Daily Archives: June 26, 2017

Near instantaneous evolution discovered in bacteria – Phys.Org

Posted: June 26, 2017 at 5:21 pm

June 26, 2017 by Grove Potter Credit: University at Buffalo

How fast does evolution occur? In certain bacteria, it can occur almost instantaneously, a University at Buffalo molecular biologist has discovered.

Mark R. O'Brian, PhD, chair and professor of the Department of Biochemistry in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, made the surprising discovery when studying how bacteria finds and draws iron into itself. The National Institutes of Health has awarded him a $1.28 million, four-year grant to delve into the mechanisms of bacteria mutating to accept iron, and how the organism expels excess iron.

The discovery was made almost by accident, O'Brian said. The bacteria Bradyrhizobium japonicum was placed in a medium along with a synthetic compound to extract all the iron. O'Brian expected the bacteria to lie dormant having been deprived of the iron needed to multiply. But to his surprise, the bacteria started multiplying.

"We had the DNA of the bacteria sequenced on campus, and we discovered they had mutated and were using the new compound to take iron in to grow," he said. "It suggests that a single mutation can do that. So we tried it again with a natural iron-binding compound, and it did it again."

The speed of the genetic mutations17 dayswas astounding.

"We usually think of evolution taking place over a long period of time, but we're seeing evolutionat least as the ability to use an iron source that it couldn't beforeoccurring as a single mutation in the cell that we never would have predicted," he said.

"The machinery to take up iron is pretty complicated, so we would have thought many mutations would have been required for it to be taken up," he said.

The evolution of the bacteria does not mean it is developing into some other type of creature. Evolution can also change existing species "to allow them to survive," O'Brian said.

Bacteria, the most abundant life form on the planet, have been around for 3 billion years, evolving and adapting. So how big is the discovery of near instantaneous evolution?

"It will depend on how broadly applicable it is," O'Brian said. "Can we characterize the mechanisms, and look around and see if they are in other systems? How does this affect bacterial communities? How important is it for human health?"

O'Brian said other researchers may take up work on how the new knowledge could impact human health.

The mutation may not be related to how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. The mutation that O'Brian observed resulted in a "gain of function," a much more complicated event than the adaptation to block an antibiotic, he said.

Organisms can adapt by switching genes on and off. Part of O'Brian's grant is to study how bacteria expel excess iron by turning on different genes.

The work now is "strictly scientific," but uses could be in the offing.

"There is the understanding of a mechanism that may help to better understand how you can approach an infectious disease, or approach remediation of the environment using bacteria," O'Brian said.

Explore further: Discovery may help patients beat deadly pneumonia

Researchers have found that a hormone responsible for controlling iron metabolism helps fight off a severe form of bacterial pneumonia, and that discovery may offer a simple way to help vulnerable patients.

The body's assailants are cleverer than previously thought. New research from Lund University in Sweden shows for the first time how bacteria in the airways can help each other replenish vital iron. The bacteria thereby increase ...

Like their human hosts, bacteria need iron to survive and they must obtain that iron from the environment. While humans obtain iron primarily through the food they eat, bacteria have evolved complex and diverse mechanisms ...

In recent years, scientists, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies have struggled to find new antibiotics or alternative strategies against multi-drug resistant bacteria that represent a serious public health problem. In ...

A team of researchers from several institutions in Germany and Austria has found possible evidence of iron from a supernova in sediment cores taken from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. In their paper published in Proceedings ...

Antibiotic resistance is a major and growing problem worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is rising to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms ...

Since at least the 1920s, anecdotes and some studies have suggested that chimpanzees are "super strong" compared to humans, implying that their muscle fibers, the cells that make up muscles, are superior to humans.

In his classic comedy routine, "A Place for your Stuff," George Carlin argues that the whole point of life is to find an appropriately sized space for the things you own. What holds for people is also true for bacteria.

Mammals possess several lines of defense against microbes. One of them is activated when receptors called Fprs, which are present on immune cells, bind to specific molecules that are linked to pathogens. Researchers at the ...

