Could Robots Become Your Toddler's New Best Friend?

Could Robots Become Your Toddler's New Best Friend?

Schoolchildren come to love humanoid classmate after spending five months with him

	MACHINE AMONG US:  Scientists found that a humanoid robot was accepted by a group of toddlers after several months of exposure.

According to the robotics community, it's unlikely that any robot now on the market could hold your attention for more than 10 hours. (Actually, if you have a robot dog gathering dust on a closet shelf , you probably already know that.)

A new study, however, indicates that this threshold is poised to be broken—at least if the humans interacting with the machines are youngsters. Researchers found that a two-foot- (61-centimeter-) tall metal man easily won over a classroom of tykes, aged 18 to 24 months, who intermittently spent time with it over a five-month period. 

"Our results suggest that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for significant periods of time," University of California, San Diego, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

QRIO, a robot programmed with a slew of social functions, was placed in U.C. San Diego's Early Childhood Education Center 45 times over the five-month observation period. For the first 27 sessions, the robot was allowed access to its full arsenal of programmed social behaviors. In addition, a controller could send commands to the humanoid, prompting it to wave, dance, sit, stand, etcetera (although there was a lag time between the prompt and when the robot made the movement).

The tots began to increasingly interact with the robot and treat it more like a peer than an object during the first 11 sessions. The level of social activity increased dramatically when researchers added a new behavior to QRIO's repertoire: If a child touched the humanoid on its head, it would make a giggling noise.

"The contingency coupled with the positive reaction of giggling made clear to the children that the robot was responsive to them and served often to initiate interaction episodes," says study co-author Fumihide Tanaka, a researcher at U.C. San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation and at Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories, Inc.

For 15 sessions midway through the experiment, QRIO was programmed to repeatedly dance to the same song rather than interact with the kids. During these trials, the children became far less interested in the friendly automaton. For the final three sessions, however, QRIO could once again unleash its entire social arsenal.

Tanaka and his colleagues scored the quality of social interaction primarily based on where children touched the robot. A teddy bear and an inanimate toy robot named Robby accompanied QRIO during most of the observation period. The teddy bear was introduced first and prior to the introduction of the robots was very popular. But the stuffed animal was lost in the shuffle when QRIO and Robby came on the scene. Though the toddlers often manhandled Robby, they eventually began touching QRIO in a pattern similar to the way they touched one another—mostly on its arms and hands.

The only time they deviated from this behavior was when QRIO was programmed to giggle, at which point they frequently petted its face and head. Another indication that the little humans viewed robo-kid as a compeer was the way they reacted when QRIO ran out of juice and lay down as if to take a nap: Some of the children would try to wake and help it up, whereas others would cover it with a blanket.

"Our work suggests that touch integrated on the time-scale of a few minutes is a surprisingly effective index of social connectedness," Tanaka says. "Something akin to this index may be used by the human brain to evaluate its own sense of social well-being." He adds that social robots like QRIO could greatly enrich classrooms and assist teachers in early learning programs. 

Making Plastic Out of Pollution

Making Plastic Out of Pollution

An emerging crop of companies making plastic out of renewable resources and waste products promises to deliver an environmentally friendly harvest

	GOLDEN SOLUTION:  The material that comes out of Novomer's reactor is a honeylike liquid containing the bonded CO2 and epoxide, plus a small amount of the catalyst material, which is later filtered out.

Plastics have dramatically changed the way we live, allowing us to fabricate new and innovative tools, containers and even replaceable body parts like hips and knees, while also spawning a host of undesirable by-products, including nonbiodegradable trash and pollution from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Now an emerging industry is trying to polish plastic's environmentally tarnished image by using waste products such as carbon dioxide and Escherichia coli bacteria to make biodegradable and renewable polymers.

This trend continued Wednesday when Novomer, Inc., an Ithaca, N.Y.–based company that manufactures ecofriendly plastics and polymers using CO₂, announced that it had raised $6.6 million in a fund-raising campaign (led by venture capital firms Physic Ventures in San Francisco and Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, Mass.). The company says it plans to use the new monies to expand both its production capacity and development efforts. This new cash infusion comes on the heels of small business grants from the National Science Foundation ($500,000) and the U.S. Department of Energy ($100,000) for continued development of its polymerization catalyst systems.

The key ingredients in Novomer's polymer-making process are metallic catalysts, such as beta-diiminate zinc acetate, which bond greenhouse-gas causing molecules such as CO₂, as well as carbon monoxide and other renewable materials, to liquid epoxides.

DEGRADING:  A sample of Metabolix's biodegradable Mirel plastic: new and after 40 days of degradation in a compost.

"Plastics are more important right now than at any other point in history," says Cornell University chemistry professor Geoffrey Coates, Novomer's co-founder and chief scientific officer, who notes that industry has produced more plastic every year of the past 50 years. This includes not just commodities like milk jugs or CD cases, but also specialized biomedical devices such as heart stents and emerging technology such as solar cells. Whereas surgeons today may hold broken bones together with metal screws that subsequently must be removed after the break is healed, bioplastics hold the promise of surgical materials that serve the same purpose but safely degrade within the body negating further surgery.

Technology commercialization firm KensaGroup, LLC, formed Novomer in 2004 based on renewable polymer research conducted by a team of Cornell researchers. The group was led by Coates and former graduate student Scott Allen, a Novomer co-founder who is now the company's director of research and development.

Prior to its work, polymers based on biological materials were possible but they were more of a novelty because the prohibitive manufacturing cost discouraged large-scale production. Novomer's process is different from other bioplastic-making efforts in several ways, primarily because it is done at room temperature using relatively little energy, says company president, Charles Hamilton. This means that fossil fuels are not burned during the process. "We combine liquid epoxides with carbon dioxide in a reactor that's like a pressure cooker," he says. "Throw in a catalyst, and those two parts come together like a zipper. You create a very long chain of epoxides bonded to carbon dioxide."

The material that comes out of the reactor—the largest of which is about a one-gallon (four-liter) metal tank—is a honeylike liquid containing a small amount of the catalyst material, which is later filtered out. Novomer develops these polymers for companies that make plastic products, including Kodak. "It's very comparable to other large-scale polymers used to make computer cases, films and bottles," Hamilton says. Novomer's plan is to use CO₂ from businesses in other industries, such as concrete manufacturers and hydrogen producers, as the company scales its production systems.

When Cambridge, Mass.–based Metabolix, Inc., formed in 1992, the bioplastics industry was built "more on hope than anything else," says co-founder and chief scientific officer, Oliver Peoples. The commercialization of bioplastics began in earnest in 2001 when Cargill, Inc., a Minneapolis-based company that provides everything from agricultural products to risk management services, launched NatureWorks, LLC, to develop biopolymers derived completely from renewable resources at a cost on par with conventional plastics.

Metabolix creates plastic pellets using microorganisms such as E. coli. "The organism takes sugar and breaks it down, and the polymer is made inside the organism," he says. Metabolix extracts the polymer and recycles the waste. The pellets can be melted down and reshaped to create a variety of plastic products.

Peoples considers other bioplastics producers to be "fellow travelers," crucial to establishing a good reputation for polymers made from biodegradable and renewable resources. Such solidarity is important, because "it'll be a long time before you'll knock petroleum-based products out of the market," he says. "The bottom line is that people need to know these biodegradable plastics are available."

Efforts to continue making oil-based plastics could be hampered by the growing price of oil, even as the public's consumption of plastic materials grows unabated. "The future need for these materials is so great," Coates says, "there's plenty of space for all of these [bioplastics] companies."

Rising Seas Could Threaten Drinking Water Supplies

Rising Seas Could Threaten Drinking Water Supplies

As Earth’s rising temperature causes sea levels to rise, coastal communities have more to worry about than disappearing beaches—they could lose up to 50 percent more of their fresh water supplies than previously thought, a new study suggests.

Scientists had previously assumed that as the ocean's salty waters gradually invaded the shore, they would penetrate underground only as far as they did above ground.

But new simulations of the sea level rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—23 inches in the next 100 years—show that saltwater can mix with fresh groundwater, turning aquifers into undrinkable zones of brackish water.

"Most people are probably aware of the damage that rising sea levels can do above ground, but not underground, which is where the fresh water is," said study leader Motomu Ibaraki of Ohio State University.

The results of the study were presented on Oct. 30 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Sand texture

Just how far the saltwater will penetrate underground depends on the texture of sand found along a coastline—fine sands are more tightly packed, and so allow less water through than coarser sands.

Coastlines typically have layers of different types of sands, and the simulations run by the hydrologists showed that the more layers present, the more the saltwater and fresh water mix together. This mixing creates convection that stirs the two types of water into a brackish mixture with salt levels that are too high to drink.

Water that has more than 250 milligrams of salt per liter, which brackish water would have, is considered unsafe to drink because it causes dehydration.

According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, about half of the country depends on groundwater supplies for drinking water, and these sources would be endangered as sea levels crept inland.

While desalinating the brackish water would create more freshwater, it's still a very expensive process, Ibaraki said.

"To desalinate, we need energy, so our water problem would become an energy problem in the future," he said.

Areas at risk

The areas of the United States most likely to be flooded as sea levels rise are along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, especially low-lying Florida and Louisiana. (The West Coast is less vulnerable to sea level rise because it has more high ground along its coast.)

Worldwide, vulnerable areas include Southeast Asia, the Middle East and northern Europe.

