Keys Corner

I mentioned recently the book “When smoke ran like water”, which describes how industry has for decades paid to discredit research which they don’t like.

The latest example of such behaviour comes from Exxon, who has been offering scientists $10 000 each if they will discredit research on climate change. Exxon is the most profitable company in the USA (over $39 billion profit in the latest fiscal reporting year). Exxon sells under the brand names “Esso” and “Mobil” in many countries, if you want to boycott their products, which is probably the only effective way to protest about their behaviour.

Update (2007-02-02):
Here’s a link to the summary of the report Exxon are trying to discredit.

This week’s Economist has a report about the new Nikon D40 – a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera which undercuts its rivals by several hundred dollars. Their main point in the article subtitled Nikon’s new camera favours quality over quantity is that they think Nikon has recognized that chasing an ever-increasing number of pixels on the image sensor is not the way to go. Thank goodness – I have recently bought a Canon Ixus 60 (which you can deduce has 6 megapixels) and noticed it is becoming quite difficult to find a decent compact camera which doesn’t offer 8-10 megapixels and correspondingly low sensitivity / high noise CCD image sensors.

America’s research arm for their armed forces, DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), has raised the bar – a lot – for next year’s Urban Challenge. The last Challenge issued by DARPA for 2005 was the Grand Challenge, which required competitors to build a vehicle capable of travelling completely autonomously 132 miles over desert terrain. The prize of $2 mio. was won by “Stanley”, a Volkswagen Touareg.

This time, people are being asked to compete in November 2007, for no cash prize at all (but up to a million dollars of up-front funding to develop the vehicles will be provided to each competitor after they submit a proposal to DARPA), to negotiate 60 miles on urban roads, with other traffic using the roads, obeying the traffic regulations. Additionally, the vehicles will have to perform maneuvers such as parking between vehicles, overtaking (but not if the other vehicles are waiting at a road junction), and U-turns. Here’s an excerpt from the rules:

The Urban Challenge course tests the vehicle’s ability to operate safely and effectively with other vehicles in and around an urban environment. The course will be nominally 60 miles in total distance, with a time objective of 6 hours. The road surface will range in quality from new pavement to potholes and broken pavement. Sections of dirt roads with low berms may also be encountered. The vehicle may negotiate sharp curbs, downed branches, traffic barrels, drains, hydrants, rocks, brush, construction equipment, concrete safety rails, power line poles, and other stationary items likely to be found in an urban environment. Vehicles will obey traffic laws as they negotiate traffic circles, intersections, and merge with moving traffic. Traffic on the route may be provided by manned vehicles, tele-operated vehicles, and other autonomous vehicles. Static vehicles may also be parked or stopped along the route. Roads may be blocked by DARPA during the course of the event. Trees and buildings along the route may interfere with GPS. Along some road segments there may be significant distances between waypoints, requiring vehicles to use their sensors to stay in the travel lane.

To complete the Urban Challenge, a vehicle must negotiate all hazards, re-plan for alternate routes, and avoid static and dynamic obstacles while completing a complex, multi-part mission at speeds of up to 30 mph, resulting in an average speed of at least 10 mph.

I read this a few days ago, and forgot to bookmark it. Now it has been reported again by CNN:

Scientists at a U.S. weapons laboratory say they have trained bees to sniff out explosives in a project they say could have far-reaching applications for U.S. homeland security and the Iraq war.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said they trained honeybees to stick out their proboscis—the tube they use to feed on nectar—when they smell explosives in anything from cars and roadside bombs to belts similar to those used by suicide bombers.

Researchers in the program, dubbed the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, published their findings Monday…

New studies by NASA show that perennial Artic ice has been shrinking by 6% per year in the last two winters – a rate far higher than has been measured before. In 12 months between 2004 and 2005, an area the size of Turkey disappeared. Turkey is a big country…

The rate of melting has increased 30 times in the last two years. And the latest estimate from America’s top climate scientist is that we only have a decade to save the planet.

According to Science (subscription required, so look here for a short summary), the percentage of people who believe in Evolution in the USA (40%) is lower than 32 of 34 countries polled^*. Only Turkey came in with a lower percentage of believers, “Old Europe” averages about 70%.

^* “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals” – True / false / not sure / don’t know?

(via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball)

Update (2006-08-17):
The New Scientist will be running an article on American attitudes to evolution in the next print edition on the 19th. You can read it here. One quote from the article:

American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don’t agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

Ballbot is a robot, a little shorter than a human, which balances on a metal ball about the size of a football. It was created at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh by Ralph Hollis, who is hoping to develop a robot capable of performing tasks such as moving objects in confined spaces.

In the screenshot above (click to watch the video), you can see the drive-belt on the right for one of the two rollers which drive the ball, so that the robot can keep its balance or roll the ball to move about.

William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed the City Car, with help on the styling from Frank Gehry in his Smart Cities research group. Mitchell felt the Smart car, developed by DaimlerChrysler in Germany didn’t go far enough either in terms of public acceptence or in reducing the space needed in inner cities for the vehicle. So the research group started with a clean sheet of paper and came up with the City Car, an electrically powered two-seater, which can be stacked at airports, train and underground rail stations like a shopping trolleys when they are not in use.

The Guardian reports in more detail here.

You’d think after the BSE skandal in the 1990’s (which was most probably precipitated by feeding cattle with ground-up bones and carcasses) that we would have learnt the error of our ways, but I see that it is now standard practice in Asia to feed chicken dung to fish. It is a United Nations recommended fish-farming technique, the Independent reports today:

... a technique firmly backed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a primary means of providing protein for mushrooming populations in developing countries.

Known as integrated livestock-fish farming, the technique involves transferring the wastes from raising pigs, ducks or chickens directly to fish farms.

The only reason it has come to the fore at the moment is because experts fear the the dung may represent a reservior (pun intended) of disease which is then transferred to migrating birds.