An ESA-designed house that uses technology designed for space could become the basis of the new German Antarctic station, Neumayer-III. The new station has to meet stringent laws set up to protect the Antarctic environment, which is where the use of space technology comes in. (from Science Daily)

(Photo credit: Science Daily)

(from IOL: Science & Tech)

San Jose, California - The builders of a new Nasa supercomputer claim the 10 240-processor machine is the fastest in the world - an exciting prospect for researchers even if the speed title has yet to be officially bestowed.

Project Columbia, named for the space shuttle that was destroyed in early 2003, was built in less than 120 days at Nasa’s Ames Research Center. The cluster of 20 computers working as one will be used to speed up spacecraft design, environmental prediction and other research.

(from Times Online)

A monkey has learned to feed itself using an artificial arm controlled by thought alone in an experiment that paves the way for new forms of prosthetic limbs for people.

The robotic arm, which is wired to the monkey’s brain through electrodes that tap into signals from nerve cells, is the most advanced of its kind yet developed and the first to be put to a practical use.

The research, announced yesterday at the Society of Neuroscience conference in San Diego, suggests that similar technology could give amputees and people paralysed by spinal cord injuries false arms controlled directly by their brains as if they were part of the body. “This is a breakthrough in the development of neural prosthetic devices,” said Andrew Schwartz Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the study.

“I have seen the future, and it looks sort of human (sometimes), makes whirring sounds (often), and fascinates geeks and gadget lovers of all ages (always). I’m talking about the robots that were on display at RoboNexus, a robotics show that just ended in Santa Clara, California.”

Robots, Robots, Robots - PC World’s Techlog

“It’s all about engineering, and thinking outside the box,” said David Waters, a member of Danville, California’s Monte Vista High School robot team at RoboNexus. “Building a robot is one of the funnest things you’ll ever do.”

Robots Generate Some Buzz - Wired

(Photos credit: Wired)

Interview with Kurzweil in CIO Magazine

When software runs inside our brains, what will happen to us? Ray Kurzweil, who helped invent the IT present, explains to Web Editorial Director Art Jahnke how humans fit into the IT future. You may not like it:

“Technology progresses at an exponential pace because we use the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. That’s a process that began with biology. It took billions of years to create DNA, but once it had evolved an information processing capacity to store and record the results of evolutionary experiments, the DNA could use that for the next stage. That was the Cambrian explosion.

We see that also in technology. The first computers were designed with pen on paper, and they were put together with screwdrivers and wires. Today, a designer sits down at a workstation and puts in formulas that look very much like software programming. The chips are laid out automatically and fabricated automatically, so the process takes days or weeks rather than years. That’s why the products of technology grow exponentially in price, performance and capability. So the creation of technology is already very much a collaborative process between humans and machines.

I think it’s important to understand that technology and human civilization are deeply integrated and that that integration is going to become more intimate. We’re getting closer to our computers. I was talking to a woman yesterday who said her 10-year-old son’s notebook is an extension of him. She said it might as well be inside him. Well, soon computers will be inside us. Within one to two decades, we will be able to place nonbiological intelligence inside us, noninvasively.

By the 2020s we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots - blood cell-size devices - inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons. We will be extending our cognitive capability directly through this intimate merger of biology with machines.

AC2004 Interface Debate Spotlight: Jaron Lanier vs. Will Wright

As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them from dehumanizing us? Can we avoid the world of MT Anderson’s masterful dystopia, Feed (2002), where the internet-jacked, childlike teens of 2030 speak pidgin English and live primarily as vehicles for highly sophisticated and automated corporate marketing and political programming?

Should we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and analytical reading skills? Do we need 1960’s math skills in a world with ubiquitous calculators, or reading skills in a world with digital cable? Or thinking skills in a world with intelligent text analytics?

Encouragingly, the Millennial generation reaches maturity earlier, communicates in new nonlinear ways, and has a strong facility to adapt to new technology. But are we in danger of losing our perspective, independence, and global vision? What are our most important priorities as we enter a world of increasingly sophisticated interfaces and simulations?

Join us as interface legends Jaron Lanier and Will Wright discuss and debate this and related topics in a fun, heated, and fascinating exchange.

