Oak Ridge's new Titan supercomputer is the fastest in the world

          The Energy Department’s new supercomputer has been named the fastest in the world. According to the Top 500 list, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s latest flagship computer Titan leapfrogged other ultra-fast machines to the top spot, clocking in 17.59 sustained petaflops on Linpack's benchmark scale.

          The open science supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 20 petaflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second. The IBM-powered Sequoia dropped to second place with 16.32 petaflops.

Last year, the Department of Energy awarded Nvidia and Cray a $97 million contract to create the world’s fastest supercomputer -- and the investment has clearly paid off.

          'The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors.'

                                                                                                                                                     - U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

          Thanks to powerful technology first used to power video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, Titan is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, Jaguar. The ultrafast computer is powered by 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, the company’s fastest accelerator ever and over 560,640 AMD processors, a surprise inclusion given that 76 percent of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list use Intel.

The Department of Energy now has five systems in the top 20 including Sequoia.

          “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.  

          “Titan joins the Department’s top-ranking supercomputers in equipping our nation’s researchers with the tools needed to keep the United States on the cutting edge of innovation.”

          The dizzying computing power will be used to simulate complex models of climate change and analyzing nuclear reactions and alternative energies, and developing the next generation of materials used to manufacture U.S. goods.

Courtesy : www.foxnews.com
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/12/oak-ridge-new-titan-supercomputer-is-fastest-in-world/#ixzz2F1me4Osz

"Bionic Arm" Technology from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

This week, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago introduced the first woman to be fitted with its "bionic arm" technology. Claudia Mitchell, who had her left arm amputated at the shoulder after a motorcycle accident, can now grab a drawer pull with her prosthetic hand by thinking, "grab drawer pull." That a person can successfully control multiple, complex movements of a prosthetic limb with his or her thoughts opens up a world of possibility for amputees. The setup -- both surgical and technological -- that makes this feat possible is almost as amazing as the results of the procedure.

The "bionic arm" technology is possible primarily because of two facts of amputation. First, the motor cortex in the brain (the area that controls voluntary muscle movements) is still sending out control signals even if certain voluntary muscles are no longer available for control; and second, when doctors amputate a limb, they don't remove all of the nerves that once carried signals to that limb. So if a person's arm is gone, there are working nerve stubs that end in the shoulder and simply have nowhere to send their information. If those nerve endings can be redirected to a working muscle group, then when a person thinks "grab handle with hand," and the brain sends out the corresponding signals to the nerves that should communicate with the hand, those signals end up at the working muscle group instead of at the dead end of the shoulder.

Rerouting those nerves is not a simple task. Dr. Todd Kuiken of the RIC developed the procedure, which he calls "targeted muscle reinnervation." Surgeons basically dissect the shoulder to access the nerve endings that control the movements of arm joints like the elbow, wrist and hand. Then, without damaging the nerves, they redirect the endings to a working muscle group. In the case of the RIC's "bionic arm," surgeons attach the nerve endings to a set of chest muscles. It takes several months for the nerves to grow into those muscles and become fully integrated. The end result is a redirection of control signals: The motor cortex sends out signals for the arm and hand through nerve passageways as it always did; but instead of those signals ending up at the shoulder, they end up at the chest.

To use those signals to control the bionic arm, the RIC setup places electrodes on the surface of the chest muscles. Each electrode controls one of the six motors that move the prosthetic arm's joints. When a person thinks "open hand," the brain sends the "open hand" signal to the appropriate nerve, now located in the chest. When the nerve ending receives the signal, the chest muscle it's connected to contracts. When the "open hand" chest muscle contracts, the electrode on that muscle detects the activation and tells the motor controlling the bionic hand to open. And since each nerve ending is integrated into a different piece of chest muscle, a person wearing the bionic arm can move all six motors simultaneously, resulting in a pretty natural range of motions for the prosthesis.

Courtesy - " science.howstuffworks.com "

Then why can one create a Robot that is controlled by a human brain!!!

How to weave machinery into biology

As we’re starting to test artificially grown organs, scientists are wondering how to make sure that their methods result in viable tissues. One of the first steps was to take organ growth into three dimensions, letting the cells grow on a scaffold and self-organize into the right muscles, valves, and other soft tissue. Usually these scaffolds are derived from existing organs purified of all their old cells and many are designed to break down into naturally occurring chemicals to be flushed out of the body on implantation. But how do you check what the organ can be implanted with the necessary level of precision? Why turn the scaffold into a monitoring device by letting cells grow on a sensor. This way, when the tissues grow, you can monitor the electrical buzz between the cells and track how well they’re developing and working together. But so far, this method had a pretty sever limitation. It could only be done in two dimensions, one less than we need for viable organic structures. So much potential but so problematic to implement.

