New Research Explores 'False Memories': you have to know

Did you really lock your door, or is it all in your head? Researchers exploring the 

fascinating phenomenon of false memories have observed subjects who had false 

memories created by watching someone else. Researchers found the subjects were 

much more likely to falsely remember doing an action if they had watched someone else 

do it.

 eaPsychological resrch has shown various ways "false memories" are created, such as through the power of suggestion or through vivid imagination. Now scientists studying imagination have found that people who watched a video of someone else doing a simple action often didn't remember and thought they had done it themselves when asked about it two weeks later.

"This is a completely new type of false memory," says Gerald Echterhoff, a psychology professor at the University of Muenster in Germany and co-author of the paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.

"This is a false memory from just observing someone," he says.

Psychologist Daniel Schacter of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who has edited a book on false memories, says he hasn't read the new paper, but it "sounds like an extension of earlier work that has shown imagining you'd done something can result in false memories."

"I think it's partly new and partly related to earlier work," Schacter says. "You saw something on TV that you think actually happened. It's another kind of example of what people have talked about as a source memory failure."

Echterhoff says more than 25 percent of participants in the study, as well as in several follow-up experiments, had false memories created by watching someone else. Since the first research on 170 participants was done, findings have been replicated with almost 500 participants, he says.

The paper details three different experiments in which participants read about or actually performed a series of simple actions, such as shaking a bottle or shuffling a deck of cards. Then they watched videos of someone else doing simple actions -- some of which they had done and some they had only seen being done. Two weeks later, they were asked which of as many as 30 actions they had done themselves.
Researchers found the subjects were much more likely to falsely remember doing an action if they had watched someone else do it. Echterhoff says the research controlled for the common situation of thinking you had done something because you do it yourself every day.

How to measure a website's IQ?

The creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has made an odd request: for a kind of rating system to help people distinguish sites that can be trusted to tell the truth, and those that can't.

Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to ensure that everyone in the world benefits as the web evolves.

In his speech he referred to the way fears that the LHC could destroy the worldspread like wildfire online. As the BBC puts it, he explained that "there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources."

He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways". Whatever process is used to hand out the labels, it sounds like a bad idea to me.

Berners-Lee himself directed us towards some of the its biggest problems:

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable...A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

There are plenty of arguments online already about whether Scientology is a cult. I find it unlikely anyone will be keen to step in and label sites on either side as not to be trusted. Others might reasonably argue that all religions - whether established or not - should come with a warning message.
As for wading in to put a stop to conspiracy theories, I can't image anything their proponents could benefit from more.

Berners-Lee also mentioned the system would help people find out the real science behind, for example, the LHC's risks. You might think handing out rating for sites about science would be easier, with publishers of peer-reviewed science, for example, receiving a top rating without problems.

But there will be papers in the archives of any journal that have been entirely superseded. And a whole lot more that present results that are valid, but can be misleading to some readers. Web licences to ensure that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.

Fortunately it's much more likely that the whole idea will quietly be forgotten, which will at least prevent Berners-Lee receiving one of the first "potentially misleading" badges for thinking it up in the first place.

Let's hope the World Wide Web Foundation and its laudable goals have a rosier future.

Vulture - Unmanned Aircraft

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of United States is working to develop an unmanned aircraft that is able to stay in air for a period of 5 years at a time. It is one of the most recent inventions of world.

Officials of DARPA has revealed that this aircraft will be known as VULTURE due to itsPersistent Pseudo-Satellite Capability . It means that this aircraft will be able to fly over a single area, communicating or performing analysis for years at a time.

Major Obstacles in Project:

Even this project looks appealing to many of you, but there are some serious problems or you can say obstacles in achieving this project.

1) First challenge in front of designers is to figure out some Way to Supply Power to this aircraft during long missions.

2) Another problem is that this aircraft will carry a 1000 pound (450 kg) payload in winds at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet.

3) Designers have also to sort out the problems regarding Deterioration of Materialsduring their long-time exposure to stratospheric flight.
In addition to this there may be many challenges during designing of this aircraft.

Daniel Newman: The Man Behind VULTURE

Daniel Newman is the Project Manger of this ambitious project of NASA. In his words: "We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft. Aviation has a perfect record - we've never left one up there. We will attempt to break that record". It looks that its time to get out of the traditional "launch - recover - maintain - launch cycle of aircrafts."

