The Origin of Artificial Species: Creating Artificial Personalities

Rity was developed to test the world’s first robot
“chromosomes,” which allow it to have an artificial
genome-based personality. (Right) A representation of Rity’s
artificial genome. Darker shades represent higher gene values, and red
represents negative values. Image credit: Jong-Hwan Kim, et al.
©2009 IEEE.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Does your robot seem to be acting a bit
neurotic? Maybe it's just their personality. Recently, a team of
researchers has designed computer-coded genomes for artificial
creatures in which a specific personality is encoded. The ability to
give artificial life forms their own individual personalities could not
only improve the natural interactions between humans and artificial
creatures, but also initiate the study of “The Origin of
Artificial Species,” the researchers suggest.
The first artificial creature to receive the genomic personality is
Rity, a dog-like software character that lives in a virtual 3D world in
a PC. Rity’s genome is composed of 14 chromosomes, which together
are composed of a total of 1,764 genes, each with its own value. Rather
than manually assign the gene values, which would be difficult and
time-consuming, the researchers proposed an evolutionary process that
generates a genome with a specific personality desired by a user. The
process is described in a recent study by authors Jong-Hwan Kim of
KAIST in Daejeon, Korea; Chi-Ho Lee of the Samsung Economic Research
Institute in Seoul, Korea; and Kang-Hee Lee of Samsung Electronics
Company, Ltd., in Suwon-si, Korea.

“This is the first time that an artificial creature like a robot or software agent has been given a genome with a personality,” Kim told PhysOrg.com.
“I proposed a new concept of an artificial chromosome as the
essence to define the personality of an artificial creature and to pass
on its traits to the next generation, like a genetic inheritance. It is
critical to provide an impression that the robot is a living creature.
With this respect, having emotions enhances natural human-robot interaction for human-robot symbiosis in the coming years.”

As the researchers explain, an autonomous artificial creature - whether a physical robot or software
agent - can behave, interact, and react to environmental stimuli. Rity,
for example, can interact with humans in the physical world using
information through a mouse, a camera, or a microphone, with 47
perceptions. For instance, a single click and double click on Rity are
perceived as “patted” and “hit,” respectively.
Dragging Rity slowly and softly is perceived as “soothed,”
and dragging it quickly and wildly as “shocked.”

To react to these stimuli in real time, Rity relies on its internal
states which are composed of three units - motivation, homeostasis, and
emotion - and controlled by its internal control architecture. The
three units have a total of 14 states, which are the basis of the 14
chromosomes: the motivation unit includes six states (curiosity,
intimacy, monotony, avoidance, greed, and the desire to control); the
homeostasis unit includes three states (fatigue, hunger, and
drowsiness); and the emotion unit has five states (happiness, sadness,
anger, fear, and neutral).

http://www.physorg.com/news161517506.html

How to Use Pulsars for Interstellar Navigation

The signals from pulsars form a natural GPS system that could locate any object in the galaxy to within a meter.

The Global Position System has revolutionised navigation on Earth. It consists of a network of satellites that each broadcast a time signal. A receiver on Earth can then work out its position in
three-dimensional space by comparing the arrival times of the signals from at least three satellites. But the system cannot help with navigation on an interplanetary scale or beyond.

Today, Bertolomé Coll at the Observatoire de Paris in France and a friend propose an interstellar GPS system that has the ability to determine the position of any point in the galaxy to within a metre.

Their idea is to tune in to the signals from four pulsars: 0751+1807 (3.5ms), 2322+2057 (4.8ms), 0711-6830 (5.5ms) and 1518+0205B (7.9ms), which each generate regular millisecond radio signals.

These form a rough tetrahedron centred on the Solar System.

Why four pulsars? Coll points out that on these scales relativity has to be taken into account when processing the signals and to do this, the protocol has to specify a position in space-time, which requires four signals.

Coll then defines the origin for this system of co-ordinates as 00:00 on 1 January 2001 at the focal point of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, the radio telescope near Cambridge in the UK that first observed pulsars. With the co-ordinate system established, any interplanetary spacecraft could then use the signals from these pulsars to determine its position in this co-ordinate system to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to about a metre.

Handy, and cheap too.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23576/

Plugging In $40 Computers

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter?

Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

All this can be yours for $99 today and probably for under $40 in two years.

“There’s not much in there,” said Sehat Sutardja, Marvell’s chief executive and co-founder, just a few chips and the sort of power supply used to charge a cellphone battery. Because this computer uses chips designed for cellphones, it uses far less power than chips designed for regular computers. Mr. Sutardja envisions an explosion of innovation about to hit home users because of the combination of open-source software and very powerful chips that are becoming available at very low costs.

The first plausible use for the plug computer is to attach one of these gizmos to a U.S.B. hard drive. Voila, you’ve got a network server. CloudEngines, a start-up, has in fact built a $99 plug computer called Pogoplug, that will let you share the files on your hard drive, not only in your home but also anywhere on the Internet.

“This creates a smart data center for the home,” Mr. Sutardja said.

Another application might be to connect a security camera to the Internet, adding enough intelligence to help analyze images to distinguish between a stray dog and a cat burglar.

Ultimately, these computers may well be used in more mainstream devices, especially for home entertainment.

“We wanted to seed the thinking of people in the market place with what you can do with our processors,” Mr. Sutardja said. “Eventually you won’t see the plug. We want this device to be in your TV, your stereo system, your DVD player.”

The plug computer idea is clearly a step in that direction. And it is part of an even broader array of chips designed initially for phones that will add features to many other devices.

Mr. Sutardja talked about the sort of digital photo frame you can now buy for about $50. Add $2 in chips, and it can display high-definition movies, he said. Another $2 adds a camera. And less than a dollar adds several microphones.

“You now have the sort of video conferencing that corporations buy for much more money,” he said.

