Just A Theory

A British company has developed a new type of cement that can suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Its use could transform the cement production from a harmful emitter of CO₂ into an environmentally beneficial process.

Traditionally, cement requires intense heat to burn the raw material used in production - typically limestone. A large amount of energy is needed to generate this heat, and so CO₂ is released. The effect is further compounded by the release of CO₂ from the burning limestone itself.

Novacem, based in London, have created a new mixture of cement based on magnesium silicates. It requires much lower temperatures during production, and as it sets it actually absorbs CO₂ from the atmosphere, making the material actually carbon negative.

The company claims that in a normal lifecycle their cement can absorb 0.6 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of cement. This is a dramatic improvement over the regular stuff, which emits about 0.4 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of cement.

There are doubts over the suitability of the new cement, however. A spokesperson for the British Cement Association said that although much work is done in laboratories on new types of cement, they aren’t yet ready for the market:

“The reality is that the geological availability, and global distribution, of suitable natural resources, coupled with the extensive validation needed to confirm fitness-for-purpose, make it highly unlikely that these cements will a be realistic alternative for volume building.”

Chief scientist of Novacem, Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, countered such claims, as an estimated 10,000 billion tonnes of magnesium silicates are available worldwide. He acknowledges that the cement requires further testing until it is safe for use in buildings, but is confident that Novacem is the way forward.

For myself, I have to applaud Novacem for their efforts. Cement might not be glamorous, but it’s scientific developments such as these that will help us tackle climate change. No one is really going to get excited about a new type of cement, but adapting our existing industrial methods will certainly make a difference.

Last night I watch the first of this year’s annual Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution. The lectures, first given by Michael Faraday in 1825, are designed to educate and entertain children with science.

This year the overarching topic for the lectures was “The Quest for the Ultimate Computer”, and they were given by Professor Christopher Bishop who works at both Microsoft and the University of Edinburgh. This first lecture was entitled “Breaking the speed limit”, and covered the evolution of the microprocessor, the building block of all computers.

The ever-increasing power of computers is all down to Moore’s law. In 1965 the founder of computing giant Intel, Gordon E. Moore, noticed that the number of transistors that can be placed on a computer chip doubles roughly every two years. Amazingly, this means that computers made two years from now will have as much processing power as every computer ever made in the past.

Prof. Bishop used his first lecture to explain exactly what a transistor is - something that I had never had an easy-to-understand explanation for. A transistor is basically an electronic switch that also uses electric current to turn on and off - in other words, no moving parts. This makes them perfect for the construction of logic gates, the very simplest possible computational element. Logic gates come in many forms, but all of these can be built from transistors.

In a number of practical demonstrations, the audience is shown how chips are be manufactured; it’s a rather clever technique. Since the circuitry of a chip is so small and complex, they are actually designed on a much larger scale and then projected on a screen. Light from this screen is shrunk down by a lens on to a light-sensitive material, which marks out the exact design in miniature.

The “speed limit” that Prof. Bishop talks about is actually a physical limit - we simply can’t squeeze any more transistors on to one chip. The solution at the moment is to include many chips in one computer - most PC’s sold these days are marketed as “dual-” or “quad-core”. Not all tasks can be sped up by splitting the workload however; as Prof. Bishop tells us, it takes a woman nine months to make a baby, but nine women can’t make a baby in one month!

If we can’t figure out a way to make better transistors, computers won’t be able to get any faster, as they will just get too hot. This is comically illustrated by making all the children stand up and sit down as fast as they can. If we continue with current technology, in 10 years time chips would be as hot as the surface of the sun. Not something you want in your laptop!

A future solution could be to use carbon nanotubes, which would produce a transistor capable of switching 1,000 times faster than our current silicon models. We could even one day be using DNA to do our computations, though Prof. Bishop admits this is very far off. It sounds like a neat idea however, as the DNA of just one human being can store more information than all of the computers in the world put together.

If you’re as interested as I am to learn about the future of computing, you can watch the remainder of the Christmas Lectures every day this week on Channel Five at 7.15pm. Tonight’s lecture promises “Chips with everything”, so tune in and find out more!