"Almost 40 percent of the world population lives in coastal areas, less than 60 kilometers from the shoreline," said study team member Jun Mizuno, an Ohio State graduate student. "These regions may face loss of freshwater resources more than we originally thought." 

Fuel Without the Fossil

The Energy Challenge
Fuel Without the Fossil 

 

Mitch Mandich is among the entrepreneurs using chemical methods to try to make fuel from material like pine chips. 

DENVER — Mitch Mandich proudly showed off his baby, a 150-foot contraption of tanks, valves, hoppers, augers and fans. It hissed. It gurgled. An incongruous smell wafted through the air, the scent of turpentine.

Articles in this series will periodically examine the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy efficient, environmentally benign future.

 

In Denver, Bud Klepper of Range Fuels is testing distillation equipment in the race for a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Mr. Mandich’s machine devours pine chips from Georgia and turns them into an energy-rich gas, a step toward making liquid fuels. His company, Range Fuels, is near the front of the pack in a technology race that could have an impact on the way America powers its automotive fleet, and help ameliorate global warming.

“Somebody’s going to hit a home run here,” Mr. Mandich said. “We want to be first.”

For years, scientists have known that the building blocks in plant matter — not just corn kernels, but also corn stalks, wood chips, straw and even some household garbage — constituted an immense potential resource that could, in theory, help fill the gasoline tanks of America’s cars and trucks.

Mostly, they have focused on biology as a way to do it, tinkering with bacteria or fungi that could digest the plant material, known as biomass, and extract sugar that could be fermented into ethanol. But now, nipping at the heels of various companies using biological methods, is a new group of entrepreneurs, including Mr. Mandich, who favor chemistry.

They believe techniques borrowed from oil refining and other chemical industries will allow them to crack open big biological molecules, transforming them into ethanol or, even more interesting, into diesel and gasoline. Those latter fuels could be transported in existing pipelines and burned in existing engines without fuss. Advocates of the chemical methods say they may be flexible enough to go beyond traditional biomass, converting old tires or even human waste into clean transport fuel.

In Madison, Wis., a company called Virent Energy Systems is turning sugar into gasoline, diesel, kerosene and jet fuel, with the long-range plan of obtaining the sugars from biomass. In Ontario, Dynamotive Energy Systems is turning biomass into a form of oil, and in Chicago, a Honeywell subsidiary called UOP is doing something similar. In Irvine, Calif., BlueFire Ethanol is using acid to break down organic material for conversion to fuel.

Possibilities like these are coming to the fore at a time when rising oil prices have created an incentive to develop substitute fuels. Making them from biomass would be environmentally friendly in that, unlike standard gasoline or diesel, the fuels would not take long-stored carbon from underground and dump it into the air as carbon dioxide.

And unlike making ethanol from corn kernels, these techniques do not require significant amounts of natural gas or coal. Carbon dioxide, emitted in large volume when people burn fossil fuels, is the primary culprit in global warming.

Lately, these factors have resulted in a flood of investment capital into both biological and chemical techniques for using biomass. Experts consider both approaches promising, and they say it is too early to tell which will win.

“It’s not obvious, and I don’t think it will be obvious for a very long time,” Andrew Karsner, the assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in Washington. His department is awarding grants to support both approaches.

Experts say it is possible that more than one type of plant will reach commercial success, with the ideal technique for a given locale depending on what material is available to convert to fuel.

Range Fuels favors pine chips and other waste from softwood logging operations, largely because there is so much of it. Logging in Georgia, for instance, leaves behind about a quarter of the tree. “Bark, needles, cones, we use all of it,” said Mr. Mandich, chief executive of Range.

Range is a privately held company whose chief scientist, Bud Klepper, has been working on the two problems, creating gas from biomass and then converting it to liquid fuel, since the 1980s. The company is heavily backed by Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has turned his focus to energy investments.

Range broke ground this week on the first full-scale biomass-to-fuel plant in the United States, in Soperton, Ga. “Today marks the beginning of a new phase of our effort to make America more energy secure,” the secretary of energy, Samuel Bodman, said at the event. The plant, its cost not publicly disclosed, is expected to produce 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, with more capacity to be added later.

In Georgia alone, enough waste wood is available to make two billion gallons of ethanol a year, Mr. Mandich said. If all that material could be captured and converted to fuel, it could replace about 1 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption. 

Biomass of various types is abundant in every state, some of it gathered daily by garbage trucks. A study two years ago by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found that enough biomass is available in the United States to replace more than a third of the nation’s gasoline consumption, assuming the economics can be made to work.

Articles in this series will periodically examine the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy efficient, environmentally benign future.

