the physics arXiv blog, July 29, 2010 – Searching for a hot news topic or buzzword can lead an unsuspecting person to harmful malware, said Dan Hubbard, CTO of Websense, at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, which took place at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Estimates have suggested that about 14 percent of traditional searches for trending news go to sites hosting malware.

Much of the problem stems from the nature of information provided in real time, Hubbard says. It’s noisy, spammy, and not authoritative. So search engines have a difficult task ahead determining what links can be trusted.

New Scientist Tech, July 29, 2010 – A new quantum protocol is the first that promises to work independently of the orientation of spin on pairs of entangled photons shared between a sender and receiver, which will prove vital if quantum communications are ever to be sent via satellites (a spinning satellite’s sense of up and down changes over time, making it harder to interpret a photon’s spin and establish a key).

A team at the University of Bristol in the UK has invented a protocol independent of orientation that exploits the fact that photons can have an entangled circular polarization as well as entangled spin. Circularly polarized light can be imagined to corkscrew either clockwise or anticlockwise along its axis of travel.… more

New York Times, July 28, 2010 – The accuracy of the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows speech-recognition program is so good that you no longer have to begin by reading a four-minute training text, writer David Pogue has found.

Biomedical engineers at Columbia University Medical Center have implanted a joint-shaped scaffold infused with a growth factor protein that allowed rabbits to begin using their injured forelimbs again in one month.

At two months, the animals moved almost as well as similarly aged healthy rabbits. The study is the first to show that an entire joint can be repaired while being used.

In the study, the researchers first imaged the damaged forelimb joint and then created a three-dimensional picture of it. They used a bioprinter to “print out” a precisely accurate, three-dimensional copy of the joint, but criss-crossed it with tiny interconnecting microchannels to serve as a scaffold for new bone and cartilage growth.

The approach has several advantages. It’s impossible to re-create in a… more

Forbes, July 29, 2010 – Real-life technologies can perform some of the mind-reading tricks shown in the new film Inception, in which people are able to observe and participate in someone’s dreams.

Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley shows people images and movies while taking a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of their brains. He uses brain-pattern analysis and computer algorithms to analyze the fMRI scans and build a model of the subject’s visual system. Using the model, Gallant can then have his subject watch a completely new movie and then he can reproduce the images the subject has seen in that new movie with very good accuracy. Gallant says he can use the same technology to reproduce images of the dreams… more

Wired Danger Room, July 28, 2010 – The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded… more

Researchers watched two groups of mice, both nearing the end of a two-day fast. One group was quietly huddled together, but the other group was active and alert. The difference? The second set of mice had been engineered so their brains produced more SIRT1, a protein known to play a role in aging and longevity.

“This result surprised us,” says the study’s senior author Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, an expert in aging research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “It demonstrates that SIRT1 in the brain is tied into a mechanism that allows animals to survive when food is scarce. And this might be involved with the lifespan-increasing effect of low-calorie diets.”

Imai explains that the mice with increased brain SIRT1 have internal… more

the physics arXiv blog, July 27, 2010 – A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other.

In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant. So as the… more

On July 29, 2010, the X PRIZE Foundation will launch its sixth major competition, a multi-million dollar privately funded Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, designed to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

The announcement will be made at the National Press Club. Attendees will include:

· Peter Diamandis, Founder & Chairman, X PRIZE Foundation

· Wendy Schmidt, President, The Schmidt Family Foundation and Founder of the Foundation’s 11th Hour Project and Climate Central. Co-Founder of the Schmidt Marine Science Research Institute

· U.S. Representative Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao, representing Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District (New Orleans and the Gulf region of Louisiana)

· Philippe Cousteau, the son of Jan and… more

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published Tuesday a landmark paper entitled “Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain” (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips.

“We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, which is essential for understanding the brain’s behavior, complexity, dynamics and computation,” Dr. Modha says. “We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain.

“We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain and grounded in anatomical tracing studies that is a stepping stone… more

A new generation of biohackers is literally taking the future of biology into their own hands, and it’s raising some red flags with the government. The basic concern: how can we avoid proliferation of dangerous bioagents?

The situation will come to a head on Friday night July 30 at the Open Science Summit conference at UC Berkeley. Edward You, Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Countermeasures Unit, Bioterrorism Prevention Program, who recently testified at the first meeting of the President’s Commission on Bioethetics, will join leaders in synthetic biology to discuss safety and security concerns about open-source DIY bio, which enables any biohacker to gin up a new organism in their kitchen.

This comes after a special Washington… more

A handful of forward-thinking biogerontologists has joined together to offer a new direction for aging intervention. Their commentary, published July 14 in Science Translational Medicine, presents the case for preventing what the scientists call an “unprecedented global aging crisis”—a sharp rise in the numbers of retired elderly in developing and industrialized nations across the world.

From both a humane and economic standpoint, a world with too many sick elderly has grim consequences and outrageous costs. It’s time to fund research for prevention, slowing, or even reversal of the biological damage caused by simply living, which manifests as age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Currently, senescence research receives only a slim morsel of the researching-funding pie. Of the entire National Institutes of Health $28 billion… more

As noted in our 2010 State of the Future (the 14th annual report from the Millennium Project, just published), the world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.

If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine an unstable world with catastrophic results. However, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperation, materials science, alternative energy, cognitive science, inter-religious dialogues, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine a world that works for all.… more

On June 12-13 of this year, Harvard University hosted the H+ Summit, organized by the nonprofit Humanity+ and loosely focused on the theme, Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

I attended and spoke at the Summit and enjoyed it very much; nearly every speaker had something interesting to say, and one came away from the conference with an excited feeling that the Singularity is, indeed, drawing palpably nearer each year. Ray Kurzweil’s keynote struck familiar and important themes about the near-inexorability of the drastic technological acceleration we’re now experiencing.

Stephen Wolfram connected the Singularity to deeper issues related to the nature of complexity and meaning — a critical perspective, in my view. In the bigger picture, all this technological acceleration is just another phase… more