Well, researchers at MIT decided to tackle this problem and came up with a new biocompatible material that could be arranged into a proper three dimensional scaffold and monitor both the structure and function of an organ. After successfully growing cardiac muscles around a mesh of this electro-sensitive substance, they were able to monitor the effects of a chemical that speeds up heart rate. Using their method, we could obtain a treasure trove of new data about how well a future artificial organ will grow and run it through a battery of tests to make sure it’s fit for clinical use to replace a damaged or failing organ. Even more interesting would be the opportunity for doctors to keep monitoring how the organ is doing and give patients advance warning should a health crisis be imminent. Imagine a future in which your aging and failing vital organs could be replaced with wired versions of themselves and report on how well your body is doing, giving all sorts of useful warnings should something new go wrong. Better yet, the mesh would simply read the behavior of the cells around it and report it back to a system which can make sense of the detected patterns so there’s not delicate, over-engineered instrument sitting inside you.

And all that brings us to another question. Could nanoparticles made from this material hitch a ride through a patient’s bloodstream to the liver, lungs, heart, kidneys, possibly into some key parts of the musculoskeletal system, maybe even the brain itself (though that would be a major challenge in and of itself), and monitor his or her health by listening to the patterns of electrical signals emitted by the organs’ cells. Could be a path to early detection and treatment of cancer strains that grow into tumors when we learn how to track the electrochemical signs of a malicious cell being formed? The possibilities posed by this technology are really quite amazing and come with great potential for new medical markets. Let’s hope there will be a lot of follow up to see if it really would be possible to make us all cyborgs with internal biocompatible sensors that will help us better diagnose what ails us as our bodies accumulate wear and tear. It sounds an awful lot like a science fiction movie, true. But in this case, the technology is very real and we have some very good ideas out there for how to turn it into science fact with the right funding and expertise behind this invention’s spin-off projects.

See: Tian, B., et al. (2012). Macroporous nanowire nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues Nature Materials DOI: 10.1038/nmat3404

Courtesy : Weird things

Monkeys use mind control to move a virtual arm and experience touch

The aim is to create a mind-controlled 'exoskeleton' that can restore movement and sensation to paralysed people

A brain implant allowed monkeys not only to move a virtual arm but also to experience tactile sensations. Photograph: Katie Zhuang

A brain implant that allows monkeys to move an avatar's arm and feel objects in a virtual world has been demonstrated for the first time.

The animals used the device to control the arm by thought alone, and feel the texture of the objects it touched through electrical signals sent directly to their brains.

Researchers built the system as part of a major effort to help paralysed people regain the use of their arms and legs, feeling the objects they touch and the ground they walk on.

Without any sensation of touch, it would be easy for people to crush or drop objects they were trying to grasp, or misjudge the terrain underfoot and stumble, the scientists said.

Miguel Nicolelis, who led the research team at Duke University in North Carolina, said the technology was a milestone in his group's bid to restore natural movement and fine control to paralysed people.

Nicolelis is working with colleagues at the Technical University in Munich to build a whole-body "exoskeleton" that can move people's paralysed limbs in response to brain activity picked up by the implant.

"The patient will be able to use their brain to control their movement, but they could also get sensations back from their legs, arms and hands," Nicolelis told the Guardian.

"We are looking to have a demonstration of this in time for the World Cup in 2014. When the Brazilian team walks on to the field, we want them accompanied by two quadriplegic teenagers who will walk on to the pitch and kick the ball using this technology."

Nicolelis, who was born in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, said the challenge was "like the Brazilian moonshot".

While a prototype exoskeleton might be more conspicuous than most patients would like, it will be quiet and made of lightweight materials. "Even the first generation is not going to be like Robocop," Nicolelis said.

Writing in the journal Nature, Nicolelis describes a series of experiments in which monkeys learned to perform tasks on a computer in exchange for a reward, in this case a sip of fruit juice.

In the first round of experiments, the monkeys used a joystick to move a virtual arm on the computer screen in front of them. The screen displayed three identical images, each a circle within a circle. As the virtual hand moved over each, the joystick vibrated to convey one of three different "textures". Using trial and error, the monkeys worked out that they received some juice when they placed their virtual hand in the centre of a circle with a certain texture.

In the second round of experiments, the monkeys switched over to the brain implant. This time, they moved the virtual arm by thoughts, which were picked up by fine wires inserted into the motor cortex region of their brains. The electrical activity of between 50 and 200 brain cells controlled the arm's movements.

When the monkeys moved the virtual arm onto a circle, they experienced a sensation of texture from tiny electrical pulses sent directly to thousands of neurons in part of the brain called the primary tactile cortex.

The more time the monkeys spent with the implant, the more they appeared to view the virtual arm as a natural part of their body. "They got better and better at the task over time. By measuring how long they spent on each circle, you could see they were really focused on finding the right texture," Nicolelis said.

Nicolelis calls the device a brain-machine-brain interface, because it translates brain activity into movement while sending information on texture back into the brain.

