Monthly Archive for November, 2007
To explore how groups of cockroaches make collective decisions, scientists have created a robotic cockroach that the real insects accept as one of their own.
The robot doesn’t look anything like a cockroach to human eyes.
“It looks like an electronic matchbox,” said Jose Halloy, a researcher at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. But that doesn’t matter, he says, “because in fact it has to look like a cockroach from a cockroach perspective.”
Basically, it has to smell like a cockroach. The scientists coat the boxy robots with a chemical, a cockroach smell, so the real roaches won’t run away.
“The cockroaches are not at all stressed by the robots because they are perceived as cockroaches,” Halloy said. “So the cockroach is just accepting that kind of strange buddy. And that’s the start of the game.”
The game was to see if researchers could use this robot to figure out how roaches make group decisions. “Cockroaches are gregarious insects, so they live in groups,” Halloy said. They don’t live in complex societies like bees or ants, he said, but roaches do make choices.
A compound found in cannabis may prevent breast cancer spreading to other parts of the body, scientists believe.
Experts hope that cannabidiol, also known as CBD, could be a realistic alternative to chemotherapy.
However, the study carried out by the California Pacific Medical Centre Research Institute does not advocate marijuana use among cancer patients.
It said it was unlikely that the right concentrations of CBD could be achieved through smoking cannabis.
CBD fights the disease by stopping the activity of a gene called Id-1, which is believed to be responsible for the spread of cancer cells from the site of the original tumour – a process known as metastasis.
The study found CBD had this affect on breast cancer cells in a laboratory.
Researchers are now optimistic that the compound can become an effective – and non-toxic – alternative to chemotherapy.
In an unprecedented feat of biological alchemy, researchers have turned human skin cells into stem cells that hold the same medical promise as the controversial embryonic stem cells.
Scientists believe stem cell research will be able to cure numerous diseases and regenerate failing bodies. The new technique, however, doesn’t require the destruction of embryos, or use human eggs or cloning. Thus, it sweeps aside the ethical objections to stem-cell research.
Even in a field accustomed to breathless proclamations of breakthroughs, the research—published Tuesday in two papers appearing in the journals Cell and Science—has provoked wonder among many scientists. They say the advance is more significant to medical research than last week’s announcement that scientists had cloned the first monkey embryo.
In a notion taken from science fiction afficionados, University of Arizona researchers presented a robot that moves by using the brain impulses of a moth at the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.
Charles M. Higgins, UA associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and doctoral student Timothy Melano presented their findings and outlined the mechanics behind the robot’s movements.The robot’s motion is guided by a tiny electrode implanted in the moth’s brain, Higgins said, specifically to a single neuron that is responsible for keeping the moth’s vision steady during flight. The neuron transmits electrical signals which are then amplified in the robot’s base and through a mathematical formula, a computer translates the signals into action, making the robot move.
The moth is immobilize inside a plastic tube mounted atop the 6-inch-tall wheeled robot. To get the moth to imitate flight, Higgins and his team placed the moth in its apparatus on a circular platform surrounded by a 14-inch-high revolving wall painted with vertical stripes. The moth’s neuron reacts to the movement of the stripes and the process begins.
PhysOrg via KurzweilAI
Researchers have made an important leap in designing DNA-based circuits, reports this week’s Science. They’ve created the first system that allows amplification of desired DNA sequences without using enzymes—a step towards creating artificial biochemical circuits inside cells.
“They’ve begun to develop a programming language, a software, for DNA,” said Andrew Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin. The work is “a significant advance over previous [attempts],” he added.
Scientists have previously used DNA to build synthetic biochemical circuits. But these networks have generally only been designed to perform one task. “These were machines that carried out a particular function or solved a particular problem,” Ellington told The Scientist.
In the new work, “we show a method of designing them generally so that it can be applied basically to any sequence you want,” said first author David Yu Zhang of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
A trial scheme which set up “shooting galleries” in three cities, enabling heroin users to obtain drugs and inject them under supervision, has dramatically cut crime rates and stopped addicts buying their supplies on the streets.
Yesterday’s preliminary results from the £2.5m pilot project sent a ripple of excitement through the treatment community, because long-term heroin users are among the hardest addicts to treat. They lead chaotic lives, often robbing and stealing to fund their habits. According to official figures, 10 per cent of drug addicts commit 75 per cent of the acquisitive crimes in the Britain. But the number of offences committed by the heroin addicts taking part in the shooting gallery scheme fell from an average of 40 each per month before they were admitted to “about half a dozen a month” after six months of intensive therapy, according to Professor John Strang, the head of the National Addiction Centre at the Maudsley Hospital, who is leading the study.
Instead of buying street heroin every day, the 150 volunteers are now buying it only four or five times a month on average – while a third of them have completely stopped “scoring” the drug on the streets.
A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment.
Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules’ dynamic reactions in a single living cell.
By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley’s Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell.
The technique could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics.
Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.
These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.
Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.
Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time.
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
BBC News via Kurzweil AI
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