Undoing Babel

NetworkWorld - 10.27.09 (by Bob Brown)

A new iPhone 3GS app that turns the mobile device into an English-Spanish/Spanish-English speech translator is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Alex Waibel. The application is being sold via Jibbigo, a company launched by Waibel.

CMU says the app has a vocabulary of about 40,000 words and is ideal for world travelers and medical doctors. Speak a couple of sentences intothe phone and it spits back an audible translation.

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Now we can see neurons firing (super-slow-motion invented)

New Scientist - 10.28.09 (by Colin Barras)

Slow motion just got a whole lot slower, with a camera sensor able to film action at 1 million frames per second.

The black and white device is quick enough to capture impulses hurtling through firing nerve cells, and its resolution is good enough to film the microsecond-long pulse-like nerve signals that speed through networks of neurons at up to 180 kilometres per hour.

Capturing frames that last one-millionth of a second requires great sensitivity to light, as well as precise timing. The device uses an array of single-photon detectors, or SPADs, each hooked up to a tiny stopwatch. The stopwatch records when the SPAD is hit by an incoming photon, with an accuracy of around 100 picoseconds.

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Your brain doesn't mind nanowires!

ScienceDaily - 10.22.2009

The biological safety of nanotechnology, in other words, how the body reacts to nanoparticles, is a hot topic. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have managed for the first time to carry out successful experiments involving the injection of so-called 'nanowires.'

In the future it is expected that it will be possible to insert nanoscale electrodes to study learning and memory functions and to treat patients suffering from chronic pain, depression, and diseases such as Parkinson's. But it is not known what would happen if the nanoelectrodes would break away from their contact points.

Scientists at Lund University have investigated this 'worst case by injecting nanowires in rat brains. The nanowires resemble in size and shape the registration nodes of electrodes of the future. The results show that the brain 'clean-up cells' (microglia), take care of the wires. After twelve weeks only minor differences were observed between the brains of the test group and the control group. The findings are published in Nano Letters.

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A Google server in every pot?

Data Center Knowledge - 10+20+2009 (by Rich Miller)

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

Google’s Jeff Dean was one of the keynote speakers at an ACM workshop on large-scale computing systems, and discussed some of the technical details of the company’s mighty infrastructure, which is spread across dozens of data centers around the world.

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How to make a really smart rat

ScienceDaily - 10.20.2009

Smart rat Hobbie-J was named after a character in a Chinese cartoon book. (Credit: Medical College of Georgia).

Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.

Dubbed Hobbie-J after a smart rat that stars in a Chinese cartoon book, the transgenic rat was able to remember novel objects, such as a toy she played with, three times longer than the average Long Evans female rat, which is considered the smartest rat strain. Hobbie-J was much better at more complex tasks as well, such as remembering which path she last traveled to find a chocolate treat.

The report comes about a decade after the scientists first reported in the journal Nature that they had developed "Doogie," a smart mouse that over-expresses the NR2B gene in the hippocampus, a learning and memory center affected in diseases such as Alzheimer's. Memory improvements they found in the new genetically modified Long Evans rat were very similar to Doogie's. Subsequent testing has shown that Doogie maintained superior memory as he aged.

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Bacteria as beasts of burden

Technology Review - 10.19.2009

Attach self-propelling bacteria to a cog and they'll set it spinning for you, say Italian physicists.

Last year, we looked at an idea for a bacteria-powered motor dreamt up by Luca Angelani and pals from the University of Rome in Italy. Their idea was to place a cog with asymmetric teeth into a bath of moving bacteria and wait for them to start it spinning for you, like carthorses pushing a millstone.

We said at the time that the idea sounds a bit like extracting kinetic energy from the random motion of particles, which is impossible because the motion is symmetric in time.

But Angelani and co say there is in important difference between Brownian and bacterial motion: the former is in equilibrium but the latter is an open system with a net income of energy provided by nutrients. This breaks the time symmetry allowing energy to be extracted in the form of directed motion.

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Black hole is in the house (lab)

Technology Review - 10.14.2009

Cloaking technology used to create a region of space that allows microwaves in, but not out again.

If you haven't heard of metamaterials and what they can do, where have you been? Most of the media coverage so far has focused on invisibility cloaks but that's just the start of the fun physicists can have with this stuff. Only a few weeks ago we were discussing how to recreate the big bang inside a metamaterial. And earlier this year, a group of physicists suggested that it ought to be possible to create a black hole using metamaterials. That's an interesting idea but a demonstration would be more exciting.

Step forward Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui at the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who have used metamaterials to create the world's first artificial black hole in their lab. Yep, a real black hole.

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Heads-Up goes Holo

Technology Review - 10.19.2009 (by Duncan Graham-Rowe)

A new projection technology could see in-vehicle displays pop up in wing mirrors.

Wing vision: Holographic projection creates a head-up display in a vehicle's wing mirror.

In the last few years, head-up displays (HUDs), which project information onto the driver's view of the road, have started appearing in a few high-end cars. But a more compact kind of projection device, small enough to fit inside a rearview mirror, could see this kind of display more widely deployed.

A head-up display overlays information on a normal view of the road. For example, symbols can be used to show the car's current speed or the distance to the vehicle ahead without the driver having to look away from the road.

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Let's go to the spidercam - endoscopy is so outre

BBC News - 10.11.2009

Scientists in Italy think they may have come up with a new way to scan for cancer of the stomach or colon.

The 'spider pill', which is fitted with a camera, is swallowed by the patient and once within the colon or intestine the legs are opened. Duncan Kennedy reports.

