A soft touch - Touch Screens with Pop-up Buttons

Technology Review - April 28, 2009, by Kate Greene

Future touch screens may need to supply tactile feedback.

Touchy-feely: A new type of touch-screen display also has physical buttons. An air pump can manipulate a latex layer that covers the screen. When the pump is off, the screen is flat. Credit: Chris Harrison, Scott Hudson

Touch-screen technology has become wildly popular, thanks to smart phones designed for nimble fingers. But most touch screens have a major drawback: you need to keep a close eye on the screen as you tap, to make sure that you hit the right virtual buttons. As touch screens become more popular in other contexts, such as in-car navigation and entertainment systems, this lack of sensory feedback could become a dangerous distraction.

Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed buttons that pop out from a touch-screen surface. The design retains the dynamic display capabilities of a normal touch screen but can also produce tactile buttons for certain functions.

Graduate student Chris Harrison and computer-science professor Scott Hudson have built a handful of proof-of-concept displays with the morphing buttons. The screens are covered in semitransparent latex, which sits on top of an acrylic plate with shaped holes and an air chamber connected to a pump. When the pump is off, the screen is flat; when it's switched on, the latex forms concave or convex features around the cutouts, depending on negative or positive pressure.

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Ubiquitous surveillance - Ugolog Creates Surveillance Website To Watch Anyone, Anywhere

Singularity Hub - April 28, 2009, by keith kleiner

What if people all over the world randomly decided to setup motion detection webcams and then send feeds from these webcams to a single website that would centralize the video data for anyone to search, view, and manipulate? Hot off of the heels of our story yesterday about the implications of cameras recording everything in our lives comes a website called Ugolog that does exactly this. The concept is both spooky and captivating all at once. The privacy implications are just out of control, opening the door to all sorts of immoral and illegal invasions of people’s privacy. On the other hand, the power and usefulness of such a network is extremely compelling.

When you go to the Ugolog website you are immediately impressed with the simplicity of the site (I sure hope they keep it this way!). No advertisements, no stupid gimmicks, no complicated interface. The site offers a bare bones, yet elegant design that allows you to do one thing quickly and easily: setup a motion detecting webcam and send the feed to Ugolog. No software is required, only a web browser and a properly configured camera. Don’t know how to setup the camera? No problem! The site has tutorials that tell you everything you need to know. Once Ugolog has a feed from one or more of your cameras, the data will be available for you and anyone else in the world to view along with all of the other feeds on the site.

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You don't have to dig to China - 'Hidden photons' to send secret emails through Earth

New Scientist - April 24, 2009, by Jon Cartwright

IF YOU shine a laser on the floor, where does the light go? With the right preparation, some of it might pop out at the other side of the world - an effect that could be exploited to transmit secret messages through the ground.

That is the conclusion of Andreas Ringwald at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, and colleagues, who have explored the possibility of hypothetical particles called "hidden photons" (www.arxiv.org/abs/0903.5300). "If such particles exist, then we can use them to communicate," says Ringwald. "It's very simple."

Hidden photons are a class of particles predicted by so-called supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Unlike normal photons, hidden photons could have a tiny mass and would be invisible because they would not interact with the charged particles in conventional matter. This means hidden photons would flit through even the densest materials unaffected.

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Holy Toledo! - 100 DVDs on a Disc

FoxNews - April 27, 2009

Imagine putting 100 of your favorite movies on one DVD.

That's what a radical breakthrough in optical-storage technology promises, according to a report in the New York Times.

General Electric researchers working at a lab in upstate New York have figured out the proper combination of materials necessary for the Holy Grail of data storage — holographic "reading" and "writing."

Ordinary-looking 5-inch discs made with this method might be able to store up to 500 gigabytes of data — more than most computers' hard drives.

CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs essentially use only one dimension: Microscopic pits, and spaces without pits, representing data are arranged in a very long linear track that spirals around the center of a flat disc. A laser reads each pit and space, one after the other, and reassembles the data accordingly.

