Science & Technology

SONY to build robot with 'emotional connection' with humans

Jasper Hamill
The Sun
Fri, 02 Sep 2016 12:05 UTC

Sony is working on a domestic robot which can form "an emotional connection" with robots [humans], it has been revealed. The firm's CEO, Kaz Hirai, said his designers are working to hard to produce a machine that humans will "bond" with.

Speaking at the IFA tech conference, he said: "I'm happy to report that we are working hard to create a robot for your home that is not only capable of assisting you with everyday needs but is really capable of forming an emotional connection with all of you. "You definitely want to stay tuned."

Of course, many humans will be unsettled by the idea of inviting a machine into their home. Science fiction is full of stories about robots which go rogue and end up killing their owner. Experts have also raised fears about the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming smarter than humans. However, Hirai told Mirror Online this "shouldn't be a concern". He said: "If Sony comes up with a robot for the house, is the AI involved in that going to be dangerous or not? Consumers ultimately decide."

Unfortunately, there's good evidence to suggest robots could make terrifying house guests. You might like the sound of a world where robots do all the work whilst you sit back and sip pina coladas. But Google staff have warned that domestic labour-saving machines could end up attacking their owners. In a research paper, three of the tech giant's top artificial intelligence experts explored what could go wrong when lazy humans let cleaning contraptions do all the hard work around their home.

Comment: So, the AI may be better emotionally adjusted than we are?!! We hardly 'live' our lives now, with all our gadgets and secondary 'real-life' experiences (computers, texting, shop online, etc.). Robots doing the work offers humans a nursing home-style existence. This development is just one more nail in the coffin of human existence in any meaningful way. Are you OK with that?

Science explains why it's impossible to ignore a baby's cry

Jordan Raine
The Conversation
Tue, 30 Aug 2016 18:09 UTC

Have you ever been sat on a flight with a crying baby in your vicinity, wondering more and more with each successive wail how much longer you can stand the sound? Or maybe you've been a parent, barely able to resist for a second before running to soothe your precious infant's ear-piercing distress? Most of us have been there at some point in our lives. But what exactly is it about a baby's cry that makes it so hard to ignore?

First, it is important to draw a distinction between crying and tears. Many species produce cries, but we appear to be the only animals that send emotional droplets streaming down from our tear ducts. While tears often accompany cry vocalisations in older age, they are by no means a prerequisite of crying - newborns cry from birth but don't produce tears until they are two to three months in age. It also turns out that these early cries have evolutionary roots separate from the more cultural, learned "emotional crying" that we develop in later life.

Crying is a primitive behaviour shared across mammals, whose governing mechanisms are rooted in the evolutionarily ancient brain stem - infant rats, cats, and humans have all been shown to be able to cry even when the forebrain, which evolved much later, is absent. Indeed, the cries of many human and non-human mammal infants are highly similar in both acoustic structure and in the contexts in which they occur - across the mammal kingdom, infants cry primarily when they're hungry, when they're in pain, and when they're alone.

Comment: See also:

It's about the long range: Why the F-35 could 'never in a million years' beat the RAF Typhoon or the Russian Su-35 in a dogfight

Alex Lockie
Business Insider
Tue, 30 Aug 2016 16:44 UTC

In a recent interview with Business Insider, Justin Bronk, a research fellow specializing in combat airpower at the Royal United Services Institute, dropped a bombshell about the US's $1 trillion F-35 program:

"The F-35 cannot outdogfight a Typhoon (or a Su-35), never in a million years."

In earlier stages of the F-35's development, some bad reports came out claiming it lost in simulated dogfights to the F-16, a legacy platform the F-35 is meant to replace in the US Air Force.

The latest news coming out about the F-35's dogfighting ability has taken a visible turn to the positive, but dogfighting was never the main purpose or strong suit of the Joint Strike Fighter.

For that reason, older fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon or the Sukhoi Su-35 could most likely outmaneuver and destroy an F-35 in a close-range confrontation.

Lightning strikes and thunderstorms are spreading mercury pollution

Kathleen Haughney
Phys.org
Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC

In the southern United States, an afternoon thunderstorm is part of a regular summer day. But new research shows those storms might be doing more than bringing some scary thunder and lightning.

In fact, these storms are moving significant amounts of mercury to the ground.

In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, Assistant Professor of Meteorology Christopher Holmes writes that thunderstorms have 50 percent higher concentrations of mercury than other rain events.

"The mercury is being transported into our region by winds, and tall thunderstorms are bringing it down to the earth," Holmes said.

Holmes and a team of researchers collected rain in a variety of locations in Florida, as well as Vermont, Georgia and Wisconsin. They then matched it to weather data that told them whether it was from a thunderstorm or just rain. They also used radar and satellite data to examine storm clouds.

Comment: Mercury pollution released into the environment becomes a serious threat when it settles into oceans and waterways, where it is converted to methyl mercury. This transition is particularly significant for humans, who absorb methyl mercury easily and are especially vulnerable to its effects. Instead of dissolving or breaking down, mercury accumulates at ever-increasing levels. In adults, mercury poisoning can adversely affect fertility and blood pressure regulation and can cause memory loss, tremors, vision loss and numbness of the fingers and toes. A growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to mercury may also lead to heart disease.

3.7-billion-year-old Greenland fossils may be the oldest signs of life on Earth

Joel Achenbach
Washington Post
Wed, 31 Aug 2016 13:39 UTC

© Yuri Amelin
Australian researchers Allen Nutman and Vickie Bennett hold a 3.7-billion-year-old fossilized stromatolite from Isua, Greenland.

Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago.

It's a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth's early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe.