With the year wrapping up, science news is thinning out and the last weekly roundup is looking a bit lean. Still, here we go!

It might not be an iPhone, but it can help save lives

Using only a cheap camera phone and some light sensors, scientists at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute have developed a portable blood tester that could monitor HIV, malaria and leukaemia, as well as detecting other diseases.

Super-phone to the rescue!

The work of Dr. Aydogan Ozcan at UCLA will cut out the more traditional method of sending blood to a lab and waiting weeks for a result, allowing accurate analysis in mere minutes. Not only will it cutting waiting time, but the phone scanner is a fraction of a cost of the massive machines used by lab technicians.

The phone is the perfect tool for developing countries, with use already widespread in areas without a landline network. Phones that come with both a camera and the ability to run the analysis software provide everything needed to save lives in one tidy package.

Nano-nano vroom-vroom

With oil supplies dwindling, car companies are increasingly developing smaller and smaller vehicles for everyday use. None of them can compare to the latest development of one Prof. James Tour however, who recently picked up the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for the development of a car just four nanometres across.

Pimp my nano-ride.

It consists of a chassis and working engine, a suspension system and rotating wheels made from a special form of carbon known as the buckyball, which forms a sphere-like shape from 60 carbon atoms. Tour hopes that inventions like his nanocar and an accompanying nanotruck, capable of carrying a payload, could one day be used to build large scale objects such as buildings by shunting around atoms.

He’s not expecting such developments any time soon however - he says that such applications are so far off that it isn’t even worth patenting the technology, because by the time it could be used to make money the patents would have expired!

Google + Magazines = Moogle?

Earlier this week, Google added a large collection of magazines to their already extensive Book Search catalogue. Of particular interest for the scientifically inclined is the entirety of Popular Science magazine, right back to the first issue published in May 1872. If nothing else, it’s quite fun watching the cover design evolve over the decades. You can also check out the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which for much of its history featured the Doomsday Clock on the cover.

No, you can’t call him Batman

Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana are auctioning the chance to name a newly discovered bat. The winner of the bid (which will start at $250,000) gains the scientific naming rights to a species of bat found recently in a Central American forest. Proceeds will be used to fund environmental research in education at the university, and in the animal’s country of origin.

Dr John Bickham, professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue and discoverer of the bat, is being cagey about the exact location of its habitat, but the winner of the auction will be invited on an expedition to the area with Dr Bickham. They better have a serious name, however:

“We want this to be a serious thing. Anyone willing to put up this kind of money would probably not do so just to be flippant,” said Dr Bickham. “In science, we name species after someone who we wish to honour. We want to find someone who’s passionate about the environment and issues of biodiversity. This is about doing something meaningful.”

Watch the chocs at Christmas - dark will fill you up quicker

Everyone loves a bit of chocolate, but at Christmas it’s easy to over do it. Over at the Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at the University of Copenhagen, they’ve found that dark chocolate may be the solution. Scientists at the Department of Human Nutrition got 16 young men to fast for 12 hours, then offered them 100g of chocolate. One session used milk, and another later on on used dark.

Two and a half hours after the chocolate feast, participants were offered as much pizza as they liked, and instructed to eat until full. It turns out that in the dark chocolate session, they ate 15% less pizza, and reported feeling less like eating sweet, salty or fatty foods.

Dark chocolate has already been shown to have health benefits over milk, what with its healthier fatty acids and antioxidants, but it seems it could now also stop you from overeating. It probably is still to hard to resist that second helping of stuffing, however…

TIME magazine, as part of their “Top 10 Everything of 2008″ series have released the ten most impressive scientific discoveries of the year. “Discoveries” might be stretching it a bit for some of the entries - accomplishments, perhaps? Semantics aside, let’s have a look at the list:

1. Large Hadron Collider

No surprises here. The LHC was the biggest thing in science for most of the year, with extensive coverage in the mainstream media. Even here at Just A Theory I’ve written quite a bit on everyone’s favourite particle accelerator. Unfortunately, there won’t be any discoveries made at CERN for a while yet - a helium leak soon after it was started means the collider won’t be up and running again until sometime next June.

