THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY

Hubble Telescope to Get Final House Call

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:40:34 PDT

The Hubble Space Telescope is about to get one last house call. And never before have the risks been higher.

On Monday, astronauts will rocket away to the most famous telescope of modern times. They'll be taking up new scientific instruments, replacement parts for broken cameras and fresh batteries that should keep Hubble running for five to 10 years.

This cosmic-scale grand finale -- stalled seven months by a telescope breakdown -- will be NASA's most daring overhaul yet of the 19-year-old orbiting observatory, a captivating, twinkling jewel in the sky representing $10 billion of investment.

Never before have spacewalking astronauts attempted to fix dead science instruments on the Hubble, equipment that was never meant to be handled in orbit. Before they've just swapped out the whole thing at the telescope, which started out life shockingly nearsighted.

In all, five spacewalks will be performed in as many days by two repair teams. Two of the repairmen have visited Hubble before and, because of that, were chosen for this extraordinarily difficult job, on a par with operating-room surgery.

"Hubble needs a hug," said the chief repairman, John Grunsfeld, who will be making his third trip to the telescope.

Blue Laser Could Lead to Autism Cure

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:35:28 PDT

Lasers could one day cure, or at least aid in the search for drugs that treat diseases ranging from autism to schizophrenia, according to two new studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and published in the online issue of the journal Nature.

A blue laser shined into a live mouse brain triggered gamma waves, which are a kind of brain wave necessary for concentration and cognition that people with autism and schizophrenia often lack.

"There are lots of theories about why [gamma wave oscillation] is impaired," said Li-Huei Tsai, a professor at MIT and a co-author on one of the Nature papers.

"This is the first proof that a specific set of neurons are responsible for gamma waves."

Swine Flu Outbreak Tracked With Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:33:42 PDT

Powerful disease-tracking tools, including those currently monitoring the spread of swine flu across the world, were once reserved for officials at the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. No longer.

Today, anyone can see the spread of diseases such as swine flu in real time, and alert public health officials to potential new cases by using Google, and now, Twitter.

"Our site used to update every hour," said John Brownstein, a physician at Children's Hospital Boston who, along with fellow CHB computer scientist Clark Friefeld, created the HealthMap swine flu tracking service, which was recently modified to include Twitter updates. "But that was too slow for the amount of information we've been accumulating, so we had to switch to a Twitter feed instead."

The new swine flu Twitter service launched Sunday morning with about 50 users. By Monday afternoon, more than 1,400 people had signed up to receive the latest swine flu news.

Hypersonic 'WaveRider' Poised for Test Flight

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:27:31 PDT

Hoping to bridge the gap between airplanes and rocketships, the U.S. military is preparing to test an experimental aircraft that can fly more than six times faster than the speed of sound on ordinary jet fuel.

Officially, it's known as the X-51, but folks like to call it the WaveRider because it stays airborne, in part, with lift generated by the shock waves of its own flight. The design stems from the goal of the program -- to demonstrate an air-breathing, hypersonic, combustion ramjet engine, known as a scramjet.

"We built a vehicle around an engine," said Joseph Vogel, the X-51 project manager with Boeing, which is building a series of four test planes under a $246.5-million program managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

New Race Car Runs on Chocolate

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:23:54 PDT

Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world's fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers.

Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fiber and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car's size, weight, and performance.
Their claims cannot be independently verified.

They hope it can reach speeds of over 145 mph when it is tested on a racetrack in a few weeks time. They have driven it at around 60 mph and are now making final adjustments to the engine before driving it at top speed.

Warwick's project manager James Meredith said their model shows that it is possible to build a fast, efficient, environmentally friendly car.

The car, named the "WorldFirst Formula 3 racing car," will go on display at several races including the European Grand Prix and Britain's Goodwood Festival of Speed

Giant 'Blob' Found in Outer Space

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:44:34 PDT

A strange giant space "blob" spotted when the universe was relatively young has got astronomers puzzled. Using space and ground telescopes, astronomers looked back to when the universe was only 800 million years old and found something that was out of proportion and out of time.

It was gaseous, big, and emitted a certain type of radiation, said study lead author Masami Ouchi, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.

Scientists don't even know what to call it. So they just called it a radiation-emitting "blob." They used that horror-film staple 34 times in their peer-reviewed study, which will be published in next month's edition of Astrophysical Journal. More formally, they named it Himiko, after a legendary ancient Japanese queen.

