Rise Of The Robots--The Future Of Artificial Intelligence

Photo: PYTAK

From Scientific American:

By 2050 robot "brains" based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence

Editor's Note: This article was originally printed in the 2008 Scientific American Special Report on Robots. It is being published on the Web as part of ScientificAmerican.com's In-Depth Report on Robots.

In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology’s rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies.

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British Scientists To Create 'Synthetic' Blood

From The Independent:

Human embryos will be used to make an unlimited supply for infection-free transfusions.

Scientists in Britain plan to become the first in the world to produce unlimited amounts of synthetic human blood from embryonic stem cells for emergency infection-free transfusions.

A major research project is to be announced this week that will culminate in three years with the first transfusions into human volunteers of "synthetic" blood made from the stem cells of spare IVF embryos. It could help to save the lives of anyone from victims of traffic accidents to soldiers on a battlefield by revolutionising the vital blood transfusion services, which have to rely on a network of human donors to provide a constant supply of fresh blood.

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Mt. Redoubt In Alaska Erupts

Video of the sixth eruption, from the Alaska Volcano observatory webcam system. (h/t to Ron De Haan)

From The Volcanism Blog:

Redoubt-watchers will be aware that the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s Hut webcam went offline during the eruption yesterday, but came back again towards the end of the afternoon. As a result images were captured of the eruptive activity - the sixth explosive event - that took place from 19:41 local time onwards yesterday.

From these webcam images Akira Shirakawa has compiled a video, with synchronized sound, that shows activity between 19:19 and 20:43, available at YouTube. Large-scale ash emission makes everything very dark around 19:50 (at video time 0:24), and a big ash eruption can be clearly seen at 20:01 (video time 0:34).

There is also a page of Hut webcam images and a time-lapse movie here (h/t Chris Rowan, via comment at Eruptions).

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Cancer Breakthrough: Tales Of 'Trojan Horse Drug' And 'Miracle Dogs'

Oscar, who scientists dubbed the "miracle dog," survived an aggressive form of cancer thanks a drug known as NO-Cbl. The drug may lead to a powerful new cancer treatment for humans. (Credit: Crandall B. Huckins)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2009) — Diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of cancer called anal sac adenocarcinoma, Oscar's future seemed bleak. Bedridden and unresponsive to chemotherapy or radiation, he would be lucky to survive three months. But thanks to an innovative new drug treatment, Oscar's cancer receded and he was walking again within two weeks.

Oscar's recovery was extraordinary enough, but his case was unusual for another reason. Oscar is a Bichon Frise, who scientists reporting in Salt Lake City, Utah at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society on March 23 call "the Miracle Dog." Joseph A. Bauer, Ph.D., and colleagues described promising results with a drug called nitrosylcobalamin (NO-Cbl) in battling cancer in Oscar and three other canines without any negative side effects. While it gives profound hope to dog owners, NO-Cbl also points to a powerful new cancer treatment for humans — one that infiltrates cancer cells like a biological Trojan horse.

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Oldest Sea Creatures Have Been Alive 4,000 Years

Radiocarbon dating results show deep-sea "corals" with proteinaceous skeletons such as the pictured Gerardia sp. on basalt outcrop, Hawai'ian Islands, are feeding on recently exported young and fresh particulate organic matter and that individual colony longevities are on the order of thousands of years. Credit: NOAA's Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL)

From Live Science:

Deep-sea corals are the oldest living animals with a skeleton in the seas, claims new research that found a 4,265-year-old coral species off the coast of Hawaii.

Deep-sea corals, which are threatened by climate change and pollution like shallow water corals are, grow on seamounts (mountains rising from the seafloor that don't reach the ocean's surface) and continental margins at depths of about 1,000 to 10,000 feet (300 to 3,000 meters).

These corals play host to many other marine organisms, and are hotspots of ocean biodiversity. The largest coral reef system in the world is the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Big reefs are also found in the Red Sea, along the coast of Mexico and Belize, the Bahamas and the Maldives.

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Laser Weapon Design Hits 100-Kilowatt Target

A Northrop Grumman Space Technology engineer in Redondo Beach, Calif., monitors a solid-state laser, in a photo from January 2007. (Credit: Northrop Grumman)

From CNET:

From the week gone by on the directed-energy weapons front: defense contractor Northrop Grumman reported that it got a solid-state laser to fire a beam with a potency of 105.5 kilowatts.

For the ray-gun wing of the military-industrial complex, the 100-kilowatt threshold is a major milestone, marking the entry point to weapons-grade laser weapons. Adding to the appeal is that solid-state lasers are much more compact, and less noxious, than chemical laser systems such as the one in the works for the 747-centric Airborne Laser.

