Pacific Biosciences is developing a DNA sequencing machine that within a few years might be able to unravel an individual’s entire genome in minutes, for less than $1,000.
The company is just one entrant in a heated race for the “$1,000 genome”–a gold rush of activity whose various contestants threaten to shake up the current $1-billion-a-year market for machines that sequence genomes.
The price today: $350,000.
IBM’s recent announcement of simulation of a cat’s cortext on a Dawn Blue Gene/P Supercomputer aligns with IBM’s “smarter planet” initiative, a method of integrating sensors into infrastructure and analyzing the data they produce to optimize systems like the electrical grid, water systems, and traffic.
An awesome 3D equivalent of the Mandelbrot fractal has been developed.
Modafinil (Provigil in the United States) was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since has become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs, says New York magazine.
Rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless, no scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very… read more
The high-protein Atkins diet works not for the reasons its inventor claimed, but simply because people eat less, according to studies by Guenther Boden at Temple University School of Medicine.
“They dropped 1000 calories because they didn’t want to eat more,” Boden says. “They loved the diet. They loved to eat bacon and eggs, and sausages and that sort of thing.”
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Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred — that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them.
Sociable robots come equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another: eye contact, gaze direction,… read more
Some researchers believe the A.I. film’s robots are a reasonable approximation of where robotics is headed.
Ray Kurzweil believes human emotions, especially love, are half a century away from being replicated by machines. Should that day arrive, says Kurzweil, machines will have become human.
The robot-boy David expresses an unrequited love for his human owner, all the while wishing he were “a real boy.”
To… read more
A University of California, Berkeley study has found that a lack of new emerging species contributes to extinction over a period of millions of years.
The researchers studied 19 groups of mammals that either are extinct or in decline from a past peak in diversity, as in the case of horses, elephants, rhinos and others.
The “Red Queen” hypothesis
The study was conducted… read more
Opportunities are opening in the emerging area of “cloud labor,” where a virtual workforce can undertake any task via the Internet.
Researchers at Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil have carried out the first measurements of “criticality” — which occurs in systems that are delicately balanced between inactivity, where the changes are always small, to a state of overactivity where any change tends to be runaway.neuronal avalanche distribution — in animals carrying out tasks and throughout their full sleep-wake cycle.
Ribeiro say their results show clear evidence of criticality throughout… read more
Two computer scientists are trying to build an intelligent material that can replicate a physical 3-D facsimile of you from nothing more than a stream of video images.
If it works, all you’ll need to project yourself around the globe is an Internet connection and a pile of their “claytronics” self-organizing nanocomputers that can stick to each other and communicate with built-in wireless at the other end to assemble… read more
The recent Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference examined the right to use enhancing technologies, such as making inheritable changes to the human genome, controlling our own brain, and uploading human consciousness into a computer.