High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza. HALE was successfully completed Tuesday, July 29, 2008. To help commemorate the 10th anniversary of LEGO® Mindstorms®, Nevada Space Grant, the University of Nevada-Reno, National Instruments, The Energizer Battery Company, and the LEGO Mindstorms Team conducted the High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza. H.A.L.E is an event that carried nine LEGO Mindstorms-based payloads into the Earth’s stratosphere. At that altitude H.A.L.E. was above 99.9% of the atmosphere. Two balloons carried payloads from the USA, Taiwan, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Denmark to an altitude just over 99,500 feet.
Brian Davis's payload set the world record for the longest NXT freefall at 80-seconds. We are pretty sure HALE also set the record for the most NXT's flown at once (5 on one balloon and 4 on the other) Two balloons were launched the same morning: Check out Brian Davis's live report on blogspot. LEGO® and Mindstorms® are trademarks of the LEGO group of companies. The New Atlantis - Why Not Artificial Wombs? - Christine Rosen. New Scientist Breaking News - Gene turn-off makes meek mice fear. Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found. The team believe the research might one day enable people suffering from fear - in the form of phobias or anxiety disorders, for example - to be clinically treated.
The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. In the experiments, the stathmin-lacking mice wandered out into the centre of an open box, in defiance of the normal mouse instinct to hide along the box's walls to avoid potential predators. And to test learned fear, the mice were exposed to a loud sound followed by a brief electric shock from the floor below them.
A day later, normal mice froze when the sound was played again. Neural responses Journal reference: Cell (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2005.08.038) More From New Scientist Recommended by. The website of Halton Arp. The Electric Cosmos. NSU: science news from the Nature news service.