[CENTRAAL] Wetenschap & Technologie in het Nieuws 3

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Op donderdag 3 juli 2014 09:43 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:

Ik denk eerlijk gezegd dat de kunstmestgrondstoffen eerder op zijn dan de fossiele brandstoffen. Er is trouwens geen voedseltekort, iedere hongersnood in de afgelopen 100 jaar had eerder een politieke oorzaak dan een tekort aan voedsel. Honger is een wapen in conflicten.

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Nieuwe 'moleculaire bal' ontdekt
Het bestaan van het balvormige molecuul van het element boor is experimenteel bevestigd.
Nieuwe 'moleculaire bal' ontdekt
Foto: Thinkstock
Dat maken Chinese wetenschappers uitgerekend op de dag van de WK-finale bekend in Nature Chemistry.
Het balvormige molecuul dat uit veertig atomen boor bestaat is te vergelijken met de ontdekking van de ‘Buckyball’ in de jaren tachtig van de vorige eeuw. Dat molecuul bestaat uit zestig atomen koolstof, en baande de weg voor onderzoek naar nanobuisjes en grafeen.
Boor was altijd een kandidaat voor het hebben van een balvormige structuur, omdat het in het periodiek systeem naast koolstof zit en dus vergelijkbare verbindingen kan maken. Tot nu toe was het bestaan ervan echter nooit experimenteel aangetoond.
Borosfereen
De Chinezen hebben het molecuul, dat ze borosfereen noemen, gevonden via een selectiemethode. Met computermodellen bedachten ze eerst hoe het molecuul eruit zou moeten zien.
Vervolgens maakten ze allerlei moleculen van booratomen, en selecteerden ze degenen die precies zwaar genoeg waren – veertig atomen dus. Tussen die moleculen bleek het illustere borosfereen te zitten.
Omdat boor een ander atoom is dan koolstof, ziet deze bal er wat anders uit. Waar de buckyball echt op een voetbal lijkt met vijf- en zeshoeken, is borosfereen vooral opgebouwd uit driehoeken, met enkele zeven- en zeshoeken.

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A Room Where Executives Go to Get Help from IBM’s Watson
Researchers at IBM are testing a version of Watson designed to listen and contribute to business meetings.

Photocopiers, PCs, and video conferencing rooms all rose from being technological novelties to standard tools of corporate life. Researchers at IBM are experimenting with an idea for another: a room where executives can go to talk over business problems with a version of Watson, the computer system that defeated two Jeopardy! champions on TV in 2012.

An early prototype has been made in the Cognitive Environments Lab, which opened last year at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. It is intended to explore how software that can understand and participate in human interactions could “magnify human cognition,” says Dario Gil, director for symbiotic cognitive systems at IBM research.

The lab looks more or less like a normal meeting space, but with a giant display taking up one wall, and an array of microphones installed in the ceiling. Everything said in the room can be instantly transcribed, providing a detailed record of any meeting, and allowing the system to listen out for commands addressed to “Watson.”

Those commands can be simple requests for information of the kind you might type into a search box. But Watson can also take a more active role in a discussion. In a live demonstration, it helped researchers role-playing as executives to generate a short list of companies to acquire.

First, Watson was brought up to speed by being directed, verbally, to read over an internal memo summarizing the company’s strategy for artificial intelligence. It was then asked by one of the researchers to use that knowledge to generate a long list of candidate companies. “Watson, show me companies between $15 million and $60 million in revenue relevant to that strategy,” he said.

After the humans in the room talked over the results Watson displayed on screen, they called out a shorter list for Watson to put in a table with columns for key characteristics. After mulling some more, one of them said: “Watson, make a suggestion.” The system ran a set of decision-making algorithms and bluntly delivered its verdict: “I recommend eliminating Kawasaki Robotics.” When Watson was asked to explain, it simply added. “It is inferior to Cognilytics in every way.”

IBM’s researchers are also considering other ways the technology at work in their current demo might help out in a workplace—for example, by having software log the relative contributions of different people to a discussion, or deliver a kind of fact-checking report after a meeting that highlights mistaken assertions.

By surfacing that kind of information, Watson could change the dynamics of group interactions for the better, says Gil. “Watson could enhance collective intelligence by facilitating turn taking, or having a neutral presence that can help prevent groupthink,” he says. For example, people may feel freer to question their boss’s opinion if Watson is the first to suggest there is another way of looking at a problem.

IBM is not the first to try to improve meetings by having software understand and enhance them. One large project backed by the European Union developed technology that records and summarizes meetings using a combination of speech recognition and sensors that tracked participants’ head movements and gaze for signals of the most useful content.

“Using recognition and content analysis technologies has a significant potential to enhance both face-to-face and remote meetings, and could significantly improve organizational cultures,” says Steve Renals, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh who helped lead that project.

However, the accuracy of speech transcription remains a challenge to the reliability of such technology, says Renals. Even a person speaking directly into a microphone in a quiet room is unlikely to have all their words transcribed correctly, and meetings come with extra problems such as people talking over one another, echoes, and incidental noises such as tapping pens.

In the demonstration shown to MIT Technology Review, the IBM participants wore microphones to give Watson a clearer signal. But Gil’s team is also working on a system of microphones able to collect sound from multiple very focused—but steerable—directions. It would use information from cameras in the ceiling to lock onto people and get a clear recording of their speech.

