Goodbye, Button Mashing

Despite my semi-irrational fear of MMORPGs and mind-reading, I'm always happy to see signs that humankind will be able to control stuff with their brains.

Next on the roster for manipulation of this sort (here I always thought it would be cyborg limbs) it's video games! And you won't even need surgery.

In this newly designed device, a series of sensors placed on a special headset will record your intentions, emotions, and even (ugh) facial expressions in order to help you better interact with a virtual world.

Particularly nifty is how they got the device to figure out what you want -- it's surprisingly intuitive -- they just put people in the same situations over and over again and tried to figure out what their brain waves had in common.

So, getting a game to know which direction you want to walk in just by thinking about it is pretty awesome, but you may be surprised to know that that's not what this is even for. So what is the darn thing supposed to do? And why the hell does it want to know your emotions? The answer is crazier than you might think.

So it can cater to them.

Homing in on these revealing brain waves allows the EPOC system to quickly deduce a player's emotional qualities and react to it by, for example, changing the music of a game in real-time to match the user's tension or throw in more villains in case a player seemed to get bored of a certain world.

This three hundred dollar headset is going to read your mind just so it can throw more monsters at you when you're bored? Oh, come on! I want a full package. Supposedly the full body movement stuff is still in the planning phase.

I get the impression that primarily this headset does the realistic-expression-mimicking thing for online avatars, so it's primarily a tool for extra-realistic online social interaction. It has thirty different presets that it tries to select out from the signals you give it, so it's not an exact replication of the one-of-a-kind look on your face at a particular moment, but it's still probably going to be closer to your real expression than, say, your WeeMee on AIM.

Look out, Second Life. Things are about to get a whole lot creepier.

Decisions

Ever get stressed about the free will question? Do we make our choices ourselves, or do chemical reactions make them for us and just kind of force us to play along?

In an experiment that tested people's brains while they were making a (notably pointless) choice, scientists were able to monitor unconscious sectors of the people's minds to figure out what decision they would make seven seconds before they thought that they actually decided. In other words, even though people consciously confirmed their choices as ones made purposefully, the readings suggested their unconscious minds sorted things out and then their conscious minds just went along with the committee.

So just what does that mean, exactly? It doesn't mean we have no free will, necessarily. Just because our conscious minds have a monopoly on our sense of self doesn't make them any more legitimate than the rest of our brains. Well. You know. I guess.

To be honest, even the scientists involved in this experiment got a little squirmy about it. From the article:

Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."

So, we learn for sure from this experiment that stupid decisions such as choosing a hand for button pushing are prepared in advance for our conscious minds to receive, but we don't know for sure whether that choice, once prepared, couldn't be rejected consciously if we had some legitimate reason.

We also don't know if consciousness plays a part in more important decisions that might bring morals, emotions, or anticipation of future events into play in a complicated way. Decisions that might have consequences.

But it is one of those spooky suggestions that point towards a world where we might only be passively watching ourselves and trying to make sense of it all.

Maybe. To me, it's more likely that it's just a sign that we're a little bit bigger than the conscious selves that float in our heads analyzing ourselves and the things around us. There's a lot going on behind the curtain. The hidden stuff belongs to us too, though. Don't panic.

The First Animal

The trouble with making sense of evolution is it doesn't seem to want anything. It's not always making the creatures of the planet more complex, it's not really making them simpler, and it's not always making them stronger or smarter.

It might change a single species in any of these ways, but at the same time, species that have opposite traits could be thriving in the same environment. Sometimes traits that are bad for survival are preserved, buried among traits that seem to balance them out.

So, scientists have found that the comb jelly is older than the sponge. It's significant because the jelly is a lot more complicated than the sponge. This means that nature may have back-pedaled after coming up with the first animal, removing many of the bells and whistles of the comb jelly and its descendants, such as tissues and nerves, in order to create the sponge, a cleaner, simpler creature that retained the ability to survive, and consequently went on existing long enough for us to become its contemporaries.