2. The North Pole of Mars

Well, we already knew it was there, but this year in May NASA’s Phoenix probe landed in Mar’s far northern region. No signs of life were found, but we now have further confirmation that Mars was once a wet planet, much like our own Earth.

3. Creating Life

Geneticist J. Craig Venter, instrumental in mapping the human genome, wrote the genetic code for an entirely new type of bacterium, Mycoplasma laboratorium. He and his team put together 582,000 base pairs that make up the genetic information of the new species. Next, this DNA must be inserted into a living bacterium to see if it can take over, effectively creating artificial life.

4. China Soars into Space

The world’s biggest country made new strides into space this year, with the first Chinese spacewalk spacewalk. Pretty impressive, since it’s only their third mission in a space programme that began in 2003.

5. More Gorillas in the Mist

For once, some good news on animal conservation. It turns out that previous estimates of the number of western lowland gorillas were too low, and the Republic of Congo is now thought to contain 125,000 gorillas - twice as many as previously thought.

6. Brave New Worlds

The discovery of extrasolar solar planets continued at a rapid pace this year, with 45 new worlds announced in June by Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor. Later on in November, we got the first ever pictures of planets around another star thank’s to good ol’ Hubble.

7. The Power of Invisibility

Scientists at Berkeley, University of California, announced the invention of an invisibility cloak. Nanotechnology and metamaterials make it possible for an object to completely vanish, but don’t expect your own cloak soon - it’s far from ready to be practical yet.

8. Cenozoic Park?

In Novemeber, biochemistry professor Steven Schuster of Penn State University revealed 80% of the genome of the ancient woolly mammoth, painstakingly recovered using fossilised hair. This lead to speculation we might one day be cloning the furry creatures - has no one seen Jurassic Park?!

9. Can You Spell Science?

Between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of science literacy in adults has doubled to 17%. It’s not that great news though - according to the survey by the University of Michigan, a quarter of the US population count as “civic scientifically literate”. In other words, three in four adults will struggle to understand science stories printed in the media - I wonder if that includes this blog?!

10. First Family

Finally, we have the discovery of the first “nuclear family”. In Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany, a 4,600-year-old grave was discovered to contain the remains of an adult male and female, and two boys aged 8 to 9 and 4 to 5. DNA evidence confirmed their relationships: they are indeed the First Family.

We are well into autumn now, and when it comes to weather there’s one thing you can be certain of in Britain (besides the cold) - rain. Woe betides those who leave home without waterproofs and umbrellas. Even with such paraphernalia you might still get wet if the downpour is heavy enough - there’s only so much water a brolly can take.

Not so with a new waterproof material developed in Switzerland. Researchers at the University of Zurich have come up with a new type of fabric made from fibres of polyester that are coated in millions of minuscule silicone fragments. It’s the most water-repellent material suitable for making clothes ever produced.

Water droplets form perfect spheres on the new material.

Lead researcher Stefan Seeger took their inspiration from examples in nature, such as the surface of Lotus leaves. These biological water-repellents have a particular nanostructure that the new material emulates. Silicone nanofilaments, just 40 nanometres wide, coat the polyester and stop water seeping through.

A stream of water bounces right off.

They also trap a small layer of air that means water never even comes into contact with the underlying polyester. In a demonstration of hydrophobic power, the material was submerged underwater. When it was removed two months later, it was still dry to the touch. Seeger spoke to New Scientist about his creation:

“The combination of the hydrophobic surface chemistry and the nanostructure of the coating results in the super-hydrophobic effect,

“The water comes to rest on the top of the nanofilaments like a fakir sitting on a bed of nails,” he says.

It’s not just polyester that can be protected in this way, although it currently gives the best results. The silicone coating can also be applied to other materials such as wool and cotton. It could even lead to the invention of self-cleaning clothes!

Sorry guys and gals, but with an essay deadline looming in a little over 12 hours I’m afraid I don’t have much time to blog today. Thankfully, I’m at the “editing and finishing up” stage, rather than the “ohgoditsalmostmidnightandihaven’tstarted” stage, but I’m still going to have to pass the buck on this one.

