“‘Sprouts can cause bouts of flatulence in animals and humans. But I don’t think any of us were prepared for a smell that strong.”

- Michael Riozzi of Chessington Zoo in Surrey, after the zoo apologized to visitors for the stench coming from a gorilla enclosure after feeding the animals sprouts.

Scientists in Israel have discovered a new way to test for water pollution by “listening” to what the plants growing in water have to say.

By shining a laser beam on the tiny pieces of algae floating in the water, the researchers said they hear sound waves that tell them the type and amount of contamination in the water.

“It is a red light, telling us that something is beginning to go wrong with the quality of water,” said Zvy Dubinsky, an aquatic biologist at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. “Algae is the first thing to be affected by a change in water quality.”

And you know what they say in Israel: 2 plants, 3 opinions.

Photo courtesy of the Khaleej Times.

It’s not easy to locate Camero’s offices in the Kfar Neter industrial zone, but it may have just gotten easier. The startup has developed a system that allows users to see through walls.

It sounds just like a comic book fantasy come true – after all, who hasn’t dreamt of getting to peek into the boss’s office or the spouse’s doings in the other room? Not so fast, budding Poirots: Camero’s product is designed not for the entertainment of our inner child, but for use primarily in military and search and rescue operations.

And such technology could indeed be beneficial for special unit soldiers, for instance, or for locating people trapped in burning buildings.

“The idea of seeing through walls has been around since the 1960s, but modern technology is now ripe enough to enable it to happen,” explains Camero’s technology director, Amir Beeri. “When we established the company in 2004, we intended to develop sufficiently high vision resolution to allow an untrained user to see through a wall.”

Camero’s unique radar utilizes Ultra Wide Band (UWB), a technology that has only come of age in recent years, and with the use of special algorithms can process data picked up by the detector to give a reasonable image of anything behind that wall. Lacking imaging algorithms, the system made by its competitor, Time Domain is able to reveal only whether there is someone on the other side of the wall.

Although the first version developed by Camero, the Xaver 800, which includes a 82cm by 82cm screen on a tripod and weighs about 10 kg, making the system too clumsy for use in battle conditions, the Xaver 400 and Xaver 300 are both lighter weight and smaller sized, meant for use as a quick-to-use tactical tool.

The systems are capable of penetrating various types of walls, but not solid metal ones, like the walls of shipping containers.

Camero CEO Aharon Aharon says that the company has already sold the system to various armies and police forces around the world, and is optimistic about the future of the technology.

“Like the Israeli army’s night vision system, which was once an expensive product and eventually came into broad, general use, we hope that our radar too will become standard issue for all military units,” Aharon said.

Now that we have something that creates transparent walls, will someone please invent something that creates transparent government?

Update: A video showing the invention (hat tip: Shy Guy)

Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned.

Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.

“We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas,” Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.

Abu Walid showed the Guardian an aerial image of the Israeli town of Sderot on his computer to demonstrate how his group searches for targets.

The Guardian filmed an al-Aqsa test rocket launch, fired into an uninhabited area of the Negev desert, last month. Despite the crudeness of the weapons, many have landed in Sderot, killing around a dozen people in the last three years and wounding scores more.

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Abu Walid insists there is no contradiction between his group’s actions and talk of peace by Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah’s leader.

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When asked about the use of Google Earth by al-Aqsa militants, Google said it was aware of potential problems, but would not comment specifically on the case. “We have paid close attention to concerns that Google Earth creates new security risks,” said the company in a statement. “The imagery visible on Google Earth and Google Maps is not unique: commercial high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery of every country in the world is widely available from numerous sources. Indeed, anyone who flies above or drives by a piece of property can obtain similar information.”

The company would not confirm whether it had received requests from the Israeli government to block certain images or areas inside Google Earth, but said it was committed to working with officials to take public safety into account.

“Google has engaged, and will continue to engage, in substantive dialogue with recognised security experts and relevant agencies worldwide,” it said.

I’m hoping that this is not just Google paying lip service. Especially if they’re serious about commandment #6.

Scientists say conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men’s chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent ‚Äî a finding experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in the fight against AIDS. The question now is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa.

The findings first were announced in December, when initial results from two major trials — in Kenya and Uganda — showed promising links between circumcision and HIV transmission. However, those trials were deemed so definitive that the tests were halted early.

The full data from the trials, carried out by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, were published Friday in The Lancet.

More proof that G-d has a sense of humor:

“This is an extraordinary development,” said Dr. Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s AIDS department. “Circumcision is the most potent intervention in HIV prevention that has been described.”

Using ultrasound, a battery of cameras and computer graphics, imaging experts have created unprecedented television pictures of animals still in the womb.

 

Fetal dolphins are, apparently, easy to get on camera, but for elephants the procedure is rather more convoluted and involves shoulder-length rubber gloves.

 

The pictures of live animal fetuses were created for broadcast at Christmas on Channel 4 in Britain and the National Geographic Channel in the US.

 

They were recorded from the point of fertilisation through to birth, and the elephant can be seen growing from a single cell to a 118kg newborn.

 

One of the world’s leading ultrasound experts, Thomas Hilderbrandt, was brought in by the producers to record four-dimensional images from inside the wombs of dogs, dolphins and elephants.

 

The dogs would lie down for the procedure and the dolphins were trained to swim against the ultrasound equipment, but the elephants had to be given an enema before a probe was pushed up the rectum to get close enough to the fetus to generate images.

 

Jeremy Dear, of Pioneer Productions, which made the 90-minute program, said the star sequence was a computer-generated scene of the elephant fetus moving down the birth canal, before switching to a live exterior shot of an elephant birth.

 

“It gets an ‘ahhh’ every time,” he said. “It’s anthropomorphism gone mad, but it’s very effective.

An Israeli woman’s breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hizbollah rocket attack during Israel’s war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday. Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart. She was saved from death,” said a spokesman for Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel. The woman has been released from hospital.

It’s a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

 

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

 

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life.

 

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

 

Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.

 

The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said.

 

“Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg,” he added. “So, I would conclude that the egg came first.”

 

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow “eggsperts” Professor David Papineau, of King’s College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns.

 

Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.

 

He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the “non-chicken” bird parents.

 

“I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it,” he said.

 

“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.”

 

Bourns, chairman of trade body Great British Chicken, said he was also firmly in the pro-egg camp.

 

He said: “Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs.”

Denim giant Levi Strauss said on Tuesday it had designed jeans compatible with the iPod music player, featuring a joystick in the watch pocket to operate the device.

 

The Levi’s RedWire DLX Jeans for men and women, which will be available this fall, also have a built-in docking cradle for the iPod and retractable headphones. Pricing was not immediately available.