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Fascinating scientific stuff

On the other hand Kim Kardashian's butt is a far bigger threat to the world, artificial black holes or no. (Though you wouldn't think so from some of the commenters. Whoever came up with that "God particle" nonsense has a lot to answer for.)

But awesome. Also, I didn't realise Higgs was still around. Good for him.
 
GECKO-inspired Robot Climbs Walls ! ​
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For years, researchers have been trying to build a robot that mimics the lizard's ability to scale walls and ceilings of any texture, even glass. But duplicating the specialized biology of the lizard's feet - which actually cling to surfaces thanks to molecular forces and not because of suction cups or toenails - has proven difficult. A Canadian research team has designed a tank-like robot that's able to roll up walls using the same molecular "clinging" technique as the gecko .
The Researchers decided to imitate the gecko, which is unique among vertebrates in its ability to scramble up vertical surfaces, no matter what the texture. Unlike animals that use claws to climb (squirrels, for instance), suction (some frogs) or even glue (a slug), a gecko sticks to walls and ceilings using the very force that attracts molecules together, called the Van der Waals force .
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Scientists reach the heights with gecko-inspired robot - YouTube
Gecko-Inspired Robot: Discovery News
 
But can it sell car insurance.
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A RED PENGUIN !
( Robots & Ecology ) ​
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Robots will also play an essential role in population Ecology, as they will allow for automatic census of individuals through image processing, or via detection of animals marked electronically. These new technologies will enable automated experimentation for increasingly large sample sizes, both in the laboratory and in the field. Finally, interactive robots and cyborgs are becoming major players in modern studies of animal behavior. Such rapid progress nonetheless raises ethical, environmental, and security issues.
( ... )Further, robots can be used to experimentally test evolutionary theory: Robotics reconstructions of Dinosaurs have helped assess how fast these extinct creatures might have run according to their putative morphological characteristics and 500 generations of robots were used to test the importance of relatedness on communication performance Experimental behavioral Ecology is also a surprisingly active field of ecological robotics.....
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ROBOTS IN ECOLOGY : Welcome to the machine !! Full Text(PDF, 1312KB)
 
Good things come in threes:

New Kenyan fossils shed light on early human evolution

Exciting new fossils discovered east of Lake Turkana confirm that there were two additional species of our genus -- Homo -- living alongside our direct human ancestral species, Homo erectus, almost two million years ago.
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Multiple Species of Early Homo Lived in Africa | Hominid Hunting

In March, I compiled a list of my top ten hominid fantasy finds. Item number six: more Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis fossils. The two species are the oldest members of the genus Homo. H. habilis lived roughly 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago while H. rudolfensis lived about 2 million years ago. But where some scientists see two contemporaneous species, others recognize just one. These researchers say the fossils of H. rudolfensis may simply represent physical variation within the H. habilis species due to differences based on geography or sex. It’s a hard question to answer as there’s only really one good H. rudolfensis fossil.

But as it turns out, fantasies really can come true: A team of researchers announced today in Nature that they’ve dug up three new fossils that match the lone H. rudolfensis specimen. The new finds confirm that at least two species of Homo lived in Africa 2 million years ago.
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You have to wonder how different history would have been if there'd been more than one of us in the last 30,000 years... OK, given how we've behaved towards members of our own species, it might not have been pretty, but still.
 
True, but that's still 30,000 years ago, before we started building large societies, before we discovered agriculture... it's easier to coexist when you're just living in small nomadic groups constantly on the move.
 
beer good said:
And of course, the Curiosity has a twitter feedhttps://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity.--- It once was one small step... now it's six big wheels.
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:lol: Yes, an original observation !
beer good said:
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Wow, Curisosity looks like Calculon's Half Brother :lol:

Multiple Species of Early Homo Lived in Africa | Hominid Hunting - Scientists now have much better evidence that two species of Homo lived in Africa at the beginning of the Pleistocene. That number grew to three species with the emergence of Homo erectus 1.89 million years ago. Now there are new questions to ponder. Were H. habilis and H. rudolfensis both dead ends? Did H. erectus descend from one of these species or a currently unknown member of Homo?
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Interesting find ! I remember when I had to read about Kenyanthropus platyops and their connections between Lucy (( Yves Coppens )) & The Turkana boy , it was a little mess !
 
beer good said:
True, but that's still 30,000 years ago, before we started building large societies, before we discovered agriculture... it's easier to coexist when you're just living in small nomadic groups constantly on the move.
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We can't even get past the exceedingly minor differences between Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid so there is little hope we'd tolerate another species of the genus roaming about the planet stealing our jerbs.
 
Point, though it's worth noting that a lot of the perceived "racial" conflicts are a fairly new invention, going back centuries rather than millennia. If there had been several species of us, the entirety of human history would look very different. Not necessarily better, but definitely different.

Though speaking of that, I just watched Animal Planet's mockumentary Mermaids: The Body Found, and... urgh. The weird thing is, they do a pretty good job of making the backstory part of it (that a subgroup of early humanoids broke off from our ancestors roughly 7 million years ago and evolved into flippered-foot merfolk) sound plausible, while obviously not being plausible. (Guess what else broke off from us 7 million years ago? Chimps and bonobos. And yet we're supposed* to accept that a group of apes living in the sea, where none of our advantages are an advantage, evolved to become more humanoid in terms of brain size, society, tool-making etc than our next-door neighbours.) I really feel sorry for proper anthropologists and marine biologists when stuff like this gets hyped. A pity, too - with all that budget, and with the bits of actual facts mixed in there, they could have just twisted it a liiiiittle bit more and turned it into a great expose of how these sorts of pseudoscientific alien/bigfoot/Loch Ness/moon landing loony conspiracies work, playing loosely with facts and exploiting people's ignorance to "prove" something patently ridiculous; instead, they just joined them.

* Yes, Animal Planet is, if you read the press release, open about the fact that the movie is "science fiction" and that the entire merpeople part of it is invented wholesale. Fine. But still, when a channel that's supposed to show documentaries present an idea like this, with absolutely no hints of what's factual and what's fantasy, using scientific jargon to argue for something that they must know is ridiculous, it feels like they help muddy the waters. And with the current level of the debate in the US and elsewhere, that's not a good thing.
 
I believe it to be just another convenient way of discerning tribal affiliation and that predisposition goes back as far as the species. Humans will always find ways to separate us from them, it is part of our base programming.

I saw that same show and can remember thinking to myself how it would bring mermaid worshipers out of the woodwork.
 
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