatory introduction of a common mobile phone charger, which could power-up all makes of handsets.

The European Parliament in Strasbourg voted in favour of draft legislation which would include compatibility with "universal" chargers as one of the "essential requirements" of all electrical goods approved for sale in the EU.

While the bill has the informal backing of the EU's 28 member states, it is now up to the European Commission, the EU's executive, to detail what a common phone charger should look like and the conditions under which it would be imposed on the industry.

"The current incompatibility of chargers ... is a nightmare and a real inconvenience for consumers. This new directive ends this nightmare and is also good news for the environment as it will result in a reduction of electronic waste," said the European parliament's negotiator Barbara Weiler after the vote.

If adopted in its current form, the legislation would include all "radio" products, meaning any piece of equipment which receives or emits radio waves with the purpose of communication, including mobile phones, GPS systems, tablets and wireless car door openers.

The Commission said the legislation, which would come into effect in three years' time, was a direct response to consumer concerns.

"We must have a common charger for all mobile phones—all citizens are in favour of it," said Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for the bill, adding she will now examine which legally binding measures are required to ensure compliance.

Belgian Socialist MEP Marc Tarabella welcomed the bill's approval, saying it would mark the "end of drawers filled with 1,001 cables and different chargers".

If adopted, the legislation would supercede a voluntary system of standardisation created in 2010, following an agreement among phone producers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

European mobile phone manufacturers welcomed parliament's vote, saying that the earlier agreement, which expired in 2012, had already laid the groundwork for industry-wide standardisation.

"Samsung sees the benefits and momentum in working alongside other manufacturers and standardisation organisations to find universal solutions to meet consumer demands," said Nicholas Breakspeare, a spokesman for Samsung.

However, Digital Europe, the organisation representing handset manufacturers such as Apple, Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia, tried to throw a spanner in the works by pointing out the important distinction between chargers and connectors.

"We are committed to industry harmonisation but a lot of our members want to reserve the right to innovate around the connector," said Paul Meller, Connect Europe's communications director.

Source phys.org

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Review: Uneasy first steps with Google Glass

Shaped like a lopsided headband, Google Glass is an unassuming piece of technology when you're holding it in your hands. You feel as if you can almost break it, testing its flexibility. Putting it on, though, is another story.

Once you do, this Internet-connected eyewear takes on a life of its own. You become "The Person Wearing Google Glass" and all the assumptions that brings with it —about your wealth, boorishness or curiosity. Such is the fate of early adopters of new technologies, whether it's the Sony Walkman, the first iPod with its conspicuous white earbuds, or the Segway scooter. Google calls the people who wear Glass "explorers," because the device is not yet available to the general public.

With its $1,500 price tag, the device is far from having mass appeal. At the South By Southwest Interactive tech jamboree in Austin this week, I counted fewer than a dozen people wearing it, including technology blogger Robert Scoble, who isn't shy about posting pictures of himself in the shower, red-faced, water running, wearing the device.

Google, like most successful technology companies, dreamers and inventors, likes to take a long view on things. It calls some of its most outlandish projects "moonshots." Besides Glass, these include its driverless car, balloons that deliver Internet service to remote parts of the world and contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics.

There's an inherent risk in moonshots, however: What if you never reach the moon? Ten years from now, we may look back at Google Glass as one of those short-lived bridges that takes us from one technological breakthrough to the next, just as pagers, MP3 players and personal digital assistants paved the way for the era of the smartphone. Fitness bands, too, may fit into this category.

In its current, early version, Google Glass feels bulky on my face and when I look in the mirror I see a futuristic telemarketer looking back at me. Wearing it on the subway while a homeless man shuffled through the car begging for change made me feel as if I was sporting a diamond tiara. I sank lower in my seat as he passed. If Google is aiming for mass appeal, the next versions of Glass have to be much smaller and less conspicuous.

