illumination;
windmills, cupcakes;
cities, robots, and brains.
It’s not against the concept of peer review, so much as the implementation. Implies some interesting roles for distributed technology to help make knowledge happen more transparently (and thus, hopefully, more efficiently).
(via leoncrawl)
A: Sort of. One of the things that sweat is for is to cool your body off (as it evaporates). So, when you sweat as a result of physical exertion a) your body heat causes the sweat to be warmer, but more importantly, b) you experience the cooling effect as a component of returning to your typical resting body temperature. That same cooling effect is experienced as “cold” when your body doesn’t need to cool down, as in the case of sweating as primarily a “psychological” reaction.
Robotic penguins!
Skip to about 1:10 to see flying robotic penguins.
I’ve told people about this trick before (a lot, I feel), but this is about a new paper just published that found at least one (out of 54) vegetative patients able to respond to yes or no questions through willful modulation of brain activity:
In the current experiment, the researchers found that three other patients identified as vegetative showed similar responses. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”
They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.
“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.” (NYT)
What’s a little weird here is that in previous experiments in this vein that I was aware of they also used the navigating house/playing tennis pair of thoughts for signaling. I understand how thinking about motor-y stuff and thinking about spacial memory stuff could be different brain scan-wise, but why tennis? Is that just the accepted convention or something? Do people who play with fMRI machines just tend to like tennis? (This is why I need to be there, to ask these questions.)
UPDATE: Turns out is was just the same folks working on new vegetables.
Also, again regarding brains: ethics?
A pretty good 17-minute documentary about the Blue Brain Project, “an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level” (not synthetic as in an artificial physical object, but as in comprehensively simulated).
They’re only on rodents now, but hope to move on to cats in a few years and progress quickly from there through primates to humans within ten years. My favorite part is a discussion on the first practical experiments they hope to do with a completed rodent model: Hook in up to a little robot with sensory data streaming back into the simulation and motor instructions being executed and then pick apart the simulation to see exactly what happens when the rat golem makes decisions. “Oh, that’s where his memory of how to get through the maze is stored.” Not really exaggerating.
The artistic flourishes at the very beginning and end are a little much, but the chunk starting around the middle is worth watching. The project director sort of defends the feasibility of the whole affair and explains what he sees at the applications for the technology involved.
There’s only a cursory reference or two to a full-scale simulation of a human brain “having and intelligence”. Not much beyond that in terms of what kind of thing it would be exactly…
(So I suppose these are the folks doing the grunt work on the Kurzweil-style (Kurztyle?) singularity scenario, though I remain skeptical of how realistic/relevant the full-blown version of that future is. Nothing in this work suggests anything even remotely close to some how “scanning” and then simulating a particular already-existing human brain. A better question, I feel, is whether once well-established this technology could be used to defend the use of invasive neural prosthetics in a wider range of contexts by saying “well, it didn’t screw up the simulation”. Oh, also, ethics and such…)
“Um, yes, we’d like a patent on all the most trendy Internet words, strung together.”
(Sorry, some habits are hard to break. I’m not even sure if it is well known that I have strong feelings about this company. Seriously though. This time it’s going to happen.)
via MiessianicTime via 2.bp.blogspot.com
Looks like Amazon has their work cut out for them. Quite a challenge…
![(reblogged from msmandrake)
Additionally, from Air & Space Magazine via Sterling:
“The policy on the [rover] team to release images to the public as soon as they came down was a novel move,” says Janet Vertesi, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine, who recently wrote her dissertation on the Mars Rover team’s operations. […]
Team members are happy to talk about this relationship. “You’re so involved with these machines that they sort of cease to be machines,” says Sharon Laubach, who holds a Ph.D. in robotics and is chief of the JPL group that develops the software instructions for the rovers. “We send them commands, like letters and missives, and they do what they want and write home at the end of the day. These girls are off on their own, and we hope they do what we ask them to.” […]
“It’s hard for us to understand the experience of these robots that are so far away from us,” says Vertesi. “So the scientists and engineers do the ‘rover dance.’ It’s a series of gestures that imitate the rover actions: unfurling of arms and rotating of wrists; splaying of arms behind them like solar panels. Always very aware of where the sun is. These people have a semi physical presence on Mars. One scientist got up and was talking about an observation and he began to shuffle backward…and then he said, ‘Janet, get your camera. I’m turning into the rover!’ ”
Driver John Wright confesses to some of it. “The thing I always notice is that I have to mentally visualize what the [rover] arm is doing. And I have to use my left arm. When I’m talking about it, I start with my right arm, and then I say, Wait, I have to use my left arm, because the shoulder joint’s on the left front side of the rover, and the elbow sticks out to the left. So you’re sticking your thumb out, wrapping the arm around. And turning the wheels. There’s definitely a lot of hand-waving.” […]
End-of-life questions make anyone close to the rovers uneasy. Yet with Spirit’s recent stranding, the scientists are often asked about the inevitable.
