Next Age of Discovery

WSJ.com Next Age of Discovery: "In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures."

"In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians."

"By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts."

Simulated brain closer to thought

BBC News Simulated brain closer to thought: "A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.
The 'Blue Brain' has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory."

Just think to tweet!

Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter (April 20, 2009): "In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it.

Just 23 characters long, his message, 'using EEG to send tweet,' demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which 'locked-in' patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools."

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans | McClatchy: "Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

"Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

"Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer 'brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars."

"A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.

"Intel, the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as "please clean this mess," according to Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer.

Making a Better Eye

The Eye | h Magazine: "Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a contact lens that creates a virtual display superimposed over the normal field of vision. By using a transparent part of the eye to place instrumentation, the contact will be safe for human wear. The lenses will be imprinted with an assortment of electronic circuits and lights to make superimposition possible. A future version of the product might include the addition of wireless communication via the lens. The team has already demonstrated that rabbits can wear the lens for 20 minutes safely without any adverse effects, and are looking into a feasible production method for the contacts. There are still some major wrinkles to be ironed out in the manufacturing process, given that the materials need to be both safe for the body and incredibly small."

GR: This technology works by modifying input to one's existing eye(s). Others are working on *replacing* the human eye -- patching an electronic device directly into the visual cortex. Sound far out? Consider the Cochlear Implant.

Brain On a Chip

Brain On a Chip | h Magazine: "Today's most powerful supercomputers are all massively parallel processing systems with names like Earth Simulator, Blue Gene, ASCI White, ASCI Red, ASCI Purple, and ASCI Thor's Hammer. Through Moore's Law – which states that the number of transistors on a chip double every eighteen months – single chips that function as parallel processor arrays are becoming cost effective. Examples include chips from Ambric, picoChip, and Tilera.

The brain is also massively parallel, but currently on a different scale than the most powerful supercomputers. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t yet exist. Researchers estimate that it would require at least a machine with a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes – a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for at least three years."

Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth

Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth | h Magazine: "Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths.� If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.”

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question.� The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box.� What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer."