Just A Theory

In a crossover of my two main interests, I’ve written an article about science and video games:

Video games have always been children of science. The earliest games were written on punch cards in university laboratories and played on enormous computer mainframes only available to researchers. Now the entire video game industry is dependent on technological breakthroughs brought about by unfaltering scientific progress. But what have video games given science in return?

Take the world’s most famous video game scientist, Dr. Gordon Freeman. Despite holding a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he’s no more a scientist than Mario is a plumber; as the silent protagonist of a first-person shooter, Freeman is essentially just a gun on a stick. His Half-Life colleagues don’t win any Nobel Prizes for personality, either. The game’s late-’90s graphical limitations meant its scientists are based on only four different character models, all wearing an identical uniform of a lab coat and tie.

Read the rest at The Escapist.

A new material could form both the battery and the body of next generation electric vehicles, say scientists at Imperial College. The composite is strong enough to be used as a bonnet or a door, while also storing and discharging electricity to power the wheels.

Current electric cars are limited to a range of a few hundred miles before they need recharging, as the heavy batteries must be small enough to keep the vehicle’s weight down. The new material could increase a car’s range without making it heavier, allowing them to be used on cross-country trips rather than being constrained to urban use.

It would also reduce the need for internal wiring, as electronic gadgets such as built-in sat nav could be powered directly from the bodywork, and may eventually find use in other electronics, according to project leader Dr Emile Greenhalgh:

“You might have a mobile phone that is as thin as a credit card because it no longer needs a bulky battery, or a laptop that can draw energy from its casing so it can run for a longer time without recharging.

“We’re at the first stage of this project and there is a long way to go, but we think our composite material shows real promise.”

The composite is made of carbon and glass fibers embedded in a polymer resin. The energy storing process isn’t reliant on chemicals, so works faster than a normal battery and is slower to degrade.

The team at Imperial are working with Volvo to try out the new technology. The first prototype will replace part of the boot where the spare tire is stored, known as the wheel well, with a piece made from the advanced material. Volvo say this could reduce the weight of their cars by up to 15%.

Chimp cinema

Earlier this week the BBC broadcast the first ever film shot entirely by chimpanzees:

The acting isn’t that great, and the special effects are terrible, but it’s still more interesting than some of the rubbish churned out by Hollywood! The film was part of a scientific study investigating how chimps perceive the world around them.

Mars movies

Although it seems we’re probably not going to step foot Mars any time soon, you can go there virtually today. Doug Ellison, founder of UnmannedSpaceflight.com, has used data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to recreate a faithfully recreated flyby of the Martian surface:

See more on his YouTube page.

Magnets…in space!

Have you ever wondered how magnets work in zero gravity? “Very well,” is the answer, according to video game developer/astronaut Richard Garriot:

Digital trees are set to become more realistic thanks to a new animation technique that copies movements from the real thing.

Dr Peter Hall and Chris Li at the University of Bath have developed software that can analyse video footage of a tree to automatically generate a natural looking computer model. Dr Peter Hall says this will make animation much easier:

“Rendering trees has always been a headache for animators. Trees move in irregular ways, and it’s very hard to achieve natural-looking movement.

“It is so expensive that traditional animation often uses static trees – except in big-budget films. In computer graphics, tree models are just as hard to produce.

“With our system, the user can produce new trees of the same variety, with each one an individual.”

With the new software, animators will be able to grow digital forests with ease. All they have to do is draw around a tree outline in the first frame of a video, and the program will track its leaves and branches. The software can even generate slightly different trees by varying the movement data. Here’s a video explaining how it works:

As a lifelong gamer, I remember when videogames first took the leap into 3D. Rendering a complicated leaf and branch structure wasn’t possible in games like Mario 64, so they just used 2D pictures instead. Things have changed a little bit since then, but dodgy trees can still let down an otherwise realistic game. I look forward to seeing this new technique put to good use!

In all the excitement of the new year, I forgot to explain my Just A Theory schedule for 2010. I’ve decided to post twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the usual Weekly Roundup on a Sunday. Of course, there might be the occasional post outside that schedule, but its what I’m aiming for. Remember that you can always subscribe to the RSS feed and get notified each time a post goes up.

Fart FAQ

Everybody does it, even though sometimes we don’t want to admit it, so why not learn some facts about farts with this handy infographic?

Hold your nose and click for a larger image.

Wii tech good enough for physio

A video game accessory designed to help you get fit could also be used to rehabilitate stroke victims, says a physiotherapist. Ross Clark of the University of Melbourne found the accuracy of a Wii balance board compared well to lab-grade “force platforms”, which normally cost more then £11,000.

Both pieces of equipment are designed to measure pressure from a person’s foot. The force platform aids physiotherapists in reteaching a stroke patient how to stand, and Clark found that a balance board could act as a suitable replacement, despite retailing for under £100.

Its not the first report of scientists using Wii controllers as cheap sensors in their work – see this Wired story, complete with a picture of a Wiimote in a lab stand.

Another New Scientist article today:

Did four-legged dinosaurs gallop like a horse, run like an ostrich or hop like a kangaroo? All three have been suggested, but with only fossils to go on it’s a difficult puzzle to solve.

That’s why Bill Sellers, a computational zoologist at the University of Manchester, UK, has developed a new technique for simulating dinosaur movement and working out which gaits they most likely used.

Sellers and his team used a laser scanner to create a 3D computer model of the skeleton of an Edmontosaurus, a type of hadrosaur or “duck-billed” dinosaur, and added virtual muscles to make it move. Fossilisation does not preserve a dinosaur’s muscles, but educated guesses about how they worked can be made by studying animals alive today, such as ostriches.

You’ll find the rest at New Scientist, along with a video of the dinosaurs in action.

My latest article for New Scientist is about a new method for mapping the globe:

A new technique for unpeeling the Earth’s skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world’s oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines.

“Myriahedral projection” was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“The basic idea is surprisingly simple,” says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe’s surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares.

Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk’s innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word “myriahedral” to describe it, a combination of “myriad” with “polyhedron”, the name for polygonal 3D shapes.

You’ll find the rest at New Scientist, along with some nifty images and video.

The Year’s Most Amazing Scientific Images

The media loves their end-of-year lists, and science magazines are no exception. Popular Science has 62 of this year’s most amazing scientific images. Bit of a random number, but they’re great – check out this nanoscale nuclear war, which was accidentally produced during the construction of 175-nanometre-wide wires:

Robots under the sea

Also included in the Pop Sci list are these robotic jellyfish, which I discovered independently earlier this week. They’re extremely lifelike, but I guess that’s easier to achieve when you’re dealing with something as alien as jellyfish!

Have yourself a very little Christmas

Missing from the Pop Sci list however was this tiny winter creation:

At just 0.01mm across, the world’s smallest snowman was made by scientists at the UK National Physical Laboratory. They welded two beads of tin together with platinum to form the head and body, then carved the eyes and mouth with a focused beam of ions. Finally, another blob of platinum finish provides the snowman’s nose. What, no nano-carrots?

Universities must do more to stop formula stories

This week Times Higher Education have an interesting article about your favourite and mine, the “formula for” story. Of particular concern is the move by PR companies to use students to advertise their dodgy equations, such as the formula for a perfect night out from last month.

The concern is that students could be damaging their scientific reputations by taking part in this kind of PR activity, and that universities should take more care in publicising the work through their press offices. It turns out that Leeds University, home to “VKendologist” Phillippa Toon, were happy to facilitate media interviews for the nonsense formula story. A bit worrying, really.

Test-tube burgers, anyone?

Would you eat meat grown in a petri dish? Scientist in Holland have produced lab-grown meat for the first time – though they haven’t tasted it yet.

Cells taken from the muscle of a live pig grew into sticky muscle tissue, which doesn’t sound very appetising because the meat needs exercise to give it a more normal consistency.

I’d certainly welcome lab-grown meat, as long as it tasted like the real thing. It would take much less space and resources than breeding pigs or cattle, and animals wouldn’t have to die before we tuck in. I’m sure many people will be horrified by the idea, but a meat cell is a meat cell, wherever it grows.

Oh nos!

It had to happen eventually. The lolcats have got in to the Large Hadron Collider, and I think we all know how it’s going to end:

I don’t know why, but I just love clever ideas for electricity generation. Maybe it’s because I’m a great big nerd with vague but constant guilt about how the energy I used is produced.

The latest idea I’ve seen comes from researchers at the City College of New York, who’ve developed a way to literally suck energy from the air flow around cars and planes. They’re using materials with piezoelectric properties, which convert physical movement in to electricity, to generate a form of wind power.

It works like this. Airplanes, cars and other vehicles all create an airflow as the move forward and push the air around the to one side. Placing a small piezoelectric device into this flow, not much bigger than your thumbnail, will produce a voltage that can charge a battery.

You’re not going to be running your car on it any time soon – the energy produced is nowhere near enough to power an engine. We use cars for a lot more than just driving these days though, and the piezoelectric devices could power internal computer systems, or charge your mobile phone. The researchers are now trying to model the best location for their devices on a vehicle to maximise the energy they produce.

I think that ideas like this are the future of electricity generation. It’s not a very sexy solution to the problems of climate change, and you won’t see any politicians crying “let’s all attach small things to our cars!”, but if we can come up with loads of small ways to produce clean power, it could add up to a significant carbon saving.

A busy week has meant a pretty poor showing on Just A Theory, but hopefully a packed roundup will make up for it:

LHC a-go-go

The Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again! As our CERN correspondent Emma mentioned last month, scientist in Geneva have been working on restarting the LHC after it had to be shut down last year. Their hard work paid off on Friday, and proton beams are now successfully colliding in the 27km-long ring of the world’s largest experiment. Now for the science!

What if the Earth had rings?

Speaking of rings, check out this short video showing how it would look if Earth had its own set, like Saturn.

At the equator they appear to be a thin line through the sky, but further north or south they make an amazing sight, lighting up the sky even at night. Anyway we can build these things and cover them in solar panels or something?

Field less players to win the World Cup

It seems that having a large squad to choose from can actually be a hindrance when it comes to top football. You might think fielding substitutions lets mangers pick the best players for every situation, but research shows that sticking with the top 11 is the key to success.

Bacteria that can detect landmines

Scientist at the University of Edinburgh have developed a strain of bacteria that glow green near explosives. By mixing them with a colourless solution, they can be sprayed from the air on to suspected landmine fields, turning the ground green if mines are detected.

Large Hadron Collider taken down by bread

Earlier this week the Large Hadron Collider suffered yet another setback, when it was dive-bombed by a bird carrying a piece of baguette. You just can’t make it up.

