Singularity & Futurism

Wiring up the earth - putting sensors everywhere

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:04:00 +0000

NYT - 11.18.2009 by RICHARD MACMANUS

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations.

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Submarine Pills - Take a couple of these and call me in the morning

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:42:00 +0000

NewScientist - 11.20.2009 by Gaia Vince and Clare Wilson

A MAN lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel, probes around inside the man's abdomen then withdraws one of its arms. Held in the machine's claw is a neatly sealed bag containing a scrap of bloody tissue.

This is a da Vinci robot. It has allowed a surgeon, sitting at a control desk, to remove the patient's prostate gland in a manner that has several advantages over conventional methods. Yet the future of robotic surgery may lie not only with these hulking beasts but also with devices at the other end of the size spectrum. The surgeons of tomorrow will include tiny robots that enter our bodies and do their work from the inside, with no need to open patients up or knock them out. While nanobots that swim through the blood are still in the realm of fantasy, several groups are developing devices a few millimetres in size. The first generation of "mini-medibots" may infiltrate our bodies through our ears, eyes and lungs, to deliver drugs, take tissue samples or install medical devices.

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Implanted Chips - Be the first kid on your block to have one!

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:44:00 +0000

ComputerWorld - 11.19.2009 (by Sharon Gaudin)

Brain waves will replace keyboard and mouse, dial phones and change TV channels.

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- Big Brother won't be planting chips in your brain against your will. Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

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The Singularity explained in 5 slides

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:11:00 +0000

Jamais Cascio

The Singularity, in Five Slides from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

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Wolfram Alfa wants to be an artificial general intelligence when it grows up

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:35:00 +0000

NewScientist - 11.17.2009 by Justin Mullins

When the search engine Wolfram Alpha launched earlier this year, the interest was huge. Enticed by a well-oiled publicity machine, web users swamped the site and its servers were overwhelmed. Then everything went quiet – so quiet that it was easy to imagine that Alpha would follow countless Google wannabes to the great search engine directory in the sky.

That was to reckon without Stephen Wolfram, a physicist famous for creating and selling the mathematics software Mathematica and for his pioneering but controversial work on cellular automata.

In the past few months, Wolfram has been plotting the future of Alpha. Last Thursday, we saw the first stage of his plan with the link-up between Alpha and Microsoft's search engine Bing. That's just the beginning, however. Wolfram's plans for Alpha are much more ambitious.

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Forget quad-core; try 1 million by 2018

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:43:00 +0000

ComputerWorld - 11.16.2009 (by Patrick Thibodeau)

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems.

There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.

Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless "what-if" scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system.

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Closer to figuring out consciousness

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:50:00 +0000

NewScientist - 11.12.2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy

A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.

It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.

"It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness .

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Augmented Reality Contacts - very sweet!

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0000

NewScientist - 11.12.2009 by Vijaysree Venkatraman

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.

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Is your brain running out of memory?

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:53:00 +0000

ScienceDaily - 11.13.09

Short-term memory may depend in a surprising way on the ability of newly formed neurons to erase older connections. That's the conclusion of a report in the November 13th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, that provides some of the first evidence in mice and rats that new neurons sprouted in the hippocampus cause the decay of short-term fear memories in that brain region, without an overall memory loss.

The researchers led by Kaoru Inokuchi of The University of Toyama in Japan say the discovery shows a more important role than many would have anticipated for the erasure of memories. They propose that the birth of new neurons promotes the gradual loss of memory traces from the hippocampus as those memories are transferred elsewhere in the brain for permanent storage. Although they examined this process only in the context of fear memory, Inokuchi says he "thinks all memories that are initially stored in the hippocampus are influenced by this process."

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Dreaming as parallel consciousness

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:33:00 +0000

NYT - 11.09.09 (by Benedict Carey)

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.

Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

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Space Hotel - Make your reservations now!

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:08:00 +0000

Collider shut down again - nature abhors a Higgs particle?

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:18:00 +0000

The Register - 11.05.09 (by Lewis Page)

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

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Space Elevator - Rising to orbit soon?

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Wired - 11.05.09 By Brian McLaughlin

Image From NASA MSFC, Artist Pat Rawling.

The legend that is Sir Arthur C. Clarke is formidable. As a science fiction author who knew how to mix imagination with scientific reality, Clarke left the world a legacy of wonderful stories as well as a firm contribution to science. In 1945, Clarke suggested the concept of utilizing geostationary satellites for communications, now a mainstay of our modern world. Another technology, described in his novel “The Fountains of Paradise“, is the Space Elevator. The concept was not new when Clarke used the construction of a Space Elevator as central element of his novel, but Clarke’s novel brought the concept to a larger audience.

The basic concept of a Space Elevator is rather simple. A satellite at geostationary orbit is anchored to the Earth at the equator by a long tether. This tether is then used to move payloads up and down the Elevator without the use of expensive chemical propellants or single-use launch vehicles. Simple in concept, difficult in execution. Between the need for extraordinarily high strength tethers, the construction of the climber with a way to power the climber over the 22,000 miles to geostationary orbit from the equator, and the construction of the anchor point itself, the Space Elevator has often seemed far off on the horizon. Now, this week, a competition at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in the desert in California is bringing the concept a Space Elevator closer to reality.

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Captchas, bots, and the intelligence arms race

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:20:00 +0000

New Scientist - 11.03.2009 by Colin Barras

Captchas, the scrambled images used to separate humans from software bots online, could become harder for bots to solve – and easier for humans to handle – by animating them.

That is the claim of computer scientist Niloy Mitra at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who along with colleagues has devised a system that should separate the bots from the humans.

With some captcha systems close to being cracked, website owners are having to make them ever more fiendish to thwart bots. That comes at a cost, however: it makes them difficult for humans to read too, says Mitra.

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Check out the MAVs (Micro Air Vehicles)

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:57:00 +0000

Undoing Babel

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:24:00 +0000

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)

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

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!

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:01:00 +0000

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?

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:02:00 +0000

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

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:58:00 +0000

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

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:06:00 +0000

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)

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:58:00 +0000

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

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:12:00 +0000

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

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:23:00 +0000

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

bmahfood@gmail.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:09:00 +0000

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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