People who build robots say that, in the future, we’ll all have at least one of them working for us. They have learned that they need to create a kind of robot evolution in order to transform a basic robot into something effective for a specific task. Roboticist Josh Bongard created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk.
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Greenland’s ice sheet, which could be a major cause of rising sea levels, melted at a record rate in 2010. And a look at an ice field atop the highest mountain in the eastern European Alps suggests that the glacier may hold records of ancient climate extending back as much as a thousand years. We better investigate them quickly before it all melts away.If Greenland’s ice sheet melts, ocean levels would rise by over 20 feet, which would drown coastal cities around the world.
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E. coli bacteria is the primary cause of food poisoning. We may be able to get even for all those stomach aches we’ve had by turning it into automobile and jet fuel. The biotech company Joule Unlimited, which is privately held and highly secretive about its work, has been granted a patent for "a proprietary organism," which turns tout o be an adaptation of the E. coli bacteria that feeds only on carbon dioxide and gives off liquid hydrocarbons that can be turned into diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline.read more
We’ve talked about the kind of language your computer uses, but what about the words that humans use? Google has created a huge database, consisting of 500 billion words, using over five million digitized books that are available to the public for free downloads, enabling scholars to see how words are used in relation to other words. It gives us a year-by-year count of how often various words appear, opening a window into how we think and act.
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