Fish Fear Robotic Predators, Unless They're Drunk

Scientists swear they had a really good reason for building a robotic fish, getting some other fish drunk, and then chasing them around with it.

The robotic bird head, too.

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome were interested in zebrafish. These thumb-sized, striped fish are laboratory favorites because their genome is well understood, they reproduce quickly, and their embryos are totally transparent.

One area of research that employs zebrafish is the study of emotions, including anxiety and fear. Outside of a lab, people may not spend much time pondering fish anxiety. But study coauthor Simone Macrì of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità says zebrafish can help unravel complex environmental and genetic interactions, such as emotion, because their genetics are not a mystery. Their simple brains are useful for "clarifying some fundamental aspects [of] emotions," he says.

It's easy to spook a little fish; all you have to do is show it a predator. But wrangling live predatory animals such as birds or other fish is inconvenient. It also adds an unwanted variable to an experiment, since your predator may not behave consistently (or may have moods of its own). So Macrì and his colleagues wondered if they could build robotic predators good enough to be stand-ins in these experiments.

They carefully crafted robots that looked like a natural zebrafish enemy, the Indian leaf fish. ("The visual appearance of the robotic fish was obtained by spray-painting the robot with an ivory base color followed by the hand painting of brown color patterns typical for this species," the authors write—in case this is a project you want to try at home—"as well as the attachment of small plastic eyes.") A motor let the robot fish wave their tails at various speeds. There was also a robotic heron head that plunged toward the water as if hunting.

To find out whether their robots made the same impression on zebrafish as a real predator, the researchers let the animals meet each other. Sure enough, zebrafish swam to the far side of their tank when a robotic leaf fish was in the water. When a robotic heron struck from above, zebrafish darted under a shelter.

Then, to make sure the fish were responding to the robots out of fear or anxiety, the researchers gave the zebrafish a drug that reduces anxiety: alcohol. After letting their subjects swim around in ethanol-spiked water, the researchers gave them the same tests. Now they didn't flee the robot fish and were slow to seek shelter after the robotic heron attack.

As the researchers had hoped, sober fish feared robotic predators, and alcohol lessened those fears. The results are published in PLOS ONE.

Macrì thinks this technique could help researchers who study anxiety with zebrafish improve their methods. As long as scientists are looking at simple behaviors, he says, "the robots are ideally suited." And after being chased by a giant robotic predator, zebrafish might need a drink anyway.


Images: left by Azul, via Wikimedia Commons; right Cianca et al. (In reality, the robotic fish were several times larger than the zebrafish.)

Valentina Cianca, Tiziana Bartolini, Maurizio Porfiri, & Simone Macrì (2013). A Robotics-Based Behavioral Paradigm to Measure Anxiety-Related Responses in Zebrafish PLOS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069661

Play Along as Sub Discovers Sunken Whale Bones Crawling with New Life Forms

Forget a needle in a haystack. For that search you'd be allowed light and air—and when you held the needle in your hand at last, it wouldn't be unrecognizably coated in bone-eating worms. Looking for whale skeletons on the ocean floor is such an impossible task that no one sets out to do it on purpose. The most recent find, lying near Antarctica and crawling with previously unseen species, was a very happy accident.

A dead whale that sinks all the way to the ocean floor is called a "whale fall," kind of like "windfall," which it is. The corpse is a massive sack of food dropped from above into a barren landscape. It feeds generation upon generation of life: first the scavengers that pick it clean, then other creatures that chew the bones into scaffolding and bacteria that churn out sulfides, and then a host of animals that feed on these chemicals directly or indirectly.

The same types of animals live at hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, where they consume sulfides and other chemicals seeping out of the earth. Whale falls may act as stepping stones for these species to migrate from one undersea chimney to the next. Even though they haven't seen many sunken skeletons up close, scientists have deduced this with the help of experiments such as dropping wood piles into the ocean and leaving them there.

