3D Animation-reconstruction: The Greek City of Syracuse

Scientists Create Automated "Time Machine" for Languages

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how "big data" and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct "proto-languages" -- the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. 

"What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online Feb. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team's computational model uses probabilistic reasoning -- which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome -- to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.
Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world's proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.
"Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future," said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.
The discovery advances UC Berkeley's mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans' earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the "comparative method" to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language. 

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree -- much like a genealogical tree -- reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages. 

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

"Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other," Klein said. "It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time."

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130212112025.htm

Real Footage of Meteorite Crash in Russia

Molecular Robotics: Nano-Spiders Made of DNA Molecules

A group of scientists from Columbia University, managed to invent extremely small spider robots measuring about 4nm across. If you wish to compare, these nano robots are about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

It would be interesting to note that the spider robots are made of DNA molecules. They can walk, turn right and left and create their own products. Developed at the molecular level, the robots represent DNA walkers, featuring legs to walk autonomously, though very slow, 30 meters in 1 hour.

In order to observe the spider robots scientists used atomic force microscopy. The molecular robots managed to attract a lot of attention due to the fact that they can be programmed to sense the environment and react accordingly. For example, they can detect disease markers on a cell surface, identify whether it is a cancerous one and then bring a compound to kill it, if necessary.

Researchers consider that their latest invention is an important step in molecular robotics. Although today this field cannot boast many great inventions, scientists and engineers believe that in the near future it could become one of the most important industries that could create devices for various medical applications.

Source: http://physicsinventions.com/index.php/robotic-nano-spiders-made-of-dna-molecules/

Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000 Years Old Unexplained Structure

Göbekli Tepe Turkish: [ɡøbe̞kli te̞pɛ] ("Potbelly Hill") is an early Neolithic sanctuary located at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa. It includes massive stones carved about 11,000 years ago by people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery.

The "tell" (hill) has a height of 15m (49ft) and is about 300m (984ft) in diameter. It is approximately 760m (2,493ft) above sea level. It was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1964. The survey recognized that the rise could not entirely be a natural feature, but postulated that a Byzantine cemetery lay beneath. The survey noted a large number of flints and the presence of limestone slabs thought to be grave markers. The hill had long been under agricultural cultivation and generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles, possibly destroying much archaeological evidence in the process.

Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist of Göbekli Tepe, is of the view that religion and the mobilization of labor behind the building of religious centers like Göbekli Tepe were the chief factors driving the development of civilization and the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic ages.

Scientists Discover How Bacteria Changes Ions Into Gold

Bacteria with the ability to change ions into solid gold? This scenario may sound like a biochemist’s version of a fairy tale, but it’s real and scientists at McMaster University have just described how the process works in a recent article published online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. 

The bacteria is called Delftia acidovorans, and it turns out that its King Midas-like conversion is part of a self-defense mechanism. Gold ions dissolved in water are toxic, so when the bacteria senses them it releases a protein called delftibactin A. The protein acts as a shield for the bacteria and changes the poisonous ions into harmless particles that accumulate outside the cells.

Although the amount of gold that Delftia acidovorans release is tiny (the particles are 25-50 nanometers across) it’s possible that the bacteria or the protein could someday be used to dissolve gold from water or to help people identify streams and rivers carrying the mineral.

Source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/06/scientists-discover-how-bacteria-changes-ions-into-gold/