Though no one knows for sure where wearable devices will lead us, Rodrigo Martinez, life sciences chief strategist at the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, has some ideas. "The reason we are talking about wearables is because we are not at implantables yet," he says. "(But) I'm ready. Others are ready."

Specs in place for the first time, I walked out of Google's Manhattan showroom on a recent Friday afternoon with a sense of unease. A wave of questions washed over me. Why is everyone looking at me? Should I be looking at them? Should I have chosen the orange Glass instead of charcoal?

Ideally, Google Glass lets you do many of the things we now do with our smartphones, such as taking photos, reading news headlines or talking to our mothers on Sunday evenings—hands-free. But it comes with a bit of baggage.

Glass feels heavier when I'm out in public or in a group where I'm the only person wearing it. If I think about it long enough my face starts burning from embarrassment. The device has been described to me as "the scarlet letter of technology" by a friend. The most frequent response I get from my husband when I try to slip Glass on in his presence is "please take that off." This is the same husband who encouraged me to buy a sweater covered in googly-eyed cats.

Instead of looking at the world through a new lens on a crowded rush-hour sidewalk. I felt as if the whole world was looking at me. That's no small feat in New York, where even celebrities are afforded a sense of privacy and where making eye contact with strangers can amount to an entire conversation.

But that's just one side of wearing Google Glass.

The other side is exhilarating. Glass is getting some bad press lately. Some bars and coffee shops in Silicon Valley and Seattle have banned Google Glass, for example, and federal authorities in Ohio interrogated a man earlier this year after he was suspected of recording a movie with the device. Last month, Google put out a Glass etiquette guide that includes the appeal "don't be creepy or rude."

But the truth is that it's a groundbreaking device, even if it doesn't take off, even if it evolves into something completely different, even if we laugh at it 10 years from now while driving our flying cars in the skies of Manhattan.

I strolled around for a few hours with the cyborg glasses, happily snapping photos. With a mere wink, I captured snowy Lower Manhattan streetscapes and my reflection in the grimy subway-car windows.

There were some whispers. ("Did you see? Google Glass!") There were some comments as I squeezed into the subway with my fellow commuters —comparisons to the Segway scooter, and a warning that it will prove to be a huge battery drainer if I use my iPhone to connect Glass to the Internet.

For more human interaction, I walked into a small macaroon shop to buy a friend some birthday sweets. Alone but for the store clerks, I fumbled to take them off, find a place to put them on the small counter and get my wallet out of my bag.

"Sorry. You're the first people I'm interacting with wearing these. I don't mean to be a jerk," I told the man and woman at the counter. I took off Glass for the same reason that I take out my earbuds when I am talking to people. I don't want to appear like I am not paying attention to them.

It was fine, though. The woman thought Glass was cool. The man, he might not have, but he didn't say anything.

Source phys.org

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Students invent 'Aura' musical instrument using gloves (w/ Video)

Imagine holding music in your hands. That's what you can do with the Aura, a new electronic musical instrument conceived by Cornell University engineering students.

"The goal was to create the most intuitive instrument," said senior Ray Li, who came up with the idea of an instrument played by gesturing in the air and brought it to life in collaboration with programmer Michael Ndubuisi, also a senior.

To play the Aura, Li dons gloves fitted with sensors that report the position and orientation of his hands in a magnetic field. Raising and lowering the hands controls pitch; spreading them apart increases volume. Closing the fingers activates flex sensors and muffles the sound, and twisting the hands adds distortion. Through an interface created by Ndubuisi, hand positions are converted to signals in the universal MIDI language for electronic instruments and fed to a synthesizer.

The result looks something like a person listening to music and pretending to conduct, but this "conductor" is more like a wizard conjuring music out of thin air. "We're trying to capture those intuitive gestures and make music," Li explained.

The magnetic sensors were lent by Ascension Technology Corp. of Vermont, which developed them for medical applications, motion tracking and manipulation of 3-D graphics.

