Walter Huston is best known for his character Howard the prospector in the 1948 film Treasure of the Sierra Madre (its line, "Badges? We ain't got no badges" has landed itself in the halls of pop iconography). Huston removed his expensive, false teeth to assume a role — spitting and sputtering through lines — to create the well nigh universal caricature of the Western prospector Pioneers themselves, Streptococcus mutans, or Stinky Pete, also shares a relationship with teeth. Commonly found in the human mouth, Stinky Pete, a gram-positive, spherical-shaped bacterium is a major ... Read More
Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining Hits ‘Deep Down’
October 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In the opening minutes of their documentary Deep Down, filmmakers Sally Rubin and Jen Gilomen take us down a winding back road in eastern Kentucky. It's fall, and the leaves are changing, adding to the idyllic beauty of the mountainous surroundings. But around one bend is a rectangular sign bearing an ominous message: "Blasting Schedule." It might as well add, "Enjoy the view while it lasts." For this is coal country, and in recent years the industry has come to realize the quickest, cheapest way to extract the precious commodity is to simply blast away. Why bother with digging a dirty, ... Read More
Global Warming: the Archaeological Frontier
October 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In the small laboratory next to his office at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, N.M., Jim Dixon unlocks a large steel cabinet, slides open a drawer and gingerly lifts out a thin piece of gray, brittle-looking wood. "This fragment is actually a spear shaft," he says and then shows me a dart shaped to fit into the socket of an ancient spear-thrower called an atlatl. "This is the stone point with sinew lashing. This is very fragile. This is about 2,800 years old." Opening one drawer after another, Dixon displays dozens of other artifacts — arrows, some decorated with red ... Read More
A Wary Eye on ‘Big Oil’ Funding Energy Research
October 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The public investment in energy research has declined rapidly from its historic high during America's last major spasm of national interest in the topic, following the Arab oil embargo in the late 1970s. Three decades ago, 18 percent of all federal R&D money went into energy. Today, amid what many scientists consider a more fundamental crisis, the U.S. government now spends 1.6 percent of its R&D budget on energy. As a result, universities that have long done much of that research increasingly turn to a different source of funding: corporations with deep pockets and a vested ... Read More
Different Cultures, Different Robots
October 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Cultures have their own songs, holidays, special foods ... and robots. Selma Sabanovic, an associate professor of informatics at Indiana University, described why last week during a talk on "Emotion in Robot Cultures" at the 7th International Conference on Design and Emotion in Chicago. People building social robots in the West and in Japan are interested in ending up with two very different types of machines, she explained. Western robots are engineered to more explicitly express emotion, while those from Japan are generally as expressive as the masks worn by actors in traditional ... Read More