Amazing Discoveries At Birmingham, UK 

Ray Van Eng (09/16/96) 

It has been quite an exciting week at the annual science festival in Birmingham, UK.

From the theory that ancient humans walk instead of crawl to planning to use the computer for telepathy and to build better planes by having a superior navigation system controlled by brain waves only, someone ought to write a song about this.

'Lucy in the sky with diamonds... ' the Beatle sings.

And the song have inspired archaeologists to code-name the skeletal remains of a woman 'Lucy', whom they have found and believed to have lived 3.6 million years ago in East Africa. Now Lucy lives in a computer doing research work for Dr. Robin Crompton, head of the University of Liver pool study.

Based on the findings of a three year project, Crompton and his staff are "very, very, very confident" that when the first humans started descending from the trees, they walked around on the face of the earth in an upright manner.

Feeding a computer simulation program with body proportion data from Lucy, the scientists were able to determine that the ancient lady could not have been moving about in a semi-crouch posture like a chimpanzee as commonly believed among historians about our early ancestors. She would just tripped.

This experiment has prompted Crompton to suggest that "any transition between quadrupedal and bipedal walking occurred before our ancestors had left the trees." That could push the time frame for the first human walk on earth back a couple of million years to between four to six millions years ago.

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Talk about ESP and telepathy. Some British scientists are now saying that we should start using the computer to communicate with coma patients. So that we could show them that we understand their plights.

Steve Roberts at London's Imperial College of Science and Technology stated that since "there are a lot of people who have had severe injury, come out of coma and tell of a nightmare situation of being conscious of their surroundings but utterly unable to communicate in any way,", the computer could be devised to 'read' the thoughts of these sufferers and be able to respond according to their brain waves.

Roberts and his colleagues have conducted studies on conscious people in which the computer can predict accurately 80% of the time when someone is thinking about moving his/her fingers.

Earlier scientific tests have already indicated that the human brain actually 'rehearses' bodily movements before we carry them out ourselves. If only the computer can tap onto a comatose's brain activities, we could help these unfortunate folks to execute their wishes.

This latest discovery may also be useful in helping to design even more advance airplanes where a pilot would only have to think about how to do a move and have the computer to do all the co-ordination work by itself.

"One life-preserving aid could be a way of enabling, say, a fighter pilot who physically can't move to operate his ejector seat. Clearly being able to think about ejecting, and enable it to happen, would help a pilot in a high-G spin." said Roberts.

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Finally, laboratory tests have demonstrated that some activities such as playing computer games could temporary lift your immune system and fight off diseases.

According to Dr. Phil Evans, the scientist engaged in the study, the effect would only last a few minutes. However, he also conceded, "we don't know much about it, what is exciting is that in some circumstances (the immune system) does actually have an upward regulation".

Hey, but that's all we needed to excuse ourselves for playing an occasional computer game or two on the job to relieve stress and live a healthier lifestyle. Now, we even have the scientists on ourside. I am sure the boss would understand. So come on, what are you waiting for!?

 
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