"A key finding of our work is to show that we can describe the basic sounds used by the artist with the same system used to describe speech sounds, which suggests that there is a common inventory of sounds that are drawn upon to create any vocal expression," Proctor said.

The research also sheds light on the human ability to emulate sounds, and on how the human instincts for music and language can overlap and converge. Also, "learning more about beatboxing and other forms of vocal musical expression may offer insights into novel future speech therapy," Narayanan said.

The scientists at the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI; Institute for Gravitational Physics at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) in Hannover are hunting for elusive gravitational waves—a prediction from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Their first direction detection will open a new window to our Universe and usher in the era of gravitational-wave astronomy. The AEI researchers aim to detect these tiny space-time ripples using detectors like GEO600 near Hannover, Germany, and aLIGO in the U.S. These detectors use lasers to measure the tiny distance changes caused by passing gravitational waves. Thus, the continuous improvement of those lasers and the minimization of disturbances like stray laser light is of great importance.

I talked about this here, here, here and here. Wrote a book about it (literally).

We're given ourselves self-serving mythologies of "shining cities on a hill"; "chosen nation"; pursue multiple choice exams over education, creationism/intelligent design and other made-up "controversies"; junk science in the halls of congress, #scamdals, chimeras and "created realities" because pursuit of poltergeists allow pols not to do their actual elected jobs of managing the commonwealth for the common good (i.e. redistricting = Zombie government).

Our technology is literally superseding our need for certain workers.

For example, when some of us just "couldn't do college" a generation ago, Americans could get a job in a factory - I'll use the automotive industry - and build a decent middle-class life for themselves and a family. A blue collar job might have been to use a drill on an assembly line for lug nuts, bolts, etc. Now, that's done by a robot that doesn't call in sick; doesn't need vacation; won't demand a retirement. Most hiring by US firms is abroad where pay is lower than our national minimum wage. The other good option was the military - recall it was a "peacetime force" post Vietnam.

I am not advocating slowing down, "crawling in a cave"; running for the hills. The genie is out of the bottle now, and we're debating (if you want to call it that) problems that have no impact. Period.

Our sense of the "American Dream" is changing daily, as should our definition of middle class, upper class and financial plasticity - the ability to move freely from class-to-class (hopefully upward). We've got the most expensive health care on the planet, and I've had two good friends - one my fraternity line brother - perish due to lack thereof: insurance is an expensive business with real casualties. Our living longer puts stress on geriatrics, resources and food supplies. Weather, whether you want to call it climate change or a rather heated solar cycle, is now part of what is briefed in the actual Situation Room. We either accept these realities, and prepare our children academically and morally for them: or, inherit the whirlwind of societal instability. This is Sky-net in slow-mo, and "The Hunger Games"; "Brave New World"  nor "1984" should not be a blueprint for our collective futures.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Don't panic: I know school's out for summer...and that's the chant from the teachers!

This is something I've thought about. In the seventies we had School House Rock (you better believe I have this DVD). A lot of great memories: multiplication, science, grammar, government and how it should work. As a teacher, I recall having to compete with the district demands of test prep, video game systems, mobile devices and the latest script-and-drama from reality TV. Rock was the innovation of its day, a way to engage us in passive learning. I can still sign most of the songs and recall things from its lessons (what I don't remember, I can now review in my living room).

This is just another means to engage kids in science, something as a nation we still need to do...

As part of a program created by Columbia professor Christopher Emdin, 10 New York City high school classes have been writing raps as a way to learn about science. The program is called Science Genius, and it sounds like the sort of patronizing pop-culture hijack kids hate more than anything. But when Wu-Tang’s GZA drops by a Bronx classroom to discuss the importance of scientific inquiry, you can see the actual moment when the students realize the program is legit.

To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less than the width of a human hair.

“Not only did we demonstrate for the first time that we can 3D-print a battery; we demonstrated it in the most rigorous way,” said Jennifer A. Lewis, senior author of the study, who is also the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Lewis led the project in her prior position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with co-author Shen Dillon, an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering there.

The results have been published online in the journal Advanced Materials.

The computational feat has been carried out by Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore, who used a quantum algorithm created in 2009 by Aram Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim and Seth Lloyd. For simple systems of linear equations, Harrow and colleagues showed that their algorithm can be exponentially faster than the best solving methods that use a classical computer. One important caveat, however, is that the algorithm does not find an exact solution, but only the most likely answer.

One way to think of light is as a field in space. In transformation optics, this field can be stretched and squeezed like a rubber sheet when it passes through certain types of material. The goal is to engineer this material so that it stretches the sheet around regions of space and so make them invisible.

The approach developed by Jeng Yi and Ray-Kuang is mathematically identical to this. But instead of starting with Maxwell’s equations, they start with the Schrodinger equation which governs the probability of an object being present in a region of space.

