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Creators believe that one day computers will be able to relate to people

LONG BEACH, California – Albert Einstein looked around, made eye contact and smiled.

Of course, the renowned scientist has been dead for more than 50 years but he was reincarnated this week in the form of a so-called empathetic robot that pushes the boundaries of automation by being able to interact with people using emotional nuances.

The rubberized rendition of Einstein’s head and shoulders with piercing movable eyes, a shock of white hair and distinctive mustache dazzled a crowd of 1,500 at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that seeks to foster creativity among entrepreneurs, scientists and designers.

The robot Einstein follows people with his eyes and smiles or frowns as appropriate. Even up close, it looks surprisingly real. “It’s machine empathy,” roboticist David Hanson told the audience. “This is a robot that can understand feeling and mimic.

Einstein got his personality two weeks ago when Hanson’s contraption was married to software from the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego.

Einstein’s creators believe that one day computers will be able to relate to people — listening and responding at a level not yet seen.

Some of the same computer techniques were used in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Ed Ulbrich, the movie’s digital visual effect producer, showed the TED audience how Brad Pitt’s expressions were imposed on a computer-created version of him as an old man. It was a task that involved 155 people.

The latest version of Einstein, which is the fourth evolution of the robot, was created two months ago. Earlier Hanson robots are at museums, research institutes and universities around the world.

Hanson, an artist/roboticist based in Dallas, designed Einstein to mimic all of the face’s roughly 48 facial muscles. It uses 32 motors that are in some cases more versatile than the muscles they mimic. Two hidden cameras look out its life-like eyes.

Nicholas Butko, a graduate student at UC San Diego who accompanied Hanson to TED, said the goal is “to make computers that have basic perceptual capabilities — things that your brain does effortlessly that you never even think about.”

The robot’s software tracks 13 parameters, everything from the blink of an eye to the raise of an eyebrow or the wrinkle of a nose. More is in the works.

“One of our goals is to make a computer that can reliably tell how sincere someone’s smile is,” he said.

ABOARD RESEARCH VESSEL POINT LOBOS, Off the California Coast (AP) — A crane on a ship deck hoisted a 502-pound video camera and plopped it into the ocean for a 3,000-foot descent to the world of neon-glowing jellyfish, bug-eyed red rock cod and other still unknown slithery critters.

The so-called Eye-in-the-Sea camera would be added to the first observatory operating in deep sea water and become part of a new kind of scientific exploration to assess the impacts of climate change on marine life.

“Bye bye,” said marine scientist Edith Widder, who supervised the deployment last month as the bulking Web camera splashed into the water and disappeared into blackness. “Hope it works.”

The camera is one of many instruments powered by the Monterey Accelerated Research Station or MARS, an underwater observatory that began operating in November off the California coast.

The observatory, which looks like a giant metal pyramid at the bottom of the ocean, is connected to shore by 32 miles of cable and serves as a gigantic electrical outlet for equipment such as the camera.

Other instruments measure currents and seismic activity, while another part studies how higher acidity would affect marine life.

Scientists say the observatory’s success will spawn others around the world, at a time when scientists warn that coral reefs and other sea life are being harmed by rising ocean acidity from absorption of greenhouse gas pollution.

Previous deep sea exploration relied on battery-powered instruments that had to be fished from the water. But the observatory permits real time information to stream to shore, giving researchers a faster, better understanding of how greenhouse gas pollution is changing the ocean.

The $600,000 Web camera offers scientists, students and others the opportunity to watch life at 500 fathoms. The camera captures images illuminated with “far-red” lights, a spectrum of luminescence invisible to undersea animals.

“The revolution in oceanography is to replace expeditionary science with a permanent presence in the ocean in the deep sea,” said Widder, a senior scientist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association, a nonprofit that develops high-tech equipment for ocean study.

Back on the research vessel 22-miles from shore, scientists in a control room used joysticks and high-definition video relayed from cameras on a submersible robot to grab the camera’s bright-orange power cord. After about four painstaking hours of maneuvering the submersible, the researches used its robotic arm to plug the camera into the observatory.

Within minutes, a phone in the control room rang — the blurred, black and white video was streaming from the camera to researchers onshore. Also, researchers were able to twist and turn the camera remotely, and turn on the camera’s electronic bait: a circular pattern of blue, neon-like lights that mimic a luminescent jellyfish that lives at these depths.

Researchers were able to immediately make out a few lazy fish lying in the sand. Their expectation are high for the 24-hour camera: A previous, battery-powered version recorded images of a large, white squid that could be new to science, as well as a deep sea shark.

It took six years of planning to make the observatory a reality. It was scheduled to go live in February 2008, but after crews sunk it into its new deep water home, a leak was discovered in its main power supply, forcing it to be shut off and hauled back ashore.

The $13.5 million station is being watched closely by scientists all over the world, and is a test for the National Science Foundation’s proposed $400 million rollout of a network of similar observatories off the U.S. coast.

“With rising sea levels as a result of ocean warming and ice caps melting, we need better observations recorded regularly and openly to better quantify what’s happening to the oceans and the planet,” said John Orcutt, a professor of geophysics at University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The ocean is absorbing most of the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, which has resulting in increased acidity, according to published studies. Greenhouse gas pollution is also blamed for warming the ocean, a trend that, if allowed to continue, could kill a wide array of marine life, according to climate change studies.

In Canada, scientists plan to launch five similar observatories this summer, some even deeper, said Mairi Best, associate director of science for the Northeast Pacific Time-Series Undersea Networked Experiments.

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NEW YORK – Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie “Anaconda.” Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

“This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”

“If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door,” reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.

Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.  Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they’d found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)

The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis (”ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss”). That means “titanic boa from Cerrejon,” the region where it was found.

While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.

Conrad, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, called the find “just unbelievable…. It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get.”

Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.

The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology.

Graduate students unwrapping the fossils “realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake.”

So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is “the size of a large Florida grapefruit.”

So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.

Titanoboa’s size gives clues about its environment. A snake’s size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.

“It’s a leap” to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has “some potentially scary implications for what we’re doing to the climate today,” he said.

The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.

“We won’t have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation” in equatorial regions, he said.

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