When Mark Martindale decided to trace the evolutionary origin of muscle cells, like the ones that form our hearts, he looked in an unlikely place: the genes of animals without hearts or muscles.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) have discovered a new, yet simple, way to increase drought tolerance in a wide range of plants. Published in Nature Plants, the study reports a newly ...

Over two million years ago, a third of the largest marine animals like sharks, whales, sea birds and sea turtles disappeared. This previously unknown extinction event not only had a consid-erable impact on the earth's historical ...

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Near instantaneous evolution discovered in bacteria - Phys.Org

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Chimpanzee ‘super strength’ and what it might mean in human muscle evolution – Phys.Org

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June 26, 2017 by Janet Lathrop Credit: CC0 Public Domain

But now a research team reports that contrary to this belief, chimp muscles' maximum dynamic force and power output is just about 1.35 times higher than human muscle of similar size, a difference they call "modest" compared with historical, popular accounts of chimp "super strength," being many times stronger than humans.

Further, says biomechanist Brian Umberger, an expert in musculoskeletal biomechanics in kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the researchers found that this modest performance advantage for chimps was not due to stronger muscle fibers, but rather the different mix of muscle fibers found in chimpanzees compared to humans.

As the authors explain, the long-standing but untested assumption of chimpanzees' exceptional strength, if true, "would indicate a significant and previously unappreciated evolutionary shift in the force and/or power-producing capabilities of skeletal muscle" in either chimps or humans, whose lines diverged some 7 or 8 million years ago.

Umberger was part of the team led by Matthew O'Neill at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Phoenix, and others at Stony Brook University, Harvard and Ohio State University. Details of this work, supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant to Umberger, appear in the current early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers began by critically examining the scientific literature, where studies reported a wide range of estimates for how chimpanzees outstrip humans in strength and power, averaged about 1.5 times over all. But Umberger says reaching this value from such disparate reports "required a lot of analysis on our part, accounting for differences between subjects, procedures and so on." He and colleagues say 1.5 times is considerably less than anecdotal reports of chimps being several-fold stronger, but it is still a meaningful difference and explaining it could advance understanding of early human musculoskeletal evolution.

Umberger adds, "There are nearly 100 years of accounts suggesting that chimpanzees must have intrinsically superior muscle fiber properties compared with humans, yet there had been no direct tests of that idea. Such a difference would be surprising, given what we know about how similar muscle fiber properties are across species of similar body size, such as humans and chimps."

He explains that muscle fiber comes in two general types, fast-twitch, fast and powerful but fatigue quickly, and slow-twitch, which are slower and less powerful but with good endurance. "We found that within fiber types, chimp and human muscle fibers were actually very similar. However, we also found that chimps have about twice as many fast-twitch fibers as humans," he notes.

For this work, the team used an approach combining isolated muscle fiber preparations, experiments and computer simulations. They directly measured the maximum isometric force and maximum shortening velocity of skeletal muscle fibers of the common chimpanzee. In general, they found that chimp limb and trunk skeletal muscle fibers are similar to humans and other mammals and "generally consistent with expectations based on body size and scaling."

Umberger, whose primary scientific contribution was in interpreting how muscle properties will affect whole-animal performance, developed computer simulation models that allowed the researchers to integrate the various data on individual muscle properties and assess their combined effects on performance.

O'Neill, Umberger and colleagues also measured the distribution of muscle fiber types and found it to be quite different in humans and chimps, who also have longer muscle fibers than humans. They combined individual measurements in the computer simulation model of muscle function to better understand what the combined effects of the experimental observations were on whole-muscle performance. When all factors were integrated, chimp muscle produces about 1.35 times more dynamics force and power than human muscle.

Umberger says the advantage for chimps in dynamic strength and power comes from the global characteristics of whole muscles, rather than the intrinsic properties of the cells those muscles are made of. "The flip side is that humans, with a high percentage of slow-twitch fibers, are adapted for endurance, such as long-distance travel, at the expense of dynamic strength and power. When we compared chimps and humans to muscle fiber type data for other species we found that humans are the outlier, suggesting that selection for long distance, over-ground travel may have been important early in the evolution of our musculoskeletal system."

