Singularity

How Drones Make it Easy to Kill Anyone, Anywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Technology Review - 6.7.13 by Fred Kaplan

How drones made it easy for Americans to kill a particular person anywhere on the planet.

The unmanned aerial vehicle—the “drone,” the very emblem of American high-tech weaponry—started out as a toy, the fusion of a model airplane and a lawn-mower engine. While its original purpose was to bust up Soviet tanks in the first volleys of World War III, it has evolved into the favored technology for targeted assassinations in the global war on terror. Its use has sparked a great debate—at first within the most secret parts of the government, but in recent months among the general public—over the tactics, strategy, and morality not only of drone warfare but of modern warfare in general.

But before this debate can go much further—before Congress or other branches of government can lay down meaningful standards or ask pertinent questions—distinctions must be drawn, myths punctured, real issues teased out from misinformed or misleading distractions.

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Inattentive? It's Not You, It's Your Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:37:00 +0000

Blogger's Note: I know, I know, your brain is you, but I liked the catchy title...

Scientific American - 6.11.13 by Keith Payne

Scientists probe the biases of “unconscious selective attention”

Image: iStock/ Hamza Türkkol

It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?

The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?

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Is Contacting Aliens A Very Stupid Idea?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:15:00 +0000

io9 - 6.12.13 by GEORGE DVORSKY

A group of scientists and entrepreneurs has created the world’s first continuous message beacon to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations. And for a fee, people can use it to transmit their own messages into space. But not everyone thinks this project is a good idea.

The idea of messaging ETs has been around for a while now, and typically goes by the name METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or Active SETI. The basic idea is that, instead of just listening passively for an alien radio signal, we should deliberately try to send messages into space in hopes of attracting the attention of alien civilizations.

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Don't Want to Eat Bugs? You Already Are!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:14:00 +0000

Scientific American - 6.5.13 by Kyle Hill

So, I hate to break it to you, but you already eat bugs. Not nearly enough for you to recognize it or to potentially harm you, but down the hatch they go.

I grabbed a box of cereal out of my cabinet. The flakes smelled stale, but I was hungry enough. I poured a cup or two into a bowl, followed by a splash of milk. Well into my third bite, I knew that stale cereal wasn’t all I was eating. I saw thrips—slender insects commonly known as corn lice—swimming in the bottom of the bowl, extending their legs in hopes of finding a flake—like a desperate swimmer in a flood. I immediately discarded the cereal, repulsed by the other bugs I had surely already eaten. But while I didn’t always see them, I had been eating bugs my whole life. So have you.

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization recently released a report [PDF] touting the nutritional and environment benefits of eating our many-legged friends (or pests), which scuttled into all corners of the media. (You can read a very thorough write-up bug eating at io9 and here at Scientific American.) The gist is that insects may end up solving a real food crisis by giving up their lives for human consumption. To most of the world, this was old news—insects are considered staples and even delicacies in many cultures. But Western media still let out an audible cringe at the thought of crunching down on chitin.

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The (Near) Future is Augmented

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:20:00 +0000

c|net - 6.7.13 by Dan Farber

"You'll get 20/20, perfectly augmented vision by 2020, with movie-quality special effects blended seamlessly into the world around you,"

Dan Farber/Augmented Reality Expo

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Reality isn't what is used to be. With increasingly powerful technologies, the human universe is being reimagined way beyond Google Glass' photo-tapping and info cards floating in space above your eye. The future is fashionable eyewear, contact lenses or even bionic eyes with immersive 3D displays, conjuring up a digital layer to "augment" reality, enabling entire new classes of applications and user experiences.

Like most technologies that eventually reach a mass market, augmented reality, or AR, has been gestating in university labs, as well as small companies focused on gaming and vertical applications, for nearly half a century. Emerging products like Google Glass and Oculus Rift's 3D virtual reality headset for immersive gaming are drawing attention to what could now be termed the "wearable revolution," but they barely scratch the surface of what's to come.

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Think Google Glass is Revolutionary? Wait Till the Contacts!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:02:00 +0000

Technology Review - 6.7.13 by Katherine Bourzac

Park wants to make contact lenses that have all the functions of a wearable computer but remain transparent and soft.

For those who find Google Glass indiscreet, electronic contact lenses that outfit the user’s cornea with a display may one day provide an alternative. Built by researchers at several institutions, including two research arms of Samsung, the lenses use new nanomaterials to solve some of the problems that have made contact-lens displays less than practical.

A group led by Jang-Ung Park, a chemical engineer at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, mounted a light-emitting diode on an off-the-shelf soft contact lens, using a material the researchers developed: a transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires. The researchers tested these lenses in rabbits—whose eyes are similar in size to humans’—and found no ill effects after five hours. The animals didn’t rub their eyes or grow bloodshot, and the electronics kept working. This work is described online in the journal Nano Letters.