When the members of a UK-funded research expedition came across the latest whale fall, they were piloting a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) more than 1,440 meters under the sea. "We were at the end of a very long ROV survey," says graduate student Diva Amon, "and had already gone an hour over our allocated time on the seafloor." Then, she says, "we spotted a row of curious white blocks in the distance."

Investigating more closely, the team realized that the blocks were spine bones. They were looking at a whale skeleton covered in deep-sea animals. "We all realized that this was only the sixth natural whale fall to be seen, and the first in the Antarctic," Amon says. "Everyone was thrilled."

In this video, you can watch from the eyes of the ROV as it pans across the find. The camera moves from the whale's skull to its vertebrae, which are lined up like a string of enormous marshmallows. Then it zooms in to see the lush jungle of life sprouting from each bone. Around 50 seconds in, you'll get a cephalopod surprise (is there a better kind?).

The fronds you see waving from the vertebrae are the tail ends of bone-eating worms called Osedax, which Amon calls "remarkable." Tucked in between them are the shells of limpets. When the camera pans down to a fellow who looks like a rubbery sock (a sipunculan worm), you might spot tiny crustaceans scurrying across the bone in the background. Did you see the worm whisk itself into hiding when the squid jetted by? You should probably watch again to be sure.

If the pale denizens of this skeleton look weird to you, they were weird to the scientists back at sea level too. The creatures at the whale fall included nine species that had never been seen before. "Every time one explores the deep sea, there is a very large chance of finding a new species," Amon says.

DNA analysis showed that the skeleton, nearly 11 meters long, once belonged to a minke whale. The types of creatures now living on it were similar to those at other whale falls. Based on these life forms and the state of the bones, scientists could tell that the whale fall has become a sulfur-rich environment. It houses the same animals that inhabit deep-sea vents and cold seeps, and it may be helping those creatures migrate across the ocean floor. "One species of limpet that was found on the whale bones was also found on nearby hydrothermal vents," Amon says.

The researchers couldn't tell whether the skeleton had been in its resting place for a few years or for several decades. Either way, they left this rare needle right where they found it.


Amon, D., Glover, A., Wiklund, H., Marsh, L., Linse, K., Rogers, A., & Copley, J. (2013). The discovery of a natural whale fall in the Antarctic deep sea Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr2.2013.01.028

Images: Whale vertebrae photo and video (c) UK Natural Environment Research Council ChEsSo Consortium; deep-sea creatures (c) Natural History Museum.

Why a Sperm Cell Is Like a Roomba

A sperm cell, much like an expensive robotic vacuum cleaner, is a minimally intelligent body on a mission. Both the Roomba and the male gamete have to navigate a walled space without much idea where they're going or why. And although it won't clean your floors on the way, the sperm cell uses some of the same strategy as the robot vacuum.

To discover the set of rules that sperm cells steer by, researchers used--what else?--sperm mazes. Led by fluid dynamics researcher Petr Denissenko at the University of Warwick, a group of scientists in the United Kingdom built hair-thin tunnels in various shapes. Then they sent human sperm into the curving or zigzagging tunnels. A camera watched through a glass wall on each channel to see what paths the tiny explorers took.

In a narrow tunnel, frantically swimming sperm soon come up against a wall. Then, the camera showed, they follow that wall, seeming to keep their heads against it as they swim. (This same trick will get you out of a corn maze if you're lost, though you might want to keep a hand on the wall instead of your head.)

Wall-following is also one of the rules used by a Roomba. In the case of the robot, it ensures that the edges of the room and the base of the sofa get clean. In the case of sperm, wall-following keeps them moving in one direction as they trace the twists and folds of a fallopian tube.

But sperm aren't experts. When the wall takes a sharp turn away from them, sperm often don't notice; they simply shoot off in the direction they were already swimming. Luckily, they'll find another wall soon. "There are no large open spaces in the reproductive tract," Denissenko says.