Li's first electronic instrument, a class project for a circuits course in his sophomore year, was Sabre, an electronic cello in which conductive strips replaced strings, and a joystick in the right hand could modify the sound. Aura grew out of a desire to improve expressiveness. He wanted more than a joystick, he said, so he could directly control the sound with his hands.

The Cornell Council for the Arts is funding a public presentation at the end of this semester, for which the team is developing the next phase, called SoundSpace. This will let the musician control recorded sounds of various instruments, add percussion through body movement, and provide some visual representations. The concert is slated for March 26 in Cornell's Barnes Hall Auditorium.

"The musician will create a whole song on stage with nothing," as Li describes it, adding that he will have to recruit a whole team of programmers to bring his vision to life.

Outside of class, Li plays "a bit of piano and guitar," but focuses on vocals, singing with the a cappella groups Tarana and Exploosh!

Source phys.org

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Smartphones become 'eye-phones' with low-cost devices developed by Stanford

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed two inexpensive adapters that enable a smartphone to capture high-quality images of the front and back of the eye. The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient's electronic record.

"Think Instagram for the eye," said one of the developers, assistant professor of ophthalmology Robert Chang, MD.

The researchers see this technology as an opportunity to increase access to eye-care services as well as to improve the ability to advise on patient care remotely.

Ophthalmology resident David Myung, MD, PhD, lead author of two upcoming papers describing the development and clinical experience with the devices, began the project with Chang about two years ago, just before Myung began his residency at Stanford. The papers will be published online March 7 in the Journal of Mobile Technology in Medicine.

The standard equipment used to photograph the eye is expensive—costing up to tens of thousands of dollars—and requires extensive training to use properly. Primary care physicians and emergency department staff often lack this equipment, and although it is readily available in ophthalmologists' offices, it is sparse in rural areas throughout the world.

"Adapting smartphones for the eye has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of eye care—in particular, to provide it in places where it's less accessible," said Myung. "Whether it's in the emergency department, where patients often have to wait a long time for a specialist, or during a primary-care physician visit, this new workflow will improve the quality of care for our patients, especially in the developing world where ophthalmologists are few and far between.

"A picture is truly worth a thousand words," he added. "Imagine a car accident victim arriving in the emergency department with an eye injury resulting in a hyphema—blood inside the front of her eye. Normally the physician would have to describe this finding in her electronic record with words alone. Smartphones today not only have the camera resolution to supplement those words with a high-resolution photo, but also the data-transfer capability to upload that photo securely to the medical record in a matter of seconds."

Chang, who is the senior author of the two papers, added that ophthalmology is a highly image-oriented field. "With smartphone cameras now everywhere, and a small, inexpensive attachment that helps the ancillary health-care staff to take a picture needed for an eye consultation, we should be able to lower the barrier to tele-ophthalmology," he said.

Adapters are available to attach a smartphone to a slit lamp—a microscope with an adjustable, high-intensity light—to capture images of the front of the eye. But Myung found this process time-consuming and inconvenient, even with commercially available adapters designed for this purpose. Given the fast pace of patient care, he wanted point-and-shoot ability in seconds, not minutes, with instant upload to a secure server. More importantly, the team envisioned the device to be readily usable by any health-care practitioner, not just eye doctors. So Myung decided to bypass the slit lamp, a complicated piece of equipment.

"I started entertaining the idea of a pocket-sized adapter that makes the phone do most of the heavy lifting," he said. After numerous iterations, he found a combination of magnification and lighting elements that worked.

"It took some time to figure out how to mount the lens and lighting elements to the phone in an efficient yet effective way," said Myung, who built the prototypes with inexpensive parts purchased almost exclusively online, including plastic caps, plastic spacers, LEDs, switches, universal mounts, macrolenses and even a handful of Legos.

After successfully imaging the front of the eye, he then focused on visualizing the inside lining of the back of the eye, called the retina. "Taking a photo of the retina is harder because you need to focus light through the pupil to reach inside the eye," said Myung.

