Mind control by Honda - Honda connects brain thoughts with robotics

My Way News - March 31, 2009, by YURI KAGEYAMA

TOKYO (AP) - Opening a car trunk or controlling a home air conditioner could become just a wish away with Honda's new technology that connects thoughts inside a brain with robotics.

Honda Motor Co. (HMC) has developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements - moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating.

Honda succeeded in analyzing such thought patterns, and then relaying them as wireless commands for Asimo, its human-shaped robot.

In a video shown Tuesday at Tokyo headquarters, a person wearing a helmet sat still but thought about moving his right hand - a thought that was picked up by cords attached to his head inside the helmet. After several seconds, Asimo, programmed to respond to brain signals, lifted its right arm.

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Better blood! - Artificial Protein Mimics Blood

Technology Review - March 30, 2009, by Kristina Grifantini

A new man-made protein that carries oxygen could lead to artificial blood.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have constructed from scratch a protein that can do what certain proteins in the human body can: carry and deliver oxygen. This may be a useful step in developing artificial blood.

For years, scientists have tried to create components of artificial blood, in the hope that such a medical advance would circumvent problems of donor blood--such as contamination, limited storage, and short supply--and lead to easier and faster blood transfusions on the battlefield and in trauma cases.

Currently, most blood substitutes include modified versions of natural hemoglobin--the key blood component that delivers oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. But research continues because some studies have suggested that existing blood substitutes can increase the risk of heart attacks in trauma victims who have received them.

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Better than the real thing - Artificial cartilage performs better than the real thing

New Scientist - March 26, 2009, by Colin Barras

The smooth cartilage that covers the ends of long bones provides a level of lubrication that artificial alternatives haven't been able to rival – until now. Researchers say their lubricating layers of "molecular brushes" can outperform nature under the highest pressures encountered within joints, with potentially important implications for joint replacement surgery.

With every step we take, bones at the knee and hip rub against each other. That would quickly wear them away if it wasn't for the protection afforded by the thick layer of smooth and slippery cartilage that covers their ends.

No amount of polishing can remove all of the small imperfections from the stainless steel used in artificial joints. Any raised areas that are left grind against each other and release debris particles that soften the bone, explains Jacob Klein at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

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Can you hear it? - The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up

Technology Review - March 26, 2009, by Kevin Bullis

Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.

The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), comprises 192 lasers that fire simultaneously at precisely the same point in space: a sphere of fuel two millimeters in diameter. They are designed to deliver 1.8 megajoules of energy in a few billionths of a second. That's enough to compress the fuel to a speck 50 micrometers across and heat it up to three million degrees Celsius. The lasers, which were fired together for the first time last month, have so far produced pulses of 1.1 megajoules.

"Depending on how you count it, it's between 60 and 100 times more energetic than any laser system that's ever been built," says Edward Moses, the principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science at LLNL. Eventually, the fusion reactions produced by each pulse are expected to generate at least 10 times the energy delivered by the lasers, a significant net gain that could be useful for generating power.

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Like a lizard's tail - Pentagon Plans to Regrow Human Body Parts

Wired - March 25, 2009, by Noah Shachtman

The first phase of the Pentagon's plan to regrow soldiers' limbs is complete; scientists managed to turn human skin into the equivalent of a blastema — a mass of undifferentiated cells that can develop into new body parts. Now, researchers are on to phase two: turning that cellular glop into a square inch of honest-to-goodness muscle tissue.

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) just got a one-year, $570,000 grant from Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, to grow the new tissues. "The goal is to genuinely replace a muscle that's lost," biotechnology professor Raymond Page tells Danger Room. "I appreciate that's a very aggressive goal." And it's only one part in a larger, even more ambitious Darpa program, Restorative Injury Repair, that aims to "fully restore the function of complex tissue (muscle, nerves, skin, etc.) after traumatic injury on the battlefield."

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When technological progress backfires? - Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

New Scientist - March 23, 2009, by Michael Brooks



IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

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Is this the end? Or the beginning? - The Conficker Worm: April Fool’s Joke or Unthinkable Disaster?

NYT - March 19, 2009, by John Markoff

The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is it the information age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”?

Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more computers overseas running unpatched, pirated Windows. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)

An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.

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Let your car do the driving - Driving software saves big chunk on gasoline

MSNBC - March 24, 2009, by Eric Bland

5-24 percent savings in test that turns pedals over to computer

Drivers willing to turn braking and acceleration over to a computer could save nearly 25 percent on their annual gas bills, say the British developers of an advanced new cruise control system.

Known as Sentience, the system uses GPS technology coupled with detailed topographical information to control the gas pedal and brakes. If alone on the road, all the driver has to do is steer.

"The car speeds up, slows down at speed humps, and stops at all the junctions without the driver having to intervene," said David Overton of Ordnance Survey, the U.K. government agency that provided the map information for the Sentience Project.

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Roadmap for Artificial General Intelligence - The Future of Machine Intelligence

h+ - Spring 2009 Issue

Ben Goertzel's Report on AGI-09: The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, March 6-9, Arlington Virginia, USA

In early March 2009, 100 intellectual adventurers journeyed from various corners of Europe, Asia, America and Australasia to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Arlington Virginia, to take part in the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-09: a conference aimed explicitly at the grand goal of the AI field, the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.


While the majority of the crowd hailed from academic institutions, major firms like Google, GE, AT&T and Autodesk were also represented, along with a substantial contingent of entrepreneurs involved with AI startups, and independent researchers. The conference benefited from sponsorship by several organizations, including KurzweilAI.net, Japanese entrepreneur and investor Joi Ito’s Joi Labs, Itamar Arel’s Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Tennessee, the University of Memphis, Novamente LLC, Rick Schwall, and the Enhanced Education Foundation.

Since I was the chair of the conference and played a large role in its organization – along with a number of extremely competent and passionate colleagues – my opinion must be considered rather subjective ... but, be that as it may, my strong feeling is that the conference was an unqualified success! Admittedly, none of the research papers were written and presented by an AI program, which is evidence that the field still has a long way to go to meet its goals. Still, a great number of fascinating ideas and mathematical and experimental results were reported, building confidence in the research community that real progress toward advanced AGI is occurring.

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Giving the robots "tells" - Robot body language gives humans a clue

New Scientist - March 22, 2009, by Colin Barras

Video: Robots are easier to get along with when their eyes signal their intentions.



Despite becoming increasingly lifelike in appearanceMovie Camera, robots still have terrible body language.

But Bilge Mutlu and colleague's team at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is changing that with robots that "leak" non-verbal information through eye movements when interacting with humans. The eyes of a robot may not provide a window into its soul, but they can help humans guess the machine's intentions.

Humans constantly give off non-verbal cues and interpret the signals of others – but without realising it at a conscious level, says Mutlu. The trembling hands of a public speaker betray their nerves even before a word is uttered, while poker players leak subtle signs such as eye flickers or twitches that can be used to spot bluffers.

But when faced with a robot all our interpretive skills are irrelevant. Robots leak no information, so it is virtually impossible to read their intentions, which makes them hard to get along with.

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Why you always feel you're on the edge - The human brain is on the edge of chaos

PhysOrg.com - March 20, 2009

Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

"Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions," says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

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Quantum computers moving closer - Scientists make quantum leap in developing faster computers

PhysOrg.com - March 19, 2009

Scientists have created a molecular device which could act as a building block for future generations of superfast computers.

The researchers have created components that could one day be used to develop quantum computers - devices based on molecular scale technology instead of silicon chips and which would be much faster than conventional computers.

The study, by scientists at the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh and published in the journal Nature, was funded by the European Commission.

Scientists have achieved the breakthrough by combining tiny magnets with molecular machines that can shuttle between two locations without the use of external force. These manoeuvrable magnets could one day be used as the basic component in quantum computers.

Conventional computers work by storing information in the form of bits, which can represent information in binary code - either as zero or one.

Quantum computers will use quantum binary digits, or qubits, which are far more sophisticated - they are capable of representing not only zero and one, but a range of values simultaneously. Their complexity will enable quantum computers to perform intricate calculations much more quickly than conventional computers.

Professor David Leigh, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Chemistry, said: "This development brings super-fast, non-silicon based computing a step closer.

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Robot power - Robots could flex muscles that are stronger than steel

New Scientist - March 19, 2009, by Kurt Kleiner

A new material that is weight for weight stronger than steel and stiffer than diamond, and weighs little more than its volume in air, could be the perfect artificial muscle for robots.

"We've made a totally new type of artificial muscle that is able to provide performance characteristics that have not previously been obtained," says Ray Baughman, a materials scientist at the University of Texas, Dallas, and co-developer of the new muscle.

Baughman and colleagues have developed a technique to make ribbons of tangled nanotubes that expand in width by 220% when a voltage is applied and then return to their normal size once it is removed. The process takes only milliseconds.

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At last! - Scientists Build Anti-Mosquito Laser

PhysOrg.com - March 16th, 2009, by Lisa Zyga

In an effort to prevent the spread of malaria, scientists have built a laser that shoots and kills mosquitoes. Malaria, which is caused by a parasite and transmitted by mosquitoes, kills about 1 million people every year.

A laser that kills mosquitoes could help reduce the spread of malaria. Image credit: PlaneMad/Wikipedia

The anti-mosquito laser was originally introduced by astrophysicist Lowell Wood in the early 1980s, but the idea never took off. More recently, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold revived the laser idea when Bill Gates asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria.

Now, astrophysicist Jordin Kare from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Wood, Myhrvold, and other experts have developed a handheld laser that can locate individual mosquitoes and kill them one by one. The developers hope that the technology might be used to create a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the insects. Alternatively, flying drones equipped with anti-mosquito lasers could track the insects with radar and then sweep the sky with the laser.

The researchers are tuning the strength of the laser so that it kills mosquitoes without harming other insects or, especially, people. The system can even distinguish between males and females by the frequency of their wing movements, which may be important since only females spread the parasite.

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Assisting self-assembly - DNA cages guide nanoparticle self-assembly

New Scientist - March 17, 2009, by Jessica Griggs

TRAPPING nanoparticles in cages made of DNA could finally allow them to self-assemble into transistors, metamaterials and even tiny robots. The technique should prevent the nanoparticles clumping together at random, one of the biggest problems with nanoscale self-assembly.

One idea for making nanoscale building kits is to coat gold nanoparticles with short sequences of single-stranded DNA. The idea is to design the DNA strands in such a way that they will bond with other strands and join the nanoparticles together in a 3D structure. But the technique has never worked well because the random position of the DNA strands on the nanoparticles makes them tend to stick together in clumps.

Now, Alexei Tkachenko and Nicolas Licata from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have come up with a solution: trap the nanoparticles in a cage where the bars are made of DNA, and then stack the cages to form nanostructures.

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Accelerating change - A Machine That Speeds Up Evolution

Technology Review - March 17, 2009, by Emily Singer

A genome-wide approach to genetic engineering greatly speeds the manufacture of bacteria for making drugs and biofuels.

Better bugs: Using a specially designed machine (shown here), scientists can rapidly engineer up to 50 genetic changes in bacteria, dramatically speeding the quest to design bacterial factories capable of efficiently producing drugs, biofuels, and other chemical products.
Credit: George Church

Rather than changing the genome letter by letter, as most genetic engineering is done, George Church and his colleagues have developed a new technology that can make 50 changes to a bacterial genome nearly simultaneously--an advance that could be used to greatly speed the creation of bacteria that are better at producing drugs, nutrients, or biofuels.

"What once took months now takes days," says Stephen del Cardayré, vice president of research and development at LS9, a biofuels company based in South San Francisco of which Church is a founder. LS9 soon plans to use the technology--called multiplex-automated genomic engineering, or MAGE--to accelerate development of bacterial cells that can produce low-cost renewable fuels and chemicals.

In the traditional stepwise approach to genetic engineering, scientists tinker gene by gene with a cell's metabolic system, attempting to rev up some reactions and dampen others. But this method is slow and unpredictable. A cell's metabolism consists of millions of intricately intertwined reactions, so making a specific change to a gene involved in one reaction may not produce the desired outcome, or may trigger harmful side effects.

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Time - What's Next 2009: Amortality, by Catherine Mayer

"We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse. It is "bleeding obvious," he adds, that it is possible to extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most people take the view that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of disease. That's nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are age-related diseases because they're the later stages of aging."