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Even AI with harmless goals will be dangerous - The Basic AI Drives

At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, Steve Omohundro of Self-Aware Systems (selfawaresystems.com) presents on his paper "The Basic AI Drives." One might imagine that AI systems with harmless goals will be harmless. The paper instead shows that intelligent systems will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways. We identify a number of ?drives? that will appear in sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design. We call them drives because they are tendencies which will be present unless explicitly counteracted. We start by showing that goal-seeking systems will have drives to model their own operation and to improve themselves. Self-improving systems will be driven to clarify their goals and represent them as economic utility functions. They will also strive for their actions to approximate rational economic behavior. This will lead almost all systems to protect their utility functions from modification and their utility measurement systems from corruption. The paper discusses some exceptional systems which will want to modify their utility functions. We next discuss the drive toward self-protection which causes systems try to prevent themselves from being harmed. Finally we examine drives toward the acquisition of resources and toward their efficient utilization. We end with a discussion of how to incorporate these insights in designing intelligent technology which will lead to a positive future for humanity.


The Basic AI Drives from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

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Robot Birds - Bionic penguins take to the water – and the skies

New Scientist - April 21, 2009, by Colin Barras



Video: The flexibile necks of these bionic penguins steer the robots as well as making them look realistic (Image: Festo)

The graceful robotic penguins in the video above were unveiled by German engineering firm Festo this week.

Using their flippers, the mechanical penguins can paddle through water just like real ones, while larger helium-filled designs can "swim" through the air. The penguins are on show at the Hannover Messe Trade Exhibition in Germany.

Each penguin carries 3D sonar developed by EvoLogics in Berlin, Germany, which is used to monitor its surroundings and avoid collisions with walls or other penguins.

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Brain-Computer Interface - Brain Wave of The Future

Washington Post - April 23, 2009, by Joel Garreau

You slip the wireless headset on. It looks like something a telemarketer would wear, except the earpieces are actually sensors, and what looks like a microphone is a brain wave detector. You place its tip against your forehead, above your left eyebrow.

A few feet away is a ping-pong ball in a clear tube called the Force Trainer. The idea is to use your thoughts alone, as recognized by the wand on your forehead, to lift the ball. Your brain's electrical activity is translated into a signal understood by a little computer that controls a fan that blows the ball up the tube. Levitates it. As if by magic. It's mind over matter.

All you have to do is concentrate. On anything, it doesn't matter. The harder you concentrate, the higher the ball goes. A musician says he played a song in his head and focused on a particular chord change. A former high school tennis star focused on his 120-mph serve. One woman brought the image of a candle flame to mind. The ball rose.

Concentrate. Concentrate.

A sound erupts -- first a groan, then a woooo, WOOOO -- like a Halloween ghost.

The ball spins, slowly at first, then faster.

Concentrate, concentrate.

And then the ball rises inside the tube. Up it lifts, two inches, four inches -- a foot!

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Metal Soldiers - Killer robots and a revolution in warfare:Bernd Debusmann

Reuters - April 22, 2009

They have no fear, they never tire, they are not upset when the soldier next to them gets blown to pieces. Their morale doesn't suffer by having to do, again and again, the jobs known in the military as the Three Ds - dull, dirty and dangerous.

They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication may herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on fighting war. "Science fiction is moving to the battlefield. The future is upon us," as Brookings scholar Peter Singer put it to a conference of experts at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania this month.

Singer just published Wired For War - the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, a book that traces the rise of the machines and predicts that in future wars they will not only play greater roles in executing missions but also in planning them.

The U.S. forces that stormed into Iraq in 2003 had no robots on the ground. There were none in Afghanistan either. Now those two wars are fought with the help of an estimated 12,000 ground-based robots and 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the technical term for drone, or robotic aircraft.

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The post-university era approaches - Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Y. professor says

Deseret News - April 20, 2009, by Elaine Jarvik

PROVO — Last fall, David Wiley stood in front of a room full of professors and university administrators and delivered a prediction that made them squirm: "Your institutions will be irrelevant by 2020."

Wiley is one part Nostradamus and nine parts revolutionary, an educational evangelist who preaches about a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free.

Institutions that don't adapt, he says, risk losing students to institutions that do. The warning applies to community colleges and ivy-covered universities, says Wiley, who is a professor of psychology and instructional technology at Brigham Young University.

America's colleges and universities, says Wiley, have been acting as if what they offer — access to educational materials, a venue for socializing, the awarding of a credential — can't be obtained anywhere else. By and large, campus-based universities haven't been innovative, he says, because they've been a monopoly.

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What difference? - Robots are narrowing the gap with humans

McClatchy - April 20, 2009, by Robert S. Boyd

WASHINGTON — Robots are gaining on us humans.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.

At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.

