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Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Hsu’

First ever study of how robots attack tests their murderous ways

Human volunteers also subjected their arms to the tender mercies of the slasher bots, but only when a prototype safety system was engaged. The collision detection system used torque sensors to spot when it hits a different substance and freeze in mid-motion, so that damage to the human subjects was limited.

We're still a bit puzzled as to why human volunteers were in this experiment at all, when there's perfectly good ballistic dummies being eviscerated every week on Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior. But perhaps the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German aerospace agency felt human arms would represent a less expensive option.

The study was presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Alaska earlier this month. We're all for developing safety systems that engage for robots too dumb to recognize Asimov's Laws of Robotics, but we'd still recommend carving your own steak in the future.

[via BBC]

Snort a dose of prevention for measles or other diseases

The inhalable vaccine bypasses the need for icky needles by mixing liquid carbon dioxide with weakened measles virus. That process creates microscopic bubbles and droplets which dry out and become an inhalable powder. Patients can then inhale their protection through a plastic nozzle similar to the neck of a plastic water bottle.

Making the breakthrough required researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a mixing device known as the Carbon Dioxide Assisted Nebulization with a Bubble Dryer, or CAN-BD. The device mixes two streams of fluid and then rapidly expands them to atmospheric pressure, before mixing in warm nitrogen to try the tiny bubbles and droplets.

"One of our primary goals of this project is to get rid of needles and syringes, because they frighten some people, they hurt, they can transmit diseases and there are issues with needle disposal," said Robert Sievers, a biochemist at CU Boulder. His innovation also represents a cost-effective method, at just 26 cents per dose, or about the cost of an injectable vaccine.

The no-needles approach has proved popular elsewhere. Australian scientists have developed a postage stamp-sized vaccine patches that can deliver a tiny but effective dose through the skin.

A first focus on measles makes sense, given that the inhalable vaccine goes directly to the lungs where measles typically attacks. But trypanophobes can also keep their fingers crossed for an inhalable treatment which delivers antibiotic particles for treating tuberculosis, or an inhalable treatment for the papilloma virus which causes cervical cancer.

The case could represent a legal precedent for sorting out truth from falsehood in a court of law

The lawyer, David Levin, represents a woman who claims that she no longer received good assignments from a temp agency after she complained of sexual harassment at a job site. A coworker at the temp agency claimed he heard a supervisor say the woman should not be placed on jobs because of the complaint.

That prompted Levin to have the coworker undergo a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide scientific validation of whether someone is telling the truth. Now the proposed evidence will test the New York standards for scientific evidence in courts -- known as the Frye standard -- which typically requires the evidence to be considered reliable among the broader scientific community.

Both Cephos and another company called No Lie MRI have marketed their brain scans as lie detectors since 2007. They report accuracy rates from 75 percent to 98 percent under lab conditions, but many neuroscientists remain skeptical of, or outright opposed to, using brain scan technology in court.

We reported earlier on a Cephos-funded fMRI study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which tested people who participated in a mock crime within the experiment. The test caught guilty parties, but also sometimes netted innocents who were telling the truth.

Last year, an Illinois court allowed an expert to describe the fMRI brain scan of man accused of murdering a 10-year-old-girl. But that was presented as evidence of the man's mental illness during the sentencing phase of the trial, whereas the new Brooklyn case would be a legal first for determining truth-telling.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on whether this battleground between science and the law translates into wider use of brain scans or not. If it does pass muster with the Frye standard, expect even more debate over the use of brain scans as direct mind readers in the future.

[via Wired]

OK, mayor, 40 percent of your water supply is leaking out ... what do you do?

The company unveiled its "serious game" this week at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas, as a training tool for city leaders and planners. The free game would require players to guide their city through sector-specific missions focused on energy, water, banking, and retail.

One mission involves the water usage increasing at twice the population growth. The city is also losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure, and energy costs are rising. Players would need to put a water management system in place that draws on "accurate real-time data" to make their decisions.

IBM pointed to expert predictions that the world's urban populations will double by 2050, with an estimated one million people moving into cities each week. Today's cities already consume 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their precious water because of infrastructure leaks.

Simulations are already used as tools for real-world planning among financial analysts and the U.S. military. But games such as CityOne could represent a stepping stone to the far more ambitious projects such as Europe's proposed Living Earth Simulator, which would incorporate reams of real-time data about the world.

