The full SDK for Android 3.0 or Honeycomb, the branch of Android aimed specifically at tablets, is now available to developers.

The APIs are final, and the developers are now free to create apps targeting Honeycomb and publish them on the Android Market.

You can learn about the new features in Honeycomb over at the Android platform highlights.

Source:  Android Developers

This is the latest post in series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world, say Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology. Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search.

When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company’s radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I’d already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.

During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn’t have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.

After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.

Six years later, I’m excited by how far we’ve come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google’s mission. Now, I’m constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We’ve advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to Voice Search, Voice Input, Voice Actions, a Voice API for Android developers, automatic captioning of YouTube videos, automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice and speech-to-speech translation, amongst others. In the past year alone, we’ve ported our technology to more than 20 languages.

Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we’re encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.

I’ve been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it’s here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.

Source: Official Google Blog

The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex has been depicted as the top dog of the Cretaceous, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex predator, much as the lion reigns supreme in the African veld.

But a new census of all dinosaur skeletons unearthed over a large area of Eastern Montana shows that Tyrannosaurus was too numerous to have subsisted solely on the dinosaurs it tracked and killed with its scythe-like teeth.

Instead, argue paleontologists John “Jack” Horner from the Museum of the Rockies and Mark B. Goodwin from the University of California, Berkeley, T. rex was probably an opportunistic predator, like the hyena in Africa today, subsisting on both carrion and fresh-killed prey and exploiting a variety of animals, not just large grazers.

“In our census, T. rex came out very high, equivalent in numbers to Edmontosaurus, which many people had thought was its primary prey,” said Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and Regents Professor at Montana State University. “This says that T. rex is not a cheetah, it’s not a lion. It’s more like a hyena.”

“This putative apex predator is as abundant in the upper layers of the Hell Creek Formation as the herbivores, its reputed primary food source,” added Goodwin, a curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and assistant director of the museum. “And it’s even more plentiful in the other two-thirds of the formation. This supports the view that T. rex benefited from a much wider variety of food sources than live prey.”

The dinosaur census in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, which dates from 65-95 million years ago, was begun in 1999 by Horner and Goodwin with the financial and occasional field support of Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer for Microsoft Corp. and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures of Bellevue, Wash. The results, authored by Horner, Goodwin and Myhrvold, were published Feb. 9 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Normally, Goodwin said, top predators are one-third or one-fourth as abundant as their prey, because of the larger energy needs of carnivores. Opportunistic hunters like the hyena, however, can be twice as abundant as the top predators.

“If you count the lions and the leopards and the cheetahs in the Serengeti, the number still does not equal the number of hyenas, because hyenas have a much wider food source,” Horner said. “Cheetahs, for example, only go after things that are really fast. They don’t eat turtles. But a hyena will eat a turtle, or anything else that it can catch or is dead.”

Similarly, T. rex was eating anything it could, he said. “There’s no evidence that T. rex could run very fast, so it wasn’t out there being a cheetah. If it could get a sick animal, it would.”

Horner suggests that juvenile and young adult T. rex may have been primarily flesh eaters, while the older adults, which developed proportionally larger, bone-crushing teeth as they aged, also consumed the bones and marrow of their prey.

Hell Creek Formation

Horner and Goodwin, together and separately, have been digging for dinosaurs in Eastern Montana for decades. The fossils date from a time when the area bordered an inland sea, which periodically advanced and withdrew over coastal plains, depositing sediment that was later exposed and heavily eroded. When Horner started his census of dinosaurs in the Hell Creek Formation around Fort Peck Lake in 1999, he teamed up with Goodwin to re-examine some of the dinosaurs discovered in the area.

Since then, through lab analysis and annual summer digs, they have shown that one named species, Torosaurus, was just a big, aged Triceratops; two dome-headed dinosaurs, Dracorex and Stygimoloch, were merely younger members of the genus Pachycephalosaurus; and the so-called Nanotyrannus was just a juvenile T. rex.