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Shrinking nuclear batteries

PhysOrg.com - 10.7.2009

Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. While scientists are finding ways to make them smaller but even more powerful, problems can arise when these batteries are much larger and heavier than the devices themselves. University of Missouri researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

"To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. "The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries."

Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, currently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS). Although nuclear batteries can pose concerns, Kwon said they are safe.

"People hear the word 'nuclear' and think of something very dangerous," he said. "However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems."

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There must be, oh, 11 ways to avoid a bad Singularity

h+ - 10.7.2009 (by Ben Goertzel)

1. Human-enforced fascism
This one is fairly obvious. A sufficiently powerful dictatorship could prevent ongoing technological development, thus averting a negative Singularity. This is a case of a "very bad outcome" that prevents an "extremely bad outcome."

2. "Friendly" AGI fascism
One "problem" with human-enforced fascism is that it tends to get overthrown eventually. Perhaps sufficiently powerful technology in the hands of the enforcers can avert this, but it's not obvious, because often fascist states collapse due to conflicts among those at the top. A "Guardian" AGI system with intelligence, say, 3x human level -- and a stable goal system and architecture -- might be able to better enforce a stable social order than human beings.

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Are you awake or asleep?

New Scientist - 10/7/09 (by by Laura Spinney)

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report's authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair's brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down (Sleep Medicine, vol 10, p 247).

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

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Robot Masters - Will they be kind to us?

Reason.com - Ronald Bailey | October 6, 2009

Notes from the Singularity Summit in New York City.

NEW YORK—The singularity grows nigh. A happy band of technophiles, futurists, transhumanists, and, yes, singulatarians gathered in New York City this past weekend to talk about prospects for life before and after the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. The phenomenon gets its name from science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who analogized a future full of super-smart artificial intelligence(s) (AIs) to the way black holes work. Black holes are singularities—surrounded by event horizons past which outside observers simply cannot see. Self-improving super-smart AIs will so radically speed up the pace of technological change that it is simply impossible to describe what the future would look like afterwards.

But that doesn't stop people from trying to peek beyond the event horizon into the post-singularity future. Convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) for the first time on the East Coast, this fourth annual meeting attracted about 900 participants. The SIAI was created to address the urgent problem of how to create super-smart AIs that are friendly to human beings. The worry is that, unless we are very careful, AIs might evolve value systems that treat us as annoying organic matter that should be more usefully turned into computronium. As the Singularity Institute's Anna Salamon explained in her opening presentation at the summit, smarter intelligences might choose to get rid of us because our matter is not optimally arranged to achieve their goals.

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Soldier Surrogates - Sensory feedback for operators of military robots

Technology Review - 10/6/09 (by Kristina Grifantini)

A modified game controller will give military bomb-disposal experts remote touch.

iRobot, the company that makes military robots as well as the Roomba vacuuming bot, announced last Friday that it will receive funding for several endeavors from the Robotics Technology Consortium (RTC).

One project will see the company develop controllers that give remote robot operators sensory feedback. The US military currently uses iRobot's wheeled PackBot in Iraq and Afghanistan for tasks such as bomb disposal, detecting hazardous materials and carrying equipment.

The company says that adding force sensing to a PackBot arm could give operators the ability to "feel" the weight of an object or whether it is hard or soft, via the robot's arms.

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Augment your reality with Wikipedia overlays

New York Times - 10/2/09 (by Marshall Kirkpatrick)

What is that mountain you're driving past? Just point your iPhone at it and you can read its Wikipedia entry. Science fiction? Not anymore. Two new apps for viewing Wikipedia entries about physical locations you look at through your iPhone camera are now available in the iTunes store.

Wikitude and Cyclopedia are the names of the apps and both require the new iPhone 3GS. That's because the 3GS is the first iPhone with an internal compass - Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone's GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you're looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you're looking at that's written up in Wikipedia. Here's how the two different apps compare.

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Robot cars will school like fish

Crave - 10/2/09 (by Tim Hornyak)

(Credit: Nissan)

Nissan has developed a mini robotic car that can move autonomously in groups while avoiding crashing into obstacles (including other cars).

The Eporo, Nissan says, is the first robot car designed to move in a group by sharing its position and other information. The aim is to incorporate the technology into passenger cars to reduce accidents and traffic jams.

Although a group of Eporos may look like a gang of cybernetic Jawa, Nissan says the cars' design was inspired by the way fish move in schools.

An evolution of the bumblebee-inspired BR23C robot car unveiled last year, the Eporo uses Nissan's collision avoidance technology to travel in groups. Check out BR23C trying to get away from a Japanese lady in this video.

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Radical life-extension is real

Breitbart -10/1/09

The fountain of youth may exist after all, as a study showed that scientists have discovered means to extend the lifespan of mice and primates.

The key to eternal -- or at least prolonged -- youth lies in genetic manipulation that mimics the health benefits of reducing calorie intake, suggesting that aging and age-related diseases can be treated.

Scientists from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at University College London (UCL) extended the lifespan of mice by up to a fifth and reduced the number of age-related diseases affecting the animals after they genetically manipulated them to block production of the S6 Kinase 1 (S6K1) protein.

Scientists have shown since the 1930s that reducing the calorie intake by 30 percent for rats, mice and -- in a more recent finding -- primates can extend their lifespan by 40 percent and have health benefits.

By blocking S6K1, which is involved in the body's response to changes in food intake, similar benefits were obtained without reducing food intake, according to the study published in the US journal Science.

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