Latest Military Vehicle - Remote-Controlled Beetle

Technology Review - January 29 2009, by Emily Singer

The insect's flight path can be wirelessly controlled via a neural implant.

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.

Beetles and other flying insects are masters of flight control, integrating sensory feedback from the visual system and other senses to navigate and maintain stable flight, all the while using little energy. Rather than trying to re-create these systems from scratch, Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues aim to take advantage of the beetle's natural abilities by melding insect and machine. His group has previously created cyborg beetles, including ones that have been implanted with electronic components as pupae. But the current research, presented at the IEEE MEMS in Italy, is the first demonstration of a wireless beetle system.

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It's the algorithm, stupid - New computational technique allows comparison of whole genomes as easily as whole books

Blogger's Note: Huge advances in technology are often the result of better computational methods rather than advances in hardware. As you will see here.

PhysOrg.com - January 28 2009

Text comparison of English books with the FFP method yields a relationship tree that groups similar books together, by genre, period or author. Credit: Sung-Hou Kim laboratory, UC Berkeley

Taking a hint from the text comparison methods used to detect plagiarism in books, college papers and computer programs, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have developed an improved method for comparing whole genome sequences.

With nearly a thousand genomes partly or fully sequenced, scientists are jumping on comparative genomics as a way to construct evolutionary trees, trace disease susceptibility in populations, and even track down people's ancestry.

To date, the most common techniques have relied on comparing a limited number of highly conserved genes - no more than a couple dozen - in organisms that have all these genes in common.

The new method can be used to compare even distantly related organisms or organisms with genomes of vastly different sizes and diversity, and can compare the entire genome, not just a selected small fraction of the gene-containing portion known to code for proteins, which in the human genome is only 1 percent of the DNA.

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Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence - A paper by Stephen M. Omohundro, Ph.D.

Here is a brief excerpt from a fascinating paper delivered at the Singularity Summit of 2007...

Our technology is likely to eventually become powerful enough to improve itself without human intervention. When this occurs, it will lead to a dramatic increase in the pace of technological progress. Irving Good [1] envisioned the consequences in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligentmachine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

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They're Not Kidding - Researchers seek to create 'fountain of youth'

PhysOrg.com - January 16 2009, by Jenn Watkins

The same principles that a Biodesign Institute research team has successfully applied to remove harmful contaminants from the environment may one day allow people to clean up the gunk from their bodies—and reverse the effects of aging. The Biodesign Institute, along with partner, the Methuselah Foundation, is working to vanquish age-related disease by making old cells feel younger.

“The mainstream approach to curing aging diseases is to delay them a little bit, which is great for pharmaceutical sales, but not so good for fixing people,” said John Schloendorn, a Molecular and Cellular Biology Ph.D. student who works in the lab of Dr. Bruce Rittmann, director of the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. “What’s different about the Methuselah Foundation is that their approach is to directly repair the damage that the passage of time does to our bodies and eventually causes disease.”

Their collaboration addresses age-related problems, such as heart disease, macular degeneration, and Alzheimer’s disease, by understanding the root causes of disease. A number of diseases that appear with age are primarily caused by a lifetime of accumulated debris inside of cells.

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Life-extension takes a whole lotta computation - Extending Human Life--And Data

Forbes.com - January 26 2009, by Ed Sperling

Gene mapping places enormous demands on computing, power and data storage.

People want to live longer, but the cost may be enormous and create fallout in places you never expected.

Mapping the human genome and proteins, viewed by many scientists as a first step in prolonging life, is emerging as one of the most compute-intensive tasks in history. The effort requires massive amounts of processing power coupled with unprecedented amounts of storage. While most companies are trying to consolidate their computing operations, proponents of genetic research are predicting an unprecedented expansion. They even anticipate a separate and distinct genomic economy.

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New Neighbors - Dark flow: Proof of another universe?

