from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Alaska's moon rocks disappeared on Sept. 6, 1973. A fire set by an arsonist had torn through the state transportation museum in Anchorage, where the four rocks had been on display.
The fragments, each smaller than a pea, were among 48 pounds of lunar material retrieved four years earlier by astronauts aboard Apollo 11. President Nixon gave samples to each state to celebrate man's first walk on the moon.
The Alaska museum curator's stepson, 17-year-old Arthur Coleman Anderson, sneaked inside the disaster scene to poke through the debris. He came across a Lucite ball mounted on a walnut plaque featuring the state flag. Inside the ball were four rocks. Anderson figured the plaque, once cleaned up and polished, would make a neat souvenir. And so, as clean-up crews set about their work, he walked away with a national treasure.
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from Time
The search for exoplanets, or worlds orbiting other stars, is evolving so fast that discoveries that seemed exotic just a few months ago have become commonplace. Multiple-planet solar systems? Astronomers expected to find just a handful; now we know of more than 200. Planets orbiting double or even triple stars? It was big news when just one was announced back in September; we've already got several more examples in hand. In short, the unexpected is something planet hunters have learned to expect--and in most cases, these surprises have tended to expand the possibilities for finding worlds where life might thrive.
It's just happened again: Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, have announced the discovery of yet another new world that defies everyone's expectations. Not only does the new planet orbit one of the suns in a triple-star system--rare enough in itself--but the stars in this system have surprisingly low levels of the heavy elements planets are made from. Theory suggests that such stars shouldn't form planets in the first place, so if this isn't a fluke, there may be many more planets in the Milky Way than anyone thought.
That's not all: The new planet, called GJ667Cc, is just 4.5 times Earth's mass. That's big enough to qualify it for the astronomical label "super-Earth" but still quite small by exoplanet standards. Indeed, it's so small that GJ667Cc is thought to be made of earthlike rock rather than gas--even if those rocks had to coalesce from a smaller supply of raw material circling the parent sun. Beyond that, it orbits in its star's habitable zone: If there's water there, that water could be in life-friendly liquid form.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists in the US have successfully made human brain cells in the lab that are an exact replica of genetically caused Parkinson's disease. The breakthrough means they can now see exactly how mutations in the parkin gene cause the disease in an estimated one in 10 patients with Parkinson's.
And it offers a realistic model to test new treatments on--a hurdle that has blighted research efforts until now. The team told Nature Communications their work was a "game-changer."
"This is the first time that human dopamine neurons have ever been generated from Parkinson's disease patients with parkin mutations," said Dr. Jian Feng who led the investigations. "Before this, we didn't even think about being able to study the disease in human neurons," Feng said.
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from the Guardian (UK)
The Carina Nebula, 7,500 light years from Earth, buzzes with activity. Countless stars are being born among the glowing clouds of dust and gas. Over several million years, this nebula--named after the keel of the mythical ship Argo--has created some of the most massive stars known to astronomers.
... The newly released image was constructed from a mosaic of hundreds of individual pictures from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is the most comprehensive image of the Carina Nebula ever produced using infrared wavelengths of light.
The VLT sits at an altitude of 2,500m, on top of Mount Paranal in the northern Atacama desert in Chile. The dry, dusty desert is almost devoid of life and a perfect place to watch the skies: At night, the bone dry air means the VLT can track and measure stars, black holes and planets with exquisite precision using its four individual observatories. At the heart of each observatory is an 8m-wide mirror made from a single piece of polished glass, the exact shape of which changes 100 times per second to counteract, in real time, the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere on the starlight it is trying to detect.
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from the Seattle Times
LOS ANGELES -- About nine of every 10 Americans eat more salt than is recommended, and Public Enemy No. 1 is bread--not junk food, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention said Tuesday.
Salt, or sodium chloride, is a sneaky ingredient, ending up in many food products that don't sport the distinctive tang of a potato chip. But just because the sodium intake per slice of bread or roll may be lower than a serving of potato chips doesn't mean that the salt isn't piling up. Americans love to chomp down on bread--and they frequently indulge.
"Too much sodium raises blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke," CDC Director Thomas Frieden said in a statement. "These diseases kill more than 800,000 Americans each year and contribute an estimated $273 billion in health care costs."
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from Nature News
Last summer, intrepid surfers flocked to Florida's east coast to ride the pounding swells spawned by a string of offshore hurricanes. But they were not prepared for a different kind of hazard washing towards shore--an invasion of stinging moon jellyfish, some of which reached the size of bicycle wheels. The swarms of gelatinous monsters grew so thick that they forced a Florida nuclear power plant to shut down temporarily out of concern that the jellies would clog its water-intake pipes.