The rogue bit of bread caused a short circuit in part of the LHC’s above-ground electronics, leading to an automatic shutdown of the giant ring’s cooling system. Thankfully the LHC was only knocked offline for a few days this time, and systems are now running normally. Lets just hope the scientists at Geneva have invested in a couple of scarecrows.

Eating fast makes you fat – now we know why

It’s often said that eating too fast will lead to putting on weight, because your brain doesn’t have enough time to catch up with your full stomach. Now, new research has found a possible physiological explanation for why this might happen.

Dr Alexander Kokkinos of the Laiko General Hospital in Athens found that eating too quickly can slow the release of two hormones from the gut, PYY and GLP-1. Volunteers were given 300ml of ice cream to eat at different rates, and those who ate the slowest had the highest hormone concentration.

X-rays top the charts

Back in June I reported on a Science Museum survey to pick the most influential scientific infection in their collection. The results are in, and it seem X-rays take the top spot, followed by penicillin and the DNA double helix.

It’s a bit of an odd choice, I think. In my original post, I went for the Pilot ACE Computer, because it was the first multi-tasking computer. It seems others disagreed though, because it came in at a lowly seventh place. Still, X-rays over penicillin? I’ve taken antibiotics far more than I’ve been X-rayed, as have most people I would’ve thought. Strange.

Smokers looking to quit could be helped by a cigarette-crushing video game, according to a study published in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior. A group of Canadian researchers discovered that smokers placed in a virtual reality environment full of cigarettes to be destroyed showed a significant reduction in nicotine cravings.

The study took 91 regular smokers and randomly assigned them to two groups. All participants went through a 12-week anti-smoking program involving questionnaires, tests and counselling, as well as four weekly sessions with a head-mounted video game set in a medieval castle. One group was tasked with collecting virtual balls, while the others had to track down and crush cigarettes.

Crushing cigarettes in a virtual world

The results showed that the cigarette-crushers had a significant reduction in nicotine cravings compared to the ball-collectors. At the end of the 12-week treatment, 15% of the cigarette-crushers had abstained from smoking, while just 2% of the ball-collectors had managed to give up.

Virtual treatment also had a lasting effect. When interviewed six months later, only 20% of the ball-collectors said they had not smoked in the last week, but 39% of the cigarette-collectors had resisted lighting up.

The researchers suggest a number of reasons why cigarette-crushing helps keep from smoking. The act of destroying a virtual cigarette could boost a person’s confidence in their ability to give up real cigarettes, or make them want to give up more. Enjoyment in the game could also lead them to change their response towards cigarettes – presumably from “I’m dying for a smoke” to “die, cigarettes!”

Whatever the explanation, this research could lead to new anti-smoking treatments. Instead of reaching for the nicotine patches, you might end up patching your PC with some cigarette-killing software. Anyone for a game of capture the fags?

Girard, B., Turcotte, V., Bouchard, S., & Girard, B. (2009). Crushing Virtual Cigarettes Reduces Tobacco Addiction and Treatment Discontinuation CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12 (5), 477-483 DOI: 10.1089/cpb.2009.0118

The past week has seen the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prizes. As with last year, I thought I’d wait for them to all come out before taking a look at the “science” ones:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

This prize was split equally between Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work in the 1980s on telomeres, the “protective caps” on the ends of the chromosomes that contain our genetic information.

These caps allow chromosomes to be copied end-to-end during cell division by protecting them against degradation. Telomeres are also a key part of the ageing process; as the telomeres shorten, cells begin to age. Maintaining telomeres through use of the enzyme that forms them (telomerase) could lead to new medical treatments.

The Nobel Prize in Physics

One half of this prize was awarded to Charles Kao for research in 1966 that lead to the invention of fibre optic cables. Kao figured out how to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, allowing high-speed transfer of data around the world. Without his work you wouldn’t be reading this, because the internet would be impossible.

The other half was shared by Willard Boyle and George Smith for the invention of the charged-couple device (CCD) in 1969. Found in everything from digital cameras to space probes, the CCD uses the photoelectric effect (for the theorising of which Albert Einstein received a Nobel Prize in 1921) to convert light in to electric signals. As well as ushering in the era of digital photography, CCDs are used extensively throughout the whole of scientific research.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Finally, this prize was also split equally, between Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz, and Ada Yonath for their work on understanding the structure of the ribosome.

Ribosomes act as a kind of molecular interrupter, translating a DNA sequence in to the proteins that make up life. Using X-ray crystallography, the trio mapped the structure of the ribosome to generate 3D models of it in action. These are used to study the effects of antibiotics on bacterial ribosomes, and thus create new treatments for disease.

Autotune the cosmos

Autotune is a piece of software designed to tidy up slightly out of tune singers, but people have discovered it can also be used to turn almost anything in to a song. Results vary, but this Autotuned version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is actually really good:

Ig Nobel 2009

This year’s Ig Nobel awards, which celebrate “improbable research” in science, were announced earlier this week. Amongst the winners were a team who investigated whether it is better to be hit over the head by a full botle of beer or an empty one, and the creators of a bra which can convert in to two protective face masks.

The best seat in the house

Above is Bruce McCandless II, around 100 meters away from the space shuttle Challenger. He’s the furthest out in space that anyone has ever been, and he’s got quite a view.

Recently I’ve been getting quite excited about the prospect of augmented reality. If you’ve not heard the buzzword, its about about overlaying digital information on to the real world. With the rise of powerful handheld devices like the iPhone, augmented reality is becoming more common – check out this Tube-location app that helps you navigate around London.

Mobile phones are a start, but what I’m really interested in is a wearable computer. Rather than living in your pocket, such a device would be built in to a pair of glasses or even contact lenses. Its not a new idea – people like Steve Mann have been using wearable computers for decades – but now there seems to be a greater appetite for a proper commercial product.

The WEAR in action

That goal could be getting closer, thanks to some experimental kit being used on the International Space Station. Astronauts are trialling the Wearable Augmented Reality (WEAR), developed by Belgium-based Space Applications as a replacement for their current system – pen and paper. This surprisingly low-tech solution allows the ISS crew to consult operational manuals with ease, but requires them to physically hold on to their instructions. WEAR offers voice-activated hands-free controls, highlighting important objects in the real world and displaying information directly in the user’s field-of-vision.

The WEAR is built from off-the-shelf components, but is currently limited by scheduling and budget constraints, rather than technology. All equipment used on-board the ISS is subject to strict checks, and the team behind the WEAR found it easier to use what was already up there. Rather than using an ultra-modern PC, the WEAR interfaces with tried-and-tested laptops that are over five-years-old. As a result, the WEAR can only operate for an hour at a time before the batteries need recharging.

While the hardware up in space may be limited, there are no such restrictions here on Earth. Space Applications is considering applying the technology to fire-fighting, presumably as a way of navigating smoke-filled buildings. I’m excited to see new uses of augmented reality coming up, and I’m looking forward to eventually trying it myself!

I’ve been away for a while, poncing around in Switzerland. In between burning my back to a crisp and getting stung in a very painful place by a wasp (lets just say it couldn’t happen to a woman), I’ve actually been doing a bit of journalism for a online magaine called international Science Grid This Week, based at CERN.

If you’ve never heard of it, grid computing is a cool way for computers to share processing power remotely (in the same way that the World Wide Web allows people to share information remotely).

Anyway, heres the first few paragraphs of an article I’ve written about a project called The Lost Sounds Orchestra. In a nutshell its about a real-life orchestra which consists of dead musical instruments, the sounds of which have been recreated using complex computer modelling. Its pretty cool stuff.

Last September, iSGTW reported upon the return of the “epigonion,” an ancient Greek wooden stringed instrument resembling a harp. Ancient instruments can be lost because they are too difficult to build, or too difficult to play, but the epigonion was heard again after ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) recreated its sound using grid-enabled computer modeling.

More ancient instruments are to be heard soon, after the organization’s official Lost Sounds Orchestra finishes its preparations for a unique performance towards the end of this summer.

It should include a whole host of other lost instruments, including the barbiton (an ancient base guitar), the syrinx (a pan flute), an ancient lower Mediterranean frame drum, the salpinx (a kind of ancient trumpet) and the aulos (an ancient oboe).

 You can read the rest here if thats sparked your interest.

Now we’ve all heard that DNA could be the future of computing, in fact Sam wrote an article for the Guardian about a recent development that showed it was possible to make DNA into components such as toothed gears and pipes.

However, it has to be said I have remained a little sceptical, I think it has something to do with the fact that, after reading the stories, I often come away with weird pictures in my head – like miniscule versions of existing machines made out of DNA.

However, last week a paper was published in Nature Nanotechnology which made more sense to me than the others. It convinced me that DNA could actually be useful in computing – to make microchips.

The paper describes how DNA can be made to “self assemble” into shapes, which are then mounted on silicon and can act as tiny fastening posts for nanoscale electrical components. Because the DNA shapes are so small, they can be placed very close together, opening up the possibility of being able to build much smaller computer components. In fact, the researchers say each component could be as little as six nanometers apart, eight times closer than is currently possible.

The technique involves taking a long strand of DNA in solution, and adding shorter ‘staple’ strands. Due to the complimentary base pair nature of DNA, the shorter strands fold the long strand of DNA into shape. The solution is then poured over a silicon substrate.

This silicon substrate requires lithographic pre-treatment to make etched ‘sticky sites’, otherwise the DNA shapes would stick randomly. However, the sites are negatively charged and would therefore repel the negatively charged DNA. The silicon is therefore washed with magnesium chloride, to allow positively charged magnesium ions to attach to the etched surface. The magnesium ions then attract the DNA shapes, which bind strongly and become mounted on the silicon.

There are still a few problems with this new technology though. Since the only shapes currently possible are triangles, or shapes composed of multiple triangles, any attached components will be able to point in any one of three directions – not ideal when the direction of the nanowires and other components need to be accurate. The researchers will also need to carry out extensive research into what the best conductor is for this application. Scientists put the timescale of the development of this technology at 10 years.

Are a generation of children growing up with text messaging at risk of turning their brains to mush? The Daily Mail seems to think so.

“Predictive text messaging changes the way children’s brains work and makes them more likely to make mistakes generally, a study has found.”

The study in question was recently published by the journal Bioelectromagnetics, and did indeed look at mobile phone use and cognitive function in children. What Michael Abramson and colleagues did not find, however, was a causal link, despite what the Mail might think. Remember folks, correlation does not imply causation.

