Self aware robot could be a reality in 5-10 years

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/self-aware-robot-could-be-a-reality-in-5-10-years/article22804385.ece?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication

WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU DIE? THE INCREASING SIGNS THAT HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS REMAINS AFTER DEATH

http://www.newsweek.com/where-do-you-go-when-you-die-increasing-signs-human-consciousness-after-death-800443

An Alarming Two Thirds of All Scientific Publications and Research Retracted Found to Be Fraudulent

Country of origin of publications retracted

 for fraud or suspected fraud

Πηγή: Globalist Report
By Andrew Puhanic
Oct 2 2012

AN astonishing two-thirds of all biomedical and life-science research publications and research articles that have been retracted from the public domain have been retracted because of fraud.

An article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reviewed more than 2000 scientific articles for reasons why they were retracted from public scrutiny and discovered that67.4% of retractions were attributed to misconduct, of which includes fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%) and plagiarism (9.8%).

Also, the number of articles retracted from circulation has increased 10 times since 1975.

So what is biomedical and life-science research? According to Wikipedia, Biomedical research (or experimental medicine), is known as medical research, is the basic research, applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the body of knowledge in the field of medicine.

Most of the publications were published by authors from more than 55 countries. Of the 2,047 publications analysed, an unprecedented two-thirds of the publications retracted because of fraud or suspected fraud were from the United States, Germany, Japan and China.

The top three publications that had the most retracted entries were:
Journal of Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The Journal of Biological Chemistry

However, the most alarming statistic from this publication is the fact that on average it took more than 32 months for the publications and research articles to be discovered and withdrawn.

Publications and research articles retracted because of fraud took an average 46 months to be discovered and withdrawn.

So what’s so alarming about having publications and research articles in circulation for so long before being discovered to be fraudulent? Well, the major problem is that decisions and policy development could be falsely derived from one of these publications, resulting in public policy based on false assumptions.

How many publications and research articles based on global warming and climate change have been and should be retracted because of fraud?

The authors of the article suggest that ‘the surge of retractions suggests a need to re-evaluate the incentives driving this phenomenon’ and presents solutions to resolve the phenomenon such as:

• Increased use of check-lists.
• Improved training in logic, probability and statistics.
• Enhanced focus on ethics.
• The formation of a centralized database of scientific misconduct.
• The establishment of uniform guidelines for retractions and retraction notices.

At the end of the day, the authors of these fraudulent publications are human, and it should be expected from time to time that mistakes will happen.

However, all of these peer-reviewed publications can exert great influence on decisions and the attitudes of many people, therefore the public should in no way tolerate such an epidemic.

From Ancient Times to Today, Greece's Great Scientific Heritage

Thales of Miletus (6th century bce)

Πηγή: Science Daily
Sept 12 2012

More than two and half millennia ago, Thales of Miletus sought to explain the physical world in terms of the natural rather than the supernatural, earning him the title of the father of science. Centuries later Aristotle and his student Theophrastus classified and named plants and animals, laying the foundations for botany. Hippocrates, meanwhile, is considered the father of Western medicine.

The contributions of these ancient Greek thinkers and visionaries, and many others from Pythagoras to Pliny, have touched virtually every area of science. Greece's contribution to politics and systems of government has been no less impressive. Perhaps therefore it is not surprising that today, amid economic and political crises across Europe, Greek researchers are looking to combine those two traditions.

Teams at the University of the Aegean are currently working on ways to use the Internet, and so-called web 2.0 technologies in particular, to help political decision-makers better understand what citizens want and how they feel about the political agenda.

In the Nomad (1) initiative, which also includes three other Greek partners including the Greek parliament, the researchers are building tools to crawl blogging, social networking and media websites for user-generated content about public policy. Powerful analytical technology and processes are used to analyse the crowd-sourced data and automatically provide it to policy-makers. Armed with an accurate summary of public sentiment on different issues from their constituents, policy-makers should be able to better match policy goals to public demands.

'Modern politicians could test, detect and understand how citizens perceive their own political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web so as to gather useful feedback for immediate (re)action,' the Nomad team says. 'In this way, politicians can create a stable feedback loop between information gathered on the web and the definition of their political agendas based on this contribution.'

