Walk like a man - A Robot that Navigates Like a Person

Editor's note: What's new about this robot? In what way does it move about in its environment like a human? Other robots take pictures of their surroundings repeatedly to plan their way through, but this robot uses sophisticated algorithms that mimic the human visual system. A lot will be learned from this one and advances in autonomous robotics will come fast. You heard it here first!

Technology Review - June 30, 2009, by Anne-Marie Corley

A new robot navigates using humanlike visual processing and object detection.

Future vision: This robot navigates using input from two cameras that serve as "eyes" in a movable "head." Credit: Antonio Frisoli

European researchers have developed a robot capable of moving autonomously using humanlike visual processing. The robot is helping the researchers explore how the brain responds to its environment while the body is in motion. What they discover could lead to machines that are better able to navigate through cluttered environments.

Once the robot had been given the software, the researchers found that it did indeed move like a human. When moving slowly, it passed close to an obstacle, because it knew that it could recalculate its path without changing course too much. When moving more quickly toward the target, the robot gave obstacles a wider berth since it had less time to calculate a new trajectory.

The robot consists of a wheeled platform with a robotic "head" that uses two cameras to capture stereoscopic vision. The robot can turn its head and shift its gaze up and down or sideways to gauge its surroundings, and can quickly measure its own speed relative to its environment.

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The first ever solid-state quantum processor created

Editor's note: Quantum mechanics involves the way matter and energy behave at minuscule sizes and distances. Counter-intuitive doesn't begin to describe the weirdness of this field of physics. And yet, we are able to make darned good use of it. A dream of computer scientists has been to build quantum computers that can perform far faster than conventional ones, and store far far more information. This article describes the creation of the world's first quantum processor. It's a really big deal.

PhysOrg.com - June 28, 2009

The two-qubit processor is the first solid-state quantum processor that resembles a conventional computer chip and is able to run simple algorithms. Credit: Blake Johnson/Yale University

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.

For example, imagine having four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but not knowing which number belonged to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

"Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process," Schoelkopf said. "It's like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one."

"Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons," said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics & Physics at Yale. "But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor."

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Making minds that won't destroy us

Editor's note: Michael Vassar gives a credible argument in this essay that artificial minds are possible, are coming, and should be designed to care about human wellbeing from the start, because we will have only one chance to get it right.

Forbes - The AI Report - Machine Minds: Let's get artificial intelligence right the first time.

June 22, 2009, by Michael Vassar

Are you in a city? If so, may I ask you to look around? Almost everything you see was created deliberately. Human minds built theories and implemented plans. Due to these plans, rocks were gathered, shaped and rearranged. You call some of these rocks your house. The main things that weren't created deliberately are the minds themselves.

Animals to which humans are indifferent often lose their habitats and go extinct. If an indifferent superintelligence is created, especially if it is created as software and can therefore reproduce very rapidly, humans will be similarly endangered.

Humans are primarily natural, not designed. Human culture shapes personal development, but on an absolute scale culture permits only a very narrow range of possibilities. A human can be raised to be an Inca, a teacher or a psychoanalyst. More careful upbringing and good luck can produce a Mozart, an Einstein or a Julius Caesar, but never a dolphin, a raven or an elephant. Michael Phelps is astounding for a human, but a dolphin can cross an Olympic pool in seconds.

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Seeing a memory form

Editor's note: As neuroscience and imaging techniques continue to improve, the mind/brain connection becomes more and more clear. There are still many people who will stubbornly believe that mind can exist outside the brain, in spite of the fact that there has never been a scrap of evidence to positively support the idea, and despite the continuous stream of discovery demonstrating that every operation of the mind can be shown to originate from and be completely explained by operation of the brain. Which brings us to this article...

msnbc - June 26, 2009, by Clara Moskowitz

The increase in green fluorescence, right, shows the imaging of protein synthesis at synapses when memories are made. MARTIN ET. AL

For the first time, an image of a memory being made at the cellular level has been captured by scientists.

The image shows that proteins are created at connections between brain cells when a long-term memory is formed. Neuroscientists had suspected as much, but hadn't been able to see it happening until now.

The experiment also revealed some surprising aspects of memory formation, which remains a somewhat mysterious process.

