Why you've already blown your 2010 resolutions

NPR - 1.26.10 (by Robert Krulwich)

This time, you say to yourself, this time I will do 50 chin-ups every day or skip dessert or call my mother every Friday. It's time to do those things that I know, I really, really know I should do.

And then you don't.

According to British psychologist Richard Wiseman, 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure. Those are his findings from a 2007 University of Hertfordshire study of more than 3,000 people.

How come so many attempts at willpower lose both their will and their power?

In our Radiolab excerpt on Morning Edition, with my co-host, Jad Abumrad, we propose an answer ...

Jonah Lehrer, one of our regular reporters (he writes all the time about the brain), told Jad and me about an experiment involving the prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead. It's the brain area largely responsible for willpower. This hunk of brain tissue, he says, has greatly expanded over the last few hundred-thousand years, but "it probably hasn't expanded enough." The reason our willpower is so often weak, he suggests, is because this bit of brain lacks a certain (how shall we put this?) ... muscularity.

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Teaching computers to understand how we're wired

MITnews - 1.28.10 (by Anne Trafton)

(Graphic: Christine Daniloff).

C. elegans, a tiny worm about a millimeter long, doesn’t have much of a brain, but it has a nervous system — one that comprises 302 nerve cells, or neurons, to be exact. In the 1970s, a team of researchers at Cambridge University decided to create a complete “wiring diagram” of how each of those neurons are connected to one another. Such wiring diagrams have recently been christened “connectomes,” drawing on their similarity to the genome, the total DNA sequence of an organism. The C. elegans connectome, reported in 1986, took more than a dozen years of tedious labor to find.

Now a handful of researchers scattered across the globe are tackling a much more ambitious project: to find connectomes of brains more like our own. The scientists, including several at MIT, are working on technologies needed to accelerate the slow and laborious process that the C. elegans researchers originally applied to worms. With these technologies, they intend to map the connectomes of our animal cousins, and eventually perhaps even those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain.

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Robots develop predator-prey techniques - Does this not frighten anyone?

PopSci - 1.28.10 (by Stuart Fox)



When we last checked in with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, their evolving robots had learned how deceive other robots about the location of a resource. Since then, their robots have continued to evolve, learning how to navigate a maze, beginning to cooperate and share, and even developing complex predator-prey interactions.

As before, the Swiss scientists placed within the robot's operating system both basic instructions, and some random variations that changed every generation in virtual mutations. After each trial, the code for the more successful robots got passed on to the next generation, while the code for the less successful robots got bred out.

This time, however, the researchers designed a whole new menagerie of robots, including a set of hunter robots that pursue prey-bots, maze-running robots, and robots designed to deposit a token in a given area.

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Resting your mind strengthens your memories

PhysOrg.com - 1.27.10

Our memories are strengthened during periods of rest while we are awake, researchers at New York University have found. The findings, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Neuron, expand our understanding of how memories are boosted—previous studies had shown this process occurs during sleep, but not during times of awake rest.

"Taking a coffee break after class can actually help you retain that information you just learned," explained Lila Davachi, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, in whose laboratory the study was conducted. "Your brain wants you to tune out other tasks so you can tune in to what you just learned."

The study, whose lead author was Arielle Tambini, a doctoral candidate in NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science, focused on memory consolidation—the period when a memory is stabilized after it is initially created, or encoded. To determine if memory consolidation occurred during periods of awake rest, the researchers imaged the hippocampus, a brain structure known to play a significant role in memory, and cortical regions during periods of awake rest. Previous studies have demonstrated regions of the brain more active during periods of rest, but their function at these times had been unclear.

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World's most powerful laser - Dr. Evil would be green with envy

PhysOrg.com - 1.25.10 (by Phillip F. Schewe, ISNS)

Producing a laser with a power of a terawatt -- equal to one trillion watts -- used to be impressive, but now the forefront of optical research power is measured in 1 quadrillion-watt units known as petawatts. But even that much power isn’t good enough for physics professor Todd Ditmire at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ditmire plans to build an exawatt laser with a power equivalent to 1000 petawatts. But such a super-laser is still years away from actual development. In the meantime, Ditmire already has the most powerful laser in the world.

To get a sense of how much power an exawatt contains, compare it to a typical filament light bulb consuming about 100 W of electricity. The capacity of the entire U.S. electrical grid is about 10 billion times more than this, or about 1 terawatt. So the entire grid could supply enough energy to continuously power 10 billion 100 W light bulbs. A petawatt is 1,000 times more power than that, and an exawatt is 1,000 times greater than a petawatt.

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Do we now have the power to control genetic switches?

PhysOrg.com - 1.25.10

Researchers in Manchester have successfully carried out the first rewire of genetic switches, creating what could be a vital tool for the development of new drugs and even future gene therapies.

