Thanks to Eldad
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
A team at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium is embarking on a 42-month research project to build and test a 60-strong swarm of small, autonomous robots—the swarmanoid—capable of collaborating in 3-D environments.
The swarmanoid initiative follows the successful completion of the swarm-bots project, in which the researchers demonstrated the ability of identical robots to work in formations to overcome challenges such as carrying heavy objects and traveling across rough terrain—tasks that a single swarm-bot could not accomplish alone.
The $3.5 million project will feature footbots, handbots and eyebots, said Marco Dorigo, research director at the university’s IRIDIA lab.
The three types of bots will join forces to create a swarmanoid and perform various jobs. The footbots will transport objects on the ground level, while handbots with specialized climbing and grappling features take to the walls. Some eyebots equipped with visual sensors will operate attached to the ceiling, overseeing the action below and feeding information to their robotic colleagues; others will fly.
The European Parliament has approved a 54bn euro (£36bn) ($80bn) plan to boost science research in Europe.
Framework Programme 7 (FP7) is designed to support several priority areas of research.
Of the different research categories, information technology gets the biggest chunk of funding, with a 9.1bn euro (£6bn)($12bn) budget.
But research into climate change and energy have received a comparatively small amount of funding in the plan.
The Parliament gave the go-ahead to the plan on Thursday at its second reading. FP7 is due to be formally adopted by the EU on 5 December. The programme is due to run from 2007 to 2013.
Protesters in Paraguay have staged a public crucifixion calling for a jailed former army general to be set free.
Tomas Velazquez, a supporter of General Lino Oviedo, popular among Paraguay’s indigenous people, was tied and nailed to a cross outside the Supreme Court.
Mr Velazquez called on the court to review Gen Oviedo’s 10-year jail sentence for plotting a 1996 coup.
A blind man suffering déjà vu. It sounds like a contradiction in terms – but the first case study of its kind has turned the whole theory of déjà vu on its head.
Traditionally it was thought images from one eye were delayed, arriving in the brain microseconds after images from the other eye – causing a sensation that something was being seen for the second time.
But University of Leeds researchers report for the first time the case of a blind person experiencing déjà vu through smell, hearing and touch.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced a half million dollars in funding for development by 2010 of supercomputers capable of two petaFLOPS sustained performance, more powerful than the fastest supercomputer existing today, and scalable to greater than four petaFLOPS.
The ultimate goal of the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS) program is to create a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems that will be available for national security and industrial users.
DARPA (.pdf)
This image of a massive walrus looming through clouds of mud while probing for food in Arctic waters was voted best overall photo in the 2006 Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. By Göran Ehlmé from Sweden.
Here is another one called puzzle and one called sai by the same crew, rinpa e shidan.
The idea that creative geniuses might not be entirely sane isn’t exactly new. But just how much do creative types have in common with people suffering from psychosis? Well, according to Daniel Nettle at the University of Newcastle, serious poets and artists have just as many ‘unusual experiences’ as people diagnosed with schizophrenia. What saves them from the disabling effects of schizophrenia is that they don’t suffer from the lack of emotion and motivation – known as ‘introvertive anhedonia’ – also associated with the illness.
Nettle asked artists and poets, mental health patients and ‘non-creative’, healthy controls to fill out a questionnaire that’s designed to detect schizophrenic-like symptoms in healthy people. Participants seriously involved in poetry or art (as opposed to mere hobbyists, or non-creative controls) reported having just as many unusual experiences as did patients diagnosed with schizophrenia – that is they tended to answer yes to questions like “Do you think you could learn to read others’ minds if you wanted to?” or “Are the sounds you hear in your daydreams really clear and distinct?”. However, in contrast, they scored lower than both patients and healthy controls on measures of lack of emotion and motivation.
With number portability already possible in the U.S., cell phone users are freely allowed to carry their numbers to whichever carrier they choose. Taking your handset with you to a new carrier, however, is a completely different story.
Many cell phone carriers “lock” their phones specifically to their network, meaning that any phone bought from one network cannot be freely used on another network using the same technology. Carriers often do this in an effort to prevent consumers from taking advantage of special subsidized phone pricing and then jumping to another service provider.
Today, the U.S. Copyright Office changed all that, and is legally allowing cell phone users to break the software locks that cell phone carriers place in their phones. However, carriers are still permitted to software lock their phones.
Also added to copyright exemptions today allow film professors copy sections from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books, reports AP.
Computer programs and video game software that no longer have available the original machines required to run them on are also exempted, thus validating the use of select emulators. A bit of a monkey wrench in the emulator legality issue is that the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii all include some form of classic library emulation, possibly taking any game playable on current consoles, new or old, off the list of copyright exempted material.
Renewable energy is gathering steam in several states as voters and governors push electric utilities to generate a set percentage of electricity from clean sources such as wind and solar power.
In Washington state, voters approved a measure Nov. 7 mandating that 15% of electrical power come from renewable sources by 2020.
That makes 20 states and the District of Columbia with such requirements, according to the Department of Energy. Two others states � Illinois and Vermont � have non-binding goals on using renewable energy sources.
More states are forcing utilities toward wind, solar and other renewable energy sources, such as geothermal and biomass, to cut the use of coal and natural gas and spur greater U.S. energy independence. Burning coal produces greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. Power plants fueled by natural gas pollute the air with sulfur dioxide.
United Nations negotiations on fisheries have ended without a global ban on trawling methods which destroy coral reefs and fish nurseries.
Conservation groups and some governments had argued for a ban on bottom-trawling, which drags heavy nets and crushing rollers on the sea floor.
Negotiators could only agree on a limited set of precautionary measures.
Last month, leading scientists warned there would be no sea fish left in 50 years if current practices continued.
Negotiations at the UN in New York aimed to secure an agreement to go before the General Assembly next month.
Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.
The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome – the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual ” letters” of the genome.
It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.
Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or “book of life”, is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.
The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought – which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.
The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene – one from each parent – people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.
The studies suggest variations in the number of copies of genes is normal and healthy. But the scientists also believe many diseases may be triggered by an abnormal loss or gain in the copies of some key genes.
Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.
The findings, published simultaneously in three leading science journals by scientists from 13 different research centres in Britain and America, were described as ground-breaking by leading scientists.
Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.
MIT researchers have worked out a theoretical scheme for a wireless-energy transfer that could charge or power devices within a couple of meters of a small power “base station” plugged into an electrical outlet.
The power base station would emit low-frequency electromagnetic radiation in the range of 4 to 10 megahertz. A receiver within a gadget—such as a power-harvesting circuit—could be designed to resonate at the same frequency emitted by the power station. Within a couple of meters of the station, it would absorb the near-field energy.
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