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POPSA Robot that Navigates Like a Person The machine is controlled by algorithms designed to mimic different parts of the human visual system. Rather than capturing and mapping its surroundings over and over in order to plan its route--the way most robots do--the European machine uses a simulated neural network to update its position relative to the environment, continually adjusting to each new input. This mimics human visual processing and movement planning.
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POPSArtificial Liver Shows Early Promise Toxins in the plasma flow through the fiber membrane, where they are metabolized by the liver cells. The cells also synthesize essential proteins, such as blood-clotting factors, which diffuse back into the plasma. The filtered plasma is then recombined with the cellular components of blood and returned to the patient. A clinical trial in China found that patients treated with the ELAD fared significantly better than those who did not get the treatment. Another study began in the United States in October. Artificial Liver Shows Early Promise
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POPSFirst complete cancer genome sequenced Understanding the genetic basis of cancer could lead to highly personalized treatments, says Mardis. “Right now, they’re all treated the same way they were 25 years ago,” she says of AML patients. It would be nice, Mardis says, if doctors could tell their patients, “Here’s what we know about your disease, and here are your best treatment options.”
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POPSStudy finds value in 'junk' DNA "Alu elements are a major source of new exons. Because Alu is a primate-specific retrotransposon, creation of new exons from Alu may contribute to unique traits of primates, so we want to better understand this process," said the study's senior author Yi Xing, Ph.D., assistant professor of internal medicine and biomedical engineering, who holds a joint appointment in the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and the UI College of Engineering. To study the impact of Alu-derived exons on human gene expression, the researchers used a high-density exon microarray. The technology has nearly six million probes for monitoring the expression patterns of all human exons. Using data generated by these microarrays, the scientists analyzed 330 Alu-derived exons in 11 human tissues. The team then identified a number of exons with interesting expression and functional characteristics.
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POPSTuberculosis Is 9,000 Years Old
The fact that Alit-Yam is one of the first Neolithic settlements evidenced to have domesticated cattle further goes to show that the bacteria infected humans first and then mutated into its bovine form. Several more skeletons found at the dig site exhibited traces of bacterial cell wall lipids, which have been directly linked to the presence of TB after DNA analysis. Having discovered the first hosts of the TB bacteria, biologists now hope to be able to sequence the bacterial DNA, in the hope that they would find out exactly how it mutated over the thousands of years it lived in humans. Already, several strand portions have been identified in samples collected from the bones in Egypt, which are not present in today's TB strains. This could mean that changes in human physiology may also trigger alternate responses in bacterial morphology. Scientists continue their research, with the big prize being finding a way of ridding humanity of this terrible disease.
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POPSSuperstruct Begins The human species has a long history of overcoming tremendous obstacles, often coming out stronger than before. Indeed, some anthropologists argue that human intelligence emerged as the consequence of the last major ice age, a period of enormous environmental stress demanding flexibility, foresight and creativity on the part of the small numbers of early Homo sapiens. Historically, those who have prophesied doom for human civilization have been proven wrong, time and again, by the capacity of our species to both adapt to and transform our conditions. It is in this context that the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) offers its forecast of the likely extinction of humankind within the next quarter-century.
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POPSRobot builders seek a little help from sci-fi "People that thought of it as a camera with legs were really pleased, but people that thought of it as a photographer were really disappointed," he says. Smart thinks those raised expectations were down to the impact of unrealistically human-like robots in movies and books. "People don't really know what they are. C-3PO in Star Wars is very humanlike, intelligent and capable, but real robots are not like that at all." Instead of just forcing people to alter their expectations, Smart thinks it makes sense to study how people's ideas about robots are influenced by fiction. That knowledge could be used to design robots that make the most of those expectations. "My real concern is to get people and robots to play together nicely," says Smart. Engineers might learn from fictional robots in other ways, says Sharkey. "It would be worthwhile to study the way computer animators make us connect with simple, non-human objects." Pixar's WALL-E, for example, is easy to connect with, he
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POPSRobots Detect Behavioral Cues to Follow Humans “As humans, we constantly incorporate other peoples' current actions as clues (cues) as to what they may do in the future,” Sanjay Joshi of the University of California, Davis, told PhysOrg.com. “For instance, we have a ‘sixth sense’ on the highway to know that a certain car will swerve into our lane soon, based on the driver's current driving patterns. Then, we may become more defensive in our own driving. In our work, we wanted to begin the process of allowing robots to use behavioral cues (of humans or other robots), to make the robot's mission more reliable and accurate. In social work environments populated by numerous people and robots, these types of cues should be abundant.” The researchers explained that behavioral cues that robots might use could include any action or signal that the leader exhibits that hints at a future action. These might be intended behaviors, such as pointing or waving. Other cues might be unconscious, such as behaviors that indicate stress or sadness,
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POPSIntelligence and Empathy He stresses that the human mind does not qualify as a completely ‘General Intelligence’ but lies somewhere on the spectrum between AGI on one end and ‘Narrow AI’ on the other. This is one of several reasons why he does not expect AGI to be achieved by mimicking the workings of the human brain. He describes how our brains fool us into believing that we understand our actions and decisions when we don’t. And why modeling an AI too closely on the human brain might make it too, vulnerable to false notions. He also says, ‘I think virtual worlds are going to be absolutely critical to the development of Artificial General Intelligence.’ As well as ‘Right now connecting AI’s to virtual worlds is probably the best way to get an AI to have a general human-like embodied experience.’
