To explore how groups of cockroaches make collective decisions, scientists have created a robotic cockroach that the real insects accept as one of their own.

The robot doesn’t look anything like a cockroach to human eyes.

“It looks like an electronic matchbox,” said Jose Halloy, a researcher at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. But that doesn’t matter, he says, “because in fact it has to look like a cockroach from a cockroach perspective.”

Basically, it has to smell like a cockroach. The scientists coat the boxy robots with a chemical, a cockroach smell, so the real roaches won’t run away.

Full Story: NPR.

See also: Ancient Scorpion Was Bigger Than Car.

(Both via Irreality News Wire).

This is an old story. How did I not hear about this before?

Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.

If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.

The grafted heads could be “excellent models” for investigating brain function in human babies after periods of no blood flow, known as ischemia, they claim.

“Our main purpose is to investigate how the transplanted brain can develop and maintain function after prolonged total brain ischemia,” researcher Nobufumi Kawai, at the Jichi Medical School in Tochigi, told New Scientist. “And we tried to investigate the effect of lowering the temperature of the brain during the grafting.”

Full Story: New Scientist.

(Thanks James).

Is the Voynich Manuscript a hoax? A recent report suggests so:

A breakthrough comes with the publication in Cryptologia this April of an article by Austrian researcher Dr Andreas Schinner, a theoretical physicist and software engineer at the Johannes Kepler University. Schinner analysed the text of the manuscript using specialist statistics capable of handling quasi-stochastic distributions, and found that the manuscript’s statistical properties were consistent with a hoax consisting of meaningless gibberish produced using Rugg’s method or a similar quasi-random method.

Full Story: Knowledge Modeling Group Research Blog.

Huh.

For 250 years, the cryptic inscription has exercised the minds of Britain’s finest theologians, historians and scientists, including Charles Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and, most recently, the Second World War code-breakers of Bletchley Park.

But an anonymous American researcher was credited yesterday with the best stab yet at what the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. – carved on the Shepherd’s Monument at Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffordshire – might actually signify.

The answer appears to be “Jesus (As Deity) Defy” – a message left by an 18th century Christian sect Priory of Sion, which was forced to keep its views secret since the Church of England thought they were heretical. On first impressions, this rather perplexing answer may disappoint those who believed the letters pointed the way to the final destination of the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus is said to have used during the Last Supper. But Shugborough Hall was holding on to its hopes last night, since the Priory of Sion was the spiritual successor to the Knights Templar, who were known as the keepers of the Holy Grail.
The stone monument, built around 1748, contains a carved relief of Nicholas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie II in reverse. Beneath it are the letters. The researcher, who applied standard codebreaking methods, initially came up with the message “Jesus H Defy” but says the H stands for Christ, hence the translation into “as deity”. This is said to give the message a meaning of defiance against prevailing Christian norms.

Link.

“A US researcher says he has “definitely” found the lost civilisation of Atlantis in the watery deep off Cyprus, adding his theory to a mystery which has baffled explorers for centuries.”

Hoax update.

Link (via Posthuman Blues).

Anthropology student and nudist Ellen Woodall spent a summer working as a researcher at a nudist colony and discovered that nudist colonies are just as closed minded and cruel as mainstream society. Ain’t that something?

Link.