Not all sperm are equally spacey about following walls. When the path bends, some follow it better than others. If future research finds a connection between wall-following skill and sperm success--are better navigators also better fertilizers?--then fertility doctors might be able to sort out the best sperm using mazes.

Knowing the rules that sperm swim by also means doctors can coax all of them to travel in the same direction. Denissenko and his coauthors built another maze, shaped like a wreath of grapes, that herds sperm into U-turns until they're all swimming one way.

Roombas use other rules that sperm don't. For example, a Roomba knows to avoid cliffs, a hazard human sperm are unlikely to encounter since there are no staircases inside a human.

Sperm have their own rule too: When they collide with each other, they swim off in different directions. Is this a trick for getting out of traffic? And how do sperm cells know they've hit a fellow swimmer, rather than a wall? Scientists aren't sure yet. "Understanding the role of collisions is really on my to-do list now," Denissenko says.

Like cat-harassing robots, humans' own little automatons rely on a few simple algorithms to do their job. It's nice to see that these seemingly clueless cells know a thing or two. Now if only they'd take on some household chores.

Denissenko, P., Kantsler, V., Smith, D., & Kirkman-Brown, J. (2012). Human spermatozoa migration in microchannels reveals boundary-following navigation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202934109 


Image: IBRoomba/Flickr

Your Sharkskin Speedo Makes Sharks Scoff

"Inspired by the sleek, hydrodynamic properties of sharkskin," Speedo claims, its Fastskin FSII swimwear mimics the texture of a shark to reduce drag and make you faster. But the material might work better if you wore it inside-out. And a closer look at the shark itself reveals engineering features that put our technology to shame.

Calling the suit--or the shark--"sleek" is a little misleading. A shark's skin is covered in miniature teeth called denticles (in case you thought sharks weren't toothy enough). The denticles themselves have ridges that run parallel to the line of the shark's body. To see what these tiny ridged teeth are or aren't doing, researchers at Harvard assembled some robotic sharkskin sandwiches.

Johannes Oeffner and George V. Lauder tested fresh pieces of skin from two kinds of sharks, the porbeagle and shortfin mako; a ribbed silicone material; and Speedo's Fastskin FSII fabric. They glued pairs of sharkskin pieces together sandwich-style to make flat rectangles of skin. With the silicone and Speedo pieces, they made both normal and inside-out sandwiches (with the textured surface on the inside).

These rectangles of skin, rubber, or swimsuit were tested with a kind of robotic swimming machine. The device dangles a rectangle of material in a current of water, waving it back and forth like an undulating 2D fish. Outside the water tank, the device floats on something "rather like an expensive air hockey table," George Lauder explains. This lets the robot propel itself: It may outswim the current, fall behind, or keep up like a person on a treadmill. It also lets the researchers see just how fast each material can swim on its own.

The sharkskin rectangles propelled themselves through the water significantly more quickly when they were intact than when they had their denticles scraped off, suggesting that the little teeth do aid in swimming speed. The rectangles made of ribbed silicone also swam faster when they were right-side-out than smooth-side-out.

But the Speedo Fastskin sandwiches were not so fast. They actually propelled themselves more quickly through the water when they were turned inside-out. That highly engineered fabric surface made the robot swim "quite a bit slower," Lauder says.

When viewed at a microscopic level, it's pretty clear why the Speedo performed differently from the real sharkskin.

Each of the shark's denticles (left) has three pronounced ridges. The imitation of this ridged pattern is presumably what helped the ribbed silicone rectangles swim faster, even though the sharkskin as a whole doesn't really have a ridged pattern. The Speedo fabric (right) doesn't have pronounced ridges at all, but does have occasional grooves--you can see these as the darker stripes in the material. 

When it comes to lessening drag, it seems Speedo's sharkskin impression is a bust. But the shark is only getting started. Those tiny teeth have another speed-enhancing trick besides reducing drag: They actually increase thrust, helping to propel the shark forward through the water.

