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DARPA plans to test whether a group of mini-spacecraft can do the work of a larger satellite.

It’s a name only a government agency could love: the Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information eXchange. Could DARPA possibly come up with a more tortured title for System F6?

Still, the name says something about the concept: using a team of small spacecraft to do the work of a single (bigger, more expensive, more vulnerable, less capable) satellite. DARPA has been talking about spacecraft clusters for years, but now the agency is planning to put some money where its mouth is. Earlier this week, DARPA gave Boeing Advanced Systems a $12-million-plus contract to demonstrate initial technologies for the concept; an on-orbit demonstration is planned for 2011.

For System F7, we hope DARPA will add a little Fun.

A new software shows promise for predicting human thought patterns—time to whip out the tin foil hat?

Get out your tin foil hats, paranoids. Your fears are one step closer to reality. Berkeley scientists are reporting in Nature that they have developed software, which, in conjunction with an fMRI scanner, can read your mind. And 80 to 90% of the time, the machine was right. Okay, settle down. These are early reports and there are more than a few caveats.

The research is intended to study how the brain processes still imagery. A subject was placed in an fMRI and her brain scanned over a span of five hours while viewing a sequence of thousands of images. The software recorded her brain patterns as each image was presented, establishing a baseline for how this particular subject’s brain processed each photograph. In the next step, new images were presented, only this time the software didn’t know what they were. It had to guess. When using a set of 120 images, the computer was right 90% of the time. With 1,000, 80%. With random predictions: 0.8%.

The study used only still images; moving pictures are not yet possible because the fMRI scanners can only take a new scan every three to four seconds. The researchers say the next step is to focus on getting the software to do image reconstruction, which is figuring out what you are seeing without the hours of building the catalogue of your brain beforehand. Ultimately, they hope it might be possible to use this technology to decode a person’s dreams. They surmise the visual part of your brain is used to generate the images and then stored in your memory, which could theoretically later be accessed by the scanning technique.

Via The Guardian

For all the problems greasy hair might bring, there’s at least once upside: lessened exposure to ozone. In a decidedly odd, though fruitful study, University of Missouri researchers Glenn Morrison and Lakshmi Pandrangi measured the ozone levels surrounding samples of washed and unwashed hair over the course of a day. Dirty hair absorbed seven times the amount of ozone. The grungy-haired, in other words, inhale one-seventh of the occasionally fatal respiratory irritant as their squeaky clean counterparts.

So, live dirty and prosper? Alas, it’s not quite that simple. Ozone levels are lowered by the interaction with hair funk, but only because of the chemical reactions that take place. A good chunk of human skin oils, 10-15 percent, are composed of (the terrifically named) squalene. The organic compound is replete with double bonds—something that ozone molecules react with “like crazy,” according to Morrison. Ozone levels might be lowered, but secondary reactions between the reactive molecule and squalene ensure there’s still some pretty bad stuff hanging around your head. The major lousy byproduct the researchers found was 4-oxopentanal—a different respiratory irritant.

Morrison is loath to draw any conclusions: “maybe there’s a net benefit, but we really couldn’t assume that.” But he notes the study underscores just how little we know about ozone. “Clearly our exposure is lower than we think, but our understanding of how it reacts with our body chemistry is pretty limited.” A policy of avoiding ozone—especially indoors—is still a prudent course of action. And until scientists figure out all possible secondary reactions, you may want to chuck that ionic filter.