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Car, heal thyself - Crab chemical could give cars a self-healing 'shell'

NewScientist - March 12, 2009, by Kurt Kleiner




Video: A material that heals its own scratches could make perfect paint

You might never have to fear for your car's paintwork again if a new kind of polyurethane that is able to heal its own surface scratches makes it to market.

Small scratches to the surface of the material close up in only a few minutes when the material is exposed to the ultraviolet light in sunlight. This life-like healing occurs because the damaged polymer molecules around the edges of a scratch use the energy from the UV to form new cross-links and recreate the network that makes up the material.

The material could make a good top coat for an automobile, says Marek Urban, a polymer scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, who led the study.

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Can't hide where you've been - Brain scan reveals memories of where you've been

NewScientist - March 12, 2009, by Ewen Callaway

Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms.

This finding suggests that more detailed mind-reading, such detecting as memories of a summer holiday, might eventually be possible, says Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London.

Her team trained its scanner on the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to the formation and storage of memories. It is known that in animals, specialised place cells in the hippocampus fire regularly as they move from place to place.

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Should we be concerned? - Q&A: The robot wars have arrived

cnet - March 12, 2009, by Candace Lombardi
Photo: P. W. Singer

Just as the computer and ARPAnet evolved into the PC and Internet, robots are poised to integrate into everyday life in ways we can't even imagine, thanks in large part to research funded by the U.S. military.

Many people are excited about the military's newfound interest and funding of robotics, but few are considering its ramifications on war in general.

P.W. Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, went behind the scenes of the robotics world to write "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

Singer took time from his book tour to talk with CNET about the start of a revolution tech insiders predicted, but so many others missed.

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Designer lifeforms - Artificial life 'could be created within five years'

Telegraph.co.uk - March 12, 2009

Prof David Dreamer believes building a new lifeform from scratch is a daunting task but is confident it could happen in five to 10 years Photo: GETTY

Artificial life could be created "within five years", researchers from the USA have claimed.

Laboratories across the world are closing in on a "second genesis" - an achievement that would be one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

Prof David Deamer, from California University, said although building a new lifeform from scratch is a daunting task he is confident it can happen in five to 10 years.

He said: "The momentum is building - we're knocking at the door."

A synthetic, made-to-order living system could produce everything from new drugs to biofuels and greenhouse gas absorbers.

Opponents of the controversial research claim the technology could lead to machines becoming "almost human".

But there would be no safety issues for a long time as any initial organisms would be very primitive and need large-scale life support in the lab, reports New Scientist.

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How to toughen up - Lockheed offers ready-to-go supersoldier exoskeleton

The Register - February 27, 2009, by Lewis Page

Jetfuel powerpack, armour... shoulder turret?

US weaponry globocorp Lockheed is pleased to announce the unveiling of its newly-acquired powered exoskeleton intended to confer superhuman strength and endurance upon US soldiers.

Needless to say, corporate promo vid of the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) is available:



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How long do we have? - Regulate armed robots before it's too late

NewScientist - March 10, 2009, by A. C. Grayling

The MAARS robot is used by the US military, but who would be responsible if anything went wrong with it? (Image: Qinetiq)

IN THIS age of super-rapid technological advance, we do well to obey the Boy Scout injunction: "Be prepared". That requires nimbleness of mind, given that the ever accelerating power of computers is being applied across such a wide range of applications, making it hard to keep track of everything that is happening. The danger is that we only wake up to the need for forethought when in the midst of a storm created by innovations that have already overtaken us.

We are on the brink, and perhaps to some degree already over the edge, in one hugely important area: robotics. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians. Police forces are looking to acquire miniature Taser-firing robot helicopters. In South Korea and Japan the development of robots for feeding and bathing the elderly and children is already advanced. Even in a robot-backward country like the UK, some vacuum cleaners sense their autonomous way around furniture. A driverless car has already negotiated its way through Los Angeles traffic.

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The next Google? - Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?

CNETNews - March 8, 2009, by Dan Farber

Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles. Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson described the tome as "a case of style over substance." (See Steven Levy's Wired profile of Wolfram).

In May, Wolfram will unveil his latest creation, now called Wolfram Alpha. It applies his work with Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science) to Web search. "All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do," Wolfram said in a recent blog post. "I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work...It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms," he added.

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Is the future here yet? - 'Watchmen' technology in the real world

MSNBC - March 4, 2009, by John Roach
Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Genetically engineered cats? Check. Teleportation? Not quite.

"Watchmen," a graphic novel set in 1985, adds a few twists to the typical superhero story – including technological advances that were not that far ahead of their time, such as genetic engineering and electric cars. Now the upscale comic-book series has been adapted for the big screen. How do the concepts featured in "Watchmen" compare with real life in the 21st century? Click the "Next" arrow above to learn the status of eight big ideas.

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Now you see it - 'Invisibility cloak' directs light away from eye

MSNBC - March 6, 2009, by Eric Bland

This illustration shows the basic design of a new 3D metamaterial, which is lined with gold nanocups that re-direct the flow of light hitting an object. When the light is gathered and aimed away from the viewer's eye, the object appears invisible. Naomi Halas, Rice University

Nanoantenna could eliminate one of the biggest costs for solar panels

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but a new metamaterial created by Rice University scientists could hide objects from human sight.

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but asight.

By creating perfectly aligned dimples in a material, the scientists channeled specific wavelengths of light from many directions into one uniform direction.

"This falls into the broad class of metamaterials that have useful and unusual properties, like cloaking," said Naomi Halas, Rice University scientist and co-author of a paper describing the material in Nano Letters. "In a broader picture, you could do some very interesting things with this metamaterial."

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I'm taping this - Eye-socket camera films from inside the head

Crave - March 6, 2009, by Dong Ngo
Photo Credit: Eyeborgblog.com

There's a blurred line between challenge and opportunity.

Having lost his eye in a childhood accident and suffered a lot of pain, Rob Spense, a 36-year-old filmmaker, has decided to do something that'll put filming and seeing into just one eye, quite literally.

His work is called the Eyeborg project, and involves his friend Kosta Grammatis, a photographer/engineer, and a team of ocularists, inventors, and engineering specialists. The team is building a prosthetic eye that can capture and transmit video.

While the idea is simple, it's a great engineering challenge. For the project to be successful, the smallest, lightest, most power-efficient technologies have to be found and implemented.

The team is using the world's smallest CMOS camera for the project. This device is about 1.5 millimeters squared. It's so small that if you sneeze while it's resting on your open palm, you might never find it again.

The eye camera captures and sends video signal wirelessly using an RF transmitter as small as the tip of a pencil. According to Kosta, the data will be sent to a recorder placed in a backpack. The eye-socket camera is powered by a lithium polymer battery that fits inside the prosthesis.

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Software warriors - Colonies of 'Cybots' May Defend Government Networks

FoxNews.com - March 5, 2009, by Joshua Rhett Miller

A video capture of UNTAME, depicting "near real-time network discovery, topology mapping, and monitoring," according to Trien.

The Cybot Age could soon be upon us. But be not afraid; this isn't Star Trek. We're not talking droves of evil cyborgs bent on galaxy domination.

If all goes as planned, in just a few years colonies of software robots -- "cybots" -- linked into a "hive" mind could be defending the largest computer systems in America against network intruders.

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory say the program behind the cybots — Ubiquitous Transient Autonomous Mission Entities (UNTAME) — will be very different from current cybersecurity systems.

Joe Trien, who leads the team at the lab's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, said what will make cybots so useful is that they will be able to form groups, function autonomously and respond almost immediately.

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Looks a bit bulky to me - Revealed: The headset that will mimic all five senses and make the virtual world as convincing as real life

MailOnline - March 5, 2009, by David Derbyshire

A virtual reality helmet that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and even tastes of far-flung destinations has been devised by British scientists.

The device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya's Masai Mara while sitting on their sofa.

They can also enjoy the smell of flowers in an Alpine meadow or feel the heat of the Caribbean sun on their face.

Scientists say the device will also enable users to greet friends and family on the other side of the world as though they were in the same room.

And students will even be able to find out what it was like to live in ancient Egypt, Rome or Greece.

