Show 77 first broadcast on 20th November 2009

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In this weeks programme we investigate the world’s smallest single wing aircraft and then, in the regular cafe scientifique insert, there is a discussion of Volcanoes and Mass extinction.But first I take a look at new evidence for the presence of water on the moon – buckets full.

Swimming on the moon

In October, NASA send a rocket and a probe hurtling into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole. It kicked up a mile high plume that could then be analysed for the presence of water. The probe following the rocket used a near-infrared spectrometer to detect water ice and water vapour. And they found gallons of the stuff. Noel reports.

It flies like a maple seed and stings like walnut

Researchers  at Maryland University’s  Clark School (Aerospace Engineering) have designed micro-unmanned aerial vehicle inspired by a maple seed. The University of Maryland engineers studied the spiral flight the seeds take when they fall from a tree and created what the university claims is the “world’s smallest controllable single-winged rotocraft.”

I talked to the main man responble for the design and construction of this fascinating air craft, graduate student Evan Ulrich. He explains just about everything you could want to know about it. There is a youtube video showing just how well it works. I thought that it was quite a stunning piece of kit and I think that we might be seeing a lot of these in model shops in the future. It is easier to fly than a model helicopter and could really catch on.

Mass Extinctions and Volcanism

In this months Cafe Scientifique  insert is presented by local science enthusiast, Eric Taylor. Dr Paul Wignall talked to the Cafe about  Mass extinctions and volcanism.

All major crises of life in the past 300 million years coincide with large scale volcanic eruptions. This includes the two biggest mass extinctions of all time: the end-Cretaceous and end-Permian events. The reasons behind this coincidence have not been clear but geologists have generally thought that it is related to the effects of two of the principal volcanic gases, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. These have diametrically opposed climatic effects, the former causes long-term global warming and the latter causes short-term cooling due to formation of clouds of volcanic aerosols. The talk will look at some of the latest research which shows that some mass extinction events coincide with huge individual eruptions – involving up a thousand cubic kilometres of lava. Event Page: http://www.sciencecafesheffield.org /200911.htm

Show 76 first broadcast on 13th November 2009

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W. Grey Walter and his amazing robots Pt2

This week, in part 2 of the life and times of William Grey Walter, we probe deeper into his life – how he was suspected of being a Russian spy and how his boss had a private eye following him. The historian of technology Rhodri Hayward and Professor Richard Gregory FRS, an old friend of Grey Walter, tell about how he loved the reputation of intrigue and mystery. They tell of Grey Walter’s romances and how he combined his love of women with his science.

At the beginning of the programme, I make a trip to the London Science Museum to see one Walter’s remaining robots from the 1951 Festival of Britain. I talk to Professor Own Holland about how he found the robot.

Contributors to this weeks programme were:

Professor Richard Gregory FRS, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology, University of Bristol. A personal friend of the late Grey Walter.

Dr. Rodri Hayward an historian from Queen Mary, University of London, who researches the history of medicine and has written a paper on Grey Walter called The Tortoise and the Love-Machine.

Professor Owen Holland now a Professor at the University of Sussex. Owen actually discovered one of the robots and replicated it. Owen has written about the legacy of Grey Walter.

Science Museum: Special thanks to Rob Skitmore and John Mumford from the London Science Museum for getting one of the original tortoises out of its case and explaining it to us.

Check out more pictures of the robots at the Bristol Robotics Lab in Bristol

There is a lovely old New Reel piece of Grey Walter, his wife and his robots Elmer and Elsie

There is a short biography here

Show 75 first broadcast on 6th November 2009

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This week’s program is the first in a two-parter dedicated to the memory of the great British Scientist William Grey Walter. It is a story of romance, sex, wife swapping, mystery and intrigue. If that isn’t enough for you, he was a great roboticist who build the first autonomous robots that could operate together. But first I have been forced onto my soapbox again.

Noel on the soapbox

If the government want to ignore scientific evidence they should make clear their moral or political arguments

I am on my soap box this week because of the sacking of the UK Government’s Head of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs, Professor David Nutt. When Gordon Brown became prime minister he said that he would relook at the cannabis classification which had been downgraded from Class B to Class C before he took office.

Professor Nutt said that the Prime minister had ignored the scientific advice completely and had even made up his mind before the council had told him that there was no evidence to support reclassifying. David Nutt, who has been a psychiatrist working of drugs and alcohol abuse for over 30 years, got sacked because he spoke out at a lecture and said that the cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.

The scientific community has been up in arms about his sacking and even the government chief scientific advisor said that he believed the evidence. There is a much wider issue here than drugs abuse. The government should separate it policy and moral arguments from scientific arguments. It is entitled to make decisions against scientific advice but it should not then make scientific arguments. It should justify is case in other ways.

See also the BBC website on the sacking.

W. Grey Walter and his amazing robots Pt1

This week’s programme begins my journey into the fascinating world of W. Grey Walter (1910-1977) a great British Scientist: psychologist-neurophysiologist-roboticist-social commentator-TV celebrity.

He was far ahead of his time. Apart from a couple of simple predecessors, Grey Walter designed and built the first fully autonomous tortoise robots that could seek light, avoid obstacles and return to their hutchs to automatically recharge. They were the first robots to interact with each other and the first learning robots. They were even said to flirt with each other

In this weeks programme I look at his work with robots and discuss its importance with world renowed roboticists:

Professor Rod Brooks from MIT founder of iRobots and widely held to be the father of modern Behaviour Based Robots.

Professor Owen Holland from the University of Essex who actually discovered one of the robots and replicated it. Owen has written about the legacy of Grey Walter.

Professor Alan Winfield director of the Bristol Robotics Lab at the University of West England

Check out more pictures of the robots at the Bristol Robotics Lab in Bristol

There is a lovely old New Reel piece of Grey Walter, his wife and his robots Elmer and Elsie

There is a short biography here

Next week I go in search of one of Walter’s surviving robots and I find out about Grey Walter the man from one of his old friends and from an historian of technology.

Show 74 first broadcast on 30th October 2009

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On this week’s programme: Chemical weapons testing that may double as a roadside drugs breathalyzer and could machines really understand our language.

Detecting chemical weapons in seconds

Dr. Stephen Bell from Queen’s University, Belfast is heading up a project on developing new sensors to detect chemical agents and illegal drugs.

For chemical weapons sensing, the devices will use special gel pads to ‘swipe’ an individual or crime scene to gather a sample which is then analysed by a scanning instrument that can detect the presence of chemicals within seconds. This will allow better, faster decisions to be made in response to terrorist threats.

The scanning instrument will use Raman spectroscopy which involves shining a laser beam onto the suspected sample and measuring the energy of light that scatters from it to determine what chemical compound is present. It is so sophisticated it can measure particles of a miniscule scale making detection faster and more accurate.

Stephen also hopes that the new sensors will also be the basis for developing ‘breathalyzer’ instruments that could be of particular use for roadside drugs testing in much the same way as the police take breathalyzer samples to detect alcohol.

At present, police officers are only able to use a Field Impairment Test to determine if a person is driving under the influence of drugs. The accuracy of this method has been questioned because of concerns that it is easy to cheat.

To ensure the technology is relevant, senior staff members from FSNI (Forensic Science Northern Ireland) will give significant input into the operational aspects of the technology and give feedback as to how it might be used in practice by the wider user community.

Could a machine ever understand you

In this month’s Cafe Scientifique package, Eric Taylor presents Professor Robert Gaizauskas talking about processing human language by computer. Rob talks about the developments and the difficulties and talks about the Turing Test and why it has been so difficult to pass.

Show 73 first broadcast on 23rd October 2009

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In this weeks programme I ask, can you become super bright  just by taking a pill

Cosmetic Neurology: a stupid way to get smart?

My featured guest this week is Dr Anjan Chatterjee MD (Institute of Neurological Science at the University of Pennsylvania) a world authority of cognitive enhancing drugs. These were designed for therapy in a wide range of problems from Attention Deficit Disorder to Alzheimer’s. They help with reduced memory and concentration among other cognitive deficits. But now they are becoming widely used in the USA by students and business people to give them a competitive edge.

Anjan coined the term Cosmetic Neurology for the non-therapeutic use of such drugs. I talk to him about their function and the ethics of their use by the population at large. What are the risks for the individual and society?

Dr. Anjan Chatterjee

Show 72 first broadcast on 16th October 2009

DOWNLOAD FIXED: SORRY! There were some problems with the audio for progs 71 and 72 which are now fixed.