NewScientist - January 23 2009 by Amanda Gefter

FOR most of us the universe is unimaginably vast. But not for cosmologists. They feel decidedly hemmed in. No matter how big they build their telescopes, they can only see so far before hitting a wall. Approximately 45 billion light years away lies the cosmic horizon, the ultimate barrier because light beyond it not has not had time to reach us.

So here we are, stuck inside our patch of universe, wondering what lies beyond and resigned to that fact we may never know. The best we can hope for, through some combination of luck and vigilance, is to spot a crack in the structure of things, a possible window to that hidden place beyond the edge of the universe. Now Sasha Kashlinsky believes he has stumbled upon such a window.

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Getting harder to keep up - Holographic discs set to smash storage records

NewScientist - January 22 2009, by Colin Barras

How quickly things change. Just as Blu-ray is starting to replace the DVDs in our homes, another technology is developed that could sound its death knell.

A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store an impressive 50 gigabytes, but discs which can hold 20 times as much data have just taken a step closer, thanks to new materials that make reading and writing 3D holograms more reliable.

CDs and DVDs store data as pits on their surface that are read by a laser. A Blu-ray disc can hold over five times more data than a standard DVD because the pits are much smaller. Writing the data onto two layers within the disc instantly doubles the volume of data that can be stored. But writing data to the whole thickness of the disc in the form of a hologram could dramatically increase storage capacity.

A pair of laser beams is used to write data into discs of light-sensitive plastic, with both aiming at the same spot. One beam shines continuously, while the other pulses on and off to encode patches that represent digital 0s and 1s.

At the points where the lasers meet, the intense light causes molecules in the disc's material to merge into chains, creating a physical pattern that locks the 0s and 1s into the disc. This pattern can be read back at a later date using another laser because the changed patches interact differently with light.

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How might a super-intelligence emerge?

This novelette by Ted Chiang if a fascinating exploration of what it might be like if/when an enhanced human intelligence arises.

Understand
a novelette by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang writes...

The initial impulse to write "Understand" arose from an offhand remark made by my roommate in college; he was reading Sartre's Nausea at the time, whose protagonist finds only meaninglessness in everything he sees. But what would it be like, my roommate wondered, to find meaning and order in everything you saw? To me that suggested a kind of heightened perception, which in turn suggested superintelligence. I started thinking about the point at which quantitative improvements -- better memory, faster pattern recognition -- turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally different mode of cognition.

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Put it together - Japanese security robot nets intruders

Breitbart.com - January 22, 2009

Japanese on Thursday unveiled a security robot that can be operated remotely by cellphone and launch a net to capture an intruder.

The prototype T-34, jointly developed by robot developer tmsuk Co. Ltd. and security company Alacom Co. Ltd., looks like a small wheeled vehicle and is loaded with sensors that detect anything untoward in an office building.

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Happy for the kid, but - Bionic Hand Gives Student New Lease on Life

FoxNews.com - January 21, 2009
Photo credit: AP

A student who lost his left hand in an accident three years ago has been fitted with the world’s most sophisticated prosthetic limb.

Evan Reynolds, 19, took only minutes to learn how to manipulate the i-LIMB, which is operated by tiny sensors resting against his arm muscles.

With his new hand he can now pick up a paper cup filled with water, peel a carrot or walk down the street eating chips, all activities he could only dream about before.

The $15,000 i-LIMB was developed by the Scottish company Touch Bionics and Reynolds is only the second person in the U.K. to be fitted with one. Unlike previous prosthetics, the hand can tell how tightly it is gripping, allowing the user a large degree of control.

Reynolds, a sports biology student at University of the West of England, was in a friend’s car hanging his hand out of the window when it was taken off by a wooden gate post. His life was saved by his quick-thinking friends who applied a tourniquet and stopped him bleeding to death but the accident wrecked his dreams of joining the British Army.

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Don't look now, but - machines closing in on human abilities

NewScientist - January 22 2009, by Colin Barras



Video: As new ways to test how well machines can match aspects of human intelligence are dreamt up, they are getting closer to beating them.

It may have been dreamt up in 1950, but the Turing test - a simple way to tell if a machine can think - still holds powerful sway over many researchers striving to produce a machine at least in some respects equal with a human.

Nowadays, although UK mathematician Alan Turing's test is still relevant, and unbeaten, new forms of it have evolved. In this online special, New Scientist discovers the different ways in which machines can be tested for human-like abilities - and how close they have come to passing as one of us.

I chat, therefore I think

Turing's biggest insight was that it is impossible to know for sure if a machine - or indeed another person - is actually thinking. So he rephrased the question to one that is much easier to answer: Can a machine act like it is thinking?

His test has a human judge engage in two, separate conversations using only text - one with a human and one with a machine. If, after a few minutes of conversation, the judge can't distinguish the two, then the machine is deemed to have passed the test.

A major turning point in the field was Joseph Weizenbaum's chatbot ELIZA, developed in 1966. It achieved impressively "intelligent" results simply by rephrasing what a human said to it:

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Edible technology - Swallow this sensor, please

The Industry Standard - January 19 2009, by Sindya Bhanoo

Proteus Biomedicals, a company in California, has developed an intelligent pill that sends digital signals to an external receiver after being swallowed.

The pill still works as an ordinary drug that a patient might take to control a health issue such as heart trouble or a psychiatric disorder.

But it also has digestible sensors that are made of food products and are activated by stomach fluids. Once swallowed, the sensors can send a digital signal through the body to a receiver. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information about the drug and the dosage. It also measures and reports heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

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Everybody, into the water - Fit to swim human arteries

PhysOrg.com - January 20 2009

A range of complex surgical operations necessary to treat stroke victims, confront hardened arteries or address blockages in the bloodstream are about to be made safer as researchers from the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia's Monash University put the final touches to the design of micro-motors small enough to be injected into the human bloodstream.

A research paper, published today, Tuesday, 20 January, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering details how researchers are harnessing piezoelectricity, the energy force most commonly used to trigger-start a gas stove, to produce microbot motors just 250 micrometres, a quarter of a millimetre, wide.



Methods of minimally invasive surgery, such as keyhole surgery and a range of operations that utilise catheters, tubes inserted into body cavities to allow surgical manoeuvrability, are preferred by surgeons and patients because of the damage avoided when contrasted against cut and sew operations. Serious damage during minimally invasive surgery is however not always avoidable and surgeons are often limited by, for example, the width of a catheter tube which, in serious cases, can fatally puncture narrow arteries.

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Teeny-tiny pipes - Nanoplumbing

NewScientist - January 19 2009, by Philip Ball

GERHARD HUMMER was pondering a serious plumbing problem. He was trying to unravel the inner workings of tiny proteins called aquaporins, which are found in the walls of living cells. Each aquaporin is threaded by a narrow pore that helps control the flow of water into the cell. The pore is a complex thing, narrow in parts and wide in others, lined with a variety of chemical groups that mostly repel water. But it is basically a pipe.

And that realisation made Hummer, working at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, turn his attention to carbon nanotubes. Consisting of curled-up sheets of carbon and just nanometres wide, they are essentially smooth pipes of water-repelling graphite. Hummer hoped that their simple structure might offer new insights into the way that water travels through aquaporins. It proved a smart move. Nanotubes have not only helped researchers like Hummer understand water flow in proteins, but they are also enabling scientists to devise a host of nanoscale plumbing parts - such as molecular pumps, gates and valves - capable of moving and filtering everything from salty water and hydrocarbon fuels to gases such as carbon dioxide. It seems that these humble tubes could hold the key to cheap desalinated water, better fuel cells and new strategies to tackle global warming.