The authors conclude, "Contrary to some long-standing hypotheses, evolution has not altered the basic force, velocity or power-producing capabilities of skeletal muscle cells to induce the marked differences between chimpanzees and humans in walking, running, climbing and throwing capabilities. This is a significant, but previously untested assumption. Instead, natural selection appears to have altered more global characteristics of muscle tissue, such as muscle fiber type distributions and muscle fiber lengths."

Explore further: Muscle fibers alone can't explain sex differences in bird song

More information: Matthew C. O'Neill el al., "Chimpanzee super strength and human skeletal muscle evolution," PNAS (2017). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619071114

Male birds tend to be better singers than femalesbut does the basis for this difference lie in the brain or in the syrinx, the bird equivalent of our larynx? The researchers behind a new study from The Auk: Ornithological ...

Elite runners do not experience the muscle weakening associated with aging as non-athletes do. A new study published in American Journal of PhysiologyCell Physiology examines if their superb fitness is because their muscles ...

University of Rochester Medical Center researchers have discovered that loss of muscle stem cells is the main driving force behind muscle decline in old age in mice. Their finding challenges the current prevailing theory ...

Muscles are made up of both 'slow-twitch' and 'fast-twitch' fibers. The body requires both fiber types to maintain a balanced skeletal muscle system, although how the two different types are determined and maintained remains ...

Elite endurance athletes commonly have mutations that result in the loss of the protein -actinin-3, which is a major component of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Loss of -actinin-3 is associated with reduced power, increased ...

February's brutal chimpanzee attack, during which a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman, was a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humansas much as four-times stronger, some researchers ...

When Mark Martindale decided to trace the evolutionary origin of muscle cells, like the ones that form our hearts, he looked in an unlikely place: the genes of animals without hearts or muscles.

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Turkey To Stop Teaching Evolution In Schools – IFLScience (blog)

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Turkey will stop teaching schoolchildren about evolution and natural selection, education officials announced, because its considered too complicated and controversial for young minds to understand.

The country's education chief announced that the new curriculum will remove a chapter called "Beginning of Life and Evolution" from the nations standardized biology textbooks used up to ninth grade. The material will be left for whenstudents goto university level.

"We are aware that if our students don't have the background to comprehend the premises and hypotheses, or if they don't have the knowledge and scientific framework, they will not be able to understand some controversial issues, so we have left out some of them," Alparslan Durmus, chairman of Turkeys education authority, announced in a video late last week, as translated by Reuters news agency.

Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist, has chucked in his two cents, saying in astatement: As Turkish scientists will agree, evolution is an established fact, as firmly established as plate tectonic movements or the solar orbits of the planets.

Id like to pay the Turkish framers of this ridiculous education policy the compliment of assuming that they are cynical political manipulators. But actually, I fear they are more likely to be just plain stupid.

Around 49 percent of Muslims in Turkey believe that humans have remained in their present form since the beginning of time, according to a 2013 report on religion and public life.For contrast, around 62 percent of people in the USbelieve in evolution.Just like the Bible, the Quran teaches that Adam and Eve were the first humans.

Since the foundation of the Republicof Turkey in 1923, the country has proudly fostered a reputation for being secular. However, in thepast few years under the reign of President Erdogan, many commenters have argued the country is being pushed away from its secular foundations and slipping towards a conservative theocracy.

The claim that evolution is too complicated is absurd and an insult to Turkeys students and teachers, added Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry. We know from our work with middle school science teachers that students pretty easily grasp the basic principles of evolution. Moreover, learning about natural selectionthe process that undergirds the diversity of all of life on Earthfascinates and inspires students. How can the government even consider withholding that from students?

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Turkey To Stop Teaching Evolution In Schools - IFLScience (blog)

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Social Darwinism Is What Truly Guides Trump – New York Magazine

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Photo: Facebook

Last week, Donald Trump appeared before a rally in Iowa, where he regaled a crowd of supporters with stories of the great wealth of his inner circle of advisers. When you get the president this is the president of Goldman Sachs smart! having him represent us, he went from massive paydays to peanuts! he boasted. The crowd applauded, as people passionate enough about a politician to attend a rally are wont to do.

