A US start-up has turned to nature to help bring water to arid areas by drawing moisture from the air.

Namib Desert beetle inspires self-filling water bottle

The Namib Desert beetle harvests moisture from the air to survive

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A US start-up has turned to nature to help bring water to arid areas by drawing moisture from the air.

NBD Nano aims to mimic the way a beetle survives in an African desert to create a self-filling water bottle capable of storing up to three litres every hour.

The insect harvests moisture from the air by first getting it to condense on its back and then storing the water.

Using nature as an inspiration for technology, known as biomimicry, is increasingly widespread.

NBD Nano, which consists of four recent university graduates and was formed in May, looked at the Namib Desert beetle that lives in a region that gets about half an inch of rainfall per year.

Using a similar approach, the firm wants to cover the surface of a bottle with hydrophilic (water-attracting) and hydrophobic (water-repellent) materials.

The work is still in its early stages, but it is the latest example of researchers looking at nature to find inspiration for sustainable technology.

"It was important to apply [biomimicry] to our design and we have developed a proof of concept and [are] currently creating our first fully-functional prototype," Miguel Galvez, a co-founder, told the BBC.

"We think our initial prototype will collect anywhere from half a litre of water to three litres per hour, depending on local environments."

Quantum computing -- nobel prize in physics

Nobel physics prize highlights weird world of quantum optics

By Karl Ritter and Louise Nordstrom The Associated Press

updated 10/9/2012 12:54:06 PM ET STOCKHOLM — A French-American duo shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for experiments on quantum particles that have already resulted in ultra-precise clocks and may one day lead to computers many times faster than those in use today.

Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland showed in the 1990s how to observe individual particles while preserving their bizarrequantum properties, something that scientists had struggled to do before.

Michel Euler / AP French physicist Serge Haroche discusses his role in Nobel-winning research during a news conference at the College de France in Paris on Tuesday.

A quantum particle is one that is isolated from everything else. In this situation, an atom or electron or photon takes on strange properties. It can be in two places at once, for example. It behaves in some ways like a wave. But these properties are instantly changed when it interacts with something else, such as when somebody observes it.

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Working separately, the two scientists, both 68, developed "ingenious laboratory methods" that allowed them to manage and measure and control fragile quantum states, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

"Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of superfast computer based on quantum physics," the academy said. "The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time."

Background: Nobel-winning physics explained

Haroche is a professor at the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Wineland is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.

The two researchers use opposite approaches to examine, control and count quantum particles, the academy said. Wineland traps ions — electrically charged atoms — and measures them with light. Haroche controls and measures photons, or light particles, by sending atoms through a specially prepared trap.

Haroche said he was out walking with his wife when he got the call from the Nobel judges.

"I was in the street and passing a bench so I was able to sit down," Haroche told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone."It's very overwhelming."

He said his work in the realm of quantum physics could ultimately lead to unimaginably fast computers. "You can do things which are prohibited by the laws of classical physics," he told The Associated Press.

Haroche also said quantum research could help make GPS navigating systems more accurate.

'Got a lot smarter' Wineland told AP he was sleeping when his wife answered the phone at 3:30 a.m. local time in Denver. He was utterly shocked even though his name had come up before. "But actually I hadn't heard anything this time around. It was certainly surprising and kind of overwhelming right now," he said. "I feel like I got a lot smarter overnight."

Wineland took pains to note that many people are working in the field. "First of all, a lot of people have been working on advanced computers and atomic clocks for a long time. It's a bit embarrassing to focus on just two individuals," he said.

Asked how he will celebrate, Wineland said: "I'll probably be pretty worn out by this evening. I'll probably have a glass of wine and fall asleep."

Christopher Monroe, who does similar work at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, said the awarding of the prize to the two men "is not a big surprise to me. ... It was sort of obvious that they were a package."

Monroe said that thanks to the bizarre properties of the quantum world, when he and Wineland worked together in the 1990s, they were able to put a single atom in two places simultaneously.

At that time, it wasn't clear that trapping single atoms could help pave the way to superfast quantum computers, he said. That whole field "justfellintoour laps,'" Monroe said.

In an ordinary computer, information is represented in bits, each of which is either a zero or a one. But in a quantum computer, an individual particle can essentially represent a zero and a one at the same time — that is, until the result is read out. If scientists can make quantum bits, or "qubits," work together, certain kinds of calculations could be done with blazing speed.

