Paranormal Magazine

A future in which robots help around the home could prove harmful to humans, suggests a study.

German researchers studied what happens in accidents involving robots using sharp tools alongside humans.

They used a robot arm holding a variety of bladed tools programmed to strike test substances that mimic soft tissue.

In some cases, the researchers found, the robots managed to accidentally inflict wounds that would prove “lethal”.

The tests were conducted to see if a prototype safety system could limit the damage done.

Human subject
The tests involved a robot arm weighing 14kg and a 1.1m reach that was equipped with a variety of bladed household tools including a steak knife, kitchen knife, scissors and screwdriver.

The robot arm was programmed to use the bladed tools to stab and cut a silicone lump, a leg from a dead pig and the arm of a human volunteer.

Striking, stabbing and puncturing tests with the safety system turned off were performed on the silicone and pig leg. Deep cuts resulted in most cases that, the researchers said, could prove to be “lethal” if inflicted on a living subject.

Three researchers from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German aerospace agency wanted to carry out the tests because they envisage a future in which robots will start to become domestic helpers.

Injuries were significantly reduced when the prototype collision detection system developed by the trio was switched on. This system uses torque sensors to spot when it has hit a different substance and halts movement. It was used to limit damage when human subjects were tested.

Previous studies have looked at what would happen when large heavy robots bump into people. However, the German study is thought to be the first to look at the slashing injuries robots could cause.

The results of the study were presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Alaska in early May.

[via: news.bbc.co.uk]

Measuring longer than a school bus and sporting tentacles covered in razor-sharp hooks, the colossal squid is the stuff of nightmares. However, new research suggests the enormous sea creature may not be the fierce hunter of legend.

This finding not only upends science’s understanding of the squid itself, but forces a reevaluation of its role in the entire ecosystem where it lives some 3,000 to 6,000 feet (914 to 1,830 meters) beneath the Antarctic sea.

This new view of the colossal squid comes from data analysis made by marine biologists Rui Rosa, of the University of Lisboa, Portugal, and Brad Seibel, of the University of Rhode Island. Rosa and Seibel looked at the relationship between metabolism (how the body’s cells turn food into energy) and body size for smaller squids in the same family and used the information to predict the metabolism of the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).

They found, the squid would’ve had a slower metabolism and so moved slower than expected, waiting for prey, rather than running it down. “Everyone thought it was an aggressive predator, but the data suggests otherwise,” Rosa told LiveScience. “It’s a squid that weights half a ton with hooks in its tentacles, but our findings show it’s more like just a big blob.”

Contrary to the image of Kraken-like shellfish attacking ships and dragging sailors to their deaths, this new data paints a picture of a mostly sedentary creature, Rosa said. Rather than swimming after prey, the colossal squid would wait to ambush passing fish.

And if the colossal squid consumed and expended less energy than previous thought, as this data indicates, then biologists will also need to reevaluate the squid’s role as whale food, Rosa said.

“Because the squid is more cold-blooded than we thought, they are not really that nutritious,” Rosa said. “The whale is not getting much by eating it. They’d have to consume a lot of squid to maintain their lifestyle.”

Rosa also noted that since so little is known about the colossal squid, almost any new discoveries are likely to overturn existing theories. The fact that the squid lives in such deep and frigid waters makes it almost impossible for scientists to acquire new specimens.

“We didn’t really have live measurements, because it’s almost impossible to go to the ocean and catch one,” Rosa said. “We know more about the moon than the deep sea. It’s a cliché, but it’s true, especially in the Antarctic.”

The study was detailed online on April 20 in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom.

[via: livescience.com]

This may have started a week ago, but we are excited by Sion Smith’s new supernatural novella venture, published via Twitter.

From 1st – 31st May 2010, writer Sion Smith will exclusively publish the ‘novella’, I, Wendigo via twitter. A new ‘chapter’ will be published each day throughout the month at twitter.com/iwendigo

The story is the first of four stand-alone horror shorts to be published through twitter this year – with the other three being made available in July, September and November.

