7 OF THE MOST FRIGHTENINGLY BIZARRE OCEAN CREATURES

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Source: Seavenger

Bizarre Ocean Creatures: The Hatchetfish

Source: Flip Side

 

Given the extreme depths to which scientists must go to find these frightful–and tiny–fish, little is known about the hatchetfish. Making top models around the world jealous, the morose-looking creatures derive their name from how razor-thin they are.

Anatomically speaking, the hatchetfish’s thorax is supposed to resemble the blade of the hatchet, and its cold, silver glint the metal. Their name is somewhat deceiving, though; measuring in at a mere one to five inches in length, the hatchetfish is hardly deadly. It’s just, well, pretty terrifying.

 

 

Source: Digital Fish Library

 

 

Source: Blogspot

Bizarre Ocean Creatures: The Blobfish

 

Source: No Cooki

More gelatinous than your grandma’s pudding, the blobfish’s strikingly jiggly appearance has captivated the attention of millions for the past several years. So striking is the mass with fins that just this year it was deemed the world’s ugliest animal. Life isn’t all that bad for this Oceania-dwelling creature, though. As the blobfish’s den is primarily near the bottom of the ocean, the water pressure is understandably high, causing the blobfish’s skin to have the approximate density of water.

You might think that lack of muscle tissue would prove disadvantageous, but you’d be wrong. All that means is that when it comes time to eat, the blobfish simply opens its mouth while floating merrily above the ocean’s floor. Its lack of density means that it doesn’t have to expend any energy in order to eat. Lazy chefs around the world, direct your ire to the blobfish.

 

Source: Blogspot

 

Source: Flickr

The Fangtooth

 

Source: Hero Machine

 

Consider the fangtooth fish to be the underwater equivalent of a menacing pitbull with a heart of gold. Despite their threatening appearance, the fangtooth is incredibly benign–especially as its poor eyesight means that if it wants to hunt, the fangtooth quite literally has to bump into its prey in order to find it.

Its chompers certainly paint a different portrait, though: protruding from its mouth, in proportion to the fish the fangtooth has the largest teeth of any fish in the ocean. Good luck catching a glimpse of the sharp-mouthed animal: it resides as far as 16,400 feet beneath the sea.

 

Source: Wallpaper77

 

Source: Deep Sea Creatures

The Sea Cucumber

 

These icky echinoderms certainly boggle the mind. Lacking a true brain and any semblance of sensory organs, the sea cucumber boasts about the same mental capacity as the food for which it is named. Nevertheless, the cuke serves as vital part of the oceanic ecosystem, as it recycles nutrients and breaks down detritus that comes its way.
Unlike the actual cucumber, the sea cuke’s collagen levels allow it to make some pretty kooky maneuvers: if the sea cucumber needs to wedge itself into a tiny crevice, the collagen will loosen and the sea cucumber will effectively liquify itself to seep into its desired locale.

Bizarre Ocean Creatures: The Goblin Shark

 

Deemed by some scientists as a “living fossil” and overshadowed by its flashy counterparts, the goblin shark leads a relatively mysterious existence deep below the ocean blue. The only extant survivor of a 125 million-year old family of sharks, the goblin is truly unique…and ugly. Apart from its most salient features (re: its long, flattened snout and protruding jaws), the goblin is relatively unremarkable.
Given its flabbiness, most scientists speculate that the goblin shark is sluggish and relatively inactive. It’s highly unlikely you’ll ever see a goblin shark in your lifetime; when one was brought to an aquarium in Japan, it died soon after.

 

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The Flamingo Tongue Snail

 

Shell collectors of the world, be warned. Though the saturated snail you see above bears a striking “shell”, the vibrant patterns aren’t part of the shell itself but rather the mollusk’s living mantle tissue.
Located in the Atlantic and Caribbean waters, the flamingo tongue snail feeds on toxic sea fans and, like Bruce Willis in “Unbreakable”, suffers no harm. In fact, the cunning snail absorbs the venom and–to the chagrin of its potential predators–becomes toxic itself.

