h+ Magazine editor R.U. Serious posted a short note on the magazine’s website to let readers know the publication is going on an “extended hiatus due to the desire of the publishers to spend more time and resources on other projects.”
I loved being able to walk in to a Borders or Barnes and Noble and pick up issues of what has been an absolutely top-notch magazine. Hopefully h+ resumes publishing sooner rather than later, although I wouldn’t necessarily need it in “dead tree” format. An edition published online or optimized for smartphones and tablet computers, similar to what Popular Science and Wired are doing with their iPad apps, would be just fine with me.
This video has gone viral, but it’s worth linking here. The expression on eight-month old Jonathan’s face when he hears for the first time, due to a Cochlear implant, is priceless. A reminder of how technology enhances our lives – and a promise of what’s to come.
Designer Diana Eng is on the cutting edge of integrating electronics with high fashion, as seen in the above footage from one of her shows. While most of us can’t go out and pick up an LED-enhanced Eng gown or tuxedo just yet, advancements in materials and electronics, including small batteries and conductive thread, make her designs possible.
It’s a short matter of time before this clothing, embedded with lights that respond to sound, shows up in dance clubs around the world. But fusing electronics with clothing isn’t all for show - there are also practical applications for the technology:
Take the M-dress, designed by CuteCircuit to solve the problem of digging through a purse in a dark lounge to find a cell phone. With a SIM card embedded in the dress’s tag, a microphone and speaker in the sleeve, and gesture-recognition software, the wearer can answer calls by simply raising her hand to her ear. There is no external device and no button to press—the movement alone activates a sensor that answers and ends calls. Our bodies become part of the communication tool, mediated by little more than fabric. “When our relation to something nonbiological is that close, and we’re secure in our access to information, then we feel the information is part of our mind,” says Clark.
He also provides his opinion on who is helping bring about this potential future:
Ok, so who is working towards this eventuality? Well, if it happens this way, pretty much everybody in the NBIC fields – everybody working on nanotech and biotech and AI and brain science, whether as citizen scientists in a collaborationist project or working for a corporation, or those wacky surrealists at DARPA – they’re all pushing this potentiality forward. Of course, we may have to “hijack the singularity” from them eventually – or even now (think gene patent v. open source bio). But mainly, I think all the people who are engaging in open source collaborationist tinkering and culture, the citizen scientists – particularly the more sophisticated and educated young people that are choosing to invest themselves in “garage” projects – I think they all may be taking us there.
I also think the best, smartest critics and skeptics and SF writers and creators are helping – by problematizing these scenarios in advance, by giving us arguments and narratives that remind us about human behaviors and emotions and political and economic and scientific realities. Brilliant fiction adds to our foresight… our pattern recognition… by playing out dramatic, difficult, dark, challenging, ambiguous or dystopian scenarios based on similar technological possibilities.
Like all of R.U. Sirius’ writings, it’s well worth reading.
Currently, Furber and his team are testing a version that includes a mere 50 “neurons” that can navigate a simple virtual environment described as “Pac-Man-like.”
Furber has big plans for the computer once it is completed:
That’s good enough for Furber, who wants to start teaching his brain-like computer about the world as soon as possible. His first goal is to teach it how to control a robotic arm, before working towards a design to control a humanoid. A robot controller with even a dash of brain-like properties should be much better at tasks like image recognition, navigation and decision-making, says Furber.
“Robots offer a natural, sensory environment for testing brain-like computers,” says Furber. “You can instantly tell if it is being useful.”
Processors for the project are currently being manufactured in Taiwan, and Furber intends to have a 10,000 chip version of the machine operational before the end of the year.
I’ve never heard of the “Mech Warfare” competition at RoboGames, but it looks like a blast. Small robots stalk the streets of a model cityscape armed with automatic airsoft weapons, which fire plastic BBs. Each mini-mech is equipped with a small camera and a sensor that measures how many times it’s been hit. Operators control their robots remotely, using the camera to hunt down their opponents.
The humanoid robot featured in the above video, complete with its Cylon-like “eye,” is a really impressive piece of hobby robotics. I could absolutely see this competition growing in popularity even among non-geeky types. It’s like taking “Battlebots” to the next level.
Swiss police said today that their car was halted on the night of April 15 at Langnau en-route to the technology centre at Rueschlikon, near Zurich.
The site is due to be opened next year and already has some of the most complex and advanced computer equipment in the world installed in it.
‘A large quantity of explosives was found,’ said a police spokesman.
He said the amount of explosive would have caused far more devastation than the Ruetli explosions of 2007. The Ruetli meadow near Lake Lucerne was the scene of small bombs detonated near the homes of politicians in that year.
IBM spokeswoman Susan Orozco confirmed ‘an incident’ but would not say more.
As nanotechnology advances and takes on a larger role in our everyday lives, I expect awareness and opposition will increase. Hopefully violent action against researchers and facilities can be curtailed, however.
Who can forget Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who received the world’s first successful partial face transplant in 2005 after being mauled by her dog? Prior to the transplant, which included a new nose and mouth, she had difficulty eating or speaking – the transplant has enabled her to do both.
Although a handful of similar procedures have been performed throughout the world, today Spanish surgeons revealed details of a face transplant that is said to be the “most complex” such transplant performed to date. The patient had been the victim of a shooting accident that left him unable to “breathe, swallow or talk properly.” Surgeons transplanted facial skin, muscles and bone, including cheekbones, jaw, nose, lips and teeth, and have reinforced the new facial structure with metal plates. Due to the severity of his injuries, reconstructive surgery was not an option:
He was considered for a full face transplant after nine previous operations failed.
A team of 30 experts carried out the operation on 20 March at the hospital in Barcelona.
The man has since seen himself in the mirror and was calm and satisfied, the leader of the medical team, Joan Pere Barret, told a news conference.
Despite the fact that the patient will have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life, this surgery gives him a chance at a dramatically higher quality of life than he would have had otherwise. Ten years ago, such a procedure would have been science fiction. Today, it’s medical fact.
The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.
Of course the nature of memory is fluid. Most memories degrade with time – become “fuzzy” – or can disappear altogether. On the other hand, occasionally we can be reminded of an event that took place in our pasts and recall a vivid memory that we’d “forgotten.”
Putting the estimated capacity of the brain in terms of petabytes, a measure of digital information, is a bit problematic, since the human brain is analog (although there is some debate on this point). Furthermore, Dr. Reber notes that we have no way to accurately measure the size of memories, so putting a number on the brain’s memory capacity doesn’t necessarily tell us a great deal.
After some adjustments to a sophisticated computer program that acts as the brain of the system, all 11 adults in the study had good blood sugar control without experiencing hypoglycemia, even after eating three high-carbohydrate meals.
“This is the first artificial pancreas device that has used both insulin and glucagon,” said Dr. Steven Russell of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who helped lead the study.
The finding is the latest in what has become a race to develop a fully functioning artificial pancreas that can give patients with type 1 diabetes an automated way to control their blood sugar.
Now if they can only shrink it to an implantable size…