DOWNLOAD A PODCAST OF SHOW 72 HERE

This weeks feature is about robot cars. Professor Sebastian Thrun’s  team won the DARPA Grand – a race of about 140 miles across the Mojave desert – with an autonomous Volkswagen Toureg car – no driver and no remote control. When we will have automated cars on our roads?

Robot cars sooner than you think

The Royal Academy of Engineering recently released a report on Autonomous Systems (which I contributed to) that discusses the impact of self driving cars and lorries for the future of our road system. What are the obstacles that are keeping us back? What are the legal restrictions?

This week I talk to one of the world’s leading exponent of robot car development, Professor Sebastian Thrun director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). In 2005 Sebastian’s team famously won the DARPA Grand Challenge – a race of autonomous cars across 140 miles of the Mojave desert. Here is a video clip of his car, Stanley, winning the race. Sebastian is very modest about the win but it was a very significant achievement.

Sebastian tells me about how this could save many lives on the world’s highways and how the disable, the blind and even children will be able to take to the roads on their own in a robot car. In 2007, the DARPA Grand Challenge moved to an Urban environment and Sebastian’s team came second – beaten by their strongest rivals at Carnegie Mellon University were Sebastian used to work. It is always close between the two of them and as Sebastian has pointed out, the greatest victory goes to the achievement of robotics in general.

Sebastin Thrun

Next Week: Can drugs make you smarter?

I talk to Dr Anjan Chatterjee MD, a neuralogist at the University of Pennsylvania, who is one of the world’s leading experts in cognitive enhancement drugs about how they are being used to boost work at school and in business. They were originally designed for therapies for disorders from Attention Deficit Disorder to Altzheimer’s disease but are now being used widely (and illegally) for “cosmetic neurology” in the the US.

Show 71 – 9th October 2009

LISTEN TO A PODCAST OF SHOW 71 HERE

This week I am up to my eyes in giving public talks and so here is one of my all time favourite interviews

The morality of other animals in the wild

This weeks programme is entirely devoted to this intriguing topic that is becoming part of a quiet new scientific revolution on animals and animal behaviour. For centuries animals have been thought of and treated as mere machines by science. Decartes in the 17th century proposed his ideas that animals, unlike humans, were like mere mechanical automata without souls (read as mind/consciousness). This lead to  increased vivisection on live animals (not Descartes’ intention). The father of mechanistic biology, Jaques Loeb, in the early part of the 20th century was fairer – he saw all animals, including us, as machines.

One of the problems is that we do not understand what mind is – it is like the holy grail of science. It is not a good idea to invoke mind and emotion unnecessarily in scientific explanation – it can clouds the issues and hold up scientific progress. Nonetheless I think that we have gone too far in ruling them out altogether. On the one hand I don’t believe an old lady when she tells me that her cat understands everything that she says to it. But on the other hand, animals may have their own types of thinking that fits in with their world.

In this show Marc Bekoff and I chat about many of these issue from Anthropomorphism to evolution and cooperation as well as the moral natures of animals with a focus on his book Wild Justice with Jessica Pierce

This is an accessible book litered with interesting anecdotes behind the science: stories about animals that put themselves out for others or punish others for their wrong doings. You can buy Wild Justice from Amazon

Next Week: robot cars sooner than you think

I talk to one of the world’s leading exponent of robot car development, Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Sebastian tells me about how this could save many lives on the world’s highways and how the disable, the blind and even children will be able to take to the roads on their own in a robot car.

Show 70 first broadcast on 2nd October 2009

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In this weeks programme our two featured interviews are about new research centres based on issues that could improve our lives: designing disease resistant buildings and creating robust cyber security.

New Cyber-security centre set to transform crime prevention

Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT)

We are living in a world that communications are making continuously smaller. There is great freedom speech and access for everyone. But without careful attention to cyber-security it could all collapse or become unusable. Cyber crime and attacks as well as fraud are on the increase and the criminals are getting racing against the protections. The new £25 million Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), based at Queen’s University Belfast, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Technology Strategy Board, Queen’s University Belfast and a range of partner organisations, has been set up to tackle the problems.

I talked to Professor John McCanny, a principle investigator on the project, to find out what the centre will do for us and how it will help to prevent crime.