Oeffner and Lauder discovered this by tracking the flow of water around their flapping robot. What they saw was a vortex--a little whirlpool of water--forming near the leading edge of the flapping sharkskin. "Insects and birds form these on their wings in flight," Lauder says. Comparing the intact sharkskin to the skin that had its denticles sanded off, the researchers saw that the toothed skin enhanced this vortex and held it closer. The low-pressure vortex helps to suck the sharkskin forward through the water.

(To make sure the flapping of the sharkskin wasn't too exaggerated compared to the motion of a real shark swimming, the researchers observed live sharks called spiny dogfish. These sharks had been trained to swim steadily in a flow tank, like a human in one of those Endless Pools. The sharkskin sandwiches, according to their measurements, did curve back and forth comparably to a real shark.)

Even though the Speedo Fastskin FSII material didn't show any signs of inherent fastness (and seemed to actually increase drag, compared to when it was turned smooth-side-out), that doesn't discount the Speedo swimsuit as a whole. Fastskin suits compress an athlete's body, making it more streamlined. Panels of material squeeze the body into a shape that's, according to the company, more efficient for swimming. And the newest designs, which use a different fabric than the one tested here, even come with a corresponding Fastkin swim cap "designed using global head scanning data."

There's one more crucial ingredient to the Speedo: psychology. "Comfort allows focus and inspires confidence," the company's website says. "And with confidence comes peak performance." 

The mental game may be just as important to athletes as the physical one. And when it comes to confidence, a swimsuit that's marketed to make you feel like a top predator can't hurt. (The sharks themselves, one assumes, don't need any such ego boost.)

Oeffner, J., & Lauder, G. (2012). The hydrodynamic function of shark skin and two biomimetic applications Journal of Experimental Biology, 215 (5), 785-795 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.063040


Photo: Shortfin mako shark jidanchaomian/Flickr; swimsuit www.speedousa.com; ESEM images Oeffner and Lauder.

Little People, Big World

Does the size of your body fundamentally impact how you see the world around you? Are your perceptions inextricably tied to your dimensions? Researchers in Sweden say the answer is yes. Reaching this conclusion was as simple as swapping people into different-sized bodies.

Before you get too concerned, let me clarify that the bottommost figure in this photo is not a headless child.

The researchers used a "body-swap illusion" that requires a somewhat tricky setup, as you can see above. The subject (the one with a head, on the left) lies down and puts on a headset. Instead of seeing her own body, when she looks down she sees the images coming from the cameras to her right. The cameras are looking down at a mannequin's body, which can be the same size as the subject's body or not. So far, no illusion: the subject knows this isn't her body. But the experimenter then starts to touch the subject's and mannequin's legs simultaneously and in the same places. After a few minutes of seeing touches on the mannequin's legs and feet that correspond to the touches she feels on her own body, the subject experiences the strange sensation that the mannequin's body is her own.

The touches have to happen in the same place and at the same time for the illusion to work. If the experimenter's pokes at the mannequin's and subject's legs are out of sync, the illusion fails. This was the control condition for all the experiments.

One of the first versions of this study, back in the late 1990s, involved a rubber hand. Subjects rested one of their hands on a table, but their view of that hand was blocked by a small barrier, while a rubber hand was in full view. The experimenter stroked the backs of both hands with a paintbrush for several minutes, and the subjects eventually came to feel that the rubber hand was their own. Some subjects even reported seeing the hand start to look like their own. 

As an aside, I have a special affection for this area of research because I actually used the rubber-hand experiment for my eighth-grade science fair project. I had read about the study in Discover magazine and I wrote to the author, Matthew Botvinick, to ask for more information so I could replicate what he'd done. Not having access to whatever supply stores psychology researchers use, I resorted to using a rubber hand from a Halloween shop. It had a gory, sawn-off wrist that my mom covered with an old shirt sleeve of my dad's. We named the hand Larry, and my ten subjects (it's hard to recruit subjects when you're paying in Reese's peanut butter cups) reported satisfyingly eerie results. One friend got freaked out by the illusion and threw poor Larry across the room in the middle of the experiment. I was a big hit at the county science fair, which made up for some of the successes I was obviously not having in other areas, like sports or being cool. Afterward, Larry was relegated to living under my bed, where he occasionally gave me heart attacks when I went searching for things.

