Machines Like Us – Science News

Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World with Sam Harris speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival.

Scientists have discovered something very unexpected in their studies of the worm C. elegans: Authority is taken away from individual cells and given to two specialized neurons to sense temperature stress and organize an integrated molecular response for the entire organism.

Berkeley Bionics™, designs and manufactures lower extremity exoskeletons to augment human strength and endurance during locomotion. Berkeley Bionics exoskeletons increase wearer's strength while decreasing their metabolic cost of walking.

Renowned Quantum Physicist and father of the Quantum Computer, David Deutsch (www.qubit.org) speaks with Aubrey de Grey about the scientific details, and feasability of life extension technology SENS (www.methuselahfoundation.org).

Robots designed to toss pool-noodle trees into a river of ping-pong balls ruled over competitors focused on rescuing fuzzy toy beavers in this year's 2.007 contest, "Da (yes) MIT, or Save the Baby Beavers," held on Thursday, May 8, in the Johnson Athletic Center at MIT.

A tiny pair of robotic tweezers with the most sensitive grip yet can pick up and move individual cells without damaging them, guided by their own sense of touch. They could be used to probe the properties of living tissue, or create microscale and nanoscale devices.

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will pass the PFLOPS barrier next year and hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

The futuristic epic 2001: A Space Odyssey influenced many to fall in love with the limitless possibilities of space exploration. The movie sparked imaginations and provided a realistic preview of what our future in space might look like.

The radioactive carbon-14 produced by above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and '60s has helped researchers determine that the number of fat cells in a human's body, whether lean or obese, is established during the teenage years. Changes in fat mass in adulthood can be attributed mainly to changes in fat cell volume, not an increase in the actual number of fat cells.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis working with diabetic mice have examined in unprecedented detail the immune cells long thought to be responsible for type 1 diabetes.

This meta-analysis, published in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, is based on data from more than 26,000 study participants. It verifies two already known genes, but also discovered ten new genes. Altogether they explain a difference in body size of about 3.5 centimeters.

The University of Leicester is leading on a national study to calculate the number of adults with autism, it has been announced today.

By Mano Singham

When all else fails, religious people sometimes resort to utilitarian arguments in favor of god, such as that some people would act worse if they did not believe in a god who would punish them for doing bad things. Other alleged benefits of 'good' religion are that it helps people cope with the stresses of life and deal with the fear of death, that it encourages people to do good acts, and to summon up courage in the face of adversity.

The future of nuclear physics is in designer isotopes -- the relatively new power scientists have to make specific rare isotopes to solve scientific problems and open doors to new technologies, according to Bradley Sherrill, a University Distinguished Professor of physics and associate director for research at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University.

When most people discover mold on their bread, they immediately throw it out. Others see a world of possibilities in the tiny fungus. A University of Missouri scientist, along with a collaborative research team, has examined a new mechanism in the reproductive cycle of a certain species of mold. This mechanism protects the organism from genetic abnormalities by silencing unmatched genes during meiosis (sexual reproduction). The finding could have implications for higher organisms and may lead to precise targeting of unwanted genes, such as those from the HIV virus.