Robotics has been increasing in a massive scale, soon normal homes will have their own robots, not just eccentrics like me and my ilk. Soon movies like AI will become reality, as child robots begin to grow… And grow… And grow… Into GIANT MONSTER ROBOTS THAT WILL DESTROY THE WORLD!!!! Unless my demands are met…as usual! No one can stand before MOBUSU!

Please ignore all the improper British spelling in the article. Just because they invented English doesn’t mean they know how to use it!

BabyBot — Robot Modelled On Two Year-old Child — Takes First Steps

BabyBot, a robot modelled on the torso of a two year-old child, is helping researchers take the first, tottering steps towards understanding human perception, and could lead to the development of machines that can perceive and interact with their environment.

The researchers used BabyBot to test a model of the human sense of ‘presence’, a combination of senses like sight, hearing and touch. The work could have enormous applications in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine perception. The research is being funded under the European Commission’s FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) initiative of the IST programme, as part of the ADAPT project.

“Our sense of presence is essentially our consciousness,” says Giorgio Metta, Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics at Italy’s Genoa University and ADAPT project coordinator.

Imagine a glorious day lying on a beach, drinking a pina colada, or any powerful, pleasurable memory. A series of specific sensory inputs are essential to the memory.

In the human mind all these sensations combine powerfully to create the total experience. It profoundly influences our future expectations, and each time we go to a beach we add to the store of contexts, situations and conditions. It is the combination of all these inputs and their cumulative power that the ADAPT researchers sought to explore.

Engineering consciousness

“We took an engineering approach to the problem, it was really consciousness for engineers,” says Metta, “Which means we first developed a model and then we sought to test this model by, in this case, developing a robot to conform to it.”

Modelling, or defining, consciousness remains one of the intractable problems of both science and philosophy. “The problem is duality, where does the brain end and the mind begin, the question is whether we need to consider them as two different aspects of reality,” says Metta.

Neuroscientists would tend to develop theories that fit the observed phenomena, but engineers take a practical approach. Their objective is to make it work.

Called the synthetic methodology, it is essentially a method of understanding by building. There are three steps: model aspects of a biological system; abstract general principles of intelligent behaviour from the model; apply these principles to the design of intelligent robots. Model, test, refine. And then repeat.

To that end, ADAPT first studied how the perception of self in the environment emerges during the early stages of human development. So developmental psychologists tested 6 to 18 month-old infants. “We could control a lot of the parameters to see how young children perceive and interact with the world around them. What they do when interacting with their mothers or strangers, what they see, the objects they interact with, for example,” says Metta.

From this work they developed a ‘process’ model of consciousness. This assumes that objects in the environment are not real physical objects as such; rather they are part of a process of perception.

The practical upshot is that, while other models describe consciousness as perception, cognition then action, the ADAPT model sees it as action, cognition then perception. And it’s how babies act, too.

When a baby sees an object that is not the final perception of it. A young child will then try to reach the object. If the child fails, the object is too far away. This teaches the child perspective.

If the child does reach the object, he or she will try to grasp it, or taste it or shake it. These actions all teach the child about the object and govern its perception of it. It is a cumulative process rather than a single act.

Our expectations also have enormous influence on our perception. For example, if you believe an empty pot is full, you will lift the pot very quickly. Your muscles unconsciously prepare for the expected resistance, and put more force than is required into lifting; everyday proof that our expectations govern our relationship with the environment.

Or at least that’s the model. “It’s not validated. It’s a starting point to understand the problem,” says Metta.

From model to BabyBot

The team used BabyBot to test it, providing a minimal set of instructions, just enough for BabyBot to act on the environment. For the senses, the team used sound, vision and touch, and focused on simple objects within the environment.

There were two experiments, one where BabyBot could touch an object and second one where it could grasp the object. This is more difficult than it sounds. If you look at a scene, you unconsciously segment the scene into separate elements.

This is a highly developed skill, but by simply interacting with the environment the BabyBot did its engineering parents proud when it demonstrated that it could learn to successfully separate objects from the background.

Once the visual scene was segmented, the robot could start learning about specific properties of objects useful, for instance, to grasp them. Grasping opens a wider world to the robot and to young infants too.

The work was successful, but it was a very early proof-of-principle for their approach. The sense of presence, or consciousness, is a huge problem and ADAPT did not seek to solve it in one project. They made a very promising start and many of the partners will take part in a new IST project, called ROBOTCUB.

In ROBOTCUB the engineers will refine their robot so that it can see, hear and touch its environment. Eventually it will be able to crawl, too.

“Ultimately, this work will have a huge range of applications, from virtual reality, robotics and AI, to psychology and the development of robots as tools for neuro-scientific research,” concludes Metta.

A beautiful spider, preserved forever. It makes me want to finish my Preservation Ray so I can just point and zap things, keeping them in pristine condition forever! A movie about a giant spider was reviewed on this very site!

Early web-spinner found in amber

The orb-weavers are a diverse spider group

Enlarge Image
Spiral orb webs, which to many people typify spiders, were catching insects in their sticky silk while the dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

True orb weaving spiders found trapped in amber from 121-115 million years ago are the oldest of their type yet found.

The spiral webs have proven an extremely successful strategy for catching prey – evidenced by the great diversity of orb weavers present today.

Two specimens are described in the UK Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

The fossil spiders were found embedded in amber from Alava in northern Spain. They date to the Lower Cretaceous.

Silky skills

Amber is a form of protective resin extruded from trees that has hardened over millions of years. It is very useful to scientists studying the history of past life because ancient animals and plants are often preserved in the gem-like material.

David Penney of the University of Manchester, UK, and Vicente Ortuno of the University of Alcala, Spain, assign the arachnids to a new species: Mesozygiella dunlopi.

Typical orb webs consist of outer frame lines to which radial (spoke-like) lines are attached, providing support for the characteristic spiral sticky line that occupies most of the web’s surface.

By using two different types of silk – one strong and rigid, the other weaker but stretchy – the orb weaver creates a web with the required strength and flexibility to cope with the impact of fast-flying insects – and the struggling which occurs once the prey is captured in the sticky trap.

Web of intrigue

The evolutionary success of this design can be seen in the high diversity of true orb weavers, which currently number 2,847 living species.

This astonishing diversity also owes much to the way in which the basic design can be easily modified.

“One modification to the web is quite fantastic,” Dr Penney told the BBC News website.

“Picture a normal, spiral orb web and picture running down from it a ladder-type structure which is also made from sticky silk. This has evolved to trap moths, which have scales that rub off.

“When a moth flies into a normal orb web, it’s the scales that stick and the moth tumbles out of it. But with the ladder structure, the moth tumbles down until all the scales come off and eventually it gets caught.”

Diverse group

In Biology Letters, Penney and Ortuno write that spiders may have expanded in number and diversity during the Cretaceous.

An explosion in the abundance of flowering plants begot an expansion of the insects which pollinated them. These in turn provided prey for the spiders, the authors suggest, which prospered as a result.

There are fossil spiders that date from the Devonian (350-420 million years ago) – long before even the dinosaurs.

In some of these mineral fossils, it is possible to see evidence of spinnerets, the organs spiders use to spin their web silk.

But it is often unclear how fossil spiders used them; some species spin web silk to line their burrows and to protect egg sacs.

Scientist have found a palm that flowers itself until it dies. Self-destruction by flowering, that’s a new one! I’ve made plants that explode when they flower, but haven’t seen any that just keep flowering until they suck the energy out of the rest of the plant. The best part of the 100 years cycle is you can set your watch to it. It’s like the old faithful of plants, every 100 years it pops a bunch of flowers then dies, and the babies will do it again 100 years later. The palm has a 59 foot tall trunk(18 meters) and has 16 feet (5 meters) wide leaves. It is the largest palm found on Madagascar, and is not only a new species but a new genus. Too bad they don’t tell us what the genus and species names are! You bastards! I’ll just make one up: Floramaxia destructus. Take that, “legitimate” scientists!

