Calling Dr. Frankenstein - Synthetic life form grows in Florida lab

MSNBC - February 27, 2009, by Irene Klotz

Researchers in a Florida laboratory are working with the most basic building blocks of life to try and understand how biology first arose on Earth — and how it might appear on other planets.

When NASA began thinking about missions to look for life beyond Earth, it realized it had a problem: how to recognize life if it were found.

Scientists came up with a definition for life — a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution — but remained understandably fuzzy on the details.

It is still not known how life on Earth took hold, what happened to a bunch of chemicals that made them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating and evolution. But a new field of science, called synthetic biology, is aiming to find out.

One of the most promising developments lies in a beaker of water inside a Florida laboratory. It's an experiment called AEGIS — an acronym for Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System. Its creator, Steve Benner, says it is the first synthetic genetic system capable of Darwinian evolution.

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Get your genome sequenced for a hundred bucks

Technology Review - March/April 2009, by Lauren Gravitz

Han Cao's nanofluidic chip could cut DNA sequencing costs dramatically.

In the corner of the small lab is a locked door with a colorful sign taped to the front: "$100 Genome Room--Authorized Persons Only." BioNanomatrix, the startup that runs the lab, is pursuing what many believe to be the key to personalized medicine: sequencing technology so fast and cheap that an entire human genome can be read in eight hours for $100 or less. With the aid of such a powerful tool, medical treatment could be tailored to a patient's distinct genetic profile.

Despite many experts' doubt that whole-genome sequencing could be done for $1,000, let alone a 10th that much, BioNanomatrix believes it can reach the $100 target in five years. The reason for its optimism: company founder Han Cao has created a chip that uses nanofluidics and a series of branching, ever-narrowin­g channels to allow researchers, for the first time, to isolate and image very long strands of individual DNA molecules.

If the company succeeds, a physician could biopsy a cancer patient's tumor, sequence all its DNA, and use that information to determine a prognosis and prescribe treatment-- all for less than the cost of a chest x-ray. If the ailment is lung cancer, for instance, the doctor could determine the particular genetic changes in the tumor cells and order the chemo­therapy best suited to that variant.

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Your chance to get up to speed on Singularity 101 - H+ Spring Issue

Excerpted from "Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge," by Doug Wolens

The Singularity. Ray Kurzweil has popularized it and, by now, some of our readers no doubt drop it frequently into casual conversation and await it like salvation. (The second “helping?”) but many more are still unfamiliar with the concept.

The contemporary notion of the Singularity got started with legendary SF writer Vernor Vinge, whose 1981 novella True names pictured a society on the verge of this “event.” In a 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Vinge made his vision clear, writing that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

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See more than is there - Microsoft Demos Augmented Vision

Technology Review - February 24, 2009, by Kate Greene

Better computer-vision algorithms overlay digital information on the real world.

Altered vision: This laptop is running augmented-reality software developed by Microsoft engineers. It can recognize a person’s location using the built-in camera. In this demonstration, virtual bubbles lead to a virtual pot of gold. Credit: Microsoft

Today, Microsoft researchers will demonstrate software that can, in real time, superimpose computer-generated information on top of a digitized view of the real world.

Adding additional visual data to a video display is a technique known as augmented reality. (See "TR10: Augmented Reality.") Michael Cohen, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in Redmond, WA, says that the approach could add another dimension to future smart phones. "You could be out on the street, hold the device up, and it could recognize a restaurant and deliver ratings and the menu," he says. A smart phone featuring an augmented-reality display could also overlay a bus route and an estimate of when the next bus is due on top of a particular street. "It essentially becomes your portal to information," Cohen says.

Cohen and his colleagues will demo the augmented-reality technology at TechFest, an annual showcase of Microsoft's research projects, in Redmond. Their software, which runs on a small portable computer, analyzes scenes from a camera, matches to those stored in a database, and overlays supplementary information on the display. The researchers note that a smart phone with augmented reality could help allow engineers to "see" the pipes or electrical cables below a street. In the demonstration given at TechFest, the software will be used to lead people on a treasure hunt to a hidden prize of a (virtual) pot of gold.

