Robotic rats in rescue missions?

An international team of scientists from Europe, Israel and the US is developing robotic rats, which will aid in rescue missions.

Based on principles of active sensing adopted widely in the animal kingdom, the multinational team is developing innovative touch technologies, including a “whiskered”

robotic rat, which will be able to quickly locate, identify and capture moving objects.

“The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now,” said Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department, whose research team is one of the groups participating in the multinational project.

According to Ahissar, “In nocturnal creatures, or those that inhabit poorly-lit places, the use of touch is widely preferred to vision as a primary means of learning and receiving physical information about their surrounding environment”.

One such animal that employs this method is the rat.Several groups of the international consortium are investigating the ways in which rats use their bristly whiskers to explore their environment, and how the brain processes such information.

Clothing to charge mobile

You may soon not have to search for an electrical socket to charge your iPod or mobile phone, for your clothes may be doing the same for you by producing energy from body movements.

This clothing, which is being developed by nanotechnology researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, can be used by soldiers in the field, hikers and other users for powering small electronic devices that they usually carry along.

The Georgia Tech research team for fibre nanogenerators led by Zhong Lin Wang, Xudong Wang and Yong Qin, have explained how pairs of textile fibres covered with zinc oxide nanowires generate electricity in response to applied mechanical stress.

This effect is known as “the piezoelectric effect”: the resulting current flow from many fibre pairs woven into a shirt or jacket may be used to power a range of portable electronic devices by using the wearer’s body movement.

Active v/s passive
A new research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has found that the female rats know exactly if a prospective mate has been mating with other females or abstaining all thanks to the male rodents’ smell. And, they also seem to prefer those males with an active sex life.

During the trail, the team led by Bennett Galef placed two male rats behind mesh screens on both ends of a tank of which one had recently copulated with a female. They later placed different female rats, separately, in the middle of the tank.

The findings revealed that the females were more attracted towards the rat that had recently copulated.
And when the trials were conducted using female rats without a sense of smell females did not show any inclination for either male.

The study seems to illustrate the maxim “success breeds success”. It’s highly likely that the female rats are attracted by the smell of the sexually active male, rather than repelled by the stench of desperation from the sex-starved one,” New Scientist quoted Galef, as saying.

However he also said “It’s unlikely that males would evolve a signal that makes them unattractive to females”.

Most accurate clock

Inventors have unveiled the most accurate atomic clock ever made, marking a new leap forward in efforts to improve precision of navigation around the world.

The clock is based on a few thousand strontium atoms trapped in grids of laser light and is twice as accurate the current US time standard based on a “fountain” of caesium atoms. The invention is also seen as an attempt to synchronise telecom networks and deep-space communications.

The unveiling of the next-generation atomic clock was reported in Science by Jun Ye and colleagues at JILA, US.
The team could link the new clock with existing clocks, using a special fibre optic link, which is crucial if the new clock is to be used as a timekeeping standard.

Since strontium atoms absorb higher frequency light than earlier clocks, which rely on longer microwaves, these optical clocks have shorter and more accurate “ticks” — 430 trillion per second, the Daily Telegraph reported.