It looks like a four-armed starfish, but so far it’s unaware of its own shape. After flailing its arms for a while, however, the robot gets a sense of its design and begins to walk. The real feat comes when engineers remove a part of its leg: The robot senses a change in its structure and begins walking in a different way to compensate. The demonstration is the first proof that a robot can generate a conception of itself and then adapt to damage, a handy skill to have in unpredictable environments.
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.
Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.
Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.
Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.
The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.
Nerdshit is going through a transition right now. We’re looking for a new host, and trying to decide if it’s worth keeping up / paying for. Sorry for the lack of updates! Much love, Zach.
In new research, reported in the current online issue of the journal Social Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Georgia and San Diego State University report for the first time that social exclusion actually causes changes in a person’s brain function and can lead to poor decision-making and a diminished learning ability.
“Our findings indicate that social rejection can be a powerful influence on how people act,” said W. Keith Campbell, a psychologist who led the research. The new research is the first to examine subjects’ brain patterns following social exclusion using the magnetoencephalography (MEG) technique.
Other authors of the paper include Jean Twenge of San Diego State University; Brett Clementz and Jennifer McDowell, also psychology faculty members at UGA; and UGA graduate students Elizabeth Krusemark, Kara Dyckman and Amy Brunnell.
Researchers have known for a long time that there is a link between social exclusion and the failure of self-control. For instance, people who are rejected in social situations often respond by abusing alcohol, expressing aggression or performing poorly at school or work. (Bridget Jones chooses “vodka and Chaka Khan.”)
The new study, however, is the first to use MEG to show that there are actual changes inside the brain when test subjects are manipulated to feel socially excluded.
Ding dong the merrio!
Sing it high!
Sing it low!
Let them know…
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is standing down, President George W Bush has announced after bruising losses for Republicans in mid-term elections.
Mr Bush said that both he and Mr Rumsfeld had agreed the time was right for new leadership at the Pentagon.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates has been nominated to replace Mr Rumsfeld.
The Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in the polls, and the Senate balance of power hangs on a tight race in just one state, Virginia.
They may be cold-blooded, but some lizards have warm personalities and like to socialise, a new study shows.
A behavioural study reveals that lizards have different social skills: some are naturally inclined to join large groups while others eschew company altogether. The discovery of reptilian personality types could help ecologists better understand and model animal population dynamics, say the researchers involved.
A diet containing curry may help protect the aging brain, according a study of elderly Asians in which increased curry consumption was associated with better cognitive performance on standard tests.
Curcumin, found in the curry spice turmeric, possesses potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
It’s known that long-term users of anti-inflammatory drugs have a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, although these agents can have harmful effects in the stomach, liver and kidney, limiting their use in the elderly.
Antioxidants, such as vitamin E, have been shown to protect neurons in lab experiments but have had limited success in alleviating cognitive decline in patients with mild-to-moderate dementia.
In their study, Dr. Tze-Pin Ng from National University of Singapore and colleagues compared scores on the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) for three categories of regular curry consumption in 1,010 nondemented Asians who were between 60 and 93 years old in 2003.
Most of the study subjects consumed curry at least occasionally (once every 6 months), 43 percent ate curry at least often or very often (between monthly and daily) while 16 percent said they never or rarely ate curry.
After taking into account factors that could impact test results, they found that people who consumed curry “occasionally” and “often or very often” had significantly better MMSE scores than did those who “never or rarely” consumed curry.
“Even with the low and moderate levels of curry consumption reported by the respondents, better cognitive performance was observed,” Ng and colleagues report.]
Americans are often thought of as people who believe in God.
But results of a new Harris Poll show that may be changing.
The poll found that 42 percent of all U.S. adults said they are not “absolutely certain” there is a God, including 15 percent who are “somewhat certain,” 11 percent who think there is probably no God and 16 percent who are not sure.
Not everyone who described themselves as Christian or Jewish said that they believed in God. Only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews said they are “absolutely certain” there is a God. However, most Christians who described themselves as “born-again” (93 percent) said they are absolutely certain there is a God.
The public is almost equally divided between those who think of God as male (36 percent) and “neither male nor female” (37 percent), with 10 percent saying “both male and female.” Only 1 percent thinks of God as a female.
Much of the public (41 percent) thinks of God as “a spirit or power that can take on human form but is not inherently human,” according to the survey. But 27 percent think of God as a “spirit or power that does not take on human form,” while 9 percent of adults think of God as being “like a human being with a face, body, arms, legs, eyes, etc.”
Only 29 percent of those polled said they believe God “controls what happens on Earth.” Of those believers, 57 percent were born-again Christians. And 44 percent of respondents said they believe that God “observes but does not control what happens on Earth.”
For poor people, living in an affluent area can be a health hazard. That is the provocative conclusion of a study of the death records of more than 8000 people living in four US cities.
The ill effects of being poor or living in economically disadvantaged areas have been demonstrated before, but it is unusual to consider both factors in the same study. When Marilyn Winkleby and colleagues at Stanford University in California did so, they were surprised to find that death rates in four Californian cities were highest for poor people living in the richest neighbourhoods (American Journal of Public Health, DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.060970).
They offer two possible explanations: poor people living in rich areas may have to pay more for housing and other services, magnifying the effect of poverty; alternatively, their health may suffer from stress caused by continually being reminded that they are at the bottom of the economic pile. “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” says team member Catherine Cubbin, now at the University of California, San Francisco.
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