Computer

A long time from now, in a house right next door, a robot that is at least as well cobbled together as the android C-3PO of Star Wars fame may be playing a game of cribbage with an elderly widow.

“I have felt for years that the first ‘killer application’ of personal robots will be companionship, especially for the elderly,” said Roger Brockett, a professor of computer science and engineering at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Robots are potentially much smarter than dogs and they will not require the same level of upkeep.”

They don’t sting or bite. They don’t cause diarrhea or headaches. They don’t even exist in a tangible form. But “digital organisms”— special programs that reproduce, mutate, and adapt —can thrive inside computers, and they are teaching scientists several lifetimes worth of information about evolution.

These artificial “bugs” show that complex functions that are the digital equivalent to something like human eyesight can evolve from the simplest of functions via a long and winding road of gradual mutation, according to a team consisting of a biologist, a computer scientist, a philosopher, and a physicist.

Fans of the television and movie series Star Trek often lust after the technology that allows characters to step onto a transporter and be instantaneously whisked from one room on the U.S.S. Enterprise to another room, another planet, or another universe.

The technology is known as teleportation. It involves taking away the material properties of an object at one location and transferring the exact details of its configuration to another location where it is reconstructed.

About 65 million years ago a space rock slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and scattered high-velocity debris around Earth, igniting wildfires in North America, the Indian subcontinent, and most of the equatorial part of the world.

However, northern Asia, Europe, Antarctica and possibly much of Australia may have been spared the inferno, according to a new computer simulation of how the wildfires spread around the world.

That well-imagined nightmare in which a bloodthirsty Tyrannosaurus rex is chasing the family car down a lonely road in the red-rock desert as the children scream and the gas gauge hovers on empty and the dinosaur gnashes at the rear bumper is just that: a bad dream. T. rex was a slowpoke.

The most feared and revered of the dinosaurs did not have the leg strength to run very fast, if at all, according to a computer model developed by two experts in the mechanical movements of living creatures.

Computers and satellites are being successfully harnessed to the problem of biodiversity conservation in the Amazon rain forest.

Scientists believe that at least half of the world’s animal, plant, and insect species reside in the rain forest, an area half the size of the continental United States.

In cycling, triathlons, and other races, the leader of the pack may not be out ahead in terms of innate talent.

The “bunching” that often occurs in such events gives some racers an advantage that masks their individual ability. As a result, the person who crosses the finish line first isn’t necessarily the most physically and mentally fit competitor in the race.