VBLOC is a new implant that works by blocking a nerve that regulates digestion, contributing thus to the weight loss. The clinical experiments were successful, and now the doctors prepare another 300 persons lot to do the next stage of research.

There is no need for surgery when installing the device, as it can be planted by laparoscopic techniques. It consists of two electrodes that block the vagus nerve, a 4mm-wide pipe connected directly to your brain, and telling it if you are or not hungry.

The method can hold the patients to 500 calories per day, without them feeling they’re hungry. In Europeans tests, nine patients lost 30% of their bodyweight in nine months, so the technique is now prepared to enter the US. This major breakthrough could end the suffering of obese people, and allow them to eat as much as they want, and whatever they want. It remains to be seen if they’ll feel the need to do that, though.

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Hua-wei Zhou, a Geosciences professor from Texas Tech University who was going to use 60 seismometers to track mini-quakes at the Three Gorges reservoir, 250 miles east of the Sichuan earthquake epicenter, is now using the devices to study the safety of the dam.

According to him and his team, the tragedy scenario could have been far worse if the dam would have collapsed. The city of Chengdu, with a population of 4 million, is just 60 miles away, and the whole town would have been flooded. More than that, more than 75 million people live downstream of the dam, and the floodplain from the Yangtze River provides food for most of China’s residents.

After all, some could look at the bright side of this tragedy: if the dam wouldn’t have resisted the earthquake, we could have witnessed one of the biggest disasters in history. Personally, I know a few persons from China, and I can tell that the Chinese are among the gentlest people in the world and I’m glad that the other 75 million of them are still alive.

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The humanity has always been interested in the universe, but one of the most interesting and argued fact is what really happens at the edge of the universe and if we can kind of reproduce the extremes in order to reveal the mystery of Big Bang. Researchers have created ultra-cold systems with the purpose of recreating the edges of the universe.

This system is actually a pinkie-sized device filled with helium and cooled until it almost reaches absolute zero. This process is believed to mimic the way that our universe was powered for a few moments after the Big Bang. What comes next only brings more similarities as the whirlpools that remain after the fluid calms down, seem to be related with the flaws that resulted in galaxies, stars and planets.

The scientists who developed the device have relied their study on the so-called theory of cosmogological inflation which states that shortly after the Big Bang, the universe swelled very fast and unexpectedly it calmed down. Most of the specialists in universe and Big Bang theory understand what happened, but they want to know more - they want to know what led to this and how.

It’s very important for the physicists to find out more about this because you would need an unbelievable amount of energy to make an universe accelerate and shortly after to make it to settle down. It will be hard to solve these mysteries because only one universe exists and as the physicists estimated, the period of growth is about 13 billion years in the past.

The scientists who managed to cool the fluid helium at just 0.0003°F above absolute zero are from the Lancaster University in England. Their experiments could be very risky if tested at a large-scale because they would not want to burst out an universe, supernova or a black-hole.

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Theoretical physics are one of the most important discoveries that the humanity ever done because we rely on them to develop technologies that the medieval humans thought of them as witch-crafts. Hewlett Packard has proudly informed the whole world that they have developed a revolutionary electrical component.

This new nanoscale component is called a memristor, but I have to say that it’s not entirely a new-comer as an electrical engineer named Leon Chua first explained it in theory in the early 1970s. This memristor is very functional and really interesting because it can work in two ways, the first, the digital mode which is simpler because memory cell is either “on” or “off”. The other way is analog mode in which the memory cell can have values between the “on” and “off”. The values of the analog mode are determined by the number of times in which the cells receive electrical signals that make these values to grow (this process is very similar to the way that neurons are building stronger memories when they are stimulated).

According to the HP researchers, the memristor does not require power to retain data or information, and it can store info denser than a hard-drive and although for the moment it cannot access it as fast as the RAM memory of a computer, the developers are pretty sure that in the future it can replace both HDD and RAM.

Going back to the fact that Leon Chua discovered it almost 40 years ago, but the experimenters did not found it - this is explained very well by the fact that scientists first suggest a particle and the researchers might find it or not and the most recent example is the quest for the theoretical Higgs boson known as the “God particle”. The HP researchers were very lucky to “catch” the memristor in action while they were studying the electrical properties of the nanoscale materials when they noticed something that was behaving like a memristor - they made some adjustments and Chua’s dream theory was true.

