There's a lot of consumer electronics news flooding out of CES in Las Vegas this week, but one of the more interesting technology stories we're seeing is trickling out of Ontario, Canada, where Queen's University researchers working with partners in the UK as well as at Intel Labs and Plastic Logic have developed a tablet computer that is both paper-thin and flexible. And while we've seen concept prototypes for flexible e-ink screens and the like previously, what's most intriguing about the so-called PaperTab is the user interface.

The idea behind PaperTab isn't to make your iPad flexible, but to rethink the way we use tablet computers--and to make them more like the actual pieces of paper we shuffle around our desks. Designed to work in clusters of up to ten tablets, the user can control various screens at once, with one or more PaperTabs for each app in use. So you can have several documents or apps running at once and work across several PaperTabs to execute tasks while moving things around between them. You can use several together to make a larger PaperTab display, or shuffle them around like you would actual paper documents. Touch two PaperTabs together and you can swap data between them (this is all far better explained in the video below).

Rather than relying on buttons or swipe gestures, PaperTabs respond to the flexing of the actual screen in certain ways--bend the right side of the display to page forward and the left side to page backward, for instance. And while it feels like this might be easier to master in theory than in practice, the folks in the video demo make it look pretty simple. But the point is, PaperTabs create a really interesting workflow--something like taking the various windows on your PC desktop and breaking them out on your physical desktop while retaining the ability to quickly move data and programs around from page to page. Figure out how to untether these things from those unsightly cords (they'll need a paper-thin, flexible battery) and this Queen's U. team might be onto something here--if not a consumer product just yet, at least a very cool interface idea.

[Human Media Lab]

Move over, Google: Audi has demonstrated its own self-driving car here at CES 2013, although engineers involved with the project say its most likely a decade away from production.

Last year, Audi presented its vision of a "self-piloting" car, where the driver could choose to cede control to the car during a traffic jam, for example, taking over when he or she wanted to drive. "Our vision of piloted driving is when I don't want to drive, I allow myself to be driven," said Ricky Hudi, chief executive engineer of electrics/electronics at Audi AG, during a press conference here.

This year, those executives said, Audi's self-driving car is a reality. A day after the press conference, Audi representatives showed off a stock Audi A7 sedan, equipped with additional sensors, in two settings: during a traffic jam, and negotiating the tight confines of a parking garage. Popular Science viewed the latter demonstration.

Here's how it works: the autonomous cars that Lexus showed off, plus Google's own Toyota Priuses, use Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology developed by Velodyne, which creates a "map" of the car's surroundings using a rapidly rotating laser beam. At its press conference, Hudi said that Audi has developed its own, much smaller LIDAR that it intends to mount in the A7's grille, eliminating the unsightly "can" at the top of other vehicles.

In the demonstration, Audi used a prototype smartphone app to "call" the car from a parking spot to the front of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Las Vegas. The car started by itself, eased its way out of the garage, turned a corner, and parallel parked. Audi then showed off the car returning to the spot, parked normally between two cars.

Automatic parallel parking is an optional feature on several cars, including European-specific Audi models, and the "radar" that Audi helped the car park are stock features. Negotiating rope obstacles, parking gates, and other cars required the car to "know" where it was at all times, however. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication was also used.

According to Audi senior engineer Annie Lien, Audi maintains several sets of test vehicles: a set for close-quarters perpendicular parking, and the "traffic jam" set, among others. The latter vehicles are equipped with several more sensors, including LIDAR, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. Although they can negotiate the state's highways at whatever speed Audi chooses, Lien said they're being tested only at speeds up to 60 km/h (37 MPH) or so. In 2010, however, Audi's driverless car climbed the windy mountain roads of Pike's Peak in 27 minutes, versus the 10 minutes or so the fastest human drivers require.

Why will it take a decade for self-driving cars to enter production? Two reasons: governments and miniaturization. Only Nevada is moving ahead with testing of autonomous vehicles, although California and Florida are not far behind. Also, according to Hudi, self-driving cars require a trunkful of electronics, in addition to the other sensors. Audi will need to hide that extra computing horsepower within the existing electronics to maintain the sense of effortless elegance the brand is trying to project.

Frank Weaver is a documentary filmmaker and native Paraguayan (now working from Florida) who has lived among and documented the culture of Paraguay's Panambi'y Indians for several years now, logging the traditions and lore of a very old culture threatened by encroaching progress, particularly deforestation and slash-and-burn farming. But when it came time to record and preserve the centuries-old traditions of the local Pai Tavytera Indians of the Amambay hills, Weaver turned to a decidedly modern tool: the much-hacked Microsoft Kinect.

The indigenous people of the Amambay hills treat the surrounding jungle as sacred, and for generations they have decorated their surroundings with rock carvings that are now increasingly disappearing, victim to both natural erosion and the local logging trade. These rock carvings are in danger of disappearing along with the rest of the jungle, so Weaver (inspired by a story written by PopSci's own Dave Mosher for another publication) turned to the Kinect--whose technology has been leveraged to create everything from invisibility to finger-tracking touchless control interfaces--to create 3-D renders of the endangered art and catalog them digitally.

It's not quite the same as preserving them in their original form, but it is an inexpensive and readily available way for Weaver and the people of the Amambay hills to ensure this part of their material culture is documented before it is lost, should it come to that. In the meantime, Weaver is launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for his next documentary, a cultural exploration of the Panambi'y mythology and customs that he hopes will raise awareness of their plight. In the meantime, he and his crew will continue digitizing rock art relics in hopes of preserving them for future generations.

Somewhere inside of your body right now, a delicate membrane is tearing open. Now a leak is springing, and fluids that were not supposed to have gotten past the membrane are gushing through at the point of the tear.

Fortunately, this leak is very small and you can't feel it. Unfortunately, your insides have sprung many other leaks since that first one. Fortunately, at the site of leak #1, several long, sticky molecules that were previously coiled like fruit roll-ups have come unrolled in the sudden torrent, and they're sticking to small solid fragments and forming little globs that are getting tangled up with other globs, and now the whole blob is plugging the leak, patching things up temporarily until the reinforcements arrive.

That this process plays out many millions of times each day is one of the marvels of the human body, but that's not why MIT materials scientist Alfredo Alexander-Katz and his colleagues have been studying it. Rather, the researchers want to replicate the process outside the human body, using slightly different ingredients to create synthetic materials that self-assemble and self-heal.

The group's first step was to figure out exactly how the initial stages of blood-clotting works. Though scientists already knew that a bio-polymer called von Willebrand factor--the "fruit roll-up" in the scenario above--is important to the process, no one understood just how or why the molecules manages to uncoil only when they're needed.

The key, it turns out, is speed: as the surrounding fluid begins to flow faster, gushing toward the leak, the shear force required to unroll the biopolymers increases too. As MIT news explains:

The self-assembling, self-healing aspect of the potential blood-clot-style materials is cool and fun, in a "we're-living-in-the-future" kind of way, but it's actually only part of what makes them attractive to materials scientists.

The other main attraction is that these kinds of composite materials--basically, polymers mixed together with other stuff--are extremely handy and amazing in lots of ways, but no one has figured out an easy way of manufacturing them.

No one, at least, except Nature, who fortifies the ceramic in bones and shells with bio-polymers that make them 3000 times stronger than they'd be without it. But bones and shells and most of Nature's other composites take a long time to form, so the secrets of their formulation wouldn't be that helpful to scientists. Blood clots, on the other hand, form in a matter of seconds.

Alexander-Katz and his colleagues are currently working to simulate the process using different kinds of molecules, and hope the work will be applied to create new kinds of inks, pigments, and coatings, as well as devices like self-healing tires.

Let's agree on one thing: CES is a spectacle. Giant TVs, cars of the future, internet-enabled everything. It's all here. And a lot of it is garbage. But there are always a few products that manage to push the envelope in their respective categories and change conversations. This year, we've selected 15 innovations. They include devices that will alter how we game, watch TV, exercise, and even play with Legos. These are PopSci's CES 2013 Products of the Future.

It takes an almost surgical approach to retrieve a plane if it goes underwater. Not only does the team in charge of the recovery need to know every detail of the plane before going in, they also have to "treat every recovery as a potential crime scene," as Rich Morin explains in a first-person account for Flying magazine. Morin has performed more than 400 recoveries, and he takes the reader through the process hour-by-hour. Definitely worth a read. [Flying]

The Washington Academy of Sciences is offering a different kind of peer review: they'll take a look at your mystery book, and if it's up to scientific snuff, give it a literal stamp of approval.

