FutureGrid - I like the sound of that!

PhysOrg.com - 9/29/09

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego is part of a team chosen by the National Science Foundation to build and run an experimental high-performance grid test-bed, allowing researchers to collaboratively develop and test new approaches to parallel, grid and cloud computing.

Called "FutureGrid," the four-year project, led by Indiana University (IU), was awarded a $10.1 million grant from the NSF to link nine computational resources at six partner sites across the country as well as allowing transatlantic collaboration via a partnership with Grid'5000, a large scale computer infrastructure primarily throughout France. The FutureGrid test-bed is expected to be installed and operational by next spring.

Partners with IU in the FutureGrid project include SDSC, Purdue University, University of Chicago/Argonne National Labs, University of Florida, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, University of Tennessee Knoxville, University of Texas at Austin/Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Virginia, and the Center for Information Services and GWT-TUD from Technische Universtität in Dresden, Germany.

These project partners will provide additional funding for the FutureGrid project, bringing the program total to $15 million.

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Locust simulator teaches robots to fly

New Scientist - 9/28/09 (by Paul Marks)

Smoke signals helps robots fly better (Image: Simon Walker, Animal Flight Group, Oxford University)

A LOCUST flight simulator could be the key to perfecting the ultimate surveillance machine: an artificial flying insect. The simulator can model the way wings of varying shapes and surface features beat, as well as how they change their shape during flight.

The device was created using extremely high-speed flash photography to track the way smoke particles flow over a locust's wings in a wind tunnel - a technique called particle flow velocimetry. This allowed researchers at the University of Oxford to build a computer model of the insect's wing motion. They then built software that mimicked not only this motion, but also how wing surface features, such as structural veins and corrugations, and the wings' deformation as they flap, change aerodynamic performance.

The work has shown that wings' surface structures are crucial to efficient lift generation, says lead researcher Adrian Thomas (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1175928).

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Get power from your clothes

Science Daily - 9/24/09

Imagine a gift wrapped in paper you really do treasure and want to carefully fold and save. That's because the wrapping paper lights up with words like "Happy Birthday" or "Happy Holidays," thanks to a built in battery — an amazing battery made out of paper. That's one potential application of a new battery made of cellulose, the stuff of paper, being described in the October 14 issue of ACS' Nano Letters, a monthly journal.

Albert Mihranyan and colleagues note in the report that scientists are trying to develop light, ecofriendly, inexpensive batteries consisting entirely of nonmetal parts. The most promising materials include so-called conductive polymers or "plastic electronics." One conductive polymer, polypyrrole (PPy), shows promise, but was often regarded as too inefficient for commercial batteries. The scientists realized, however, that by coating PPy on a large surface area substrate and carefully tailoring the thickness of the PPy coating, both the charging capacity and the charging (discharging) rates can be drastically improved.

The secret behind the performance of this battery is the presence of the homogeneous, uninterrupted, nano-thin coating — about 1/50,000th the thickness of a human hair — of PPy on individual cellulose fibers which in turn can be molded into paper sheets of exceptionally high internal porosity. It was special cellulose, extracted from a certain species of green algae, with 100 times the surface area of cellulose found in paper. That surface area was key to allowing the new device to hold and discharge electricity very efficiently.

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Augmented reality in a contact lens - the future approaches

IEEE Spectrum - 9/09 (by Babak A. Parviz)

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight.

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

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Video surveillance system thinks like human - Let's just give them the keys!

Help Net Security - 9/21/09

BRS Labs announced a video-surveillance technology called Behavioral Analytics, which leverages cognitive reasoning, and processes visual data on a level similar to the human brain.

It is impossible for humans to monitor the tens of millions of cameras deployed throughout the world, a fact long recognized by the international security community. Security video is either used for forensic analysis after an incident has occurred, or it employs a limited-capability technology known as Video Analytics – a video-motion and object-classification-based software technology that attempts to watch video streams and then sends an alarm on specific pre-programmed events. The problem is that this legacy solution generates a great number of false alarms that effectively renders it useless in the real world.

BRS Labs has created a technology it calls Behavioral Analytics. It uses cognitive reasoning, much like the human brain, to process visual data and to identify criminal and terroristic activities. Built on a framework of cognitive learning engines and computer vision, AISight, provides an automated and scalable surveillance solution that analyzes behavioral patterns, activities and scene content without the need for human training, setup, or programming.

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Augmented Reality's Killer App

Technology Review - 9/23/09 (by Kristina Grifantini)

Researchers plan to offer more than just directions with innovations in software and hardware.