You’re in luck though, as earlier this evening I came across this snazzy little video about the history of the light emitting diode. They’re in practically every electrical appliance you own, but have you ever stopped to think about where they come from? Well, now you can. Enjoy.

P.S. Don’t worry, Einstein & Eddington is still on it’s way!

Spanish surgeons have performed the worlds first transplant using a tissue-engineered organ. A windpipe grown from the patients own stem-cells was transplanted allowing the medical team to return 30-year-old Claudia Castillo to perfect health. Without the procedure, she would have lost a lung due to tuberculosis. Five months later, she is able to lead a normal life once more.

Scientists in Bristol grew the organ for transplant, tailoring it to Ms Castillo’s immune system. This means that the transplant is also the first to not require anti-rejection drugs. They began with a donor windpipe, or trachea, and then used chemicals to wash away any traces of the original cells, leaving only a framework of fibrous protein. Adult stem cells, which can be grown into many other types of cells, were taken from her bone marrow, and encouraged to grow on the framework which was placed inside a rotating bio reactor.

In conjunction with cells from her original organ, these cells coated the new trachea in just four days, ready to be implanted. Professor Paolo Macchiarini of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona performed the operation last June:

“I was very much afraid. Before this, we had been doing this work only on pigs.

“But as soon as the donor trachea came out of the bioreactor it was a very positive surprise.”

He was not the only one to be afraid. As is understandable with a never-before performed procedure, the patient had some nerves as well:

“I was scared. I had the illness for four years and in January they told me they had to operate,” said Ms Castillo.

“He told me that it was a trial that had never been carried out before and that this would be the first in the world.”

The resounding success of the operation put all fears to rest, however. Ms Castillo encourages the team to continue the work, and help others in the same way as her. Professor Martin Birchall, who helped grow the new trachea and is professor of surgery at the University of Bristol, certainly plans to. He believes that in 20 years time, nearly any organ for transplant could be grown in this way:

“This will represent a huge step change in surgery.

“Surgeons can now start to see and understand the potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases.”

The RSC are at it again

The Royal Society of Chemistry are clearly not reading Just A Theory. Not one week after I pointed out the bizarre competitions they have been running, they announce a recipe for Yorkshire pudding.

The Society was replying to the inquiry of one Ian Lyness, who wanted to know why his Yorkshires had failed to rise in the mountainousness Colorado, despite previous success elsewhere in the US. Though they haven’t answered Ian’s question, the RSC have decreed that the perfect Yorkshire should be at least 10 cm tall.

Chemical scientist Dr John Emsley of Yorkshire claimed that only his fellow Yorkshire men and women could produce “worthy” puds. All extremely unscientific conclusions, you might agree. Emsley also provided the “chemical formula” for a pudding, namely carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.

I know they’re just trying to appeal to a wider audience (and it worked, the story was run by many papers), but the RSC really should give up on this kind of thing.

A robot that’s uncanny

The uncanny valley is a commonly held belief that as robots and animations become more humanlike, there is a point before they reach perfection at which they become abhorrent. It’s not been scientifically proven, but I’ve certainly experience the phenomenon for myself.

The latest example is Jules, a creation of the Bristol Robotics Lab. Jules is designed to mimic the facial expressions of other human beings, thanks to the motors embedded beneath its “skin”.

Jules: he's watching you.

Robotic engineers Chris Melhuish, Neill Campbell and Peter Jaeckel spent three-and-a-half years creating the software that powers Jules’ interactions. You can see their results, and Jules’ slightly creepy monologue, in the following video:

This cannot be said enough: science and religion can live happily ever after

The Guardian have an article by Micheal Poole on that old chestnut, science and religion. He’s a visiting research fellow in science and religion at the department of education and professional studies at King’s College London, so unsurprisingly he has a thing or two to say on the matter.

He makes the point that whilst ideas intelligent design and young Earth creationism are nonsense, they do not discredit the concept of creation, or rather Creation as preformed by a Creator. I’ve said similar in the past, but Poole’s argument is very nicely laid out, and worth a read.

