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Now, the creation by Welsh scientists of the first robot in the world to make an independent scientific discovery has been named the fourth most significant discovery of 2009 by one of the world’s most influential magazines.

Adam, a computer that fully automates the scientific process, discovered in April how a baker’s yeast converts food like sugar into the amino acid lysine to produce the protein in bread.

The robot then devised experiments to test its predictions, ran experiments using laboratory robotics and interpreted the results, before repeating the cycle.

Adam was designed by Professor Ross King and colleagues at the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University to carry out each stage of the scientific process automatically without the need for further human intervention.

Its success was placed ahead of the discovery of water on the moon and the progress made this year at the large hadron collider in Switzerland – project managed by Welsh scientist Dr Lyn Evans – in Time magazine’s 10 most significant scientific discoveries of 2009. However, its importance was ranked behind the discoveries of our oldest human ancestor and a potential cure for colour blindness.

Time said of Adam: “By any standard, it was an elementary discovery — the identification of the role of about a dozen genes in a yeast cell. But what made this finding a major breakthrough was the unlikely form of the scientist: a robot.

“In April, Adam became the first robotic system to make a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input. Robots have long been used in experiments – their vast computational power assisted in the sequencing of the human genome, for example – but Adam was the first to complete the cycle from hypothesis to experiment to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention.”

Adam’s discovery was published in the journal Science in April. The scientists chose yeast because its genes provide a simple model of how human cells work. Many of the reactions within yeast are replicated within human cells.

In October, the South African government reversed its position and threw its support behind the class action, brought in 2002 by victims of apartheid crimes, including torture, rape and denationalization.

The class members filed suit on behalf of “themselves and all black South African citizens” for violations of the law of nations.

From 1960 to 1994, blacks in South Africa were deprived of their citizenship and were forced to become citizens of tribally based homelands called “Bantustans.”

U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin gave the suit new life last year when she gave the plaintiff class the opportunity to sue under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The 220-year-old law lets U.S. federal courts hear human rights cases brought by foreigners alleging violations of international law.

The defendants unsuccessfully sought dismissal, saying corporations are exempt under the statute.

Judge Scheindlin denied their bid to dismiss the case last spring, and then rejected a motion for “certification of an interlocutory appeal” in the most recent action.

Revenue dropped 13.3 percent, or $80 billion, compared with the same nine months of 2008, to $523 billion, the institute said. Collections in the third quarter alone sank 10.9 percent to about $162 billion, according to the report released today by the Albany-based body. It was the fourth straight quarterly decline. The institute is the public policy research arm of the State University of New York.

“The first three quarters of 2009 were the worst on record for states in terms of the decline in overall state tax collections, as well as the change in personal income and sales tax collections,” Rockefeller analysts Lucy Dadayan and Donald J. Boyd wrote in the report. The institute explores ways to help state and federal governments work better.

The worst economic slump since the Great Depression has forced states to cut spending, raise taxes and pass down costs to local governments to cope with $193 billion of combined budget deficits in the current fiscal year, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report issued last month.

Budget gaps have opened in 31 states since fiscal year 2010 began, Dadayan and Boyd wrote, citing a National Conference of State Legislatures study.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

TA-CD works by preventing cocaine from entering the brain, thus stopping the user from getting high. It does not, however, stop cravings, leading some test participants who received the vaccine to take 10 times as much cocaine in the hopes of overriding the vaccine and getting high, or to bankrupt themselves while trying to do so.

According to the study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, some participants in the study bumped more yeyo than the researchers conducting the study had every seen before. Others lost all their money buying one cut of charlie after another in the vain hopes of finding a package that actually got them high.

Amazingly, none of the test subjects overdosed.

The Transportation Security Administration is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to purchase 150 of the full body scanners, according to TSA spokeswoman Sarah Horowitz.

These “backscatter” scanners, which use X-rays to provide detailed images of hidden objects in or under a person’s clothing, are manufactured by Rapiscan, a subsidiary of Hawthorn, Calif.-based OSI (OSIS). The scanners cost from $150,000 to $180,000 apiece, according to the company.

Peter Kant, vice president of global government affairs for Rapiscan, said his company received a $25 million contract from the TSA to produce the 150 backscatter scanners. The contract has helped create 25 jobs, mostly manufacturing positions in the company’s Ocean Springs, Miss. facility, as well as some engineering jobs, he said.

Kant said the U.S. government has given the TSA the green light to spend $173 million on scanners, which includes the initial $25 million contract.

The government’s broad outline of how it will get out of its fiscal mess has not impressed markets, making the talks with Brussels on the details of a long-term budgetary plan Greece must submit by end January a sensitive point for investors.

“The EU officials are here (at the finance ministry), they are looking at the draft of the plan,” a senior finance ministry official said. “They will meet in the coming days officials from the health, labour, defence, and economy ministries.”

In a sign of increasing pressure on Greece to get its finances back in order, Stark told Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore that EU states would not help out.

“The markets are deluding themselves when they think at a certain point the other member states will put their hands on their wallets to save Greece,” Stark said in the newspaper.

Greek bond spreads widened slightly in response to the report, which helped to push the euro down for a short time. But analysts said Stark’s comments did not necessarily mean the EU would refuse to assist Greece if aid became necessary to prevent a debt default.

They said Stark was probably using tough rhetoric in an effort to press the Greek government, and Greek public opinion, into accepting major public spending cuts to bring the country’s budget deficit down to levels permitted for euro zone states.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.

I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, and rage that this process can entail. Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community. This hope continues to motivate my work.

Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff’s Office.

The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.