Since the Swedish researchers wanted to know how the size of your body affects your perceptions, they decided to "swap" their subjects into outlandishly sized bodies. In addition to a normal adult-sized mannequin and a toddler-sized mannequin, they created a giant set of legs that would have fit on a 13-foot-tall person. They also did the experiment with a Barbie doll, which they expected to be an extra challenge because not only is Barbie just under a foot tall, but she's recognizably a toy.

Equipped with their cast of Gulliver's Travels characters, the researchers performed a series of experiments. First, they showed that they could make the illusion work even with a giant body or a Barbie body. They conclude that the illusion is "potentially unlimited," which makes me eager for their follow-up study.

This all seems creepy enough, but it was worse for subjects in the stabbed-in-the-abdomen portion of the study. To prove that subjects were really feeling ownership of the fake body, and not just experiencing a visual illusion, researchers measured subjects' skin conductance (an indicator of high emotions) while sticking a knife into the mannequins' stomachs. Unsurprisingly, subjects were scared by this.

Here's what you might have seen if you were a subject in the Barbie-body illusion. Subjects reported feeling like they were in a "giant world":

But the researchers wanted to test what being in a giant world--or a tiny world, in the case of subjects who had been swapped into giant bodies--really meant. They hung cubes of different sizes in front of subjects who had been body-swapped, and asked them to estimate the objects' sizes. Subjects who were inhabiting a tiny body thought the cubes were huge, just like the giant hand that had been poking them in the legs. Subjects who felt like they were inhabiting a huge body, conversely, thought the cubes were tiny, just like the puny researchers tickling their feet. Control subjects, who were looking at the same set of legs but not experiencing the illusion, didn't misjudge the cubes in the same way. This showed that the subjects weren't just comparing the cubes to the size of their legs--they really felt that everything in their world had grown or shrunk.

Finally, the researchers put objects at various distances from the subjects, then asked the subjects to stand up and walk (with their eyes closed) to where they thought the object was. The giant-body subjects thought things were closer to them, while the tiny-body subjects thought everything was farther away. Even when standing and walking--physically inhabiting their real bodies--they were still mentally inhabiting their fake bodies.

Aside from creating crazy props to fill some lab's store closet, the study suggests that our sense of our body size is tied to how we perceive the world. (Other studies have shown that your height affects how you experience time.) When we look around us and judge how far away other people are, how tall a building is, or whether we have enough time to dash acros a busy street, our mental calculations rely heavily on the body that our brain is inside. This makes me wonder whether people who have just lost half their body weight due to gastric bypass surgery, or lost both their legs in combat, feel as though they're inhabiting an entirely new world.

The authors suggest a few fascinating applications for their research in the field of virtual-reality-meets-robotics. Perhaps surgeons who need to perform a microscopic procedure could be made to feel as though they're inhabiting a very tiny surgical robot. Or an engineer could inhabit a gigantic oil-drilling robot at the bottom of the sea. They'd have to watch out for enormous squid, though, because those things are not an illusion.

Images: PLoS ONE (doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0020195.g001)

Robot Cars Are Coming

Few things will say "It's the future!" like robotic cars. While phones have become all-in-one personal assistants and video games no longer need controllers, the car has stayed stubbornly analog. Sure, you can unlock it with a remote control and listen to a thousand channels of satellite radio, but you still have to drive the darn thing.


Finally, it seems like self-driving cars are really around the corner. Google, for one, has been test-driving autonomous cars all around California. They seem to work pretty well. But if the technology does become widely available, it will be many years down the road (so to speak). The cars will have to be made safer than safe; new laws have to be written; trust will have to be gained.