One example is prime factorization, the process of discovering which two prime numbers can be multiplied together to producea given number.That has implications for breaking the encryption codes that provide the foundation for today's secure financial transactions. However, quantum encryption could open the way for a new generation of secure communication tools as well.

Quantum computers could radically change people's lives in the way that classical computers did last century, but a full-scale quantum computer is still decades away, the Nobel judges said. "The calculations would be incredibly much faster and exact, and you would be able to use it for areas like meteorology and for measuring the climate of the earth," said Lars Bergstrom, the secretary of the prize committee.

The physics prize was the second of the 2012 Nobel Prizes to be announced, with the medicine prize going Monday to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka. Each award is worth 8 million kronor,orabout $1.2 million.

The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

More about quantum physics:

Millions invested in quantum weirdness Time-twisting test stuck in limbo Information teleported between atoms

AP science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York, Lori Hinnan

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2 suns 2 planets are first time found

Orbiting in the Habitable Zone of Two Suns

This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-47, a double-star system containing two planets, one orbiting in the so-called "habitable zone." This is the sweet spot in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet.

Unlike our own solar system, Kepler-47 is home to two stars. One star is similar to the sun in size, but only 84 percent as bright. The second star is diminutive, measuring only one-third the size of the sun and less than one percent as bright. As the stars are smaller than our sun, the systems habitable zone is closer in.

The habitable zone of the system is ring-shaped, centered on the larger star. As the primary star orbits the center of mass of the two stars every 7.5 days, the ring of the habitable zone moves around.

This artist's rendering shows the planet comfortably orbiting within the habitable zone, similar to where Earth circles the sun. One year, or orbit, on Kepler-47c is 303 days. While not a world hospitable for life, Kepler-47c is thought to be a gaseous giant, slightly larger than Neptune, where an atmosphere of thick bright water-vapor clouds might exist.

Sharing the Light of Two Suns

This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system -- multiple planets orbiting two suns – 4,900 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus. The system was detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, which measures minisucule changes in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that pass in front of or 'transit' their host star.

As seen from our vantage point on Earth, the two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other every 7.5 days. One star is similar to the sun in size, but only 84 percent as bright. The second star is diminutive, measuring only one-third the size of the sun and less than one percent as bright.

Two planets also eclipse, or transit, the host stars. The inner planet, Kepler-47b, orbits the pair of stars in less than 50 days. At three times the radius of Earth, it is the smallest known transiting circumbinary planet.

Seen in the foreground, the outer planet, Kepler-47c, orbits its host pair every 303 days, placing it in the so-called "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet. While not a world hospitable for life, Kepler-47c is thought to be a gaseous giant, slightly larger than Neptune, where an atmosphere of thick

Arctic ice cap shrinks to new record low

While a number of people continue to deny that humans are responsible for the Earth getting warmer, it's hard to avoid the fact that global temperatures are indeed increasing. Just take a look at the Arctic Ocean, where scientists say ice levels will be at their lowest modern levels ever within a week or two.

Prior to this year, the record smallest size of the Arctic ice cap was 4.25 million square kilometers. While the current ice cap isn't quite at those levels — the last estimate was 5.09 million square kilometers — levels continue to drop sharply by as much as 100,000 square kilometers per day. Ice levels will continue to drop through the end of the melting season, which is approximately two weeks from now. And even if the ice melt ceased immediately, the current level would still mark the third lowest on record.

Unfortunately, Arctic ice melt is a vicious cycle. According to National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serrez, "the ice now is so thin in the spring, just because of the general pattern of warming, that large parts of the pack ice just can't survive the summer melt season anymore."

Postcard from Mars

Postcards from Mars: The Curiosity rover sent a 360-degree color panorama of its new home on the Red Planet, as well as a self-portrait. Blast marks from the rover's descent can be seen in the foreground. See the latest photos from Mars here: http://yhoo.it/O8GATi

Scientists find chemotherapy can encourage cancer growth in healthy cells

Although chemotherapy is effective at killing cancer cells , new research found that it can actually encourage cancer growth in healthy cells that didn't have cancer before. Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle said the team's findings, which were published in the journal Nature Medicine, were totally unexpected.

