This is a rebroadcast of a webinar that tracks the evolution of next-generation sequencing and explores what the future holds in terms of the technology and its medical applications.

Panelists:

1. George Church, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

2. George Weinstock, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Molecular Microbiology, Washington University

3. Joel Dudley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of Biomedical Informatics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

— Gerontology Research Group

“The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope was a seminal moment in the history of science and information technology,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president and director of Research. “This invention gave scientists the ability to image, measure and manipulate atoms for the first time, and opened new avenues for information technology that we are still pursuing today.” [...]

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— IBM Research

Sergey Brin is half of the team that founded Google. Now he’s leading the development of special projects like Google Glass.

— TED Talks

• Gather anonymous real time audience analytics such as gender, age and attention time using a basic webcam.
• Use Cara to create intelligent things and interactive spaces — trigger events based on the audience. Connect the online and offline worlds.

— IMRSV

Don’t let go.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney:

In theaters October 4th.

With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Find out more:

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

— Chris Hadfield

Discovery | Interview for a Spanish/English show about the future called 2111, a series covering robotics, communications, travel, longevity, and other futures scenarios. This is a segment of the episode dedicated to longevity, the part on Alcor and cryonics, featuring Alcor member Maria Entraigues. The full episode includes interviews with Dr. Aubrey de Grey at SENS Research Foundation, Alcor president Max More, Peter and Louise Voss, James Canton, and Ray Kurzweil, among others.

Aldrin’s new book, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, now available, charts out a course that could put astronauts on the surface of Mars by 2035.

“The mission really is establishing permanence on another planet in the solar system,”The famed Apollo 11 moonwalker told SPACE.com in a video interview.

— Space.com

Mission Statement of the International Fleet

United under a single, harmonious government, the International Fleet serves to protect the Earth from another global invasion, while striving to maintain order and propel human progress on Earth.

The most essential pillar of a stronger world is unity. Only through unity can we work together to be prepared. “Lucky for us, every human being has preparation on their mind,” reports I.F. Major Gerald Stacks, special negotiations envoy to the nations of Earth. “The leadership of humanity must prioritize interstellar readiness and, to support that, total global cohesion.”

We know our enemy is out there, amongst the stars. But we also know the human spirit is strong, and that if we are united, we cannot fail. All citizens are encouraged to come together and participate in all global, national, and local peace discussions in the news forums.

— I.F. Sentinel

(Credit: NBC via Hulu)

The teams successfully produced hands that can be manufactured for as little as $3,000 per unit (in batches of 1,000 or more), down from the $50,000 cost of current technology. The new hands also incorporate sufficient dexterity to enable manipulation of objects in their fingers when controlled by a skilled operator. This technology helps pave the way for adaptable, low-cost robots that can use a wide range of human tools to assist in dangerous defense missions.

The hand in this video was developed by iRobot of Bedford, Mass., with support from Harvard University and Yale University.

– DARPA

— IBM

In this Pentagon media briefing, DARPA Director Dr. Arati Prabhakar explains what the Agency does for the U.S., how it does it, how it thinks about its mission in the context of today’s realities, and the future that it’s building by creating the next generation of technology to give Defense leaders more options for tomorrow’s missions.

She mentions innovations in cyber warfare, electronic warfare, position navigation and timing beyond GPS, new technology from biological sciences, and big-data analytics ad examples of these options.

Opened April 19 in theaters.

— Universal Pictures

The precise methods they employed in early efforts to play back their recordings are lost to history. As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.”

Then, Stephens learned that physicist Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had succeeded in extracting sound from early recordings made in Paris in 1860. He and his team created high-resolution optical scans converted by computer into an audio file.

Documents indicated that one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April 15, 1885 — a date now deciphered from a wax inscription — contained a recording of Bell speaking.

On June 20, 2012, at the Library of Congress, the research team was transfixed as it listened to the inventor himself : “In witness whereof — hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”

Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface to the play).

The intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bell’s speech. The voice is vigorous and forthright — as was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.

— Charlotte Gray, Smithsonian.com

The Touch Bionics i-limb ultra revolution, featuring a powered rotating thumb, 24 grip options, and extra-sensitive electrodes, is the first upper-limb prosthesis that can be controlled via a mobile app.

The scientists exposed a tiny liquid pouch that contained gold nanoparticles covered with a positively charged coating to an intense beam of electrons generated with a transmission electron microscope. Some of the electrons that penetrated the outside of the cell became trapped in the fluid medium in the cell. These “hydrated” electrons attracted the positively charged nanoparticles, which in time reduced the intensity of charge of the positive coating.

As the hydrated electrons reduced the coating’s positive charge, the nanoparticles no longer repelled each other as strongly.  Instead, their newfound relative attraction led the nanoparticles to “jump around” and eventually stick together in long chains. This self-assembly of nanoparticle chains had been detected before in different studies, but this technique allowed researchers, for the first time, to observe the phenomenon as it occurred.

“The moment-to-moment behavior of nanoparticles is something that’s not yet entirely understood by the scientific community,” said Argonne nanoscientist Yuzi Liu, the study’s lead author. “The potential of nanoparticles in all sorts of different applications and devices — from tiny machines to harvesters of new sources of energy — requires us to bring all of our resources to bear to look at how they function on the most basic physical levels.”