"The remarkable success with nonhuman primates is what makes us believe that humans could accomplish the same task much more easily in the near future," Nicolelis said. "We hope that in the next few years this technology could help to restore a more autonomous life to many patients who are currently locked in without being able to move or experience any tactile sensation of the surrounding world."

Courtesy : http://www.guardian.co.uk

SCIENTISTS TO REVEAL GOD PARTICLE FINDINGS

By Genevieve Gannon, AAP

An experiment accused of jeopardising the future of the planet will reach its climax this week.

Scientists will on Wednesday reveal the findings of their investigation into the piece of sub-atomic matter dubbed the God particle.

There are three possible outcomes to the 30-year search for the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is key to the scientific understanding of all matter.

The first outcome - they will prove its existence.

The rule book for how particles have mass operates under the assumption the Higgs boson exists.

The Higgs boson theory is a missing piece of the rule book, which would have to be rewritten or scrapped if scientists discover the particle doesn't exist.

The second outcome - they will find something previously unthought of.

The third outcome - they will be able to rule out the existence of the Higgs Boson altogether.

Melbourne University physicist Geoff Taylor, who has been involved in the Geneva project since 1989, says the significance of the experiment cannot be overstated.

"The existence or not of the Higgs is an absolutely pivotal moment," Prof Taylor said.

"For us it's an incredibly important step in understanding the universe around us."

Should the Higgs boson be discovered, scientists will be able to explore other mysterious phenomena such as dark matter.

Last week, physicists started analysing the data collected from the latest batch of experiments in Geneva.

Even they don't know what they will find.

"We know we have to discover something in this energy range," Prof Taylor said.

"The simplest thing would be the Standard Model Higgs."

The experiments having been taking place below the Geneva airport and surrounding farmland.

The Large Hadron Collider, which is housed in a 27 kilometre long tunnel, has been "smashing" particles together.

Data has then been collected from the sub-atomic fragments released by the collision.

Scientists have been analysing the data in a double-blind test, to minimise the interference of what Prof Taylor calls human foibles.

"We have to find one particular event in about a million million events," Prof Taylor says.

The experiment has previously met with opposition.

There were some who believed it could cause the end of the world because the smashing of the particles would result in the generation of mini black holes.

Prof Taylor dismissed the claims.

"As soon as you say there is the possibility of creating black holes you have people saying we are going to be swallowed up by black holes," Prof Taylor said in 2008.

"It's completely misguided."

An announcement will be made in Geneva and Melbourne at 6pm (AEST) on Wednesday.

"Whatever comes out comes out, we don't know what that will be yet," Prof Taylor said.

Google's 'brain simulator': 16000 computers to identify a cat

                                      Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the internet to learn on its own.

Stanford computer scientist Andrew Ng next to an image of a cat that a neural network taught itself to recognise. Photo: The New York Times

Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google's brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

The neural network taught itself to recognise cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognising objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.
The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.
Although some of the computer science ideas that the researchers are using are not new, the sheer scale of the software simulations is leading to learning systems that were not previously possible.
And Google researchers are not alone in exploiting the techniques, which are referred to as "deep learning" models. Last year Microsoft scientists presented research showing that the techniques could be applied equally well to build computer systems to understand human speech.
"This is the hottest thing in the speech recognition field these days," said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist who specialises in machine learning at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

And then, of course, there are the cats.
To find them, the Google research team, lead by the Stanford University computer scientist Andrew Y. Ng and the Google fellow Jeff Dean, used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections. They then fed it random thumbnails of images, one each extracted from 10 million YouTube videos.

The videos were selected randomly and that in itself is an interesting comment on what interests humans in the internet age. However, the research is also striking. That is because the software-based neural network created by the researchers appeared to closely mirror theories developed by biologists that suggest individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant objects.

Currently much commercial machine vision technology is done by having humans "supervise" the learning process by labeling specific features. In the Google research, the machine was given no help in identifying features.

"The idea is that instead of having teams of researchers trying to find out how to find edges, you instead throw a ton of data at the algorithm and you let the data speak and have the software automatically learn from the data," Dr. Ng said.

"We never told it during the training, 'This is a cat,' " said Dr. Dean, who originally helped Google design the software that lets it easily break programs into many tasks that can be computed simultaneously. "It basically invented the concept of a cat. We probably have other ones that are side views of cats."

The Google brain assembled a dreamlike digital image of a cat by employing a hierarchy of memory locations to successively cull out general features after being exposed to millions of images. The scientists said, however, that it appeared they had developed a cybernetic cousin to what takes place in the brain's visual cortex.

Neuroscientists have discussed the possibility of what they call the "grandmother neuron," specialised cells in the brain that fire when they are exposed repeatedly or "trained" to recognise a particular face of an individual.

"You learn to identify a friend through repetition," said Gary Bradski, a neuroscientist at Industrial Perception, in Palo Alto, Calif.
While the scientists were struck by the parallel emergence of the cat images, as well as human faces and body parts in specific memory regions of their computer model, Dr. Ng said he was cautious about drawing parallels between his software system and biological life.