Bizarre Ocean Creatures: The Angler Fish

 

The angler fish is perhaps one of the most fascinating and bizarre sea creatures known to man. Not only known for their wily predation techniques (re: having a spine that grows its own fleshy mass that the angler can wiggle about so that it resembles prey, and then devouring its soon-to-be predators in one fell swoop) but also for its mating habits. When scientists first discovered the angler, they noticed that almost all of them were female… and that these specimens had what appeared to be some sort of parasitic growth attached to their lower parts.
Turns out that those “parasites” were actually just greatly reduced male angler fish, whose puny size renders their sole objective in life to finding and mating with a female. Once they do find a female partner, the male anglers quickly bite into the female’s skin and thus fuses them together. From this point on, the male’s life literally depends on its female host, as they share a circulatory system. When the female is ready to mate, he pays his dues by providing her with sperm on the spot.

 

 

BING BANG EXPERIMENT 2008 AN INSIGHT

The Big Bang Experiment: In Photos and Videosby Stevie Smith - Sep 12 2008, 05:12
Inside the Large Hadron Collider. Image: CERN.');

The four main points of interest that will be utilised during the LHC experiment.

ATLAS during its beam pipe installation.

ATLAS during its calorimeter installation.

ATLAS during the installation of its detector.

One of the ATLAS semi-conductor tracker barrels.

Inside the ATLAS solenoid cryostat.

Geneva:  It's being called a new beginning for our understanding of the universe and particle physics. After lengthy delays the multi-billion dollar scientific experiment to smash protons moving at near light-speed has been successful. (Read: What the Big Bang experiment part 2 is)

The experiment has taken place inside the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator near Geneva belonging to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another.

Big Bang Experiment: Possible Outcomes:

Researchers to sift through sub-atomic debris of proton collisions

Could lead to discovery of the Higgs boson (God particle)

New discoveries about the laws of physics expected

Scientists hope to make discoveries into mysterious dark matter

Scientists: Dark matter makes galaxies spin faster

Hunt For 'God Particle':

The hypothetical Higgs boson also called as the 'God particle'

Believed to have existed when the universe was born

Discovery would help explain origin of mass in universe

Scientists: Higgs is particle(s) that might give others mass

Evidence to prove Higgs exists still inconclusive

Goal:

To mimic conditions moments after the Big Bang

To examine nature of matter and the origin of stars, planets

Ultimate aim to find Higgs boson, the so-called 'God particle'

How:

By colliding protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other

Proton beams are collided in a particle accelerator called Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider:

World's biggest, most powerful particle accelerator

Consists of a 27-km ring of superconducting magnets

Operates at Swiss-French border at a depth of 100 metres

The experiment was delayed because of a problem detected in the huge underground particle accelerator.

The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider directed the beams into each other Tuesday as part of its ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces.

The collisions herald a new era for researchers working on the machine in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel below the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

"That's it! They've had a collision," said Oliver Buchmueller from Imperial College in London as people closely watched monitors.

In a control room, scientists erupted with applause when the first successful collisions were confirmed. Their colleagues from around the world were tuning in by remote links to witness the new record, which surpasses the 2.36 TeV CERN recorded last year.

Dubbed the world's largest scientific experiment, scientists hope the machine can approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of antimatter and the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe.

Tuesday's initial attempts at collisions were unsuccessful because problems developed with the beams, said scientists working on the massive machine. That meant that the protons had to be "dumped" from the collider and new beams had to be injected.

The atmosphere at CERN was tense considering the collider's launch with great fanfare on September 10, 2008. Nine days later, the project was sidetracked when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated, causing extensive damage to the massive magnets and other parts of the collider some 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground.

It cost $40 million to repair and improve the machine. Since its restart in November 2009, the collider has performed almost flawlessly and given scientists valuable data. It quickly eclipsed the next largest accelerator -- the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago.

Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the tunnel, the coldest place in the universe, at a couple of degrees above absolute zero. CERN used powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles.

"Experiments are collecting their first physics data -- historic moment here!" a scientist tweeted on CERN's official Twitter account.

"Nature does it all the time with cosmic rays (and with higher energy) but this is the first time this is done in Laboratory!" said another tweet.

When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

The experiments will come over the objections of some people who fear they could eventually imperil Earth by creating micro black holes -- subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

CERN and many scientists dismiss any threat to Earth or people on it, saying that any such holes would be so weak that they would vanish almost instantly without causing any damage.