What does this say about the way the world works? Well, for me it brings to mind Planet of the Apes and other creepy scenarios where humankind "devolves" into a more primitive state, as the ability to create high tech weapons with our superbrains becomes more liability than advantage and takes us to the brink of extinction.

Interestingly (or terrifyingly, depressingly, if you like) the capability of humans to contemplate evolution in itself has caused a lot of destruction, if you look at the pseudo-science fueling the genocide and racism of World War II. Ideas and nukes can both be dangerous, especially put together.

Currently, humankind's unique abilities have allowed them to dominate the planet essentially unchallenged, if you knock out the bugs and the microbes and other things that are more abundant than we are even if they can't strictly eat us or kill us if we have the right tools. But I'm not sure this is really what evolution means -- it isn't some machine aimed at the creation of a species with the capacity to dominate. It isn't really the survival of the fittest, either, just the survival of whatever survives. Anything and everything that survives.

Worms and ducks and whales and people and all that other stuff out there.

More Mad Science

Do You Constantly Feel Bored and Let Down by the Stem Cell Controversy?! Shouldn't Humankind be Fooling Around More Playfully With the Fabric of his/her Own Existence?!:

British researchers say they have created embryos using human cells and the egg cells of cows, but said such experiments would not lead to hybrid human-animal babies, or even to direct medical therapies.

Dr. Lyle Armstrong of Newcastle University presented preliminary data on his work to Israel's parliament last week, Newcastle University said in a statement released on Tuesday.

They said they had hollowed out the egg cells of cattle and inserted human DNA to create a growing embryo. The hope would be to take it apart to get embryonic stem cells.

Full article here.

Nothing funny going on here, we just made HUMAN COW CHIMERAS. But don't worry! They can't grow up! Ha ha ha... So, okay, it's not quite a cowperson. It's just a human stem cell encased in a cow egg "shell" of sorts that can't develop too far before it dies. Super!

The idea is to practice with these cow eggs without wasting human eggs, which are understandably in high demand for creating, well, babies. Interestingly, this crazy shit is all part of the process involved in learning to make stem cells do what we want so that we can have awesome things like total limb regeneration and mending spinal cords.

But I do still feel a little bad for the poor little freak cowpeople. They're so pitiful they can't even become real organisms. ...And if they did, man would they be pissed.

(image source: starcostumes)

Human Limb Regeneration!

(image by: Sbocaj)

For a while now we've been, as a species, looking jealously at salamanders wondering how they can regrow chopped off limbs. I think it's safe to say that most of us assume that, though awesome, the complete regeneration of lost body parts isn't really for humankind.

Maybe one day, with nanomachines or cybernetics, we'll find a way to tell robots how to build us new arms and legs. But we can't do it the way that salamanders do it. Even healing simple wounds seems to almost defeat the human body's level of ingenuity, leaving pronounced scars made of tissue that doesn't match or serve a purpose other than sealing.

That view, however, is changing! Scientists are starting to learn more about the process salamanders use to regrow limbs, and it turns out, it's not quite as far from our own capabilities as we might have thought. Humans have the capacity to regrow "limb buds" during embryonic development and even as adults can still regrow their fingertips, if not the joint.

What's so special about the salamander healing process, that lets them regrow exactly the portion of the limb that they're missing, while humans are left with nothing but a scar and a stump? It's called a "blastema," a bunch of cells that behave much like stem cells, and are capable of regeneration. They apparently form from the fibroblasts around the wound site, which for humans just create clumps of functionless extracellular material to fill in the hole.

Although there are other complicating factors, the main reason animals that can regenerate early in life can't do it as adults seems to be that something called a "Fibroblast Growth Factor" circuit, or FGF, gets turned off at some point in the development of the organism. By turning it back on in frogs (which can regrow limbs as tadpoles) they were able to create amazing tragic frog monsters with malformed limbs sticking out of places they don't belong.

They're still working on it.

Windows

The future of computers and television is see-through. And bendy. Innovations in nanotechnology mean that the screens of the future might just be pretty weird. The most obvious advancement scientists have in mind is to create a readout that displays directly onto the windshield of a car, giving you access to maps and other useful information.