“The uses of an application processor are endless,” he said. “It is up to smart people to imagine what it can do.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/plugging-in-to-the-uses-of-40-computers/
http://www.plugcomputer.org/

Improving Space Elevators By Having a Rototating Hoop

By have a rotating hoop for a space elevator then objects sliding along Rotating Space Elevator(RSE) strings do not require internal engines or propulsion to be transported from the Earth's surface into outer space. (H/T Tom Craver)

A previous article had noted that the strength of the space elevator tether and the power of the engines driving the climbers were inter-related in terms of how feasible the space elevator was. By removing the need for powered climbers this could improve the overall feasibility of space elevators.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/05/improving-space-elevators-by-having.html

WolframTones

Here's a website that lets you generate distinct calculated music. There are a trillion trillion trillion possibilities for the musical composition, or you can influence the style, scale, and instrumentation of the composition.

http://tones.wolfram.com/

A Third Revolution in DNA Nanotechnology

In a new paper, Shawn Douglas and his colleagues at William Shih’s lab have demonstrated the first systematic method for building multilayer 3D nanostructures of DNA. In his commentary, Tom LaBean calls this “a third revolution in DNA nanotechnology”, following Seeman’s launch of the field and Rothemund’s development of the breakthrough origami technique.

In the authors’ words:

We anticipate that our strategy for self-assembling
custom three-dimensional shapes will provide a general route to the
manufacture of sophisticated devices bearing features on the nanometre
scale.

This paper closely follows the report of 3D structural-DNA technique that demonstrated a way to build closed boxes from single-layer origami sheets (in a sense, the first folded DNA origami). What the new technique adds to the engineering toolkit is a way to bundle DNA helices into sturdier structures, and to use those structures as building blocks for yet larger structures.

This is a further step toward the development of a methodology for building atomically precise self-assembled structures in which DNA forms an addressable framework for organizing other components (nanotubes, quantum dots, proteins…) into functional systems (circuits, sensors, fabrication tools…). Tom LaBean himself has been a pioneer in developing these DNA-based composite systems.

http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-r

evolution-in-dna-nanotechnology/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/abs/nature08016.html

Web 2.0 companies that have flipped or closed

X = game over

O = flipped

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meg/3527560991/

47 Million Year Old Skeleton Reveals the Missing Link Between Lemurs and Humans

Meet Ida, the 47 million year old fossil who may represent one of our earliest known ancestors. She's probably the most complete primate fossil ever discovered, and she explains where humans (and lemurs) come from.

Hailing from the Middle Eocene (about 47 million years ago), this discovery will help to shed light on the early history of a potential human ancestor. Discovered in the late 1980s, the specimen was divided into two separate parts and sold to different buyers, and wasn't reassembled until 2007.

This new species, now called Darwinius masillae, is named for Charles Darwin, and is believed to exist very close to an evolutionary branch that would eventually lead to modern primates and humans. This specimen in particular is a young female, named Ida, and is so highly preserved that soft tissues and fur impressions were preserved, along with the digestive tract that allowed researchers to discover the last meal that it ingested - fruits and leaves. She also had a broken wrist, which had since healed, and it is believed that she would have been about 9 months old. Alive, she would have weighed around two pounds, and about two feet in length.

This finding is a remarkable one, not only for the high preservation of the fossil, but for the potential implications for paleontologists. A mere twenty million years prior to this is the KT boundary, a major extinction line that saw the demise of the Dinosaurs. With their passing came the rise of the mammals, and a world that looked much like ours today. The location where Ida was discovered is known as the Grube Messel, a World Heritage Site, and 47 million years ago, it was a para-tropical rain forest.

http://io9.com/5261379/47-million-year-old-skeleton-reveals-the-missing-link-between-lemurs-and-humans

A Map of Science

The image above is a view of an extraordinarily information-dense representation, not just of connections among fields, but of their content. At 13,566,672 pixels, most of the text is readable. I have the printed version and examined it with a magnifying glass.

Under the title “A Map of Science”, it was featured by Nature in 2006. Here’s a description by the developers at informationesthetics.org:

As to what the image depicts, it was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as red and blue circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved lines) were made between the paradigms that shared common members, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms closer to one another when a physical simulation forced them all apart: thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers. Labels list common words unique to each paradigm.

Each “list of common words unique to each paradigm” forms a streaming ribbon in the image above. What the authors call a paradigm, I would call a field, or topical area (such as seismology, organometallic chemistry, cryptology, virology, and stellar dynamics), clustered within broader areas (such as geophysics, chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, and astrophysics).

Chocolate-Fueled Race Car Unveiled By Scientists

LONDON — Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world's fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers. Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car's size, weight, and performance.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/chocolatefueled-race-car-_n_196861.html

'Racetrack' computer memory could be 100 times faster, cheaper

Soon your computer and electronic gadgets could be much smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable and even greener thanks to a new form of computer memory technology called racetrack.

Christopher Marrows, a physicist at England's University of Leeds, says racetrack memory, currently under development at IBM, will be a vast improvement over today's leading computer memory technology - hard disk and flash - which each have serious limitations.

Racetrack is showing to be more reliable than hard disks, making consistent computer crashes, well, a distant memory.

And it's cheaper than flash - perhaps 100 times less expensive.

"This technology will allow you to have the best of both worlds - cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders and other devices," says Marrows. "But, more importantly, there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free, like YouTube.com and Gmail.com."

Racetrack, as the name implies, is all about speed - and reliability, since all the parts are static.

Data stored on racetrack moves around on a wire pushed by spiralling magnetics, unlike hard disks in which a motor-operated head, much like a record player, has to move to the data to read it. It's those moving parts that make hard disks, invented by IBM in 1956, susceptible to crashing.

"Hard disks are so good because they are so cheap," says Marrows. "But they are bad because of the moving parts, which wear out or crash."

Flash memory, created by Toshiba in 1980, has its own drawbacks. As a solid-state storage device with no moving parts, it's faster and more reliable than disks, but it has a limited number of erase-write cycles before the memory capacity begins to deteriorate.

The impact of racetrack, which has the durability and speed of flash and the affordability of hard disk, will be enormous, says Stuart Parkin, IBM fellow and inventor of the technology.

"Racetrack will have cheap memory with the possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out," he says.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Racetrack+speeds+memory/1488396/story.html

Earth-Sized Planet Discovered By Scientists

HATFIELD, England — Scientists have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is close to Earth in size _ far different from the behemoths previously detected, researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists attending a conference in England said that the planet was less than twice the size of Earth. Nearly 350 so-called exoplanets have been found outside our solar system but so far nearly every one has been too close or too far from its sun, making all too hot or too cold to support life.

Massive planets are more likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Planets much smaller than earth are very difficult to detect.

The new planet is the smallest exoplanet yet discovered but it is probably too hot for human life because it sits very close to the sun-like star it orbits, researcher Michel Mayor said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/21/earthsized-planet-discove_n_189433.html

3D Printing and Self Replicating Machines In Your Living Room - Seriously!

Imagine having a machine for $500 in your living room that can take your computer based specification for a 3D object and print out a plastic replica of the object in a matter of minutes.  Imagine furthermore that all of the specifications for the machine are completely open source, completely shareable and modifiable by anyone in the world, and that there is a worldwide community of volunteers working feverishly to support you and anyone else to troubleshoot and improve the machine.  Imagine no longer…this machine, called a Reprap, is reality!  Best of all, these machines are ultimately designed to self replicate themselves, bringing us within tantalizing reach of a long envisioned era of self replicating machines.


http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/09/3d-printing-and-self-replicating-machines-in-your-living-room-seriously/

Mars has a layer of Ice

Formed sometime between January and September 2008, this fresh crater has dredged up barely buried water ice and splashed it onto the Martian surface. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this colour close-up image on 1 November 2008. The scene is about 30 metres across. (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Mars has a layer of ice as shallow as a few tens of centimeters below the surface. If the Viking lander had been able to dig deeper it would have found it in the 1970s. Analysis of recent impact craters show the exposed ice, which then is sublimated into the atmosphere.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/mars-has-layer-of-ice.html

Implantable Telescope for the Eye

A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.

"This is one of the few options for people with end-stage macular degeneration," says Kathryn Colby, an eye surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, in Boston, who helped develop the surgical procedure used to implant the device.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22378/

Microbes turn electricity directly to methane

(PhysOrg.com) -- A tiny microbe can take electricity and directly convert carbon dioxide and water to methane, producing a portable energy source with a potentially neutral carbon footprint, according to a team of Penn State engineers.

"We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, Penn State. "We may now understand why."

Methanogenic microorganisms do produce methane in marshes and dumps, but scientists thought that the organisms turned hydrogen or organic materials, such as acetate, into methane. However, the researchers found, while trying to produce hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells, that their cells produced much more methane than expected.

"All the methane generation going on in nature that we have assumed is going through hydrogen may not be," said Logan. "We actually find very little hydrogen in the gas phase in nature. Perhaps where we assumed hydrogen is being made, it is not."

Microbial electrolysis cells do require an electrical voltage to be added to the voltage that is produced by bacteria using organic materials to produce current that evolves into hydrogen. The researchers found that the Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells. They report their findings in this week's issue of Environmental Science and Technology.

"We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane," said Logan.

http://www.physorg.com/news157651388.html

DNA-Based Assembly Line for Precision Nano-Cluster Construction

March 29, 2009

UPTON, NY — Building on the idea of using DNA to link up nanoparticles — particles measuring mere billionths of a meter — scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a molecular assembly line for predictable, high-precision nano-construction. Such reliable, reproducible nanofabrication is essential for exploiting the unique properties of nanoparticles in applications such as biological sensors and devices for converting sunlight to electricity. The work will be published online March 29, 2009, by Nature Materials.

http://www.bnl.gov/cfn/news/PRdisplay.asp?prID=921

A genetic technique successfully treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy in dogs

An international team of researchers has successfully treated dogs with the canine form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rapidly progressing and ultimately fatal muscle disease that afflicts one out of every 3,600 boys. The researchers used a novel technique called exon skipping to restore partial function to the gene involved in Duchenne. The study, published in Annals of Neurology, gives hope that a similar approach could work in humans.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22327/page1/

Solar Refrigerator: A Counterintuitive Prototype

The fridge was developed by mechanic engineering students Frederik Knop, Nicolás Ripoll, and Olivier Bernade, the last one a French exchange student.

The prototype is based on adsorption, which Wikipedia explains in the following way:

Absorptive refrigeration uses a source of heat to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling process.[...] The classic gas absorption refrigerator sends liquid ammonia into a hydrogen gas. The liquid ammonia evaporates in the presence of hydrogen gas, providing the cooling. The now-gaseous ammonia is sent into a container holding water, which absorbs the ammonia. The water-ammonia solution is then directed past a heater, which boils ammonia gas out of the water-ammonia solution. The ammonia gas is then condensed into a liquid. The liquid ammonia is then sent back through the hydrogen gas, completing the cycle.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/new-solar-refrigerator-prototype-from-chile.php

Massive young star explodes 'before its time'

A massive young star seems to have exploded before its time, new Hubble Space Telescope images reveal. The star, the heftiest to have been linked to a supernova explosion, could challenge models of when stellar furnaces end their lives.

Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the Sun end their lives in dramatic explosions when the nuclear furnaces at their cores run out of fuel and collapse into neutron stars or black holes.