Researchers tested the mental abilities of 317 Australian 12 and 13-year-olds, and recorded their mobile phone usage. Results show children who had more calls and text messages were less accurate in memory tests, but completed them faster. The paper goes on to suggest that text messaging could be responsible, as predictive text “train[s] the user to favour speed over accuracy.” A quote from Abramson in the Mail article backs this up:

“We suspect that using mobile phones a lot, particularly tools like predictive text, is behind this.

“Their brains are still developing so if there are effects then potentially they could impact down the line, especially given that the exposure is now almost universal.

“The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave.”

In a word: bollocks. The data gathered simply does not back this up. It may be completely true, but it’s not a statement that can be drawn from the evidence available in his paper. Makes a nice sound bite, though.

This line of argument is further undermined because the same correlation was seen with phone calls, not just texts, implying the underlying mechanism might be the same. Perhaps children who use their phones more often are just naturally more easily distracted, thus pay less attention? There is no way to tell from this study.

That doesn’t stop Baroness Susan “Facebook makes you fat” Greenfield weighing in, with her usual attacks on anything invented in the past couple of decades. In addition to suggesting “Generation Text” will cause the downfall of humanity, she has a go at Twitter:

When I was a child, if I wanted to tell someone about my day, I spoke to them face-to-face, I wrote them a letter or I walked to the phone box down the road.

Communication was far from instant and, although we were not aware of it at the time, it influenced what information we deemed worthwhile sharing.

Today, we can ‘tweet’ to the universe such inanities as: ‘I’ve just put my socks on.’ A friend can respond – ‘Congratulations!’ – within seconds.

A Twitter search for “I’ve just put my socks on” does admittedly turn up a single result, but this is just one of the thousands of message sent every day. Despite this common criticism of banality, I don’t think most people actually use Twitter in this way. No one cares what you had for breakfast, so tweeting about it probably results in a quick exodus of followers. Of course, I have no evidence to confirm this other than my own anecdotal experience, but at least I admit as much!

I agree with Greenfield that new technologies must be evaluated for potential harm. Where we differ is my requirement for causal links and solid evidence, rather than conclusions pulled out of thin air.

So I wrote a post a few weeks ago about some new software that looked to help emails self destruct, hoping to spark a debate about online privacy. I got in touch with the producer of the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet and got commissioned to do a radio piece on it. You can download the podcast here, my piece starts at 13.40. It is also available  on the website to stream directly (Episode 11/08/2009).

I interviewed one of the inventors Yoshi Kohno, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and Peter Sommer, a Digital Forensic Specialist and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.

It was great to make the blog go auditory and hopefully there will be more to come soon.

Another 100 metres

High-speed running will sap the energy of even the top athletes, but it seems scientists never tire of it. Dutch statisticians have declared the 100-metre sprint could potentially be run in just 9.51 seconds. The current record, set by Usain Bolt in 2008, stands at 9.69 seconds.

If this sounds familiar, its because I wrote not one but two blog posts last year on the very same subject. This time, the researchers used a branch of statistics called extreme-value theory to analyse previous records.

As the name suggests, extreme-value theory is used to answer questions about extreme events. It’s normally used by insurers to calculate the risks of natural disasters, but it seems that a record-breaking sprint can also be classed as “extreme”.

Machines are better than you

Japanese engineers have built a robot that can move faster than the human eye can see. Watch, with the aid of slow mo, how the robotic hand deftly controls balls and sticks as no human can:

LHC will run on half power

Ah, the Large Hadron Collider. It’s been good to Just A Theory, providing a wealth of blogging material from raps to rants, but has faired less well in actually working. Even the classic technological fix, “have you switched it off and on again?” hasn’t worked, because when the LHC boots up again this November, it will only operate at 3.5 TeV, half normal operating power.

The massive ring had to be shut down in September last year after damage caused by an incident that caused the temperature to rise rapidly. The LHD will run through Christmas to let researchers gain experience in running it, and then the power will be boosted to 5 TeV. If all goes to plan, the machine will be shut down again at the end of 2010 to prepare for full power operations of 7 TeV.

A week on the Guardian’s Technology desk means I haven’t been keeping up with all the science news as much as I normally would. Don’t worry though, I’ve still got some good stuff in this week’s roundup.

Run Forrest.exe, Run!

Toyota have created a robot that can run. Not an easy task, as the machine must keep its balance whilst moving at fast speed, but the result looks promising:

Will we eventually have millions of these little guys running about the place, I wonder?

LaTeX tech

Bit of a geeky one this. LaTeX is a language used by scientists and other people to create documents containing lots of equations. I’ve used it in the past, and whilst it produces nice results, it can be tricky to use because of all the commands you have to learn. Remembering the codes for mathematical symbols can be especially difficult. Detexify allows you to draw the symbol you want with your mouse, and it will give you the code. Even if you have no use for LaTeX, it’s fun to have a play and watch the symbol recognition in action. Try drawing a smiley face!

Kill or cure?

Kill or cure? is a website that seeks to “make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.” Where else can you learn that ketchup prevents cancer, but toothpaste causes it?

Kids vs climate change, round 2

A while back Sam wrote a post laying out the environmental reasons not to have children. It inspired quite a debate between some commenters, and now his position has been backed up by new research. Statisticians at Oregon State University found that in the US, having one less child will have an almost 20 times larger impact on the environment than things like changing the car you drive, or recycling.

I guess it’s fitting that I should write a story about bacteria whilst feeling ill:

Computers are evolving – literally. While the tech world argues netbooks vs notebooks, synthetic biologists are leaving traditional computers behind altogether. A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.

The research, published today in the Journal of Biological Engineering, proves that bacteria can be used to solve a puzzle known as the Hamiltonian Path Problem. Imagine you want to tour the 10 biggest cities in the UK, starting in London (number 1) and finishing in Bristol (number 10). The solution to the Hamiltonian Path Problem is the the shortest possible route you can take.

Read the rest at the Guardian

‘Never write anything in an email that you wouldn’t want your mother to read’. The idea behind the saying is that nothing on the internet ever dies, and could one day come back to haunt you. Unfortunately roughly 85% of the emails I send I would rather not have read by my immediate family.

Realistically a throwaway email or Facebook message never truly gets thrown away. Recent cases of information interception, specifically tabloid phone-tapping, have featured prominently in the news. It seems reasonable to assume that emails are an even easier target. You can only guess what Damian McBride would have given for those emails he sent to Derek Draper to stay private.

Researchers at the University of Washington have released a paper and an open source beta version of a piece of software that aims to change the way sensitive messages are sent over the internet. Other encryption services are available but they usually require some element of trust in a third party or some additional key which may be retrieved retrospectively.

The team in Washington have created Vanish, a piece of software which takes a body of text from an email or online message; encrypts it with a key, which never gets revealed to the user, destroys the local key copy and sends it in fragments via peer to peer sharing (such as bit torrent).

Peer to peer systems are also known as Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). The fragmented data sent is lost as the DHT’s evolve. DHT nodes carrying information cleanse themselves over time, a process known as ‘churning’.

The receiver uses the same software to convert the encryption. After 8 hours (or multiples thereof) the message then becomes purely the random encryption. The original message is rendered inaccessible by either party (or by any third party) forever. The software takes only seconds to work for normal sized emails and messages. Watch a cool demonstration video here.

The reality is that many social networking sites and ISP’s archive data for long periods of time. Some of which you may want to keep private. Sure it’s great to look back at old emails you sent and had completely forgotten about. It is fascinating to revisit the mistakes of your life which you have invariably forgotten, repeated, forgotten, repeated and forgotten again. Or is that just me? Either way there are certainly some messages which need not linger in the aether forever.

The debate about this type of technology is incredibly interesting. It seems that this type of software will benefit the Damian McBrides of this world but more worryingly the criminals and terrorists. Some may argue that ordinary, law-abiding people have nothing to fear by having all their messages stored. Something about this perspective worries me a lot.

There will, most likely, be governmental objections to this type of software. If it, or some other software, takes off and becomes ubiquitous, the culture change will be pronounced. Is it important that we can send all data privately; or should we just accept that there is no such thing as true privacy on the net? Are consequences for what you put out into cyberspace fair enough?

Should we safely assume that ‘the man’ does not care about your membership to Nipple-Tasslers Anonymous or that you got off with your boyfriend’s best mate last weekend?

One of the most popular email providers Gmail; already scans your email to offer targeted marketing based on the content of your message. This is pretty obvious to anyone reading emails, especially when your spam folder has adverts for SPAM alongside. This seems neither particularly malevolent or sophisticated.

Are the desirable interceptions and consequences of data monitoring enough for us to relinquish our everyday privacy concerns?

The internet and cloud-computing in particular, are becoming more prominent in our lives. As we give more of ourselves away publicly, it seems vital, to me, to be able to keep some things genuinely private.  We just have to make sure we find out about those hidden terror plots somehow too…

There are complex debates to be had but I think the answer can simply be summarised  like this :

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I’m amazed we didn’t think of it before.

I created this radio package on vinyl records for an assignment in the final term of the science communication course. Speaking to jazz critic John Fordham, UK bass producer Joe and Dr Patrick Naylor of Imperial College, I learn about why vinyl is still popular, its history and its future. Click the player below to have a listen.

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To mark the anniversary of Apollo 11 touching down on the lunar surface, Google have decided to release an updated version of their Google Earth software, featuring detailed maps of the Moon:

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first small steps on to the surface of the moon. Forty years later you can join them, thanks to a new release from Google. Moon in Google Earth brings the lunar landscape to your desktop, complete with photos, video and guided tours provided by the astronauts themselves.

Downloading the new Google Earth software allows users to roam the moon in full 3D for the first time. You can visit the historic Apollo landing sites to see the astronauts at work, or fly above the surface hunting for your favourite crater.

Read the rest at the Guardian

Travelating in slow motion

The moving walkways used in airports actually slow you down, according to scientists in America. Research has found that people reduce their speed when stepping on to a travelator, making the human conveyor belts only marginally faster than walking. This is only true on an empty walkway however, as any congestion will drop your speed to less than a normal walking pace.

Manoj Srinivasan of Princeton University created a mathematical model to investigate the problem. Publishing in the journal Chaos, he found that the conflict between what your eyes see and your legs feel is responsible for the reduction in speed.

Visual cues tell the brain you are travelling faster than your legs are walking, so in order to conserve energy you slow down. This means that using an empty travelator will only save you about 11 seconds for every 100-metre stretch, compared to walking on regular ground.

But as any regular fliers know, airport travelators are rarely empty. Another study by Seth Young of Ohio State University found that delays due to other travellers getting in the way occur so often that you are better off avoiding the walkway all together. “Moving walkways are the only form of transportation that actually slow people down,” said Young, speaking to New Scientist.