"A loose and frankly awful analogy is that our numerical parameters correspond to synapses," said Dr. Ng. He noted that one difference was that despite the immense computing capacity that the scientists used, it was still dwarfed by the number of connections found in the brain.

"It is worth noting that our network is still tiny compared to the human visual cortex, which is 106 times larger in terms of the number of neurons and synapses," the researchers wrote.

Despite being dwarfed by the immense scale of biological brains, the Google research provides new evidence that existing machine learning algorithms improve greatly as the machines are given access to large pools of data.

"The Stanford/Google paper pushes the envelope on the size and scale of neural networks by an order of magnitude over previous efforts," said David A. Bader, executive director of high-performance computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. He said that rapid increases in computer technology would close the gap within a relatively short period of time: "The scale of modeling the full human visual cortex may be within reach before the end of the decade."

Google scientists said that the research project had now moved out of the Google X laboratory and was being pursued in the division that houses the company's search business and related services. Potential applications include improvements to image search, speech recognition and machine language translation.

Despite their success, the Google researchers remained cautious about whether they had hit upon the holy grail of machines that can teach themselves.

"It'd be fantastic if it turns out that all we need to do is take current algorithms and run them bigger, but my gut feeling is that we still don't quite have the right algorithm yet," said Dr. Ng.

The New York Times

Windows 8 Release Preview(Evaluation copy)

Its look like Microsoft also begins to distribute free apps and let us to develop a app like Linux distributions..... Microsoft clearly plans to overtake both Android and Linux by distributing free apps like open source!!!

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited MTurk Requester site. Requestors are restricted to US-based entities.

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, Workers can have an address anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically businesses, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs to Amazon.

CERN Officials May Have Witnessed ‘God Particle’

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number. The Higgs field is a quantum field with a non-zero value that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state.

One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton-proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons, visible as lines.

The existence of the Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model to explain how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry (the Higgs mechanism) takes place in nature, which in turn explains why other elementary particles have mass. Its discovery would further validate the Standard Model as essentially correct, as it is the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been observed in particle physics experiments. The Standard Model completely fixes the properties of the Higgs boson, except for its mass. It is expected to have no spin and no electric or color charge, and it interacts with other particles through weak interaction and Yukawa interactions. Alternative sources of the Higgs mechanism that do not need the Higgs boson are also possible and would be considered if the existence of the Higgs boson were ruled out. They are known as Higgsless models.

Experiments to determine whether the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and were performed at Fermilab's Tevatron until its closure in late 2011. Mathematical consistency of the Standard Model requires that any mechanism capable of generating the masses of elementary particles become visible at energies above 1.4 TeV; therefore, the LHC (designed to collide two 7-TeV proton beams) is expected to be able to answer the question of whether or not the Higgs boson actually exists. In December 2011, Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, spokespersons of the two main experiments at the LHC (ATLAS and CMS) both reported independently that their data hints at a possibility the Higgs may exist with a mass around 125 GeV/c2 (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg). They also reported that the original range under investigation has been narrowed down considerably and that a mass outside approximately 115–130 GeV/c2 is almost ruled out. No conclusive answer yet exists, although it is expected that the LHC will provide sufficient data by the end of 2012 for a definite answer.

"Discovery or exclusion of the Higgs particle, as predicted by the Standard Model, is getting ever closer," CERN Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. "Both occurrences will be great news for physics, the former allowing us to start the detailed study of the Higgs particle, the latter being the first proof of the incompleteness of the Standard Model, requiring new phenomena to be happening within the reach of the LHC."

"We’re taking our first steps in this new physics landscape," added CMS experiment spokesman Guido Tonelli, "and it is great to see how fast we are producing new results. I am confident that soon there will be only a few regions left where the Higgs boson, as postulated by the Standard Model, might still be hiding."

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/160nr)

Transhumanism

Neuroscientist Anders Sandberg has an interesting career: he's working on uploading the contents of human brains onto a computer. This would be important, he explains, to combat aging as well as overpopulation.

Illustration by Michael Gibbs: a secular icon representing transhumanism

At a meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) held in Chicago this past July, "Transvision 2007," Sandberg and other transhumanists from around the world got together to talk about the future of humanity ("transhumanism" means, literally, "beyond humanity").

In pursuit of his goal of creating human-machine hybrids, Sandberg described how to scan a mouse brain, using a camera, a laser beam and a diamond blade. Conceivably, with their brain hosted by a computer, a person could live indefinitely.

More pragmatically, AI member Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at MIT, explains why humanity would want this. "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," Minsky explained to Egan. "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." But scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve, would appreciate the extended lifespans, he says.

According to the Transvision Web site , the WTA has a foundation of seemingly non-controversial principles: for instance, they support the development of new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy "better minds, better bodies and better lives." Their goals are ambitious, yet common: they seek to solve nothing less than the greatest challenges that humanity will face. They look for solutions including longevity therapies, sustainable energy, clean water, a restored environment, and space development.

The science and technology they consider using is the most striking part of transhumanist thought, although much of it is abstract and theoretical. Often with the intent to modify the human body, transhumanists employ ideas and tools from biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, simulated reality, artificial intelligence, and more futuristic disciplines. Because they deal with technologies far from today's lab bench, many "traditional" scientists are skeptical of the technical feasibility of transhumanist science.

Best-seller by Ray Kurzweil, WTA's unofficial prophet

Sometimes the transhumanists are accused of lacking ethical boundaries for their work, but the WTA actually is quite interested in ethics, morality and civil liberties, albeit with their own definitions. For example, a transhumanist thought is that humans can and should use technology to become more than human -- ethically worded, at least.

"Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies," says AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on the need to move forward before someone with malevolent intentions or ethical ignorance does first. "If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble."

(If that's not an ethical understatement, what is?)

On the other hand, Minsky represents another perspective of transhumanist ethics. The 80-year-old father of AI, who is strongly against regulating the development of new technologies, told Egan, "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want. You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people."
...And, it seems, transhumanists don't seem to mind a little controversy.

Further information:
New Scientist video interview with WPA members

Prototype Nano Assembler

This is not what you'd normally expect to see in a press release from a U.S. government scientist:

The first real steps towards building a microscopic device that can construct nano machines have been taken by US researchers. Writing in [a] peer-reviewed publication, researchers describe an early prototype for a nanoassembler.

In his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler set down the long-term aim of nanotechnology -- to create an assembler, a microscopic device, a robot, that could construct yet smaller devices from individual atoms and molecules.

For the last two decades, those researchers who recognized the potential have taken diminutive steps towards such a nanoassembler. Those taking the top-down approach have seen the manipulative power of the atomic force microscope (AFM), a machine that can observe and handle single atoms, as one solution. Those taking the bottom-up approach are using chemistry to build molecular machinery.

However, neither the top-down nor the bottom-up approach is yet to fulfill Drexler's prophecy of functional nanobots that can construct other machines on a scale of just a few billionths of a meter. . .

Yet the rewards could be enormous with the ultimate potential of creating a technology that can construct almost any material from atoms and molecules from super-strong but incredibly lightweight construction materials to a molecular computer or even nanobots that can make other nanobots to solve global problems, such as food, water, and energy shortages.

Jason Gorman, contact person on the announcement, is with the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Here's more from the release:

Gorman and his colleagues at NIST have taken a novel approach to building a nanoassembler and reveal details in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nanomanufacturing. "Our demonstration is still a work in progress," says Gorman, "you might describe it as a 'proto-prototype' for a nanoassembler."

The NIST system consists of four Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) devices positioned around a centrally located port on a chip into which the starting materials can be placed Each nanomanipulator is composed of positioning mechanism with an attached nanoprobe. By simultaneously controlling the position of each of these nanoprobes, the team can use them to cooperatively assemble a complex structure on a very small scale. "If successful, this project will result in an on-chip nanomanufacturing system that would be the first of its kind," says Gorman. . .

Importantly, once the team has optimized their design they anticipate that nanoassembly systems could be made for around $400 per chip at present costs. This is thousands of times cheaper than macro-scale systems such as the AFM.

Gorman points out that it should be possible to have multiple nanoassemblers working simultaneously to manufacture next generation nanoelectronics. At the moment, his team is interested in developing the platform for scientists and engineers to make cutting edge discoveries in nanotechnology. "Very few effective tools exist for manipulation and assembly at the nano-scale, thereby limiting the growth of this critical field," he says.

Assuming this concept can be put into practice, as Gorman and his team expect, it will represent a significant step forward in enabling technologies for molecular manufacturing. It's not all the way there, of course. In fact, several more steps will be required, which may take at least another five to ten years.

But this is an important advance, especially since it comes from within the U.S. scientific community, which up until now has been largely dismissive of molecular manufacturing theory.

IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer

IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain

Using 144 terabytes of RAM, scientists simulate a cat's cerebral cortex based on 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

IBM and Stanford University researchers modeled a cat's cerebral cortex using the Blue Gene/IP supercomputer, which currently ranks as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. They had simulated a full rat brain in 2007, and 1 percent of the human cerebral cortex this year.

The simulated cat brain still runs about 100 times slower than the real thing. But PhysOrg reports that a new algorithm called BlueMatter allows IBM researchers to diagram the connections among cortical and sub-cortical places within the human brain. The team then built the cat cortex simulation consisting of 1 billion brain cells and 10 trillion learning synapses, the communication connections among neurons.

A separate team of Swiss researchers also used an IBM supercomputer for their Blue Brain project, where a digital rat brain's neurons began creating self-organizing neurological patterns. That research group hopes to simulate a human brain within 10 years.

