A Shorter Path to Singularity

The coming technological singularity, defined by Ray Kurzweil as "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history," is predicted in his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology to occur around 2045. But Marshall Brain (yes, that's really his name), founder of How Stuff Works, a noted author and a fan of robotics, says that it could happen a lot sooner than that, with one caveat: we have to really really try.

By "we," he means gifted computer scientists, coming together in a coordinated effort. Brain claims to have already "arrived at a detailed software design that is capable of giving rise to intelligence at the human level and beyond." But he needs a cadre of scientists to help with the implementation, testing and teaching. To this end he has started a small software company called Novamente LLC7.

I certainly wish Marshall God-speed. Stay tuned.

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Today, Half Mouse Brain, Tomorrow Whole Human Brain

BBC News (why them?) reports this weekend that US researchers have simulated half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. Called a "cortical simulator," the program simulated the equivalent of 8 million neurons, each of which can have as many as 8,000 synapses, or connections, to other neurons.

In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.

Some researchers believe that it will take until about 2020 before supercomputers are able to simulate a human brain, and another 5 years or so for personal computers to manage this feat. This achievement may seem modest when compared to simulating an entire human brain, but it seems to me rather analogous to the difference between the Wright brothers' first faltering flight and the power of today's jets. But because of the law of accelerating returns, the time between half a mouse brain and a whole human brain will be much more compressed than that.

On other smaller simulations the researchers said they had seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" emerge as nerve impulses flowed through the virtual cortex.

In these other tests the team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse's mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.

For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.

Today, half a mouse brain. Tomorrow, ? Stay tuned.

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Superintelligence: Point of No Return?

Many people at the forefront of artificial intelligence research and development are quite certain that machine intelligence will attain human level intelligence very soon, within two decades to be specific. They are also confident that, once that point is reached, and once machine intelligence has access to its own code and is therefore able to build upon it, it will quickly become superintelligent. Then all bets are off.

The blog Accelerating Future has an excellent article about superintelligence and how such an intelligence might view humanity. Consider how we view the technology of early man.

For example, consider the world from the viewpoint of a Homo erectus. They had tools - handaxes. These tools were of various types - pointed, cordate, ovate, ficron and bout-coupé shapes, cleavers, retouched flakes, scrapers, and segmental chopping tools. Flint, basalt, chalcedony, quartzite, andesite, sandstone, chert and shale were all used as raw materials to build these axes. Some were very large and probably just ornamental. Some were discus-shaped and possibly used as hunting weapons. It is thought they also had a social role, with enterprising Homo erectuses fashioning better tools for greater peer approval. From the viewpoint of one of these guys, they had command over a remarkable number of handaxe forms and designs, and put them to use for a variety of different purposes.

From the viewpoint of an intelligence smarter than us in the way that we’re smarter than Homo erectus, all our technology, from planes to trains to lamps to sinks to nanotubes to satellites to linear accelerators, probably looks like the same variants on the basic handaxe. Our descendants or future selves will not look back on us admiringly, and say, “golly gee, these guys were so clever that no leap in intelligence ever happened that bested the difference between them and their immediate predecessors!” They will not be genuinely impressed with what we are doing, any more than we are genuinely impressed by a pre-Neolithic hand axe. If we were to show them our greatest technological achievements, they might pretend to be genuinely impressed, so as not to hurt our feelings, but really, they’d probably be daydreaming on the side about mechanisms of such complexity that no aggregation of human beings, no matter how numerous or intelligent, could ever make sense of it all.

This is quite rightly a frightening prospect, is it not? As the article points out, comparing our intelligence to that of a self-improving superintelligence is not a matter of comparing yourself to Einstein. He was certainly smarter than most of us, but that's much too small a difference to be useful here.

I believe that a lot of Singularity skepticism derives from people who don’t get that we’re not the highest form of intelligence that the universe permits to exist. Being a computer science poindexter sometimes hurts more than it helps, because such people are accustomed to being the smartest ones in the room, making it all the more difficult to imagine an intelligence that not only blows them out of the water quantitatively, but can think thoughts they can’t think, even in principle. When people say, “oh, we’ll be able to fight the superintelligent AIs with our rebel guerilla group!”, or “we’ll nuke it to smithereens if it disobeys!”, they don’t get that, once it’s smarter than you, you’ve already lost. Once you’re dealing with something genuinely smarter than human, you have to rely on the hope that it doesn’t want to hurt you, not the assumption that your crappy “foolproof safeguards” will do a lick of good against a true superintelligence.