Read more in the Tech Tidbits Newsletter

A new U.N. report tracks the increasing use of robots in homes and factories around the world.

Coverage:

When Robots Rule the World | Wired News

Robo-servants set to sweep into homes | ZDNet

Robotic Revolution | Winston-Salem Journal

U.N.: Robot Use to Surge Sevenfold by 2007 | Newsday.com

Smart robots for home use: the future is now

Household chores set to end at last with rise of the robot | The Scotsman

Communications: the driving force behind the accelerating rate of change.
(from Ann Clin Lab Sci)

The rate of change of all aspects of the life of mankind on this planet is accelerating at an ever-increasing pace. It is stated that this upheaval is directly attributable to technological changes and their interaction with social, economic and political changes. The hypothesis is advanced that this dramatically increasing rate of change is due to four unique innovations, all dealing with communications. The four are the spoken language, the written language, the printing press and the electronic computer. The accelerating rate of technological change is measured by the rate at which one hundred “technological breakthroughs” have appeared. In prehistoric times, such breakthroughs occurred tens or hundreds of thousands of years apart. Today, several appear each decade. Hope is expressed that this rapidly accelerating rate of change will enable mankind to cope with the major problems of our modern civilization. The problems specifically flagged out are population growth, human genetics, energy and pollution.”

X Prize Foundation Chairman to Lead Steering Committee

Palo Alto, CA — October 14, 2004 - Foresight Institute has appointed Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, to lead the think tank’s Nanotechnology Prize Steering Committee. The leading think tank and public interest organization focusing on nanotechnology, Foresight Institute established the Feynman Grand Prize in 1996 to motivate scientists and engineers to design and construct a functioning nanoscale robotic arm with specific performance characteristics. The prize was named after Dr. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, whose original goal for nanotechnology - systems of molecular machines building with atomic precision, is the guiding vision of long-term nanotechnology.

The X PRIZE’s success in creating a competitive environment for private space development proves that prizes encourage talented individuals to do great things,” said Diamandis.” I look forward to accomplishing similar results in nanotechnology development by serving on Foresight Institute’s prize committee.

Foresight Institute was founded in 1986 to educate the public about nanotechnology when it was a little-known science. The Institute’s 1st Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology held in 1991 preceded the signing of the National Nanotechnology Initiative by nearly a decade. In addition to offering the Feynman Grande Prize, Foresight Institute also awards four prizes annually to leaders in research, communication and study in the field of nanotechnology.

“With Dr. Diamandis chairing our Nanotechnology Prize Steering Committee, we expect to grow the number of prizes and their purses to spur further research and development activity” said Scott Mize, President of Foresight institute. “Now is the time for our society to focus on and pursue the nanotechnologies that will help us meet the major challenges facing humanity.”

About the X PRIZE Foundation
The X PRIZE Foundation is a not-for-profit educational organization with headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri. Supported by private donations and the St. Louis community, the Foundation’s mission is to create educational programming for students and space enthusiasts as well as provide incentives in the private sector to make space travel frequent and affordable for the general public. Several additional sponsorships for the ANSARI X PRIZE competition remain available to corporations or individuals who wish to support the X PRIZE Foundation and associate themselves with space, speed and high technology.
XPrize.org

About Foresight Institute
Foresight Institute is the leading think tank and public interest organization focused on nanotechnology. Foresight dedicates itself to providing education, policy development, and networking to ensure the beneficial implementation of molecular manufacturing.
For more information about Foresight Institute click here
For more information about Foresight Institute’s Nanotechnology prizes click here

(from MSNBC)

Medical milestone or privacy invasion? A tiny computer chip approved Wednesday for implantation in a patient’s arm can speed vital information about a patient’s medical history to doctors and hospitals. But critics warn that it could open new ways to imperil the confidentiality of medical records.

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that Applied Digital Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla., could market the VeriChip, an implantable computer chip about the size of a grain of rice, for medical purposes.

With the pinch of a syringe, the microchip is inserted under the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and leaves no stitches. Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over it.

Think UPC code. The identifier, emblazoned on a food item, brings up its name and price on the cashier’s screen.

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Where are we now?

