For many centuries many scientists or musicians tried to find connections between music and mathematics, but they didn’t find any precise proof. Now, with the help of a breakthrough that Prof Dmitri Tymoczko from the Princeton University, discovered a couple of years ago, we know that there is a strong link between them.

Alongside Clifton Callender from Florida State University and Ian Quinn from the Yale University, Prof Tymoczko developed a new method to analyze and categorize music in order to reduce the music to a mathematical kernel.

According to Prof Tymoczko, now we can understand in a deeper way the bonds between different genres of music because they managed to “take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families”.

In the end, Tymoczko explained the possibilities that their discovery will bring - “you could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys”.

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Researchers from the Oxford University, UK, and from the Yale University, US, have managed to gain control over the brain of female flies and they made the female fruit flies to act like males. They activated the brain cells that control the sexual behavior with a light-pulse.

This activation made the females to sing a courtship song which is specific for males. The leaders of the project were Gero Misenboeck from O.U. and J. Dylan Clyne from Y.U, and they based their research on the fact that males are having a pretty hard job when trying to mate with a female, but if the female-fly likes the song then we have a match.

According to a previous research, about two thousand brain cells are need for courtship and the researchers noticed that the males and the females have almost the same neuronal equipment but they act differently therefore Prof. Miesenboeck and Prof. Clyne decided to see what was the difference.

The team of researchers comfortably put some flies in a tiny sound studio and they genetically modified them in order to respond to the light pulses. After they turned on the neurons from a female they noticed that one of the female fruit fly started to lift and vibrate the wings in the same way like the males and they produced a song.

Now that the researchers have the proof that the female and male brain circuits are almost the same, they will try to find out what makes them to act so different under normal circumstances.

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Global warming is caused mostly by humans and this fact was confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that showed the heating in a report that includes temperatures from the last 50 years. Many researchers don’t agree with this theory and they say that global warming is caused by natural causes like changes in the flux of cosmic rays that are striking Earth’s atmosphere.

This theory has been named as “cosmic ray culprit” and it brings forth to detailed reports and discussions, but so far we really don’t know what’s the truth. UK scientists, Terry Sloan from the University of Lancaster and Arnold Wolfendale from the University of Durham, studied this idea and concluded that there is no evidence to show that cosmic rays are responsible for the global warming.

A recent report in the Physics World can give you more information about the cosmic ray culprit and the global warming. For he future, we hope that scientists and specialists could reach an agreement based on reliable tests and theories.

Luxim’s tiny light bulb produces about 140 lumens per watt which makes it 10 times better than conventional light. The system has a Color Rendering Index of 91 and according to its developers, the lifetime is about 20,000 hours. Also they said that their LIFI Entertainment lasts 7 times longer than the traditional HID lamps and are safer because they don’t explode or chip away.

The silicon has proven once again its capabilities and now it can be coiled around spheres and other shapes without losing its electric performance. This new silicon integrated circuit was developed by a team of researchers from the Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois.

According to John Rogers, Founder Professor of MSE at the UI, their silicone integrated circuit can stretch, fold, bend and compress without any problem and as we said before, it doesn’t lose its electrical performances. This new silicon technology can provide devices that will monitor your health or it can be wrapped around aircraft wings.

This new study is a sequel of a project made by Prof. Rogers and his team that was finished in December 2005 consisting of a one-dimensional single-crystal silicon and now the extension of the silicon can go in two dimensions.

The researchers wanted to develop integrated circuits that can be applied to complex systems and they were helped by the wavy concept as Prof. Rogers says: “The wavy concept now incorporates optimized mechanical designs and diverse sets of materials, all integrated together in systems that involve spatially varying thicknesses and material types”.

These new silicon integrated circuits are high-performance and the developers claim that this technology “goes well beyond what planar configurations on semiconductor wafers can offer”.

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These words were said by Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University, and he is backed by some calculations which showed that “they can hold about 8 percent of their weight in hydrogen at room temperature, which is considerably better than the federal target of 6 percent”.

Buckyballs are part of the fullerenes family which are a class of carbon molecules. It was very hard to reproduce the strength of the bonds between carbon atoms because they are one of the strongest chemical bonds and those are responsible for the hardest known substance, the diamond.

I hope that this will result in a breakthrough that will help the humanity to scale-harvest hydrogen which will lead to a greener Earth.

This new technology was called LEC and it represents a combination between regular LEDs and light emitting electrochemical cells which eventually could lead to cheaper HDTVs and other very flat displays. This technique is not that innovative, but until now “LECs have always had problems with lifetime” as Yan Shao said.

Yan Shao is a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is one of the authors of this project. Professor Shao claims that they “demonstrated for the first time that organic LECs can have a long lifetime; even longer time than organic LEDs”.

These LECs are so cheap because they can be printed in film rollers and are longer lasting because their light will brighten as days passing, unlike LEDs which tend to fade as they get older. Another advantage is the time of illumination - LECs light up instantly meanwhile LEDs need some time to fully illuminate.

LECs received praises from Qibing Pei, researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who said that “Traditional LEDs are not suitable for high-resolution information display such as TV sets. The LECs can be”. The race hots up for the best lighting technique and we are expecting LEDs developers with a new project that will beat LECs’ technology.

Northrop Grumman, the defense-specialized company, is going to manufacture a new “killer drone”. This new machine will do just about anything from missile-defense to manhunt. The combat drone will be called X-47B and will be a project of $635 million and is scheduled to start its flights in November 2009 and two years after that will be ready for its first carrier-landing.

According to Scott Winship, vice president of Northrop and program-manager of Navy Unmanned Combat Air Systems, showed some of the missions of X-47B - BPI, CAS, ESM, HPM, SCAR, SOF and SEAD/EW. And there are many others because as Winship suggested this will be an “all-in-one” combat drone.

The “killer drone” will capable of carrying a load of 4,500 lb. of weapons and designers will try to build an aircraft that will fly 50 to 100 hr. missions into to toughest enemy defenses.

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Their idea has received $8.5 million from the European Union and this funding is part of EU’s project called CILIA. This amount should be enough to develop an advanced sonar technology using sophisticated computer modeling and robotics. The two researchers will try to unravel the secret behind the sonar system of the bat and build some antennas inspired from the freaky animal.

Rolf Muller is the possessor of about 600 ear and facial parts coming from different species of bats and he had been studying them with the help of a digital CT scanner in order to make a system that simulates the echolocation of the bats. The design of the antennas is being improved with the help of a NASA scientist.

Herbert Peremans is working on some artificial ears which are inspired from the 3D scans made by Muller. After that he will put the ears on a bat-like robot called “Robat” which will have an on-board sonar and navigation system in order to produce a range of ultrasonic pings just like the bat. Although we do not have information about the time that they will complete their research, we expect that will not very long.

This new material is based on abalone’s shell which is made of a basic mineral and she is trying to apply this technique to her innovative and complex material. The abalone-based material will be very important for all gadget manufacturers and what we hope is that Angela makes it cost-effective. If she completes her studies, very soon we will not worry about spilling water on gadgets.