The KOTS Enterprise

They are nature's very own Death Star beams -- ultra-powerful jets of energy that shoot out from the vicinity of black holes like deadly rays from the Star Wars super-weapon. Now a team of scientists led by the University of Southampton has moved a step closer to understanding these mysterious cosmic phenomena -- known as relativistic jets -- by measuring how quickly they 'switch on' and start shining brightly once they are launched. How these jets form is still a puzzle. One theory suggests that they develop within the 'accretion disc' -- the matter sucked into the orbit of a growing black hole. Extreme gravity within the disc twists and stretches magnetic fields, squeezing hot, magnetised disc material called plasma until it erupts in the form of oppositely directed magnetic pillars along the black hole's rotational axis. Plasma travels along these focused jets and gains tremendous speed, shooting across vast stretches of space. At some point, the pla...

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have begun to discover preferences in human-robot interactions and the need to personalize those encounters to fit both the human's preferences and the designated task. According to a new study published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, the researchers tested user preferences when interacting with a robot on a joint movement task as a first step toward developing an interactive movement protocol to be used in rehabilitation. Dr. Shelly Levy-Tzedek, head of the Cognition, Aging and Rehabilitation Lab in BGU's Department of Physical Therapy and a member of the University's Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, focuses her research on the use of robots for rehabilitation of patients. Since many patients do not practice their physical therapy routines enough or at all at home, she is designing robot companions to encourage them to practice and track their progress. "In the future, human beings may i...

Neuroscientists at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have discovered precisely where and how to electrically stimulate the human brain to enhance people's recollection of distinct memories. People with epilepsy who received low-current electrical pulses showed a significant improvement in their ability to recognize specific faces and ignore similar ones. Eight of nine patients' ability to recognize the faces of specific people improved after receiving electrical pulses to the right side of the brain's torrential area, which is critical to learning and memory. However, electrical stimulation delivered to the left side of the region, tested on four other people, resulted in no improvement in the patient's recall. The study builds on 2012 UCLA research published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating that human memory can be strengthened by electrically stimulating the brain's entorhinal cortex. The researchers followed 13 people with ...

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, behind the planet's rings. The much smaller moon Epimetheus is visible in the foreground. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare -- they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years -- they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected. "I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that," said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Geoscience. "So this is quite a surprise." The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan's surface is strikingly similar to Earth's, with flowing rivers that spill into great...