The robot invasion may soon be coming to a warehouse near you. In a conventional warehouse, workers walk from shelf to shelf to fill orders, while in conveyor-based systems, boxes move past workers who pack them. A new warehouse design arranges rows and columns of freestanding shelves in a memory-chip-like grid serviced by robots. When a consumer submits an order, robots deliver the relevant shelving units to workers who pack the requested items in a box and ship them off allowing workers to fill orders two to three times faster than they could with conventional methods because the robots can work in parallel, allowing dozens of workers to fill dozens of orders simultaneously. The robotic system is also faster because the entire warehouse can adapt, in real time, to changes in demand by having the robots move shelves with popular items closer to the workers (pdf), where the shelves can be quickly retrieved while items that aren't selling are gradually moved farther away. Two giant warehouses have already been built for Staples and a third is being built for Walgreens where the software will also keep track of expiration dates to ensure that items that can go bad are sent out in the order that they're stocked.

Paid circulation at major newspapers in the United States declined sharply this year with readership at 609 papers that filed on Sunday falling 3.5% to 46,771,486. With the business model under extreme pressure, publishers have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers and increasing their internet presence. While newspapers now generate only a fraction of their income from their web sites -- online profits margins have been skyrocketing worldwide and now account for an average of 5.5% of total ad revenue and is projected to hit 10% by 2008-2009. Last week the NY Times provided an especially good example of how newspapers are tailoring their stories for the internet when they published a story by writer Tom Bissell on his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and supplemented the story with an Interactive Kilimanjaro Climb documenting Bissell's climb with 3D maps and video.

Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, presented a six-step program for reforming outdated US copyright laws in a speech at the New Media conference at Boston University expressing no patience with the "disconnect between the law and the technology" of media production and distribution. Sohn puts Fair Use at the top of the list for changes that will help return balance to copyright laws that have limited innovation, scholarship, creativity and free speech. In addition to the four-part legal test for fair use currently on the books, Sohn recommends that Congress add incidental, transformative and non-commercial personal uses to the list of fair uses enumerated in copyright law and expressly provide that making a digital copy for the purpose of indexing searches is not an infringement. In additional to Fair Use reform, Sohn advocates protecting a manufacturer of a technology from liability for the infringing activity of others if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, punishing a copyright holder who "knowingly or recklessly" sends out false takedown notices, promoting fair and accessible licensing of copyrighted works, limiting damages for the use of orphan works, and requiring copyright holders to provide notice of any limitations on users' ability to make fair or lawful uses of their products.

People deal with cognitive dissonance -- the clashing of conflicting thoughts -- by eliminating one of the thoughts. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth." Now experimenters at Yale have demonstrated that other primates employ the same psychological mechanism. In one experiment, a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M's and was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest -- he was now much more likely to reject the blue. Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher.

Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future.

Whose laws apply if astronauts from different countries get into a fight, make a patentable discovery, or damage equipment belonging to another country while on the International Space Station? According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 98 nations, states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. When the space station was assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency (ESA), partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. "It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking," said Dr Frans von der Dunk of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden. So what happens if a crime is committed in space? "If somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction," Dr. von der Dunk added.

Last week the NY Times provided an especially good example of how newspapers are melding disparate media on the internet to tell stories more effectively than on the printed page alone when they published an essay by writer Tom Bissell on his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and the contradictions inherent in having "paid a great sum to come to Tanzania to do something virtually no Tanzanian of sound mind would contemplate doing for free." To supplement the story, the Times created an Interactive Kilimanjaro Climb documenting Bissell's climb with 3D maps and video so readers can get a feel for what it's like to climb 15,100 ft up an inactive stratovolcano that includes the highest peak in Africa.

Researchers at the University Of Alabama In Huntsville have discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of "warm" gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons leaving the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter than previously calculated. In 2002 the same team reported finding large amounts of extra "soft" (relatively low-energy) x-rays coming from the vast space in the middle of galaxy clusters. Their cumulative mass was thought to account for as much as ten percent of the mass and gravity needed to hold together galaxies, galaxy clusters and perhaps the universe itself. When the team looked at data from a galaxy cluster in the southern sky, however, they found that energy from those additional soft x-rays doesn't look like it should. "The best, most logical explanation seems to be that a large fraction of the energy comes from electrons smashing into photons instead of from warm atoms and ions, which would have recognizable spectral emission lines," said Dr. Max Bonamente.

Nick Frey, the reigning national time-trial bicycle champion, is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major at Princeton who puts his knowledge to work in modifications to his racing bike. Once a bicycle is moving fast enough, nearly all the cyclist's strength goes into pushing aside air. Reducing that resistance by a relatively small amount can result in major increases in speed with minimal increased effort so one of Frey's innovations is enclosing his brake cables in a special housing shaped like an airplane wing that shields them from the wind, reducing the resistance on his bike. "It's like free speed," says Frey. "And in cycling, every second counts." Other improvements include the helmet he purchased to match his riding posture and the silicon gel between his wheel rims and tires that subtly changes the shape of his tires, making them more aerodynamic. Frey subjects his own performance to rigorous analysis and posts his training and performance results, along with details about various races, on his blog.

