Science & TechnologyS


Robot

Exoskeleton prototype: Ironman style suit gives super strength to its pilot

Gerry Block
IGN.com
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:25 UTC
The hottest mechanical suit yet seen.

US, April 11, 2008 - Popular Science has put together a rather sweet article tying the ongoing marketing blitz for Iron Man to a look at where real world exoskeleton technology stands. The focal point of the story is Ratheon's XOS exoskeleton, a suit the company is apparently accurate in describing as the most advanced yet assembled. A product of Darpa funding much like the BigDog quadraped robot, the XOS is the brainchild of Steve Jacobsen, a robotics engineer relatively new to designing products for the military, and fortunately so. His abilities to engineer and integrate discrete, yet vitally important solutions ranging from hydraulic valves, to complex algorithms and operating software in-house are apparently the key to the XOS' lead over other exoskeleton concepts.

Exoskeleton
©Popular Science

Comment: Yet another gadget for the military.

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Magnify

Can prehistoric mammoths now be cloned?


Russia Today
Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:45 UTC


Russian scientists say they've managed to develop the most detailed picture ever of the insides of prehistoric animals. They made the discovery after studying a baby mammoth found immaculately preserved in the Yamalo-Nenets region in the Urals last year.
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Robot

Rise of the machines: Armed robot pullout from Iraq after gun moves on its own

Erik Sofge
Popular Mechanics
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:55 UTC


Robot
©Unknown

PITTSBURGH - We already knew that iRobot CEO Colin Angle was running the only successful business in the home robotics game, so it was fitting that he closed his keynote at the RoboBusiness Conference here today by asking if there's really a robot industry in the first place: "Are we sure we're not just an adjunct to another industry?"

After all, Disney stopped buying its animatronic actors years ago, and started building them. What's to stop retail chains from adding a robotics division, or an upright vacuum-maker from hiring its own team of roboticists? This is not, we can assume, what audience wanted to hear. This conference, whose founder and biggest sponsor is iRobot, is a place for deals to be made, and an industry to be cultivated. But as the public continues to devour news of Asimo's latest sprint or stumble, and schools across the country vie for scholarships in national robotics competitions, the industry itself is barely out of the incubator.
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Cloud Lightning

Absence of clouds caused prehuman supergreenhouse periods


Penn State Live
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:17 UTC
In a world without human-produced pollution, biological productivity controls cloud formation and may be the lever that caused supergreenhouse episodes during the Cetaceous and Eocene, according to Penn State paleoclimatologists.

"Our motivation was the inability of climate models to reproduce the climate of the supergreenhouse episodes of the Cetaceous and Eocene adequately," said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "People have tried increasing carbon dioxide in the models to explain the warming, but there are limits to the amounts that can be added because the existing proxies for carbon dioxide do not show such large amounts."

In general, the proxies indicate that the Cretaceious and Eocene atmosphere never exceeded four times the current carbon dioxide level, which is not enough for the models to create supergreenhouse conditions. Some researchers have tried increasing the amount of methane, another greenhouse gas, but there are no proxies for methane. Another approach is to assume that ocean currents changed, but while researchers can insert new current information into the models, they cannot get the models to create these ocean current scenarios.
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Bulb

Electrified Deep Earth Changing Length of Day

Anne Casselman
National Geographic News
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:12 UTC
Tiny shifts that make our days milliseconds longer may be due to forces under our feet, a new study has found.

It has long been known that natural phenomena on Earth's surface, such as tides and winds, affect its rotation speed.

Now scientists are investigating how events in a mineral layer at the core-mantle boundary, 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) deep, similarly affect the planet's spin.

"The length of a day ... is changing due to the interaction between the mantle and the core in the very deep Earth," said study co-author Kei Hirose, a geoscientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.
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Evil Rays

Scientists highlight brain differences in infants with auditory processing problems


Asian News International
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:34 UTC
Washington: Rutgers University researchers have found in a study of infant brains that babies who struggle to process tiny auditory differences like "ba" and "da" sounds seem to be using different brain areas, and perhaps different analysis strategies to accomplish the task, as compared to children who do not have such difficulties.
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Better Earth

Journey To The Center Of The Earth: Discovery Sheds Light On Mantle Formation


sciencedaily.com
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:28 UTC
Uncovering a rare, two-billion-year-old window into the Earth's mantle, a University of Houston professor and his team have found our planet's geological history is more complex than previously thought.

Jonathan Snow, Assistant Professor of Geosciences at UH, led a team of researchers in a North Pole expedition, resulting in a discovery that could shed new light on the mantle, the vast layer that lies beneath the planet's outer crust. These findings are described in a paper titled "Ancient, highly heterogeneous mantle beneath Gakkel Ridge, Arctic Ocean," appearing recently in Nature.

400-foot-long icebreaker vessel
©Heinz Feldmann, Max-Planck Insitut fuer Chemie, Mainz, Germany
The mantle rock was collected during an expedition to the North Pole aboard a 400-foot-long icebreaker, a research vessel designed to break through the ice.
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Cow Skull

Grand Canyon May Be As Old As Dinosaurs, 40-50 Million Years Older Than Previously Thought


sciencedaily.com
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:23 UTC
New geological evidence indicates the Grand Canyon may be so old that dinosaurs once lumbered along its rim, according to a study by researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the California Institute of Technology.

The team used a technique known as radiometric dating to show the Grand Canyon may have formed more than 55 million years ago, pushing back its assumed origins by 40 million to 50 million years. The researchers gathered evidence from rocks in the canyon and on surrounding plateaus that were deposited near sea level several hundred million years ago before the region uplifted and eroded to form the canyon.

Grand Canyon
©Rebecca Flowers, CU-Boulder
The Grand Canyon may be as old as the dinosaurs, according to a new study by the University of Colorado and the California Institute of Technology
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The First Animal On Earth Was Significantly More Complex Than Previously Believed


sciencedaily.com
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:17 UTC
A new study mapping the evolutionary history of animals indicates that Earth's first animal -- a mysterious creature whose characteristics can only be inferred from fossils and studies of living animals--was probably significantly more complex than previously believed.

Using new high-powered technologies for analyzing massive volumes of genetic data, the study defined the earliest splits at the base of the animal tree of life. The tree of life is a hierarchical representation of the evolutionary relationships between species that was introduced by Charles Darwin.

Comb jelly
©Casey Dunn
A comb jelly. The evolutionary history of the comb jelly has revealed surprising clues about Earth's first animal.

The study is published in the April 10, 2008 issue of Nature.

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Phoenix

'This thing is nuts': The Triassic Pterosaur Raeticodactylus

David Hone
The DinoBase Public Forum
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:12 UTC
There are a few fundamental biases in the fossil record and they can heavily influence what you are looking for. The older something is, the less likely you are to find it - every million years older it gets is another million years for it to be subducted, buried, eroded or destroyed. The smaller something is, the harder it is to find - 50 metre sauropods leave behind big bones that can be seen on the surface from half a mile away, rodent teeth are another matter. The more delicate something is, the rarer it is - it is more vulnerable to destruction before and after fossilisation, and even if you find it, it might be so badly crushed that all the details are lost. Finally, the rarer something was in life, the less likely you are to find it - a species with billions of individuals is more likely to enter the fossil record than one with a few hundred.

Raeticodactylus filisurensis
©Rico Stecher
Raeticodactylus filisurensis
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