Digitally Evolving To Be A Specialist


Now we have organisms in our computers digitally evolving to be a specialist. Division of labor is usually seen as efficient. We laud creatures from insects to captains of industry for operating highly differentiated systems. However it is difficult to start at time zero and run experiments with people or insects.

As a result the computer has come to our rescue once again and we will see if Adam Smith and evolution give us the same end point. Goldsby et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy for Science have given over their computer as a safe haven for digital organisms to evolve in peace, free from predators whether free market or hungry critters (though perhaps these two are the same)(1).

The starting points are colonies whose members can send or receive messages so the cost of changing to a different task is known. This knowledge isn’t lost, but gets established in the genome so that subsequent generations can build on decisions made by previous generations. There were 7 discrete logic tasks to get on with. Different experiments put moderate or high cost on task switching.

The control had no cost for switching so an organism could do whatever was needed in its location and could thus evolve into a generalist colony with everybody tackling everything whenever it came along.

The cost of task switching was written in as a delay of so many turns before the organism could start its new task. These delays were bad news for the colony that would be slower to prosper and the colony had to decide whether the task urgency outweighed the delay, and then store its knowledge in its genome for the benefit of future generations. A high cost meant waiting 50 turns, while the moderate cost meant waiting 25 turns.

Of course the inevitable happened – evolution towards specialist colonies with a strong division of labor. The higher the cost, the faster the evolution occurred. Communication was important in that it enabled synergies to work where groups managed to be more successful than individuals stuck without good communication.

Looks good for Adam Smith, but the problem comes in determining costs of switching in the broader sense. It’s not just the cost to the colony, or worse the colony owner, but the cost to the individual is forgotten. A termite, an ant or a bee doesn’t have quite the same desires and ambitions as an assembly worker in a car plant.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/07/1202233109.full.pdf



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Just Another Big Softy, But Now You See him, Now You Don’t


The new excitement on the block is that we have just another big softy, but now you see him, now you don’t.

Species from chameleons to squids have an interesting ability to change color to blend in with the background. Just the sort of ability many of us would have wished when we ended up somewhere either over-dressed or under-dressed.

Some while ago, Whitesides et al made a soft tetrapod that could lurch, crawl and undulate about the place like something you wouldn’t want to step on in poor light (1). It was tethered to its driver via pneumatics driving its fluid actuators deep in its silicone rubber body.

It is now a horse of a different color. It has developed a circulatory system and dyes can be pumped through its bendy body (2, 3). Not just plain dyes, but light sensitive dyes like fluorescent dyes or heat sensitive dyes.  There is local control of segment circuits so it can exhibit color patterns.

So we have a prototype soft, squidgy robot that can glow in the dark or hide in your cabbage patch and listen to the sweet nothings that you’re whispering in your neighbor’s shell-like auricular appendage.

This little beastie has a big advantage – it’s cheap. Even better, I would think it’s a great candidate for 3-D printing. But before we all rush out crying for our own squidgy tetrapod for Christmas, they still have to crack the external drive system and build the pneumatics into its body.

Computer control would clearly go hand in hand with that. The only thing that we have left to do is to define its mission statement so that it has a clear understanding of its place in the world. We don’t want to envision a future world with lots of cheap squidgy tetrapods running amok, changing color and causing trouble.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/51/20400.full.pdf+html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19286259
  3. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6096/828.abstract


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That’s My Song They’re Singing


That’s my song they’re singing is a critical realization in developing the personality of young crickets. Young field crickets don’t have ears like you and me. They develop a sort of equivalent on their front legs called a tympanum. We’re not talking about the subtleties of medieval architecture but about a membrane, like that in our middle ear, that vibrates in response to sound waves.

So very young crickets can’t hear any singing in the hot evenings, but as they hit adolescence they begin to develop their apparatus. DiRienzo et al in the latest J. Animal Behaviour took up the challenge of personality development of field crickets brought up with and without choral participation (1, 2).

