IBM Research – Almaden presented at Supercomputing 2012 last week the next milestone toward fulfilling the ultimate vision of the DARPA’s cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE), according to Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, Manager, Cognitive Computing, IBM Research – Almaden.
Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales… read more
William ‘Red’ Whittaker often spends his Sundays lowering a robot into a recently blown up coal mine pit near his cattle ranch in Pennsylvania (see video below). By 2015, he hopes that his robot, or something like it, will be rappelling down a much deeper hole, on the Moon, Nature News reports.
“This is authentic exploration, this is the real deal,”… read more
“What is the Niantic Project?” asked a teaser video. Now we know the answer: the Niantic Project is a game called Ingress, CNET reports.
Ingress is a world in which two shadowy sides are vying for dominance: the Enlightened, who are trying to establish portals around the world that will let them control people’s… read more
After months of building a brand new Fiber infrastructure, Google is starting to connect homes in Kansas City, Google Fiber Blog reports, offering some tips on what to expect.
They’re soft, biocompatible, about 7 millimeters long — and, incredibly, able to walk by themselves. Miniature “bio-bots” developed at the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology.
Designing non-electronic biological machines has been a riddle that scientists at the interface of biology and engineering have struggled to solve. The walking bio-bots demonstrate the Illinois team’s ability to forward-engineer functional machines using only hydrogel,… read more
Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are “freestyling” — spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time.
Published online in the November 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports (open access), the findings… read more
Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online, MIT Technology Review reports.
Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian, prize-winning author, and director of Harvard’s library system, has an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, “make all knowledge available… read more
Quantum mechanics promises the potential to create absolutely secure telecommunications networks by harnessing a fundamental phenomenon of quantum particles.
Now, a team of Stanford physicists has demonstrated a crucial first step in creating a quantum telecommunications device that could be built and implemented using existing infrastructure.
The work done… read more
On November 20, Creative Time will launch an archival disc created by artist Trevor Paglen called The Last Pictures into outer space from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Made of ultra-archival materials, the disc is expected to orbit the earth for billions of years affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI.
To create the artifact, Paglen micro-etched one hundred photographs selected to… read more
There is no centralized system to monitor and report changes in the Earth’s life-support systems. So scientists in 77 nations have established the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), which integrates existing data streams into one platform to provide a global warning system for Earth’s… read more
Faceshift, announced Monday, is software that uses Kinect and similar cameras to read your face and create a moving avatar from it. It could enhance the future of video games and make video chats more fun, says Thibaut Weise, founder of Faceshift, a spinoff of EPFL’s Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory.
The software needs only ten minutes to recognize your face as you create basic expressions requested by the program:… read more
Northwestern Medicine researchers have developed a biodegradable nanoparticle that stealthily delivers an antigen that tricks the immune system into stopping its attack on myelin and haltd a model of relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (MS) in mice, according to new research.
The nanoparticles can also be applied to other immune-mediated diseases, including Type 1 diabetes, food allergies, and asthma.
In… read more
Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and postdoctoral scholar Melissa Warden, PhD, have isolated the neurons that carry the split-second decisions to act, from the higher brain to the brain stem. In doing so, they have provided insight into the causes of severe brain disorders such as depression.
In organisms… read more
Vision researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute have made a groundbreaking discovery into the optimization of light sources to human vision. By tuning lighting devices to work more efficiently with the human brain, the researchers believe billions of dollars in energy costs could be saved.
The research, conducted by Stephen Macknik, PhD, of Barrow’s Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology, and Susana Martinez-Conde, PhD, of Barrow’s Laboratory of… read more