Wii-ly good for you

Active video games like Wii Sports can be a good alternative to moderate exercise for children, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics.

While not a replacement for more intensive sporting activities, scientists at the University of Oklahoma found they were comparably to a moderate walk. Children aged 10-13 were monitored as they watched television, played the Wii and walked on a treadmill. Both gaming and walking increased the number of calories burned by two to three times. As such, the researchers suggest encouraging kids to play active games instead of more passive ones.

Facebook for scientists

UK researchers have created myExperiment, a social networking site for scientists. Intended to challenge traditional models of academic publishing, it allows scientists to share “Research Objects”.

Rather than just publishing a paper, myExperiment lets users share data, files, and other information required to understand and reuse research. The site also allows the usual social networking interactions, such as messaging and groups.

Drayson vs Stuart, round two

Our very own Colin Stuart had an article in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in a continuation of his Twitter debate with science minister Lord Drayson. In it, he criticises the decision to merge science with business, fearing it will result in pure science losing out as applied science is brought to the fore.

The internet…in space!

A headline I never get tired of, because it always sums up a story beautifully. The internet now has a permanent connection to space, aboard the International Space Station.

The space internet differers slightly from our Earth-bound version. The regular internet uses TCP/IP connections, which repeatedly sends information until the computer knows they have got through. This wouldn’t work in space due to bandwidth issues, so the computer aboard the ISS uses delay-tolerant networking, which holds on to information at each step in the communication chain until it has been received.

Citizen science exposes false vegan restaurants

This is pretty neat. Vegan food blog quarrygirl.com were worried about imported vegan foods being served in a number of restaurants in Los Angeles, so decided to run some tests.

Using industrial food testing tools, they examined meals from 17 establishments for traces of egg, cheese and shellfish – all foods which are not compatible with a vegan diet. The found evidence of these foods in all of the meals, suggesting that the common source of production, Taiwan, has not been enforcing strict vegan regulations.

What I like about this is the way their investigation is presented in a very scientific manner. Hypothesis, methods, results and discussion are all laid out in such a way that anyone wishing to dispute or replicate their results can do so. In fact, that’s exactly what happened, with many of the restaurants contacting the blog to say they would conduct tests of their own. It just goes to show, you don’t have to be a scientist to follow the scientific method.

Whoops. Wrote this yesterday but somehow failed to put it on the site. Warning: incoming link dump. I’ve still got loads of interesting stuff left, so I thought I’d burn it all off at once.

Honours for UK astronauts

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) have created an award for people from the UK who have flown in to to space – all five of them.

The silver pins were give to Helen Sharman and Richard Garriott, who were backed by private funds, and Michael Foale, Nicholas Patrick and Piers Sellers who all became US citizens to fly with NASA.

Despite UK government resistance to human spaceflight, the BIS have made up another five pins that they hope to give to future UK astronauts.

One quarter of Londoners believe in creationism

The figure falls to one in seven nationwide, which is still fairly concerning. Worse though are the one in five Londoners who have never even heard of Darwin – you don’t have to believe the guy, but at least know his name!

US Navy is building electromagnetic plane guns

As in, guns that fire planes. Well not quite, but the Pentagon has spent half a billion dollars on building a new launch system for aircraft carriers.

Currently, they use “steam catapults” to launch planes off the short carrier runways – which is pretty much what it sounds like. The new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System will instead use an electric linear motor to shoot the planes off in to the sky.

Self-help books don’t

A psychological study has found that self-help books can actually have the opposite effect to that intended. The research showed that people with low self-esteem actually feel worse about themselves after repeating typical self-help statements like “I am a lovable person”.

Monkeys barter and trade on a simian stock market

Instead of pounds or dollars, non-human primates use grooming as currency. Scientists from the University of Strasbourg in France examined monkey exchange rates by placing food in a box that only one female was trained to open.

An hour after she did, the other members of the group rewarded her with longer and more frequent grooming, and she reciprocated less.

Her new-found wealth wasn’t to last however. When the scientists introduced another trained monkey, the first female’s grooming “stock value” decreased as the second female’s rose. Eventually the “market” equalised and they were both groomed for the same amount of time.

This is just awesome. Maverick designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have built a collection of robotic furniture that generates its own energy by catching and digesting vermin. No, really.

This picture shows an LCD clock with a strip of flypaper on a roller. At the bottom of the roller,a blade scrapes the flies off and they fall into a microbial fuel cell, to be digested by bacteria to yield energy.

This lamp lures flies with ultraviolet LEDs, then traps them like a pitcher plant.

This wall-mounted robot is designed to encourage flies to build webs on it. A camera detects when a fly gets caught, then when the fly stops moving, a robotic arm nabs it from under the spider’s nose.

Its energy needs are supplemented by the UV fly-killer depicted below.

Most gory of all is this innocuous-looking coffee table. In the centre is a trapdoor on which crumbs can be set as bait. One of the table legs is hollow, and mice can crawl up the inside. Infra-red motion sensors detect when a mouse walks onto the trapdoor, and send it tumbling into the fuel cell below. All it’s missing is the ability to emit a Bond-villain style evil laugh as the rodent is slowly devoured.

Sadly, as far as I’m aware, Ikea have no plans to sell flat-pack versions of any of these items.

The robots were inspired by was designed by the Ecobot, an energetically autonomous robot designed by Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Ecobot uses sewage to attract insects into its microbial fuel cell, where they get digested by sludge bacteria. As the bacteria metabolise the sugars yielded from breaking down the robot’s prey, electrons are released, which can be harnessed to generate an electric current. You can get your own, yeast-based microbial fuel cell from the National Centre for Biology Education at Reading University.

A brief glance at Bristol Robotics Laboratory’s website reveals that they’re working on numerous fascinating biology-inspired projects, like robots that can sense their surroundings with rodent-like whiskers, robots that can keep their vision focused on something while moving (by mimicking the vestibulo-ocular reflex) and flying robots that can save energy by soaring like albatrosses. But I can’t help getting the impression that these people are hell-bent on bringing about humanity’s destruction at the mechanical hands of robots. Some of the other projects that they’re working on are robots with the ability to heal themselves, robots that can work as a team to find food, and even robots that can develop their own culture. A project they’re involved in called SYMBRION ‘may lead not only to extremely adaptive, evolvable and scalable robotic systems, but might also enable the robot organisms to reprogram themselves without human supervision; to develop their own cognitive structures and, finally, to allow new functionality to emerge: the most suitable for the given situation.’ And there I was thinking that Terminator was far-fetched.

If you think BRL’s projects are wacky, wait until you see Auger and Loizeau’s previous work. Their website catalogues an array of mind-bogglingly bizarre projects, all aiming to offer ’services that contrast and question current design ideology’, and ‘instigate a broader analysis of what it means to exist in a technology rich environment and its cultural implications for the present and the near future.’

The interstitial space helmet is like a digital burka that brings to reality Susan Greenfield’s nightmare scenario in which nobody interacts face-to-face and all interaction is mediated through telecommunications devices. Social tele-presence is a system that allows the user to effectively occupy someone else’s body, or even a dog’s. The subliminal watch is a device for those too lazy to look at their wrist and instead want the time zapped into them through electric shocks. The isophone aims to make phone calls a fully immersive experience by enclosing the user’s head in a digital helmet while the rest of their body floats in water.

Ramping up the ridiculousness yet further, we have digitised banality, a series of products that revel in their own pointlessness: a device that counts ripples in a lake, an electronic leaf that alerts its owner when it falls off a tree, and a chair that records an ever-increasing total of all the weight it has ever borne. Best of all is a range of inventions designed to aid animals, including an aquatic stealth jacket for whales, an acorn positioning system for squirrels, and ‘omnivore dentures’ that allow big cats to munch on vegetable matter.

Who says technology has to be useful? I think this stuff’s bloody brilliant.

Training to be a doctor is difficult, and not just for the medical students. For prospective physicians to have real life experience they must examine real patients, but this can be awkward for more intimate procedures such as breast exams.

Up until now the solution has been for students to practice on lifeless prosthetics, but a new initiative by the University of Florida, along with three other universities, uses a combination of prosthetics and computer technology to better simulate the experience.

A mannequin allows students to conduct the physical exam, whilst a computer representation of the patient, named Amanda Jones, responds on the screen above. This “mixed reality human” lets medical students converse with their virtual patient whilst conducting an exam.

A mixed reality breast exam in progress.

Students can talk to Amanda in realtime thanks to computer speech and voice recognition software. This allows them to discover her medical history and respond to questions or concerns during the exam.

Feedback is also provided by sensors within the prosthetic breast that send data to the computer simulation, providing a colour representation of the pressure students are applying.

Different situations can be programmed in to the system, such as whether a breast abnormality is present or not, and dialogue lines can also be changed to prevent an unscripted experience. Benjamin Lok, an assistant professor of computer and information sciences and engineering at the University of Florida, says this communication practice is key.

“Studies have shown that communication skills are actually a better predictor of outcome than medical skills,” Lok said. With the virtual patient, “all of a sudden, students have to not only practice their technique, but they also have to work on their empathy.”

Although the mixed reality system is not intended to replace real exams, it does help students get more experience when volunteers are scarce. Thanks to the success of the breast exam system, researchers are now looking in to simulation other intimate procedures. Lok and team are now building a virtual prostrate exam for students to practice on.

The days of the lone astronomer are long gone. Modern astronomical research is a multi-national and highly organised outfit with million dollar telescopes perched high on mountain tops in some of the most remote places on Earth. These optical leviathans don’t even need a pupil at the eyepiece; computers are more than capable of doing that for us.

You might think then, that this world of highly mechanised, suped-up star-spotters was beyond the clutches of your average Joe, but you’d be wrong. Around the world an army of enthusiastic amateurs, often armed with nothing more than their home computers, are reeling in the secrets of the universe. Meet the citizen astronomers.

Comets

David Evans works for SERTEC, a company based in Coleshill, Warwickshire, specialising in the manufacture of parts and components for the automotive industry. At least that’s what pays his bills. David’s real passion is astronomy and he has discovered nineteen comets previously unknown to science, all from the comfort of his home PC.

“My first discovery was confirmed 22 June 2002 by Derek Hammer of NASA. I found the comet in images which were taken by the SOHO Space Telescope on 13 June 2002,” David explained, referring to a telescope whose job it is to stare at the Sun. As these comets pass in front of the Sun their silhouettes can be spotted by those who have the patience to sift through the mountains of data produced by modern telescopes.