Another more radical approach from Stanford University looks to recreate the human brain's messily chaotic system on a small device called Neurogrid. Unlike traditional supercomputers with massive energy requirements, Neurogrid might run on the human brain's power requirement of just 20 watts -- barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

http://www.popsci.com/

The Blue Brain Project

Blue Brain Project: Build a virtual brain in a supercomputer 

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.

The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is to study the brain's architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute's director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons. It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness.

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain...

...or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

Ray Kurzweil shuffle off his mortal coil tomorrow, the obituaries would record an inventor of rare and visionary talent. In 1976, he created the first machine capable of reading books to the blind, and less than a decade later he built the K250: the first music synthesizer to nigh-on perfectly duplicate the sound of a grand piano. His Kurzweil 3000 educational software, which helps students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, is likewise typical of an innovator who has made his name by combining restless imagination with technological ingenuity and a commendable sense of social responsibility.

However, these past accomplishments, as impressive as they are, would tell only half the Kurzweil story. The rest of his biography – the essence of his very existence, he would contend – belongs to the future.

Following the publication of his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil has become known, above all, as a technology speculator whose predictions have polarised opinion – from stone-cold scepticism and splenetic disagreement to dedicated hero worship and admiration. It's not just that he boldly envisions a tomorrow's world where, for example, tiny robots will reverse the effects of pollution, artificial intelligence will far outstrip (and supplement) biological human intelligence, and humankind "will be able to live indefinitely without ageing". No, the real reason Kurzweil has become such a magnet for blogospheric debate, and a tech-celebrity, is that he's convinced those future predictions – and many more just as stunning – are imminent occurrences. They will all, he steadfastly maintains, happen before the middle of the 21st century.

Which means, regarding the earlier allusion to his mortal coil, that he doesn't plan to do any shuffling any time soon. Ray Kurzweil, 61, sincerely believes that his own immortality is a realistic proposition... and just as strongly contends that, using a combination of grave-site DNA and future technologies, he will be able to reclaim his father, Fredric Kurzweil (the victim of a fatal heart attack in 1970), from death.

Just when will this ultimate life-affirming feat be possible? In Kurzweil's estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing "a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history", by the end of the 2030s; humans and non-biological machines will then merge so effectively that the differences between them will no longer matter; and, after that, human intelligence, transformed for the better, will start to expand outward into the universe, around about 2045. With this last prediction, Kurzweil is referring not to any recognisable type of space travel, but to a kind of space infusion. "Intelligence," he writes, "will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst [and] spread out from its origin on Earth."

It's as well to mention at this point that, in 2005, Mikhail Gorbachev personally congratulated Kurzweil for foreseeing the pivotal role of communications technology in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates calls him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". A man of lesser accomplishments, touting the same head-spinning claims, would impress few beyond an inner circle of sci-fi obsessives, but Kurzweil – honoured as an inventor by US presidents Lyndon B Johnson and Bill Clinton – has rightfully earned himself a stockpile of credibility.

In person, chewing pensively on a banana, the softly spoken, slightly built Kurzweil looks chipper for his 61 years, and wears an elegantly tailored suit. A father of two, he resides in the Boston suburbs with his psychologist wife, Sonya, but has flown into Los Angeles for a private screening of Transcendent Man, the upcoming documentary that examines his life and theories over a suitably cosmic score by Philip Glass. "People don't really get their intellectual arms around the changes that are happening," he says, perched lightly on the edge of a large armchair, his overall sheen of wellbeing perhaps a shade more encouraging than you'd expect from a man of his age. "The issue is not just [that] something amazing is going to happen in 2045," he says. "There's something remarkable going on right now."

To understand exactly what he means, and why he thinks that his predictions bear up to hard scrutiny, it's necessary to return to the title of the above-mentioned book, and the grand idea on which it's based: "the singularity".

Borrowed from black-hole physics, in which the singularity is taken to signify what is unknowable, the term has been applied to technology to suggest that we haven't really got a clue what's going to happen once machines are vastly more "intelligent" than humans. The singularity, writes Kurzweil, is "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed". He is not unique in his adoption of the idea – the information theorist John von Neumann hinted at it in the 1950s; retired maths professor and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge has been exploring it at length since the early 1980s – but Kurzweil's version is currently the most popular "singularitarian" text.

"I didn't come to these ideas because I had certain conclusions and worked backwards," he explains. "In fact, I didn't start looking for them at all. I was looking for a way to time my inventions and technology projects as I realised timing was the critical factor to success. And I made this discovery that if you measure certain underlying properties of information technology, it follows exquisitely predictable trajectories."

For Kurzweil, the crux of the singularity is that the pace of technology is increasing at a super-fast, exponential rate. What's more, there's also "exponential growth in the rate ' of exponential growth". It is this understanding that gives him the confidence to believe that technology – through an explosion of progress in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics – will soon surpass the limits of his imagination.

