NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

2012: Science Fiction Dreams That Came True

As a longtime reader of science fiction, it's always interesting to see how the visions of writers eventually become real. Take Arthur C. Clarke's letter to Wireless World in 1945, which details the geostationary communications satellite network everyone uses today. The satellites are in what is called the "Clarke Orbit." And Isaac Asimov wrote frequently about humanoid robots, which are becoming more common in research labs -- although we have yet to see R. Daneel Olivaw from Asimov's Robot series.

So inspired by these writers and others, I decided to take a look at 2012 and the futuristic technologies that are materializing before our eyes.

ANALYSIS: Robot Prostitutes, the Future of Sex Tourism

Bionic Limbs
The term "cyborg" was coined in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, in an article they wrote for the journal Astronautics. Since then bionic limbs have been a trope in many pieces of fiction -– The Six Million Dollar Man of the 1970s, the Borg of the Star Trek franchise, and even Darth Vader. In 2012 for the first time, a paralyzed woman was able to control a robotic limb and feed herself directly with her brain. Continuing work with primates demonstrated that it's possible to make the brain-computer interface efficient enough to design more realistic movement into the limbs. The bionic limbs so far don't look anything like their fictional counterparts, as they are still connected via external electrodes to the skull. But that dream seems to be a lot closer than it was even a decade ago.

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

Quantum Teleportation and Communication
While it's not possible -- yet -- to "beam" an object around as in Star Trek, new records for zapping photons instantly from one place to another were set this year. Quantum teleportation has been done in the lab for some time, but the distances were on the order of a few yards. In 2012 the new record was 89 miles. In addition to teleporting, scientists built the first quantum Internet. It's only a beginning, but teleporting photons for miles would enable communications that can't be hacked or eavesdropped.

Genetic Disease Prevented
Genetic engineering for "better" humans is a theme that's appeared repeatedly ever since Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1931 -- although at that point nobody knew what DNA really was. Later, films such as Gattaca and novels such as Beggars in Spain explore the implications of widely available genetic alterations. In 2012, we saw a proof-of-concept for mitochondrial diseases. About one in 200 people are born with a disorder of the mitochondria, the energy factories of cells. For the first time scientists were able to transfer the nuclear DNA of one human egg cell to another. Two groups independently found a way to transplant nuclei between human egg cells, leaving behind the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child. The finding means that mitochondrial disorders could be cured before a child is born. Such techniques won't cure something like Down's syndrome, which involves nuclear DNA. But it shows that some manipulation of the human genome is not only possible, but happening. 

ANALYSIS: Ray Bradbury's Visions

The Universal Translator
Most of the time when intrepid explorers in fiction meet aliens, they always seem to speak perfect English. Doctor Who's TARDIS generates a field that allows travelers to be understood, while the crew of the Enterprise never seem to need a dictionary. Kim Stanley Robonson's Mars Trilogy features one, but he didn't think it would appear until late in the 21st century (the novels were written in the 1990s). While they won't let you talk to aliens, in the last year several speech-to-speech translators have managed to reach real consumer devices -- and even one type that uses your own voice. Most of the apps require an internet connection, though some, such as Jibbigo, can store their dictionaries locally. (If they ever add Klingon I'm taking it to the next ComicCon).

Head-mounted Computer Glasses
Readers of Charles Stross' novel Accelerando would have eagerly anticipated Google Glasses -- the Internet giant's foray into augmented reality. In the novel, "venture altruist" Manfred Macx carries his data and his memories in a pair of glasses connected to the Internet. Google Glasses allow the wearer to access data, the Internet and capture life via a head-mounted digital camera. Memories will have to wait.

Private Space Flight
In many science fiction stories, space travel is private. In Ridley's Scott latest movie, Prometheus, the Weyland Corporation funds an expedition to follow a star map to the distant moon LV-223. In real life, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched the first of a dozen planned missions to the International Space Station. The Dragon capsule is designed to resupply the ISS, but Musk, who made his fortune as founder of PayPal, has bigger plans: a colony on Mars. Is 2013 going to be the year human spaceflight becomes an enterprise like railroads? We won't know that for a while, but SpaceX is a heck of a start.

This list isn't comprehensive, and it isn't meant to be the last word on anything; readers, if you think there's something I missed, please sound off in the comments!

Credit: Colin Anderson/Blend Images/Corbis

---

Email:

---

Best-Yet Robotic Arm: DNews Nugget

Best-Yet Mind-Controlled Robotic Arm: A 52-year-old paralyzed woman has controlled a robotic arm using her thoughts. The arm, developed by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, has an unprecedented amount of fine motor control. The woman manipulates the arm via two sensors that are embedded in the motor cortex portion of her brain. After just two days of training, she was able to move the arm using her thoughts. After three months of use, the woman's task completion rate rose to 91.6 percent. The robotic arm's level of dexterity and coordination is impressive. The video demonstrates the arm successfully picking up a small cube of wood and tosses a ball from one cup to another. via The Verge

GET MORE MUST-READS HERE!

