NASA will fly drone for hurricane study
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- NASA scientists say an unmanned drone will help them discover the relationship between lightning and tropical storms to help in hurricane forecasting.
Any change in intensity in a tropical cyclone is often accompanied by increases in lightning strikes, but whether more lightning meant the storm was strengthening or weakening has long eluded researchers, SPACE.com reported Monday.
NASA says it plans to use a remotely piloted Global Hawk airplane -- the same drone model flown by the U.S. Air Force -- equipped with a Lightning Instrument Package to give an unprecedented, sustained look at the inner workings of hurricanes.
"The availability of the Global Hawk makes this a very exciting and unique experiment," NASA study team leader Ramesh Kakar said.
The drone, which can fly for up to 20 hours, will carry the LIP over the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet for 40 days during August and September.
"We'll be able to see a storm in a way we've never seen it before," said LIP team leader Richard Blakeslee at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
"We'll see how the storm develops over the long term, and how lightning varies with all the other things going on inside a hurricane," he said.
"It's the difference between a single photograph and a full-length movie."
Study: Brain connections like the Internet
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- A U.S. study of brain circuitry suggests neural connections are democratic, a task-sharing network of equality rather than a top-down pyramid model.
The University of Southern California study contradicts traditional views that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with most areas feeding into the "higher" centers of conscious thought, ScienceDaily.com reported Monday.
The study lends support to a more recent model of the brain as a flat network similar to the Internet, where all of the parts talk to each other directly and equally.
Until recently the network of brain connections was thought too complex to describe, but molecular biology and computing methods have made it possible for the National Institutes of Health to announce a $30 million plan to map the human "connectome," similar to the effort that mapped the human genome.
USC scientists studied rat brains to trace their circuitry.
"We started in one place and looked at the connections," neuroscientist Larry W. Swanson said. "It led into a very complicated series of loops and circuits.
"It's not an organizational chart. There's no top and bottom to it," he said.
The "Internet" model would explain the brain's ability to overcome a lot of local damage, Swanson said. "You can knock out almost any single part of the Internet and the rest of it works."
Similarly, Swanson said, "There are usually alternate pathways through the nervous system. It's very hard to say that any one part is absolutely essential."
Britain's oldest dwelling uncovered
MANCHESTER, England, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- British archaeologists working at a Stone Age site in North Yorkshire say they've uncovered Britain's oldest surviving house.
Teams from Manchester and York universities say the 11-foot circular structure dates to at least 8,500 B.C., when Britain was still a part of the European landmass, a University of Manchester release said Tuesday.
The structure was unearthed next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough, a site comparable in archaeological importance to Stonehenge, scientists say.
Researchers are also excavating a large wooden platform next to the lake, made from split and hewn timbers, said to be the earliest evidence of carpentry in Europe.
The house at Star Carr predates what was previously Britain's oldest known dwelling at Howick, Northumberland, by at least 500 years.
"This changes our ideas of the lives of the first settlers to move back into Britain after the end of the last Ice Age," Dr. Chantal Conneller the University of Manchester said.
"We used to think they moved around a lot and left little evidence. Now we know they built large structures and were very attached to particular places in the landscape," she said.
Hawking: Outer space offers human survival
LONDON, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says the human race must expand into outer space in the coming century or face possible extinction.
The renowned scientist said he fears mankind is in great danger and its future "must be in space" if it is to survive, The Daily Telegraph reported Sunday.
War, resource depletion and overpopulation threaten the existence of the human race as never before, he said, advocating colonizing space to continue human existence.
"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space," Hawking said.
"We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space," he said.
"I see great dangers for the human race," Hawking said. "There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future.
"But I'm an optimist," he said. "If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space."