The photo of it is beyond fuzzy.

Earth-Sized Exoplanet Is Least Massive Ever Found

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:42:40 PDT

Scientists say they've discovered a planet outside our solar system that is close to Earth in size -- far different from the behemoths they had previously seen so far.

Scientists attending a conference in England said Tuesday that a planet less than twice the size of Earth has been located in a galaxy outside our solar system. The planet, dubbed "e," was found in the well-known star system Gliese 581. The discovery is the outcome of more than four years of observations using the HARPS spectrograph attached to the 12-foot ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.

As many as 300 so called exoplanets -- or planets outside our solar system -- have been discovered, but most are much larger than Earth.

The BBC is quoting scientist Xavier Bonfils of the Grenoble Observatory in France as saying the new planet is the least massive exoplanet ever detected.

Complex Molecules Found in Milky Way's 'Sweet Spot'

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:40:35 PDT

The newly detected presence of two complex organic molecules in the Milky Way suggests the building blocks for life may exist in space even before the formation of planets.

Located close the center of the galaxy, the molecular cloud Sagittarius B2 is something akin to a galactic watering hole. A popular hangout for biologists and chemists looking for the building blocks of life in space, it contains a rich stew of materials in the process of being recycled into stars and planets.

Within the cloud are a wide variety of organics, now known to include two of the most complex molecules ever found in interstellar space -- ethyl formate and n-propyl cyanide. The molecules are similar in size and complexity to amino acids, the building blocks of life.

"It shows that you can go to this high level of complexity in space. These are comparable to the simplest amino acids," said Cornell astrochemist Robin Garrod, who presented the findings along with colleagues from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the University of Cologne at this week's European Astronomy and Space Science conference in the United Kingdom.

Shuttle's Future Facing April 30 Deadline

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:36:44 PDT

NASA is facing a critical deadline to make its biggest decision in a generation: whether to go forward with plans to retire the space shuttle fleet and replace it with a new mode of space travel. But the agency still has no chief to make the $230 billion call.

NASA seems so far off the White House radar, said one presidential expert, that it might as well be on Pluto.

"As each day goes by, the need for these decisions becomes greater and greater, and the absence of an administrator becomes more and more an issue," said John Logsdon, a member of the NASA Advisory Council who also advised President Barack Obama's campaign.

Obama's science adviser has said that crucial decisions on the shuttle and a new spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon will not be made until NASA gets a new administrator. In an interview two weeks ago, John Holdren did not know when that would be.

A key deadline is April 30, when a congressional rule governing the shuttle's infrastructure expires. After that date, NASA will be free to start taking apart the shuttle program if it chooses.

Microbe-Powered 'Fart' Machine Stores Energy

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:33:53 PDT

It sounds like a gag gift instead of serious science, but a new electrical farting machine could improve fuel cell technology by turning C02 in the atmosphere into methane.

The technique won't combat global warming directly, since both CO2 and methane are potent greenhouse gases, but it could help store alternative energies such as wind and solar more efficiently.

It works like this: giving small jolts of electricity to single-celled microorganisms known as archea prompts them to remove C02 from the air and turn it into methane, released as tiny "farts." The methane, in turn, can be used to power fuel cells or to store the electrical energy chemically until its needed.

"We found that we can directly convert electrical current into methane using a very specific microorganism," said Bruce Logan, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, who details his discovery in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Simulated brain closer to thought

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:29:45 PDT

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.

The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory.

Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head.

The work was presented at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague.

The Blue Brain project launched in 2005 as the most ambitious brain simulation effort ever undertaken.

While many computer simulations have attempted to code in "brain-like" computation or to mimic parts of the nervous systems and brains of a variety of animals, the Blue Brain project was conceived to reverse-engineer mammal brains from real laboratory data and to build up a computer model down to the level of the molecules that make them up.

The first phase of the project is now complete; researchers have modeled the neocortical column - a unit of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex which is responsible for higher brain functions and thought.

"The thing about the neocortical column is that you can think of it as an isolated processor. It is very much the same from mouse to man - it gets a bit larger a bit wider in humans, but the circuit diagram is very similar," Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain project and founder of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland, told BBC News.