To optimize the view through a dilated pupil, Myung used optics theory to determine the perfect working distance and lighting conditions for a simple adapter that connects a conventional examination lens to a phone. Myung and chief ophthalmology resident Lisa He, MD, shot hundreds of photos with various iterations of the adapter, consulting with Chang and Mark Blumenkranz, MD, retina specialist and chair of the ophthalmology department, until they got it right. Then Stanford mechanical engineering graduate student Alexandre Jais constructed computerized models of these "screwed-and-glued" prototypes to produce 3D-printed versions. Jais made the first of these prototypes on his own 3D printer before moving to the Stanford Product Realization Lab to manufacture higher-resolution adapters.

Chief resident He is leading a clinical study grading the quality of images taken using the adapters in the Stanford emergency department. A second study, spearheaded by resident Brian Toy, MD, will test the ability of the adapters to track eye disease in patients with diabetes.

Myung and Chang have recently been awarded seed grants from the School of Medicine and the Stanford Biodesign Program to fund the production of the initial batch of adapters, currently dubbed EyeGo, for distribution and continued evaluation. The initial adapters will be available for purchase for research purposes only while the team seeks guidance from the Food and Drug Administration. "We have gotten the production cost of each type of adapter to under $90 but the goal is to make it even lower in the future," Chang said. Recently, a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia used the two adapters on a medical mission trip to Ethiopia and told Chang they were excited about the results.

Myung, Chang, Jais and He co-authored both articles and Blumenkranz co-authored the article on the retinal-imaging adapter. Stanford's Office of Technology and Licensing is managing the intellectual property.

Source Medicalpress

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New dinosaur found in Portugal, largest terrestrial predator from Europe

A new dinosaur species found in Portugal may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe, as well as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE on March 5, 2014 by co-authors Christophe Hendrickx and Octavio Mateus from Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã.

Scientists discovered bones belonging to this dinosaur north of Lisbon. They were originally believed to be Torvosaurus tanneri, a dinosaur species from North America. Closer comparison of the shin bone, upper jawbone,teeth, and partial tail vertebrae suggest to the authors that it may warrant a new species name, Torvosaurus gurneyi.

T. gurneyi had blade-shaped teeth up to 10 cm long, which indicates it may have been at the top of the food chain in the Iberian Peninsula roughly 150 million years ago. The scientists estimate that the dinosaur could reach 10 meters long and weigh around 4 to 5 tons. The number of teeth, as well as size and shape of the mouth, may differentiate the European and the American Torvosaurus. The fossil of the upper jaw of T. tannerihas 11 or more teeth, while T. gurneyi has fewer than 11. Additionally, the mouth bones have a different shape and structure. The new dinosaur is the second species of Torvosaurus to be named.

"This is not the largest predatory dinosaur we know. Tyrannosaurus,Carcharodontosaurus, and Giganotosaurus from the Cretaceous were bigger animals," said Christophe Hendrickx. "With a skull of 115 cm, Torvosaurus gurneyi was however one of the largest terrestrial carnivores at this epoch, and an active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm." Fossil evidences of closely related dinosaurs suggest that this large predator may have already been covered with proto-feathers. Recently described dinosaur embryos from Portugal are also ascribed to the new species of Torvosaurus.

Source phys.org

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Cybercriminals entrenched in 'Dark Web', researchers says

Cybercriminals are settling into a comfortable place in the "Dark Web" where they test, refine and distribute malware for online thievery.

That's the conclusion of researchers at McAfee, the US Internet security specialist, who noted that a huge data breach that affected as many as 110 million customers of the US retailer Target may be just the tip of the iceberg.

In its quarterly threat assessment released Monday, McAfee Labs noted the relative ease with which this type of malware is bought and sold in "Dark Web" marketplaces.

McAfee researchers concluded that the malware for the Target attacks used "relatively unsophisticated technologies likely purchased 'off the shelf' from the Cybercrime-as-a-Service community, and customized specifically for these attacks," the security firm said.