New tree species found in Madagascar

By JONNY HOGG, Associated Press Writer Wed Jan 16, 11:04 PM ET

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar – A self-destructing palm tree that flowers once every 100 years and then dies has been discovered on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, botanists said Thursday.

The name of the giant palm and its remarkable life cycle will be detailed in a study by Kew Gardens scientists in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society published Thursday.

“It’s spectacular. It does not flower for maybe 100 years and when it’s like this it can be mistaken for other types of palm,” said Mijoro Rakotoarinivo, who works for the London botanical gardens in Madagascar.

“But then a large shoot, a bit like an asparagus, grows out of the top of the tree and starts to spread. You get something that looks a bit like a Christmas tree growing out of the top of the palm,” he said.

The branches of this shoot then become covered in hundreds of tiny white flowers that ooze with nectar, attracting insects and birds.

But the effort of flowering and fruiting depletes the tree so much that within a few months it collapses and dies, said botanist Dr. John Dransfield, author of the study.

Dransfield noted that “even for Madagascar this is a stupendous palm and an astonishing discovery.”

The world’s fourth largest island, Madagascar is renowned for its unusual flora and fauna, including 12,000 species of plant found nowhere else in the world. Indeed 90 percent of its plant species are endemic.

The palm tree, which grows to 66 feet in height and has about 16-foot leaves, is only found in an extremely remote region in the northwest of the country, some four days by road from the capital. Local villagers have known about it for years although none had seen it in flower until last year.

The bizarre flowering ritual was first spotted by Frenchman Xavier Metz, who runs a cashew plantation nearby. After seeing it he notified Kew Gardens.

Puzzling Dransfield is how botanists had missed such a “whopping palm” until now. According to him it is the largest palm species in the country but there appear to be only about 100 in existence.

He also questions how the palm got to Madagascar. The tree has similarities to Chuniophoeniceae palms, however these are only found in Asia, more than 3,700 miles away.

Dransfield suggests the plant has been quietly living and dramatically dying in Madagascar since the island split with mainland India 80 million years ago.

Giant rodents are nothing new. I myself create large rodents all the time thanks to my growth rays. However, it looks like Mother Nature has decided to try to trump me once again, with the discovery of Josephoartigasia monesi, a rodent that lived 4 million years ago. Weighing between 1700 and 3000 pounds, it is far bigger than anything I have created. But not for long! Inspired by this fossil treat, we shall soon witness the growth of Mega-Rats, whose large size will crush houses! I regret lagging so far behind in the giant rodent industry, and hopefully the newly created Mega-Rats will once again put me back on top. These ROUSes are the perfect bragging rights animal when you get together with your fellow mad scientists to show off. Take that, Dr. Von Wonkenberg! Nice albino chimp, Dr. Frank, too bad it was crushed by my Mega-Rats! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Even better, I’ll revive these Josephoartigasia monesi and begin breeding them as well. You can never have enough giant rodents.

Here is the news article:

Scientists: Extinct rodent weighed a ton

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Wed Jan 16, 10:06 PM ET

LONDON – Eeek! Imagine a rodent that weighed a ton and was as big as a bull. Uruguayan scientists say they have uncovered fossil evidence of the biggest species of rodent ever found, one that scurried across wooded areas of South America about 4 million years ago, when the continent was not connected to North America.

A herbivore, the beast may have been a contemporary, and possibly prey, of saber-toothed cats — a prehistoric version of Tom and Jerry.

For those afraid of rodents, forget hopping on a chair. Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds.

Although British newspapers variously described it as a mouse or a rat, researchers say the animal, named Josephoartigasia monesi, actually was more closely related to a guinea pig or porcupine.

