Are you frustrated with ads getting in the way of your Internet browsing? Well, your frustrations can become a thing of the past with a simple download of Adblock Plus.

What is Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus is an add-on that you can download for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Internet browsers – along with several other browsers – that blocks the annoying ad content on sites you want to visit.

How much does it cost?

This add-on is available for free. All it takes is a download, and you can be surfing the web without those time-consuming ads.

Where do I download it?

It is available from Adblockplus.org. Once there, all you need to do is click “download.” Install and you are ready to go.

Will it run on my operating system?

Yes. It can run on any operating system because it is a platform-independent extension. All you need to be able to run Adblock Plus is Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 or later or Google Chrome 10 or later.

So what else is really cool about it?

Adblock Plus is customizable. When you download the add-on, a little stop sign with the letters “ABP” will appear on your browser, by clicking on this sign you can filter what you want to see and what you don’t. The add-on gives you the freedom to make your Internet experience as streamlined as you want it to be. In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits is being able to watch videos online without having to watch commercials.

So, whether you’re looking for something to stop banners on websites, constant pop-up ads or commercials before videos, Adblock Plus is a great add-on at your disposal.

– Eric C. Lipsky

From the Roomba to the Mars Rover, robots are an important part of our modern society. They are used to facilitate efficient mass production, they assist our soldiers in combat situations and they explore parts of our planet and cosmos that are impossible for humans to reach. Though these machines perform their specific tasks very well, they have very little room for variation. There is another branch of robotics that focuses on robots that perform multiple tasks in many environments: modular robots.

UC Davis researchers have recently created a modular robotic system, named iMobot. A modular system is like building with a ton of identical Lego pieces. The pieces fit together to make an infinite number of arrangements. This means that multiple iMobots can be combined to perform many different tasks.

“Now-a-days, there is greater interest in modular robotic systems because they provide greater flexibility,” said Harry Cheng, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and co-inventor of the iMobot. “We are trying to develop reconfigurable systems that can be configured for different tasks.”

An individual iMobot unit, rectangular in shape, has two joints in the center section, and a wheel on each end. This allows the iMobot to drive on its wheels, make crawling-like motions, and elevate one end of its body.

“A single iMobot has four controllable degrees of freedom, or ways that it can move,” said Graham Ryland, a UC Davis alumnus and co-inventor of the iMobot.

To put that in perspective, a pair of scissors has only one joint, so it has one degree of freedom. But the human body has hundreds of degrees of freedom.

The motions the iMobot can make are similar to the ball-joint of the human shoulder.

“If you attach a gripper onto the end of it, it almost looks like it has a wrist, and it can go through the whole motion that an arm can go through,” said Ryland.

One of the purposes of the iMobot is to study bio-mimetics, or machines that resemble biological creatures. Biomimetics can be used to study the locomotion of a snake’s body or the human gait.

Multiple iMobot units can be connected in either as a series and in parallel. Units connected in series would resemble a snake, with one unit attached to the end of another unit. There is theoretically no limit to how many units can be connected, but as more units are added, it becomes a difficult engineering and programming task to make the units move synchronously.

If scientists need to lift a payload, iMobot units can work together to raise it above the ground. If the weight is too much for units connected in a series, other units can be connected in parallel, or side-by-side, with the current units. If two units are connected, the lifting strength is doubled. If three are connected, the strength is tripled, and so on.

The primary goal of this project was to create a mass-produced modular system that can be used by other researchers. Users can integrate ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, gravity sensors, accelerometers or any other kind of sensor.

“There are so many applications, and it all depends on the sensor information,” said Cheng. “That is the flexibility that we provide.”

A modular, artificially intelligent can also “self-heal,” which means it can replace its own parts if it malfunctions.

Cheng believes that robotics is a perfect field for interdisciplinary research. His proof lies in the UC Davis Robotics Club, which has over 100 members from many different majors.

“We’ve created a robotic system that is an open canvas that doesn’t limit the creativity of the user,” Ryland said.

The researchers have filed a patent, and have started a company, Barobo Inc., so that they can begin commercial production of the iMobot.

HUDSON LOFCHIE can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

A virus that normally only infects humans has caused the deaths of wild mountain gorillas in Africa, reported a team of researchers from the U.S. and several African countries.

The researchers are from the UC Davis nonprofit Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University and the Rwanda Development Board.

The virus, called human metapneumovirus (HMPV), causes mild respiratory tract infection in humans. In 2008 and 2009, a group of mountain gorillas living in Rwanda experienced an outbreak of respiratory disease that resulted in the deaths of a female gorilla and her infant.

“Diseases can flow from humans to animals and from animals to humans,” said Linda Lowenstine, a veterinary pathologist with the UC Davis Mountain Gorilla One Health Program. “The more closely related the species, the more likely they are to share diseases, including viral diseases.”

When Lowenstine looked at the tissues of the gorillas under the microscope, she found bacterial pneumonia that often occurs after a viral infection weakens the immune system. The infant showed signs of poor nutrition and umbilical infections, likely due to the mother feeling too ill to properly care for her young.

Lowenstine worked with collaborators in New York to detect and identify a virus in the gorillas. One of the collaborators was Gustavo Palacios, a virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York.