For too long, WAS says, crime- and thriller-fiction writers have skimped on plausible plotlines, passing manuscripts off to editors who won't check to see if their facts are straight. And with new-fangled tech cropping up, it's getting harder all the time for writers to write about mysteries convincingly. As an alternative, the writers can hand their work over to WAS. If it passes muster, they'll give it a "Peer Reviewed & Approved for Science" button.

The BBC points out exactly why we need this. DNA testing and the War on Terror fundamentally changed crime novels: the old gumshoe detective writers who didn't need to know much more than how a telephone worked and a lie looked on a face might need the extra hand nowadays.

Makes you wonder how Dashiell Hammett would describe a centrifuge.

[BBC]

A species of hardy bacteria found anywhere from human skin to plant roots can survive in a Mars-like environment, a new study says. The finding has implications for extraterrestrial life, but maybe more importantly, there are implications for planetary protection. Could stowaway microbes hop off the Mars rover Curiosity (or its descendants) and make a new life on the Red Planet?

Astrobiologists like studying extremophiles, those bacteria and other creatures that live in horrid temperatures or pressures, because they could conceivably live in the hostile environs of other planets. But Serratia liquefaciens is a generalist, as the authors described it--it evolved probably at sea level and lives in plant, animal and aquatic worlds.

To understand how well future human missions might imperil Mars with our filthy life forms, microbiologists led by Andrew Schuerger at the University of Florida set out to test how well common Earth bacteria could survive in Mars-like environments. There's a surprising lack of data on this matter, the authors say in their paper, which was published this week in the journal Astrobiology.

They worked with 26 strains of 22 types of bacteria that have been recovered before from spacecraft, and would therefore be the likeliest to hitch a ride to a hospitable spot on Mars. Importantly, the researchers assume the bacteria would survive the harmful radiation to which they would be subjected on the journey--but still, the study has some important findings.

The team grew bacterial colonies in dishes and then turned down the heat, the pressure and the oxygen. Hyperbaric chambers reduced atmospheric pressure down to just 7 millibar, with many strains perishing as the conditions worsened. (Earth atmospheric pressure is about 1,000 mbar.) S. liquefaciens was able to survive at 7 mbar, freezing temperatures, low oxygen and increased carbon dioxide--just like the conditions on Mars. Interestingly, two known extremophile species did not make it.

In a different study, Schuerger and colleagues looked at thousands of strains of bacteria recovered from core samples drilled 40 to 70 feet into the Siberian permafrost. The thought was that these microbes might survive in a permanently frozen area on Mars that could be an interesting target for future life-hunting missions. Among that sample, six bacterial species--all from the cold-loving genus Carnobacterium--survived Mars-like conditions and continued to grow. That study was published Dec. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The studies do not prove that life could grow on Mars, the authors warn. The radiation hazard is one major key that would probably prevent spacecraft stowaways from colonizing Mars. But still, the hardiness of these bacteria--especially one that was not considered an extremophile--is a sign that more work needs to be done to try and answer that question.

CES isn't usually the venue for checking out the latest in firearm technologies, but this week the public got its first (as far as we know) really good look at Austin-based TrackingPoint's "Precision Guided Firearms." When we first heard about TrackingPoint back in November, details were pretty scarce; a YouTube clip offered a quick primer on how the computerized scope allows shooters to "tag" their targets and call their shot before they actually pull the trigger, ensuring that they hit the target right where it is marked. Now we're learning a lot more about the technology, and it turns out it's pretty deep.

TrackingPoint's "Precision Guided Firearms" aren't really guided, but they do allow the human shooter to mitigate shaking or flinching that might occur at the moment of trigger pull, movements that could send a shot off target (and when a target is, say, 200 yards downrange even a slight movement of the rifle can pull a round many inches off target). The entire rig is all one system--scope, rifle, and even the ammunition, which must be of a specific type manufactured to very narrow tolerances so that the guidance computer is working within known constraints.

And so it works like this: The integrated scope and rifle system doesn't employ a traditional telescoping optic. Rather, looking into the scope offers the shooter a magnified downrange view streamed as video to a Linux-powered computerized display overlaid with a head-up display. The shooter then zeroes in on the target and uses a button near the trigger to "tag" the place he or she wishes the bullet to make contact. In this way, the shooter can pre-define the shot to his or her liking before discharging the firearm.

