Posts

October 01, 2012

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7:21 PM | In Artificial Intelligence Competition, Two Bots Pass for Human

In the 2012 Bot Prize competition, the true winner may be the one who makes the most mistakes. In this match, video game avatars directed by artificial intelligence compete to see which comes across as most human in a fight against real human players. This year, for the first time, human participants mistook the two bots for humans more than half the time, a feat researchers attribute to the fact that these bots were programmed to be less-than-perfect players. During the game, the aptly […]

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7:03 PM | Interplanetary Jet Lag: How NASA Rover Staff Adjust to Martian Time

On the left, shifting hormone levels over time. On the right, work (gray) and sleep (black) hours of NASA staff on Martian time gradually cycle around the clock. Mars, thanks to its position slightly farther away from the Sun, has an ever-so-slightly longer day than we do: 24 hours and 39 minutes, to be exact. To control solar-powered rovers like Phoenix and Curiosity, NASA teams must shift their sleeping cycles to match, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds: that fraction of an hour […]

September 28, 2012

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6:32 PM | To make money from science photographs, specialize

A reader emails: I have been doing nature and wildlife photography for some years now, mostly as an advanced hobby, and have been expanding my efforts in arthropoda and macro work. I am at some disadvantage in this regard since I am one of dem unedumacated types who has to look up nearly everything he [...]

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3:00 PM | Look at This: Curiosity Finds Evidence of Ancient Martian Stream

When water flows over stones, it smooths them out and carries them in its path. Even when the steam has long since dried up, the gravel it leaves behind provides distinct evidence of the water’s former presence. And now the Curiosity rover has found tell-tale gravel embedded in the Martian bedrock, small stones rounded by water and too large for wind to have transported—rocky proof of water’s presence on the Red Planet. Although previous photos suggested that water once […]

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2:00 PM | Watch This: Hummingbirds Fly Forwards and Backwards With Equal Ease

Hummingbirds are incredible flyers, with the ruby-throated hummingbird beating its wings 80 times every second, an ability that inspired this blog’s name. These tiny birds can fly forwards, hover, and are the only known birds to fly backwards as well. But although zooming backwards is the rarest of the hummingbird’s flying tricks, a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology reveals that it takes no more energy than moving forwards. In the top video, an Anna’s hummingbird […]

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1:00 PM | Drug Companies Cherry-Pick Data to Get Approval for Useless Drugs

It goes without saying that the drugs you take for a headache, or high blood pressure, or even depression should work better than a Tic-Tac. That’s what drug trials are for: researchers give a group of subjects either the drug under investigation or a placebo to check that the medicine is significantly more effective than a sugar pill. Plus, the trials can reveal any potentially harmful side effects. In theory, this is a great way to weed out useless or actively harmful drugs. But it […]

September 27, 2012

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5:28 PM | Thrifty Thursday: Memories of Digital Memory

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [HP deskjet F4280 printer/scanner - $99] This scan tracks the progression of my digital photography career from my hobby days with a 3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera through a series of higher resolution cameras requiring ever more space and write speed. These aren’t all my [...]

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5:19 PM | How Does Male DNA Get Into a Woman’s Brain?

Some women always have men on the brain. And some women literally have men in their brains. A new study in PloS ONE found that quite a few female brains contain male DNA. This genetic material presumably passes into a mother while she is pregnant with a male fetus. Although we already knew that fetal cells can enter a mother’s body, until now, it was unknown whether the cells could pass into the brain as well, because the blood brain barrier normally blocks large molecules and foreign […]

September 26, 2012

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7:09 PM | Why Our Brains Stick Their Heads in the Sand (Metaphorically) When We Hear Bad News

We humans aren’t the most logical creatures. Take information processing: if we were perfect reasoners, we would absorb all the new facts we learn and use them to modify our view of the world. But while we do something like this with good news, bad news tends to go in one ear and out the other. While this good news / bad news effect gives you a more positive outlook on life, it can make you blindly optimistic, unprepared for the real consequences of medical problems or natural […]

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3:15 PM | Watch This: A Starfish Digesting Its Prey, From the Dinner’s Point of View

Fans of marine trivia may already know that a starfish is a messy eater. Instead of putting prey in their stomachs, many starfish species put their stomachs into their prey, throwing up this organ inside-out and letting its acidic juices break down the food into nutrient soup. Then the starfish slurps up its meal, sucks its stomach back in, and shuffles on its merry way. Because starfish like to dine on bivalves like mussels, which hide away in an opaque shell, it can be pretty hard to watch a […]

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1:30 PM | A Fortress That Fights Back: Structural Proteins in the Eye Double as Antimicrobials

