Here's the 1:5 scale A-10 Warthog remote control model in some video action at Top Gun 2008, in Lakeland, FL.—the biggest remote controlled airplane competition in the world. And to match it, a real A-10 appeared on the scene, taking off from a parallel runway.

http://gizmodo.com/384601/a10-rc-mo...at-top-gun-2008

A parachute designed by Leonardo da Vinci more than 500 years ago has been used successfully for the first time by a Swiss.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...28/wpara128.xml

This is joke article I recently co-wrote...


INS Fails To Deport Wonder Woman
http://buglesplanet.blogspot.com/20...imghttpi20.html

ESA’s Mars Express radar sounder, MARSIS, has looked beneath the martian surface and opened up the third dimension for planetary exploration. The technique’s success is prompting scientists to think of all the other places in the Solar System where they would like to use radar sounders.

No matter how accurate a camera is, it can only map a planet’s surface. To retrieve information about the underground realm, planetary scientists in the past would have thought it necessary to land on the surface and start digging. But that would only be good for a single spot on a large planet and the first few decimetres of the surface.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMJP84XQEF_index_0.html

Aging suit helps Japanese car designers simulate elderly life(VIdeo)

Car designers eye the senior circuit
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/pla....php?cl=7422811

The technique, called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery, has been successfully used on patients in America, France and India. Darzi, who became a health minister last year, is one of the first surgeons in Britain to use the technique in experiments on pigs, before the first human tests.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle3735983.ece

MIT's Nexi robot expresses emotions the same way you do - with your highly mobile face.
Nexi's head and face were designed by Xitome Design with MIT. The expressive robotics started with a neck mechanism sporting 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) at the base, plus pan-tilt-yaw of the head itself. The mechanism has been constructed to time the movements so they mimic human speed.

Nexi's face has been designed to use gaze, eyebrows, eyelids and an articulate mandible to communicate a greater range of different emotions.

http://www.livescience.com/technolo...nexi-robot.html
-R

Israeli hospitals have recently started to use virtual reality therapy for stroke patients. One commonly used program has the patient watch his virtual image on a screen. For example, tennis balls are virtually thrown at the patient from all directions and the patients' actual hand motions are recorded on screen.

In the first stage of development of this new program, computer scientists Dr. Larry Manevitz of the University of Haifa, together with Dr. Uri Feintuch, a neuroscientist from Hebrew University and a research fellow at the Haifa's Caesarea Rothschild Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science, and Eugene Mednikov, a computer science graduate student, fed video sessions of this virtual reality therapy into their newly developed program.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...80310110859.htm

Scientists presented evidence today that desert heat, a little water, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for life: The dominance of “left-handed” amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet.

In a report at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, Ronald Breslow, Ph.D., University Professor, Columbia University, and former ACS President, described how our amino acid signature came from outer space.

Chains of amino acids make up the protein found in people, plants, and all other forms of life on Earth. There are two orientations of amino acids, left and right, which mirror each other in the same way your hands do. This is known as “chirality.” In order for life to arise, proteins must contain only one chiral form of amino acids, left or right, Breslow noted.

“If you mix up chirality, a protein’s properties change enormously. Life couldn’t operate with just random mixtures of stuff,” he said.

With the exception of a few right-handed amino acid-based bacteria, left-handed “L-amino acids” dominate on earth. The Columbia University chemistry professor said that amino acids delivered to Earth by meteorite bombardments left us with those left-handed protein units.
http://www.physorg.com/news126694357.html

NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site.

In a 2005 report about its exploration plans, NASA said it wanted to set up a base at a fixed location on the Moon after initially returning humans there in 2020.

But a gargantuan robotic vehicle called ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) could change that. Measuring about 7.5 metres wide, with legs more than 6 metres long, the robot could act essentially like a turtle, carrying the astronauts' living quarters around on its back.
http://space.newscientist.com/artic...heir-backs.html

NASA scientists have identified the smallest black hole ever found -- less than four times the mass of our sun and about the size of a large city.

But the mini-black hole, dubbed J1650, could still stretch a person into a "strand of spaghetti" with its pull, the researchers told a meeting in Los Angeles.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080401...ce_blackhole_dc

Climate change drove woolly mammoths to the edge of extinction and then humans finished them off, according to a Spanish study on Tuesday that adds to the debate over the demise of the Ice Age behemoths.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080401...HMuys0NUE<br />