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Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

“The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain,” said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot’s principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs,” he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation “Wall-E”, Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.

This “multi-electrode array” (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit — it communicates with its “body” via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. “Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,” said Warwick.

“Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity” similar to what happens in a normal rat — or human — brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.

“Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways,” explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot’s sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions.

Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities — several MEA “brains” that the scientists can dock into the robot.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of experiments.

But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be attributed to quantity not quality.

Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Humans have 100 billion.

“This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where we can look — and control — the basic features in the way that we want. In a human brain, you can’t really do that,” he said.

For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.

The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s poorest big cities.

And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.

The sale price of the home may be an anomaly, but illustrates both the depths of the foreclosure crisis in Detroit and the rapid scuttling of vacant homes in some of the city’s impoverished neighborhoods.

The home, at 8111 Traverse Street, a few blocks from Detroit City Airport, was the nicest house on the block when it sold for $65,000 in November 2006, said neighbor Carl Upshaw. But the home was foreclosed last summer, and it wasn’t long until “the vultures closed in,” Upshaw said. “The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else.”

The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby.

Scrappers tore out the copper plumbing, the furnace and the light fixtures, taking everything of value, including the kitchen sink.

“It about doesn’t make sense to put the family out,” Upshaw said. “Once people are gone, you’re gonna lose the house in this neighborhood.”

Tuesday, the home was wide open. Doors leading into the kitchen and the basement were missing, and the front windows had been smashed. Weeds grew chest-high, and charred remains marked a spot where the garage recently burned.

Researchers said substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet, the scientists said in an online article this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species, scientists said.

Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events. There have been only five in our planet’s history, until now, scientists said.

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events.

“My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens,” Wake said.

The study was co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said.

It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction.

It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

No matter what the start date, data show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline, he said.

In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on in decline.

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The Bay Area’s back yard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.

“We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too,” Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened.

Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park.

This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size.

Second-quarter home prices fell 9.9 percent from a year earlier, giving 29 percent of owners negative equity, said Zillow, the Seattle-based service that offers values for more than 80 million homes. For those who bought at the 2006 peak of the housing market, 45 percent are now underwater, Zillow said.

Negative equity and declining prices are making it difficult for homeowners to sell property for a profit. Almost one-quarter of U.S. homes sold in the past year were for a loss, Zillow said. That contributes to the foreclosure rate because some homeowners can’t absorb the loss and end up surrendering their homes to the bank that holds the mortgage, said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s vice president of data and analytics.

“For homeowners who need to sell, this is a gravely serious situation,” Humphries said in an interview. “It can also be harmful to communities where the number of unsold homes adds more to inventory and puts downward pressure on prices.”

The highest percentages of homeowners with negative equity were located in California. In four of the state’s metropolitan areas — Stockton, Modesto, Merced and Vallejo-Fairfield — the number of homeowners whose mortgage debts exceeded the values of their properties topped 90 percent, Zillow said.

Pope was the oddball New Yorker who created the National Enquirer, the rag that gave the world headlines like “Mom Uses Son’s Face for an Ashtray” and sold 6.7 million copies in August 1977 with a sneaked cover photo of Elvis Presley laid out in his coffin at Graceland. Pope, who went to the Horace Mann prep school in New York and to MIT and worked in psy-ops for the CIA before starting the National Enquirer in 1952, is the subject of a respectful biography that argues that he belongs in the populist-press pantheon with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Maybe not. Still, “The Godfather of Tabloid” is an engaging saga of one man’s obsessive devotion to creating an entertaining alternative universe each week for four or five million Americans clutching their quarters at the supermarket check-out racks (which he conveniently owned). Pope’s Boswell, Jack Vitek, a onetime newspaperman now a journalism professor, gives him a little too much of the dubious credit for the tabloid bent of much of American pop culture today. But it’s fair to say that the man who sold 6.3 million copies with the headline “Drinking Beer Prevents Heart Attacks” deserves his due.

The pill is thought to disrupt an instinctive mechanism that brings people with complementary genes and immune systems together.

By passing on a wide-ranging set of immune system genes, they increase their chances of having a healthy child that is not vulnerable to infection.

Couples with different genes are also less likely to experience fertility problems or miscarriages.

Experts believe women are naturally attracted to men with immune system genes that differ their own because of their smell.

The major histocompatability complex (MHC) cluster of genes, which helps build proteins involved in the body’s immune response, also influences smell signals called pheromones.

Although pheromones may be almost unnoticeable at a conscious level, they can exert a potent effect.

A man’s pheromonal odour is partly determined by his MHC. From a woman’s point of view, a man with an alluring smell is also likely to have suitable immune system genes.

The new research provides evidence that the contraceptive pill can upset this process.

Researchers asked 100 women to sniff six male body odour samples from 97 volunteers and say which they preferred, with tests carried out both before and after the women had started taking the pill.

“The results showed that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odours,” the University of Liverpool’s Dr Craig Roberts, who led the study, said.

The cutter Healy will leave Barrow, Alaska, tomorrow on a three-week journey to map the Arctic Ocean floor in a relatively unexplored area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea, in an attempt to bolster US claims to the area by proving that it is part of its extended outer continental shelf.

The rush to stake out territory across the Arctic has intensified since last August, when a Russian submarine planted the nation’s flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole, which was viewed as a provocative land grab.

That triggered an immediate response from the Canadian Government, which within a week announced that it was going to build two new military bases in the Arctic wilderness, a warning shot in the new Cold War over the far North’s energy resources. The Healy will be joined by a Canadian icebreaker on September 6.

On board the Healy will be scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will use an echo sounder to make a three-dimensional map of the sea floor in an area known as the Chukchi borderland.

Claims for jobless benefits climbed 20,100 from June to 864,700, the biggest increase since December 1992, the Office for National Statistics said today in London. Economists predicted an increase of 17,000, according to the median of 31 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. Incomes rose the least in five years in the second quarter.

Gross domestic product shrank an annualized 2.4 percent in the three months ended June 30 after expanding 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average fell 2.1 percent, the most since Aug. 1.

Exports dropped for the first time in three years, robbing Japan of the engine that drove its longest postwar expansion, while record fuel and food prices deterred spending at home. Toyota Motor Corp. last week reported its worst earnings decline in five years as U.S. sales slumped, and Japan Airlines Corp. said it will cut wages to counter rising costs.

“The economy will keep flying at a low level this year as demand weakens, even from Europe and Asia,” said Hiromichi Shirakawa, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in Tokyo. “Japan’s economy is deteriorating.”