A new system to verify identification

A new technology can recognize people using real-life biometric system. 

Anyone can do a electrocardiogram (ECG)- the five peaks and troughs, known as a PQRST pattern, that record each heartbeat. The shape of this pattern is affected by the heart’s size, its shape and its position in the body. Cardiologists have known since 1964 that everyone’s heartbeat is thus unique, and researchers around the world have been trying to turn that knowledge into a viable biometric system.

Now a group may have been success. They devise a system which ceaselessly measures a person’s PQRST pattern, conforms this corresponds with the registered user’s pattern, and can thus verify to various devices that the user is who he says he is.

ECGs are difficult to clone. Cloning a biometric marker takes two steps. First it must be “skimmed”. In the case of an ECG, this means duping someone into touching a surface that can record his heartbeat. That makes ECGs more secure than, say, fingerprints, which can be recovered from nearly anything that has been touched.

One obvious worry is that a person’s PQRST pattern might change beyond recognition in response to exercise or—over a longer period—as he aged. But according to Karl Martin, neither of these things is actually a problem. An elevated heartbeat does not change the shape of an ECG, just its frequency. And five years’ data collected by Dr Agrafioti’s group suggest age does not change it much either.

Mothers has traumatic experience tend to avoidance of interactint with their children

A study from the university of Notre Dame shows that mothers who have experienced childhood abuse, neglect or other traumatic experiences show an unwillingness to talk with their children about the child’s emotional experiences. According to the study, some of the low-income mothers selected as a sample, who had experienced their own childhood traumas exhibited ongoing ”traumatic avoidance symptoms,” which is characterized by an unwillingness to address thoughts, ,emotions, sensations or memories of those traumas. This avoidance interfered with mother’s ability to talk with their children about the child’ emotion leading to shorter, less in-depth conversations, those mothers also used closed-end questions that did not encourage child participation.

“Traumatic avoidance symptoms have been shown to have a negative impact on the cognitive and emotional development of children,” said Kristin Valentino, Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology who specialize the development of at-risk and maltreated children. Valentino conducted the research with Notre Dame undergraduate Taylor Thomas “This research is important because it identifies a mechanism through which we can understand how maternal trauma history relates to her ability to effectively interact with her child. This relates to her ability to effectively interact with her child. This finding also has implications for intervention work, since avoidance that is used as a coping mechanism is likely to further impair psychological functioning," Valentino said.

In a related study published recently in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, Valentino found that maltreating parents, many of whom had experienced childhood trauma, could successfully be taught to use more elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing with their preschool-aged children, which has been linked to a children's subsequent cognitive abilities in a number of areas including memory, language and literacy development.

Europeans are a big family

A professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis has found in his study that Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years. The study will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology.

"What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop said.

"This was predicted in theory over a decade ago, and we now have concrete evidence from DNA data," Coop said, adding that such close kinship likely exists in other parts of the world as well.

Coop and co-author Peter Ralph, now a professor at the University of Southern California, set out to study relatedness among Europeans in recent history, up to about 3,000 years ago. Drawing on the Population Reference Sample (POPRES) database, a resource for population and genetics research, they compared genetic sequences from more than 2,000 individuals.

As expected, Coop and Ralph found that the degree of genetic relatedness between two people tends to be smaller the farther apart they live. But even a pair of individuals who live as far apart as the United Kingdom and Turkey -- a distance of some 2,000 miles -- likely are related to all of one another's ancestors from a thousand years ago.

New Analysis Suggests Wind, Not Water,Formed Mound On Mars

Scientists found new evidence that suggests a roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound, which is considered to preserve evidence of a massive lake, might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere.

If this assumption is true, the research could leave less focus on expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water.

The definition of water existence on Mars would have important implications for understanding Mars’s past habitability.

