RoboCup 2010 marks the 14th year that hundreds of roboticists pit their mechanized creations against each other in five different soccer leagues. Some are reserved for two-legged, two-armed humanoids, whereas others are for small, wheeled robots that look like polka-dotted coffee cans. There’s even a league just for virtual robots, where computer programs go head-to-head to test the limits of cooperative artificial intelligence.

The goal at RoboCup is not just to win but to push robotics in ways that apply in the real world—and to eventually build a team of robots that can beat the human World Cup champions. Humanoid robots have made great strides since their debut in the 2002 RoboCup, where they competed in four events: a penalty kick competition, a race, freestyle demonstrations, and the aptly titled “Standing Still on One Leg.”

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They’re not the most aww-inspiring baby pictures, but new infrared images prove the youngest known planet outside our solar system does in fact exist—and that planets can grow up fast—a new study says.

Probably only a few million years young, Beta Pictoris b is already fully formed, despite standard models that say such a planet should take ten million years to reach “adulthood,” researchers say. The planet breaks the record once held by the planet BD 20 1790b, which clocked in at 35 million years old.

The new planet is also nearer to its parent star than any other known planet outside our solar system—about as close as Saturn is to our sun.

Located about 63.4 light-years from Earth, that star, named simply Beta Pictoris, is similar to our own star. And like Beta Pictoris b, Beta Pictoris is relatively young—about 12 million years old, compared with the sun’s 4.5 billion years.

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Saltwater crocodiles in the South Pacific travel between islands by body surfing, according to new research designed in part by late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.

The world’s largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile is found in brackish and freshwater habitats extending east-west from East India to Fiji and north-south from southern China to northern Australia (see a map of the region).

Despite being found on several islands across this range, different crocodile groups haven’t evolved into completely unique species—the way Darwin’s finches evolved on the Galápagos Islands.

That suggests the crocodiles are somehow island hopping, keeping the overall gene pool well mixed. But until now, no one was sure just how the crocs were traveling, as they’re excellent swimmers for short distances but aren’t great at long, endurance swims.

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All eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, an imaginary disk that extends from the sun’s equator.

But new data show that two of the three Jupiter-like planets known to circle the sunlike star Upsilon Andromedae have orbits that are tilted 30 degrees from each other.

The orbit of the third, innermost planet is still unknown. (Find out about a batch of planets recently found outside our solar system that have tilted, “wrong way” orbits.)

The unusual discovery suggests that astronomers can’t assume all star systems with multiple worlds will always be able to keep planetary siblings in line. (See “Our Solar System May Have Millions of ‘Twins.’”)

The Upsilon Andromedae system probably formed the same way as other planetary systems, including our own, said study leader Barbara McArthur of the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin.

When a cloud of material condenses and collapses to form a star, some leftover material can circle the star’s middle in what’s called a protoplanetary disk. This disk, in turn, can coalesce to form planets.

In Upsilon Andromedae’s case, something knocked two of the outer planets into strange, crisscrossing orbits after the star system had been born.

The star has a binary companion, a dim red dwarf star that orbits Upsilon Andromedae at a distance of about 70 billion miles (112 billion kilometers). If that red dwarf has a very elongated orbit, it might have swooped in close to Upsilon Andromedae sometime in the past, disturbing the planets’ orbits with its gravity.

There’s also evidence that a “missing” planet might have been involved in a gravitational tug-of-war with its peers. The planets could have pushed each other around so much that the loser got thrown out of the system, while the remaining worlds were left askew.

(Related: “Mystery Space Object May Be Ejected Black Hole.”)

“Planet-planet scattering is a very likely cause for what we see,” McArthur said.

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In the past 20 years we’ve traded pagers for smart phones and library cards for Kindles. But the joint federal-industry task force charged with responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is still using cleanup methods that haven’t changed much since the days of the Exxon Valdez.

Nearly four million gallons of oil have already spewed into the Gulf since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank last month.

Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades.

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At this week’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival, a panel of scientists and advertising executives dissected the latest research on “neuromarketing”: measuring consumers’ brain activity to help develop ads and products.

The tactic is making headlines for big business. Frito-Lay studied women’s brains to help develop an ad campaign, and Campbell Soup (CPB, Fortune 500) just unveiled a packaging redesign based on consumers’ “neurological and bodily responses” to different mockups. By hooking customers up to EEG or MRI machines, a company can learn about what’s really going on inside a buyer’s brain — possibly even before the buyer knows it.

But Campbell’s and Frito-Lay have huge budgets; this technology isn’t cheap. What about smaller companies?

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The so-called pregnant man has company: One of the most common weed killers in the United States can make male frogs lay eggs, a new study says.

Atrazine, widely used to kill pests on U.S. croplands, is an endocrine disruptor—a substance that interferes with animals’ reproductive systems.

Previous research has shown that atrazine can give male amphibians female characteristics: For instance, male frogs exposed to atrazine have lower testosterone levels, produce less sperm, and even change their mating habits by choosing males over females.

Now, researchers have discovered that the chemical transforms male frogs into fully functioning females—and that the substance may be contributing to a worldwide decline in amphibians.

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That’s because our universe is about 20 million years older than thought, according to the most accurate measurement yet made of the universe’s age.

The data are the latest from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite launched in 2001 that has been mapping what’s known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. This “afterglow of creation” is believed to be radiation emitted as matter began to cool 400,000 years after the big bang created the universe.

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Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books.

The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors’ laws in a single manuscript.

The Codex Gregorianus covered the laws of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to those of Diocletian, ruler from A.D. 284 to 305.

Later codices excerpted the laws that were still relevant and added new ones, so only parts of the first codex survived as passages in other editions. All copies of the original collection of laws were thought to have been lost.

Luckily, in the 16th century it was common to use scraps of paper to reinforce the bindings of new books.

Seventeen such fragments—each smaller than 2 square inches (13 square centimeters)—were recovered from a set of books decades ago. The scraps were eventually acquired by a private owner, who recently loaned them to Roman-law experts at University College London.

A preservation librarian who examined the scraps told the researchers that the shapes of the pieces and the patterns of wear suggest the ancient papers had been wrapped around cords that went over the books’ spines.

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Lou Jost, an ecologist with the EcoMinga plant-conservation foundation, has studied the plants of the South American country’s mountainous forests for 15 years.

Earlier this year he’d collected an orchid of a larger species to study in his greenhouse. “Several months later I saw this tiny plant,” he said.

Read the rest at News.NationalGeographic.com

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