Science News- Science Video, Experiments, Science News // Current

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Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don't tell Intel researchers. Intel's Pittsburgh lab... more

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Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture

No, it's not going to destroy the world. But this collection of photos of the LHC at the Big Picture is a great reminder that... more

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Is this the end for human space flight?

SO WE won't be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear fantasies are dashed. Don't believe the spin - the dream is over.

OK, the Augustine panel's review of NASA's human space-flight plans outlines several options. Mars may be out, but the moon is still in with a shout, and plans to go to the Lagrange points and even the asteroids are mooted. Technically, all this is probably doable. But it won't happen, and here's why.

The problem is not money: the US can afford an extra $3 billion a year. It is psychological. NASA, the only game in town, has no idea what space is for, and no audacity.

There certainly was audacity in 1961, when John F. Kennedy made his lunar pledge. The key line was not the crazy bit about landing a man on the moon, it was the hubristic promise to do so by 1970. If Wernher Von Braun had insisted the moon was unreachable before 1975, they probably would never have gone. Why? Because by 1975 Kennedy's presidency would be ancient history. Some other guy would get all the glory as Old Glory was hammered into the lunar regolith.

Of course that happened anyway, but Kennedy's reasoning must have been that, even in 1969, he would be able to bask in the glory of a successful moon shot.

It may simply be that space exploration is incompatible with US democracy. A Mars shot would take four presidential terms at least. No president will ask taxpayers to fund something he won't be around to take credit for.

Another big problem is the legacy of some terrible decisions that left NASA with the expensive, dangerous space shuttle and a white-elephant space station that manages the feat of making space seem as dull as cardboard. The whole thing is a mess.

So where now? Probably nowhere. Expect the Augustine report to be quietly forgotten. After all, we've been here before. In 1989 George Bush Snr promised the moon and Mars too, and that came to naught. The problem with these visions is that they are too sane. Human space exploration requires a tinge of madness - that theatrical Kennedy hubris - to work.

They'll probably keep the International Space Station going out of bloody-mindedness. The shuttles will fly a few more times. There will be some vague plans, more studies. Robots, of course, but no concerted attempt to look for alien life, the most compelling raison d'être for space exploration. But as to the moon, Mars, infinity and beyond, I'm afraid, in all likelihood, Buzz Lightyear will just have to wait.

Continued at link . . .

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427355.700-is-this-the-end-for-human-space-flight.htmlSO WE won't be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear... more

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7 hours ago

What if Earth had Rings

What would Earth look like if it had rings like Saturn? This animation was done by Roy Prol, and it shows not only how the... more

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10 hours ago

Is your Sushi Endangered?

"That tuna in your sushi might be an endangered species, a new study finds. Some genetic detective work by scientists has... more

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10 hours ago

Robotic Spy Planes Go Green

"Robot spy planes are harnessing alternative energy to make them more covert and longer lasting than ever. Such drones... more

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1 day ago

First Programmable Quantum Computer Created

Quantum processing units are fundamentally different in a number of ways. First, where a regular bit can be only 1 or 0, a quantum... more

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1 day ago

Thousands of Worms Headed to International Space Station For Muscle Tests

The perils of space flight number in the hundreds, from radiation exposure to the impact of micro-asteroids. But for astronauts... more

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1 day ago

Killer bees: nasty sting, not so smart

Killer bees may be among the most feared of all insects - but they ain't too smart. A new study has compared the wits of... more

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2 days ago

Mesmerizing, Isn't It?

This is what goes on behind the scenes whenever you open your mouth to speak. The image was captured at 50 frames per second over... more

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2 days ago

The Banana is the Atheist's Worst Nightmare

New Zealand born evangelical Christian Ray Comfort, aka "the banana man", has published a new 150th anniversary edition... more

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2 days ago

In Search of the Human Element

"This is a picture without much information in it; nevertheless, it's a powerful image," says photojournalist Gary... more

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2 days ago

Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds

WHY can't we be in two places at the same time? The simple answer is that it's because large objects appear not to be subject to the same wacky laws of quantum mechanics that rule subatomic particles. But why not - and how big does something have to be for quantum physics no longer to apply? Ripples in space-time could hold the answer.

The location of the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds is a long-standing mystery. One idea is that everything starts off as a quantum system, existing in a superposition of states. This would make an object capable of being, for example, in many places at once. But when this system interacts with its environment, it collapses into a single classical state - a phenomenon called quantum decoherence.

Brahim Lamine of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and colleagues say that gravitational waves may be responsible for this. These waves in the very fabric of the universe were generated by its rapid expansion soon after the big bang, as well as by violent astrophysical events such as colliding black holes. As a consequence, a background of ripples at very low amplitudes pervades space-time.

