Camera components could be made tiny enough to fit in a contact lens in just a few years. A high-precision microphone could fit in your ear and the data could be downloaded to a searchable handheld gadget. (Courtesy: Popular Science)

Humans naturally have the power to remember almost two bits of information per second, or a few hundred megabytes over a lifetime. Ccompared with a DVD movie, which holds up to 17 gigabytes, that’s nothing. Worse, you might easily recall the 40-year-old dialogue from a movie yet forget your mom’s birthday.
It’s a problem that’s been bothering Gordon Bell for almost as long as he can remember. In 1998 Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, began digitally capturing his entire life for a project he calls MyLifeBits. First, he scanned his old photographs, research documents and notes. He began recording his meetings and phone calls and cataloguing his new photos and movies he saw. Every e-mail exchange he had was digitally archived, and he started using the company’s prototype SenseCam, which he wears around his neck, to automatically snap photos throughout the day, popsci.com reports.
Bell now documents about one gigabyte of information every month, all of which is stored in a searchable database on his PC. His is a highly manual process, but he expects that in as few as 15 years it will be common to carry nearly all our “memories“ around with us in a single device that will automatically record the sound and video of our daily activities, creating an inventory of the conversations we have, the faces we see and the articles we read. That data would be tied to communications that are already tracked electronically, like e-mail and event calendars, as well as TV shows, movies and other media we take in. The end result: on-demand total recall.
The biggest challenge to Bell’s vision is developing the software required to search your memory database effectively. So far, MyLifeBits pulls together more than 20 data types to link various memories to one another. Using a full-text search, Bell tracks down what he’s looking for in no more than 30 seconds. Soon, when searching through meeting notes, for instance, photos of people attending those meetings and their contact information will appear side by side.
The effort could be pushed along by Columbia University researchers who are using statistical-analysis programs to automatically sort hours of recorded audio by time and location. Next, they’ll tackle speaker recognition, which would allow for categorizing and searching conversation by who’s talking.

Chinese artist view of a Dongfanghong-3 communications satellite in space. The Chang'e-1 lunar probe will be a moon satellite based on this earth satellite design. (Courtesy: Space Today)

Space officials in China are eying April of next year for the launch of their first lunar orbiterÑChang’e-I.
The probe has been under development since early 2006 and makes use of China’s Dongfanghong III satellite platform and other technology. The lunar orbiter will be tested at the space launch center in December. If checkout goes well, the spacecraft is to be launched in April atop a Long March 3A booster.
According to space.com, quoting Luan Enjie, director of the China National Space Administration, funding for Chang’e-I is 1.4 billion yuan Ð equal to $169 million in U.S. dollars.
One of Chang’e-I’s tasks is to obtain three-dimensional images of the lunar surface. The moon orbiter, Luan said, is part of a three-step lunar program during a lecture at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province.
Following the Chang’e-I orbiter mission, Luan said, is landing an unmanned vehicle on the moon by 2010 and collecting samples of lunar soil with an unmanned vehicle by 2020. “Only after we finish the three phases can we carry out the manned satellite project to probe the moon“, Luan stated.
The Chinese exploration project would involve three stages, according to Luan Enjie, director of the Chinese National Space Administration: Orbiting the Moon in 2006, landing an unmanned rover on the Moon in 2010 or 2012, and returning lunar soil and rock samples from the Moon around 2015. Only after those steps have been taken, might China land human beings on the Moon.
The Moon is nearly one-quarter-million miles away from Earth. Only Russia, Japan and the United States have sent spacecraft into orbit around the Moon.

Studies have been unable to provide a convincing link between cancer and mobile-phone towers. (Courtesy: Nature)

A Melbourne university has emptied the top floors of one of its buildings after a spate of brain-tumor cases were reported during the past month. Most affected staff worked on the top floor, raising fears that cell-phone masts on top of the building are responsible. But experts told nature.com it is far more likely to be an unfortunate coincidence.
Since mid-April, five staff from the business school of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University have reported developing brain tumors. Two other cases have been reported since 1999. Of the seven, two are malignant and five benign.
Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor, and all except one have worked in the building for a decade, mostly on the top level. Some staff are concerned that mobile-phone-transmitter towers on top of the building are to blame.
International studies have been unable to provide a convincing link between cancer and the use of mobile phones or the proximity of mobile-phone towers.
Preliminary results from the university’s investigation indicate that radiofrequency levels are extremely low, according to an RMIT spokesperson.
Although little is known of what causes brain tumors, a bacterial or viral agent could be responsible.
Many experts say it is most likely to be a coincidental clustering of cases. The fact that the tumors are different from each other may also make a common cause unlikely. The tumors detected have varying origins and only three of the seven types have known associations with radiation.

The debate over whether the “hobbit“ fossil found on an Indonesian island is a separate species has reignited, as a new study of dwarfing in a range of mammals suggests that Homo floresiensis was a modern human with a pathological condition.
According to the New Scientist, the remains of a tiny woman were found in a limestone cave in Flores, Indonesia. Named H. floresiensis by the discoverers, she quickly became known as “the hobbit“ by everyone else. When the find was reported in 2004 some anthropologists disputed whether it was a new species of human, arguing that the skeleton had characteristics of a modern human with microcephaly, a condition that causes reduced cranium size. Microcephaly is relatively common in isolated populations and is associated with reduced brain function.
Peter Brown and Mike Morwood from the University of New England, Australia, proposed that the 1-metre-tall body (known as LB1) had evolved in an isolated population of Homo erectus as an adaptation to the restricted diet found on an island. But at 380 cubic centimeters, some thought that LB1’s chimp-sized cranial capacity was too small to be a dwarf H. erectus. Brown and Morwood denied this, but their conclusion has now been challenged again.
Species identity
“As they dwarf, species’ brain sizes decline far more slowly than body size,“ says Ann MacLarnon from Roehampton University, UK, who modeled dwarfing in a range of mammals from dogs to elephants with a team from the Field Museum, Chicago, US.

