President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair.
Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s enabled. The little girl adopted by Fred and Dale Fairchild in Duluth, Georgia was born with half a thumb and no fingers on her right hand. Half-way across the country a smart teenager and five other girl scouts were looking for a science and technology project to complete.
Danielle Fairchild Writes with Help of Prosthetic Hand
Dale Fairchild contacted Kate Murray and the troop of The Flying Monkeys and a partnership was born. 13-year old Murray was born with a thumb but no fingers on her left hand. Despite this digital abnormality she took up the violin five years ago using a device that clips to the bow and wraps around her left palm. And she thought she could help someone else learn to write.
Upon hearing about little Danielle The Flying Monkeys flew into action, learning all they could about prosthetic limbs, talking to doctors and learning how to build one from scratch.
Fast forward to February 7 as Kate Murray, Gaby Dempsey and Mackenzie Gewell present their prosthetic hand device to President Obama in the White House at the second White House Science Fair.
As the President held the BOB-1.2 plastic device in his hand, he said, “This is outstanding.”
President Obama Pumps Air Cannon at White House Science Fair
The Flying Monkeys won a $20,000 Innovation award from For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League. FIRST is the non-profit organization started by inventor Dean Kamen, who famously brought us the Segway. And for Murray a trip to the White House is “super exciting.”
She says, “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up. I want to design cars to be more fuel efficient and/or rely entirely on wind or solar energy.”
14-year old Joey Hudy unwittingly stole the show providing spectacular photo opportunities as President Obama listened the story about how the Phoenix teen built his marshmallow air gun from PVC pipe with the help of employees at his local Home Depot. Then he asked if the device was operational and decided on the spot that the two should fire it together.
The President asked that everyone in the line of fire move back because this was an improvised activity while strolling through the student exhibits and talking to the winners of over 40 science fairs and competitions.
Joey Hudy with President Obama Impressed by Power to Shoot a Marshmallow Missile
When the gun popped, press cameras clicked wildly and they caught the child-like wonderment in the eyes of the President, which encapsulated the entire White House science fair.
Clearly, the President was impressed by the caliber of projects presented and the students themselves. He said, “Now, as I was walking around the science fair, I was thinking back to when I was your age. And basically, you guys put me to shame.”
President Obama lauded the whip smart students and their clever projects. But he was struck by something more.
He said, “It’s the fact that you recognize that you’ve got a responsibility to use your talents in service to something bigger than yourselves.”
He said some students will develop new products that change the way we live. He pointed out Hayley Hoverter, the winner of the 2011 Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Challenge. The 16-year-old Los Angeles resident invented a flavorless, colorless sugar packet that dissolves in hot water.
About her invention the President said, “It could potentially save up to two million pounds of trash each year — and that’s just at Starbucks.” Mastercard gave the teen $10,000 to turn her concept into a working business.
Next the President said that some students will see a problem in their town or city and do something about it. After 14-year old Benjamin Hylak was worried that seniors in nursing homes would get lonely he built a robot attached to a computer monitor. His telepresence robot which moves around the center and allows seniors to connect via Skype with their family and friends qualified him as a BROADCOM Masters Competition 2011 finalist.
Angela Zhang Explains Her Nanoparticle Cancer Treatment
President Obama said, “Inventions like Benjamin’s could make life better for millions of families.”
The same holds for the three representatives from California.
Angela Zhang of Cupertino, who has proposed a potential cure for cancer. This year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for her nanoparticle cancer treatment. She says, “I keep saying 60 years from now I will probably be telling my grandkids everything that happened when I was 17.”
Hayley Hoverter of Los Angeles, who developed sugar packets that dissolve in hot drinks is the now the 16-year old CEO of Sweet (dis)SOLVE. She spoke at TEDx SoCal last year.
Neil de Grasse Tyson with Braeden Benedict at White House Science Fair
Braeden Benedict of Ranchos Palos Verdes designed a device to detect concussions in athletes after one of his football teammates experienced prolonged concussion symptoms and had to stop playing contact sports. The 15-year old designed a helmet-mounted sensory detector that turns red when an athlete is hit hard enough to cause a concussion.
He took the top prize in America’s 2011 Top Young Scientist competition at the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge where he won $25,000 for his efforts.
