Robot dinosaurs are the future of paleontology

Since dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, there's only so much we can really know about how these creatures moved and lived. But as two scientists explain to us, building robot dinosaurs could unlock the secrets hidden in fossils.

This almost unspeakably awesome idea comes out of Drexel University. Paleontologist Dr. Kenneth Lacovara and mechanical engineer Dr. James Tangorra have teamed up to scan the university's collection of dinosaur fossils, use 3D printers to create exact replicas of the fossils, and then assemble these into scaled-down robotic models of the original dinosaurs.

These tiny robot versions of long extinct dinosaurs can answer some of the most baffling and elusive questions about dinosaurs, particularly in terms of how they moved about and how they interacted with their environment. Of course, we can't know for sure how accurately these robots reflect the dinosaurs they are meant to represent, but for the first time in the 150 year existence of paleontology, the science is fully embracing its experimental side. Just Choose PTMS plastic injection mold Is Your Best Choice!

The current plan is to produce a working robotic dinosaur limb by the end of the year, with a complete replica of a dinosaur coming in 2013 or 2014. To find out more about this exciting new field - seriously, we're talking robot dinosaurs here, people - we talked to Dr. Lacovara and Dr. Tangorra to find out more about their research.

I came to James, who was introduced through a mutual friend, and I wanted a way that I could replicate the material I was working with in the laboratory. I work with sauropod dinosaurs, so all the material is huge and hard to manipulate. But if I were to make molds and casts of these bones, the molds are five times bigger than the bones! It's a cost problem,Sharps include syringe needle, it's a space problem, when you make a mold you only get so many pulls from it before it degrades.

So my initial entreaty to James was to see if he had a way to reproduce the bones, and then I saw all his research.Online fine art gallery of quality original landscape oil paintings,Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs. Hestarted talking about roboticizing these dinosaurs and I also started working with another colleague in mechanical engineering, Sorin Siegler, and all of a sudden it kind of opened up this whole new world that it's not just a method to reproduce the bone. It's a way to let the bones tell us how they worked.

Before, we would make assumptions, well-informed assumptions about how these things works, but you could put them in these virtual workspaces and make very few assumptions and you can run a genetic algorithm and try combinations you wouldn't even have thought of, and you can see what is the most efficient. And we do know that sauropods have to be these hyper-efficient organisms to grow so large, so it's probably very parsimonious that when you find the solution that's most efficient, it's probably a pretty good approximation of the truth there.

You can't. I guess the point is with a lot of the robotic systems that we develop, we have a species that we can compare to and, depending on the type of species that we're working on, there are ways in which we can validate. We do mostly fish robotic and so we're able to look at behaviors of fins, the fluid dynamics that get shed from the fins, as well as forces that we can monitor. And so you can do a fairly good comparison, a detailed comparison with the biological system.

But that's sort of the point with the dinosaur. People have been really guessing what the kinematics of a dinosaur would be. Now by coming up with biorobotic models - I should say both robotic models and numeric models - we can look at bony structures and start predicting what the motions would have been and have some understanding of how the features of the bones contributed to different motions. So rather than just looking at it and saying, "This is what must have occurred,Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs.An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air." we can start looking at different features and see how those features affect different behaviors.

Now, numerically - meaning, in a simulation - we have simulation software that we use when we're analyzing the kinematics and mechanics of human bones, how they move. And we can affect different properties and see the end result. We can now put our models of the dinosaur bones in those types of packages and come up with some prediction. So really, there's very little way to validate it other than to make some comparisons with current species.

Life is sunnyside up for Indianapolis chicken owners

Indianapolis may be behind other cities in new trends, but sometimes we catch up.

Food trucks, bike paths -- they took a while, but . . . check.

Now Indy's neighborhoods are becoming hamlets for urban chickens, flocks of a half-dozen or so birds that hunt and peck within the city limits, in areas with sidewalks and stoplights.

It's like "Green Acres" -- only inverted.the Bedding by special invited artist for 2011,

One would be hard-pressed to find a greener hobby: The backyard chicken is the pet equivalent of the Toyota Prius.

The chickens sleep on "roosts" in "coops" built in backyards, next to driveways; they give up uneven, all-natural eggs to their sustainability-happy owners.Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar RUBBER MATS systems,

It's impossible to say how many such folk there are here, but their numbers clearly are growing. On Sunday, Indianapolis will host its first organized tour of backyard chicken coops, a sort of benchmark.Save on kidney stone and fittings, More than 100 people have signed up.