“They talk about them as geriatric,” says Vertesi. “Amnesia. Arthritis. All very human experiences. But to mention a rover death….The pressure to preserve the rovers is huge.”
John Grant is practical about the demise of the probes, but says they’re not there yet. “I know it will happen someday, but I don’t want to think about the eventual end of the mission,” he says. “With the rovers, it’s open-ended. You don’t want to let go of them.”
“There’s definitely a lot of hand-waving.” There always is.
[Also this is sort of the job I mainly want—sitting around people doing science and asking them what it feels like.]](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png)
(reblogged from msmandrake)
Additionally, from Air & Space Magazine via Sterling:
“The policy on the [rover] team to release images to the public as soon as they came down was a novel move,” says Janet Vertesi, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine, who recently wrote her dissertation on the Mars Rover team’s operations. […]
Team members are happy to talk about this relationship. “You’re so involved with these machines that they sort of cease to be machines,” says Sharon Laubach, who holds a Ph.D. in robotics and is chief of the JPL group that develops the software instructions for the rovers. “We send them commands, like letters and missives, and they do what they want and write home at the end of the day. These girls are off on their own, and we hope they do what we ask them to.” […]
“It’s hard for us to understand the experience of these robots that are so far away from us,” says Vertesi. “So the scientists and engineers do the ‘rover dance.’ It’s a series of gestures that imitate the rover actions: unfurling of arms and rotating of wrists; splaying of arms behind them like solar panels. Always very aware of where the sun is. These people have a semi physical presence on Mars. One scientist got up and was talking about an observation and he began to shuffle backward…and then he said, ‘Janet, get your camera. I’m turning into the rover!’ ”
Driver John Wright confesses to some of it. “The thing I always notice is that I have to mentally visualize what the [rover] arm is doing. And I have to use my left arm. When I’m talking about it, I start with my right arm, and then I say, Wait, I have to use my left arm, because the shoulder joint’s on the left front side of the rover, and the elbow sticks out to the left. So you’re sticking your thumb out, wrapping the arm around. And turning the wheels. There’s definitely a lot of hand-waving.” […]
End-of-life questions make anyone close to the rovers uneasy. Yet with Spirit’s recent stranding, the scientists are often asked about the inevitable.
“They talk about them as geriatric,” says Vertesi. “Amnesia. Arthritis. All very human experiences. But to mention a rover death….The pressure to preserve the rovers is huge.”
John Grant is practical about the demise of the probes, but says they’re not there yet. “I know it will happen someday, but I don’t want to think about the eventual end of the mission,” he says. “With the rovers, it’s open-ended. You don’t want to let go of them.”
“There’s definitely a lot of hand-waving.” There always is.
[Also this is sort of the job I mainly want—sitting around people doing science and asking them what it feels like.]
We can’t wait for our first ever Tumblr reading: Friday, February 19th at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in NYC!
Somehow I feel like this is crossing the streams.
Scientists Grow Cheap Biodegradable Solar Using Tobacco : TreeHugger
Researchers at UC Berkeley have hacked tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic cells which can then be extracted and sprayed onto any substrate to create solar cells. How? The scientists tweaked a few genes within the tobacco mosaic virus to build tiny structures called chromophores. Once the plant is sprayed with the virus, the new chromophores will group into tightly coiled formations. Chromophores are structures that turn light into high powered electrons.
Nothing about that is not great, especially the part where it looks like it’s from two hundred years ago.
