Machines Like Us

Complete Genomics Inc., a third-generation human genome sequencing company, today announced its formal launch as the world's first provider of large-scale human genome sequencing services.

The machine created by the technological centre – based in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa - and known as Roptalmu, is a lightweight and portable robot the mission of which is to perforate holes in large-scale aeronautic components, such as aircraft wing spars, during their assembly stage. This machine will compete for the prize together with such important enterprises as SAP, Bombardier, HP, Rockwell or Procter & Gamble, within the category of Innovation, and which is sponsored by Microsoft.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to fly within 16 miles of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Oct. 9 and measure molecules in its space environment that could give insight into the history of the solar system.

The first NASA spacecraft to image and map the dynamic interactions taking place where the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space is ready for launch Oct. 19.

Leave it to hypothesized gravity to weigh down what physicists have thought for 30 years. If theoretical physicists, led by the University of Oregon's Stephen Hsu, are right, the idea that nature's forces merge under grand unification has grown fuzzy.

From majestic African elephants to tiny and often unappreciated rodents, mammals on Earth are in a state of crisis. One in four mammal species on Earth is being pushed to extinction, according to the Global Mammal Assessment, the most comprehensive assessment of the world's mammals.

Magnetic resonance brain imaging reveals that patients with generalized social phobia respond differently than others to negative comments about themselves, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

People who occasionally forget an appointment or a friend's name may have a loss of brain volume, even though they don't have memory deficits on regular tests of memory or dementia, according to a study published in the October 7, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Religulous, Bill Maher's new documentary on religion, is an eye-opening examination of the fallacy of faith.

The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, October 3, by Alexander Vargas and colleagues at Yale University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Game designer David Perry says tomorrow's videogames will be more than mere fun to the next generation of gamers. They'll be lush, complex, emotional experiences -- more involving and meaningful to some than real life.

We keep sending missions to Mars with the key objective to search for past or present life. But what if a huge impact early in the Red Planet's history hindered any future possibility for life to thrive?

A study in the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that the successful manipulation of sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) amplitude by instrumental SMR conditioning (ISC) improved sleep quality as well as declarative learning. ISC might thus be considered a promising non-pharmacological treatment for primary insomnia.

If the current financial climate has taught us anything, it's that a system where over-borrowing goes unchecked eventually ends in disaster. It turns out this rule applies as much to our bodies as it does to economics. Instead of cash, our body deals in energy borrowed from muscle and given to the brain. Unlike freewheeling financial markets, the lending process in the body is under strict regulation to ensure that more isn't lent than can be afforded. New research by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reveals just how this process is implemented.

The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought.