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February 28, 2005
Digging and Sniffing for Life on Mars
Mars is undergoing intensive, simultaneous scrutiny by the largest number of spacecraft ever to explore the red planet.
While orbiters conduct sensor sweeps of the martian landscape, the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers continue their extraordinary surface sojourns. The flood of scientific data continues to expose the truth about Mars.
But still to be nailed down: Was the planet once a home for life, perhaps even a hangout for biology today?
Ground-breaking investigations are just that. Some scientists see Mars underground as breathing room for a subsurface biosphere. If true, drilling down to come up with martian life may be in order.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 27, 2005
Unnatural Selection
To become a professional antenna designer, you can follow one of two paths: you can enroll in college- and graduate-level courses on electromagnetism, immerse yourself in the empirical study of antenna shapes, and apprentice yourself to an established technician willing to impart the closely guarded secrets of the discipline.
Or you can do what Jason Lohn did: let evolution do the work.
Physicists know a lot about Maxwell’s equations and the other principles governing wireless communications. But antenna design is still pretty much a dark art, says Lohn, a computer scientist working at NASA Ames Research Center outside Mountain View, CA. “The field is so squirrelly. All your learning is through trial and error, the school of hard knocks.”
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 26, 2005
The Ornithopter Project
Recently there have been many breakthroughs in “flapping wing” flying technology, particularly at University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, under the purview of Prof. James DeLaurier. Presently the prototypes that exist are mostly remote controlled small scale ornithopter’s. If this continues at the present state of development, major advancement could take numerous years. Professor DeLaurier has found an opportunity where this technology can be advanced in an expeditious and awe inspiring manner. In one year he envisions showcasing this technology at the 2006 Turin Olympics in Italy!
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Evolution Revolution
The college biology student felt yanked in two directions - as if he were being forced to choose between the scientific evidence he was encountering in college and the religious beliefs with which he'd been raised.
He went to see his teacher, Margaret Towne, a visiting distinguished professor at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. Towne was not only a devout Protestant Christian, but a pastor's wife. Yet, oddly enough, she embraced and taught evolutionary principles to college students.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 01:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 25, 2005
The future of the future
bring it up because I've been hearing more references lately to Kurzweil's Law, otherwise known as the Law of Accelerating Returns. Coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil, the theory states that building on past accomplishments, the pace of technological change doubles every decade--leading to a Moore's Law vision of progress.
"Early stages of technology--the wheel, fire, stone tools--took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift such as the printing press took on the order of a century to be widely deployed. Today, major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the World Wide Web, were widely adopted in only a few years time," Kurzweil wrote in the original essay outlining the theory.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Cloying Girlfriends
For Asian men who can't or won't find a girlfriend, a Hong Kong artificial intelligence company will soon offer a virtual one who lives in a cell phone.
Named Vivienne, the 3D electro-nymph offers many of the responsibilities, but none of the pleasures a breathing woman can provide.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 23, 2005
Grand ambitions
Hugh Durrant-Whyte is building a world where one day he will control the Hunter Valley's mines and robotic expeditionary forces in remote areas from the PC in his Sydney office.
Professor Durrant-Whyte and his team at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems are tackling a "Grand Challenge" of IT research – the fusion of machines, computing, sensing and software to create intelligent systems that interact with the complex real world.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 22, 2005
World's Fastest OscillatingNanoMachines
Nanotechnology leapt into the realm of quantum mechanics this past winter when an antenna-like sliver of silicon one-tenth the width of a human hair oscillated in a lab in a Boston University basement. With two sets of protrusions, much like the teeth from a two-sided comb or the paddles from a rowing shell, the antenna not only exhibits the first quantum nanomechanical motion but is also the world’s fastest moving nanostructure.
A team of Boston University physicists led by Assistant Professor Pritiraj Mohanty developed the nanomechanical oscillator. Operating at gigahertz speeds, the technology could help further miniaturize wireless communication devices like cell phones, which exchange information at gigahertz frequencies. But, more important to the researchers, the oscillator lies at the cusp of classic physics, what people experience everyday, and quantum physics, the behavior of the molecular world.
Comprised of 50 billion atoms, the antenna built by Mohanty’s team is so far the largest structure to display quantum mechanical movements.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Robots That Act Like Rats
Sanjay Joshi, assistant professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering, and associate professor of psychology Jeffrey Schank have recorded the behavior of rat pups and built rat-like robots with the same basic senses and motor skills to see how behavior can emerge from a simple set of rules.
