Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
A robot salamander created at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology supports its developers' theory of how animals made the transition from swimming to walking.
Having already established that real salamanders will switch from a walking gait to a swimming motion if a particular brain stem area was electrically stimulated, team leader Auke Jan Ijspeert hypothesised that two separate nerve patterns were involved, one for walking and one for swimming.
The team then built a robot salamander embodying these ideas and an artificial nervous system based on that of the lamprey. As the current applied to the 'spinal cord' is increased, the walking motion accelerates until it reaches its maximum and then the sinuous swimming action kicks in.
The significance is not simply that it works - the robot is only doing what it was designed to - but that it shows that a walking 'circuit' could have evolved in the first amphibians as a relatively simple add-on to the existing ability to swim.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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