Tongan volcano has created a substantial new island

Clouds of ash and gas rise from the cone of a new volcanic island some 65 kilometres (40 miles) southwest of Tonga's capital Nuku'alofa. 

The Tongan volcano has created a substantial new island since it began erupting in December, spewing out huge volumes of rock and dense ash that has killed nearby vegetation, officials said. 

The Lands and Natural Resources Ministry said the volcano was erupting from two vents, one on the uninhabited island of Hunga Ha'apai and the other underwater about 100 metres offshore.

Picture: AFP/Getty

DARPA MUSE: Deep program analysis and big data analytics create a public database

DARPA's MUSE seeks to leverage deep program analyses and big data analytics to create a public database containing mined inferences about salient properties, behaviours and vulnerabilities of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today.

The program aims to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained and understood, and to enable the automated repair of existing programs and synthesis of new ones.

During the past decade information technologies have driven the productivity gains essential to U.S. economic competitiveness, and computing systems now control significant elements of critical national infrastructure.

As a result, tremendous resources are devoted to ensuring that programs are correct, especially at scale.

Unfortunately, in spite of developers' best efforts, software errors are at the root of most execution errors and security vulnerabilities.

To help improve this state, DARPA has created the Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program.

MUSE seeks to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained and understood.

The collective knowledge gleaned from MUSE's efforts would facilitate new mechanisms for dramatically improving software correctness, and help develop radically different approaches for automatically constructing and repairing complex software.

Suresh Jagannathan

"Our goal is to apply the principles of big data analytics to identify and understand deep commonalities among the constantly evolving corpus of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today," said Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager.

"We're aiming to treat programs—more precisely, facts about programs—as data, discovering new relationships (enclaves) among this 'big code' to build better, more robust software."

Central to MUSE's approach is the creation of a community infrastructure that would incorporate a continuously operational specification-mining engine.

This engine would leverage deep program analyses and foundational ideas underlying big data analytics to populate and refine a database containing inferences about salient properties, behaviours and vulnerabilities of the program components in the corpus.

If successful, MUSE could provide numerous capabilities that have so far remained elusive.

"Ideally, we could enable a paradigm shift in the way we think about software construction and maintenance, replacing the existing costly and laborious test/debug/validate cycle with 'always on' program analysis, mining, inspection and discovery," Jagannathan said.

"We could see scalable automated mechanisms to identify and repair program errors, as well as tools to efficiently create new, custom programs from existing components based only a description of desired properties."

US researchers create 'bionic ear,' using 3-D printer

US researchers create 'bionic ear,' using 3-D printer to combine tissue with electronics

With a 3-D printer, a petri dish and some cells from a cow, U.S. researchers are growing synthetic ears that can receive — and transmit — sound.

The Princeton University scientists send bovine cells mixed in a liquid gel through the printer, followed by tiny particles of silver.

The printer is programmed to shape the material into a "bionic ear" and forms the silver particles into a coiled antenna. Like any antenna, this one can pick up radio signals that the ear will interpret as sound.

The 3-D ear is not designed to replace a human one. The research is meant to explore a new method of combining electronics with biological material.

Michael McAlpine

"What we really did here was actually more of a proof of concept of the capabilities of 3-D printing," said Michael McAlpine, the professor who led the project.

"Because most people use 3-D printing to print passive objects — things like figurines and jewelry."

After it's printed, the 3-D ear is soft and translucent. It is cultivated for 10 weeks, letting the cells multiply, creating a flesh color and forming hardened tissue around the antenna.

McAlpine and his team demonstrated the antenna's ability to pick up radio signals by attaching electrodes onto the backs of the ears in the printing process.

When they broadcast a recording of Beethoven's "Fur Elise" to a pair of fully cultivated ears, the electrodes passed the signal along wires to a set of speakers, and the music flowed out clear and without interference.

Although the new research is just one iteration in the field of cybernetics — an area that looks at combining biology with technology — McAlpine said the research could lead to synthetic replacements for actual human functions, and to a sort of electronic sixth sense.

"As the world becomes a more digital and electronic place, I think ultimately we're going to care less about our traditional five senses," he said. "And we're going to want these new senses to give us direct electronic communication with our cellphones and our laptop devices."

NASA Mars Curiosity Fires Laser 100X To Create Soil Indent - Time-Lapse Video

Laser shots that harness a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second were fired by MSL's ChemCam instrument into a soil target named 'Sutton Inlier'. 

Sixteen frames from the 20 minutes experiment are time-lapsed/looped.

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Scottish scientists create single-pixel camera for 3D images

A projector displays patterned light on the face on a mannequin. These patterns are used to produce a 2D image. A 3D image is then formed using a technique called "shape from shade"

Scientists in Glasgow have discovered a low-cost way to create 3D images.

Their system uses detectors which have a single pixel to sense light instead of the millions of pixels used in the imaging sensors of digital cameras.

The detectors can "see" frequencies beyond visible light, which researchers say could open up new uses for 3D imaging in medicine and geography.

They said the single-pixel detectors cost "a few pounds" compared to current systems, which cost "thousands".

It is hoped that the system's ability to senses wavelengths far beyond the capability of digital cameras and its low cost, could make it a valuable tool for a wide range of industries.

Researchers said possible uses could range from locating oil to helping doctors find tumours.

Miles Padgett

Crossword patterns
Prof Miles Padgett led the team at University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy, which developed the technique.

He said: "Single-pixel detectors in four different locations are used to detect light from a data projector, which illuminates objects with a rapidly-shifting sequence of black-and-white patterns similar to crossword puzzles.

"When more of the white squares of these patterns overlap with the object, the intensity of the light reflected back to the detectors is higher.

"A series of projected patterns and the reflected intensities are used in a computer algorithm to produce a 2D image."

"A 3D image was then created by combining images from the four detectors using a well-known technique called "shape from shade"."

This 3D computational imaging, or ghost imaging produces detailed images of objects in just a few seconds.

Conventional 3D imaging systems uses multiple digital camera sensors to produce a 3D image from 2D information. Careful calibration is required to ensure the multi-megapixel images align correctly.

Beyond the visible
Prof Padgett continued: "Our single-pixel system creates images with a similar degree of accuracy without the need for such detailed calibration."

Baoqing Sun

Lead author on the paper Baoqing Sun said: "It might seem a bit counter-intuitive to think that more information can be captured from a detector which uses just a single pixel rather than the multi-megapixel detectors found in conventional digital cameras.

"However, digital camera sensors have a very limited sensitivity beyond the spectrum of visible light, whereas a single-pixel detector can easily be made to capture information far beyond the visible, reaching wavelengths from X-ray to TeraHertz."

More Information:
The team's paper, 3D Computational Imaging with Single-Pixel Detectors, is published in the Science 17 May 2013: Vol. 340 no. 6134 pp. 844-847 DOI:10.1126/science.1234454.

China to Create and Broadcast Its Own Version of the News - NYTimes.com

China to Create Its Own Version of the News - NYTimes.com

An ambitiouspolitical plan, set forth in guidelines last week by China's State Council, envisions the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and with less government backing.

China, in short, would like to consolidate its media industry into companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts say.

There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China

Beijing want the moves to improve the nation's image overseas - part of a longstanding effort to use 'soft power,' rather than military might to win friends and influence people abroad. The iron fist in a silk glove!

Along the way, Beijing will allow private and foreign companies to invest in everything from music, film and television to theater, dance and opera productions - though largely through state-owned companies and always controlled by the government.

The News Corporation, Viacom and other Western media giants have for years been frustrated by their inability to win approval to produce films and television programs aimed at Chinese consumers; often, they have operated with Chinese joint venture partners and run into procrastinating tactics; constant delays or political barriers. Several American companies said they were studying the new Chinese rules and declined to comment further on them.

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