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Thursday July 15, 2010 Daily edition News and Blog Headlines Submarines could use new nanotube technology for sonar and stealth New technique lets optical microscopes image objects at .5 nanometer resolution 'Ultimate' solvent for carbon nanotubes brings highly conductive quantum nanowire closer Blind Mice Can See, Thanks To Special Retinal Cells Brain fitness program study reveals visual memory improvement in older adults Meditation Helps Increase Attention Span Study Shows Electrical Fields Influence Brain Activity Tokyo trials digital billboards that scan passers-by Picture puzzles separate human from machine How Twitter Could Better Predict Disease Outbreaks The state of the future Latest News Submarines could use new nanotube technology for sonar and stealth July 15, 2010      "Nanotube speakers" made from carbon nanotube sheets have been found to be able can both generate sound and cancel out noise — properties ideal for submarine sonar to probe the ocean depths and make subs invisible to enemies, according to a report in ACS' Nano Letters. Ali Aliev of MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute, University of Texas at Dallas and colleagues explain that thin films of nanotubes can generate sound waves via a thermoacoustic effect. Every time that an electrical pulse passes through the microscopic layer of carbon tubes, the air around them heats up and creates a sound wave. Chinese scientists first discovered that effect in 2008, and applied it in building flexible speakers. Aliev's group took the next step, showing that nanotube sheets produce the kind of low-frequency sound waves that enable… more New technique lets optical microscopes image objects at .5 nanometer resolution July 15, 2010      Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Steven Chu led the development of a technique that enables the use of optical microscopy to image objects or the distance between them with resolutions as small as 0.5 nanometers, an order of magnitude smaller than the previous best. "The ability to get sub-nanometer resolution in biologically relevant aqueous environments has the potential to revolutionize biology, particularly structural biology," says Secretary Chu. "One of the motivations for this work, for example, was to measure distances between proteins that form multi-domain, highly complex structures, such as the protein assembly that forms the human RNA polymerase II system, which initiates DNA transcription." Secretary Chu is the co-author of a paper now appearing in the… more 'Ultimate' solvent for carbon nanotubes brings highly conductive quantum nanowire closer July 15, 2010      Rice University scientists have found the "ultimate" solvent for all kinds of carbon nanotubes (CNTs): chlorosulfonic acid, which can dissolve half-millimeter-long nanotubes in solution, they reported this month in the online journal ACS Nano. This is a critical step in spinning fibers from ultralong nanotubes, and a breakthrough that brings the creation of a highly conductive quantum nanowire closer. Nanotubes have the frustrating habit of bundling, making them less useful than when they're separated in a solution. Rice scientists led by Matteo Pasquali, a professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering and in chemistry, have been trying to untangle them for years as they look for scalable methods to make exceptionally strong, ultralight, highly conductive materials that could revolutionize power distribution, such as the "armchair quantum wire." The armchair… more Blind Mice Can See, Thanks To Special Retinal Cells July 15, 2010      Researchers at Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences have found that mice that didn't have any rods and cones function could still see — and not just light, but also patterns and images — using intrinsically photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells (ipRGCs) — special photosensitive cells in the rodents' retinas. "Our study shows that even mice which were blind could form low-acuity yet measurable images, using ipRGCs," said biologist Samer Hattar, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology. The exciting thing is that, in theory at least, this means that a blind person could be trained to use his or her ipRGCs to perform simple tasks that require low visual acuity." Hattar's findings also hint that, in the past, mammals may have used their ipRGCs for… more Brain fitness program study reveals visual memory improvement in older adults July 15, 2010      A commercial brain fitness program from Posit Science Corp. has been shown to improve memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or "working" visual memory. The research, led by scientists at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is also one of the first to measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused by a cognitive training program. In the study, healthy older participants trained on a computer game designed to boost visual perception. After ten hours of training, they not only improved their perceptual abilities significantly, but also increased the accuracy of their visual working… more Meditation Helps Increase Attention Span July 15, 2010      A new study by psychologists at University of California, Davis has found that Buddhist meditation can improve a person's ability to be attentive and helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see. A group of 60 people took part in several experiments. At three points during a retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response. Participants got better at