Aestus Ajith

How Isaac Asimov got 2014 both so right and so wrong Asimov imagined a future exactly like the present for 2014, but with underground cities, moon colonies, and awesome hovercars. (Credit: Rowena Morrill/Wikimedia Commons) In 1964, legendary writer of science fiction and science fact Isaac Asimov visited the World's Fair, where a General Electric pavilion chronicling advances in electric appliances inspired him to imagine how that progress might continue into the future. So Asimov sat down and penned his vision  of life in the year 2014, 50 years in the future at that point. Asimov has awed me since I was a small child reading a  pop-up book  inspired by his work in robotics, but I read this particular essay of his for the first time on my way to the  International Consumer Electronics Show  this year. There, much like Asimov 50 years ago, I was inspired by all the tech on display to look both back toward Asimov's heyday and further into  the fut...

Chinese researchers have done the seemingly impossible: observed and recorded an instance of ball lightning completely by accident. And it bodes well for a decade-old theory about the nature of the conundrum. An instance of ball lightning recreated in the lab last year by a team at the US Air Force Academy. (Credit: Mike Lindsay/US Air Force Academy) Ball lightning, a phenomenon in which a glowing orb of light persists for seconds after a lightning strike, is one of the most enduring atmospheric mysteries in science. Reported sightings date as far back as ancient Greece; an occurrence of ball lightning is rumored to have  killed 18th century scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann ; and recreating it synthetically has been a daunting feat, accomplished by only a few research teams after  Nikola Tesla managed to first manifest spherical charges in the lab in 1904 . Since then, little progress has been made toward concrete theories that can explain the strange, near-myst...

CANCER is nothing to play around with. But a new online game encourages people to do just that, fiddling with swarms of nanoparticles to come up with promising strategies for attacking tumours. The game, called  NanoDoc , trains players on a few basic rules, including the types of nanoparticles in their arsenal and how they swarm through tissue to find cancerous cells. It then lets players try challenges, which feature real configurations of tumour cells, some of which researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for. The idea is that, as crowds of online users chip away at these tough problems, they will find solutions researchers haven't thought of yet, leading to improved treatments. "We want bioengineers to come in and design the scenarios," says  Sabine Hauert , a swarm engineer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who released NanoDoc online last week. Hauert was inspired by the protein-folding game  FoldIt , in which online u...

Spider silk darkened with a coating of carbon nanotubes can tell if your heart just skipped a beat. Following a few simple steps, researchers have made a silk-nanotube hybrid that is tough, flexible and electrically conductive. The material might find uses in a range of bendy medical sensors. Long known as one of nature's toughest and most flexible materials, spider silk is not naturally conductive. Scientists have previously married metals such as gold with spider silk, but those hybrids didn't allow the silk to stretch as much as usual. To create a conductive but less rigid silk,  Eden Steven  at Florida State University in Tallahassee collected bundles of silk from a species of golden orb-weaver spider. He polarised a powder of carbon nanotubes so that the tubes would stick to the naturally charged silk, then mixed the materials with a few drops of water and pressed them between two sheets of Teflon. Wrap, shrink When the material dried out, the silk was coated ...

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of  metamaterials . These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver " invisibility cloaks " that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta  at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the  old idea of analogue computing . Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The  slide rule  is one example...

Step far enough back from the tree of life and it begins to look quite simple. At its heart are just three stout branches, representing the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. But that's too simple, according to a band of biologists who believe we may be on the verge of discovering the fourth domain of life. The bold statement is the result of an analysis of water samples collected from the world's seas.  Jonathan Eisen  at the University of California, Davis, Genome Center has identified gene sequences hidden within these samples that are so unusual they seem to have come from organisms that are only distantly related to cellular life as we know it. So distantly related, in fact, that they may belong to an organism that sits in an entirely new domain. Most species on the planet look like tiny single cells, and to work out where they fit on the tree of life biologists need to be able to grow them in the lab. Colonies like this give them enough DNA to...

Hollywood director James Cameron found little evidence of life when he descended nearly 11,000 metres to the deepest point in the world's oceans last year . If only he had taken a microscope and looked just a few centimetres deeper. Ronnie Glud  at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and his colleagues, have discovered unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments at the site of Cameron's dive –  Challenger Deep  at the bottom of the western Pacific's Mariana Trench. Glud's team dispatched autonomous sensors and sample collectors into the trench to measure microbial activity in the top 20 centimetres of sediment on the sea bed. The pressure there is almost 1100 times greater than at the surface. Finding food, however, is an even greater challenge than surviving high pressures for anything calling the trench home. Any nourishment must come in the form of detritus falling from the surface ocean, most of which is consumed by other organisms...

IT'S a chart that no one wants to top, but global warming's worst offenders, in absolute terms, are the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the UK. New calculations suggest that these nations are responsible for more than 60 per cent of the global warming between 1906 and 2005. Damon Matthews  of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues calculated national contributions to warming by weighting each type of emission according to the atmospheric lifetime of the temperature change it causes. Using historical data, they included carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and changes in land use – such as deforestation. They also accounted for methane, nitrous oxide and sulphate aerosols. These together account for 0.7 °C of the world's  0.74 °C warming  between 1906 and 2005. The US is the clear leader, responsible for 0.15 °C, or 22 per cent of the 0.7 °C warming. China accounts for 9 per cent, Russia for 8 per cent, Br...

The human family tree may be in for a dramatic rewrite. DNA collected from a fossilised finger bone from Siberia shows it belonged to a mysterious ancient hominid – perhaps a new species. "X-woman", as the creature has been named, last shared an ancestor with humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago but is probably different from both species. She lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. "This is the tip of the iceberg," says  Chris Stringer , a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the find. More hominids that are neither Neanderthal nor human are likely to be discovered in coming years, particularly in central and eastern Asia, he says. Roaming Asia Previously, anthropologists thought that Neanderthals and humans were the only hominids roaming Europe and Asia during the late Pleistocene. The discovery of 17,000-year-old  Homo floresiensis  – the "hobbit" – dispelled that notion, but many anthropo...

A UK research team has discovered a massive ancient subglacial trough that’s deeper than the Grand Canyon. Researchers used radar and satellite data to map the region beneath the West Antarctic ice sheets. Photo via University Herald Scientists from several universities in the U.K. have discovered a massive ancient subglacial trough – deeper than the Grand Canyon. They used satellite data and ice-penetrating radar to chart the Ellsworth Subglacial Highlands – an ancient mountain range buried beneath several kilometers of Antarctic ice. The researchers spent three seasons investigating and mapping the region in West Antarctica. The massive trough they found – a subglacial valley – is up to three kilometers deep, more than 300 kilometers long and up to 25 kilometers across. In places, the floor of this valley is more than 2,000 meters below sea level. A small icefield – a wide flat expanse of floating ice, typical of those found at Earth’s poles – is thought to have carved t...