Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit

PC World - October 28, 2008, by Christopher Null

Since the dawn of electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.

What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.

Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.

Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.

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Voyage of the Bacteria Bots

Technology Review - October 31, 2008, by Kristina Grifantini

Self-propelled microbots navigate through blood vessels.

The 1966 science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage famously imagined using a tiny ship to combat disease inside the body. With the advent of nanotechnology, researchers are inching closer to creating something almost as fantastic. A microscopic device that could swim through the bloodstream and directly target the site of disease, such as a tumor, could offer radical new treatments. To get to a tumor, however, such a device would have to be small and agile enough to navigate through a labyrinth of tiny blood vessels, some far thinner than a human hair.

Researchers at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, led by professor of computer engineering Sylvain Martel, have coupled live, swimming bacteria to microscopic beads to develop a self-propelling device, dubbed a nanobot. While other scientists have previously attached bacteria to microscopic particles to take advantage of their natural propelling motion, Martel's team is the first to show that such hybrids can be steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

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Virtual touchpad lets you scroll in thin air

NewScientistTech - October 27, 2008, Devin Powell

The Apple iPhone's sexy touchscreen with its multi-touch commands has been a huge hit with the public, but such screens can only get so small before clunky fingers get in the way. So Microsoft is extending the concept of the touchscreen beyond the edges of the phone itself.

The company's researchers have developed a system called SideSight, which allows you to control a phone placed on a table by wiggling your fingers in the space around it.

The technology was unveiled last week at the User Interface in Software and Technology symposium in Monterey, California.

Alex Butler of the Sensors and Devices Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK lined the long sides of a phone with infrared sensors that can pick up the movement of fingers up to 10 centimetres away.

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Computer circuit built from brain cells

NewScientistTech - October 23, 2008, by Colin Barras

For all its sophistication and power, your brain is built from unreliable components – one neuron can successfully provoke a signal in another only 40% of the time.

This lack of efficiency frustrates neuroengineers trying to build networks of brain cells to interface with electronics or repair damaged nervous systems.

Our brains combine neurons into heavily connected groups to unite their 40% reliability into a much more reliable whole.

Now human engineers working with neurons in the lab have achieved the same trick: building reliable digital logic gates that perform like those inside electronics.

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Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans

NewScientist - October 22, 2008, by Paul Marks

The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human".

One thing that really bugs defence chiefs is having their troops diverted from other duties to control robots. So having a pack of them controlled by one person makes logistical sense. But I'm concerned about where this technology will end up.

Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed? I asked two experts on automated weapons what they thought - click the continue reading link to read what they said.

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Robotic ants building homes on Mars?

ITC Results - October 21, 2008

Recent discoveries of water and Earth-like soil on Mars have set imaginations running wild that human beings may one day colonise the Red Planet. However, the first inhabitants might not be human in form at all, but rather swarms of tiny robots.

“Small robots that are able to work together could explore the planet. We now know there is water and dust so all they would need is some sort of glue to start building structures, such as homes for human scientists,” says Marc Szymanski, a robotics researcher at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Szymanski is part of a team of European researchers developing tiny autonomous robots that can co-operate to perform different tasks, much like termites, ants or bees forage collaboratively for food, build nests and work together for the greater good of the colony.

Working in the EU-funded I-SWARM project, the team created a 100-strong posse of centimetre-scale robots and made considerable progress toward building swarms of ant-sized micro-bots. Several of the researchers have since gone on to work on creating swarms of robots that are able to reconfigure themselves and assemble autonomously into larger robots in order to perform different tasks. Their work is being continued in the Symbrion and Replicator projects that are funded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme.

Planet exploration and colonisation are just some of a seemingly endless range of potential applications for robots that can work together, adjusting their duties depending on the obstacles they face, changes in their environment and the swarm’s needs.

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Untangling Web Information

Technology Review - October 21, 2008, by Erica Naone

The Semantic Web organizer Twine offers bookmarking with built-in AI.

The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web--that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. Microsoft's acquisition of the semantic search engine Powerset earlier this year shows faith in this vision. But thus far, little Semantic Web technology has been available to the general public. That's why many eyes will be on Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology that launches publicly today.

