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Image: biblioteekje

Issue no. 11, 2012 Published: Apr 13, 2012
Trust pushes for open access to research
Baboons and 4-letter words point to origins of reading
US tops global clean energy investment rankings
EU investigates internet's spread to more devices
Dual-focus contact lens prototypes ordered by Pentagon
Media multitasking may be good for you after all
'Smart sand' builds copies of objects
Dutch 'flying car' takes to the skies
Computers powered by swarms of crabs

Trust pushes for open access to research
One of the world's largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, is to support efforts by scientists to make their work freely available for all. The Trust is to establish a free, online publication to compete with established academic journals. They say their new title could be a 'game changer' forcing other publishing houses to increase free access. The trust's move is the latest salvo in a battle about ownership of, and access to, the published work of scientists that has been simmering underneath the sedate surface of scientific research for years. The majority of the world's scientific journals are accessible only via subscription, including highly influential titles such as Nature, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. Others, such as the Public Library of Science stable, can be read by anybody. The cost of publication falls on the scientists or their institutions. Many researchers want their work to be freely available to all as they believe this will speed up discoveries. They also argue it is unfair that publicly funded research should only be accessible behind the paywalls of private publishing houses. Later this year, the Wellcome Trust will launch an online open access journal called eLife that will compete with the paid-for heavyweights.
BBC News Apr 10, 2012	back to top

Baboons and 4-letter words point to origins of reading
A group of baboons has learned to discriminate real English words from non-words just by looking at them written down. The findings suggest that some of the mental processing involved in reading evolved separately from the specialised language centres that are unique to human brains. The baboons' achievement is only the first step in reading a word. They did not match the written words to sounds, or understand what the words meant. Researchers of the University of Aix-Marseille, France, trained six captive Guinea baboons (Papio papio) to look at letters on computer screens. Sometimes the baboons were shown a real, four-letter English word, but on other trials they were shown a four-letter non-word. They had to press one of two buttons, depending on whether a word or non-word was shown, and were rewarded with food if they got it right. After a month and a half, the baboons had learned dozens of words: one could reliably identify 308. That is an impressive feat of memory, but is not that surprising. Most complex animals can learn to categorise objects into two groups, given enough training. But the baboons became much better at identifying real words that they had never seen before. That means they had learned the rules that determine which letter orderings form real words, and could apply these rules to distinguish them from unlikely letter orderings. The findings suggest that the brain mechanisms human children use when they learn to recognise written words are evolutionarily ancient, and were co-opted when written language came along, around 6000 years ago.
New Scientist / Science Apr 12, 2012	back to top

US tops global clean energy investment rankings
The US has regained top spot from China as the biggest investor in clean energy in 2011, according to global rankings. The table, published in a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts and compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, showed that US invested more than USD 48bn in the sector, up from USD 34bn in 2010. China slipped to second place, the authors reported, with investment only increasing by USD 0.5bn to USD 45.5bn. Globally, overall financial backing in clean energy technologies hit a record USD 263bn, up 6.5% from 2010 levels. The report, Who is Winning the Clean Energy Race, showed that G20 nations accounted for 95% of the investment in the sector, which does not include nuclear power. Over the course of the year, an additional 83.5 gigawatts (GW) was added to the world's clean energy generation capacity, including almost 30GW of solar and 43GW of wind.
BBC News Apr 12, 2012	back to top

EU investigates internet's spread to more devices
The European Commission is extending a probe into the spread of the internet. The regulator says it expects an explosion in the number of household appliances and other devices connected to the net before 2020. It is launching a consultation over controls of the way information is gathered, stored and processed, saying it wants to 'ensure the rights of individuals are respected'. The public is being invited to send in its views before a 12 July deadline. The commission says that the average person living within the EU has at least two devices connected to the net at present - typically a computer and smartphone. It expects the figure to rise to seven by 2015, with a total of 25bn wirelessly connected to the net worldwide. By the end of the decade it says that could climb to 50bn. The spread of wireless-connected devices has been dubbed 'the internet of things' and has previously identified as potential catalyst to the economy. The commission said it plans to publish its recommendations by the summer of 2013.
BBC News Apr 12, 2012	back to top