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How to hide buildings from earthquakes

Editor's note: Science fiction has long been fascinated with the idea of the cloaking device. But that's only because human beings have long had the occasional need to hide. The most oft-dreamed-of capability is that of making oneself invisible to others while moving about freely among them. So scientists have been working on ways to accomplish just that, focusing on fashioning materials that allow light waves to pass over and around them without being deflected or reflected. Now, scientists are concentrating on other types of waves: The storm waves of tsunamis and the seismic waves of earthquakes.

NewScientist - June 26, 2009, by Colin Barras

Invisibility cloak could hide buildings from quakes

After effects of a major earthquake in Sichuan province, Central China. Could future buildings be protected using the physics of invisibility cloaks? (Image: Sipa Press / Rex Features)

Borrowing from the physics of invisibility cloaks could make it possible to hide buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, say physicists in France and the UK.

The "earthquake cloak" idea comes from the team led by Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France. They were the first to show that the physics of invisibility cloaks could have other applications – designing a cloak that could render objects "invisible" to destructive storm waves or tsunamis.

"The outer rings remain nearly still, but the pair of rings tuned to the frequency of the wave move like crazy, bending up and down and twisting," says Guenneau. "For each small frequency range, there's one pair of rings that does most of the work." The team has simulated cloaks containing as many as 100 rings, says Guenneau, although fewer would be needed to protect against the most common kinds of earthquake surface waves.

The seismic waves of an earthquake fall into two main groups: body waves that propagate through the Earth, and surface waves that travel only across the surface.

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The Meat-Eaters - Domestic robots with a taste for flesh

Editor's note: Yes, they're real. These robots run on flies, mice, and other disgusting things. Right now they only supplement their power supply with vermin and pests, but they could eventually be self-sustaining. Just like your cat.

NewScientist - June 25, 2009, by Jessica Griggs

This robot catches flies to generate its own energy, click the link in the main text, left to see more of this robot and others with a taste for flesh (Image: Auger-Loizeau)

Futuristic-looking robots like Honda's sleek humanoid Asimo don't cut it for designer James Auger, at the Royal College of Art, London. Believing that they need to fit unobtrusively into the home, he has built robotic furniture. And, believing they need to be useful and entertaining, he has given the furniture an appetite for vermin, like mice and flies.

But the robots also have a taste for flesh. They can gain energy by chomping on flies and mice, an idea inspired by researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab, UK, who built a fly-powered robot and have also suggested that marine robots could feed on plankton.

Auger worked with long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau to build the five domestic robots. Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.

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The Future of Mobile Intelligence - Video

Editor's note: In this presentation by Jamais Cascio he discusses "Mobile Intelligence," and the ways you and I will participate in augmented reality...



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Brain incorporates tools into body map - Cyborg adaptations no problem?

Editor's note: Your brain knows where all the parts of your body are at any given moment. This is why you can catch a ball without looking at your hand. There are nerve sensors at your joints that measure angles so that your brain is aware of your body's configuration, moment to moment. This study demonstrates that your brain will incorporate the tools you use into your mental body map, which has implications for the cyborging of your body.

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements: NewScientist - June 23, 2009, by Linda Geddes

The human brain may be able to include cyborg implants in its representation of the body (Image: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty)

When you brush your teeth, the toothbrush may actually become part of your arm – at least as far as your brain is concerned. That's the conclusion of a study showing perceptions of arm length change after people handle a mechanical tool.

The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, "and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms."

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

To test the idea, Alessandro Farné of the University of Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, and colleagues attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.

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• Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain (scientificamerican.com)

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Quando, quando quando? - When Will Computers Be Smarter Than Us?

Editor's note: I am always fascinated by what people like Nick have to say. First, because it's always damned interesting. Second, because I think it behooves me to have an idea where the world is headed. Some may find it more comforting to play the head-burial game. If that floats you, fine, but I see the ability and willingness to adapt to a changing environment as the best way to proceed.

In this article Nick gives a plausible argument for cognitive enhancement, i.e. radically improving human intelligence through merging our brains with technology, as well as exploring the varied means by which intelligence can, and probably will, dramatically multiply on the earth and beyond.

Forbes.com - June 22, 2009, by Nick Bostrom

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization.

Perhaps the smartest and wisest thing the human species could do would be to work on making itself smarter and wiser. In the longer run, however, biological human brains might cease to be the predominant nexus of earthly intelligence.

All our technological inventions, philosophical ideas and scientific theories have gone through the birth canal of the human intellect. Arguably, human brain power is the chief limiting factor in the development of human civilization.