But there are other ideas, too, like reusable newspaper you can roll up and swat people with. Even your laptop might be a candidate for some bending and folding. You might be able to program your wallpaper to different high-resolution displays, or read all the books you want from just one sheet of paper. The full-wall-TVs of Fahrenheit 451 are almost inevitable at this point.

Still, I see a bright future for modern art.

Learning Robot is "A Lot Like a Puppy"

I'm excited to report that I just read the first news about real AI that's ever made me just a little bit nervous.

First off: apparently, when artificial neural networks are used in AI, they have to be carefully limited to keep robots from doing dumb things. I'm pretty sure that at this level this just means controlling the number of completely irrational solutions the robot comes up with for a problem on the level of "There's a wall in my way," but looking ahead to the future, I like to think that this could mean one missing line of code could stand between peaceful coexistance and robots eradicating humanity.

On a more serious note, the point of the article is that through cleverly mixing artificial neural networks with the traditional "pre-programmed" approach to AI, they found something that works a lot better than either one works on its own.

Here's a quote, because this is just that awesome:

Working in the EU-funded COSPAL project, Felsberg’s team found that using the two technologies together solves many of those issues. In what the researchers believe to be the most advanced example of such a system developed anywhere in the world, they used ANN to handle the low-level functions based on the visual input their robots received and then employed classical AI on top of that in a supervisory function.

“In this way, we found it was possible for the robots to explore the world around them through direct interaction, create ways to act in it and then control their actions in accordance. This combines the advantages of classical AI, which is superior when it comes to functions akin to human rationality, and the advantages of ANN, which is superior at performing tasks for which humans would use their subconscious, things like basic motor skills and low-level cognitive tasks,” notes Felsberg.

What's really interesting is how they handle the problem of setting a robot free to learn on its own. Essentially the robot has no innate criteria for making decisions, so how does it know when it's done something "right?" Well, we tell it so. A human operator has a device with two buttons.

The good boy, button, and the bad boy button.

Wow. Can you imagine when this becomes a toy, or an ethical issue?

There's actually a video game that functions similarly. I guess it'll be harder without a magical fairy.

Fake plants. No, Really.

One of the strategies for producing clean energy is to do it the way plants do it. Photosynthesis. Imagine! Not only creating energy without pumping any CO2 into the air, but actually consuming CO2 and getting energy in return. Still, it's hard to imagine getting enough energy out of photosynthesis to fuel, say, a car. Plants are quiet, and slow. They can't even read our thoughts! But they are awfully good at making possible the cycle of life on earth. I have to give them that one.

According to a Science Daily article, that's one of the things scientists are working on right now. Their progress is meager; they've managed to stabilize the process of water oxidation, which is just the beginning of a long task list of problems to figure out.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, just a little bit. Icebergs are melting, and ecosystems people need and rely on are deteriorating. Long term strategies for reducing carbon output are great, but it's also a good time to be looking into how we're taking care of our water resources. We can't necessarily stop global warming before it can do harm, but we've got a bit more control when it comes to polluting and damming the rivers it puts at risk.

(Image by: Paul)

A Visit to the Past, with Rabbits

I guess in a way we could kind of see this coming, given the reproductive reputation of rabbits, but still. Can you believe that these critters have been around for 53 million years?

That spans the better part of the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago until now) and means rabbits evolved around the same time as grass. Other contemporaries of rabbits include three-toed horses and whales with legs.

Things were strange on planet Earth when rabbits were new. North America and Europe were just starting to pull apart. Dinosaurs had gone extinct only recently, and mammals were just beginning to thrive. But the world was cooling down and drying out, triggering extinctions of 50-90 percent of certain groups of animals.

...But not the rabbits. They made it. I wonder how much further they'll go.

(Image by: Franie Frou Frou)

Beating the Superbugs

MRSA, otherwise known as antibiotic-resistant bacteria, are some scary bugs. There was a fairly recent local outbreak in the D.C. area, which left a lot of people feeling pretty helpless and apprehensive. Public schools are still dealing with the threat -- but the best they can do is focus on prevention. For the most part, we only have a few options when it comes to treating bacterial infections.

So what happens when bacteria become better than the drugs we use to kill them? Do the bugs just win? I mean, I know they've pretty much been around since the dawn of time, but aren't we smarter than they are?

Yes! (Thank goodness.) A group of researchers led by the University of Warwick have investigated the process these bacteria use to get around penicillin's attack strategy of breaking down the cell wall of the bacterium. Now that they know the protein and the chemical reaction associated with resistance, (the trick seems to be that resistant bacteria have been building their cell walls with more ropes than ordinary bacteria) they can work on ways to mess it up.

Once they can disrupt this deceptively cutely named MurM reaction, penicillin will be able to kill the previously resistant bacteria.

I like it when humans win!

Interactive Space Atlas, Stage 1

So, checking out Google Sky, I just used the "hand" icon to grab a fistful of the known universe and drag it two inches to the left.

I think there's something to be said for that.

The bad news about Google Sky is that you can't really use it to zoom right up to planets and see them in all their high-res glory, which is kind of what I was unrealistically hoping for: cratered planets, burning suns, and "stars" expanding out to become galaxies and all that. It's not like a road map, either, or even like a political map. Nothing's labeled.

It's actually even a little unintuitive trying to get the names and close-ups of the celestial bodies you might be looking at while you randomly browse the universe. The easiest way to figure out what's what is to use the search function and ask it to point you at something in particular --only then does a label show up.

Even then, though, all you get is an awkwardly (almost comically) pasted-in picture of the celestial body over the larger star-field, which, even though it changes size as you zoom in and out, still kind of disrupts your sense of cosmic perspective.

There's also a lot of holes -- places where they didn't have the data to fill in any picture at all. That's the worst part. They really ruin the aesthetic experience, but I suppose it's better than false advertising-- putting "black sky" in places that might turn out to be full of stars.

Still, it's great to have dragging and zooming features applied to something like the night sky, where the distances are so difficult to wrap your mind around in the abstract. There are also some cool features that let you check out the same sights using different spectra. What it needs most, I think, is an optional label overlay so you can browse without everything looking like anonymous colored dots.

Check out Ars Technica for a full review combined with a list of "must-see" destinations in the universe.

Change your skin?

I had no idea we were anywhere near being able to do this, but here you are.

Artificial skin made of carbon nanotubes that scientists say can eventually be linked up to the human nervous system to give people the experience of heat, cold, and pressure. Not only will prosthetics be able to move better, but they'll also be able to start sensing like a real limb.

(Although I imagine they'll still lack the sense of motion-consciousness that lets us know the positions of our limbs without looking at them...)

Still, most exciting thing ever, right? Unfortunately, there's no time scale given for how long it will take to develop this stuff, so while we wait, let's learn more about nanotubes!

I am Rubber, I am Glue...

So they came out with this nifty new kind of rubber that can knit itself back together after being cut, eventually becoming as good as new! Not only can you put it back together just by kinda pushing and squeezing it like clay, but THEN YOU CAN STRETCH IT AGAIN. Full healing takes about 6 hours, but you can get it to hold together almost immediately, and start stretching it again after about an hour.

According to the Scientific American article, the way it works is by utilizing the same sort of weak hydrogen bonds that exist in water -- after the bonds are broken, they still have a latent attraction to one another and can be recombined.

What remains to be seen is how we'll use this. Proposed applications include "rubber duckies" and "healing tires." Surely we can do better than that? As far as I know, we've never really had a material that combined durability with the ability to squish back into its original state, so there ought to be great new things to do with it.

I have to admit, my first thought was "androids..."

Why We Get the Flu in the Winter

This was something I always wondered. Why do people get sick when it's cold? The usual consensus always had to do with the time people spend cramped up indoors among other people, facilitating the passing of germs.

But that's not really totally satisfying, and it seems that the reason why is because there's more to it than that. According to an article at abc.net the flu virus is covered in a fatty substance that actually hardens in the cold. Instead of killing the virus, the hardened coating actually protects the virus from the elements, allowing it to survive longer outside while it waits for a biological host.

What's most interesting to me about this discovery is that before I read the article, I figured someone out there completely understood the subject--even if I didn't. So what I mean is, I noticed here that sometimes there can be a hole in the scientific explanation of how something works that the average person might not even realize is there.

Here's another example. Scientists recently discovered that bacteria in the atmosphere play a significant role in the creation of ice and snow. Bacteria are sent up into the atmosphere by wind, and they wind up becoming the most active "substrate" for gathering ice crystals and water droplets until they form a unit big enough to fall to the ground in the form of rain. Dust and soot can serve the same purpose, but bacteria form a much larger percentage of the substrate than we thought, and can accomplish it at warmer temperatures.

And just like that, there's a biological component to the water cycle. The finding could be extremely useful, too, as it will add another potential tactic for cloud-seeding during a drought.

Either way, I'm still surprised. I just never knew the water cycle was something we didn't fully understand.

Ships you Can't See

Did you know that radar was invented as a sort of consolation prize after Robert Watson Watt determined it would be impossible to invent a death ray?

Anyway, I was in the middle of reading this article about how stealth technology for warships is improving, when I came across something that made me pause and say "Holy crap."

Here it is:

"Metamaterials are tailored to have specific electromagnetic properties not found in nature. In particular, they can bend light around an object, making it appear to an observer as though the waves have passed through empty space."

Come again? Invisibility? What? Huh?

But hold on. Let's hear some more and get disappointed.

From an interview with David R. Smith, one of the physicists working with metamaterials:

TR: So an object inside the shield is actually invisible?

DRS: More or less, but when we talk about invisibility in these structures, it's not about making things vanish before our eyes--at least, not yet. We can hide them from microwaves, but the shield is plain enough to see.

So...only microwaves. Bummer. And Smith also points out that the way metamaterials work isn't really all that conducive to using them to hide away giant objects like ships and planes. Right now, some more likely uses are better data storage and solar energy technology that can run on indirect sunlight.

Still, it seems the biggest barrier right now is the size of the waves -- they're tiny, and it's hard to build tiny. The microwave demonstration was easiest to make, but a demonstration that applies to visible light could be coming. Someday.

Or just more room for special features on our DVDs. And less global warming, with better solar panels. Which is good too.

(Image: The Visby Corvette, a Swedish warship that uses "dazzle painting" among other techniques to make it harder to see and detect. naval-technology.com)

Facial Expression Recognition. Who Wants This?

I came across another interesting article on Science Daily concerning new software prototype that can read your face and identify your expression as one of six basic emotions. The article lists a couple of possible applications for this kind of software -- none of them anything I would ever want my computer monitor doing without some pretty explicit case-by-case authorization.

The basic idea is that after it decides what look is on your face, it can communicate with some kind of online avatar that will reproduce the basic expression for the benefit of whoever you happen to be corresponding with. So maybe your World of Warcraft avatar is mimicking your expressions in near real-time, or maybe you're doing business online and your computer is spying on your reaction to the offer you just got.

I mean... I guess it's cool. But it's kind of nosy. Facial expressions might give a more complete picture of a person's feelings than their words, but words are chosen, while facial expressions are largely involuntary. If you wanted to video chat, there's already software to do it. Do we need virtual faces?

In terms of web immersion, it seems a little bit too intense -- we're already creating weird enough social phenomena in MMORPGs as it is-- but giving people the tools to put up a false front that synchs up to their faces? How deep do we want to get into this stuff?

And in terms of e-commerce, I'm just not sure what's going to come of that. A new form of market research that tracks people's facial expressions when they look at a new product or ad? I can't see a scenario where that could possibly work out to the buyer's advantage, but I see plenty where it could be abused by the seller. We've already got spyware programs doing their best to track our browsing habits -- expression tracking just seems like one more step in the wrong direction -- unnecessary and invasive.