And that’s the appeal of citizen astronomers to those who research the cosmos for a living. Often a human is still better at discerning detail than computers, but the professional astronomers simply don’t have the time or the resources to analyse all the data. By farming it out in manageable chunks to citizen astronomers, more research can be done and the public get a real chance to contribute to cutting edge science.

GalaxyZoo

One extremely successful example is Galaxy Zoo, a citizen astronomy project designed to get members of the public classifying galaxies. Galaxies are huge collections of stars gathered together in space, and they come in many different shapes and sizes. The Galaxy Zoo community are presented with photos of galaxies and asked simple questions about what they can see. They might be asked to choose from a sliding scale as to how round it is, or how many spiral arms it’s got.

The beauty of Galaxy Zoo is that it sends out the same photo to many users and only if a consensus is reached between a high percentage of users do the team know they can trust the classification. Such has been the success of the project that a completely new type of galaxy has been discovered this way.

Melanie-Jane Ryal, a personal assistant, is a keen Galaxy Zoo user, “The Galaxy Zoo project is amazingly easy to get involved with. All you have to do is register and then do a short test to ensure you know what you’re looking at. As an amateur it allows you to feel involved as you’re helping to classify galaxies that very few other people have seen,” she said. That’s the kicker, sometimes you get to be the very first human ever to lay eyes on a particular galaxy, a galaxy that contains billions of stars, and perhaps even other life forms.

SETI@home

And the search for aliens, or more officially The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), hasn’t been overlooked by citizen astronomy; in fact it was one of the trail blazers. I’ve previously blogged about the SETI@home project celebrating it’s tenth year keenly listening to signals from space and trying to detect evidence of an interstellar phone call. But the key to the success of this project has been that, in true citizen astronomy style, the data is farmed out to you and I. SETI@home uses your spare computer power to work its way through the radio waves received by the giant Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.

Once downloaded to your PC the SETI@home program gets to work whilst your not. When you’re away from your PC having a cuppa or fielding a phone call, SETI@home kicks in and starts using your computer to decipher the messages. No signal has been found yet that astronomers believe not to have come naturally from space but thanks to home PC’s they are getting through the data much faster than would otherwise be possible.

Public Engagement

It is appropriate that SETI@home is celebrating it’s inaugural decade, just as astronomers are celebrating another temporal milestone. This year has been designated International Year of Astronomy or IYA2009, to mark four centuries since Galileo first used the telescope to gaze at the heavens. IYA2009 has been an opportunity for professional astronomers to engage with the public and Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and sees citizen astronomy as an indispensable tool in this process.

“Citizen astronomy is a tremendous opportunity to engage members of the public with real scientific research in a way which would have been impossible only a few years ago,” he said. And he agrees that the astronomers get more than just an extension of their computing power. “It’s not a one-sided process either – the scientists also benefit enormously because it enables them to answer questions which they simply couldn’t tackle on their own, getting extra value out of the large amounts of data which are now routinely gathered by telescopes, space missions and earth-monitoring experiments.”

So citizen astronomy is many things. It’s an opportunity for astronomers to engage with the public. It’s an opportunity for that public to actively, and often indispensably, contribute to cutting edge research. But most importantly it’s a way for astronomers to unlock the scientific secrets hidden amongst the astronomically sized sets of data churning out of the myriad of hardware both in space and on the ground.

As we move into the 401st year of the telescope, the next great discovery could just come from you, your friends, or the citizen astronomer next door.

Tweeters aren’t psychic

Earlier this month I reported on Richard Wiseman’s Twitter experiment which hoped to use the social networking site to study psychic ability. Now the results are in, and you don’t need to be able to see the future to predict them.

The experiment consisted of Wiseman going to a location each day, then asking people to Tweet their impressions of where he was. They would then select from five pictures of possible locations. In all four trials, the majority voted for an incorrect location. Even those who declared they had some form of psychic ability with high confidence scored zero. Sorry guys, but you’re not special.

Who Pooped?

A strange question yes, but one with an important answer. Scientists are able to determine the nature of an animal from their fecal matter alone, and now you can too in a game brought to you by the Minnesota Zoo. I guessed all three correctly, so perhaps there is a new career waiting for me.

Ten icons of science – but which is the best?

To celebrate its centenary, the Science Museum have selected 10 objects from their collection that changed the future. From the steam engine to penicillin, each invention or discovery has a huge influence on our lives today, but which one gets your vote? I think I’ll have to go for the Pilot ACE Computer – the first multi-tasking computer. So much of the modern world revolves around computers, and most importantly of all, you wouldn’t be reading Just A Theory without one!

Two stories today of new technology that could one day be built in to mobile phones. The first, developed by engineering students at Duke University, would allow people to write short notes by simply waving their phones in the air. The technology makes use of accelerometers already inside many newer phones, like the iPhone, which are used to switch the display from portrait to landscape view.

“We developed an application that uses the built-in accelerometers in cell phones to recognize human writing,” said Sandip Agrawal, one of the developers of the PhonePoint Pen. “By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air.

“The accelerometer converts the gestures to images, which can be sent to any e-mail address for future reference,” Ionut Constandache said. “Also, say you’re in a class and there is an interesting slide on the screen. We foresee being able to take a photo of the slide and write a quick note on it for future reference. The potential uses are practically limitless. That this prototype works validates the feasibility of such a pen.”

Whilst I can see the appeal of this, I’m not sure what more it offers over just using buttons or a touchpad keyboard. Perhaps if the keys are too small for you it would be useful alternative, but I think I’ll pass.

Perhaps more useful is this second story: Nokia are working on a phone that charges itself without being plugged in. This seemingly magical feat is made possible by sucking in power from the sea of electromagnetic energy that surrounds the modern world.

We are constantly wading through radio, TV and WiFi signals emanating from all directions, and scientists at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge have created a phone that harvests tiny amounts of power from a wide range of frequencies. So far though they have only achieved a tiny 5 milliwatts, which isn’t much use. Their next goal is 20 milliwatts, which would allow a phone to remain on standby indefinitely. Ultimately they hope to reach 50 milliwatts, enough to slowly recharge the handset.

You’re going to have to wait a while for both of these new gadgets though. In the case of PhonePoint Pen the team expect to put a prototype up for download in the next few months, but the recharging phones are at least three to five years off.

If there is one thing which I’ve learned from watching films, it’s that in the future robots are going to cause a lot of trouble for human beings. Once they become advanced enough they will join together to kill us, enslave us or perhaps just keep us in containers to be used as a power source. Terminator Salvation, released last week, tells the story of how human beings are fighting against the machines for their survival even in 2018.

Can’t we just work together and get along? Well, maybe we can. Researchers on the JAST (Joint-Action Science and Technology) project are looking into ways to build robots which can anticipate human action, allowing them to collaborate with human beings on simple tasks.

The JAST team is multidisciplinary, bringing together scientists from robotics, psychology and the cognitive sciences. In order to make human-robot interactions more natural the team first examined how humans collaborate together, in particular how we observe each other when working together on an activity.

When we watch someone doing a task our brains activate mirror neurons to map the activity. This allows us to work out what is going on and notice when someone makes a mistake. The JAST team have programmed their robot to use a similar observation based system, allowing it to compare a person’s action to the task at hand.

The net result is that the JAST robot does not just learn how to do a particular task, but rather it learns how to work with a human being to accomplish it. For example, it can distinguish between different tools and different ways in which their human partner can hold it for different functions.

This looks like a step towards improved human –robot relations. Maybe we will never need John Connor for our salvation, but I still can’t shake of the feeling that robots like these are just trying to lure is into a false sense of security…

You can see a video of the robot on the ICT results website. It doesn’t look as cool or sophisticated as most movie robots, but I do like its orange top.

This review originally appeared in the most recent issue of Imperial College’s science magazine I, Science.

Wallace & Gromit, the nation’s most beloved plasticine duo, have arrived at the Science Museum. I went along with I,Science editor Mico Tatalovic to check out the new exhibition, Wallace & Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas.

The duo are known for their crazy inventions that inevitably go horribly wrong, and it seemed that the Science Museum’s lifts were getting in to the spirit of things. As we waited for a ride to the exhibition floor one of the Museum’s sleek glass lifts arrived, but refused to open its doors before shooting off again. It eventually returned and we step aboard, only to find ourselves stuck between floors. “Perhaps we’ll get the stairs next time,” I said to Mico. Thankfully we were not trapped for long and, for the rest of the morning at least, the inventions on display behaved themselves.

Working in collaboration with Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman Animation, the Science Museum have recreated their home, 62 West Wallaby Street, and stuffed it full of things to see and do. With funding from the Intellectual Property Office, the £2m exhibition is designed to inspire the nation’s creativity and get us all inventing.

Visitors will find “Idea Stations” in each room of the house where they can scribble down their new creations, before sending them off to Wallace & Gromit through a suitably wacky delivery process, the Eureka Brainwave. This overhead conveyer belt channels ideas through the exhibition to the Thinking Cap Machine, which…turns them into paper hats. A bit of a let-down if you have just submitted your idea for the next iPod killer, but kids will love it.

As well as coming up with your own ideas, you can play around with Wallace & Gromit’s. In the living room you’ll find the Tellyscope, their answer to the television remote. After throwing enough balls at a target (both myself and Mico were hopeless throws), a television will move towards a massive sofa. Take a seat, and a series of levers move a gloved hand to select the button of your choice, which will play a short video clip. Very silly, very Wallace & Gromit. Other fun things include a slide down the plughole from the bathroom to the garden, where you’ll be to take part in a modelling clay activity.

It’s not just Wallace & Gromit’s inventions on display though. The Science Museum have dug through their extensive catalogue to find examples of weird and wonderful inventions from the real world. Displays range from an early electric kettle to 1960’s food packaging. You can also track the development of inventions like the telephone, from Alexander Graham Bell’s original to the latest shape-shifting Nokia prototype – unfortunately a model, and not the real thing just yet!

If old inventions aren’t your thing, there’s still a lot on show for Wallace & Gromit and fans. Sets from the films are lovingly displayed, and simply walking through the house really feels like you’re taking part in one of their crazy adventures. It would be very easy to spend almost two hours taking in everything the exhibition has to offer.

I have just one very minor criticism, of an ideological nature. A message throughout the exhibit is the importance of protecting your intellectual property by registering inventions with the Intellectual Property Office, and I have no qualms with that. Up in the bathroom, in a display all about music, was a poster that left me feeling rather different.

