Building new lifeforms with CAD

New Scientist - 12.31.09

FIRST it was planes, trains and automobiles that benefited from computer-aided design technology. Now, as synthetic biologists attempt to build artificial life forms, a CAD system has been developed to allow them to redesign the stuff of life much faster and more easily.

Deepak Chandran and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle developed Tinkercell to allow biologists to meddle with the components of, say, a bacterium, and simulate the effect the change has (Journal of Biomedical Engineering, vol 3, p 19).

The package has a library of the components of life, from which users can pick different cells, membrane proteins, fluorescent proteins, enzymes and genes to create their organism. Tinkercell can then simulate the life form to see if it functions as expected.

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Finally! A book-like e-reader from Kurzweil

Wired - 12.29.09 (By Priya Ganapati and Charlie Sorrel)

Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor who is best known for his prediction that machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045, still has a few things to offer carbon-based life forms. Kurzweil has introduced new e-reader software, called Blio, that approaches e-reading from a completely different angle than the current E Ink-based devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader.

Blio is not a device. Rather, it is a “platform” that could run on any device, but would be most obviously at home on a tablet. The software is free and available currently for PCs, iPod Touch and iPhone.

“Everyone who has seen it acknowledges that it is head and shoulders above others,” says Kurzweil. “We have high-quality graphics and animated features. Other e-readers are very primitive.”

Blio is set to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

E-readers have become a hot consumer electronics product. About 5 million e-reader devices are expected to be sold by the end of the year. Meanwhile, electronic books for the Kindle outsold physical books on Amazon for the first time this Christmas, said Amazon, one of the largest online book retailers.

Kurzweil — who is better known for his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near — has worked extensively in areas such as optical character recognition, speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. His company Kurzweil Technologies has a joint venture with the National Federation of the Blind called knfb Reading Technology to create reading products for people with disabilities. knfb Reading is the company that has created Blio.

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Soon you won't have to move your mouth to speak

PhysOrg.com - 12.21.09 (by Lisa Zyga)

Model of the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The stroke-induced lesion (red X) disables speech output, but speech motor planning in the cerebral cortex remains intact. Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the signals. The neural decoder then translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer. Credit: Guenther, et al.

By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how to wirelessly transmit neural signals to a speech synthesizer. The "thought-to-speech" process takes about 50 milliseconds - the same amount of time for a non-paralyzed, neurologically intact person to speak their thoughts. The study marks the first successful demonstration of a permanently installed, wireless implant for real-time control of an external device.

The study is led by Frank Guenther of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University, as well as the Division of Health Science and Technology at Harvard University-Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The research team includes collaborators from Neural Signals, Inc., in Duluth, Georgia; StatsANC LLC in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Marietta, Georgia; the Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia; and Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. The team published their results in a recent issue of PLoS ONE.

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The death of handwriting is nigh

New York Times - 12.23.09

When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one,” writes Anne Trubek in Miller-McCune magazine. “Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.”

But Trubek, an Oberlin College professor, looks askance at such sentimentality, and differs with those would like to see handwriting reinvigorated in schools. Educators often err in linking good handwriting with smarts, she says — a bias that carries over to the scoring of the new written portion of the SAT.

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Gesture Recognition - You'll soon be flipping off your TV

PhysOrg.com - 12.23.09 (by Chris Lefkow)

A TriplePoint illustration shows a man working an interactive TV screen. Touchscreens are so yesterday. Remote controls? So last century.The future is controlling your television with a simple wave of your hand. Softkinetic, a Brussels-based software company, has teamed up with another Belgian firm, Optrima, and US computer chip giant Texas Instruments to make this vision of the future a reality

Touchscreens are so yesterday. Remote controls? So last century. The future is controlling your devices with a simple wave of the hand.

A wiggle of the fingers will change television channels or turn the volume up or down. In videogames, your movements will control your onscreen digital avatar.

It's called 3D gesture recognition and while it may not be in stores this Christmas a number of technology companies are promising that it will be by next year.

Softkinetic, a Brussels-based software company, is one of the leaders in the gesture-control field and has teamed up with US semiconductor giant Texas Instruments and others to make this touchless vision of the future a reality.

Besides TI, Softkinetic has forged partnerships with France's Orange Vallee for interactive TV, another Belgian firm, Optrima, a maker of 3D cameras and sensors, and with Connecting Technology, a French home automation company.

