From wired.com

The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what’s occupying their operators’ attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions.
The idea — to grossly over-simplify — is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display, to compensate. If a person’s getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.

Full story located here.

Very interesting map of science representing relationships between 1.6 million scientific articles can be found here.

From wired.com

High school student Thiago Olson has gone beyond basic physics class. Way beyond. Using parts and materials aquired from the local hardware story and eBay, he built a working fusion reactor.

In November 2006, a few tiny bubbles in his neutron dosimeter told him that he’d achieved success: Fusing hydrogen nuclei into helium.

While it takes far more energy to run than it produces, Olson’s nuclear reactor is pretty bad-ass, producing 200 million-degree plasma at its core — or, as Olson points out, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”

With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.
Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the North and South Poles of Mars. Until now, the deposits have been difficult to study closely with existing telescopes and satellites. The current advance comes from a probe of the deposits using an instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter.
The reflected beams revealed that 90 percent or more of the frozen polar material is pure water ice, sprinkled with dust particles. The scientists calculated that the water would form a 36-foot-deep ocean of sorts if spread over the Martian globe.

From slashdot.org

NASA created two virtual flyovers of the Mars rover landing sites using 3D imagery from the MR Orbiter. The images were made using the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).

The three-dimensional information is obtained by taking pairs of images from slightly different vantage points as the spacecraft orbits the Red Planet.

Movie 1. Movie 2.

From www.itwire.com.au

When New Horizons (officially called Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission) flies by Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest within the solar system, at 47,000 miles per hour (21 kilometers per second) it will send back images of the gigantic planet through its almost 7-foot (2.1-meter) dish antenna. The images sent back to Earth, which were first transmitted on September 4, 2006, will help astronomers to better calculate the orbits of the inner moons of Jupiter, measure physical characteristics of the active volcanoes on moon Io, and study the four Galilean moons (Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io) in greater detail than ever before.

The New Horizons mission will be the first exploration of a probe to the distant Pluto-Charon system. The spacecraft, built by the Southwest Research Institute (Texas) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (Maryland), is expected to fly within 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) of Pluto and as close as 6,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Charon. The scientific instruments aboard New Horizons—including cameras, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers, and radio science and space plasma experiments—will study (as its primary mission) the geology, geomorphology, and surface compositions and temperatures of both Pluto and Charon. In addition, the instruments will study the atmosphere of Pluto.

NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life’s molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.
The instrument, called Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector, has already shown its capabilities in one of the most barren climes on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Space Agency has chosen this tool from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Last month, NASA selected Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.

More info here.