Now, where this discovery can lead to? Well, according to Stan Williams, the leader of the HP research team, the memristor will be available for PCs in the next few years as the cache which lies between the hard-drive and the DRAM. How this works? The hard-drive will load the key data into memristor’s cache, then dump it into the DRAM faster than moving it directly from the hard-drive which means that we will be able to boot and open large files and folders with the speed of light. This is only for the next few years, says Williams, as his masterplan is to substitute the hard-drive and the RAM of the PC.

Another important part of this discovery can lead to a CPU with many processing cores very different of a digital computer. The logic of a digital computer can be either yes or no which makes it very difficult to recognize a face, but with Williams working on an electronic mind which will make a PC to think exactly as a human, facial recognition will be a piece of cake. Williams does not think this is possible for the moment but “we’re going to build a brain anytime in the next decade” and even if they will not succeed, they are not disheartened because lets remember the fact that memristor took almost 40 years to finally be discovered.

Leon Chua named this particle memristor from memory resistor and back then, he said that the electric resistance will grow its levels when stimulated and it will remember it until another stimulation and the bad thing was that nobody ever saw it.

The memristors developed by HP measure about 15 nanometers across, enough to store information as much as a hard-drive (about 100GB per square centimeter). If it were to believe HP researchers, this memristor could be even smaller - between 4 and 2 nanometers.

I am really excited by this discovery because a just a few days ago I was totally convinced that those android movies are pure fantasy, but now I see that I was totally wrong. Everybody will love the next generation of computers and I am not sure about the computer thinking like a human.

Researchers from University of Texas have developed a laser that can produce a power of more than one petawatt. This laser is based on the original petawatt laser which was built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, CA in 1999.

The Texas Petawatt Laser is the most powerful operating laser in the world and Todd Ditmire from the Texas Center for High Intensity Laser Science, wanted to give a special praise to Ed Moses, LLNL Principal Associate Director, but he also mentioned the participation of some members from the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Principal Directorate.

This breakthrough was achieved thanks to the amplification of a laser pulse to the energy of 190 joules which eventually is compressed to a duration of less than 170 femtoseconds (femtosecond = the quadrilionth of a second). This technique is called chirped pulse amplification and it’s used by the most powerful lasers in the world, like the Titan laser at LLNL.

This technique was used also by NOVA laser, but for Texas’ Laser it allows a compression of the laser pulses that is shorter than NOVA’s.

The Texas Petawatt Laser is going to be employed for studies of the high-energy density plasmas and for studying astrophysical phenomenons like the explosion of supernovas and the formation of galactic jets.

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With the help of science we can do just about anything even music. Here is ArcAttack, a company that build singing Tesla coils and gives very nice musical performances. Besides Tesla coils, its manufacturers, Joe DiPrima, Oliver Greaves and Tony Smith, used a PVC pipe and a robotic drumset.

The “artists” put up a nice show and they managed to perform about 45 minutes of original music but they say that sometimes they use popular songs and other mixups.

The Synchrotron is a highly sophisticated x-ray machine that allows scientists to look at prehistorical insects trapped in opaque amber without slicing the stone. It uses a high-tech tomography method to clearly delimit the shapes of an organism and enables its user to take hundreds of rotational views of the insect.

The technique is called micro-tomography and it consists of a combination of x-ray scanning, 3D computer modeling, and the use of a high-performance 3D printers. Aside from just watching the insects, the Synchrotron designs 3D models of them and gives researchers actual high-scaled objects representing the scanned organism.

Using this new machine, scientists can learn a lot more from the objects they can hold than from the specimens themselves. Watching the 3D representations, paleontologists are able to study the models much better than looking at them from a microscope.

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The Olympics are getting closer therefore the organizers are making the final preparations in order to have a perfect display during the games. One of the biggest problems is the rainy climate but the Weather Modification Office in Beijing has come up with a plan.

They will make use of their supercomputers, aircrafts and artillery that will move away any precipitation that might disturb the competitors. The main point that needs to be protected is the Bird’s Nest, a 91,000 seat stadium. The Weather Modification Office will monitor the rainfalls with the help of a IBM p575 supercomputer that will model a map of about 44,000 square-kilometers destined to forecast the weather.

If there is any raining possibility, two airplanes and twenty artillery and rocket-launch positions will have the mission to shoot and dissipate the threatening clouds before they make it to the olympic stadium. We can only hope that their technique will be successful and will not have any negative impacts for the environment.

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