Young crickets were kidnapped and divided into groups. Some were brought up in silence and some were brought up listening to taped numbers from a chorus of five males singing in their prime.

Personality questionnaires are out with crickets and so the only answer was to mix, match and sit back to watch the entertainment. Those deprived of growing up in the cacophony of song turned out to be more aggressive than crickets whose tympanums had been vibrating to the nightly rhythms of cheeky, chirpy males.

The idea used to explain this was that those who’d enjoyed the quiet life thought that cricket density was low so a bit of aggression could do them some good. If they had realized that cricket density was high, the aggression could get them into lots of fights which would take up too much time and energy when they could be devoting themselves to the numerous females that would also be around. Taking an easy come, easy go approach would be the way to go.

However another exciting side effect of chorality in the life of a maturing cricket was that those that had lots of singing in their lives grew bigger. Perhaps if your bigger, you don’t feel the need to pick fights by getting in the first blow. (See yesterday's post for example.)

Maybe Congreve was a student of cricket when he penned his immortal line ‘Musick has Charms to sooth a savage breast’ in The Mourning Bride in 1697.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347212003156
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19248230

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The Benefits Of Striking The First Blow

                          
                          Australian Desert Goby
                                           Wikipedia Creative Commons



The benefits of striking the first blow are large if you’re small. There are many reasons that males fight and this may be over food resources, or the love of their lives –­ territory usually includes both of these drivers, but the bigger, stronger individual most often are the ones to bet on. Interestingly, though, small individuals often get aggressive very quickly.

Svensson et al have been trying to make sense of this in this week’s PLoS ONE with a study using Australian Desert Gobies (1). These are pretty little fish where the males take care of the egg watching duties while the females go off and mind their own business.

The research team set up a goby with a nest to defend in their lab and then hypothesized that there would be fights if the resident and other fish thought that there were females to fight over, so they tempted the males with females for a couple of days and then let intruders in near the nest.

Of course, a fish has to do what a fish has to do and fights occurred. The degree of aggression was not dependent on there being sexy females in the offing. Consistently, when small males were given the nest to defend they went in hard and very fast and were generally successful in scaring off the intruder before he’d got himself organized.

Bigger defenders were not in such a hurry to attack first and showed no signs of a Napoleon Complex. Also there was no correlation with the size of the intruders. The small guys just didn’t hang around to discuss things in a fishy way, they knew the benefits of striking the first blow and went for it. In a long drawn out brawl, they would have almost inevitably lost. But their in fast and hard strategy worked.

Seems to be a strategy that is well known across species, so no surprises down under in the fishy lagoons.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043121


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Your Flexible Electric Friend – Coming Soon


Your flexible electric friend is­ coming soon. We’ll all need one. Electric cars are fast becoming the flavor of 2012 along with the assumption that they are greener than anything based on fossil fuels. As we frack and frack some more to squeeze natural gas out of its hiding place to drive our power stations, we will, of course, use some of it to generate the electricity to power our new car.

The question remains hanging in the air, why don’t we stuff that natural gas in our car and use it rather than go through a secondary and the tertiary process to get to the liquor store, but enough of this gloom and doom, we should look towards the blue skies.

One nice blue skies project that brightened my day is the Hiroko Project, which is quite close to becoming a reality (1). It’s based in Spain, but has roots as diverse as MIT’s town car concept.

It is another two-seater electric car, which has a satisfying futuristic design. Ready to race you at the traffic lights, it has a slightly VW Beetle look, but I hasten to add a futuristic beetle, not a retro one.

The downside is that it has a 75-mile range at present. That is a bit limiting if you are foolish enough to want to buzz around LA and its environs every day, but for simple commuting or retail therapy it will be fine. Especially when they fit inductive charging stations in parking lots so we can go and drink our skinny lattes with the beautiful people and come back after an hour or two of Facebooking and connecting with the Twittering classes to find our battery topped up.