Concept Behind Vulture:

Basically Aircrafts operates just like satellites, but the major difference is that these are not regulated by orbital mechanics. You can understand Vulture as a Pseudo-Satellite, which operates in the stratosphere and not in the low Earth orbit. This would provide a 65 dB upgrading in communications capability and will increase onboard sensor resolution.

SWALLOWING DIAMONDS COULD FIND WHAT'S AILING YOU

THE GIST

• Swallowing nanodiamonds could someday to help diagnose disease.
• Plain nanodiamonds coat the digestive tract, coated nanodiamonds could target other organs and tissues.
• Nanodiamonds have been proven to be nontoxic and safe in animal tests.   

Scientists from Taiwan have developed nanodiamonds that, when swallowed, harmlessly coat the digestive track. When coated with special sugars or proteins, the nanodiamonds are absorbed into the body and attach themselves to specific cells.

The research, which is currently limited to animals, could eventually diagnose and eventually treat diseases in humans.

"This research work demonstrates that nanodiamonds are non-toxic in both cellular and organismic levels," said Yi-Chun Wu, a scientist who, along with Huan-Cheng Chang and their colleagues in Taiwan, co-authored a new study in the journalACS Nano Letters.

Nanodiamonds are tiny pieces of pure carbon only a few of nanometers across. (One nanometer is about 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.) Most nanodiamonds are formed by blowing up TNT or other explosives to create high temperate and high pressures that bond carbon atoms together in a classic 3D diamond nanostructure.

These nanodiamonds are not solid, however. Inside those tiny structures are tiny holes, called vacancies, where a nitrogen atom from the air has replaced two carbon atoms. Nitrogen vacancies in diamonds are common. Natural diamonds with lots of nitrogen have a yellow tint to them. The nanodiamonds the scientists from Taiwan used absorb yellow light and emit violet light.

Next, the scientists fed two types of nanodiamonds to the round worm C. elegans. The first batch of nanodiamonds were uncoated, just pure carbon with a few nitrogen atoms. Those nanodiamonds coated the digestive tract of the transparent roundworm.

The second batch of nanodiaonds the roundworms ate were coated with a special sugar. Once inside the roundworm, the nanodiamonds passed through the digestive tract and into the body of the worm, congregating at various points inside the body.

Both the coated and uncoated nanodiamonds glowed purple when yellow light was shined onto the roundworms, revealing their location inside the worm. All the bejeweled worms had normal lifespans, and none of them showed any sign of distress, said the scientists.

The scientists fed the nanodiamonds to the worms just to measure their toxicity and to see where the diamonds ended up. More specific functions will come soon though, said Vadym Mochalin, a scientist at Drexel University who uses nanodiamonds in his own research.

Virtually any kind of protein or chemical can coat nanodiamonds. When placed into the body, those coated nanodiamonds could seek out and attach themselves to cancer cells, immune cells, pathogens and other cells.

At first, coated and glowing nanodiamonds will likely help doctors and scientists find and map cancers and other things that harm humans. After that nanodiamonds will likely be used to deliver low doses of powerful drugs to help treat those diseases.

Some researchers are most excited about using nanodiamonds to track stem cells.

"One of the most exciting applications of [fluorescent nanodiamonds] in humans is the long-term imaging, tracking, and sorting of human stem cells," said Chang.

Those stem cells could jump-start immune responses, help repair nerve damage, and potentially even regenerate entire organs if the research pans out. Those kinds of advanced therapies are still years, if not decades away however, caution scientists. But this research, along with dozens of other papers and groups working with nanodiamonds, opens the door for powerful therapies in the future.

"The nanodiamond looks very promising compared with other carbon-based nanoparticles," said Mochalin. "It's the least toxic carbon-based nanomaterial to date."

 

sony's show for latest gadget with new technology :Sony Expo Showcases Latest Tech

The annual Sony Hawaii Expo was held this week at the Ala Moana Hotel Hibiscus

 Ballroom.    Highlight of this year’s Sony Expo was the desktop Sony OLED flatscreen TV (shown above). The hallmark of this high tech wonder is its small size and crystal clear high definition picture. The screen itself is thinner than a compact disc jewel case.

