Ministry of Intrigue

NASA , in cooperation with DARPA, has been designing little robots for use in space. These robots are designed to be able to conduct synchronized flight with each other, in order to conduct a variety of tasks in space, such as emergency repairs, that previously would have required an astronaut.

From the article:

Known officially as Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, the droids have been on the station since 2006. Astronauts have conducted more than 20 experiment sessions with them, and are on tap to conduct many more. Each SPHERES droid is self-contained with power, propulsion, computing and navigation equipment. Together, they are testing techniques that could lead to advancements in automated dockings, satellite servicing, spacecraft assembly and emergency repairs. 

snip…

Miller says that, when his team designed the SPHERES droids, all of their uses couldn’t be imagined up front. So, they built an “expansion port:” into each droid where additional sensors and appendages can be added, such as cameras and wireless power transfer systems.

It looks like they are being tested inside the International Space Station right now, but eventually they plan to move to tests outside in space. Very cool stuff.

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This piece from Annalee Newitz is an overview of the utopian city designed by King Camp Gillette back before he began his razor empire. He diagrammed out this future city — which he named Metropolis — in his book The Human Drift, which was released in 1894. Gillette apparently designed his city not just for efficiency, but also in an attempt to resolve the issues of social inequality.

From the article:

[Metropolis] would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.

The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city’s residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.

It’s a fascinating article, but to be fair, Newitz never successfully makes the case for claiming that this design in any way “changed the twentieth century”. Regardless, it’s still a great read and well worth your time.

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This is a great Wired article by Warren Ellis on the current state of space travel and sums up my feelings as well. Some gems from the article:

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

[snip]

Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it’s in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination.

However, the best bit in this article for me was the following observation, which hit me like a kick in the teeth:

In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.

Amen to that. Go read the whole article.

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This is the kind of breakthrough we need in order to make AR a practical technology for day to day use.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.

Just as exciting is proposed power source for the device:

Parviz says that future versions will be able to harvest power from a user’s cell phone, perhaps as it beams information to the lens. They will also have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so that it appears suspended in front of the wearer’s eyes.

WANT

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Scientists have found a way to prolong the youth of mice in a laboratory setting by genetically manipulating them to block production of the S6 Kinase protein, which mimics a reduction of calorie intake without actually having to limit the amount of food consumed.

From the article:

“The mice lived longer and were leaner, more active and generally healthier than the control group. We added ‘life to their years’ as well as ‘years to their lives.’”

The genetically altered female mice lived 20 percent longer — living a total of 950 days — or over 160 days more than their normal counterparts.

At age 600 days, the equivalent of middle age in humans, the altered female mice were leaner, had stronger bones, were protected from type 2 diabetes, performed better at motor tasks and demonstrated better senses and cognition, according to the study.

Their T-cells, a key component of the immune system also seemed more “youthful,” the researchers said, which points to a slowing of the declining immunity that usually accompanies aging.

Male mice showed little difference in lifespan although they also demonstrated some of the health benefits, including less resistance to insulin and healthier T-cells. Researchers said reasons for the differences between the two sexes were unclear.

Very interesting research, I’m curious if the ratios for extended youth would also hold true in humans. If so, extended youth: check. Now where’s that brain/internet hookup I’ve been waiting for?

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By masses, of course, they mean companies that can afford the hardware, but this is still a pretty huge development in pushing quantum computing out of the lab and into the real world. The Dutch will get it first, but hopefully it will begin to become common in developed countries with high broadband penetration.

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This io9 article is reporting on research being conducted in Spain on a drug that enhances visual memory.

From the article:

Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.

[snip]

If this protein boosts visual memory in humans, the implications are staggering. In their paper, the researchers say that it could be used as a memory-enhancer…

It’s interesting that this drug only enhances visual memory, and I’m very curious about any potential parallels this research has with the memory editing/enhancement research that has been going on in Brooklyn.

It now seems almost a certainty that we’ll all be taking memory enhancing drugs at some point in the future, as well as utilizing technologies that make direct use and manipulation of our memories possible. This raises a number of ethical questions, of which I’m not confident we as a society will answer appropriately. That’s a larger subject that I am not prepared to address in this post, but definitely worth thinking about.

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Quite simply, I think this is one of the greatest advances in library science and computing in recent memory. This isn’t just a toy or a search engine, this is a knowledge processor that makes any factual data in its system instantly computable.

If you are a teacher or scientist, you need to be paying attention to this. In fact, if you are a human being who is engaged with any sort of data, you need to be paying attention to this as well, because while Wolfram|Alpha may not live forever, this advance, as well as any of its inevitable successors, are the future of information computing.

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Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange. That would be a mistake, because while Ellis shows us how the world is changing, demonstrating his clear fascination with the bizarre, he begins to make a case for why the slower approach to news gathering and reporting as typified in the print publishing industry is essential in a way that blog networks are not.

For the record, I agree with Ellis on this point, but I wish he had taken some additional time to fully illustrate the differences between the two publishing styles as opposed to assuming implicit understanding of the reader. Although, perhaps that is not his purpose. Like most of Ellis’ commentary, there is mental current to this piece, and getting the reader carried away in that flow of thought usually seems to be more important that knocking off bullet points like some academic. It’s good reading material, and full of Warren Ellis’ wicked (some might say twisted) sense of humor.

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This New York Times article by Benedict Carey is reporting on a fascinating discovery in the field of neuroscience: a specific molecule that appears to control the way memory is formed in the brain. This is huge, especially since it appears that researchers have already been conducting research with a drug that can inhibit this molecule, effectively limiting the formation or retention of a particular memory. The article talks about some practical uses for the drug, but I’m not clear on how researchers would go about targeting specific memories to block or erase.

Obviously, there are a ton of ethical and practical concerns related to this, and the article hints at them effectively enough without going into a terrible amount of detail. I won’t dive into them yet either, it’s far too big an issue to address in a bookmark, but it is something we should all be discussing.

One other point I found quite interesting is that Carey makes the statement:

Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious as the New World was to explorers of the past.

There’s some judgement implied here, but I find the assignment of roles fascinating. Once again, that’s for a longer post. Sorry to be a tease, but the gears are turning and attempting to yank my thoughts from them prematurely will almost certainly result in broken fingers.

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