Acceleration

On September 6, 2005, in Acceleration
With New Orleans seemingly in its death throes, Kashmir in seismic shambles, central America buried in mud, a global flu pandemic on the way, Iraq disintegrating, Bali bombed again, not to mention more decent Americans joining the millions reduced to living in poverty and lacking access to care, it’s hard not to get despondent.

Most of our setbacks are caused by Man or Nature; but Science and Technology, more often than not, are forces for progress. We hope the examples of technological progress in medicine — which are also examples of the human gifts of imagination and creativity — in this and other issues of the Digest help lift the spirit.

A year is a long time in the compressed timescale of technological advance. The autonomous vehicles that failed so publicly in last year’s DARPA Grand Challenge race have been a spectacular success this year. Four drove themselves 130 miles to the finish line over a Mojave Desert course that would test the mettle of even a human driver.

Thanks to a recent breakthrough there is a good chance that among the technologies packed into future self-drive vehicles will be environmentally friendly biodiesel engines. But who’ll want even biodiesel when hydrogen becomes at least as inexpensive and ubiquitous? Dismissing the pessimists, General Motors’ R&D chief said his confidence about the arrival of fuel-cell-powered vehicles in showrooms in 2010 grows “every week.”

A similar dialectic obtains in haptics (remote touch). Skeptics say the haptic glass is half empty, but some in Singapore think it is full enough to drink from, and have developed a haptic chicken to prove it, or perhaps to taunt their tactilely timid colleagues.

The Physiome Project has already produced a fully functional virtual skeleton, heart, and lungs. Now, a US-Swiss team (apparently not part of Physiome) is planning to built a functional virtual brain. Intelligence may or not emerge in the virtual brain, but “collective intelligence” does emerge in groups of people, and we are learning to harness its power. We are also learning to manipulate trust. This is one advance on which it would be wise to keep an untrusting eye, if they don’t get to you first. Perhaps future “cognition enhancers” will give us the intellect to guard against such manipulation.

Finally: The Europeans and Japanese, with US involvement, have just embarked on a multibillion dollar, gigantic fusion reactor project. What if a desktop fusion reactor arrives to blow it away?

Autonomous Cars

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Carnegie Mellon University’s autonomous robotic Hummer SUV nicknamed “Sandstorm” drove itself 200 miles in seven hours, without human involvement, in preparation for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a 130-mile driverless desert race. Sandstorm used sensors to “see” and computers to “drive.” It drove 131 laps on a racecourse, averaging 28 miles per hour and reaching a top speed of 36 miles per hour.

[As of the time of this issue, the race was already run, and CMU’s vehicle failed to finish. However, four vehicles did finish, in superb style. A VW SUV entered by Stanford University came in first, having covered over 130 miles of rough Mojave desert terrain at an average speed of 19 mph.]

Biodiesel

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have proposed a new way to produce biodiesel — diesel made from plants — converting not just the 10 percent mass of the plant made up of fatty acids, as traditional biodiesel refining does, but all of the plant — roots, stems, leaves, fruit, and all. “That means,” according to an article in Technology Review, “the waste biomass of America’s vast agriculture industry — everything from corn stover (the stems and leaves of the plant) to peanut shells and fallen leaves — can be used. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study . . . estimated that more than 1.3 billion tons of such waste is produced every year. If all of it were turned into biodiesel, it would provide enough fuel to replace one-third of the petroleum consumed in the United States. Furthermore, turning currently unused farmland into grassland to be harvested for biodiesel production would easily account for the other two-thirds of petroleum needs.”

Unlike ethanol, the new biodiesel does not require energy-hungry, expensive distillation to remove water, using instead a simpler, cheaper method. Biodiesel produced with this method has chemical properties almost identical to refined biodiesel and burns just as well in diesel engines. Its only byproducts are water and heat. Other recent advances in cellulose transformation using enzyme technology bring us “tantalizingly close to making the whole [biofuels] system economically competitive with cheap gas,” says Technology Review.

Fuel Cell Cars

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Wired magazine recently interviewed Larry Burns, GM’s vice president of R&D and strategic planning, about the car giant’s plans for hydrogen-powered vehicles. Among the Q&A was this:

“Many scientists say it will take decades to develop fuel cells and the infrastructure to support them. What do you know that they don’t?

Burns replied: “The first question I’d like to ask them is, when was the last time you were in a state-of-the-art fuel cell-development laboratory? I work with a tremendous team of scientists and engineers who are creating that capability, and my confidence in our 2010 timetable grows every week.”

Haptic Hen

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Researchers in Singapore have developed a system that enables people to stroke a live chicken over the Internet. The remote chicken is decked out in a lightweight haptic jacket lined with tiny vibrators that vibrate as the remote human strokes a mechanical replica of a chicken.