The President spoke of the adversity several groups of students overcame just to be at the science fair. A rocketry team from Presidio, Texas came from the 4th poorest school district in the nation where most students speak English as a second language. Parents raised money to help the students make the trip to Washington D.C. Mr. Obama said they even sold a goat to make the journey to the White House.
He applauded the winners of the Michigan Regional Contest of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Three Detroit students imagined a clean energy future for their city and while they were doing so their school burned down, forcing them to merge with another school while they completed their project. The team said, “(Future City) helps me make a better city to live in.” They designed there vision around a city following the theme of “Fuel Your Future: Imagine New Ways to Meet Our Energy Needs and Maintain a Healthy Planet.”
Samantha Garvey Tells President Obama about Mussels
The President also acknowledged 18-year old Samantha Garvey, who has spent a lot of time with the President lately. The high school senior from New York made headlines after winning a spot in the semi-finals of the Intel science talent search. But more than her ingenious project studying mussel predation on Long Island she captured the attention of America because when she found out she was a semi-finalist she was homeless.
Since then she has appeared on television and sat in the First Lady’s box at the State of the Union Address last month. At the White House science fair the President announced that the teen would like to work for NOAA or EPA some day. Pointing at them he said, “This is Dr. Lubchenco. She is the head of NOAA. Lisa Jackson, right there, head of EPA. You might, you know, just want to hook up with them before you leave.”
The President said that all the students who participated in the science fair inspired him. He said, “It’s young people like you who make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come.”
President Obama Tells Science Fair Students They Are Paving the Way to the Future
Dale Fairchild says that before The Flying Monkey’s created BOB-1 for little Danielle to use as she learns to write the toddler used her right hand like a flipper. But after the molded plastic device arrived, complete with a Vel-cro(TM) strap to attached a plastic pencil holder, the girl began using her fingerless hand to pick things up.
The teen engineers have never met Danielle Fairchild but their prosthetic hand device is going through the expensive and lengthy patent process, placing the teen inventors on track to help many more people besides the little girl in Georgia.
C-SPAN coverage of President Obama’s speech to the White House Science Fair, Feb. 7, 2012. (15:13)
The focus of Lee Cronin’s work is understanding and controlling self-assembly and self-organisation in chemistry to develop functional molecular and nano-molecular chemical systems; linking architectural design with function and recently engineering system-level functions.
Lee Cronin's Lab Searches for Inorganic Building Blocks of Life
In other words, the 38-year old organic chemist started with the very predictable inorganic molecules as a basis to build nano-machines. Somewhere in the process he began to create self-assembling structures that also began to self-oranize and to evolve. He was on his way to creating inorganic life.
In the process he has created large inorganic, metallic cells from polyoxometalates assembled into bubbly spheres. These non-biological cells let chemicals in and out of their membranes. Some have been taught to photosynthesize.
First Inorganic Cell, iCHELL
And Cronin says, “What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving, inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”
He tells the BBC, “The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world – a kind of inorganic living technology.
“Bacteria are essentially single-cell micro-organisms made from organic chemicals, so why can’t we make micro-organisms from inorganic chemicals and allow them to evolve?
“If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it’s not just a biological process. It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design.”
His team submitted a paper on Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells (iCHELLs) to the journal Angewandte Chemie.
In his TED Talk Making matter come alive in July, Cronin says that in his lab he is recreating the famous Urey-Miller chemistry experiment which led to the discovery of amino acids, the building blocks of life in the 1950s.
In 2011, Cronin’s own lab looks like something out of Frankenstein as he sends electricity through bubbling flasks filled with chemicals trying to find similar inorganic building blocks of life.
He postulates that we emerged from a primordial soup of chemicals before we had RNA, DNA or proteins. Before we became humans, our genetic makeup had to be contained in cells. Once there it could become self-replicating and evolve into our ancestors and eventually into us.
He is testing this hypothesis in the lab by using an inorganic “LEGO kit” of molecules. Taking the three or four building blocks, he and his team of collaborators in his lab and around the world are aggregating them all together into thousands of large nano-molecular molecules.
These molecules are about the same size as DNA and proteins but they contain no carbon, the element in all living things. The one piece he was lacking was containers to hold the molecules. Much like biology, he needed to make some cells.