But the thing about Trumps core supporters is that Trump doesnt have enough of them. To win the election, he had to pry away some former Obama voters in the Midwest, and he did it by positioning himself to his opponents left on economics. Hillary will never reform Wall Street. She is owned by Wall Street! he warned. Im not going to let Wall Street get away with murder, he promised. His closing ad quoted Trump insisting, The Establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election, while images of a stock ticker and the street sign for Wall Street appeared onscreen.

Trump lies and reverses himself about all kinds of things, but usually this behavior is a flailing attempt at self-preservation. The curious thing about these particular reversals is that this hypocrisy comes at large cost to himself. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently interviewed white working-class Obama voters whod turned to Trump and found that news of the presidents Wall Street advisers was the fact most likely to shake their faith in his administration. Trumps approval ratings have sunk to 40 percent or lower. Why is he making so little effort to conceal his bait-and-switch? Why forfeit his most precious political asset? The best explanation for this grand act of self-sabotage (beyond his simply not understanding the policies he endorses) is that Trump, like much of the Republican Party, is an instinctive social Darwinist.

Social Darwinism is a philosophy that treats the market as a perfectly efficient and moral mechanism for allocating wealth. Just as natural selection favors those species best adapted for survival, the theory goes, capitalism rewards the smartest and most deserving among us. It is the intellectual scaffolding, constructed by writers like Ayn Rand and various Austrian economists, behind the vision of conservatives like Paul Ryan and David Koch. Trump may not have read up on the theory, but he understands it viscerally. His father, Fred, inculcated his son with the unshakable belief that his own greatness would lead to enormous wealth.

Trumps boast in Iowa about the great, brilliant business minds in his administration communicates a great deal about his innermost beliefs. I love all people, rich or poor, he explained, but, in those particular positions, I just dont want a poor person, does that make sense? The richest people in the country are, by definition, the most brilliant and well qualified. Trump rejects the notion that circumstance, luck, or social advantage might play a role. In a 1990 interview, a more candid time, Trump expressed his belief that being born into poverty would not have arrested his rise. The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son, he told an interviewer. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people dont have the imagination or whatever to leave their mine. They dont have it Youre either born with it or youre not.

Conservative intellectuals make a sharp distinction, at least in theory, between good wealth amassed through pure capitalism and bad wealth obtained by government favoritism. Trump has never observed any boundary between the two. (On the contrary: During the campaign, he presented his experience buying government influence as a qualification for office.) And in practice, few Republicans bother themselves too much over how a person got rich, either. The Bush administration was a boom time for grifters Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and Duke Cunningham were among the party eminences who used Republican control of government to fatten their wallets.

After the Bush presidency collapsed, conservatives made a show of remorse and vowed not to succumb again to the temptations of corruption. Abramoff, the crooked conservative activist and lobbyist, refashioned himself after returning from prison as a chastened reformer. In 2012, he appeared at a Public Citizen event, denouncing the evils of the system.

But now the lessons have been discarded, and the stench of self-dealing is everywhere. The only low-income-housing program spared by Trumps budget is one his business profits from, and he picked a comically underqualified family loyalist, an event planner by trade, to oversee federal housing in New York, where his business has its largest interest. Trump has handed control of every major regulatory agency to the industries they oversee a Wall Street lawyer runs the Securities and Exchange Commission, fossil-fuel surrogates run the Environmental Protection Agency, the CEO of a for-profit lender will oversee the student-loan system, and on and on. Lobbyists are already shuffling between the White House and K Street. Even Abramoff has been lured out of retirementregistering as a foreign lobbyist, in which capacity he prevailed upon one member of Congress to write a letter requesting a presidential meeting with a client of Abramoffs, a foreign dictator.

Congress has indulged Trumps flagrant profiteering in part because he is letting them dip their beaks too. That Trump is holding his inaugural reelection fund-raiser in the Trump International Hotel, where party elites will join in an event that lines the presidents pockets, is one of the perfectly symbolic moments of the young administration. Any theoretical distinction between the Trumpian ethos of self-entitlement and the conservative doctrine of rewarding job creators has long since washed away.