Nestled in a corner, away from the karaoke disco in the shower and a charming vinyl jukebox, it said that the music industry is the only way for artists could “avoid losing out to copycats” and “benefit from hitting all the right notes”. In other words, sign a record deal or go broke. In a world where internet exposure and digital distribution is making the music industry increasingly irrelevant, it struck me as nothing more than an out-of-place attempt at propaganda. I’m sure though that kids will just run past without a second glance as they head for something fun to do, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.

My woolly liberal sensibilities aside, Wallace & Gromit present A World of Cracking Ideas is well worth a visit. You might not learn anything as such, but you’ll be too busy having fun with all the crazy contraptions to care. The exhibition will run until 1st November 2009, and the usual fees apply: Adults £9, Concessions £7, with extra deals for families. Cracking good time, Gromit.

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, and I’m still not entirely sure what the point of it is and what you can do with it. Well, starting tomorrow we can add one more use for Twitter to the list: science.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, in conjunction with New Scientist, plans to conduct the first scientific experiment on Twitter. Wiseman is a professor at the University of Hertfordshire, and specialises in studying possible psychic abilities. He plans to harness the power of the Twitter crowd to investigate remote viewing, the supposed ability of psychics to identify distant locations.

Every day this week at 3pm, he will travel to a randomly selected location and then ask everyone on Twitter to give him their thoughts on where he is. Thirty minutes later, he will follow up with another Tweet showing five photos – one of the real location, and four decoys. Participants will then vote for the photo they believe to be genuine.

Today’s experiment, taking place in just over an hour, is just a test run to make sure the system works, so Wiseman will only be counting data from the rest of the week. If you’d like to participate, simply follow him on Twitter. Word of warning, he has a rather unusual background image on his Twitter page!

But is it actually worth you while to do so? Is Twitter a suitable tool for this type of experiment? It all comes down to statistics. For each location, participants have a one in five chance of choosing the correct photo simply by random chance. If some form of psychic powers truly do exist, we would expect a higher proportion of correct guesses.

The odds are stacked against you with each subsequent test however. Whilst you may have a one in five chance of getting one location right, only one in 625 participants will correctly guess all four. Wiseman hopes that 10,000 people will answer his Twitter call. A quick calculation tells us that we can expect just 16 Twitterers to score four out of four. If the results are significantly higher than this, it suggests something odd is going on – though not necessarily psychic powers!

So Twitter really is a good way of conducting this experiment. For very little cost, Wiseman can find the large numbers of people he needs to make his study work. There are problems – what if people simply re-Tweet what they view as likely guess – so I’m not sure we’re going to get any amazing results out of this trial, but I look forward to taking part.

Growing skyscrapers

Metal crystals that look mini cities? Very cool:

A small crystal city in the palm of your hand.

Frank Swain of the SciencePunk blog found these cool crystals made of bismuth, a metal similar to lead. Grown by Ken (first name only, it seems) you can actually win one by guessing its weight.

Building a CPU from scratch

I’d like to say I know my way around the innards of a computer, as I can change a harddrive or replace a broken fan without too much fuss. For Steve Chamberlin, however, these tasks are child’s play. Instead, he’s built an 8-bit CPU (like you’d find in a NES console) from 1,253 piece of wire.

Called the BMOW or Big Mess O’ Wires, when hooked up to a keyboard an monitor the CPU is a perfectly functioning computer, if practically Stone Aged when compared to modern machines. Capable of running programs like a Chess game, it’s a pretty amazing feat of ingenuity – and patience! If you’d like more info, Wired have an article and interview with Chamberlin.

Renaming the God particle

Ian Sample of the Guardian wants a new name for the Higgs boson, or “God particle” as it is often known.

Everyone’s favourite particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will resume the search for the elusive Higgs once it is up and running again. In honour of Peter Higgs’ eightieth birthday this week, Sample suggests we find a new name meeting the following criteria:

1) Names should be serious and accurate
2) It is good to name things after people, but only if you can resist the pressure to hyphenate with two or three extra names
3) Names should be evocative and inspiring.

He says Higgs boson fails 3, whilst God particle fails 1 and 2. If you can think of a better name, submit it to the Guardian and you could win a copy of Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara. Personally, I think it should be something beginning with “C” – if only to fit in to the title of this post!

Saw this on the Twitterverse and thought I’d share. Channel 4 have commissioned a piece of research into the young peoples’ relationship with technology, and I found the results quite interesting. Obviously I haven’t seen the full report, amusingly entitled A Beta Life, but here are some stats on the average 12-24 year old.

• They personally own 8 devices (including MP3 player, PC, TV, DVD player, mobile phone, stereo, games console, and digital camera)
• They frequently conduct over 5 activities whilst watching TV
• 25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access”
• A quarter of young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are physically with at the time
• They have on average 123 friends on their social network spaces
• And the first thing the majority of them do when they get home is turn on their PC

I was surprised to realise that the majority of these apply to me:

• I’m scared to even count the number of “devices” I have, but it’s certainly closer to 18 than 8.
• Geeky as it is, I’m not a huge fan of going on holiday, and lack of web access is a factor. Thank you, inventor of the internet cafe.
• Who hasn’t texted their friend in the pub?
• I’ve got 113 friends on Facebook and 61 followers on Twitter. There is certainly some overlap, so I can’t be much over 123
• The first thing I do when I get up is turn on my PC. It’s already on by the time I get home again in the evening.

The only thing I can’t fathom is conducting five activities whilst watching TV. What are these activities? All I can think of is watching TV whilst perhaps surfing/IMing on a laptop, and texting on a phone. That’s just four. Any hardcore multitaskers care to enlighten me? My personal favourite is playing video games whilst on the exercise bike, listening to podcasts. If there is some super multitasking combo out there, I’m yet to discover it.

What will the effects of this increasingly connected generation be? It doesn’t seem to be a decrease in the amount of time spent physically with others. The research found that hanging out with friends and watching TV still take up most of young adults free time. It’s just that phones, Facebook, etc allow me and my contemporaries to stay in contact even when we’re apart.

Earlier this month Seth wondered Can web 2.0 technology change our nature? and I pretty much agree with his conclusion. Whilst I doubt Facebook gives you cancer, constant connectivity is certain to change our social structures and the way we lead our lives. After all, I probably wouldn’t have even written this if it weren’t for Twitter!

Everything from electric cars to mobile phones could soon be powered by air. A new type of battery promises ten times the energy storage of current designs by sucking in oxygen to recharge.

Research led by scientists at the University of St Andrews and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has resulted in new battery design that is both ligher and smaller than its predecessors – a definite plus for electric cars.

The STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell, designed with the help of partners in Strathclyde and Newcastle, uses porous carbon as a replacement for lithium cobalt oxide. This change of material, combined with a more compact size, means that the new batteries will be much cheaper.

The battery is charged as normal, but as its energy is drained oxygen from the air is drawn through its surface. Then, the oxygen reacts with the pores in the carbon to create more energy and recharge the draining battery.

Oxygen drawn from the air reacts within the porous carbon to release the electrical charge in this lithium-air battery.

Leading the four-year research project is Professor Peter Bruce of the St Andrews Chemistry Department:

“Our target is to get a five to ten fold increase in storage capacity, which is beyond the horizon of current lithium batteries. Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations.

“The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery.”

You won’t be running on air just yet though, as further investigation in to the chemical reaction of the battery is needed. The team hope to build a small STAIR cell prototype soon, with the intention to power small devices such as mobile phones or MP3 players.

On the Guardian website last week, George Monbiot launched an all out attack on UK science funding entitled ‘These men would’ve stopped Darwin’. The men he is attacking are current research council bosses, as well as Lord Drayson, minister for science and innovation. Monbiot accuses them of damaging economic interference in science funding.

Last month’s budget ringfenced £106 million for science that showed “economic potential”. This was accompanied by a new mandate from research councils, asking that all new grant applications include a rundown of the research’s economic implications.

UK science is certainly becoming more business savvy. And this is changing how science is done. But it is not necessarily damaging it. Monbiot jumps from arguing that economic aims should not control scientific funding to the conclusion that scientists’ imaginations alone should have that job. For him, proper science is when scientists are free to pursue their passions; “it is about wonder and insight and beauty”.  He puts an absolute divide between scientist-led science and business-led science. If economic interests encroach on science funding, then, according to Monbiot,  scientist-led science will disappear.

But this is going too far. There is no great chasm between what scientists aim at and commercial aims. There is certainly tension between the two, but they are not distinct. Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York uses one particular example to illustrate this. Research into the biological processes behind cancer has been productive in recent years. So much so that work at the level of cell-processes is almost complete. In order to increase our understanding in this area, and perhaps develop new treatment, we do not need more medicalresearch but better computer-modelling. We need more mathematical research. If mathematicians working in abstract areas had not been publically funded over the last few decades, then we would be much further away from the relevant models.  The economic potential of new cancer treatments is huge. Whichever mathematicians get there first will open up the road to large-scale commercial possibilities. But this could not have been foreseen. IT was serendipitous.

Lord  Drayson’s response on Sunday made this point. Unfortunately, it was lost alongside both his defense of his own commercial record and forceful, pro-Labour concluding remarks. 

Drayson agreed that scientific serendipity is a necessary part of how science works, and that this scientist-led science should be protected. But this does exclude asking scientists to consider the economic implications of their work. Nor does it make it any easier to ask for more science funding from Alastair Darling’s already tight budget without promising the money to projects with economic potential.

Public spending on science is justified in one of two ways:

(1) Science is an academic discipline that finds out wonderful things.

(2) Science is part of the foundation of a knowledge economy and it’s output will help improve the economic climate.

Neither fully captures the real need for continued spending on science – that is a mixture of the two. But what Monbiot fails to acknowledge is the importance of the second. If you are in the business of convincing politicians to give more money to science, then talking in terms of economic outcomes looks like the more profitable route. And so that is the rhetoric that Drayson et al needs to use, even if they know in reality science doesn’t quite work like that.

The other day Jacob wrote about Susan Greenfield’s claim that Facebook can make you fat. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the Internet can change the structure of your brain. However, it seems fairly self-evident to me that web 2.0 technology is offering us ways to change how we live and think.

We have greater freedom to express our thoughts and opinions to both friends and strangers through Twitter, Facebook, comment forums and blogs like this. Even Gordon Brown has got in on the action by broadcasting on YouTube.

The Internet offers better medium for dialogue than traditional print or broadcast media. Do web 2.0 technologies have the potential to change the fundamental structure of our society?

