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Second Genesis: The search for shadow life


New Scientist
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:26 UTC
While some researchers are attempting to create brand new life in the lab, others are searching for alien life on Mars and, eventually, elsewhere in the solar system. This burgeoning field of astrobiology has a less well-known offshoot right here on Earth: the search for a "shadow biosphere"- a second, independent form of life unrelated to sort we know (Astrobiology, vol 5, p 154).

After all, many astrobiologists now think that given the right conditions any sufficiently complex molecular soup has a good chance of generating life if it simmers long enough. If that's so, it seems plausible that life may have arisen on Earth not once, but several times. New origins of life are unlikely today, because existing life would gobble up any aggregations of prebiotic molecules before they could edge over the threshold. However, opportunities for the origin of life may well have existed for long periods on the early Earth. Some of these origins may have been dead ends, out-competed by other life forms - but others could still be living among us, unnoticed.
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Robot

Who needs teachers when you could have bankers? Or better still, robots?

John Crace
The Guardian
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:14 UTC
teacher robot
© APJapan's teacher robot Saya expresses the emotion "surprise"

Tokyo University has come up with every child's worst nightmare: a teacher that really could have eyes in the back of its head

You can see the government's point of view. Why waste a year training someone to be a teacher when everyone knows it only takes half that? I mean, what's to learn? Any halfwit can stand in front of a class of 13-year-olds and teach them basic maths. You just hand the kids a calculator and tell them to get on with it. And if that doesn't work, you start shouting at them. Easy.

So easy, in fact, that you're probably starting to wonder if maybe six months isn't a ridiculously indulgent waste of time. How about you get fired from RBS on a Friday afternoon and start teaching the following Monday?

In fact, who needs a real teacher when now you can just as easily get a robot to do the job?

A professor at Tokyo University has just built a life-like robot teacher, tenderly named Saya, who comes pre-programmed with six different emotions - five more than the average government minister - and can easily deal with the demands of taking the register and keeping the kids under control. "Children even start crying when they are scolded," Saya's creator, Hiroshi Kobayashi, said proudly.

Comment: Getting robots to make children cry is a good thing?

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Meteor

Moon hides scars of a violent past


New Scientist
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:24 UTC
The moon has been hiding the scars of its violent, asteroid-filled past. Most surveys of lunar impact craters have used photos, but Herbert Frey of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to know if there were any old craters buried beneath younger ones. So he studied elevation mapping data from the Clementine mission in the 1990s. He also used simulations to identify impact signatures, such as a roughly circular crater with a thin crust and a thicker rim. This approach uncovered 150 craters more than 300 kilometres wide instead of 45.

Frey is now trying to work out the age of the newly found craters. If they are the same age as the others, this would support the idea that asteroids bombarded the inner solar system for a particularly intense period about 4 billion years ago. Some researchers think that life may have existed before this bombardment, but if so, its survival now seems less likely, says Andrew Valley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "The probability that early primitive life, if it existed, could find refuge, even in sediments beneath the ocean would be reduced," he says.
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Magnify

Archeologists find rare Maya panels in Guatemala

Mica Rosenberg
Reuters
Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:40 UTC
Mayan panel
© Reuters/Eduardo González SCSPR/HandoutArcheologist Richard Hansen explains the detail on one of two newly discovered Mayan panels in the northern Guatemalan Peten jungle March 7, 2009.
Archeologists have uncovered carved stucco panels depicting cosmic monsters, gods and serpents in Guatemala's northern jungle that are the oldest known depictions of a famous Mayan creation myth.

The newly discovered panels, both 26 feet long and stacked on top of each other, were created around 300 BC and show scenes from the core Mayan mythology, the Popol Vuh.

It took investigators three months to uncover the carvings while excavating El Mirador, the biggest ancient Mayan city in the world, the site's head researcher, Richard Hansen, said on Wednesday.
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Einstein

Flashback Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr
Atlantic Monthly
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:38 UTC


Image
©Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial » brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."
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Robot

Engineers find way to build a better battery

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:03 UTC
Chicago - U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars.

And because they use older materials in a new way, the batteries could be available for sale in two to three years, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
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Question

Debris Briefly Forces Astronauts From Space Station

Jim Loney
ABC News
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:29 UTC
A tiny piece of space junk smaller than a fingertip forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station on Thursday when the debris came too close for comfort.

The astronauts, Russian Yury Lonchakov and Americans Michael Fincke and Sandra Magnus, spent about nine minutes in the Soyuz escape ship before the space litter passed by.

NASA called the threat to the $100 billion space station "minimal" and said the astronauts were moved into the Soyuz capsule as a precaution.
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Magic Wand

"Miracle" water a low-cost alternative cleaner to harsh chemicals

Marla Dickerson
Seattle Times
Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:25 UTC
miracle water
© Los Angeles Times
It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it.

Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. U.S. regulators have approved it. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water, not as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, Calif., some hotel workers are calling it "el liquido milagroso," the miracle liquid.
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Magnify

New technology for dating ancient rock paintings


PhysOrg.com
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:25 UTC
A new dating method finally is allowing archaeologists to incorporate rock paintings - some of the most mysterious and personalized remnants of ancient cultures - into the tapestry of evidence used to study life in prehistoric times. That's the conclusion of a new report in ACS' Analytical Chemistry.

In the study, Marvin W. Rowe points out that rock paintings, or pictographs, are among the most difficult archaeological artifacts to date. They lack the high levels of organic material needed to assess a pictograph's age using radiocarbon dating, the standard archaeological technique for more than a half-century. Rowe describes a new, highly sensitive dating method, called accelerator mass spectrometry, that requires only 0.05 milligrams of carbon (the weight of 50 specks of dust). That's much less than the several grams of carbon needed with radiocarbon dating.
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Family

In Science and Technology, Efforts to Lure Women Back

Sue Shellenbarger
The Wall Street Journal
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:23 UTC
It will come as no surprise that many career re-entry programs, designed to help at-home mothers return to the work force, are disappearing, victims of hard times among the Wall Street firms and banks that led the so-called on-ramping trend.

But a new bright spot is emerging. Small, innovative return-to-work programs are springing up in other sectors -- specifically in science, engineering and technology. Prospects for long-term job growth in these fields are relatively good, and many employers expect a talent shortage, partly because of high quit rates among experienced women.
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