Flowers are known to attract pollinating insects through a variety of means, from alluring fragrances and nectar to vibrant colors and shapes. According to a new study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, scientists can now add an unlikely mechanism to the list: movement. Researchers from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales observed 300 specific coastal flowers, noting stem lengths, the range of swaying distance, how often and how long they were visited by insects, and how many seeds were ultimately produced.

Those flowers with long and thin stems proved to be the most attractive to insects and produced the most seeds. The scientists concluded their swaying motions made them most visible among others. There are practical limits, however. Those flowers with terribly long stems moved too much to allow insects to make a stable landing and so were generally avoided. Similarly, the flowers with shorter stems were less visited since they were hard to differentiate from the crowd.



In 2009, Canada plans to launch a suitcase-sized spacecraft that will be charged with spotting asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. There's already a big ground-based program underway. NASA regularly identifies and tracks asteroids, calculating the likelihood that they could at some point run into our pale blue dot.
But the Canadian Space Agency thinks that its Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite might be able to identify risky rocks that grounded telescopes can't see. And its total cost to build and launch will be just $10 million. So, even if it doesn't prove to be much better than ground-based observatories, as some experts suggest might be the case, the CSA won't be blowing its budget. And if it does spot a threat that NASA's NEO program doesn't catch, we'll all be saying thank you, before sending Bruce Willis up to blow the thing apart.



Duke University engineers think they've made an important step towards developing robotic surgeons that operate independently. The robot they used in their experiments—which were just feasibility studies, and were not performed on real people—uses 3-D ultrasound as its eyes, and an AI program that processes the 3-D information it gathers to determine the robot's next steps.

The robot has successfully performed several simulated procedures—directing catheters inside synthetic blood vessels, carrying out needle biopsies and even removing a fake cyst. A tiny 3-D ultrasound transducer gathers the images, effectively providing the robot's arm with a map of where it needs to go.

And while the long-term goal is to have some future version of their robot perform more complex tasks in animal models, the engineers also say that the 3-D ultrasound tech they use could prove to be a valuable tool to today's surgeons.



Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, is a technology developed to send data over lines also used for electric power transmission. Simply put, it's high-speed Internet through your electrical outlets. Right off the bat, the appeal of a system like this is attractive for a lot of reasons. It could provide broadband service to rural areas without the physical infrastructure for DSL or cable and would require only minimal hardware installations by the power utilities. It would also pave the way for Internet-enabled appliances in that end users would be able to connect any device to the Internet simply by plugging it into any electrical wall socket.

It's of course not without its downsides, the most significant of which is the lack of standardization across the national electricity network. Another is the issue of managing the noise on power lines, which are already a noisy environment from a transmission perspective.

All this speculation may be moot, however, as the largest planned U.S. deployment of the technology has been scrapped by Oncor, a Texas utility company buying out the network. The system was poised to offer Internet service to 2 million electricity customers, but Oncor has decided to use the wires for power only. Without this new launch, the number of BPL subscribers in the U.S. remains under 5,000. In the business of high speed data delivery, that figure spells almost certain future demise.



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