The Hubble observations suggest the erstwhile star was a luminous blue variable, a massive star at least 50 times as heavy as the Sun that jettisons most of itself material into space in a series of outbursts. Eta Carinae, wedged between gigantic hourglass-shaped clouds of material that it sloughed off, is a classic example of this kind of star.

That classification was surprising, since luminous blue variables were not expected to explode. Stellar models predict that the stars should evolve further – into other stellar types, shedding all of the hydrogen on their surfaces and most of their mass, before running out of fuel and going supernova.

But "our star when it exploded still had some of its hydrogen envelope. It seems to have exploded before its time," says team member Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University in California.

One possibility, Leonard says, is that the star was actually close to death at its core, and for some reason did not lose all the hydrogen on its surface, appearing 'healthy'.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16823-massive-young-star-explodes-before-its-time.html

Desktop Factory 125ci 3D Printer

Until now, 3D printers have been large, expensive machines confined to the shops and design departments of major corporations and elite design firms. With the introduction of the Desktop Factory 3D printer, priced disruptively lower than the nearest competitive offering, Desktop Factory becomes the leader in high performance low-cost 3D printing technologies.

http://www.desktopfactory.com/

U.S. engineers find way to build a better battery

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars.

And because they use older materials in a new way, the batteries could be available for sale in two to three years, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Current rechargeable lithium batteries can store large amounts of energy, making them long-running. But they are stingy about releasing their power, making them discharge energy slowly and require hours to recharge.

Scientists traditionally have blamed slow-moving lithium ions -- which carry charge across the battery -- for this sluggishness.

However, about five years ago, Gerbrand Ceder and a team at MIT discovered that lithium ions in traditional lithium iron phosphate battery material actually move quite quickly.

"It turned out there were other limitations," Ceder said in a telephone interview.

Ceder and colleagues discovered that lithium ions travel through tunnels accessed from the surface of the material. If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, it can quickly deliver a charge. But if the ion is not at the entrance, it cannot easily move there, making it less efficient at delivering a charge.

Ceder and colleagues remedied this by revamping the battery recipe. "We changed the composition of the base material and we changed the way it is made -- the heat treatment," Ceder said.

This created many smooth tunnels in the material that allow the ions to slip in and out easily. "The trick was knowing what to change," he said.

Using their new processing technique, the team made a small battery that could be fully charged in 10 to 20 seconds.

Ceder thinks the material could lead to smaller, lighter batteries because less material is needed for the same result.

And because they simply tinkered with a material already commonly used for batteries, it could be easily adapted for commercial use.

"If manufacturers decide they want to go down this road, they could do this in a few years," Ceder said.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090311/tc_nm/us_batteries_3

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

When those Apple advertisements tout "there's an app for just about anything," they aren't kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan's App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called "ServersMan@iPhone", the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

The new application was developed by a Japanese operation called FreeBit, a Tokyo-based venture company known for providing its network platform to many VNO/ISPs (virtual network operator/Internet service providers).

Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.

Nanotubes That See Everything

Carbon nanotubes that respond to visible light might mean better solar cells and artificial retinas

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Livermore, CA, have created the first carbon-nanotube devices that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light. Their work might one day find a range of applications, including in solar cells that absorb more light, tiny cameras that work in very low light, and better artificial retinas.

Other researchers have demonstrated nanotubes that can detect light of specific wavelengths, including ultraviolet light, but never the entire visible spectrum of light. "This is a significant milestone," says George Grüner, a professor of physics and head of the Nano-Biophysics Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the Sandia work.

The light sensor inside a digital camera--known as a charge-coupled device--converts light into an electrical signal because as photons bombard silicon, they create electron holes in the material. In contrast, carbon-nanotube light sensors work in a similar way to biological eyes. The nanotubes are decorated with three kinds of chromophores--molecules that change shape in response to a particular wavelength of light. This change in shape results in a change in the chromophores' orientations with respect to the nanotube that, in turn, changes the electrical conductivity of the nanotube in a way that can be measured to deduce the color and intensity of the light. The Sandia researchers used three different types of chromophores, which respond to either red, green, or blue bands of the visible-light spectrum.

The work is still at an early stage, but nanotube light sensors could have advantages over today's light-sensing chips. Most important, says Sandia researcher Xinjian Zhou, the devices are intrinsically high resolution and small. Their resolution is the same as the diameter of each nanotube--about one nanometer. And because an array of the nanotubes could be very small, light could be focused into a very small area, meaning that future devices would be very sensitive to low light levels. Also, nanotube light sensors could be printed on flexible polymer backings. This could make them cheaper to manufacture and also less irritating to biological tissue--an important consideration for retinal implants.

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

When those Apple advertisements tout "there's an app for just about anything," they aren't kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan's App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called "ServersMan@iPhone", the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

The new application was developed by a Japanese operation called FreeBit, a Tokyo-based venture company known for providing its network platform to many VNO/ISPs (virtual network operator/Internet service providers).

Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.

Find may revolutionize computers

Scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology have
made a significant breakthrough that could help pave the way for new
generations of smaller, more energy-efficient computers.

The
team, led by Robert Wolkow, has invented the world's smallest quantum
dots, atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons, using a
fraction of the power of current computer technology.

"Roughly
speaking, we predict there could be a 1,000-time reduction in power
consumption with electronic computers built in this new way," said
Wolkow, a physicist at the University of Alberta.

"And they could
be something like 1,000 times smaller in size. So it's reaching the
very limit as far as anyone could imagine of how small things could
get."

The team's work is published in the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, considered the world's premier physics journal.

Current
computers use transistors, which are essentially valves for flowing
streams of electrons around a circuit. In recent years, engineers have
found ways to make these devices smaller, but pushing electrons through
narrow spaces raises the danger of the machines overheating and failing.

"So the problem is no longer how do we make it smaller, it's how do we consume less power," Wolkow said.

