One of the challenging field in Artificial Intelligence is Face recognition,  People can recognize the emotion others by looking at other faces, and not more than a second it will know whether it's angry, happy, or sad. But not with a computer, it need a complex algorithm to know whether the image contain happy faces, sad or else.

So when someone come with other ideas about Face Recognition surely it make one step closer to make a really smart computer (software).  That's happen  not so long ago, Researchers  At Department of Artificial Intelligence (DIA) of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) have, in conjunction with Madrid’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has developed an algorithm that make a software capable of processing 30 images per second to recognize a person's facial expressions in real time, and categorize it into six prototype expression, anger, disgust , fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

This software although it can process a sequence of images, and recognizing the expression,  even still a prototype, it can be run on desktop computer or even a laptop. But of course it won't run on our pentium 166 Mhz.

The prototype analyzes the face of person sitting in front a camera connected to a computer, then the system analyses the person's face  through several boxes, each “attached” to or focusing on part of the user’s face. These boxes monitor the user’s facial movements until they manage to determine what the facial expression is by comparison with the expressions captured from different people (333 sequences) from the Cohn-Kanade database.

So far it has 89% success chances, not bad for a prototype.

One thing that comes to mind is this software has a really good chance to adopt in video chatting to analyze whether our chatting friend is happy or not, or perhaps got to do with e-commerce solutions, and also put that in front of the cashier store, to check the people and analyze whether the customer happy or feel bad after they do some shopping.

The results of this research were published in the January issue of Pattern Analysis and Applications in an article authored by Luis Baumela and Enrique Muñoz, of the DIA, and José Miguel Buenaposada, of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid’s College of Computer Systems Engineering. http://www.springerlink.com/content/q075h33723m475k1/?p=d626d623f4294fde878ed45706cd3971π=2

Hmm.. this is a very latest news regarding a founding of a Frog Fossil in Madagaskar. Well It's a frog but the different is the size of the frog, it's so huge compare to current size of the frog, we could call it a grand-grand-grand mother of the frog.

A team of researchers, led by Stony Brook University paleontologist David Krause, has discovered the remains in Madagascar of what may be the largest frog ever to exist.

The 16-inch, 10-pound ancient frog, scientifically named Beelzebufo, or devil frog, links a group of frogs that lived 65 to 70 million years ago with frogs living today in South America.

Discovery of the voracious predatory fossil frog -- reported on-line this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) -- is significant in that it may provide direct evidence of a one-time land connection between Madagascar, the largest island off Africa's southeast coast, and South America.

To identify Beelzebufo and determine its relationship to other frogs, Krause collaborated with fossil frog experts Susan Evans, lead author of the PNAS article, and Marc Jones of the University College London. The authors concluded that the new frog represents the first known occurrence of a fossil group in Madagascar with living representatives in South America.

"Beelzebufo appears to be a very close relative of a group of South American frogs known as 'ceratophyrines,' or 'pac-man' frogs, because of their immense mouths," said Krause, whose research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The ceratophryines are known to camouflage themselves in their surroundings, then ambush predators.

"The finding presents a real puzzle biogeographically, particularly because of the poor fossil record of frogs on southern continents," said Krause. "We're asking ourselves, 'What's a 'South American' frog doing half-way around the world, in Madagascar?'"

He said that because frogs "are not adept at dispersal across marine barriers, and since the few fossil frogs that are known from the Late Cretaceous in Africa are unrelated to Beelzebufo, one possibility is that there was a land connection between South America and Madagascar during that period."

Some geoscientists have suggested a lingering physical link between South America and Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous Period -- a link involving Antarctica. Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous was much warmer than it is today.

"The occurrence of this frog in Madagascar and its relatives' existence in South America provides strong evidence that the supercontinent Gondwana 'disassembled' during the latest part of the Cretaceous," said Richard Lane, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

Krause and colleagues have hypothesized this connection based on previous discoveries of sauropod and theropod dinosaurs, crocodiles and mammals in Madagascar that were very closely related to forms in South America.

Beelzebufo is one of the largest frogs on record and was perhaps the largest frog ever to exist. The size and robustness of its bones and its relatedness to the rotund South American forms indicates it was also probably the heaviest frog to exist.

The size, girth, appearance, and predatory nature of the frog prompted its discoverers to call it the "armored frog from hell." They derived the genus name from the Greek word for devil (Beelzebub) and the Latin word for toad (bufo). The species name, ampinga, means "shield."

The largest living frog today is the goliath frog of West Africa, which attains lengths of 12.5 inches and weights of 7.2 pounds. The largest frog alive on Madagascar today, at just over four inches long, "would have been a nice hors d'oeuvre for Beelzebufo," Krause said.

Since the discovery of the first bones found in northwestern Madagascar in 1993, Krause and his team have gathered some 75 fossil fragments of Beelzebufo. Through the accumulation of these fossils, the team has been able to reconstruct the frog's skeleton, including nearly the entire skull.

Not only was the frog huge, it was powerful in design, had a protective shield, an extremely wide mouth and powerful jaws. These features made Beelzebufo capable of killing lizards and other small vertebrates, perhaps even hatchling dinosaurs.

Researchers in Japan come with some research for using a new proteins as storage device. It means there's a way to replace conventional magnetic and optical storage systems, which are quickly approaching their memory storage capacities.

As we know that proteins are the main source of our storage system in the brain. Scientist has come long way to exploring the possibility to use proteins and others biological materials to build memory based devices, that has a potential capabilities to  processing faster and have a greater storage capacity than current existing materials. One of the challenge is use some known proteins for practical use.

Tetsuro Majima and colleagues used a special fluorescent protein to etch or "record" a specific information pattern on a glass slide. Using a novel combination of light and chemicals, the researchers demonstrated that they could "read" the pattern and subsequently erase it at will.

source: http://www.sciencedaily.com

Have you wonder why those people that lurking around in game shop is a man, or the crowd at your game center is a man?, I suspect that because it the way man brain behave, our brain from thousand year ago, is trained for a competition, and that's what a game about right? A competition and an adventure to get a better challenge.

Well, My guess is a bit missed, Allan Reiss, MD and his colleagues recently published a paper in the journal of psychiatric research, have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during vido-game play

"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Dr Alan Reiss, senior author of the study and the Howard C. Robbins Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has long been interested in studying gender differences; in 2005, he published a study showing that men and women process humor differently. He and his colleagues became interested in exploring the concept of territoriality, and they determined the best way to do so was with a simple computer game.

They conducted an experiment to a group of male and female, and After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain's mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn't the case with women.) Three structures within the reward circuit - the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex - were also shown to influence each other much more in men than in women. And the better connected this circuit was, the better males performed in the game.

The findings indicate, the researchers said, that successfully acquiring territory in a computer game format is more rewarding for men than for women. And Reiss, for one, isn't surprised. "I think it's fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial," he said. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species-they're the males."