Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or functions.

We're all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali's various disorders and Sylvia Plath's depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.

The finding could help to explain why mutations that increase a person's risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome have been preserved, even preferred, during human evolution, says Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who carried out the study.

Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. Some 90 million articles and blog posts, which appeared from August through October, were scrutinized with their phrase-finding software.

Monkeys first became familiar with a certain pattern, such as "shoy-bi." During the test, the researchers would then suddenly vary that to "bi-shoy," turning what was once a suffix into a prefix. When this happened, the monkeys would turn their heads toward the individual playing back the recordings, a response previously determined to indicate their acknowledgement that the familiar sound ordering pattern had been violated.

“Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you,” Juan Antonio Martinez said in a press release. “Within another couple weeks you can tell the difference between trees and pavement.”

Current handcrafted approaches to compiler development are no longer sustainable. With each generation of re-configurable architecture, the compiler development time increases and the performance improvement achieved decreases. As high performance embedded systems move from application specific ASICs to programmable heterogeneous processors, this problem is becoming critical.

This project explores an emerging alternative approach where we use machine-learning techniques, developed in the artificial intelligence arena, to learn how to generate compilers automatically.

According to the first empirical study of its kind in the UK, by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester, it's the former. DRM is so rage-inducing, even to ordinary, legal users of content, that it can even drive the blind to download illegal electronic Bibles.

Their system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully. "The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred. The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it," he says in a preliminary research paper (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.0363). So the message is hidden among the teeming network traffic.

Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other.