Earlier in the year, similar invasions had forced shut downs at power plants in Israel, Scotland and Japan. The gargantuan Nomura's jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai) found in Japanese waters can weigh up to 200 kilograms and has plagued the region repeatedly in recent years, hampering fishing crews and even causing one boat to capsize. Jellyfish have destroyed stocks at fish farms in Tunisia and Ireland. And in the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere, officials have built nets to keep out jelly swarms.
The jellyfish blooms seem to bear out warnings from some scientists and conservationists, who argue that humans are knocking marine ecosystems off balance, causing a massive increase in the global population of jellyfish--a catch-all term that covers some 2,000 species of true cnidarian jellyfish, ctenophores (or comb jellies) and other floating creatures called tunicates. But many marine biologists are now questioning the idea that jellyfish have started to overrun the oceans.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Yep, they did it: A team of Russian scientists has drilled 3769.3 meters through the Antarctic ice to reach the surface of buried Lake Vostok, the team announced Wednesday morning on the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute's Web site (in Russian).
Valery Lukin, leader of the Russian team, confirmed in a press release that the team reached the East Antarctica lake on Sunday evening Moscow time. On Saturday, the drill had encountered water at about 3,766 meters depth, but the team determined that it was a water lens sitting above the surface of the lake rather than the lake itself.
The team collected water samples from the lens, and then kept drilling until reaching the lake surface itself. As expected, the pressurized water of the lake rose about 30 to 40 meters through the borehole and froze, plugging the borehole; the team will return next fall to retrieve the plug and examine it for signs of life.
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from Science News
A recently criticized textbook example of evolutionary forces in action, the dark forms of peppered moths that spread with industrialization in Britain, may be on its way back.
Results of an ambitious experiment on the moths (Biston betularia) support the original hypothesis that their dark-colored forms spread in soot-coated landscapes because they are more difficult for hungry birds to spot, says evolutionary biologist James Mallet of Harvard University. He and three colleagues have published the final peppered moth experiment of Michael Majerus, who spent six years monitoring the fates of a total of 4,864 moths, presented his conclusions at a conference but died before publishing them. The study appeared online February 8 in Biology Letters.
The moth story not only makes "a compelling example of evolution in action," but it's "a terrific case history of how science works," says evolutionary biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington in Seattle. "Majerus raised questions; he and his colleagues did the hard work required to answer them."
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from Smithsonian Magazine
Weather changes not just from season to season, but also from year to year. Where I live in Minnesota, we had only a few days of frost before the year's end, and January, normally the coldest month of the year, was relatively balmy. But in another year we might have days on end of sub-zero weather during the winter. It is hard for a person to detect climate change at this scale, even though global temperature measurements clearly show that the planet has warmed.
But every now and then something comes along that demonstrates a longer term trend that we can see and measure more directly. For instance, the USDA recently released a new version of its "Plant Hardiness Zone Map." If you are a gardener in the United States, you probably already know about this map; its zones are used to determine what kinds of plants can be grown outdoors in your area, the estimated dates of the last killing frost in the spring and the first killing frost in the fall. This is at least the second time in my memory that this map has been redrawn with all the zones moved to the north, reflecting a warming planet in a way that every gardener can observe and understand.
Not all global climate changes are simple warming, however. Global warming causes changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation as well. Westerly winds in the southern Pacific Ocean have shifted south towards the pole and have become more intense. A recent study in Science shows that the foraging patterns of breeding Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans) on the Crozet Islands has been changed by global warming in a way that seems to benefit them now, but that will likely harm them in the future.
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from Scientific American
Whether you succeed at work may depend on many factors--intelligence, empathy, self-control, talent and persistence, to name a few. But one determinant may outweigh many of these: how you perceive those around you. New research suggests that your own ability to get things done--not to mention your success in non-work relationships--is highly correlated with how you see others. Are your coworkers capable and kind, or are they, dare I say, incompetent jerks?
It turns out that such opinions are tied to a key component of achievement called psychological capital, a mixture of efficacy (self-confidence), resilience (you believe you can bounce back from setbacks), hope (you believe you can achieve your goals) and optimism (you expect good things to happen in the future). As a concept, psychological capital reflects our capacity to overcome obstacles and push ourselves to pursue our ambitions. Not surprisingly, scoring high on this measure is linked to markers of success: being promoted, winning awards, popularity with peers, stability of marriage and even longevity.
Given the power of this trait, psychologists--and employers--want to measure it. After all, a prospective employee with a lot of psychological capital is likely to do well on the job and thus, be a smart hire. Individuals might like to know how much of it they have. (I am curious about my own stockpile.) It is difficult to intuit, even if you think you know yourself fairly well, because you have little sense of how you compare with others.
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from BBC News Online
It is not yet clear whether Russian scientists have succeeded in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok. National media on Monday reported a breakthrough
into the lake, the largest of more than 300 bodies of liquid water buried under Antarctica's ice.
