Messi must be quaking in his boots... Robocup kicks off in Germany - with the aim of beating human champions by 2050

By Damien Gayle

The Robocup kicked off in Germany this weekend, but it looked like it might be a long time before they're challenging the likes of Lionel Messi.

Students and researchers from all over Europe fielded teams over three days from March 30 to April 1 in Magdeburg, central Germany.

These pictures show German team Bembelbots, from Goethe University, Frankfurt, competing against Spanish side SPIteam from University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid.

More than 35 teams from 12 nations participated in the event, showing off their robots in four different leagues.

The Robocup was established in Japan with the mission of fielding a team of robots capable of winning against the human football world champions by 2050.

Since then it has expanded in other areas including rescue and home help.

According to the Robocup website, the event's aim is to advance the 'state of the art' of artificial intelligence.

'Building a robot to play soccer game itself do not generate significant social and economic impact, but the accomplishment will certainly considered as a major achievement of the field,' the website says.

'We call this kind of project as a landmark project. RoboCup is a landmark project as well as a standard problem.'

The website adds: 'By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.

'We propose that this goal to be the one of the grand challenges shared by robotics and AI community for next 50 years.'

Getting shirty: The robots seem to have had some kind of disagreement on pitch - where's the ref?

Skills: A robot of the Spainish SPIteam holds the ball as his opponent tries to challenge for the ball

Saved: The goalkeeper robot of the Spanish SPIteam blocks the ball

Half time oranges: Robots hang on a battery charging station during a break from play

Prepare for a new era of oil shocks

By Martin Wolf

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Oil prices are up. Barack Obama is to blame. Drilling in the US is the solution. This is the mantra from the president’s opponents. All presidents tend to get the blame for high fuel prices. But with the price of gasoline nearing $4 a gallon, Mr Obama is getting it by the barrel load.

This may be good politics. But it is absurd. Oil, unlike natural gas, is a globally traded commodity, whose price is set in world markets. In 2010, the US produced 7.8m barrels a day, 9 per cent of the world’s supply. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the US lacks spare capacity: it is a price taker. Responding to his critics, Mr Obama said: “We are drilling more. We are producing more. But the fact is, producing more oil at home isn’t enough to bring gas prices down overnight.” These remarks are correct, except for the last word. Producing more oil would have next to no effect on oil prices.

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Moreover, if there is a specific cause for the rise in oil prices, it is the tightening of sanctions on Iran, which Republicans support. If, as many desire, military action is taken, the impact on oil prices and the world economy will be far greater.

In the longer run, a big reduction in US demand, still 20 per cent of the world’s total, might make an appreciable difference to prices. Moreover, the relative wastefulness of US oil use, compared with other high-income countries, would make such a reduction quite easy to achieve. The best way to make this happen would be to raise prices, via higher taxation. But that policy is deemed un-American. It is a policy fit only for European wimps.

Yet, despite the absurd politicking, we should be concerned about the economic impact of high oil prices: a rise of $10 in the price of oil shifts $320bn a year from higher-spending consumers to lower-spending producers, within and across countries. The 15 per cent rise since December 2011 would shift close to $500bn. The real price of oil is also very high, by historical standards (see chart). Further rises would take the world into uncharted territory.

In short, higher oil prices are a threat. So what is going to happen?

In a recent note, Goldman Sachs argues that a 10 per cent rise in oil prices tends to lower US gross domestic product by 0.2 percentage points after one year and by 0.4 percentage points after two. In the European Union, the impact is smaller: a reduction of 0.2 percentage points in the first year, but no further reduction thereafter.

Since the actual rise has been 15 per cent since December, the impact on US and EU GDP would be a reduction of 0.3 percentage points over the first year – appreciable, but not calamitous. Such a price rise would lower US household incomes by about 0.5 per cent. Moreover, crossing the threshold of $4 a gallon might be significant when confidence is fragile, as it is now.

Goldman also suggests the factors that would determine the size of any adverse impact.

The first is whether the rise in prices is caused by demand or a shock to supply, with the latter being more disruptive. The answer, it suggests, is that demand is now the principal cause of higher prices, though the tightening of sanctions on Iran would be more important. The Paris-based International Energy Agency, in its latest monthly report, even qualifies this view. It agrees that “there may be no actual physical supply disruption at present deriving from the Iranian ‘issue’. But there are ongoing non-OPEC outages totalling around 750,000 barrels a day”.

The second factor is how much spare capacity exists. The answer: not much. Inventories in high-income oil markets are low (see chart). Saudi Arabian production is now at 30-year highs, which suggests limited spare capacity. Moreover, the growth of world oil supply has been persistently slow, at just below 1 per cent a year over the past decade, despite generally high oil prices. Thus, capacity is structurally tight. That explains the level and the volatility of prices over the past decade. With potential global economic growth at 4 per cent a year, oil supply growing at 1 per cent and the lack of easy alternatives to oil as a transport fuel, supply is likely to become tighter.