---

Email:

---

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Joins Google: DNews Nugget

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Joins Google: Ray Kurzweil is more than an inventor. Sure, he gave us the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. But Kurzweil is more than that. He is keenly focused on exploring how biological systems (mostly human) will merge with artificial intelligence in ways that will impact science, economics, politics, medicine, education and everything in between.

Today, he starts his new job as Director of Engineering at Google. It's unclear what he'll be doing but anyone who has heard of Google's X Lab might be able to put two and two together. The X Lab is a secret facility where technologists are working on 100 projects pertaining to future technologies. Surely Kurzweil will get a peak inside.

He's been thinking about or something like it for 13 years. On his website, Kurzweil said, "In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development."

via dvice

GET MORE MUST-READS HERE!

---

Email:

---

Artificial Brain Mimics Human Abilities and Flaws

Content provided by Francie Diep, TechNewsDaily

Spaun's mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most. Credit: Seamartini Graphics, Shutterstock

Spaun, a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a human brain's 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

ANALYSIS: Computer Chip Works Like Artificial Brain

Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are.

"There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture," said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. "It's definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain]," he told TechNewsdaily. "It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do."

Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said.

A Brain with Thought and Action

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

Researchers have made several brain models that are more powerful than Spaun. The Blue Brain model at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France has 1 million neurons. IBM's SyNAPSE project has 1 billion neurons. Those models aren't built to perform a variety of tasks, however, Eliasmith said.

Spaun is programmed to respond to eight types of requests, including copying what it sees, recognizing numbers written with different handwriting, answering questions about a series of numbers and finishing a pattern after seeing examples. 

Spaun's myriad skills could shed light on the flexible, variable human brain, which is able to use the same equipment to control typing, biking, driving, flying airplanes and countless other tasks, Eliasmith said. That knowledge, in turn, could help scientists add flexibility to robots or artificial intelligence, he said. Artificial intelligence now usually specializes in doing only one thing, such as tagging photos or playing chess. "It can't figure out to switch between those things," he said.

ANALYSIS: Teenager Builds Cancer-Detecting Artificial Brain

In addition, artificial intelligence isn't built to mimic the cellular structure of human brains as closely as Spaun and other brain models do. Because Spaun runs more like a human brain, other researchers could use it to run health experiments that would be unethical in human study volunteers, Eliasmith said. He recently ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age, to see how the dying off affected the model's performance on an intelligence test.

Such tests would have to be just first steps in a longer experiment, Eliasmith said. The human brain is so much more complex than models that there's a limit to how much models are able to tell researchers. As scientists continue to improve brain models, the models will become better proxies for health studies, he said.

Next Up: a Brain in Real Time

There's one major way Spaun differs from a human brain. It takes a lot of computing power to perform its little tasks. Spaun runs on a supercomputer at the University of Waterloo, and it takes the computer two hours to run just one second of a Spaun simulation, Eliasmith said.

So Eliasmith's next major step for improving Spaun is developing hardware that lets the model work in real time. He'll cooperate with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and hopes to have something ready in six months, he said.

In the far future, people may find Spaun's humanlike flaws deliberately built into robot assistants, Eliasmith said. "Those kinds of features are important in a way because if we're interacting with an agent and it has a kind of memory that we're familiar with, it'll more natural to interact with," he added.

Eliasmith and his colleagues published their latest paper about Spaun today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.

You can follow TechNewsDaily staff writer Francie Diep on Twitter @franciediep. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

• Beyond the Mouse: 5 Ways We’ll Interface With Future Computers
• Seven Modern-Day Technologies Sparking Controversy
• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead

Copyright 2012 TechNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Touch Screen Desks For Next-Gen Schools

There are some projects proposed for the future that can make you roll your eyes, and others that make you say, "Can we have this now, please?" The NumberNet desk belongs in the latter category.

Researchers from Durham University have been testing out the multi-touch, multi-user desk as part of a three-year project with over 400 students. The students range from ages eight to ten and use the desk in a group setting. Using the desk in this way allows the students to solve mathematical questions by working together and collaborating on one large platform rather than on multiple sheets of paper.

NEWS: Vampire Algae Suck on Salad

DNEWS VIDEO: Gadgets and Gizmos

Much like other multi-touch desks on the market, this one has been designed to recognize multiple touches on its desktop using infrared lights. These screens have been built into existing fabric and furniture in the classroom and are linked to a main smart board controlled by a teacher. Because of this control, a teacher can use the screen as a lecture piece as well. Which means no Power Point or whiteboard and no more peeking over screen-covering tall kids. Solutions and input from other students can be shared to other groups by the teacher through the screens.