Seven to 10-day-old rat pups, blind and deaf, do not seem to do a whole lot. Videotaped in a rectangular arena in Schank's laboratory, they move about until they hit a wall, feel their way along the wall until their nose goes into a corner, then mostly stay put. Because their senses and responses are so limited, pups should be a good starting point for building robots that can do the same thing.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Artificially induced
There are some things that Selmer Bringsjord simply can't divulge. Specifics about a grant-funded project to develop reasoning computers, to ultimately enhance homeland security. Not "top secret," but "need to know."
And we don't need to know.
Bringsjord, the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, knows the deal in a totally non-conceptual way. He let something slip once. And he got The Call.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 20, 2005
Shuttle's recovery given a shot in the Canadarm
When the Discovery blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center this spring, it will be a landmark event for NASA, eager to prove that the shuttle is safe after the Columbia disaster two years ago. But it will also be a shining moment for Canadians who have played a crucial role in the craft's return to flight.
The Discovery will employ a number of new features to help ensure that the events of Feb. 1, 2003, when the Columbia disintegrated on re-entering Earth's atmosphere, are not repeated.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 19, 2005
Cosmic blast among brightest recorded
A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday.
No known eruption beyond our solar system has ever appeared as bright upon arrival.
The event equaled the brightness of the full Moon's reflected visible light, NASA says. It was not visible to the naked eye.
The blast originated about 50,000 light-years away and was detected December 27. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 18, 2005
Not so special after all
Advances in science may reduce humans to the pets of machines in 100 years, write Ian Sample, David Adam, Alok Jha and Simon Rogers.
Humans have always thought of themselves as special, and with good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics and in creating the spectacle that is morris dancing.
But our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of life has suffered huge blows at the hands of science. Every now and again comes an idea so revolutionary that it rocks the foundations on which our hubris is built.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 17, 2005
Cyber Treasures For Sale
The history of computing is largely written on paper and plastic that gets thrown away. Technical papers, manuals, business plans, magnetic data storage tapes. Why save 'em?
Because one day you may be able to sell them for a million bucks. At least that's the theory behind Christie's February 23 auction, called The Origins of Cyberspace. The sale's 255 lots range from a 1617 text by John Napier, the inventor of the logarithm, to 14 pages of notes penciled in 1982 by J. Presper Eckert, co-creator of the world's first large-scale computer, known as the ENIAC. That sheaf of three-ring binder paper is estimated to fetch between $4,000 and $6,000.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 16, 2005
Immortality Through Google
Artists participating in a group show being held at the Big Easy's charmingly bizarre Barrister's Gallery through March 27 are getting a little taste of what their lives might be like after they are dead.
"What are memorials to the dead but touchstones for the great post-mortem popularity contest? He whose gravestone draws the biggest crowds wins," said gallery owner Andy Antippas, who is curating Hydriotaphia: New Orleans Artists Design Their Own Funeral Urns with artist Dan Teague.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 15, 2005
Inside the future
Ian Pearson rattles off future technologies that range from the seemingly magical, such as supercomputers that breed like yoghurt cultures, to using your mobile phone in the mundane act of finding your mates at the pub.
Pearson is the futurist-in-residence at British Telecom's research labs, one of the most hallowed halls of deep research in the world and, along with Bell Labs in the US, a birthplace of early optical-fibre technologies. Pearson says that within a generation, we will grow computers from biological cultures that are faster than those we today construct in silicon, gold and plastic.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 14, 2005
TESTING DARWIN
If you want to find alien life-forms, hold off on booking that trip to the moons of Saturn. You may only need to catch a plane to East Lansing, Michigan.
The aliens of East Lansing are not made of carbon and water. They have no DNA. Billions of them are quietly colonizing a cluster of 200computers in the basement of the Plant and Soil Sciences building at Michigan State University. To peer into their world, however, you have to walk a few blocks west on Wilson Road to the engineering department and visit the Digital Evolution Laboratory. Here you'll find a crew of computer scientists, biologists, and even a philosopher or two gazing at computer monitors, watching the evolution of bizarre new life-forms.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 13, 2005
US denies patent for part-human hybrid
A New York scientist's seven-year effort to win a patent on a laboratory-conceived creature that is part human and part animal ended in failure Friday, closing a historic and somewhat ghoulish chapter in US intellectual property law.