The computer then takes into account a bunch of other data--the target's range, air temperature, humidity, incline of the firearm, even the age of the barrel--in the blink of an eye, adjusting the crosshairs to account for all of these data points. All the while a computer vision system keeps the tag in the same place on the target, even if the target or firearm moves some in the interim. The shooter then has to simply apply pressure to the trigger as he or she attempts to line up the crosshairs with the tag. The firearm will not discharge until the crosshairs and the tag are in perfect alignment. At which point: boom. This not only ensures that the round finds its mark, but it forces the shooter to apply constant pressure to the trigger--to squeeze the trigger--rather than pull it (Shooting 101 for those uninitiated: always squeeze the trigger, never pull it--trigger pulling is a bad habit that encourages inaccuracy).

We knew (or could infer) most of that already, save the number of data points the onboard computer crunches prior to firing (The age of the barrel? Really?). But there are some other intriguing aspects to these firearms--even some the ardently anti-firearm crowd might find interesting or appealing. For instance, an on-board computer means data storage, and data storage means these firearms possess something like the data recorders the FAA requires on commercial aircraft. It constantly records the visual feed from the optic and can even feed it to an iPad or iPhone app over a short-range Wi-Fi hub, allowing a person sitting next to the shooter to act as a spotter or simply observe or advise on the shot. And of course the videos can later be uploaded to the Web. Mom will be proud.

TrackingPoint currently offers three rifles packing its Precision Guided Firearm tech, all bolt-action hunting rifles (though pistol-style grips are often associate with tactical rifle design--just saying) designed with sport rather than combat or law enforcement in mind. That being said, firearms and firearm ownership are hot-button issues, especially in the wake of recent events. But by computerizing the firearm, TrackingPoint has raised some interesting notions for the gun industry at large. For one, if guns go the way of the automobile and become increasingly computerized and connected, could that make them easier to track and regulate? And by ensuring the perfect shot every time, can hunters ensure that they take their game in the most humane way possible? The answer to the second question would on its face seem to be yes. The first, well, that's up for debate.

Anyhow, for the time being TrackingPoint's tech is probably going to stay in the hands of only the most serious sportsmen and sportswomen. At $17,000 per rifle, the barrier to entry is a little steep for any but the most dedicated shooters.

[Ars Technica]

Flavor wheels -- a visual depiction of the varieties of flavors or aromas that a particular substance might display -- has a long, if somewhat gnarly history. For centuries, physicians used a urine flavor wheel to help them diagnose a patient's illness based on the taste of the patient's pee. While this wasn't particularly accurate overall, it was quite helpful in detecting diabetes mellitus, a disease that makes a patient's urine taste sweet. Since those more adventurous days, other items have gotten their own flavor or aroma wheel, including chocolate, coffee, maple products, whisky and beer.

One of the problems with the beer flavor wheel is that it's not particularly consumer-friendly. A brewer with at least a passing interest in chemistry will be able to recognize flavor/aromas such as "isoamyl acetate" (that's the banana ester so very prevalent in, say, German hefeweizens.) But your regular beer drinker is probably not going to have a clue what that means. Beer writer Mark Dredge, who has a book, Craft Beer World, coming out soon, decided to make a more consumer-friendly beer flavor wheel. (The link will take you to his blog, where he explains his rationale for creating the wheel.)

For the most part, I think it's successful. It uses clear verbiage instead of chemical names, although I am curious to know how many non-trained drinkers are going to think "aha! gooseberry!" when quaffing a beer hopped with, for example, Nelson Sauvin hops. I also appreciate that he's trying to educate non-brewers on which components of a beer will produce a particular flavor or aroma. Brewers know that you'll get different flavors from different yeast strains (even if the recipe is otherwise identical), for example. But having all of those flavors and aromas spread out all along the wheel can make reading the chart frustrating and, paradoxically, vague. It also puts "creamed corn" squarely in the faults section, even though certain beer styles need a verrrrrrrry slight bit of that to be true-to-style. These are, of course, the grumblings of the terminally uptight -- the kind of person who got a poster infographic of all of the beer styles in the world as a gift and immediately started grousing about the placement of certain styles on that graphic.

