Category: Science &Technology

{{Two US fighter jets were due to make their international debuts this week at the year’s most important aerospace event, the Farnborough Airshow. At the moment, only one of them is here.}}

The F-35 Lightning II may be the world’s most expensive, most advanced military jet programme, but it was a cheap and cheerful budget aircraft that managed the trans-Atlantic crossing to Farnborough.

The Scorpion costs about $20m (£12m) a throw, is built from off-the-shelf components, and went from drawing board to first flight in 23 months.

The F-35 Lightning, conceived in the early 1990s and costing about $157m, is still in the US while engineers figure out what caused a fire that has grounded the entire fleet.

OK, making comparisons is unfair; the Scorpion and F-35 are lightyears apart in specification and functionality. But it is still slightly ironic.

Whit Peters, part of the company behind the Scorpion, was involved in the F-35 when he was Secretary of the US Air Force in the 1990s.

A few years ago, he and some colleagues had an idea for a new, light tactical fighter for general security and reconnaissance, positioned between existing cheaper, but ageing aircraft, and full-on strike fighters.

“We were pretty sure that there was a gap in the market,” Mr Peters says. “It was about building something with enough tactical capacity to satisfy customers, but that also had low running costs. We are in an era when defence departments are facing budget cuts.”

{{No customers}}

His company, AirLand, pitched the concept to manufacturers, but it was Textron, the US giant behind Cessna corporate jets and Bell Helicopters, that grabbed the opportunity.

In 2012, Textron AirLand Enterprises was born. “It started with a team of about 10, a whiteboard and a clean sheet,” Mr Peters says.

{wirestory}

{{IBM’s staff will sell Apple devices to its business customers, and the two companies will work together to develop applications tailored to work with IBM’s data analytics and cloud services, the companies said in a statement today. }}

Apple also will offer customer-service support for the apps.

The partnership helps Apple pursue a bigger slice of the market for corporate users of smartphones and tablets.

Working with its erstwhile foe may also help Armonk, New York-based IBM chase other technology giants — including Apple — that have done a better job seizing on the mobile-computing boom.

“This is a shot in the arm for IBM and a great validation of Apple in the enterprise space, where they already are a huge success,” Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of cloud-storage company Box Inc., said in an interview.

With the deal, Apple gains a large sales force that will push its mobile devices to companies, while IBM, whose sales have been stagnating, adds the cachet of being partners with one of the best known and most popular consumer-electronics brands.

“We really recognized almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another’s strategy and that there was literally no overlap,” Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM’s senior vice president of global business services, said in an interview. “It’s moved incredibly quickly and smoothly.”

{{Business Customers}}

The success of the iPhone and iPad has helped Apple gain more traction with business customers that had long shunned the company in favor of machines running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software.

Deutsche Bank AG has almost 20,000 iPhones, while Siemens AG has 30,000 iPhones, Apple said in April.

Employees at more than 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using the iPhone or iPad for their work, the company said. To gain more customers, Apple has been adding new security and software tools for makers of business software.

Apple and rival Samsung Electronics Co. are seeking to further displace BlackBerry Ltd., which once held a strong grip on the corporate market. Shares of BlackBerry fell 3.4 percent to $10.92 in late trading after Apple’s deal with IBM was announced.

{adapted from Bloomberg}

{{Heathrow Airport has told passengers to ensure all electronic devices carried as hand baggage are charged before travel if they are flying to the US.}}

It posted details of the new rule on its website and Facebook page.

The move follows a request from the US that “certain overseas airports” implement enhanced security measures.

The UK government has also revised its rules to state that if a “device doesn’t switch on, you won’t be allowed to bring it on to the aircraft”.

Affected passengers have been told they may also have to undergo extra screening measures.

British Airways has said that its customers face being made to rebook if they are found in possession of an uncharged device.

The Department for Transport declined to say whether other UK airports would enforce a similar restriction on flights to the US.

American officials said last week they were aware of a “credible” terrorist threat, but have not linked the security changes to any specific intelligence.

{wirestory}

{{Changing cultural traditions have given modern men a larger role in the care of their children and it may be changing their brain activity, experts say.}}

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found that the more a father cares for his newborn child, the more his brain looks and behaves like that of a mother.

Researchers recruited nearly 90 first-time parents, including primary-caregiving mothers, secondary-caregiving fathers, and fathers who are raising infants as primary caregivers in a committed relationship.

The parents were recorded as they interacted with their babies and later watched the video of themselves as researchers performed brain scans to see which regions of the brain would activate.

The results revealed clear differences between the brains of women who had taken a lead role in raising a child and men who had taken a supporting role.

While the mothers showed more activity in the amygdala and other emotion-processing structures while watching the videos, the fathers showed more activity in their superior temporal structures, a region of the brain involved in logical tasks.

The findings suggest there is a neural network in the brain dedicated to parenting and that it responds to changes in parental roles.

“Pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are very powerful primers in women to worry about their child’s survival,” said lead study author Ruth Feldman, in a news release. “Fathers have the capacity to do it as well as mothers, but they need daily caregiving activities to ignite that mothering network.

The more fathers are involved in active caregiving, the more the fathering network will activate the mothering network.”

{wirestory}

{{Dr Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews, who led the research, said that this was the only form of intentional communication to be recorded in the animal kingdom.

Only humans and chimps, she said, had a system of communication where they deliberately sent a message to another individual.

“That’s what’s so amazing about chimp gestures,” she told media.
“They’re the only thing that looks like human language in that respect.”}}