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• Will Singularity Result in Integration of the Human Nervous System and the Mobile Networks and Interfaces? So You Are Your IPhone. (futurelab.net)

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Helping the Internet think faster - New technology enables high-speed data transfer

Editor's note: Signal speed is a significant factor in a brain's intelligence. Consciousness is a function of the rapidity of communication between networks of neurons. This being said, cannot increases in date transfer speeds between computer networks be seen as a harbinger, or prerequisite, of consciousness and intelligence springing forth from the ether?

PhysOrg.com - June 18, 2009

GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a reliable, high-performance communications infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, collaborative science endeavors.

The Argonne-developed system proved key to enabling research groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California to move large data sets between the facilities at a rate of 200 megabytes per second.

"The data tsunami problem has been a major bottleneck to scientific advancement," said Raj Kettimuthu, technical lead and technology coordinator of the GridFTP project at Argonne. "With GridFTP computational scientists can analyze their simulated and derived data in real time."

The deployment of GridFTP at the two computing facilities is part of a major project to optimize wide-area network data transfers between sites hosting DOE leadership-class computers.

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Eyes on the sky - Sunspots Revealed In Striking Detail By Supercomputers

Editor's note: You may wonder what this story has to do with Singularity. It bears on the topic of this blog in at least 2 ways: First, the power of our closest star gives it veto power over our existence. It can cancel our ticket in a flash, via slow-roasting energy-deprivation. Existential threats may be the only way Singularity can be stopped. Second, the computing power making this level of intimacy with its workings possible is also part of the "approach to Singularity" story. So, enjoy!

ScienceDaily - June 21, 2009

In a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the Sun and its impacts on Earth, an international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots. The resulting visuals capture both scientific detail and remarkable beauty.

The interface between a sunspot's umbra (dark center) and penumbra (lighter outer region) shows a complex structure with narrow, almost horizontal (lighter to white) filaments embedded in a background having a more vertical (darker to black) magnetic field. (Credit: Copyright UCAR, image courtesy Matthias Rempel, NCAR)

The high-resolution simulations of sunspot pairs open the way for researchers to learn more about the vast mysterious dark patches on the Sun's surface. Sunspots are associated with massive ejections of charged plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and disrupt communications and navigational systems. They also contribute to variations in overall solar output, which can affect weather on Earth and exert a subtle influence on climate patterns.

The research, by scientists at NCAR and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, is being published June 18 in Science Express.

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Nano-Recipes - Designing Structures Made of Nanomaterials

Editor's note: Putting nano-sized particles together to build specific things is, as one might imagine, not a very easy thing to do. Why? Because particles at that scale are subject to laws of physics that we never experience on a macro scale. Things tend to come together, or not, in ways that are highly complex and difficult to manage. (At this point I'm thinking about George Costanza and really tiny surgical instruments.) So Microsoft steps in and comes up with a computer model that concocts recipes for making the tiny particles into something useful.

Technology Review - June 19, 2009

Microsoft researchers hope to simplify algorithms for self-assembling materials

Particle packing: Algorithms designed by Microsoft researchers predict what the forces between a group of particles must be in order for them to self-assemble into a particular structure, such as a closely packed cube. Credit: Salvatore Torquato

Making complex structures out of nanoparticles or polymers, be they for photonic computing or solar cells, typically involves a lot of expensive and time-consuming trial and error in the lab. Theorists hope to simplify the process by developing computer models that will generate recipes that always come out right, but so far, the ones that they've made have been too complex to realize in the lab. Now, in the hope of making these algorithms useful to chemists, computer scientists at Microsoft have simplified a model that creates recipes for self-assembling materials.

"If you have in mind a form or shape, the model will tell you how to get it," says Henry Cohn, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, who led the work with MIT assistant professor of mathematics Abhinav Kumar.

The new Microsoft models, described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are intended to speed the design of new self-assembled structures. Using trial and error, materials scientists have employed nanoparticles to make structures on what's called the mesoscale. These ordered arrangements of nanoscale particles can have remarkable optical, electrical, and other properties but are difficult to create. "Theory there is sorely lacking," says Mila Boncheva, a senior scientist at Firmenich, in Geneva, who played an important role in early research on this kind of self-assembly at Harvard University. "What people are currently doing in design is mostly trial and error based on common sense." The theoretical model is aimed at helping materials scientists figure out much more quickly what the right materials and conditions are for self-assembly of a given structure.

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• Scientists Make Blackest Material Ever (wired.com)

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Moving towards machine-human merger - Human eye inspires advance in computer vision

Editor's note: Machines become more human, humans become more machine - a marriage that seems inevitable.

Boston College - June 2009

Inspired by the behavior of the human eye, Boston College computer scientists have developed a technique that lets computers see objects as fleeting as a butterfly or tropical fish with nearly double the accuracy and 10 times the speed of earlier methods.

The linear solution to one of the most vexing challenges to advancing computer vision has direct applications in the fields of action and object recognition, surveillance, wide-base stereo microscopy and three-dimensional shape reconstruction, according to the researchers, who will report on their advance at the upcoming annual IEEE meeting on computer vision.

BC computer scientists Hao Jiang and Stella X. Yu developed a novel solution of linear algorithms to streamline the computer's work. Previously, computer visualization relied on software that captured the live image then hunted through millions of possible object configurations to find a match. Further compounding the challenge, even more images needed to be searched as objects moved, altering scale and orientation.

Rather than combing through the image bank – a time- and memory-consuming computing task – Jiang and Yu turned to the mechanics of the human eye to give computers better vision.

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• The difference between objects and scenes... random thoughts (scienceblogs.com)

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Let slip the dogs... - Plan to teach military robots the rules of war

NewScientist - June 18, 2009 by Tom Simonite

Can military machines be programmed with a conscience? (Image: Robert Nickelsberg / Getty)

Technology has always distanced the soldiers who use weapons from the people who get hit. But robotics engineer Ron Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, is working to imagine wars in which weapons make their own decisions about wielding lethal force.

He is particularly interested in how such machines might be programmed to act ethically, obeying the rules of engagement.

Simulations are a powerful way to imagine one possible version of the future of combat, says Illah Nourbakhsh, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US. But they gloss over the complexities of getting robots to understand the world well enough to make such judgements, he says; something unlikely to be possible for decades.

Arkin has developed an "ethical governor", which aims to ensure that robot attack aircraft behave ethically in combat, and is demonstrating the system in simulations based on recent campaigns by US troops, using real maps from the Middle East.

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Layar - Augmented reality is up and running...in the Netherlands

Check out "the world's first  mobile augmented reality browser," now available in the Netherlands.



Layar

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Re-Engineering the Earth - Get your degree now!

Atlantic - July/August 2009, by Graeme Wood

As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part.

If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun’s full force, keeping temperatures cool—as long as the puffing never ceased.

Roger Angel, an astronomy and optics professor at the University of Arizona, would block the sun by building a giant visor in space.

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.

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Nano-Gears - Scientists invent 1.2nm molecular gear

Physorg.com - June 15, 2009

Scientists from A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), led by Professor Christian Joachim, have scored a breakthrough in nanotechnology by becoming the first in the world to invent a molecular gear of the size of 1.2nm whose rotation can be deliberately controlled. This achievement marks a radical shift in the scientific progress of molecular machines and is published in Nature Materials, one of the most prestigious journals in materials science.

Said Prof Joachim, "Making a gear the size of a few atoms is one thing, but being able to deliberately control its motions and actions is something else altogether. What we've done at IMRE is to create a truly complete working gear that will be the fundamental piece in creating more complex molecular machines that are no bigger than a grain of sand."

"Christian and his team's discovery shows that it may one day be possible to create and manipulate molecular-level machines."

Prof Joachim and his team discovered that the way to successfully control the rotation of a single-molecule gear is via the optimization of molecular design, molecular manipulation and surface atomic chemistry. This was a breakthrough because before the team's discovery, motions of molecular rotors and gears were random and typically consisted of a mix of rotation and lateral displacement. The scientists at IMRE solved this scientific conundrum by proving that the rotation of the molecule-gear could be wellcontrolled by manipulating the electrical connection between the molecule and the tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope while it was pinned on an atom axis.

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Artificial Life Draws Nearer - Tantalizing clues to the chemical origins of life

Nature.com - June 12, 2009, by Katharine Sanderson

A synthetic molecule can reshuffle itself to match a DNA template.

The new molecule can adapt its sequence to a DNA template. Science / AAAS

Chemists in the United States have made an artificial DNA-like molecule that can change its sequence to bind to a DNA template without the help of enzymes. The findings could shed light on how molecules underpinning life were first able to emerge from a chemical soup.