In the end, anything that helps consumers appreciate all of the elements that go into brewing beer -- and dispelling the notion that being specific about a flavor isn't purely the realm of the hopelessly snobbish -- is a benefit in this beer lover's opinion. So print out that flavor wheel, grab yourself a beer, and start analyzing its characteristics!

Team BeerSci was marooned in The Land of Always Winter (aka New Hampshire) for the Christmas holidays. I decided to take advantage of the absurd cold (it never got above freezing) and try an experiment in beer concentration: I would freeze some of the water out of a brew and decant the now-concentrated booze into a delicious stronger tipple, a practice called fractional freezing.

The concept is simple: water (the main component of beer) has a higher solid-to-liquid phase transition temperature (aka "melting point") than does ethanol. If one were to get beer cold enough, one could freeze some of the water in the beer -- the alcohol would remain liquid -- and separate the solids from the liquids. This would yield almost-pure water ice, and beer with a higher percent alcohol-by-volume (%ABV). Repeated rounds of this (under successively colder conditions) could yield a pretty potent brew.

Fractional freezing -- "jacking" in old parlance -- has a long history in the United States. The beverage applejack was produced using this method by first fermenting apple juice into hard apple cider. Then barrels of this cider were left outside during the winter and the connoisseur would occasionally fish out the frozen chunks of water, leaving an ever-concentrated batch of hard alcohol behind. At some point in the 20-25 percent ABV range, the liquor would stop freezing at ambient temperatures and the booze was ready to consume as "Jersey Lightning." It was also used as currency.

Moving into the malt-beverage world, brewers in Germany use fractional freezing to make eisbock. These brews are usually just regular bock beers, which clock in at 6 percent ABV, freeze-concentrated to something in the 13 percent ABV range. Frankly, there are probably easier ways to get high-proof beers (make a barleywine, for example) than by starting with a mid-strength one and concentrating it, but there's a market for eisbocks and it's possible to find them in the US as well. A more infamous set of freeze-concentrated beers was made by the Scottish brewery BrewDog in their quest to make "the strongest beer in the world." The first was Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a beer that started with an ABV in the teens and ended at 32 percent ABV. Then a little brewing war started up between BrewDog and German brewery Schorschbräu to make ever-stronger beers. Schorschbräu made a Schorschbock at 40 percent ABV, BrewDog countered with Sink the Bismarck at 41 percent ABV. Then came another beer at 55 percent ABV (that's 110 proof, my friends). Schorschbräu is current record-holder with Schorschbock 57, at 57 percent ABV.

No, I haven't tried any of these beers. At some $800 a bottle, that's just a bit too rich for my budget. I could buy a lot of regular beer for that cash.

Anyway, so back to our particular experiment. We took a strong ale -- as it so happens, we adapted the recipe to make the Marathon Mild by tripling the amount of grains and hops in the beer -- and called it Stormbringer (named after one of the Ten Who Were Taken, from Glen Cook's Black Company books). We poured two bottles of it into a container with a spigot, and left it out of doors overnight. What we didn't count on was an unusually "warm" night at 24°F, and so in the morning we found some very, very cold but still entirely liquid beer. Part of the problem was that Stormbringer is already 12% ABV. When I did some research, I discovered that I would need temperatures between 20°F and 15°F to get the desired freezing effects. Because that wasn't going to happen for another two nights, I opted to throw the beer into the downstairs freezer, which was a pleasing 15°F.

And there it sat, perched atop a frozen pizza, for two hours. When we checked on it, beer slushy! So we raced upstairs, decanted the beer off the ice, and measured the volume. By our very rough calculations, we concentrated the beer from 12 percent to maaaayyyybe 15 percent or 16 percent ABV. Honestly, we could have probably concentrated it further, as 20 percent ABV has a freezing point of 15°F. But this experiment wasn't about that, we just wanted to see if it would work and what the beer would taste like.

As it turns out, pretty damn awesome. That said, if I were to do it again, I'd purposefully brew a beer with slightly lower hop presence (not surprisingly, that also gets amplified during concentration). You know, make an all-Maris Otter barleywine and then try to concentrate it to 20 percent ABV. If one wants to go colder, feel free to opt for a different cooling medium. That freezer only made it to about 15°F/-9C. If you use the tried-and-true ice-salt mixture, you can reach -20C.