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POPSHuman Obesity Genes Revealed Based On Fly Experiments As De Luca reports, "We found one variant to be associated with weight and lean mass in both ethnic groups. This variant was also associated with height, total fat mass and HDL-cholesterol, but only in European American women. A different variant was associated with triglyceride levels and HDL-cholesterol in African American women." The use of flies in a study of human obesity may seem strange, but according to De Luca "Insects store fat like mammals do, as lipid droplets accumulated in the fat body, the functional equivalent of both mammalian liver and white adipose tissue". She adds that, "Drosophila share many components of fat biosynthesis, degradation and regulation with humans, including many of those implicated in diabetes and obesity".
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POPSWere Ancient Viruses a Key to Human Evolution? These viral fragments are fossils that reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Although many of these evolutionary relics still manage to generate proteins, scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick. That is until Thierry Heidmann who runs the laboratory at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, brought one to life. Heidmann long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could have the evolutionary power to influence humans as a species becoming part of the genetic blueprint, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.
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POPSHuman-frog hybrids reveal autism's secrets To see if abnormalities in neurotransmitter signalling also underlie autism, Miledi's team collected brain samples from six deceased autistic patients, aged eight to 39. They fused brain-cell membranes, which house neurotransmitter receptors, together with Xenopus egg membranes. As a control, they did the same thing with brain cells from patients with no history of mental disorder. Miledi's team then doused the frog eggs in neurotransmitter chemicals, and measured the voltage generated within each egg. The neurotransmitter chemicals tell brain cells to pump charged molecules in and out the membrane, creating a voltage across the membrane. Since Xenopus eggs do not respond to the neurotransmitters, the human proteins are completely responsible for any electric current generated. Four of six autistic brains responded to neurotransmitters chemicals less vigorously than the controls.
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POPS"Do Humans Have 23 years to Go?" Play Superstruct and Find Out -Invent the Future! “The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which it a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.” According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.
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POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
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POPSWatermelon May Have Viagra-effect In watermelons, these include lycopene, beta carotene and the rising star among its phyto-nutrients – citrulline – whose beneficial functions are now being unraveled. Among them is the ability to relax blood vessels, much like Viagra does. Scientists know that when watermelon is consumed, citrulline is converted to arginine through certain enzymes. Arginine is an amino acid that works wonders on the heart and circulation system and maintains a good immune system, Patil said.
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POPSReligion is a product of evolution, software suggests Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious. To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.
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POPSSo you think humans are unique? "Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have compiled a list of gestures observed in monkeys, gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans, which reveals that gesticulation plays a large role in their communication. Ape gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape's attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them or touch the recipient."
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POPSExploring The Mechanics Of Judgment & Beliefs "We already knew that some parts of the brain are involved in specific aspects of perception and motor control, but many doubted that an abstract high-level cognitive process like understanding another person's thoughts would be conducted in its own private patch of cortex," Kanwisher says.
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POPSHumanity Was Genetically Divided For 100,000 Years the study provides insight into the early demographic history of human populations before they moved out of Africa. “These early human populations were small and isolated from each other for many tens of thousands of years,” says Rosset. MtDNA, inherited down the maternal line, was used in 1987 to discover the age of the famous “Mitochondrial Eve,” the most recent common female ancestor of everyone alive today. This work has since been extended to show unequivocally that “Mitochondrial Eve” was an African woman who lived sometime during the past 200,000 years.
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POPSA Speech Center of the Monkey Brain Has Been Found! The researchers played recorded coos, grunts, and other vocalizations made by macaques, but also other animals and natural sounds like thunder and running water. A small area of the macaques' temporal lobes turned on only in response to macaque voices, being insensitive to other sounds. The nucleus could differentiate the voices of individual macaques: its activity decreased when the researchers played several times a monkey's voice, but it was boosted by a new played voice.
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