Campaign Asks For International Treaty To Limit War Robots

Robots are synonymous with modern warfare, but what are the ethical implications? (Image: Ethan Miller/Getty)

From New Scientist:

A robotics expert, a physicist, a bioethicist and a philosopher have founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) to campaign for limits on robotic military hardware.

Roboticist Noel Sharkey at the University of Sheffield, UK, and his colleagues set up ICRAC after a two-day meeting in Sheffield earlier this month. Sharkey has spoken before of ethical concerns about military systems that make their own decisions.

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Real or Fake? The World's Longest Basketball Shot

From Popular Science:

If we time the flight, we can then apply some ballpark approximations to determine whether the trajectory we see in the video conforms to that flight time. Using our stopwatch we observe that the ball is in the air for 3.8 seconds before passing through the basket. The horizontal distance to the basket from the launch point is approximately 50 meters, and the launch angle θ is about 20 degrees.

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New Filters In Google Search For Speed, News

The new options on the left side of a regular Google search results page emphasize how important presentation has become in search results. (Credit: Google)

From CNET:

Google has added a few new filters to the search options panel it introduced last May, emphasizing speed and continuity on its search results pages.

The "show options" link at the top of a Google search results page brings up a number of filters on the left side of the search results page that allow searchers to refine their queries, allowing them to search just for content types like videos or search results from a certain timeline. Google is gradually rolling out some new options in that panel, allowing searchers to find results from the last hour or results posted in Google Books or Google News, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager in search.

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The End Of Skype?

Mario Tama / Getty

The Skype Founders' Revenge Against eBay -- Time Magazine

Just when eBay thought it had figured out a way to unload a majority interest in Skype, along came the Scandinavian founders of the world's biggest provider of Internet telephony to sink the $1.9 billion deal — and perhaps Skype itself.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are suing eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., and a consortium of investors that includes private-equity firms Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz (co-owned by Netscape's Marc Andreessen) and the Canada Pension Plan over the breach of a software-licensing agreement.

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New Nobel Prizes Are 'Unlikely'

From The BBC:

Calls from a group of eminent scientists for new Nobel prizes look unlikely to prove successful.

The group had argued that the current range of prizes was too narrow to reflect the breadth of modern science.

The Nobel prizes are considered to be the most prestigious awards in science, and are limited to a few categories.

But a senior official from the Nobel Foundation has told BBC News that the categories were outlined in Alfred Nobel's will and would not change.

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'Smart Drugs' Set To Cause Trouble

More powerful performance-enhancing drugs are in the pipeline, and may cause serious problems for universities in the future. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Students who use performance-enhancing drugs to stay alert and learn faster could pose a major dilemma for universities, and they may even face future urine tests, warns an Australian expert.

Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, psychologist Vince Cakic of the University of Sydney, says that ‘nootropics’ – drugs designed to help people with cognitive problems – are already being used off-label to boost academic performances.

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Raining Pebbles: Rocky Exoplanet Has Bizarre Atmosphere, Simulation Suggests

The exoplanet COROT-7b is close enough to its star that its "day-face" is hot enough to melt rock. Theoretical models suggest the planet has an atmosphere of the components of rock in gaseous form and lava or boiling oceans on its surface. (Credit: Image by ESO/L. Calcada)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2009) — So accustomed are we to the sunshine, rain, fog and snow of our home planet that we find it next to impossible to imagine a different atmosphere and other forms of precipitation.

To be sure, Dr. Seuss came up with a green gluey substance called oobleck that fell from the skies and gummed up the Kingdom of Didd, but it had to be conjured up by wizards and was clearly a thing of magic.

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Loss Of Top Predators Causing Ecosystems To Collapse

From Live Science:

The catastrophic decline around the world of "apex" predators such as wolves, cougars, lions or sharks has led to a huge increase in smaller "mesopredators" that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions, a new study concludes.

The findings, published today in the journal Bioscience, found that in North America all of the largest terrestrial predators have been in decline during the past 200 years while the ranges of 60 percent of mesopredators have expanded. The problem is global, growing and severe, scientists say, with few solutions in sight.

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Farmed Out: How Will Climate Change Impact World Food Supplies?

BLEAK FUTURE?: A new report estimates that climate change will result in 25 million more malnourished children by 2050. © iStockphoto.com / Clint Spencer

From Scientific American:

A new study attempts to estimate the effects of climate change on global agriculture--and outline ways to mitigate its most dire consequences.

The people of East Africa once again face a devastating drought this year: Crops wither and fail from Kenya to Ethiopia, livestock drop dead and famine spreads. Although, historically, such droughts are not uncommon in this region, their frequency seems to have increased in recent years, raising prices for staple foods, such as maize.

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Excavating Ardi: A New Piece For The Puzzle Of Human Evolution

Image: A artist's rendering of the probable life appearance and skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, aka "Ardi" (c) 2009, J.H. Matternes

From Time Magazine:

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building.

