Future-deniers, think again – if there was ever a headline that people in the 1950s would have expected to read in 2010, this is it. It seems that the U.S. military has developed and deployed robots – known as Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems, or MDARS – to patrol a nuclear dumping ground in Nevada. From Wired:

The camera-equipped MDARS
can scoot around pre-determined paths on its own, alerting
flesh-and-blood guards when it encounters an intruder or a broken lock.
In development by the Navy and General Dynamics since the early 1990s,
the diesel-fueled sentry bot
can operate for up to 16 hours, and reach a top speed of 20 mph. The
U.S. military has experimented with using the MDARS machines to patrol some of its Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada. The bots have even been tested with automatic weapons — though I doubt that’s the plan at the nuke site.

Check out this official video footage. Not quite as spine-chilling as Terminators, but getting there:

In the meantime, on the other side of the country, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are attempting to duplicate human learning processes in machines:

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo
— has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master
semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a
sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a
week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in
Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic
knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission
to teach itself.

(Read more here.) Bring these two together, and what do you get? Well… we’ll find out. (Along these lines – check out this NPR segment, “Can Unmanned Robots Follow the Laws of War?“)

This is fascinating stuff – evolution at work. Sounds like some of the theories about how eukaryotes first emerged. Check it out:

It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue.
But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and
an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades.

Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy —
something only plants can do — it also appears to have swiped this
ability from the algae it consumes.

 

Native to the salt marshes of New England and Canada, these sea
slugs use contraband chlorophyll-producing genes and cell parts called
chloroplasts from algae to carry out photosynthesis, says Sidney Pierce,
a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

 

That genetic material has since been passed down to the next generation, eliminating the need to consume algae for energy.

Full article.

A newly-discovered species of spider, found in Madagascar, apparently spins the world’s largest webs – they span more than 25  meters, or 82 feet (80 percent of the length of an average-sized blue whale!). From the BBC:

The spider also makes the largest orb web yet found for any spider,
and constructs it out of the most tough biomaterial yet known, say
scientists.

Darwin’s bark spider, a species new to science, weaves its huge web over flowing rivers, stretching from bank to bank.

It is so big that it can catch 30 or more prey insects at any one time.

Darwin’s bark spider weaves what experts call an orb web, the most familiar spider web design

But this web is unusual as it is the largest orb web yet known to be
made by any living spider, with the largest web measuring 2.8m².

You can read and see more here.

About a month ago, health officials announced the discovery of an Indian “superbug,” otherwise-common bacteria carrying profound resistance to nearly every antibiotic available. This “superbug” isn’t a single particular type of bacterium; rather, it’s a host of different bacteria that all possess a specific gene, called NDM-1 (short for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase), that confers “dire” resistance factors on whatever bacteria happen to possess it. A recap from Wired Science:

NDM-1 was first spotted in 2008,
in a 59-year-old man of South Asian origin who lived in

Image via Wikipedia

Sweden. He was
hospitalized on a visit home to New Delhi, had surgery, recovered, went
back to Sweden and was hospitalized there again. At that point,
physicians recognized that he had a urinary tract infection that was
unusually drug-resistant. The infection was caused by a common
bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the Klebsiella
possessed an unusual and worrisome ability to disable carbapenems, a
class of drugs given for very resistant infections. They named the
enzyme and the gene directing its production for the place where the man
had apparently acquired it: New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, and bla_NDM.
In 2009, the United Kingdom’s public-health agency sent out an alert
saying the same resistance mechanism was appearing there and increasing
rapidly, going from unknown in 2007 to 18 instances in the first half
of 2009, most of them in people who had gone to India for medical care
or had frequent family travel back and forth. In June this year, the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a bulletin about
NDM-1’s first US appearance,
in three patients in three different states (California, Massachusetts
and Illinois), again with ties to South Asian medical care.

It turns out that bacteria carrying the NDM-1 gene have spread around the world. Meanwhile, home-grown superbugs with resistances of their own have been found in 35 different states. Even more troubling: they render ineffective even our “last ditch” treatments for other infections that won’t respond to standard antibiotics. From USA Today:

“We’ve lost our drug of last resort,” Fishman [director of infection control and epidemiology at the University of
Pennsylvania and president of the Society of Healthcare Epidemiologists] says.

Doctors say the bacteria are more worrisome than another well-known
superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), because
more drugs are available to treat MRSA, Fishman says. “When MRSA started
to develop 15 years ago, the industry started producing antibiotics now
coming onto the market,” he says. “We’re in the same position with KPCs
as we were with staph aureus 15 years ago, except that the
pharmaceutical industry isn’t rushing to produce new drugs.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Scientists, scholars, and other whistle-blowers have been warning us for some time that our overuse of antibiotics – particularly on factory farms, where drugs are dispensed en masse to healthy animals to prevent infections in unsanitary conditions – could give rise to something particularly nasty. Really, you could call this a classic tale of scientific overreaching – like Frankenstein’s monster, our hubris is coming back to haunt us.
It turns out this is exactly what is happening: Minnesota, one state that is currently beset by its own set of drug-resistant superbugs, tracked their origin to livestock production facilities.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss all of this with a wave of the hand. “So we’ve got these so-called superbugs – big deal, it’s just the new H1N1, which was the new SARS, which was the new…” ad infinitum. Maybe, but maybe not – things get unsettling when we venture into the realm of drug resistance. And you can’t be too careful – it’s better to avoid a devastating global pandemic, as I always say.