Scientists have replicated the behavior of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the open access journal PLOS Computational Biology.
The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the… read more
Bacteria appear to speed up their evolution by positioning specific genes along the route of expected traffic jams in DNA encoding. Certain genes are in prime collision paths for the moving molecular machineries that read the DNA code, as University of Washington scientists explain in this week’s edition of Nature.
The spatial-organization tactics that the researchers’ model organism, Bacillus subtilis, takes to evolve and adapt might be… read more
President Obama on Tuesday will announce specifics on the Brain Activity Map project Tuesday, The New York Times reports. The initiative, which will officially be known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short, has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century by the Obama administration.
The broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, is intended to invent and… read more
EnerG2 has developed a carbon anode that improves the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries by up to 30 percent without requiring a new battery design or a different manufacturing process, MIT Technology Review reports.
EnerG2’s new lithium-ion battery anode is made of a form of carbon in which the atoms have a disorganized, amorphous structure, compared to the crystalline structure of graphite, the material normally… read more
Using a Kinect depth camera and some ingenious computer vision algorithms, SimSensei can diagnose whether you’re depressed or not with 90% accuracy, MIT Technology Review reports.
The system uses an interactive digital avatar to conduct a verbal interview with the person being screened for depression.Skeletal polygonal overlays map the depressed human’s posture, gaze direction, and even “smile level.”
Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was formally declared available for use today at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
Blue Waters, a partnership among NSF, the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, is capable at peak performance of nearly 12 petaFLOPS (12… read more
Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers are working on a multi-university, nationwide project for the U.S. Navy that one day will put life-like autonomous robot jellyfish in waters around the world.
Uses of the robot jellyfish could include conducting military surveillance, cleaning oil spills, and monitoring the environment.
The main focus of the program is to understand the fundamentals of… read more
University of Copenhagen researchers and an international team have for the first time mapped telomerase, an enzyme with a rejuvenating effect on cell aging.
This is one of the results of a major research project involving more than 1,000 researchers worldwide, four years of hard work, DKK 55 million from the EU, and blood samples from more than 200,000 people.
It is the largest collaboration project… read more
Smell-O-Vision was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could “smell” what was happening in the movie.
Now the “smelling screen,” invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee,… read more
Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, has set a new record for itself as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92, IEEE Spectrum reports. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.
Bitcoin is a digital currency that runs on a global peer-to-peer network… read more
It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second, New Scientist reports.
The attackers exploited open domain name server (DNS) resolvers, faking their own IP addresses, replacing them with the address of the target. This… read more
TED has removed the license of TEDxWestHollywood for their planned “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” event, says the TEDxWestHollywood blog.
The takedown was only a couple of weeks before the April 14 event (and after they had spent more than a year preparing), the blog says.
In an email to Suzanne Taylor, the organizer of TEDxWestHollywood, a representative of TED outlined the objections: “And when… read more
Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, are programming a group of 40 robots.
The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.
The robots can also group themselves together into a single… read more
As part of a national research project to develop low-cost artificial hands, the Pentagon has released a video of a robot that can change a tire — almost, The New York Times reports.
In the video, the two-armed DARPA-funded robot uses a tool to remove a tire from a car:
The goal of the program, now in its third phase, is to develop robots… read more
The use of drones by domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage, blogger Glenn Greenwald writes in The Guardian.
A short summary of Greenwald’s comprehensive article: