Robotic Spiders and Snakes Enter the Battlefield

Talk about a frightening taste of the future. People tend to have a fear of robots (which is perhaps why designers try so hard to make them look non-threatening), and they have a definite fear of spiders and snakes. So what happens when you mesh the two concepts? The military is about to find out.

"BAE Systems is developing electronic spiders, insects, and snakes to help soldiers gather information without exposing them to dangerous situations on the battlefield, according an announcement the defense giant released this week. The effort is being funded by a $38 million agreement with the U.S. Army.

The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance aims to create miniature robots that will act as the eyes and ears of soldiers in dangerous situations, such caves and mountainous areas, potentially saving many lives."

View the promo video here.

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Quantum Computing - A Prototype is Demonstrated

As a means (there are more than one being developed) of forcing the death of Moore's law into the very distant future, you cannot hope to beat quantum computing. Whereas conventional computing can, at best, make use of individual atoms to store bits of information (sort of like one man one vote), quantum computing makes use of the weirder features of quantum mechanics that hold sway at very small dimensions to allow unheard of processing power.

In traditional computing, binary code forms the most basic language, with an alphabet of only two letters: one and zero. Each unit of information, or bit, can register either of those two values. In quantum computing, however, the basic unit is called a "qubit," and can register simultaneous values of one and zero, making use of the phenomenon known as "superposition."

In the words of Seth Lloyd, writing for Technology Review:

Since one qubit can simultaneously represent two different values, two qubits can simultaneously represent four (00, 01, 10, and 11, in binary notation); four qubits can represent 16 values; eight qubits 256 values; and so on. Even a relatively small quantum computer, one that had a few tens of thousands of qubits, could consider so many different values at once that it would be able to break all known codes commonly used for secure Internet communication. Quantum computers might also be used for faster database searches, or to tackle hard problems that classical computers couldn't solve with all the time in the universe.

Now comes news that a Canadian company called D-Wave has built and tested a prototype of an "adiabatic quantum computer." The catch? The developers must prove that the computer is actually using adiabatic quantum computing. Turns out this is not an easy task. So stay tuned.

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Using DNA to Build Really Tiny Things

Nanotech holds some of the most radical and far-reaching promise for creating a future we can only dream about now. But how do you actually build things that small? You can't shrink yourself down like in the movies, and you can't make the tiny tools unless you know how to build really tiny things, which is where we started this erudite discussion. It so happens that evolution has already discovered the means. After all, it's been building really tiny things for billions of years, and getting better at it every million years along the way. In a huge leap forward, researchers have been able to take advantage of this fact.

In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles (particles with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter). The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale - for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties.

You don't have to understand the details to realize that we are moving very quickly now towards the technological singularity referred to in this blog's title. So hold on tight. It may be a bumpy ride, but it sure will be exciting.

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Time Travel Can Be Educational and Fun!

I used to think the following: Either time travel is never going to be possible, or the world will end before it becomes possible. How did I come to such a depressing conclusion? Simple. We haven't been visited by people from the future. Ergo, what I said before. If time travel ever becomes possible, we'd have been visited.

But now I see the flaw in my logic. There's another possibility: Perhaps time travelers from the future are just really sneaky. If so, and they've been here in our time, how would we know? So maybe they're all around us and are just not letting us in on the secret, not out of meanness, but because they don't want to destroy their own present by introducing the dreaded time travel paradox.

That's the problem caused when you go back in time to kill your grandfather, only to discover this means you were never born. Oh well. Maybe the instruction manual on the time machine makes this clear: Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, interact with the old-timers, or you'll screw up everything here!

Well, it turns out that math has come to the rescue, as it usually does:

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea.

The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveler could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But the existence of parallel worlds offers a way around these troublesome paradoxes, according to David Deutsch of Oxford University, a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, the deeply mathematical, successful and baffling theory of the atomic world.

He argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on parallel universes, the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory.

The new work bolsters his claim that quantum theory does not forbid time travel. "It does sidestep it. You go into another universe," he said yesterday, though he admits that there is still a way to go to find schemes to manipulate space and time in a way that makes time hops possible.

If you do kill dear old granddad, no worries, mate. You won't disappear like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. You'll just cause a fork in the road, as it were, whereby the new branch of the universe where you aren't born (because you killed your grandfather, you idiot) goes off on its merry way, while the old one where you were born, unfortunately goes on.

So time travel could well be possible. And it may be coming sooner than you think:

The first time travelers from the future could materialize on Earth within a few weeks.

Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.

Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world's first time machine, reports New Scientist.

The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine.

That means 2008 could become "Year Zero" for temporal travel, they argue.

Time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel, used Einstein's theory of relativity to show that travel into the past was possible.

Ever since he unveiled this idea in 1949, eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveler could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But, sixty years later, there is still no fundamental reason why time travellers cannot put historians out of business.

But the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle - a trillionth the size of a mosquito - they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime.

While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed timelike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment.

So keep your eyes peeled and your ears to the ground.

Original articles one and two.

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Rainbows End Contacts Coming Soon!

A future predicted in the novel Rainbows End is a bit closer to becoming the present. A very cool technology described by Vernor Vinge in his amazing novel centers around contact lenses that do a whole lot more than improve vision and change your eye color.

Vinge's contacts are actually connected wirelessly to an omnipresent Internet on steroids. They overlay what you see with everything from private text messages to an alternate reality. With these contacts you can share an augmented reality with others so that you all see the same things. For example, you could be sitting together at a table at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, enjoying good conversation and a view of the Parisian landscape, when each of you is in a different city.

Another use of these contacts would be informational overlays that could tell you what the restaurant you happen to be walking by is serving for lunch. A city utility worker could see which cables run under the sidewalk he stands on. The possibilities are virtually endless.

So here comes this article:

Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.

For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.

Remember this little article when you see what follows.

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