Professor Daiqin Li, from the National University of Singapore, said: "UVA and UVB make up a small fraction of the Sun's rays, but humans cannot see them. Most previous studies have focused on UVA in animal communication, but this is the first study of UVB on any animal. Until now, scientists have assumed that animals cannot 'see' UVB, but we have found that this is not the case."

Spiders have complex eyes and although scientists know that they have UVA receptors, it remains unclear how they can detect the ultraviolet B light.

Reference:

http://www.nus.edu.sg/corporate/research/gallery/research82.htm

They have already been used to build novel transistors - tiny switches that are the building blocks of all chips. Memristors were first proposed in 1971 by Professor Leon Chua, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the "fourth" basic building block of circuits, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.

Professor Chua says: "I never thought I'd live long enough to see this happen. I'm thrilled because it's almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it's fundamental."

The memristors are so called because they have the ability to "remember" the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off. This could allow researchers to build new kinds of computer memory that would not require powering up.

Most PCs use dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which loses data when the power is turned off.But a computer built with memristors could allow PCs that start up instantly, laptops that retain sessions after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge.

Reference:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor.html

Specially created team studied 19 healthy people using a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. In one set of experiments, people played a gambling game in which they were told one of three cards would yield a payout. The researchers then monitored the brain activity triggered when the subjects received a cash reward. In a second set of experiments, people were told they were being evaluated by strangers based on information from a personality questionnaire and a video they had made. The researchers then monitored reactions to these staged evaluations, including when the subjects thought strangers had paid them a compliment. Both kinds of rewards triggered activity in a reward-related area of the brain.

The finding represents an important first step toward explaining complex human social behaviours such as altruism.

Reference:

http://www.nips.ac.jp/eng/news/2008/20080424/

Dr Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester have been leading research into the potential application of graphene in electronics and were the first to separate a sheet of the material from graphite

Graphene has been hailed as a super material because it has many potential applications. It is a flat molecule, with only the thickness of an atom, and both very stable and robust. The researchers are also looking at its use in display technology - because it is transparent.

The Manchester-based scientists have shown that graphene can be carved into tiny electronic circuits with individual transistors not much larger than a molecule.

Graphene is a hot topic among semiconductor researchers at the moment because it is an excellent conductor of electricity. Unlike silicon graphene transistors perform better the smaller they become.

The global semiconductor business is currently built on sand; stamping out microchips from large silicon wafers. Companies like Intel have a roadmap to reduce the size of circuits on the silicon wafer, down to about 10 nanometres - 10,000 times smaller than the width of a single human hair.

Many researchers believe that producing circuits smaller than 10 nanometres in silicon will be too difficult because they start to leak electricity at that size. That current silicon roadmap is expected to end in 2020, making the race to find alternative materials potentially very lucrative.

Many researchers around the world are working on creating large wafers of graphene. In order to produce microchips wafers would need to be several inches across. The biggest wafer produced so far is 100 microns across, just a tenth of a millimetre.

In the shorter term graphene could be used in LCD displays to replace materials used to create transparent conductive coatings. The material is also being touted for use in solar panels, transparent window coatings and also for sensing technologies.

Reference:

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=3529

Gero Miesenboeck, from Oxford University, UK, who carried out the research with J. Dylan Clyne from Yale University, US, said: "It is often the case that males have to work very hard to convince females to mate with them. Male fruit flies will vibrate one of their wings to produce a barely audible song. And if the female likes that sound, she'll surrender to his advances.”

Previous research has revealed that a group of 2,000 brain cells are necessary for this courtship behaviour in the insects; however, both male and female fruit flies appear to possess most of these neurons.

"It looks like males and females have very similar neuronal equipment, yet they behave so differently - only the male sings, and only the female responds to the song by allowing a male to copulate with her.” - says Professor Miesenboeck.

To investigate, the team placed some flies in a "mini sound studio". The insects had been genetically modified so that a pulse of light would activate this group of courtship neurons. First of all, the researchers looked at male flies and found that the light would indeed spark a song. As the light pulsed through the chamber, video footage shows the female fruit fly lifting and vibrating one of her wings to produce a song.