Again, a frightening prospect. But I see it a more benign future, if we are careful. As Ray Kurzweil explains in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, it does not have to become an us/them situation, because they will be us. Intelligent machines will be built using the architecture of the reverse-engineered human brain. Human minds will be instantiated into machine substrates. Human brains will be augmented with computer modules (they already are, cochlear implants are an example). All these factors imply that the superintelligences will be evolved human intelligences, and will not be inclined to suicide.

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Peering into the Human Brain: Nanoscale Resolution MRI

Reverse-engineering the human brain is the goal of many researchers in their quest to understand how it works and to construct machine equivalents. It is believed that supercomputers will achieve the computational power of human brains by about 2020, personal computers just a few years later, so figuring out the details of the brain's structure and functioning needs to keep pace. A major challenge in this has been the limits of MRI resolution, which is why the news of a major breakthrough has such significance.

physicsweb reports,

Researchers in the US have used an alternative form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualize objects with a resolution of just 90 nm. The best conventional MRI microscopes, in contrast, typically have a resolution of about 3 µm. The researchers claim the technique, known as magnetic resonance force microscopy, could be used to map out the structure of nanometre-scale structures such as proteins and pharmaceutical drugs.

We can expect the power of MRIs to continue to resolve smaller and smaller structures, and the preternatural sagacity of Ray Kurzweil and others like him to prove correct. Reverse-engineering the brain and building conscious machines using that knowledge will certainly occur, and I'm thinking it'll be sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.

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Nanotech & Food: The Coming Merger

What do you get when you put nanotechnology and food together? You get some pretty amazing things. First, we should understand that the longer term (decades) changes that are coming will include the instantiation of human minds (not the brain itself, but the pattern of information that makes up our personality) into man made substrates, in which case conventional "foods" will no longer be our source of energy or nutrition.

For the nearer term however, nanotech will be applied to several aspects of food creation, preparation, packaging and delivery. A highly informative and interesting article in Nanowerk's blog titled The promises of food nanotechnology describes some of these applications.

Let's start with where the benefits of this will be needed most: third world countries where food supply is often limited and the quality of available food leads to nutritional deficiencies and the quality of drinking water is a major contributor to disease. In a study by the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics from two years ago ("Nanotechnology and the Developing World"; pdf download, 220 KB), a panel of international experts ranked the 10 nanotechnology applications in development worldwide with the greatest potential to aid the poor. Number two on the list was "agricultural productivity enhancement", number three was "water treatment and remediation" and number six was "food processing and storage."

One of the first arguments against the feasibility of radical life-extension made by its detractors is the claim that there wouldn't be enough food for the increased population that would result. Besides the fact that populations have already increasing in many developed nations, there is the fact that technological advances have already resulted in an overabundance of food in developed countries. Whereas less than a century ago in the U.S., food was difficult to come by for many Americans, today there is too much. Admittedly food is scarce in some places in the world, but that is more a factor of political strife than anything else. As nanotech influences the food industries of the world, the abundance we enjoy in the west will be more common in poorer nations.

Another benefit of nanotech as applied to our food will be nutrition.

"The ancient Asian concept that 'food and medicine are one' has gradually also become accepted in Western countries" says Dr. Yun-Hwa Peggy Hsieh, a professor at Florida State University with a research interest in functional foods. "Foods no longer merely meet an individual’s basic physical needs, but are also expected to contribute to their health and wellbeing. Nutritional and epidemiological studies have provided strong evidence that many chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer are linked to diet and the risks posed by these diet-related diseases can be reduced by the consumption of foods with extra measures of phytochemical antioxidants and with lowered fat content, especially saturated fat."

"Recent research, however, has begun to address the potential applications of nanotechnology for functional foods and nutraceuticals by applying the new concepts and engineering approaches involved in nanomaterials to target the delivery of bioactive compounds and micronutrients" she says. "Nanomaterials allow better encapsulation and release efficiency of the active food ingredients compared to traditional encapsulating agents, and the development of nano-emulsions, liposomes, micelles, biopolymer complexes and cubosomes have led to improved properties for bioactive compounds protection, controlled delivery systems, food matrix integration, and masking undesired flavors."

