Adam Norwood

Tag: research

  • Slime moulds work on computer games
    Visit the source: www.alphagalileo.org

    Hey, that’s not a very nice thing to call game developers! Oh, you mean literal slime molds…

    British computer scientists are taking inspiration from slime to help them find ways to calculate the shape of a polygon linking points on a surface. Such calculations are fundamental to creating realistic computer graphics for gaming and animated movies. The quicker the calculations can be done, the smoother and more realistic the graphics. …

    Adamatzky explains that the slime mould Physarum polycephalum has a complicated lifecycle with fruit bodies, spores, and single-cell amoebae, but in its vegetative, plasmodium, stage it is essentially a single cell containing many cell nuclei. The plasmodium can forage for nutrients and extends tube-like appendages to explore its surroundings and absorb food. As is often the case in natural systems, the network of tubes has evolved to be able to quickly and efficiently absorb nutrients while at the same time using minimal resources to do so.

    The Internet will some day be a series of (feeding) tubes?

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  • Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard
    Visit the source: arxiv.org

    Science!

    We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.

    Translation: video games might provide interesting fodder for complexity theory, and possibly provide a model for novel ways of looking at difficult decision problems. In any case, I just like seeing Metroid mentioned on the arXiv.

    (Via New Scientist)

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  • GelSight 3D Rubber Imaging

    GelSight, a high-resolution, portable 3D imaging system from researchers at MIT, basically what looks like a small piece of translucent rubber injected with metal flakes. Watch the video to see some of the microscopic scans they’re able to get using this. I love non-showy SIGGRAPH tech demos like this one.

    (Via ACM TechNews)

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  • Anonymizing the photographer
    Visit the source: arxiv.org

    Via New Scientist, research into an image processing technique designed to mask the actual physical position of the photographer, by creating an interpolated photograph from an artificial vantage point:

    The technology was conceived in September 2007, when the Burmese junta began arresting people who had taken photos of the violence meted out by police against pro-democracy protestors, many of whom were monks. “Burmese government agents video-recorded the protests and analysed the footage to identify people with cameras,” says security engineer Shishir Nagaraja of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, India. By checking the perspective of pictures subsequently published on the internet, the agents worked out who was responsible for them. …

    The images can come from more than one source: what’s important is that they are taken at around the same time of a reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software then examines the pictures and generates a 3D “depth map” of the scene. Next, the user chooses an arbitrary viewing angle for a photo they want to post online.

    Interesting stuff, but lots to contemplate here. Does an artificially-constructed photograph like this carry the same weight as a “straight” digital image? How often is an individual able to round up a multitude of photos taken of the same scene at the same time, without too much action occurring between each shot? What happens if this technique implicates a bystander who happened to be standing in the “new” camera’s position?

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  • Cryptochrome

    Research continues on whether humans (and other animals) have the ability to perceive magnetic fields:

    Many birds have a compass in their eyes. Their retinas are loaded with a protein called cryptochrome, which is sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic fields. It’s possible that the birds can literally see these fields, overlaid on top of their normal vision. This remarkable sense allows them to keep their bearings when no other landmarks are visible.

    But cryptochrome isn’t unique to birds – it’s an ancient protein with versions in all branches of life. In most cases, these proteins control daily rhythms. Humans, for example, have two cryptochromes – CRY1 and CRY2 – which help to control our body clocks. But Lauren Foley from the University of Massachusetts Medical School has found that CRY2 can double as a magnetic sensor.

    Vision is amazing, even more so when you take into account the myriad other things that animals and insects can detect beyond just our “visible” EMF spectrum. See also: box jellyfish with their surprisingly complex (and human-like) set of 24 eyes.

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  • Donald Duck Discovered Methylene

    Actually, he does. Donald Duck accidentally (and somewhat accurately) described the chemical compound methylene nearly two decades before real-world scientists:

    In 1963, the Disney Studio learned just how wide and faithful a readership [Carl] Barks had. A letter arrived from Joseph B. Lambert of the California Institute of Technology, pointing out a curious reference in “The Spin States of Carbenes,” a technical article soon to be published by P.P. Gaspar and G.S. Hammond (in Carbene Chemistry, edited by Wolfgang Kirmse, New York: Academic Press, 1964). “Despite the recent extensive interest in methylene chemistry,” read the article’s last paragraph, “much additional study is required…. Among experiments which have not, to our knowledge, been carried out as yet is one of a most intriguing nature suggested in the literature of no less than 19 years ago (91).” Footnote 91, in turn, directed readers to issue 44 of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. … A year later, the Studio received a letter from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. “Recent developments in chemistry have focused much attention to species of this sort,” Greenwald commented. “Without getting technical let me say that carbenes can be made but not isolated; i.e. they cannot be put into a jar and kept on a shell. They can, however, be made to react with other substances. Donald was using carbene in just such a manner, many years before ‘real chemists’ thought to do so.”

    (Via Cracked’s 5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck [Seriously])

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  • Optical tweezers and laser tractor beams
    Visit the source: blogs.discovermagazine.com

    Mind-boggling stuff like this is why I keep reading science journals. We can already use photons to push and pinch things with their tiny mass (amazing enough), but new research is underway in how to pull with photons:

    Light is pushy. The physical pressure of photons is what allows for solar sail space missions that ride on sunlight, and what allows for dreams of lasers that will push those sails even faster. And light can trap objects, too: Optical tweezers can hold tiny objects in place. Pulling an object with light, however, is another matter.  …  Jun Chen’s research team says that the key is to use not a regular laser beam, but instead what’s called a Bessel beam. Viewed head-on, a Bessel beam looks like one intense point surrounded by concentric circles—what you might see when you toss a stone into a lake.

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  • Medical Paradolia

    A handful of medical paradolia on NCBI ROFL: Bad news: you have a tumor. Good news: it’s really cute!

    UPDATE: I learn via Back of the Cereal Box that there’s a cancer-causing genetic mutation known in scientific circles as Sonic hedgehog!

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  • An ecological study of glee in small groups of preschool children
    Visit the source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

    A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotapes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another.

    Science! 

    See also:

    (Via NCBI ROFL, which I guess is appropriately named in this case)

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  • CV Dazzle

    Technologist Adam Harvey explores using dazzle camouflage makeup to thwart facial recognition libraries like OpenCV in his thesis project CV Dazzle (red squares in image denote the drawings that were successfully identified by the software as faces). Summary article over at PopSci.

    (Via Discover)

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