He reminds us that creation is a religious concept, not a scientific one, however, it can also not be disproved by science. Science can answer questions about the processes of the natural world; it cannot determine if these are the results of actions by God. In other word, it’s a matter for religious philosophers to fret over, not scientists. Region and science are not enemies, and they should cease to be portrayed as such.

The phrase “google-fu” is used by some as a description of one’s ability to efficiently use the famous search engine, but it’s not to be confused with the recently released Google Flu.

Google have used their gigantic databases of search terms to come up with something quite interesting: predicting levels of flu activity in the United States. By aggregating data on flu-related searches, the search giant was able to get accurate results up to two weeks faster than the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Google's flu predictions match the CDC's surprisingly well.

By speeding up predictions, Google can provide an early warning system for influenza outbreaks. The CDC report that each year in America, 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu complications and about 36,000 people die from the disease - although these is some debate about these figures. In an early version of a paper that has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature, Google researchers state:

Up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics. If a particular region experiences an early, sharp increase in ILI physician visits, it may be possible to focus additional resources on that region to identify the etiology of the outbreak, providing extra vaccine capacity or raising local media awareness as necessary.

Google is also keen to reiterate it’s company’s unofficial motto: Don’t be evil. Using search engine data in this way brings up questions about privacy issues, but Google assures its users that they can not be identified from the data used in Google Flu. Which is nice. Now if they could just invent Google Where In The Damn Hell Did I Leave My Keys…

Spec-tape-ular: visible light is generated in this 30-second exposure of peeling tape.

A paper in the latest issue of Nature has revealed that peeling sticky tape can produce X-rays.

It has been known since 1939 that tape can produce visible light when peeled. This is called triboluminescence, and is due to the energy released during the breaking of the chemical bonds between the two layers of tape.

The research by a group of scientists at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of University of California in Los Angeles found that in addition to this visible light, tape could also produce X-rays and radio waves, both forms of electromagnetic radiation but with different wavelengths to that of light.

The equipment used in the experiment

They used an interesting looking set-up (left) to search for the X-rays. An automated peeling machine removed the tape with a measurable force, whilst a detector looked out for an X-rays that were emitted. All of the equipment had to be placed in a vacuum, as the X-rays cannot normally be generated otherwise - which means that you’re safe when reaching for the office supplies.

The X-rays are produced as electrons jump from the main roll to the sticky side of the peeling tape. When they hit the other side they slow down, losing energy in the process. This energy has to go somewhere, and it just so happens to come out as X-rays.

It’s not all fun and games however, as the X-ray tape could have useful applications. Medical X-rays are made using costly and bulky equipment, but with some refinements the team believe that inexpensive X-ray machines could be produced for use by paramedics, or places where access to electricity is limited - all you need is a bit of tape. The researchers have applied for a patent on the concept. They were able to produce an image of one of the team’s thumbs:

An X-rayed thumb, produced using tape.

Will computers ever be able to talk to us? The Turing Test, posed by the mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptographer Alan Turing, is meant to answer the question. Turing suggested that if a human conversing (via on-screen text) with both another human and a computer could not tell which was which, then for all intents and purposes the computer had succeed in acting like a person.

He predicted that by the year 2000 a computer with 125MB of memory would be able to fool 30% of people during a five minute conversation. It appears that here in 2008 we’re still not quite there - but we are getting close.

The Loebner Prize, now in its 18th year, is up for grabs to any computer (and it’s programmers!) that can pass the test. A bronze medal and $2000 are awarded to the most human-like computer that year, but the Grand Prize of $100,000 and a gold medal is reserved for the first computer to fool 30% of the judges.

This week, a program named Elbot came close. Three out of the 12 judges, or 25%, were fooled. One more would have bumped it over the 30% threshold, and won the grand prize. Unfortunately, Elbot’s creators had to settle for bronze.

Elbot is actually online for anyone to converse with, so I decided to interview the artificial intelligence to see how it felt about winning:
Read more

Better luck next year

Everyone has heard of the Nobel Prize, one of the highest achievements a scientist can win, but what about the Ig Nobel Prize?