The benefits to having everyone behind the wheel of a smart, self-driving car are undeniable. With perfectly efficient driving, we'd use less fuel. Without antsy drivers changing lanes or rubberneckers slowing at accidents, congestion might become a thing of the past. Without human error, how many of the 40,000 motor vehicle deaths per year would be eliminated? How many of the 10 million accidents? 


Though fully self-driving cars are far in the distance, little pieces of the technology--automatic parallel parking, automatic braking, that horrible beeping thing when you're close to another object--are appearing in the cars people buy today. By the time the robot cars get here, it might not seem so strange to hand one the keys.


In the meantime, there's a compromise that might give us the benefits of smart driving without surrendering all control to the machines. Volvo just demonstrated its progress in a project called SARTRE, or Safe Road Trains for the Environment. (Only in Europe would a highway transportation project be named after an existentialist.) The "road train" is really a convoy of cars electronically linked to one another. A professional driver controls a lead car, and the cars behind latch on to that car via computer. Then the drivers in the platoon can sit back and relax while their cars automatically follow the lead driver. The cars stay close together, preventing other drivers from interrupting their train while reaping the benefits of smart driving. (Obviously, this system relies heavily on the competence of the lead driver.)


The pseudo-car at the top of this post represents another step toward fully autonomous vehicles. It's an Electric Networked Vehicle, made by GM. Not quite a car and not quite a transformer, the vehicle snaps its driver inside, then balances itself on two wheels to travel down the road. The EN-Vs can communicate with each other and drive autonomously. Tiny and lightweight, the vehicles would be fuel efficient if they used fuel--but they're entirely electronic. This is the future, after all.




Image: scientificamerican.com

I'll Take Penguins in Peril for 500, Alex. (a quiz)

Which of this week's science news stories did you catch? I know Watson would ace this quiz.

1. Distressingly, a long-term study has shown that king penguins with tracking bands attached their flippers are more likely to:

a. die

b. develop infections

c. become obese

d. abandon their young

2. Testing anxiety can cause students to underperform on exams. But researchers at the University of Chicago showed that in a high-stakes test environment, both high-school and college students did better on exams when they:
a. studied less
b. wrote about their feelings for 10 minutes before the test
c. ate chocolate before the test
d. watched a film about Stephen Hawking before test




3. Daily Double!! What is this?

a. a colony of bioluminescent bacteria
b. the surface of an exoplanet
c. a picture of the universe
d. part of Fermilab's particle accelerator, which will be shut down this year






4. At a 6,000-year-old site in an Armenian cave, researchers discovered the world's oldest:
a. zoo
b. flower garden
c. bakery
d. winery


5. In February, you'll be able to watch a Jeopardy match on TV between Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing robot, and two humans. Who won this week's demonstration match?
a. Human champion Ken Jennings, who won 74 games in a row in 2004
b. Human champion Brad Rutter, biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy
c. The computer
d. No one, because the match was suspended when Watson froze just before Double Jeopardy




Answers are in the comments.


Image: M. Blanton and the SDSS-III

These Robots Are Ready for Liftoff

Liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery--the next-to-last NASA shuttle launch ever--has been delayed until at least Thursday (November 4). But one of the shuttle's postponed passengers to the International Space Station claims to feel no anxiety about the upcoming trip:

I'm not nervous--with my stomach full of brains, there's no room for butterflies.

That's from the Twitter feed of Robonaut 2, also called R2. No relation to R2D2, except that both are cute and helpful space-bots.

Once R2 makes it to the space station, it will take up permanent residence there. But it's not like robots will suddenly be running the place. R2 doesn't have much of a mind of its own, for one thing. It only carries out orders from human-nauts. And for now, it's a prototype. On the space station, humans will learn how R2 functions without gravity, and how well its extra-dextrous hands perform various functions.

For example, weightlifting.

Eventually, robonauts will use those hands, which NASA describes as "approaching human dexterity," to take over dangerous or boring tasks from human astronauts. R2 is already able to change an air filter, a trick which might get old fast. ("Mikhail! Stop playing with that robot; I told you the air filter is clean already!")