But all this is nothing compared the big idea of Hiroko. It folds up to park on a dime. It leisurely tucks it rear wheels under its body like a Saluki hound folds itself up to sit in your favorite chair and balances on its nose.  As a driver you step out elegantly from a close to standing position. When getting in you do the same and your Hiroko casually stretches out taking you into a semi-recumbent posture ready to scoot off leaving the parking demons standing open mouthed before they can hand you a ticket.

My only thought is that being rear ended in a multi-vehicle pile up could be a tad unusual, but my mother always told me that I had too much imagination for my own good. I am already saving up for my first fold up car. If it gets Googled so that I just have to tell it where to go and don’t have to soil my hands on a steering wheel, I’ll be in heaven.

  1. http://www.hiriko.com/what-is-the-hiriko-project


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Sleep Deprived And Forgetful At The End Of A Long Vacation


Sleep deprived and forgetful at the end of a long vacation is par for the course for our youngsters. It won’t be long now before the kids are wending their weary way back to school. It is well established that we adults need our beauty sleep and it is Slow Wave Sleep, SWS, that we need to help us remember things.

Potkin and Bunney have observed that adolescents haven’t been studied very much in terms of the effects of sleep deprivation and have set out to remedy that with their study that was published last week in PLoS ONE (1).

They took 40 boys and girls between 10 and 14 and tested them at home (no music, TV or other distractions as we find when our kids are doing homework) and tested them with paired words sequences. They had to learn these and were then tested later. This was to test their semantic memory. This is part of the declarative memory, which we use to stuff facts away to spit them out later in term tests or trivia games.

There were two groups. One learned their paired words at 9 a.m. and were tested at 9 p.m. with no sleep during that 12-hour period. The other group learned their word pairs at 9 p.m. They were then tucked up to get a good night’s sleep before being tested at 9 a.m. the next day.

The results showed a clear improvement for the group that had a good night’s sleep. Their score was 21% better.

All of them were given a control working memory test in which they re-ordered letters and numbers in case there was a circadian rhythm factor. There wasn’t and sleep or no sleep made no difference to that working memory performance. Maybe you don’t ride a bicycle as well when you’re tired, but you don’t forget how to ride it.

We need to make sure our kids get 8 – 10 hours of sleep with as much SWS as possible before school days. Tricky in this electronic age. Reading a book under the cover with a flashlight doesn’t compare with the pull of interactive games on smartphones and tablets.



  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042191


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Worming Their Way Into Things That Don’t Concern Them


Worming their way into things that don’t concern them is a habit of security units throughout the globe. The trick is to do this at will, but also to be undetected. Not an easy task in this day and age where we are all at a degree of heightened awareness.

Seok et al have decided to take the brief quite literally and have emulated a segmented worm’s musculature with a soft flexible robot (1, 2). Worms have many advantages as potential spies as DARPA, who funded the work, recognize, but they are difficult to train. Hence the solution was to build a robot worm.

Robot worm spies have to be wriggly, silent and cheap. It helps if they don’t become incapacitated if accidentally stepped on by heavy boots. The team have gone a long way to cracking this. The outer body of the wormy robot is made out of polymer mesh and a Nickel/Titanium wire is coiled around the outside.

When heated in sections the differential expansion and contraction of the coil cause the worm to expand and contract sequentially and move the robot forward like the peristaltic motion of a live, segmented worm. With wire muscles on the left and the right, it can wriggle round corners.

So far speed is not its strong point. It can move across your floor at a rate of 18 m/hour. However if spotted and attacked with a hammer, it shrugs of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and gets back to its sluggish motion. In fact it is rather closer in appearance to a slug than a worm and may be better suited to wriggling around in gardens spying on the goings on behind the hedges, rather than in the drawing rooms of the good and the great.


  1. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6232458&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26arnumber%3D6232458
  2.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19200285




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