Once these fossils had been properly identified, Homer and Goodwin were able to catalog the species and relative ages of known dinosaurs in the formation, which is about 100 meters thick at exposed areas covering some 1,000 square kilometers. The census included only skeletal remains, not teeth, because the paleontologists wanted a record of the maturity of each specimen, and teeth tell little about the age of a dinosaur at death, Goodwin said.

Collating only skeletons containing three or more bones, the researchers counted 23 Triceratops, five Tyrannosaurus and five Edmontosaurus within the Upper Hell Creek Formation. The youngest or “upper” formation dates from between 65 and 70 million years ago, just before the purported mass extinction of the dinosaurs that was attributed to a comet or asteroid impact.

A census of older sediments – the lower Hell Creek formation – turned up 11 Triceratops, 11 T. rex and six Edmontosaurus partial skeletons, along with fossil bones of three other dinosaurs: Thescelosaurus and Ornithomimus, two bird-like, bipedal meat-eaters reaching some 12 feet in length at maturity; and Ankylosaurus, an armored, four-legged plant-eater with a club tail.

“Small juveniles and older adults were relatively rare compared to large juveniles and subadults for all the dinosaurs,” Goodwin said. This could be explained if juveniles lived in other locations, which is not uncommon in some species. The largest adults may simply have been relatively rare.

“This adds to an emerging picture of what the dinosaur fauna looked like during the late Cretaceous,” he said.

Horner noted the greater variety of dinosaurs in the older sediments, the Lower Hell Creek Formation, compared to the younger “Upper” formation.

“Definitely there was a change in population leading up to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, so something was happening to the faunas prior to the impact,” he said. “During the 10 million years after dinosaur diversity peaked 75 million years ago, the dinosaurs dwindled pretty fast, and there weren’t many left at the end.”

The work was supported by individual donations from James Kinsey, Catherine B. Reynolds and Homer Hickam, as well as Intellectual Ventures, the Windway Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations
Source: University of California – Berkeley

The Western fence lizard’s reputation for helping to reduce the threat of Lyme disease is in jeopardy. A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that areas where the lizard had been removed saw a subsequent drop in the population of the ticks that transmit Lyme disease.

A Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) can often be found with dozens of ticks attached to it. However, they have a unique influence on the ecology of Lyme disease. The lizard's immune system clears the Lyme disease bacteria from ticks after the ticks feed on the lizard. (Anand Varma photo)

“Our expectation going into this study was that removing the lizards would increase the risk of Lyme disease, so we were surprised by these findings,” said study lead author Andrea Swei, who conducted the study while she was a Ph.D. student in integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Our experiment found that the net result of lizard removal was a decrease in the density of infected ticks, and therefore decreased Lyme disease risk to humans.”

The study, to be published online Tuesday, Feb. 15, in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, illustrates the complex role the Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) plays in the abundance of disease-spreading ticks.

Lyme disease – characterized by fever, headache, fatigue and a bullseye rash – is spread through the bite of ticks infected with spirochete bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. In the Western region of the United States, the Western black legged tick (Ixodes pacificus) is the primary vector for Lyme disease bacteria.

In 1998, a pioneering study led by UC Berkeley entomologist Robert Lane found that a protein in the Western fence lizard’s blood killed Borrelia bacteria, and as a result, Lyme-infected ticks that feed on the lizard’s blood are cleansed of the disease-causing pathogen. Moreover, research has found that up to 90 percent of the juvenile ticks in this species feed on the Western fence lizard, which is prevalent throughout California and neighboring states.

The lizard is thus often credited for the relatively low incidence of Lyme disease in the Western United States. The new UC Berkeley-led study put that assumption to the test experimentally.

“When you have an animal like the Western fence lizard that supports such a huge population of ticks, you can’t assume that all those juvenile ticks will go to another host if the lizard population drops,” said Lane, UC Berkeley Professor of the Graduate School and co-author of this study.

For their field test, the researchers selected 14 plots, each measuring 10,000 square meters and spread out over two sites in Marin County, Calif. Half the plots were located at China Camp State Park, and the other half were at the Marin Municipal Water District Sky Oaks headquarters. The researchers had already been extensively surveying tick density in those plots over the course of two years, so they had detailed data on tick and vertebrate populations before this experimental field trial.