Shapiro says, however, that Ghadiri and colleagues' method is an elegant piece of chemistry, and sees its potential especially in the field of synthetic biology. "More needs to be done to show that [Ghadiri's] system can function as a gene. If it can, then it would be a candidate for service as the genetic component in current efforts to construct a cell artificially," he says.

The vexing question of how strands of DNA or RNA might have first formed has led many chemists to try and recreate the situation in the lab, using synthetic molecules that stack together to form DNA-like strands. Now, Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has taken a different tack — coming up with a molecule that can pair up with different sequences of DNA by rearranging its own sequence.

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I'd love to see this - Inflatable tower could climb to the edge of space

New Scientist - June 8, 2009, by Jeff Hecht

An inflatable tower reaching 20 km above sea level could save on rocket launches and provide an amazing view. (Image: NASA)

A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, its proponents claim.

Inflatable pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower, say Brendan Quine, Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University in Toronto, Canada, writing in Acta Astronautica (DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2009.02.018). If built from a suitable mountain top it could reach an altitude of around 20 kilometres, where it could be used for atmospheric research, tourism, telecoms or launching spacecraft.

"Twenty kilometres up is about as dark as outer space. You can see about 600 kilometres in any direction," Quine says. Tourists could get a view almost like that from space, but without the difficulties of coping with zero gravity. He calculates the tower could be extended up to low Earth orbit at 200 kilometres.

The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules (see image). Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular spacers and inflated with air.

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Tesla Personal Supercomputer - Own your own!

Tesla - The world’s first teraflop many-core processor

Today, scientific research is carried out on supercomputing clusters, a shared resource that consumes hundreds of kilowatts of power and costs millions of dollars to build and maintain. As a result, researchers must fight for time on these resources, slowing their work and delaying results. NVIDIA and its worldwide partners today announced the availability of the GPU-based Tesla™ Personal Supercomputer, which delivers the equivalent computing power of a cluster, at 1/100th of the price and in a form factor of a standard desktop workstation.

“We’ve all heard ‘desktop supercomputer’ claims in the past, but this time it’s for real,” said Burton Smith, Microsoft Technical Fellow. “NVIDIA and its partners will be delivering outstanding performance and broad applicability to the mainstream marketplace. Heterogeneous computing, where GPUs work in tandem with CPUs, is what makes such a breakthrough possible.”

Priced like a conventional PC workstation, yet delivering 250 times the processing power, researchers now have the horsepower to perform complex, data-intensive computations right at their desk, processing more data faster and cutting time to discovery.

“GPUs have evolved to the point where many real world applications are easily implemented on them and run significantly faster than on multi-core systems,” said Prof. Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee and author of LINPACK. “Future computing architectures will be hybrid systems with parallel-core GPUs working in tandem with multi-core CPUs."

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Science proves the value of sleeping on it - Problems are solved by sleeping

BBC News - June 9, 2009

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.

They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep - when most dreams occur - were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

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I can see! - Record-breaking superlens smashes diffraction limit

Technology Review - June 11, 2009

The world's highest resolution lens opens the door to real-time movies of molecules in action.

It must be 10 years since John Pendry at Imperial College London dreamt up the idea of superlenses. Until then physicists had thought that the resolution of all lenses was limited by a phenomenon called the diffraction limit which holds that you can't see anything smaller than about half the wavelength of the illuminating light.

That's true if you look at the propagating component of light waves. But light also records smaller subwavelength details in its evanescent components which do not propagate. At least not usually. What Pendry showed was that evanescent components can propagate in a material with a negative refractive index and pointed out that a thin film of silver ought to have just the right properties.

Since then the race has been on to build superlenses. In 2005, Nicolas Fang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created one that could record details as small as 1/6th of a wavelength. That's was a significant improvement over the diffraction limit but why not better?

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Where intelligence lies - Speeding up brain networks might boost IQ

NewScientist - June 9, 2009, by Ewen Callaway

For decades scientists have tried, mostly in vain, to explain where intelligence resides in our brains. The answer, a new study suggests, is everywhere.

After analysing the brain as an incredibly dense network of interconnected points, a team of Dutch scientists has found that the most efficiently wired brains tend to belong to the most intelligent people.

Now that scientists are finally getting a grip on what features of the brain underlie intelligence, it may be possible to manipulate them, says van den Heuvel. "We're looking at communication between brain regions, so why shouldn't we be able to influence that?"

And improving this efficiency with drugs offers a tantalising – though still unproven – means of boosting intelligence, say researchers.

The concept of a networked brain isn't so different from the transportation grids used by cars and planes, says Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center who led the new study.

"If you're flying from New York to Amsterdam, you can do it in a direct flight. It's much more effective than going from New York, then to Washington, and then to Amsterdam. It's exactly the same idea in the brain," he says.

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Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot - Start saving for yours today

NYT - June 8, 2009, by John Markoff

POWERING UP A prototype of Willow Garage’s PR2 robot recharging itself at the company’s headquarters.

Consider it one small step — or a roll, actually — for a robot, one not giant, but significant step for robotics.

William L. Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University roboticist and the winner of a Defense Department urban challenge robot driving contest last year, said it was “unprecedented” for a robot to navigate in a building reliably and repeatedly recharge itself. “These guys are the real deal,” he said.

Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. In a different test, the same robot completed a marathon in the company’s office, traveling 26.2 miles. PR2 will not compete with humans yet; it took more than four days.

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We need this NOW! - Making Fat Disappear

Technology Review - June 8, 2009, by Courtney Humphries

Engineering mice with a fat-burning strategy from bacteria keeps the animals thin.

Mice that were engineered with a fat-burning pathway borrowed from bacteria (top) remained thin compared with normal mice (bottom) when both were fed a high-fat diet. Credit: Jason Dean, University of California, Los Angeles

Can burning excess fat be as easy as exhaling? That's the finding of a provocative new study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who transplanted a fat-burning pathway used by bacteria and plants into mice. The genetic alterations enabled the animals to convert fat into carbon dioxide and remain lean while eating the equivalent of a fast-food diet.

"What I found fascinating is that it shows how you could use synthetic biology for human therapies in a highly novel way,"says James Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University.

The feat, detailed in the current issue of Cell Metabolism introduces a new approach to combating the growing obesity problem in humans. Although the proof-of-concept study is far from being tested in humans, it may point to new strategies for borrowing biological functions from bacteria and other species to improve human health.

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Those left behind - Dragging the tech-challenged into the present

Blogger's note: You've seen the stories like this one in the New York Times, explaining how millions of households will face (gasp!) blank TV screens on June 12 because they still receive broadcast TV via analog hardware. My reaction? WTF! OK, some of the problem may be that folks can't afford cable or satellite. Some. But my guess is, this just isn't the problem for most of the millions who have yet to come into the present. They are the left-behind, and blank TV screens won't be the biggest issue for them.

New York Times - June 5, 2009, by Stephen Labaton

Danielle Eberhardt, front, and Katherine Daniel of AmeriCorps set up a TV converter box for Laura Wilson, left, in Baltimore.

WASHINGTON — Millions of households will lose television reception next week when about 1,000 broadcasters around the nation shut off their analog signals and complete their conversion to digital programming, federal officials say.

Concerned about a possible political reaction, President Obama issued a statement on Thursday urging consumers to take steps so they do not lose television reception. “We have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition,” Mr. Obama said.

The government has spent more than $2 billion to ease the transition to digital television, and in the last few months has cut in half the number of households that are unprepared for the final conversion on June 12. But the latest survey by the Nielsen Company indicates that as of the end of May, more than 10 percent of the 114 million households that have television sets are either completely or partly unprepared.

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Beyond Human - A must-see for anyone who wants to know what's ahead

The future is being revealed right now as biology and technology begin to merge...



Click here to see the rest of the documentary.

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When the abyss looks into you - The Display That Watches You

Technology Review - Friday, June 5, 2009 by Kate Greene

Researchers in Germany have created a display that doubles as a camera.

Two-way display: This image shows a detailed layout of the Fraunhofer display chip, which combines photodetectors with an organic light-emitting diode display. Credit: Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems

For decades, engineers have envisioned wearable displays for pilots, surgeons, and mechanics. But so far, a compact wearable display that's easy to interact with has proved elusive.

"This is of great interest for all kinds of applications where your hands are needed for something else, like a pilot flying an aircraft or a surgeon wanting to access vital parameters while performing a surgery."

Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have now developed a screen technology that could help make wearable displays more compact and simpler to use. By interlacing photodetector cells--similar to those used to capture light in a camera--with display pixels, the researchers have built a system that can display a moving image while also detecting movement directly in front of it. Tracking a person's eye movements while she looks at the screen could allow for eye-tracking control: instead of using hand controls or another form of input, a user could flip through menu options on a screen by looking at the right part of the screen. The researchers envisage eventually integrating the screen with an augmented-reality system.

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Tag! You're it! - Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech

Wired - June 3, 2009, by David Hambling

The story that the CIA uses tiny homing beacons to guide their drone strikes in Pakistan may sound like an urban myth. But this sort of technology does exist, and might well be used for exactly this purpose. It might even have been the “secret weapon” that Bob Woodward said helped the American military pacify Iraq.

The reports from Pakistan suggest that the CIA knew which village to strike, they just needed to locate the exact building (descriptions like “third house on the left” can be dangerously ambiguous, especially when viewing from the air). A Radar Responsive tag would be very handy for guiding a strike from a drone a few miles away.

The military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of “Tagging tracking and locating” (TTL) gear — gizmos designed to keep covertly tabs from far away. Most of these technologies are highly classified. But there’s enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

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Today, a game, tomorrow, every computer - Sony latest to demo videogame motion-sensing controller

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

PhysOrg.com - June 3, 2009 by Glenn Chapman

Sony on Tuesday demonstrated a prototype motion-sensing videogame controller, as the maker of PlayStation consoles joined rivals in a trend away from playing with complicated buttons and joysticks.

Sony Computer Entertainment researcher Richard Marks provided a glimpse of the prototype controller at the Japanese firm's press conference at the open of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

Microsoft revealed on Monday that is has been secretly developing technology that lets people play videogames using natural body movements instead of hand-held controllers.

"It's more distinct and cool feature is a glowing sphere on the end that the PlayStation 3 eye can track," said Marks, as a colleague wielded what looked like a pair of television remote controls with lights on the tips.

The camera tracked the player's movements, and software translated his movements to onscreen characters wielding swords, racquets, flashlights, maces, guns, baseball bats, and other implements.

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Get those eyes back on the road! - Google Explores "Eyes-Free" Phones

Technology Review - June 2, 2009, by Kate Greene

An adaptive interface with tactile and audio feedback could make it easier to ignore a small screen.

Circular motion: The eyes-free interface for Android phones is based on a radial menu of numbers and letters. When a finger passes over a character, the phone vibrates and a computerized voice repeats the number or letter beneath. Credit: Google

The screens on many mobile phones can leave a user feeling distinctly vision impaired, especially if her attention is divided between tapping virtual buttons and walking or driving. Fortunately, engineers at Google are experimenting with interfaces for Android-powered mobile phones that require no visual attention at all. At Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference held in San Francisco last week, T.V. Raman, a research scientist at Google, demonstrated an adaptive, circular interface for phones that provides audio and tactile feedback.

One problem with most graphical user interfaces, says Raman, is that the buttons are in a fixed location, which is inconvenient if you can't feel them. To address this problem, his interface appears as soon as a finger touches the screen, so that it is centered on this initial touch.

"We are building a user interface that goes over and beyond the screen," says Raman. Often, eyes-free interfaces are employed for blind users, but Raman, who himself is blind, assures that these interfaces have much broader implications. "This is not just about the blind user," he says. "This is about how to use these devices if you're not in a position to look at the machine."

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A whole new you - Progress Toward Artificial Tissue?

PhysOrg.com - May 15, 2009

For modern implants and the growth of artificial tissue and organs, it is important to generate materials with characteristics that closely emulate nature.

However, the tissue in our bodies has a combination of traits that are very hard to recreate in synthetic materials: It is both soft and very tough.

A team of Australian and Korean researchers led by Geoffrey M. Spinks and Seon Jeong Kim has now developed a novel, highly porous, sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, it consists of a robust network of DNA strands and carbon nanotubes.

This results in materials that are as elastic as the softest natural tissues while simultaneously deriving great strength from the robust DNA links.

Soft tissues, such as tendons, muscles, arteries, and skin or other organs, obtain their mechanical support from the extracellular matrix, a network of protein-based nanofibers. Different protein morphologies in the extracellular matrix produce tissue with a wide range of stiffness. Implants and scaffolding for tissue growth require porous, soft materials -- which are usually very fragile. Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation. At the same time, the material must be very strong and resilient, or it may give out.

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