Our fascination with robots goes all the way back to antiquity

BY
BRUCE BOWER

Artificial intelligence and robotics are hot scientific fields today. But even in the brave new world of AI, there’s
nothing new under the sun, writes classics and science history scholar Adrienne Mayor in Gods and Robots.

In a breezy and thought-provoking account, Mayor describes how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese
myths expressed hopes and fears about human-made life long before conversational robots and computer
chess champions flexed their algorithms. Mayor argues that myths influenced, and were influenced by, real
animated machines invented by ancient engineers.

Mayor also explores accounts of actual self-moving machines. Egyptians, for instance, created a seated female
statue that stood up, tilted over to pour milk from a vessel and sat down. Gears, weights and other parts may
have moved the nearly 4-meter-tall figure, known only from a description.

As Mayor explains, ancient civilizations told tales of a conflicted desire to transcend death and create artificial
life. Those same longings inspire some of today’s humanoid bots and brain-computer interfaces. But, she
cautions, modern algorithmic entities have weak points, just as Talos did.
Cryptic remains of tiny animals have turned up in an Antarctic lake
BY
MARIA TEMMING

Much to their surprise, scientists in Antarctica have uncovered what appear to be remnants of tiny animals in
mud dredged from a lake that has been covered by a thick mantle of ice for thousands of years.

The researchers on this expedition — known as the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access, or SALSA —
are the first to sample Lake Mercer, a body of water about 600 kilometers from the South Pole. After drilling
about a kilometer through the ice in late December, researchers lowered instruments that brought water and
sediment up to the surface.

Looking at these samples under a microscope, the team found “some things that looked like squished spiders
and crustacean-type things with legs … some other things that looked like they could be worms,” says
expedition member David Harwood, a micropaleontologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The
researchers also spotted what appeared to be the vestige of a famously durable microscopic critter called a
water bear (SN Online: 7/14/17). Examining the DNA of these remnants will help researchers ID them more
precisely.

This find, first reported online by Nature on January 18, “is really intriguing,” says Slawek Tulaczyk, a
glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who is not part of the SALSA team. Until now, scientists
hadn’t considered such Antarctic lakes like Mercer to be suitable environments for organisms larger than
microbes.

When researchers in 2013 sampled Lake Whillans, the only other ice-lidded lake in Antarctica that scientists
have drilled into, “we didn’t uncover any evidence of anything more complex than a microbe,” says SALSA
team member Brent Christner, a microbiologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville (SN: 9/20/14, p. 10).
“We had a similar expectation here.”
Prosecco production takes a toll on northeast Italy’s environment
BY
CASSIE MARTIN

Sorry to burst your bubbly, prosecco lovers, but skyrocketing demand for the sparkling wine might be sapping
northeastern Italy’s vineyards of precious soil — 400 million kilograms of it per year, researchers report in a
study posted online January 10 at bioRxiv.org

That’s a lot of soil, but not an anomaly. Some newer vineyards in Germany, for example, have higher rates of
soil loss, says Jesús Rodrigo Comino, a geographer at the Institute of Geomorphology and Soils in Málaga,
Spain, who was not involved in the study. And soil erosion isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it can help generate
new soils to keep an ecosystem healthy.

But the amount of erosion from Italy’s high-quality prosecco vineyards is not sustainable, he says. Letting too
much earth wash away with rain and irrigation could jeopardize the future of the region’s vineyards, which
produce 90 million bottles of high-quality prosecco every year.

Concerned that the recent bottle boom was taxing the local environment, a team led by researchers from the
University of Padua in Italy calculated the “soil footprint” for high-quality prosecco. It found the industry was
responsible for 74 percent of the region’s total soil erosion, by studying 10 years-worth of data for rainfall,
land use and soil characteristics, as well as high-resolution topographic maps.

The team then compared their soil erosion results with average annual prosecco sales to estimate the annual
soil footprint per bottle: about 4.4 kilograms, roughly the mass of two Chihuahuas.

Prosecco vineyards could reduce their soil loss, the scientists say. One solution — leaving grass between
vineyard rows — would cut total erosion in half, simulations show. Other strategies could include planting
hedges around vineyards or vegetation by rivers and streams to prevent soil from washing away.
This honeybee parasite may be more of a fat stealer than a bloodsucker
BY
SUSAN MILIUS

Tests with fake bee larvae reveal that a “vampire” mite attacking honeybees may not be so much a
bloodsucker as a fat slurper.

