In the News

In the News is a monthly round-up of research news. We try to provide two links for each story: first, a media story showing how research is being presented to the public and, second, the original research. In the News is compiled by Stephen Zachary.

HUMANS

1. Singer, Emily, “A Test for 400 Inherited Diseases,” TechnologyReview.com, Jan. 14, 2011.

based on: Bell, Callum J., et al., “Carrier Testing for Severe Childhood Recessive Diseases by Next-Generation Sequencing,” Sci. Transl. Med., Jan. 2011.

ANIMALS

1. Kluger, Jeffrey, “Dog Might Provide Clues on How Language is Acquired,” The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2011.

based on: Pilley, John W., and Reid, Alliston K., “Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents,” ScienceDirect.com, 2010.

2. “Mammoth ‘could be reborn in four years’,” The Telegraph, Jan. 13, 2011.

based on: Kato, Hiromi, et al., “Recovery of cell nuclei from 15,000 years old mammoth tissues and its injection into mouse enucleated matured oocytes,” Proceedings of the Japan Academy, May 2009.

MACHINES

1. Paul, Ian, “IBM’s Supercomputer ‘Watson’ Wins Jeopardy Practice Round,” PCWorld.com, Jan. 14, 2011.

based on: Ferrucci, David, “Build Watson: an overview of DeepQA for the Jeopardy! challenge,” Proceedings of the 19th international conference on parallel architectures and compilation techniques, 2010.

2. Spitznagel, Eric, “The Robot in the Next Cubicle,” Businessweek.com, Jan. 14, 2011.

HUMANS

1. Kloc, Joe, “Into the Uncanny Valley,” SeedMagazine.com, Nov. 16, 2009.

based on: Steckenfinger, S.A. and Ghazanfar, A.A., “Monkey Visual Behavior Falls into the Uncanny Valley,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sc