Physicists demonstrate a scalable quantum network that ought to be adaptable for all manner of long-distance quantum communication.
Quantum technologies are the way of the future, but will that future ever arrive?
Maybe so. Physicists have cleared a bit more of the path to a plausible quantum future by constructing an elementary network for exchanging and storing quantum information. The network features two all-purpose nodes that can send, receive and store quantum information, linked by a fiber-optic cable that carries it from one node to another on a single photon.
The network is only a prototype, but if it can be refined and scaled up, it could form the basis of communication channels for relaying quantum information. A group from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (M.P.Q.) in Garching, Germany, described the advance in the April 12 issue of Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Quantum bits, or qubits, are at the heart of quantum information technologies. An ordinary, classical bit in everyday electronics can store one of two values: a 0 or a 1. But thanks to the indeterminacy inherent to quantum mechanics, a qubit can be in a so-called superposition, hovering undecided between 0 and 1, which adds a layer of complexity to the information it carries. Quantum computers would boast capabilities beyond the reach of even the most powerful classical supercomputers, and cryptography protocols based on the exchange of qubits would be more secure than traditional encryption methods.
Excerpt from an article by John Matson at Scientific American. Continue HERE
According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites. Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the internet.
While page views are a fine starting point, they only tell you that X porn site is more popular than Y non-porn site. Four billion page views sure sounds like a lot, but it’s only when you factor in what those porn surfers are actually doing that the size and scale of adult websites truly comes into focus.
Excerpt from an article written by Sebastian Anthony at ExtremeTech. Read it HERE
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is growing from showy adolescence into a workhorse of brain imaging.
The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. With their heads held still, the volunteers watched flashing lights or tensed their hands, while the research teams built the data flowing from the machines into grainy images showing parts of the brain illuminated as multicoloured blobs.
The results showed that a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could use blood as a proxy for measuring the activity of neurons — without the injection of a signal-boosting compound1, 2. It was the first demonstration of fMRI as it is commonly used today, and came just months after the technique debuted — using a contrast agent — in humans3. Sensitive to the distinctive magnetic properties of blood that is rich in oxygen, the method shows oxygenated blood flowing to active brain regions. Unlike scanning techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which detects electrical activity at the skull’s surface, fMRI produces measurements from deep inside the brain. It is also non-invasive, which makes it safer and more comfortable than positron emission tomography (PET), in which radioactive compounds are injected and traced as they flow around the body.
Excerpt of an article written by Kerri Smith at NATURE. Continue HERE
In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.
And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
For years, New York parents have been applying to preschools even before their youngsters are born. That’s not new, but the approach one prestigious pre-school on the Upper West Side is.
At the Porsafillo Preschool Academy, all applicants must now submit a DNA analysis of their children.
The preschool is housed in a modern glass and steel building designed by IM Pei. It’s situated in a leafy corner of the Upper West Side. On a recent afternoon, Headmaster Rebecca Unsinn showed off “Porsafillo Pre,” as it’s called.
Short synopsis: The non-verbal documentary ROBOT WORLD depicts the evolution of robots from a mechanical somnambulist to an autonomous sensorium. The neoclassical violinist Matt Howden emphasizes the film’s message: these artificial people are our alternate doubles.
About the film: ROBOT WORLD is a compilation. The source material for this one-hour film comes from robot laboratories at universities, from private footage at industrial fairs, military archives and corporate videos from the robot industry. Motion pictures of old 16 mm films from the 1930’s were added. This non-verbal documentary was recycled from far in excess of one hundred hours of raw material. ROBOT WORLD is the second film in the “Technology & Mind & Evolution” series of Munich filmmaker Martin Hans Schmitt. The first film in this series, HIGHWAY WORLD, deals with highway worlds and in 2008/2009 was successful at international film festivals.
Robot World – A Meeting with Your Alternate Double will be screened at Robots and Avatars
Robert Wright : “…But is Dawkins really pursuing our common goal in a reasonable way? At the Reason Rally he encouraged people not just to take issue with religious teachings, but to “ridicule” religious belief and show “contempt” for it.”
A gun accident fifteen years ago left Richard Lee Norris without his lips, nose, and with limited movement of his mouth. Now after a marathon 36-hour surgical procedure described as “the most extensive full face transplant completed to date,” a team led by Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez at the University of Maryland has restored Mr. Norris’ quality of life.
A team at Manchester Royal Infirmary hospital, England, claim to be the first surgeons to perform keyhole surgery using 3D cameras and monitors — and embarrassingly clunky spectacles. Furthermore, if that wasn’t high-tech enough, the lead surgeon also performed the surgery using a hand-held robotic claw.
To this end, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), with support from the Office of Naval Research, is conducting research and developing new technologies to enable shoulder-to-shoulder robotic damage control teammates.
The robot in this video is a research platform for testing software for cognitive robotics and human-robot interactions. The knowledge gained from this research will be applied to firefighting robots used on ships.
Through a combination of speech and visual recognition, the robot is able to identify trusted individuals, in this case, the human fire-fighting teammate.
The human is able to provide situational information to the robot by voice and gestural commands. Here, the human partner is telling Octavia the general location of the fire before she enters the compartment.
Using two infrared cameras, Octavia is able to localize the fire, allowing her to target it with the compressed air/water backpack.
Ongoing work is focused on improving the naturalness of the interactions so that the human partners can interact with the robot as if it were another human teammate. Additional work is focused on recognizing and characterizing the type and behavior of the fire so that proper extinguishing techniques can be used.
Masaki Batoh, former musician of the band Ghost and currently also an acupuncturist, recently released the album called Brain Pulse Music. Here, he experimented with his BPM Machine and used traditional Japanese ritual melodies and instrumentation to form a prayer/requiem for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Fortunately, I read some of his wise insights thanks to Co.Design
“We survivors were mentally shattered like our dead victims.” He explains to Co.Design
Batoh wanted to articulate that devastation, but the worst experiences can be tough to articulate. Talking can require that you catalog each emotion, and how do you do that when your whole psyche is a mess? How do you share the truth of what you feel, if you have no idea what that truth is?
“Human beings lie, but their brain waves never lie,” writes Batoh. And with that mantra in mind, Batoh moved beyond words. He turned to a modified EEG, what he calls a Brain Pulse Machine, to measure the brain waves of earthquake victims and play them back as music. He then mixed these tracks with his own to create Brain Pulse Music, a memorial album to raise money for Japan’s orphans.
To get Masaki Batoh’s $699.99 Brain Pulse Music Machine go to Drag City.
Hear audio samples HERE
“We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”
Lithium is lionized. Silicon has a whole valley named after it. But what about the silent heroes of modern technology? Rare earth elements—a set of 17 related metals, mostly shunted off to a tacked-on lower line of the periodic table—are crucial to the way we live now; responsible for miniaturizing computers and headphones, powering hybrid cars and more. The time has come to get better acquainted with the molecules that make our modern world run.
Erbium: In the Pink The applications of erbium are both deeply important, and a little silly. For instance, adding erbium to glass is about the only way to create a stable pink shade. So erbium-doped glass pops up in novelty sunglasses and decorator vases. At the same time erbium keeps information flowing around the globe. Add a little erbium to the optical fibers that carry data in the form of light pulses, and those pulses get amplified. It can also be used as part of the gain medium that amplifies light in a laser. When you do this, you end up with a laser that can be used for dental surgery and skin treatments because it doesn’t build up much heat in the human skin it’s pointed at.
Erbium is a great example of how rare earth elements work in practical applications. You won’t find very many places where a solid chunk of a single rare earth element is being used. Instead, they tend to be things that are added, in small doses, to composites and alloys. In that way, rare earth elements work a bit like vitamins, says Daniel Cordier, mineral commodity specialist with the United States Geological Survey. “Rare earths have really unique chemical and physical properties that allow them to interact with other elements and get results that neither element could get on its own,” he says.
Find about the other 3 at Popular Mechanics
All text and image via Popular Mechanics.
Gijs Gieskes is a sonic artist/craftsman/circuit-bender/electrician/digi-magician/industrial designer/educator among other things. As you travel through his website, you will find how wonderfully generous and transparent he is about his process and work. Bellow you will find some audio visual samples of his work.
Acid-Machine
Analog Hard Disk 2
Cappuccino Synth
Image Scan Sequencer
Test_Lab: Audio_Objects (2007); Photo by Jan Sprij
Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.
Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van
Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford.
Designers are increasingly faced with the problem of understanding and visualizing data-filled space and making it inhabitable. In their book Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who conduct research in the field at the Royal College of Arts, speak of the electro-climate and the electro-geography – which can effect architecture just as the real climate can – and refer to it as »hertzian space.« The two designers think of electromagnetic fields full of data. But in times of geospatial data and location-based services data also assumes this wave field-like materiality. Are screens an appropriate medium for this? What is the form of these metadata?
Now that location-based metadata waft through the space, thereby redefining contexts and places, a new field opens up to designers: How will information be usefully integrated into the physical space? Inspired by the fictional illustrations by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas, who interprets the spatial expansion of radio waves, we attempted to lend metadata a form. Using the light painting technique, we placed our idea of these data in a room, making it haptic. The resulting forms depict possible data sets and examine the design possibilities between technoid holograms and personal notes.
Most people know Kew Gardens as home of the world’s largest living plant collection but are not aware that it is also the location of an internationally important botanical research and educational institution. Going beyond the gardens as we know them, Lonelyleap produced two films for 2012′s Tropical Extravaganza Festival which showcase the behind the scenes work of Kew’s scientists whilst also exploring two of the festival’s themes, Earth and Air.
The second film in the series looks at the work of the the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in Surrey, home to 10% of the world’s plant diversity, and how the Seed Conservation Department is helping to save wild plants and habitats for our future.
In an age when Internet devices are always on, meeting face-to-face is becoming increasingly rare as people choose to meet screen-to-screen. Goldfield wants to know what this new dynamic is doing to normal social interaction? How do these devices and social media services, such as Facebook, affect the way we socialize and communicate with each other?
But, more than that, what impact do these social networks have on their user’s mental health?
Murray and Goldfield have teamed up and have scraped together funding to conduct a study this summer examining the impact Facebook has on people’s mental health and their everyday lives and interactions.
They aren’t alone.
John Lyons, director of CHEO’s mental-health research group, has applied to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for a grant to conduct his own study into the topic. However, Lyon’s study will be laser focused. With so much anecdotal evidence about the effects of cyberbullying and online taunts, he wants to know what role social media plays in a person’s decision to end their life, and if there is a way to leverage social technologies to reach out to people considering suicide.
“It’s becoming the medium by which young people communicate with each other. It’s a pretty significant social change,” said Lyons. “There are some very valuable things about social media and networking, and there are also some dangers. Historically, the (societal) changes have been in musical taste and style of dress. Now it has to do with technology and the use of technology to deal with social relations. It’s so fast moving and there is so much going on that it’s rather complicated to figure out the good and the bad aspects of it.”
Excerpt of an article by Vito Pilieci at The Gazette. Read HERE
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism—the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.
Excerpt of an article by Ross Andersen at The Atlantic. Continue HERE
Google Maps is now available for 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES). Availability in Google Store is TBD but you can try it on your browser by going to http://maps.google.com and clicking “Quest” in the upper right hand corner of the map.
Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivializer? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky.
Let’s start with the idea that everyone connects you with from the 1950s and ’60s—a “universal grammar” underlying all languages. How is that idea holding up in 2012?
It’s virtually a truism. There are people who misunderstand the term but I can’t deal with that. It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar.
It can’t be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.
That’s conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like “and” that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can’t say very much, but that doesn’t say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt very much that a language like that could exist.
Excerpt of the interview with Graham Lawton for SLATE. Continue HERE
ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses – legacies of colonialism – in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women’s groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework. These videos instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women’s experiences in the contemporary moment. Culled from hundreds of online videos produced by ICT4D programs, including those in countries classified as having “Low Human Development” according to the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program, these media represent powerful instances of a decolonial aesthetics, an altogether unexpected development. These ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women’s future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies.
Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video Dalida Maria Benfield, Berkman Center Fellow
This event will be webcast Tuesday, April 17, live at 12:30 pm ET.
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
About Dalida:
Dalida María Benfield’s research addresses artists’ and activists’ creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collective Video Machete. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, chaired by Trinh T. Minh-ha, considers contemporary media art theory and practice, including work by Cao Fei, Michelle Dizon, and the Raqs Media Collective, in relation to the Third Cinema movement. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is studying race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs, as well as working on collaborative projects with the Networked Cultures Working Group, the Cyberscholars Working Group, and metaLAB(at)Harvard.
