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Mimicking the Building Prowess of Nature

Iain — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Scientists build new materials using inspiration from complex biological forms.

Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist at Harvard University, has scoured the natural world for clues to biological building codes. She aims to decipher some of Mother Nature’s unique designs, including dirt-resistant sea urchins and sea sponges made of super-strong light-conducting glass, to develop novel materials that, like these organisms, can self-assemble and sense and respond to their environment.

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Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer

nuncio — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

Japan eyes solar station in space as new energy source

Iain — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:37:00 +0000

It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.

The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.

With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.

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Alan Johnson on cannabis

nuncio — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:25:00 +0000

Somebody should explain endocannabinoids to UK Home Secretary Alan Johnson. Your brain is on cannabis Mr Johnson - everybody's is. Your brain is a drug-squirting machine. Perhaps you should have taken a good drag of THC from an external source before sacking Professor David Nutt in a fit of ill-educated pique. It might have calmed you down a little.

This issue is, of course, much larger. There is a scientific process which politicians simply don't seem to understand. The scientific evidence about the relative dangers of commonplace drugs is not a matter of political opinion - there are well-established factual studies which cannot be buried just because politicians do not like people who take proscribed drugs. Professor Nutt could not, in all conscience as a scientist, do other than point out these facts.

The easy availability of proper, detailed, scientific information should, I hope, make it increasingly difficult for politicians to hide the truth in a miasma of spin. But we need to make use of that information and hold them to account. Mr Johnson is starting to discover that the public is not quite as acquiescent, ill-informed and gullible as he thought.

How your brain sees virtual you

Iain — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:53:00 +0000

As players who stay up all night fighting imaginary warriors demonstrate, slipping into the skin of an avatar, and inhabiting a virtual world can be riveting stuff. But to what extent does your brain regard your virtual self as you?

Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.

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Light down a wire for solar power

Iain — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:42:00 +0000

Solar power could be produced cheaply in specially designed optical fibres, say researchers.

The work, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, makes use of nanometre-scale wires built around optical fibres like bristles.

Those wires give the light much more surface area to interact with, leading to higher overall efficiencies.

However, only the ends of the fibres must be exposed - they funnel the light elsewhere for power generation.

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Elevator to space? They're really trying

Iain — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:04:00 +0000

Rocketing into space? Some think an elevator might be the way to go. That's the future goal of this week's $2 million Space Elevator Games in the Mojave Desert.

In a major test of the concept, robotic machines powered by laser beams will try to climb a cable suspended from a helicopter hovering more than a half-mile (one kilometer) high.

Three teams have qualified to participate in the event on the dry lakebed near NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards. Attempts were expected from early Wednesday through Thursday.

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Psychological Continuity

nuncio — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:38:00 +0000

If you were to be duplicated just before you died and the duplicate survived, would it be you?

This can be seen as a deep philosophical question with a myriad differently nuanced answers. But I'm not much of a philosopher so my answer is simply "no". A duplicate of your entire person or a perfect molecular copy of your brain, could be just like you for some period time but it would not be you.

The soul-mongers may be rubbing their hands with glee at this point but this has nothing to do with them or their fantastical constructs. Their agenda is to promote the notion of a unique ethereal part that "lives on" somehow after you die. By their definition the duplicate person would have no soul - one person one soul - that's all that God hands out (then takes back). What a quaint and morbid idea.

We cannot make such a copy at present so you can think of this as a thought experiment. In the relatively near future we will be able to make such copies and there will be various ways of doing this. The copying will not be the problem, the method of the state/substrate transfer process may be.

Let's say that the scientists doing the copying decide to conceal who is the "original" and whom the "duplicate", even from themselves. Immediately after completion of the copy process both entities would insist that they are the "real" version of the person and both would be correct. If you dispute this then, in what sense would they not both be correct? Let's not get hung up on which of them would be composed of the most recently rearranged atomic material. But that is all it really comes down to. Then divergence sets in.

When does the divergence between the two entities set in? How much do they diverge? Pretty much immediately or somewhat later. A little or vastly. What does it matter? They diverge, they are not the same person. This could be an excellent moral thought experiment for the religious if they were a little more imaginative - they could have a 'soul dilution' construct with each duplicate being, in comparison to the pre-duplication 'original', a kind of watery orange squash in the soul department.

