[Special Issue News] Skin: Shedding light on skin color
Why do humans have skin of various colors? Anthropologist Nina Jablonski explains that it's all about sunlight. As modern humans spread out of Africa in the past 60,000 years, they adapted to the varying natural light they encountered, from the twilight of northern winters to the blazing sun of the equator, and their originally dark skin evolved into a sepia rainbow. Jablonski has popularized this evolutionary history in countless radio and TV interviews, two popular books, and a TED talk viewed by nearly 700,000 people online. She argues that our skin color has crucial implications for health. In the modern era, as humans...
Source: Science: This Week - November 20, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Ann Gibbons Tags: Skin Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The Aging Brain: Starting young
In 1932 and 1947, Scottish education researchers hoping to measure and track the nation's intelligence required nearly every 11-year-old in the country to take an IQ test, a rare nationwide assessment called the Scottish Mental Surveys. About 50 years later, more than 1000 surviving members of this group, called the Lothian Birth Cohort, were invited by cognitive psychologist Ian Deary to take the same test, to see whether they had maintained their youthful wit or had begun to exhibit cognitive decline. After readministering the test and a range of other cognitive and physical evaluations over 10 years, Deary and colleague...
Source: Science: This Week - October 30, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Emily Underwood Tags: The Aging Brain Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Q&A: Robots and the law
Should driverless cars be allowed on the roads? Should robots capable of thought be accorded rights as sentient beings? Ryan Calo, a lawyer at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, tackles these and other questions in "Robots and the Lessons of Cyberlaw," a paper that will appear in the California Law Review next spring. Science caught up with Calo recently on the murky questions surrounding robo rights and responsibilities. Among other things, Calo argues that robots tend to undermine the clean distinction between a thing and a person, but he doesn't think society will create "stand-alone rights" for robo...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Dennis Normile Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] The accidental roboticist
Like living things, robotic tadpoles called Tadros evolve, changing from generation to generation in response to a form of survival-of-the-fittest selection. They are the brainchildren of John Long, a Vassar College biologist. He and his team believe that experiments with robots can lay bare the nuts and bolts of evolution in ways that observations with living things cannot. Long has used Tadros to study the evolution of backbones, testing the idea that by making ancient fish stiffer, backbones made them faster and hence better at collecting food or evading predators. Now, his group is gearing up for an even more ambitious...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Adrian Cho Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Humans need not apply
It's hard enough these days landing a job as a flesh-and-blood human. Soon we may be competing with robots. A report from the University of Oxford's Oxford Martin School estimated that 47% of U.S. jobs could be taken over by machines in the next decade or two. In this graphic feature, Science takes a look at careers where robots may have the inside track. Tough, strong, and fearless, robots could make ideal first responders to a natural disaster. And newsrooms already employ algorithms to churn out stories on corporate earnings and earthquakes. The automatons can even formulate hypotheses and design experiments without...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Hassan DuRant Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] In our own image
For 2 decades, Hiroshi Ishiguro's teams have deployed various robots—some with vaguely human forms, others crafted to look indistinguishable from people—as customers in cafes, clerks in stores, guides in malls and museums, teachers in schools, and partners in recreational activities. The roboticists, who use robots both operating autonomously and under human remote control, have come to some startling conclusions. In some situations, people prefer to speak with an android instead of another person, and they feel that robots should be held accountable for mistakes and treated fairly. And humans can quickly form deep emo...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Dennis Normile Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Helping robots see the big picture
Robots are clumsy because they struggle to make sense of all the data coming in from their cameras. Although machines easily surpass human ability for certain constrained visual tasks, such as identifying a face among thousands of passport photos, they flounder in the everyday human environment. Two years ago, a powerful new computational technique called deep learning took the field of machine vision by storm. Inspired by how the brain processes visual information, a computer first learns the difference between everyday objects by creating a recipe of visual features for each. Those visual recipes are now incorporated int...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Getting a feel for the world
To be fully autonomous, robots must be able to make sense of their surroundings, but designing mundane, practical sensors for robots has proven to be a formidable challenge. Today's machines have the ability to gently touch objects with tactile "skin," differentiate beers with an electronic tongue, or even stay balanced on one leg when whacked with a 9-kilogram wrecking ball. Still, the automatons fail at many basic human skills, from filtering out noise during cocktail party conversations, to making sense of what they see and walking around without breaking an ankle. Some say that equipping robots with the senses humanize...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Hassan DuRant Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Minds of their own
EyeRover may look like a miniature Segway with eyes, but the foot-tall bot is packed with some of the most advanced robotic technology ever devised, including a prototype computing platform designed to emulate the human brain. Unlike conventional computer chips and software, which execute a linear sequence of tasks, this new approach—called neuromorphic computing—carries out processing and memory tasks simultaneously, just as our brains do for complex tasks such as vision and hearing. Many researchers believe that neuromorphic computing is at the threshold of endowing robots with perceptual skills they've never had bef...