The Bush administration is counting on biofuels to help limit the growth of petroleum demand, and environmentalists routinely include such fuels in their forecasts as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But to date, no one has shown that fuels from biomass can be made profitably, even when competing with gasoline at $3 a gallon.

Daniel M. Kammen, director for the renewable and appropriate energy laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I suspect we will have a trickle” of fuels from biomass in the next few years. But it will be only a trickle unless the government adopts quotas or offers additional support, he said.

Companies like Range that are trying to convert biomass by chemical methods follow one of two broad approaches. The first is to mix the material with steam to produce a gas known as synthesis gas, consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. With additional processing, that gas can be converted to liquid fuels. The second technique does not break the material down as far, creating a product that resembles oil that can then be refined into liquid fuel.

Research papers and patents are flying these days as scientists struggle to improve these methods. As with oil refineries, the final stages typically produce a variety of chemicals, of varying value, and the trick is to maximize production of the desirable chemicals. “Everybody is dealing with a byproduct they don’t want,” said Arnold Klann, the chief executive of BlueFire.

Range Fuels is one of the companies that turn biomass into a gas before converting it to liquid fuel. The company wants to make ethanol, a form of alcohol, but its technique produces less valuable varieties of alcohol as well. Company scientists are tweaking their approach to maximize the ethanol yield.

The other day, laboratory technicians grabbed samples of a yellow liquid emerging from the machinery and swirled it like a suspect vintage of chenin blanc. An expensive chemical analyzer called a gas chromatography machine stood in the corner. By using it, engineers can calculate what changes in temperature, pressure and flow rates would work best to produce ethanol in a full-scale commercial venture.

Overseeing the operation, Mr. Mandich radiated confidence. “You can’t have so many people at bat without hitting something,” he said.

As the nation seeks to develop new types of fuel, Congress has leaned heavily toward ethanol made from corn kernels, and it is the only alternative fuel available today in large volume. Ethanol benefits from a tax break and a mandate that a significant amount of it be blended into gasoline.

Turning biomass into gasoline would be simpler, requiring no changes in the nation’s cars or pipelines, but federal policy is tilting many research programs toward ethanol.

Range, for instance, could make any of several types of fuel from its pine chips. Asked whether the company chose ethanol for the 51-cent-a-gallon tax break, Mr. Klepper declared: “It’s the American way.”

The Green Dream Home

The Green Dream Home

The Wired LivingHome shows connectivity and sustainability can live together -- but it takes green to be green under this roof.

If the International Space Station and a Toyota Prius were to mate, the Wired LivingHome would be its offspring - a mix of space-age technology and earth-friendly design that makes the effort to save the planet seem, at first glance, a little less austere. 

The Wired LivingHome combines high design with the latest in green technology.

The five-bedroom, four-bathroom house is a joint project of Wired Magazine and the architectural firm LivingHomes and was constructed out of eleven glass and steel prefabricated modules on a sloping canyon lot in the exclusive Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The concept is to show that connectivity and sustainable living don't have to be mutually exclusive.

"Up to now, green has been thought of as really granola and you have to make a sacrifice," says Shiron Bell, one of the Wired LivingHome tour guides. "There's no sacrifice in this house at all."

The dwelling is literally built on a foundation of recycled materials that includes the glass in the windows and the steel girders that make up the modules. And the redwood planks that provide the distinctive exterior face have already had two other lives before this latest incarnation-once as the roof of an Army barracks and once as the trestles of a bridge.

Inside, the floors are made of bamboo, a plant that grows so quickly it nearly dares you to cut it down, walls are softened and warmed with coverings of hemp-and insulated with soybean fiber. There's a chair made of discarded margarine containers and a bench constructed of recycled milk cartons.

If that's all too low-tech for you, step inside one of the four bathrooms, which offer two water-saving flush options (depending on the nature of your pit stop). There's also a countertop range that won't burn your hands or anything else it's not supposed to, since it only conducts heat when in contact with cast iron cookware.

Touch smart computers can be found in almost every room, allowing you to control nearly every aspect of the house while monitoring energy and water usage. Heated family debates can be settled conclusively with a quick Internet fact check.

Every gallon of water and kilowatt of energy used in the house can be tracked on the Web.

On the more romantic side, the home's electronic control system allows you to automatically adjust the lighting, music and temperature of each room in the house. An upbeat Buena Vista Social Club salsa vibe in the living room can seamlessly slip into more subdued lighting and a chill, martini lounge atmosphere as you approach the master bedroom.

The home was designed by celebrated architect Ray Kappe, whose foray into sustainable architecture has led to experiments with prefabricated, modular units-in which some homes can be completely assembled in as little as one day.

But while the home is green, the price tag is hardly lean - the Wired LivingHome comes in at a bank-busting $4.3 million, a not-so-subtle reminder that conservation wrapped in luxury is not without its price.