While Nomad focuses on helping policy-makers obtain information about public sentiment, another project called Padgets (2) focuses on providing policy-makers with better methods of communication with the public. Also coordinated by the University of the Aegean and involving companies such as Google in the United Kingdom and Fraunhofer in Germany, the project is developing a system to turn public policy proposals and measures into web applications. These so-called Policy Gadgets, or Padgets, are designed to be used in relation to underlying web content and social activities, allowing policy-makers to spread a uniform multimedia message easily across multiple media and new media channels and receive direct feedback from many different users. The ultimate goal is to enable more effective direct communication between policy makers and the public.

At the National Technical University of Athens, meanwhile, researchers are focusing on another issue important to governments and societies everywhere: conflict resolution. The team behind the Siren (3) initiative are taking advantage of recent advances in serious games, social networks, computational intelligence and emotional modelling to create uniquely motivating and educating games that can help shape how children think about and handle conflict.

The Siren software will enable teachers across Europe to easily develop conflict scenarios that match the cultural background, age and technical expertise of their students, with the aim of improving conflict resolution skills among young people, and in the long term, society at large.

While those three projects reflect, at least in part, Greece's long-standing contribution to political systems, public policy and forms of government, others are more closely tied to the country's scientific tradition.

Echoing Eratosthenes

For example, Teleios (4), coordinated by National and Kapodistrian University Of Athens, has echoes of the work of Eratosthenes of Alexandria, the first person to measure the Earth's circumference.

The Teleios team, however, are doing much more than mathematics and geography. They are focused on solving the large and growing problem of managing and using Earth observation data -- the several terabytes of data sent every day by satellites to organisations such as NASA and the ESA. The project, which also involves the National Observatory of Athens and partners in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, is setting up a virtual observatory infrastructure for Earth observation data so data can be accessed, organised and used more effectively for a range of applications, from climate monitoring to detecting wildfires.

Also dealing with large volumes of data is the I-Search (5) project, coordinated by the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas and involving Google as a partner. The initiative is focused on developing the first search engine able to handle specific types of multimedia content, from text and 2D images to video and 3D content, as well as multimodal (such as facial expressions and eye movements) and real-world data (such as weather and location information). In addition, the search engine, based on a unique Rich Unified Content Description system, will also provide a very high degree of personalisation.

The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas is also involved in another far-reaching EU-funded project, Noptilus (6), in which a team is working on developing 'Autonomous underwater vehicles' (AUVs). The project aims to develop and test an advanced AUV that will be fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human operator as is needed by most systems today. With a range of potential uses such as environmental monitoring and underwater mapping, prototype Noptilus AUVs are to be tested off the coast of Portugal for round-the-clock monitoring.

Meanwhile, Greek company Systema Technologies is coordinating another pan-European initiative involving robotics research, albeit for very different aims. The goal of Mobiserv (7) is to develop a service robot to support independent living, socialisation and communications among older people. One of the key features of the initiative is the team's focus on using the robot to provide healthcare services and emergency support by monitoring users' vital signs and environmental factors tied in with a smart home setting. The system is currently undergoing extensive field trials with end users.

'This research could have long-term benefits in supporting a growing elderly population. We need to look at these systems holistically in the context of real lives and ensure that the support they give to older people living independently matches their expectations and meets a real need,' explains Dr Praminda Caleb-Solly, who is leading the user experience research.

Connected with smart buildings research is the Pebble (8) project. The initiative, coordinated by the Technical University of Crete, is focused on intelligent energy management for buildings that will make them 'energy positive' -- i.e. they will produce more energy than they consume. 'The view taken by the Pebble system, along with the potential of most effectively and harmoniously utilising all available resources, makes it an ICT-based "enabler of energy efficiency",' the project team says.

The approach aims to maximise the net energy produced by buildings with renewable energy sources fitted. The system will use a combination of sensors, simulation of heat response within the building, and sophisticated control tools. According to the project team, 'with a reasonable installation of renewable sources, [the system] will help realise significant energy savings -- reaching or even surpassing the target of 30 % reduction.'

The projects featured in this article have been supported by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research.

(1) Nomad: Policy Formulation and Validation through non moderated crowdsourcing

(2) Padgets: Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media

(3) Siren: Social games for conflIct resolution based on natural iNteraction

(4) Teleios: Virtual Observatory Infrastructure for Earth Observation Data

(5) I-Search: A unified framework for multimodal content SEARCH

(6) Noptilus: autoNomous, self-Learning, optimal and complete Underwater Systems

(7) Mobiserv: An integrated intelligent home environment for the provision of health, nutrition and mobility services to the elderly

(8) Pebble: Positive-energy buildings thru better control decisions

Science endures as conditions in Greece worsen

Participants at the first Greek–Turkish conference on statistical mechanics and dynamical systems in 2008 stand in front of the library ruins in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. Greece is not cohosting the conference this year because of the country’s financial crisis.

Πηγή: Physicstoday
By Toni Feder
April 2012
(Vol. 65, Issue 4)

“You need fresh blood. This is a long-term catastrophe,” says Leonidas Resvanis, a high-energy physicist at the University of Athens. For scientists in Greece, the country’s financial meltdown has exacerbated preexisting problems and created new ones. Money for research was already both tight and irregular, but now it’s not clear when or if it will be disbursed at all. The community is worried that the best scientists will leave and that recruiting people is becoming impossible.

Greece is, of course, striving to reduce its spending and debt according to guidelines from the troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. But the country’s scientists fear that applying the prescribed measures across the board, without regard to quality or productivity, damages science. As Giorgos Tsironis, a physicist at the University of Crete and at the Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas (FORTH), puts it, “If the remedy is successful, but the patient dies, it’s not a very good remedy.”

“The ambience really worries me,” says Resvanis. “To produce, you have to be in a creative atmosphere. People in Greece don’t know what will come above the horizon tomorrow. They are scared. When you have to make a choice, you take the conservative approach, and this is not how science moves forward.”

Relying on Europe

Greece gets about €3 billion ($4 billion) per year in European structural funds—money collected from value-added tax throughout the European Union for use in poorer regions. Roughly €150 million of that, earmarked for research, is administered by the Greek government. Since structural funding began more than 20 years ago, the country has assigned its national research budget to go mainly toward projects funded by the European money. In 2011 the European Commission lowered from 25% to 5% the percentage that Greece is required to match, making it easier in some cases for researchers to get funding.

The other main source of research funding in Greece is competitive grants through the European Union. Greek scientists manage to win a lot of European Union grants, says Achilleas Mitsos, an economics professor who served as director general of the European Commission’s research directorate and until last year was secretary general for research in Greece’s education ministry. “Since that money and the structural funds have not been reduced, you would imagine that in terms of funding, research is not suffering a lot. But things are not like that, unfortunately.”

The European money is to some extent shielding research from the financial crisis. But soft money is not a dependable source of funding, it does not allow for long-term planning, and it rarely covers fixed costs, such as equipment maintenance, salaries, water, and electricity. Such fixed costs are covered by the Greek government, and money for them has been repeatedly slashed. Greece invests only about 0.5% of its gross national product in research. Membership fees for international scientific organizations such as CERN, the European Space Agency, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which total about €30 million a year, take up a sizable portion of the Greek research budget and are being paid.

Ubiquitous cuts

Resvanis, who heads plans to build an underwater neutrino detector in the Mediterranean Sea, says that about $1 million he had “accumulated” for running the project “evaporated a year and half ago. [The government] took it away to supplement salaries. You cannot say no to that.” Still, the project remains an “oasis,” he says. Plans for the detector have increased from 1 km3 to 10 km3, with a €240 million price tag. The Greek government is so far standing by its commitment of €50 million, of which it must provide only 5%; the rest will come from structural funds. The partner countries are Italy—which will also pay out of structural funds—France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania.

Scientists have sometimes had luck getting small grants from sources such as the Onassis and Latsis Foundations. Last year, Stavros Baloyannis, a neurologist, managed to launch a new institute to study Alzheimer’s, aging, and degenerative disorders. “I have an electron microscope, light microscopes, a PCR [polymerase chain reaction instrument] for genetics, and I have organized equipment for neuropathology and neurochemistry,” he says. Most of the institute’s funding is from the Greek Orthodox Church. Even so, Baloyannis spends money from his own pockets on research. And charitable organizations are saying they no longer have money for science because of more pressing demands, says Astero Provata, a researcher at one of the National Center for Scientific Research (“Demokritos”) institutes in Athens. She and colleagues have been denied their requests for a few thousand euros to cover expenses for a conference on genomic complexity in Brussels later this year.

Even projects that have been approved to get structural funds sit waiting for the money. Tassos Bountis, a physicist at the University of Patras, leads one such project, on mathematical modeling of complex systems in biomedicine, physics, and the technology of materials. The project is supposed to get €500 000, and is one of 200 projects waiting for promised funding. Bountis is optimistic that the money will come through soon because, he says, “we know the money is there. And politicians are being scrutinized now. They realize they can’t get away with channeling the money to something else.”

“Unexpected discontinuities”


 

A laser technique for cleaning statues is applied here to a caryatid from the Acropolis. The technique, developed by scientists at the FORTH Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers in Crete, involves the simultaneous emission of two wavelengths and preserves the surface.
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM

For example, the eight Demokritos institutes have been recast as five, including the merging of three Athens institutes to form the Institute of Advanced Materials, Physicochemical Processes, Nanotechnology, and Microsystems. The government is creating a few mega-institutes, and next to them there will be nano-institutes, says Georgios Papavasiliou, director of the now subsumed Institute for Advanced Materials. Merging research centers is necessary, he says, “but not in a hurry. There is no plan behind this merging.” The mergers, he adds, were done independently of an imminent law intended to restructure and streamline the research system.

In Greece, says Costas Fotakis, president of the seven research institutes that make up FORTH, “we are witnessing a violent financial restructuring which deeply affects the society and the scientific landscape. It is causing some unexpected discontinuities.” Fotakis and others are particularly upset about the cuts applied across all scientific activities “without preserving existing islands of excellence.” Treating everyone the same, he says, “works against those who do exceptionally good work.”

Such horizontal cuts are in keeping with Greece’s tradition of not linking performance with funding for education and research, says Lefteris Economou, retired president of FORTH. The best scientists survive by getting money from the European Union, he says, “but this does not promote competition within the Greek system. If everyone thinks their salary is guaranteed, more and more start not producing.” What’s more, he notes, most Greek researchers get their PhDs in other countries and then come back. He says many of them end their careers after a postdoc. “They have high enthusiasm in the beginning, but they receive almost no funding from the Greek government, and they see others who are deadwood treated the same way they are. In the long run this does not promote high performance.”

Michael Kokkoris says that he, “like all young scientists in Greece, got no startup package” when he returned from the US to become an assistant professor in experimental nuclear physics at the National Technical University of Athens. “The whole core of research is in constant jeopardy. The fact that we have learned to produce with little should not hide the need for structural reforms”—and for more money.
On top of such long-term problems with Greece’s research system, the crisis creates “a general paralysis of machinery. This paralysis is choking everything,” says Siotis. Another problem, he says, is that “our politicians believe research should have a short-term financial return. Our effort is to change this unrealistic attitude that leads to enormous waste of resources through the funding of ‘monkey projects’ that ultimately do not deliver.”

Human capital
More than the salary cuts, more than the changing laws and merging centers, more than the uncertainty and having to make do with little money, scientists in Greece are worried about keeping their community vibrant. “Greek scientists have always gone outside to study and work,” says Provata. “The difference now is that students who are finishing their bachelor’s degrees in physics don’t even consider the possibility of staying in Greece. They are all asking for help to get out. And the ones who are outside the country and have gained experience do not consider the possibility of returning.” Says Kokkoris, “I love my country, I do not want to leave. The level of our students is high. It is decadent to be forced to send all these young minds abroad. But what can I tell them about the future?”

The University of Crete and FORTH were created about 30 years ago by Greek scientists who returned from years abroad. Says Fotakis, “We have managed to act as a pole of attraction for prominent scientists and talented young researchers. Now we are in danger of losing them, or some of them. It’s not only a financial problem, it’s a political problem.” One of the main dangers of the crisis, he says, “is that we have a repetition of brain drain. Human capital—not just researchers, but technicians and administrators, too—[is] more important than the actual infrastructure.”

Until last fall, the Demokritos institutes were collectively able to offer scholarships for 100 PhD students, thanks to Greek national money. “If the blood is students, then the flesh is postdocs,” says Papavasiliou. “Funding for postdocs hasn’t stopped yet, but I am afraid we will not have them for long. Things are getting worse.”

Many scientists say they are counting on the structural funds to tide them over. But Economou says he is “hoping for a miracle. It has to come soon if a culture of scientific excellence in Greece is to survive.”Superimposed on the tight funding are constantly changing rules. A set of university reforms enacted last year has yet to be implemented because of opposition within the university hierarchy and by students. In February scientists were surprised by an announcement that the country’s 56 public research institutes would be merged to 31. The idea is to share resources, but researchers are skeptical. The mergers are “an exercise in linguistics and window dressing with no substantial effect on budgets or anything else,” says Ion Siotis, a high-energy physicist and former director of Demokritos and of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. “This exercise will allow our ministry to tell the troika that Greece is reducing the number of public bodies and thus saving on public expenditure. It is all a big joke.”Not surprisingly, anything that requires money from the Greek government is feeling the squeeze. Salaries for faculty at Greece’s research centers and two dozen or so universities have been cut by up to 30% in the past two years, and another 10%–15% cut is expected this summer. New hires are officially allowed at a rate of 1 per 5–10 vacancies. For months libraries have been unable to pay for journal access. Facilities are doing without technicians.