Source: Science: This Week - October 10, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Robert F. Service Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Meet your new co-worker
Autonomous robots have never had the dexterity, vision, or common sense to safely navigate our world. But they are poised to break through as pets and helpers in homes, as caregivers in hospitals, and as co-workers in factories. The company behind a robot called Baxter is selling it to factories on the assumption that assembly lines are poised for disruption by a versatile robot that can take over mind-numbing tasks. For people to embrace bots in their daily lives, however, the machines will need social smarts. To probe that frontier, Baxter is serving as a test subject for robot psychology. In the past, experiments in hum...
Source: Science: This Week - October 9, 2014 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Zambia fights to sustain its malaria success
Zambia has been a poster child for progress against malaria. Between 2006 and 2011, donors invested more than $300 million into the country to combat the disease. Zambia was the first country in Africa to adopt artemisinin combination therapy to treat malaria. More than 24 million insecticide-treated bed nets were distributed to protect against the mosquitoes that transmit the disease. Screening for the disease was scaled up. The efforts paid off, with dramatic drops in malaria cases and deaths in parts of the country. But those gains are fragile, malaria experts warn, and if attention is diverted, they could well be lost....
Source: Science: This Week - September 11, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Kai Kupferschmidt Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] China tries to kick its salt habit
China's alarmingly high salt intake has contributed to a spike in hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. All told, the average rural Chinese person consumes 12 grams of salt daily, according to the 2010 Global Burden of Disease study, far above the daily maximum of 5 grams recommended by the World Health Organization. Researchers are now testing whether introducing a low-sodium salt substitute in which sodium chloride is partially replaced with potassium chloride, which has been shown to lower blood pressure, might reduce salt intake for villagers in northern China. A massive randomized trial of 21,000 participant...
Source: Science: This Week - September 11, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Mara Hvistendahl Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] As cholera goes, so goes Haiti
Following the worst cholera epidemic in recent history, the Haitian government has unveiled an ambitious plan to eradicate the disease within 10 years. But for that to work, people in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, need access to decent sanitation and safe drinking water, both of which are in short supply. But because of chronic problems like corruption and government instability, almost every effort to improve access to latrines, sewers, and safe water over the past 100 years has failed, and many question whether this new push will be any different. Without a dramatic change in Haiti, cholera may be...
Source: Science: This Week - September 11, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Sam Kean Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] A new vaccine vanquishes meningitis A in Africa
Every few years with the onset of the dry season, Neisseria meningitidis sweeps across a swath of Africa, causing bacterial meningitis that kills 5% to 10% of those infected and leaves many others deaf or disabled. No good affordable vaccine existed for the main strain in Africa, serotype A. In the early 2000s, a public-private partnership called the Meningitis Vaccine Project set out to develop the first vaccine specifically for Africa at a price Africans can afford—less than 50 cents a dose. It has been called one of the most dramatic successes in global health. Meningitis cases have dropped to near zero in every count...
Source: Science: This Week - September 11, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Kai Kupferschmidt Source Type: research
[Special Issue News] Hard cash boosts child health in South Africa
The South African government since 1998 has offered poor families small amounts of cash each month for each child in the house. Though the Child Support Grant (CSG) program now reaches 11 million children, not all eligible families enrolled at first, and families with more children received more cash. Researchers from the Capetown–based Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI) compared children in families that received no CSGs with those that received one or more. In EPRI's "dose-response" analysis, children fared best in families that received more CSGs, enjoying improved health and well-being and also having better...
Source: Science: This Week - September 11, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Jon Cohen Source Type: research