Nevertheless, the researchers say the study reveals that male and female brains are extremely similar in flies - even the circuits thought to be dedicated to sexual behaviours such as courtship.

References:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2008/080417_3.html

Taking the average of just two daily samples makes it tricky to untangle the impact that a higher than average testosterone level has on that day's profit and loss or vice versa. Testosterone levels are known to rise during competitive encounters as much as they do during sexual ones, so it's hardly surprising that the hormone responds to the trials of financial markets.

The effects triggered by chronically elevated levels of testosterone can have the opposite effect. Animals observed in this same situation by scientists start to pick fights they ought to avoid, or to patrol a wider, more hazardous patch of territory. Perception of risk becomes blurred. For a trader on a roll in the midst of a bubble, for instance, that suggests "several rounds of winning means testosterone so high they start taking stupid risks," - says John Coates, a former Wall Street trader turned senior research fellow at Cambridge, and lead author of the study.

References:

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2008041501

The capacity of MP3 players could increase 100 times from present levels.But the IBM team say racetrack memory is still seven to eight years away from commercial use.

The work being done on racetrack memory by Dr Parkin and colleagues could produce a storage medium that is cheap, durable and fast. Currently Most desktop computers use flash memory and hard drives.

"It's now possible to build a racetrack memory though we've not built one yet," - said Dr Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at the Almaden laboratory.

The racetrack memory stores data in the boundaries, known as domain walls, between magnetic regions in nanowires. The medium gets its name because the data races around the wire or track as it is read or written.

The domain walls are read by exploiting the weak magnetic fields generated by the spin of electrons. The tiny amounts of power needed to exploit these fields means racetrack memory generates far less heat than existing devices.

The team has also shown how to fabricate the slim wires that would form the racetracks on which data is stored. If the expected data densities of the technology are realised it could mean gadgets that have about 100 times more memory on board than is possible today. It would mean that a portable MP3 player could hold up to 500,000 songs.

Racetrack memory could replace both flash and hard drives in computers and other gadgets.

Reference:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23859.wss

In Parkinson's disease, nerve cells in the part of the brain that controls muscle movement either die or become impaired. Normally, these cells produce a vital chemical known as dopamine, which allows smooth, co-ordinated function of the body's muscles and movement.

In this study, stem cells were developed into dopamine-producing neurons the missing nerve cells in Parkinson's disease. The mice that received neurons derived from their own clones showed significant signs of improvement. But when these neurons were grafted into mice that did not genetically match the transplanted cells, the cells did not survive and the mice did not recover.

The researchers say the therapy is promising because, as the cells originally came from the animal that was ill, they were not rejected by its immune system.

Scientists are pursuing the use of stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease because it would allow the replacement of the dead dopamine-producing nerve cells with new, healthy cells. This should restore the supply of dopamine within the brain and allow it to work normally again.

"This is an exciting development, as for the first time, we can see that it may be possible to create a person's own embryonic stem cells to potentially treat their Parkinson's. Researchers in this area now need to carry out more studies to satisfy safety concerns and to make the process more efficient before these studies are carried out on people living with Parkinson's. Stem cell therapy offers great hope for repairing the brain in people with Parkinson's. It may ultimately offer a cure, allowing people to lead a life that is free from the symptoms of Parkinson's." – says Dr Kieran Breen, director of research and development at the Parkinson's Disease Society.

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, an expert in stem cell research at the National Institute of Medical Research, said this was good research which showed using therapeutic cloning could be beneficial : "There was a very significant level of recovery. They only studied the mice for 11 weeks afterwards, which is not a huge amount of time to see how persistent the repaid would be."

However, the experts said much more research in both animals and humans was needed before the treatment could be offered to people with Parkinson's. The finding is able to provide scientists with a clue as to what causes Parkinson's - and could contribute to the search for new treatments.

Reference:

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Scientists from the University of Ulster and United Arab Emirates University have tested a synthetic version of pseudin-2, a compound which protects the paradoxical frog from infection. They found it stimulated the secretion of insulin in pancreatic cells in the laboratory. And importantly, there were no toxic effects on the cells. The synthetic version was better at stimulating insulin than the natural compound, opening the way for it potential development as a drug for treating diabetes.