A team of scientists from the School of Chemistry and the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) at The University of Manchester have found a way of hijacking so-called 'riboswitches' and directing gene activity.

Working within cells of bacteria, chemical biologist Professor Jason Micklefield and his team have rewired these genetic switches so they are no longer activated by small naturally occurring molecules found in cells - but through the addition of a synthetic molecule.

The work builds on the recent discovery that these naturally occurring molecules can turn genes on and off by triggering riboswitches found within a large molecule called 'messenger RNA'.

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When particles collide, can black holes be far behind?

ScienceNow - 1.22.10 (by Adrian Cho)

You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up Earth--physicist say that's impossible--and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole.

"I would have been surprised if it had come out the other way," says Joseph Lykken, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "But it is important to have the people who know how black holes form look at this in detail."

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Driverless cars - Meet the Boss (Video)

Click here to watch the video

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Kurzweil defends his predictive accuracy

Accelerating Future - 1.18.10 (Response by Ray Kurzweil to Michael Anissimov)

Today, I received an email from Ray Kurzweil responding to my January 5th post titled “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions”, where I said that I found a list of seven of his “1999 predictions for 2009″ that I thought were false. Below is the letter in its entirety. I have read the letter and am thinking about it. I will conduct further research on all the claims and produce a response with my new thoughts shortly.

—–

January 17, 2010

Dear Michael,

I want to respond to your Blog post “Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009.”

This starts out “Michael Anissimov notes that Ray Kurzweil had several predictions from 1999 for 2009 and those predictions are in general wrong.”

You also write “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions. In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.”

Your review is biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways.

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Earth's end may be sooner than expected

Technology Review - 1.14.10

Dark Matter May Explain the Puzzling Change in Earth-Sun Distance

If the sun sweeps up dark matter as it moves through the galaxy, how would that affect the orbit of the planets?

In the last five years or so, astronomers have noticed a puzzling change in the astronomical unit, the distance of the Earth's from the sun. Various measurements indicate that this distance (or at least the length of the Earth's semimajor axis) is increasing at the rate of 15 cm per year (plus or minus 4 cm).

Why that should be, nobody knows. But today, Lorenzo Iorio at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Pisa, Italy, says dark matter could be to blame.

Astronomers have long assumed that dark matter must fill the universe. In fact, the motion of the Milky Way implies that there ought to be some 10^-25 grams of the stuff in every cubic centimeter of the galaxy. And the density ought to be even higher near massive bodies such as stars, whose gravity would attract a halo of dark matter. Around the sun, the density of dark matter should be about 10^-19 g/cm^3.

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They're climbing the walls - (Video of wall-climbing robots)

PhysOrg.com - 1.19.10

A robotics scientist from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheeba, Israel, has developed four different kinds of robots that climb up walls.

This video presents four types of wall climbing robots that were developed in Dr. Amir Shapiros lab at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
The latest projects of Amir Shapiro, head of the robotics laboratory in the Department of Engineering, are wall-climbers, two of which are inspired by animals that climb. One robot, inspired by snails and their trails of mucus, secretes a tiny trail of hot melted glue that allows it to stick to walls as it climbs, while another, inspired by cats and rodents, has four legs with claws made of fish hooks to help it climb rough surfaces.

Video

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Robot Maid - She may get the job done but she ain't pretty

PhysOrg.com - 1.18.10

Mahru-Z (R), a robot developed by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology picks up a sandwich in Seoul. South Korean scientists have developed a walking robot maid which can clean a home, dump clothes in a washing machine and even heat food in a microwave. The institute took two years to develop Mahru-Z.

South Korean scientists have developed a walking robot maid which can clean a home, dump clothes in a washing machine and even heat food in a microwave.

Mahru-Z has a human-like body including a rotating head, arms, legs and six fingers plus three-dimensional vision to recognise chores that need to be tackled, media reports said Monday.

"The most distinctive strength of Mahru-Z is its visual ability to observe objects, recognise the tasks needed to be completed, and execute them," You Bum-Jae, head of the cognitive robot centre at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, told the Korea Times.

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Israeli Robot Wars - The future battlefield

WSJ - 1.13.10 (by Charles Levinson)

Israel pioneered the use of aerial drones like the Heron, under construction, above, at Israeli Aerospace Industries. (David Furst/AFP for The Wall Street Journal).

TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world's leading innovators of military robotics.

"We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield for each platoon in the field," says Lt. Col. Oren Berebbi, head of the Israel Defense Forces' technology branch. "We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk."

In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel's military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel's leading weapons manufacturers.

"We are moving into the robotic era," says Mr. Katz.

Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world is betting big on the role of aerial drones: Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla force in Lebanon, flew four Iranian-made drones against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.

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Robots - You can't stop them (Video)

Silicon.com - Video: Artificial intelligence: Noel Sharkey on the inexorable rise of robots

Sheffield University's professor of robotics and AI discusses our fascination with autonomous machines...

• Artificial intelligence: Noel Sharkey on the inexorable rise of robots
• |
• silicon.com

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DARPA's cyber warfare training, $51 million

Popsci - 1.12.10 (by Stuart Fox)

Do Virtual IT Administrator Opponents Dream Of Electric Jolt Cola Bottles? via Chas Andrews.

As any soldier will tell you, consistent and realistic drill forms the foundation of any successful military action. But whereas an infantryman can hone his aim at a firing range, America's Internet warriors don't have a similar venue for developing their skills at cyberwar. But DARPA hopes a $51 million network simulation, complete with computer programs that behave like human targets and adversaries, will provide the perfect arena for developing the next generation of cyberwar weapons and tactics.

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Wetware computers under development

BBC - 1.11.10 (by Jason Palmer)

A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired "chemical computer" has begun as part of an international collaboration.

The "wet computer" incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power.

The team's approach mimics some of the actions of neurons in the brain.

The 1.8m-euro (£1.6m) project will run for three years, funded by an EU emerging technologies programme.

The programme has identified biologically-inspired computing as particularly important, having recently funded several such projects.

What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable "cells" featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.

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Accelerating technological change causing more frequent generational gaps

NYT - 1.9.10 (by Brad Stone)

My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.

Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

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Sex Sells...Robots!

PhysOrg.com - 1.9.10 (by Glenn Chapman)

Engineer-inventor Douglas Hines adjusts the head of his company's "True Companion" sex robot, Roxxxy, at the TrueCompanion.com booth at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Roxxxy the sex robot had a coming out party Saturday in Sin City.

In what is billed as a world first, a life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin was introduced to adoring fans at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

"She can't vacuum, she can't cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean," TrueCompanion's Douglas Hines said while introducing AFP to Roxxxy.

"She's a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person."

Roxxxy stands five feet, seven inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, "has a full C cup and is ready for action," according to Hines, who was an artificial intelligence engineer at Bell Labs before starting TrueCompanion.

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Organic transistors break out of the lab

Technology Review - 1.7.10 (by Katherine Bourzac)

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Plastic Logic announced the details of the first consumer product based on organic transistors, a technology that's been limited to the lab for the past 20 years. The company's thin, lightweight e-reader, called the Que, uses organic transistors to power a black and white, touch-sensitive display made by E Ink, an electronic paper company. Such transistors can be built on lightweight plastic backings.

For the Que, the organic transistors mean a large and lightweight touch-sensitive display measuring 27 centimeters. Que users can annotate documents, by either scribbling directly on them with a finger, or using a touch-screen-based keyboard to type in notes. The two models announced today were a version with 4 gigabytes of onboard memory, retailing for $649 and the 3G-enabled version, with 8 gigabytes of memory for $799. The 8 gigabyte version should be able to store about 75,000 documents. Both weigh roughly 0.5 kilograms.

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Border Bots - 'Twas only a matter of time

NewScientist - 1.8.10 (by Paul Marks)

A MIGRANT makes a furtive dash across an unwalled rural section of a national border, only to be confronted by a tracked robot that looks like a tiny combat tank - with a gimballed camera for an eye. As he passes the bug-eyed droid, it follows him and a border guard's voice booms from its loudspeaker. He has illegally entered the country, he is warned, and if he does not turn back he will be filmed and followed by the robot, or by an airborne drone, until guards apprehend him.

Welcome to the European border of the not-too-distant future. Amid the ever-present angst over illegal immigration, cross-border terrorism and contraband smuggling, some nations are turning to novel border-surveillance technologies, potentially backed up by robots, a conference on state security at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, heard in November. The idea is to scatter arrays of sensors in a border area in ways that give guards or robots plenty of time to respond before their targets make good an escape.

The need to secure borders is evident across the globe, from India - which is constructing a 3400-kilometre, 3-metre-high barbed-wire and concrete border wall to close itself off from Bangladesh - to Libya, where foot patrols are being augmented with new people-sensing technologies.

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3-D TV, Oh My!

NYT - 1/5/10 (by BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE)

Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press. The 3-D TV sets to be unveiled this week may start at $2,000.

Ralph Kramden can finally buy a television.

It was more than half a century ago, in a 1955 episode of “The Honeymooners,” that Kramden, the parsimonious bus driver played by Jackie Gleason, told his wife, Alice, that he had not yet bought a new television because “I’m waiting for 3-D.”

The wait will soon be over. A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them.

Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. Beginning at around $2,000, the 3-D sets will, at first, cost more than even the current crop of high-end flat-screens, and buyers will need special glasses — techie goggles, really — to watch in 3-D.

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An interview with the master (Kurzweil)

H+ - 12.30.09

Photo credit: Guru Khalsa.

A 3-way conversation with the brilliant and controversial inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil needs little or no introduction to most h+ readers. Principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition, Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. The magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States and called him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” His Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. is an umbrella company for at least eight separate enterprises.

Ray‘s writing career rivals his inventions and entrepreneurship. His seminal book, The Singularity is Near, presents the Singularity as an overall exponential (doubling) growth trend in technological development, “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” With his upcoming films, Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near: A True Story about the Future, he is becoming an actor, screenplay writer, and director as well.

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Where's tech going in the next decade?

NYT - 1.1.10 (by Jenna Wortham)

It’s hard to believe that a decade ago, there was no Facebook, iPhone, Wikipedia or YouTube. Almost shocking, considering how those entities have shaped a culture around the Internet, disrupted business models and affected how and what information was shared through the Web.

So what big Web themes might we see emerging into the next few years? Based on reporting and informal chats with venture capitalists, here’s a quick guess at what might be big in 2010.

The third wave of mobile applications: Mobile app stores continue to evolve from kitschy collections of games and novelty programs into robust catalogs of applications that push the limits of what a cellphone can do. So where can we expect to see the next big innovation? External attachments. So far, Square, a device that plugs into the audio jack of a mobile phone, turning it into a credit card machine, has made the splashiest entrance into the market, but that is just the beginning. Example: a glucose monitor that could directly port blood sugar readings and other health information into a program for analysis.

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Speed of evolution measured

ScienceDaily - 1.3.10

Mutations are the raw material of evolution. Charles Darwin already recognized that evolution depends on heritable differences between individuals: those who are better adapted to the environment have better chances to pass on their genes to the next generation. A species can only evolve if the genome changes through new mutations, with the best new variants surviving the sieve of selection.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and Indiana University in Bloomington have now been able to measure for the first time directly the speed with which new mutations occur in plants. Their findings shed new light on a fundamental evolutionary process. They explain, for example, why resistance to herbicides can appear within just a few years.

Their research appears in the Jan. 1, 2010 issue of the journal Science.

"While the long term effects of genome mutations are quite well understood, we did not know how often new mutations arise in the first place," said Detlef Weigel, director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It is routine today to compare the genomes of related animal or plant species. Such comparisons, however, ignore mutations that have been lost in the millions of years since two species separated. The teams of Weigel and his colleague Michael Lynch at Indiana University therefore wanted to scrutinize the signature of evolution before selection occurs. To this end, they followed all genetic changes in five lines of the mustard relative Arabidopsis thaliana that occurred during 30 generations. In the genome of the final generation they then searched for differences to the genome of the original ancestor.

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You can pay for that with your cell phone

ScienceDaily - 01.02.10

New security technology allows people to make payments via cell phones. The technology is designed to work in almost all situations: person to person, in a shop or restaurant, at a vending machine, online, or as part of a telephone conversation. (Credit: iStockphoto/Hillary Fox).

The announcement on 16 December by the board of the UK Payments Council that cheques are to be phased out by 2018 has heightened the need for secure replacement payment systems.

New security technology developed at Oxford University by Professor Bill Roscoe and his team that allows people to make payments via mobile phones, offers a solution.

The technology is designed to work in almost all situations: person to person, in a shop or restaurant, at a vending machine, online, or as part of a telephone conversation.

Isis Innovation, the University of Oxford's technology transfer company, is working with Professor Roscoe to commercialise the technology.

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Eating when full? Could be your brain telling you to do it!

ScienceDaily - 12.28.09

The premise that hunger makes food look more appealing is a widely held belief -- just ask those who cruise grocery store aisles on an empty stomach, only to go home with a full basket and an empty wallet.

Prior research studies have suggested that the so-called hunger hormone ghrelin, which the body produces when it's hungry, might act on the brain to trigger this behavior. New research in mice by UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists suggest that ghrelin might also work in the brain to make some people keep eating "pleasurable" foods when they're already full.

"What we show is that there may be situations where we are driven to seek out and eat very rewarding foods, even if we're full, for no other reason than our brain tells us to," said Dr. Jeffrey Zigman, assistant professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at UT Southwestern and co-senior author of the study appearing online and in a future edition of Biological Psychiatry.

Scientists previously have linked increased levels of ghrelin to intensifying the rewarding or pleasurable feelings one gets from cocaine or alcohol. Dr. Zigman said his team speculated that ghrelin might also increase specific rewarding aspects of eating.

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