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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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Image: Aurora Michele

Having a baby can mean thinking a lot about pee. You pee on a stick to see if you’re ovulating. You pee on a stick to check if you’re pregnant. And soon, you might be able to pee to check your baby’s health. Using urine samples collected from pregnant women, researchers have developed a test that found signs of serious medical issues in the still unborn baby, including Down syndrome, premature birth, brain damage and pre-eclampsia (a disorder that can cause a mother to have seizures).

The new research, conducted by a team of Portuguese researchers lead by Sílvia Diaz, is still in the early stages. But, if the technique bears out it could mean that checking for serious complications will be as easy as peeing in a cup—an alternative to the invasive techniques, like biopsies or umbilical cord blood tests, used today.

The researchers collected urine samples from 300 women who were in the second trimester of their pregnancies. They froze the samples and waited until the baby was born. Then, they combed through the urine with a sensitive analytical technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy looking for chemicals that were related with the conditions of the babies. According to the researchers, they found chemicals that could be related to “central nervous system malformations, trisomy 21, preterm delivery, gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction and preeclampsia.”

According to Chemical and Engineering News, the next step is to do bigger and better tests, looking at more mothers from a larger geographic area.

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Image: Harvard University

Robots get smaller, smarter and faster every day. Now that we can 3-D print the little devices, they’re also easier to make. In fact, they’re so easy to make that there’s one robot that can actually assemble itself.

Here it is, assembling its way to world supremacy:

The materials used here are shape memory polymers. They remember certain shapes and, when the right conditions are met, fold into those forms. This robot can bend itself from a flat sheet into a little worm-like thing. Here’s an explanation of how shape memory works from IEEE Spectrum:

Self-folding happens thanks to shape memory polymers that contract when heated. By printing these polymers on one side of a hinged substrate and then heating them, the hinge can be made to bend. The amount of bend is controlled by etching flexible connectors that connect both sides of the hinge, and with enough hinges heated in the right order, it’s possible to create fairly complex folded shapes, including things like interlocking structural elements.

The tricky part of the process is the folding of the robot itself: installing the battery and motor is trivial enough for a human to do, which means that a relatively simple pick and place robot should have no problems doing the same thing. This means that these robots have the potential to scale massively: they can be printed out of cheap materials, they fold themselves together, and another robot can plonk some hardware on them and they’re good to go.

Now, we’ve seen self assembling robots before. Like this one:

And we’ve seen robots that have been 3-D printed before. Like this one:

But this is the first robot to be both 3-D printed and have the ability to self assemble. Next step: teach them to solder.

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Map by Hatnote

Who are these people who edit Wikipedia, and where do they come from? The answer to this question matters: It was these editors who decided, for instance, to remove women from the “American novelists” category.

This real-time map gives some indication of who’s making these judgment calls. The map shows unregistered users making contributions to Wikipedia. The project creators explain:

When an unregistered user makes a contribution to Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to the contributor’s approximate geographic location. A study by Fabian Kaelin in 2011 noted that unregistered users make approximately 20% of the edits on English Wikipedia [edit: likely closer to 15%, according to more recent statistics], so Wikipedia’s stream of recent changes includes many other edits that are not shown on this map.

You can download more about how they built the map here at Github. Or you can just sit there and become totally mesmerized by the little dots that pop up as people all over the world add to, change, delete and edit one of the most commonly used works of reference in the world.

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Image: CarbonNYC

While blind people can’t enjoy photographs the same way sighted people do, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to take them. Or at least that’s the premise of this new app that helps blind people position their cameras better through sound cues.

Researchers recently asked blind and partially sighted people what the hardest part of getting a photo right was. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what their sampling of blind people wanted help with, the researchers made an app, which solves a few key problems that blind photographers have.

The first is locating the shutter button. In the app, there’s no button—an upward swiping motion on the screen takes a picture. The app also detects the number of faces it sees and speaks that number out loud. It also uses audio to help the photographer move the camera and get the subjects in focus.

To help photographers recognize the shots, the app records sound, too. New Scientist explains:

This is to help with photo organising and sharing – and is used as an aide-memoire as to who is in shot. The user can choose to save this sound file along with the time and date, and GPS data that is translated into audio giving the name of the neighbourhood, district or city the shot was taken in.

While sighted people might not understand why a blind person would want to take photographs, the results can be quite incredible. Take this gallery of photos taken by a blind woman. Sonia Sobertas, a blind woman who paints with light in her photographs, is part of the Seeing With Photography group of people who want to create images despite being blind. The New York Times explained Sobertas’s reason for taking photographs:

For seeing individuals, it may seem bizarre that Ms. Soberats dedicates so much time to an art she cannot fully appreciate. Why not a more tactile pursuit, like sculpting? But Ms. Soberats said she savored her work through the eyes of others.

“The more difficult the photo, the more interesting and the more rewarding when you complete it and it’s good,” she said. “To be able to realize and obtain something that at the end everybody praises, it’s very satisfactory.”

The researchers developing the app want to give their users that same experience and provide one more way for them to enjoy the same activities as everybody else.

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