An accidental experiment in America shows how evolution happens

Both Hudson tomcod and New Bedford killifish are able to tolerate levels of PCB far higher than those that would kill such fish in cleaner waters.

Πηγή: Economist
Oct 29 2011

It is not often that biologists have a chance to watch natural selection in action. The best-known cases—the evolution of resistance to antibiotics in bacteria and to pesticides in insects—are responses to deliberate changes people have made in the environment of the creatures concerned. But mankind has caused lots of accidental changes as well, and these also offer opportunities to study evolution.

Recently, two groups of researchers, one at New York University (NYU) and the other at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, have taken advantage of one of these changes to look at how fish evolve in response to environmental stress. The stress in question is pollution by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These chemicals—widely used in the middle decades of the 20th century to manufacture electrical insulation, coolants, sealants and plasticisers—often ended up dumped in lakes, rivers and coastal waters. Eventually, such dumping was banned (in America, this happened in 1977). But PCBs are persistent chemicals, and their effects are felt even today. In particular, they disrupt the immune systems of animals such as fish, cause hormonal imbalances and promote tumours.

As is the way of evolution, however, some fish species have developed resistance to PCB poisoning. Isaac Wirgin, at NYU, and Mark Hahn, at Woods Hole, have been studying PCB-resistant fish, to see how they do it. After that, the two researchers will be able to look at how these populations evolve yet again as the environment is cleaned up.

Breaking the chain

The species of interest to Dr Wirgin is the Atlantic tomcod of the Hudson river in upstate New York. Part of the Hudson was polluted with PCBs by two General Electric plants. Dr Hahn is looking at a different animal, the killifish (pictured), in New Bedford harbour, Massachusetts, which was polluted by other producers. Both Hudson tomcod and New Bedford killifish are able to tolerate levels of PCB far higher than those that would kill such fish in cleaner waters. The question is, why?

PCBs do their damage by binding to a protein called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, or AHR, thus stopping it working properly. AHR is a transcription factor, meaning that it controls the process by which messenger molecules are copied from genes. These messenger molecules go on to act as the blueprints for protein production, so preventing a transcription factor from working can cause all sorts of problems. Both Hudson tomcod and New Bedford killifish, however, have unusual AHR molecules. And it is this that seems to explain their immunity.

A protein is a chain of chemical units called amino acids. In tomcods, AHR is composed of 1,104 such units. Except that in Hudson tomcod it frequently isn’t. These fish generally have 1,102 amino acids in their AHRs. The two missing links in the chain (a phenylalanine and a leucine, for aficionados) are encoded in the gene for ordinary tomcod AHR by six genetic “letters” that are missing from the DNA found in PCB-resistant Hudson tomcod. The shortened version of AHR does not bind nearly so easily to PCBs. It still, however, seems to work as a transcription factor. The result is fish that are more or less immune to PCB poisoning.

In the case of the New Bedford killifish the situation is similar, but more complicated. There are no missing amino acids. Dr Hahn has, however, found nine places along the amino-acid chain of killifish AHR where the link in the chain varies between individuals. Altogether, he has identified 26 such variations. Two of them seem particularly resistant to the effects of PCBs. It is not that the pollutants do not bind to the protein—they do. But the protein does not seem to mind. It appears to work equally well, whether or not it has PCB passengers on board.

These fishy cases are reminiscent of the peppered moth in Britain. This, too, evolved in response to industrial pollution. It developed black wings, so that it was invisible when it settled on soot-covered tree trunks. Now, with the clean air brought by anti-pollution legislation, British peppered moths are once again peppered.

Both the Hudson river and New Bedford harbour are being cleaned up, too. This year, for example, General Electric will dredge 1.8m cubic metres (2.4m cubic yards) of PCB-contaminated sediment out of 60km (35 miles) of the Hudson. Dredging will continue over the next few years, after which the river should be PCB-free. It is possible that the tomcod and the killifish will then evolve again, just as the peppered moth did, if their PCB-resistant proteins are not absolutely as good as the original versions—which they might not be, given that evolution did not find them before. If that happens, Dr Wirgin and Dr Hahn will be watching.

Russian and US Scientists Gather to Hunt Down Yeti

Oct. 21, 2008: A footprint was found in the snow on the Mount Dhaulagiri in northern Nepal by a group of Japanese mountaineers during a 2008 expedition. They claimed it was of the legendary Yeti -- and said it could prove the long-rumored existence of a giant ape living in the Himalayan peaks.