He added that, when evolution discovered this "mammalian secret", it duplicated it many many times and then "used it as it needed more and more functionality".

Botnet 'ensnares government PCs'

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:27:28 PDT

Almost two million PCs globally, including machines inside UK and US government departments, have been taken over by malicious hackers.

Security experts Finjan traced the giant network of remotely-controlled PCs, called a botnet, back to a gang of cyber criminals in Ukraine.

Several PCs inside six UK government bodies were compromised by the botnet.

Finjan has contacted the Metropolitan Police with details of the government PCs and it is now investigating.

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office, which is charged with setting standards for the use of information technology across government, said it would not comment on specific attacks "for security reasons".

"It is Government policy neither to confirm nor deny if an individual organisation has been the subject of an attack nor to speculate on the origins or success of such attacks."

He added: "We constantly monitor new and existing risks and work to minimise their impact by alerting departments and giving them advice and guidance on dealing with the threat."

India's Spy, Education Satellites Launched Successfully!

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:21:56 PDT

In its 15th mission carried out from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota today, ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C12) successfully placed two satellites - RISAT-2 and ANUSAT - in the desired orbit. The intended orbit of the satellites is at 550 km with an inclination of 41 degree.
RISAT-2 is India's first all-weather spy satellite with capability to take images of the earth during day and night as well as cloudy conditions. RISAT-2 weighs 300 kg and will have a life span of three years. This satellite will be used to monitor India's borders and as part of anti-infiltration and anti-terrorist operations. The spacecraft is built by Israeli Aerospace Industries. RISAT-2 will enhance ISRO’s capability for earth observation, especially during floods, cyclones, landslides and management of disasters in a more effective way.

In addition to RISAT-2, PSLV also carried the 40 kg micro satellite named ANUSAT, built by Anna University, Chennai. ANUSAT is the first experimental communication satellite built by an Indian University under the over all guidance of ISRO and will demonstrate the technologies related to message store and forward operations. It carries an amateur radio and technology demonstration experiments.

"Again, we have set a record. As in the past, we declared the launch date, time and we made it happen. RISAT-2 would be a good asset to national resources, and I am sure it is going to serve the country well," G Madhavan Nair, chairman, ISRO told PTI.

"The year 2009 has started off well. The final moments of the launch were more thrilling than a cricket match as we hit a few boundaries and bowled some googlies," added Nair. He said the performance of the PSLV-C12 launch vehicle was "precise and on the dot."

PSLV-C12 lifted off from the Second Launch Pad at 6:45 am IST today with the ignition of its first stage. The important flight events included the separation of the first stage, ignition of the second stage, separation of the payload fairing at about 125 km altitude after the vehicle had cleared the dense atmosphere, second stage separation, third stage ignition, third stage separation, fourth stage ignition and fourth stage cut-off.

Today’s launch was the 14th consecutive success for PSLV. In these launches, PSLV has placed a total of 14 Indian satellites and 16 foreign satellites into Polar, Geosynchronous Transfer and Low Earth Orbits.

It may be recalled that during its previous mission on 22 October 2008, PSLV had successfully launched Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which is now exploring the moon from lunar orbit.

Simple painless treatments could protect eyes in old age

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:13:48 PDT

It may soon be possible to improve or prevent failing eyesight in old age using a combination of simple and painless

treatments.

The need to protect or 'tune up' the visual system is becoming acute, says Jonathan Stone of Sydney University and ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science (Vision Centre).

The Vision Centre is reporting significant success in a major collaborative research programme which seeks to protect and possibly restore functional vision using simple therapies based on light, diet and oxygen.

These therapies include light management, anti-oxidant dietary supplements, healing of damaged eye cells using near-infra-red light and short-term oxygen therapy, and are all based on a deepening understanding of the cellular and genetic processes within the eye.

A Vision Centre team headed by Krisztina Valter has produced evidence that eyesight damage caused by exposure to very bright light can be repaired or even prevented, using doses of near-infra-red light.

A second form of treatment is simply to restrict the amount of light entering the eye, using dark glasses or other means.

"We have shown that restricting light in young eyes in animal models of retinal degeneration greatly reduces the amount of damage they sustain from ordinary bright daylight," Valter said.

