Science & TechnologyS


Evil Rays

Hundreds of television stations cut analog signals

New York - About a quarter of the nation's TV stations cut off their analog signals today, causing sets to go dark in households that were not prepared for digital television despite two years of warnings about the transition.

Though most viewers were ready - and people with cable or satellite service were unaffected - some stations and call centers reported a steady stream of questions from frustrated callers. Many wondered how to get coupons for converter boxes that translate digital signals for older TVs - or how to get the devices working.

Robot

US Navy Report Warns of War Robots Going "Terminator"

Robots must learn to obey a warrior code, but increasing intelligence may make keeping the robots from turning on their masters increasingly difficult

Robots gone rogue killing their human masters is rich science fiction fodder, but could it become reality? Some researchers are beginning to ask that question as artificial intelligence advances continue, and the world's high-tech nations begin to deploy war-robots to the battlefront. Currently, the U.S. armed forces use many robots, but they all ultimately have a human behind the trigger. However, there are many plans to develop and deploy fully independent solutions as the technology improves.

Some mistakenly believe that such robots would only be able to operate within a defined set of behaviors. Describes Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of a new U.S. Navy-funded report, "There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do. Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person."

Comment: An 'ethics code' is to be programmed into killing machines by people who apparently do not themselves know what it means to be human? We do not find that reassuring. The robots will not "understand the difference between enemies and non-combatants" because an increasing number of their programmers and controllers are themselves biological Terminator machines incapable of empathy.


Bulb

Idea of Infinity Stretched Back to Third Century B.C.

The first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity has been pushed back some 2,000 years via a new analysis of a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle. For instance, if you add or subtract a number from infinity, the remaining value is still infinity, some Indian philosophers said. Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time.

The parchment page comes from the 348-page Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest copy of some of the Greek genius' writings, which were hidden for centuries because a monk partly scraped them off the animal-skin parchment in the 13th century A.D. to clear the pages to print a prayer book. Also, a forger painted pictures over the prayer book hundreds of years after that.

Blackbox

New Artificial DNA Points to Alien Life

A strange, new genetic code a lot like that found in all terrestrial life is sitting in a beaker full of oily water in a laboratory in Florida, a scientist said today, calling it the first example of an artificial chemical system that is capable of Darwinian evolution.

The system is made of the four molecules that are the basic building blocks of our DNA along with eight synthetic modifications of them, said biochemist Steven A. Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville.

The main difference between the synthetic molecules and those that make up conventional DNA is that Benner's molecules cannot make copies of themselves, although that is just "a couple of years" away, he said.

The wild biochemistry finding, described to a small group of reporters today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, offers ideas about new types of life for scientists to look for beyond our planet, or even possibly hidden on our planet.

Telescope

History Corrected by 400-year-old Moon Map

Mare Crisium (at the top), Mare Tranquilitatis and Mare Foecunditatis
© Lord EgremontThe first drawing of the Moon through a telescope, dated July 26, 1609, by Thomas Harriot. This crude but historic sketch roughly delineates the terminator, the line that marks the boundary between day and night on the lunar surface. The original image is a little more than 15 cm across. The dark patches correspond to Mare Crisium (at the top), Mare Tranquilitatis and Mare Foecunditatis.

Galileo Galilei is often credited with being the first person to look through a telescope and make drawings of the celestial objects he observed. While the Italian indeed was a pioneer in this realm, he was not the first.

Englishman Thomas Harriot made the first drawing of the moon after looking through a telescope several months before Galileo, in July 1609.

Historian Allan Chapman of the University of Oxford details that 400-year-old breakthrough in astronomy in the February 2009 edition of Astronomy and Geophysics, a journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Chapman explains how Harriot preceded Galileo and went on to make other maps of the moon's surface that would not be bettered for decades.

Telescope

More Details Emerge on Possible Mars Hot Springs

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© NASA/MRO/HiRISE/C. Allen, D. OehlerTonal anomalies in Vernal Crater, Arabia Terra (top image, red arrows) are seen as spring-like mounds similar to those spotted in Dalhousie, Australia (bottom image).

Mounds on Mars that could be from ancient hot springs are described in a new study, after setting the astrobiology community abuzz last spring.

Hydrothermal springs on Earth, like those in Yellowstone National Park, harbor what scientists figure are the closest relatives to the original organisms that lived on our planet. Finding these features on Mars (or any other planet) could have big implications for the question of extraterrestrial life.

Mars has many features that suggest the planet was once warmer and wetter. At the least, the ancient vents - if that's what they are - would make great places to look for signs of past life.

The features found on Mars, imaged on the edge of the Arabia Terra region by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), have "proved to be a very close match" to hydrothermal springs on Earth, said study co-author Carlton Allen, of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The findings, announced today, are detailed in the new issue of the journal Astrobiology, and were presented last April.

Info

Gadget reads users' minds from their grip

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© Brandon Taylor/ACMShifting your grip on this gadget lets it guess what you want it to do.

The functions of previously separate gadgets like cameras, phones, and music players have come together into single devices in recent years. But juggling all of those functions in one product with multiple personalities is not simple, and confusing interfaces plague many big-selling gadgets.

But a new prototype that is able to predict what function its user wants from the way it is manipulated, shows a more intuitive way to tackle the problem.

"The ideal device would be a generic block, like a bar of soap, that knew the user's intent and could change its interface accordingly," says Brandon Taylor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A basic version of this concept is already built into a handful of portable gadgets. Some smartphones automatically dim the screen when they sense they have been swung against a person's ear during a call. But Taylor and colleague Michael Bove have taken the idea much further.

Info

Hypnosis used to induce 'synaesthesia'

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© Unknown

Do we all have the capacity for synaesthesia or is the brain's ability to blend senses bestowed on a select few at birth? It now seems it could be a mixture of the two.

Synaesthesia seems to underpin some savants' enhanced memory and numerical skills. The hope is that a better understanding of its origins could help to explain savant abilities - and perhaps even shine some light on whether we are all capable of attaining them.

The condition is thought to arise when extra connections in the brain cross between regions responsible for separate senses. To see if genes play a role in building or maintaining these connections, a team led by Julian Asher at the University of Oxford took genetic samples from 196 individuals from 43 families, 121 of whom exhibited auditory-visual synaesthesia, meaning they "see" sounds. "When I hear a violin, I see something like a rich red wine," says Asher, who is a synaesthete. "A cello is more like honey."

From their analysis, the team were able to pin down four chromosomal regions where gene variations seemed to be linked to the condition (The American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: link). As one of the regions has also been associated with autism, there may be a common genetic mechanism underlying the two, says Asher.

So if we are genetically disposed to develop synaesthesia, does that rule out the possibility of inducing the experience? To find out, Roi Cohen Kadosh from Imperial College London and colleagues hypnotised four volunteers so that they viewed numbers as having innate colours, known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia. The volunteers then looked at a series of coloured slides, some with a black digit in the centre and some without.

Einstein

Mathematics: The only true universal language

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© Wolcott Henry/National Geographic/GettyAn alien's description of the cosmos might teach us a thing or two about the nature of reality.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Network

Flashback Qwitter, the Darwinian side of social networks

Qwitter_01
Twitter is the web service that perfectly epitomizes the information sharing addiction of our age.

The micro-blogging platform allows users to create a constant flow of short text-based messages (tweets) that can be spread with different systems, such as SMS, RSS or Instant Messaging.

Updates usually concern everyday activities and trivial thoughts, and are shared among circles of friends. It has been argued that getting constant updates from the social network helps the user to develop a sort of social sixth sense that facilitates face-to-face relations, but many commentators see Twitter as the most pointless and addictive internet fad.