Hummer's study of fluid flow in nanotubes kicked off around a decade ago when along with two colleagues he created a detailed computer simulation of the way water moves inside a carbon nanotube just 0.8 nanometres wide. When they dunked the tube into a tiny tank of virtual water, the researchers found that a thin thread of water molecules rushed into the interior of the tube. This was surprising, given the narrowness of the nanotube's pore and the water-repelling nature of its carbon surface. Then when they tweaked the simulation, slightly increasing the repulsion between the water molecules and the carbon atoms of the nanotube, they were surprised to see that the tube emptied almost instantaneously. When they decreased the strength of the repulsion, the tube filled again. The ease with which they could fill or empty the tube was unexpected, and their results - published in Nature in 2001 (vol 414, p 156) - implied that just small changes in charge or even tube geometry might be used to move water through real nanotubes.

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Growing pains - It's the antenna, stupid

Blogger's Note - As we approach the anticipated technological singularity, things are going to change faster and faster. Those who are resistant to change, of which there are many, will either stick with old technology and be somewhat at a disadvantage, or lose their old technology when it just won't work anymore and be pissed. One of the first big examples of this phenomenon is coming up next month: the switch to digital TV. This article is the most straightforward I have yet seen on the looming debacle.

MSNBC - January 13 2009, by Bob Sullivan

Let's review where things stand a little more than one month from DTV-Day -- the day that old-fashioned analog TVs will stop working -- currently set for Feb. 17.

• There's a waiting list for government coupons so people can buy converter boxes so they can continue to watch television on those old TVs. A waiting list! Sounds almost like a breadline. Church groups are actually being enlisted so people with unused coupons can donate them to "needy" TV watchers. Rome fell after just such a coupon shortage.

• The president-elect thinks we need to postpone the event, but the head of the FCC thinks we need to move forward. After all, think of all the posters that have been printed up!
• Electronics stores are making a killing selling $800 TVs to consumers who walk in looking to buy a converter box.
• The cable TV industry has made a killing by using the issue to market its products to confused consumers. Meanwhile, the industry is undergoing its own painful analog-to-digital conversion.
• Despite all the publicity about the conversion -- and more than $1 billion spent on coupons -- tens of millions of viewers are likely to see their televisions turn into bricks on Feb. 17. These will include TV watchers in remote places like rural New Jersey and in dense cities like New York. And there has been virtually no publicity around the “other” issues facing over-the-air TV viewers come DTV-Day, including the fact that even if their TVs and converter boxes work, their antennae won't.

This is why I keep saying that Feb. 17 is the real Y2K. I know those of you with satellite or cable television have been watching this story with bemused detachment, but trust me: You don’t want to be wandering the streets of American cities the day 10 million or 15 million televisions go dark.

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We all live in a... 'Mini-submarine' Invented To Blast Diseased Cells

ScienceDaily - January 16 2009

Ever since the 1966 Hollywood movie, doctors have imagined a real-life Fantastic Voyage a medical vehicle shrunk small enough to “submarine” in and fix faulty cells in the body. Thanks to new research by Tel Aviv University scientists, that reality may be only three years away.

The blueprints for the submarine and a map of its proposed maiden voyage were published earlier this year in Science by Dr. Dan Peer, who now leads the Tel Aviv University team at the Department of Cell Research and Immunology. The team will build and test-run the actual “machine” in human bodies. Dr. Peer originally developed the scenario at Harvard University.

Made from biological materials, the real-life medical submarine’s Fantastic Voyage won’t have enough room for Raquel Welch, but the nano-sized structure will be big enough to deliver the payload: effective drugs to kill cancer cells and eradicate faulty proteins.

A Nano-GPS System

“Our lab is creating biological nano-machines,” says Dr. Peer. “These machines can target specific cells. In fact, we can target any protein that might be causing disease or disorder in the human body. This new invention treats the source, not the symptoms.”

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Look for the glitches - Our world may be a giant hologram

NewScientist - January 15 2009, by Marcus Chown

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

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Can you feel me? - Morphing gel display puts images at your fingertips

NewScientist - January 14 2009, by Jon Evans

A tactile display made from a watery gel that changes shape to show objects on its surface has been developed by German electrical engineers.