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At least they'd be good for something - Harnessing spammers to advance AI

New Scientist - April 17, 2009, by Colin Barras

CAPTCHAs – scrambled letters that separate real online users from software bots – protect online services from being overwhelmed by spam by posing problems only humans can solve. But they may also offer a way to coerce spammers into solving some important problems in artificial intelligence.

Spammers have already written software able to match humans at some CAPTCHAs. But when CAPTCHAs finally fail, their co-creator Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University says there will be reason for celebration as well as concern.

Software that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a milestone for artificial intelligence as it will be a problem for online security.

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An Argument for cognitive enhancement - Brain Boosters

Stanford Magazine - March/April 2009

More drugs are going to come along, and some of them will have the characteristic that they not only make sick people better but they make healthy people still better. These drugs will be there, we need to think about how we should deal with them. One strong reaction is a knee-jerk “We should ban them”: that they’re cheating, that they’re unnatural, that they’re somehow wrong. The main point of this article is that we don’t agree with that. Enhancement is not a dirty word. I’m a teacher—my job is to enhance people. I’m a parent—my job, until they became teenagers, was to enhance my kids.

We do enhancement all the time. Education is enhancement. And as a law professor, I’m not only teaching my students facts that are important to them, but ways of manipulating those facts, ways of dealing with them. That’s cognitive enhancement. And it only works if I actually change their brains. If you remember tomorrow anything I’ve said today, it will be because I’ve made physical or electro-chemical changes in the cells of your brain. It’s kind of a weird thought, but true. So why is it that we do enhancement by so many other ways, but if you start talking about doing it through drugs, suddenly it becomes evil?

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Introducing - FACETS: Making Computers Work Like Brains

Singularity Hub - April 13, 2009, by Aaron Saenz

FACETS’ neural hardware simulates the processing power of the brain’s neurons and synapses. The next stage of the chip will act like 200,000 neurons and 50 million synapses.

How can you get a computer to solve problems like a brain? How does the brain even solve problems to begin with? Below is an indepth look into FACETS, a groundbreaking consortium of European scientists and engineers that are taking long strides to bridging the gap between your brain and your PC. Give them enough time and money, and these cutting edge researchers may have a computer that doesn’t just act like a human…it will think like a human, too.

What is FACETS? What is it doing?

Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States — with a daunting acronym that only a scientist could love, FACETS is a group of over 75 researchers with more than 10.5 million Euros to spend on tackling one major issue: finding out how the brain solves problems and getting computers to work in the same way. They’re part of the larger Future Emerging Technology (FET) and Information Society Technology (IST), some of Europe’s heaviest hitters in computation.

Why do we want computers that think like brains? Electrical signals in computers are faster than neurons, but brains have better strategies at solving big problems. You don’t race your calculator in addition competitions, but you also don’t ask a computer when you should get married. If we want computers that emulate human brain intelligence, we can’t just use brute force (make computers that are faster and more power hungry). We need to make computers that work in a completely different way from the ground up, replicating the amazing power, efficiency, and parallel processing of the brain.

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Good for business - Robots Get Down to Business

Technology Review - April 17, 2009, by Kristina Grifantini

At a conference in Boston, companies demonstrate robots for education, bomb disposal, agriculture, and more.

Yesterday, at the RoboBusiness conference in Boston, companies demonstrated a number of robots designed for use in offices, the military, even down on the farm. While plenty of very cool, cutting-edge research is going on in robotics labs across the world, RoboBusiness focuses on those companies looking to turn that research into a profit. Here are some of the most promising robots on show at the event.

Segway's Firefighter: Aside from the zippy personal transporter that most people have seen out and about, Segway has an extensive line of robots based on a versatile and robust wheeled platform. At the conference, Segway premiered a rugged, new, wheeled firefighting robot. It has a powerful, rotating spray nozzle, which could also be used for crowd control, according to Will Pong, director of robotics at Segway. The robotic firefighter can move at 18 miles per hour for 10-12 miles without stopping, and can carry up to 400 lbs. The finished product is currently being tested and is already available for a few customers.

CCS Robotics' Receptionist: A secretary and tour guide by day, security guard by night: that's the role of a four-foot tall wheeled robot called Guiabot, designed by CCS Robotics and Mobile Robots. With lasers and sonar sensors in its base, CCS can autonomously navigate a random or pre-decided path, successfully maneuvering around people and objects in its way. First introduced last year as a guest-greeting robotic butler, Guiabot is now in beta testing and is targeted toward offices and hospitals. A visitor can use the touch screen on Guiabot's front to request the robot to show her around. A high definition camera on its head also lets remote users interact with people via the robot. CCS Robotics envisions a human security guard using several Guiabots to efficiently patrol a large area.