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Dogs Show A Fetching Communication Savvy

GO FETCHFETCHING. In a re-enactment of an experiment on dogs' ability to understand human communication, a border collie watches its owner present a miniature replica of a rope toy (1), searches among the toys in an adjoining room (2) and brings the actual rope toy back to the owner (3).J. Kaminski

From Science News:

Border collies know to retrieve toys when owners present replicas or, in some cases, photos of those toys.

Dogs are lousy conversationalists and can’t write worth a lick. But don’t sell the family pooch short when it comes to grasping subtle references in human communication, a new study suggests.

Border collies quickly realize that their owners want them to fetch a toy from another room when shown a full-size or miniature replica of the desired item and given a command to “bring it here,” say biological psychologist Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues. Even a photograph of a toy works with some dogs as a signal to fetch that toy from an unseen location, the researchers report in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.

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How (And Why) Athletes Go Broke

From Sports Illustrated:

Recession or no recession, many NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball players have a penchant for losing most or all of their money. It doesn't matter how much they make. And the ways they blow it are strikingly similar.

What the hell happened here? Seven floors above the iced-over Dallas North Tollway, Raghib (Rocket) Ismail is revisiting the question. It's December, and Ismail is sitting in the boardroom of Chapwood Investments, a wealth management firm, his white Notre Dame snow hat pulled down to his furrowed brow.

In 1991 Ismail, a junior wide receiver for the Fighting Irish, was the presumptive No. 1 pick in the NFL draft. Instead he signed with the CFL's Toronto Argonauts for a guaranteed $18.2 million over four years, then the richest contract in football history. But today, at a private session on financial planning attended by eight other current or onetime pro athletes, Ismail, 39, indulges in a luxury he didn't enjoy as a young VIP: hindsight.

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New Hope For Controversial 'Cold Fusion' Power Source

An experimental "cold fusion" device produced this pattern of "triple tracks" (shown at right), which scientists say is caused by high-energy nuclear particles resulting from a nuclear reaction. Credit: Pamela Mosier-Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR)

From Live Science:

If cold fusion can be made to work, it could power the world cheaply on a virtually limitless supply of seawater. But scientists don't even know if it's possible.

Now a new study has produced evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the new name for the controversial process labeled "cold fusion" two decades ago.

Fusion is the energy source of the sun and other stars. It occurs when atomic nuclei are combined. Today's nuclear plants employ fission, the splitting of nuclei. Scientists have been striving for decades to tap fusion to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Fusion would not come with the radioactive byproducts of fission.

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Curious Pair Of Galaxies: Best Image Ever Of Strange And Chaotic Duo

This colour composite image of Arp 261 was created from images obtained using the FORS2 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Located 2600 m above sea level, in the mountains of the Atacama Desert, the Paranal Observatory enjoys some of the clearest and darkest skies on the whole planet. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — The ESO Very Large Telescope has taken the best image ever of a strange and chaotic duo of interwoven galaxies. The images also contain some surprises — interlopers both far and near.

Sometimes objects in the sky that appear strange, or different from normal, have a story to tell and prove scientifically very rewarding. This was the idea behind Halton Arp’s catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies that appeared in the 1960s. One of the oddballs listed there is Arp 261, which has now been imaged in more detail than ever before using the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image proves to contain several surprises.

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Drink Up: Taking the Salt Out of Seawater

FREE FROM SALT: Special membranes help desalinize 25 million gallons of water a day at the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant in Florida. COURTESY OF DOW

From Scientific American:

Removing the salt from briny water is becoming more affordable.

Almost three quarters of Earth's surface is covered with water, but most of it is too salty to drink. And the 2.5 percent that is freshwater is locked up either in soil, remote snowpacks and glaciers or in deep aquifers. That leaves less than 1 percent of all freshwater for humans and animals to drink and for farmers to use to raise crops—and that remnant is shrinking as rising global temperatures trigger more droughts. The upshot: it's becoming increasingly difficult to slake the world's thirst as the population grows and water supplies dwindle. Analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs estimate that worldwide water use doubles every 20 years.

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The Physicists Killed Wall Street

From Discover Magazine:

A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes about how physicists are the harbingers of doom, and are responsible for the end times. Or, more specifically, it’s because of physicists that the financial markets are in tatters all around us.

The basic idea is that greedy physicists have gone to Wall Street, cooked up all sorts of arcane derivative products, and subsequently unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the financial markets. This sentiment is best epitomized by a statement from none other than Warren Buffett (perhaps the world’s most successful investor, and certainly the world’s richest): “beware of geeks bearing formulas”

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Can Science Reveal The Truth?

From First Science:

In St John's gospel, Jesus Christ tells Pilate that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth. To which, Pilate famously responds: "What is truth?" - a question that, for me at least, makes Pontius Pilate leap off the page as one of the most human of Biblical characters.

Perhaps the single greatest strength of science is that doesn't have to face up to the meaning of truth: Science's very methodology allows it to sidestep the whole issue of truth. The scientific method is a way of translating our individual responses to the world into something that's collective.