The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the claim, saying the hybrid -- designed for use in medical research but not yet created -- would be too closely related to a human to be patentable.
Paradoxically, the rejection was a victory of sorts for the inventor, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y. An opponent of patents on living things, he had no intention of making the creatures. He said his goal was to set a legal precedent that would keep others from profiting from similar "inventions."
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
Genetic Barcodes Will Identify World's Species
A team of international scientists launched an ambitious project on Thursday to genetically identify, or provide a barcode for, every plant and animal species on the planet.
By taking a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information, the researchers plan to build the largest database of its kind.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 09, 2005
Tech Solves Hope Diamond Mystery
Researchers using computer analysis have traced the origin of the famed Hope Diamond, concluding that it was cut from a larger stone that was once part of the crown jewels of France.
A French connection had been suspected for the Hope, but the new study shows just how it would have fit inside the larger French Blue Diamond and how that gem was cut, Smithsonian gem curator Jeffrey Post explained.
The deep blue Hope Diamond is the centerpiece of the gem collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, famed for its claimed history of bad luck for its owners. It's been good fortune for the museum, though, drawing millions of visitors.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 06:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2005
What Exactly Is Under the Sea?
The nuclear-powered submarine USS San Francisco was heading toward Australia on Jan. 8 when it hit an underwater mountain not marked on naval charts. The impact brought the sub to an almost instantaneous stop, killing one crew member and seriously injuring 23 others.
The accident raises the question of why a state-of-the-art vessel in the world's most powerful military was effectively operating blind. The inner hull of the submarine was not breached, but one death resulted. Why, with sonar and satellite scanning, is so little known about the topography of the seabed?
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2005
Self-assembled nano-sized probes
Nano-sized particles embedded with bright, light-emitting molecules have enabled researchers to visualize a tumor more than one centimeter below the skin surface using only infrared light. A team of chemists, bioengineers and medical researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota has lodged fluorescent materials called porphyrins within the surface of a polymersome, a cell-like vesicle, to image a tumor within a living rodent. Their findings, which represent a proof of principle for the use of emissive polymersomes to target and visualize tumors, appear in the Feb. 7 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 05, 2005
Towards a truly clever Artificial Intelligence
Dr James Anderson, of the University’s Department of Computer Science, has developed for the first time the ‘perspective simplex’, or Perspex, which is a way of writing a computer program as a geometrical structure, rather than as a series of instructions.
Not only does the invention of the Perspex make it theoretically possible for us to develop robots with minds that learn and develop, it also provides us with clues to answer the philosophical conundrum of how minds relate to bodies in living beings.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 04, 2005
Machines that grow smarter with use
Among the handiest villains in science fiction are Computers That Know Too Much.
Think of the dream-weaving despots of The Matrix or murderous HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But in reality, even the most super supercomputer lacks the reasoning capacity of a child engrossed in a textbook.
Computers can't read the way we do.
They can't learn or reason like us.
Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines - creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level - is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 02, 2005
Robots acquire a sex drive
Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, giving cybersex new meaning.
Kim Jong-hwan, a leading authority on technology and ethics of robotics and the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed artificial chromosomes that he says will allow robots to feel lusty, and may even lead to them reproducing.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2005
Nanotechnology, Biotech, and Our Common Future
As befits an information-besotted age, we live amidst buzzwords that, like some species of exotic insect, seem to live and die in weeks. You might think that the acronym “NBIC” (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information and communication technology (ICT), and Cognitive science) is such an infocritter. But the phenomena behind this term are complex and profound, and raise difficult conceptual and operational questions for not just environmentalists, but anyone interested in human futures.
NBIC is not simply recognition of four rapidly evolving areas of research and technological advance. Rather, it also indicates that the four components -- which are probably best thought of as frontiers of knowledge, rather than simply new technologies -- are increasingly converging in many ways. The boundaries between them are growing increasingly fuzzy and fluid -- is building a DNA-based computational system ICT, or biotechnology, or nanotechnology? They also share some important functional similarities -- for example, all of them represent substantial leaps in the amount of information available to humans, and the ability to manipulate and learn from that information. Thus, for example, biotechnology explicates genome after genome, and the patent system and free market economics rapidly commoditize such information as it is developed. They also represent significant extensions of human intentionality into scales -- such as the very small -- that heretofore were closed to human design.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 05:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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