Futurehead.com

A previously undetected element has been found in the atmospheres of two different extrasolar planets. Using a new technique at a new telescope, two separate groups of exoplanet scientists have discovered potassium in the atmospheres of two hot Jupiters more than 190 light-years from Earth.

“I’m really excited about this,” exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT, who was not involved in the new discoveries, said in an e-mail. “Together with other ground-based advances it is changing exoplanet atmosphere studies in a huge way.”

The two groups, one led by exoplanet scientist David Sing of the University of Exeter and the other led by University of Florida grad student Knicole Colón, used the 34-foot-wide Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands to observe the planet XO-2b, located around 500 light-years from Earth, and the planet HD 80606b, about 190 light-years from Earth.

Imagine that you are looking at a dog that is standing behind a picket fence. You do not see several slices of dog; you see a single dog that is partially hidden by a series of opaque vertical slats. The brain’s ability to join these pieces into a perceptual whole demonstrates a fascinating process known as amodal completion.

It is clear why such a tendency would have evolved. Animals must be able to spot a mate, predator or prey through dense foliage. The retinal image may contain only fragments, but the brain’s visual system links them, reconstructing the object so the animal can recognize what it sees. The process seems effortless to us, but it has turned out to be one of those things that is horrendously difficult to program computers to do. Nor is it clear how neurons in the brain’s visual pathways manage the trick.

Read full article

Forget the imaginary filaments used to weave the clothes that fooled the fabled emperor, can we make real invisible threads instead? Combining techniques used to produce light-bending metamaterials with those used to make optical fibres might just do the trick.

Alessandro Tuniz at the University of Sydney's Institute of Photonics and Optical Science in Australia is one of many physicists interested in the optical metamaterials that are being fashioned into "invisibility cloaks" in labs across the world. These metamaterials incorporate components much smaller than the wavelength of light, which allows them to control the light waves and gives them optical properties beyond those of conventional materials.

Read full article

When it comes to copying the real behaviour of synapses, two memristors are better than one, according to a new circuit design.

Since the 1970s, electronic engineers have known that there are four fundamental building blocks of electronic circuits: resistors, capacitors, inductors and memristors (essentially variable resistors with memory). Memristors, however, had an air of mythology about them until last year when a group of researchers at HP Labs in California announced they had discovered them for the first time.

Since then, numerous others have claimed to have played with memristance over the years (although none seem to have noticed what they were doing until now). In fact, it turns out that the synapses between neurons behave exactly like memristors. That raises the possibility that memristors can be connected together in a way that truly mimics the wiring of human brains.

Read full article