At a conference in Germany, engineers unveiled a robotic jellyfish designed to swim—but not sting—like the real thing.

The AquaJelly runs on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, has a roughly spherical body and uses eight tentacles to get around in the water. The tentacles undulate like the tail of a real fish, and small fins at the ends give the machine a little extra push on the water. To steer, the robot shifts its weight, and it drives around its tank autonomously. Pressure sensors tell the AquaJelly how deep it is in the water within a few millimeters, and light sensors give it an idea of the location of potential obstacles, including other robo-jellies.

Now if we could just outfit them with lasers and get them to fry the jellies that plague so many beaches in the summer, that would be something.



Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies says that Grand Theft Auto IV may have cost more than $100 million to develop, which would reportedly make it the most expensive game ever produced.

Apparently more than a thousand people worked on the job. There's a 1,000-plus page script. Photographers snapped 100,000 photos for background scenes. And yes, the developers worked long hours getting things ready.

That $100 million figure might sound shocking—and Benzies says it's a real guess—but it's not that wild considering how successful the franchise as a whole has been. The controversial series boasts global sales of almost 70 million units. Now we'll see whether the latest installment meets the hype.



Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist and discoverer of LSD died yesterday at the age of 102. Hofmann, who succumbed to a heart attack while at his home in Switzerland, first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 while researching the alkaloid compounds of ergot, a fungus which grows on rye and wheat. It was deemed to be of no interest at the time and was set aside until Hofmann decided to reinvestigate the compound five years later. In mid April of 1943 while resynthesizing LSD, he accidentally ingested a small amount and was made aware of its effects. On April the 19th, he deliberately consumed 250 micrograms and set off on his bicycle to return home, unwittingly setting in motion a major catalyst for the drug counterculture of the 1960's.

There is an element of serendipity in Hofmann having been the one to have discovered the drug. He long saw promise in the compound as a psychiatric tool for understanding human consciousness and championed its carefully controlled use by doctors during the short span before it took on a life of its own and was ultimately banned worldwide. It was a tremendous disappointment to him to have seen it become a recreational drug of choice and cause widespread panic. He viewed it as almost sacred, in much the same way historical cultures have ingested psychotropic plants with a focused spiritual intent.

While Hofmann is understandably most well known for LSD, his work was also key to developing many new drugs for treating postpartum hemorrhaging, stabilizing blood pressure, and improving circulation and cerebral function.


Not much in science is more of a mind-bender than thinking about the size and fate of the known universe (except for quantum mechanics and string theory, which also has a lot to do with the size and fate of the universe, albeit on the opposite end of the size spectrum). When we first developed theories about the universe, the model which resulted depicted all of space as static and unchanging, infinite in depth in any direction. Then Einstein posited general relativity and suddenly a whole host of universes were theoretically possible: static, dynamic, infinite, and finite.

Once practical observation caught up to theory, we were able to conceive of the Big Bang and prove it by observing Doppler shifts. We knew at least that galaxies were moving away from each other, expanding off into the distance. What we didn't know was whether that expansion would continue forever or if it would, like the largest and slowest rubber band ever known, eventually snap back.

It is only recently that we have determined the former to be the case. The universe will expand until our neighbor galaxies are no longer visible to us (of course, assuming we are still around tens of billions of years from now) and the stars in our galaxy will use up all the raw hydrogen fuel, fading out to nothing. There is one other long shot possibility (and here we return to string theory) that dark matter may ultimately refuel the rubber band from the earlier example and we may indeed all snap back to the first moment of the Big Bang. Under this scenario, our universe could be just the most current in an infinite number of universes that have expanded and collapsed over trillions and trillions of years.



http://www.popsci.com/

__________________
Regards,
P.R.