WEAPONS designed to fire "electric bullets" into crowds are being developed for police and border protection agencies in the US. The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, has launched an "innovative less-lethal devices for law enforcement" programme to radically expand the capabilities of electric shock weapons.

The programme aims to develop wireless weapons that can be used over greater distances in spaces such as "an auditorium, a city street or a sports stadium".On impact, the device sticks to the target and delivers an 80,000-volt shock for 7 seconds, using a pulsed delivery similar to that used by Tasers. Further shocks can be triggered via remote control.

Learn more about this and other HSARPA tasty treats in US shoots ahead in stun gun design at NewScientist and in
Homeland Security Orders Modern Version of Jules Verne's Leyden Ball at LiveScience.

Researchers have been looking into the possibility of using nonviral vectors, which should carry fewer inherent risks than with viral vectors, to deliver therapeutic genes.

In a paper published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists report that silicon nanoparticles can perform this task successfully in mice.

Paras N. Prasad of the State University of New York at Buffalo and his colleagues showed that organically modified silicon particles can be tailored to target specific cells and transport marker gene into cells. The study is the first in which a nonviral vector has shown efficacy comparable to that of a viral delivery system in an animal model.

The team discovered that the nanoparticles can be used to reactivate adult stem cells by altering a nuclear growth factor receptor. "In the future," says study co-author Earl J. Bergey "this technology may make it possible to repair neurological damage caused by disease, trauma or stroke."

Read the full Nanoparticles Pass Muster as Vectors for Gene Therapy at Scientific American.

Space tourism is set to boom in 2008. That is when Virgin Galactic plans to start carrying paying customers to the edge of space in a fleet of suborbital spaceships.

Virgin Galactic hopes to carry 400 passengers in the first year of operation, scaling up to 2000 in the second year and 3000 in the third. To date, only about 450 people in the world have experienced space travel.

The company plans to eventually operate one flight per day, with each SpaceShipTwo flying once every five days. After the first 100 people fly, the price will drop to around $100,000 a seat, which Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn expects to be a financial "sweet spot", encouraging a "much wider take-up" on the offer.

See the full Space tourism company to fly in 2008 article for more details.

A bright patch of water ice sitting serenely on the floor of a crater near the Martian north pole has been imaged by the Mars Express spacecraft. The image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European Space Agency (ESA) probe.

Faint traces of water ice are also visible along the rim of the crater and on the crater walls.

See the picture and read the full Frozen lake shines bright in Martian crater article at New Scientist Space.

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

The patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed," said Marc Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium.
Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that such a patent could be used by Microsoft to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application.

"It is unfortunately quite clear such patents have nothing to do with protecting investments nor R&D, and only with obtaining exclusion rights which can help them [Microsoft] maintain their dominant position in the market," said Maebe.

Read the Microsoft frowned at for smiley patent article at ZDNet UK.

VOLUNTEERS taking part in tests of the Pentagon's "less-lethal" microwave weapon were banned from wearing glasses or contact lenses due to safety fears. The precautions raise concerns about how safe the Active Denial System (ADS) weapon would be if used in real crowd-control situations.

The ADS fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam, which is supposed to heat skin and to cause pain but no physical damage (New Scientist, 27 October 2001, p 26). Little information about its effects has been released, but details of tests in 2003 and 2004 were revealed after Edward Hammond, director of the US Sunshine Project - an organisation campaigning against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons - requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The ADS weapon's beam causes pain within 2 to 3 seconds and it becomes intolerable after less than 5 seconds. People's reflex responses to the pain is expected to force them to move out of the beam before their skin can be burnt. One person suffered a burn in a previous test when the beam was accidentally used on the wrong power setting.

The US marines and police are both working on portable versions, and the US air force is building a system for controlling riots from the air.

Read the full Details of US microwave-weapon tests revealed article at New Scientist

An inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications.

A key component of the experiment was a glass test chamber about the size of two coffee mugs filled with a liquid called deuterated acetone, which contains a form of hydrogen known as deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. The researchers exposed the test chamber to subatomic particles called neutrons and then bombarded the liquid with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which caused cavities to form into tiny bubbles. The bubbles then expanded to a much larger size before imploding, apparently with enough force to cause thermonuclear fusion reactions.

Scientists have long known that high-frequency sound waves cause the formation of cavities and bubbles in liquid, a process known as "acoustic cavitation," and that those cavities then implode, producing high temperatures and light in a phenomenon called "sonoluminescence."

In the Purdue research, however, the liquid was "seeded" with neutrons before it was bombarded with sound waves. Some of the bubbles created in the process were perfectly spherical, and they imploded with greater force than irregular bubbles. The research yielded evidence that only spherical bubbles implode with a force great enough to cause deuterium atoms to fuse together, similar to the way in which hydrogen atoms fuse in stars to create the thermonuclear furnaces that make stars shine.


Deuterium is contained in seawater, so a fusion reactor's fuel supply would be virtually infinite. A cubic kilometer of seawater would contain enough heavy hydrogen to provide a thousand years' worth of power for the United States.