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Move over for computer-controlled cars

Technology Review - 12.22.09

As the percentage of computer-controlled cars on the road increases, traffic should flow smoothly for longer, says a new study.

Adaptive cruise control systems work by monitoring the road ahead using a radar or laser-based device and then use both the accelerator and brake to maintain a certain distance from the vehicle ahead. (Other variations can bring the car to a halt in the event of a potential accident).

These devices have been available on upmarket cars for ten years or more and are now becoming increasingly common. If you drive regularly on freeways, the chances are you regularly come across other vehicles being driven by these devices, especially in Europe and Japan (here, the density of traffic means that ordinary cruise control has never caught on in the way it has in the U.S.).

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Nano-surgery in your future.

PhysOrg.com - 12.21.2009

Engineering professor's nanorobot could be performing non-invasive surgical procedures on patients with tumors within the next decade.

Nader Jalili, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, is working to create a controlled nanorobot that will be capable of performing non-invasive cancer surgery with a degree of precision not possible through existing surgical procedures.

At about the size of a ring box, nanorobots could revolutionize surgical practice within the next five to 10 years by making procedures of all sorts more precise and safer, said Jalili.

“Precision,” he said, “is one of the most important aspects of a surgical procedure.”

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

To my loyal readers and the fantastic writers whose stories are featured on Singularity and Futurism every day: May you enjoy the most wonderful holiday season ever, and may you enter the New Year and upcoming decade with a spirit of optimism and hope.

We have enjoyed sharing some truly amazing technology created by truly amazing minds, and we cannot wait to experience with you what tomorrow will bring.

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Artificial life be created in 2010?

New Scientist - 12.21.09 (by Peter Aldhous)

Building life from scrap in the lab (Image: Thomas Deerinck/NCMIR/SPL).

Waiting for Synthia - that has been the script for enthusiasts of synthetic life for the past two years, ever since genomics pioneer Craig Venter promised to unveil a living bacterial cell carrying a genome made from scratch in the lab. 2010 is the year for him to deliver.

Synthia is the popular name for a species containing a lab-built set of genetic instructions that are close to the minimum necessary to support bacterial life - based on the DNA of a microbe called Mycoplasma genitalium.

When Venter announced the creation of a synthetic M. genitalium genome in January 2008, Synthia's birth was thought to be imminent. Just months before, his team had demonstrated the technology for smuggling the DNA into a living bacterial cell, by performing a "genome transplant" between two different Mycoplasma species.

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Five easy ways to make humans obsolete

Cracked.com - 5.4.09 (by Michael Swaim)

From the perspective of the planet Earth, humans have existed for about three seconds. In those three seconds, we’ve made such astounding technological leaps that, at present, we actually have articles written in light, by electricity and broadcast instantaneously all over the globe, complaining about the fact that we don’t have flying skateboards yet.

Compared to the technological progress of, say, the dinosaurs during their tens of millions of years on Earth, we’re the equivalent of a guy who shows up at a party already hammered, shoots a liter of heroin and asks if they have any medical-grade adrenaline kicking around in the back. Clearly, we’re a little impatient when it comes to getting our next hit of sweet, sweet progress.

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Disaster-Proof Internet and Phone Service

Live Science - 12.18.2009 (by Jeremy Hsu)

Losing an Internet connection or phone service can prove incredibly annoying for most people, but in an emergency, it can spell disaster.

During the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, frantic calls jammed cell phone networks, and firefighters, police and ambulances could not even talk to one another by radio. Since then, European researchers have tried to develop a technology that allows emergency responders to still use phone or Internet in the most chaotic situations.

Their solution: a souped-up router that allows a specially equipped command vehicle to find the best Internet access through any available wireless networks, or even satellite connections.

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Anissimov on the Successful Singularity

Singularity 101 - 12.14.09 (by Michael Anissimov)

Getting artificial intelligence right could lead to a new world of abundance.

Part five in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

“...the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" (1963)

In a post three weeks ago, Roko Mijic explained why singularity researchers are so interested in the prospect of smarter-than-human intelligence. The intelligence of Homo sapiens which we all share underlies all the achievements of each individual human and the collective human family. Human intelligence underlies our artistic creations, philosophical treatises, humanitarian efforts, scientific reasoning, and much more. Chimps cannot participate in any of these areas of thought and action, because their intelligence is not sufficient.