Augmented games: In this game, developed by researchers at Columbia University, a player holds a flat board and sees three-dimensional objects projected onto it through a head-worn display. The player tilts the game board to control a virtual ball. Credit: Ohan Oda and Steve Feiner, Columbia University

Augmented reality (AR), which involves superimposing virtual objects and information on top of the real world, may be coming to a phone near you. As mobile phones become packed with more sensors, better video capabilities, and faster processing power, many experts predict that AR will become increasingly common. But in a panel discussion today at EmTech@MIT in Cambridge, MA, panelists will admit that several obstacles still remain and that the "killer app" for augmented reality has yet to emerge.

Several AR apps have already been released for cell phones with positioning sensors. For example, PresseLite's Metro Paris app and Acrossair's Nearest Tube both provide iPhone users with augmented directions to nearby subway stops. AR apps are also available for phones powered by Google's Android platform. Layar, developed by SPRXmobile, based in the Netherlands, overlays information from Twitter, Flickr, and Wikipedia on real-world locations, while Wikitude, from Austria-based Mobilizy, displays tourist information collected from Wikipedia.

Some researchers believe that AR represents a fundamentally new way to organize and interact with information. "In the future, we see augmented reality as a component of any kind of digital media interaction," says Mobilizy's co-CEO, Alexander Igelsboeck, who will speak at the EmTech@MIT session.

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Surely this is enough processing power to make a brain

Computer World - 9/18/09 (by Tim Lohman)

Two technologies currently under research by IBM may hold the key to processing and storing the exabyte (1018) of data expected to flow per day from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project.

The company, which is part of a research consortium that includes Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Curtin University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, is currently working down a technology roadmap that leads to the development of exaflop machine — the processing equivalent of about a billion PCs. It is also developing a new form of solid state storage, 'Racetrack Memory', which may hold the key to enabling the storage of the SKA’s vast amount of astronomical data.

Much of the progress toward solving the massive engineering problems posed by the SKA is still at the whiteboard and analysis stage, but real progress was being made, said the director of IBM's Australia Development Laboratory for ANZ, Glenn Wightwick.

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Quantum-sized motor developed - but what kind of mileage will it get?

Technology Review - 9/18/09

Place a couple of cold atoms in an alternating magnetic field and you've got a quantum version of an electric motor.

How small can you make an electric motor? Today, Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and a couple of pals describe how to do it with just two atoms. Yep, an electric motor made of just two ultracold atoms.

Their motor consists of one neutral atom and one charged atom trapped in a ring-shaped optical lattice. The atoms jump from one site in the lattice to the next as they travel round the ring. Placing this ring in an alternating magnetic field creates the conditions necessary to keep the charged atom moving round the the ring.

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Human Enhancement is our future - A Q & A with Nick Bostrom

Time - 9/9/09 (by Eben Harrell)

Modern science already offers ways to enhance your mood, sex drive, athletic performance, concentration levels and overall health. But is such medically driven self-improvement always a good idea? Nick Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, believes it's time to open the ethical debate surrounding human enhancement — a term that is growing to include genetic, pharmaceutical and technological ways to improve our physical and mental abilities and even dramatically extend human life. He recently edited a collection of essays on the subject, Human Enhancement, and in an e-mail exchange explained why our future holds great promise — and grave danger.

You believe it's time to have this ethics conversation. Why?

For the most part, the ethical discussion is running ahead of reality, which is as should be. However, we already have alertness enhancers (caffeine, modafinil), athletic enhancers (steroids, EPO), sexual-performance enhancers (Viagra), immune enhancers (vaccinations) and concentration enhancers (Ritalin). One can expect improved versions of these to become available in the short term. In addition, memory enhancers are currently in clinical trials. Perhaps there will be compounds that facilitate trust — such as Oxytocin — and encourage pair bonding, or improved diet pills, or treatments that slow the rate of aging and increase sustainable mental energy. Each intervention has to be judged on its merits, the benefits weighed against the costs and risks.

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Quantum superposition in a living creature - the ultimate in multi-tasking

New Scientist - 9/15/19 (by Marcus Chown)

Water bears, similar to the one pictured here, can survive in a vacuum and might be made to behave like quantum objects (Courtesy: Ralph O Schill)

Quantum weirdness could soon invade the living world, if a scheme to give a flu virus a strange double life comes off.