The organisers say they honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think” - and winners have certainly come up with some of the strangest discoveries in science. This year, the 18th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held last Thursday at Harvard University.

Highlights include Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse who discovered that fleas on a dog can jump higher than those on a cat, and Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Douglas Smith of the University of California who mathematically proved that a heap of string will inevitably tangle into knots. You can view the full list of winners here.

It’s the freakiest show snow

It’s not quite “Life On Mars”, but maybe David Bowie would consider changing the chorus of his classic song - NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has found snow falling from clouds on Mars. Using a laser sensor from the planet’s surface, the plucky little probe detected snow 4 kilometres above its landing site. Whilst the snow evaporated before hitting the ground, scientists think it might be possible to find signs that snow has reached the surface in the past.

Another experiment that analysed soil samples has also found suggestions of calcium carbonate (which makes up chalk) and possibly, clay. These substances tend to form only in the presence of liquid water here on Earth, giving further evidence that Mars had a “liquid past”.

Could future cars be used for electric storage?

The popularity of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius continues to increase as drivers become more environmentally concious - so much so that the Prius actually goes up in value, as hybrid enthusiasts are prepared to pay over the odds for a second hand car.

Hybrids work by using a traditional petrol-based engine in combination with a recharging battery that captures energy from wasteful actions such as braking, but plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) take this one step further, allowing you to hook up the car to a socket and charge from the National Grid.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have come up with a cunning idea to use PHEVs as overnight batteries, storing excess energy in your car whilst you sleep, and then releasing back into the gird when it is needed. Storing electricity until it is needed can often be costly and inefficient for power plants, but using this distributed model would allow the electric companies to keep up their supply without wasting energy. They’ll even pay you for the privilege of using your car’s battery - if the system ever takes off, that is.

Round ‘em up boys - it’s the carbon capturers

Carbon, carbon, carbon. Life as we know it could not exist without carbon, but this poor little element has a bad reputation these days. Really, it’s only when carbon gets together with two of it’s oxygen friends to form carbon dioxide (CO₂) that the trouble starts. Now, a team of climate change researchers at the University of Calgary have invented a machine that pluck CO₂ straight out of the air.

Although CO₂ only makes up around 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is the main contributor to global warming. Removing CO₂ molecules from the air would help slow down climate change. The new machine uses less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity to remove one tonne of CO₂ from the air, and can capture the equivalent of a US citizen’s average yearly emissions - around 20 tonnes CO₂ per annum - on one square metre of scrubbing material. Team leader David Keith is optimistic about the technology’s prospects:

“This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you’d be capturing 10 times as much CO₂ as the power plant emitted making that much electricity,”

At the moment, however, the machine is still in its early stages. The current cost of capturing CO₂ is too high to make it commercially viable, but work continues on bringing the technique to market.

Tiny pictures, big prizes

You can now vote for your favourite entry in the 34th Annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. Some stunning pictures of the very small have been entered, so I encourage you to take a look. Winners will receive thousands of dollars worth of Nikon photography equipment, and personally I’m going for this strange looking chicken embryo.

I often find myself frustrated with the stupidity of computers. If I’m performing a simple but repetitive task such as resizing pictures or uploading files, I begin to wonder why the computer can’t do it for me. All you have to do is click there, then drag that, then check this - surely the computer can learn this?

A team of computer scientists at Stanford university had the same idea, but set their sights on a task much more impressive than simple file management: flying a remote control helicopter. After “watching” expert radio control pilot Garett Oku demonstrate a series of stunts, the autonomous helicopter (controlled by a computer on the ground) was able not only to match the performance, but to actually better it as well.

The Stanford team pose with their helicopters. Graduate students Pieter Abbell (left) and Adam Coates (right) worked under the direction of Professor Andrew Ng (center)

The computer has multiple ways of observing the human-controlled flight. A system of cameras on the ground measure the position of the helicopter in the sky, whilst a sensor inside the craft tracks orientation during the loops and spins of the stunts. Data from multiple demonstrations is then fed into the computer, which calculates the ideal way to carry out a stunt. This is much more complicated than simply taking an average of a human pilot’s control input; this approach would soon result in a crash landing.