Previously, scientists have only been able to use virtual reality technology to recreate sound and vision.

Now a team of British academics from York and Warwick universities are creating a virtual reality helmet they are calling the Virtual Cocoon.

They say it stimulates the senses so convincingly they have called the experience Real Virtuality.

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Making light do your bidding - Scientists Create Light-Bending Nanoparticles

PhysOrg.com - by Laura Mgrdichian

Metallic nanoparticles and other structures can manipulate light in ways that are not possible with conventional optical materials. In a recent example of this, Rice University researchers discovered that cup-shaped gold nanostructures can bend light in a controllable way. The cups act like three-dimensional nano-antennas.

When light interacts with nanoparticles and other tiny structures, many interesting and even dramatic physical effects can occur. For example, man-made "metamaterials" have very fine structures with features smaller than the wavelength of light, some just tens of atoms across, imparting them with unique and often intriguing optical behaviors. Metamaterials are of interest to scientists because they may be able to interact with light in ways that naturally occurring materials cannot.

The gold nanocups created in this research interact with light in two main ways: axially, the up-down direction, or transverse, the left-right direction. The transverse mode is by far the stronger of the two.

"When we illuminated the nanocups, the transverse interaction exhibited a strong scattering resonance," said Rice University researcher Naomi Halas, the study's corresponding scientist, to PhysOrg.com. She conducted the study with colleague Nikolay Mirin. "We learned that the direction of the transverse resonant light scattering depends on the orientation of the cups, a property that has not been observed in studies of similar structures."

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This is not a Terminator - TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor

Technology Review - March/April 2009, by Matt Wald

A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper, says John Gilleland.

Wave of the future: Unlike today’s reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. (Click here for a larger diagram, also on page 3). The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars (shown in black and green). In a “wave” that moves through the core at only a centimeter per year, this fuel is transformed (or bred) into plutonium, which then undergoes fission. The reaction requires a small amount of enriched uranium (not shown) to get started and could run for decades without refueling. The reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant; core temperatures are extremely hot--about 550 ºC, versus the 330 ºC typical of conventional reactors. Credit: Bryan Christie Design

Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.

These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researcher­s at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel--that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It's called a traveling­-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.

As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs "theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years" without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

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Singularity via Microsoft? - Microsoft Mapping Course to a Jetsons-Style Future

NYT - March 1, 2009, by Ashlee Vance

Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands. Stuart Isett for The New York Times.

REDMOND, Wash. — Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one.

Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling a flight.

More compelling, however, is Laura’s ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.

Instead of being a relatively dumb terminal, Laura represents a nuanced attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years.

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God's shrinking domain? - Origin of Life On Earth: Scientists Unlock Mystery Of Molecular Machine

ScienceDaily - March 1, 2009

A major mystery about the origins of life has been resolved. According to a study published in the journal Nature, two Université de Montréal scientists have proposed a new theory for how a universal molecular machine, the ribosome, managed to self-assemble as a critical step in the genesis of all life on Earth.

"While the ribosome is a complex structure it features a clear hierarchy that emerged based on basic chemical principles," says Sergey Steinberg, a Université de Montréal biochemistry professor who made his discovery with student Konstantin Bokov. "In the absence of such explanations, some people could imagine unseen forces at work when such complex structures emerge in nature."

What is a ribosome?

The ribosome is an enormous molecule responsible for translating the messages carried in the genetic code of all organisms into the workhorse molecules of the cell – proteins – that carry out all functions, including replicating the genome itself. As the world celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the Father of Evolution, Charles Darwin, Prof. Steinberg's theory brings the scientific community even deeper into the study of the origins of life.

By examining the molecular self-organizing processes that preceded the living cell, the point where time begins for biologists, Prof. Steinberg goes further than Darwin and the many evolutionary biologists who followed could have imagined

By the standards of biological molecules, ribosomes are immense. Though visible only through lenses of the most powerful microscopes, comparing most other biological molecules to this behemoth is like comparing a tricycle to a jumbo jet. Having spent years gazing at the detailed structure of the ribosome, Prof. Steinberg pondered how such an immense and complex structure could have assembled itself from smaller building blocks that existed on the early Earth.

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