In quantum theory, a single object can be doing two different things at once. This so-called "superposition" is a delicate state, destroyed by any contact with the outside world. The largest objects that have been superposed so far are molecules. It is hard to put a much larger object such as a cat or human into a superposition because air molecules and photons are always bouncing off it.

But it might be possible with a small life form, according to Oriol Romero-Isart of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues. They hope to prove the concept with the flu virus, which exhibits some properties of life, because it can survive in a vacuum – solving the problem of pesky air molecules.

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Atoms up close and personal

Inside Science - 9/14/09 (by Mike Lucibella & Lauren Schenkman)

The first detailed images of atoms show various arrangements of the clouds of electrons surrounding a carbon atom. A and B depict two different arrangements of the electron clouds. Credit: Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology.

Though scientists have been studying them for years, atoms are only now ready for their first close-up portrait.

For the first time, physicists have photographed the structure of an atom down to its electrons.

The pictures, soon to be published in the journal Physical Review B, show the detailed images of a single carbon atom's electron cloud, taken by Ukrainian researchers at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine.

This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom's internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to map out a material's atomic structure in a mathematical sense, using imaging techniques.

Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.

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Ready for your wall-size HD screen?

Gizmodo - 9/8/09 (by Danny Allen)



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Wanna be immortal?

SDNN - 09/08/09 - Arthur Salm

“There is hope, but not for us.” - Kafka

There’s bad timing, and then there’s this: Instead of a day late and a dollar short, most of us are a day early and … well, money doesn’t even play into it, because we’re gonna die.

Nothing revelatory there, of course. People have been dealing with awareness of their own mortality ever since the first stone-age hunter and/or gatherer — or maybe even his pre-homo sapiens ancestor — figured out what was in store, and began working frantically at constructing a set of beliefs that would allow him not only to continue on after death, but to do so with perks denied him in this mortal, saber-tooth-tiger- and annoying-brother-in-law-infested coil.

But a lot of us alive today are likely to really have our noses rubbed in that vexing mortality thing, because it’s looking more and more as if nanotech-boosted medicinal biology is going to make “life extension” an everyday term. Nanobots will be able to repair the slightest defect arising from defective genes, a detrimental environment, and even, yes, aging. In short, people are going to live forever.

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Providing power to omnipresent sensors by tapping into trees

Editor's Note: One day in the near future everything will be connected to everything else through omnipresent sensor arrays. This has nothing to do with a mystical eastern religion, but rather the proliferation of electronic sensors. And now we know how to power them.

PhysOrg.com - September 8, 2009

Electrical engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis and undergraduate student Carlton Himes (right to left) demonstrate an electrical circuit that runs entirely off tree power. Credit: University of Washington

You've heard about flower power. What about tree power? It turns out that it's there, in small but measurable quantities. There's enough power in trees for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit, according to results to be published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.

"As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree," said co-author Babak Parviz, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering.

A study last year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. Those researchers have since started a company developing forest sensors that exploit this new power source.

The UW team sought to further academic research in the field of tree power by building circuits to run off that energy. They successfully ran a circuit solely off tree power for the first time.

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Schrodinger's cat in real life?

Technology Review - September 10, 2009

How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things

First photons, atoms and molecules. Now physicists want to create a quantum superposition of a virus, which will allow them to perform Schrodinger's Cat experiment for real.

One of the great challenges for quantum physicists is to find quantum behaviour in macroscopic objects. There are obvious examples of quantum behaviour on a large scale, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, but physicists want more.

Having created quantum superpositions of photons, electrons, atoms and even molecules, one of the current obsessions is to create a quantum superposition of a living thing, such as a virus. The question is how to do this and whether it makes any sense to say these things are living at all.

This is an experiment that will be hard. But today Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik in Germany and a few buddies suggest that it is achievable with current technology and outline the challenges that will have to be tackled to pull it off.

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Singularity to end all war?

USAF - August 10, 2009, by by Chuck Paone

The convergence of "exponentially advancing technologies" will form a "super-intelligence" so formidable that it could avert war, according to one of the world's leading futurists.

Dr. James Canton, CEO and chairman of the Institute for Global Futures, a San Francisco-based think tank, is author of the book "The Extreme Future" and an adviser to leading companies, the military and other government agencies.

He is consistently listed among the world's leading speakers and has presented to diverse audiences around the globe.

He will address the Air Force Command and Control Intelligence, Survelliance and Reconnaissance Symposium, which will be held Sept. 28 through 30 at the MGM Grand Hotel at Foxwoods in Ledyard, Conn., joining Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz and a bevy of other government and industry speakers.

