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Billionaires to change face of research?
They are an elite club of billionaires, movie producers, dotcom whiz kids and the occasional astronaut, and between them they hope to change the face of scientific research.
With money and influence, the 20-strong team — among them the producer of the Blues Brothers and Naked Gun movies, the co-founder of Google, a former White House aide and the Vietnam veteran-turned-billionaire genetics entrepreneur, Craig Venter — are to launch a series of multimillion dollar prizes to accelerate scientific breakthroughs that otherwise might be decades away.
Together, they make up the X-Prize Foundation, an organization set up by Peter Diamandis of Space Adventures, the company that arranged for Dennis Tito to fly to the International Space Station in 2001 and so become the world’s first space tourist. The foundation (motto: “Creating radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity”), plans to launch three prizes of at least $10m this year to crack some of the toughest problems facing genetics, nanotechnology and the car industry.
The move follows the foundation’s huge success with the Ansari X-Prize, which promised $10m for the first commercial manned spacecraft to reach suborbital space twice within two weeks. Named after Anousheh Ansari, a dotcom multimillionaire and one of only two women on the foundation’s board, the prize attracted 26 teams which spent more than $100m trying to win.
From cradle to calculator
They might not be able to talk or feed themselves, but babies can do one thing that may come as a surprise to parents — maths. Researchers have shown that the ability to understand numbers comes to us well before we learn to speak.
Neuroscientists Kerry Jordan and Elizabeth Brannon, of Duke University, North Carolina, conducted an experiment to show that seven-month-old babies can accurately tell how many people are speaking at a given time. The scientists presented 20 babies with two videoclips of women saying the word “look”.
One clip contained two women, the other three. The babies heard either two or three women saying “look” and were shown the clips side by side. “Infants spent a greater proportion of time looking at the display that numerically matched the number of women they heard, compared with the numerically non-matching display,” wrote the researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The babies spent almost 60 per cent of their time looking at the correct display — the clip that matched the number of voices. “Our results provide clear evidence of a developmental basis for language-independent numerical representations that extend across different (senses),” the researchers said, adding that the use of faces and voices may have enabled the babies to make judgments more accurately.
First robot run by living cells
Ever worried that the terrifying cyborgs that fill sci-fi stories might one day become a reality? Perhaps the latest research by Klaus-Peter Zauner of Southampton University will cause a stir: the engineer has invented a robot that is controlled by living cells.
The cells in question are a specially grown type of “slime mould” that naturally shies away from light. Dr Zauner grew a star-shaped sample of the slime mould and attached it to a six-legged robot (with each point of the star attached to a leg) to control its movements.
Shining white light on to a section of the single cell organism made it vibrate, changing its thickness. These vibrations were fed into a computer, which then sent signals to move the leg in question. Pointing beams of light at different parts of the slime mould means that different legs move. Do it in an ordered way and the robot will walk.
The work came out of a collaboration with scientists at Kobe University in Japan, who had been studying ways of using biological cells in robots. Dr Zauner himself had been trying to use individual molecules — rather than instructions from computer programs — to control the functions and movements of robots.
DNA test for Joan of Arc
History contends that the ashes of Saint Joan of Arc were gathered from the pyre on which she was burned alive and tossed into the river Seine. Anxious to avoid creating a martyr, the English, who had ordered her death in 1431, wanted nothing left of the 19-year-old French heroine.
According to legend, however, a devoted follower managed to find and conceal some of her remains, including fragments of charred rib and material from clothing, that today are one of the Roman Catholic church’s most precious relics.
Now DNA tests are to be carried out on the Pucelle d’Orléans (the Maid of Orleans), who was killed 575 years ago for being a heretic and a witch after she claimed voices from God had told her to drive the English from France.
Philippe Charlier, a specialist at the Raymond-Pointcaré hospital at Garches, west of Paris, said the tests would solve the mystery. “The remains include fragments of ribs, material, wood and traces of human body tissues on pieces of bone and wood from the pyre,” he said.
Joan of Arc, was burned at the stake, but because her heart remained intact — seen in the 15th century as a miracle — her remains were cremated on two more occasions before being thrown in the river. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Environment
Several leading energy and manufacturing firms have joined with a prominent environmental think tank to develop the first comprehensive plan for the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Shell Oil, British Petroleum, Cinergy Corp, Intel, the aluminum producer Alcan Inc, and others have endorsed the “Agenda for Climate Action” issued by the Virginia-based Pew Centre on Climate Change, a non-governmental group that works with the private sector to provide reliable information and solutions on climate change. — Dawn/IPS News Service
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