Another hyped product at the Sony Hawaii Expo is the new Sony Rolly MP3 player. It is a new portable device that is shaped like a little barrel and moves to the beat of the music. The speakers on this device are positioned at both ends and open up with winglike flaps on each end. The device will not be marketed in the U.S. and is aimed only at consumers in Japan. If it were sold in the U.S. the price would be at around $400.

The Sony Rolly MP3 player. Sold only in Japan.

Face recognition “smile” technology for Sony Cybershot cameras were also a new this year. The new Cybershots can sense when a person smiles and fires only at that time. People were happily smiling for the demo at the Sony Cybershot booth. There were many other Cybershot digital still and video cameras that were also on display for consumers to play with.

I was most interested in the small super zoom, SLR-like cameras that I may want to get in an effort to find a capable SLR-like digital camera without all of the weight and bulk.

Last year’s hot product, the Sony Playstation 3 was almost like a has-been this year. Yes, there were displays of the venerable Playstation 3 for people to use, but the crowds around those stations were not very big. Sony is still marketing the Playstation 2 which is still the most popular game console of all time, despite Nintendo running away with the market lead on their new generation Wii product.

I am still interested in perhaps getting a Sony PSP, mainly for the fact that it can surf the web with its wireless internet feature. Another wifi device that was touted last year, the Sony Mylo, was nowhere to be seen this year. Sony still sells the device.

HDTV are the big products Sony is pushing this year as the Expo was dominated by flatscreen high definition sets all over the place. Going hand in hand with that were several Sony Blu-Ray HDTV DVD players. the pictures on the sets and from the players are incredibly clear.

People clamor around the latest Sony digital cameras.

Don’t know if I am ready to sink money in either of these technologies, especially Blu-Ray since it is locked in a format war with the rival HD-DVD. Beta vs. VHS all over again. I’ll wait for the dust to settle on this one.

Overall the Sony Expo was a great little venue to check the latest technology from one of the most popular electronic companies on the face of the earth.

Will they able to get success ?

NASA planning mission to visit the sun

We know it's hot up there, but NASA wants to know a bit more about the sun and its atmosphere. And so sometime before 2018, the agency intends to send a spacecraft into the solar atmosphere.

This will mark the first time that a spacecraft from Earth will actually visit a star.

The decision to chart a mission to the sun also realizes a dream that astronomers almost realized a half century ago, when the National Academy of Science's "Simpson Committee" in 1958 recommended a probe to investigate. Several studies were subsequently carried out to test the feasibility of the project, but nothing came of them.

Since NASA has never sent any vehicle this close to Earth's sun, the craft will have to be outfitted with a special shield designed to withstand radiation and temperatures exceeding 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit. A spokesman for NASA said scientists will depend on simulations to guarantee that the probe can cope with that sort of intense heat.

Humanoid Robot !

'Sci/Tech' Archives

Telenoid R1 minimalist humanoid robot

02 Aug 2010

Researchers from Osaka University have teamed up with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) to develop a minimalist humanoid robot that recreates the physical presence of a remote user.

Named "Telenoid R1," the teleoperated communication robot measures 80 centimeters (31 in) tall and weighs 5 kilograms (11 lbs). The portable machine features a soft silicone body that is pleasant to the touch, and it uses 9 actuators to move its eyes, mouth, head and rudimentary limbs.

 Data is transmitted between the user and robot via Internet connection

The Telenoid R1 robot is designed to add an element of realism to long-distance communication by recreating the physical presence of the remote user. The robot's actions mirror those of the remote user, whose movements are monitored by real-time face tracking software on the user's computer. Users can also transmit their voice through the robot's embedded speakers.

Telenoid R1 with Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University)

The Telenoid R1 is endowed with only the most basic human features -- just enough to recreate the physical presence of the remote user, according to robot's creators. The robot's androgynous and ageless look makes it suitable for a wide range of users, whether they are male, female, young or old.

English lessons can be conducted via the Telenoid R1 robot

At the unveiling in Osaka on August 1, the developers announced plans to begin selling two versions of the minimalist humanoid in October. The high-end model will be priced at about 3 million yen ($35,000), and a cheaper model will be available for about 700,000 yen ($8,000).