It uses a hydrogel, the type of material used to make soft contact lenses, which consists mainly of water bound up within a polymer. Some hydrogels can swell or shrink in response to changing conditions like temperature or acidity.

Andreas Richter and Georgi Paschew from the Technical University of Dresden turned to those abilities when trying to develop a new tactile display for blind people.

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Grandma, what big eyes you have - Telescope the size of Earth

PhysOrg.com - January 13 2009

Radio telescopes around the world will join forces this week to carry out a unique observation of three quasars, distant galaxies powered by super-massive black holes at their cores.

The nearly continuous 33-hour observation will be conducted on Jan 15-16 as part of a demonstration at the opening event for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA 2009) in Paris.

17 telescopes in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America, including several operated from The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, will take part in the mammoth project.

Arpad Szomoru, Head of Technical Operations and R&D at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) noted, "The unique aspect of these observations is that telescopes located all around the globe will be brought together to work in real-time as a single gigantic instrument."

Using an astronomical technique called electronic, real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or e-VLBI, participating telescopes will observe the same object simultaneously. Data from each telescope will be streamed across the globe through high-speed optical networks to a purpose-built supercomputer at JIVE in the Netherlands. This machine acts as the focus of the giant distributed telescope, the largest real-time telescope ever, combining the signals collected from instruments across the world.

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Take me to your pancreas - Tiny robots used in surgical procedures

Physorg.com - January 12 2009, by Masayuki Takata

Tiny robots that aid surgical procedures and medical checkups currently are the focus of intense research and study. In fact, some of these small-scale devices already are in practical use.

The robots, equipped with arms less than 1 centimeter long, can move around inside the human body and treat affected areas, echoing ideas first set out in science fiction. The small devices are able to repeat subtle movements precisely, making doctors' lives easier. Furthermore, due to the size of the robots, patients need only small incisions to undergo major surgery.

Four domestic facilities have introduced medical robots using systems developed by U.S. companies, such as the da Vinci surgical system.

Under the da Vinci system, an endoscope and a clamp are used in tandem with the tiny robots, which enter the body via small incisions to treat affected areas or assist with bypass surgery. This latter technique is due to be introduced at Tokyo Medical University Hospital, which already has introduced the system for cardiac surgery and urology, according to the hospital.

The complete system weighs a total of nearly 1 ton.

The robots' arms operate similarly to human wrists. Surgeons operate by remote control scalpels and clamps attached to the arms, while viewing the targeted areas on a monitor.

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AI-based virtual agent for call centers lowers costs, improves caller experience

KurzweilAI.net - January 12 2009

Adaptive A.I. Inc. (a2i2) of Playa del Rey, CA plans to announce on Monday the "world's first commercial AGI (artificial general intelligence) system" -- a virtual IVR (interactive voice response) call center operator that can hold "smart, productive conversations," CEO Peter Voss, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, told KurzweilAI.net in an exclusive interview.

Voss said the company's SmartAction IVR System, running on a2i2's data center, "constantly monitors and manages conversation flow and meta-cognitive state (such as mood, degree of certainty and surprise), and determines when clarification via live interaction, email, or live-agent assistance is needed."

Its speech engine then responds, based on the current conversation context (with natural-language programming), and a cognitive engine analyzes multiple speech hypotheses for the most likely meaning, resolving ambiguities.

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It’s Gonna Get Colder - Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

Pravda – January 11 2009

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

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Compressed Entertainment - 100 high-def movies on a stamp-sized chip?

MSNBC - January 9 2009, by Jim Wolf

First of new series of 'extended capacity' cards available toward end of year

AS VEGAS - Imagine storing 100 movies in glorious high-definition on a card the size of a postage stamp, then calling them up instantaneously for viewing on your cellphone whenever and wherever you like.

That could happen within five years, according to the SD Association, a trade group that brings together more than 1,100 technology companies from SanDisk Corp to Hewlett-Packard Co and sets interoperable memory card standards.

