I sit in the small windowless room at the back of the MIT Humans and Automation Laboratory staring excitedly at the computer screen in front of me. The tutorial for the simulation begins. I will have four drones at my disposal, or unmanned vehicles as those in the know call them. Three are aerial vehicles. The fourth is a watercraft that navigates its way on a river cutting through the center of the digital battle ground. A series of controls will allow me to direct these drones, but there is a catch.

I cannot micromanage the drones the way one would move pieces on a chessboard. Instead, the interface asks me to pick from a variety of priorities, such as seeking out potential targets, babysitting ones I have already found, and destroying hostile ones. A complicated algorithm, I am told, will ensure my priorities are doled out to my machines in the most efficient way possible. In other words, my puny mind can’t fly three planes at once, but a computer can. The question is, how? Full Article »

Bossart’s research is part of a growing trend—exploring how modern conservation efforts are not only compatible, but often more effective, when combined with incumbent religious practices protecting natural areas. This success has caused some researchers to propose a formal partnering of the two.

To Bossart, all the rigmarole to get into sacred forests is good news. When it comes to these groves, “The ones that have weaker protective measures are not as high quality as the ones that have strong protective measures,” said Bossart, citing the noticeably better health of the latter (they generally had fewer gaps in their canopies). Protective measures vary depending on cultures but take the form of anything that restricts or discourages people from exploiting the sacred area, such as involved permission ceremonies, local patrolling by religious officials, or taboos condemning harmful resource extraction or even entrance. Full Article »

Byers had bought into the latest in “homeopathic” trends, radium-infused products. Radium is actually present in small quantities in almost all plants, animals, rock, soil and even water. But it was its presence in natural hot springs, considered by many to have curative properties, that kick-started the element into celebrity. In an effort to cure a golf injury, Byers adopted the religious habit of downing several bottles a day of the popular and delicious Radithor. Radiothor was an early form of smart water, but instead of your day’s worth of vitamins, the elixir delivered “certified radioactive water.” “New Substance, Declared to be Cheap and Efficacious in Many Diseases, Shown to Doctors,” read a 1909 New York Times headline on the product.

Radium was cool and everybody was doing it. French women were putting it on their faces in creams. Watches and military instruments used it for its glow-in-the-dark effect. A European company was plunking it in their bread, and another was using it to spruce up their chocolate. Radium toothpaste graced supermarket shelves promising to “load cells with new life.” Even James John “Jimmy” Walker, New York’s incumbent mayor, was home-brewing his own radium water. Full Article »

It is not known for sure whether sharks aggregate to mate, but scientists think it is likely. A new analysis method provides the first hints that an area located halfway between Hawaii and the Baja Peninsula (the “White Shark Café,” as some scientists call it) and traditionally speculated to be a popular shark foraging area, could actually be a mating area.

The study used diving and location data from tags attached to 53 White Sharks. A total of 5,571 data days were analyzed to see how they cluster. The results show that male sharks are gathering in the café in the spring where, according to Salvador Jorgensen, the lead author of the study published in the journal PloS One at the end of October, “they’re swimming up and down [to about 1000 feet below the surface, at just under two feet per second—a fast rate for sharks]…for almost three months, night and day.” Full Article »

But, according to linguists, there are certain words that are so basic and essential, they just won’t budge. By examining 200 words thought to be resistant to change across 103 languages (from the ancient Tocharian to the more familiar Spanish), an interdisciplinary team of researchers came up with a map that shows how the Indo-European language family may have spread over time.

To do this, the University of Auckland team looked for similarities in words across the 200-word list that Michael Dunn, the group’s linguist, said has been the standard since the 1950’s or 60’s. Full Article »

Researchers can now use forensic traces left in the water by marine fish to discern what species are present without ever having to see them.

Using DNA from the environment (eDNA) to detect animals is a cutting edge approach, and in the paper published on PLOS One on August 29, Danish researchers report the first instance of its successful use in the marine world, carried out in the Sound of Elsinore, Denmark, on October 1, 2011.

Previously, fish could only be studied by conventional methods, which involve putting a human in the water or taking the fish out. The non-invasive eDNA method, on the other hand, requires only a half-liter of seawater be taken to a lab where scientists can determine the fish species that left it behind.

Currently, the eDNA method is used to track freshwater invasive species. “But it has much more potential and could be used to monitor changes in biodiversity or species ranges due to climate change; changes in population boundaries; spread of deleterious mutations; the list could go on and on,” says Andrew Foote of the Centre for GeoGenetics, who along with Philip Francis Thomsen, co-authored a similar study looking at marine mammals, published on the same date. Full Article »