Mars rover makes historic landing

         
PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.

Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error.

"I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.

Moments later, Curiosity beamed back its first three images from the Martian surface, one of them showing a wheel of the vehicle and the rover's shadow cast on the rocky terrain.

NASA put the official landing time of Curiosity, touted as the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time (1:32 a.m. EDT/0532 GMT).

The landing marked a much-welcome success and a major milestone for a U.S. space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its space shuttle program, NASA's centerpiece for 30 years.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this," said John Holdren, the top science advisor to President Barack Obama, who was visiting JPL for the event. "It was an incredible performance."

Obama himself issued a statement hailing the Curiosity landing as "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future."

"It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," he said.

CHECKUP FOR CURIOSITY BEFORE IT ROVES

While Curiosity rover appears to have landed intact, its exact condition was still to be ascertained.

NASA plans to put the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover and its sophisticated instruments through several weeks of engineering checks before starting its two-year surface mission in earnest.

"We're going to make sure that we're firing on all cylinders before we blaze out across the plains," lead scientist John Grotzinger said.

The rover's precise location had yet to be determined, but NASA said it came to rest in its planned landing zone near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater, in Mars' southern hemisphere.

Launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' thin atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- and starting its descent.

Encased in a protective capsule-like shell, the craft utilized a first-of-its kind automated flight-entry system to sharply reduce its speed.

Then the probe rode a huge, supersonic parachute into the lower atmosphere before a jet-powered backpack NASA called a "sky crane" carried Curiosity most of the rest of the way to its destination, lowering it to the ground by nylon tethers.

'SEVEN MINUTES OF TERROR'

When the rover's wheels were planted firmly on the ground, the cords were cut and the sky crane flew a safe distance away and crashed.

The sequence also involved 79 pyrotechnic detonations to release exterior ballast weights, open the parachute, separate the heat shield, detach the craft's back shell, jettison the parachute and other functions. The failure of any one of those would have doomed the landing, JPL engineers said.

NASA sardonically referred the unorthodox seven-minute descent and landing sequence as "seven minutes of terror."

With a 14-minute delay in the time it takes for radio waves from Earth to reach Mars 154 million miles (248 million km) away, NASA engineers had little to do during Curiosity's descent but anxiously track its progress.

By the time they received radio confirmation of Curiosity's safe landing, relayed to Earth by a NASA satellite orbiting Mars, the craft already had been on the ground for seven minutes.

NASA engineers said the intricate and elaborate landing system used by Curiosity was necessary because of its size and weight.

Over twice as large and five times heavier than either of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004, Curiosity weighed too much to be bounced to the surface in airbags or fly itself all the way down with rocket thrusters -- systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers, engineers said.

Curiosity is designed to spend the next two years exploring Gale Crater and an unusual 3-mile- (5 km-) high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater's floor.

Its primary mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once hosted the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve.

The rover comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to Earth.

One is a laser gun that can zap a rock from 23 feet away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition.

Mission controllers were joined by 1,400 scientists, engineers and dignitaries who tensely waited at JPL to learn Curiosity's fate, among them film star Morgan Freeman, television's "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek, comic actor Seth Green and actress June Lockhart of "Lost in Space" fame. Another 5,000 people watched from the nearby California Institute of Technology, the academic home of JPL.

"There are many out in the community who say that NASA has lost its way, that we don't know how to explore, that we've lost our moxie. I think it's fair to say that NASA knows how to explore, we've been exploring and we're on Mars," former astronaut and NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, told reporters shortly after the touchdown.

Twitter to predict spread of flu ?

Researchers, led by Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester in New York, are looking for a way to use Twitter to predict when individuals will get sick with the flu. By analyzing the 4.4 million tweets with GPS location data from more than 630,000 Twitter users around New York City, the team created a heat map of where people were unwell. They then created a video mapping the spread of illness across the city over the course of a day. Based on that data, the team could predict when an individual would get sick up to eight days before symptoms appeared with 90% accuracy.

Scientists have been looking for more accurate ways to use tech and computers to predict disease outbreaks for years. This new prediction model isn't perfect either. Although it can distinguish between tweets of "I feel so sick" and "I'm sick of this traffic," it cannot account for people who do not reliably tweet about their flu symptoms. Also, the system only measures location-based contact with other sick people, which is not the only way to pick up a bug.