For the really enterprising, although PLEASE don't try this at home unless you know what the hell you are doing, you can use the cold bath I used frequently in lab experiments: dry ice in isopropanol, which gets down to a brisk -77C and can freeze liquids that are 90 percent ABV. You won't be able to go much more concentrated than that, as the mixture will form a eutectic at about 93 percent ABV. This means that the entire mixture will freeze, rather than just the water. Something similar happens during distillation, where water and ethanol form an azeotrope at about 95 percent ABV.

I don't recommend actually trying the isopropanol/dry-ice bath chilling for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it's probably illegal to make booze that concentrated without a license. But more importantly, -77C is dangerously cold and you could risk serious injury if it were to splash on your skin or in your eyes or in your mouth.

Do you have one or more pairs of broken headphones at home? Us too. Which is why we're excited about this post, from our sister publication Sound & Vision, about a new pair of ultra-resilient, remarkably water-resistant headphones. We have no idea what they're made of or how they sound, but we're looking forward to finding out. [Sound & Vision]

The U.S. Department of Energy is fighting back against China's stranglehold on global rare earth mineral supplies--or at least throwing money at the problem--by awarding $120 million to Ames Laboratory to set up a new Energy Innovation Hub aimed at shoring up American energy security. Officially titled the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), the DOE lab will roll the resources of more than a dozen national labs, universities, and industry partners into one place in an effort to make rare earths less rare.

Rare earths are a collection of 17 elements that are valued for their unique properties. They are used in the production of everything from computer hard drives and smartphones to wind turbines, batteries, and precision weapons systems. They are found in computer displays and light bulbs and communications infrastructure. We use them to refine oil and build cars. In other words, we need refined rare earth minerals and China owns 95% of the global market for them--and isn't always willing to share. Ramping up domestic supplies could take more than a decade. The CMI has the un-enviable job now of figuring out a solution to this problem.

How? CMI is taking a three-pronged approach. First, it will try to diversify the supply by bring new sources online. Second, CMI will support research into developing substitutes for rare earths, something that to date has shown marginal promise (particularly in Japan, the world's largest importer of rare earths and on-again-off-again geopolitical thorn in China's side). And finally, improve and encourage reusing and recycling of existing rare earths that are often thrown out with the consumer products they are packed inside.

Hopefully between these three efforts something will click. China has already rattled the rare earths saber on a couple of occasions, reminding its global customers that it alone can shut off the spigot to large segments of their manufacturing economies. It has yet to decisively shut off rare earth exports completely, but that could theoretically change at any time.

[Network World]

Anyone who has witnessed the development of a newborn into a toddler knows that babies progress fairly quickly from making seemingly random, spastic body movements to interacting with the world in what seems a much more natural way--through touching and grabbing as well as through social cues, like smiling, grimacing, and other facial expressions. Now we're getting our first real glimpse of a multidisciplinary project mashing up robotics, neuroscience, computer vision, developmental psychology, and machine learning, a project led by University of California San Diego researchers has created Diego-san, a robotic one-year-old that learns to control its body and interact with others the same way a human baby does.

At four feet 3 inches tall and 66 pounds, Diego-san isn't a perfect physical analog for a toddler (miniaturizing all of the parts would have driven Diego-san's price tag way up), but his 44 pneumatic joints and the 27 moving parts in his extremely life-like face make for a humanoid that can mimic human movements--at least those of a one-year-old--quite deftly. The high definition cameras in his eyes take in the world around him--gestures, movements, facial expressions--and the team is developing algorithms that allow Diego-san to "learn" from these cues the same way a human baby would (to the extent that developmental psychologists understand this process, anyhow).

The video below is the first of Diego-san that's been publicly released, depicting the robot moving through a variety of facial expressions that it has learned from the humans it interacts with. Fair warning: Diego-san flirts dangerously with the uncanny valley phenomenon, as his facial expressions are just life-like enough to be somewhat creepy. But the ability to build a humanoid robot with this kind of human-like sophistication--particularly where the face is concerned--is fairly amazing.

Diego-san's research goals go both ways. for the roboticists and computer scientists on the project, Diego-San is granting a deeper understanding of sensory motor intelligence from a computational vantage point. From the other side, by mimicking the development of human babies Diego-san is helping developmental psychologists understand this phase of human development during which children first learn to interact with their physical environment and the other humans that populate it.