The key idea was to imagine that the expert demonstrations were nearly perfect, but not quite there. Perhaps on one run the helicopter goes a bit too wide, but on another it flies too low to the ground, and so on. By taking the best bits of each run, the computer can piece together the best possible stunt. It’s a bit like trying to view a large painting through a small hole - one viewing doesn’t tell you very much, but move the hole around and you can put together the image in your mind.

A plot of the helicopter's change in position during a loop. The coloured lines are the human-controlled demonstration, whilst the black line shows the much rounder ideal path calculated by the computer.

This clever software crunches the numbers 52,000 time a second, and enables the performance a range of difficult stunts with absolutely no human input. One of the most impressive is the “tic toc”, in which the helicopter points straight upwards and vibrates from side-to-side like the pendulum of a clock. Professor Andrew Ng, director of the research, called the stunts “by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter.”

The team have a YouTube channel where you can watch the results of their experimentation, including the helicopter putting on a show all by itself:

References:

Adam Coates, Pieter Abbeel, Andrew Y. Ng (2008). Learning for Control from Multiple Demonstrations ICML

A team at MIT have created microscopic batteries built with viruses. The tiny batteries are half the size of a human cell and could have many applications such as powering implanted medical devices such as a pacemaker.

Microbatteries, each only four micrometers in diameter.

They could even be spun into fibres and then woven in to your clothes - although the researchers are still working on that, according to team leader Angela Belcher:

“We definitely don’t have full batteries on those [fiber architectures]. We’ve only worked on single electrodes so far, but the idea is to try to make these fiber batteries that could be integrated into textiles and woven into lots of different shapes.”

The batteries are made by genetically engineering viruses to form wires from individual molecules of materials such as cobalt oxide. The viruses have been specifically engineered to make them ideal for working at room temperature and pressure. They also can’t reproduce by themselves, and will only infect bacteria. They form a wire 17,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper that is packed together to make part of the battery.

The teams next goal is to work on applying thee batteries to curved surfaces, as well as looking at integrating the batteries with other biological organisms.

Going, going, found!

A new species of insect was found this week - on eBay. Dr Richard Harrington, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Entomological Society, paid £20 for a 40-50 million-year-old fossilised insect trapped in amber. After struggling to identify it he sent the purchase to Professor Ole Heie, an aphid expert in Denmark, who confirmed it was a previously undiscovered type of aphid.

Professor Heie named the insect Mindarus harringtoni after its purchaser, but Dr Harrington himself had wanted to go for something slightly more unorthodox. “I had thought it would be rather nice to call it Mindarus ebayi,” he said. “Unfortunately, using flippant names to describe new species is rather frowned upon these days.”

Because you can’t just have one…

If you are trying to lose weight, going for a small bag of crisps rather than a larger one might seem the obvious route, but researchers from the Technical University of Lisbon and Tilburg University in the Netherlands have found that this may not be the case. Participants in a study were asked to complete a questionnaire on body satisfaction and dieting, then weighed and measure in front of a mirror in order to active their “dietary concerns” - in other words, to get them to watch their weight. Along with a control group who had not had their “dietary concerns” activated, they then watched episodes of Friends (aside: why Friends? Perhaps due to its constant looping on E4…) and were asked to evaluate the adverts.

In fact, the researchers were watching their consumption of the crisps that had been provided. Available in large or small packaging, the study found the “dietary concerns” group given large packages at the fewest number of crisps. The conclusion was that large packages made participants think of overeating and dieting, but small packages were “innocent pleasures” that did not trigger dieting concerns. My conclusion: I now want some crisps.

Power adaptor tyranny could soon be over

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a few gadgets. When ever I travel anywhere I have to take a mess of power adaptors to feed my phone, mp3 player and Nintendo DS - I’m just thankful I don’t have a laptop to add to the mix. It’s also easy to forget to plug the damn things in, leaving me to play the “do I have enough battery life to make this call?” game. I’ve often thought of a solution - a “power pad” on my desk, where any electrical device would charge simply by being left there and forgotten about.

