65862317
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have genetically analysed 900 violent offenders in Finland and discovered that those with two particular genes are 13 times more likely to have a history of repeated violent behaviour.
The group of criminals had committed a total of 1,154 murders, manslaughters, attempted homicides and batteries. The researchers created a profile for each criminal according to their offences, classifying them as either violent or non-violent.
Their research, Genetic Background of Extreme Violent Behavior, is published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
The scientists discovered at least 4-10% of all violent crime in Finland was committed by people who had the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene and a variant of the cadherin 13 (CDH13) gene.
65723353
submission
concertina226 writes:
The UK branch of global defence firm General Dynamics is working on a futuristic state-of-the-art smart-tank to replace the British Army's ageing armoured vehicle fleet, to be delivered to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 2020.
The Scout SV armoured vehicle is the first fully-digitised armoured fighting vehicle to have been built for the British Army, and is far bigger and more durable than any of its existing tanks, which are now at least 20 years old.
The tank comes in six variants that can be customised with a tools for different missions, and has numerous sensors, cameras, and sights to offer real-time intelligence on weather conditions, target acquisition, and reconnaissance — all crucial battlefield data required by commanders to access and direct situations.
65664901
submission
concertina226 writes:
Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have used high-resolution sonar imagery to discover two important sunken WWII vessels approximately 30 miles off the coast of North Carolina from the Battle of the Atlantic.
The vessels, the German U-boat 576 submarine and a freighter named Bluefields, have been lost for over 70 years and were found in an area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
"Most people associate the Battle of the Atlantic with the cold, icy waters of the North Atlantic," said David Alberg, superintendent of NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.
"But few people realise how close the war actually came to America's shores. As we learn more about the underwater battlefield, Bluefields and U-576 will provide additional insight into a relatively little-known chapter in American history."
65660411
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from the University of Michigan Medical School, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary have succeeded in restoring hearing in noise-deafened mice by activating a protein to repair crucial connections in the inner ear, which could one day be used to treat patients with hearing loss.
Neurotrophin-3 (NT3) is a protein that supports the survival of neurons in the central nervous system and also encourages the growth of new neurons and synapses in the body.
Until now, cells that produce NT3 have traditionally been seen by scientists to be "supporting actors" in the ear-brain nerve connection, forming a physical base for the hair cells that interact directly with nerves to carry sound signals to the brain from the ear.
The scientists' research has shown that not only is NT3 crucial to the body's ability to form and maintain connections between hair cells and nerve cells, but it is also possible to stimulate the production of NT3 by triggering genes in inner ear cells.
65539821
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from Cambridge University have discovered a new way to detect consciousness in vegetative patients by studying brainwaves, which could offer fresh hope for unresponsive brain damage patients and their families.
The scientists analysed the brain networks of 32 vegetative, comatose and minimally conscious patients as well as 26 healthy people with electroencephalography (EEG).
They then used a type of applied mathematics known as Graph Theory to analyse the EEG data in order to search for patterns of communication across brain regions.
In the brains of healthy people, there are "rich and diversely connected networks" of brain activity, which are lacking in the brains of patients with brain damage. However, some of the vegetative patients were found to have brain activity patterns that are similar to those of healthy people.
65534765
submission
concertina226 writes:
American tourist David Willis from Dallas, Texas has become an overnight Twitter sensation after he was locked inside the Waterstones Trafalgar Square bookshop in London for two hours last night.
Willis posted on Instagram at 10:11pm that he had gone upstairs to the first floor of the bookstore for 15 minutes and then came downstairs to find himself locked in with "all the lights out and door locked".
65202363
submission
concertina226 writes:
Cambridge University researchers have succeeded in mimicking nanotechnology used by ancient Romans to make a 4th century AD glass cage chalice change colour in different lights. Using the same process, they have made a breakthrough that could greatly increase the storage capabilities of today's optical devices.
In order to produce the dichroic effect on the Lycurgus Cup, Roman artisans are believed to have ground down particles of gold and silver to 50 nanometres in diameter, which is less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt, and then laid these nanoparticles within the glass before it set. No one has been able to replicate the effect, until now.
The researchers created nanoscale metallic nanoparticle arrays from a thin layer of silver that mimic the dichroic colour effect of the Roman chalice to create multicoloured holograms containing 16 million nanoparticles per square millimetre.
Each nanoparticle scatters light into numerous colours depending on its size and shape, and the light, when put together, produces an image.
65127429
submission
concertina226 writes:
A group of British fathers with backgrounds in IT, security, and law have teamed up to create an Android app that is capable of proactively controlling which apps children download onto their smartphones, as well as flagging and blocking questionable content received in SMS text messages and filtering out adult web search results.
MobileForceField is an app designed to help parents monitor and decide which social networking apps – such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter – are suitable for their children and teenagers to use.
The MobileForceField app works in the background, taking control of the child's phone. It prevents children from downloading apps where permission has not been granted. If the Google Play app store is enabled, anything the child downloads will not work until the "Allowed" switch is toggled in the web portal.
In addition, the system also has filters connected to a cloud-based database of inappropriate and offensive phrases, so if the child is sent SMS text messages from a bully containing bad language and insulting content, the text message will be proactively intercepted and blocked, and an alert will be sent to the parent from the web portal.