“These are totally different from the rats and mice we’re accustomed to,” said Bruce Patterson, the curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, adding that it was the biggest rodent he had ever heard of.

An artist’s rendering showed a creature that looked like a cross between a hippopotamus and guinea pig.

The fossil was found in 1987 about 65 miles west of the capital of Montevideo, near the vast River Plate estuary — a muddy waterway separating Uruguay from Argentina that empties into the South Atlantic. That area is site of ancient riverbanks and other deposits where fossils have been found, he said.

An Argentine fossil collector identified as Sergio Viera donated the skull to Uruguay’s National History and Anthropology Museum nearly two decades ago, said museum director Arturo Toscano.

It spent years hidden away in a box at the museum and was rediscovered by curator Andres Rinderknecht, who enlisted the help of fellow researcher Ernesto Blanco to study it.

Blanco told The Associated Press he was shocked when he first came face to face with the fossil, saying it looked even bigger than a cow skull.

“It’s a beautiful piece of nature,” he said in an interview. “You feel the power of a very big animal behind this.”

Blanco said the skull’s shape and the huge incisors left no doubt they were dealing with a rodent, but he cautioned that the estimate of the animal’s bulk was imprecise.

The extinct rodent clearly outclassed its nearest rival, the Phoberomys, found in Venezuela and estimated to weigh between 880 and 1,500 pounds.

Blanco said the rodent was far more enormous than any South American rodent alive today, surpassing even the present-day capibara that can weigh up to 110 pounds.

He said the animal’s teeth pointed to a diet of aquatic plants.

“From what we can tell, we know it was a herbivore that lived on the shores of rivers or alongside streams in woodland areas,” Rinderknecht told the AP. “Possibly it had a behavior similar to other water-faring rodents that exist today, such as beavers, which split their time between land and water.”

But he said the rodent appears to have had no tail, adding that follow-up studies are being planned to better determine its diet and other traits.

The creature may have been a contemporary to the saber-toothed cats and giant carnivorous birds that roamed the area millions of years ago, but Blanco said it was not clear whether such predators had the power necessary to bring down the huge beast.

“This investigation began about a year and a half ago but it’s still not complete,” Rinderknecht said, adding that the next step may be a CT scan of the skull “to better determine its interior dimensions.”

The research by Rinderknecht and Blanco was published Wednesday in this week’s issue of biological research journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scientists uninvolved with the finding agreed that this was one really big rodent.

“I think it’s a very important discovery — it is certainly an immense animal,” said Mary Dawson, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. She said it and other rodents grew bigger by filling the ecological niche taken elsewhere by rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses.

“They got large taking the role of some herbivores that were not present at that time — South America was still an island continent,” she said. But when North and South America were linked about 3 million years ago, the rodents were swamped by North American animals and eventually died out.

“It’s too bad they’re extinct, I’d love to see those things,” she said.

Patterson said its discovery gave scientists more insight into the fauna of the prehistoric South American continent, when it hosted creatures such as marsupial predators and hoofed animals known to scientists as archaic ungulates.

“These were things with trunks on their noses, huge claws on their hands, they look like somebody just made them up,” he said.

Little trace of big rodent is left. Its closest surviving cousin, the pacarana, is endangered. The sharp-clawed 33-pound rodent lives in the hills around the Andes Mountains. It is considered among the largest living rodents, but its slow rate of reproduction — and reputation among humans as a tasty treat — means its prospects are grim.

Blanco said he was thrilled with the discovery of the huge rodent after so many years.

“When you start to open all these boxes, often times you find all kinds interesting pieces of paleontology,” he said.

“The collector alerted us that it was an important fossil,” Toscano said, adding that the skull remains carefully packed in a box in the museum’s paleontology collection.

Both Blanco and Toscano said they hoped the find would attract more resources to museums in the developing world such as Uruguay’s — which is so strapped for cash it has been unable to hold public exhibitions since 2000.

