"The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 could be ... the event that shocks us into a new vision of ourselves, our past, our future, our mission, and our destiny... or the prelude to a long decline, the beginning of the Chinese Century," says Howard Bloom, author of the forthcoming book, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism.
The outcome depends on our serotonin neurochemistry, which causes us to react to success with confidence and dignity or to failure with depression, he points out.
"If America can find its next big goal and aim for it, if America can see its next way of climbing to the heights, if America can shift its perception from decline to the peaks that lay ahead of us, to the next big challenge, if we can lift ourselves with all our might, we can enjoy the bio-boost that surges through winning crayfish and lizards. We can see obstacles as challenges and difficulties as opportunities. And we can make massive contributions to humanity. But if we insist that we've reached the end of our run and that it's all downhill from here, down is where we will go. Our internal chemistry will make it so."
A superconductor made from a layer of copper oxide material less than a nanometer thick, developed by Brookhaven National Labs, suggests a new possible route to faster electroniccomponents.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers.
These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if they can be built using cheap polymer fibers, they shouldn't be significantly more expensive to make.
In 1974, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the world's first omni-font OCR, and in 1984, he created the world's first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition technology.
"His vision and sense for how fast technology was progressing led to products that were usually not only first to market, but were commercially successful, and have assisted the handicapped, advanced the arts, and stimulated the imagination of countless other technologists and entrepreneurs. His work is a stellar example of the achievements that The Economist's Innovation Awards are intended to recognize and encourage."
"I am deeply honored to receive this recognition," said Kurzweil, Founder, Kurzweil Computer Products (now Nuance), currently CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. "In my work in optical character recognition and speech recognition, my goal was to provide new modalities for the transmission of humanknowledge. As an inventor, I quickly realized that timing was critical to success, so I sought to develop models of how informationtechnology evolves. With these projections, we can use our imaginations to envision inventions of the future, and I have tried to do that in my books and web sites such as KurzweilAI.net."
Stanford University School of Medicine. researchers have devised a way to efficiently coax human embryonic stem cells to become human germ cells -- the precursors of egg and sperm cells -- in the laboratory.
Unlike previous research, which yielded primarily immature germ cells, the cells in this study functioned well enough to generate sperm cells.
A camera sensor able to film action at 1 million frames per second to detect one-microsecond neuron signals has been developed by Delft University of Technologyresearchers.
The device uses an array of single-photon detectors, each connected to a stopwatch with 100-picosecond accuracy.
Neuroscientists can now use "neural decoding" to recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing, read memories and future plans, diagnose eating disorders, and detect which of two nouns a subject is thinking of, all at rates well above chance.
Rockefeller University researchers have found that chronic disruption of one of the most basic circadian (daily) rhythms -- the day/night cycle -- leads to weight gain, impulsivity, slower thinking, and other physiological and behavioral changes in mice, similar to those observed in people who experience shift work or jet lag.
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have developed the "Whole Brain Catalog," a repository for data gathered about the mousebrain.
Petman, a bipedal bot that walks on two legs and can recover from a push (using the same balancing technology that allows BigDog to recover from a kick) has been developed by Boston Dynamics.
A gesture-based system using electrodes attached to a person's forearm that read electrical activity from different arm muscles to allow for hands-free, gestural interaction have been developed by researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto.
A University of Pennsylvania research team has found a molecular pathway in the brain that is the cause of cognitive impairment due to sleep deprivation.
The impairment may however be reversible by reducing the concentration of a specific enzyme that builds up in the hippocampus of the brain, they found.
Brain pleasure centers became progressively less responsive in rats fed a diet of high-fat, high-calorie food, a new study by the Scripps Research Institute has found.
As the changes occurred, the rats developed compulsive overeating habits and became obese. The overeating continued even when it meant the rats had to endure an unpleasant consequence (a mild foot shock) in order to consume the food.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found a way to induce nanoparticles to assemble themselves into complex arrays, using block copolymers with surfactants as mediator molecules.
An augmented realitysystem has been built by Carnegie Mellon University researchers that gives the impression that one is seeing through walls.
It uses two cameras: one that captures the driver's view and a second that sees the scene behind a view-blocking wall. A computer takes the feed from the second camera and layers it on top of the images from the first so that the wall appears to be transparent.
Ultimately, the team wants to build the system into a car.
The federal Energy Department will announce on Monday 37 grants totaling $151 million for radical energy proposals with a "transformative impact," in a program directed by the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or Arpa-e.
On Tuesday, President Obama plans to discuss $3.4 billion in spending from the stimulus package to improve the electricity grid.
Brain "clean-up cells" (microglia) take care of nanowires injected in rat brains but that break away from their contact points, Lund University researchers have found.
One advantage of nanoscale electrodes is that they can register and stimulate the tiniest components of the brain.
By understanding the mechanisms of our brain's clock, researchers hope to learn ways of temporarily resetting its tick. This might improve our mental speed and reaction times, and since time is crucial to our perception of causality, a faulty internal clock might also explain the delusions suffered by people with schizophrenia.
Researchers from Wadsworth Center in Albany, NY used electrocorticography (ECoG), recording activity from the surface of the brain, to determine what vowel and consonants a person is thinking of. The system, which has about a 50-to-70% accuracy rate, could one day be used as a neural prosthesis for people with severe paralysis, translating their thoughts into actions on a computer or prosthetic limb.
A way to protect healthy tissue from the toxic effects of radiation treatment and also increase tumor death has been discovered by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
They found that blocking a molecule called thrombospondin-1 from binding to its cell surface receptor, called CD47, affords normal tissues nearly complete protection from both standard and very high doses of radiation, and delayed the regrowth of tumors in radiation-treated mice.
A new study at Max Planck Institute for BrainResearch reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible.
Neuroscientists hope that brain scans used to find the brain areas and circuits involved in intelligence will provide new insights into neurological and psychiatric diseases that impair cognition, such as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, and may also improve understanding of learning disabilities such as dyslexia and ADHD, perhaps leading to better treatments.
The possibility of transgenic primate models (suggested by recent research) could revolutionize medical research, offering a proving ground for new therapies that look promising in mice but seem too risky to try in humans.
If the genes associated with some cases of human illnesses such as Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Alzheimer's disease were introduced into primates, colonies of the genetically altered animals could be used to test therapies for these disorders. This would probably be far more effective than studying the effects of the genes in, say, mice or rats, because primates' brains are much closer to humans' in terms of complex motor functions and cognition.
Gold nanoantennas smaller than 100 nm that transmit and receive light have been developed by Karlsruhe Institute of Technologyresearchers.
The antennas could be used in new optical high-speed datanetworks and in chip manufacturing and photovoltaic devices, and for the study of individual biomolecules.
"In theory, two-way optogenetic traffic could lead to human-machine fusions in which the brain truly interacts with the machine, rather than only giving or only accepting orders," says writer Michael Chorost.
"It could be used, for instance, to let the brain send movement commands to a prosthetic arm; in return, the arm's sensors would gather information and send it back. Blue and yellow LEDs would flash on and off inside genetically altered somatosensory regions of the cortex to give the user sensations of weight, temperature, and texture.
"The limb would feel like a real arm. Of course, this kind of cyborgtechnology is not exactly around the corner. But it has suddenly leapt from the realm of wild fantasy to concrete possibility."