So Cronin and his team made iCHELLS to hold these new inorganic molecules.
Once he achieved that over the summer, he began to conduct mini chemistry experiments inside the inorganic cells.
And now he is searching for a way to activate the process of Darwinian evolution within his iCHELLS by getting inorganic molecules to compete with one another.
He says, “Evolution cannot be cut apart. You have to find the fitness function.”
He says if this theory holds true then he will be able to take the idea of the selfish gene — a biological system that wants to survive and replicate — one step further to the notion of selfish matter.
Cronin’s effort to make inorganic matter able to evolve on its own is his way to build a more comprehensive definition of life.
He says, “We are really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive.”
]]>(no audio to accompany video)
After the earthquake in Japan or Haiti robots were pretty useless in sifting through rubble to find survivors. They also didn’t do well in off-road situations where the environment had shifted and they couldn’t maneuver over obstacles.
But a chemist at Harvard has been leading the charge to overcome this massive challenge. By studying the locomotion of squid, starfish, worms and other creatures that undulate, slither, creep and crawl, George M. Whitesides has pioneered a new class of robot, called soft-bodied robots.
Designed to edge into tight spaces, under doors or through slightly opened windows, soft robots or softbots can change their shape depending on the situation they are in. MIT roboticist Matthew Walter tells the Associated Press, “The unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go to places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot.”
The current softbot resembles a drunken Gumby character. Then it ambles to life when air is pumped into its rubber body and four limbs. Its gait is somewhat unsteady as it lopes along dragging wires to an external power source with it as it goes. But it looks a lot more like a slimy sea creature than a robot.
And that’s just the look scientists were going for. Like many other fields of science robotics uses Mother Nature as a source of inspiration. Unmanned military flying vehicles or drones get their agility, body shape and other characteristics from birds and bugs.
Now a new generation of soft-bodied robots resembles invertebrate animals, including a slug.
After years of experimentation a four-inch catepillar-shaped silicone robot emerged from a cocoon at Tufts University and showed it could roll into a ball and propel itself forward.
(no audio to accompany video)
Right now the Harvard softbot has mastered traveling on several surfaces, including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O. But it drags wires around wherever it goes. Making the robot self-contained is the researchers’ next challenge. That and increasing its speed. Right now it takes just under a minute to slither under a pane of glass.
The research appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
]]>What started out as an educational lesson turned into real-world adventure for five high school students from Sagniaw, Michigan. The students from Arthur Hill High School, near Michigan’s Shipwreck Alley on Lake Huron located two missing ships at the bottom of the lake.
In a science outreach collaboration called Project Shiphunt, Sony and Intel partnered with NOAA’s Dr. Mark Delgado, the chief scientist responsible for mapping the Titanic wreck and invited the students to map the lake bottom in an effort to locate the Merrick and the Laurentian, both of which sank in the late 1800s.
Much to their surprise the students were able to find the exact location of the shipwrecks after creating millions of sonar data points and mapping the bottom of Lake Huron. They then directed divers and a submersible robot with a camera to go inspect the wreckage.
Tiesha Anderson researched historic shipping lanes on Lake Huron and the other Great Lakes before embarking on their ship hunt. The students learned how to plot possible shipwreck locations. James Willett helped plot possible wreck locations with the help of Stan Stock, a local shipwreck hunter.
After eliminating several locations to narrow the search, the students worked with a hydrographer to learn about tracking coordinates before hitting the water to look for the ships.
The teen team consisted of James Willett, Cody Frost, Tiesha Anderson, Yer Vang and Tirrea Billings.
17-year-old sophomore James Willett dabbles with guitar when he isn’t searching for shipwrecks. In school he likes math and is going to try out for the football team this year. He wants to be a video game designer.
A Junior at Arthur Hill, Cody Frost helps out his dad at the family-run auto body shop when he’s not busy looking for 100 year old ships. He describes himself as a laid back, glass half-full kind of guy. Rather than worrying about not having enough he focuses on what he can do with what he has.
Tiesha Anderson is a 15 year old sophomore who has been playing basketball since she was in 3rd Grade. That instilled a competitive drive in her that has motivated her to be a straight-A student. She likes science because she is a curious person with a big imagination. She is hoping that finding ships will help her decide what she wants to do in life. She just knows it will be in the sciences.