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Six Awesome New Life-Simplifying Car Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:21:00 +0000

TechHive - 6.6.13 from Edmunds.com

You drive your Audi to a specially designated car lot, leave the car at a drop-off area, choose an open space with a smartphone app and then let the car do all the work.

Technology is supposed to make life simpler and better. Cars cover greater distances than horses. The automatic transmission spares us the task of shifting gears. Cruise control gives feet a rest on long road trips.

Here are six new car technologies that continue in that tradition. They might not be offered on all vehicles, and some will take time to make their way to the mainstream car market. But at the very least, this list can serve as a glimpse into the future of some cool, make-it-simple car technologies.

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CIA Will Use Robot Writers

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:47:00 +0000

All Things D - 6.5.13 by Peter Kafka

If you’d like to see an example of their stuff, you can head to Forbes, which is using Narrative Science to create automated earnings reports and previews, like this look-ahead at Smucker’s prospects for tomorrow.

Narrative Science has already proven that its robot writers can make sentences that are good enough for newspapers and internal company reports. Now they’re going to work for the CIA.
The Chicago-based startup, which uses computers to turn structured data sets into prose, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture firm that invests on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.* The money comes along with a deal to put Narrative Science’s automated writers to work for the CIA and “the broader intelligence community.”

Narrative Science had previously raised $6 million. While it made its initial splash by figuring out how to create sports stories based on box scores, without the need for human intervention, it has been making most of its money creating prose most people won’t ever see: Daily reports for the likes of financial services firms, or a large fast-food chain, etc. But I still think the notion of automated stories for newspapers and other publishers is both fascinating and unsettling, so I like to keep in touch with the company, even as it focuses on enterprise sales.

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Rare Anti-Cyclone Flanks Friday's Tornado

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:12:00 +0000

The Washington Post - 6.5.13 by Jason Samenow

“At that point we bailed east towards Oklahoma City,” Wurman said. “I’m very happy my team had a radar out there. We only knew about [the anticyclonic tornado] because of the radar; otherwise we may have driven into it.”

(AP Photo/Omaha World-Herald, Chris Machian)

Not only was Friday’s El Reno tornado the widest on record, but it was also flanked by an incredibly rare tornado that rotated in the reverse direction.

The National Weather Service confirmed Tuesday that a rare “anticyclonic” tornado touched down about three miles southeast of the monstrous 2.6-mile wide EF5 tornado that killed 9 people, including four storm chasers.

An anticyclonic tornado is one that spins clockwise rather than the conventional counterclockwise (cyclonic) direction. Precious few tornadoes are anticyclonic, and, of those, most are typically in the form of waterspouts or non-supercell thunderstorms (i.e. thunderstorms without a rotating updraft).

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No More Cog in the Wheel, Now You'll Be a Node in the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:57:00 +0000

GigaOM - 6.3.13 by Kevin Fitchard

A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network.

Photo: Shutterstock/higyou

Ever wonder what the network infrastructure of the future will be? Try looking in the mirror.

Some day our bodies — or at least the clothing or accessories that adorn them — could become key network nodes in the internet of things. European researchers think that sensors and transmitters on our bodies can be used to form cooperative ad hoc networks that could be used for group indoor navigation, crowd-motion capture, health monitoring on a massive scale and especially collaborative communications. Last week, French institute CEA-Leti and three French universities have launched the Cormoran project, which aims to explore the use of such cooperative interpersonal networks.

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Man Plans to be a Cyborg by 2045

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:27:00 +0000

New York Times - 6.1.13 by David Segal

What Mr. Itskov is striving for makes wearable computers, like Google Glass, seem as about as futuristic as Lincoln Logs.

GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started “this project,” as he sometimes calls it.

Namely: Are you insane?

“I hear that often,” he said with a smile, over lunch one recent afternoon in Manhattan. “There are quotes from people like Arthur C. Clarke and Gandhi saying that when people come up with new ideas they’re called ‘nuts.’ Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange.”

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First Hard Evidence for Other Universes?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 16:34:00 +0000

Daily Galaxy - 6.1.13

"Dark Flow" sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It's not! The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.

Is our universe merely one of billions? Evidence of the existence of 'multiverse' revealed for the first time by a cosmic map of background radiation data gathered by Planck telescope. This past week, the first 'hard evidence' that other universes exist has been claimed to have been found by cosmologists studying the Planck data. They have concluded that it shows anomalies that can only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes.

"Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago," says George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University."But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe."