___

Associated Press writers Raul Garces and Alfonso Castiglia contributed to the report from Montevideo, Uruguay.

The largest fossil rodent
Andrés Rinderknecht1, R. Ernesto Blanco2
Abstract

The discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved skull permits the description of the new South American fossil species of the rodent, Josephoartigasia monesi sp. nov. (family: Dinomyidae; Rodentia: Hystricognathi: Caviomorpha). This species with estimated body mass of nearly 1000kg is the largest yet recorded. The skull sheds new light on the anatomy of the extinct giant rodents of the Dinomyidae, which are known mostly from isolated teeth and incomplete mandible remains. The fossil derives from San José Formation, Uruguay, usually assigned to the Pliocene–Pleistocene (4–2Myr ago), and the proposed palaeoenvironment where this rodent lived was characterized as an estuarine or deltaic system with forest communities.

Choice size quote:

In Reynolds (2002), the body mass of the giant extinct rodent Castoroides was estimated based on skull length, obtaining a maximum value of 200kg. If we apply the same method (with the same allometric relation) to J. monesi, we obtain a mean body mass of 1400kg with a standard deviation of 533kg and extreme values of 716 and 2250kg.

Skull comparison:

(that’s a pacarana, a capybara, and J. monesi for you non-scientists)

My Bear Frenzy Ray is nearing completion! This wonderful device will cause all bears hit by it to go bear-crazy and ravage anything and everything they see. Several of the bears escaped from Bear Camp and still had bear-crazy residual rays within their bodies, causing them to kill their kin. Soon, I shall use the Bear Frenzy Ray to take over several zoos around the world, and hold them ransom for $500 million each!

MuHahahahahahahaha!!

Study: Warming turns bears into cannibals
Monday, June 12, 2006; Posted: 9:01 p.m. EDT (01:01 GMT)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.

Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth.

Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study’s principal author, Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center.

“During 24 years of research on polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region of northern Alaska and 34 years in northwestern Canada, we have not seen other incidents of polar bears stalking, killing, and eating other polar bears,” the scientists said.

Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century.

The Center for Biological Diversity of Joshua Tree, California, in February 2005 petitioned the federal government to list polar bears as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Cannibalism demonstrates the effect on bears, said Kassie Siegal, lead author of the petition.

“It’s very important new information,” she said. “It shows in a really graphic way how severe the problem of global warming is for polar bears.”

Deborah Williams of Alaska Conservation Solutions, a group aimed at pursuing solutions for climate change, said the study represents the “bloody fingerprints” of global warming.

“This is not a Coca-Cola commercial,” she said, referring to animated polar bears used in advertising for the soft drink giant. “This represents the brutal downside of global warming.”

The predation study was published in an online version of the journal Polar Biology on April 27. Amstrup said print publication will follow.

Researchers in spring 2004 found more bears in the eastern portion of the Alaska Beaufort Sea to be in poorer condition than bears in areas to the west and north.

Researchers discovered the first kill in January 2004. A male bear had pounced on a den, killed a female and dragged it 245 feet (75 meters) away, where it ate part of the carcass. Females are about half the size of males.

“In the face of the den’s outer wall were deep impressions of where the predatory bear had pounded its forepaws to collapse the den roof, just as polar bears collapse the snow over ringed seal lairs,” the paper said.

“From the tracks, it appeared that the predatory bear broke through the roof of the den, held the female in place while inflicting multiple bites to the head and neck. When the den collapsed, two cubs were buried, and suffocated, in the snow rubble.”

In April 2004, while following bear footprints on sea ice near Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, scientists discovered the partially eaten carcass of an adult female. Footprints indicated it had been with a cub.

The male did not follow the cub, indicating it had killed for food instead of breeding.

A few days later, Canadian researchers found the remains of a yearling that had been stalked and killed by a predatory bear, the scientists said.