LHC restarts - will it go all the way this time?

PhysOrg.com - 2.28.10

Scientists have restarted the world's most powerful atom-smasher overnight, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said Sunday, as they launch a new bid to uncover the secrets of the universe.

"The LHC is on its way again. First beam of 2010 circulated in each direction by 04.10 CET (0310 GMT)," said CERN in a tweet on its website on Sunday.

The 3.9 billion euro (5.6 billion dollars) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down in December to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels. It was run for a few weeks after being successfully revived from a 14 month breakdown.

The particle collider -- inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva -- is aimed at understanding the origins of the universe by recreating the conditions that followed the Big Bang.

In the weeks before the technical shutdown in December, the collider achieved over a million particle collisions and accelerated proton beams to energy levels never reached before, according to CERN.

Collisions reached a world record energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV), already allowing scientists to gather data.

But CERN now wants to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate conditions close to the Big Bang, and run it at those levels for 18 to 24 months.

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Whence the wandering apostrophe? Science explores.

Technology Review - 2.4.10

A new technique for analyzing early English texts is gradually revealing the history of the apostrophe.

Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul's Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square.

The council's reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James's Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit 'n' run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.

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Dawkins on the Singularity? Very cool

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Mozart, step aside! Cyber Composer is in da house!

Miller-McCune - 2.22.10 (by Ryan Blitstein)

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?

UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope is ready to introduce computer software that creates original, modern music. (Catherine Karnow).

The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles. A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek out from the intellectual rubble. Above, something like 200 sets of wind chimes from around the world hang, ringing oddly congruent melodies.

And in the center, the old University of California, Santa Cruz, emeritus professor reclines in his desk chair, black socks pulled up over his pants cuffs, a thin mustache and thick beard lending him the look of an Amish grandfather.

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Controlling the brain with light

Technology Review - 2.24.10 (by Mark Williams)

A novel optical device could ultimately be used to treat neurological disease.

Light therapy: A neuron (green) engineered to express a light-sensitive protein fires in response to specific wavelengths of light. A glass electrode (lower left corner) records the neuron’s electrical response. Researchers from Medtronic used this system to confirm that a new implantable stimulator can properly activate neurons with light. Credit: Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University.

Researchers at Medtronic are developing a prototype neural implant that uses light to alter the behavior of neurons in the brain. The device is based on the emerging science of optogenetic neuromodulation, in which specific brain cells are genetically engineered to respond to light. Medtronic, the world's largest manufacturer of biomedical technologies, aims to use the device to better understand how electrical therapies, currently used to treat Parkinson's and other disorders, assuage symptoms of these diseases. Medtronic scientists say they will use the findings to improve the electrical stimulators the company already sells, but others ultimately hope to use optical therapies directly as treatments.

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Augmented Identity - I know who you are (if not what you did!)

Technology Review - 2.23.10 (by Erika Jonietz)



An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality.

"It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT. "We thought the idea of bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating would be really interesting."

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Midday naps make you learn better - Tell your boss.

PhysOrg.com - 2.21.10

If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don't roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour's nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.

Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter - a common practice at college during midterms and finals -- decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.

"Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap," said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies.

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Is Aging Really Necessary? (Panel Discussion)

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Newest generation of brain-like computers under development

ScienceDaily - 2.19.10

Nerve cells are joined together by independent connections called synapses. (Credit: Copyright TU Graz/IGI).

Intelligent machines that not only think for themselves but also actively learn are the vision of researchers of the Institute for Theoretical Science (IGI) at Graz University of Technology.

They have been coordinating the European Union research project "Brain-i-Nets" (Novel Brain Inspired Learning Paradigms for Large-Scale Neuronal Networks) for three years, and are launching a three-day meeting of the participating researchers in Graz. The scientists want to design a new generation of neuro-computers based on the principles of calculation and learning mechanisms found in the brain, and at the same time gain new knowledge about the brain's learning mechanisms.

The human brain consists of a network of several billion nerve cells. These are joined together by independent connections called synapses. Synapses are changing all the time -- something scientists name synaptic plasticity. This highly complex system represents a basis for independent thinking and learning. But even today there are still many open questions for researchers.

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Taking the search for extraterrestrials off-world

NewScientist - 2.18.10

Boosting signals from ET (Image: TED/James Duncan Davidson).

FRANK DRAKE, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), wants to take the search for aliens further: about 82 billion kilometres away, in fact.

At this point in space, electromagnetic signals from planets orbiting distant stars would be focused by the gravitational lensing effect of our sun, making them, in theory, more easily detected. Drake wants to send spacecraft there in a bid to overhear alien communications, which would be too faint for telescopes on Earth to detect.

It's neither a new or original idea, but it has never taken off because of the distances involved. With existing propulsion technologies, spacecraft would take hundreds of years to make the voyage, which is about 550 times the distance from Earth to the sun.

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What could you do with 100 megabits per second?

Networkworld - 2.16.10 (by Jeff Bertolucci)

There's little debate that the United States lags behind other industrialized nations in high-speed Internet use. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), more than 100 million Americans don't have broadband at home because they either can't get it, can't afford it, or aren't aware of its benefits. Some 65 percent of U.S. households have broadband, a far lower adoption rate than in other technologically advanced countries such as Singapore (88 percent) or South Korea (95 percent).

And that's why FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is proposing a National Broadband Plan that would greatly widen the data pipe to most American homes. Speaking in Washington D.C. on Tuesday at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference, Genachowski set an ambitious goal: His "100 Squared" initiative would bring 100-megabit-per-second broadband to 100 million U.S. households by 2020.

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The Future of Futurism (Guest Post)

So you've read all of Ray Kurzweil's books. You've tracked the progression of the technological singularity, and you can feel it coming. You excitedly tell all your friends about the emergence of superhuman artificial intelligence, but they all write you off. Skepticism isn't new, of course. Darwin's theories on evolution were met with the same disbelief that eventually morphed into contempt, a sentiment that still exists today, despite that evolutionary theory has been proved sound.

Roko Mijic, a mathematics and AI researcher, writes about futurism and transhumanism for both his personal blog and GOOD, a blog dedicated to innovative ideas. In one article, Mijic explains the problems that plague futurism. He contends that rejecting absurd ideas--despite there being evidence in favor of such ideas--is a survival skill from our earlier stages in evolutionary development, a skill that we haven't completely discarded.

He argues that futurism is also hampered by the media proffering a very misconceived version of futurism, in which evil robots run the world. Mijic reasons that futurism is based on probability theory, which is the most rigorous mathematical model available for analyzing uncertainty. And so, as long as we see futurism in this light, as a theory supported by analyzing current trends and numbers, then it won't seem as far-fetched as the media and futurist critics make it out to be.

Another area that Mijic predicts will be at the heart of futurist studies is ethics. In another article, Mijic focuses on the question that's on everyone's mind concerning the technological singularity--will artificial intelligence, even though surpassing our own capabilities, want to do good? Will AI be able to empathize, to love? Or will the media be right about "evil robots?"

Mijic takes these questions very seriously, and he supports the latest solution to the problem of unrestrained, self-improving AI--Coherent Extrapolated Volition, known as the CEV algorithm. Instead of programming human values directly into AI, the CEV algorithm--currently being developed by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a scientist at the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence (SIAI)--would create a procedure that allows AI to extract information on human values based on human behavioral studies, brain scans, and more. To read Yudkowsky's research on the CEV algorithm, visit the SIAI's publications web page.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Pamelia Brown, who writes on the topics of associates degree. She welcomes your comments at pamelia.brown@gmail.com.

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Gesture-activated computer interface - it'll be big

NYT - 2.15.10 (by Jennifer 8. Lee)

John Underkoffler, who helped create the gesture-based computer interface imagined in the film “Minority Report,” has brought that technology to real life. He gave a demonstration at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., on Friday.