Social Darwinism is the tissue connecting this shady conduct with the Republican Partys highest policy priorities. Conservatives believe programs that tax the rich and benefit the poor illegitimately meddle with the natural and correct distribution of wealth produced by the marketplace. The Republican health-care bill both what passed in the House and what Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has brought to the Senate confers a nearly trillion-dollar tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy. That appears to be its sponsors primary consideration. Secondarily, it strips away an equal amount in Medicaid and middle-class insurance tax credits.

Conservatives have little difficulty applying the logic of social Darwinism to justify punishing the sick. Vice-President Mike Pence explains that the administrations health-care plan supports the promotion of personal responsibility. Kellyanne Conway implies that only an unwillingness to work would cause an able-bodied adult to have trouble affording health care: If they are able-bodied and they want to work, then theyll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do. The Republican plan, explained Alabama congressman Mo Brooks, will reduce the cost to those people who lead good lives. Theyre healthy, theyve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. Mick Mulvaney, Trumps budget director, allowed that while people who get cancer should have a safety net, that doesnt mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly, and gets diabetes.

After passing a health-care bill built around a regressive tax cut, Republicans plan to proceed quickly to a second tax cut, which is expected to also benefit the rich disproportionately. The two bills, which are the entire focus of the partys current legislative ambitions, would constitute the most sweeping upward redistribution of resources in American history. Washington in the summer of Trumps first year is an atmosphere of organized looting. The precariousness of Trumps position, given his anemic polling, a riled-up opposition, and Robert Mueller lurking in the background, has only heightened the urgency to get while the getting is good.

*A version of this article appears in the June 26, 2017, issue ofNew YorkMagazine.

The Supreme Court did reinstate a narrower version of the order. But the White House could easily lose in the end.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of this much-rumored event, had it occurred.

In the meantime, the Court will allow the ban, in much narrower form, to go into effect.

The Senate still needs a replacement for Obamacares individual mandate. Their idea could amount to a death sentence for uninsured cancer patients.

Obama is Americas vacation-dad-in-chief.

It is bizarre to watch a party carry out a major welfare-state rollback while fervently insisting the welfare state will not be rolled back.

Republicans are laying out their demands, and its hard to see how both moderates and conservatives can be appeased.

Nobody knows, but everyones guessing.

Just wait. Watergate didnt become Watergate overnight, either.

Sixty British high-rises have already failed fire-safety tests following the devastating Grenfell Tower inferno. Hundreds more may still be at risk.

Soon there will be one less person Trump administration officials have to avoid taking selfies with.

A shooting down of an Assad-regime jet raises some questions, such as, are we about to go to war with Russia? How about Iran?

Hes complaining that Obama stole the term from him.

The Trump administration doesnt seem to be taking the threat of future Russian election interference very seriously.

Were about to find out what Mattiss Pentagon will do with mostly unchecked authority to conduct a war.

Should Democrats in places like Georgia keep trying to rebuild white support? Or should they focus on minority mobilization? The debate goes on.

A new report suggests Obama knew about Putins intervention in the 2016 election and its aims, but didnt move aggressively until it was too late.

The emergence of a new game plan, from persuasion to motivation.

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Investing In The Future Means Investing In Robotics Software And Services – Benzinga

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Loup Ventures is siding with the machines, concluding on Friday a series of notes analyzing the growth of robotics in the economy.

We believe a cultural shift is underway and robots are playing an increasingly crucial role in our everyday lives, said analyst Andrew Murphy.

Murphys modeling estimates the robotics market will grow from last years $20.9 billion to over $221 billion in 2025. Two-thirds of that comes from related software and services.

While hardware will still be key as robotics gains its foothold in the near term, in the long term, it will likely be commoditized software and services will then be the primary drivers of growth, making those companies in the space where investors will want to be.

The robotic revolution is already underway, despite some reassurances that the total replacement of human workers is a long way off. BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE: BLK) is beginning to test replacing human money managers with machines.

Loup Ventures Doug Clinton recently criticized Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Chairman Eric Schmidt for behaving like a savvy politician, suggesting that most human jobs are not replaceable to protect his companys image.

Murphy sees five aspects of robotics developing into major markets:

1. Robot Control Software: Few companies will likely develop their own control software in the future, instead relying on open-source programming platforms. Moving even further out, though, machine learning systems and artificial intelligence will become key.