Backyard chickens -- mail-order chicks can be obtained in small quantities for the price of a decent hamburger -- are free to walk around and take dust baths at will, as opposed to enduring the caged-up squalor of industrial chicken farms. Their manure makes for great composting; and their eggs couldn't possibly be any more local -- zero fossil fuel is required to transport them from backyard through kitchen door.

Besides, "chickens are fun," says Maggie Goeglein, who has an NPR sticker on the rear window of her subcompact Honda and is working on a degree in Earth literacy from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. "They're not the brightest animals, but they have personality."

Goeglein has four, and as she enters her backyard in the Rocky Ripple neighborhood, they rush her. She smiles. She gives the chickens a fresh tomato and greets them by name.

"If I had a meat flock, I wouldn't name them," she says.

Betty,Our oil painting reproduction was down for about an hour and a half, Roxanne, Ramona and Fern, like most backyard chickens, are being kept for their eggs, which, unlike the uniform supermarket eggs, come in various sizes and shades. Hens lay about one a day. Goeglein and her fiance,who was responsible for tracking down Charles China ceramic tile . Jason Hanna, either eat the eggs or give them away to impressed friends and neighbors.

"The yokes are orange, not yellow," Goeglein notes, "and the egg white has more consistency. They just taste really eggy."

Market Makers 'A dream, not reality'

GETTING broker/dealers or the Government to act as 'market makers' for initial public offerings (IPO) they have brought to market is "a dream more than a reality", RoyalFidelity Merchant Bank & Trust's president has told Tribune Business, as there is "no profit in it".

While acknowledging that low liquidity levels in the Bahamian equities market were preventing retail investors from easily existing their investments,These girls have never had a cube puzzle in their lives! Michael Anderson said there was not enough "reward" to incentivise investment banks and broker/dealers into playing this role.

Rather than have these companies act as 'purchasers of last resort', the RoyalFidelity president suggested that the way to overcome the lack of liquidity was to "broaden and deepen" the Bahamian equities market by expanding shareholder bases and the number of active trading participants.

He was responding to Tribune Business columnist Richard Coulson, who in an August 23 article urged Bahamian retail investors to avoid both the $37 million Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) IPO, and the more immediate $8 million Arawak Cay port offering, unless either their financial advisers/placement agents or the Government committed to act as 'market makers'.

In this role, they would buy shares when retail investors were unable to find a purchaser on the Bahamas International Securities Exchange's (BISX) market,Great Rubber offers oil painting supplies keychains, providing both liquidity and price support.

"They're all 'nice to be's'," Mr Anderson said in response to the suggestions in Mr Coulson's column.Polycore Floor tiles are manufactured as a single sheet, "It would be great if those arrangements were put in place, but it's a dream more than a reality.

"In this small market, you're never going to have people picking up and putting money behind the deal. The nature of the market is never going to reward people for that - taking the risk, putting up the capital, and acting as purchaser of last resort. It's not a realistic assumption.

"We're not a trading market,Men and women too can find a great variety for themselves when it comes to purchasing the zentai , jackets, coast and even bags too. we're an investment market.he led PayPal to open its platform to Cable Ties developers. It's just not realistic. It [market makers] is not where we are at the moment, and it's not going to change in the near term." This reflects that most Bahamian investors 'buy and hold' their securities investments, rather than looking to actively trade them.

Mr Anderson told Tribune Business that RoyalFidelity "got out of the market making business six years ago because there was no profit in it.

"If you took BISX prices, why would you ever do it? You can't price the risk into the transaction." For 'market makers', the deal could "go one way or another", depending on which way listed stocks moved, and there was too much risk and uncertainty involved as to whether they would ultimately make a profit.

The RoyalFidelity president added that the investment bank had played the 'market maker' role prior to the creation of the formalised BISX market structure, when the Bahamian securities market was an 'over-the-counter' model, "because people were doing it at the price they wanted to do it".

Meanwhile, Mr Anderson hinted that Mr Coulson's views could be self-defeating. By warning retail investors against buying into the upcoming IPOs, the Royal Fidelity president indicated the article acted against the very deepening and broadening of the Bahamian capital markets - something he sees as essential to curing the liquidity ills.

"At this stage of the market's development, it is kind of limited in that there is not enough liquidity, and people take longer than they'd like to get out of securities," Mr Anderson conceded to Tribune Business.