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High-Res Images of New Territory on Mercury

From Wired Science:

Flying within 228 kilometers of the surface of Mercury on Sept. 29, the Messenger spacecraft snapped portraits of a portion of the planet that had never before been imaged close up.

Messenger also examined in greater detail Mercury’s western hemisphere, which had been imaged during a previous passage in October 2008 (SN Online: 10/29/08).

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Will Computer Programs Replace Mozart?

From Discover Magazine:

Meet Emily Howell. She’s a composer who is about to have a CD released of sonatas she composed. So what makes her unique? She’s also a computer program.

Emily was created by University of California-Santa Cruz professor David Cope, who claims to be more of a music teacher than a computer scientist (he’s both). Cope has been working on combining artificial intelligence with music for 30 years—thereby challenging the idea that creating music should be limited to the human mind.

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Asian Quake Could Trigger California's Big One

Influencing the San Andreas fault line at Parkfield. (Image: David Paul Morris/Getty)

From New Scientist:

IT'S a kind of geological butterfly effect. Fenglin Niu of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and colleagues believe they have found two clear cases where remote events weakened the San Andreas fault near Parkfield, California. The finding suggests powerful earthquakes - like the one that has just hit Sumatra - may trigger further quakes worldwide.

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Plutonium Shortage Threatens Future Deep Space Missions

Fuel Shortage Dwindling supplies of plutonium-238, the fuel NASA uses to launch probes into deep space and to power Mars rovers, threaten to set back some missions for a decade. Los Alamos National Laboratory

From Popular Science:

Imagine you’re driving across the Mojave Desert, and somewhere in the middle of absolutely nowhere you realize that the next gas station is further away than your car can travel on its current supply of gasoline. What next? That’s the problem NASA mission planners are facing as the agency's supply of plutonium-238, the fuel used to power deep space probes like Cassini and surface scouts like the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory, are dwindling. Unfortunately, that leaves NASA in a pretty tight spot: we’ve depleted our reserves of plutonium-238, and there isn’t anywhere to refuel ahead on the horizon either.

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How to Make Biodiesel With a Commercial Kit

Senior editor Mike Allen (who used to teach organic chemistry in a previous career) gloves up to pump methanol into the processor.

From Popular Mechanics:

“Make your own diesel for 70 cents a gallon,” the Internet ad claimed. I was tired of paying for 30 gallons of regular diesel each week to fill my pickup, so I downloaded the instructions. It wasn’t long before I was sucking used fry oil out of tanks behind a restaurant, and mixing it with lye and methanol in a 5-gallon bottle before pouring it into an old water heater.

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Microsoft Researcher Converts His Brain Into 'E-Memory'

Photo: Gordon Bell wearing a SenseCam, which automatically records photos throughout the day.

From CNN:

(CNN) -- For the past decade, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been moving the data from his brain onto computers -- where he knows it will be safe.

Sure, you could say all of us do this to some extent. We save digital pictures from family events and keep tons of e-mail.

But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences.

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First Intelligent Financial Search Engine Developed

Financial search engine image.
(Credit: Image courtesy of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — Researchers from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UCM3) have completed the development of the first search engine designed to search for information from the financial and stock market sector based on semantic technology, which enables one to make more accurate thematic searches adapted to the needs of each user.

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Spiritual Women Have More Sex

From Live Science:

Is it sexy to be spiritual? New research has found that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults — especially women — than religion, impulsivity, or alcohol.

“I think people have been well aware of the role that religious and spiritual matters play in everyday life for a very long time,” said Jessica Burris, one of the study’s researchers at the University of Kentucky. “But in the research literature, the unique qualities of spirituality — apart from religiousness — are not usually considered.”

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Cleaning Up On Dirty Coal

Photo: Cheap coal: This demonstration plant in Wilsonville, AL, uses a transport gasifier to turn two tons of cheap, low-quality coal per hour into a clean-burning gas. A plant based on similar technology is scheduled for China. Credit: KBR

From Technology Review:

A novel gasification process for low-quality coal heads to China.

The industrial boomtown of Dongguan in southeast China's Pearl River Delta could soon host one of the country's most sophisticated power plants, one that uses an unconventional coal-gasification technology to make the dirtiest coal behave like clean-burning natural gas. Its developers, Atlanta-based utility Southern Company and Houston-based engineering firm KBR, announced the licensing deal with Dongguan Power and Chemical Company this month.

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World Biofuel Use Expected To Double By 2015

From CNET:

Global biofuel use is expected to increase twofold by 2015 and Brazil will remain the world's top exporter of biofuel, according to a report released Wednesday by Hart Energy Consulting.

The U.S. is expected to see the largest increase in biofuel use per country, increasing its current consumption by more than 30 percent, according to data from the "Global Biofuels Outlook: 2009-2015" report.

The overall increased use of biofuel in many countries around the world will make a dent in the world's consumption of traditional gasoline, according to Hart.

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