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Butterflies can change colour quickly through evolution
The evolution of colours in nature is still a mysterious process, but researchers from Yale University have helped shed light on the subject after managing to change the colour of butterflies' wings using selective breeding in less than a year.

By turning the butterfly wings from brown to violet, the researchers have produced the first structural colour change in an animal by attempting to influence its evolution. The species of butterfly used in the experiments -- known as bicyclus anynana, or the squinting bush brown -- is naturally a musty brown hue, and the violet shade achieved in the study was chosen as a goal to work towards by the researchers.

"What we did was to imagine a new target colour for the wings of a butterfly, without any knowledge of whether this colour was achievable, and selected for it gradually using populations of live butterflies," said Antónia Monteiro, a former professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale.

Brilliant colours in animals are often caused by light interacting with the various biomaterials integrated in their physical makeup, such as the scales on butterfly wings. The colour change that was ultimately achieved by the researchers involved changing the relative thickness of the scales that coat the wings. They managed to coax the change out of the butterflies in only six generations of selection. The bicyclus anynana was chosen for the study as it has cousin species that have managed to evolve coloured wings independently and the researchers wanted to see if they could reproduce these changes in the lab.

"We just thought if natural selection has been able to modify wing colours in members of this genus of butterfly, perhaps so can we," Monteiro said.

Proving that they can shows that butterflies harbour high levels of genetic variation and can react swiftly to selective conditions they might encounter via slight modifications to the physical dimensions of the scales on their wings.

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This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet’s interaction with its own ripples, which form what’s known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.

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'Menselijk taalgen verbetert leervermogen van muis'

Als muizen worden uitgerust met een menselijk taalgen verbetert hun leervermogen, zo blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek.

Genetisch gemanipuleerde muizen met het taalgen FOXP2 zijn sneller in staat om nieuwe routes te leren in een doolhof, dan muizen die niet over het gen beschikken.

Het taalgen zorgt er mogelijk voor dat de dieren snel kunnen schakelen tussen hun bewuste en onbewuste leervermogen.

Dit melden onderzoekers in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift PNAS.

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Veel water op aarde ouder dan zon

Veel water op aarde is waarschijnlijk ouder dan de zon, zo blijkt uit nieuw wetenschappelijk onderzoek.

Zeker de helft van het water op onze planeet moet afkomstig zijn uit de interstellaire wolk van stof en gas waaruit uiteindelijk de zon ontstond.

Dat betekent dat ook planeten buiten ons zonnestelsel net als de aarde overvloedig veel water kunnen bevatten.

Britse en Amerikaanse onderzoekers komen tot die conclusie in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Science.

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Op vrijdag 26 september 2014 16:56 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

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Nuclear fusion energy in a decade? Lockheed Martin is betting on it.

What if the nuclear reaction that heats the sun could be replicated to power cities on earth?

Lockheed Martin is betting that it can be done — and within a decade. The defense giant said Wednesday it is building a compact nuclear fusion reactor.

The key term here is “compact.” Although nuclear fusion has been studied for decades, Lockheed is hoping to build a reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck and ship around the globe.

“Many of the approaches [to nuclear fusion] right now have significant drawbacks,” Tom McGuire, compact fusion lead for Lockheed’s California-based “Skunk Works” team, said in a phone interview. Some of those drawbacks include instability associated with the reaction, he said, or scaling problems, which means the reactor needs to be very large in order for fusion to work.

“What’s different about our physics is it’s inherently small and stable,” McGuire said. The Skunk Works Group’s first step is proving that its model works, he said. Eventually, the company hopes that “instead of a construction project, we can make them in a factory,” he said.

With the announcement, Lockheed joins a host of ongoing global efforts to study the potential of nuclear fusion. For example, the European Commission last week announced a $1 billion (850 million euro) initiative to develop nuclear fusion as an energy source by 2020.

Here’s how nuclear fusion works: When two extremely hot atoms collide, their nuclei combine to form one, releasing massive amounts of energy. Unlike nuclear fission, which powers the world’s reactors today, nuclear fusion does not release harmful radioactive material, making it a clean form of energy.

This Lockheed video explains how scientists want to harness the energy released in the fusion reaction, to potentially fuel airplanes or power cities:
[video]

Why talk about the effort now?

“We’ve strategically chosen this time because of our technical progress and exposure to our patents pending,” a Lockheed spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement. “We are also looking for partners to work with us on the project, plus we think it is important for the public and decision makers to understand the real promise that compact fusion has for our nation and the world as a near-term solution to our energy needs.”

Lockheed said it would look for partners in industry as well as the academic community, McGuire said. The team at Lockheed is made up of about 10 people, he said.

Lockheed Martin didn’t say how much money it will invest in the project. But as with many defense contractors, the company has ramped up its investment in energy projects such as wind, solar and tidal energy over the last few years.

For the nuclear fusion project, the company hopes to take a cue from the venture capitalist world, McGuire said. That means the team will seek additional funding after successful technology demonstrations at every stage, he said.

Most recently, the company acquired a Massachusetts energy start-up that developed a low-cost rechargeable battery.