Locus Sonus is a research group specialized in audio art. It is organized as a post graduate lab by the Art Schools of Aix en Provence (ESAA) and Bourges (ENSA) in France. We have a partnership with sociology lab CNRS, LAMES Aix en Provence (which is interested by the way practices relate to new technologies and are creating modifications in artistic production and the way that the audience reacts to these modifications). We currently continue collaborations with the CRESSON, architecture lab CNRS in Grenoble (sonic spaces research centre), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and other international partners.
Locus Sonus is concerned with the innovative and transdisciplinary nature of audio art forms, in the framework of networked sonic spaces, some of which are experimented and evaluated in a lab type context. An important factor is with the collective or multi-user aspects inherent to many emerging audio practices and which necessitate working as a group. The main goals define this research – audio in it’s relation to space and networked audio systems. Today our research is grouped under several main headings Sound and Distance, Field Spatialization, Networked Sonic Spaces, Audio Fluxes, Sonification, and Internet Auditoriums
Self-healing materials will eventually fix anything from cell phone screens to car fenders, enabling surfaces to heal on their own in the presence of different types of light. But none of the earlier prototypes we’ve seen work quite like this new plastic: It bleeds red at the site of injury. Then it heals itself, inspired by the properties of tree trunks and human skin.
Marek W. Urban from the University of Southern Mississippi presented a paper on his new co-polymer at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in San Diego Monday. When it scratches or tears, a red splotch forms around the “wound,” marking the site.
Development of self-healing substances is one of the biggest current research areas in materials science, and we’ve seen a variety of approaches in these pages. Some would seed plastic or metal materials with capsules that break open when damage occurs, while others would stimulate plastics to re-grow chemical bonds using heat or light. This one works in a variety of situations — in the presence of sunlight, visible light from a light bulb, in pH changes or in different temperatures.
Urban’s plastic is made from water-based copolymers, which are more environmentally friendly than other polymers. They contain a type of molecular link that serves as a bridge in the polymer chain. When the plastic is scratched, cut or cracked, these bridges break. Urban’s breakthrough was to design bridges that produce a visible color change — in this case, a red blotch. The copolymer would work as a thin coating on top of other layers of plastic or other material, he said.
Unlike other self-healing materials, this plastic’s healing process can work over and over, he added. It could serve a variety of purposes, from things like nail polish to self-healing car fenders to airplanes. It would improve safety by drawing attention to a structural defect, and it could repair minor defects in the presence of intense light.
“Where degradation occurs or [there is] mechanical damage, the color would start to change,” Urban said.
Randal Koene, Neuroscientist and Neuroengineer, discusses Substrate Independent Minds with Stuart Mason Dambrot on Critical Thought TV. Topics covered include the science, technology and ethics of Whole Brain Emulation, Universal Darwinism, Pattern Survival and a possible very far-future universe.
Despite the Internet’s global reach, the lion’s share of the content comes from the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world.
If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.
Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which these two graphics were drawn. In the book’s foreword, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation reluctantly concludes that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”
“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” she writes. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.”
We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The book’s authors, Mark Graham, Monica Stephens, Scott A. Hale, and Kunika Kono, sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.
The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal.
Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams.
But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie.
“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature. “This is the rigorously designed 21st-century test of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s early-1900s accidental observation suggesting that mind is based on matter.”
Image: a transgenic mouse hippocampus. Image: Nikon Small World Gallery
Ever wish you could cover up an embarrassing event? By getting your hands on a time cloak, you could make it seem like it never happened.
Now, a new animation by Moti Fridman and his team at Cornell University, who have developed a technology that can hide superfast events, demonstrates how such a device would work. It shows how a stealthy ball can sneak by a laser beam thanks to a series of light tricks that mask an event over a specific period of time.
The demo shows how manipulating the laser beam creates an opportune time gap. Laser pulses, shown in red, break the signal beam, denoted in green, into a rainbow of different wavelengths that travel at different speeds. This change creates an opening in the beam where the ball can pass. The effect is then reversed with another pulse of light to make the change undetectable.
So far, the team has used the effect to edit out 15 picoseconds as a light beam passed through filters. However, the technique could be developed for a range of applications, for example to hide data moving through fiber optic cables to prevent eavesdropping.
To find out more about the technology, read our full blog post. If you enjoyed this video, check out how to build a time machine or see why the past and the future are the same.