A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures," published Wednesday in Nature.

They made their find in July 2012 while doing field research in Isua, a region of Greenland so remote that they had to travel there by helicopter. The site is known for having some of the oldest rocks on Earth, in what is known as the Isua supracrustal belt. Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist who has studied the rocks there since 1980, said one day he and his colleagues were working at the site when they spied some outcroppings they'd never seen before. The formations had been exposed where the snow pack had melted — the result, Nutman said, of the global warming that is so pronounced in Greenland or of low levels of snowfall the previous winter.

Solar eclipse to be observable over much of Africa

SpaceWeather
Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:27 UTC

Sky watchers in more than 50 African countries are about to witness a solar eclipse. On Thursday, Sept.1st, the Moon will pass in front of the sun, covering as much as 97% of the solar disk. Click here to view an animated eclipse map created by Larry Koehn of ShadowandSubstance.com.

This is not a total eclipse, but rather an annular one, in which maximum coverage leaves a thin strip of sun shining around the lunar limb. The narrow path of annularity snakes across Gabon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar. For as much as three minutes, people in those countries can see the "ring of fire":

Blood flow to the brain may have driven evolution of human intelligence

Phys.org
Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC

© South Australian Museum.
Skull casts from human evolution. Left to right: Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis

A University of Adelaide-led project has overturned the theory that the evolution of human intelligence was simply related to the size of the brain—but rather linked more closely to the supply of blood to the brain.

The international collaboration between Australia and South Africa showed that the human brain evolved to become not only larger, but more energetically costly and blood thirsty than previously believed.

The research team calculated how blood flowing to the brain of human ancestors changed over time, using the size of two holes at the base of the skull that allow arteries to pass to the brain. The findings, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, allowed the researchers to track the increase in human intelligence across evolutionary time.

"Brain size has increased about 350% over human evolution, but we found that blood flow to the brain increased an amazing 600%," says project leader Professor Emeritus Roger Seymour, from the University of Adelaide. "We believe this is possibly related to the brain's need to satisfy increasingly energetic connections between nerve cells that allowed the evolution of complex thinking and learning.

"To allow our brain to be so intelligent, it must be constantly fed oxygen and nutrients from the blood.

Comment: Humans became the large-brained, large-bodied animals we are today because of natural selection to increase brain size

Scientists grow liver that can replicate natural functions of human liver

RT
Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:59 UTC

American scientists have grown a liver which can manage the closest ever set of processes to that of a real human one. The lab-grown organ has the potential to be a "game-changer" for patients suffering from liver diseases, they said.

Scientists at a The Saban Research Institute of the Children's Hospital Los Angeles created the liver with the help of both people and mice, the study published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine on Tuesday said.

Using stem and progenitor cells obtained from human and mouse livers the researchers generated the so-called liver organoid units (LOU) which were later implanted into mice. The LOU then developed into a liver with bile ducts, blood vessels, hepatocytes (liver cells involved in bile production) and other cells required for it to function. What is more, the tissue-developed organ produced albumin - the same protein a human liver generates.

The tissue-engineered liver did not fully resemble a human one as there were differences in cellular structure, scientists noted.

Astronomers discover asteroid twice the size of Chelyabinsk bolide... a few hours before it narrowly missed Earth

Avery Thompson
Popular Mechanics
Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC

On Saturday, astronomers discovered a new asteroid, just a few hours before it almost hit us.

The asteroid is called 2016 QA2, and it missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon. That puts it about three times as far away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it coming.

So how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit. It's highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging out by either Mars or Venus, but rarely ends up near Earth.

But another, more worrying reason is that there aren't a lot of people looking for potentially dangerous asteroids. While Congress has tasked NASA with finding 90 percent of asteroids 450 feet or larger by 2020, the agency is nowhere close to that goal. Funding for asteroid detection is very low, and most telescopes that could detect asteroids of this size won't come online for a few more years.

Comment: So, the technology is lagging, the funding is lacking, and the politicians are too busy feathering their nests.

Comment: Our other report about this estimates that this object was at least twice the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid.

Alternating between sleeping and studying boosts memory

Dan Modano
Reliawire
Sat, 27 Aug 2016 21:55 UTC

Grabbing a little sleep between study sessions might make it easier to recall what you studied, and to re-learn what you've forgotten, even 6 months later, according to new findings.

Psychological scientist Stephanie Mazza, of the University of Lyon, explains:

"Our results suggest that interleaving sleep between practice sessions leads to a twofold advantage, reducing the time spent relearning and ensuring a much better long-term retention than practice alone. Previous research suggested that sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but now we show that sleeping between two learning sessions greatly improves such a strategy."

While studies have shown that both repeated practice and sleep can help improve memory, there is little research investigating how repetition and sleep influence memory when they are combined. Mazza and colleagues hypothesized that sleeping in between study sessions might make the relearning process more efficient, reducing the effort needed to commit information to memory.

Comment: See also:

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Science & Technology

SONY to build robot with 'emotional connection' with humans

Science explains why it's impossible to ignore a baby's cry

It's about the long range: Why the F-35 could 'never in a million years' beat the RAF Typhoon or the Russian Su-35 in a dogfight

Lightning strikes and thunderstorms are spreading mercury pollution

3.7-billion-year-old Greenland fossils may be the oldest signs of life on Earth

Solar eclipse to be observable over much of Africa

Blood flow to the brain may have driven evolution of human intelligence

Scientists grow liver that can replicate natural functions of human liver

Astronomers discover asteroid twice the size of Chelyabinsk bolide... a few hours before it narrowly missed Earth

Alternating between sleeping and studying boosts memory

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