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Be your own power company

PhysOrg.com - 12.16.09

A rooftop solar panel converts sunlight to electricity. In a new study, an expert describes progress toward an efficient and inexpensive method for storing and distributing solar energy in the home. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

New scientific discoveries are moving society toward the era of "personalized solar energy," in which the focus of electricity production shifts from huge central generating stations to individuals in their own homes and communities. That's the topic of a report by an international expert on solar energy published in the ACS' Inorganic Chemistry. It describes a long-awaited, inexpensive method for solar energy storage that could help power homes and plug-in cars in the future while helping keep the environment clean.

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Help! The scientists are drowning in data!

NYT - 12.14.09 (by John Markoff)

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.” The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.

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Enhanced Humanity - Good or bad?

Program on Ethics of the New Biosciences - 10.1.09

Human Enhancement: Bioliberation or Biothreat? - Professor Julian Savulescu

Visit to watch the video.

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Kurzweil counts down to 2020 (no, not 2012, 2020)

NYDailyNews.com - 12.13.09 (by Ray Kurzweil)

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

Source

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Excellent AI Quotes - “The AI does not hate you,.." Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

—Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk

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MIT's Mind Machine Project - A rethinking of artificial intelligence

MIT news - 12.7.09 (by David L. Chandler)

Broad-based MIT project aims to reinvent AI for a new era. By going back and fixing mistakes, researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind.

The field of artificial-intelligence research (AI), founded more than 50 years ago, seems to many researchers to have spent much of that time wandering in the wilderness, swapping hugely ambitious goals for a relatively modest set of actual accomplishments. Now, some of the pioneers of the field, joined by later generations of thinkers, are gearing up for a massive “do-over” of the whole idea.

This time, they are determined to get it right — and, with the advantages of hindsight, experience, the rapid growth of new technologies and insights from the new field of computational neuroscience, they think they have a good shot at it.

Source

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Dark matter found? Glory be!

NewScientist - 12.8.09 (by Valerie Jamieson)

The physics blogs are abuzz with rumours that a particle of dark matter has finally been found.

If it is true, it is huge news. Dark matter is thought to make up 90 per cent of the universe's mass and what evidence there is for it remains highly controversial. That's why any news of a sighting is seized upon.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment is one of several designed to look for the tell-tale signature of dark matter particles passing through. No one is sure what a dark matter particle will look like, though theory gives some pointers.

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New model says: Past crystallizes out of the future to form the present

Technology Review - 12.08.09

What do you get when the past crystallizes out of the future? According to a new model of the universe that combines relativity and quantum mechanics, the answer is: the present.

What's the difference between the past and the future? Not a great deal, if you take a purely relativistic view of the universe, say George Ellis from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Tony Rothman from Princeton University in New Jersey.

The standard spacetime diagrams used in relativity accord no special status to the past, the present or the future. That's because they assume that everything evolves from time-reversible local physics.

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Typing by thought - Mind-machine interface breakthrough

Live Science - 12.6.09 (by Charles Q. Choi)

Electrodes placed directly on the surface of peoples' brains allow them to type just by thinking of letters. Image credit: stockxpert.

By focusing on images of letters, people with electrodes in their brains can type with just their minds, scientists now reveal.

These findings make up one more step on the road to mind-machine interfaces that may one day help people communicate with just their thoughts. Researchers have recently employed brain scans to see numbers and maybe even pull videos from inside people's heads.

The neuroscientists were monitoring two patients with epilepsy for seizure activity with electrodes placed directly on the surface of their brains to record electrical activity generated by the firing of nerve cells. This kind of procedure requires a craniotomy, a surgical incision into the skull.

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Brain-equivalent processing power by 2019, says IBM

cnet - 12.2.2009 (by Daniel Terdiman)

According to IBM, 'BlueMatter, a new algorithm created by IBM researchers in collaboration with Stanford University, exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.' (Credit: IBM)

Computers capable of mimicking the human brain's power and efficiency could be just 10 years off, according to a leading researcher at IBM.

According to the researcher, Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, scientists from his company and some of the world's most prestigious universities have already managed to simulate the computing complexity of the feline cortex, a feat that could augur a day not too far off when it will be possible to ramp up to what the human brain can accomplish.

Last year, IBM and five universities were awarded a DARPA contract to work on a cognitive computing project aimed at eventually achieving that goal. Just a year later, Modha said, his team, working in conjunction with the universities' scientists, have achieved two major milestones.

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Soylent Green? Growing your meat

Times Online - 11.29.2009 (by Lois Rogers)

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

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