(from bafuture)

Mon Nov 29, 2:17 PM ET Science - Reuters

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Brain scans show that the brains of people who are lying look very different from those of people who are telling the truth, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, not only sheds light on what goes on when people lie but may also provide new technology for lie-detecting, the researchers said.

“There may be unique areas in the brain involved in deception that can be measured with fMRI,” said Dr. Scott Faro, director of the Functional Brain Imaging Center at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

“There may be unique areas in the brain involved in truth-telling,” Faro added at a news conference.

Faro and colleagues tested 10 volunteers. Six of them were asked to shoot a toy gun and then lie and say they didn’t do it. Three others who watched told the truth about what happened. One volunteer dropped out of the study.

While giving their “testimony,” the volunteers were hooked up both to a conventional polygraph and also had their brain activity imaged using fMRI, which used a strong magnet to provide a real-time picture of brain activity.

There were clear differences between the liars and the truth-tellers, Faro’s team told a meeting in Chicago of the Radiological Society of North America.

“We found a total of seven areas of activation in the deception (group),” he said. “We found four areas of activity in the truth-telling arm.”

Overall, it seemed to take more brain effort to tell the lie than to tell the truth, Faro found.

Lying caused activity in the frontal part of the brain — the medial inferior and pre-central areas, as well as the hippocampus and middle temporal regions and the limbic areas. Some of these are involved in emotional responses, Faro said.

During a truthful response, the fMRI showed activation of parts of the brain’s frontal lobe, temporal lobe and cingulate gyrus.

Faro said the study was small and limited. Volunteers were not asked to try especially hard to deceive the equipment, he said — noting that it has been documented that some people can fool a polygraph using various techniques.

Using fMRI as a lie detector is expensive, but it may be worthwhile in some cases — such as trying to question a terrorism suspect, or in a high-profile corporate crime case, Faro said.

Posthumanity and phillip k. dick (by Jennifer Attaway)

<6> dick embraces the critical potential of the mythic cyborg through his anthropomorphic android. Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg is useful when applied to a discussion of dick’s contestation of boundaries and the construction of the posthuman subject. According to Haraway, the cyborg is not merely a fantastic phenomenon that occupies the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. It is a “powerful social and scientific reality.” Haraway explains that, “(l)ike any important technology, a cyborg is simultaneously a myth and a tool, a representation and an instrument, a frozen moment and a motor of social and imaginative reality…The cyborg is the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy” (1). dick’s androids are an embodiment of the interface between automaton and autonomous beings. Occupying a borderland of blurred distinctions, these renegade robots have a mind of their own: “Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here” (184). “Androidization,” according to dick, “requires obedience and predictability” (”The Android and the Human” 191). In Do Androids Dream?, the androids are defiant and unpredictable. Like humans, androids long for liberty.

The first computer network in which communication is secured with quantum cryptography is up and running in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“People have been trying to make transistors faster and smaller. There is a Holy Grail of electronics that engineers call ballistic transistors - ultimately faster than anything.”

A ballistic transistor is one in which electrons can shoot through without collisions, like a bullet. In other words, it has what is called a long mean free path - the distance a molecule travels without colliding into another.

(Photo credit: BBC)

Join the discussion at the new ISAC forum:

Accelaware: Thriving in a World of Accelerating Change

Then read these recent observations and follow-up discussions on accelerating change at The J Curve:

More Things Change:

I am at the World Technology Summit today. Just finished a panel on accelerating change, where John Smart made the following provocative points:

Technology learns 100 million times faster than you do. Humans are selective catalysts, not controllers, of technological evolutionary development. 80-90% of your paycheck comes from automation. Catastrophes accelerate societal immunity. The network always wins.

Accelerating Change and Societal Shock:

Despite a natural human tendency to presume linearity, accelerating change from positive feedback is a common pattern in technology and evolution. We are now crossing a threshold where the pace of disruptive shifts is no longer inter-generational and begins to have a meaningful impact over the span of careers and eventually product cycles.

The history of technology is one of disruption and exponential growth, epitomized in Moore’s law, and generalized to many basic technological capabilities that are compounding independently from the economy.

Exponential progress perpetually pierces the linear presumptions of our intuition. “Future Shock” is no longer on an inter-generational time-scale. How will society absorb an accelerating pace of externalized change? What does it mean for our education systems, career paths, and forecast horizons?

(from nature.com)

A pill-sized brain chip has allowed a quadriplegic man to check e-mail and play computer games using his thoughts. The device can tap into a hundred neurons at a time, and is the most sophisticated such implant tested in humans so far.

Many paralysed people control computers with their eyes or tongue. But muscle function limits these techniques, and they require a lot of training. For over a decade researchers have been trying to find a way to tap directly into thoughts.

In June 2004, surgeons implanted a device containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic. The device, called the BrainGate, was developed by the company Cyberkinetics, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Each electrode taps into a neuron in the patient’s brain.

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

(Photo credit: nature.com)

(from The Register)

Physicists at the University of Bonn have successfully demonstrated a five-qubit quantum register, using neutral atoms.