“Looking at what’s been attempted through twitter previously, nobody has tried very hard to raise their game to what can be achieved there. twitter is like a restaurant in that it’s their obligation – somehow – to serve up what the customers want. Right now, it’s all chicken nuggets and fries. I don’t see anybody else stepping up to the plate, so I figured I might turn up the heat and see what happens.”

The twitter venture is just one of the projects Sion Smith has slated for 2010. Others include the beginning of the Ashley Stone series with some free short stories and a free weekly podcast of the first Stone novel Carnival of Souls.

For more information, visit: zodiaclung.co.uk or zodiaclung.blogspot.com

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner wants to attempt a record-breaking free fall from 120,000 feet above the Earth.

It’s not the kind of jump a person can do with a conventional sky-diving suit and helmet. After all, Baumgartner will break the speed of sound during his fall. He will need life-support.

To that end, the space equipment manufacturer David Clark Company developed a special pressurized suit and helmet for Baumgartner that provides an artificial atmosphere as well as providing insulation against fire and extreme cold.. There’s a nice article in the Engineer here.

The suit will protect Baumgartner from:

• temperatures as cold as -68.8 degrees Fahrenheit
• little oxygen
• no pressure

Baumgartner will reach the high altitude by way of a capsule suspended from a helium-filled balloon.

The video below gives a great explanation and also shows an animation of the capsule and balloon reaching the stratosphere.

[via: news.discovery.com]

The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has caught an interesting new view of the tiny moon Mimas.

The probe measured temperature differences across the object’s surface and produced a map that looks just like the 1980s Pac-Man video games icon.

Scientists are unsure why Mimas should display such variations but say it is probably related to the diversity of textures in the surface materials.

Some textures may retain heat better than others, they explain.

Mimas is about 400km (250 miles) across. It has a distinctive scar called Herschel Crater which has led many to draw comparisons with the “Death Star” from the Star Wars movies.

The Cassini team says the creation of the crater itself might have played a key role in changing conditions across extensive regions of the moon’s surface.

Cassini is a joint venture between the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

Its mission was recently extended through to 2017.

[via: news.bbc.co.uk]

Plans to more precisely plot the orbit of an asteroid with a small chance of hitting Earth in 2036 may be badly hit by funding cuts to a US radar facility.

Radar measurements set to be made in January 2013 by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, US, could help rule out an impact by asteroid Apophis.

But the cuts mean Arecibo needs an extra $2m-$3m a year to continue.

If not, the observations planned for 2011-2013 will have to be abandoned, the facility’s director told BBC News.

Dr Michael Nolan said he was “moderately optimistic” that the money could be found.

But he pointed out that Arecibo was the only observatory in the world sensitive enough for the task.

“If we measure [Apophis] in 2013, there is something like a 95% chance that we’ll be able to prove that it can’t hit the Earth in 2036,” he explained.

[Read on at news.bbc.co.uk]

AN invisible star may be circling the Sun and causing deadly comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said yesterday.

The brown dwarf – up to five times the size of Jupiter – could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years.

The star – nicknamed Nemesis by Nasa scientists – would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant.

Nemesis is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.

As it spins through the galaxy, its gravitational pull drags icy bodies out of the Oort Cloud – a vast sphere of rock and dust twice as far away as Nemesis.

These “snowballs” are thrown towards Earth as comets, causing devastation similar to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Now Nasa boffins believe they will be able to find Nemesis using a new heat-seeking telescope that began scanning the skies in January.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer – expected to find a thousand brown dwarfs within 25 light years of the Sun – has already sent back a photo of a comet possibly dislodged from the Oort Cloud.

Scientists’ first clue to the existence of Nemesis was the bizarre orbit of a dwarf planet called Sedna.

Boffins believe its unusual, 12,000-year-long oval orbit could be explained by a massive celestial body.