Brian Appleyard, writing for the Sunday Times, doesn’t think so. He argues that it is historically ignorant to believe that technology can fundamentally change society:

“”The internet”, says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, “is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Edgerton is the world expert in tech dead ends. Fifty years ago, he points out, nuclear power was about to change the world; then there was supersonic passenger flight, then space travel. The wheel, he concedes, did change the world, as did steam power. The web is not in that league.”

I’m not really convinced by this argument. I agree that there are a plethora of ‘revolutionary’ technologies which failed to change the world, but communication technologies (like television, radio or newspapers) did change the very structure our society. The extent to which they did is difficult to articulate because of the difficulty for us to imagine our lives without them.

Similarly, I don’t think that blogging, twittering and the like are an optional fad which will simply be incorporated into our existing cultural framework. In western society we live a culture intensely interested in celebrity. Web 2.0 technology offers a way for people to express their need to be recognised and acknowledged by a wider audience than just the people they see in the pub.

I recently attended a talk at the dana centre (Dinner@Dana: Social Surveillance) which questioned whether sites like Facebook endanger our privacy. I don’t think this is the question we need to be asking. We should instead be asking how new technologies will change the way we think about privacy itself. If new generations grow up micro-broadcasting and making their lives public to others it seems likely that our current notions of ‘privacy’ will gradually be replaced by a very different animal.

So, whilst I don’t think the Internet has the potential to change our brains, I think it does have the potential to change the way we think.

It didn’t work out so well for the three little pigs, but it turns out that houses made of straw may be more resistant to huffing and puffing than the old fairytale makes out. Tests have been carried out at the University of Nevada to see whether houses made mainly of straw can remain stable during serious earthquakes. And they can.

The houses, designed by the team at the University of Nevada and the non-profit organisation ‘Pakistan Straw Bale and Appropriate Building’ (PAKSBAB), were tested at the Large-Scale Structures Laboratory at Nevada and subjected to seven simulated earthquakes of increasing magnitude. The houses remained standing even after the final and most powerful test.

Admittedly the houses are not just made of straw. The straw is used as a load-bearing component and for insulation, whilst the foundations rest on clay and gravel. Importantly, the houses are relatively simple to build and all the additional materials are cheap and locally available in developing countries, giving them an advantage over existing straw house designs.

There have already been nine such houses built in Mansehra in Pakistan, a region devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale in 2005, which left over three million people homeless. The results of the earthquake tests are encouraging and may help minimise the impact of future earthquakes in countries such as Pakistan. PAKSBAB already runs a programme which helps local residents learn how to build the houses.

Meanwhile in the UK, North Kesteven District Council in Lincolnshire has recently announced that they too will soon be building straw houses as a way of providing affordable housing. The straw provides such good insulation that the houses will not require a central heating system.

Straw houses are showing a lot of promise in both developing and developed countries. Who thinks those three little pigs will be moving back to their old digs?

Oxygen never looked so cute

Here is a really nice computer animation produced by Christopher Hendryx for his graduate thesis. It shows the interactions that an oxygen atom can have with other elements in the periodic table. I hope he makes more!

Just be glad they’re really tiny

An amoeba is a single-cell organism that floats around eating other smaller organisms like bacteria. It’s a bit like PacMan. Sounds pretty harmless you might thank, but I challenge you to watch this time-lapse video of an amoeba in action without recoiling in terror.

A chocolate-powered racing car

Slightly more useful than a chocolate tea pot, a team at Warwick University have constructed a car built from vegetables and powered by chocolate.

Of course, you should always eat your veg before snacking on chocolate.

The unusual construction materials were created by blending vegetable fibres with resin, in order to demonstrate that green cars don’t have to be slow. Unfortunately the car is not eligible to enter the Formula 3 races it was designed for, because chocolate fuel fails to meet regulations.

Hand-drawn holograms

This video from William Beaty, the self-styled Science Hobbyist, demonstrates a rather interesting concept: hand-drawn holograms.

Holograms are traditionally created using lasers, but these ones use just a compass and some copper. There appears to be some debate about whether they are really holograms, but I think they’re too cool to worry about silly definitions.

How much sugar?

It’s interesting how simply communicating things in a different way can change their meaning. If I tell you that a can of Coca-Cola contains 39 grams of sugar, what does that mean to you? Probably not much. If I show you this picture however, you might think twice before reaching for a Coke:

That's a lot of sugar!

You can find this image along with many more at Sugar Stacks, a website dedicated to revealing the “hidden” sugar in drinks and snacks. It’s US focused so there are a lot of things I don’t recognise, but you get the idea. I wouldn’t snack on one sugar cube, let alone the 10 in a single can of Coke, so perhaps I’ll avoid the stuff from now on!

Compulsory bicycle helmets might hurt more

An Australian mathematician has concluded that legally requiring cyclists to wear helmets could actually increase healthcare costs.

Piet de Jong of Macquarie University in Sydney reasoned that requiring helmets leads to a decrease in the number of cyclists, so more people miss out on the health benefits of cycling.

There is a bit of debate around this, with various figures for the increased health costs and reduced number of cyclists being thrown about. To solve the problem, de Jong created a model that could be adjusted for a variety of values.

It was only under extreme circumstances that mandatory helmet laws resulted in a net benefit. Head injuries must make a up a large proportion of cycling accidents, a small number of people must stop cycling due to helmet laws, and the benefits of cycling must be low.

With that in mind, de Jong hopes that this model will lead to more informed policy, but he doesn’t discourage the use of helmets:

“I go to Holland and places like that, and I don’t wear a helmet,” he says. “I used to live in London, and I wore a helmet all the time.”

Nearly over! Normal service resumes tomorrow.

Tesla coil art

Who doesn’t love Tesla coils, the high voltage lightning generators that are fun for all the family? An Australian named Peter Terren is certainly a fan, and has used them to create some rather striking images:

It tickles.

Can you appreciate the gravity of the situation?

If Tesla coils aren’t you thing, how about gravity waves? Not be confused with gravitational waves which are fluctuations in spacetime that have yet to be directly detected, gravity waves occur when two fluids meet. I remember studying them on a fluid mechanics course, but they were never as cool as this:

Confusingly, the “fluid” in fluid mechanics doesn’t refer to just liquids, but can also include gases. Here the gravity wave occurs when clouds meet the air.

Staying up late better than getting up early

Whilst revising for these exams I’ve been attempting to get up early in order to get a lot of work done, but perhaps I’ve been doing it wrong. A study by the University of Liege in Belgium has found that night owls concentrate better than earlier risers

Splitting participants into two groups, one which stayed up late whilst the others went to bed, the researchers found that after 10 hours of being awake the early group showed reduced brain activity in areas linked to attention. They were also sleepier and slower to perform tasks. Sounds like an excuse for a late night!

Before I head off for the first day of exams, here’s the next roundup.

Pope goes solar powered

No, unfortunately His Holiness hasn’t developed the ability to absorb sunlight though his skin. Vatican City soon will though, with the announcement of a €500 million solar power plant. The 100 megawatts generated by solar energy will produce more than enough to power the tiny state, making Vatican City effectively the first country in the world powered entirely by renewables. The Pope may spout some dodgy science, but this time he’s done good.

Twitter your thoughts – literally

Twitter’s opponents decry the banality of sharing your every thought with the world, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin have taken the concept one step further. Using a machine which can translate brainwaves into movement of an on-screen cursor, a team of neuroscientists can literally tweet their thoughts.

It’s not simply for a laugh, however. They hope that the technology can be used by sufferers of locked-in syndrome; people who are concious but unable to move or communicate.

A map of global warming

Even though we know it’s happening, we don’t know exactly how much the Earth’s surface will heat up due to global warming. The image below shows one possibility:

Could the Earth warm this much?

Created by Global Warming Art, a wiki devoted to bringing data about global warming and climate change to the public, it is based on data from the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change. The map shows a world much warmer than the one we currently live in, with some areas of land warmed by as much as 6 or 7°C.

Talking in your sleep can be an annoying habit for anyone you share a bed with, but applying the same principle to computers could help combat climate change. ‘Sleep talking’ PCs are a new development from the University of California, San Diego and Microsoft Research that allow the computer to continue communicating on a network whilst in power-saving ’sleep’ mode.

Computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal was lead author of a paper outlining the new technique, dubbed ‘Somniloquy’ – Latin for ’sleep talking’. He says that people are leaving their PCs switched on even when they are not doing very much, simply because they want to remain online:

“Large numbers of people keep their PCs in awake mode even though the PCs are relatively idle for long blocks of time because they want to stay connected to an internal network or the Internet or both,

“I realized that most of the tasks that people keep their computers on for can be achieved at much lower power-use levels than regular awake mode.”

I know I’m guilty of going out for the day and leaving my PC on just to download a few files, and it turns out that I’m not alone. Previous research has shown that the average home PC is on 34% of the time, but only in use for half that.

Somniloquy works by plugging a piece of USB hardware into your PC that can communicate with other computers in the network. Low-intensity tasks can be performed whilst the PC is asleep, and if a bit more computational oomph is required Somniloquy will wake the PC up.

The current prototypes will work with any type of computer or network, and consumes anything from 11 to 24 times less power than a switched on, but idle, PC. This could mean a reduction of power consumption by 60 to 80% – quite a significant saving.

I’m a big champion of small, unglamorous ideas that can be rolled out on a large scale to lower energy usage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Somniloquy looks to be a great idea in this vein, and I look forward to installing it on my own PC.

Who would have thought it possible to create a prosciutto-powered thermal lance? Theodore Gray of PopSci.com, that’s who. Despite referring to the meat as “bacon”, his crazy idea actually works.

Prosciutto, more usually found on deli counters and in sandwiches everywhere, takes the place of the traditional iron rod in this power tool with a tasty difference. Gray first created seven tubes of prosciutto by wrapping them around a fiberglass rod and baking them in an oven. These tubes were then wrapped in more meat, and baked again to create the thermal lance’s fuel core. Attach a supply of oxygen and set the thing on fire, and you’re ready to start cutting:

Mmm...crispy

For the veggies amongst you, Gray also created a meat-free version made from a hollowed out cucumber and some breadsticks. It’s not as powerful, but that’s only to be expected – anyone who has ever eaten Quorn will tell you that vegetarian alternatives are never quite as good as the real thing.

Despite being really cool, what’s the point of this little experiment? As Gray says, it demonstrates that the food we eat really does contain quite a lot of energy. Feeding pure oxygen into the mix makes the energy release much faster than normal, but it’s the same calories that add to your waistline as are cutting through pure steel here.