discriminating the short… more Study Shows Electrical Fields Influence Brain Activity July 15, 2010      Electrical fields can influence the activity of neurons, Yale scientists report in the July 15 issue of the journal Neuron. The researchers introduced slow oscillation signals into brain tissue and found that the signal created a sort of feedback loop, with changes in electrical field guiding neural activity, which in turn strengthened the electrical field. The finding helps explain why techniques that influence electrical fields such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and deep brain stimulation are effective for the treatment of various neurological disorders, including depression. The study also "raises many questions about the possible effects of electrical fields, such as power lines and cell phones, in which we immerse ourselves," said David McCormick, the Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine, a researcher… more Tokyo trials digital billboards that scan passers-by July 15, 2010      Source Link: AFP "Minority Report" style digital advertising billboards being trialled in Japan have cameras that read the gender and age group of people looking at them to tailor their commercial messages. The technology uses face recognition software to glean the gender and age group of passers-by, but operators have promised they will save no recorded images, only the collated data about groups of people. Picture puzzles separate human from machine July 15, 2010      Source Link: New Scientist Tech Researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan have developed a tool that camoflages images and could be used to make Captcha images, to ensure that website users signing up for accounts are genuinely people, rather than software bots. The work fits with the theory that the brain can only be conscious of one visual feature at a glance, but can track the locations of multiple features simultaneously. Can you find the four hidden animals? (National Cheng Kung University) How Twitter Could Better Predict Disease Outbreaks July 15, 2010      Source Link: Technology Review Invited Guests University of Bristol researchers have released a paper about the utility of Twitter for tracking flu outbreaks, building on research that resulted in Google.org's Flu Trends. The researchers gathered a database of more than 50 million geo-located tweets which could then be compared to official data from the U.K.'s national health service on flu incidence by region. By figuring out which keywords in the database of tweets were associated with elevated levels of flu, they were able to create a predictive model that transformed keyword incidence in future tweets into a prediction of the severity of flu for a given area. Future improvements might involve information from Facebook and other sources of status updates. New Blog posts The state of the future July 14, 2010 by Jerome C. Glenn As noted in our 2010 State of the Future (the 14th annual report from the Millennium Project, just published), the world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems. If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine an unstable world with catastrophic results. However, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperation, materials science, alternative energy, cognitive science, inter-religious dialogues, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine a world that works for all.… more New Books 2010 State of the Future author Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon Millenium Project | This "report card on the future" distills the collective intelligence of over 2,700 leading scientists, futurists, scholars, and policy advisors who work for governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and international organizations. The 2010 State of the Future comes in two parts: a 83-page print executive summary and an attached CD containing about 7,000 pages of research behind the print edition and the Millennium Project's 14 years of cumulative research and methods. Some unique features not available in other global assessments include: - Building Collective Intelligence Systems - 15 Global Challenges - Producing the State if the Future Index Using the International Futures Model - Emerging Environmental Security Issues - Latin America 2030 - Futures Research and Gaps… more 2009 State of the Future (The Millennium Project) author Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon Amazon | The 2009 State of the Future comes in two parts: a 100-page print executive summary and an attached CD containing about 6,700 pages of research behind the print edition and the Millennium Project's 13 years of cumulative research and methods. Some unique features not available in other global assessments include: International assessment of 35 economic elements of the next economic system that could help improve the human condition over the next 20 years; 15 Global Challenges Prospects, Strategies, Insights; State of the Future Index with and without the world recession; Emerging international environmental security issues; applications of the Real-Time Delphi technique; 750 annotated scenario sets; and much more futures intelligence on technology, environment, governance, and the human condition. This… more Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty author Andy Miah Amazon | This innovative book, inspired by material from FACT's Human Futures program and informed by an inquiry into the future of humanity, combines scholarly essays, images, interviews, design products, artifacts, and creative writing in order to portray how the culture of technological innovation is made and remade through bioculturally diverse forms of consumption. Human Futures addresses biological developments such as cloning, genetic modification, stem cell research alongside issues like the ethics and aesthetics of human enhancement and the future of biological migration. The result is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the clash of art, technology, and science and its impact on our very human future. Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning author Martin Rees Amazon | Nano-machines stand poised to revolutionize technology and medicine, but what happens if these minuscule beasties break their leash and run amok? Rees, the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal and prolific author (Just Six Numbers; Our Cosmic Habitat), warns that the 21st century may well witness the extinction of mankind, a doomsday more likely to be caused by human error than by a natural catastrophe. Bioterrorists are the most widely publicized threat at the moment, but well-intentioned scientists, Rees says, are capable of accidentally wiping out mankind via genetically engineered superpathogens that create unprecedented pandemics, or even through something as weird as high-energy particle experiments that backfire and cause the universe to implode. Rees poses some hard questions about scientists' responsibility to forsake research that might lead to… more On Intelligence author Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee Amazon | Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future… is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level… more The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It author Joshua Cooper Ramo Amazon | Former foreign editor of Time, Ramo pushes the reader into uncomfortable yet exhilarating places with controversial ways of thinking about global challenges (e.g., studying why Hezbollah is the most efficiently run Islamic militant group). His book, which lays bare the flaws in current thinking on everything from American political influence to the economy, is designed to change the physics of the way we think. Analyzing the failure of the Bush administration's Democratic Peace Theory and the fruitless efforts at a Mideast peace process, Ramo suggests that people must change the role they imagine for themselves from architects of a system they can control to gardeners in a living ecosystem. Ramo's message—that the most dynamic forces emerge from outside elite circles: geeks, iconoclasts and maligned populations—is… more The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life author Ben Sherwood Amzaon | Sherwood (The Man Who Ate the 747), a writer for the L.A. Times, travels worldwide to gain insight from people who have survived a slew of near fatal phenomena ranging from a mountain lion attack to a Holocaust concentration camp, and interviewing an array of experts to understand the psychology, genetics and jumble of other little things that determines whether we live or die. Readers curious about their own survivor profile can take an Internet test, which is explained in the books later pages. Sherwood's assertion that survival is a way of perceiving the world around you is enlightening, as are some of the facts he uncovers: you have 90 seconds to leave a plane crash before the cabin temperature becomes unbearable; luck has more… more The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right author Atul Gawande Amazon | That humblest of quality-control devices, the checklist, is the key to taming a high-tech economy, argues this stimulating manifesto. Harvard Medical School prof and New Yorker scribe Gawande (Complications) notes that the high-pressure complexities of modern professional occupations overwhelm even their best-trained practitioners; he argues that a disciplined adherence to essential procedures—by ticking them off a list—can prevent potentially fatal mistakes and corner cutting. He examines checklists in aviation, construction, and investing, but focuses on medicine, where checklists mandating simple measures like hand washing have dramatically reduced hospital-caused infections and other complications. Gawande gets slightly intoxicated over checklists, celebrating their most banal manifestations as promethean breakthroughs (First there was the recipe, the most basic checklist of all, he intones in a restaurant kitchen). He's at… more Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet author Joseph Menn Amazon | In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers and defense secrets from governments. Using unprecedented access to Mob businesses and Russian officials, the book reveals how top criminals earned protection from the Russian government. Fatal System Error penetrates both the Russian cyber-mob and La Cosa Nostra as the two fight over the Internet's massive spoils. The cloak-and-dagger adventure shows why… more ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century author Susan Greenfield Amazon | If you've ever wondered what effect video games have on your children's minds or worried about how much private information the government and big companies know about you, ID is essential reading. Professor Susan Greenfield argues persuasively that our individuality is under the microscope as never before; now more then ever we urgently need to look at what we want for ourselves as individuals and for our future society. ID is an exploration of what it means to be human in a world of rapid change, a passionately argued wake-up call and an inspiring challenge to embrace creativity and forge our own identities.