Read the full release from Purdue University.

A method of splicing nanoscopic wires could enable engineers to make speedy electronic circuits featuring molecular components.

Individual molecules may one day take the place of standard electronic components - such as transistors - in electronic circuits. It would lead to vastly more compact circuits than those found inside modern computers and gadgets. Designers could then pack greater processing power into handheld devices and supercharge desktop machines well beyond their current capabilities.

Lidong Qin and colleagues at Northwestern University in Chicago, US, created nanowires containing gaps just a few nanometres wide (1 nm is one-billionth of a metre) along its length, all held in a gutter-shaped support. The gaps are so minute that individual molecules can be dropped in, converting the wire into simple, incredibly small, electronic circuitry.

To make the nano-gaps, Qin's team first made nanoscopic wires comprised of tiny sections of silver sandwiched between longer stretches of gold. They electrochemically positioned the two materials within a template which was subsequently dissolved in a chemical solution.
Repeatable trick

The resulting wires, measuring 360 nanometres in diameter and 5000 nanometres in length, were then deposited onto a glass slide and a layer of silica added on top. When the glass slide was taken away, the silica acted as a gutter-shaped support for the wire. Finally, the ultra-thin silver segments were also dissolved, leaving gold nanowires with gaps just a few nanometres wide, held together by the silica splints. The process is called on-wire lithography.

Crucially, the researchers were able to use the trick to reliably manufacture wires with specific gap-lengths, ranging between 2.5 nm and 210 nm long. Previous methods - such as pulling the wires till they snapped - were not reliable. Finally, they were able manoeuvre a conductive polymer material into the gap, to make a prototype piece of nano-circuitry.

"This really opens up the possibility of using molecules as components for a variety of nanoscale devices," says Chad Mirkin, another member of the team.

Read the entire entire article.

Researchers at the University of Alberta have proven the potential for constructing electronic circuitry on a molecular scale, a breakthrough that could shatter the limitations of conventional transistor technology and pave the way for smaller, faster, cheaper microelectronic devices.

The report by National Research Council National Institute of Nanotechnology's Molecular Scale Development Group, led by U of A physics professor and iCORE Chair in Nanoscale Information and Communication Technologies Dr. Robert Wolkow, has been published in the June 2005 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

Wolkow said his team has proven that a single molecule can be controllably charged while all the surrounding molecules remain neutral, causing it to act as a basic transistor. Transistors control the flow of current in most electronic devices and are combined to form integrated circuits used to make the microprocessors and memory chips that drive everything from computers and cell phones to household appliances.

But where conventional transistors might use a million electrons to switch a current, Wolkow's team was able to control the current through a hydrocarbon molecule using a single atom.

Wolkow emphasized that, while the concept his team tested is a long way from practical application, it undoubtedly fits the definition of a transistor, which has three terminals - an 'in,' and 'out,' and a control outlet.

"To call something a transistor, it needs a control element," Wolkow said. "We have control, but it's very sluggish and slow right now. It takes us on the order of minutes to change conditions that make current go or not, so for any computer technology, this thing is today impractical. But it's not hopeless. There are many hurdles, but there aren't any we see as insurmountable."

In fact, the research team has already cleared what appeared to be insurmountable obstacles in manipulating molecules measuring one one-billionth of a metre in size.

"It's very hard to connect wires to a molecule," Wolkow said. "Imagine trying to bring three watermelons together all to touch something the size of a poppy seed. You couldn't do it - you could make two watermelons touch a poppy seed, and even that would be kind of difficult, holding that poppy seed in place. But then to bring in the third watermelon is impossible - you can't have all three touching such a small object."

To solve this problem, the "transistor" molecule was placed on a silicon surface that had been exposed to hydrogen gas, so that each silicon atom was capped with a hydrogen atom. By removing the hydrogen cap from single silicon atom, that silicon atom could be made to conduct a charge while the surrounding atoms remained neutral. The tip of a powerful scanning tunneling microscope served as the on/off switch.

Read the full Single molecule transistor could revolutionize electronic miniaturization arcticle or check out the Researchers develop new concept for single molecule transistor press release.

It is possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.

So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention. In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.

By understanding the perception pathway and working out the point at which consciousness kicks in, patient consciousness could be diagnosed. This would mean the setup could be used as a “consciousness-meter,” says Haynes; “a device that allows us to assess whether a patient is consciously perceiving his or her outside environment.”

Yang Dan, a neurobiologist at the University of California in Berkeley, agrees this would be possible. But she cautions that there is little agreement over what consciousness actually is.

More subtle forms of mind-reading such as working out intentions or beliefs are much more speculative, she argues. Even if such subtle information could be gleaned from brain scans both studies suggest the patterns are unique to individuals.

And using the technique as an alternative to the polygraph would be very risky, says Dan. “The relationship between brain patterns and lies may be very loose.”

Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn1445 and 10.1038/nn1444), Mind-reading machine knows what you see article at New Scientist