Rat neuron cells on silicon are the brains behind a new robot—a breakthrough that may lead to better computer chips. The “hybrot” is in essence a rat-controlled robot, and marks the first instance in which cultured neurons have been used to control a robotic mechanism.
The device contains thousands of rat neuron cells on a silicon chip that’s embedded with 60 electrodes connected to an amplifier. The electrical signals… read more
A new technique for imaging the brains of living animals known as “two photon microscopy” represents a breakthrough in understanding rewiring of the brain that will have far-reaching implications for neurobiology, researchers say. It involves shining laser light into the brains of living animals and picking up the “returning light” produced by neurons engineered to express fluorescent proteins.
Plastic magnets with fractal magnetic field may one day be the heart of computer hard drives small enough to power nanotechnology-based devices.
Plastics with fractal magnetic fields “may provide ways to store a high density of information” in a very small space because of their intensely ordered structure, says Arthur Epstein, director of the Center for Materials Research at Ohio State University.
News tip: Walter Purvis
Vanderbilt researchers are working on a robot that can sense human emotion, using measures of human heart rate, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity.
“Stratellites,” spherical airships at 19,000 meters in altitude, will be used as high-flying telecommunications platforms to supply two-way Internet access across the United States and into Mexico and Canada ihin 2004. They offer the advantages of satellites without the launch costs and transmission latency.
The seeds already have been planted for much of the technology portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” including biometrics, ads that call you by name, holographic displays, motion capture, and swarm robotics.
Project Entropia, a 3D futuristic role-playing game set in a virtual online world in which players can earn and spend real money, will launch on January 30.
“Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world…According to the Department of Energy, the Earth Simulator has put American scientists at a 10- to 100- fold disadvantage in weather studies. And there are much deeper implications….”
“A spate of new books addresses eighteenth-century automata, ventriloquists’ dummies, and puppets– together with more recent avatars of chess computers, artificial intelligence, androids, robots, and cyborgs. Does ‘computerization’ challenge human identity as ominously as ‘mechanization’ previously seemed to?”
Two years after the human genome was mapped, scientists are drawing a stunning insight by comparing human genes with those of mice. Researchers now agree human genes are definitely missing something; they’re just not entirely sure what. Figuring it out could involve arguments about the very definition of the word “gene.”
Prey, Michael Crichton’s latest techno-thriller, fictionalizes Bill Joy’s notorious Wired article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” which warned, “Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species.”
The technophobic novel (and coming film version) is based on the “gray goo” scenario (nanoparticles out of control).
“Crichton’s new novel further solidifies his position as our generation’s bush-league… read more
Interactive movie posters (called ThinkPix Smart Displays) have been developed that can collect marketing information, like how many times their posters and trailers are shown, how many people walk up to them, how long they looked at them, even how close they got to them.
Based on the exponential growth of computational capacity, if we could overcome the speed-of-light limitation, intelligence would spread to the entire universe within 300 years, said Ray Kurzweil, speaking at Edge’s REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II meeting.
Within that time, we would “multiply current computational capacities by a factor of 1090, and thus exceed Seth Lloyd’s estimate of 1090 bits in the Universe.”
The latest avenue in nanotechnology involves harnessing biological structures and processes, scientists said Wednesday at a National Science Foundation conference.