Robot nightmares and the chocolate Doctor...
26 Sep 2014 by Evoluted New Media
Here at the Science Lite desk we've been inundated with research that is not only interesting and worthwhile, but also manages to shatter our illusions and have us quaking in our boots. Rather than just pick one, we've chosen to share our favourites with you… We’ll start with the Killerbots…a thousand-strong robot flash mob which scurry around on their three pin-like legs, intermittently blinking at each other with their piercing red eyes, before carrying out their master’s instruction. It’s fair to say we were pretty scared when our editor first told us about these Killerbots… What’s that? Oh, yes, it does appear as if we may have misheard. Kilobots…he said Kilobots – as in, a thousand robots. Not scary in the least then. This band of miniature automatons – 1,024 of them to be precise – was developed by researchers at Harvard to test AI algorithms and simulate the behaviour of large swarms of robots. The scary blinking is in fact the tiny robots communicating with their nearest neighbours via infrared, and if one steps out of line, they get pulled back into place by their neighbours…hmmm, there is every chance we may have been a little previous with our relaxation here. Over a thousand robots that can self-organise? This is clearly the beginning of the end for us fleshy humans… But it’s ok; we all know magpies are attracted to shiny objects – they could just pick off the Kilobots one by one. Eventually they’d all be destroyed… Except that magpies aren’t actually drawn to shiny things and don’t routinely steal sparkly trinkets. The pilferers of the bird kingdom don’t live up to their reputation in any way and are actually afraid of unfamiliar objects, say researchers are the University of Exeter. “We suggest that humans notice when magpies occasionally pick up shiny objects because they believe the birds find them attractive, while it goes unnoticed when magpies interact with less eye-catching items,” said Dr Toni Shephard, who led this research. “It seems likely therefore, that the folklore surrounding them is a result of cultural generalisation and anecdotes rather than evidence.” Fom a black and white animal to a creepy crawly so white it scatters light with supreme efficiency. The key to the super-whiteness of the Cyphochilus beetles lies in the complex geometry of their scales. The chitin elements that make up the incredibly thin scales vary in size and shape, making them incredibly disordered and allowing them to deflect all other colours with equal strength. This finding, from researchers at the University of Cambridge, could make whiter-than-white paper, paints and plastics. And now for something a little different. Forget making bags or clothing from – or even smoking – hemp, it has the potential to be transformed into high-performance energy storage devices say Clarkson University researchers in New York. The team cooked cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and then built supercapacitors which perform better than ‘wonder material’ graphene. “People ask me: why hemp? I say, why not,” said Dr David Mitlin. “We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste. The hemp we use is perfectly legal to grow. It has no THC in it at all – so there’s no overlap with any recreational activities.” We should hope not. But this isn’t Matlin’s first effort at turning bio-waste into something useful – he turned banana peel into batteries. “You can do really interesting things with bio-waste. We’ve pretty much figured out the secret sauce of it,” he said. And just because we love the idea – a PhD in chocolate has been up for grabs – um…yes please. But, much to our disappointment, it does involve much more than just sitting at a desk munching chocolate. This three-and-a-half year position at the University of Cambridge will be studying the fundamentals of heat-stable chocolate and determining what enables it to remains solid and retain its tasty properties particularly in warm climates.We love chocolate – we love warm climates…where is that application form, we sense a change of career coming on...