It is also why, in addition to bananas and the odd beneficial glass of red wine, he follows a regime of around 200 vitamin pills daily: not so much a diet as an attempt to "aggressively re-programme" his biochemistry. He claims that tests have shown he aged only two biological years over the course of 16 actual vitamin-popping years. He also says that, thanks to the regime, he has effectively cured himself of Type 2 diabetes. Not even open-heart surgery, which he underwent last year, and from which he made a rapid recovery ("a few hours later I was in the next room, and sent an email") could dent his convictions. On the contrary, he thinks that the brevity of his convalescence is proof positive that the pills are working. If he slows down the ageing process, he reckons, he'll be around long enough to witness the arrival of technology that will prolong his life... forever.

Kurzweil was raised in Queens, New York, where two youthful obsessions – electronics and music – would lead to a guest appearance on the 1960s TV quiz show I've Got a Secret, on which (aged 17) he showcased his first major invention: a home-made computer that could compose tunes. Five years later came the death (in 1970, when Ray was 22) of his father, Fredric, a struggling composer and conductor who, Kurzweil believes, never really got his due. "I'm painfully aware of the limitations he had, which were not his fault," he says. "In that generation, information about health was not very available, and we didn't have [today's] resources for creating music. Now, a kid in a dorm room can create a whole orchestral composition on a synthesizer."

The tragedy of that loss – and the fact that the means to repair a congenital heart defect were available to him, but not his father – is clearly an intense motivation for Kurzweil. Sometime soon, he believes, he will once again be able to converse with his father, such is the potential of the scientific advances he believes will ultimately pave the way to the singularity. Not everyone, though, concurs with his appraisal of technological progress, and his belief in the imminence of immortality.

Memorably, in the Transcendent Man documentary, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of future-thinking magazine Wired, labels Kurzweil a "deluded dreamer" who is "performing the services of a prophet". In reacting to that assessment, Kurzweil's habitually mellow tone of voice takes on a hint – albeit mild – of umbrage. "It's interesting that [Kelly] says my views are 'hard-wired', when I actually think his views are hard-wired," he says. "He's a linear thinker, and linear thinking is hard-wired in our brains: it worked very well 1,000 years ago. Some people really are resistant to accepting this exponential perspective, and they're very smart people. You show them the data, and yes, they follow it, but they just cannot get past it. Other people accept it readily."

Whereas Kelly differs from Kurzweil on the grounds of interpretation and tone, other voices of dispute are rooted in a deep-seated fear of technological calamity. "The form of opposition from fundamentalist humanists, and fundamentalist naturalists – that we should make no change to nature [or] to human beings – is directly contrary to the nature of human beings, because we are the species that goes beyond our limitations," counters Kurzweil. "And I think that's quite a destructive school of thought – you can show that hundreds of thousands of kids went blind in Africa due to the opposition to [genetically engineered] golden rice. The opposition to genetically modified organisms is just a blanket, reflexive opposition to the idea of changing nature. Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it."

To those opponents who detect a thick strain of techno-evangelism in Kurzweil's basically optimistic interpretation of the singularity, he reacts with self-parody: there's a tongue-in-cheek photo in The Singularity is Near of the author wearing a sandwich board bearing the book's title, and he insists he was never "searching for an alternative to customary faith". At the same time, he says humankind's inevitable move towards non-biological intelligence is "an essentially spiritual undertaking".

Whether or not he attracts a significant following of dedicated believers in search of deliverance, ecstasy or any variation thereof (some commentators have called the singularity "the rapture for geeks"), Kurzweil has undoubtedly positioned himself at the heart of a growing singularity industry. He is a director of the non-profit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, "the only organisation that exists for the expressed purpose of achieving the potential of smarter-than-human intelligence safer and sooner"; there's a second film awaiting release (part fiction, part documentary, co-produced by Kurzweil), also based on The Singularity is Near; and in addition to his theoretical books, he has co-authored a series of health titles, including Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. The secret of immortality, he wants you to know, is available in book form.

Those who have lent Kurzweil their support include space-travel pioneer Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation; videogame designer (and creator of Spore and SimCity) Will Wright; and Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot. All three can be found on the faculty and adviser list of the recently founded Singularity University (Silicon Valley), of which Kurzweil is chancellor and trustee.

If the pace of technology continues to accelerate, as Kurzweil predicts, it seems likely that discussion of the singularity will see an exponential growth of its own. Few would dispute that it's one of the 21st century's most compelling ideas, because it connects issues that intensely polarise people (God, the energy crisis, genetic engineering) with sci-fi concepts that stir the imagination (artificial intelligence, immersive virtual reality, molecular engineering). Thanks largely to Kurzweil and the singularity, scenarios once viewed as diverting entertainment are being reappraised with a new seriousness. The line between fanciful thinker and credible, scientific analyst is becoming blurred: what once would have been relegated to the realms of sci-fi is now gaining factual currency.