R2 is legless for now. It will stand on a fixed pedestal on the space station. But future generation might have legs--or even wheels. The "Centaur," currently being tested on land, is a robonaut torso attached to a four-wheeled rover.

Robonaut 2's dextrous and human-like hands are the pride of NASA, but other scientists have been working on a whole new model. Led by Eric Brown at the University of Chicago, a team created a "universal robotic gripper" that forgoes fingers altogether. Instead of bothering with all those complicated joints, the robotic gripper is just a round rubber sack filled with a granular material. When the sack comes in contact with an object, the grains flow around the shape (think of setting a small bag of rice on top of a pen). Then a vacuum quickly sucks a tiny bit of extra air out of the gripper. This changes the sack's volume by less than 1%, but it's enough to mold it around the object and grip it tight.

Here, you can (and should) watch a video of the robotic gripper pouring a glass of water and drawing with a pen. The gripper can pick up most sturdy objects, but still has trouble with porous or squishy things, such as cotton balls.

Brown says that amputees could one day benefit from prosthetic hands based on this technology. I have a hard time imagining that people would want their missing hands replaced by grippy blobs, but maybe I'm wrong. Either way, there are certainly plenty of robots that could use good hand technology. I wonder if the universal gripper works in microgravity...

Images: robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov; John Amend

Goldilocks Would Never Use Banned Substances (a quiz)

It's time to find out how well you've been following the news! This week was a big one for both space and Spain.

1. Astronomers are pretty excited about a newly discovered planet called Gliese 851. The planet orbits its star in a so-called "Goldilocks zone," which means it is:

a. in close orbit to a small planet, a medium planet, and a large planet

b. just the right size for humans to be able to walk around comfortably--unlike a huge planet whose gravity would pin us down, or a tiny planet where we'd bounce around uselessly

c. just the right temperature for liquid water to exist

d. blond, with a propensity to sit in the wrong chair

2. Speaking of outer space, congress just passed a new NASA bill. Under President Obama's plan, the space organization will do all of the following EXCEPT:

a. return to the moon by 2020

b. fly to an asteroid and/or Mars

c. fund private spaceflight

d. retire the NASA shuttles for good

3. If you live in a mid-Atlantic state, you might be currently overrun by stink bugs. What makes these triangular brown fellows such formidable opponents?

a. They have a sulfurous odor that becomes overwhelming when they're in large groups.

b. They were introduced from Asia and have no natural predators here.

c. They have a fondness for biting people's ankles and fingers.

d. They are impervious to pesticides.

4. Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, who's won the Tour de France three times, was suspended this week over a positive test for the banned substance clenbuterol. He insists the drug came from a contaminated steak. (Though if it's true that plastic residues were also found in his blood--suggesting a blood transfusion from a plastic bag--the steak excuse is not going to get him very far.) In addition to cheating cyclists, other users of clenbuterol include all of the following EXCEPT:

a. horses

b. asthmatics

c. farmed fish

d. Hollywood types trying to lose weight

e. cheating baseball players

5. A Spanish team took home the prize at the 2K BotPrize 2010 robotics competition this week (presumably without the help of banned substances). Contest judges played against both humans and robots in a video game, and tried to guess which avatars were which. The Spanish team had the most convincing robot, with a "humanness rating" (how often it was guessed to be human) of 31.8%. For comparison, the actual humans had humanness ratings ranging from:

a. 85-95%

b. 60-90%

c. 50-85%

d. 35-80%

Answers are in the comments.

Autism and Automatons

Robots, robots, I love robots, robots are so great, I love, I love, I love robots because they are so cool... *starts singing weird chant about robots*

That's a comment on my magazine's web site from a girl who goes by Mango. A lot of our readers love robots, and they write in to tell us so. I would guess that a lot of them, or at least a decent pie-slice, are also on the autism spectrum. Several of them wrote in to say so after our autism-themed issue. Here's Mango again:

I am a person with Asperger's and proud of it! I go to a gifted school, go to Lego League, and all in all feel pretty smart.