The ominously named Varroa destructor mite invaded North America in the 1980s, and has become one of the
biggest threats to honeybees. Based on research from the 1970s, scientists thought that the parasitic mites
feed on the bee version of blood, called hemolymph. But the mites are actually after the fat of young and
adult honeybees, says entomologist Samuel Ramsey, who is joining the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee
Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

That insight might aid the largely failed efforts to develop antimite compounds for feeding to bees, says
toxicologist Aaron Gross of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He has documented mites resisting some of the
current controls and hopes for new options.

Ramsey’s rethink started with Varroa biology. For instance, the mites don’t have the more flexible body that
can swell with a lot of incoming fluid or a gut specialized for elaborate liquid filtering that many other
bloodsuckers do. And insect hemolymph looked to Ramsey like a weak, watery choice for exclusive nutrition.
The moon’s craters suggest Earth hasn’t erased lots of past impacts
BY
LISA GROSSMAN

A new look at the moon’s craters suggests the Earth and moon both suffered a sharp increase in impacts
around 290 million years ago, and Earth has kept its biggest scars.

Geologists long assumed that erosion and tectonic activity had erased Earth’s craters so thoroughly that “you
couldn’t say anything about the craters on Earth at all,” says planetary scientist Rebecca Ghent (SN: 12/22/18,
p. 40). So to figure out how much Earth was pummeled in the past, Ghent and her colleagues turned to the
moon.

Ghent used nine craters whose ages were already known to figure out a mathematical relationship between a
crater’s nighttime glow and its age. Then Mazrouei, working by hand, mapped all 111 lunar craters less than a
billion years old and wider than 10 kilometers in diameter, and used that map to figure out the cratering rate.

Most lunar scientists assumed that, after an early turbulent period of extreme bombardment more than 3
billion years ago, the moon’s impact rate has been mostly constant. “But we saw an increase,” Mazrouei says
— specifically, a jump in impacts by a factor of 2.6 around 290 million years ago.

The team then compared the lunar craters’ sizes and ages with 38 of the largest and most stable craters on the
Earth. They lined up almost exactly in their timing and sizes.

To double check that such large craters on Earth weren’t often erased by erosion, the researchers looked at
volcanic features called kimberlite pipes near the craters. These carrot-shaped lava tubes change starkly in
appearance when eroded. The kimberlite pipes that appeared on the same terrain as the large craters
confirmed that very little of either feature had been lost to erosion, Ghent says.

The jump in the impact rate could have been caused by a smash-up in the asteroid belt sending debris toward
the inner solar system, says coauthor William Bottke, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute
in Boulder, Colo. In 2007, Bottke linked one such asteroid break-up to the impact that killed the dinosaurs (SN:
9/8/07, p. 148).

Ghent cautions against drawing conclusions about an exact date for that spike in impacts, noting it could have
happened tens of millions of years earlier or later than estimated, or in multiple spurts. “I don’t want people
to say, ‘Hey, the Permian-Triassic extinction happened during that time. This might have caused it.’ We don’t
know that,” she says.
New ways to image and control nerve cells could unlock brain mysteries
BY
LAURA SANDERS

Using laser light, ballooning tissue and innovative genetic tricks, scientists are starting to force brains to give
up their secrets.

By mixing and matching powerful advances in microscopy and cell biology, researchers have imaged intricate
details of individual nerve cells in fruit flies and mice, and even controlled small groups of nerve cells in living
mice.

The techniques, published in two new studies, represent big steps forward for understanding how the brain
operates, says molecular neuroscientist Hongkui Zeng of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Along with these new details on nerve cell anatomy come hints about some of these cells’ jobs. Karl
Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University, and colleagues developed an advanced
form of optogenetics, a technique that uses laser light to control genetically engineered nerve cells. With
advances in microscopy and improvements to a protein that responds to laser stimulation, the researchers
were able to monitor individual nerve cells’ behavior and activate them at will, changing the mice’s eating
behavior. The results, described online January 16 in Nature, help to untangle cells involved in eating behavior
and social experiences.

