Jeremy Shere

Scientists and engineers at MIT have created a new, experimental robot called Nexi that can appear to express human emotions like anger, surprise and sadness through a series of facial expressions.

The machine is an MDS robot, which stands for mobile, dexterous and social. And, indeed, as you can see in this clip, Nexi is all of those things …

Which raises a few questions. First, why do we want robots to act and appear as human as possible? Do we? I few years ago I remember reading an article in Popular Science about a roboticist named David Hanson who made a working robot head that looked exactly like his girlfriend. Using several motors and other electronic doo-dads covered by a flexible plastic skin molded to look like his girlfriend, Hanson could make the head move and model various facial expressions. And it freaked people out because of a phenomenon called the Uncanny Valley. The basic idea is that people are attracted to robots and avatars that look human–up to a point. But beyond that point–when the robot looks almost but not quite human–people are repulsed. An article in the online magazine Slate makes the point that however good the graphics are in video games, renderings of human figure always come off as decidedly creepy when you see their faces close up. The bodies seem alive but the faces look dead, devoid of any human spark.

Not that this is a problem with Nexi, which looks nothing like a real person and very much like a robot. But Nexi is clearly a step in the direction of making robots look and act like actual people. And I’ve always wondered–why do we feel the need or desire to recreate ourselves in robot form? The most useful robots are ones that look like machines–robot arms on assembly lines, those robot vacuum cleaners that scoot around the floor like oversize hockey pucks … while human-like robots are essentially useless, as far as I can tell. Even in Star Wars, C-3PO was always standing around annoying everyone while R2-D2 did all the hard work. (Although I suppose Data from Star Trek Next Generation was pretty cool, to be fair.)

I’m not trying to make a utilitarian argument. Research and invention are not (nor should they be) necessarily spurred by function or need. Creativity, curiosity and invention are just as important. But this desire for robots that look like us still strikes me as curious. In movies and science fiction literature, at least, androids are almost always dangerous and feared–I, Robot, Aliens and its sequels, 2001, Blade Runner, etc.

Anyhow, I wonder what you think. Would you look forward to a future where robots have become so much like us that it’s hard to tell the difference?

Is this man pregnant? Not really. But sort of. There is, in fact, a fetus inside his distended belly. But it’s the fetus of his unborn, malformed twin brother.

I know this sounds like bad science fiction or something straight out of the pages of the National Inquirer. But it’s legit.

Here’s the story . . .

All his life, Sanju Bhagat, a farmer living in the city of Nagput, in India, had a big belly. He wasn’t a fat man; in fact, his face, arms and legs were stick-figure thin. But his stomach was huge. It was so round and oddly taught that Bhagat looked pregnant.

Then, in 1999, the 36-year-old Bhagat started to have trouble breathing. Fearing that the bulge inside his abdomen was caused by a giant tumor, Bhagat was whisked to the hospital for an emergency operation. When the surgeons cut into his belly to remove the tumor, gallons of fluid splashed out. When the lead surgeon reached inside the body cavity to feel around for what they still thought was a tumor, he encountered something entirely unexpected and almost unspeakably grisly: bones, limbs, human hair and a pair of perfectly formed human hands complete with long fingernails.

What the doctors pulled out of Bhagat was the mishappen body of his unborn twin brother.

How is this possible? Bhagat had a bizarre and extremely rare condition called fetus in fetu. What happens is that when the twin feti are in the womb, one gets absorbed by, or trapped inside, the other. This happens very early in pregnancy. One twins grows normally while the trapped lives on as a parasite, leaching off its sibling’s blood supply.

Normally, both twins die in utero because neither gets enough nutrients to survive. But in very rare cases, as with Bhagat, both twins are born alive. The dominant twin grows and develops normally except for a noticeable bulge in his (or her) belly. The nested twin, meanwhile, survives for a time, living as a parasite and feeding off his host’s blood.

How rare is this condition? There are fewer than 90 known cases in medical history. And in most of those instances, the entombed twin is discovered and excised early on.

But, incredibly, Bhagat carried his brother inside him for three and a half decades.