Bivek Sharma, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, said the images of the first crashed proton beams were beautiful.

"It's taken us 25 years to build," he said. "This is what it's for. Finally the baby is delivered. Now it has to grow." (With AP inputs)

Scientists trying to the crack the fundamental laws of physics on Tuesday said they had recreated in miniature the conditions just after the start of the universe, without bringing the world to an end.

In a groundbreaking moment, researchers operating the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva combined two opposing beams of sub-atomic particles travelling at almost the speed of light as they attempted to simulate events in the fraction of a second after the “Big Bang”, the most widely accepted theory.

After several false starts early on Tuesday, scientists just before 1pm local time brought together the two proton beams that had been running in alternate directions in the collider’s 27km loop in a vacuum at minus 271°C. The resulting heat was equivalent to 100,000 times that generated by the sun.

The success triggered rounds of applause and cheers from the scientists and journalists gathered in the circular control room, while allaying concerns that the experiment would create a black hole and destroy the universe.

Sixteen months after glitches brought the collider’s first effort to a halt, the breakthrough sparked worldwide interest, sharply slowing down a live webcast – and briefly outranking the singer Ricky Martin, who declared his homosexuality on Twitter during the day – as the collider recruited 100,000 Twitter followers.

Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics where the collider project is based, said: “It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

The breakthrough heralds the beginning of a new era in efforts to try to understand profound scientific questions, including whether the sub-atomic particles – quarks – inside the protons and neutrons can be freed; and why these latter particles weigh some 100 times more than the quarks of which they are composed.

The protons in the LHC, which requires 100 megawatts of power to operate, collided at more than 7 tera – or trillion – electronvolts (TeV), a measure of energy given to an electron as it accelerates through a potential of one volt. This was more than triple the levels of previous experiments.

Nearly three decades after the project was first discussed, and 15 years after construction of the SFr6.5bn collider began, the breakthrough signals the start of at least 18 months of experiments at the current energy levels, and still longer periods of analysis using “the Grid”, a vast international network of computers that will process 15m gigabytes of data a year. A paper released by Cern earlier this month concluded that “there can be little doubt that black hole production at the [Large Hadron Collider] would be an unacceptable and irresponsible risk”.

But officials were quick to argue on Tuesday that neutron stars showed these conditions would be safely reproduced in the collider.

“We are not doing anything that nature has not done before,” said a spokeswoman. “Nature shows us by the existence of neutron stars that we will not recreate black holes.”

Experiments with the Large Hadron Collider began in September 2008 but had to be halted after a fault damaged the magnets in the equipment.

The original objective was to reach 14 TeV, but in order to avoid a repetition of these problems, researchers will operate the collider at half that level for 18 months before a technical shut down and analysis. An attempt to reach the maximum level is only likely to take place in two or three years’ time.

Cern said it would know by Wednesday the number of internet users who visited its website on Tuesday to follow the project. The previous experiment in 2008 attracted 100m users.

Once they have “rediscovered” sub-atomic particles which have already been observed in the so-called Standard Model, the four separate experiments associated with the collider will start seeking the Higgs boson, a hypothetical elementary particle – sometimes dubbed God’s Particle – which has been postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical physics to help explain the origin of mass.

Largest machine, smallest particles

● Although built to study the smallest known building blocks of all things – particles – the Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It contains 9,300 magnets and has a circumference of 27km (17 miles)

● At full power, trillions of protons race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600m collisions every second

● To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum – a cavity as empty as interplanetary space

● The cooling system circulates super-fluid helium around the LHC’s accelerator ring and keeps the machine at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius

● When two beams of protons collide, they generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space

● To collect data of up to 600m proton collisions per second, physicists and scientists have built electronic trigger systems to measure the passage time of a particle to a few billionths of a second

● The data recorded by the LHC’s big experiments will fill about 100,000 dual-layer DVDs every year. Tens of thousands of computers have been harnessed in a network called The Grid that will hold the information

● Thousands of scientists around the world will collaborate on analysing the data over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC)

TEACHING AI TO BE SOCIABLE

Teaching ai to be sociable

Humans can already form social bonds with robots, but the real trick may be getting AI equally interested in us


In the recent superhero film Iron Man, there’s a scene where Robert Downey Jr.’s character struggles to reach a device to power his failing heart. He stretches an arm up to the device, but collapses before he can grab it. Lucky for him, his trusty robot is nearby—it manages to anticipate what he wants and hand him the device just in time.

In the real world, we’ve yet to create artificial intelligences that can respond so intuitively to our needs. The quest to do so has pushed two groups of researchers in nearly opposite directions. One group, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, N.Y., has built Eddie, an AI that resides in the virtual world of Second Life and harnesses the power of a supercomputer to analyze a library of rules about human thinking. The other, MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, has built Leonardo, a furry, animatronic robot that learns as a child does, by interacting with people in the physical world. Within the last two years both Eddie and Leonardo have demonstrated a basic social ability that is the first step toward AI that understands how humans think.

“We’re not there yet, but a major turning point for AI is working out logic that can do justice to your views of another person’s mind,” says Selmer Bringsjord, an AI expert who heads the cognitive science department at RPI. For an artificial intelligence to fully interact and cooperate with people, it has to understand the concept of a mind separate from its own, he explains. Bringsjord and his team created Eddie with this goal in mind, and in March 2008, showed off some of its social skills in Second Life.

Eddie’s avatar met two other avatars, CrispyNoodle and BinDistrib, both controlled by humans. A red briefcase and a green briefcase lay open on a table, with the red briefcase containing a gun. While Eddie watched, CrispyNoodle asked BinDistrib to leave, then moved the gun from the red briefcase to the green one, and closed them both. When BinDistrib returned, CrispyNoodle asked Eddie to predict where BinDistrib would look for the gun. Eddie was able to correctly predict that BinDistrib would look for the gun in the red briefcase, even though it was no longer there.

The correct answer may seem obvious, but most children under 5 years old get it wrong, because they don’t understand how the other person can believe something that is untrue. Cognitive scientists use such false-belief tests to determine if a child can understand another person’s point of view—the beginning of social awareness.

Bringsjord’s team helps Eddie understand other people by translating human mental states into logic-based rules and theorems—“If Bob appears happy at a particular time, and nothing happens to change that, then he will still be happy at a later time”—in what researchers refer to as a top-down approach. This type of AI can only reason about human mental states insofar as Bringsjord’s team has included them in its knowledge database.

At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots Group has created social AI through the opposite approach—nurturing robotic intelligence through bottom-up learning, where simple imitation behaviors lead to social interaction. In a 2007 demonstration, Leonardo—which can’t walk but has 32 degrees of freedom in his expressive face alone—watched Matt Berlin, a MIT researcher, struggling to open a box that he mistakenly believed contained potato chips (it was really full of cookies). The robot responded by pulling a lever that opened the box that actually held chips.

Unlike Eddie, Leonardo has no preprogrammed knowledge of human thoughts. The robot started with a set of basic learning abilities and built-in social skills, and gradually, through imitation, learned to map certain human facial expressions or gestures to rudimentary intentions and goals. “The core systems and learning algorithms are very well known and nothing fancy, but then we get more bang for your buck,” said Berlin. Leonardo requires relatively simple programming and little computing power to perform the same tasks compared with Eddie.

But the RPI group has ambitious plans—in the fall they want to attempt the holy grail of AI research: a Turing test. Right now, Bringsjord believes that his team has created AI capable of second- and third-order beliefs about other minds—in other words the AI can consider what a second intelligence believes about a third mind’s beliefs. Bringsjord’s team plans to combine Eddie’s AI program with the biographical background of a grad student and the power of IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer to carry on a conversation with a human avatar. If a human judge can’t tell the difference between another human and the AI through online conversation, then the system will have passed the test.

Futurologist predicts brain to computer transfer by mid 21st century


British futurologist Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT, predicts humans will be able to download the contents of their brain into computers by the mid 21st century. Pearson also believes machines will also be capable of feeling emotion in the future, and that the next computing goal is replicating consciousness.

"If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem," Pearson told the Observer newspaper in an interview.

"If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine.

"We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT."

Extrapolating computing power is not a difficult task: transistor density on semiconductors has increased at the rate predicted by Intel co-founder Gordon Moo