Mike Brown, who discovered Sedna in 2003, said: “Sedna is a very odd object – it shouldn’t be there.

“The only way to get on an eccentric orbit is to have some giant body kick you – so what is out there?”

Professor John Matese, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said most comets come from the same part of the Oort Cloud.

He added: “There is statistically significant evidence that this concentration of comets could be caused by a companion to the Sun.”

[via: thesun.co.uk]

A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

[For the rest of this story go to telegraph.co.uk]

An “astonishing” black penguin suffering from a rare condition has been photographed by wildlife enthusiasts.

The penguin, believed to be suffering from a condition known as melanism, was spotted on Fortuna Bay, a sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, about 860 miles off the Falklands.

A group of travellers had travelled to the island to watch local wildlife and one of the group, Andrew Evans, took this picture of the penguin, one of several thousand.

“Observing this black penguin waddle across South Georgia’s black sand beach revealed no different behaviour than that of his fellow penguins. In fact, he seemed to mix well,” he wrote on a National Geographic blog.

“Regarding feeding and mating behaviour there is no real way to tell, but I do know that we were all fascinated by his presence and wished him the best for the coming winter season.”

Biology experts say that because black penguins are particularly rare there is very little research discussing the subject.

Melanism is however, common on other animal species such as squirrels.

It is estimated that about one in every 250,000 penguins shows evidence of the condition.

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology expert Dr Allan Baker, from the University of Toronto, said the Antarctic penguin was black because it had lost control of its pigmentation patterns.

After being shown the pictures by National Geographic, Dr Baker, also the head of the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum, described them as “astonishing”.

“I’ve never ever seen that before,” he told the magazine.

“It’s a one in a zillion kind of mutation somewhere. The animal has lost control of its pigmentation patterns. Presumably it’s some kind of mutation.”

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the condition is the darkness in an animal’s skin, feathers, or fur is acquired by populations living in an industrial region where the environment is soot-darkened. It can be gene related

It does, however, mean that the probability that its members will survive and reproduce is enhance.

The condition evolves over the course of several generations.

But due to being lighter in colour, they become more conspicuous to predators.

[via: telegraph.co.uk by Andrew Hough]

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.

Arsenic is chemically close to phosphorus. While phosphorus is a primary building block of life on Earth — an essential component of DNA and ATP, the energy molecule — arsenic is a deadly poison. In Mono Lake there are micro-organisms that live with arsenic. But they don’t incorporate it into their biology.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has theorised that there may be life that chose an “evolutionary pathway” to utilise arsenic. If such microbes existed, it could suggest that life started on our planet not once but at least twice. In turn this would help to support the idea that life is much more likely to have started elsewhere in the galaxy.

“There is life ‘as we know it’ and there is life ‘as we don’t know it’. What would that look like? I am trying to give us a framework to work with to help us look for what ‘we don’t know’, the particular framework of arsenic,” she says.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero. She adds sugar, vitamins and other nutrients to encourage organisms to grow and tests the results.

Her experiments are not yet over but she is quietly pleased with the progress she is making. “We have some very exciting data,” she says. The results should be published by the end of this year.

She points out that Mono Lake arsenic life, if found, may only go as far as proving the extreme adaptability of life on Earth billions of years ago. It is generally agreed that on early Earth the chemical soup was very different because of the material being thrown out of the planet’s depths by volcanoes and hydrothermal vents and the lack of biologically derived oxygen. If arsenic was around in far greater concentrations then, perhaps “arsenolife”, as she calls it, in Mono Lake is evidence of that ancestral life, a finding that would deepen our understanding of how life on Earth got started.

But she hopes that her research may help scientists to reconsider what alien or “weird” life might look like: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought. We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”

Her work is funded by the Nasa Astrobiology Institute and she is based at the laboratories of Professor Ron Oremland, of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Does she believe that there are alien life forms out there? “I don’t know how there could not be extraterrestrial life,” she replies.

[via: timesonline.co.uk]

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