2. Data Analytics Software: Its no secret that robots and other devices amass huge amounts of data, and companies that develop ways for it to be processed quickly and efficiently will be critical for convincing businesses robots are worth investing in.

3. Unmanned Traffic Management Software: Drone and autonomous vehicle technologies are advancing rapidly and will be sharing air, ground and maybe even sea spaces with human operators. Manned and unmanned vehicles will need a common system to facilitate their interactions on the move.

4. Robotics As A Service: Given the high cost of investment to integrate robots into a business, companies will arise that rent and/or provide services such as processing and delivering data and operating robots on an as-needed basis.

5. Delivery Robots: Drones, and potentially even ground vehicles, will become major methods of package delivery, but will require legal reforms to allow for freer flight patterns and traffic management system implementations.

Gear up for robotics camp – Daily Journal

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Students who love robotics can enroll in an upcoming robotics camp.

Center Groves Red Alert Robotics Team is offering a robotics camp this summer.

Joanne Lovrinic, communications director for the organization, tells you what you need to know.

When is the camp?

Thirteen-year-old Jacob Tallman programs a change in the movements of his team's robot on Tuesday, February 7, 2017. The Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 will compete in a state competition later this month. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

Members of the Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 watch as their robot shoots a ball toward a target on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

Members of the Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 work to replace a faulty motor on their robot Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

L-R Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 members 15-year-olds Ethan Matei and Josh Stevenson work together to replace a faulty motor on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 member 15-year-old Ethan Matei attaches a plug to the end of a motor on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

A cellphone is used to control the robot of Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

Members of the Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 practice using their robot on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

A cellphone and video game controllers are used to control the robot of Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

Center Grove FIRST Tech Challenge team Panic in the Build Room 8149 members work together to replace a faulty motor on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at Center Grove High School. Scott Roberson / Daily Journal

8 a.m. to noon July 17 to 21 at the Center Grove Innovation Center, 4800 Stones Crossing Road, Greenwood.

How much is the camp?

Cost of the camp is $125 per camper.

Who can attend?

The camp is open to children entering third through sixth grade. Children from any school district or who are homeschooled are welcome.

How maNy students can enroll?

There is room for a maximum of 30 campers.

Why did you plan the camp?

As a FIRST team, Red Alert Robotics 1741 has a mission of community outreach through fun, educational activities such as robot demonstrations, STEM fairs and STEM camp. The Radical Robots camp is planned and conducted by the high school team members to get younger kids excited about STEM and specifically, robots.

What can students expect to learn?

Each day of camp features a variety of themed hands-on activities, ranging from biology to chemistry to aeronautics, as well as opportunities to design, build, program and test robots.

Where does the money go?

The fees from camp are used by Red Alert Robotics to cover the cost of the camp and help defray outreach and other team expenses during the year.

How do I register my student?

redalert1741.org

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Heritage High School robotics team wins gold at SkillsUSA championship – Maryville Daily Times

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Heritage High School students won first place in Robotics: Urban Search and Rescue during the national SkillsUSA awards Friday night.

This was the third time recent graduate Savannah Bradburn has placed nationally, with silver and bronze medals the previous two years. Rising junior Landon Davis also was Bradburns partner for last years national third-place finish.

Congratulations to the students for their outstanding engineering skills of building and operating a robot, said Dr. Alisa Teffeteller, Blount County Schools director of career and technical education. Their first-place award is well-deserved. The students demonstrated the outstanding guidance and instruction they received from their teacher, Sam Warwick.

A Heritage High team has placed in the top three nationally since the school began competing in 2014, but this is the first gold medal.

For the challenge the students design, build and control a robot that must maneuver through a small model to find and remove blocks that simulate bombs. In addition to their performance on the course, the students are judged on an oral presentation and a manual they create that includes a complete parts list, technical drawings and repair instructions for their robot.

We had a very smooth run, but we didnt have the fastest time, Davis said, but they scored well enough on the presentation and notebook to overcome that.