“One of the concerns at the start was to know if it was a new virus or if it was an unknown virus,” Palacios said.

Technician Nazir Sajvi and his colleagues from CII used a test called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which amplified the available amount of gorillas’ DNA so that the molecular biologists could compare the unknown disease samples with known DNA sequences.

“We did phylogenetic analysis to identify the virus’s evolutionary history and quantified the viral load in all samples,” Sajvi said.

Palacios said the researchers found that the closest relative was to human cases of pneumonia in South Africa.

“[The virus] is not necessarily from there,” Palacios said, “but it is a close neighbor.”

Mountain gorillas are protected in national parks in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo; however, according to the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, the densest human populations in continental Africa surround them. Since gorillas share 98.5 percent of their DNA with humans, this could put them at risk for human-borne infectious diseases.

“Gorillas and other great apes … are susceptible to many human viruses, including chicken pox, measles and, as was demonstrated in the paper, HMPV,” Lowenstine said.

So far, researchers are unsure if HMPV infection in mountain gorillas is a recent species jump or if mountain gorillas have always been susceptible due to the genetic similarity.

“HMPV has been confirmed in chimpanzees, but how frequent this jump occurs is the question,” Palacios said. “If we explore other ecological niches like non-human primates, bats and rodents that have close contact with humans, we can try to predict what are the mechanisms that guide species jumps.”

Mountain gorillas are a severely endangered species with fewer than 800 individuals in the world. About 480 individuals live in an area called the Virunga Volcanoes Massif, which combines national parks in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rest of the individuals live inside the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.

Stricter rules for tourists visiting the mountain gorillas’ habitats are needed in order to protect the apes from infectious disease, Sajvi said.

“[Protective] masks are a must,” Sajvi said.

Though both the public and researchers pay a great deal of attention to the possibility of animal viruses infecting humans – such as the swine flu outbreak in 2009 – this study focused on human-to-ape transmission.

“One of the messages that we like to emphasize is that normally we only think of transmissions of species infections from other animals to humans,” Palacios said. “There is increasing research that it isn’t a one-way road but a two-way highway of transmission between species.”

AMY STEWART can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

“Everybody calls me Dr. Hammerhead,” said Peter Klimley.

Klimley’s proud of his nickname, and he should be. He earned it.

Klimley has traveled the world to study sharks. In 2003, he wrote a book called The Secret Life of Sharks. And today he works as a professor of wildlife, fish and conservation biology at UC Davis.

“Hammerheads are the Ph.D.’s of the shark world,” he said. “I was the first person to get in the water and study their behavior.”

I heard of Klimley when I read a recent report out of UC Davis estimating the number of great white sharks off the central coast of California. Klimley was an adviser to the report’s primary author, Taylor Chapple. While studying animal behavior is important, Chapple and Klimley wanted to know the actual population size.

“People didn’t really know how many there were, so they would pick out of a hat the number 500 or so,” Klimley said.

Turns out there are only about 219 sharks off our coast.

“I think what we’re seeing is the last of their kind,” said Patric Douglas, CEO of Shark Diver, a commercial company that leads shark-watching expeditions.

Douglas is not a scientist, but several years ago, he worked with Klimley to establish a shark-tagging program where scientists and eco-tourism businesses work together. Douglas called the 219 estimate “frightening.”

“I thought the population was more like 1,000 animals,” Douglas said.

Because scientists didn’t know the great white population before now, Klimley couldn’t say whether 219 was a frightening number, but he did explain why sharks are in danger.

Weirdly, evolution actually seems to have hurt their ability to survive.

Sharks are what are called “apex” predators. That means they are at the top of the food chain. But Klimley said it is important to look at predator/prey relationships as less of a chain and more of a “pyramid.” On land, there are typically three levels of the pyramid, and there are fewer organisms on each level. This pyramid goes something like grass then elk then wolf.

The ocean is a different sort of ecosystem because there are many more pyramid levels; In the waters off California, zooplankton eat phytoplankton, small fish eat zooplankton, sea lions eat small fish and great white sharks eat sea lions. If the pyramid were this tall on land, then bears would eat wolves.

Because there is less food at each level of the pyramid, sharks have to compete for their meals. One way of making sure food is available is for sharks to reproduce slowly and keep the population down. Klimley said it takes great white sharks between 10 and 12 years to be able to reach maturity, and female sharks have only five to nine offspring.

This slow-and-steady system worked for millions of years – until humans arrived.

According to Klimley, shark pups are very vulnerable to fishing. They are either caught for their meat or tangled up in nets meant for other species.

“We need to concentrate on eating species that grow quickly,” said Klimley. “Sharks are not those species.”

Klimley and Douglas think that the more people learn about those 219 sharks off the central California coast, the more people will care about conservation.

“Let’s get busy and get the word out,” Douglas said.

Klimley believes programs like “Shark Week” have already given sharks a celebrity status.

“That may, in the end, by the very reason these sharks survive,” Klimley said.

MADELINE McCURRY-SCHMIDT hopes she never sees a bear eating a wolf. That is definitely the 37th sign of the apocalypse. If you’ve witnessed the end of times, e-mail Madeline at science@theaggie.org.