Developed by Radar Networks, based in San Francisco, Twine is part bookmarking tool, part social network, and part recommendation engine, helping users collect, manage, and share online information related to any area of interest. For the novice, it can be tricky figuring out exactly where to start. But for experienced users, Twine can be a powerful way to research a subject collaboratively or find people with common interests, with the usual features of a bookmarking site augmented by Twine's underlying semantic technology.

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A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer

The New York Times - October 20, 2008, by JOHN MARKOFF

REDMOND, Wash. — In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In about 30 seconds the computer is “owned.”

An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a “zombie.” That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called “botnets” — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.

Botnets remain an Internet scourge. Active zombie networks created by a growing criminal underground peaked last month at more than half a million computers, according to shadowserver.org, an organization that tracks botnets. Even though security experts have diminished the botnets to about 300,000 computers, that is still twice the number detected a year ago.

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5 Prophecies about Artificial Intelligence

Popular Mechanics - October 16, 2008, by Erik Sofge

MACHINES WILL NEVER ACHIEVE HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

According to Wright, one of the main benefits of the quest for AI is a better definition of human intelligence. "Intelligence is whatever we can do that computers can't," says Wright

YOUR SIM WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU (KIND OF)

Wright believes that computers, whether they're artificially intelligent or not, will learn about humans in order to become more effective. "Computers are going to have to build very elaborate models of humans," says Wright.

GAMES WILL WRITE THEMSELVES

In the future, Wright sees plot-driven videogames—which he sees as an unfortunate result of "film envy"—giving way to a kind of personalized gaming experience, based on a computer's ability to read you.

HIVE MINDS WILL BE LOTS OF FUN

As computers continue to seek more data on human behavior and more accurate models of humans, Wright predicts that they'll begin to compare notes.

MACHINES WILL BOOT-STRAP THEIR WAY TO SENTIENCE

Hive minds sound relatively harmless when they're toiling away at tailor-made videogames for human leisure time. But in Wright's future, computers will progress towards something far more powerful and inherently alien.

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Computing with RNA

Technology Review - October 17, 2008, by Duncan Graham-Rowe

Devices that self-assemble from biological molecules could represent the future of drug delivery.

Scientists in California have created molecular computers that are able to self-assemble out of strips of RNA within living cells. Eventually, such computers could be programmed to manipulate biological functions within the cell, executing different tasks under different conditions. One application could be smart drug delivery systems, says Christina Smolke, who carried out the research with Maung Nyan Win and whose results are published in the latest issue of Science.

The use of biomolecules to perform computations was first demonstrated by the University of Southern California's Leonard Adleman in 1994, and the approach was later developed by Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. But according to Shapiro, "What this new work shows for the first time is the ability to detect the presence or absence of molecules within the cell."

That opens up the possibility of computing devices that can respond to specific conditions within the cell, he says. For example, it may be possible to develop drug delivery systems that target cancer cells from within by sensing genes used to regulate cell growth and death. "You can program it to release the drug when the conditions are just right, at the right time and in the right place," Shapiro says.

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'Buckypaper' may build the future

msnbc - October 17, 2008, by Bill Kaczor

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.

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Self-Assembled Organic Circuits

Technology Review - October 17, 2008, by Prachi Patel-Predd

Molecules that form an ordered layer could lead to low-cost, bendable plastic electronics.

Researchers have found a simple way to make high-performance electronic circuits from organic semiconductors. The advance, reported in this week's Nature, brings us one step closer to low-cost, bendable plastic electronics.

A research team led by Dago de Leeuw at the Philips Research Laboratories, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, developed semiconductor molecules that automatically arrange themselves on a surface in a layer just a few nanometers thick. These "self-assembling" molecules could make it much easier to fabricate organic transistors, the essential building blocks of plastic electronics. In experiments, the researchers used the technique to make hundreds of transistors and arranged them into complex circuits.

In the past, others have used similar self-assembly tricks to make organic transistors, but the new method is much simpler. Moreover, researchers have been unable to accurately and reliably replicate self-assembled devices until now. "You need every transistor to be working in order for the circuit to work," says John Kymissis, an electrical-engineering professor at Columbia University. "Here, there are hundreds of transistors, all of which work. The yield is extremely good for complicated circuits."

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Scientists develop eye camera

CNET News - August 7, 2008

Photo by Beckman Institute, University of Illinois

Caption by Andy Smith

Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have developed a camera with a layout similar in size and shape to the human eye. The eye camera is based on "single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh," according to the University of Illinois.

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Surfing the Web Stimulates Older Brains

Blogger's Note: An encouragement for older folk to surf!

WebMD Health News - October 14, 2008, by Julie Edgar

Web-Savvy Baby Boomers, Seniors Plumb More Regions of the Brain During Internet Searches

Googling is good for Grandpa and Grandma, says a new study by researchers at UCLA.

The study, which looked at brain activity during web searches, resulted in a fascinating finding: Middle-aged to older adults who know their way around the Internet had more stimulation of decision-making and complex reasoning areas of the brain than peers who were new to web surfing.

What’s more, reading didn’t stimulate the same number of brain areas as Internet searching.

The UCLA study, funded by the Parvin Foundation, involved 24 adults from 55 to 78 years old, half of whom had experience searching the web from once a day to many times a day. The other half reported using the Internet never to once a month. The participants didn't have any neurological conditions such as dementia and were similar in age and educational level.

In order to measure brain activity during reading and web searches, the 24 adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans while separately performing both activities, either a new Internet search or reading text on a computer screen that was formatted to look like a book.

While reading stimulated the same areas of the brain in both groups, those who regularly searched the Internet showed twice the increase in brain activity when performing the new Internet search than their counterparts, especially in the areas of the brain that control decision making and complex reasoning.

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Giant database plan 'Orwellian'

BBCNews - October 15, 2008

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

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Brain boost drugs 'growing trend'

BBC - October 13, 2008

Increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin to boost alertness and brain power, say experts.

Up to a fifth of adults, including college students and shift workers,may be using cognitive enhancers, a poll of 1,400 by Nature journal suggests.

Neuropsychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge University said safety evidence is urgently needed.

Experts gather to debate this topic at a meeting in London on Monday evening.

Professor Sahakian's own work shows 17% of students in some US universities admit to using the stimulant Ritalin (methylphenidate) - a drug designed to treat hyperactive children - to maximise their learning power.

One in five of the 1,400 people who responded to the Nature survey said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil (modafinil) or beta-blockers for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory. 

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How Spam is Improving AI

Technology Review - October 14, 2008, by Kurt Kleiner

Anti-spam puzzles are helping researchers develop smarter algorithms.

Those pesky visual puzzles that have to be completed each time you sign up for a Web mail account or post a comment to a blog are under attack. It's not just from spam-spewing computers or hackers, though; it's also from researchers who are using anti-spam puzzles to develop smarter, more humanlike algorithms.

The most common type of puzzle (a series of distorted letters and numbers) is increasingly being cracked by smarter AI software. And a computer scientist has now developed an algorithm that can defeat even the latest photograph-based tests.

Known as CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), these puzzles were developed in the late '90s as a way to separate real users from machines that create e-mail accounts to send out spam or log in to message boards to post ad links. The Turing Test, named after mathematician Alan Turing, involves measuring intelligence by having a computer try to impersonate a real person.

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Machines Edge Closer To Imitating Human Communication

ScienceDaily - October 13, 2008

At a major artificial intelligence competition at the University of Reading on 12 October, machines have come close to imitating human communication.

As part of the 18th Loebner Prize, all of the artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competing to pass the Turing Test have managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a human rather than a machine. One of the ACEs, the eventual winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of human interrogators.

Top machines from around the world were entered into the competition and following extensive scrutiny these were whittled down to the five best for the 12 October finale. During the Turing Test at the University of Reading, the ACEs competed in a series of five minute long, unrestricted conversations with human interrogators, attempting to pass themselves off as human. The interrogators did not know whether they were conversing with a human or a machine during the test.

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Goldmine bug DNA may be key to alien life

NewScientist - October 9, 2008, by Catherine Brahic

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

A community of the bacteria Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. Its 60°C home is completely isolated from the rest of the world, and devoid of light and oxygen.

Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, studied the genes found in samples of the fluid to identify the organisms living within it, expecting to find a mix of species. Instead, he found that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory.

"The fact that the community contains only one species stands one of the basic tenets of microbial ecology on its head," says Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in Chivian's DNA analysis but whose team made the initial discovery that there were microbes living in this particular fissure two years ago.

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Researchers design artificial cells that could power medical implants

Physorg.com - October 9, 2008

Researchers at Yale University have created a blueprint for artificial cells that are more powerful and efficient than the natural cells they mimic and could one day be used to power tiny medical implants.

The scientists began with the question of whether an artificial version of the electrocyte – the energy-generating cells in electric eels – could be designed as a potential power source. "The electric eel is very efficient at generating electricity," said Jian Xu, a postdoctoral associate in Yale's Department of Chemical Engineering. "It can generate more electricity than a lot of electrical devices."

Xu came up with the first blueprint that shows how the electrocyte's different ion channels work together to produce the fish's electricity while he was a graduate student under former Yale assistant professor of mechanical engineering David LaVan, now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

But the scientists didn't stop there. "We're still trying to understand how the mechanisms in these cells work," said LaVan. "But we asked ourselves: 'Do we know enough to sit down and start thinking about how to build these things?' Nobody had really done that before."

Using the new blueprint as a guide, LaVan and Xu set about designing an artificial cell that could replicate the electrocyte's energy production. "We wanted to see if nature had already optimized the power output and energy conversion efficiency of this cell," said Xu. "And we found that an artificial cell could actually outperform a natural cell, which was a very surprising result."

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Plastic film could make house lights obsolete

msnbc - October 10, 2008, by Peter Svensson

Flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) could be lighting's future

NISKAYUNA, N.Y. - On a bank of the Mohawk River, a windowless industrial building of corrugated steel hides something that could make floor lamps, bedside lamps, wall sconces and nearly every other household lamp obsolete.

It's a machine that prints lights.

The size of a semitrailer, it coats an 8-inch wide plastic film with chemicals, then seals them with a layer of metal foil. Apply electric current to the resulting sheet, and it lights up with a blue-white glow.

You could tack that sheet to a wall, wrap it around a pillar or even take a translucent version and tape it to your windows. Unlike practically every other source of lighting, you wouldn't need a lamp or conventional fixture for these sheets, though you would need to plug them into an outlet.

The sheets owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. While there are plenty of problems to be worked out with the technology, it's not the dream of a wild-eyed startup.

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Using living cells as nanotechnology factories

Physorg.com - October 08, 2008

In the tiny realm of nanotechnology, scientists have used a wide variety of materials to build atomic scale structures. But just as in the construction business, nanotechnology researchers can often be limited by the amount of raw materials. Now, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University researcher Hao Yan has avoided these pitfalls by using cells as factories to make DNA based nanostructures inside a living cell.

The results were published in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yan specializes in a fast-growing field within nanotechnology -- commonly known as structural DNA nanotechnology -- that uses the basic chemical units of DNA, abbreviated as C, T, A, or G, to self-fold into a number of different building blocks that can further self-assemble into patterned structures.

"This is a good example of artificial nanostructures that can be replicated using the machineries in live cells" said Yan. "Cells are really good at making copies of double stranded DNA and we have used the cell like a copier machine to produce many, many copies of complex DNA nanostructures."

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Long-Lasting Quantum Memory Leads to Long-Distance Quantum Communication

Physorg.com - October 07, 2008, by Lisa Zyga

A) In the scientists’ apparatus, the atomic ensemble is confined in an optical trap formed by a focused laser beam. This beam is overlapped with counterpropagating “write” and “read” beams. The resulting Stokes and anti-Stokes photons are detected, serving as a useful probe for quantum memory storage. (B) An absorption image of the optically trapped atoms. Image: Thorsten Strassel.

Physicists have taken a step closer to realizing long-distance quantum communication, in which a quantum state is transferred from one location to another by becoming entangled with a traveling photon.

The basis for quantum communication is the ability to entangle two photons, A and B, where one photon, B, is sent down a transmission channel. There is also a third photon, C, which is entangled to a quantum state but not to the other two photons. A quantum state may be represented by a group of atoms that shares a superposition between two ground states (in superposition, both ground states exist simultaneously, and there is a certain probability that the atoms are in one ground state or the other).

When physicists perform entanglement swapping by making a Bell state measurement on photons A and C, photon B also becomes immediately entangled to the quantum state, even though it has already traveled down the transmission channel.

The site where the sent photon becomes entangled with the quantum state is called a quantum repeater. Quantum repeaters, which occur throughout the transmission channel, can generate and store entanglement in order to boost the signal, with the aim of getting the entangled state to reach the other end. Entanglement can be stored by some sort of quantum memory device until, ultimately, the quantum state is “read” by being converted into another photon.

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Atomically Precise Manufacturing Consortium Receives Award from Texas' ETF and DARPA

AZOnanotechnology - October 3rd, 2008

Zyvex Labs today announced the award of a $9.7M program funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Texas' ETF (Emerging Technology Fund). The goal of this effort is to develop a new manufacturing technique that enables "Tip-Based Nanofabrication" to accelerate the transition of nanotechnology from the laboratory to commercial products. Starting with the construction of 'one-at-a-time' atomically precise silicon structures, the Consortium initially plans to develop atomically precise, 'quantum dot' nanotech-based products in volume at practical production rates and costs. Harnessing this capability will position the United States and Texas with the fundamental technology to develop next-generation quantum dot applications for military and commercial applications such as advanced communications, metrology, and quantum computers. The spin-off nanomanufacturing capabilities from that early application will result in revolutionary nanotech products in follow-on development.

The charter industry APMC members are Zyvex Labs, General Dynamics, Integrated Circuit Scanning Probe Instruments, and Vought Aircraft; while Texas Higher Education members include the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas. Other Higher Education members are the University of Central Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Government and non-profit consortium members are the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the North Texas Regional Center for Innovation & Commercialization (NTXRCIC). Other consortium members of all three types are expected to be added as the program progresses into later stages.

"We are extremely proud to receive this award," said John Randall, Ph.D., Vice President of Zyvex Labs and Principal Investigator for the APMC research program. "The technologies developed by this program will be the first to allow robust three-dimensional solid structures to be created with atomic precision under computer control. While, historically, this falls in line with ongoing efforts throughout human history to improve manufacturing precision, it is revolutionary because it will achieve unprecedented precision by taking advantage of the quantized nature of matter."

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'Intelligent' computers put to the test

guardian.co.uk - October 5 2008, by David Smith

Programmers try to fool human interrogators

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.

In the Turing test a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be "thinking".

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be "conscious" - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off.

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Lying about your age? A computer can tell

MSNBC - October 6, 2008, by Bryn Nelson

How well can you hide your age? Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a software program that estimates age based solely on someone’s facial appearance, suggesting that in the near future you won’t be able to fool either Mother Nature or that video camera verifying your ID at the local bar.

Beyond more accurate age estimates, the technology suggests a way for ads to target passersby with age-appropriate pitches, for face-based security systems to improve their accuracy, and for robots to become more adept at responding to human needs.

“Definitely for human-robot interactions, the robot would like to know as much about humans as possible,” said Thomas Huang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois who led the research.

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This is your grid on brains

Physorg.com - October 2, 2008

Managing power networks in the future may involve a little more brain power than it does today, if researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology succeed in a new project that involves literally tapping brain cells grown on networks of electrodes.

The Missouri S&T group, working with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, plans to use the brain power to develop a new method for tracking and managing the constantly changing levels of power supply and demand.

Led by Dr. Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the researchers will use living neural networks composed of thousands of brain cells from laboratory rats to control simulated power grids in the lab. From those studies, the researchers hope to create a "biologically inspired" computer program to manage and control complex power grids in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria and elsewhere.

"We want to develop a totally new architecture than what exists today," says Venayagamoorthy, who also directs the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at Missouri S&T. "Power systems control is very complex, and the brain is a very flexible, very adaptable network. The brain is really good at handling uncertainties."

Venayagamoorthy hopes to develop a system that is "inspired by the brain but not a replica. Nobody really understands completely how the brain works."

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