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Robot (image copyright: istockphoto.com)

It is now 50 years since, on 4 October 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first ever artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. It was able to circle Earth in roughly 96 minutes, at an altitude of about 150 miles, travelling at a speed of 18,000mph, crossing the US seven times a day. Inside the sphere of polished aluminium were two radio transmitters, and batteries.

Even though modern satellites make the technology used in Sputnik look extremely primitive it was a milestone in history. To read more about Sputnik see the Independent.

In 2007 we have already experienced more floods, droughts and storms than any other year on record, amounting to a 'mega disaster' according to Sir John Holmes, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, reported the Guardian.

Only half of the international disasters the UN dealt with two years ago had anything to do with climate, whereas this year only one of the thirteen emergency appeals has not been climate-related.

In spite of very little media attention there have been absolutely devastating floods across Africa this year. In Ghana for example, more than 400,000 people have been left homeless as a result of flooding. Flooding is likely to become more common, as a warming planet will cause an increase in the number of storms, while higher levels of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide make it more difficult for plants to draw groundwater.

A breakthrough in genetic engineering has resulted in the breeding of a see-through frog, reported the National Geographic.

Professor Masayuki Sumida from the Institute of Amphibian Biology at Hiroshima University in Japan intends to use the frog as a humane learning tool. 'You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life, as you don’t have to dissect it,' he announced at an academic meeting last week.

New studies into the behaviour of chimpanzees have shown that they have a very different sense of fairness in comparison to human beings, the New Scientist has reported.

When it comes to making a deal humans have a propensity to compare their own outcomes with those of any other people involved. In a game called the 'ultimatum game', a player can either accept or reject a portion of money that has been divided up by an anonymous partner. While the economically rational decision would be to accept the free money, people will often to choose to reject a deal completely if they feel that they are receiving too small a fraction of the total amount available.

Chimpanzees were observed in a simplified version of the game where two players divided by a Plexiglas screen had to share out 10 raisins between them, and 95% of the time where the first chimp decided to give themselves an uneven proportion of the raisins the second chimp still accepted being left with a bad deal, such as only two out of ten raisins. In contrast only 55% of humans would accept such measly shares when they knew that their partner could have decided to share the rewards equally.

James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego says, 'These are important results, because they suggest that the willingness to bear costs to punish others is a uniquely human trait.'

Nature has reported that a new method of producing painkillers using the active ingredient from chilli peppers has been developed which will kill pain without producing numbness or preventing movement.

Current local anaesthetics work by blocking all the channels in a nerve cell, consequently blocking movement and sensation as well as pain. The new technique combines two compounds which home in on pain-sensing nerves in the targeted area, leaving other functions unaffected. The discovery will be particularly useful situations where patients are required to be able to move or control muscles, such as in childbirth and some dental procedures.

The recent outbreak of the mysterious bluetongue disease, for which there is no vaccine, could potentially change the landscape of Britain forever – hills dotted with sheep could become a thing of the past. There is, however, a reason for British farmers to be optimistic, report the BBC. According to Professor Peter Mertens at the Institute of Animal Health, Pirbright, Surrey: 'The only thing saving us from bluetongue is our climate. There is hope. If we start having frost, it will kill off the majority of adult midges. A few good frosts will really bring the midge season to an end. When that happens it's the end of transmission.'

The virus is unable to replicate below 15 degrees Celcius. 'Hopefully we are going to get some really nasty cold weather, a really bad winter with lots of snow would be perfect.'

The Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be built on the site of Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile, has now joined the race to become the largest telescope in the world. Due to be completed in 2016, it will be capable of producing images up to 10 times as sharp as the Hubble Space Telescope.

The GMT will have an aperture of 24.5 metres, which is much larger than world’s current largest telescopes - the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii; but larger telescopes still, such as the Thirty Metre Telescope, and a 42-metre telescope called the European Extremely Large Telescope are also planned in the next decade.

Astronomers hope to look at extrasolar planetary systems, the formation of stars, galaxies and black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy with the telescope. Read more in the New Scientist.

The largest offshore wind farm in the world, which will occupy 90 square miles off the coast of Kent, has been given the go-ahead by the government and should be providing clean power for a quarter of homes in London by 2010, reported the Guardian.

IBM’s plans to create a robot that learns how to learn could one day lead to 'the Singularity', according to the Times. This would be a point in the future when artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass human intelligence, and the status of humans in society will be equivalent to that of am amoeba, or possibly a domestic cat.

Children spend the first few years of their lives learning how to carry out basic tasks, but the rest of our lives building on that knowledge so that we can learn how to do other things. Robots have not really been able to do that – they can learn but they constantly need to be shown what to do. The new robot that IBM are working on, which has been named Joshua Blue (from the same family tree as Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer), is having its software modelled on the brain of a child. This is because IBM believe that if a machine is to develop a sense of meaning about the world, as a child does at the age of three, it must have a sense of superstition and forgetfulness.

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