WildSpace

"An ancestor of the AIDS virus hijacked an entire gene, perhaps from some prehistoric cat it had infected, a gene that makes it much better able to infect humans, according to a study published online today in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. The discovery represents the first instance in which researchers have found an entire animal gene within the genome of the human immunodeficiency virus despite 30 years of intense analyses." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"Obviously yes. In a way. Julia and I play Super Mario Kart on the Wii. This is a racing game where we select a vehicle and race on one of several possible courses against either ghosts, robots, or real people located elsewhere in the world. It occurs to me that we are carrying out a Turing Test every time we do this. We know when we are racing real people connected to us via the Internet because we select this option, and because of other signals that would be impossible to miss because we know how the game works. Therefore, we are not really carrying out a Turing Test because we know in advance if we are playing Artificially Intelligent Robots built into the game vs. real humans. I imagine we could set up a test for someone who does not know the game, but that would be a lot of work and would require that we let someone else use our stuff and they might break it, so that's not gonna happen. But we can ... and as a matter of survival (in the game) do ... contemplate the difference... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"In the past decade, we’ve examined our Solar System’s orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. We've launched missions seeking out habitable Alien Earths and the existence of dark energy and have migrated from wondering if there's life on Mars to searching out and studying myriads of exo planets in the Milky Way and infinite galaxies beyond. Our incredible advances have also underscored own, very human limitations — our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler in his new book, Heaven’s Touch: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe, see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter. Kaler calls our visual spectrum “…but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.” Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

bellegarde-webb: I agree with that sentiment. - Christopher A Carr

"It’s not really anyone’s idea of normal care for the elderly, being served by a robot that looks like an anime cartoon gone over the top, but that’s what the Japanese government has come up with for aged care and covering their shortage of nurses. This is the first “official” application of robot nurses in a care role, however vaguely defined, and it has global ramifications, particularly for the United States, where cost cutting has been a basic business ideology. If they become an accepted health care methodology, robot nurses could be serious trouble for the industry, especially in their present primitive state of development. The danger is that they seem like a good idea in terms of cost-based care services. This is a different economic approach to nursing, marketed as a money saver, which is capable of directly impacting nursing standards and forms of care. In terms of providing care, the concept is also bordering on anarchic. Selling points for the robot nurses include the... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"This interesting article presents data indicating that it takes around half a second for an unconscious visual percept to become conscious (in the human brain)... This matches well with Libet's result that there is a half-second lag between unconsciously initiating an action and consciously knowing you're initiating an action... (Of course, what is meant by "consciousness" here is "consciousness of the reflective, language-friendly portion of the human mind" -- but I don't want to digress onto the philosophy of consciousness just now; that's not the point of this post ... I've done that in N prior blog posts ;-) My Chinese collaborator ChenShuo pointed out that, combined with information about the timing of neural firing, this lets us estimate how much neural processing is needed to produce conscious perception. As I recall, the firing of a single neuron's action potential takes around 5 milliseconds ... It takes maybe another 10-20 milliseconds after that for the neuron to be able... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Is it an elegant solution to pressing problems related to the food supply, or another example of putting too much faith in technology? That's a tough question to answer. But what is clear right now is that vertical farming is in its infancy. The idea is to grow food inside buildings — not conventional greenhouses, but multi-storey buildings, quite likely in cities — in closed ecosystems using hydroponics rather than soil, and without the use of pesticides. So far it has only been tried on a very small scale. Paignton Zoo in South Devon, U.K., for example, is growing produce to feed some of its animals. But advocates of vertical farming — notably Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor of public health — envision towering gardens in the heart of a city. Despommier, who is working on a book on the idea, sees vertical farming as part of the answer to global warming, water shortages and inner-city health problems." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

seems crazy considering how cheap a lot of flat land is compared to the energy requirements to re-structure such things in the city, but anything to keep city folk sane, growing things helps - meika loofs samorzewski

"ARMCHAIR explorers who soar over 3D cityscapes on their computer may be used to the idea of maps with an extra dimension. But they are now getting accurate enough to offer much more than a preview of your next holiday destination. Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments. "Everyone is now familiar with 3D maps, we're trying to take them beyond simple visualisation," says Glen Hart, head of research at the Ordnance Survey (OS), the UK government's mapping agency, based in Southampton. As part of a project to demonstrate the potential of 3D mapping, the coastal resort of Bournemouth in southern England has probably become the best-mapped place on the planet, (see right) says Hart. Lasers were fired at the town from the ground and from the air to capture the height of buildings, trees and other features, using a technique called Lidar. Adding information from aerial photos and traditional surveys produced a... more... - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"In a scientific first, researchers have been able to demonstrate the ability of humans to control the activity of individual brain cells. Scientists examining single neurons in the human brain have successfully identified individual brain cells responding to particular stimuli such as pictures of individual people and objects. They have also found that people can control the firing of the neurons. The research studied volunteers with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted in their brains to track where their seizures originated. The electrodes were used by the researchers to "eavesdrop" on single cells in the medial temporal lobe, an area important for attention, perception and memory. Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the molecular anatomy of a cell, and understand how an entire organism functions as a system? These are just some of the questions that scientists in a partnership between the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Centre de Regulacio Genòmica (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain, set out to address. In three papers published back-to-back today in Science, they provide the first comprehensive picture of a minimal cell, based on an extensive quantitative study of the biology of the bacterium that causes atypical pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The study uncovers fascinating novelties relevant to bacterial biology and shows that even the simplest of cells is more complex than expected. Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a small, single-cell bacterium that causes atypical pneumonia in humans. It is also one of the smallest... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Unlike that of other, larger, bacteria, M. pneumoniae's metabolism doesn't appear to be geared towards multiplying as quickly as possible, perhaps because of its pathogenic lifestyle. Another surprise was the fact that, although it has a very small genome, this bacterium is incredibly flexible and readily adjusts its metabolism to drastic changes in environmental conditions. This... more... - Wildcat