Scientists had predicted that it should be evenly distributed, but the map shows a stronger concentration in the south half of the sky and a 'cold spot' that cannot be explained by current understanding of physics. Laura Mersini-Houghton, theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Richard Holman, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, predicted that anomalies in radiation existed and were caused by the pull from other universes in 2005. Mersini-Houghton will be in Britain soon promoting this theory and, we expect, the hard evidence at the Hay Festival on May 31 and at Oxford on June 11.

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Say Hi to the Multiverse

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 21:52:00 +0000

Scientific American - 6.1.13 by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News

New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

Image: Simons Foundation

On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

“The universe is inevitable,” he declared. “The universe is impossible.”

The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50-year-old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass, which enables them to form big structures such as galaxies and humans. “The fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for experiment, it’s a triumph for theory, and it’s an indication that physics works,” Arkani-Hamed told the crowd.

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Creating Sleep-Free Soldiers

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 13:13:00 +0000

Slate - 5.29.13 by William Saletan

There’s a military arms race to build soldiers who fight without fatigue.

Illustration by Robet Neubecker

All over the world, scientists are experimenting on soldiers to keep them awake beyond the limits of normal endurance. Researchers are engineering, and militaries are deploying, chemically enhanced troops. Of all the superpowers we’ve imagined, the one that has turned out to be most attainable—so attainable we’re already using it—is the ability to go without sleep.

Much of this research, which focuses on a drug called modafinil, is openly sponsored and supervised by military agencies. The United States leads the pack, conducting experiments through its Air Force Research Laboratory, Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and Special Operations Command Biomedical Initiative Steering Committee. Other countries’ armed forces are studying the same drug: Defense Research and Development Canada, China’s Second Military Medical University, the Netherlands Ministry of Defense, South Korea’s Air Force Academy, Taiwan’s National Defense Medical Center, and the Bioengineering Laboratory of Singapore’s Defense Medical and Environmental Research Institute. India is investigating modafinil through its Institute of Aerospace Medicine and Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences. France’s research program includes its Ministry of Defense, Military Health Service Research Center, and Institute of Aerospace Medicine. Many of the supervising agencies sound Orwellian: Human Effectiveness Directorate, Fatigue Countermeasures Branch, Département des Facteurs Humain. This, mind you, is just the published research. God knows what’s going on in secret.

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Google Glass Changes Everything

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 28 May 2013 19:19:00 +0000

Fast Company - 5.28.13 by Steven Rosenbaum

Next around the corner is the connected web, and while Google Glass is out front, we're already hearing reports that Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and others are exploring wearable devices. Glass may be the first, but it won't be the last.

From the moment that Sergey Brin wandered by me in the lobby at TED this year, I found myself in love.

Not with him, of course, but with his glasses. They where so sexy, so exciting, with a tip of the hat to past eyewear--but a magical glimpse of the future as well.

So many things went through my mind. The first time I plugged in an early version of Steve Jobs's remarkable Apple IIe, I had that same burst of adrenaline that only a glimpse of the future can bring. And again, when I was forced to retire my trusty Palm Treo for the sparkling new iPhone 1. Adrenaline.

Already, the pundits are out in force. Some of the Glass fan boys are ready to declare it a massive hit. Others are just as quickly proclaiming its inevitable failure. Whichever side you are on, it's quickly become one of the central conversations in the tech community. Google Glass is the "it" product of 2013, and it's still in closed beta.

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The Google Glass Fracas

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 27 May 2013 15:50:00 +0000

Credit: Stop The Cyborgs

Now that Google Glass has been in the hands of developers and tech bloggers for a little while (although I've not been fortunate enough to spot a pair in real life yet), I'll put in my two pennies...

People are so darn predictable. Those who like to bitch and cry over our lost past, who ought to go back in a time machine to 1920, when you could have all the privacy you could stand, who feel they have to point out every possible problem that could present itself when a brand new thing enters the world, have come out in their predictable manner.

I, on the other hand, applaud Google for getting things started. Google Glass will look like the ancient pyramids of technology very shortly, when this tech gets more and more effective, but for now, someone had to get the ball rolling. And that's all they've done. This is only the first step folks. Yes, it's got problems, but those will be fixed and there will be applications of the technology none of us has even thought of. So calm the heck down.

That being said, the tech does lend itself to some hilarious panning, to wit:

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Search for Extraterrestrial Tech

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 26 May 2013 16:41:00 +0000

Universe Today - 5.24.13 by Markus Hammonds

Dyson put forward the ideas that any potentially advanced civilisation may need a tremendous amount of power to sustain itself. A method he proposed was to build a vast array of satellites which would enclose an entire star to harvest its energy.

