King Kong director Peter Jackson has agreed a deal with Microsoft to create what he describes as a “new form of interactive entertainment”.
The Oscar-winning film-maker said he would be creating a series based on the Halo video game franchise, created by Bungie Studios.
“I’m getting a little bored with films,” he said.
The series will appear on the Xbox 360 games console and Xbox Live, the machine’s online service.
China claims to have carried out a successful test of its experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor. But what exactly made this test ‘successful’ is not clear. From the article: ‘Xinhua cited the scientists as saying that deuterium and tritium atoms had been fused together at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for nearly three seconds. The report did not specify whether the device… had succeeded at producing more energy than it consumed, the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable.
China is a participant in the 10-nation ITER project to build a fusion reactor in the south of France by 2015. The article quotes the research head of ITER as saying, “It was important for China to show that it is part of the club.
A team of French doctors say they have carried out a successful operation on a human under “weightless” conditions in an adapted aircraft. The trial is being seen as a first step to performing surgery in space.
The doctors removed a benign tumour from the arm of a volunteer as their plane made a series of swoops to mimic a reduced-gravity environment.
The medics and patient were strapped down for the procedure which was done inside a hygienic plastic tent.
Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, has a secret ingredient for rescuing the suspended global trade talks – the renewable energy sources known as biofuels.
“Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know.”
So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.
Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen’s team. Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).
The war in Iraq has made global terrorism worse by fanning Islamic radicalism and providing a training ground for lethal methods that are increasingly being exported to other countries, according to a sweeping assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The National Intelligence Estimate, a report from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, paints a considerably bleaker picture of the impact of the Iraq war than Bush administration or U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged publicly, according to officials familiar with the assessment.
Women are being filtered out of high-level science, math and engineering jobs in the United States, and there is no good reason for it, according to a National Academies report released on Monday.
A committee of experts looked at all the possible excuses—biological differences in ability, hormonal influences, childrearing demands, and even differences in ambition—and found no good explanation for why women are being locked out.
“Compared with men, women faculty members are generally paid less and promoted more slowly, receive fewer honors, and hold fewer leadership positions,” the Academies said in a statement.
“These discrepancies do not appear to be based on productivity, the significance of their work, or any other performance measures.”
Female minorities fare the worst, the study found. And the expert panel said the discrepancies are costing the country many talented leaders and researchers and recommended immediate and far-reaching changes to change the balance.
@ the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The installation consists of 99 life-sized wolves, fabricated from painted sheepskins and stuffed with hay and metal wires, barreling in a continous stream towards – and into – a glass wall. Only the first ones crash into it, but the pack chases after the leader.
via wmmna
Defiant GOP senators and the White House ended a standoff Thursday over legislation authorizing the CIA’s tough interrogations and military tribunals for terrorism suspects.Both sides appeared to bend some to reach an arrangement that would allow the CIA program to go forward while ensuring that accused terrorists would not be convicted in tribunals with evidence they could not see or challenge.
Under the bill, high-value detainees could face interrogations using methods that fall somewhere between simple assault and torture, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., but would exclude waterboarding, or simulated drowning.
In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs.
Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb.
The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities. According to Army Medical Command, 411 soldiers who fought in Iraq and 37 in Afghanistan are amputees as a result of combat wounds. If preliminary research is successful, the scientists could receive more funding for up to four years.
Elaborate ritual objects and carved masks have been uncovered in the ancient ruins of a city in Guatemala.
Exploration of the 2,000-year-old site has caused archaeologists to question the established chronology of the enigmatic Maya civilisation. The city, Cival, thrived in what is generally considered the “pre-classic” period – but it bore the hallmarks of the more advanced “classic” period.
The excavations were supported by the National Geographic Society.
The ancient city of Cival, in Guatemala’s Peten region, was first mapped by the explorer Ian Graham in 1984. Since 2001, it has been the focus of an exhaustive excavation, led by Francisco Estrada-Belli, of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.
His team’s discoveries have included two monumental carved masks, 120 pieces of polished jade, a ceremonial centre that spanned 800m (2,600ft) and an inscribed stone slab dating to 300 BC.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Maya culture ‘ahead of its time’
It’s the stuff of science fiction: a prosthetic arm that can be moved just by thinking about it and that can feel heat and the pressure of a handshake. It became a reality for US Marine Claudia Mitchell two years after she lost her arm to a motorcycle, researchers said last week.
The bionic arm is controlled by rerouting nerves in Mitchell’s shoulder to healthy muscles in her chest. This targeted muscle reinnervation directs the signals once sent to the amputated arm to the robotic arm via surface electrodes that respond to Mitchell’s thoughts.
Over the past three decades, conservatives have been procreating more than liberals—continuing to seed the future with their genes by filling bassinets coast to coast with tiny Future Republicans of America.
Take a randomly selected sample of 100 liberal adults and 100 conservative adults. According to an analysis of the 2004 General Social Survey—a bible of data for social scientists—the liberals would have had 147 kids, while the conservatives would have had 208. That’s a fertility gap of 41 percent. Even adjusting for other variables like age and income, there is a gap of 19 percent.
Now superimpose this on a map of the United States. The highest fertility rate is found in the most Republican state, Utah, home to the Mormon Church. The lowest fertility belongs to Vermont, a state liberal enough to be the first to sanction gay unions.
Ever wondered how some people can “put themselves into another person’s shoes” and some people cannot? Our ability to empathise with others seems to depend on the action of “mirror neurons” in the brain, according to a new study.
Mirror neurons, known to exist in humans and in macaque monkeys, activate when an action is observed, and also when it is performed. Now new research reveals that there are mirror neurons in humans that fire when sounds are heard. In other words, if you hear the noise of someone eating an apple, some of the same neurons fire as when you eat the apple yourself.
So-called auditory mirror neurons were known only in macaques. To determine if they exist in humans Valeria Gazzola, at the school of behavioural and cognitive neurosciences neuroimaging centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues, put 16 volunteers into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and observed their brains as they were played different noises.
The volunteers heard noises such as a sheet of paper being torn, or of someone crunching potato chips. Then the same subjects were scanned again, this time whilst tearing a piece of paper, or eating potato chips.
As many chronic diseases are closely linked to lifestyles, an estimated 80% of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancer, could be avoided if common lifestyle risk factors were eliminated. ... Seven leading risk factors – high blood pressure, tobacco, alcohol, high cholesterol, overweight, low fruit and vegetable intake and physical inactivity – account for almost 60% of all ill health in [Europe].
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