"Rocket science is opening new doors to understanding how sounds associated with Navy sonar might affect the hearing of a marine mammal – or if they hear it at all. The same type of large industrial sized X-ray scanners that NASA uses to detect flaws in the space shuttle's behemoth solid fuel rockets is now allowing scientists to peek inside the giant head of a whale. The scans are providing detailed three-dimensional replicas of a whale's hearing anatomy using a breakthrough method developed by Dr. Ted Cranford, a marine biologist sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Chief of Naval Operations Environmental Readiness Division (N45)." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"A.I. Anchors Engineers at Northwestern have created an entire newsroom operation using artificial intelligence, even using avatars to anchor the evening news. In the great media reshuffling ushered in by the Internet Age, print journalists have suffered the most from online journalism’s ascent. Broadcast journalists, however, may be the next group to feel technology’s cruel sting. Engineers at Northwestern University have created virtual newscasts that use artificial intelligence to collect stories, produce graphics and even anchor broadcasts via avatars. The project, dubbed “News At Seven,” goes beyond simply regurgitating news stories gleaned from the Web. The system can generate opinionated content like movie reviews or pull the most relevant facts from a box score to pen a hometown sports story. The AI is even learning to crack wise, injecting humor into reports. But don’t take our human-generated word for it, check out the NSF video below." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"If you’re under age 30, it is likely that you will be able to live as long as you want. That is, barring accidents and wars, you have centuries of healthy life ahead of you. So the participants in the Longevity Summit convened in Manhattan Beach, California, contend. Over the weekend Maximum Life Foundation president David Kekich gathered a group of scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to meet for three days with the goal of developing a scientific and business strategy to make extreme human life extension a real possibility within a couple of decades. Kekich dubbed the effort the Manhattan Beach Project." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene's past twelve years of brain-imaging research is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders in patients. "For the past twelve years", says Dehaene, "my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

3rd October: http://twitter.com/siggibe... - Siggi Becker

"SO MUCH to do, so little time. Between a hectic work schedule and a thriving social life, Yves (not his real name), a 31- year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one. "If I take a dose just before I go to bed, I can wake up after 4 or 5 hours and feel refreshed," he says. "The alarm goes off and I'm like, let's go!" Yves is talking about modafinil, a stimulant that since its launch seven years ago has acquired a near-mythical reputation for wiring you awake without the jitters, euphoria and eventual crash that come after caffeine or amphetamines. Yves has been popping modafinil on and off for the past three years and says it is "tremendously useful". "I find I can be very productive at work," he says. "I'm more organised and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning." Modafinil is just the first of a wave of... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

Very interesting... cannot wait till we can go on without sleep altogether - Spaceweaver

"The world's largest particle accelerator is officially back in business, scientists in charge of it announced today. Over the weekend, physicists began circulating beams of protons around the 27-kilometre ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The tests bring the giant machine closer than ever to high-energy collisions that physicists hope will lead to the discovery of new particles. "The first three days of operation have been an enormous success," Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators, told reporters at a press conference about the status of the machine. "We've shown the LHC is in superb condition."" - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

Finally....! But then, let us remember also the pyramids weren't built in just a couple of years :-) - Spaceweaver

Next to the many amazing feats our brain pulls off daily, its inferior ability to juggle a few simple tasks sticks out like a sore thumb. Now research from Vanderbilt University suggests that these limits on multitasking arise from slow processing in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s central executive. Although the area has been known to be involved in multitasking, its exact role is a matter of debate. Using functional MRI, the researchers found that when people were juggling two assignments, their prefrontal cortex appeared to deal with the tasks one by one—creating that familiar mental bottleneck—instead of processing them in parallel as do sensory and motor parts of the brain. With training the prefrontal activation time became shorter, cranking up the speed of the mental conveyor belt by about 10 times. Unfor­tunately, the researchers note, the benefits of training might not apply to tasks other than those specifically practiced. “It’s not like you become able to multitask [with... more... - Wildcat

"Humans have been able to change the world because we’re smart. When machines outpace us, they’ll change it all over again." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

With its 20 billion neurons connected in networks made of millions of kilometers of axons the brain is a very complex system. In our quest for understanding it we need tools to handle this complexity. Using the strategy of divide-and-conquer, we can study smaller and smaller parts and attempt to understand the whole through the principle of hierarchical reductionism (Dawkins, 1986). Employing such principles, a century of neuroscience has advanced our understanding tremendously on all levels from molecules to behavior, but there are still gaping holes in our knowledge, for example with regard to the nature of the neural code and the principle of operation of the cerebral cortex. - Wildcat

"It is too early to say whether the Russian government sponsored the recent hacking of British CRU (Climatic Research Unit) computers or not. Regardless, 156 megabytes of files and sensitive emails between world-renowned, influential climate scientists were spilled onto the internet recently via a Russian server. The repercussions from the "liberation" of these emails have just begun to clang around the world's networks of networks." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

Lots of links here: http://www.climatedepot.com/a... - Alexander Kruel