USA Today has an advance story on Google's plans to announce a new operating system, geared specifically for cellphones with partners that include Sprint, Motorola, Samsung and Japanese wireless giant NTT DoCoMo. Although details won't be released until later today the new G-system will be based on Linux overlaid with Java and Google hopes to have a branded device ready for worldwide shipment by spring. Mobile Web browsing is notoriously slow and Google plans to change that by providing easy access to the Internet at PC-type speeds. Google plans to basically give away the software developer tools, used by programmers to write new applications. "If you're a developer, you'll be able to develop (applications) for the new Google Phone very quickly," said Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation. AT&T and Verizon Wireless are noticeably absent from the coalition not wanting to support a device that favors Google over other providers. Sprint, the No. 3 carrier, supports the coalition, but it hasn't formally agreed to make the Google Phone available to its 54 million subscribers.

There are many tasks on Wikipedia. Some people fact check. Some people control vandalism. Some people correct spelling and punctuation. The activity that I most enjoy is doing the research to write in-depth articles for Wikipedia. I like to find a musician, an actor, a politician, or a scientist that I am interested in learning more about and write their biography from scratch. Last week my wife and I went to a concert by one of our favorite singers, Marie Daulne of Zap Mama. We wanted to get a photograph of her to put into the Creative Commons for the Wikipedia article so we went backstage after the show to meet her. Read my blog post on what happened after I told her that I was her Wikipedia biographer. Caution, this may not work for U2 or the Rolling Stones.

The Guardian has a story on a woman who was claims she is innocent and was apprehended 35 years after escaping prison by a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security. Linda Darby was convicted of killing her husband in 1970 and sentenced to life at an Indiana prison but escaped two years later by climbing over a barbed-wire fence at the Indiana Women's Prison. She knocked on a stranger's door in Indianapolis, telling the woman who answered that her cuts and scratches were from a fight with her boyfriend. In Indianapolis she met the man who would become her third husband and moved to his hometown of Pulaski, where they raised their two children and watched eight grandchildren grow up. As Linda Jo McElroy, she used a similar date of birth and social security number to her real ones which allowed a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security to identify her. Darby says she is innocent and fled prison because she did not want to serve time for another person's crime.

Engineers at the Centre for Advanced Materials Technology at the University of Sydney have found a way to use the elasticity of carbon nanotubes to make a material that will not only stop bullets penetrating material but actually rebound their force. Most bullet-proof jackets are currently made of multiple layers of Kevlar, Twaron or Dyneema fibres which stop bullets by absorbing and dispersing the impact energy to successive layers to prevent the bullet from penetrating. However, the dissipating forces can still cause non-penetrating injuries known as blunt force trauma that can damage critical organs. The investigation showed that nanotubes with larger radii can withstand higher bullet speeds (pdf) and estimates that body armor made from six layers of 100 micrometer nanotube yarns could bounce off a bullet with a muzzle energy of 320 Joules. "The dynamic properties of the materials we have found means that a bullet can be repelled with minimum or no damage to the wearer of a bullet proof vest."

People possess a remarkable ability for recalling pictures and researchers at Newcastle University are exploiting this characteristic to create graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords. With Draw a Secret (DAS) technology, users draw an image over a background, which is then encoded as an ordered sequence of cells. The software recalls the strokes, along with the number of times the pen is lifted. If a person chooses a flower background and then draws a butterfly as their secret password image onto it, they have to remember where they began on the grid and the order of their pen strokes. The "passpicture" is recognised as identical if the encoding is the same, not the drawing itself, which allows for some margin of error as the drawing does not have to be re-created exactly. The software has been initially designed for handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberry and Smartphone, but could soon be expanded to other areas. "The most exciting feature is that a simple enhancement simultaneously provides significantly enhanced usability and security," says computer scientist Jeff Yan.

Volcanic eruptions from the Deccan Flood Basalts in India that released huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may have had more to do with wiping out dinosaurs 65 million years ago than the meteorite strike at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Marine sediments drilled from the Chicxulub crater itself reveal that that the mass extinctions occurred 300,000 years after Chicxulub hit Earth. The Deccan volcanism began over a million years before the mass extinctions but it was a long cumulative process that continued releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere right up to the mass extinctions. "On land it must have been 7-8 degrees warmer," says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller. "The Chicxulub impact alone could not have caused the mass extinction, because this impact predates the mass extinction." Keller also postulates a second larger and still unidentified meteor strike after Chicxulub, that left the famous extraterrestrial layer of iridium found in rocks worldwide and pushed earth's ecosystem over the brink. But where's the crater? "I wish I knew," says Keller.