Improbable Research

Robotic Chess Players are not new. But robots which play Chess via a touch-screen are. For this reason, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology has just received a US patent for their ‘Board Game System Utilizing a Robot Arm’.
The emphasis on the ‘arm’ part is perhaps an understatement of their achievements, for the drawings show a semi-complete humanoid-bot playing chess. This is one of the very few inventions to implement a robot which operates a touch-screen (initially designed for humans) via the prodding of its robotic arm.
The University previously published details of the supporting research which led to the patentable invention in their paper ‘The Multifunctional Interactive Touch Panel System for Entertainment Robot’ (caution: 6MB .pdf)

Note: Because of the re-configurable touch-screen the bot can also play Checkers, Go, GoBang, and Machang.

“A complete theory of icicle shape, including tip growth, self-similarity and the ripple instability, is currently lacking.”

Prompting professor Stephen W. Morris and Antony Szu-Han Chen from the Department of Physics, at the University of Toronto, Canada to construct ‘An apparatus for the controlled growth of icicles’. The team used their specially designed table-top apparatus in an attempt to grow what they call ‘ideal icicles’:

A study called The Sexual Unification of Germany tells what happened, on paper and in some people’s heads, when East Germany hooked up with West.

Ingrid Sharp

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners. Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

With bedbugs much in the news [and see the the EPA/CDC joint statement on bedbug control], let us not forget the Ig Nobel Prize-winning life’s work of Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

See part of her Ig lecture in the video here. And you might enjoy reading her monograph “Huis, Bed en Beestjes” [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31, and her many other related publications.

This month’s Quasi-Poetical-Research-Paper-Title-of-the-Month is “On Quartzite Lenticles in the Schists of South-Eastern Anglesey” read by Edward Greenly (who also read the abstract of the paper) at a meeting of the British Association, in Liverpool on September, 1896.

BONUS: Edward Greenly also wrote The metalliferous mines of Parys Mountain.

Big, albeit to some people icky, maggot news:

“Lucifensin, the Long-Sought Antimicrobial Factor of Medicinal Maggots of the Blowfly Lucilia sericata,” Lenka Monincova, Zdenek Voburka, Robert Bem, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, vol. 67, 2010, pp. 455–66. (Thanks to Mitch Dushay for bringing this to our attention.) The image here shows “Left toe neuroischaemic foot ulcer of female diabetic patient at the time of larvae removal”. The authors, in Prague, report: