Science & TechnologyS


R2-D2

Robot scientists can think for themselves

London
robot adam
© Reuters/Aberystwyth University/HandoutThe robot scientist Adam.
- Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.

Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.

Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.

For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.

At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.

Meteor

Noise from space may help reveal mass of near-Earth asteroids

Planetary scientists are all set to turn noise from the data obtained by NASA/ESA LISA satellites' mission into useful information about the mass of near-Earth asteroids.

LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves - a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.

Slated for launch no earlier than 2018, LISA will include three satellites connected by laser beams. The distance between the satellites should change as a gravitational wave passes.

Butterfly

Bird Feathers Produce Color Through Structure Similar to Beer Foam

bluebird /beer foam
© Ken ThomasPrum and Dufresne discovered that the nanostructures that produce some birds’ brightly colored plumage, such as the blue feathers of the male Eastern Bluebird, have a sponge-like structure. (Photo:
Some of the brightest colors in nature are created by tiny nanostructures with a structure similar to beer foam or a sponge, according to Yale University researchers.

Most colors in nature - from the color of our skin to the green of trees - are produced by pigments. But the bright blue feathers found in many birds, such as Bluebirds and Blue Jays, are instead produced by nanostructures. Under an electron microscope, these structures look like sponges with air bubbles.

Now an interdisciplinary team of Yale engineers, physicists and evolutionary biologists has taken a step toward uncovering how these structures form. They compared the nanostructures to examples of materials undergoing phase separation, in which mixtures of different substances become unstable and separate from one another, such as the carbon-dioxide bubbles that form when the top is popped off a bubbly drink. They found that the color-producing structures in feathers appear to self-assemble in much the same manner. Bubbles of water form in a protein-rich soup inside the living cell and are replaced with air as the feather grows.

Chalkboard

Hundreds Of Natural-selection Studies Could Be Wrong, Study Demonstrates

bovine rhodopsin protein
© Masafumi Nozawa, Penn State (Adapted from Yokoyama et al. 2008 PNASThe image depicts the structure of the bovine rhodopsin protein. The blue circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through experiments, while the red circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through statistical analyses.
Scientists at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.

"Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team's leader. The team's results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday 3 April 2009 and also in the journal's print edition at a later date.

Nei said that many scientists who examine human evolution have used faulty statistical methods in their studies and, as a result, their conclusions could be wrong. For example, in one published study the scientists used a statistical method to demonstrate pervasive natural selection during human evolution. "This group documented adaptive evolution in many genes expressed in the brain, thyroid, and placenta, which are assumed to be important for human evolution," said Masafumi Nozawa, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and one of the paper's authors. "But if the statistical method that they used is not reliable, then their results also might not be reliable," added Nei. "Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences," he said.

Comment: Interesting. Using statistical models appears to have been a hidden weakness in genetics research. Yet we are expected to take the statistical models proving 'global warming' as ironclad. This article ought to serve as a warning against such dogmatism. As this article says;
Nei said that to obtain a more realistic picture of natural selection, biologists [and all scientists] should pair experimental data with their statistical data whenever possible. Scientists usually do not use experimental data because such experiments can be difficult to conduct and because they are very time-consuming.
Or maybe it might squash a beautiful (profitable) theory with ugly facts.


Battery

Batteries That Feed on Blood

Image
The yeast-based fuel cell produces around 40 nanowatts of power, compared to the microwatt a typical wristwatch battery might produce, Chaio says. That might be enough power for some devices if it were coupled with a capacitor to allow energy to be stored. The yeast could also be genetically engineered to boost its power output.
Yesterday researchers at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver announced that they'd created a tiny battery (pictured) that could draw power from human blood. They're basically cyborg batteries, half biological and half technological.

The batteries are designed for use in pacemakers and other implantable medical devices. A small colony of yeast lives inside each battery, and this living core of the fuel cell can draw energy from glucose (sugar) in blood flowing around it.

Info

US: America's Nazca lines

Blythe intaglios
© Unknown
The intaglios near Blythe, along the Colorado River along the California-Arizona border are the American equivalent of the Peruvian Nazca lines. Though never promoted as the airport for extraterrestrial beings, here are nevertheless the same geometric shapes, animals and humans, etched in the soil and best - and some of them only - visible from the sky.

Geoglyphs can be found in a number of locations across the States, but those that rival the intricacies found at Nazca most closely are near Blythe and Bouse, where allegedly over 600 exist - though far fewer - and only the largest - can be located today. The intaglios are found east of the Big Maria Mountains, about 15 miles north of downtown Blythe just west of U.S. Highway 95 near the Colorado River, where it defines the border between Arizona and California.

Network

Flashback Blogosphere Beats Peer Review Finding Stealth Creationist Paper

Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said. But a few years ago a study of a sample of entries compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with that of the unquestionably prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia was at least as accurate, in some cases more.

Better Earth

Earth may have largest ripples in the solar system


They may look like low dunes, but the cresting ridges on Argentina's Puna Plateau are the world's largest "megaripples". Geological features of this size had been thought impossible on Earth.

Wind-formed ripples are not the same as dunes because they are shaped by the airflow less than 2 metres above the ground. The key factor for dunes is air fluctuations as high as 4 kilometres up.

Most such ripples are no bigger than those created by waves on a beach. Given high winds, light grains and geologic timescales, however, they can grow.

Question

Does a Shower of Subatomic Positrons Mean We've Found Dark Matter?

The mysterious stuff known as dark matter may have left a calling card at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere where a space-faring satellite named PAMELA could pick it up. Researchers are reporting that PAMELA detected a high number of the subatomic particles called positrons, the positively-charged counterpoints to electrons, which could have been created by collisions between dark matter particles. "PAMELA found a number of positrons much higher than expected," the mission's principal investigator Piergiorgio Picozza [said]. "Many think this could be a signal from dark matter" [SPACE.com]. But of course, others think there's a more mundane explanation.

Saturn

Titan's squashed shape hints at soggy interior

Titan
© NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteTitan may look like a sphere, but radar studies by the Cassini probe show it is slightly squashed.
Saturn's moon Titan is surprisingly non-spherical, suggesting it may hide vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface, according to a new study.

Titan is 5150 kilometres across, making it larger than Mercury and only slightly smaller than the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter's Ganymede.

By bouncing radar signals off the moon's smog-enshrouded surface, the Cassini spacecraft has now measured Titan's shape precisely for the first time.

"What we have are the first actual measurements showing that Titan's not an exact sphere - this distorted egg-shaped thing best fits the observed shape," study leader Howard Zebker of Stanford University told New Scientist.