A third factor is what is happening in other commodity markets. Here the news is good: natural gas prices have been falling, while agricultural prices have not been so much of a problem this year. This should limit the inflationary impact.

A final consideration is the monetary response. Here the news remains favourable. Central banks are likely to ignore movements in commodity prices, particularly ones whose impact is contractionary, provided they see no pass-through into wages. They are right to do so.

In all, Goldman concludes, the price increase is a “brake”, not a “break”, in growth. But Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, warns against too much complacency. He notes that the EU’s net imports of oil will cost 2.8 per cent of GDP at present prices, against an average of 1.7 per cent between 2000 and 2010. Given the frailties of the EU economy, the dangers are evident.

Furthermore, in this stressed oil market, further spikes in prices are quite possible. A war with Iran may be the most frightening possibility. But danger is always present, given the political instabilities in places where oil is produced. Moreover, the world is going to remain stuck in this danger zone, given the soaring demand for oil from rapidly growing emerging countries. The IEA suggests that Chinese sales of private light-duty vehicles will reach 50m a year by 2035, even under an energy-efficient scenario. The implications of such growth in vehicle fleets are quite obvious.

The world will be vulnerable to high oil prices and repeated shocks, so long as supply is stagnant, demand buoyant and unrest likely – in short, so long as it remains as it now is. For the US, the best response would be to lower the oil-intensity of its economy, to reduce vulnerability to these shocks. Higher prices would help deliver this. But why does it let all the revenue go to foreigners? It makes far more sense to tax imports and keep some of it, instead.

Spicy Compound May Boost Heart Health

by Kim Carollo / ABC News
Some people can’t get enough of the painful pleasure of spicy foods. Now, new research on hamsters suggests that those who like it hot may get some added heart-health benefits from capsaicinoids, the compounds that give chili peppers from jalepenos to habaneros their kick.

Scientists from the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied how capsaicinoids — capsaicin and its chemical relatives — affected the blood vessels of hamsters. Researchers fed hamsters diets high in cholesterol, and spiced up the food for some groups of the animals with varying levels of capsaicinoids.

The hamsters fed any capsaicinoids had lower levels of cholesterol in their blood, particularly LDL or “bad” cholesterol. They also had decreased plaque in their arteries compared with the hamsters that got no capsaicinoids.

The findings were presented today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego.

Zhen-Yu Chen, a professor of food and nutritional science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and one of the study’s authors, said the findings give scientists a better idea of just how spicy foods might work to improve heart health in humans.

“But we certainly do not recommend that people start consuming chilies to an excess,” Chen said in a press release. “They may be a nice supplement, however, for people who find the hot flavor pleasant.”

Scientists have been hot on the trail of capsaicin’s potential health benefits in recent years. The compound is currently used as an effective remedy for pain associated with arthritis, neuropathy and psoriasis. Dr. Paul Bosland, co-founder and director of New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute, told ABC News that capsaicin works against pain by prompting the body to produce endorphins.

“The endorphins work to block the heat. The body produces them in response to the heat, which it senses as pain,” Bosland said.

Some studies have also suggested that capsaicin may help prevent prostate cancer.

Spicy foods may even improve metabolism. A 2011 study found that foods flavored with spices like turmeric, paprika, cinnamon, rosemary, oregano and garlic powder lowered insulin and triglyceride levels after a meal in overweight but healthy male volunteers.

More work is needed on the connection between spicy compounds and cardiac health, but for now, some researchers say, that burn in your mouth should make you feel good.

Viewpoint: How hackers could decapitate the internet

By Prof Alan Woodward

A recent threat, purportedly from the hacker group Anonymous, stated boldly that its members would stop the internet on 31 March.

The term "Operation Blackout" was coined and it caused much discussion in all the usual forums.
Those issuing the threat even stated how they would do it. They claimed they could disable the Domain Name Service (known by engineers as the DNS) and that would stop the internet. How so?
The Domain Name Service is what converts the web addresses you type into your browser (such as www.bbc.co.uk) into what the internet actually uses: IP addresses (something like 212.58.244.66).
It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless.

The theory behind the proposed attack is based on the fact that the Domain Name Service is a tree structure: it starts with 13 servers at the top level and each of those talks to the next level down, which then pass it on to a further level down, and so on.

When a change is made at the top level it is copied out across the net so that when you look up what is effectively your local copy of the phone book, it takes you to the correct place.

If somehow one could prevent some or all of the 13 top level members of the DNS from working, specifically from communicating with others, then this would disrupt the remainder of the tree, and very quickly no-one would be able to use the addresses that we all typically know.

Overwhelmed
When the threat was made, it did cause some concern as the would-be hackers correctly identified the locations of the top level systems.