Study leader Dr Yasser Abdel-Wahab, senior lecturer in biomedical sciences at the University of Ulster, said there had been a lot of research into bioactive molecules from amphibian skin secretions.

One recently developed diabetes drug - exenatide - was developed from a hormone in the saliva of the Gila monster - a lizard found in south-western United States and northern Mexico.

"We found that it stimulated the secretion of insulin and that the synthetic version is more potent that pseudin-2 itself. More research is needed, but there is a growing body of work around natural anti-diabetic drug discovery that, as you can see, is already yielding fascinating results."

Douglas Smallwood, chief executive of Diabetes UK, said although type 2 diabetes could be managed with diet and physical activity, the condition was progressive and may require medication to control it effectively.

"Good diabetes control reduces the risk of complications including blindness, heart disease, kidney problems and amputation so new treatments are vital."

The bright green and pink paradoxical frog, from Trinidad and the Amazon basin, is appropriately named because of its odd habit of shrinking with age.

References:

http://news.ulster.ac.uk/releases/2008/3654.html

"Air is going to allow applications that run on the web today - that run in the browser - to be brought down to the desktop. It's about taking existing web applications and adding extra functionality whether you want to work offline or whether you want to access data on your disk " – says Andrew Shorten, platform evangelist at Adobe.

Mr. Shorten said that the technology is not about replacing the web browser: "It's about delivering the best experience depending on where you are and what you need to get from the application. If I'm on the road with my laptop maybe I want to use the desktop version of my application. If I pop into an internet cafe I can still access it through the browser."

The software is part of a growing number of technologies that aim to make the transition between the on and offline worlds seamless. In 2006, Microsoft unveiled its Silverlight technology. And last year http://www.google.com/ Google launched Gears.

The tool does not allow the creation of new content but does allow web applications to be used offline. For example, the developers of the free online office package Zoho use Gears to give users similar functionality to normal desktop office programs. Similarly, Adobe is looking into provide Air versions of many of its popular programs such as Photoshop. A host of other companies and web services have already built Air applications. For example, Ebay has built a program that allows users to do much of the legwork required in setting up auctions offline. The next time the user connects to the internet the listing would be posted to the website.

The application also allows users to keep up to date with auctions and bids without the need to have a browser open at the eBay page. The corporation is currently building prototype versions of several applications such as the news ticker, which displays headlines on a desktop, and mini Motty, which provides desktop football commentary. The current versions of the programs only work on PCs. Other programs exploit Air's ability to access both web content and files on a computer's disk. For example, the web-version of Finetunes allows users to stream music over the internet

"If you install the Air version on your desktop it can also look at what you have in your iTunes library and then suggest music based on what it finds. So it's really taking the essence of what works on the web, brining it to the desktop and then making it more personal to you " - explained Mr. Shorten.

Some commentators have pointed out that the ability for an application to delve between the web and a computer's hard drive raises security implications.

"Our advice would be to only install applications from sources that you trust," - said Mr. Shorten.

It said a retired general plans to present to the air force the results of a study he conducted on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania where he found that tadalafil, the active ingredient in Cialis tablets, improved breathing in a thin atmosphere.

"The study's findings justify the continuation of tests with drugs of this type in low oxygen environments," - an unnamed air force officer told Bamahaneh, the military's weekly magazine.

An army spokeswoman said that there were no plans to use any such drug and a statement said the phenomenon of chronic oxygen starvation experienced by mountaineers and the immediate oxygen starvation which pilots suffer at high altitude are different.

"(Because of the different circumstances) there is no significance for medical treatment of any drug for pilots in the Israel Air Force ... and it has no intention of using any form of drug," the statement read.

"We are not trying to alter genes, we're just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones," - said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

The process aims to create healthy embryos for couples to avoid passing on genes carrying diseases. The genes being replaced are the mitochondria, a cell's energy source, which are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria's genetic code can result in serious diseases like muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, strokes and mental retardation.

In their research, Chinnery and colleagues used normal embryos created from one man and one woman that had defective mitochondria in the woman's egg. They then transplanted that embryo into an emptied egg donated from a second woman who had healthy mitochondria.

The research is being funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, a British charity. Only trace amounts of a person's genes come from the mitochondria, and experts said it would be incorrect to say that the embryos have three parents. "Most of the genes that make you who you are are inside the nucleus. We're not going anywhere near that." - Chinnery said. So far, 10 such embryos have been created, though they have not been allowed to develop for more than five days. Chinnery hoped that after further experiments in the next few years the process might be available to parents undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

"If successful, this research could give families who might otherwise have a bleak future a chance to avoid some very grave diseases," - said Francoise Shenfield, a fertility expert with the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). Shenfield was not connected to the Newcastle University research.

Similar experiments have been conducted in animals in Japan, and has already led to the birth of healthy mice who had their mitochondria genes corrected.

Shenfield said that further tests to assess the safety and efficacy of the process were necessary before it could be offered as a potential treatment.

A bill to allow the procedure to be regulated as a therapy for couples — once it is proven to work — is expected to be discussed in Britain's House of Commons in March.

The research team succeeded in creating a man-made copy of the genome for a bacterium, the first time that's been done. A genome is the complete set of DNA in the chromosomes of a living organism, the instruction set for how an organism works.

But while they were able to copy the genome of an existing organism, they weren't able to create a brand new one. Essentially, they managed to write the "software code" for a bacterium but they haven't yet figured out how to turn it on and make it live.

Once that's possible, it opens the door to building made-to-order organisms that could do things natural organisms don't: plants that take up large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere to slow global warming, microbes that turn grass clippings into fuel, bacteria that eat sugar and produce medicine. Some researchers believe that's a long way off.

"These guys have not synthesized a brand new life form," - says Jim Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University. Science still has a long way to go to understanding the underlying biology of life necessary to do that, he says.

There are "multiple barriers to this," - Venter acknowledges. "But we're confident that they can be overcome."

Another worry: Once this technology becomes commonplace, it can be used to create both good organisms and dangerous ones, says David Magnus, director of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics.

Venter's team has already genetically modified the bacterium to make it non-infectious.

Beyond these innovations, however, there are likely to be many, many more. One of the most important areas of research in the world of computers is that of artificial intelligence. When many people think of artificial intelligence, they may picture fully aware machines, complete with emotions, and the problems that can arise from them. Even though this remains the goal of many artificial intelligence researchers, in fact artificial intelligence technology is already in place and already serving the needs of humans everywhere.

One of the most powerful uses of artificial intelligence thus far is in the world of speech recognition. This powerful technology is already in place in call centers, banks, brokerage centers, insurance companies and other businesses throughout the world. While speech recognition is still imperfect, it has improved greatly in recent years, and in the future many routine, and even non-routine, phone calls and telephone inquiries may be handled completely without human intervention.

Robot technology has also come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. Robots in the future are unlikely to take human form, expect in a few specialized applications. Instead, robots are likely to do a great deal of work that is simply too dangerous for humans to accomplish. From spaceflight applications to search and rescue, robots are likely to continue down the learning curve they have already entered, further enhancing human lives and providing valuable services for a fraction of the cost of today’s robot helpers.

Quantum computers are also likely to transform the computing experience, for both business and home users. These powerful machines are already on the drawing board, and they are likely to be introduced in the near future. The quantum computer is expected to be a giant leap forward in computing technology, with exciting implications for everything from scientific research to stock market predictions.

Nanotechnology is another important part of the future of computers, expected to have a profound impact on people around the globe. Nanotechnology is the process whereby matter is manipulated at the atomic level, providing the ability to “build” objects from their most basic parts. Like robotics and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology is already in use in many places, providing everything from stain resistant clothing to better suntan lotion. These advances in nanotechnology are likely to continue in the future, making this one of the most powerful aspects of future computing.

And if history is to be any guide, some of the most powerful advances in the world of computers and computer technology are likely to be completely unforeseen. After all, some of the most powerful technologies of the past have taken us by surprise, so stay tuned for a truly fascinating future.