The report pointed out that the attackers who stole the data have also found a market—offering some of the 40 million credit card numbers reported stolen in batches of between one million and four million at a time.

"The fourth quarter of 2013 will be remembered as the period when cybercrime became 'real' for more people than ever before," said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president for McAfee Labs.

"These cyber thefts occurred at a time when most people were focused on their holiday shopping and when the industry wanted people to feel secure and confident in their purchases. The impact of these attacks will be felt both at the kitchen table as well as the boardroom table."

Weafer added that the attacks "represent a coming of age for both Cybercrime-as-a-Service and the 'Dark Web' overall."

The "Dark Web" actors appear to be operating with ease, like other kinds of online businesses, McAfee said.

"We must recognize that this class of attack is far from 'advanced,'" it added.

"The BlackPOS malware family is an 'off-the-shelf' exploit kit for sale that can easily be modified and redistributed with little programming skill or knowledge of malware functionality."

The thieves who employ the malware can easily turn to a popular credit card black market like Lampeduza Republic, which McAfee said had a "well-organized hierarchy" which allows for a "disciplined and functional marketplace."

"Thieves can pay for the stolen credit cards using one of the many anonymous virtual currency mechanisms, such as Bitcoin," McAfee said.

"We believe these breaches will have long-lasting repercussions. We expect to see changes to security approaches and compliance mandates and, of course, lawsuits.

"But the big lesson is that we face a healthy and growing cybercrime industry which played a key role in enabling and monetizing the results of these attacks."

McAfee's report also noted a surge in mobile malware as more people use smartphones. It collected 2.47 million new mobile malware samples in 2013, with 744,000 in the fourth quarter alone.

Source pyhs.org

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Chimps catch people’s yawns in sign of flexible empathy

Chimpanzees possess a flexible, humanlike sensitivity to the mental states of others, even strangers from another species, researchers suggest March 11 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Empathy’s roots go back at least to the common ancestor of humans and chimps, they say.

Psychologist Matthew Campbell and biologist Frans de Waal, both of Emory University in Atlanta, treated chimps’ tendency to yawn when viewing videotapes of others yawning as a sign of spontaneous empathy. Their research follows other scientists’ observations that young chimps mimic scientists’ yawns (SN Online: 10/16/13).

Nineteen chimps living in an outdoor research facility yawned when they saw the same action from chimps that they lived with, researchers and staff they had seen before and people who were new to them. Unfamiliar chimps and baboons failed to elicit contagious yawning. As in the wild, unfamiliar chimps were probably viewed as threats. Chimps in the study hadn’t seen baboons before.

Having socially connected with facility workers, chimps reacted empathically to human strangers who yawned, the researchers propose.

Imitating others’ facial expressions represents a rapid way to forge empathic ties, Campbell says. His research didn’t test whether chimps spend a lot of time trying to read others’ thoughts and feelings, a more complex type of empathy.

PASS IT ON Two chimps yawn after seeing video clips of chimps from their own social groups do it. Chimps also yawn just after watching familiar and unfamiliar humans doing it but they won’t imitate baboons and unfamiliar chimps in the behavior. Credit: M. Campbell and F. de Waal 2014/Yerkes National Primate Research Center/Emory Univ.

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Malaysia Airlines mystery revives black-box debate

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has rekindled a debate over the iconic "black box" flight recorder and whether it's time for aircraft to start live-streaming in-flight data in real time.

Civil aviation industry sources agree thetechnology exists for commercial airliners to immediately relay via satellite vital technical information otherwise compiled by a flight data recorder in the course of a flight.

But it's another question whether airlines, forever struggling to keep costs down in a highly competitive business, want to front up the money involved—or even if it's truly worth the expense.

"There are no technical barriers ... and the cost barriers can be addressed," said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the US government agency that investigates major aviation accidents.

"But the reality is that air carriers don't want to do anything unless they're ordered to do it," he told AFP.

Commercial airliners typically carry two black boxes, which in fact are bright orange in color. One monitors cockpit conversations, the other records a vast array of technical data from airspeed to engine performance.