But, that information was relatively easy to come by from the internet itself.

The suggestion was made that the hackers could mount what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the top level of the DNS.

A DDOS attack is one where you simply flood a webserver with so many requests that it can no longer respond to legitimate requests.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the computer security firm Sophos, likens it to "15 fat men trying to fit through a revolving door all at once - nothing moves".

One way the hackers might generate enough traffic is by hijacking others' computers to send the requests.

They could use a virus to turn the machines into "bots" to do their bidding. The innocent owners need never be aware.

This technique was used to prevent access to Interpol's website on 28 February 2012. Hackers identifying themselves with the Anonymous movement committed the act - apparently as retaliation against recent arrests.

It is just one of many organisations to have fallen victim to the manoeuvre over the years.

"If the attacker has enough bandwidth, almost anything can be taken down," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the anti-malware firm F-Secure told me.

"In 2004, the massive botnet created by the Mydoom worm briefly shut down Google.com."

Amplified assault
So the big question is whether it is possible to use a similar process to generate enough traffic to stop the whole internet.

As ever, the answer is "that depends". Not surprisingly the authorities know which are the particularly critical elements of the DNS and they have plans to protect them.

The 13 top-level systems are actually in different countries, are looked after by different organisations and run on different technologies.

We can be as sure as one can ever be when dealing with the internet, that the top level of DNS can be kept secure.

But there is a potential problem if hackers subvert the way the DNS has been set up to make it part of the attack.

This could be done by a process dubbed "amplification" which exploits two facts:

A DNS query returns far more information than was in the request itself.

It is relatively easy to falsify the address from which a query was sent.

To carry out the assault the hacker would first identify a target system and then create an army of bots spoofing its IP address.

This botnet would then send a large number of requests to the DNS which would reply, resulting in a much larger amount of data being fired at the target, causing it to be swamped.

Create several such botnets and select several targets and you can cause the DNS to flood the very network it is supposed to be serving.

BH Consulting's information security expert Brian Honan agrees there is a real-world risk.
"It should be noted though that this disruption, if successful, would be localised to segments of the internet vulnerable to these attacks," he told me.

"Unfortunately despite this vulnerability being widely known about for many years a large proportion of DNS servers are still not configured correctly to prevent this type of attack."

Nightmare scenario
Recently one network provider suffered what appeared to be just such an attack that employed 140,000 machines from the Domain Name Service.

The attack was able to generate such an avalanche of data that it completely overwhelmed the network.

There are relatively simple ways of reconfiguring the machines within the Domain Name Service so that they conduct their searches in an alternative way that doesn't allow this "amplification". But few machines do this.

There are technologies such as domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC) which, although originally designed to meet other threats, could be used to mitigate the effects of some forms of amplification. But only a fortnight ago a study showed that 40% of the US government's part of the DNS had not implemented it, despite it being US government policy to do so, which suggests that even when there are standards that might help they are of little help if not widely implemented.

And, consider for a moment what would happen if the DNS network was used to attack itself using such an amplification technique? The resulting torrent of data could render significant portions of the web unusable, preventing all of us from accessing the systems we have come to rely upon in our daily lives.

So to those who say our Domain Name Service is secure and can never be used to disable to internet, I say, never say never.

The man machines? Scientists develop plastic skin that BLEEDS red liquid - and can even heal itself

Robots that 'bleed' like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator have come one step closer to reality.
Scientists have created a plastic 'skin' that oozes red blood when cut.

It can also 'heal' itself, building tiny molecular bridges inside in response to damage.
The red 'blood' might sound like a pointless Halloween novelty - but the idea is that the 'skin' can warn engineers that a structure such as an aicraft wing has been damaged.

The material could provide self-healing surfaces for a multitude of products ranging from mobile phones and laptops to cars, say researchers.

When cut, the plastic turns from clear to red along the line of the damage, mimicking what happens to skin.

It reacts to ordinary light, or changes in temperature or acidity, by mending broken molecular ‘bridges’ to heal itself.

U.S. scientists told how they created the material at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in San Diego, California.

Lead researcher Professor Marek Urban, from the University of Southern Mississippi, said: ‘Mother Nature has endowed all kinds of biological systems with the ability to repair themselves.

‘Some we can see, like the skin healing and new bark forming in cuts on a tree trunk. Some are invisible, but help keep us alive and healthy, like the self-repair system that DNA uses to fix genetic damage to genes.

‘Our new plastic tries to mimic nature, issuing a red signal when damaged and then renewing itself when exposed to visible light, temperature or pH changes.’

The material could flag up damage to critical aircraft structures, said Prof Urban. A decision could then be taken whether to replace the component or ‘heal’ it with a burst of intense light.

Scratches on vehicle fenders could be repaired the same way.

Prof Urban’s team is now working on incorporating the technology into plastics that can withstand high temperatures.