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Originally published by The atlantic

Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what’s now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, erupted with a strength more than a thousand times that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Some 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge. Some scientists speculate that as the Earth went into a deep freeze, the population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to as low as a few thousand families.

The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language.

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Robot Can Crawl Through Human Body

Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology researchers have created
a prototype micro robot that can
crawl through the human body. It is
only a millimeter in diameter and 14
millimeters long, so it can get into
the body's smallest areas. It is
powered by either actuation through
magnetic force located outside the
body, or through an on-board...









See original article at American Technion Society

Blind students test-drive experimental vehicle

Seattle Times August 1, 2009

Virginia Tech engineers have
developed the first vehicle that can
be independently operated by a blind
driver. Using data from a laser scan
of obstacles, a computer voice
signals the driver through
headphones how to steer to avoid a
collision -- one click to the left,
for example; three clicks to the
right -- and the vehicle's computer...

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