Yer Vang struggled her first year of high school because she was quiet. But her sophomore year she helped find two ships and discovered that high school can be pretty fun. She’s not sure if she wants to be an astronaut but she definitely wants to ride a rocket into space some day.
Tirrea Billings is a 16 year old junior who loves math and science. She is interested in how the environment is being destroyed by pollution and forest degradation. Until Project Ship Hunt she had never been on a ship and says she really had no intention of going on one.
The rest of their story will be told in a one-hour documentary about the project on August 30 on Current TV.
]]>Psychologists have learned that the Internet is becoming a primary form of transactive memory, meaning the information is external or stored outside of the person.
For some it is becoming far easier to reach for a keyboard than to try to extract a piece of information from the brain. Google and Yahoo! are among the first words people in a new study thought of when asked a trivia question.
Researchers say that rather than knowing the answer to a question we are learning how to seek the answer and fast. Over the last few decades intelligent quotients have been gradually rising but many people don’t feel any smarter.
But the research from Columbia University finds that the Internet is already changing the way we remember. Betsy Sparrow asked a bunch of trivia questions (including, which Best Picture nominee lost the Academy Award to Gone with the Wind in 1939?)
She is studying memory, specifically types of external memory, ranging from other people to the Internet. In this study, Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, which is published in the current issue of the journal Science she looked at whether people think about their computers when they don’t know the answer to something.
She says, “We found that they do. Secondly, we found that people when they don’t expect to have access to information later remember it better than if they do expect to have that access.”
Before the Internet, we still relied on outside resources to find information. We called them other people. Other research shows that after the death of a spouse or even divorce, some people experience memory loss because they have lost their partner, a memory resource.
Now we are offloading much of the information we used to hold in our working memories and shifting to create memories of how to access the information rather than the information itself.
“We also found that people tend to prioritze where to find things over the things themselves, which is adaptive in this case I think.” — Betsy Sparrow, Columbia University
Is this part of our natural evolution or is technology driving the change? Please leave your comments below.
]]>Now that we’ve been living in the Information Age for over 50 years, it’s safe to say we’ve become quite proficient at gathering data. We’ve built elaborate systems to collect and transmit data. We’ve also built elaborate systems to protect and encrypt personal information so it can’t be misused.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of the people in gathering, processing and analyzing huge amounts of data. Peer to peer computing networks and citizen scientists are helping the scientific world gather an entire world of data. But automated systems are churning out more data than we know what to do.
Some clever artists are sensing that within each piece of data there is a single artifact of humanity. When pooled together, those data points become a catalog, documenting human moments. The patterns that can be derived from the information clearly document our culture.
It turns highly impersonal data into a very intimate portrait of humanity.
Artist Aaron Koblin gave a TED Talk at this year’s technology, art and design demonstration. The video is 18 minutes but is very powerful. Here’s some background on what he mentions during his talk.
“The 19th Century culture was defined by the novel.
The 20th Century culture was defined by the cinema.
The culture of the 21st Century will be defined by the interface.” — Lev Manovich, media theory professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
He sets the scene by saying, “Interface can be a powerful narrative device.” Marshaling the power of the Internet, powerful home computers running on a protocol that showcase the power of audio and video, Koblin puts an artsy twist on the hustle and bustle of modern life while leveraging the latest technology to help refine the information, tranforming it into art.
First he visually represents one statistic – there are 140,000 airplanes flying at any given time – and turns it into an art project called Flight Patterns. Then he creates a map with routing information, makes it come alive by color-coding different aspects. The overall image is a dynamic system that could just as easily be a snapshot of our brains in action as the U.S. flight system.
Working with the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT he maps international communication in a way that could easily appear to be a giant solar flare erupting on the sun. By visualizing tiny bits of information a story emerges and it is one where the digital world looks like a mirror image of the natural world, an idea that should comfort some.
Drawing on a computer program developed by Amazon.com called Mechanical Turk, Koblin exploited the system for his own artistic pleasure. Mechanical Turk creates human intelligence tasks that allows access tens of thousands of people to perform simple jobs, like rating an item, drawing a simple picture or just giving an opinion. The idea is that there are some things people can do better, faster and more accurately than a computer. For their small effort they are given a small reward. Each task takes just a minute and participants are paid in pennies.