Hollywood imitates life. And sometimes life imitates Hollywood.

John Underkoffler, who led the team that came up with the interface that Tom Cruise’s character used in the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” co-founded a company, Oblong Industries, to make the gesture-activated interface a reality.

Using special gloves, Mr. Underkoffler demonstrated the interface — called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment — on Friday at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., a series of lectures by experts across a variety of technologies.

He pushed, pulled and twisted vast troves of photos and forms that were on a screen in front of him, compressing and stretching as he went. He zoomed in, zoomed out and rotated the images using six degrees of control. In one part of the demonstration, he reached into a series of movies, plucked out a single character from each and placed them onto a “table” together where they continued to move. (Oblong has released its own demonstration video).

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Introducing new and improved lifeforms!

NewScientist - 2.14.10 (by Linda Geddes)

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four "letters" of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell's machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic "words" are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin's team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don't even exist yet.

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Gonna get colder before it gets warmer

Daily Galaxy - 2.12.10 (by Casey Kazan with Rebecca Sato)

Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans are, at least in part, responsible. The concern is that the warming of our climate will greatly affect its habitability for many species, including humans. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concur that this is the case. But some argue that this thinking is too limited. They say that too many scientists are either ignoring, or don’t understand, the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future—in either direction.

Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling of about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? It sure could, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

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Global warming skeptics on the ascendancy

LiveScience- 2.11.10 (by Robert Roy Britt)

Except for a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth's surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded. The graph shows global annual surface temperatures relative to 1951-1980 mean temperatures. As shown by the red line, long-term trends are more apparent when temperatures are averaged over a five year period. Credit: NASA/GISS.

Eroding confidence in climate science punctuated by a pair of blizzards has global warming skeptics across the United States calling for a sharp rollback to years of political and industrial efforts to curb greenhouse emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

Climate scientists are on the defensive, and they're not backing down.

Public views have shifted starkly over the past year on the long-running controversy over whether global warming is real, and whether human activity contributes to it.

In a survey released last month, the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening declined 14 percentage points vs. the year prior, to 57 percent. The survey, from the Yale Project on Climate Change, found that only half of U.S. residents say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease from 2008.

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Let your computer summarize the boring meeting

NewScientist - 2.12.10 (by Colin Barras)

Over the phone it's even worse (Image: Randy Faris/Corbis).

MOST of us talk to our computers, if only to curse them when a glitch destroys hours of work. Sadly the computer doesn't usually listen, but new kinds of software are being developed that make conversing with a computer rather more productive.

The longest established of these is automatic speech recognition (ASR), the technology that converts the spoken word to text. More recently it has been joined by subtler techniques that go beyond what you say, and analyse how you say it. Between them they could help us communicate more effectively in situations where face-to-face conversation is not possible.

ASR has come a long way since 1964, when visitors to the World's Fair in New York were wowed by a device called the IBM Shoebox, which performed simple arithmetic calculations in response to voice commands. Yet people's perceptions of the usefulness of ASR have, if anything, diminished.

"State-of-the-art ASR has an error rate of 30 to 35 per cent," says Simon Tucker at the University of Sheffield, UK, "and that's just very annoying." Its shortcomings are highlighted by the plethora of web pages poking fun at some of the mistakes made by Google Voice, which turns voicemail messages into text.

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Simulate falling into a black hole

PhysOrg.com - 2.10.10 (by Ted Goodman)

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The ratio between the black hole Schwarzschild radius and the observer distance to it is 1:9. Of note is the gravitational lensing effect known as an Einstein ring, which produces a set of two fairly bright and large but highly distorted images of the Cloud as compared to its actual angular size. (Image: Wikipedia.)

Black holes are my constant companions, at least in my imagination. Starting back a couple of decades ago, two sets of basketball tickets disappeared into one of them, and since then a pair of ski gloves, a gold ring, and more CD’s than I can count were sucked out of my hands in the same way.