Nanotechnology also has the potential to improve food processes that use enzymes to confer nutrition and health benefits. For example, enzymes are often added to food to hydrolyze anti-nutritive components and hence increase the bio-availability of essential nutrients such as minerals and vitamins. To make these enzymes highly active, longlived and cost-effective, nanomaterials can be used to provide superior enzyme-support systems due to their large surface-to-volume ratios compared to traditional macroscale support materials.

When what we eat is nanoengineered to deliver precise and powerful anti-ageing nutrients, and remove those factors that cause obesity and disease, everyone will be better off.

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New Computer Processor: TRIPS to the Future

A revolutionary new general purpose computer processor called TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System) has been announced by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. The new processor has the potential of achieving trillions of calculations per second. That's one processor, not the hundreds or thousands used in today's supercomputers.

"The TRIPS prototype is the first on a roadmap that will lead to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies," said Burger, associate professor of computer sciences.

The TRIPS processor relies on a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE) which, unlike conventional processors that process one instruction at a time, can process large blocks of instructions at once.

Current "multicore" processing technologies increase speed by adding more processors, which individually may not be any faster than previous processors. Adding processors shifts the burden of obtaining better performance to software programmers, who must assume the difficult task of rewriting their code to run well on a potentially large number of processors.

"EDGE technology offers an alternative approach when the race to multicore runs out of steam," said Keckler, associate professor of computer sciences. Each TRIPS chip contains two processing cores, each of which can issue 16 operations per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously. Current high-performance processors are typically designed to sustain a maximum execution rate of four operations per cycle.

This development demonstrates the historical experience of technological evolution: When a paradigm begins to reach its limits for further development, a new paradigm takes its place. Moore's law is safe. Stay tuned.

Original Article

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Nanofrontiers: A Vision of the Future

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies is reporting on a recent NanoFrontiers Workshop, where Nanofrontiers: Visions for the Future of Nanotechnology made its debut.

Controlling the properties and behavior of matter at the smallest scale—in effect, “domesticating atoms”—can help to overcome some of the world’s biggest challenges, concludes a new report on how diverse experts view the future of nanotechnology. This event marks the release of Nanofrontiers: Visions for the Future of Nanotechnology, by Karen Schmidt. This is a new publication that highlights the findings of a Washington, DC meeting organized by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

A brief excerpt:

It seems that the sky is the limit on what might one day be accomplished with nanostructured artificial tissues and nano-enhanced prosthetic devices…Perhaps what now seems almost like science fiction will one day seem like a historic paradigm shift that helped us solve some of our most pressing and complex problems.

Relevant to nearly every industry, nanotechnology is considered a “platform technology,” the report says, because “it readily merges and converges with other technologies and could change how we do just about everything.” Today, nanotechnology is delivering promising methods for cleaning up polluted sites, monitoring water sources, and enabling new methods of drug delivery. Tomorrow, it could provide the technical means for new solutions to the world’s energy problems, to treat water at its point of use, and to make artificial tissues that replace diseased organs and even repair nerve damage.

Nanotechnology is still very much a work in progress—for example, while most first-generation nanomedicines are reformulations of existing drugs, farther down the road, experts predict the creation of novel nanostructures that could serve as new kinds of drugs for treating cancer, Parkinson’s, and cardiovascular disease.

The report will be released at an event featuring one of the contributors to the report, Dr. Samuel Stupp, director of Northwestern University’s Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine. He will present the findings from his latest research in applying nanotechnology to jump-start cell regeneration. Dr. Stupp will also share his predictions on the long-term potential of using nanotechnology to treat specific medical conditions.

If you read this carefully, and give it some thought, you will understand just a bit of the impact nanotech will have on our lives in just a couple of decades. It will be a genuine paradigm shift because it will change virtually every aspect of our society and culture.

(Featured on Carnival of Emerging Technologies)

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Reality Ruled Out?

Quantum physics is baffling, not only to the general public, but for physicists as well. Richard Feynman encouraged his students by informing them that no one understands quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger said, "I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it." One of the most shocking ideas to come out of quantum mechanics is that all individual quantum events are innately random.

Proceeding from this idea is the strange but seemingly correct proposal that quantum particles do not fix on any particular state until they are observed. They are said to exist in a state of indecision until a consciousness observes them, at which point they settle into the form we know as reality. Niels Bohr said of these ideas, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word." Well said.

Understandably upset by the idea that reality does not exist without an observer, many physicists have postulated the existence of "hidden variables" that could explain the mathematical and experimental data that give rise to these bizarre conclusions. But recently, as an article in PhysicsWeb describes, an experiment run in Austria appears to dash the hopes of the hidden variables crowd.

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it.

The details of the experiment, as one might expect, are complicated beyond the reach of laymen like myself. What the experiment claims to demonstrate, however, is mind-bending.

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Nanotech Cures Paralyzed Mice

The Chicago Tribune today reports another step forward in the use of nanotechnology to grow new tissue in the human body. Northwestern University researcher Samuel Stupp, director of the school's bionanotech in medicine institute, "will present results showing paralyzed lab mice that have regained mobility through nanomaterial treatments."

The demonstration, set for Monday in Washington, is intended to underscore nanotech's potential as outlined in a new report, Nanofrontiers, sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trusts. The report, which grew out of an earlier meeting of scientists sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is restrained, talking about results that may occur decades hence.

In Stupp's research, material designed to self-assemble was injected by syringe into mice with severed spinal cords. The nanomaterial grew into nanofibers that repaired damaged neurons, enabling the mice to again use their hind legs about 1 1/2 months after initial treatments.

The same work has implications for treating Parkinson's and Alzheimer's patients.

"This research provides an early glimpse into the new and exciting places where nanotechnology can take us," said David Rejeski, director of the Wilson Center's emerging nanotech project.

Some nanotech enthusiasts believe that medical applications will become available much sooner than the Nanofrontiers report predicts.

In his book, "The Singularity is Near," Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur and writer, argues that nano-based therapies to regenerate failing tissue will help extend the lives of Baby Boomers so most may live until more advances will enable them, essentially, to avoid traditional death altogether.

Stupp said he thinks that Kurzweil's optimism has some basis. Working with animals now, the Northwestern researcher said he hopes within three years, researchers will obtain regulatory approval to begin studies using nanomaterials to regenerate tissue in humans.

"Regenerating bone and cartilage are our first targets," Stupp said. "That would be very important to Baby Boomers who value their quality of life. We are also working with regenerating blood vessels to address damage from heart attacks. [Nanotech] will first aid in diagnosing illness, but it also will provide therapies to alleviate or cure."

This is such a brief, beneath-the-fold, story that most people will miss it, which illustrates why the rapid acceleration of technological evolution has not yet been noticed by the public. It's all happening below the radar. If you are paying attention, however, you will be able to watch as it comes into view. Stay tuned.

(Original Story)

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Study Proves: Sleeping on it Works

You've probably used that expression at one time or another: I need to sleep on it. Perhaps you understood intuitively that there was really something to be gained by literally sleeping before making an important decision. Or maybe you were just postponing having to decide. In either case, it's now been demonstrated that sleeping on it really does work.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that understanding the big picture, seeing connections between disparate pieces of information, depends very strongly on taking a mental break from learning, and even more importantly, getting a good night's sleep.

“Relational memory is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” explains senior author Matthew Walker, PhD, Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “It’s not enough to have all the puzzle pieces – you also have to understand how they fit together.”

Adds lead author Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, a postdoctoral fellow at HMS and sleep neurologist at BWH, “People often assume that we know all of what we know because we learned it directly. In fact, that’s only partly true. We actually learn individual bits of information and then apply them in novel, flexible ways.”

For instance, if a person learns that A is greater than B and B is greater than C, then he or she knows those two facts. But embedded within those is a third fact – A is greater than C – which can be deduced by a process called transitive inference, the type of relational memory that the researchers examined in this study.

Earlier research by Walker and colleagues had shown that sleep actively improves task-oriented “procedural memory” – for example, learning to talk, to coordinate limbs, musicianship, or to play sports. Because relational memory is fundamental to knowledge and learning, Walker and Ellenbogen decided to explore how and when this “inferential” knowledge emerges, hypothesizing that it develops during “off-line” periods and that, like procedural memory, would be enhanced following a period of sleep.

Hey, anything that justifies getting more sleep is fine by me.

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The Downside of Natural Selection: Cancer

Most people don't really understand the point of natural selection and evolution. The common misconception is that natural selection's goal is the continuation of the species. In other words, we believe that traits that are advantageous to an individual will be propagated in order for the species to survive. In fact, natural selection doesn't care about the individual or the species. It cares only about the genes.

Richard Dawkins' 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, explained this concept.

The phrase "selfish gene" in the title of the book was coined by Dawkins as a provocative way of expressing the gene-centric view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes, and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection on genes. More precisely, an organism is expected to evolve to maximise its inclusive fitness – the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy.

So what's the downside? According to Jarle Breivik, an associate professor at the University of Oslo, Norway:

“Cancer is a fundamental consequence of the way we are made. We are temporary colonies made by our genes to propagate themselves to the next generation. The ultimate solution to cancer is that we would have to start reproducing ourselves in a different way.”

Although DNA repair is favourable to the organism; it may not be favourable to the individual cell. The theory was developed in several science papers, including an invited Commentary in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and may be illustrated as the effect of alternative strategies in a car race.

“Deciding when to stop for repairs and when to keep on going is a difficult challenge. Making repairs assures an optimized vehicle, but it also consumes valuable time and resources. At first thought, it may seem obvious that a damaging environment calls for more repair. Paradoxically, however, the effect may be exactly the opposite. Imagine that you are racing through a war zone with constant bombardment. Stopping for repair can then be a fatal strategy, and it is better to keep on going with flat tires and a screaming engine than to stop for repairs,” says Breivik.

This illustration thus explains why genetically unstable cancer cells are favoured in hostile environments—such as in the lungs of a heavy smoker. The model may also be described mathematically and has been experimentally confirmed in cell cultures and animal models by leading research groups in the field.

“Cells exposed to particular carcinogens die if they have the relevant repair mechanism, while genetically unstable cancer cells continued to grow,” Breivik explains.

But this hypothesis, that finding a therapeutic solution to cancer is impossible, doesn't mean that it can't be solved by any other means. In fact, Breivik suggests that the goal of radical life extension will simply have to find a better substrate in which to place ourselves:

He argues that cancer therapy is an attempt to counteract the natural decay of the body. If we think about it, however, it is not really the body we care about. After all, most people are more than happy to trade in a defect organ for a new one.

“It's the mind, our thoughts and consciousness that we desperately want to preserve. If we look at technological developments as a whole, that may be exactly what’s happening. The ongoing revolution in information and biotechnology may be interpreted as the mind’s liberation from the genes. It’s difficult to imagine the alternative, but if I could see a thousand years into the future, I would be very surprised if earth is still dominated by two-legged creatures with a limited life span,” says Jarle Breivik.

This will sound familiar to anyone interested in the coming singularity. I say onward, and let the devil take the hindmost!

(Via ScienceDaily)

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House, Heal Thyself!

The idea of a self-healing house, if such a thing would even enter the typical person's mind, would be a homeowner's dream. Come hell (global warming) or high water (hurricanes, floods, etc.), earthquakes or whatever, wouldn't it be wonderful if your house could repair itself?

Contractors would probably hate the idea, but they could concentrate on building the self-healing houses. In any case, just such a house is under construction on a Greek mountainside.

A "self-healing" house is under construction on a Greek mountainside. Leeds NanoManufacturing Institute will take the lead in a EU-funded project by developing special walls with nano polymer particles. The intent is that when squeezed under pressure (during an earthquake), the nano polymer particles will flow into cracks and harden to form a solid material.

This house will have more going for it than nanotech. The house walls will be built from unique load-bearing steel frames. But the house will also contain wireless, battery-less sensors and RFID tags to collect data over time—information about stresses and vibration, temperature and humidity.

Of course it may be a few years before you can order yourself a self-healing house, but perhaps it won't be as long as you might think.

Original Story

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Taking a Walk on Your Heart

No, that's not the title of a country and western song. How would you like it if, instead of having to cut your chest open, or stick a long tube into your heart through a hole in your leg, you could get treatment for heart disease from a small robot that looks like a caterpillar? Inserted through what the Tom Simonite of NewScientistTech calls "minimally invasive keyhole surgery," the device would crawl along on the outside of the heart delivering the necessary treatment.

Sounds like science fiction, but a prototype of the device, called HeartLander, has been tested on live pigs, inserting pacemaker leads and injecting dye into the heart.

The 20-millimetre-long robot has two suckers for feet, each pierced with 20 holes connected to a vacuum line, which hold it onto the outside of the heart. By moving its two body segments back and forth relative to one another it can crawl across the heart at up to 18 centimetres per minute. This back-and-forth movement is generated by pushing and pulling wires that run back to motors outside the patient's body. The robot is being developed by Cameron Riviere and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The plan is to insert the HeartLander through an incision below the ribcage, and pass it through a further incision in the membrane that encloses the heart. Surgeons keep track of the device using X-ray video or a magnetic tracker, and control its movements via a joystick.

Traditional open-heart surgery requires a massive incision, and the heart usually has to be stopped to make it easier to operate safely. Though minimally invasive procedures on a beating heart are sometimes possible, some areas of the heart are out of reach to instruments inserted through the keyhole incisions, and the limited space in the chest cavity makes operating difficult.

"HeartLander can reach all parts of the heart's surface," Riviere says. And because it is stationary relative to the heart's surface, there is no need to interfere with the organ's movement.

Entering the body from a single small incision could even allow some heart procedures to be performed without a general anaesthetic, he says. "It avoids having to disturb the ribcage, or to deflate the left lung to access the heart."

"This device is certainly like nothing else I've seen," says Andrew Rankin, a cardiologist at the University of Glasgow in the UK. Many procedures can be performed by passing instruments into the heart through blood vessels, but this is not possible where damaged or diseased tissue is close to the heart's surface. "This device could be useful in those cases," Rankin says.

He suggests it might come into its own for future treatments such as stem cell therapies to encourage regeneration of heart tissue. "You can imagine this device moving around the surface of a scarred heart to deliver treatments."

The researchers are now working on adding a radio-frequency probe to the device, to treat arrhythmias by selectively killing malfunctioning heart tissue. They also plan to add a camera.

Click to watch a video showing the latest prototype creeping over the surface of a beating model heart (2.1MB, mpg format). Coming soon to a surgery near you!

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Closing in on Automated War

The Department of Defense wants to replace a third of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robots by 2015, the Economist reported today. As we've seen from the war in Iraq, the country will not support a war that brings lots of body bags home. The answer to this political reality, as far as the generals are concerned, is to take the men and women out of harm's way altogether. As the Economist correctly points out, "Nobody mourns a robot," although the generals may mourn the expense of a lost robot.

The armed forces already use unmanned vehicles, but they are still controlled remotely by humans. The Pentagon wants to give these robots increasingly greater levels of autonomy, allowing them to operate without human direction apart from the programming supplied by humans.

To achieve this, Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, is developing a set of rules of engagement for battlefield robots to ensure that their use of lethal force follows the rules of ethics. In other words, he is trying to create an artificial conscience. Dr Arkin believes that there is another reason for putting robots into battle. It is that they have the potential to act more humanely than people. Stress does not affect a robot's judgement in the way it affects a soldier's. His approach is to create what he calls a “multidimensional mathematical decision space of possible behaviour actions”. Based on inputs that could come from anything from radar data and current position to mission status and intelligence feeds, the system would divide the set of all possible actions into those that are ethical and those that are not. If, say, the drone from which the fatal attack on Mr Atef was launched had sensed that his car was overtaking a school bus, it may have held fire.

Will these developments make war much more palatable to the American public? And if so, will that make them more frequent? And the most important question of all is this: Will humans lose control of their robotic armies altogether. In my opinion, an inexpert as it may be, we will be able to prevent and defend against such an eventuality, and the fewer humans that have to die to protect us, the better. What do you think?

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An Old Folks Home or a Robot in the Home?

As the populations of many developed nations continue to age, their demographics are aging along with the populations. More elderly, fewer young, proportionately speaking. Not only are people having fewer children, but people are also living longer.

Within this context, many people around my age are facing, or will soon face, a heart-wrenching decision concerning parents who are finding it difficult or impossible to adequately care for themselves. Even as assisted living facilities become an inevitable choice, researchers are working hard on another option...a robot in the home.

While the concept may seem farfetched, it is coming closer to becoming a truly viable option. Researchers at MIT (as reported by Rachel Ross for MIT Technology Review) have built (created?) a humanoid robot called Domo who can "size up an object by shaking it in its (his?/her?) hand and then put it away in a cupboard."

