Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient Indus Script Matches Spoken Language

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery by Brandon Keim

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
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The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
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They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.

When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.

Nanoparticles With Scorpion Venom Slow Cancer Spread

In a, chlorotoxin molecules, colored blue and green, attach themselves to a central nanoparticle. In b, each nanoprobe offers many chlorotoxin molecules that can simultaneously latch on to many MMP-2s, depicted here in yellow, which are thought to help tumor cells travel through the body. In c, over time nanoprobes draw more and more of the MMP-2 surface proteins into the cell, slowing the tumor’s spread. Image from the University of Washington.

University of Washington researchers found they could cut the spread of cancerous cells by 98 percent, compared to 45 percent for the scorpion venom alone, by combining nanoparticles with a scorpion venom compound already being investigated for treating brain cancer.

For more than a decade scientists have looked at using chlorotoxin, a small peptide isolated from scorpion venom, to target and treat cancer cells. Chlorotoxin binds to a surface protein overexpressed by many types of tumors, including brain cancer. Previous research by Miqin Zhang‘s group combined chlorotoxin with nanometer-scale particles of iron oxide, which fluoresce at that size, for both magnetic resonance and optical imaging.

Chlorotoxin also disrupts the spread of invasive tumors — specifically, it slows cell invasion, the ability of the cancerous cell to penetrate the protective matrix surrounding the cell and travel to a different area of the body to start a new cancer. The MMP-2 on the cell’s surface, which is the binding site for chlorotoxin, is hyperactive in highly invasive tumors such as brain cancer. Researchers believe MMP-2 helps the cancerous cell break through the protective matrix to invade new regions of the body. But when chlorotoxin binds to MMP-2, both get drawn into the cancerous cell.

Research showed that the cells containing nanoparticles plus chlorotoxin were unable to elongate, whereas cells containing only nanoparticles or only chlorotoxin could stretch out. This suggests that the nanoparticle-plus-chlorotoxin disabled the machinery on the cell’s surface that allows cells to change shape, yet another step required for a tumor cell to slip through the body.

So far most cancer research has combined nanoparticles either with chemotherapy that kills cancer cells, or therapy seeking to disrupt the genetic activity of a cancerous cell. This is the first time that nanoparticles have been combined with a therapy that physically stops cancer’s spread.

Full press release

Keeping Out Technology Workers is not a Good Economic Strategy

The barriers between countries, related to jobs, are decreasing. Jobs are more international today than 20 years ago and that trend will continue. People are going to move to different countries to do jobs (especially in science, engineering and advanced technology). The USA has a good market on those jobs (for many reasons). But there is nothing that requires those jobs to be in the USA.

The biggest impact of the USA turning away great scientists and engineers will be that they go to work outside the USA and increase the speed at which the USA loses its place as the leading location for science, engineering and technology work. This is no longer the 1960’s. Back then those turned away by the USA had trouble finding work elsewhere that could compete with the work done in the USA. If the USA wants to isolate ourselves (with 5% of the population) from a fairly open global science and engineering job market, other countries will step in (they already are trying, realizing what a huge economic benefit doing so provides).

Those other countries will be able to put together great centers of science and engineering innovation. Those areas will create great companies that create great jobs. I can understand wanting this to be 1960, but wanting it doesn’t make it happen.

You could go even further and shut off science and engineering students access to USA universities (which are the best in the world). That would put a crimp in plans for a very short while. Soon many professors would move to foreign schools. The foreign schools would need those professors, and offer a great deal of pay. And those professors would need jobs as their schools laid off professors as students disappeared. Granted the best schools and best professors could stay in the USA, but plenty of very good ones would leave.

I just don’t think the idea of closing off the companies in the USA from using foreign workers will work. We are lucky now that, for several reasons, it is still easiest to move people from Germany, India, Korea, Mexico and Brazil all to the USA to work on advanced technology projects. The advantage today however, is much much smaller than it was 30 years ago. Today just moving all those people to some other location, say Singapore, England, Canada or China will work pretty well (and 5 years from now will work much better in whatever locations start to emerge as the leading alternative sites). Making the alternative of setting up centers of excellence outside the USA more appealing is not a good strategy for those in the USA wanting science, engineering and computer programming jobs. We should instead do what we can to encourage more companies in the USA that are centralizing technology excellence in the USA.

Comment on Reddit discussion.

Amazonian Ant Species is All Female, Reproduces By Cloning

Ants inhabit ‘world without sex’

The ants reproduce via cloning – the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters. This species – the first ever to be shown to reproduce entirely without sex – cultivates a garden of fungus, which also reproduces asexually.
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Dr Himler’s interest in Mycocepurus smithii was originally sparked not by their unusually biased sex ratio, but by their ability to cultivate crops. “Ants discovered farming long before we did – they have been cultivating fungus gardens for an estimated 80 million years.

“They collect plant material, insect faeces and even dead insects from the forest floor and feed it to their crops,” she said.

New Yorkers Help Robot Find Its Way in the Big City

Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.
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Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
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The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Very cool, fun and interesting. Cute integration of technology, psychology and an inquisitive scientific mind.

Home Engineering: Reading in Bed

Photo of Kindle, with read-in-bed holder by Randall Munroe

By Randall Munroe, author of the great XKCD comic, The Pursuit of Laziness

Since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for the perfect way to read in bed.
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I recently got a Kindle. I was intending to use it mainly as a mobile web browser, but I’ve surprised myself by using it to read an awful lot. And, with apologies to all the bibliophiles out there, I find the ergonomics better than a paperback. When snacking and reading, I can lay it flat on a table without the use of a book weight to hold it opened, and when lying in bed, I don’t have to keep moving it to read.

But it’s not perfect. There’s no way to hold it with a finger on the ‘next page’ buttons that doesn’t require a few muscles to hold it upright
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I got out of bed one night, went to the closet, and got a steel coat hanger and some pliers. After a few minutes of twisting, I created this

Continue reading →

Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk

The devices combine sensor-driven motors and weight-bearing chassis to guide strides and support body weight. Though derived from technologies pioneered during the ASIMO’s quarter-century of development, their use could be deeply human, boosting manual laborers or assisting people unable to walk without help.
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The devices are still in the research stage, and Honda has not yet formalized plans to go commercial. If they do, the market could be large, and not only in Japan. The number of Americans aged 65 and older is expected to double by 2030. More than 17 million report difficulty climbing stairs or walking a quarter-mile.

Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant

Deriving the Gravitational Constant by Joe Marshall

In the summer of 1985 I was at home convalescing and being bored. It occurred to me one day that if Cavendish could determine the gravitational constant back in 1798, I ought to be able to do something similar
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Cavendish cast a pair of 1.61 pound lead weights. I found a couple of 2-pound lead cylinders my dad had lying around. I used duct tape to attach them to a 3-foot wooden dowel. Cavendish used a wire to suspend the balance, I used nylon monofilament. To determine the torsion of the fiber, you wait until the balance stops moving (a day or two) and then you slightly perturb it. The balance will slowly oscillate back and forth. The restoring force is calculated from the period of oscillation. Cavendish had a 7-minute period. My balance had a 40 minute period (nylon is nowhere near as stiff as wire).

Cavendish used a pair of 350 pound lead balls to attract the ends of the balance from about 9 inches away. I put a couple of 8 pound jugs of water about an inch away. The next trick was to measure the rotation of the balance. Cavendish had a small telescope to read the Vernier scale on the balance. I used some modern technology. I borrowed a laser from Tom Knight (Thanks again!), and bounced it off a mirror that I mounted on the middle of the balance. This made a small red dot on the wall about 20 feet away. (I was hoping this would be enough to measure the displacement, but I was considering an interferometer if necessary.)

To my surprise, it all worked. After carefully putting the jugs of water in place, the dot on the wall started to visibly move. Within a few minutes, it had moved an inch or two. I carefully removed the jugs of water and sure enough, the dot on the wall drifted back to its starting position.

Very cool example of a home physics experiment.

Bacteria Communicate Using a Chemical Language

Each person has about 1 trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In the webcast Bonnie Bassler, Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, discusses the chemical language that lets bacteria coordinate defense and mount attacks (quorum sensing). The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

Bacteria do all sorts of amazing things for us: educating your immune system to keep bad microbes out, they digest our food, they make our vitamins…

Fellowship Winners Announced

Several science and engineering fellowships and scholarships have announced winners recently:

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
Goldwater Scholarships
Marshall Scholarships
Department of Defense (NDSEG) Fellowships – no online list of winners yet

From the NSF GRFP site:

Due to the complexity of the current budget situation, the 2009 GRFP awards will be announced in installments based on fields of study and other factors. The first installment is now available on FastLane. Awardees, as well as Applicants not recommended for funding, have been notified by email. Recipients of Honorable Mention and any additional Fellowship award offers will be forthcoming. Applicant ratings sheets will be available after all award announcements have been made. We thank you for your patience.

Find out more about these and other science and engineering fellowships and scholarships. Also see: How to Win a Graduate Fellowship – NSF Graduate Research Fellows 2008