For his digital sheep project, The Sheep Market, Koblin asked for people to give him their two cents by drawing a sheep. For that, he would in turn pay them two cents. He collected 10,000 sheep for his project and then sold the sheep as stamps on an open sheep market in blocks of 20. He did similar projects with asking people to draw portions of a $100 bill as part of his Ten Thousand Cents project. This was to measure accuracy rather than creativity. Then he built an audio task to collect voice recordings which he turned into a crowdsourced version of “Bicycle Built for Two.”
He also decided to demonstrate the power of the modern web browser by challenging people to create music videos without using a digital camera, or any camera for that matter. He again had people draw images which he then stitched together into 24 frames per second. And the result was a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, honoring the last song he ever recorded before he died.
In another music video project, he personalized the video for the individual viewers by having them enter their street address before playing the song, We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire. In this ongoing project, Google Earth and advanced web browser features help serve up personal childhood information in the context of the music, giving the video a more intimate feel.
Through all of his artistic exploration with technology, Koblin’s message is clear. The data that is out there is not to be feared. He says, “I think data can actually make us more human.”
Koblin works for Google, where he is currently directing the Data Arts team.
]]>“As we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.” — Aaron Koblin, media artist
It sounds like something from science-fiction — but it’s actually the latest brainchild from town planners in the western French town of La Rochelle. Small electric cars without drivers steer themselves through the streets taking locals and tourists around town in the first driverless car pilot program.
French law prevents vehicles without drivers from traveling on expressways so when those tests begin later this year, they will have a person in the vehicle as backup in case something goes awry.
The system works much like an elevator. A screen at stations allows passengers to enter their destination and the nearest vehicle comes to pick them up. Civic leaders want to add more automated vehicles to the fleet of five to reduce wait times at stations and get people where they need to go faster.
New Rochelle is hoping to roll out more driverless vehicles in time for the Christmas holidays.
In the U.S. tech giant Google is pressing Nevada to change state law and allow driverless vehicles on state roads and highways. The company would like to get permission to test its location software on driverless cars but must get permission from the state legislature before conducting any tests.
Volvo’s Senior Safety Engineer Thomas Broberg says that driverless cars will become a reality as they are a big part of the company’s initiative to eliminate fatalities in any of its cars by 2020.
]]>Students at the California Institute of the Arts have built an orchestra of interactive musical robots. Musicians use specialized computer programs to play the robotic instruments. The Associated Press sat in on a rehearsal for the group’s May 12 concert.
Tammy, BreakBot, NotomotoN, GlockenBot and a handful of other kinetic music machines round out the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra. Made from old furniture, scraps from electronic junkyards and other found objects, this robot orchestra combines synthesized music with programmed machines. When you put together you get beautiful music.
Four years ago Ajay Kapur decided that he wanted to create a full orchestra composed equally of humans and robots. He also wanted trained musicians and programmers to work together to program and instruct the robots.
He worked with Michael Darling, the CalArts’ theater program director to recruit musicians from their classes and to build robots from broken furniture and other discarded theater props.
After several months of collaboration, KarmetiK was born.
Kapur, who holds a doctorate in electronic engineering, says, “It’s like a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.”
And the machines in the orchestra can do things humans can’t, including playing every note perfectly and faster than humanly possible.
This is not the first group of music-loving robots ever to perform. A few years ago a solo bot at Japan’s Waseda University played Flight of the Bumblebee flawlessly and faster than any human could. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny also took a robot orchestra on the road with him last year. But like the Japanese robot, his bots played pre-programmed compositions.
]]>Call them operabots. In a marriage of music and media, a team at the MIT Media Lab has infused an opera with robotic technology.
In Death and the Powers, a new opera by Media Lab professor Tod Machover, the main character wishes to leave the physical world, but remain there digitally. He downloads himself into The System and continues to interact with the audience and other characters through robots using a technique Machover invented, called disembodied performance.
On stage the operabots appear more like podiums (podia?) than humans as they roll across the stage. But their movement and artificial emotion is controlled by sensors attached to the main actor who spends most of the show in a concealed booth in the orchestra pit.