Registers are the central memory of a computer, in which information is stored in 1s and 0s. Neutral atoms are considered natural candidates for building a register because they can exist in an abundance of quantum states, and these individual states can be manipulated relatively simply. (Not to mention the fact that they can be counted - quite a useful property, when building a register.)

In Physical Review Letters, the researchers explain how they set up the register experimentally. You can access their paper here.

(from New Scientist)

A microscopic swimming robot unveiled by Chinese scientists could eventually be used for drug delivery or to clear arteries in humans, say researchers.

The 3 millimetre-long triangular machine was constructed by Tao Mei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China.

The craft is propelled using an external magnetic field which controls its microscopic fins. The fins are made from an alloy that contracts in response to application of the field. Applying the field quickly makes the tiny submersible paddle forwards and gradually switching the field off slowly moves the fins back to their original position.

It is possible to control the speed of the craft by altering the resonant frequency of the magnetic field. The next stage is to build a robot with fins that respond to different magnetic field resonances. This would enable an operator to control the fin separately and steer the robot around.

(from Guardian)

European scientists are about to reach for the moon. After a 13-month journey, driven by a new kind of technology, an experimental spacecraft the size of a washing machine will begin to orbit around the moon on Monday night.

In the course of the next year, Smart-1 will take a new look at the moon in an attempt to investigate lunar history. Theories suggest the moon formed billions of years ago, from molten rock thrown off the Earth after a collision with a Mars-sized object. The ratio of iron and magnesium in the lunar crust could confirm that the moon is, in effect, a daughter of the Earth.

Smart-1 (the acronym for small missions for advanced research and technology) could be a scouting party for more ambitious attempts. Two Japanese missions could reach the moon in 2006; Chinese and Indian spacecraft could arrive in 2007; the US could revisit in 2008.

European scientists are contemplating a “robot village” on the lunar surface: a collection of shelters, instruments and exploration vehicles, perhaps on a ridge at the lunar south pole which is in sunlight all year round.

(from MarketWire)

An independent study released today named an IBM supercomputing system as the world’s most powerful supercomputer. IBM’s Blue Gene/L tops the list with a sustained performance of 70.72 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second. IBM’s primary partner, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency, will install a 360 Teraflop Blue Gene/L supercomputer in the first half of 2005.

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project dedicated to building a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today’s fastest systems. The full Blue Gene/L machine is being built with the Department of Energy’s NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and will have a peak speed of 360 Teraflops. When completed in early 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to lead the TOP500 supercomputer list. IBM and its collaborators are currently exploring a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling.

Conference coverage:

Future Salon blog

WorldChanging: here, here and here

ACC2004 Wiki

Interesting article by Jack Uldrich

Many business people are familiar with Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a computer chip doubles every 18 months. This seemly simply law has increased the number of circuits on a chip from a mere 2,400 in 1973 to over 200 million today. Late last year, Intel announced the creation of a 90-nanometer circuit which will create transistors measuring on 50-nanometers in length and put more than 400 million transistors on a chip. The development will technically move the semiconductor sectors into the realm of nanotechnology.

The development is however only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The latest draft of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors states that within ten years most semiconductors will likely be produced with nanotechnology techniques. If you understand exponential growth and nanotechnology it is reasonable to understand how many in the scientific community are predicting that computers will soon become 100 and then 10,000 and eventually one million times more powerful than those we have today.

Change happens and, due to exponential advances that nanotechnology is enabling, change is only going to occur at an ever faster rate. The best way for each industry to begin preparing for this new reality is to understand the field of nanotechnology.

The 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, once said: “Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science.” He was right then and, prophetically, he is even more correct today at the beginning of the 21st century. The future is going to look radically different than it does today and the science of nanotechnology is going to be one of the primary reasons.

A recent USA Today article highlights the hyped nature of nanotech coverage in the mainstream media:

Nano-based products starting to have consumer impact

Already, nanoscience has produced stain- and wrinkle-resistant clothing, self-cleaning windows, glare-reducing and fog-resistant coatings for eyeglasses and windshields, dramatically increased computer memory, better sports equipment, improved cosmetics and sunscreens, and lighter, stronger auto components.

What’s next? More user-friendly cell phones, longer-lasting batteries, lighter car tires that retain air longer, better imaging techniques for diagnosing disease, drugs more precisely targeted to limit side effects, faster consumer electronics, perhaps even cheaper beer made with “nano yeast,” experts say.

Fortune 500 companies from General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. and IBM to Motorola, Sony, DuPont and 3M are making big investments in nanotechnology to improve medicine, computer components, electronic toys, microelectronics, photovoltaic systems, cosmetics and flat-panel displays for TV and video screens. Some products are already on store shelves.

Nanotechnology is in the process of revolutionizing consumer technology,” said Dave Bishop, president of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. “It’s really a transformational technology, like transistors were.