In a third development at the Vision Centre, Silvia Bisti of the University of L'Aquila in Italy has discovered that a dietary supplement of the herb saffron offers potentially major benefits for protecting and repairing damaged vision, said an ARC release.

A fourth is the possible use of oxygen as a short-term therapy to improve vision. While oxidative damage is a major cause of the loss of our vision cells, it has been observed that saturating the eyes with oxygen for a very short time in a chamber can cause vision to improve, Stone said.

Scientists discover 'dancing' algae

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:13:11 PDT

Scientists at Cambridge University have discovered that freshwater algae can form stable groupings in which they dance around each

other, miraculously held together only by the fluid flows they create.

According to their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers studied the multicellular organism Volvox, which consists of approximately 1,000 cells arranged on the surface of a spherical matrix about half a millimetre in diameter.

Each of the surface cells has two hair-like appendages known as flagella, whose beating propels the colony through the fluid and simultaneously makes them spin about an axis.

The researchers found that colonies swimming near a surface can form two types of "bound states"; the "waltz", in which the two colonies orbit around each other like a planet circling the sun, and the "minuet", in which the colonies oscillate back and forth as if held by an elastic band.

The researchers, which include PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, have developed a mathematical analysis that shows these dancing patterns arise from the manner in which nearby surfaces modify the fluid flow near the colonies and induce an attraction between them.

The observations constitute the first direct visualisations of the flows, which have been predicted to produce such an attraction.

First images from spy satellite next week

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:11:20 PDT

The first images from RISAT-2, the all-weather spy satellite put into orbit by a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on Monday, will

start arriving next week, Isro said.

Isro's chief spokesman S Satish said on Tuesday that there would be no further altitude-raising operation for RISAT-2 and Anusat, the country's first university satellite that piggy-backed on the spy satellite.

"In the first shot itself they reached their designated orbits 18 minutes after lift off,'' he said.

"Both the satellites are being tracked continuously and the first set of images from RISAT-2 are expected next week. I am happy to say that they are performing satisfactorily,'' he added.

Anusat project director T V Ramakrishna said the signals received from the satellite, to be used for document sharing between colleges and universities, at Isro's telemetry, tracking and command network at Bangalore were of good quality.

Ramakrishna said Anusat would be declared operational and the ground stations at the Madras Institute of Technology and Pune University would begin to receive data.

Watch Latest Movie Online

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:06:32 PDT

Movie of the week-Barah Aana

Part-1

Part-2

Part-3

Part-4

Part-5

Adding Iron to Ocean Won't Stop Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:06:04 PDT

An ambitious plan to slow global warming by locking CO2 deep in the ocean has hit a stumbling block, according to a new study that shows the geoengineering technique is not as effective as scientists had previously hoped.

"The amount of carbon dioxide that could be taken up is less than we assumed," said Victor Smetacek, a scientist at Alfred Wegener Institute who co-led the expedition. Don't discount ocean fertilization yet however, say scientists working both inside and outside the research study.

"With other climate change initiatives, ocean fertilization could still play a role in reducing climate change," said Smetacek.

The idea behind ocean fertilization is a simple one. Carbon dioxide is slowly raising the average temperature of the Earth. If some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be removed the Earth wouldn't heat up as fast.

Scientists have come up with a wide variety of plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Some scientists want to pump C02 deep into the underground. Others want to use carbon nanotubes to turn CO2 into methane or other compounds.

Police Using Twitter to Get the Word Out

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:01:13 PDT

When Milwaukee police wanted to get word of a murder out quickly, they did it in 113 characters on Twitter.

"Latest homicide in the city is NOT a random act. Male, 33, shot in 1500 block N. 39. More details as we have them," read the recent entry.

Milwaukee's department is one of a growing number of police and fire agencies turning to social networking Web sites such as Twitter, which lets users send text-message "tweets" to a mass audience in 140 characters or less. The tweets can be read on the Web or on mobile phones within seconds.

Some departments use Twitter to alert people to traffic disruptions, to explain why police are in a certain neighborhood or to offer crime prevention tips. Others encourage leads on more pressing matters: bomb scares, wildfires, school lockdowns and evacuations.

People signed up to automatically receive every tweet from one source are known as "followers," and by that measure, public-safety Twitter pages are nowhere near the most popular. Cyclist Lance Armstrong and actress Demi Moore each have more than 500,000 followers. Milwaukee police have about 900.