He offered a sneak preview of his symposium presentation and answered various questions about the future of technology and warfare in early August.

"The superiority of convergent technologies will prevent war," Doctor Canton said, claiming their power would present an overwhelming deterrent to potential adversaries. While saying that the U.S. will build these super systems faster and better than other nations, he acknowledged that a new arms race is already under way.

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Big changes coming in college education

Editor's Note: Technology is transforming human culture and society in ways that most of us haven't even considered and do not expect. The way people get a college education is going to experience a transformation that will fit the increasing ease with which information is available. We may end up seeing more students getting an online education in the future.

Washington Monthly - September / October 2009, by by Kevin Carey

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

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A new theory for life's beginnings

PhysOrg.com - September 4, 2009, by Anuradha K. Herath

The new hypothesis suggests that life on Earth originated at photosynthetically-active porous structures made of zinc sulfide similar to deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Credit: The Institute for Exploration, the University of Rhode Island (URI) Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO), and the URI Institute for Archaeological Oceanography.

The Miller-Urey experiment, conducted by chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1953, is the classic experiment on the origin of life. It established that the early Earth atmosphere, as they pictured it, was capable of producing amino acids, the building blocks of life, from inorganic substances.

Now, more than 55 years later, two scientists are proposing a hypothesis that could add a new dimension to the debate on how life on Earth developed.

Armen Mulkidjanian of the University of Osnabrueck, Germany and Michael Galperin of the U.S. National Institutes of Health present their hypothesis and evidence in two papers published and open for review in the web site Biology Direct.

The scientists suggest that life on Earth originated at photosynthetically-active porous structures, similar to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, made of zinc sulfide (more commonly known as phosphor). They argue that under the high pressure of a carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere, zinc sulfide structures could form on the surface of the first continents, where they had access to sunlight. Unlike many existing theories that suggest UV radiation was a hindrance to the development of life, Mulkidjanian and Galperin think it actually helped.

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Robot swarms are our future

PhysOrg.com - August 28, 2009, by Lisa Zyga

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, explain that their building approach marks a new paradigm of robot development in microrobotics. The technique involves integrating an entire robot - with communication, locomotion, energy storage, and electronics - in different modules on a single circuit board. In the past, the single-chip robot concept has presented significant limitations in design and manufacturing. However, instead of using solder to mount electrical components on a printed circuit board as in the conventional method, the researchers use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit board is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot.

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Research breakthrough - Mathematically proving safety- and security-critical software

NICTA - August 12, 2009

NICTA today announced the completion of the world’s first formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating system kernel, promising safety-critical software of unprecedented levels of reliability.

There is now a way to mathematically prove that the software governing critical safety and security systems in aircraft and motor vehicles is free of a large class of errors – long before the plane takes off or the car’s engine starts.

The Secure Embedded L4 (seL4) microkernel, designed for real-world use, has potential applications in defence and other safety and security industries where the flawless operation of complex embedded systems is of critical importance.

“It is hard to comment on this achievement without resorting to clichés,” says Professor of Computational Logic at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, Lawrence C Paulson. “Proving the correctness of 7,500 lines of C code in an operating system's kernel is a unique achievement, which should eventually lead to software that meets currently unimaginable standards of reliability.”

“Formal proofs for specific properties have been conducted for smaller kernels, but what we have done is a general, functional correctness proof which has never before been achieved for real-world, high-performance software of this complexity or size,” explains NICTA Principal Researcher Dr Gerwin Klein, who leads NICTA’s formal verification research team.

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Hospitals pushing toward Singularity?

New Scientist - August 31, 2009, by Tom Simonite

If you want to know how people will interact with machines in the future, head for a hospital.

That's the impression I got from a new report about the future of human-computer interaction from IT analysts Gartner, based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Gartner's now-classic chart, shown right, shows the rollercoaster of expectations ridden by new technologies: rocketing from obscurity to a peak of overblown hype, then falling into a "trough of disillusionment" before finally becoming mainstream as a tech's true worth is found.

Speech recognition, currently climbing the slope of enlightenment towards the plateau of productivity, is a good example of how healthcare helps new technology.

Some homeworkers are now hooked, and the technology is appearing in cellphones and voicemail systems. But its maturity owes as much to the rehabilitation industry as the software industry.

Today's true power users of voice recognition are people who are physically unable to use keyboard or mouse. For them, it is as much a medical device as an office aide. They have not only supported public and private research over the years, but also provided a market for the technology when it was far from perfect.

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