Researchers based at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology suggest that the mound, known as Mount Sharp, most likely emerged as strong winds carried dust and sand into the 96-mile-wide crater in which the mound sits. They report in the journalGeology that air likely rises out of the massive Gale Crater when the Martian surface warms during the day, then sweeps back down its steep walls at night. Though strong along the Gale Crater walls, these "slope winds" would have died down at the crater's center where the fine dust in the air settled and accumulated to eventually form Mount Sharp, which is close in size to Alaska's Mt. McKinley.

This dynamic counters the prevailing theory that Mount Sharp formed from layers of lakebed silt -- and could mean that the mound contains less evidence of a past, Earth-like Martian climate than most scientists currently expect. Evidence that Gale Crater once contained a lake in part determined the landing site for the NASA Mars rover Curiosity. The rover touched down near Mount Sharp in August with the purpose of uncovering evidence of a habitable environment, and in December Curiosity found traces of clay, water molecules and organic compounds. Determining the origin of these elements and how they relate to Mount Sharp will be a focus for Curiosity in the coming months.

Hawaii may be exposed to big hurricanes

A new study shows that Hawaii may experience mega hurricanes over the next 75-90 years. These hurricanes are powered by a continuing warming climate, not just frequent air stream change.

The conclusions of the study are published by the hurricanes scientific journal Nature Climate Change. According to the study although it is incredible rare that hurricanes hit Hawaii, that’s all going to change as the ocean’s surface temperature shift upward.

“Computer models based on global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide, but this may not be what will happen with local communities.” A author said.

Hawaii is one such local community where climate change is expected to hit hard. “From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii,” Murakami said. “Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region.”

To make matters worse, those storms are expected to be bigger, more destructive and slower-moving than the storms of the last century, amplified by the warming climate. Researchers warned that changes in the atmosphere’s composition, driven by human activity increasing the amount of CO2 in the air, will result in wholly new moisture patterns and a shift in the jet stream that causes mega storms to drift toward the Hawaiian islands.

Weather in the North Pole of Saturn

Saturn’s rings are famous, and People are attracted by the mystery on the Solar System’s second-largest planet. From 1610, when Galileo used his primitive telescope to spot what looked like bumps protruding from either side of Saturn, to today when modern telescopes and space probes and aircrafts are created to assist unveil what’s on Saturn.

Like Earth, Saturn is surrounded by wide atmospheric gases, compared with which the solid core is so small. An those atmospheric gases, driven by powerful winds, organize themselves into massive storms which can last for decades, or even centuries.

However, when observer show what is on Saturn’s north polar, even experienced Saturn-watchers did a double-take. It is storm, which is so gigantic that it could swallow Earth, with room to spare. The eye alone is more than 1,200 miles (1,900 km) across, and wind speeds at the vast cyclone’s outer edges reach 330 mph (531 k/h).

the storm is far bigger and more powerful than anything Earth has ever experienced. it’s structurally similar to the hurricanes that batter the U.S. and Caribbean islands every year. What’s markedly different is that those storms move across the planet; Saturn’s polar storm just sits at the top of the globe without budging. That’s not because the dynamics of Saturn’s atmosphere are fundamentally different from those of Earth: the giant planet has jet streams and prevailing winds just as we do.

Imaging functions of new digital cameras inspired by bug’s view

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created the first digital cameras with designs that mimic those of ocular insects.

The cameras apply large arrays of tiny focusing lenses and miniaturized detectors in hemispherical layouts, just like eyes found in arthropods. The devices link soft, rubbery optics with high performance silicon electronics and detectors.

Eyes in arthropods use compound designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes cooperate to provide image perception. Each small eye, known as an ommatidium, comprise a corneal lens, a crystalline cone, and a light sensitive organ at the base. The entire system is configured to provide exceptional properties in imaging, many of which lie out of the reach of existing human-made cameras.

"Full 180 degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts -- much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras," Rogers explained. "When implemented with large arrays microlenses, each of which couples to an individual photodiode, this type of hemispherical design provides unmatched field of view and other powerful capabilities in imaging. Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution." The researchers described their breakthrough camera in an article, "Digital Cameras With Designs Inspired By the Arthropod Eye," published in the May 2, 2013 issue of Nature.