Their idea is to treat this probability field like a rubber sheet that can be stretched and squeezed. So the goal in designing a quantum invisibility cloak is to stretch this sheet around a region of space so that the probability of existing inside it is zero. In effect, they’re designing a cloak that shields its contents from reality.

A little history is helpful. The drone as we know it today was the brainchild of John Stuart Foster Jr., a nuclear physicist, former head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory), and—in 1971, when the idea occurred to him—the director of defense research and engineering, the top scientific post in the Pentagon. Foster was a longtime model-airplane enthusiast, and one day he realized that his hobby could make for a new kind of weapon. His idea: take an unmanned, remote-controlled airplane, strap a camera to its belly, and fly it over enemy targets to snap pictures or shoot film; if possible, load it with a bomb and destroy the targets, too.

Two years later, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) built two prototypes based on Foster’s concept, dubbed Praeire and Calere. Weighing 75 pounds and powered by a modified lawn-mower engine, each vehicle could stay aloft for two hours while hoisting a 28-pound payload.

The opportunity to elevate oneself from lower to at least middle class - somewhere mid-trunk beneath social canopy, but still shadow - is offered as well as to "see the world" by all major branches of the services. The trick for that opportunity is to survive your deployment, and even your garrison service in the company of fellow members with limbs attached, perhaps some educational/vocational training and without sexual or other assault; harassment or PTSD. All branches are now embroiled in an in a record increase of sexual assault cases - on men as well as women - and the lack of accountability/prosecution by higher ups on perpetrators, the same higher-ups from the "good old boys" club often rendering ham-fist, half-witted pardons to assailants and no help of recovery for victims.

Childhood as I recall it, with imagination creating my own space battles, "rattle snake eggs" with rubber bands, paperclips and an envelop; origami figurines; rubber band guns with clothes pins, stick ball and snow ball fights now kowtow to $25 - 50 video game programs with more than a million players online. Babies and Toys-R-Us makes children a consumer commodity after clearing placenta. Hours are spent by young people to master the next level while education is transformed into meaningless "teach-to-the-test" Pavlov drivel: it makes for an orderly society [of sorts] without critical thinking subjects that will question authority; the enjoyment of creativity for its own sake or expressive insight. Thus, we breed bottom-line capitalists at best; sociopaths at worst.

It is an interesting title by Mike Wall (Space.com), and I like how he makes his case, but what would we be taking with us (in US) to space if successful? Will our drones/death stars follow; the arrogance of Manifest Destiny to the stars; will we cast the natives we find to their asteroid belt reservations; see the universe as "free-fire zone"? I recall some advice a noted martial artist friend gave another: "you fight like a bull. That's OK, until you run into a bigger bull." What if the bigger alien bull sees us as hostile, inconsequential...or, as food?

And even more soberly: With growing inequality, gynophobia, xenophobia, is the silence not golden from space, but the darker conclusion to the Drake Equation: the aliens did not survive themselves, let alone invaders? What if they concluded their third world war, and are fighting their fourth (if survived) fulfilling Einstein's surmise: "with sticks and stones"?

Maybe before warp drive, we need to tackle our materialism and conflict resolution skills.

Technology Review: The World as Free-Fire Zone

The international system of units (SI) is made up of seven base units, which are the metre, kilogram, second, kelvin, ampere, mole and candela. The ampere, volt and ohm are the three fundamental units of electricity.

Ideally, a new definition of the ampere would be based on an extremely accurate source of electric current, capable of delivering one electron at a time. A single-electron pump (SEP) could be ideal in this respect because it produces a flow of individual electrons by shuttling them into a quantum dot and emitting them precisely one at a time. A good SEP also pumps the electrons quickly, so a sufficiently large current is generated.

Until recently, two types of SEP were promising contenders: tunable barrier pumps made from semiconductors, which are fast, and so-called hybrid turnstiles made from superconductors, which can be mounted in parallel to make the output current larger. Although the most accurate, a third type of pump usually made from metallic islands is too slow for making a practical current standard, but the UK researchers have now improved its performance by making it from graphene, which is a semi-metal. Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick that has a honeycomb lattice structure.

"Our experiments have shown that graphene is ideal for pumping large currents and its 2D crystal structure is just what is needed to make electrons pass through the SEP quickly," team leader Malcolm Connolly told physicsworld.com. The electron flow can reach near-gigahertz frequencies, very close to what is needed to create a current standard, he added.

If it proves accurate enough, the SEP could also help close the "quantum metrological triangle", which relates current, voltage and resistance. Voltage can be measured using the AC Josephson effect, while resistance can be related through the quantum Hall effect. Both these relationships include the same two fundamental constants – Planck’s constant, h, and the charge on the electron, e. A metrological current pump would allow physicists to directly relate current to frequency, and thus test whether e and h are as universal as we think.