Not too many of us have actually seen a black hole, but Thomas Müller, physics student, and Daniel Weiskopf, computer science professor, at the University of Stuttgart, have programmed a vision for us. With their simulation of a black hole in space, you can really imagine what it would be like to be in the pull of one.

A black hole occurs from the huge gravitational force of an exploding star. The force is so strong and dense that nothing can escape it, not even light. In fact, the enormous gravitational pull of the black hole would seem to displace the surrounding stars, creating dynamic and dramatic changes in, let’s say, a constellation. This effect is explained by the Schwarzchild black hole.

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Human-level AI, how long must we wait for you?

h+ - 2.5.10 (by Ben Goertzel, Seth Baum, Ted Goertzel)

When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond? When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter?

Well, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to predict, especially about the future.” But what do experts working on human-level AI think? To find out, we surveyed a number of leading specialists at the Artificial General Intelligence conference (AGI-09) in Washington DC in March 2009. These are the experts most involved in working toward the advanced AIs we’re talking about. Of course, on matters like these, even expert judgments are highly uncertain and must be taken with multiple grains of salt — nevertheless, expert opinion is one of the best sources of guidance we have. Their predictions about AGI might not come true, but they have so much relevant expertise that we should give their predictions careful consideration.

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Automatic, instant voice translation in 2 years, via Google

TimesOnline - 2.7.10 (by Chris Gourlay)

GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.

The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week.

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Synthetic replacement organs for soldiers planned

Wired - 2.5.10 (By Katie Drummond)

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

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Smartphone personal assistants just got a lot smarter

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Robotic exoskeleton makes lame walk (and soldiers run?)

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NASA and GM to build robots together

ComputerWorld - 2.4.10 (by Sharon Gaudin)

Instead of sending a regular astronaut to make a dangerous spacewalk outside the International Space Station, NASA might some day soon be able to send a robotic astronaut to do the job instead.

NASA and General Motors (GM) announced late on Wednesday that they are working together to develop and build humanoid robots that can work side-by-side with humans. The idea, according to NASA, is to build robots that can help astronauts during dangerous mission and help GM build cars and automotive plants.

"This cutting-edge robotics technology holds great promise, not only for NASA, but also for the nation," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. "I'm very excited about the new opportunities for human and robotic exploration these versatile robots provide across a wide range of applications."

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It's a bird! It's a book! It's Superkindle!

NYT - 2.3.10 (by Nick Bilton)

If you were Amazon, and Apple released the iPad, what would you do? Scurry away into the corner, or buy a small company in New York and use its technology to build a Superkindle, with a multitouch color screen and built-in applications? If you guessed the latter, you’d be right.

In an article I wrote with Brad Stone, we reported that Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up that was developing flexible, transparent, force-sensitive multitouch panels.

I profiled Touchco in a blog post last month, explaining how its technology could potentially enliven a new round of touch-screen devices. Instead, it might breathe new life into one device in particular: Amazon’s Kindle.

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Turn (almost) any surface into a multitouch screen

PhysOrg.com - 2.2.10

A new large-format multi-touch technology launched today by DISPLAX, a developer of interactive technologies, will transform any non-conductive flat or curved surface into a multitouch screen.

The DISPLAX Multitouch Technology, believed to be the first of its kind, has been developed based on a transparent thinner-than-paper polymer film. When applied to glass, plastic or wood, the surface becomes interactive. Significantly, this new multitouch technology can be applied to standard LCD screens as well, making it an attractive choice for LCD manufacturers. The new technology will also be available for audiovisual integrators or gaming platforms to develop innovative products.

The DISPLAX Multitouch Technology dramatically extends the capabilities of the interactive format. It can be applied to flat or curved, opaque as well as transparent surfaces up to three metres across the diagonal. It is hyper sensitive, allowing users to interact with an enabled surface not just by touching it but, for the first time, by blowing on it, opening up new possibilities for future applications. Currently, the technology can detect up to 16 fingers on a 50-inch screen. The number of fingers detected is expected to increase as development progresses.

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Ray Kurzweil predicts brain-computer merger

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