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Robot

New Robot With Artificial Skin To Improve Human Communication


ScienceDaily
Sun, 10 May 2009 04:07 UTC
robot with skin

Kaspar. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Hertfordshire)

Work is beginning on a robot with artificial skin which is being developed as part of a project involving researchers at the University of Hertfordshire so that it can be used in their work investigating how robots can help children with autism to learn about social interaction.

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and her team at the University's School of Computer Science are part of a European consortium, which is working on the three-year Roboskin project to develop a robot with skin and embedded tactile sensors.

According to the researchers, this is the first time that this approach has been used in work with children with autism.
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Info

200,000 year old human hair found in dung

Richard Gray
Telegraph
Sun, 10 May 2009 01:56 UTC
Strands of hair from a human who lived 200,000 years ago have been found preserved inside fossilised hyena dung from South Africa.

Palaeontologists found 40 strands of fossilised hair inside samples of coprolite, or fossilised dung, from a cave in South Africa that was used by brown hyaenas.

Until now the oldest samples of human hair were from a 9,000 year old mummy found in northern Chile. It is extremely rare for soft tissue such as hair, skin and muscle to survive more than a few hundred years and only hard tissue like bone is fossilised normally.
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Blackbox

Possible site of free will found in brain

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 07 May 2009 22:42 UTC
Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests.

When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless.

"What it tells us is there are specific brain regions that are involved in the consciousness of your movement," says Angela Sirigu, a neuroscientist at the CNRS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, who led the study.
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Info

Sea 'snake' generates electricity with every wave

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Sat, 09 May 2009 21:34 UTC
Anaconda, a giant rubber "snake" that floats offshore and converts wave energy to electricity, is a step closer to commercialisation. An 8-metre long, 1/25th scale version is currently undergoing tests in a large wave tank in Gosport, UK, and a full-size working version could be a reality in five years.

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Blackbox

Volcanic shutdown may have led to 'snowball Earth'

David Shiga
New Scientist
Sat, 09 May 2009 16:41 UTC
Image
© Denis Hallinan / Alamy
Early in our planet's history, volcanoes stopped spewing out lava for around 250 million years
A 250-million-year shutdown of volcanic activity which is thought to have occurred early in Earth's history may be what turned the planet into a glacier-covered snowball. It could also have helped give rise to our oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Previous studies have noted that very little volcanic material has been dated to between 2.45 and 2.2 billion years ago, but it was widely assumed the gap would vanish as more samples were dated. Now an analysis of thousands of zircon minerals collected from all seven continents indicates that the gap may be real after all. Zircons provide a record of past volcanic activity, as the date they were formed can be calculated from the radioactive isotopes they contain.

The failure of so many samples from all over the world to fill the gap suggests there was a major slowdown in the planet's volcanic activity during this period, says Kent Condie of New Mexico Tech in Socorro, who led the study (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, DOI: link). "Volcanism didn't shut off, but it became much, much less widespread during this time."
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Laptop

US threatens military force against hackers


Times of India
Sat, 09 May 2009 16:24 UTC
Cyber espionage and attacks from well-funded nations or terror groups are the biggest threats to the military's computer networks, a top US officer said.

Gen Kevin Chilton, who heads US Strategic Command, said he worries that foes will learn to disable or distort battlefield communications.

Chilton said even as the Pentagon improves its network defences against hackers, he needs more people, training and resources to hone offensive cyber war capacity. At the same time, he asserted that the US would consider using military force against an enemy who attacks and disrupts the nation's critical networks.
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Laptop

Hackers broke into FAA air traffic control systems - more than once

Elinor Mills
C net
Thu, 07 May 2009 16:20 UTC
Hackers have broken into the air traffic control mission-support systems of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration several times in recent years, according to an Inspector General report sent to the FAA this week.

In February, hackers compromised an FAA public-facing computer and used it to gain access to personally identifiable information, such as Social Security numbers, on 48,000 current and former FAA employees, the report said.

Last year, hackers took control of FAA critical network servers and could have shut them down, which would have seriously disrupted the agency's mission-support network, the report said. Hackers took over FAA computers in Alaska, becoming "insiders," according to the report dated Monday.
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Rocket

NASA Helm Empty as Agency Must 'Beg' for $120 Billion Moon Shot

Jeff Bliss
Bloomberg
Sat, 09 May 2009 14:43 UTC
NASA tried a rocket scientist at the helm for four years under President George W. Bush. Now the world's biggest space agency may need a salesman as it aims to raise as much as $120 billion to get back to the moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, preparing for the May 11 space shuttle launch of a risky repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, faces critical decisions about returning to the moon by 2020. And 50 years after its founding, the agency is struggling to prove its relevance.
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Igloo

The rise of oxygen caused Earth's earliest ice age


PhysOrg
Thu, 07 May 2009 04:12 UTC
oxygen cycle
© unknown


The evolution of organic photosynthesis ca.2.5 billion years ago would have had a profound effect on Earth's surface environments, and potentially on aerobic respiration by eukaryotes.
Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.

Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice age on the planet.

"We can now put our hands on the rock library that preserves evidence of irreversible atmospheric change," said Kaufman. "This singular event had a profound effect on the climate, and also on life."

Using sulfur isotopes to determine the oxygen content of ~2.3 billion year-old rocks in the Transvaal Supergroup in South Africa, they found evidence of a sudden increase in atmospheric oxygen that broadly coincided with physical evidence of glacial debris, and geochemical evidence of a new world-order for the carbon cycle.
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Footprints

Mexico: Really Big Footprints


Inexplicata
Fri, 08 May 2009 16:17 UTC
Really big footprint
© Narcisco Rodriguez/analuisacid.com
Prof. Ana Luisa Cid's site features some very interesting photographs of footprints clearly belonging to something from the Cenozoic (or thereabouts!) era.

A letter from Ing. Narciso Rodriguez, who discovered these impression in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila some sixteen years ago, states that the footprints are specifically located in the outskirts or Arteaga, some 20 minutes away from Saltillo, the area's largest city.

Really big footprint
© Narcisco Rodriguez/analuisacid.com
Photos have been sent to the local anthropological museum. Our thanks to Prof. Cid and Ing. Rodríguez for these images.
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