Curbing disease by changing the infrastructure of buildings

They’re everywhere: micro-organisms from a typical hand print as revealed by ‘blood agar’, a substance used by scientists to detect and distinguish pathogens

The spread of swine flu and other infectious diseases could be dramatically reduced by revolutionising the way that the places we live in are designed and built.

That’s the view of experts investigating how the micro-organisms that cause disease behave in buildings and associated infrastructure.

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), researchers at the new ‘Healthy Infrastructure Research Centre’ (HIRC), at University College London, are studying the behaviour of pathogens in places like hospitals and schools and drainage and sewage systems.

HIRC aims to:

• spot characteristics in building/infrastructure design that encourage diseases to spread
• pinpoint changes that can be made to infrastructure (in design, materials, maintenance etc) to restrict pathogens’ ability to survive and move around there.

I talked to Dr. Ka-man Lai about how the centre aims to help change the infrastructure of buildings so that they are healthier for the inhabitants.

Show 69 first broadcast on 25th September 2009

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This week I interview two of the members of the newly establish International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) to find out about some of the issues of the new military technology.

Talon SWORD- US military robot

Robot Arms Control – limiting military technology

Now if you’re a regular listener to the programme you will know that I have been banging on about the new robot weapons coming into play in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are thousands of these on the ground and in the air.

You can download programme 58 to hear Obhama advisor, P.W. Singer give a lot of facts about them.  The majority of these are for surveillance and bomb disposal but the worry is that an increasing number are being armed. At present there is always a person in the loop to make decisions about killing people …. but the US plans show a drive to reduce the role of the person and eventually do away with them altogether and let the robots decide who to kill.

This seems quite astonishing and many people just don’t believe it but it is all there in black and white if you care to look for it. Here is a link to the US unmanned aerial systems roadmap 2009-2047 and here is link to a Daily Telegraph article of mine on the topic. You can get a lot of information very quickly and quotes from generals etc with a google search for military robots or unmanned systems or autonomous robot weapons. It is worth havin a look.

These are not super smart machines like terminator but dumb killing machines and the US are not the only country at it – they are  proliferating – there are over 50 other countries with military robot programmes.

A group of us have now gotten together to set up the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRA) and I interview two of the members: Juergen Altmann  a physicist from Dortmand the Technical University in Dortmund in Germany – author of Military Nanotechnology and  Rob Sparrow from the Philosophy department in Monash University in Australia

Jeurgen-Noel-Rob at Sheffield Station

Show 68 first broadcast on 18th September 2009

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First up in this week’s programme we go back to an item from Show 65 (August, 29) to find out what happened to the petition to get an apology from the UK for the treatment of mathematician and founder of computer science, Alan Turing. The petitioner, John Graham Cumming tells me about how he got a surprise phone call from the prime minister Gordon Brown and what was said.

In our featured interview this week I talk  to world renowned AI and robotics expert, Professor Rolf Pfeifer about  a revolutionary approach to AI that devolves some of some of the computing to the body.  He argues that it is not processor speed that we need for human-like intelligence but a human body.

Feature Interview: How the body shapes the way we think

Professor Rolf Pfeifer is a visionary in AI and Robotics whose range is extremely broad.  He has been head of the famous Zurich University AI labs since 1987.

Rolf is the author of the exceptional book “How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence,” MIT Press, 2007 (with Josh Bongard) which is written in popular science style (no specific prior knowledge required). Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic translations of “How the body …” are to appear shortly. I recommend this as part of your reading list if you want to know the most recent direction of AI and robotics.

Now Rolf  is someone who seems to have been almost everywhere you can think of. He spent 3 post-doctoral years in the early 1980s at Carnegi Mellon University in the US and then with the Yale AI group (where I shared an office with him for a year). Then after his appointment at Zurich he was visiting professor and research fellow at Free University of Brussels (Belgium), the Beijing Open Laboratory for Cognitive Science (China), the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. (US), the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego (US), and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris (France), he was elected “21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology” at the University of Tokyo, Japan, for 2003/2004, from where he held the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series “The AI Lectures from Tokyo” (including Tokyo, Beijing, Jeddah, Warsaw, Munich, and Zurich). In 2009 he was elected as a “Fellow of the School of Engineering at The University of Tokyo”. He is also a visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy. Most impressive.