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Here's looking at you, kid - Eye Robot Aims to Crack Secret of Nonverbal Communication

Technology Review - April 16, 2009

Social referencing is the ability to communicate with nonverbal signals. Children, in particular, learn much from the expressions of adults in new situations-whether to be frightened, happy sad etc. Nonverbal communication is important for everybody but in its purest form, perfected by many a primary school teacher, it is possible to control young children with eyebrow movements alone (a skill sadly lacking in many workplaces).

Now nonverbal communication is being roboticised by Yoichi Yamazaki and his pals at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The team has built an "eye robot" consisting of nothing more than a pair of eyeballs capable of conveying a wide range of nonverbal signals. "The proposed system provides a user friendly interface so that humans and robots communicate in natural fashion," say the team

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Learn more about the Singularity and Ray Kurzweil

Additional episodes can be found here.

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Brain too simple to understand itself? - Cryptic Consciousness

Conscious Entities - March 21, 2009

I was thinking about the New Mysterian position the other day, and it occurred to me that there are some scary implications which I, at any rate, had never noticed before.

As you may know, the New Mysterian position, cogently set out by Colin McGinn, is that our minds may simply not be equipped to understand consciousness. Not because it is in itself magic or inexplicable, but because our brains just don’t work in the necessary way. We suffer from cognitive closure. Closure here means that we have a limited repertoire of mental operations; using them in sequence or combination will take us to all sorts of conceptual places, but only within a certain closed domain. Outside that domain there are perfectly valid and straightforward ideas which we can simply never reach, and unfortunately one or more of these unreachable ideas is required in order to understand consciousness.

I don’t think that is actually the case, but the possibility is undeniable; I must admit that personally there’s a certain element of optimistic faith involved in my rejection of Mysterianism. I just don’t want to give up on the possibility of a satisfying answer.

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It's not the soul that needs saving, it's the brain, stupid - Keeping Our Heads

NYT - March 29, 2009, by MICHAEL PAUL MASON

THE death of the actress Natasha Richardson after a fall on a ski slope has further publicized an ugly truth that millions of Americans already know: Hardly anyone outside of an emergency room knows how to respond to brain trauma. There isn’t a standard response system that has been adequately promulgated in high school or college athletics, boxing rings or ski resorts. We’re fascinated by the inner workings of the brain and marvel at its mysteries, yet we aren’t very serious about protecting our most prized organ.

According to a 2008 list put together by the American Academy of Certified Brain Injury Specialists, there isn’t a single certified brain injury specialist working on America’s ski slopes.

Brain injury prevention and research has been notoriously underfinanced for decades now. In 2007, the federal AIDS budget was $22.8 billion, and Parkinson’s disease received $250 million. In contrast, the Health and Human Services Department’s traumatic brain injury program, the most substantive public health program targeting this problem, was allotted only $8.5 million, and last year President George W. Bush even proposed eliminating it. (President Obama recently added around $1 million to the program.

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A transhumanist vision - Imagining Full-immersion VR

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

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Living on the water - City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away

CNN - March 10, 2009, by Shelby Erdman

A floating city off the coast of San Francisco may sound like science fiction, but it could be reality in the not-too-distant future.

The Seasteading Institute already has drawn up plans for the construction of a homestead on the Pacific Ocean.

One project engineer described the prototype as similar to a cruise ship, but from a distance the cities might look like oil-drilling platforms.

According to the plans, the floating cities would not only look different from their land-based counterparts, but they might operate differently, too.

Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who now works for the Seasteading Institute, said floating cities are the perfect places to experiment with new forms of government.

Some of the new political ideas the group is tossing around include legalizing marijuana and making intellectual property communal -- so that everyone would take ownership in art produced on the city at sea.

"The idea isn't just about getting away from rules or getting rid of rules. It's about a system that encourages experimentation with different political systems," he said.

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Avoiding the "Terminator" Outcome - Friendly artificial intelligence

It would be good for everyone to know this stuff....Barry

Wikipedia

A Friendly Artificial Intelligence or FAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) that has a positive rather than negative effect on humanity. Friendly AI also refers to the field of knowledge required to build such an AI. This term particularly applies to AIs which have the potential to significantly impact humanity, such as those with intelligence comparable to or exceeding that of humans ("superintelligence"; see strong AI and technological singularity.) This specific term was coined by researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence as a technical term distinct from the everyday meaning of the word "friendly"; however, the concern is much older.

Many experts have argued that AI systems with goals that are not perfectly identical to or very closely aligned with our own are intrinsically dangerous unless extreme measures are taken to ensure the safety of humanity. Decades ago, Ryszard Michalski, one of the pioneers of Machine Learning, taught his Ph.D. students that any truly alien mind, to include machine minds, was unknowable and therefore dangerous. More recently, Eliezer Yudkowsky has called for the creation of “Friendly AI” to mitigate the existential threat of hostile intelligences. Stephen Omohundro argues that all advanced AI systems will, unless explicitly counteracted, exhibit a number of basic drives/tendencies/desires because of the intrinsic nature of goal-driven systems and that these drives will, “without special precautions”, cause the AI to act in ways that range from the disobedient to the dangerously unethical.

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[via Accelerating Future]

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Ask the machine - Science's most powerful computer tackles first questions

New Scientist - April 2009 by Tom Simonite

Jaguar is the second most powerful computer ever built and the fastest dedicated to science (Image: National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

In cult sci-fi tale Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most powerful computer in the universe was charged with finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

The projects were chosen in a peer-reviewed process designed to get the computer producing useful science even during the period when its performance is still being fine-tuned by engineers.

Jaguar is located at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, and has a peak operating performance of 1.64 petaflops, meaning it can perform more than a million billion mathematical operations every second.

Jaguar has 181,000 processing cores, compared to the one or two found in most desktop machines. The world's only more powerful computer is the US Nuclear Security Administration's 1.7-petaflop Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

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Damn, they're good - Computer Derives Natural Laws From Raw Data

Science Daily - April 3, 2009

If Isaac Newton had access to a supercomputer, he'd have had it watch apples fall – and let it figure out the physical matters. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm, just developed by Cornell researchers, which can derive natural laws from observed data.

The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that become established laws – yet without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.

The research is published in the journal Science (April 3, 2009) by Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology.

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Bringing is together - The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future

Technology Review - April 6, 2009, by Duncan Graham-Rowe
Photo credit: Microsoft

Say goodbye to the mouse and hello to augmented reality, voice recognition, and geospatial tracking.

Computer scientists from around the world will gather in Boston this week at Computer-Human Interaction 2009 to discuss the latest developments in computer interfaces. To coincide with the event, we present a roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future.

The granddaddy of all computer interfaces is the command line, which surfaced as a more effective way to control computers in the 1950s. Previously, commands had to be fed into a computer in batches, usually via a punch card or paper tape. Teletype machines, which were normally used for telegraph transmissions, were adapted as a way for users to change commands partway through a process, and receive feedback from a computer in near real time.

Video display units allowed command line information to be displayed more rapidly. The VT100, a video terminal released by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1978, is still emulated by some modern operating systems as a way to display the command line.

Graphical user interfaces, which emerged commercially in the 1980s, made computers much easier for most people to use, but the command line still offers substantial power and flexibility for expert users.

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Power to the soldiers - New exoskeleton gives soldiers super-strength

MSNBC - March 6, 2009, by Eric Bland

Device helps a soldier carry up to 200 pounds at a top speed of 10 mph

Stronger, faster and harder is the promise of a new exoskeleton developed by Lockheed Martin for U.S. soldiers. Dubbed the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC, the device helps a soldier carry up to 200 pounds at a top speed of 10 mph.

"The soldier has the feeling of maybe an extra five to 10 pounds," said Doug Medcalf, Business Development Manager at Lockheed Martin. Today some soldiers are carrying loads of up to 130 pounds into combat.

Unlike most exoskeletons built to boost human ability, the HULC, which Medcalf says does not owe its name to the popular green comic book character, isn't limited to the length of its power cable.

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Another warning - Humans May Be Losers If Technological Nature Replaces The Real Thing, Psychologists Warn

ScienceDaily - April 5, 2009

There are Web cams focused on falcons, ferrets and fish, virtual tours of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and robotic dogs, seals and even dinosaurs. But what about the real deal: observing animals in their natural habitat, hiking the John Muir Trail or a playing with a live pet?

Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

"We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives," said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity's growing estrangement from nature.