The choice of a chicken was apparently whimsy, but the technology is serious. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that “telehaptics” (remote touch) will open up a whole new world where people could touch zoo animals, pet their pets remotely, and dance with a remote partner (the dance teaching business would go global overnight.) We’d prefer to say nothing about the sex industry, but it’s a fact of life and there is no avoiding the social and moral implications. The researchers have already begun planning to develop a haptic body suit with tiny air sacs, compressors, and valves, that would enable two people to hug over the Internet. Both huggers would need to wear the suits while hugging a mannequin or pillow embedded with pressure sensors.

Wired News quotes several skeptical experts who think today’s haptic technology is too crude for such ambitious applications.

In Silico Brain

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IBM together with Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) plan to build “Blue Brain” — a functioning, but virtual, close approximation of the human neocortex. They’ll first create virtual neocortical columns (real ones are about a third of a millimeter in diameter and three millimeters long, containing some 10,000 neurons) then stitch the virtual columns together. IBM’s current world champion Blue Gene/L supercomputer has enough independent processors for each to be programmed to emulate an individual nerve cell in a column, according to the Economist.

While Big Blue essentially supplies the hardware, the EPFL’s Brain Mind Institute will essentially supply the software that will determine how the neurons interact. As the Economist notes, “That will be no mean feat,” given that a single neuron has about 10,000 connections. It will take two to three years just to program one column, from which others — about a million of them, if they intend to replicate nature — can then be more easily derived. But even that is just a warm-up exercise for the really hard work: simulating the molecular structure of the brain and observing how gene expression affects brain function. That will take another 10-15 years, and is explicitly dependent on Moore’s Law’s supplying the necessary computing power during the course of the project. It is not stated in the Economist, but this is essentially a Human Physiome Project-type project.

To the Economist, “The most interesting questions, surely, are whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both.” But the project’s leaders insist that “Blue Brain” is not aiming to create an intelligent or conscious machine. On the other hand, one of them believes that if intelligence serendipitously emerges, it “is going to be far more than we can even imagine.”

Collective Intelligence

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A thoughtful article in MIT’s Technology Review synthesizes the evidence for a technology-enabled and technology-driven trend toward “collective intelligence” and its effects on the individual and society. It argues that groups “can often outthink even the most knowledgeable experts,” and that collective intelligence can be harnessed given “diversity of opinion, independence of opinion, decentralization, and a way to aggregate opinions to arrive at a collective decision.” That way has been led by the open-source movement (specifically, the Linux operating system), by post-modern companies such as Google and eBay, and most recently by blogs and wikis, all of which capture the collective intelligence of masses of people worldwide.

At a more parochial level, corporations too are learning to apply technology to harness the collective intelligence of their employees and customers. E-mail, blogs, SMS, and RSS are obvious examples, but some companies have created more focused collective intelligence tools such as artificial electronic markets that “aggregate employees’ best guesses about sales, resource allocation, research and development efforts, and even [this was done at oil giant BP] pollution control.”

The same trend is also remaking the media, politics, and democracy — generally for the better.

Computable Trust

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Swiss scientists have found that the naturally occurring and widely used hormone oxytocin influences how much we trust one another. In a study, people who inhaled the hormone were more likely to entrust others with large sums of money than were those who inhaled a placebo. The researchers hope their discovery might lead to cures for people with social disorders. (We hope and assume they mean voluntary cures.)

Neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study, suggests that “Some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates,” but he himself is “more alarmed about the manipulations of marketing than the possibility of oxytocin sprays.”

Brent Waters, an ethicist at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, cautioned that “The experiment presupposes a highly diminished and reductionistic understanding of what trust means.”

Mind Enhancement

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A scientific report prepared for the UK government’s Office of Science and Technology predicts that powerful “cognition enhancers” — stimulants that improve memory, intellect, or other aspects of cognition — will almost certainly be developed during the next 20 years, and will have few side-effects and be non-addictive. “In a world that is increasingly non-stop and competitive, the individual’s use of such substances may move from the fringe to the norm, with cognition enhancers used as coffee is today,” according to the report. “It is possible that such an advance could usher in a new era of drug use without addiction.”

Fusion Power

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An inexpensive “tabletop” device has produced nuclear fusion reactions using ultrasound to excite a liquid containing deuterium, creating tiny bubbles that expanded then imploded with enough force to cause what appeared to be thermonuclear fusion reactions, based on the emission of neutrons at 2.5 mega-electron volts and a yield of tritium, both of which indicate that fusion has taken place. Temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level. Since those extreme conditions exist only within the collapsing bubbles, the device is safe.

 

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