Πηγή: Foxnews
Oct 4 2011


KEMEROVO, Russia – Scientists from several countries, including Russia and the U.S., will gather in the Kemerova region of Siberia to hunt down the Yeti, after alleged sightings of the legendary creatures increased threefold in the area over the past 20 years.

Scientists from Russia, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Estonia, Mongolia and China were invited to evaluate evidence of the creatures -- the existence of which has never been proven -- at a conference later this week, according to Russian radio station the Voice of Russia.

Alleged sightings of Yetis in Kemerovo and the neighboring Altai region, about 1,988 miles (3,200 kilometers) east of Moscow, are up three times compared to 20 years ago, with scientists estimating that there is a current population of at least several dozen in the area.

Other evidence of the existence of the creatures -- such as basic twig huts, twisted branches and footprints of up to 35 centimeters (14 inches) -- also has been found in the area.

A group of scientists from the conference will be sent out to search the region's mountains to examine the evidence and try spot a Yeti.

It will be the first expedition of its kind since 1958, when scientists from the Soviet Academy of Sciences scoured Western Siberia trying to catch a Yeti.

Igor Burtsev, who heads the Moscow-based International Center of Hominology, said, "When Homo sapiens started populating the world, it viciously exterminated its closest relative in the hominid family, Homo neanderthalensis. Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes."

New emotion detector can see when we're lying

Our faces betray a range of emotions; the thermal sensor even detects changes in blood vessels

Πηγή: BBC
By Hamish Pritchard

13 September 2011

A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watching our faces as we talk, experts say.

The computerised system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolution thermal imaging sensor and a suite of algorithms.

Researchers say the system could be a powerful aid to security services.

It successfully discriminates between truth and lies in about two-thirds of cases, said lead researcher Professor Hassan Ugail from Bradford University.

The system, developed by a team from the universities of Bradford and Aberystwyth in conjunction with the UK Border Agency, was unveiled today at the British Science Festival in Bradford.

This new approach builds on years of research into how we all unconsciously, involuntarily reveal our emotions in subtle changes of expression and the flow of blood to our skin.

We give our emotions away in our eye movements, dilated pupils, biting or pressing together our lips, wrinkling our noses, breathing heavily, swallowing, blinking and facial asymmetry. And these are just the visible signs seen by the camera.

Even swelling blood vessels around our eyes betray us, and the thermal sensor spots them too.Real-world test

Traditional lie detection depends on the venerable polygraph, first developed in 1921, a much more invasive apparatus with a set of wires attached to the skin. This new device promises non-invasive, even covert truth tests in real time.

"We bring together all this well-established work on expressions, these recent developments in thermal imaging, techniques for image tracking of subjects and our new algorithms into one operational system," said Professor Ugail.

So far, the team has only tested its lie detector on willing volunteers rather than in a real-life, high stakes situation. Later this year, though, they plan to deploy it in a UK airport, probably running alongside experienced immigration officers as they conduct security interviews. The algorithms can then be tested against the verdicts of these officers.

"In a real, high-stress situation, we might get an even higher success rate," noted Professor Ugail, who believes he'll eventually be able to detect around 90% of those who are lying, which is similar to the performance of the polygraph.

The researchers acknowledge, though, that these tests can never be 100% accurate.

What they detect are emotions, such as distress, fear or distrust, and not the act of lying itself. Fear can sometimes be the fear of not being believed rather than the fear of being caught.

World Population Predicted to Hit 7 Billion This Year

Πηγή: Time

By: MEGAN GIBSON 

30/7/2011

If this keeps up, things are going to get crowded.

A new study shows that the earth's population will hit 7 billion in 2011, which is double what it was in the 1960s, according toDiscovery News. What's more, researchers predict that another 2.3 billion people will be added to our planet over the next 39 years. In case you were wondering, that's a lot of people in not a lot of time.

Worryingly, the study adds:

"Over the next forty years, nearly all (97%) of the 2.3 billion projected increase will be in the less developed regions, with nearly half (49%) in Africa. By contrast, the populations of more developed countries will remain flat, but will age, with fewer working-age adults to support retirees living on social pensions."

Which means the coming population explosion will be bad news all across the globe, putting strains on space, labor and the environment. And, if estimates turn out to be true, things are going to get far, far worse: by the year 2100, the earth could be home to a staggering 15.8 billion people.