Credit: Hill/Wikimedia Commons

It’s a big galaxy out there. Even the most skeptical scientist has to accept that if a civilisation like our own exists, then there’s a good chance we’re not the only one to have ever done so. When most people think about SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intellgence), they imagine someone like Ellie Arroway searching the skies for radio transmissions. But what about looking in other ways? Perhaps a highly advanced alien civilisation might build structures large enough for us to see.

Vast structures, constructed on astronomical scales by advanced civilisations, is what the field of astroengineering is all about. This, admittedly, sounds audacious – and for the human race right now, it is. For us, astroengineering is still very much the realm of thought experiments, theoretical calculations, and science fiction. So it may be surprising to know that certain astronomers have made some quite serious attempts to look for astroengineered artifacts around other stars. With telescopes becoming ever more sensitive, and images being taken of exoplanets, the idea is starting to captivate imaginations once more.

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12 Disruptive Technologies - Will Add Trillions to Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 25 May 2013 21:27:00 +0000

Real Clear Technology

The bottom line: renewable advances will deliver $0.2-$0.3 trillion to the economy by 2025.

AP Photo

One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives.

The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's more, McKinsey has put an estimated price tag on each one of these disruptive innovations, claiming they will deliver tens of trillions (yes, with a "t") of dollars of economic impact worldwide, should they come to pass.

The report, as you might guess, is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for new technology to "raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies." Here are the technologies that McKinsey sees adding trillions of dollars to the global economy by 2025.

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Google's Real Goal is Artificial Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Motherboard - 5.16.13 by Meghan Neal

“SEARCH AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER”

Image: Google

If the sprawling opening day at Google's I/O 2013 conference made one thing clear, it’s that Google knows everything about everything.

To stay competitive in today’s tech market, Google is brandishing its biggest weapon: Data. Massive amounts of data. The company knows so much about us it can serve as a cross between a personal assistant and a brain extension. The major product announcements from the opening day of Google’s annual developer conference reflect that, all trending toward the founders’ dream of artificial intelligence. Basically, Google is reading our data so that it will be able to read our minds.

All this personalized information has the potential to be transformative—so long as you’re not concerned with things like privacy or corporate world domination. It all depends on how much creepy we’re willing to put up with in exchange for usefulness.

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Quantum Computers Are Here!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:01:00 +0000

New York Times - 5.16.13 by Quentin Hardy

Google said it had already devised machine-learning algorithms that work inside the quantum computer, which is made by D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia.

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times

Google and NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers, is expected to be in active use in the third quarter of this year.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their outputs. Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems.

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What To Do When Your Boss is a Robot

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Mother Jones - May/June 2013 by Kevin Drum

Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.

Illustrations by Roberto Parada

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

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The Man Behind the Google Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Wired - 5.7.13 by Daniela Hernandez

For the first time in my life, it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”

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How to Negotiate with Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 05 May 2013 14:58:00 +0000

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence - 5.5.13

Everything around us is getting smarter.

Credit: Zipcar

Vehicles, robots and other autonomous devices could soon collaborate with humans, thanks to researchers at MIT who are developing systems capable of negotiating with people to determine the best way to achieve their goals.

“In general, everything around us is getting smarter,” says Brian Williams, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and leader of the Model-Based Embedded and Robotic Systems group within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “So we’re trying to allow people to interact with these increasingly autonomous systems in the same way that they would interact with another human.”

Ultimately such systems could be used to control autonomous vehicles, such as personal aircraft and driverless cars. But in the short term, Williams and graduate student Peng Yu are developing systems to allow conventional vehicles to work with their drivers to plan routes and schedules.

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Brain-Computer Interface Coming Closer

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:25:00 +0000

New York Times - 4/28/13 by Nick Bilton

“The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,” said John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.”

Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.

But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In a couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Farther into the future, your robot assistant will appear by your side with a glass of lemonade simply because it knows you are thirsty.

Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.

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And the dead shall rise...

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:42:00 +0000

BBC News - 4.23.13 by William Kremer

A doctor says people can be revived several hours after they have seemingly died. Should this change the way we think about death?

"I know it must have been a Friday around lunchtime, because we'd got back from shopping," the 63-year old says. "I can't remember getting out of the car."

Her husband David has much clearer memories of that day three months ago. He opened the front door of their Wiltshire home and saw Carol lying down, gasping for breath, the colour rapidly draining from her face.

Carol had had a cardiac arrest - her heart had stopped beating. Luckily, an elderly neighbour knew the rudiments of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and quickly began to work on her chest.

Paramedics soon took over, and at a point between 30 and 45 minutes after her collapse - no-one noted the exact time - Carol's heart started beating again.

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