Energy in relation

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/type-iii-kardashev-civilization.html

Klingon Keyboard: for serious Trekkies only

Are you one of the biggest nerds in the world? If so, you probably know the fake Klingon language from Star Trek.
And maybe you want to write things in this fake tongue. But here you
are stuck with a stupid English keyboard. What to do? Buy a keyboard
with Klingon symbols on it, that's what!

Not only does this keyboard let you type in a made-up language, but
it also connects with a PS/2 cable, something no current computers use.
So to recap: if you're a super nerd with an old computer and you want
to type in Klingon, you can buy this warrior's accessory here.
For the other 99.99999999% of the world, we'll stick to regular
keyboards. And for the precious few of us who might need their Klingon
fix now and then, stick to online Klingon translators.

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/01/klingon_keyboar.php

NASA Successfully Tests First Deep Space Internet

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called
Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space
images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million
miles from Earth.

"This is the first step in creating a
totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary
Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking
architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in
Washington.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google
Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., partnered 10 years ago to develop this
software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that
differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf
co-designed.

The Interplanetary Internet must be robust to
withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Glitches can
happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms
and long communication delays occur. The delay in sending or receiving
data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the
speed of light.

Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not
assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a
destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded.
Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary
until it can communicate safely with another node. This
store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing
the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not
get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually,
the information is delivered to the end user.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html

Water Vapor Confirmed on Alien Planet

The unequivocal signature of water vapor has been found on a
planet beyond our solar system.

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope,
astronomers detected
the steamy signature of water vapor in the light coming from a large
exoplanet circling around a star about 63 light-years from Earth.
Though it's not the first sign of water vapor around this planet, it's
the strongest evidence yet.

The planet, HD 189733b, is what's called a "Hot Jupiter" — a boiling,
gigantic gas planet more akin to our own Jupiter or Saturn than to a
terrestrial planet like Earth. It's not a good candidate itself for alien
life, but the successful detection of water vapor here, in the
location and quantities that theorists predicted, bodes well for further
studies of more promising locales for extraterrestrial life.

"It means we're starting to understand these objects a
little bit better than we did when we first started," astrophysicist Adam
Burrows of Princeton University told Wired.com. "It’s a trial run for the
much more detailed investigations that will be possible in the years to come as
we take this stepping stone from giant planets to terrestrial planets."

Though water vapor is thought to be fairly common on planets — even
our own Jupiter has it — the discovery of its presence on another world
is significant and points the way toward future discoveries, scientists
say. Yesterday scientists announced that the Hubble Space Telescope
had found carbon dioxide, which under the right circumstances could be
connected to life, on the same planet. The presence of methane has also
been detected.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/embargoed---wat.html

Proposed Laser ignition Fusion/Fission Hybrid Commercial Power by 2030

LIFE, an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, is an advanced energy concept under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Conceptual design for a LIFE engine and power plant based on National
Ignition Facility (NIF)-like fusion targets and a NIF-like laser
operating at an energy of 1.4 megajoules (MJ) at a wavelength of 350
nanometers (ultraviolet), with a 2.5-meter-radius target chamber and
with the final optics at a distance of 25 meters from the target. The
National Ignition Campaign will begin during 2009, and ignition and
fusion energy yields of 10 to 15 megajoules (MJ) are anticipated during
fiscal years 2010 or 2011. Fusion yields of 20 to 35 MJ are expected
soon thereafter. Ultimately fusion yields of 100 MJ are expected on
NIF. The LIFE system is designed to operate with fusion energy gains of
about 25 to 30 and fusion yields of about 35 to 50 MJ to provide about
500 megawatts (MW) of fusion power – about 80 percent of which comes in
the form of 14.1 million electron-volt (MeV) neutrons with the rest of
the energy in X-rays and ions. This is an approach which would be as
good as and in some ways superior to liquid flouride thorium reactors.
Improvements in lasers and cost reduction with laser components would
meet the requirements of this project if current trends continue. A
success with aneutronic nuclear fusion such as might occur with Bussard
Inertial electrostatic fusion, dense plasma focus fusion would likely
be superior to this. It would be worthwhile to fund several of these
vastly superior approaches to nuclear fission and fusion for a billion
or few billion each in order to get many multiple trillions of payoff
with a homerun energy success. Even partial success with one of these
approaches could deal with all of the current nuclear waste (unburned
fuel) which would cost tens of billions to store in a place like Yucca
Mountain.

A Computer Program That Taught Itself to Draw the Mona Lisa

These images represent four steps in one computer program's progress
towards recreating the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent
polygons. Swedish programmer Roger Alsing did this simple weekend
project with genetic programming that resulted in a program that could
generate, on its own, a pretty awesome likeness of the famous painting.
So how did he do it?

He wrote a program that would randomly place shapes on a black
background, and decide whether the abstract pattern looked more or less
like the famous painting. After almost a million tries, the program's
output had evolved to the point where Alsing had the image on the far
right.

http://io9.com/5106124/a-computer-program-that-taught-itself-to-draw-the-mona-lisa

No Neanderthal Ancestors for Modern Humans

If ancient homo sapiens got it on with their Neanderthal
cousins, there were no children to show for it. Researchers studying
Neanderthal DNA have sequenced half of the Neanderthal genome, and
shoot down the theory that European humans interbred with the
now-extinct species. And the team says the genome has other things to
teach us about Neanderthal life, including their sexual proclivities.

The
research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthology
presented their findings last week at a human evolution conference. The
researchers have compared the Neanderthal genome to that of modern
humans of European and African descent. Because Neanderthals and modern
humans coexisted in Europe, researchers have theorized that European
genomes would have more similarities with the Neanderthal genome than
would African genomes. However, European and African genomes have a
similar number of differences from the Neanderthal genome, suggesting
that modern humans in Europe outbred rather than assimilated the
Neanderthals.

http://io9.com/5105912/no-neanderthal-ancestors-for-modern-humans

Einstein's E=MC2 Finally Proven Right 103 Years Later

PARIS (AFP) - It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's
celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a
heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre
for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest
supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass
of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and
neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are
bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of
quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95
percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of
mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many
times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic
weapons.

But resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081120/sc_afp/sciencephysicseinstein_081120235605??

Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed

A nearby solar system bears a striking similarity to our own solar system, raising the possibility it could harbor Earth-like planets.

Epsilon Eridani, located about 10.5 light-years from our sun, is surrounded by two asteroid belts that are shaped by planets, astronomers at SETI Institute and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced today.

But it's the possibility that currently undetected smaller planets could lie within the innermost asteroid belt that make the solar system intriguing to astrobiologists.

"This system probably looks a lot like ours did when life first took root on Earth," said SETI's Dana Backman, lead author of a paper on the 850-million-year-old star that will appear next year in The Astrophysical Journal, in a release.

Back then, the Kuiper Belt of space objects beyond Neptune was much larger. Over time, many of those objects fell into the inner solar system during a period about four billion years ago known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. The barrage of large asteroids pockmarked the rocky planets and possibly created our moon when a large object collided with Earth, expelling a huge amount of material into space.

Epsilon Eridani's evolution could provide insight into how universal these processes are. That's important because our solar system contains a planet — Earth — just far enough from the sun not to be fried but close enough to capture enough energy to support life as we know it. Similar systems
could end up with planets orbiting in the same biological sweet spot.

"Epsilon Eridani looks a lot like the young solar system, so it's conceivable that it will evolve similarly," said astronomer Massimo Marengo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a co-author of the paper.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/nearby-solar-sy.html

Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed

A nearby solar system bears a striking similarity to our own solar
system, raising the possibility it could harbor Earth-like planets.

Epsilon Eridani, located about 10.5 light-years from our sun, is surrounded by two asteroid belts that are shaped by planets, astronomers at SETI Institute and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced today.

But it's the possibility that currently undetected smaller planets could lie
within the innermost asteroid belt that make the solar system intriguing to astrobiologists.

"This system probably looks a lot like ours did when life first took root on Earth," said SETI's Dana Backman, lead author of a paper on the 850-million-year-old star that will appear next year in The Astrophysical Journal, in a release.

Back then, the Kuiper Belt
of space objects beyond Neptune was much larger. Over time, many of
those objects fell into the inner solar system during a period about
four billion years ago known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.
The barrage of large asteroids pockmarked the rocky planets and
possibly created our moon when a large object collided with Earth,
expelling a huge amount of material into space.

Epsilon Eridani's evolution could provide insight into how universal these processes are.
That's important because our solar system contains a planet — Earth —
just far enough from the sun not to be fried but close enough to
capture enough energy to support life as we know it. Similar systems
could end up with planets orbiting in the same biological sweet spot.

"Epsilon Eridani looks a lot like the young solar system, so it's conceivable that it will evolve similarly," said astronomer Massimo Marengo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a co-author of the paper.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/nearby-solar-sy.html

Holographic Television Coming Soon

We use high-definition television, dark rooms, and surround sound to create an immersive media experience. But for those who want television that more closely resembles the holodeck, there’s good news. A University of Arizona research team has made a significant breakthrough in 3-D displays that could put holographic sets on the market in five to ten years.

A team at the university’s Optical Sciences department, headed by photonics and lasers chair Dr. Nasser Peyghambarian, has created the first rewritable holographic displays that operate from memory:

"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.

The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.

These holographic television would offer multiple types of 3-dimensional viewing experiences:

According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath.

So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall.

It’s still a long way away from the multisensory experience of the holodeck, but it could mean that next decade’s first person shooters will have you sniping aliens from behind your sofa.

http://io9.com/5059828/holographic-television-coming-soon

Two Planets Suffer Violent Collision

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — Two
terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300
light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision,
astronomers at UCLA, Tennessee State University and the California
Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the
Astrophysical Journal.
"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," said Benjamin
Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on
the paper. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before.
Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully
mature planetary system."

"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision
would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the
ultimate extinction event," said co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer
at Tennessee State University (TSU). "A massive disk of
infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to
this sad fate."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080923164646.htm

China takes the leap: Emdrive aka Infinite Improbability Drive now in development

While the rest of the world was in some kind of mass coma over the past
year, China decided to have a hand at building the highly controversial
Emdrive (electromagnetic drive) -- an engine that uses microwaves to
transform electrical energy into thrust, all in a comparably
light-weight, efficient package. The end result could mean 41 day
journeys to Mars, not to mention terrestrial vehicle propulsion and
satellite applications. Perpetual motion
malarkey you say? British scientist and originator of the concept,
Roger Shawyer of Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd. (SPR), assures you
it's nothing of the kind, and Chinese Professor Yang Juan concurs.
Research headed by Juan at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU)
in Xi'an commenced in June 2007, and a thruster now being built based
on Shawyer's theories is scheduled for completion by the end of this
year. Meanwhile in the US: cue the sound of crickets.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/chinese-buildin.html
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/25/china-takes-the-leap-emdrive-aka-infinite-improbability-drive-n/

A Plane With Wings Of Glass?

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2008) — Imagine a plane that has wings made out of glass. Thanks to a major breakthrough in understanding the nature of glass by scientists at the University of Bristol, this has just become a possibility.

Despite its solid appearance, glass is actually a 'jammed' state of matter that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass can't reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbours, so it never quite becomes a 'proper' solid.

For more than 50 years most scientists have tried to understand just what glass is. Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic jam, but now Dr Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol, with colleagues in Canberra and Tokyo, has shown that the problem really lies with the destination, not with the traffic jam.