But Valery Lukin, the Russian Antarctic programme director, has told Nature journal that the claim is premature. He said data from a number of
sensors monitoring the drilling had yet to be analysed.
"Only when I will have this I can say we penetrated [the lake]," Nature quoted him as saying. "We want to be sure we have really reached the
surface of Lake Vostok." Russian, British and US researchers are in a race to see who will be first to reach down into the waters of an Antarctic subglacial
lake.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles -- No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso's works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire
Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most
exquisitely preserved fossils in the world?
The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock's asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but
a village. Since the early 20th century, more than 1 million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time
capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at the tar pits disappeared altogether
as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood but may be especially pertinent to
understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today.
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from BBC News Online
Night-time in the Jurassic forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush crickets. This is according to scientists who have
reconstructed the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago.
A remarkably complete fossil of the prehistoric insect enabled the team to see the structures in its wings that rubbed together to make the sound. The
international team report their findings in the journal PNAS.
Scientists from the US and China discovered the tiny fossil and named their newly discovered species Archaboilus musicus, because the
music-making structures in its body were so clearly visible.
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from the Guardian (UK)
In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured
pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them
to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a
sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up.
The aim of the study, which will take weeks to complete, is simple. It has been set up to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the
identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud, the Piltdown Hoax.
Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago, those shards of skull were part of a
scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual
who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Ivanpah Valley, Calif.-- Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in
scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.
Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public
land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors--each the size of a garage door--are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square
miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.
BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired
power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert
tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a
tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.
The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct.
"Nobody's been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying," said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the
University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome. Mr. Iverson and his colleagues gathered seawater from the sound near Seattle and filtered it so
it contained only organisms smaller than 0.8 microns. That is really, really tiny: The width of a human hair is about 100 microns.
"What we had to do was take this mixture of DNA from multiple organisms and tease out the genome," said E. Virginia Armbrust, a biological oceanographer
at the University of Washington.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
The San Diego Zoo made conservation history 30 years ago by adopting a California condor chick and raising it at what is now the Safari Park. The known
free-ranging population at the time was 22 birds--a number that fell to zero in 1987 when the last wild condor was taken captive in hopes of preventing
extinction.
It was the first time since the Pleistocene era that no condor soared over North America. Today, pioneering work has boosted the wild condor population to
210 across the Southwest and Baja California, and decades of research have advanced techniques for boosting avian recovery initiatives more broadly.
But human-caused threats pose the major obstacle for wild condors to survive without costly intervention by wildlife agencies and nonprofit groups,
according to a new journal paper by scientists at the zoo's Institute for Conservation Research and elsewhere. It shows that lead poisoning and eating
garbage such as bottle caps are the biggest dangers to the iconic, baldheaded birds.
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from Nature News
In a blinded clinical trial, neither the patient nor the clinician should know who is receiving placebo and who the active drug. But during a trial of
Kalydeco (ivacaftor), a cystic-fibrosis treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on 31 January, Drucy Borowitz says it was sometimes easy to
tell the difference.
"We had two brothers in the trial," says Borowitz, a paediatric pulmonologist at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After two weeks, she says,
the pair stepped out of the lift together and it was clear who was taking the drug. "The younger brother looked sturdier," she says. "It reminded me of the
change in appearance that we see in patients with cystic fibrosis after they have lung transplants."
Kalydeco, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the first drug to target a cause of cystic fibrosis rather than the condition's
symptoms. In doing so, it fulfils a promise made more than 20 years ago when a mutated gene, called cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator
(CFTR), was first discovered and researchers spoke optimistically about developing drugs to correct it
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from Science News
Plants of different species can swap chloroplasts, the little cellular factories that capture energy from sunlight, when stems graft together. The
surprising discovery may explain why evolutionary histories based on chloroplasts sometimes disagree with those based on other sources of DNA.
"If you had asked me before I did this work, I would have said, 'This isn't happening,'" says plant geneticist Pal Maliga of Rutgers University in
Piscataway, N.J.
Chloroplasts contain their own genetic material, which is typically passed to offspring as mother plants form seed. Now it appears that two plants of
different species can exchange chloroplast DNA nonreproductively, by swapping the whole cellular organs through a graft, Maliga's team and an independent
group in Germany report online January 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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from National Geographic News
Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says.
Using both fossil and living specimens, scientists calculated growth rates for 28 different mammalian groups during the past 65 million years--and found
that, for mammals, getting big takes longer than shrinking.
It takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for mammals to achieve a hundredfold increase in body size, about 5 million generations for a thousandfold
increase, and about 10 million generations for a 5,000-fold increase, the team discovered.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Archaeologist Deanna Jones couldn't believe her eyes as she hunched over a shallow pit dug next to railroad tracks in front of the San Gabriel
Mission.
