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The Earth is at risk from more asteroids than previously thought, according to a new survey. New data from the asteroid-tracking NEOWISE mission reveals that twice as many asteroids as previously thought are on low-inclination orbits that could bring them into contact with our home planet.

"We were very surprised to find that," says Amy Mainzer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We were not expecting to find [that result] at all."

NEOWISE, which took data with NASA's infrared WISE space telescope from 2010 to 2011, has completed the most accurate census yet of potentially hazardous asteroids: those that come within 8 million kilometres of Earth, and are large enough to survive the trip through the atmosphere.

Because WISE searched in infrared wavelengths, it was equally as sensitive to large dark asteroids as to small bright ones. Previous surveys that looked only at visible light couldn't tell those two populations apart, Mainzer says.

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On April 12, 2011, nearly 15 years after she became paralyzed and unable to speak, a woman controlled a robotic arm by thinking about moving her arm and hand to lift a bottle of coffee to her mouth and take a drink, using the BrainGate neural interface system.

That achievement is one of the advances in brain-computer interfaces, restorative neurotechnology, and assistive robot technology by the BrainGate2 collaboration of researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

A 58-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man participated in the study. They had each been paralyzed by a brainstem stroke years earlier, which left them with no functional control of their limbs.

In the research, the participants used neural activity to directly control two different robotic arms, one developed by the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and the other by DEKA Research and Development Corp., to perform reaching and grasping tasks across a broad three-dimensional space.

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A group of Chinese engineers have smashed the records for quantum teleportation, by creating a pair of entangled photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometers.

If you examine one particle and measure a certain property — say, vertical polarization — then the other will instantly adopt the opposite property — in this case, horizontal polarization.

It’s crazy stuff. Albert Einstein described it as “spooky action at a distance,” when he was still struggling to get his brain around the ideas proposed by quantum theory. But it’s a powerful phenomenon, and one that physicists have long attempted to harness in the lab.

Trouble is, creating a pair of particles with any distance between them has always been a difficult hurdle to overcome. Imperfections in optic fiber glass, or air turbulence, means that the qubits become unentangled. Plus as the distance gets farther your beam gets wider, so photons simply miss their target.

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Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The generator produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.

Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.

The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such aswalking or shutting a door.

It also points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. Using self-assembly, the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work.

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