His movement, heart rate, and other information is sent on stage to the robots who convey what he is experiencing below.
Known as America’s most wired composer, Machover has been trying to get audiences to see and feel sound for over 30 years.
]]>Ever wish your eyes were lasers? A Lenovo laptop prototype brings that wish closer to reality.
Touch screen and movement based technology is quickly supplanting the mouse as the standard way to interact with computers. But a company is looking down the road to make our interface with machines more user friendly.
Tobii is perfecting eye tracking so that a user can merely peer at the screen to point and click. The technology measures the distance between the pupil and the glint in the eyeball using lasers. Then it creates a 3-D model of where the user is looking. From there it’s just a matter of seeing to make the laptop go.
The goal is to make PCs more personal, faster and less reliant on outside tools, like keyboards or even fingers.
Practical computer applications are about two years away but many see eye tracking just around the computing corner.
]]>Ray Kurzweil, chairman and chief executive officer of Kurzweil Technologies, discusses artificial intelligence and the impact of computer technological advancements on society.
Based on the recent artificial intelligence accomplishment of a machine beating man at the game show Jeopardy!, futurist Kurzweil says computers are getting smarter and they will reach human levels by about 2029. He also adds that a singularity will occur in 2045 where computers surpass the intelligence of people and begin creating and thinking at a new level.
Kurzweil speaks with Margaret Brennan and Jon Erlichman on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness.”
]]>Hundreds were put in jeopardy tonight at the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute campus in upstate New York. But there was no danger. They were there to watch two humans take on a super computer named Watson on the TV game show Jeopardy!
Spoiler alert. The computer wins.
Bested by the super smart machine, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter–two top Jeopardy! winners–tried to outwit the computer but in the end machine dominated man.
Going into the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge, Chris Welty, a Rennselaer graduate and the man behind the machine didn’t think his next generation artificial intelligence could stand up to the brainpower of the two game show champions.
Dr. Welty says it was very hard to watch, especially when his creation failed to answer several questions. But those mistakes were few and far between.
Now the team that built Watson says they will try to apply this type of computer technology to medicine, government and law in an effort to advance computer-aided decision-making in those fields.
]]>In Jeopardy’s! 47 year history, there has NEVER been a contestant like Watson. And who knew the first public face-off between man and machine would be a TV game show.
Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter represented humanity in a demonstration of intellectual prowess against a new IBM supercomputer named Watson.
Both seasoned human contestants say playing against Watson is like playing against a really tough competitor but it can be beat both on the buzzer and in answering the question.
IBM unveiled Watson, which is the size of ten refrigerators, not to beat Jeopardy champions but to demonstrate that it has the ability to take information from atlases, encyclopedias and other reference works and not just regurgitate facts. Watson has the ability to contextualize by taking all surrounding facts about a place, person or process and arrive at a likely conclusion based on the information presented.
The company is hopeful that this new generation of supercomputer will speed medical diagnoses and perform other useful real world computation in a fraction of the time.
]]>“I don’t know if there is a Vegas [betting] line, but always bet on humanity.” — Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings
When the ants go marching two by two, pay attention to what they are doing. Scientists are. And they are discovering clever ways to improve cyber security just by mimicking the behavior of ants.
The foraging insects use something called swarm intelligence to efficiently locate and gather food. Computer scientists are applying this behavior to computer networks to find viruses, worms and other electronic threats.
Story written and produced by Michelle Ma
]]>
The government has enlisted the help of furry critters and buzzing bugs to further its military mission of surveillance, defense and even weaponization.
From carrier pigeons that carried encoded messages during World War II to canine suicide bombers, animals have been conscripted into global conflicts for a long time.
Now a new movie–complete with talking guinea pig ninja spies–takes a fanciful look at this covert kingdom. But below the Mission Impossible meets Rin Tin Tin glossy shell of a plot lies some real science.
Listen here.
G-Force Trailer with Interview:
G-Force: Weird Science Creates Animal Spies – Awesome video clips here
In a move to take science from the lab and place it in the public square, the World Science Festival is about to start its second year of inciting curiosity.
REALscience talked with organizer and physicist Brian Greene to hear what we can expect at this year’s festival.
