When God said “Let there be life” did S/He mean partial life as well? If not, a growing
number of scientists could be in for it when they meet their Maker. A
fitting punishment might be to make them watch — once would be an eternity — a
slow motion re-run of the entire series of Days of Our Lives shot with
the world’s fastest camera, which
has a shutter speed fast enough to snap an electron whizzing around an atom.

Most toys on display at a recent major US toy fair included at least one
microchip, reports Wired‘s Michelle Delio. Even classic wooden toys and
games had embedded microchips enabling them to interact with sounds, color
changes, and even limited speech with kids. Still more interesting was a new
line of Batman toys incorporating VEIL (Video Encoded Invisible Light)
technology designed to interact with upcoming Batman TV cartoons. The cartoon
contains data encoded in invisible light which the toy picks up from the TV
screen and then makes noises and movements synchronized with the action in the
cartoon. It also automatically and invisibly receives software upgrades. The
Barbie doll is also being equipped with VEIL so she can sing along to The
Princess and the Pauper DVD, which also has the invisible light code.
Wheel of Fortune is one of a slew of VEIL-equipped new games that will
enable viewers at home to play the game virtually alongside studio contestants.

If (rather, when) these toys and especially the games are wirelessly
networked via the Internet, a whole new stream of business revenue will come on
tap. Already, in the adult online games world, players are moving into paying
for virtual products with real money, not just virtual or play money. IBM is
pushing that trend through its “Business Integration for Games (“BIG”)
initiative.

Real money is already exchanging hands to pay for virtual environments that
help psychologists, psychiatrists, and researchers treat patients with various
kinds of phobia by making them confront the object of their fear in physically
safe virtual environments. There is anecdotal evidence such therapy works, but
no rigorous study has yet been done. While not photo-realistic, the virtual
scenes are convincing enough to evoke patient response. They include “a glass
elevator and a bridge to address fear of height, an airplane cabin for those who
fear flying and a thunderstorm to diminish fear of bad weather,” reports Sam
Lubell in the New York Times. They also include a virtual bar and a
virtual drug house to help addicts overcome their addictions; “a Vietnam scene
to help veterans confront memories they may be blocking out”; and even “a
re-enactment of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to help those
coping with their aftermath.”

The near-ultimate in virtual environments would be a virtual planet Earth. It
should come as no surprise that one is being built for the US Army, to enable it
to “plan future conflicts which are unlikely to involve set-piece battles and
instead be smaller in scale,” according to the BBC. It will “model real world
physics as closely as possible,” and will include simulation capabilities for
both diplomatic and military activities, including combat, intelligence work,
patrols, military planning, and “working with indigenous populations.” The
breathtakingly detailed scale of the simulation will be small enough to simulate
a stroll in a park or a walk across America. The simulation will incorporate
“models of the way that things such as crowds and vehicles react.”

Reference: Delio, Michelle (2004). “Toymakers Bet
Big on Microchips.” Wired News, February 20.

Reference: Terdiman, Daniel (2004). “Interreality
Business Machines.” Wired News, February 20.

Reference: Lubell, Sam (2004). “On the
Therapist’s Couch, a Jolt of Virtual Reality.” New York Times, February 19.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “US military
creates second Earth.” BBC News, February 23.

Post-Humanity?

The US Army may be the first not to march on its stomach. Perhaps as a
halfway measure towards the goal of dismissing soldiers altogether in favor of
attack humanoids and robotic Rottweillers, the Pentagon plans to enable soldiers
to fight on not only without
feeling the pain of their wounds and blisters and without
sleep but also without breakfast, lunch, and dinner — for days on end. The
question, a military consultant told Wired‘s Noah Shachtman, is: “Are
there temporary biochemical approaches we can use to squeeze the last ounce of
performance out of soldiers when they’re already worked to exhaustion?” The
consultant asked not to be named.

Apparently, the answer to his question is yes, there are. They range from
adding “nutraceutical” pills, potions, and transdermal patches to the soldier’s
C rations, to lowering core body temperature by turbocharging mitochondria in
order to change the body’s metabolism. The Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA)’s “Metabolic Dominance” program is working on both. Some
scientists regard all this as fantasy, while others say some of it may be only a
few years away from reality. We would put money on the latter.

Reference: Shachtman, Noah (2004). “Darpa Offers No
Food for Thought.” Wired News, February 17.

Living-Nonliving Interface

The term “artificial life” has been around long enough to have lost its
spookiness and acquire an acronym — “alife.” Picking up the spooky mantle today
is the new field of “partial life,” of which lab-constructed “xDNA” (expanded
DNA) molecules are an example. One such, created at Stanford University (and
which we have reported
before) is more heat-resistant than natural DNA and glows in the dark, but
it can’t reproduce.

Other p-life examples already created in various labs include:

• Organic components in solar cells
• Programmable living cells
• Fish neurons grown over silicon chips, creating electrical activity that
  controls a robotic arm and produces “art”
• A bioartificial
  kidney containing human kidney cells
• A three-dimensional sheet of living tissue printed using standard inkjet
  printers (see previous articles here
  and here)
• A synthetic bacterium under construction, gene by gene, by DNA decoder Craig
  Venter
• A muscle cell-silicon structure that ambulates spasmodically when placed on
  a surface smeared with glucose, which gives it energy
• Peptide-semiconductor chemical combinations that turn into nanorods for use
  in electro-active fabric or bioelectronic medical sensors
• Frog cells grown into edible frog steaks

Bionics and cyborgism usually seems to mean adding technology to enhance or
replace living tissue in humans. The above examples show that p-life is more
about adding living tissue to machines. Given the existence of artificial limbs
and organs, one can conceive a cyborg consisting of a human head on a robot
body. As p-life progresses, one can conceive a robot head on a human body.

Reference: Krieger, Lisa M. (2004). “Exploring
borders of natural, artificial: Symposium studies ‘partial life’ projects.”
Mercury News, February 21.

Reference: Jones, Debra (2004). “From
Frankenstein to Frog Steaks.” Wired News, February 24.

Just an Attosec

Using pulses of laser light and a “streak camera,” Austrian physicists have
been able to see what happens to electrons moving around atoms in the space of
just 100 attoseconds. An attosecond is a 10^-18 seconds, and a
thousand times shorter than a femtosecond (10^-15 seconds). The almost
new science of femtochemistry, in which the motion of atoms and molecules is
observed and measured on the femtosecond timescale, already seems old.

Reference: Peplow, Mark (2004). “Snapshot taken of the
tiniest time interval: Electron movements pinned down to the split second.”
Nature, February 26.