The technology exists - your electric toothbrush is charged not by wires, but by magnetic induction. Flowing electrons in a circuit generate a magnetic field which in turn induces electron flow in nearby circuits - bam, wireless electricity. I had assumed that the process was too slow to be of use with general electronics, and left it at that.

Turns out I should have got to work on a prototype, because MIT and Intel have found a way to make it work - and not just in close contact. They demonstrated a 60-watt light bulb powered by an energy source three feet away, with no wires in sight. The technology is at least five years away however, especially one-quarter of the energy is lost in transmission. In a world increasingly looking to improve energy usage, 75% efficiency is pretty unacceptable. Still, I can’t wait to get rid of those chargers.

What constitutes a brain? Scientists at the University of Reading have connected neurons from the foetus of a rat to a bank of electrodes which control a small robot. You can watch the robot learning to turn in this video:

This experiment has been widely reported by the media as a “rat-brained robot”. This instantly conjures up the mental image of a B-movie experiment gone horrible wrong - “Rat-Brained Robots…FROM SPACE!” perhaps - quite far from reality.

Neurons are the cells that make up the majority of the nervous system, including the brain. There are around 100 billion of these cells in a human brain. The robot is controlled by 300,000 rat neurons, less than 2% of the 21 million in a rat brain. Do these randomly connecting neurons make a brain? Clearly one neuron cannot be call a brain - it’s just a single cell after all. At what point do you go from a clump of neurons to a fully fledged brain? The Reading team themselves are unclear on this point, using phrases such as “brain material” and “brain culture” along with just plain old “brain”.

What is clear is this experiment is not “cruel”, as many commenters on the news websites seem to be saying. They haven’t cut the brain from a living adult rat and placed it into a robot in some kind of twisted transplantation - for one thing, I imagine they would have no idea how to hook up a rat brain to a robot. The neurons aren’t even physically attached to the robot, as their organic nature requires a temperature-controlled environment. Instead, communication takes place with the robot via Bluetooth.

So what’s the point of it all? Once the robot has learnt to navigate its environment and recognise its surroundings by forming connections between neurons, the researchers plan to disrupt these connections in an attempt to recreate conditions that cause memory loss such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. In other words, they aren’t trying to build an army of robo-rat slaves.

Following on from yesterday’s story on Virgin Galactic’s latest airborne creation, we have the Martin Jetpack (the site is pretty slow at the moment, presumably due to all the current media attention.) Not a jetpack in the truest sense as it is powered by large duct fans rather than an airplane-like jet engine, it can nevertheless reach six feet into the air. The designer, Glenn Martin, expects to eventually reach 8,000 feet - although it would normally be operated much lower at between 1,500 and 2000 feet at a top speed of over 60mph.

Harrison Martin demonstrates the Martin Jetpack at AirVenture

The machine was revealed to the public at the AirVenture air show yesterday, where it was piloted by Martin’s son Harrison who has been testing the craft in secret since he was 15 years old. Now 16, his demonstration took place just a few feet off the ground, and he was assisted by helpers holding him down on either side.

Glenn Martin plans to sell the jetpacks for $100,000 dollars each, and will begin training the first 10 Rocketeer hopefuls next year in New Zealand where Martin lives. His website states “all owners are required to pass the Martin Aircraft Company approved training program before receipt of their aircraft,” and that although a pilots license is not necessary, “to attempt to fly any aircraft without professional instruction is extremely foolhardy.”

I can’t help but agree with him. I am currently learning to drive, and find handling a vehicle in two dimensions difficult enough. The prospect of strapping two large fans to my back and navigating the skies is frankly terrifying, and unlike yesterday’s promised of mass spaceflight, I’m not sure that we will every see jetpacks in use by the general public - if only because governments will never fully allow it. On the other hand, the media was equally as doubting of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, and now millions of people fly in planes daily. Perhaps the personal jetpack is just waiting to take off.