Consumers will be able to store as many as 100 high-definition movies on a stamp-sized memory card and retrieve them with devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras, according to the promoters of the next-generation SD card technology.

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The Power of an Algorithm - New tool enables powerful data analysis

PhysOrg.com - January 8 2009

After using the algorithm to determine the filament structure of an aerogel -- a lightweight foam used in shielding electronic equipment in satellites -- the researchers were able to compute changes to its structural integrity by the simulated impact of a micrometeorite traveling at 10,000 miles per hour (red sphere on left). Image: Attila Gyulassy/UC Davis Copyright UC Regents

A powerful computing tool that allows scientists to extract features and patterns from enormously large and complex sets of raw data has been developed by scientists at University of California, Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The tool - a set of problem-solving calculations known as an algorithm - is compact enough to run on computers with as little as two gigabytes of memory.

The team that developed this algorithm has already used it to probe a slew of phenomena represented by billions of data points, including analyzing and creating images of flame surfaces; searching for clusters and voids in a virtual universe experiment; and identifying and tracking pockets of fluid in a simulated mixing of two fluids.

"What we've developed is a workable system of handling any data in any dimension," said Attila Gyulassy, who led the five-year development effort while pursuing a PhD in computer science at UC Davis. "We expect this algorithm will become an integral part of a scientist's toolbox to answer questions about data."

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No special glasses needed - Bringing 3-D Home

Technology Review - January 9 2009, by Kate Greene Photo credit: Technology Review

The electronics industry hopes to woo consumers with eye-popping technology.

According to industry estimates, there are already some two million television sets in homes that are ready to show 3-D video. The only problem is that there aren't a lot of 3-D broadcasts ready to roll. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, however, electronics and 3-D production companies are showing off the potential of 3-D content with the hope that in-home 3-D television will be mainstream within a couple of years.

The experience of watching a movie in 3-D has changed significantly over the past few decades. Gone are the red and blue cardboard glasses that meld two different images together and often distort on-screen colors. Directors and cinematographers have also learned to avoid gimmicks, like a pie in the audience's face, and are trying to use the extra dimension to tell the story better. Many new televisions are already shipping with software and hardware that supports 3-D, and some early adopters are taking advantage of the technology with video games.

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Let there be life - Artificial molecule evolves in the lab

NewScientist - January 8 2009, by Ewen Callaway

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things.

If that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.

"Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team's molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.

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Fear the Reaper - Stone-Cold Robot Killers

Washington Post - January 4 2009, by John Pike

Armed robotic aircraft soar in the skies above Pakistan, hurling death down on America's enemies in the war on terrorism. Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle. Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace.

The detachment with which the United States can inflict death upon our enemies is surely one reason why U.S. military involvement around the world has expanded over the past two decades. The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return.

War is about the sacrifice of blood and treasure, and the American style of war is to substitute treasure for blood. From the early days of the republic, when Eli Whitney is said to have used interchangeable parts to manufacture superior muskets, to the invention of Gatling guns and Kevlar armor, American ingenuity has been devoted to devising ever more efficient ways of killing the enemy and preventing the enemy from killing us.

One common factor in much of American military prowess is the surprisingly obscure fact of modern life known as Moore's Law. Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, noticed nearly half a century ago that computing power seemed to be doubling about every two years. Laptops, cellphones, the Internet -- they're simply commentaries on Moore's Law.

The rapid emergence of the armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) that roam over Pakistan is a sequel to Moore's Law. Onboard computers became far more powerful, so automatic pilots became far more competent. Signal processors became more sophisticated, facilitating collection and processing of more interesting intelligence. Global Positioning System receivers shrank and could be economically employed on small robotic aircraft. Precision-guided munitions could deliver lethal firepower. And so forth.

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The Future of the Future - 3 Interesting Predictions

American Scientist - January 2009, by Brian Hayes

What comes next in the march of progress? Have we reached the end point in the evolution of computerized society?

Since I have poked fun at the predictions of an earlier generation, it’s only fair that I put some of my own silly notions on the record, giving some future pundit a chance to mock me in turn. I think the main folly of my predecessors was not being reckless enough. I’ll probably make the same mistake myself. So here are three insufficiently outrageous predictions.

1. We’ll automate medicine. I don’t mean robot surgeons, although they’re in the works too. What I have in mind is Internet-enabled, do-it-yourself diagnostics. Google is already the primary-care physician for many of us; that role can be expanded in various directions. Furthermore, as mentioned above, medical care is where the money is going, and so that’s where investment in cost-saving technologies has the most leverage.

2. We’ll automate driving. The car that drives itself is a perennial on lists of future marvels, mentioned by a number of the automation prophets of the 50s and 60s. A fully autonomous vehicle, able to navigate ordinary streets and roads, is not much closer now than it was then, but a combination of smarter cars and smarter roads could be made to work. Building those roads would require a major infrastructure project, which might help make up for all the disemployed truckers and taxi drivers. I admit to a certain boyish fascination with the idea of a car that drops me at the office and then goes to fetch the dry cleaning and fill up its own gas tank.

3. We’ll automate warfare. I take no pleasure in this one, but I see no escaping it either. The most horrific weapons of the 20th century had the redeeming quality that they are difficult and expensive to build, and this has limited their proliferation. When it comes to the most fashionable weapons of the present day—pilotless aircraft, cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions—the key technology is available on the shelf at Radio Shack.

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Quantum Shenanigans - UNDO THE PRESENT; RECALL THE PAST

Edge World Question Center - SETH LLOYD, Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT; author, Programming the Universe

While quantum computers afford their users protection and anonymity that classical computers cannot, even classical computers can be programmed to share this ability to erase regret, although they currently are not. Although classical computers dissipate heat and operate in and a physically irreversible way, they can still function in a logically reversible fashion: properly programmed, they can un-perform any computation that they can perform. We already see a hint of this digital nostalgia in hard-disk 'time machines,' which restore a disk to its state in an earlier, pre-crash era.

Suppose that we were to put this ability of computers to run the clock backward to the service of undoing not merely our accidental erasures and unfortunate viral infections, but to undoing financial transactions that were conducted under fraudulent conditions? Credit card companies already supply us with protection against theft conducted in our name. Why should not more important financial transactions be similarly guaranteed? Contracts for home sales, stock deals, and credit default swaps are already recorded and executed digitally. What would happen if combined digital finance with reversible computation?

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Dick Tracy, at last - New 3G Watch Phone from LG at CES 2009

TechTree - January 2 2009, by Jayesh Limaye

A call is now just a watch away, actually.

LG has unveiled a brand new 3G Watch Phone - LG GD910. The GD910 features touchscreen technology and is touted to have one of the slickest interfaces you may have seen in a watch phone (assuming you may have seen any other watch phone before). The phone has a camera at the top-right corner and built-in speaker allowing the user to make video calls over high-speed 3G network according to a statement by LG Electronic.

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Tiny tools - Nanotechnology to repair the brain

NanoWerk - December 29 2008
Photo Credit: Laura Ballerini, University of Trieste

Neural engineering is an emerging discipline that uses engineering techniques to investigate the function and manipulate the behavior of the central or peripheral nervous systems. Neural engineering is highly interdisciplinary and relies on expertise from computational neuroscience, experimental neuroscience, clinical neurology, electrical engineering and signal processing of living neural tissue, and encompasses elements from robotics, computer engineering, neural tissue engineering, materials science, and nanotechnology.

In order for neural prostheses to augment or restore damaged or lost functions of the nervous system they need to be able to perform two main functions: stimulate the nervous system and record its activity. To do that, neural engineers have to gain a full understanding of the fundamental mechanisms and subtleties of cell-to-cell signaling via synaptic transmission, and then develop the technologies to replicate these mechanisms with artificial devices and interface them to the neural system at the cellular level. A group of European researchers has now shown that carbon nanotubes may become the ideal material for repairing damaged brain tissue.

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