Dreams Into Lightning 2

Morning Report: 2012-04-13

Did 1976 Viking mission find life on Mars after all? 'New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.'

North Korea rocket launch fails. 'North Korea's long-range rocket failed early Friday, U.S. officials said, calling it a blow for the reclusive state's propoganda efforts. The rocket broke up about 90 seconds after taking off, an official told NBC News.' Video at the link, where Rachel Maddow covers the story in her inimitable fashion. Claire Berlinski offers a thoughtful analysis.

Apparent coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau. 'Soldiers have taken control of much of the capital of the Guinea-Bissau in what appears to be a coup attempt. Heavy gunfire was heard in the city of Bissau and at the residence of outgoing Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior.' UPDATE: PM Gomes, President Pereira arrested.

Monitors report first Syria clashes since ceasefire. '"Fighting with heavy machineguns took place in Khirbet al-Joz, located [in Edleb province] on the Turkish border, between regime soldiers and [army] deserters," Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP in Beirut.'

Police find weapons cache in Scotland house. 'The man who found the guns told BBC Scotland the haul included three assault rifles, handguns and a shotgun. At least two dozen officers, including a forensic team, have been searching a farm in Kessington Road in the Killermont area of Bearsden.'

Haredim: We accept the Universe!

Ha'Aretz:

In the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem two weeks ago, an unwritten taboo was shattered in broad daylight: The first Haredi conference on "Torah archaeology" - having been boldly advertised in the Haredi daily Hamodia, and approved by several leading rabbis - drew a packed audience.

The opening speaker, Chabad Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, brought several ancient coins to the conference, held in the Beit Bracha hall near Jerusalem's Mea She'arim neighborhood. Deutsch, who flew in from Brooklyn for the event, runs a museum that displays artifacts he acquired on the private market from the time of the Mishna. ...

Read the rest at the link to find out how an ancient scale in Deutsch's collection resolved an old halakhic dispute. More broadly, in the words of conference organizer Rabbi Eliyahu Soloveitchik,

"We're all Haredim who are guided by the fear of heaven, but that's not a reason to be afraid of science. The Haredi fear of science is gradually dissipating."

Go read it all.

Language Acquisition

Scientist Deb Roy (he's a guy) made a detailed study of his own son's journey in learning to speak. Wired:

Roy, a cognitive scientist and director of MIT Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines Group, wanted to understand how children assimilate and learn language in order to build robots that can learn as children do. So in 2005, before his son was born, he and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones to capture every word the infant and his caregivers spoke and record the environment and events around which these utterances occurred. Part of the goal was to determine how much influence place and context have on language acquisition.

One of the most interesting discoveries, though, had to do with the behavior of adult caregivers teaching the child to speak:

Roy and his team had logically hypothesized that if caregivers were attuned to a child’s language skills, they would begin communicating with the child in simple language that grew more complicated as the child showed signs of comprehension.

“But when we plotted it, we didn’t see it,” Roy told Wired.com in an interview. “There was no correlation.”

Instead, the caregivers actually used simpler language the closer the boy got to grasping a word. At the point they sensed he was on the cusp of getting it, all three primary caregivers – Roy, his wife and their nanny – simplified their language to guide him to the word, then gently brought him into more complex language once he passed the hump.

Go read the full article at the link.

Scary Robots: Cheetah, Atlas, Geminoid DK

Why don't they just call them Centurions and Skinjobs and be done with it?

Gizmag:

[R]obotics company Boston Dynamics recently announced that America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded it a contract to design and build such a ... critter. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier.

The CHEETAH robot will reportedly have four legs, a flexible spine, an articulated head/neck, and perhaps a tail. It will be able to run faster than any existing legged robot or human runner, make tight, zig-zagging turns in order to chase or evade, be able to accelerate very rapidly from a standstill, and stop just as quickly.

The other robot, ATLAS, "will walk like a man, using a heel-to-toe walking motion, long strides and dynamic transfer of weight on each step," according to Boston Dynamics VP of Engineering Rob Playter. It will have a torso, two legs and two arms, although spookily enough, there's no mention of a head. It will be able to turn sideways to squeeze through narrow passages, and use its hands for balance and support on rough terrain.

DARPA + Boston Dynamics = Oh, shit.

But wait, there's more!

See that sandy-haired guy making faces at the camera? Well, he's a robot.
Fox:

Japanese researchers have blurred the lines between man and machine with their latest robot, the incredibly realistic Geminoid DK.

It is the third of the Geminoid series, a line of androids designed by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University and his team at Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Nara.

The robot has been constructed to look exactly like Henrik Scharfe, an associate professor of Aalborg University in Denmark and is the first of the series based on a non-Japanese person.

Read the rest - and watch the videos, if you dare - at the link.

No word, yet, on how long it will take them to type the works of Shakespeare.

Monkeys use brainpower to control robotic arm.

Now we know where those alien spacecraft are hidden.

PhysOrg: Mercury craters show dark halos, shiny bottom.

The surprises continue. Scientists studying the harvest of photos from the MESSENGER spacecraft's Jan. 14th flyby of Mercury have found several craters with strange dark halos and one crater with a spectacularly shiny bottom.
"The halos are really exceptional," says MESSENGER science team member Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "We've never seen anything like them on Mercury before and their formation is a mystery."