Publishing June 22, 2008, in Nature Materials, the team has revealed that glass 'fails' to be a solid due to the special atomic structures that form in a glass when it cools (ie, when the atoms arrive at their destination).

UnoCycle single-wheel bike just might be real

You've seen the Noah, marveled at the Embrio
— isn't it time you saw a one-wheeled motorcycle that might
actually be real? Witness the UnoCycle, a single-wheel, single-rider
(please don't test that limit) vehicle that appears to be based on
gyroscopic tech similar to a Segway and, more importantly, has
photographic evidence of its existence. Of guys riding it and
everything.

Still in development, the Uno's top speed is 15 mph, but the
inventor, Ben Gulak, suspects it could go as high as 40. That's no
Harley, but it's faster than a Segway, and remember this is a
battery-powered machine that you never need to fill up. Gulak says he's
getting lots of interest lately — we hope he invests a little of
his incoming finances into a less-skeletal website.

Southern California Hot Spot Hits 812 Degrees, Baffles Experts

The ground is so hot in one part of Southern California it can melt the shoes right off your feet.

An unexplained "thermal anomaly" caused a patch of land in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, to reach a temperature of over 800 degrees on Friday, baffling experts who have been monitoring the area for weeks.

The anomaly was discovered after the land got so hot that it started a brush fire and burned three acres last month.

Firefighters were brought to the scene after reports of a blaze, but by the time they arrived only smoldering dirt and brush remained.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,398484,00.html

Phoenix Lander Has Touched Martian Water For the First Time

NASA just announced that the Phoenix Lander has successfully scooped up a Martian water ice sample and placed it in its oven for scientific analysis. "Mars Odyssey discovered this ice six years ago, but we've now touched it and tasted it, which is something that hasn't been done before," said a scientist at today's press conference. The sample has been dubbed the "Wicked Witch" (because it's meeeelting, meeeelting—get it?) and it will continue to be analyzed over the course of the coming weeks as data trickles in. Exciting, exciting stuff from this very successful mission. More details and new hi-res surface images to follow.

"Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution

Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity - whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source - runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

http://www.truthout.org/article/major-discovery-from-mit-primed-unleash-solar-revolution

Advance brings low-cost, bright LED lighting closer to reality

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -





Researchers at Purdue University have overcome a major obstacle in
reducing the cost of "solid state lighting," a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted.

The technology, called light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, is about four
times more efficient than conventional incandescent lights and more
environmentally friendly than compact fluorescent bulbs. The LEDs also
are expected to be far longer lasting than conventional lighting,
lasting perhaps as long as 15 years before burning out.

"The LED technology has the potential of
replacing all incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs, which would
have dramatic energy and environmental ramifications," said Timothy D.
Sands, the Basil S. Turner Professor of Materials Engineering and
Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The LED lights are about as efficient as compact fluorescent lights, which contain harmful mercury.

The crowd within

THAT problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.

That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess that they can.

Ask them to make a second and it should, by definition, be less accurate. If that were true, averaging the first and second guesses should decrease the accuracy. Yet Edward Vul at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harold Pashler at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed in a study just published in Psychological Science that the average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the “CIA World Factbook”: for example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?” Half the participants were unexpectedly asked to make a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11614183

Laughter May Outlive Humans—and Even Numbers

Futurologists envision a world a million years from now in which the entire solar system has been turned into computronium
and nanobots transform our garbage into foie gras. But in my
experience, the repeated sin of futurologists is that they often
extrapolate from what is new rather than from what is old. Computers
and nanotechnology, impressive though they are, are things of
relatively recent origin. As such, they are unlikely to be around for
very long.

To find something that will pretty certainly endure into the distant
future, we are obliged, paradoxically enough, to go back much farther
into the past. And if we could cast a look back several million years,
we would see, among other things, laughter and numbers. So we can be
pretty confident that laughter and numbers will survive long after most
of what we’re familiar with is gone.

The insight that old things tend to last and new things tend to disappear flows from the Copernican principle.
This principle says, in essence, “You’re not
special.” Before Copernicus, we imagined that we occupied a very
special place at the center of the universe. Now we know better: We are
on an average planet in an average galaxy in an average cluster. But
the Copernican principle applies to time as well as to space. If there
is nothing special about our perspective, we are unlikely to be
observing any given thing at the very beginning or the very end of its
existence. And that rather obvious point can lead to some interesting
predictions.

Consider the longevity of the human race. If there is nothing
special about the moment at which we observe our species, then it is 95
percent certain that we are seeing Homo sapiens in the middle 95
percent of its existence—not the first fortieth (2½
percent) or the last fortieth (2½ percent). Humans have already
been around for about 200,000 years. That means we can, with 95 percent
confidence, expect the species to endure for at least another 5,100
years (1/39 x 200,000) but for no more than 7.8 million years (39 x
200,000).

It was Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist at Princeton University,
who pioneered this sort of reasoning. In a paper published in Nature on
May 27, 1993, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects,”
Gott noted that the Copernican-based calculation gives H. sapiens an
expected total longevity comparable to that of other hominid species
(H. erectus lasted 1.6 million years) and of mammal species in general
(whose average span is 2 million years). It also gives us a decent shot
at being around a million years from now.

What else might be around in the Year Million? Consider something of
recent origin, like the Internet. The Internet has existed for about 25
years now (as I learned by going on the Internet and looking at Wikipedia).
By Copernican reasoning, this means we can be 95 percent certain that
it will continue to be around for another seven-plus months but that it
will disappear within 975 years. So in the Year Million, there will
almost certainly be nothing recognizable as the Internet. (This is,
perhaps, not a terribly surprising conclusion.) Ditto for baseball.
Ditto for what we call industrial technology, which, having come into
existence a little more than two centuries ago, is likely to be
superseded by something strange and new in the next 10,000 years.