Bird Maneuvers Inspire Next-Gen Flying Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:01:35 PDT

Flying, flapping robots could soon get an upgrade, thanks to new research that reveals the deceptively simple mechanism used by bats, birds and bugs to turn in flight.

"Why are animals so much better at maneuvering and recovering from perturbations than our human-designed flight systems?" asked Tyson Hedrick, a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina and an author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Science.

"From fruit flies through hummingbirds to larger birds and bats, we tried to uncover the fundamental aspects of turning in flight," he said.

The study is the first to examine how various flying creatures can turn in midair without crashing to the ground. Previous studies of animal flight have mostly focused on how they manage to stay aloft at all.

Radio Buffs Tune In to Jupiter

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:03:58 PDT

From his place in New Mexico, Thomas Ashcraft recently took in a live show -- even though it unfolded some 390 million-plus miles away on Jupiter. All he needed was a few antennas, some short wave radios and a recorder to document the event.

Listen to a recording of Jupiter's sounds here, courtesy of Thomas Ashcraft.

It turns out Earth's big brother can belt out a tune ... well a few notes anyway. The radio waves come to Earth in two varieties: long bursts and short ones. They appear when particular parts of Jupiter are aligned with Io -- its closest and most volcanically active moon -- and receiving stations on Earth.

The stations can be very simple. Ashcraft, a 58-year-old artist who has been listening to the sounds Jupiter, the sun and other celestial bodies for about 20 years, uses a directional antenna system known as a Yagi antenna, a series of secondary dipole antennas and a short wave radio.

There's a group called Radio Jove that sells kits for under $20. If owning the goods isn't your thing, the University of Florida Radio Observatory streams its catch live on the Internet.

The short bursts last just a few milliseconds before shutting down and shifting over to other radio frequencies, Francisco Reyes, director of the UF radio observatory, told Discovery News.

"It's like pebbles or hail falling on a tin roof," Reyes said.

The long notes can linger for 30 minutes, or even an hour or two.

Nanocluster Acts as Hydrogen Super Sponge

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:04:01 PDT

A crystal riddled with tiny pores has the highest surface area of any material in the world, according to the University of Michigan chemists who created the material, which is detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

One-thirtieth of an ounce of the zinc-oxide crystal has enough surface area to cover an entire football field. Scientists say this labyrinthine material could eventually store hydrogen for cars or pull planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air.

"It's a crystalline material like salt, or sugar," said Adam Matzger, the University of Michigan chemist who created the material. "Looking at it you would never know that it is filled with empty space, that it's full of these holes."

Each pore is tiny, only a nanometer or two in size, just large enough for two hydrogen atoms, bonded to each other, to slip into a pore and bounce around like a rubber ball.

Watch-Live-Match-IPL2009

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:40:24 PDT

Lunar Reflections Reveal Earth's Surface

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:12:44 PDT

Reflections of the Earth seen on the moon could help identify surface features on planets orbiting nearby stars, an Australian researcher says.

Astrophysicist Sally Langford, from the University of Melbourne, says the Earth's oceans and land reflect light differently when viewed on the dark side of the moon.

In a paper, published in the latest Astrobiology journal, Langford, a doctoral student, says the brightness of earthshine varies as the Earth rotates.

Earthshine is the light reflected from the day side of the Earth, which is seen as a pale glow in the darkened portion of the crescent moon.

After Transplant, Brain Rewires Left Hand First

noreply@blogger.com (Yogesh Niranjankumar Patel) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:07:10 PDT

When patients had both hands transplanted, their brains re-established connections much more quickly with the left hand than the right, a team of researchers in France reports.

The sample was small, just two patients, but both had been right-handed before losing their hands, and both followed a pattern of reconnection with their brain that was quicker for the left hand.

The study, led by Angela Sirigu of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Lyon, France, is reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The research shows that even years after the loss of hands the brain can reorganize and rewire itself to recognize and connect to a replacement.

And it comes just days after French physicians, in a 30-hour operation, performed the world's first simultaneous partial-face and double-hand transplant. Paris' Public Hospital authority described the recipient as a 30-year-old burn victim who was injured in a 2004 accident.

Sirigu's team used magnetic imaging to study the brains of people who had lost both hands and to see how the motor region that controls movement responded after new hands were transplanted.