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Singularity going mainstream - Change: Approaching 'singularity'

StarTribune.com - February 21, 2009, by Karen Youso

Consider the telephone. Since its invention in the 1800s, it went from crank-style to push-button to cell by the 1980s. Quickly it became smaller and smaller, smarter and smarter. Now phones take pictures, play music, send text and soon will wrap around your wrist like a bracelet. Or, consider the nanoparticle. The number of products on store shelves using nanotechnology -- manipulating atoms to create new materials -- in 1990 was near zero. In 2004, it was 212. Today, it's more than 800 and increasing by three or four a week.

See a pattern here? Things are moving faster and faster. It feels like you can't keep up. Remember the last months of 2008, and the dramatic series of events from presidential campaign, election, Wall Street collapse, wild stock market swings, the bailouts? It was enough to make your head spin. Indeed, society is changing at a pace that can seem like it's whirling out of control. And you haven't seen anything yet.

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More footage of Big Dog - A Soldier's (Robotic) Best Friend

Technology Review - February 23, 2009, by Kristina Grifantini



The video above, from the U.S. army's Benning Report, shows new footage of a robot called BigDog--a sophisticated, four-legged "pack-bot" designed to carry heavy payloads across all kinds of terrain.

Resembling a headless, mechanical canine, BigDog has to be one of the most unsettling robots out there. But it's also one of the more impressive--it can walk up or down hills, through ice, sand, snow and dirt by monitoring sensors in its legs and adjusting its posture accordingly. It can also quickly recover from a stumble or slip. The 250-pound robot, designed by Boston Dynamics, can carry 340 lbs and could provide a valuable safety addition to soldiers in the field.

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Bend and stretch - Flexible electronic books to hit market soon

NewScientist - February 23, 2009, by Paul Marks
GADGET-makers have long promised us a flexible electronic book, but actually producing a robust, bendy screen has proved tough - until now.

Plastic Logic, a display technology company based in Cambridge, UK, says it will launch the first flexible electronic book in January.

The two most popular e-books on the market, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle, are paperback book-sized devices that use first-generation black and white electronic "ink" displays. These consist of a plastic sheet containing pixel-sized voids, each filled with black and white ink particles. Electric fields attract the ink to the top of these voids to display print. The problem is, the transistors that apply these electric fields sit on a layer of glass, making the displays fragile.

Plastic Logic says it has now perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto a layer of bendy plastic - allowing the screens to flex and bounce. "Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today's e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble," says Joe Eschbach of Plastic Logic.

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Power to the soldiers - Methane fuel cells the latest in portable power

cnet news - February 22, 2009, by Mark Rutherford
Photo credit: SFC

A German company has introduced a ""wearable" fuel cell that uses direct methanol fuel cell technology, doing away with the weighty mechanical components usually associated with generation of electrical power.

Based on an award-winning unipolar stack technology design, the Jenny 600S delivers 25 watts of power for up to 20 hours at a time, according to the company Smart Fuel Cell (SFC). SFC fuel cells took top honors in the U.S. Department of Defense's Wearable Power Competition last October against stiff competition from a host of big-name competitors. But it's not the only game: companies like UtraCell and Jadoo Power also offer a range of portable fuel cell options to military customers.

The Jenny uses replaceable liquid methanol fuel cartridges and can be worn by soldiers in a vest, where it instantly kicks in from standby mode to automatically recharge batteries when needed. It works silently in both vertical and horizontal positions, according to SFC. It can also be left in a hands-off mode to automatically power up equipment in the field. The company estimates that the unit could reduce the weight of the batteries that soldiers must carry on certain missions by up to 70 percent.

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A glimpse of tomorrow - MIT's "Sixth Sense": The wearable gestural interface

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The future of energy - New Company Looks to Produce Space Based Solar Power Within a Decade

Universe Today - February 18, 2009, by Nancy Atkinson
Photo credit: Mafic Studios

Is space-based solar power (SBSP) a technology whose time has come? The concept and even some of the hardware for harnessing energy from the sun with orbiting solar arrays has been around for some time. But the biggest challenge for making the concept a reality, says entrepreneur Peter Sage of Space Energy, Inc., is that SBSP has never been commercially viable. But that could be changing. Space Energy, Inc. has assembled an impressive team of scientists, engineers and business people, putting together what Sage calls "a rock-solid commercial platform" for their company. And given the current looming issues of growing energy needs and climate change, Space Energy, Inc. could be in the right place at the right time.

