KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter

Tuesday July 13, 2010 Daily edition News and Blog Headlines Decoding motion detection in the fly's brain Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole Fibers that can hear and sing Can you teach yourself synaesthesia? It's Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It Latest News Decoding motion detection in the fly's brain July 13, 2010      Neurobiologists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have used state-of-the-art methods to decode the basics of motion detection in a fly's brain. While the number of nerve cells in the fly is comparatively small, they are highly specialized and process images with great precision while in flight. Flies can process a vast amount of information about motion and movement in their environment in real time. One sixth of a cubic millimeter of brain matter contains more than 100,000 nerve cells, each with multiple connections to its neighboring cells. Although it seems almost impossible to single out the reaction of a certain cell to any particular movement stimulus, this is precisely what neurobiologists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now succeeded in doing.… more Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole July 13, 2010      Source Link: the physics arXiv blog A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born. "Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587: Cosmology With Torsion – An Alternative To Cosmic Inflation Fibers that can hear and sing July 13, 2010      Fibers that can detect and produce sound have been developed by scientists at MIT's Research Lab of Electronics. How it works The heart of the new acoustic fibers is a plastic commonly used in microphones. By playing with the plastic's fluorine content, the researchers were able to ensure that its molecules remain lopsided — with fluorine atoms lined up on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other — even during heating and drawing. The asymmetry of the molecules is what makes the plastic "piezoelectric," meaning that it changes shape when an electric field is applied to it. In a conventional piezoelectric microphone, the electric field is generated by metal electrodes. But in a fiber microphone, the drawing process would cause… more Can you teach yourself synaesthesia? July 13, 2010      Source Link: New Scientist Life A form of synesthesia in which people experience letters or numbers in color may be trainable, University of Amsterdam psychologists have found in an experiment, suggesting that natural synesthesia may develop as a result of childhood experiences as well as genetics. It's Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It July 13, 2010      Source Link: Advertising Age It won't be enough just to build branded mobile applications that repurpose content across all of the different platforms. That's like newspapers taking the print experience and replicating it on the web as they tried back in the 1990s. Rather, we will need to rethink, remix and repackage information for an entirely different modality than platforms of yore to deal with "content snacking" and "infinite choice." Latest Kurzweil Corner posts Chat with Ramona 4.0! Ramona chatbot Version 4 is now live with improved custom natural language processing. Chat now