Consider the picture above [at link].

The two craters at the bottom of the frame are located in Mercury's giant Caloris Basin, a thousand mile wide depression formed billions of years ago when Mercury collided with a comet or asteroid. For scale, the larger of the two is about 40 miles wide. Both craters have dark rims or "halos" and the one on the left is partially filled with an unknown shiny material. ...

The article suggests a couple of theories to explain the halos. But

None of this explains the shiny-bottomed crater: "That is an even bigger mystery," says Chapman. Superficially, the bright patch resembles an expanse of ice glistening in the sun, but that's not possible

because Mercury is, like, really really hot.

"We don't yet know what the material is, why it is so bright, or why it is localized in this particular crater."

Fortunately, MESSENGER may have gathered data researchers need to solve the puzzle. Spectrometers onboard the spacecraft scanned the craters during the flyby; the colors they measured should eventually reveal the minerals involved. "The data are still being calibrated and analyzed," says Chapman.

Full article, with photo, at the link. My money's still on the alien theory.

Science Roundup

Evolution: Four aspects of human thought. PhysOrg: ' In new work presented for the first time at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, presents his theory of “humaniqueness,” the factors that make human cognition special. He presents four evolved mechanisms of human thought that give us access to a wide range of information and the ability to find creative solutions to new problems based on access to this information. ... These four novel components of human thought are the ability to combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding; to apply the same “rule” or solution to one problem to a different and new situation; to create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input; and to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.'

History: Napoleon not murdered, say Italian physicists. PhysicsWorld: 'The idea that Napoleon Bonaparte was murdered by arsenic poisoning appears to have been ruled out by new research by nuclear physicists in Italy. The team analysed samples of the French emperor’s hair that they had irradiated with neutrons and found that it contains about the same amount of arsenic as hair from several of his contemporaries — suggesting that the poison probably came from environmental sources such as wallpaper dyes, rather than from a malicious poisoner. ...'

Astronomy: Organics on Titan. Astronomy: 'Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.'

Mathematics: MathWorld gets a new look. Wolfram Blog reports on the newest upgrades at Wolfram MathWorld. Also, if you are a math geek, do not miss Wolfram Demonstrations. It's crack for mathheads, baby.

Marine life: Save the sharks! PhysOrg reports that extinction may be looming in the future of many large shark species.

Space and Science Roundup

Shuttle launch sends astronauts on ISS mission. 'NASA’s shuttle Discovery and its seven-astronaut crew launched into orbit Tuesday with a thunderous roar on an ambitious mission to add a new orbital room to the International Space Station (ISS). Commanded be veteran shuttle flyer Pamela Melroy, Discovery’s STS-120 crew rocketed into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here at 11:38 a.m. EDT (1538 GMT), despite an iffy weather forecast of rain showers and ice build-up on the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Tucked in the orbiter’s payload bay was Harmony—a cylindrical module that will anchor future international laboratories to the space station.'

Japan's KAGUYA / SELENE probe orbits moon. 'The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) injected the KAGUYA main satellite in its scheduled orbit and shifted its operation mode to the regular control mode. Both the KAGUYA main satellite and its two baby satellites are in good health. The "KAGUYA" (SELENE) is a lunar explorer launched by the H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 13 (H-IIA F13) on September 14, 2007, (Japan Standard Time, JST) from the Tanegashima Space Center.'

China begins laying trans-Pacific fiber optic cable to US. 'The "Trans Pacific Express" cable will directly link China with South Korea, Taiwan and the United States, greatly increasing Internet speeds between the regions, the China Daily said. Work laying the cable began in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao on Monday, with completion of the trans-oceanic line scheduled for July next year, the paper said. The terminus of the cable that will also be able to transmit high definition television signals during the Beijing 2008 Olympics will be in Nedonna Beach, Oregon, it added.'

International Space Station update.

All ISS systems continue to function nominally, except those noted previously or below. Sunday - first day alone for CDR Whitson, FE-1 Malenchenko and FE-2 Anderson. Day 136 for Anderson. Ahead: Week 1 of Increment 16 (Increment 15 lasted 26 weeks, four less then Inc-14). ... The ISS crew, currently asleep since ~7:00am EDT, has an unusual day: off-duty with wake-up tomorrow morning at 1:00am & bedtime at 4:30pm (to 1:00am Tuesday).

After Soyuz departure at 3:14am, FE-1 Yuri Malenchenko manually closed the PEV (Pressure Equalization Valve) between the Service Module (SM) and its docking port vestibule and later restored the onboard communications system (STTS) setup which had been configured for Soyuz undocking and descent, including the VHF comm link from the TMA-10 SA to TsUP via RGS (Russian Ground Site).

Peggy Whitson performed the daily maintenance of the SOZh (Environment Control & Life Support System, ECLSS) system in the SM, including the ASU toilet facilities systems/replaceables.

Children, Television, and Problems

The Scotsman (h/t - teh invaluable silverseabear):

Study shows ill-effects of TV more wide-ranging than initially thought
Quantity of TV and age of children viewing key elements of study
Time in front of computer screens also part of problem

We're doomed.

Least comforting headline of all time.