The RoboBees project at Harvard has been flying prototype bees for months, and the next challenge is equipping them with brains. The scientists have just released the video of the first controlled flight of such a robotic bee. The bees are half the size of a paperclip and weigh less than a tenth of a gram, and the fact they can fly at all is an engineering marvel in its own right given their minute size. RT's Meghan Lopez has more.
The US government's internal guidelines for targeted killings of al-Qaeda suspects allow for such strikes against US citizens abroad, as long as they are believed to be senior leaders of the group and still engaged in operations, a leaked justice department memo shows.
The 16-page document, released by the US-based NBC news television service on Tuesday, provides a legal rationale behind the US administration's use of drone strikes against al-Qaeda suspects.
The memo says that it is lawful for the US to target al-Qaeda-linked US citizens if they pose an "imminent" threat of violent attack against other US citizens, and that delaying action against such people would create an unacceptably high risk.
Al Jazeera speaks to Pardiss Kebriaeu, a senior lawyer with the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York.
The BBC was splashed across the front pages on Thursday as the media digested the Pollard review into the corporation's handling of the Jimmy Saville Scandal.
Newsnights inquiry into Jimmy Saville last year started a chain of events which was to prove eventually disastrous for the BBC. It led to one of the worst management crises in the BBC's history and contributed to further chaos that led eventually to the resignation of the director general a few weeks later.
This crisis stems from allegations of child abuse by BBC veteran host Jimmy Saville. The report concluded that "there was knowledge, not just rumour..." about this at the BBC. But yet no sweeping changes have been announced.
The first public data release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Led by Berkeley Lab scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's BOSS is bigger than all other spectroscopic surveys combined for measuring the universe's large-scale structure.
The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars, plus new information about objects in previous Sloan surveys (SDSS-I and II).
This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins.
There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth.
SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant - and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.
With optical telescopes, it's difficult to make out the surface features of asteroid Toutatis. Radar gives us a different picture. On Dec. 12 and 13, 2012, scientists pointed NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar precisely on the asteroid while it was over four million miles/6.9 million kilometers away. Using the bounced radar signals scientists assembled these "images" showing the surface features of Toutatis, an asteroid measuring about 3 miles long (4.8 km). The orbit of Toutatis is well understood. An analysis indicates there is zero possibility of an Earth impact over the entire interval over which its motion can be accurately computed, which is about the next four centuries.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013 