Self-assembly is particularly interesting to scientists because it could lead to new materials that could be used to develop new, energy-relevant technologies. “When we look at self-assembly, we’re looking to use nature as a springboard into man-made materials,” said Argonne nanoscientist Tijana Rajh, who directed the group that carried out the study.

Because the particles under study were so tiny — just a few dozen nanometers in diameter — an optical microscope would not have been able to resolve, or see, individual nanoparticles. By using the liquid cell in the transmission electron microscope at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Liu and his colleagues could create short movies showing the quick movement of the nanoparticles as their coatings contacted the hydrated electrons.

Funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

— Argonne National Laboratory

YouTube celeb Rachel Mahassel (Grandma) says “Thank You!”

University of Toronto scientists have recorded atomic motions in real time for the first time. Despite the enormous number of possible arrangements of atoms during a structural transition, such as occurs with changes in charge distribution or chemical processes, the interconversion from one structure to another reduces to a few key types of motions. This enormous reduction in dimensionality is what makes chemical concepts transferable from one molecule to another and has enabled chemists to synthesize nearly any molecule desired, for new drugs to infusing new material properties. This movie gives a direct atomic level view of this enormous reduction in complexity. The specific trajectories along three different coordinates, as highlighted in the movie, are shown as projections (right view) on a cube. The key atomic motions can be mapped on to three highly simplified coordinates — the magic of chemistry in its full atomic splendor. (Credit: University of Toronto)

My own fork of the project will show up in Leap Motion’s AirSpace app store as a polished, cross-platform app for OS X & Windows.

AirHarp is on GitHub!
Feel free to browse the source of the original hack, or fork and make this project even more awesome.

— Adam Somers, Leap Motion developer and electronic musician

The IM-CleVeR project, launched in 2009, aims at “developing a new methodology for designing robots that can cumulatively learn new skills through autonomous development based on intrinsic motivations, and reuse such skills for accomplishing multiple, complex, and externally-assigned tasks.”

This documentary gives an overview of the technologies, architectures and algorithms required to make this humanoid robot learn more autonomously. Skills include active perception, reasoning and manipulation of the environment.

— IDSIA

The only man with the chance to bring equality to these worlds is Max (Matt Damon), an ordinary guy in desperate need to get to Elysium. With his life hanging in the balance, he reluctantly takes on a dangerous mission – one that pits him against Elysium’s Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her hard-line forces – but if he succeeds, he could save not only his own life, but millions of people on Earth as well.

In theaters Aug. 9

– Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures | After Earth movie trailers starring Will Smith
RETV | Comic Con sneak peak of After Earth

related:
After Earth official website

video sources: Sony Pictures / RETV

— Google

— IEEE Spectrum

— Fast Company Co.Exist

— TED

— TED

— IEEE Spectrum

A new study at the University of Vienna, on an Indonesian cockatoo species — the Goffin’s cockatoo — which recently made headlines, showed notable results.

“The animals were allowed to pick up an initial food item and given the opportunity to return it directly into the experimenter’s hand after an increasing time delay. If the initial food item had not been nibbled by this time, the bird received another reward of an even higher preferred food type or of a larger quantity than the initial food in exchange” explains Isabelle Laumer, who conducted the study at the Goffin Lab at the University of Vienna.

“Although we picked pecan nuts as initial reward which were highly liked by the birds and would under normal circumstances be consumed straight away, we found that all 14 of birds waited for food of higher quality, such as cashew nut for up to 80 seconds”, she further reports.

Alice Auersperg, the manager of the Vienna Goffin Lab says: “When exchanging for better qualities, the Goffins acted astonishingly like economic agents, flexibly trading-off between immediate and future benefits. 

At the 13th annual Microsoft TechFest, Ben Glocker demoed a prototype app that would allow neurosurgeons to look inside a patient’s brain before they cut it open. Doctors could see the skeleton, brain, blood vessels, and the targeted tumor on a tablet–which can move around the patient’s head — helping them to plot the best brain surgery path.

— IEEE Spectrum

Their bioprinter has multiple arms that can print several materials concurrently. This capability offers a time-saving advantage when attempting to print a human organ because one arm can be used to create blood vessels while the other arm is creating tissue-specific cells in between the blood vessels.

— University of Iowa

Here’s Kinect Fusion, which can live 3-D model anything that will stand still, including me. Brought to you by the Microsoft Research Cambridge team — who also brought you KinEtre.

— IEEE Spectrum

— Microsoft Research

— Microsoft

— NASA

— Square Enix

With a wave of your hand, MYO will transform how you interact with your digital world.

The MYO armband lets you use the electrical activity in your muscles to wirelessly control your computer, phone, and other favorite digital gadgets.

— Thalmic Labs

Boston Dynamics is developing the control and actuation techniques needed for dynamic manipulation. The cinderblock weighs about 35 lbs and the best throw is a bit more than 17 ft. The research is funded by the Army Research Laboratory’s RCTA program.

— Boston Dynamics

Hmm, should we have a robot Olympics? — Editor