Original 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.
PARIS (AFP) – Anti-doping tests used at the Olympics and other major sporting events are too often based on faulty science and statistical methods that can yield erroneous results, a researcher charged Wednesday in a leading scientific journal.
Donald Berry, an expert in biostatistics at the University of Texas, used the case of American cyclist Floyd Landis to point up flaws in anti-doping procedures, but cautioned that the problems he uncovered apply across the board to lab tests designed to ferret out athletes who cheat by using performance enhancing substances.
Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France cycling race victory after a drug test showed he had taken synthetic testosterone to boost his endurance.
The cyclist has maintained his innocence, but an arbitration court in June dismissed his last-chance appeal to overturn the test results.
Writing in the British science journal Nature, Berry argues that the tests performed by the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) that condemned Landis to ignominy and barred him from competition for two years were “non-informative” and potentially subject to error.
While Berry does not have an opinion as to the cyclist’s guilt or innocence, he is highly critical of what he called the “inherent flaws” in current testing practices.
By Shannon Pettypiece
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — Patients infected with HIV might be able to live symptom free without medicines as aggressive treatment with newer drugs better control the disease, the head of U.S. infectious disease research said today.
While research on a vaccine continues, early treatment with the current AIDS drugs also could prevent some people from getting infected, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland, said at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. Scientists should conduct more studies to assess that theory, he said.
Current drugs reduce the amount of the virus in the body to undetectable levels, making HIV a treatable disease similar to diabetes or arthritis, Fauci said. Still, only one person is getting the drugs for every three people infected, he said. There were 2.7 million new infections in 2007, according to a July report by UNAIDS, and an estimated 33 people worldwide have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
“ A cure will likely require early diagnosis and treatment,” Fauci said. “Studies need to be done in next few years to determine if very aggressive therapy early on will allow us to get a functional cure.”
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US authorities have expressed confidence that a US bioweapons expert who committed suicide was the lone culprit behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that terrorized the United States.
Bruce Ivins, 62, killed himself with a prescription drug overdose last week as prosecutors were preparing to charge him in the attacks that left five people dead and sickened 17 others, in a case that brought fears of bio-terrorism on the heels of the September 11 attacks.
After a seven-year-long investigation during which authorities wrongly named another scientist as a “person of interest” in the case, officials said they were wrapping up the probe and would declare the case closed.
“Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks,” US attorney Jeffrey Taylor told a news conference.
“We are now beginning the process of concluding this investigation,” he said. “We will formally close the case.”
Officials said they began focusing on Ivins as a suspect last year after new forensic science allowed them to trace the anthrax back to the scientist.
Scientists at a California company reported yesterday they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.
Creation of the embryos — grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors — also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb — a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.
No one knows if those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.
“It’s unethical and it’s illegal and we hope no one else does it either,” said Samuel H. Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew J. French, the firm’s scientific officer.
Original news from www.informationweek.com. Science development in robotics is very fast in growth, just like the growth of computer science.
