Dr. Olaf Lahl at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, has shown that simply falling asleep does more than refresh the brain – it can improve recall and mental efficiency.

In fact, a six-minute nap can have the same effect as nighttime sleep on memory.

Dr. Lahl’s team asked students to memorize a list of vocabulary and tested their ability to recall the list after an hour of playing solitaire.

via Earth Times

Read the full article here.

U.S. scientists have developed a microfibre fabric that generates its own electricity, making enough current to recharge a cell phone or ensure that a small MP3 music player never runs out of power.

If made into a shirt, the fabric could harness power from its wearer’s simply walking around or even from a slight breeze, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The fibre-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from the physical movement,” Dr. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who led the study, said in a statement.

The nanogenerator takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires – tiny wires one-thousandth the width of a human hair – embedded into the fabric. The wires are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures, shaped like a bottle brush.

via Globe and Mail

The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware – the car – and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.

“Because the price of gasoline fluctuates so much during the life of a car, it’s hard to predict the cost basis for driving,” Agassi said. “But electricity fluctuates less, and you can buy it in advance, so I can give you a guaranteed price per mile, cheaper than the price of gas today.”

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

Scary, scary stuff.

…three technicians died and three others were critically injured while performing a routine cold-flow test of nitrous oxide that did not involve a rocket firing. The company, which has done the test numerous times before without a problem, uses the chemical as an oxidizer in its spaceship’s hybrid rocket motor.
…
Virgin Galactic did privately contact its prized customers known as founders, who have paid the full $200,000 to be among the first to experience four minutes of weightlessness.

Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s astronaut liaison, reassured the founders in an e-mail that the accident’s impact on the first commercial spaceflights — expected in late 2009 or 2010 — will be “minimal” and that it was “business as usual.”

Those peppy Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to make tracks as they wheel about two diverse locales on Mars – far outstripping their original warranties of 90 days of lifetime and a target of roughly 2,000 feet (600 meters) of driving range when they landed on the planet in January 2004.

Both of the mechanized emissaries from Earth remain hard at work, said Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Project and astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.