There is, of course, no dilution. Both versions are valid entities ready to go back out into the cosmos on their own divergent paths, no matter how closely they stick together. But weren't we talking about the death of the "original"? This kind of duplication wouldn't save you, so what would? Well, we know that we are constantly in the process of being rebuilt at the molecular level and that, every few years, every atom in our bodies will have been replaced. So in what sense are we the "same person" as a few years previously? The key is that we feel the same because of our memories and the continuous "psychological flow" of our being. When we think back we don't usually detect vast gaps prior to which we suspect that we may have been somebody else. The psychological continuity of the self is an illusion but a very useful one, and one that we feel we must maintain in order for "me" to mean anything. So if there is to be any kind of 'movement' of our 'selves' from one state/substrate to another there must be a transition process which maintains psychological continuity.

I have imagined that this could be done with a future perfected version of a virtual brain akin to the Blue Brain project. A perfect human/virtual brain interface would also be required. The neocortical columns of the dying person are wired to the virtual brain and data communication begins at whatever level of resolution/fidelity is required. At first the 'generic' virtual brain is acting only as a relay so that the patient's columns can adjust to the new environment. Gradually some of the less-active columns in the bio brain could begin to 'share' some thought/memory structures with the virtual, allowing the virtual brain to 'learn' the bio brain's structure and patterns. The virtual columns gradually take on more and more responsibility until the virtual brain is handling entire neocortical areas, and the virtual and bio are operating as one entity. The process continues until only some autonomic functions, such as regulation of blood oxygenation, are being handled by the bio brain. The virtual brain does not strictly require autonomic functions but some simulation of those functions would be required in order to prevent the patient from suffering a kind of ontological shock brought on by the realisation of the substrate transfer. If required the biological body and brain stem can continue to function in tandem with the virtual brain indefinitely but the transfer of the 'self' to the new substrate is now complete.

I don't think it's looking good for teleportation. A teleport would be a kind of duplicator/destroyer device. Let the duplicates live. Anything else would be unthinkable. But this isn't about duplication, it's about transfer. And here's where it does get philosophical. Have you ever felt like you have, even for a short while, become "one" with another person? It can be joyful, unsettling or both. I think it's a realisation that our boundaries are mutable and that we could, ultimately, accept a new substrate as home.

AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists

Iain — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:24:00 +0000

Equipped with wearable AI systems and digital eyes that see what human eyes can’t, space explorers of the future could be not just astronauts, but “cyborg astrobiologists.”

That’s the vision of a research team led by Patrick McGuire, a University of Chicago geoscientist who’s developed algorithms that can recognize signs of life in a barren landscape.

“When they look at scenery, children gravitate towards the thing that’s different from the other things,” said McGuire. “That’s how I looked at the cyborg astrobiologist.”

At the heart of McGuire’s system is a Hopfield neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that compares incoming data against patterns it’s seen before, eventually picking out those details that qualify as new or unusual.

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'The Future of Aging' makes the scientific case for biogerontology

Iain — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:34:00 +0000

The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension has just been announced by Springer.

The 40 authors make the scientific case that a biological "bailout" could be on the way, and that human aging can be different in the future than it is today. Based on the future therapeutic potential of biogerontology, their paradigm-breaking proposals include sirtuin-modulating pills, new concepts for attacking cardiovascular disease and cancer, mitochondrial rejuvenation, stem cell therapies and regeneration, tissue reconstruction, telomere maintenance, prevention of immunosenescence, extracellular rejuvenation, artificial DNA repair, and full deployment of nanotechnology.

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Xerox Claims Printable Electronics Breakthrough

Iain — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:14:00 +0000

Xerox on Tuesday announced a new silver ink (among other things) that it's calling, and apparently is, a breakthrough in printable electronics, a leading edge concept that's generated a lot of discussion but few actual products to date, largely because of the issues that Xerox's new technology addresses.

In concept, printable electronics is just what it sounds like: using a printer, basically an ink jet, to print electronic circuits. If you can do that reliably, you can print electronic devices for far less than current methods cost. You can also print the devices on a variety of new materials.

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Robot Armada Might Scale New Worlds

Iain — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:06:00 +0000

An armada of robots may one day fly above the mountain tops of Saturn's moon Titan, cross its vast dunes and sail in its liquid lakes.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.

"The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time."

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