Much derided by those looking to shed a few kilos, calories are simply a way of measuring energy. The official definition of a calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. In other words, a Mars Bar which contains 280 calories (according to Mars’ stupidly designed website which won’t let me provide a proper link) provides enough energy to boil nearly three kilograms of water when starting from 0° C. It’s not much of a surprise then that meat can cut metal.

This week the internet security company McAfee released the results of a survey they commissioned on the carbon footprint of email spam. The survey shows that the annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). This is equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes. And 80% of it comes from us searching for and deleting spam emails from our inboxes.

Wow. That’s huge. Imagine how goody green-drops we would be if we had some way of getting rid of spam? Well we don’t need to imagine, we can just buy McAfee’s Spamkiller software.

There is nothing wrong with a company paying for a survey that might increase the brand-profile of one of its products. After all, that just makes good business sense. But there is something a bit sad about the way this was picked up by mainstream, well-respected publications and reported as news. The worst case is a New Scientist article in their online Tech section. This was a near verbatim repeat of McAfee’s press release with the addition of one quote – from Jeff Green, McAfee’s senior vice president of product development.

There are similar articles hopping around cyberspace, replicated in part or whole on various sites. They all do the same thing; they report the story as straight news, with a carbon footprint quote from someone at McAfee. My favourite is James Murray’s report for BusinessGreen.com entitled Spam Epidemic Results in Giant Carbon Footprint. Getting “epidemic” and “Carbon Footprint” in the same heading is pretty impressive. I challenge anyone not to click on the article if it appears in their Google news results.

Luckily, that particular article dose not actually appear on a Google news search for “carbon footprint spam”. The top article in that search is, in fact, a piece where the writer appears to have grasped more than the copy and paste functions of a keyboard. Jeremy A. Kaplan from PCmag.com should be applauded for being the only writer I found who applied his critical faculties to the McAfee study.

In Why the Spam Carbon Footprint Study is Wrong Kaplan makes the simple point that most of the energy we use whilst filtering and deleting emails (the process that accounts for 80% of the carbon footprint McAfee have calculated) comes from having a computer switched on. And by including a computer’s footprint in their calculations the study grossly overestimated the true effects of the spam epidemic.

Kaplan’s article was posted later than many of the other pieces and it illustrates well why taking time over a story can make for better journalism. If you read the McAfee study properly, mulled it over for a bit and then set about deciding whether it’s newsworthy, queries like Kaplan’s tend to crop up. Then when you speak to or, more likely, email someone at McAfee, you might just ask them about why the study they commissioned points more to the carbon footprint of computer uses rather than of spam emails. And that way, you might do more than play your part in their corporate marketing scheme. You might do some journalism.

All this is even more surprising given a similar statistical manipulation that burned a bona fide journalist at The Sunday Times back in January. Google and You’ll Damage the Planet claimed that just two Google searches has the same carbon footprint as boiling a kettle. This was almost instantly refuted by Google as Jacob reported. A search is equivalent to 0.2g of carbon, whereas a kettle burns 7g. The Times Online version of the article now carries a clarification. It claims that the original article based its numbers on the amount of carbon produced in the average number of searches done before some one finds the information they need, rather than in a one-click search. But this correction didn’t matter. The response from Google spread across the web quicker, discrediting the article.

The Google-Kettle episode taught us how precarious calculations of computing carbon footprints are. But those reporting the McAfee survey chose to forget that in favour of an easy article. Maybe that’s a little harsh; perhaps they are just too busy filtering their spam mail to do any real reporting.

This it seems is the week of extraneous body parts. First, from Geneva, a city used to the media spotlight of late, came the news that a pensioner had developed a completely imaginary but yet perfectly working third arm. And then yesterday it was announced that Australian performance artist Stelarc would be giving a talk in Edinburgh about his third ear. An ear it is worth noting that happily resides on his forearm. I can see we are going to need some clarification so let’s start in Switzerland.

Doctors at the Geneva University Hospital have reported in the Annals of Neurology a rare case of Supernumerary Phantom Limb (SPL) syndrome in a 64-year-old stroke patient. A few days after her stroke the pensioner told of how she could not only perceive a third arm, but see it and move it as well. In fact, not only could she move her imaginary appendage but could use it to scratch a very real itch on her cheek.

Curious about the veracity of her claims, neurologist Asaid Khateb put her through an MRI machine and studied the activity of her brain. Remarkably when asked to move her ‘phantom limb’ her motor cortex was activated, suggesting that the brain thought the arm truly existed and was able to be moved. Furthermore, her visual cortex showed signs of activity suggesting she could also see this apparition.

The team in Geneva believe this to be the first case of its kind where a patient can intentionally move a make believe member.

For our second anatomical add-on we must move to Scotland, where yesterday’s Guardian website reported that Stelios Arcadiou, Visiting Professor at Brunel University, would be leading a session at The Edinburgh Science Festival. Arcadiou, better known as Stelarc, is a performance artist with a twist, that twist being an extra ear on his lower arm (see picture below) that was cultivated from stem-cells in 2006. In his talk, entitled Alternate Anatomical Architectures: Fractal Flesh Chimeras & Extra Ears, Stelarc hopes to “explore and extend the concept of the body through human-machine interfaces.” After waiting ten years to find a surgeon willing to construct his aural addition out of human cartilage, he is now trying to hook it up to the internet so that people all over the world can tune into to the delightful acoustic surroundings of his forearm.

Stelarc and his third ear.

In days gone by, people with more body parts than traditionally adorned with by nature would be cruelly toured around the world in so called freak shows, glorified circus acts. It seems to me that a modern day self promoting circus act is just what Prof. Arcadiou may be.

The Kyoto box isn’t just a theory. It’s just a box (well technically it’s two, but that just sounds less snappy.) It’s a solar cooker made from cardboard boxes which won the Climate Change Challenge, a $75,000 prize organised by Forum For The Future. For the Kenyan-based entrepreneur behind it, Jon Bøhmer, it’s a bit like winning Dragon’s Den. Except it has the potential to save millions of lives. Almost as good as Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae sauce?

How to assemble: Take one cardboard box (ask at your local Tesco if you don’t have one lying around), cover in silver foil. Place newspaper at bottom of box for insulation. Place second cardboard box inside and paint black. Cover top of second box with acrylic to trap sun-rays.

That’s it. Sounds like half an episode of Art Attack, or a particularly good GCSE technology project. Except this disarmingly simple box can cook stuff using the power of the sun alone and it only costs 5 Euros to make at a manufacturing level. Apparently it can reach over 100 degrees no problem. Perhaps the most amazing part is that no one has had this idea before (or if they have, that they failed to market it successfully).

The Kyoto box is very good news for the population of developing countries for a whole host of reasons. First, it offers a very cheap and easy way to sterilize water.  Second, for the three billion people who still rely on firewood for cooking the Kyoto box offers a wood-free method of cooking. Not only is this better for the environment, but it’s also safer – apparently 1.6 million women and children die from smoke inhalation during indoor cooking every year.

So I’m a fan, as were the judges (who included my old boss Richard Branson) and the prize money will be used to trial the Kyoto box in 10 different countries, including South Africa and India. 

The appeal of the Kyoto box is not just its potential to save lives, but its simplicity.  If you read the About page for Just A Theory, Jacob warns us of the danger of journalists who dumb down science. How do you dumb down the Kyoto box? You can’t, and this is the joy of this story. There is no elaborate scientific experiment or incomprehensible statistics for us to struggle with, because the concept behind the Kyoto box is beautiful in its simplicity. 

For me, science is at its best when clever thinking about simple ideas leads to a remarkable result (such as when Einstein developed Special Relativity using only high school mathematics) and the Kyoto box is a prime example of this. I’m all in favour of complicated experiments and expensive particle accelerators, but scientists would do well to remember that sometimes a small, simple idea can go a long way.

Nine scientific words that are actually from science fiction

Jeff Prucher, freelance lexicographer and editor for the Oxford English Dictionary’s science fiction project has put together a list of common scientific words that originated in fiction. Such terms include “robotics”, “ion drive” and even “zero-gravity”.

Reading the comments of the article however, it seems that this may not be entirely accurate. Jack Williamson is credited with coining “genetic engineering”, but one commenter points out that Williamson himself admits “some scientist beat me by a couple of years.” He does claim credit for “terraforming”, however – but that’s not even on the list.

The technologies of Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf returned to our screens this weekend, and as a long-time fan of the sci-fi sitcom I wasn’t too impressed. Oddly enough, I felt that the lack of a laugh track actually harmed the show – something I’d never normally say!

To mark the occasion, Cnet gives us Red Dwarf’s six greatest technologies, along with a comparison to real-world equivalents. Some of the links are tenuous at best (is Facebook really the equivalent of storing someone’s personality on disk?), but it’s good for a laugh.

The time-travellers cheat sheet

On a more serious note, if you found yourself travelling back in time to a technologically-barren past, would you have the knowledge to rebuild society yourself? If the answer is no, you need this handy cheat sheet:

Click for a bigger view, and hang it in your time machine.

Created by Topatoco.com, this handy document covers everything a would-be time traveller needs to know to get things up and running again. How do you make penicillin? What’s the speed of light? Do you know the chemical formula for super glue? It’s all in there, along with a whole lot more – and remember, because you’re doing it before the original inventors, take the credit.

Today may be the Grand National, but I’m more interested in a different type of racetrack. New research in to a new type of computer memory means hard drive failure could be a thing of the past.

Physicists at the University of Leeds, in conjunction with IBM Research’s Zurich Lab, have been working on developing “racetrack” memory which could replace current hard drives. Good news for anyone who has ever lost crucial data thanks to a dead drive.

Existing storage technology works like a tiny record player. Information is stored on metal discs made up of groups of magnetised atoms called domains. These discs spin beneath a “head” to read off your mp3 files, documents, and emails.

Racetrack memory was conceived last year by Stuart Parkin at IBM Research’s Almaden Lab, and uses no moving parts, meaning disks using the technology would be much less likely to break. Instead, the information is moved about by an electric current, which switches the magnetic direction of the domains.

The new research, published in Physical Review Letters, uses an electron microscope that can “see” magnetism to investigate how these tiny magnetic devices behave. The aim is to reduce the electric current required to move information along the racetrack.

As well as being more reliable, racetrack memory could also be much cheaper and faster. The price of iPods and USB memory sticks could fall, with the cost of racetrack memory 100 times cheaper per bit than flash memory. With no moving parts and no time needed to search the disk for information, computers could potentially boot up in an instant.

All this wonderful stuff is still a long way off, however. The next stage in the quest for improved memory is to develop better materials with which to construct the racetrack. It’s expected that the new memory will be available within 10 years.