Will Biology Solve the Universe?

weird interview just read in wired ...

For years, scientists have tried to develop a universal theory of everything. Steven Hawking predicts that such a theory will be discovered in the next 20 years. A new theory asserts that biology, not physics, will be the key to unlocking the deepest mysteries of the universe, such as quantum mechanics.

"The answer to the universe is biology -- it's as simple as that," says Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of research and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology. He details his theory in The American Scholar's spring issue, published on Thursday. Lanza says scientists will establish a unified theory only if they radically rethink their understanding of space and time using a "biocentric" approach. His article is essentially a biological and philosophical response to Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which he questions how we interpret the big bang, the existence of space and time, as well as many other theories -- assertions that might ruffle the feathers of some physical scientists.

(LS)

Robot swarms 'evolve' effective communication

Robot swarms 'evolve' effective communication


Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated by Swiss researchers. The experiments suggest that simulated evolution could be a useful tool for those designing of swarms of robots.

Roboticists Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, and Stéphane Magnenat at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne collaborated with biologist Laurent Keller from the University of Lausanne.

They first evolved colonies of robots in software then tested different strategies on real bots, called s-bots. Both simulated and real robots were set loose in an arena containing two types of objects – one classified as "food" and another designated "poison" – both lit up red.

Each bot had a built-in attraction to food and aversion to poison. They also have a randomly-generated set of parameters, dubbed "genomes" that define the way they move, process sensory information, and how they flash their own blue lights.

"They start with completely random behaviour," Keller explains. "All they can do is discriminate food from poison." The robots can see both food or poison from a distance of several metres but can only tell them apart when almost touching.

very nice biomimicy research - we should try to see if we can't apply this also to landing spacecraft!!

A miniature robotic helicopter has revealed a simple yet effective visual trick that lets insects fly so adeptly without sophisticated avionics.

Besides explaining how insects zoom around and land without crashing into the ground, the technique could potentially be used to help control aircraft.

As insects fly forwards the ground beneath them sweeps backwards through their field of view. This "optical flow" is thought to provide crucial cues about speed and height. For example, the higher an insect's altitude, the slower the optical flow; the faster it flies, the faster the optical flow.

Previous experiments involving bees suggest that optical flow is crucial to landing. Maintaining a constant optical flow while descending should provide a constant height-to-groundspeed ratio, which makes a bee slowdown as it approaches the ground. Distorting this optical flow can cause them to crash land instead.

General flight

Now Nicolas Franceschini at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles, France, and colleagues have shown the same technique may explain more general flying behaviours.

They fitted a miniature helicopter with a simple software feedback loop to ensure that optical flow remains constant as it flies along. This allowed the tethered micro-copter to take off gracefully, maintain altitude over varying terrain and land, all without any means of directly measuring its speed or height. A video produced by the researchers shows the micro-copter in action (43.7 MB .avi format, requires DivX).

The fact that insects are such effective fliers could all be thanks to a similar feedback mechanism hardwired into their brains, Franceschini says.

Bee brains

Maintaining a constant optical flow should be relatively easy for an insect, says Rob Harris, a specialist in insect vision at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK, who was not involved with the project.

Maintaining a constant optical flow precludes the need to calculate height and groundspeed manually. "You have to assume they are not doing complicated trigonometry in their little brains," he adds.

"It explains about 70 years of experiments," Franceschini says. For example, it explains why bees sometimes drown when flying over still water. Without any features on the surface of water, a bee detects no optical flow and instinctively descends, eventually landing in the water.

Franceschini is currently talking to helicopter manufacturers about developing optical flow regulators for their aircraft. Such feedback mechanisms would be lightweight and trivial to develop and could help prevent crashes, he claims.

Journal reference: Current Biology (vol 17, issue 4, manuscript 5340)

Blogged with Flock

New prize by Branson for a method to remove CO2 from the atmosphere ... start using your brains!

A prize of $25 million for anyone who can come up with a system for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was launched on Friday. It is the biggest prize in history, claims its sponsor, Richard Branson.

The head of Virgin Group said at the launch in London, UK, that the prize was not for removing emissions from power plants before they reach the atmosphere and storing them deep underground – an existing technology known as carbon capture and sequestration.

Instead, the brief is to devise a system to remove a "significant amount" of greenhouse gases – equivalent to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or more – every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade. It was inspired by the £20,000 prize for developing a way of measuring longitude won by 18^th century clockmaker John Harrison, and recounted in the book Longitude. The $10 million X-Prize for private human spaceflight, won in 2004, was also an inspiration.

The initial closing date for Branson's Earth Challenge is 8 February 2010. If the judges deem that no design submitted by that stage is worthy of the prize, it will re-open for two more year-long phases.

$25 million prize for greenhouse gas removal - earth - 09 February 2007 - New Scientist Environment

lets win this prize :-)

Blogged with Flock

The brain scan that can read people's intentions (The Guardian)

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.

The brain scan that can read people's intentions | Science | Guardian Unlimited

Blogged with Flock