She was inside the recently excavated foundation of a long-gone adobe building that once stood in the mission's 40-acre Bishop's Garden, first cultivated
in the early 1780s. As Jones scooped a trowel full of dirt from what had been the adobe floor, a silvery glint caught her attention.
"It looked like a piece of scrap metal at first," said Jones, a 29-year-old Van Nuys resident who has worked four years as a professional archaeologist.
"I rubbed it on my jeans and noticed the detail." With the crust of dirt wiped away, it was clear this was an old coin.
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from BBC News Online
A 3-D printer-created lower jaw has been fitted to an 83-year-old woman's face in what doctors say is the first operation of its kind.
The transplant was carried out in June in the Netherlands, but is only now being publicised.
The implant was made out of titanium powder--heated and fused together by a laser, one layer at a time. Technicians say the operation's success paves the
way for the use of more 3-D-printed patient-specific parts.
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from National Geographic News
With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City,
scientists say.
The crevasse stretches 19 miles long and up to 260 feet wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA's Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a
NASA Image of the Day.
Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles--versus 303
square miles for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
An uncanny twin of our own Milky Way galaxy takes center stage in a new cosmic portrait by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The amazing photo shows the galaxy NGC 1073, a barred spiral like our own Milky Way. The galaxy is located 55 million light-years away in the
constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).
By looking at cosmic wonders thought to be similar to our own galactic home, astronomers hope to learn more about the Milky Way, which we can only see
from the inside.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Families hand down many things from one generation to the next--and addiction can be one of them. A child of drug-addicted parents is eight times more
likely to become an addict than a child growing up in a drug-free home. But genes aren't everything. Even in families whose very brains seem primed for
addiction, some children still go on to lead productive lives free of drugs, according to new research.
Behavioral neuroscientist Karen Ersche of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues had set out to examine whether drug abusers
begin life with miswired brain circuitry or merely end up that way. Imaging studies of addicts show dramatic differences in brain areas involved in
motivation, reward, and self-control, to name just a few.
But it's less clear whether these differences are the cause or the effect of drug abuse. Because both addiction and brain structure are likely to be
inherited traits, many researchers suspect that drug abusers have faulty brain circuitry based in their genes.
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from Science News
Humankind's sharpest minds have figured out some of nature's deepest secrets. Why the sun shines. How humans evolved from single-celled life. Why an apple
falls to the ground. Humans have conceived and built giant telescopes that glimpse galaxies billions of light-years away and microscopes that illuminate the
contours of a single atom. Yet the peculiar quality that enabled such flashes of scientific insight and grand achievements remains a mystery:
consciousness.
Though in some ways deeply familiar, consciousness is at the same time foreign to those in its possession. Deciphering the cryptic machinations of the
brain--and how they create a mind--poses one of the last great challenges facing the scientific world.
For a long time, the very question was considered to be in poor taste, acceptable for philosophical musing but outside the bounds of real science.
Whispers of the C-word were met with scorn in polite scientific society.
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from National Geographic News
Native Americans originated from a small mountainous region in southern Siberia, new genetic research shows. The work is the most targeted study yet to
suggest a genetic "homeland" for North America's indigenous peoples, according to the authors.
New DNA analysis of ethnic groups living in the Altay Mountains revealed a unique genetic mutation that also occurs in modern-day northern Native
Americans.
A possible link between Siberians and Native Americans is an "age-old question" that was first raised by European explorers in the New World, said study
leader Theodore Schurr, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That's because some of those early explorers had also been to
Asia, and they noticed physical similarities between the two populations.
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from Scientific American
PHILADELPHIA -- When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled
Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world's top space program.
When Jim Freihaut goes to work each day, he doesn't have to win a war or outfox a Communist foe. All he has to do is crack a market, a market that has
stubbornly resisted the notion of energy-efficient buildings for decades. That might be tough enough.
Freihaut and his team have a five-year charter--one year already down--and $122 million from the federal government to meet this challenge: Convince the
Philadelphia construction industry to do deep energy retrofits on some 7,000 commercial buildings, by proving it makes good business sense.
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from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer
Six months before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the
weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle's huge rocket boosters could fail.
"The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life," he wrote.
The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and which employed Boisjoly. About six months earlier a task force had been
formed, partly on Boisjoly's recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters.
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from NPR
Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them
exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy
tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.
In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put
them on the post. Apparently Abbeel's robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so
demonstrations.
Technology Review magazine says "Abbeel taught one robot how to fold laundry by giving it some general rules about how fabric behaves, and then
showed it around 100 images of clothing so it could analyze how that particular clothing was likely to move as it was handled." No live human instruction.
Just pictures.
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