Whenever a crash occurs, investigators scramble to recover both devices—and if the tragedy happens on terra firma, they typically find them in short order.

At sea, however, it's another story.

Digital link yields clues

By then investigators already had a vague clue what might have happened thanks to the doomed flight's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), a digital datalink for brief text messages.

It puts out limited information about location and airspeed—but nothing compared to the several thousand parameters that a black box can monitor during the course of a flight.

Malaysia Airlines has said all its aircraft are ACARS-equipped, but it has so far declined to release whatever data it got from Flight 370.

Twelve years ago, US avionics manufacturer L-3 estimated it would cost $300 million a year for a global airline to transmit flight data in real time, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported.

But Goelz said "there's no reason to stream all the data all the time."

Systems could be programmed, for instance, to emit only a limited amount of data in normal circumstances—and then put out lots of data when an in-flight abnormality is detected.

The main hurdle is getting airlines to invest in such systems. Goelz said the onus is on governments to make them mandatory, as in the case of mid-air collision avoidance systems and smoke detectors in cargo holds.

"The technology does exist, but the question is: why spend the money?" added John Cox, a former airline captain who is chief executive officer of aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems in Washington.

Not only might there be "massive amounts of data" to be managed, but there would also be a potential for misinterpretation and misuse, on top of data protection concerns, he told AFP.

"If you look back in history, it's not as if we have a large number of these (lost) airplanes that we don't find... (and) it is not as though we are not finding the cause of aircraft accidents using the technology that we have."

Source phys.org

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World's first 3-D acoustic cloaking device hides objects from sound

Using little more than a few perforated sheets of plastic and a staggering amount of number crunching, Duke engineers have demonstrated the world's first three-dimensional acoustic cloak. The new device reroutes sound waves to create the impression that both the cloak and anything beneath it are not there.

The acoustic cloaking device works in all three dimensions, no matter which direction the sound is coming from or where the observer is located, and holds potential for future applications such as sonar avoidance and architectural acoustics.

The study appears online in Nature Materials.

"The particular trick we're performing is hiding an object from sound waves," said Steven Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. "By placing this cloak around an object, the sound waves behave like there is nothing more than a flat surface in their path."

To achieve this new trick, Cummer and his colleagues turned to the developing field of metamaterials—the combination of natural materials in repeating patterns to achieve unnatural properties. In the case of the new acoustic cloak, the materials manipulating the behavior of sound waves are simply plastic and air. Once constructed, the device looks like several plastic plates with a repeating pattern of holes poked through them stacked on top of one another to form a sort of pyramid.

To give the illusion that it isn't there, the cloak must alter the waves' trajectory to match what they would look like had they had reflected off a flat surface. Because the sound is not reaching the surface beneath, it is traveling a shorter distance and its speed must be slowed to compensate.

"The structure that we built might look really simple," said Cummer. "But I promise you that it's a lot more difficult and interesting than it looks. We put a lot of energy into calculating how sound waves would interact with it. We didn't come up with this overnight."

To test the cloaking device, researchers covered a small sphere with the cloak and "pinged" it with short bursts of sound from various angles. Using a microphone, they mapped how the waves responded and produced videos of them traveling through the air.

Cummer and his team then compared the videos to those created with both an unobstructed flat surface and an uncloaked sphere blocking the way. The results clearly show that the cloaking device makes it appear as though the sound waves reflected off an empty surface.

Although the experiment is a simple demonstration showing that the technology is possible and concealing an evil super-genius' underwater lair is a long ways away, Cummer believes that the technique has several potential commercial applications.

"We conducted our tests in the air, but sound waves behave similarly underwater, so one obvious potential use is sonar avoidance," said Cummer. "But there's also the design of auditoriums or concert halls—any space where you need to control the acoustics. If you had to put a beam somewhere for structural reasons that was going to mess up the sound, perhaps you could fix the acoustics by cloaking it."

Source phys.org

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