So I was intrigued by this New York Times article about robots in classrooms, especially robots designed to interact with autistic kids. A bunch of labs are working on versions of classroom robots right now. Some of them are not specifically aimed at autistic kids; South Korea, for example, is putting into its classrooms hundreds of robots that will play with the kids and act as teacher aides.

Though a robot is extremely patient and has a great head for facts, none of the robots, so far, are meant to replace teachers. Some give foreign language lessons (I'm sure they're vocabulary whizzes, but how are they with idioms?). Some just hang out with preschoolers, at an age where basic social interaction is the lesson. The article describes one robot that popular with the kids when it first entered a classroom, but had its arms yanked off by the end of the day. Its programmers cleverly rewired it to cry when kids pulled its arms. The result? Over-aggressive kids first backed off--then came back to give the crying robot a hug.

A robot can read your facial expressions and respond accordingly. It can use artificial intelligence and speech recognition to have a conversation with you. And with autistic children, it can conduct a kind of therapy.

In recent experiments at a daycare center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

"The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up," said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, "you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with."

The story quotes an 8-year-old with Asperger's who practices karate kicks with a robot. "I just love robots," he says, "and I know this is therapy, but I don't know--I think it's just fun."

On the one hand, it seems counterintuitive to treat autistic children, whose chief difficulty is interacting with humans, by having them spend time with a robot instead. But autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Sacha's cousin) speculates that autistic children find robots more appealing than people because robots are more predictable. He says that autistic kids "find unlawful situations toxic...They can't cope. So they turn away from people and turn to the world of objects."

So researchers have been working on robot buddies for autistic children for years. They avoid creepy androids in favor of cutesy machines. This little guy, for example, is tiny and squishy. But its young autistic friends are happy to give the robot a kiss, or feed it imaginary medicine when it has a Band-aid on its head.

Of course, the robot also has cameras in its eyeballs. But if this is what the future of artificial intelligence looks like, I think I can get behind it.

Make sure you watch this video of the little guy dancing to Spoon before you disagree.

(Images: nytimes.com, popsci.com)

Whalers, Watson, and One Lost Shoe

The Friday quiz returns! This time, the subject is general sciencey news stories of the past week. You can thank me if any of this comes up on "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me" tomorrow.

1. The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission is taking place this month in Morocco. The IWC will decide whether to overturn a whale-hunting ban that's been in place since 1986. Under the current laws, Japan is allowed to kill:

a. zero whales

b. one whale a month

c. enough whales to provide meat for the restaurants that are licensed to sell it

d. 1,000 whales a year for "scientific research"

2. Japan was recently accused of buying votes from other IWC member nations, in hopes of overturning the whaling ban. Which of the following was among the allegations?

a. Japan pledged aid, or gave cash payments, to officials from other countries in exchange for their support

b. Some of the countries that agreed to vote with Japan in favor of whaling are landlocked

c. Officials from other countries were provided with prostitutes on all-expenses-paid trips to Japan

d. Whalers on Japan's "research" boats steal whale meat and sell it for huge profits

3. The world's oldest shoe was discovered in a cave in Armenia! It can best be described as:

a. more of a sock, really

b. an Ugg-like slipper made from sheepskin and wool

c. a sneaker made from a single piece of leather, with leather laces

d. totally disintegrated

4. IBM has built a new artificially intelligent supercomputer named Watson. This fall, Watson will compete against a human expert in:

a. Go

b. Scrabble

c. Texas Hold 'em

d. Jeopardy

5. Remember that YouTube video that was filmed by an octopus who stole a guy's camera and swam away with it? There's a new viral videographer in the ocean; you can see a sample of its work above. The video was made by a:

a. sea turtle

b. whale

c. shark

d. manta ray

Answers and relevant links are in the comments. Photo: YouTube.