Kurzweil’s latest work — given the ominous title The Singularity is Near — forecasts a century that he claims will see the merging of “biological” and “artificial” intelligence to the point that, by 2099, the two distinctions will have conjoined and perhaps even fused.

At the core of Kurzweil’s thesis, summarized in his précis of Singularity, is what he argues is a double-exponential growth in technology to date…

…”Most people have a linear view of the future,” he said. “People look at the 21st century, and they expect 100 years of progress at today’s rate of progress. But because we’re doubling the rate of progress every 10 years, we’re actually looking at 20,000 years of progress during the 21st century. That’s quite a difference in outlook. You get to a point where the rate of progress is so fast that it’s virtually a rupture in the fabric of human history.

Read the whole Wired News article here

Readers of Accelerating Technology can use the discount code AC2004-FS to receive $50 off the registration fee for the upcoming Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford University.

(from Wired News)

Generations of Indians have grown up recounting jokes about how the only contribution their nation has made to the world is the invention of zero. Innovation was something other people did.

That’s no longer the case. At research labs across the country, Indians are creating technologies specifically designed for the nation’s multilingual masses and its poor. In doing so, the country is emerging as a research hub for technologies geared to the Third World.

Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order (from SFGate.com)

The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source — antimatter, the eerie “mirror” of ordinary matter — in future weapons…

…More cataclysmic possible uses include a new generation of super weapons — either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn’t emit radioactive fallout. Another possibility is antimatter- powered “electromagnetic pulse” weapons that could fry an enemy’s electric power grid and communications networks, leaving him literally in the dark and unable to operate his society and armed forces…

…The real excitement, though, is this: If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs.

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons “is 10 billion times … that of high explosive,” Edwards explained in his March speech. Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal “23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.” Thus “positron energy conversion,” as he called it, would be a revolutionary energy source” of interest to those who wage war.

It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck of antimatter — even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards’ March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Friday and Saturday, October 22-23, 2004 Santa Clara, CA

“RoboNexus features over 50,000 square feet of robotics products, technologies, competitions and robots from the leading research labs in the world. RoboNexus is the largest robotics exposition ever showcased in the U.S.”

Details here

Scientists bewildered by sharp rise of CO2 in atmosphere for second year running (from Guardian)

An unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running has raised fears that the world may be on the brink of runaway global warming.

Scientists are baffled why the quantity of the main greenhouse gas has leapt in a two-year period and are concerned that the Earth’s natural systems are no longer able to absorb as much as in the past…

It is possible that this is merely a reflection of natural events like previous peaks in the rate, but it is also possible that it is the beginning of a natural process unprecedented in the record.”…

But the fear held by some scientists is that the greater than normal rises in C02 emissions mean that instead of decades to bring global warming under control we may have only a few years. At worst, the figures could be the first sign of the breakdown in the Earth’s natural systems for absorbing the gas.

That would herald the so-called “runaway greenhouse effect”, where the planet’s soaring temperature becomes impossible to contain. As the icecaps melt, less sunlight is refected back into space from ice and snow, and bare rocks begin to absorb more heat. This is already happening.

Scientists teleport atomic particles and push quantum computing closer to reality. (from Popular Science)

The Vulcan ears of Star Trek fans perked up this summer when two research teams announced that they had successfully performed teleportation. But the scientists hadn’t beamed William Shatner to Pluto (alas); their feat was solid-particle quantum teleportation, which doesn’t transport matter itself but instead transmits the quantum state of a single atom to another atom without a direct link between the two. This, experts say, is a breakthrough in the march toward the first quantum computer, a still theoretical machine that could take seconds to crunch the same numbers that today’s best processors chew on for years.

Links posted on bafuture (with a nice intro comment) by Wayne Radinsky

“We are so close to the beginning of the quantum computing
revolution. Imagine it’s 1947 and the transistor has just
been invented, and the full potential won’t be realized for
many decades. But you can see the advances, step by step
You know it is coming, but don’t know what inventions it
will bring with it.”

Innovation Brings Quantum Computation Closer

Pushing computers to the limit

New technique offers promise of 3-D view of a single protein

Single spins come into view

Using Carbon Nanotubes for Quantum Computing

Teleport lifts quantum computing

Entanglement breaks new record

Chip Protects Single Atoms