You could get the horizontal velocity from putting it at the top of a space elevator and pointing it sideways... But seriously, you think they'd have figured it out haha. They don't point it straight up...point it at an angle. And probably once you're out of the atmostphere, you can use rocket boosters/fuel much more efficiently. But what do I know.

They talk about that in the summary. They say that after absorbing blue light, the electrons in that channel protein can move. This will likely result in modulating the probability of channel opening (which in turns allows ions to flow into or out of the cell, changing its membrane potential). The change in membrane potential will cause an increase or decrease in neurotransmitter vesicle exocytosis rates...which will eventually propogate to the brain via retinal ganglion cells (I actually didn't read in detail -- is this a special type of ganglion cell? In which case it will directly modulate the probability of action potential induction).

Wish I had mod points, this is hilarious. Gold.

I agree with the other responses to this, but come on, this is interesting. If it weren't for this, would you have heard about all the research that starvation states could improve longevity? That studying the pathways activated by those states in cells could point us to direct therapies to increase lifespan? I found it exceedingly interesting.

If you can't run, cycle. Get that heart beating. Peace.

If I remember correctly, google snapped up both Boston Dynamics as well as the winner of the DARPA challenge, the Japanese company "SHAFT". I wonder if some kind of cross-flow of information has improved BD's stuff?

EDIT* Arkins original Robot Schema paper was in *1989*, not his 1998 book http://ijr.sagepub.com/content...

It actually sounds like a "Schema Architecture" that Arkins proposed in 1998 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catego.... You can implement it in about 10 lines of python because it's just that: the sum of attractive (goals) and repelling (obstacles) force vectors, weighted by the inverse of the distance squared. I was surprised OP didn't mention the Schema architecture, because it is exactly that, and since it sounds like a (simulated) robot game...

Your paper on newborn looking is really interesting. I build robotic models of the early visuo-motor system and am super interested in neonates but it's extremely hard to get any data from them and so I pretty much don't have any data from less than 8 weeks, which is really unfortunate.

The purpose of peer review is not to replicate results, it is to determine whether the methods are sound, as OP said.

What *exactly* is preventing them from replicating is: thousands of hours and millions of dollars of equipment. Not everyone has access to a trillion dollar LHC or super high tech bio lab, and even if the reviewer does, he is doing his own research and cannot spend his grant money or time to the experiment described in the paper just for the purpose of peer review.

Now, you might suggest re-vamping the system so that there is specific funding for scientists to peer review papers, but that is insane since there are literally thousands of papers published every month, and that is only counting the highest tiers of journals and proceedings.

A recent PLOS article (free to view!) analyses modern research, coming to the conclusion that most research findings are false.
TLDR: Because of the nature of the statistics used and the fact that only positive results are reported.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Is that his stage name? What a badass name though, seriously.

Nevermind :). I just tried routing from the closest train station to a place I used to take a bus to, and it has me walking the whole way :)

huh, one of the check boxes says "rosen basu wo tukau" (use city buses). Maybe the info just isn't in there yet for some places? I know it's routed me through city buses before :) But that's in Tokyo... R

Err, I posed as AC a second ago, and forgot to post the link :) Anyways, all Japanese people I know use this site to route (mostly between train stations?), but it gives you all things including normal buses, high speed buses, shinkansen, walking, water ferries, etc. I don't know if they have an english version though... http://transit.loco.yahoo.co.jp/