In the study, the researchers targeted nerve cells in mice’s orbitofrontal cortex, a stretch of tissue on the outer
front surface of the brain. Because the cells involved in eating behavior and in social behavior are mixed
together there, they’re not easy to study separately.

So Deisseroth’s team used genetic tricks to identify single nerve cells that are active as a mouse does a certain
behavior — in this case, licking high-calorie water or interacting with another mouse. After identifying certain
cells, the researchers then used laser light to prod the cells into action and watched for the resulting behavior.
When the scientists stimulated a handful of the “eating” nerve cells, mice licked up more of the calorie-dense
water. But when the team stimulated the social nerve cells, licking decreased, results that hint that social
interactions can curb eating behavior.

Deisseroth and his colleagues first described the method for stimulating single nerve cells in 2012, but until
now, hadn’t been able to use it to control behavior in a mammal. Advances in microscopy, including a special
lens that sits atop the brain and focuses light in a particular way, allowed the researchers to stimulate nerve
cells about three millimeters deep in the brain of a live mouse — the deepest single cell stimulation to date,
the researchers report.
This rediscovered Bolivian frog species survived deadly chytrid fungus
BY
JEREMY REHM

Save for one “lonely” survivor in captivity, the Sehuencas water frog hadn’t been seen in the wild since 2008.
That’s when its numbers collapsed, primarily due to chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease that has devastated
frog populations worldwide. Fearing the species might be extinct, some scientists spent 10 years searching the
Bolivian mountain forests for the amphibians. Now, they’ve found a tiny population of five.

“It’s just incredible,” says herpetologist Robin Moore, communications director at Global Wildlife Conservation
in Austin, Texas. He was among the scientists who announced the discovery on January 15.

With no current way to get rid of the lethal chytrid fungus in the wild, scientists are keen to study the
survivors, Moore says. The five Sehuencas water frogs (Telmatobius yuracare) were found in their native
habitat: the Bolivian mountain cloud forests, where the climate is moist and cool — and ideal for chytrid to
grow. “It could be that this small population has immunity” or genetic resistance, Moore says. “It could be an
environmental factor,” such as an unusually warm microclimate.

It could also just be nature’s luck. “Many species of frogs that disappeared for years — decades in some cases
— have been seen again later,” says ecologist Karen Lips of the University of Maryland in College Park. In
December 2018, for example, researchers announced they had rediscovered Ecuador’s marsupial horned frog,
more than 10 years after the species disappeared.

Reappearances can occur for several reasons, including changes in the frogs, the fungus or the environment,
Lips says. “The simplest explanation is that once most of the frogs are gone, the fungus declines” from having
fewer hosts to infect, and the frogs, in turn, slowly rebound until they’re seen years later (SN Online: 3/29/18).

These newly found frogs raise hopes that more populations exist in the wild, and also offer researchers a
chance to help the species recover.

“Each case that we have a frog that we thought had succumbed to chytrid fungus but survived, it’s just an
opportunity to understand a little more about how this pathogen works,” Moore says, “and the prospect for
bringing these frogs back.”
An ancient child from East Asia grew teeth like a modern human
BY
BRUCE BOWER

An ancient child with a mysterious evolutionary background represents the oldest known case of humanlike
tooth growth in East Asia, researchers say.

The child’s fossilized upper jaw contains seven teeth that were in the process of developing when the roughly
6½-year-old youngster died at least 104,000 years ago and possibly more than 200,000 years ago. Using X-rays
to examine the teeth’s internal structure revealed that the first molar, which typically sprouts through the
gums at around age 6 in kids today, had erupted a few months before death.

The root of that tooth was about three-quarters complete, similar to the pace of development in modern
human children. Other tooth roots found in the fossil grew more rapidly than those of modern youngsters.
But the ancient child’s overall dental growth and development falls within the range observed among kids
today, paleoanthropologist Song Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and her colleagues report
online January 16 in Science Advances.

Identifying the Chinese fossils’ species is difficult because these finds have an unusual mix of features. A thick
braincase and large teeth most resemble traits of Neandertals and Homo erectus, two now-extinct members
of the genus Homo. Yet the shapes of several cheek teeth look most like corresponding teeth of Homo sapiens.
Xing and colleagues suggest that it’s also possible that the Xujiayao fossils come from Denisovans, an
enigmatic East Asian population known mainly from ancient DNA (SN: 8/5/17, p. 17). Fossil and ancient DNA
analyses suggest that all four Homo species lived in the region during the period that the child’s fossil is dated
to.

