Artificial Neural Network from DNA Created

 California Institute of Technology - 7.20.11

Credit: Caltech/Lulu Qian

Artificial intelligence has been the inspiration for countless books and movies, as well as the aspiration of countless scientists and engineers. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now taken a major step toward creating artificial intelligence—not in a robot or a silicon chip, but in a test tube. The researchers are the first to have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as a brain can.

"The brain is incredible," says Lulu Qian, a Caltech senior postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and lead author on the paper describing this work, published in the July 21 issue of the journal Nature. "It allows us to recognize patterns of events, form memories, make decisions, and take actions. So we asked, instead of having a physically connected network of neural cells, can a soup of interacting molecules exhibit brainlike behavior?"

The answer, as the researchers show, is yes.

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Melding Minds and Machines - There's a grant for that

Lest you worry that no one's working on this...

NSF Funds $18.5 Million Effort to Create Mind-Machine Interface

The National Science Foundation today announced an $18.5 million grant to establish an Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering based at the University of Washington.

“The center will work on robotic devices that interact with, assist and understand the nervous system,” said director Yoky Matsuoka, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. “It will combine advances in robotics, neuroscience, electromechanical devices and computer science to restore or augment the body’s ability for sensation and movement.”

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Can We Hide Time?

What if you could cloak a period of time so that any events that occurred within it could not be seen from without? Actions without consequences? Some researchers have demonstrated that it's possible to cloak time, albeit for very short periods at this stage. Later on, who knows?

Technology Review - July 14, 2011

Invisibility cloaks are the result of physicists' newfound ability to distort electromagnetic fields in extreme ways. The idea is steer light around a volume of space so that anything inside this region is essentially invisible.

The effect has generated huge interest. The first invisibility cloaks worked only at microwave frequencies but in only a few years, physicists have found ways to create cloaks that work for visible light, for sound and for ocean waves. They've even designed illusion cloaks that can make one object look like another.

Today, Moti Fridman and buddies, at Cornell University in Ithaca, go a step further. These guys have designed and built a cloak that hides events in time.


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Singularity and the changing job market

The essence of the Singularity idea is simple: accelerating technological change. That means technology is changing a lot faster today than it did 5 years ago, and it will be changing much faster still 5 years from today. I recently read an article that made me realize that this means that our jobs are changing faster, too, at least any jobs connected in any way to technology. And if you want to have a job, well, you need to be changing too. Here's that article:


NYT - July 12, 2011 by Thomas Friedman


The Start-Up of You


The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.


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New Species Found - Fish with Hands!

National Geographic

Photograph courtesy Karen Gowlett-Holmes



Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a recent scientific review of the handfish family.


Only four specimens of the elusive four-inch (ten-centimeter) pink handfish have ever been found, and all of those were collected from areas around the city of Hobart (map), on the Australian island of Tasmania.


Though no one has spotted a living pink handfish since 1999, it's taken till now for scientists to formally identify it as a unique species.


The new-species determinations were made based on a number of factors, including number of vertebrae and fin rays, coloration, the presence of scales and spines, and proportional body measurements, according to review author Daniel Gledhill of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.


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What would be so great about a Singularity?

Michael Anissimov has an excellent and easy to read post on this. Check out The Benefits of a Successful Singularity, posted July 6, 2011.


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Wireless without limits?

Singularity & Futurism is always on the lookout for news of the next big thing. Could this be one?

Wired - June 30, 2011 by Eric Blattberg

Imagine if every mobile device had its own personal fat-pipe ethernet connection — without the CAT5 cable. That’s how Steve Perlman — inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO and founder of OnLive, the games-on-demand system — explains distributed-input-distributed-output (DIDO) technology, an experimental wireless communications system that could render cellular connections obsolete.

If a cell tower today broadcasts on channels that have a capacity of 100 megabits of bandwidth per second, and 100 people connect to that cell tower and share bandwidth equally, each person’s connection will measure roughly one megabit per second. If 1,000 people connect, each will get 100k bits per second. With DIDO wireless signals, everyone within range would get the entirety of the channel.

“I know that sounds impossible,” says Perlman, “but literally if you have a cell that has 100 megabits per second worth of bandwidth in it and you have 100 people, each person gets 100 megabits a second. It’s really pretty amazing; you don’t interfere with anybody else.”

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The Indestructible Botnet is Here

Computerworld - June 29, 2011 by Gregg Keizer

A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is "practically indestructible," security researchers say.

"TDL-4," the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is "the most sophisticated threat today," said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.

"[TDL-4] is practically indestructible," Golovanov said.

Others agree.

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