Today, Bhagat is reportedly fine and lives a relatively normal life–at least as normal as one can be knowing that you gave birth to your own twin.

But hey, stranger things have happened. Or, actually, maybe not. This is probably one of the strangest things that can happen to anyone.

Source: ABC News

If you can’t get enough of this strange tale, check out the video below. But be warned: some of the images are pretty disturbing. This footage is not for the squeamish.

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A movie called “Expelled,” pitting intelligent design against Darwinism and featuring actor and conservative writer Ben Stein, is due out in theaters this April.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that movie trailers can be misleading. Perhaps this film is a fair-minded, even handed investigation of the place of religion in academic science. As a former grad student in the humanities who somehow managed to earn a Ph.D. in English lit, I have first-hand experience with the biases and sometimes insular thinking of the academy.

However, based on repeated viewings of the trailer, it appears that Expelled is merely a slick, well-produced bit of creationist propaganda–the latest conservative salvo in the ongoing culture wars timed to strike during an election year.

The film’s argument, such as it is, is that any scientist in (and presumably also out) of academia who dares to question the theory of evolution is immediately shunned, ridiculed and denied tenure. As such, “Big Science,” as it’s called in the movie, is accused of systematically oppressing scholars who dissent from the mainstream, Darwinist line–a point underscored, bizarrely, with images of the ovens at Auschwitz.

Let’s pause here for a second. The trailer, which lasts perhaps five minutes, includes two prominent references to Nazi Germany–one clip shows Hitler making a speech, the other shows various concentration camps and emaciated Holocaust victims. The film maker’s intention, I assume, is to obliquely compare the oppressive tactics of “Big Science” to the genocidal policies of the Nazis. (And, by extension, the film equates the dissenting scientists it champions with victims of the Holocaust.)

Check out the trailer here:

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At first this struck me as supremely weird. But then it seemed to make sense. Intelligent design and its precursor, creationism, have always had about them a whiff of desperation, an overeagerness to be taken seriously as bone fide science. Because that has not happened, proponents of intelligent design now resort to Michael Moore-like tactics of overkill and extreme, unabashed propaganda.

I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of intelligent design vs. evolution. There’s been a ton written about that, and you can read a good overview of the opposing viewpoints here and here.

But I do want to address the claim that scientists are being persecuted in academe because they challenge Darwin. Academe has its pros and cons, but overall it remains valuable as one of the few institutions where almost anything goes. Spend a few moments online and you’ll find papers written by professors arguing some of the strangest things. And this is good. Academics are for the most part professional skeptics, people trained to question, doubt and verify. Scientists are especially careful. You’ll rarely hear a scientist make a claim that something is outright true or that they’ve definitively proved something or once and for all solved a problem. As a science writer, I spend a lot of time talking with scientists about their research, and they’re always careful to explain that their findings are inconclusive, or incomplete, or open to question. In short, there are very few absolute truths in science.

But the Darwinian theory of evolution comes about as close as you can to attaining the status of rock-solid fact. Over the past century and a half, supporting evidence has piled up. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming. Einstein’s theory of general relativity seemed utterly odd and contrary to common sense when it was first proposed. But the evidence backs it up, so we accept E=MC2 as fact. The same can be said for evolution.

So if there are in fact scientists out there whose careers have been derailed by their support for intelligent design, it’s not due to the sinister machinations of an evil, “Big Science” cabal. It’s because the scientists in question produced shoddy work. Natural selection is a testable theory that’s been verified time and again. Intelligent design is a theological concept that cannot be definitively tested and proven either correct or incorrect. Ergo, it’s not science.

And that’s the main point. There’s plenty of room in academe for creationism and intelligent design–in departments of religion, philosophy, sociology and other disciplines. But intelligent design is not science. And scientists who stake their reputations defending it as such are taking a risk in the same way that an astronomer who argues that the sun revolves around the earth (an idea once accepted as gospel truth) is certain to be met with ridicule.

Again, to be clear, I’m basing this entirely on a five minute trailer. So go see the actual movie when it comes out and make up your own mind about its merits. And let me know what you think.

Sources: Expelled website, Skeptic’s Dictionary