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Monthly Archives: December 2008

Scientist Builds Female Android Robot

14-Dec-08

Aiko-Female Android RobotOriginal news from www.informationweek.com. Science development in robotics is very fast in growth, just like the growth of computer science.

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A Toronto-based researcher has built what he claims is the world’s first fully functional female robot — a lifelike android named Aiko that is capable of recognizing faces, identifying medication, and even buttering toast.

33-year-old researcher Le Trung, a graduate of York University, built Aiko with silicon and computer parts. Programming her internal software took over a year.

To date, Trung has spent $24,000 building his robo-girl.

Aiko sports delicate, Geisha-like features and is armed with sensors that allow her to respond to touch and voice commands. A camera in her neck provides her with visual input. All told, the robot weighs in at about 70 pounds.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier – The Father of Modern Chemistry

14-Dec-08

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

French chemist who, through a conscious revolution, became the father of modern chemistry. As a student, he stated “I am young and avid for glory.” He was educated in a radical tradition, a friend of Condillac and read Maquois’s dictionary. He won a prize on lighting the streets of Paris, and designed a new method for preparing saltpeter. He also married a young, beautiful 13-year-old girl named Marie-Anne, who translated from English for him and illustrated his books. Lavoisier demonstrated with careful measurements that transmutation of water to earth was not possible, but that the sediment observed from boiling water came from the container. He burnt phosphorus and sulfur in air, and proved that the products weighed more than he original. Nevertheless, the weight gained was lost from the air. Thus he established the Law of Conservation of Mass.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (26 August 1743 - 8 May 1794), the father of modern chemistry, was a French noble prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, introduced the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. The concept of the finite nature of matter was first introduced by Antoine Lavoisier during the 18th century. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Thus, for instance, if water is heated to steam, if salt is dissolved in water or if a piece of wood is burned to ashes, the total mass remains unchanged. The principles of this discovery were elaborated centuries before by Islamic Persia’s great scholar, Abu Rayhan Biruni. Lavoisier was a disciple of the Muslim chemists and physicists and referred to their books frequently. He was also an investor and administrator of the “Ferme Generale” a private tax collection company; chairman of the board of the Discount Bank (later the Banque de France); and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic administrative councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. Because of his prominence in the pre-revolutionary government in France, he was beheaded at the height of the French Revolution.

Isaac Newton – The Most Famous Physics Scientist

10-Dec-08

Sir Isaac Newton

English physicist and mathematician who was born into a poor farming family. Luckily for humanity, Newton was not a good farmer, and was sent to Cambridge to study to become a preacher. At Cambridge, Newton studied mathematics, being especially strongly influenced by Euclid, although he was also influenced by Baconian and Cartesian philosophies. Newton was forced to leave Cambridge when it was closed because of the plague, and it was during this period that he made some of his most significant discoveries. With the reticence he was to show later in life, Newton did not, however, publish his results.

Sir Isaac Newton, FRS (4 January 1643 - 31 March 1727 was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.
In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he built the first “practical” reflecting telescope[6] and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.

In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalised binomial theorem, developed the so-called “Newton’s method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.

Euclid – The Father of Geometry

10-Dec-08

euclidEuclid, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician and is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323 BC-283 BC). He is the author of Elements which gives the principles of what is now called Euclidean geometry deduced from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and rigor.

Biographical knowledge

Little is known about Euclid other than his writings. What biographical information we do have comes largely from commentaries by Proclus and Pappus of Alexandria. Euclid was active at the great Library of Alexandria and may have studied at Plato’s Academy in Greece. The date and place of Euclid’s birth and the date and circumstances of his death are unknown.

Some writers in the Middle Ages confused him with Euclid of Megara, a Greek Socratic philosopher who lived approximately one century earlier.

Albert Einstein – Physics Scientist

09-Dec-08

Albert Einstein

German-American physicist who, in 1905, published three papers, each of which had a profound effect on the development of physics. In one paper, he proposed the theory of special relativity, Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics which provides a correct description for particles traveling at high speeds. The two postulates of the special theory of relativity were that the speed of light Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics in a vacuum is constant and that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial reference frames. Einstein did know about the Michelson-Morley experiment Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics null result, but was not familiar with Lorentz’s work after 1895, so he reinvented the Lorentz transformation Eric Weisstein’s World of Math for himself (Pais 1982, p. 133).

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, expressed by the equation Emc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

Einstein’s many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which was intended to extend the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion and to provide a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include advances in the fields of relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

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