Dual-focus contact lens prototypes ordered by Pentagon
The Pentagon has put in an order for prototype contact lenses that give users a much wider field of vision. The lenses are designed to be paired with compact heads up display (HUD) units - glasses that allow images to be projected onto their lenses. The tech could help troops enhance their awareness on the battlefield. The iOptik system's lenses, developed by Innovega, work by allowing the wearer to focus on two things at once - both the information projected onto the glasses' lenses and the more distant view that can be seen through them. They do this by having two different filters. The central part of each lens sends light from the HUD towards the middle of the pupil, while the outer part sends light from the surrounding environment to the pupil's rim. The retina receives each image in focus, at the same time. One suggested application would be to allow users to watch what appear to be big-screen 3D movies on their glasses - with a different image projected to each lens. Other potential uses include augmented reality eyewear similar to that teased by Google in its recent Project Glass demo, and a device to offer gamers a more immersive experience. The lenses are still going through clinical trials as part of the US Food and Drug Administration's approval process, but Innovega thinks the tech should be available to the public towards the end of 2014.
BBC News Apr 12, 2012	back to top

Media multitasking may be good for you after all
Media butterflies, flitting from TV to email to social networking, may be improving their skills at integrating information. A new study by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong shows that those who frequently use different types of media at the same time seem to be better at integrating information from multiple senses. The team asked 63 people, aged between 19 and 28, to fill out questionnaires on their media usage - both the time they spent using various media and the extent to which they used more than one type at a time. They were then given a visual search task, with and without a warning sound signal which contained no information about the visual target's location, but indicated the instant it changed colour. On average, the people who media multitasked the most tended to be the best at multisensory integration, handling the task better when the tone was present than when it was absent. They also performed worse in the tasks without the tone. The researchers reckon that the multitaskers' ability to routinely take in information from a number of different sources made it easier for them to take advantage of the unexpected auditory signal in the task.
TG Daily Apr 12, 2012	back to top

'Smart sand' builds copies of objects
Self-assembling robots have been around for ages, from modules that build themselves into a mechanical snake that can wriggle across the floor, to robotic pieces that automatically stack to build a two-legged walker. Most of those efforts involved designing modules that would add themselves together, like very smart Legos, using internal electronics and mechanics to self-assemble. Now researchers at MIT have taken new tack. Instead of adding pieces, they first pile the bits together, then shed the parts they don't need to leave the desired shape. Their 'smart sand' is made up of individual grains that are really one centimetre square cubes with microprocessors inside and switchable magnets on four of their six faces which can talk to each other electronically and sense their neighbours. The team demonstrated how they work in two dimensions by placing a 2-D 'footstool' inside a grouping of blocks. The magnets are turned on, and the modules check what is next to them on all four sides of the plane. Then an algorithm calculates how to create the same pattern in an adjacent region of block, and switches off magnets on the faces of the module corresponding to those next to the footstool. This forms a copy of the original object. Computer models show the same approach can work in three dimensions.
New Scientist Apr 02, 2012	back to top

Dutch 'flying car' takes to the skies
Is it a flying car or a driving aircraft? Either way, the Personal Air and Land Vehicle, or PAL-V for short, has just proved it can handle the skies as well as the highway, both at up to 180 kilometres per hour, according to its Dutch developers. The PAL-V is a gyrocopter that can fly as far as 500 kilometres at an altitude of up to 1,200 metres. When it lands, it tucks away its rotor-blades and turns into a road-legal three-wheeled vehicle with a range of 1,200 kilometres. In development since 2008, the first commercial models of the arrow-shaped PAL-V are expected to go on sale in 2014 at EUR 250,000-300,000. If the PAL-V sounds like the perfect getaway vehicle from a traffic jam, there is a hitch - it requires 165 metres of runway to take off, 30 metres to land and can only be flown from airports.
PhysOrg / AFP Apr 03, 2012	back to top

Computers powered by swarms of crabs
Most of us are happy with computers that run on electricity, but imaginative systems based on chemical reactions, slime moulds and a host of other unusual concepts are also capable of computation. Now we've got another to add to the list: crabs. Although you're unlikely to ever stop by the Apple store to pick up the latest iSnap model, it turns out that swarms of soldier crabs herded through tunnels can form the AND, OR and NOT logic gates required to make a computer. Researchers of Kobe University in Japan realised that when two swarms of crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means the researchers could adapt a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls, to work with swarms of crabs, with 0s and 1s represented by the absence or presence of a swarm. They first tried the idea with simulated crab swarms. The OR gate, which simply combines one or two crab swarms into one, worked every time, but the more complicated AND gate, which involves the combined swarm heading down one of three paths, was less reliable. They then tried the logic gates for real, using swarms of 40 crabs. The crab swarms were placed at the entrances of the logic gates and encouraged to move by a looming shadow that fooled them into thinking a predatory bird was overhead. The results closely matched the simulation, suggesting that crab-powered computers could indeed be possible.
New Scientist Apr 12, 2012	back to top