The Web Time Forgot

MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading
medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory
Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny
storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in
the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home
for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or
“electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow
people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents,
images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the
devices to send messages to one another, share files and even
congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a
“réseau,” which might be translated as
“network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through
a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug
Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim
Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced
ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair
would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although
Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies
like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the
hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk
version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired,
who is writing a book about the future of technology.

RiTdisplay develops OLED touch panels

Taiwan-based RiTdisplay has developed OLED panels with touch functionality, which is now ready for volume production once orders are received, according to the company.

The OLED capacity touch panel adopts STMicroelectronics' controller IC, and currently three sizes – 1.1-, 1.8- and 3.1-inch –have been developed, the company said.

RiTdisplay is a leading supplier of OLED panels, with its focus on the passive matrix type. It said 70% of its clients are brand name vendors.


RiTdisplay OLED touch panel

Scientists develop fastest computer

WASHINGTON - Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.

"The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.

But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080609/ap_on_hi_te/fastest_computer

New 'super-paper' is stronger than cast iron

Punching your way out of a paper bag could become a lot harder,
thanks to the development of a new kind of paper that is stronger than
cast iron.

The
new paper could be used to reinforce conventional paper, produce
extra-strong sticky tape or help create tough synthetic replacements
for biological tissues, says Lars Berglund from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Despite
its great strength, Berglund's "nanopaper" is produced from a
biological material found in conventional paper: cellulose. This long
sugar molecule is a principal component of plant cell walls and is the
most common organic compound on Earth.

Wood is typically about half cellulose, mixed with other structural compounds.

Support network

In
plant cell walls individual cellulose molecules bind together to
produce fibres around 20 nanometres in diameter, 5000 times thinner
than a human hair. These fibres form tough networks that provide the
cell walls with structural support.

"Cellulose
nanofibres are the main reinforcement in all plant structures and are
characterised by nanoscale dimensions, high strength and toughness,"
Berglund told New Scientist.

Cellulose
is extracted from wood to make paper, is the basis of cellophane, and
has also recently been used by materials scientists developing novel
plastic materials. But they have used it only as a cheap filler
material, ignoring its mechanical properties.

However,
the mechanical processes used to pulp wood and process it into paper
damage the individual cellulose fibres, greatly reducing their
strength. So Berglund and colleagues have developed a gentler process
that preserves the fibres' strength.

Tough as iron

The
new method involves breaking down wood pulp with enzymes and then
fragmenting it using a mechanical beater. The shear forces produced
cause the cellulose to gently disintegrate into its component fibres.

The
end result is undamaged cellulose fibres suspended in water. When the
water is drained away Berglund found that the fibres join together into
networks held by hydrogen bonds, forming flat sheets of "nanopaper".

Mechanical
testing shows it has a tensile strength of 214 megapascals, making it
stronger than cast iron (130 MPa) and almost as strong as structural
steel (250 MPa).

Normal
paper has a tensile strength less than 1 MPa. The tests used strips 40
millimetres long by 5mm wide and about 50 micrometres thick.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14084-new-superpaper-is-stronger-than-cast-iron.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_dn14084

Say goodbye to paper tickets

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has bid farewell to
the paper ticket on the eve of the industry’s conversion to 100%
electronic ticketing.

“Today we say goodbye to an industry icon,” said Giovanni
Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO. “The paper
ticket has served us well, but its time is over. After four years of
hard work by airlines around the world, tomorrow marks the beginning of
a new, more convenient and more efficient era for air travel.”

Paper tickets date back to the 1920s. Each airline used a different
form with varying rules. Airlines soon recognised the need for
standardisation of traffic documents, regulations and procedures to
support the growth of an industry that spanned the world. In 1930, the
IATA Traffic Committee developed the first standard hand-written ticket
for multiple trips. These same standards served the industry into the
early 1970s.

The organisations says a paper ticket costs an average of US$10 to
process versus US$1 for an electronic ticket. With over 400 million
tickets issued through IATA’s settlement systems annually, the
industry will save over US$3 billion each year.

To complete the conversion IATA has contacted 60,000 travel agents in
more than 200 countries to collect the remaining unused paper tickets
in the system – some 32 million worldwide. These will be securely
reclaimed, destroyed and recycled. “An era has ended. If you have
a paper ticket, it’s time to donate it to a museum,” said
Bisignani.

New York And London Finally Connected Via Undersea Tunnel

The telectroscope, a looking-glass tunnel connecting New York and
London has been completed at last, over 100 years after it was
abandoned. The tunnel, which starts in Brooklyn, was designed and
partly executed by late 1800s inventor Alexander Stanhope St. George. A
series of mirrors, cameras and a large underground tunnel, connects the
two cities. More details about the scope and gallery after the jump.

The telectroscope's inventor, St. George, was passionately committed to
the idea of being able to connect London and New York without having to
move. He constructed parts of a great shaft which unfortunately
collapsed on many of his workers in 1892. The project was never
completed. His ancestor Paul St. George stumbled upon the original
blueprints and details and brought the telectroscope to life.

What Windows Might Look Like On The OLPC

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/16/what-windows-might-look-like-on-the-olpc/

Estimated World Population to Pass 6,666,666,666 Today

The estimated population of the world will pass 6,666,666,666 today.
No doubt an interesting number for people everywhere (not referring to
any religion connotations). 5,555,555,555 was passed about 14 years
ago. You may not realize that only a 80 years ago, the population of
the Earth was only around 2 billion.
This shows how the population of the world has increased at an alarming
rate in recent times. Although the growth rate is almost half what it
was at its peak in 1963, when it was 2.2%. Unrelated but also an
interesting coincidence, the estimated number of available IPv4
addresses is getting very close to 666,666,666. It should cross over today as well.

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/09/1721239&from=rss