"Although it’s a very grandiose vision, it makes total sense," Sage told Universe Today. "This is an inevitable technology; it's going to happen. If we can put solar panels in space where the sun shines 24 hours a day, if we have a safe way of transmitting the energy to Earth and broadcasting it anywhere, that is a serious game changer." If everything falls into place for this company, they could be producing commercially available SBSP within a decade.

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Sensationalism, or valid concern? - Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

FoxNews -February 19, 2009
Photo credit: AP

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.

Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

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My place in this world? - The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives

NYT - February 16, 2009, by John Markoff

The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.

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Starting over - Do We Need a New Internet?

NYT - February 14, 2009, by John Markoff

Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.

Since then things have gotten much, much worse.

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

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Every poet's dream? - Trapped rainbows could make optical computing a reality

NewScientist - February 14, 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy

YOU'LL never catch a rainbow, but it might just be possible to trap one inside a specially designed grating. If the technique works, the advance would revolutionise computing and telecommunication networks.

In existing networks and computers, signals have to be converted back and forth from optical to electrical. Devices that use optical signals alone could be much faster and more efficient, but doing this means being able to stop or slow down light long enough to carry out the necessary computations or operations.

Light has been slowed down, and even stopped, inside gases of ultra-cold atoms and inside specially constructed photonic crystals. However, these crystals work only for a very narrow range of frequencies and any practical device would need to work at room temperature and for a wide range of frequencies.

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Another big step - Researchers Demonstrate 'Quantum Data Buffering' Scheme

PhysOrg.com - February 12, 2009

Pushing the envelope of Albert Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," known as entanglement, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland have demonstrated a "quantum buffer," a technique that could be used to control the data flow inside a quantum computer. Quantum computers could potentially speed up or expand present capabilities in decrypting data, searching large databases, and other tasks. The new research is published in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Nature.

"If you want to set up some sort of communications system or a quantum information-processing system, you need to control the arrival time of one data stream relative to other data streams coming in," says JQI's Alberto Marino, lead author of the paper. "We can accomplish the delay in a compact setup, and we can rapidly change the delay if we want, something that would not be possible with usual laboratory apparatus such as beamsplitters and mirrors," he says.

This new work follows up on the researchers' landmark creation in 2008 of pairs of multi-pixel quantum images (http://www.physorg.com/news132500362.html). A pair of quantum images is "entangled," which means that their properties are linked in such a way that they exist as a unit rather than individually. In the JQI work, each quantum image is carried by a light beam and consists of up to 100 "pixels." A pixel in one quantum image displays random and unpredictable changes say, in intensity, yet the corresponding pixel in the other image exhibits identical intensity fluctuations at the same time, and these fluctuations are independent from fluctuations in other pixels. This entanglement can persist even if the two images are physically disconnected from one another.

By using a gas cell to slow down one of the light beams to 500 times slower than the speed of light, the group has demonstrated that they could delay the arrival time of one of the entangled images at a detector by up to 27 nanoseconds. The correlations between the two entangled images still occur—but they are out of sync. A flicker in the first image would have a corresponding flicker in the slowed-down image up to 27 nanoseconds later.

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How long till holographic displays? - New smartphones have built-in projectors

MSNBC - February 13, 2009

Texas Instruments Inc. and Samsung Electronics on Friday unveiled smartphones embedded with chips that enable projection viewing — devices the companies say can project videos and images larger than 50 inches, depending on surrounding light.

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First step to resurrecting a Neaderthal? - First draft of Neanderthal genome is unveiled

NewScientist - February 12, 2009 by Ewen Callaway

This Neanderthal skeleton was found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Mettmann (Image: Action Press/Rex Features)

The first draft of the genome of a 38,000 year-old Neanderthal is complete, scientists announced today.

Early glimpses of the genome, which was sequenced by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues, have already cast new light on the ancient human species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago.

"This will be the first time the entire genome of an extinct organism has been sequenced," Pääbo told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

Now study of the more complete genome will allow scientists to examine Neanderthals' relationship with modern humans as never before.

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It's What You Can't See that can Hurt You - 'Dark' comets may pose threat to Earth

NewScientist - February 11, 2009 by Paul Parsons

SWATHES of dark comets may be prowling the solar system, posing a deadly threat to Earth.

Hazardous comets and asteroids are monitored by various space agencies under an umbrella effort known as Spaceguard. The vast majority of objects found so far are rocky asteroids. Yet UK-based astronomers Bill Napier at Cardiff University and David Asher at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland claim that many comets could be going undetected. "There is a case to be made that dark, dormant comets are a significant but largely unseen hazard," says Napier.

In previous work, Napier and Janaki Wickramasinghe, also at Cardiff, have suggested that when the solar system periodically passes through the galactic plane, it nudges comets in our direction (New Scientist, 19 April 2008, p 10).

These periodic comet showers appear to correlate with the dates of ancient impact craters found on Earth, which would suggest that most impactors in the past were comets, not asteroids.

Now Napier and Asher warn that some of these comets may still be zipping around the solar system. Other observations support their case. The rate that bright comets enter the solar system implies there should be around 3000 of them buzzing around, and yet only 25 are known.

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Is human evolution accelerating? - Human evolution kicks into high gear

MSNBC - February 10, 2009 by Kathleen McAuliffe

Researchers debate whether our species is growing apart or together

For decades the consensus view — among the public as well as the world’s preeminent biologists—has been that human evolution is over. Since modern Homo sapiens emerged 50,000 years ago, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed. “There have been no biological changes. Everything we’ve called culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”

This view has become so entrenched that it is practically doctrine. Even the founders of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, signed on to the notion that our brains were mostly sculpted during the long period when we were hunter-gatherers and have changed little since. “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” they wrote in a background piece on the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

So to suggest that humans have undergone an evolutionary makeover from Stone Age times to the present is nothing short of blasphemous. Yet a team of researchers has done just that.

They find an abundance of recent adaptive mutations etched in the human genome; even more shocking, these mutations seem to be piling up faster and ever faster, like an avalanche. Over the past 10,000 years, their data show, human evolution has occurred a hundred times more quickly than in any other period in our species’ history.

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Seeing to the beginning - Cosmologists 'see' the cosmic dawn

PhysOrg.com - February 11, 2009

Cosmic Dawn z=8.5 shows the Universe 590 million years after the Big Bang

The images, produced by scientists at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, show the "Cosmic Dawn" - the formation of the first big galaxies in the Universe.

The Cosmic Dawn began as galaxies began to form out of the debris of massive stars which died explosively shortly after the beginning of the Universe. The Durham calculation predicts where these galaxies appear and how they evolve to the present day, over 13 billion years later.

The researchers hope their findings, which highlight star forming galaxies, will improve their understanding of dark matter - a mysterious substance believed to make up 80 per cent of the mass in the Universe.

Gravity produced by dark matter is an essential ingredient in galaxy formation and by studying its effects the scientists eventually hope to learn more about what the substance is.

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Beware the dreaded crab-bot - Six-legged 'sandbot' walks on sand

MSNBC - February 10 2009, by Eric Bland

Crabs make walking on sand look so easy. It's a simple motion that has so far baffled scientists who have unsuccessfully tried to recreate the movement in legged robots.

Now scientists from Georgia Tech have created the SandBot, the first legged robot that can scurry across sundry sandy surfaces.

"We are very interested in why animals can so effortlessly run across all sorts of natural terrain," said Chen Li, a student at Georgia Tech and the lead author of the paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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From big-screen to... - Televisions 'to be fitted in contact lenses within ten years'

Telegraph - February 9 2009

The sets would be powered by the viewer's body heat, according to Ian Pearson, a so-called "futurologist" who has advised leading companies including BT on new technologies.

Mr Pearson told the Daily Mail he believed that channels could be changed by voice command or via a wave of the hand.

Meanwhile "emotional viewing" could be another development in television technology, according to a report commissioned by the technology retailer Comet.

A "digital tattoo" fitted to the viewer would pick up on the feelings of characters on screen and create impulses causing them to feel the same way.

The development could see James Bond fans become able feel the thrill of a high-speed car chase or sports fans allowed to share the joy of elated players, it said.

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Ready for Wi-Rx? - Wireless drug control

PhysOrg.com - February 6 2009

Electronic implants that dispense medicines automatically or via a wireless medical network are on the horizon. Australian and US researchers warn of the security risks in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.

With the advent of personalized medicine, advances in diagnostics and the miniaturization of sensors and control systems for delivering drugs automatically, the Remote Intelligent Drug Delivery System (RIDDS) may soon be a reality. Such devices, implanted under the skin, would remove the inconvenience of manual drug delivery. By connecting a RIDDS to a wireless medical control centre wirelessly patients with physical disabilities, learning difficulties, or who are otherwise unable to give themselves medication could benefit.