Davis served as the spotter, looking directly at the course, while Bradburn drove the robot based on the view she could see from its camera. During a point on the course Davis couldnt see directly, Bradburn ran into some difficulty opening one of the mailboxes, which slowed them.

When the schools name was called as the gold-medal winner during Friday nights ceremony, Davis said, Me and Savannah jumped up and hugged each other and hugged Mr. Warwick.

Davis said they are proud to bring the first-place prize back for Heritage High School, Blount County Schools and the state of Tennessee.

Im really proud of our school, he said.

During next years competition, hell move into the drivers role and work with a new spotter.

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Heritage High School robotics team wins gold at SkillsUSA championship - Maryville Daily Times

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UK Robotics Week highlights expertise and potential for mechanical assistants – The Engineer

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Jason Ford News editor

There doesnt appear to be much middle ground when it comes to discussions about robotics and automated systems.

The automotive industry has had robotic operatives on shop floors for decades but technological advances mean that the robot is becoming more capable and will inevitably become more ubiquitous in a variety of industries.

A broader look at automated and autonomous technology sees the potential for such systems to be truly disruptive, giving companies the opportunity to rethink how they deliver products or services.

In the maritime arena, for example, container ship operators might look at automated systems in terms of the savings theyll make when purchasing vessels that dont require crew facilities and the wider capabilities their vessels will give them. Merchant seamen might not be looking at this prospect with the same level of enthusiasm, a view that is applicable wherever the robot or automated system is introduced into the workplace.

Companies will argue with some justification that robots will step in to carry out laborious or dangerous jobs, freeing the human employee to do something more suited to their talents.

Whilst co-bots have gradually made their way onto the shop floor, the humanoid equivalent has been slow to evolve, although that could all be about to change.

Multi-contact robots will be able to make contact with their environment using their entire bodies, giving them the sort of agility that has previously been seen in sci-fi movies but not in industry.

To this end, Airbus has been working with the Franco-Japanese Joint Robotics Laboratory in Tsukuba to develop robot capable of for example undertaking work in the confines of an aircrafts fuselage.

From the USA, two and four-legged robots have regularly emerged from the labs of Boston Dynamics to enthrall and disturb the imagination in equal measure. As things stand, though, the robot remains a tool and it is up to humans to decide whether they are put to work for good or nefarious purposes. Things might change, of course, if the robot becomes sentient.

This potentially dystopian and so far unproven outlook shouldnt overlook the fact that Britain sees its robotics research as world-leading and this years UK Robotics Week will be showcasing how such systems can be applied in areas including surgery, social care, and disaster relief.

EPSRC is supporting the series of robot-related events that culminate in the International Robotics Showcase on June 30, 2017 at IETs HQ in London.

According to EPSRC, this years programme of events includes five competitions in the areas of surgery, extreme environments, resilient infrastructure and social care robotics, and the premiere of an Autonomous Systems film by Southampton University on emergency resilience and disaster response. Schoolchildren from across the UK are also participating in the School Robot Challenge, where they will learn how to design a virtual robot bug and teach it to move.

The International Robotics Showcase includes talks, panel discussions, exhibitions, robot demonstrations and an award ceremony for competition winners demonstrating cutting-edge robotics innovation. The UK-RAS Network will also launch four new White Papers, providing an overview of the current research landscapes in resilient infrastructure robotics; AI and robotics; robotics for emergency response, disaster relief and resilience; and robotics in social care. Doors open at 9-00am at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Savoy Place in central London.

South Auckland students to represent NZ at US robotics competition – Stuff.co.nz

Posted: at 5:21 pm

KYMBERLEE FERNANDES

Last updated22:06, June 26 2017

Kymberlee Fernandes/ Stuff.co.nz

Four south Auckland students will represent New Zealand in the United States in a robotics competition. Using science to help humanity, they will present a robot that can help clean contaminated water.

Four students from South Auckland are aiming to solve the world's problems using robotics.

Kacey Roberts, Daniel Gallahar-Ikitule, Esther Asi and Vanshika Ram will represent New Zealand at an Olympics-style robotics competition in the United States in July.

The theme for the First Global competition this year is providing access to clean water.Team NZ will go up against teams from Syria, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, Chile and Pakistan among 160 other countries.