So far the project has found that the children who collaborated together showed improvement in mathematical flexibility and fluency, compared to those who used paper-based methods. The lead researcher of the project, Liz Burd says that the whole point of the project is to encourage more active student engagement, "where knowledge is obtained by sharing, problem-solving and creating, rather than by passive listening."

If implemented, this method of learning would encourage participation from all students, and not just one smarty-pants. Only mathematics was testing in this project, but researchers say that it could be applied in other areas of learning as well.

Credit: Durham University

---

Email:

---

One Step Closer To Efficient Robotic Limbs

A device that would allow paralyzed people to use their thoughts to move robotic limbs fluidly and realistically is now one step closer to reality.

A team of scientists from Harvard, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital led by Ziv Williams have found two groups of cells in one area of the monkey brain that allow the animals to remember a sequence of two movements at once. The team was then able to program a computer to interpret those brain patterns, in turn moving a cursor on a screen in the planned sequence.

The development is an improvement over current brain-machine interfaces, which focus on translating a single thought into a single movement in an external device.

NEWS: Brain In A Dish Flies Plane

DNEWS VIDEO: Mind-Controlled Robot Uses Human Brainwaves

Most real-world actions are multi-faceted. When planning to take a sip from a cup or play a song on a piano, for example, people imagine the fluid behavior, not each individual movement required to get it done.

To bring technology closer to the goal of fluid and efficient movements, the researchers trained two male rhesus monkeys to move a cursor on a computer screen to two targets that had previously flashed in front of them, one after the other. During each round, the researchers recorded activity in 281 neurons in two areas of the prefontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning complex actions.

BLOG: Mind-Controlled Drone Takes Off

Using the information collected, the team reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, they were then able to program computers to turn the activity of just a small number of monkey neurons into a two-stage action on the screen with an accuracy rate of more than 70 percent.

The findings could eventually lead to robotic limbs that will move more quickly, flexibly or efficiently.

The development of [brain-machine interfaces] that can perform and potentially execute sequential motor function more effectively in this way will require substantial technological innovations,” the researchers wrote. “But as a key initial step, it is necessary to consider a concurrent BMI architecture in which the elements of a planned motor task are decoded in parallel (at once).”

Credit: Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library/Corbis

---

Email:

---

Laser Controls Worm's Brain

From the department of "I hope this never happens to me," scientists have used a laser to manipulate the behavior of a worm. First, a research team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute genetically engineered a tiny, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans to have neurons that give off fluorescent light. This allowed the neurons to be tracked during experiments. The scientists also engineered the neurons to be sensitive to light, which made it possible to activate them with pulses of laser light. Next, they built a movable table for the worm to crawl on, keeping it aligned beneath a camera and laser.

ANALYSIS: Brain-Controlled Computer Tracks Attention

DNEWS VIDEO: Mind-Controlled Robot Uses Human Brainwaves

They used the laser to activate a single neuron at a time. By doing so, they were able to control a worm's behavior and its senses. In tests, which the researchers published in the journal Nature, the laser made the worm turn left or right and move through a loop. The laser also tricked the worm brain into thinking food was nearby. The worm, in turn, wiggled toward what it thought was a meal.

The research, which on the surface seems like a bit of a circus, actually is important because it shows scientists which neurons are responsible for what.

ANALYSIS: Decision-Making in the Brain Mapped

"If we can understand simple nervous systems to the point of completely controlling them, then it may be a possibility that we can gain a comprehensive understanding of more complex systems," said Sharad Ramanathan, an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and of Applied Physics. "This gives us a framework to think about neural circuits, how to manipulate them, which circuit to manipulate and what activity patterns to produce in them."

via Medical Xpress

Credit: NIH

---

Email:

---

Armband Could Teach Williams' Backhand

Any athlete will tell you that training involves a lot of repetition -- doing something until it's in the "muscle memory" and doesn't need to be consciously recalled.

For visually impaired athletes, though, it can be harder to train, because they can't see well enough to know what movement they are supposed to imitate. That got Benedict Copping, an engineering student at Imperial College, London, thinking: how to transmit what a coach is feeling when they demonstrate a movement. This is especially true in swimming, where getting motions precisely right can shave an extra fraction of a second from the swimmer's time. 

ANALYSIS: Ginormous Armed Robot Controlled by Phone

Copping and a group of friends, Jason Cheah, Idrees Rasouli and Shruti Grover, designed the Ghost, a device that tracks the movement of the wearer's arm and allows him or her to repeat the motions precisely. It also has sensors that detect the twisting and flexing in the arm.