Photo: Physicist and Co-Founder Brian Greene
Credit: Suzie Horgan for World Science Festival
Listen here.
Buy Tickets (if you are in the New York City area.)
REALscience correspondent Richard Romano will have a full report from the festival next week.
Festival highlights:
Opening Gala to celebrate E.O. Wilson’s 80th Birthday.
Pioneers in Science, a discussion with Harold Varmus and Sylvia Earle led by New York City high school students.
Transparent Brain, a neurological exploration of how close we are to reading the mind of others.
Watching Wilson and Watson, actress Anna Deavere Smith’s trip down the rabbit hole and into the minds of these two mega scientists.
Notes & Neurons, a musical adventure with Bobby McFerrin (of Don’t Worry, Be Happy fame.)
World Science Festival Street Fair, an all-day outdoor science fair with the Math Midway, Discovery Labs, CSI, and much, much more.
]]>Using brain waves to communicate sounds a lot like science fiction but it might be the answer for people with communication disorders.
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on his Twitter feed using only his mind.
]]>Dr. Mark Kuzyk is a Washington State University physics professor, who accidentally blew up a podium using a glove and some liquid oxygen. But he is also a physicist working on medical technology and wants to use smart materials to turn your couch into an iPod.
He studies the photomechanical effect where he uses light to change the shape of materials. His devices control light in the same way that transistors control electricity.
]]>The best way to teach students is to throw them in a lab and get them working. — Mark Kuzyk
Scientists are worried that the Internet is becoming a clogged superhighway, complete with bottlenecks where information seems to disappear.
These electronic misfires are called Internet black holes. And, they seem to be a result of limited routing architecture.
But a team at University of California, San Diego is trying to uncover the hidden shape of the overall network to help open up the information arteries that get information across the globe in just a few seconds.
A new math model is based on the 1990s party game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which uses a sociology theory called the “small-world” paradigm.
While that team tries to understand the structure of the Internet, a team at University of Washington is mapping the black holes as they appear.
]]>
As the line between fact and fiction blurs in television and film productions, Hollywood is turning to the National Academies of Science for a much-needed dose of reality.
A new initiative, called the Science & Entertainment Exchange was announced yesterday and will match creative screenwriters and producers with scientists to keep the fiction realistic or at least scientifically accurate.
]]>
Science is facing some big questions, like how will we capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide or how will we overcome antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections?
But, a one-celled organism that lives in the sea may have the answers to health and environmental issues living inside.
Cyanobacteria and bacteriophages are knocking down barriers in biology and could even help the environment down the road. But first, scientists need to figure out how these tiny sea creatures tick.
]]>
A group of University of Washington engineers have built a school of fish.
The underwater robots look like fish, act like fish and thanks to some clever programming, move like fish.
]]>
Scientists are teaching monkeys how to operate a mechanical arm by using just their thoughts.
]]>
Detectives use reasoning to solve cases. The most famous detective is Sherlock Holmes, known for his keen deductive reasoning and ability to make sense of subtle clues.
Now a group of scientists is trying to construct a virtual Sherlock to help machines learn. The goal of the five-year project is to get machines thinking and deciding based on multiple types of information.
]]>Spring is here. The grass is growing. That means the lawn needs to be mowed. For many, the thought of yard maintenance is enough to wish for cooler, winter weather. But for those who’d rather watch the lawn being mowed there’s hope on the horizon.
Robot lawn mowers are here. They’re not cheap and they don’t do a better job than a power mower but Consumer Reports thinks they will get better over time.
]]>It sounds like science fiction but it’s real. A giant robot is being assembled during the current mission to the International Space Station. Built in Canada, Dexter will assist space-walking astronauts complete the station and starting next year will take over the heavy lifting.
]]>For decades robots have been the stuff of science fiction. But the bots unveiled at the RoboExpo in San Jose show how they are becoming essential for manufacturing, technology and even entertainment.
]]>
Soon taking a stroll through the landmarks of Europe will be as easy as opening a digital map. Wait a couple of years and all the major landmarks of the world—from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to the Statue of Liberty will be digitally reconstructed using other people’s vacation photos. The work is being done at the University of Washington and has already shown great promise.
]]>