[PhysOrg]

Behold, the largest structure in the universe. An international team of astronomers has discovered a large quasar group (also known as an LQG) that is some 4 billion light years across. For comparison, that's something like 1600 times farther than the distance between the Milky Way and the "nearby" Andromeda Galaxy.That's huge.

It's also really far away. Quasars are the cores of galaxies during the early days of the universe. Periodically, these cosmological artifacts emit huge amounts of extremely bright light, which makes them visible across vast distances of space. This LQG is so far away that it looks as it did when the universe was just 770 million years old. It is hands down the brightest object we've ever observed out there, so bright and huge that it actually challenges one of the underpinnings of modern cosmology: the Cosmological Principle.

The Cosmological Principle is the assumption that the universe, if viewed from a large enough scale, looks the same no matter where you are viewing it from. It's one of those things that fits in with the work theorists like Einstein and others who have vastly influenced 20th- and 21-st century cosmological thinking, but that we obviously can't observe. Cosmologists (generally speaking) just believe it, or at least recognize it. But the Cosmological Principle, when factored into the prevailing theories of cosmology, suggests that astrophysicists shouldn't be able to find anything bigger than 370 megaparsecs (again, for scale, the distance from here to Andromeda is roughly 0.75 megaparsecs, or 2.5 million light-years).

This new LQC appears to average more like 500 megaparsecs across, with its longest dimension reaching up to 1,200 megaparsecs. That doesn't necessarily mean the Cosmological Principle is toast, but we may have to take what we think we understand about it back to the drawing board.

The evolution of speech is a complex story, but one key feature is we humans' ability to form intricate sounds using vowels and consonants. Animals have simpler anatomy, so they can't produce as many distinguishable sounds, instead combining their basic noises into more complicated patterns that become things like birdsong. But it turns out even the monosyllabic noises work like a sort of Morse code, with specific structures that contain different information.

Behavioral biologists from the University of Zurich studied banded mongoose in Uganda, observing their behavior and listening to their calls. They recorded contact calls, which only lasted between 50 and 150 milliseconds, and broke them into their constituent parts.

The first bit of screechy call works like an identifier, providing information about the animal making the racket. This is important for mongoose relationships, because the animals can recognize individuals based on this sound. The second, more tonal part of the call indicates what the animal is doing. Study coauthor David Jansen compared that second part to a vowel, and says it shows for the first time that mongoose, at least, make sounds in a way that bears some resemblance to the way we build words. The study appears in BMC Biology.

Animal behaviorists should start listening more closely to other seemingly monosyllabic creatures, they added--from bats to frogs and more. We have evidence that dogs and cats can talk, so of course this makes sense.

[via ScienceDaily]

While film buffs have been arguing over the need to make The Hobbit into three different films, anthropologists have been busy debating the origins of real hobbits, whose remains were discovered in Indonesia only a decade ago.

In 2003, researchers uncovered 18,000-year-old bones of a woman with a skull a third of the size of a human's on the island of Flores, Indonesia. They subsequently found more remains belonging to up to nine similarly pint-sized prehistoric creatures. Nicknamed after the the J.R.R. Tolkien characters, they stood some 3 and a half feet tall.

The origin of these hobbits has been controversial, as claiming they are a different kind of hominid closer to Homo erectus than Homo sapiens throws a wrench in many established theories of human evolution. But Frodo fans can delight in new evidence that hobbits did in fact belong to the extinct species Homo floresiensis.

A study published in Journal of Human Evolution last week shows hobbit wrists were markedly different from humans', lending credence to the theory that they were a separate species from Homo sapiens. After studying the differences between the carpal bones of the Homo floresiensis remains discovered in 2004 and modern human and Neanderthal wrists, scientists says that hobbits weren't just abnormally small humans.

Being different comes at a price, though. Because hobbit wrists weren't well shaped to bear loads equally on both sides of the arm, hobbits probably couldn't grip very well, or at least were subject to more frequent fractures and arthritis. Although researchers have exacted basic stone cutting tools from up to 800,000 years ago on Flores, the structure of their wrists probably restricted hobbits' ability to make and use tools.

Hobbits reached Indonesia by 1 million years ago, and went extinct 17,000 years ago. Some researchers contend that rather than being a separate species, hobbits were deformed humans with a developmental disorder that would account for their small stature and brain.

[Science News]