Technology Rat brains show robots the way A car fitted with a navigation system inspired by a rat's brain has successfully mapped a 66-kilometre road network in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. Built by Michael Milford and Gordon Wyeth at the University of Queensland in St Lucia, the system is designed to give future autonomous robotic vehicles the ability to explore and … 51¶¯Âþ
Eleven things the next president should do for science Science holds the key to many of the pressing issues facing the US, so 51¶¯Âþ asked a group of prominent scientists and thinkers to offer advice to the incoming president Peter Agre The first priority should be to re-establish the Presidential Science Adviser within the White House with a rank equivalent to cabinet secretary. … Opinion
When concrete boxes were for healthy living These days, hoteliers take a dim view of guests who smash up their rooms. But in 1850, as Orson Fowler travelled through Milton, Wisconsin, he stayed at the newly built Milton House inn, whose proprietor delighted in inviting guests to take a sledgehammer to the walls for 6 cents a swing. Intrigued, Fowler hefted a … Features
Review: The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern by Keith Devlin EVEN scholars once thought that fortune alone controlled the future. Forecasting it, unless they were at a casino, was deemed impossible. But Pascal and Fermat, in a series of dashed-off letters in 1654, reformulated the laws of dice and cards for messy real life. In doing so, they wiped out ages of superstition and created … Books & Arts
Feedback LHC for sale THE switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, on 10 September generated a large number of stories on the internet. Nigel Bailey points us to one of the more surprising of these – the announcement on Ebay of the successful sale of an LHC constructed in a garden … Regulars