A Milestone in the History of AI: Watson's victory in Jeopardy! and the supercomputers that preceded it

Yesterday the victory of IBM's Watson was aired on national television as the AI program beat two of the most renowned winners of Jeopardy!, record holders Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in the ultimate test of "natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering." [Read more on Watson and the DeepQA research project on IBM's website].

While some of us still remember the first developments of chess-playing computers and the such, AI has evolved at an outstanding rate through the years and has become more and more involved in our daily lives.

For a pick on a brief history of AI milestones,

visit the National Geographic article on their Daily News section.

For more on Watson and the program's contribution in

developing AI technologies, visit www.ibm.com/watson

Finally, an article comparing IBM's Deep Blue's technology

back in 1997 vs. Watson's current developments

NASA Life Discovery: New Bacteria Makes DNA With Arsenic

source: National Geographic - Daily News

A scanning electron micrograph of the arsenic-based bacteria. Image courtesy Science/AAAS

A new species of bacteria found in California's arsenic-rich Mono Lake, (a volcanic valley southeast of Yosemite National Park), is the first-known life-form that uses arsenic to make its DNA and proteins.

While arsenic is toxic to most known organisms, the bacteria not only tolerates high concentrations of the element, it actually incorporates it into its cells.

Dubbed the GFAJ-1 strain, the bacteria can substitute arsenic for phosphorus, one of the six main "building blocks" for most known life. The other key ingredients for life are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur.

While Earth remains the only planet known to contain life, the discovery of these extremophiles holds implications for the search for life elsewhere in the universe, since it shows that organisms can exist in chemical environments biologists once wouldn't have imagined.

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On a funny note,

Arsenic-Based Life

(xkcd)

Tiny Dragon

A Reddit.com user by the name of Biophilia_curiosus posted a few photos that he took in Indonesia. They show an amazing species of gliding lizard which basically looks like a miniature dragon.

The Clearest View Yet Of A 1,000 Year Old Explosion

In 1054, humans recorded sightings of the mega-star explosion that created the Crab Nebula. It was so bright it was visible to the naked eye. Now three space telescopes have together created a more complete picture of the debris.

According to National Geographic:

This new picture of the Crab Nebula combines data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope . . . Infrared light caught by Spitzer and visible light seen by Hubble paint the nebula's expanding debris cloud in shades of purple and red. Meanwhile, Chandra's x-ray vision is helping astronomers understand the high-energy particles (seen in blue) coming from the dead star's core, known as a [sic] white dwarf.

Evolution

It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem

We’ve all heard the plastic bag horror stories—the billions of bags discarded every year that wind up polluting oceans, killing wildlife and getting dumped in landfills where they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. Researchers have been wracking their brains for years to figure out a solution. But leave it to a Canadian high school student to leave them all in the dust. Daniel Burd, an 11th grader at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, has discovered a way to make plastic bags degrade in as little as three months—a finding that won him first prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair, a $20,000 scholarship, and a chance to revolutionize a major environmental issue.

Burd’s strategy was simple: Since plastic does eventually degrade, it must be eaten by microorganisms. If those microorganisms, as well as the optimal conditions for their growth, could be identified, we could put them to work eating the plastic much faster than under normal conditions.

With this goal in mind, he ground plastic bags into a powder and concocted a solution of household chemicals, yeast and tap water to encourage microbe growth. Then he added the plastic powder and let the microbes work their magic for three months. Finally, he tested the resulting bacterial culture on plastic bags, exposing one plastic sample to dead bacteria as a control.

Sure enough, the plastic exposed to the live bacteria was 17 percent lighter than the control after six weeks. Once Burd examined the most effective strains of bacteria, he was able to isolate two types—Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas—as the plastic munchers. At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, the microbes had consumed 43 percent of a plastic sample within six weeks.

Next up, maybe it’s time to put him to work on this whole carbon emissions thing.

Leaf-like Sea Slug Can Photosynthesize!

A green sea slug found off North America’s east coast not only looks like a leaf, but can also make food out of sunlight, just like a plant.

via CBC News – Technology & Science – Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light.

Discoveries: Sea Microbes

Huge numbers of newly-discovered microscopic sea species are coming to light.

All of the knowledge collected in the last 10 years by the Census of Marine Life will be released in October of this year.

Nanotechnology... Sponges and muscles.

A few developments from last year in the field of nanotechnology:

Carbon Nanotube Sponge Can Absorb Toxic Oils and Solvents up to 180x Its Weight!

(source: treehugger.com)

Created by scientists from Peking University and Tsinghua University, this development might prove especially useful for cleaning up oil spills, as it does not absorb water, only the toxic liquids, after which it can be wrung and reused.

"180 times its weight seems to be the maximum that such a sponge can absorb (it depends on what you're mopping up). The figure for diesel fuel is 143x, and for ethylene glycol its 175x."

"The sponges are made from interconnected carbon nanotubes that are about 30-50 nanometres across and tens to hundreds of micrometers long, and they are over 99% porous (which leaves a lot of space to absorb oil and solvents). And since carbon nanotubes are hydrophobic, there's no modification required to make them not absorb water."

The sponges might also have diverse other uses, (for the entire article, click here).

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Another development in the field of nanotechnology:

Carbon Nanotube Muscles

From: Giant-Stroke, Superelastic Carbon Nanotube Aerogel Muscles. Science, Vol. 323 Issue 5921, March 19, 2009.

The first known vegetarian spider

In the tropical habitats of southeastern Mexico and northwestern Costa Rica, where a certain species of ant protect acacia trees in return for shelter and food, their mutualistic relationship is exploited by an unexpected source.

A study published this Monday in the journal Current Biology reveals the first known vegetarian spider amongst an approximate 40,000 spider species. The Bagheera kiplingi, named in the 1800s after the panther character in Kipling's The Jungle Book, has managed a way to leap from thorn to thorn to eat the nutrient-rich buds the acacia trees produce to reward their mutualistic protective ants.

The spider uses its superb strategies to hunt on the plant while avoiding the highly aggressive ants.

Apparently, though the spiders occasionally snack on ant larvae, the bulk of their diet is the plant itself.

Notes:

Although I was unable to find the full article on the journal itself, I read the info related to it on the National Geographic webpage. The photograph is from the same source and was taken by Robert L. Curry.

Toyota premieres violin-playing robot

"Toyota unveiled on Thursday the latest two creations from its robot project, including one that can play the violin, and said it is targeting the early 2010s for the development of a viable human-assistance robot." ... (Read the rest of the article and watch the video below here).

Baby Woolly Mammoth: Extinct Animal Found Intact

Source: MSN.com

A baby woolly mammoth was found in Siberia in 2007.

Estimated to be 37,000 years old, 'Lyuba' is the best-preserved prehistoric animal ever found.

Baby Woolly Mammoth Discovery

(For the National Geographic coverage on the story, click here.)