World Health Organization (WHO) has rebuffed requests from the pharmaceutical industry to tone down its plans for openness in drug testing.
Industry groups had asked for critical details about clinical trials to be omitted from a new WHO database, which will bring together information on trials from around the world and provide each study with a stamp of approval. They argued that making such details public would amount to disclosing commercial secrets, and said that the information could be misused by patients desperate for a cure.
The WHO remained unconvinced by industry’s pleas. “We said: give us your best case,“ says Ida Sim, a clinical-trials expert at the WHO who discussed the organization’s plan with industry. “But it was clear that the strongest case was not sufficient to counter the need for transparency and other ethical arguments,“ he told nature.com.
The system is being set up in part because major pharmaceutical firms have been accused of hiding evidence that some new drugs, such as anti-depressants, can be harmful. By bringing together data on all known trials, the WHO hopes to make it harder for drug companies to bury trials when the results do not go as planned.
Sim and her colleagues have discussed the matter with industry representatives and other stakeholders for more than a year, and the groups have moved closer on some issues. Drugs firms had, for example, initially asked for key trial data, such as the scientific name of the drug being tested, to be kept confidential at the start of the trial. Some firms now say they are happy to publish this information, along with the other data requested by the WHO.
But other issues continue to cause divisions. Most prominent is the WHO call for registrations of early-stage trials, which assess factors such as safety. Although drug firms routinely register advanced trials, they prefer to keep initial tests secret.

How can astronomers ensure that their space telescopes fly in ultra-precise formations around our planet? By combining the push of laser light with the pull of tethers.
As the New Scientist reports, the question is an important one. While giant telescopes and sensitive detectors hundreds of meters across would provide an incredible window on the Universe, they would be prohibitively expensive and cumbersome to launch and maintain in space. So several next-generation space missions propose to use more than one, and in some cases dozens, of smaller spacecraft flying in formation to cover the area between them.
The idea is that lasers are beamed between pairs of spacecraft within a formation. Mirrors on each satellite reflect the laser beams back and forth, providing an energy-efficient thrust.
This outward push is balanced by the inward pull of tension in Kevlar tethers linking the satellites. The system also uses the laser beams to measure and maintain the desired distance between satellites very accurately. The alignment accuracy cannot be achieved by any other means.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts funded the first stage of the laser-tether project and is considering the concept for a second, more in-depth study.
But Robert Cassanova, director of the institute based in Atlanta, Georgia, says the idea is not the only proposal for how to control formation flying. “We’re testing ideas in parallel,“ he says. “We don’t want to put all our bets into one concept. And there may be applications for two different types of systems where one would be better than the other.“

A way to cloak carbon nanotubes, making them both non-toxic and highly customizable, has been revealed. It marks a step towards using nanotubes in biological research and medicine, the New Scientist reports.
Nanotubes are rolled up sheets of linked carbon atoms and are as little as 10 atoms wide. In the future they could act as tiny molecular sensors, detecting individual enzymes inside living cells, or could enable new medical treatments for diseases such as cancer.
But for reasons that remain unclear, bare nanotubes are toxic, triggering the death of cells that they touch. To deal with this problem, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, US, created rod-shaped synthetic polymers that mimic molecules found naturally on the outer surface of the body’s cells. They then attached these molecules to the nanotubes like pine needles on a twig.
This polymer coating prevented the nanotubes from damaging cells grown in the lab. They also provide a versatile way to customize the nanotubes.
“I think this is a huge step forward that will open the door for using nanotubes for biological uses,“ says Alex Zettl, a physicist on the research team.
The coating mimics biological molecules called mucins Ð a family of complex sugar molecules embedded in cells’ membranes that help regulate how the cells interact with the rest of the body. By choosing to mimic a particular mucin, Zettl and his colleagues coaxed the treated nanotubes into bonding to the outside of their test cells.

Humans and chimpanzees may have split away from a common ancestor far more recently than was previously thought, writes BBC.
A detailed analysis of human and chimp DNA suggests the lines finally diverged less than 5.4 million years ago. The finding, published in the journal Nature, is about 1-2 million years later than the fossils have indicated.
A US team says its results hint at the possibility that interbreeding occurred between the two lines for thousands, even millions, of years. This hybridisation would have been important in swapping genes for traits that allowed the emerging species to survive in their environments, explain the scientists affiliated to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Harvard Medical School. And it underlines, they believe, just how complex human evolution has been.
Humans and chimps contain DNA sequences that are very similar to each other; the differences are due to mutations, or errors, in the genetic code that have occurred since these animals diverged on to separate evolutionary paths. By analyzing where these differences occur in the animals’ genomes, it is possible to get an insight into the two species’ histories - the timing of key events in their evolution.
The US investigation indicates the human and chimp lines split no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. It is a problematic finding because of our current understanding of early fossils, such as the famous Toumai specimen uncovered in Chad.