It's the ability to deal with the unpredictability in the home environment, as opposed to a factory floor for example, that makes Domo's skill so important. Industrial robots deal with predictable objects, whereas the seemingly simple task of putting away the items in a bag of groceries is actually quite complicated by comparison.

Rather than programing Domo to deal with objects of specific sizes and shapes, the researchers have equipped Domo to size up each item before deciding how to store it.

Domo can also perform basic insertion tasks, such as placing a spoon in a bowl, and help with tidying up the house by carrying around a box in which the human can put clutter. "I can hand it a box of any size, and it can hold it between its two hands, track me, and keep the box nearby," Edsinger says.

Domo, which was created for research purposes, will probably never make it onto store shelves--or into anyone's kitchen. But the research that goes into Domo will likely be used by other roboticists in their quest to create the ideal domestic robot. For example, a robot's ability to find the tip of an object is extremely helpful for scientists developing robots that can work with household tools.

While some have suggested that a more efficient way to assist the elderly would be to incorporate robots into standard appliances "so that they disappear into the world around you," it seems to me that a humanoid robot would be able to provide for perhaps a more important than putting away groceries. It might provide for the need for companionship. What do you think?

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The Explosion of Intelligence

Here's a video of a speech delivered at The Singularity Summit by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a research fellow at The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (Click here for more on the singularity.)

The speech is on The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion, and addresses the impact of the rapidly accelerating progress of AI as it approaches and eventually exceeds the capacity of human intelligence.

Mr. Yudkowsky has been working on the development of "friendly AI," a worthy subject of study, it seems to me. He discusses AI that has access to its own source code, enabling it to generate successively improved versions of itself.

He first discusses the concept of intelligence and what people understand it to be. Rather than seeing the spectrum of intelligence as going from low IQ to high IQ among humans, he suggests that we see it instead as a much broader range, from the lowest lifeforms to humans, in which the range of human intelligence is actually quite small.

He goes on to posit that intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, shaping and manipulating its environment to suit its needs. It is also one of the last remaining mysteries in science.

A bit from the speech...

"In everyday life, we underrate the importance of intelligence because our social environment consists of only other humans, who as a species are far more intelligent than mice or lizards. The rise of human general intelligence enormously transformed the world. Yet we may have only begun to see the effects of intelligence. In 1965, the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good published a paper titled "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", in which he suggested that a sufficiently intelligent AI could redesign itself to make itself smarter, and then, being smarter, re-reinvent itself and become smarter still - a positive feedback cycle. Good labeled this the "intelligence explosion". An intelligence explosion could reshape the universe more than all human actions up to this point. It is the responsibility of this generation to shape the intelligence explosion."

Watch the video to hear more!



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Let Machines Target Machines - Let Men Target Men

This is the essence of a new set of robot rules suggested by John Canning, an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, Dahlgren Division – an American weapons-research and test establishment, for governing the behavior of killer robots in warfare situation.

You will recall, I'm sure, Isaac Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics, either from his seminal book or the movie of the same name, I Robot. They are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws, however, would not work for robots whose purpose is warfare. So Canning proposed some laws that would apply. According to Lewis Page, reporting for The Register,

"However, the new Canning Laws are certainly not a carte blanche for homicidal droids to obliterate fleshies without limit; au contraire.

Canning proposes that robot warriors should be allowed to mix it up among themselves freely, autonomously deciding to blast enemy weapon systems. Many enemy “systems” would, of course, be themselves robots, so it's clear that machine-on-machine violence isn't a problem. The difficulty comes when the automatic battlers need to target humans. In such cases Mr Canning says that permission from a human operator should be sought."

Canning has prepared a presentation called “Concept of Operations for Armed Autonomous Systems” which is available in pdf format here.

As Mr. Lewis aptly mentions, under the rules proposed by Canning one wonders if a killer robot would be allowed to destroy an AK47 (machinery) that happens to be in the hands of a human enemy. He very drolly concludes, "If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear. Effectively the robot is allowed to disarm enemies by prying their guns from their cold dead hands."

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A "Do-Over" for the Internet

Consider the assumptions made by the researchers who laid the foundation for the Internet. They were a small group of scientists who trusted one another, so they weren't concerned about security. They all had computers that stayed put, so they weren't concerned about mobile connections.

They wanted to use it to send each other information that no one's life depended on, and if it didn't get to its destination immediately, no one would die, so the concept of mission critical functionality didn't enter their minds. One can't blame them for not anticipating the future of the Internet, and even if they had, the hardware they had available weren't up to the task.

The result? The Internet that we all know and love is built on a rickety and extremely limited framework of legacy hardware and software, and much of its present functionality is a cobbled-together hodge podge of work-arounds and duct tape fixes. That simply won't do.

Researchers are very sensibly suggesting scrapping the present Internet and starting over from scratch, this time building a structure that has the underlying robustness, security, functionality and speed that will take us forward into the next several decades.

The National Science Foundation is only one of several organizations currently working on experimental networks; theirs is called the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI. The idea is to build a parallel network that would run alongside the current one and that would eventually replace it.

Another exciting bit of news concerns plans for the first Internet router in orbit, which will allow satellites to communicate directly with one another rather than having to go through ground-based routers. Sounds a bit ominous, I know, but the more distributed the Internet is, the less vulnerable it will be to attack. Hmm, that also sounds ominous.

As always, keep up with developments by visiting this site daily.

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Nanobots: Getting from Point A to Point B

If you remember the movie Innerspace with Martin Short, Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, you'll recall that they shrunk down their submarine, got injected into Martin Short, and zipped around through the bloodstream with amazing ease. Like many other aspects of the movie, it just doesn't work that way. For a bacterium, moving around at the microscopic scale is like us trying to swim through something "thicker than molasses." So how do they do it?

Bacteria evolved the "highly sophisticated flagellum." A molecular motor that "pumps protons across the cell's membrane causes the helical filaments of the flagellum to rotate" at speeds up to 1,000 rpm.

So how are nanobots supposed to imitate this very effective method?

Researchers have developed a novel form of propulsion for microrobots that mimics the way bacteria zip about using corkscrew-like appendages called flagella. Tests show that the tiny rotating nanocoils--just 27 nanometers thick and 40 micrometers long--are capable of spinning at 60 revolutions per minute and that it is possible to propel an object at nearly 5 micrometers per second.

Such propulsion could be used as part of smart drug delivery systems, which are steered through the bloodstream directly to their target, says Bradley Nelson, a professor of robotics and intelligent systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, who led the research. And in the long term, the nanopropellers could be used to propel autonomous biomedical microrobots, he suggests.

Nelson's nanocoils generate their motion using an external rotating magnetic field which causes them to move in much the same way as flagella. The nanocoil was made by fabricating two very thin strips of gallium arsenide on top of each other, using photolithographic techniques; the bottom layer is laced with indium. "The indium atoms in the lower layer induce a compressive stress," says Bell. This causes it to curl up into a helix to release the stress, says Bell. "It's like a corkscrew," Nelson explains.

I'm telling you, there'll be nanobots in your blood sooner than you think. Keep up with the latest by coming to this web site every day.

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3-D Chip Stacking Comes Much Closer

I've told you before about Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 18 months. People have predicted that Moore's Law will ultimately hit the limits of physics, but new paradigms under development will allow it to continue. One of those paradigms is 3-dimensional stacking. Currently chips are laid out in only 2 dimensions, and have been connected by relatively long wires. According to the International Herald Tribune, "The memory and processor chips are often spaced inches apart from each other, causing a lag in transmission as chip makers multiply the number and voracity of calculating cores on their processors. Slowdowns crop up when data-hungry processors cannot retrieve information fast enough from memory to perform their increasingly complex functions."

But the irrepressible folks at IBM have found a way to connect chips vertically, shortening those distances hugely.

In IBM's solution, two chips are sandwiched on top of one another, the distance between them measured in microns, or millionths of a meter. They are held together by vertical connections that are etched in silicon holes filled with metal. The vertical connections are referred to as "through-silicon vias," which allow multiple chips to be stacked together and for more information to flow between them.

IBM said that its three-dimensional approach creates the possibility of up to 100 times more pathways for information, and divides by 1,000 times the distance that information needs to travel on a chip.

"This is a big step, this is a really historic move," said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research. "This has been studied to death, but it's the first time a company is saying, 'We can connect two chips in the vertical direction.' "

This development gives chip makers a whole new direction, literally, in which to take their future products. IBM plans to begin full production in 2008. Intel and others are sure to be hot on their heels. Look for computers to become thousands of times more powerful in the very near future.

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