RIDDS device will have inbuilt sensors to monitor biomarkers of a patient's symptoms, pulse rate, or blood oxygen levels, for instance. Wireless control will allow healthcare workers to monitor the patient's health as well as device behavior. They could adjust medication frequency or levels as necessary based either on direct patient observation or sensor outputs. However, one aspect of RIDDS deployment that is yet to be addressed is security.

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Building Artificial Nerve Networks

ScienceDaily - January 30 2009
In research that was recently featured on the cover of Nature Physics, Prof. Elisha Moses of the Physics of Complex Systems Department and his former research students Drs. Ofer Feinerman and Assaf Rotem have taken the first step in this direction by creating circuits and logic gates made of live nerves grown in the lab.

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We're doomed, I tell you! - Unnatural selection: Robots start to evolve

NewScientist - February 4 2009, by Paul Marks

LIVING creatures took millions of years to evolve from amphibians to four-legged mammals - with larger, more complex brains to match. Now an evolving robot has performed a similar trick in hours, thanks to a software "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops.

Existing robots cannot usually cope with physical changes - the addition of a sensor or new type of limb, say - without a complete redesign of their control software, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

So artificial intelligence engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. "If we want to make really complex humanoid robots with ever more sensors and more complex behaviours, it is critical that they are able to grow in complexity over time - just like biological creatures did," he says.

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Be the first kid on your block! - MIT researchers make 'sixth sense' gadget

Breitbart.com - February 5 2009

US university researchers have created a portable "sixth sense" device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines.

The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures.

The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger.

The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections.

"Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in 'Minority Report' it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you," said MIT researcher Patty Maes.

Maes used a Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference stage in Southern California on Wednesday to unveil the futuristic gadget made from store-bought components costing about 300 dollars (US).

The device can recognize items on store shelves, retrieving and projecting information about products or even providing quick signals to let users know which choices suit their tastes.

The gadget can look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store and then project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages.

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Minuscule tech - Single Atom Quantum Dots Bring Real Devices Closer

PhysOrg.com - January 27 2009

Four atomic quantum dots are coupled to form a "cell" for containing electrons. The cell is filled with just two electrons. Control charges are placed along a diagonal to direct the two electrons to reside at just two of the four quantum dots comprising the cell. This new level of control of electrons points to new computation schemes that require extremely low power to operate. Such a device is expected to require about 1,000 times less power and will be about 1,000 times smaller than today's transistors. Credit: Robert A. Wolkow

Single atom quantum dots created by researchers at Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology and the University of Alberta make possible a new level of control over individual electrons, a development that suddenly brings quantum dot-based devices within reach. Composed of a single atom of silicon and measuring less than one nanometre in diameter, these are the smallest quantum dots ever created.

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20-times faster - IBM to send blazing fast supercomputer to Energy Dept.

CNET - February 3 2009, by Jennifer Guevin

IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports.

Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took top honors on a twice-yearly list of the world's fastest supercomputers, IBM is announcing that its successor will outdo it by an order of magnitude. Sequoia will be able to work at a staggering 20 petaflops, the equivalent of the compute power of 2 million laptops according to Reuters.

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'Bout time - Google and Nasa back new school for futurists

FT.com - February 3 2009, by David Gelles

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

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But will they obey the 3 laws? - Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses

Wired - January 27 2009, by Alexis Madrigal

Next time you order a new pair of skinny jeans from Gap.com, you should know that you are helping welcome in the hive-mind robot overlords of retail.

Warehouses run by Gap, as well as Zappos and Staples now use autonomous robots to pluck products from their shelves and send them to you.

All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.

"It's a major game-changer. There's no question about that. You can increase productivity immensely," said Michael Levans, editorial director for a group of supply-chain trade magazines like Logistics Management. "The Zappos guys claim that from the moment you put your order in and it is submitted to the time the box is on the dock and ready to be put on a truck is 12 minutes."

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What Next? - Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning

Telegraph - January 31 2009, by Richard Gray and Roger DobsonPhoto: Jose Luis GOMEZ de FRANCISCO/naturepl.com

An extinct animal has been brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue.

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain.

Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

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