Science & TechnologyS


Robot

The Living Robot: Uses Biological Brain

Joe Kloc
Seed Magazine
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:26 UTC
Kevin Warwick's new robot behaves like a child. "Sometimes it does what you want it to, and sometimes it doesn't," he says. And while it may seem strange for a professor of cybernetics to be concerning himself with such an unreliable machine, Warwick's creation has something that even today's most sophisticated robots lack: a living brain.

Life for Warwick's robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. "It's an innate response of the neurons," says Warwick, "they try to link up and start communicating."

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
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Info

Flashback Rutgers University students discover 1.5 million year old footprints in Kenya

Mark Mueller
The Star-Ledger
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:14 UTC
Image
© AFP/Getty Images
The field of archaeology requires uncommon patience. Is that specimen so painstakingly coaxed from the hard earth animal or early human? Is it historically, significantly old or just old enough to be mildly interesting? The answers come slowly, sometimes in months, often in years.

So it was that New Jersey archaeologist David Braun tempered his excitement after he and other researchers, among them a Rutgers University professor and a group of Rutgers students, found what looked to be very unusual footprints in the ancient sediment of a riverbed in Kenya.

"We knew we might have something special, but we also kept thinking, 'OK, these could be from a baboon,'" Braun said.
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Battery

Soon, mobiles could be recharged with wave of hand


Science Technology
Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:22 UTC
Image
Washington: Imagine charging your cell phone or iPod by waving your hand, or stretching your arm, or taking a stroll. Well, it could be a reality soon.

Scientists are mulling a technology which can convert mechanical energy from body movements or the flow of blood in the body into electric energy that may be utilised to power a broad range of electronic devices without batteries.

"This research will have a major impact on defence technology, environmental monitoring, biomedical sciences and even personal electronics," lead researcher Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology said.

In fact, the new "nanogenerator" could have countless applications, among them a way to run electronic devices used by the military when troops are far in the field.
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Meteor

Comet Chemistry Explains Tunguska event


MIT Technology Review - arXiv Blog
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:30 UTC
A better understanding of the chemistry of comets may finally explain the 1908 exposion over an isolated part of Russia.

Tunguska
© Unknown
On 30 June 1908, a bolide streaked across the skies above Lake Baikal near the border of Russia and Mongolia. Seconds later, a huge explosion above the taiga some 600 kilometres to the northeast flattened an area of forest the size of Luxembourg and went on to scorch trees for hundreds of kilometres around.

The detonation took place in a more or less uninhabited part of Russia called Tunguska but the explosion lit up skies across the northern hemisphere for three nights, interfered with the Earth's magnetic field and triggered strong seismic and acoustic waves that shook the entire planet.

Despite a century of study, many aspects of the Tunguska event are still unexplained. For example, the explosion released more energy than a thousand Hiroshima-type atom bombs and yet left no crater. A similar-sized object is thought to have hit North America some 12 000 years ago, triggering the megafaunal extinction and widespread cooling. And yet the Tunguska event seems to have left our climate intact.
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Info

Fresh proof of China being cradle of rice cultivation

Lin Shujuan
China Daily
Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:47 UTC
Image
© Daily ChinaIn domesticated rice grains, the spikelet remains attached to the panicle, until it is threshed.
Several archaeologists, once split over when human beings turned from nut collectors into rice farmers, seem to have solved their differences after collaborating on a project using methodologies agreed upon by both parties.

Dorian Fuller from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, joined by Zheng Yunfei from Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Antiquity and Archaeology and a few other Chinese archaeologists, investigated rice remains at the Neolithic excavation site of Tianluoshan, part of the local Hemudu Neolithic Culture that goes back 7,000 years in Zhejing province.
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Magnify

Excavation in Turkey set to rewrite history of Iron Age

Nobuyuki Watanabe
The Asahi Shimbun
Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:41 UTC
Japanese researchers digging in Turkey have pushed back the start of the Iron Age, until now presumed to have begun around 1500 B.C., with the discovery of fragments of an iron tool that predate previous finds by several centuries.

The implication of the excavations at Kaman-Kalehoyuk, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, is that the history of iron tool production may have to be rewritten.
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Hourglass

Archaeologist: Oldest Cyprus temple discovered


International Herald Tribune
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:00 UTC
An Italian archaeologist claimed Friday to have discovered Cyprus' oldest religious site, which she said echoes descriptions in the Bible of temples in ancient Palestine.

Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said the 4,000-year-old triangular temple predates any other found on the east Mediterranean island by a millennium.

"For sure it's the most ancient religious site on the island," she told The Associated Press from her home in Rome. "This confirms that religious worship in Cyprus began much earlier than previously believed."

But authorities on the island say they cannot confirm her claim before further study.

"That the site is dated to around 2,000 B.C. is certain, but the interpretation that it's a temple or a sacred site has yet to be confirmed," Cyprus Antiquities Department official Maria Hadjicosti told state radio.
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Telescope

Zooming in on Mars in glorious 3D


New Scientist
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:55 UTC
3d mars
© NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaDark, crescent-shaped dunes in a crater called Herschel show that the wind there blows mainly from north to south.
Get out your 3D spectacles! Hundreds of new red-cyan anaglyph images of Mars were recently released by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Although other Mars missions have taken 3D images, HiRISE is the most powerful camera to ever orbit another planet. It resolves features as small as 1 metre across - roughly the scale of a person.
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Telescope

What to see in the sky this week

Alan M. MacRobert, SkyandTelescope.com
New Scientist
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:44 UTC
Image
© Sky and TelescopeWatch the crescent Moon passing the Pleiades and Hyades at nightfall. This scene is drawn for the middle of North America. European observers: move each Moon symbol a quarter of the way toward the one for the previous date. The blue 10° scale is about the size of your fist held at arm's length.
Some daily events in the changing sky for March 27 - April 4.

Friday, March 27

Venus is at inferior conjunction (between Earth and the Sun), passing 8° north of the Sun. See this article.

Saturday, March 28

As twilight gives way to night, look to the right of the crescent Moon in the west for the stars of little Aries (just outside the frame in this illustration). Higher to the Moon's upper left is the Pleiades star cluster.

Sunday, March 29

In late dusk, the Pleiades are about 7° above the crescent Moon (seen at the time of dusk for North America), as shown at right.

Monday, March 30

This evening the Pleiades are about 7° below the Moon.
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Better Earth

Ice that burns could be a green fossil fuel

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:38 UTC
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© USGS"Ice that burns" could provide enormous amounts of energy, but can it be made environmentally friendly?
Natural gas locked up in water crystals could be a source of enormous amounts of energy - and if a new technology delivers what scientists are claiming, then it could even be emissions-free too.

To the naked eye, clathrate hydrate looks like regular ice. However, while it is made up partly of water, the water molecules are organised into "cages", which trap individual molecules of methane inside them.

Compared to other fossil fuels, methane - also known as natural gas - releases less carbon dioxide per unit of energy generated. Nevertheless, burning it still releases carbon dioxide and thus drives climate change.

However, according to research presented this week at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, a new method of extracting the methane could effectively make it a carbon-neutral fossil fuel.
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