DNEWS VIDEO: SPORTS AND TECH

For example, a trainer might guide a swimmer through the motions of a stroke. The Ghost notes certain "waypoints" and stores them. When the athlete moves her arm, the Ghost will vibrate to give feedback to show whether the movement is correct. Repeating the motion helps the athlete get it right and also develop the unconscious memory.

BLOG: Exoskeleton Helps Paralyzed Patients Walk

Copping told Discovery News he envisions one day connecting the Ghost to a computer via Bluetooth, which could then store the information and even create a kind of "virtual arm." With further development, Copping said the Ghost could even be built into the  tape that was popular among Olympic athletes this year.

While it was designed for paralympic athletes, Ghost could also be used by able-bodied people in sports such as tennis. Imagine Roger Federer or the Williams sisters storing their own racquet technique, and aspiring players downloading it from the Internet. Or perhaps R. A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield could finally explain how to throw a knuckleball.

Copping added that he came up with the idea while thinking about gymnastics. There's no paralympic gymnastics, and he started considering how people orient themselves. "I was struck by the story of somoene losing their sight, and how they lost confidence and the ability to orient themselves in space. It can be harrowing." That got him thinking about how people learn movement.

The Ghost is was developed at Imperial College London in the Sports Innovation Challenge, funded by Rio Tinto (which provided the metal used in the Olympic medas this year). It is also a finalist for the James Dyson award, which will be announced on Nov. 8.

via The Telegraph, Cargo Collective

Credit: Cargo Collective / Jason Cheah

 

---

Email:

---

Mind-Controlled Drone Takes Off

Mind-controlled applications and drones have been quite in vogue as of late, wouldn't you say? We've told you about scads of brain-computer interfaces and our list of drone-related projects stretches as far as the finger can click.

So, naturally, it came as no surprise when this landed in our lap: a brain-controlled quadcopter drone.

NEWS: Brain In a Dish Flies Plane

Researchers at Zhejian University in Hangzhou, China, developed the quadcopter with the intent to give those with impaired motor skills a new way to interact.

DNEWS VIDEO: MIND-CONTROLLED ROBOTS, CYBORGS AND ROBOTIC CARS

By wearing an emotiv electroencephalography (EEG) headset, the researchers showed how they can pilot the drone simply by thinking "left hard" to have quadcopter take off and land, "left lightly" to rotate, "right" to move it forward and "push" to have it fly up. If users clench their teeth, the drone descends. Blinking the eyes causes the on-board camera to snap a photo.

The EEG headset first relays commands from Bluetooth to a laptop, then via Wi-Fi to the drone. The quadcopter, named Flying Buddy 2, also live streams video footage of the flight back to the laptop to give users better control.

BLOG: Brain Hackers Pluck Your Private Data

Researchers will present their mind-controlled drone this week at the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012) in Pittsburgh, Pa. Check out the team's demo video below. Make sure to stick around until the end, where there's some pretty wicked drone-on-drone combat, a fight almost as fierce as the time Daniel LaRusso battled Johnny Lawrence for the All Valley Karate Tournament.

via Wired

Credit: Zhejiang University via YouTube

---

Email:

---

Cyborg Update: Living Tissue Grown on Nanowires

One of the staples of science fiction is embedding the human body with sensors, to merge humans and machines. That goal may be a bit closer.

A team of chemists and anesthesiologists has found a way to embed nanometer-scale wires into living tissue. When implanted into a body, the "cyborg" tissue could potentially sense and monitor medicine or inflammation and keep doctors aware of whether the transplant is working.

BLOG: First Human Infected With A Computer Virus

DNEWS VIDEO: MODERN MEDICINE AND TECH

The scientists started with a mesh of silicon wires coated in an organic polymer, each 30 to 80 nanometers in diameter. The mesh is three-dimensional, like a sponge, and can be bent into any shape. Next, the scientists seeded the mesh with living cells that were grown in a culture. The result was living cells with a three-dimensional mechanical support able to carry electrical signals. While two-dimensional scaffolds have been made before, those don't replicate what happens in the human body, where cells are in three-dimensional structures.

Thus far the team has engineered cyborg tissues using heart, muscle, blood vessel and nerve cells. The cells' viability and activity wasn't affected. The embedded sensory circuits were able to pick up electrical signals generated by the cells in response to drugs. In the case of the blood vessels, the circuits detected pH changes, which could be useful in tracking inflammation.

None of these pieces of tissue has been implanted into a human being yet; it will be some time before the technology gets to that point.

BLOG: Cyborg Cockroach Turned Into Fuel Cell

The team was led by Charles M. Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard and Daniel Kohane, a Harvard Medical School anesthesiologist. Kohane developed the "scaffolds" for the cells. Other contributors were Robert Langer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Zhigang Suo, professor of mechanics and materials at Harvard. The work was published Aug. 26 in Nature Materials.

Credit: Charles M. Lieber and Daniel S. Kohane, MIT

---

Email:

---