Lamine and colleagues calculated how this fluctuating space-time might contribute to quantum decoherence. They found that for systems with very large mass, such as the moon, decoherence induced by the gravitational waves would have caused any quantum superposition to dissipate immediately. At the other end of the scale, such waves would have a negligible effect on massless photons.

To test whether gravitational waves do in fact cause the decoherence seen in large objects, the researchers suggest using a set-up called a matter-wave interferometer in which molecules are made to pass through multiple gratings. The wave-like nature of the molecules causes them to diffract, and the diffracted waves interact to give rise to an interference pattern. Quantum decoherence destroys this pattern, so in principle this could provide a test for whether the decohering effect of background space-time fluctuations matches predictions. Such a system would have to be completely isolated to rule out other effects.

This is, however, impossible in practice - with today's interferometers, at least. Experiments pioneered by Anton Zeilinger, Markus Arndt and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Austria, have been able to generate interference with beams of 60-atom carbon buckyballs, but even with molecules of this size the effect of gravitational waves would be too small to be observed.

According to Lamine, who presented his work last month at the Gravitation and Fundamental Physics in Space meeting at Les Houches in the French Alps, the effect should be measurable in larger systems at high energy. Supersonic beams of about 3000 carbon atoms would do the trick if made to interfere over an effective area of about 1 square metre. This is far beyond the reach of any foreseeable technology.

Some speculative theories predict, however, that quantum decoherence will occur on a lower energy scale than that suggested by Lamine. If so, this could be within experimental reach. "That is why our experiments are pushing [up] the interference mass limit, step by step," says Arndt.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427353.800-ripples-in-space-divide-classical-and-quantum-worlds.htmlWHY can't we be in two places at the same time? The simple answer is that it's because large objects appear not to be... more

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2 days ago

Radioactive Batteries Keep Going and Going and Going

Minuscule amounts of radioactive elements could safely power handheld electrical devices for months or even years, according to... more

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2 days ago

It Takes 147,456 PowerPC Processors To Out-Think a Single Cat Brain

Also on IBM's cat-sized-brain-simulation materials list: 143 terabytes of RAM, miles and miles of cabling, a million watts of... more

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2 days ago

Algae Sex and Amoeba Smackdown - Best Microscopy Videos of the Year

Every wonder what it looks like when algae have sex? Now you'll find out in this winning video from the Olympus BioScapes... more

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2 days ago

Nasa and Microsoft launch 'explore Mars' website

Nasa and Microsoft have launched an interactive website that allows users to explore the planet Mars. The Be a Martian website... more

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2 days ago

The Biggest Artificial Brain Ever

"Scientists at IBM's Almaden research center have built the biggest artificial brain ever—a cell-by-cell simulation of the human visual cortex: 1.6 billion virtual neurons connected by 9 trillion synapses. This computer simulation, as large as a cat's brain, blows away the previous record—a simulated rat's brain with 55 million neurons—built by the same team two years ago.

"This is a Hubble Telescope of the mind, a linear accelerator of the brain," says Dharmendra Modha, the Almaden computer scientist who will announce the feat at the Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore. In other words, in the realm of computer science, the team's undertaking is grand.

The visual cortex, the wrinkly outer layer of the brain, performs most of the higher functions that make humans human, from recognizing faces and speech to choreographing the dozens of muscle contractions involved in a perfect tennis serve. It does this using a universal neural circuit called a microcolumn, repeated over and over. Modha hopes the simulation, assembled using neuroscience data from rats, cats, monkeys and humans, will help scientists better understand how the brain works—and, in particular, how the cortical microcolumn manages to perform such a wide range of tasks.

But deciphering the microcolumn can also help build better computers, Mars rovers and robots that are truly intelligent. By reverse engineering this cortical structure, Modha says, researchers could give machines the ability to interpret biological senses such as sight, hearing and touch. And artificial machine brains could process, intelligently, senses that don't currently exist in the natural world, such as radar and laser range-finding. "Imagine peppering the entire surface of the ocean with pressure, temperature, humidity, wave height and turbidity sensors," Modha says. "Imagine streaming this data to a reverse-engineered cortex." In short, he envisions wiring the entire planet—transforming it into a virtual organism with the capacity to understand its own evolving patterns of weather, climate and ocean currents.

IBM has revealed the biggest artificial brain of all time, a simulation run by a 147,456-processor supercomputer that requires millions of watts of electricity and over 150,000 gigabytes of memory. The brain simulation is a feat for neuroscience and computer processing—but it's still one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain and is only as large as a cat's. Will we ever get to truly capable artificial intelligence?"

MUCH more at link:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4337190.html?nav=RSS20&src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=pop

What are you thoughts on the future of AI?"Scientists at IBM's Almaden research center have built the biggest artificial brain ever—a cell-by-cell... more