erratica » science

The (technological) Singularity

coche — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:25:06 +0000

So it seems like Kurzweil’s dreams/predictions are getting a few steps closer to being fulfilled. Wired has news of scientists at Columbia University, designed “Adam” a ‘robot scientist’, capable of “carry[ing] out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.”. At pretty much the same time, a computer program developed by researchers at Cornell, managed to ‘discover’ the laws of physics in 1 day without any previous input (or knowledge?).

Mate these two and you’ll get a pretty smart cookie.

Read the Wired articles here and here.

Darwin’s Works

coche — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:13:46 +0000

Charles Darwin’s complete works, as well as thousands of illustrations, letters and documents never published before, have been made available online. The collection is by far the greatest ever compiled on Darwin’s works and will be of course an invaluable resource, and not only for scholars.

Check out the Illustrations page for some incredibly beautiful drawings and diagrams.

Visit Darwin Online here.

Via [Wired]

The Vulcan Project

coche — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:58:47 +0000

Funded by NASA and Department of Energy, The Vulcan Project is an effort to quantify the emissions of CO2 within North America at a scale never seen before, up to individual power plants…

Check out their YouTube video here to see some other fantastic visualizations.

via [wired ]

Reusing PC heat

coche — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:54:19 +0000

Heat produced by computers has long been one of those byproducts that are, more often than not, vented to the exterior and therefore wasted. A computer center in Switzerland is reusing the heat produced by its equipment to warm up a town pool. The town payed for part of the system to reroute the heat but it’ll continue to use it or free. A cool symbiotic relationship that will probably become a model.

Read the Wired article here.

Drunk gay flies

coche — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:00:30 +0000

It seems like scientists at U Penn have a bit too much free time on their hands. They set up what they called a ‘Flypub’, and got the fruit flies drunk to see how alcohol (or its fumes in this case) loosened their sexual inhibitions. The male flies started hitting on each other and forming little conga lines after they were completely wasted. Some were passed out on the curb, others were zigzagging, just like in the pubs on the upper east side… As if this wasn’t enough embarrassment for the flies, they then proceeded to film it all and put it on YouTube for the whole world to see.

Read the article in New Scientist here.

Take a look at an impressive zoomed image after the jump.

I wonder where they got those mini-pbr’s?

One day Chimps will rule

coche — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:05:11 +0000

A group of Japanese researchers has published the results of their recent cognitive experiments involving chimps and humans in which, both were shown sequence of numbers on a screen to then be recalled. The chimps outperformed the university students…

No one can imagine that chimpanzees – young chimpanzees at the age of five – have a better performance in a memory task than humans.
“Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection – better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers…The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response. The BBC article reads.

Maybe we should send them to school instead and let us debug ourselves all day.

Read the full article here.