From March to April 2008, before tick season went into full swing, the researchers captured and removed 447 lizards from six plots – three at each site – and left the remaining plots unaltered as controls. The lizards that had been captured were marked before being relocated so the researchers could determine whether any wandered back into their old haunts.

After the lizards were removed, the researchers spent the following month trapping other mammals known to harbor ticks – particularly woodrats (Neotoma fuscipes) and deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) – to determine whether they bore an uptick in ticks as a result of the lizards’ absence. The researchers also checked for differences between control and experimental plots in the abundance of host-seeking ticks by systematically dragging a large white flannel cloth over the ground.

The researchers found that in plots where the lizards had been removed, ticks turned to the female woodrat as their next favorite host. On average, each female woodrat got an extra five ticks for company when the lizards disappeared.

However, the researchers found that 95 percent of the ticks that no longer had lizard blood to feast on failed to latch on to another host.

“One of the goals of our study is to tease apart the role these lizards play in Lyme disease ecology,” said Swei, who is now a post-doctoral associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. “It was assumed that these lizards played an important role in reducing Lyme disease risk. Our study shows that it’s more complicated than that.”

Notwithstanding the results in this new study, Lane pointed out that the Western fence lizard are key to keeping infection rates down among adult ticks. “This study focused only on the risk from juvenile ticks, specifically those in the nymphal stage,” he said. “The earlier finding that adult ticks have lower infection rates because they feed predominantly on the Western fence lizard at the nymphal stage still holds.”

“In attempting to decrease infectious disease risk, we need to remember the law of unexpected consequences,” said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research through the joint NSF-NIH (National Institutes of Health) Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program. “This study demonstrates the complexity of infectious diseases.”

Other authors on this study are Cheryl Briggs, a professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology; and Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

By Sarah Yang, Media Relations
Source: University of California – Berkeley

The Stripe of Gennari (right: subjects with normal vision, left: blind subjects) shows up as a thin dark line in the sulcus calcinarus (white) which surrounds the primary visual cortex. (Credite photo: Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences )

The Stripe of Gennari develops even in those who are blind from birth and does not degenerate, despite a lack of visual input. This was discovered by Robert Trampel and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences using magnetic resonance imaging. This bundle of nerve fibers, which is approximately 0.3 mm thick, is not exclusively responsible for optic information. In the blind, it might play a greater role in processing tactile stimuli. This could contribute to an enhanced sense of touch and support fast reading of Braille.

The Stripe of Gennari – also known as the ‘Stria of Gennari’ – transverses the gray matter of the primary visual cortex as a distinct white line. “Although the visual cortex is one of the best-studied parts of the brain, and the Stripe of Gennari is a rather obvious structure, why it develops and what its function is has not previously been studied in detail”, explains Robert Trampel from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. “An obvious connection with sight was assumed.”

However, as is now clear, this cannot be the only function of the stripe of Gennari: In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the researchers found the stripe of Gennari in the brains of congenitally blind subjects. “This brain structure therefore can’t exclusively be involved in vision and must be capable of carrying out other tasks”, says Trampel. In the blind, the Stripe of Gennari could play a role in supporting the sense of touch, the scientists speculate. “This faculty is essential in reading Braille and the region carrying the Gennari-Stripe is known to show an increased activity in the blind when performing this task.” All participants in the present study were highly proficient in reading Braille, having responded to an advertisement written in Braille in a newspaper for the visually impaired.

However, since the stripe of Gennari is already present in the first years of life and does not degenerate, it is likely to have an important role already in early infancy. In blind people, the brain uses tactile and acoustic stimuli to construct a rough spatial representation of the surroundings in the absence of visual information. The stripe of Gennari might play a role in this process and could later support highly demanding tactile tasks, like Braille-reading. In future studies with fMRI, the researchers aim to learn more about the work of this versatile nerve bundle in the human brain.

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft