New radar sees through walls, takes video
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists say new radar technology sees through solid walls and returns real-time images of what's going on behind them.
It's been difficult to build radar that can penetrate walls well enough to show what's happening behind, but researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab say their system can see through walls from some distance away, giving an instantaneous picture of the activity on the other side.
The technique has powerful implications for military operations, especially "urban combat situations," Gregory Charvat, the leader of the project, said in an MIT release Tuesday.
The researchers tested their system of arrayed antennas, 13 transmitting ones and eight receiving elements, on walls of concrete as much as 8 inches thick.
The main goal and biggest hurdle for the research was achieving the speed, resolution and range necessary to be useful in real time, Charvat said.
"If you're in a high-risk combat situation, you don't want one image every 20 minutes, and you don't want to have to stand right next to a potentially dangerous building," he said.
The system can be used as far as 60 feet away from the wall and returns images at more than 10 frames per second, Charvat said.
Malaria vaccine trial announces success
SEATTLE, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- First results from a malaria vaccine trial show the candidate drug reduces the risk of malaria by half in African children aged 5 to 17 months, researchers say.
The results were announced Tuesday at the Malaria Forum hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.
The results of a large-scale Phase III trial of the RTS,S drug, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrate it can provide young African children with significant protection against malaria with an acceptable safety and tolerability profile.
The trial was conducted at 11 trial sites in seven countries across sub-Saharan Africa, researchers said.
In the trial, three doses of RTS,S reduced the risk of children experiencing clinical malaria and severe malaria by 56 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
Clinical malaria, with symptoms of high fevers and chills, can rapidly develop into severe malaria with serious effects on the blood, brain or kidneys that can prove fatal.
"The publication of the first results in children aged 5 to 17 months marks an important milestone in the development of RTS,S," Tsiri Agbenyega, a principal investigator of the trial and Chair of the Clinical Trials Partnership Committee, said.
"Sadly, many have resigned themselves to malaria being a fact of life in Africa," Agbenyega said.
"This need not be the case. Renewed interest in malaria by the international community, and scientific evidence such as that we are reporting today, should bring new hope that malaria can be controlled."
'Friendly' bacteria help Pandas survive
BEIJING, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Giant pandas survive on a very un-bear-like diet of hard-to-digest bamboo because they carry around digestive helpers in their gut, Chinese researchers say.
While pandas are closely related to meat-eating bears, their vegetarian diet consists almost exclusively of bamboo that is full of hard-to-digest cellulose.
Most mammals lack the ability to break down cellulose.
"If fully degraded, cellulose can contribute nearly half of the calories in bamboo," researcher Fuwen Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told LiveScience.com in an e-mail. "However, because cellulose is very difficult to be digested, the real percent of the calories of cellulose in bamboo available for giant pandas is very low."
So how do panda's survive on a steady diet of bamboo? It's all down to bacteria, the researchers said.
Their studies found that panda guts are full of cellulose-degrading bacteria.
"It is highly possible that it is this kind of bacterium [that] plays an essential role in the degradation of cellulose of the giant panda," Fuwen said.
The bacteria, along with a strong jaw and thumb-like bones on their paws, enables the pandas to gather, eat and digest bamboo and the cellulose within it, the researchers said.
German satellite set to fall to Earth
BERLIN, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Another satellite is expected to plummet to Earth this weekend, though the timing and location cannot be precisely determined, European scientists said.
The decommissioned German ROSAT satellite, the size of a large car, is set to fall to Earth somewhere either Saturday and Sunday, Fox News reported Tuesday.
The satellite will break up as it hits the atmosphere but Germany's DLR space agency says the odds of pieces hitting anyone are 1-in-2,000, a slightly higher risk than the 1-in-3,200 chance NASA gave when its UARS satellite fell late last month.
German aerospace officials said about 1.6 tons of debris, consisting of about 30 large glass and ceramic fragments, could reach Earth's surface.
"We don't expect big parts to re-enter, except the mirror and the glass and ceramic parts," Jan Woerner, head of the executive board of the DLR, told SPACE.com.
ROSAT was launched in June 1990 as a joint venture between Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, and was decommissioned in 1998.