All web searches using browsers on mobile devices are also filtered to prevent inappropriate content from showing up in search engine results. The web portal also contains logs of the child's internet activity, recent calls and photos taken on their smartphone camera, but they are deleted after 90 days.
65068681
submission
concertina226 writes:
A fake Android mobile app containing malware that can spy on users' actions has been circulating for the past week, claiming to be part of the official Occupy Central pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
The app seems harmless, but once a protester agrees to install it, it secretly unpacks malware.
As the user has already granted permission to the first app, a second secret app is able to read their SMS text messages, receive messages, record phone calls and even triangulate the user's exact location using the phone's GPS.
65066743
submission
concertina226 writes:
Due to overwhelming demand from Apple users, the developers behind time4popcorn.eu, the European fork of popular movie torrent streaming service Popcorn Time have announced the service is now available for iOS devices as long as they have been jailbroken.
Users can download the controversial software for free from Cydia, the jailbroken app store alternative to the iTunes App Store, but they must first have jailbroken their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch using a jailbreaking tool such as Pangu or evasi0n.
According to the developers, demand for Popcorn Time on Apple devices was so great, 8,000 iOS users a day were trying to download the Android version of the app on to their devices and make it work since the European option began, since there was no iOS version.
"We're on the road to becoming not only the ultimate watching experience but also the safest with the free built-in VPN we've worked so hard on to ensure our user's safety," time4popcorn.eu's developers told IBTimes UK.
"All of our traffic is encrypted because there are ISPs that are blocking or slowing down BitTorrent traffic for various reasons, for example, protecting their bandwidth. Encrypting the traffic helps us bypass these barricades and ensures a better watching experience for our users."
65042207
submission
concertina226 writes:
A group of Swiss scientists have succeeded in creating a device that can convert solar energy into hydrogen fuel at a much lower cost than ever before and which could help to harness solar power and solve the global energy crisis.
Researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a Swiss federal institute of technology, split water that had been exposed to sunlight into separate hydrogen and oxygen cells using a solar cell device made from perovskite and a low-cost catalyst made from nickel and iron.
In order to produce electrical energy from water, the process requires both a catalyst able to lower the activation energy barrier of splitting water so the reaction can occur and a solar cell — an electronic device converting the energy of light into electricity via the photovoltaic effect.
Solar cells are conventionally made from silicon but they are expensive to produce and require several cells to be used for each solar water splitting reaction, as silicon is not an extremely efficient absorber of light.
Although solar cells made from perovskite don't last for longer than a few hours, the cells were able to absorb 12.3% of the energy diffused by the sun and the researchers discovered using nickel and iron catalysts is key to improving the result from the reaction.
64895965
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from Penn State University have discovered how to produce and string nanodiamonds together to form ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that could bring the long-held dream of space elevators to life, following almost a century of failed attempts by the international scientific community.
The researchers have succeeded in creating diamond nanothreads with extraordinary properties of strength and stiffness that are far stronger than today's nanotubes and polymers, using a specialised, large-volume, high-pressure device to compress benzene up to 200,000 atmospheres.
The high pressures caused the benzene to spontaneously polymerise into long, thin strands made up of hexagonal rings of carbon atoms in chains, rather than the usual three-dimensional lattice structure of a diamond.
64872911
submission
concertina226 writes:
Engineering students from the University of Toronto have developed a 3D bioprinter that can rapidly create artificial skin grafts from a patient's cells to help treat burn victims.
In severe burn injuries, both the epidermis (outer layer of the skin) and the dermis (inner layer) are severely damaged, and it usually takes at least two weeks for skin cells to be grown in a laboratory to be grafted onto a patient.
As both layers of skin are made from completely different cells that have different structures, it is very difficult for the body to regenerate itself and burn victims can die if their wounds cannot be closed quickly enough.
So instead of trying to replicate a real human skin graft, the PrintAlive Bioprinter creates a type of "living bandage" from hydrogel.
64567907
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from three international universities have succeeded in twisting radio beams in order to transfer data at the speed of 32 gigabits per second, which is 30 times faster than 4G LTE wireless technology in use today.
The researchers, led by Alan Willner, an electrical engineering professor with the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, successfully demonstrated data transmission rates of 32 gigabits per second across 2.5m of free space in a basement laboratory.
Millimetre waves occupy the 30GHz to 300GHz frequency bands. They are found in the spectrum between microwaves, which take up the 1GHz to 30GHz bands, and infrared waves, which are sometimes known as extremely high frequency (EHF).
64567217
submission
concertina226 writes:
Scientists from three international universities have succeeded in twisting radio beams in order to transfer data at the speed of 32 gigabits per second, which is 30 times faster than 4G LTE wireless technology in use today.
The researchers, led by Alan Willner, an electrical engineering professor with the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, successfully demonstrated data transmission rates of 32 gigabits per second across 2.5m of free space in a basement laboratory.
Millimetre waves occupy the 30GHz to 300GHz frequency bands. They are found in the spectrum between microwaves, which take up the 1GHz to 30GHz bands, and infrared waves, which are sometimes known as extremely high frequency (EHF).