Personal Satelitte

 Years of rummaging through back-alleyelectronics stores will pay off later this year for a South Korean artist when he fulfills his dream of launching a homemade, basement-built satellite into space.

"Making a satellite is no more difficult than making a cellphone," said Song Hojun, 34, who said he built the $500 OpenSat to show people they could achieve their dreams.

"I believe that not just a satellite, but anything can be made with the help of the Internet and social platforms. I chose a satellite to show that symbolically."

There's a long history of do-it-yourself satellites being launched byuniversities and scientific groups around the world, as well as amateur radio clubs, but Song said his is the first truly personal satellite designed and financed by an individual.

An engineering student at university, Song regularly incorporated technology into his art pieces. In a work called Apple he used light bulbs that would "ripen" -- change color from green to red when people take photos of it with flashes.

After working as an intern at a private satellite company, he came up with the idea for his "Open Satellite Initiative," which in turn led him to contact space professionals from Slovenia to Paris.

"I'm just an individual, not someone working for big universities, corporations or armies, so they open up to me and easily give out information," said Song.

The bespectacled Song spent nearly six years combing through academic papers, shopping online at sites that specialize in components that can be used for space projects, and rummaging through electronic stores hidden in the back alleys of Seoul.

He ran a small electronics business to support himself, but the bulk of his funds came from his parents.

The cubical OpenSat weighs 1 kg (2.2 lbs) and measures 10 cubic centimeters. It will transmit information about the working status of its battery, the temperature and rotation speed of the satellite's solar panel.

Radio operators will be able to communicate with the satellite. If all goes well, it will repeat a message in Morse code using its LED lights at a set time and location.

The components cost only 500,000 won ($440). But the cost for launching it hit 120 million won after Song signed a contract with NovaNano, a French technology company, which acted as a broker to arrange the launch, including submitting paperwork and finding a rocket.

The satellite will be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in December with another satellite.

Song has been invited to talk at international universities and organizations including MIT Media Lab and CalArts, both in the United States, and the Royal College of Art in London.

"The reason why technology or science is talked about is not because it is an absolute truth, but rather because it generates interesting stories," he said. ($1 = 1146.9500 Korean won)

(Reporting by Eunhye Shin, editing by Elaine Lies and Patricia Reaney)

Mars One wants to send you to the red planet, but it's a one-way trip

If you've always wanted to live on a distant world, Dutch company Mars One wants to give you your chance to settle on the red planet. There's only one catch: You'll never be able to return to Earth.

Next year, Mars One will hold a worldwide lottery to select 40 people to train to be civilian astronauts. That group will be sent to live in a desert simulation for three months, after which the initial pool will be whittled down to 10. By 2023, this group will be sent to Mars to form the first permanent human settlement.

According to Bas Lansdorp, founder of Mars One, "We will send humans to Mars in 2023. They will live there the rest of their lives. There will be a habitat waiting for them, and we'll start sending four people every two years."

Once the new settlement has begun to thrive, the possibility for a return visit to Earth may open up. Still, that's not guaranteed. Says Lansdorp, "our astronauts will be offered a one-way trip. We have no idea when it will be possible to offer return tickets."

NASA telescope snaps most detailed photos of the Sun ever taken

We've always been warned never to look directly at the sun, but on July 11 a team of scientists fromNASA did exactly that. They were using a specialized telescope called the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C for short) and the resulting photos are nothing short of spectacular.

The Hi-C telescope was launched onboard a 58-foot-tall rocket which carried it along a sub-orbital trajectory for only 10 minutes. For five of those minutes, a camera mounted inside the telescope snapped 165 pictures of an area on the Sun that scientists had picked out nearly a month prior. Once it was done, the Hi-C returned to Earth and was recovered at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

NASA scientists pointed the 10-foot-long Hi-C at an area of the Sun expected to have intense magnetic activity due to the presence of a sunspot. They weren't disappointed, and you can see the swirling solar corona in better-than-ever detail in the video above. The photos were made possible by using some of the highest-quality mirrors ever produced by NASA. The agency says the Hi-C was able to capture details on the Sun as small as 137 miles wide, which is pretty impressive when you consider the star is more than 100 times the size of the Earth.

Short-lived mission provides an astounding new perspective on our life-giving star