"People can wax philosophically," says Kurzweil. "It's very abstract – whether it's a good thing to overcome death or not – but when it comes to some new methodology that's a better treatment for cancer, there's no controversy. Nobody's picketing doctors who put computers inside people's brains for Parkinson's: it's not considered controversial."

Might that change as more people become aware of the singularity and the pace of technological change? "People can argue about it," says Kurzweil, relaxed as ever within his aura of certainty. "But when it comes down to accepting each step along the way, it's done really without much debate."

'Transcendent Man' ( transcendentman.com) screens at Sheffield Doc/Fest (0114 276 5141, sheffdocfest.com), running in association with 'The Independent', from 4-8 November

The greatest thing since sliced bread?

Ray Kurzweil's guide to incredible future technologies — and when he thinks they're likely to arrive ...

1 Reconnaissance dust

"These so-called 'smart dust' – tiny devices that are almost invisible but contain sensors, computers and communication capabilities – are already being experimented with. Practical use of these devices is likely within 10 to 15 years"

2 Nano assemblers

"Basically, these are three-dimensional printers that can create a physical object from an information file and inexpensive input materials. So we could email a blouse or a toaster or even the toast. There is already an industry of three-dimensional printers, and the resolution of the devices that can be created is getting finer and finer. The nano assembler would assemble devices from molecules and molecular fragments, and is about 20 years away"

3 Respirocytes

"A respirocyte is a nanobot (a blood cell-sized device) that is designed to replace our biological red blood cells but is 1,000 times more capable. If you replaced a portion of your biological red blood cells with these robotic versions you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for four hours. These are about 20 years away" '

4 Foglets

"Foglets are a form of nanobots that can reassemble themselves into a wide variety of objects in the real world, essentially bringing the rapid morphing qualities of virtual reality to real reality. Nanobots that can perform useful therapeutic functions in our bodies, essentially keeping us healthy from inside, are only about 20 years away. Foglets are more advanced and are probably 30 to 40 years away"

5 Blue goo

"The concern with full-scale nanotechnology and nanobots is that if they had the capability to replicate in a natural environment (as bacteria and other pathogens do), they could destroy humanity or even all of the biomass. This is called the grey goo concern. When that becomes feasible we will need a nanotechnology immune system. The nanobots that would be protecting us from harmful self-replicating nanobots are called blue goo (blue as in police). This scenario is 20 to 30 years away"



http://www.independent.co.uk

Mind Uploading

               Whole brain emulation or mind uploading (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably. The simulated mind is assumed to be part of a virtual reality simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively, the simulated mind could be assumed to reside in a computer inside (or connected to) a humanoid robot or a biological body, replacing its brain.


               Whole brain emulation is discussed by futurists as a "logical endpoint" of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields, both about brain simulation for medical research purposes. It is discussed in artificial intelligence research publications as an approach to strong AI. Among futurists and within the transhumanist movement it is an important proposed life extension technology, originally suggested in biomedical literature in 1971. It is a central conceptual feature of numerous science fiction novels and films.
Whole brain emulation is considered by some scientists as a theoretical and futuristic but possible technology, although mainstream research funders and scientific journals remain skeptical. Several contradictory predictions have been made about when a whole human brain can be emulated; some of the predicted dates have already passed. Substantial mainstream research and development are however being done in relevant areas including development of faster super computers, virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, animal brain mapping and simulation, connectomics and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains.

Source - wikipedia

Brain-computer interfaces

Source Wikipedia

             

               Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) (also known as neuro-computer interfaces, direct neuron interfaces or cerebral interfaces) constitute one of the hypothetical technologies for the reading of information in the dynamically functioning brain. The production of this or a similar device may be essential to the possibility of mind uploading a living human subject.

n°	Français :	English:
1	Socle	Pedestal
2	Capteur	Sensor
3	Électrode	Electrode

Read More : Neuro Informatrics.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroinformatics

Neuron-Like Computer Chips Could Portably Digitize Human Brain

Simulating the brain with traditional chips would require impractical megawatts of power. One scientist has an alternative.

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That's the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain's low energy requirements of just 20 watts -- barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

Discover Magazine has the story on how the Neurogrid computer could completely overhaul the traditional approach to computers. It trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain's chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era -- the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

Boahen has so far managed to squeeze a million neurons onto his new supercomputer, compared to just 45,000 silicon neurons on previous neural machines. A next-generation Neurogrid may host as many as 64 million silicon neurons by 2011, or approximately the brain of a mouse.

This new type of supercomputer will not replace the precise calculations of current machines. But its energy efficiency could provide the necessary breakthrough to continue upholding Moore's Law, which suggests that the number of transistors on a silicon chip can double about every two years. Perhaps equally exciting, the creative chaos from a chaotic supercomputer system could ultimately lay the foundation for the processing power necessary to raise artificial intelligence to human levels.