Meanwhile, this article urges caution, arguing that too much hype can create a backlash:

Nano World: Dealing With Too Much Hype

“There is no doubt nanotechnology promises dramatic advances in everything from electronics to medicine. Governments, corporations and venture capitalists will spend more than $8.6 billion on nanotech research and development worldwide in 2004 alone, according to nanotech firm Lux Capital in New York. That level is expected to rise in coming years.

Everyone with a chance to gain from nanotech - from businesses to academia to the media, the government and non-profits - has an incentive to cash in. The prefix nano has become a buzzword for bringing in the money.

Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, urges caution. For years, he has lambasted companies that appear to use the nano prefix to pump up their stock prices, such as NanoPierce Technologies, which he noted was previously called Sunlight Systems and Mendell-Denver.

They’ve got nothing to do with nanotechnology, he noted in a report.

Some businesses that had nothing to do with nanotechnology did quite well when (President) Bush signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, Berube said.”

“People have trouble dealing with the aftermath of hyperbole… The public thinks it’s real. You can’t tell them it was wrong thinking…”

(from Technology Review)

Researchers working to form nanoscale machines and materials are increasingly tapping nature’s building blocks. Two particularly helpful molecules are DNA, which encodes instructions for making the proteins that carry out life’s processes, and the motor protein kinesin, which is part of a cell’s transportation system.

DNA molecules contain strings of four types of bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine — attached to a sugar-phosphate backbone. Single strands with delete self-assemble into structures like life’s familiar double helix when their bases match up. Researchers can manipulate artificial strands of DNA by controlling these connections.

Kinesin molecules have two extensions, or legs, at one end and a tail at the other end. The legs attach to a microtubule molecule, and step to move the kinesin bipedal molecule forward along the microtubule. The tail grabs cell structures like vesicles and mitochondria to transport the structures over a cell’s extensive network of microtubules.

Several research teams have built DNA walkers, inspired by kinesin, that move along DNA tracks.

Researchers from Duke University and the University of Oxford in England have devised a series of DNA stations that pass a DNA fragment from one to the next. The walker works autonomously, using enzymes present in the environment to initiate each step of the process.

California Institute of Technology researchers have built a bipedal DNA walker that improves the gate of a walker originally designed by researchers at New York University from shuffling, with one leg always in back of the other, to leg-over-leg walking.

DNA walkers could eventually be used to construct nanoscale devices, synthesize and deliver drugs, and carry out DNA computation.

(from news @ nature.com)

In cloning, the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult cell is injected into an egg whose own nucleus has been removed. At the moment, the majority of cloned mice, sheep and other animals die before birth. It is thought this is because the adult DNA is not properly ‘reprogrammed’ and cannot orchestrate the growth of an embryo.

Using flies, researchers might reveal genes that are important for this reprogramming, and that have counterparts in other animals. That is because it is relatively easy in flies to knock out the function of a single gene and then attempt cloning with these cells, which will test whether that gene is crucial.”

(Photo credit: nature.com)

By 59% to 41% of votes, Californians said “yes” to Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, which will raise around $300 million a year for a decade through bond sales. (from nature.com)

(Photo credit: nature.com)

Accelerating Change Conference 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface
November 5-7 at Stanford University, Palo Alto CA

SPECIAL DISCOUNT FOR ACCELERATING TECHNOLOGY READERS:

Register for only $300! (Save $250 off the current $550 rate!)

Use the registration code: AC2004-STANFORD

There will be 42+ world-class speakers, 3 awesome debates (very fun, very heated, very interesting), some great new technology demos, and many opportunities for networking and conversation with leading futurist thinkers.

In the last quarter, $2.1 billion in venture capital�38% of all the venture money in the U.S. �was invested in Silicon Valley. (BusinessWeek 10.11.04). This was more than twice that invested in the next closest region (Boston). Which people, ideas and innovations will fuel the next long boom? Come find out.

Speakers include:

* Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality, Google
* Helen Greiner, Co-founder, iRobot
* Shai Agassi, Executive Board Member, SAP
* Doug Engelbart, digital interface legend–creator of the mouse
* Jaron Lanier, Founder, VPL Research
* Will Wright, Creator of The Sims
* Peter Thiel, Co-founder and former CEO, PayPal
* BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford
* Gordon Bell, Project Director, MyLifeBits, Microsoft BARC
* Cory Ondrejka, VP of Product Development, Linden Lab/Second Life

Special Events include:

* Tech Night at SAP Labs, Palo Alto
* Interactive demos at the Human Virtual Interface Lab, Stanford
* Collective Intelligence Dinner, Futuristically Incorrect

Accelerating Change is your community for the most broad minded, future-aware, practical and passionate speakers and participants. Can you join us this year?

Medical sculptors and neurosurgeons create virtual 3D cranial models based on patient CT data superimposed over their hands as if they were sculpting physical models. (from ACM Queue)

“Repairing severe human skull injuries requires customized cranial implants. Traditionally, medical sculptors have employed their anatomical modeling expertise to sculpt prosthetic implants using clay and wax. However, even with the aid of automated manufacturing techniques, the design process remains expensive in terms of labor, materials, and money.

(Photo credit: U Illinois - Chicago, via ACM Queue)