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A Machine That Speeds Up Evolution

Photo: Better bugs: Using a specially designed machine (shown here), scientists can rapidly engineer up to 50 genetic changes in bacteria, dramatically speeding the quest to design bacterial factories capable of efficiently producing drugs, biofuels, and other chemical products. Credit: George Church

From Technology Review:

A genome-wide approach to genetic engineering greatly speeds the manufacture of bacteria for making drugs and biofuels.

Rather than changing the genome letter by letter, as most genetic engineering is done, George Church and his colleagues have developed a new technology that can make 50 changes to a bacterial genome nearly simultaneously--an advance that could be used to greatly speed the creation of bacteria that are better at producing drugs, nutrients, or biofuels.

"What once took months now takes days," says Stephen del Cardayré, vice president of research and development at LS9, a biofuels company based in South San Francisco of which Church is a founder. LS9 soon plans to use the technology--called multiplex-automated genomic engineering, or MAGE--to accelerate development of bacterial cells that can produce low-cost renewable fuels and chemicals.

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Physics In The Oil Sands Of Alberta

Figure 1. Crushed oil-sands ore. (Photograph from Suncor Energy Inc image bank.)

From Physics Today:

Alberta’s petroleum reserves are comparable to Saudi Arabia’s, but accessing that oil poses challenges in the physics of fluids and particulates.

The recent spike in the price of oil to over US$140 per barrel focused worldwide attention on the need for more diverse supplies of fuel from unconventional sources and renewable resources. The oil sands of Alberta, the largest source of unconventional fuel for North America, are also the largest petroleum deposit on Earth. Sometimes called tar sands, they contain an estimated 2.5 trillion barrels of crude oil over an area of more than 140 000 square kilometers, but that oil, called bitumen, is too viscous to be extracted by conventional drilling. Large oil-sands deposits also exist in Venezuela, and smaller ones are found in Utah, western Africa, and Russia, but production from the Canadian deposits is the largest.

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Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Volcano Is Erupting; Large Explosions Recorded

Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Volcano, which had been in a tempestuous mood for two months,
began erupting early this morning.

From the L.A. Times:

Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Volcano, which had been in a tempestuous mood for two months, began erupting early this morning.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory recorded four large explosions at Redoubt volcano in the predawn darkness Monday, and at 7 a.m. the website anounced, "Another large explosion has just occurred."

The height of the eruption cloud is estimated to be 50,000 feet above sea level, but it remains unclear what direction the enormous plume will travel.

Two calls to the AVO/U.S. Geological Survey operations center went unanswered.

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More News On Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Volcano

Mount Redoubt Volcano Erupts Five Times, So Far -- Live Science
Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupts after weeks of waiting -- McClatchy
Alaska's Mount Redoubt has 5th eruption -- UPI
Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupts -- Examiner
Mount Redoubt blows its top -- CBS 12

Carbon Nanotube Muscles Strong As Diamond, Flexible As Rubber

From Wired News:

For the next installment of the Terminator franchise, Hollywood might skip the polymimetic liquid alloys — they're so 2003 — and turn to the laboratory of Ray Baughman, who has created a next-generation muscle from carbon nanotubes.

Baughman and his colleagues have produced a formulation that's stronger than steel, as light as air and more flexible than rubber — a truly 21st century muscle. It could be used to make artificial limbs, "smart" skins, shape-changing structures, ultra-strong robots and — in the immediate future — highly-efficient solar cells.

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Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds

A saxophonist. Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music. (Credit: iStockphoto/Richard Clarke)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2009) — Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.

"These findings could explain why Western music has been so successful in global music distribution, even in music cultures that do not as strongly emphasize the role of emotional expression in their music," said Thomas Fritz of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

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Living Model Of Basic Units Of Human Brain Created

An isolated astrocyte shown with confocal microscopy. (Credit: Image created by Nathan S. Ivey at TNPRC / courtesy of Wikipedia)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2009) — Researchers in the School of Life & Health Sciences at Aston University in Birmingham, UK are developing a novel new way to model how the human brain works by creating a living representation of the brain.

They are using cells originally from a tumour which have been ‘reprogrammed’ to stop multiplying. Using the same natural molecule the body does to stimulate cellular development, the cells are turned into a co-culture of nerve cells and astrocytes - the most basic units of the human brain.

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Star Explodes, And So Might Theory

This artist's illustration provided by NASA shows what the brightest supernova ever recorded, known as SN 2006gy, may have looked like when it exploded. Photo: AP/NASA

From Live Science:

A massive star a million times brighter than our sun exploded way too early in its life, suggesting scientists don't understand stellar evolution as well as they thought.

"This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising," said Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

According to theory, the doomed star, about 100 times our sun's mass, was not mature enough to have evolved a massive iron core of nuclear fusion ash, considered a prerequisite for a core implosion that triggers the sort of supernova blast that was seen.

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