Regardless of species, the Xujiayao child provides the first peek at dental development in an ancient East
Asian Homo population, says paleoanthropologist and study coauthor Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg of Ohio State
University in Columbus. “Modern humans develop slowly, and at least for the first 6½ years of life, the
dentition of the Xujiayao individual suggests that it also developed slowly,” she says.

Lines that form in teeth at regular intervals during childhood mark enamel layers that accumulate daily and
over longer periods. The Xujiayao child’s age and dental growth rates were calculated by counting daily
enamel layers. Intriguingly, a distinct growth line that forms about every eight days in human children’s
enamel materialized more slowly in the Xujiayao child’s teeth, about every 10 days. But it’s hard to know from
that one piece of evidence whether the ancient child matured even more slowly than youngsters today do, the
researchers caution. The same growth line appears about every seven days in other fossil hominids.

If the Chinese find belongs to H. sapiens, its dental growth rate and other tooth traits align with those
of fossil H. sapiens from Israel and North Africa dating to as early as around 300,000 years ago (SN: 7/8/17, p.
6),

H. sapiens, as well as H. erectus and Neandertals, display a wide range of sometimes overlapping dental traits
and growth rates over time (SN Online: 2/18/15), she adds. That complicates classification efforts based on
teeth alone. Extracting DNA from the Chinese youngster’s jaw or teeth would help to clarify its evolutionary
standing. No such DNA retrieval attempts have yet been made, Guatelli-Steinberg says.
With this new system, robots can ‘read’ your mind
BY
MARIA TEMMING

Getting robots to do what we want would be a lot easier if they could read our minds.

That sci-fi dream might not be so far off. With a new robot control system, a human can stop a bot from
making a mistake and get the machine back on track using brain waves and simple hand gestures. People who
oversee robots in factories, homes or hospitals could use this setup, to be presented at the Robotics: Science
and Systems conference on June 28, to ensure bots operate safely and efficiently.

Electrodes worn on the head and forearm allow a person to control the robot. The head-worn electrodes
detect electrical signals called error-related potentials — which people’s brains unconsciously generate when
they see someone goof up — and send an alert to the robot. When the robot receives an error signal, it stops
what it is doing. The person can then make hand gestures — detected by arm-worn electrodes that monitor
electrical muscle signals — to show the bot what it should do instead.

MIT roboticist Daniela Rus and colleagues tested the system with seven volunteers. Each user supervised a
robot that moved a drill toward one of three possible targets, each marked by an LED bulb, on a mock airplane
fuselage. Whenever the robot zeroed in on the wrong target, the user’s mental error-alert halted the bot. And
when the user flicked his or her wrist left or right to redirect the robot, the machine moved toward the proper
target. In more than 1,000 trials, the robot initially aimed for the correct target about 70 percent of the time,
and with human intervention chose the right target more than 97 percent of the time.

The team plans to build a system version that recognizes a wider variety of user movements. That way, “you
can gesture how the robot should move, and your motion can be more fluidly interpreted,” says study
coauthor Joseph DelPreto, also a roboticist at MIT.

Issuing commands via brain and muscle activity could work especially well in noisy or poorly lit places like
factories or outdoors. In such areas, other hands-off means of directing robots, such as visual cues or verbal
instructions, may not work as well, says Alexandre Barachant, a brain-computer interface researcher at CTRL-
Labs in New York City. This technique could also be used to direct robots that assist people who can’t speak or
can hardly move, such as patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (SN: 11/16/13, p. 22).

What’s more, the system can correct robot errors almost instantly. Error-related potentials in the brain are
discernible a few hundred milliseconds after a person notices a mistake, and electrical muscle signals can be
detected before actual movement, Barachant says. This feature could be useful in situations where quick
reaction time is key for the safety of the bot and others — as with self-driving cars or manufacturing machines.

For this system to enter widespread use, though, the equipment that tracks users’ brain activity would need to
be more broadly accessible than it is now, Barachant says. This mind-monitoring device can cost thousands of
dollars, and electrode caps are hardly the most comfortable headwear. But if researchers could measure brain
waves with cheaper, more comfortable headsets, the system could provide a relatively quick, easy way for
average users to make a robot do their bidding.