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The Power of Intelligence - [Singularity Fundamentals]

By Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

In our skulls we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn’t think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe. If you’d never seen an anatomy textbook, and you saw a brain lying in the street, you’d say “Yuck!” and try not to get any of it on your shoes. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ that cooled the blood. It doesn’t look dangerous.

Five million years ago, the ancestors of lions ruled the day, the ancestors of wolves roamed the night. The ruling predators were armed with teeth and claws – sharp, hard cutting edges, backed up by powerful muscles. Their prey, in self-defense, evolved armored shells, sharp horns, poisonous venoms, camouflage. The war had gone on through hundreds of eons and countless arms races. Many a loser had been removed from the game, but there was no sign of a winner. Where one species had shells, another species would evolve to crack them; where one species became poisonous, another would evolve to tolerate the poison. Each species had its private niche – for who could live in the seas and the skies and the land at once? There was no ultimate weapon and no ultimate defense and no reason to believe any such thing was possible.

Then came the Day of the Squishy Things.

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If you can't beat it, put it inside you - Putting Everything on a Mobile Network

NYT - April 2, 2009, by Matt Richtel

There’s a theme emerging here in Las Vegas at the CTIA conference: Add mobile data capability to absolutely everything, including video cameras and the human body.

That quasi-science-fiction notion is being tossed around at the show by mainstream companies like Qualcomm and AT&T. At a lunch for the press and industry analysts on Thursday, AT&T discussed its new “emerging devices” division, which is working on wireless applications for consumer electronics devices, including game machines, electronic book readers and video and still cameras.

Glenn Lurie, president of the division, said that his group was talking to a whole range of device makers — from garage start-ups to billion-dollar companies — along with the major retailers. The business models for these devices are still developing, but Mr. Lurie said that, for example, camera owners might pay each time they send a video from the device over AT&T’s network.

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Starting with the rats - Neuroscientists propose project to comprehensively map mammalian brain circuits

PhysOrg.com - March 31, 2009

Thirty-seven scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and 20 other major research institutions in the U.S. and Europe have issued a major challenge to the neuroscience community. At long last, the time has come, they argue in a just-published paper, to assemble a comprehensive map of the major neural circuits in the mammalian brain.

In an age in which the genomes of many organisms, including that of humans, have been fully sequenced and can be accessed instantly by anyone with a computer, anywhere in the world, it is astonishing to consider that "we have, as yet, not been able to compile a whole-brain map of the circuitry that underlies the functioning of our own brains," notes Professor Partha P. Mitra, Ph.D., senior author of the paper and leader of the ongoing Brain Architecture Project at CSHL, funded by the WM Keck Foundation. To help address this knowledge gap, Mitra organized a series of meetings at the CSHL Banbury Center in 2007 and 2008, from which this proposal grew.

The neuroscience community's "sparse knowledge" of mammalian neuroanatomical circuitry is "perhaps the largest lacuna in our knowledge about nervous system structure," Mitra and colleagues observe in their paper, which appears in the March issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

The case for committing resources to assembly of a whole-brain circuit map is particularly strong, they say, because it almost certainly will provide insights about what goes wrong in brain dysfunctions spanning a range of neurodevelopmental illnesses including autism, schizophrenia, and perhaps mood disorders such as depression, bipolar illness, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Further, the authors argue that technological advances along with decreasing computational and data-storage costs have made such an effort feasible now, when it could only be dreamt of even in the recent past.

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Oh, he'll help alright - Humanoid robot helps scientists to understand intelligence

PhysOrg.com - March 31, 2009, by Colin Smith

A humanoid robot newly acquired by Imperial College London will lead to a deeper understanding of human intelligence, says scientists today.

The College’s Departments of Computing and Electrical and Electronic Engineering believe that iCub, about the size of a three year old child, will further their research into cognition, the process of knowing that includes awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement.

Researchers want to learn more about how humans use cognition to interact with their world. They believe iCub’s human-like body will help them to understand how this is done.

iCub has mechanical joints that enable it to move its head, arms, fingers, eyes and legs similarly to the way that humans do. Professor Murray Shanahan, of the Department of Computing, says this is important because cognition is very much tied up with the way we interact with the world.

“Nature developed cognition for us in order to make us better at interacting with the physical and social world,” he explains. “If we want to understand the nature of cognition better then we really need to understand it in the context of something that moves or interacts with objects. That is where iCub can help us.”

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