Either way, we're just waiting for the Hollywood story where the young genius with knack for urban planning suddenly realizes that he's been "playing" not just a game, but real life all along.

Two Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft will help contain what may be the greatest oil spill disaster in history

Two of four modified C-130s have deployed to the Gulf of Mexico from the 757th Airlift Squadron at Youngstown ARS, Ohio. They typically spray pesticides or fire retardant using the Modular Aerial Spray System (MASS), although other Air National Guard units have the Modular Aerial Fire Fighting System (MAFFS). A newer MAFFS 2 version can dispense 30,000 pounds of retardant in just 3 to 5 seconds from one nozzle at almost 14,000 pounds of thrust. Last year, PopSci took a tour of a firefighting 747 that uses similar technology.

Such flying behemoths are just the latest weapon being thrown into the desperate battle to contain the oil slick. The Macondo well has been spilling an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank on April 20. Controlled burning has only had limited impact on the spill, and robot submarines have failed to activate a cutoff valve to cap the undersea well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has corralled almost 106,000 gallons of dispersant -- one third of the world's supply -- to try and break up the oil slick. But the unfolding disaster has already shut down fishing between the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana and Florida's Pensacola Bay. That area provides the majority of U.S. production of oyster and shrimp, as part of the $1.8 billion seafood industry in the Gulf that's second only to Alaska, Reuters reports.

As if to underline the magnitude of the event, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an open submission form for anyone with a tech solution to the oil cleanup problem. Just make sure to note the cost, because BP already faces perhaps the most expensive oil cleanup ever -- and that's not including the collateral environmental damage which may very well cripple the Gulf fishing and tourism industries.

[via Ares Defense Blog]

The future of weather manipulation just got even crazier

The concept works because laser pulses strip electrons from atoms in the air and promote formation of hydroxyl radicals. Those in turn make sulfur and nitrogen dioxides into particles which can form the basis for water droplets -- not unlike how current cloud seeding methods use silver iodide crystals as the "seeds" for water droplets.

But rather than seeding the air with crystals delivered by airplanes or artillery rockets, the Swiss, German and French researchers used a laser which could generate 220-millijoule pulses within 60 femtoseconds, where one femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second. That's as much power as what 1,000 power plants could generate, according to Jérôme Kasparian at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

A lab experiment involved the laser firing inside water-saturated air to create tiny clouds similar to airplane contrails. The outdoor experiment did not produce visible clouds, but clearly boosted the density and size of water droplets according to weather LIDAR measurements.

Cloud seeding has had plenty of critics voice their doubts over its effectiveness. Still, China has used the weather-control tactic for its hosted Olympics, and even delivered snowstorms to weary Beijing residents on multiple occasions. Russia has also prominently used cloud seeding in an attempt to make snow fall on the outskirts of Moscow rather than on the city itself.

Nations intrigued by the idea of more high-tech cloud seeding shouldn't abandon their silver iodide just yet. Researchers need to work on tuning their laser in the hopes of creating large enough water droplets which could fall as rain.

[via New Scientist]

The goal would require gathering unprecedented amounts of information about the planet and its societies

Such "reality mining" would track everything from financial transactions to individual travel itineraries, from medical records to carbon dioxide emissions. If computer modelers can pull off the feat of simulating not only the planet's systems but also every one of its inhabitants, it could potentially lead to simulating the future in a way similar to how weather forecasters predict the weather.

That astounding vision is the brainchild of Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Helding's desire for such real-time knowledge of the Earth stems from his leadership in the emerging field of techno-socio-economic studies, and perhaps reading a bit much of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and dreaming of psychohistory's predictive powers.

Plenty of supercomputers already run complex simulations focused on financial markets or climate change. NASA has also joined forces with Cisco to launch a $100 million "Planetary Skin" network that integrates all sorts of ground, sea, air and space sensors -- perhaps a bit of a precursor to what Helding has in mind.

That's not to say that the project might not need a heck of a lot more money than $1.3 billion, assuming that the European Commission approves it. But Technology Review suggests that the alternate to a publicly funded effort is a darker vision of such predictive power in the hands of a single corporation, or perhaps one nation's military. In that spirit, we'd suggest that there's no time like now to start -- hopefully any such model incorporates the zoom and swoop options available in Google's Liquid Galaxy engine.

[via Technology Review]