Bacteria invisible to the naked eye find their way to many of the external surfaces of our bodies, including the naked eye. But the eye isn’t defenseless against this onslaught of microbes—researchers have found that it has special weapons for fighting back. This fight happens at the surface of the cornea, the eye’s clear outer layer. New research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation has found that keratin—a type of protein that gives structure to the […]

September 25, 2012

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4:35 PM | New SARS-Like Virus Causes Respiratory Disease in the Middle East

Coronaviruses derive their name from the corona visible in images such as this 1975 transmission electron micrograph of infectious bronchitis viruses When a 49-year-old Qatari man fell ill in England this month, doctors realized that his respiratory problems and kidney failure were due to a previously unknown virus. Earlier this year, a nearly identical virus, 99.5 percent genetically identical to be exact, killed a middle-aged Saudi man. While a new disease is always cause for caution, there […]

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3:34 PM | Organic Produce Has Pesticide Residues, Too—and the Residues on Conventional Produce May Not Be All Bad

Unlike pesticide-laden conventional food, organic produce is more natural, healthier, and better for you…right? Organic food does contain less synthetic pesticides. But the natural pesticides that replace them can also have harmful effects. For example, the organic pesticide copper sulfate is more toxic than some synthetic pesticides, and it can cause genetic mutations, cancer, liver disease, and anemia. No matter what you choose to eat, both conventional and organic produce can expose […]

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12:39 PM | Clear As Mud: Researchers Make Transparent Soil For Plant Research

Plant researchers who want to study the roots of growing plants have a problem: Those roots are obscured by the soil in which the plant grows. But no more hiding. Now researchers have designed a transparent soil that lets them look at not only roots but also the microbes, good and bad, that colonize them. The transparent soil is made of a synthetic polymer called Nafion. (When not serving as soil, Naflon, a polymer that conducts electricity, lends itself to batteries and fuel cells, among […]

September 24, 2012

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5:45 PM | Data Centers Support the Cloud—But Waste 90 Percent of Their Energy in the Process

Once I’ve typed in a message, shared a video, or uploaded a photo to a social media website like Facebook or Twitter, I tend to forget about it. I assume that if I check back days or even weeks later, the status update or tweet will still be there, safely stored…somewhere. That “somewhere” is in one of tens of thousands of data centers, each filled with many, many servers that physically preserve the vast quantity of information flowing over the internet every day. But while […]

September 23, 2012

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3:49 PM | Data visualisation and Scoop.it

In an effort to clear out my desk I came across an article on Aaron Koblin – the head of the data arts team at the Google Creative Lab. Check out his website – there’s cool crowdsourcing and technology driven … Continue reading →

September 22, 2012

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2:00 PM | Whoa! Sealed-Up Liquid Nitrogen Creates a Ping-Pong-Plosion!

Do not put liquid nitrogen in a sealed container. Without an outlet, the liquid will turn into a gas, pressure will build up extremely quickly, and BOOM! The whole thing will explode. But as you can see in the above video, with a few safety precautions—and 1500 ping-pong balls—Roy Lowry of Plymouth University managed to turn this phenomenon into an unforgettable learning experience.

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1:30 PM | Are Biologists Watching an Evolutionary Leap: One Life Form Absorbing Another?

More than 1.6 billion years ago, one cell engulfed another and put it to work. More specifically, a eukaryotic cell, the sort of cell that contains distinct structures with different functions, took in a blue-green bacterium that could do something it could not: use sunlight to make sugars. The ancient eukaryote then reproduced the bacterium in all of its cells, making it a permanent part of the intracellular environment. What was once an independent microbe was now the chloroplast: the […]

September 21, 2012

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8:05 PM | Wax Filling Was the Cutting Edge of Stone-Age Dentistry

This Stone Age human jawbone contains a tooth with the oldest filling ever found We’re lucky to live in a modern age, an age when, instead of ripping out a painful cavity-ridden tooth, we can have dentists drill away the rotten bit and plug up the hole with a filling. But a new discovery reveals that fillings aren’t just modern conveniences: they date back to the Stone Age. Researchers have discovered that a tooth on a 6500-year-old human jawbone has a large cavity covered by a […]

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12:30 PM | Quick, Lend Me Some Money—Humans Act More Generously Under Time Pressure

Selfishness is good for us—thinking “me (and my relatives) first” lets humans ensure their survival and that of their genes. But generosity can be good, too; it binds humans into safe communities. So if both behaviors are beneficial, which one dominates? A new Nature paper suggests that it all comes down to timing: when we have to make a fast decision, we act more generously than when we have time to think about our choices. Harvard researchers recruited subjects from around the […]

September 20, 2012

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4:02 PM | New Material Will Finally Let Us Convert Waste Heat to Electricity

If you’re reading this with a laptop sitting on your legs, you might have noticed that computers tend to warm up as they work, turning electrical energy into thermal energy. In fact, two-thirds of all the energy we use is lost as waste heat. Maybe, instead of just using the heat from your computer to keep your lap toasty, we should be harnessing that heat by turning it back into electricity. But the thermoelectric materials that convert thermal to electrical energy aren’t very good […]

September 19, 2012

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6:36 PM | Crows Understand Cause and Effect, Even When the Cause is Hidden

For the New Caledonian crow, birdbrain is a misnomer: These members of the corvid family have proved their problem-solving and tool-wielding abilities again and again. The birds may have yet another impressive cognitive capacity, a new study suggests: causal reasoning. The ability to link an event with the mechanism that caused it, even if that mechanism is hidden, is the basis of modern science—and our most basic knowledge of the world around us. If New Caledonian crows are capable of […]

September 18, 2012

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7:51 PM | Meet Baxter, Factory Worker of the Future

Today, Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based start-up run by famous roboticist Rodney Brooks, has unveiled a manufacturing robot that can safely interact with humans, is easily programmable, and at $22,000 is pretty inexpensive, as industrial robots go. Brooks thinks that the robot, Baxter, which goes on sale in October, could revolutionize manufacturing by creating a new source of inexpensive factory labor. Industrial robots are fairly common in today’s factories. Technology Review reports […]

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7:33 PM | Dark Energy Camera Peers Into Cosmic Mystery

A composite image of the star cluster 47 Tucanae, taken by the Dark Energy Camera We know that the universe is expanding, and that it’s doing so faster and faster. But we don’t know why the rate of expansion is increasing. Astronomers have dubbed the unknown cause “dark energy,” which is a pretty cool name for something we know absolutely nothing about. To shine some light on the mystery, scientists devised a the most powerful digital camera in the world: the Dark Energy […]

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5:20 PM | How Isolation Damages Youngsters’ Developing Brains

Young children need attention—and not just to keep them from wandering off or yelling their lungs out. Social interactions actually help their developing brains. We know about this from studying children and animals raised in relative isolation: Neglected children, like those raised in Romanian orphanages, suffer from behavioral and cognitive deficits as adults, and isolated young monkeys grow up to have weaker memory and learning abilities than their socialized peers. Just what is […]

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4:30 PM | Brain Implant Restores Decision Making In Drugged Monkeys

Neuroscientists have made a brain implant that restored decision-making ability in laboratory monkeys whose faculties had been experimentally addled by cocaine. Eventually, researchers hope, such prostheses could boost cognitive abilities of brain-damaged patients. In this experiment, five rhesus monkeys were wired up with an implant that tapped into two areas of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain credited with such functions as thinking and planning, that communicate during decision […]

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1:20 PM | How To Harvest Uranium from the Ocean

Nuclear power depends on a steady supply of uranium. The good news is that we have at least a hundred years worth of uranium. The bad news is that both demand for uranium and the price of production are rising—and a hundred years isn’t all that long. To reinforce our stock of uranium, researchers have proposed a backup plan: gather it from the sea. For every billion pounds of water in the ocean, there are 3.3 pounds of uranium—we just need to figure out how to extract it. […]

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12:30 PM | Look at This: Opportunity Finds Mysterious Martian Bumps

Well, they’re not blueberries. That’s about as close as NASA comes to describing these bumps that the Opportunity rover has photographed from the Western rim of Mars’ Endeavor Crater. In 2004, soon after the rover arrived on the Red Planet, it encountered iron rich orbs (nicknamed blueberries) in the Victoria Cater that scientists cite as evidence for water in Mars’ past. After a preliminary analysis, the researchers found that these new Martian goosebumps, each about 3 […]

September 17, 2012

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5:47 PM | Look at This: We Can Zoom In On Individual Molecular Bonds

We’ve come a long way from the first glass-and-light optical microscopes. These days, scientists can focus on individual molecules using advanced methods like atomic force microscopy (AFM), where a miniscule probe feels out the details of a surface. And in this AFM image of a nanographene molecule, the resolution is so high that for the first time, we can see the individual bonds between atoms, shown here as green lines. In a new paper in the journal Science, IBM researchers used the […]

September 14, 2012

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8:20 PM | Watch This: Water Droplets Held Aloft By Sound Waves

To keep droplets of liquid floating in midair, the device in the video above relies on a hum of sound just above the range of human hearing. This technology, called an acoustic levitator, suspends these tiny balls of liquid using two speakers that project sound waves in opposite directions, counteracting the force of gravity. Originally, NASA developed the device to simulate microgravity. Now researchers at Argonne National Lab are using it as a way to evaporate drug compounds in midair so […]