Now, there really are ways this could be used that would be cool and important, so I'm not saying I wish it didn't exist. I'd really like to see some applications where a program attempted to respond "intelligently" to your expressions by offering you different options depending on your reaction -- still, you'd really need a verbal override, because people just aren't in full and constant command of their faces the way they are with their voices and their fingertips.

Check out a video of someone testing out the program. Notice that it looks sort of fun to manipulate, but consistently misses the authentic half-smile and eyerolling that keep creeping up between unrealistic stage-expressions. I don't think this is going to clarify people's emotions over the net very well, though people might enjoy using it to express them.

Meanwhile, if we're going to be using something like this to show people our expressions and clarify our responses and intentions-- then instead of categorizing expressions and repackaging them as a basic catchall emotion like "fear" or "joy", wouldn't it make more sense to use those sophisticated tracking abilities to just rebuild the same face you made?* Human expressions are too complicated to be sliced up into six types.

*Given the somewhat vague wording of the article, it's possible the program in question does this, but my overwhelming feeling from the description of the way it works is that it focuses on identifying rather than rebuilding the expressions it captures.

I Just Assumed All Children Naturally Want to Go to Space...

Space tourism is close. Very close. I had known for a while that it was going to be possible soon for those who have the money to ride a special jet that kind of skims out past the atmosphere and technically makes it out there. It was exciting, but kind of not exciting, if you know what I mean.

But now we're talking space elevators. Moon hotels. Slowly rotating low-gravity swimming pools where you can pop out of the water like a flying fish (I want to know who came up with that one. It's cute.) This kind of stuff is projected for 2025.

The most interesting part of all of this is the idea of a space hotel. If you were rich, you could stay in one of these for a few nights for about 4 million dollars. But if you're not? Well, we can't exactly leave these high-paying tourists all alone in their moon rooms to fend for themselves.

So are we going to have people living and working full-time in service positions in space? The majority of jobs needed for the daily operations of a hotel aren't the most rewarding or enjoyable in the world, so I've got to wonder. Your job sucks, but you're living on the moon. Is that a plus or a minus? How long does it take to get sick of something like that?

And also, how does the pay situation work out? You can't really spend your money from the moon, unless Amazon is going to start delivering there. I can only assume your basic needs will be provided for by your employer, but what about entertainment? Communication with friends and family back home? Will the moon get cable? How do you live on the moon?

(Spacefuture.com actually predicts 2 month rotations for moon staff-- so it could be that you're just expected to go without this stuff until your shift is up.)

Apparently, though, this is something that students from the University of Delaware are interested in doing. According to Science Daily's article on space tourism, the University of Delaware is a Land, Sea, Urban, and Space Grant university. So their students majoring in tourism and hospitality are being encouraged to pursue job opportunities in space.

Now, that's ambitious.

(Image credit: Shimizu Corporation, Tokyo, Japan)

It's Time to Take Your Medicine.... (Robots part 2)

I saw Honda's ASIMO robot today at the Robotopia Rising exhibit at the Kennedy Center, and I have to say that the presentation was not really all it could have been. ASIMO has a handful of showcase-abilities, all of them made most significant by the fact that ASIMO is life-sized, about as big as a twelve year old human.

So keeping that in mind, the biggest challenge in ASIMO's design has obviously been balance. ASIMO can't just casually throw its weight around. Walking, running, climbing stairs, kicking a ball, and "dancing..." these are all things ASIMO can do... but slowly. And carefully.

So, ASIMO was presented in a 15 minute show that was clearly aimed at kids. Which means they had a lady using her best kindergarten teacher voice to try to get everybody really, really excited about whatever ASIMO was about to do. This is kind of a subtle robot, though. For example, when it runs, it doesn't really look like it's running. It's more of a half-comical sneaking motion.

When you build something up like it's going to be awesome, knowing full well that it isn't all that visually impressive, that makes the event itself kind of a disappointment. It was like that all throughout the show, especially when it came time for ASIMO to dance.

Now, ASIMO can't actually move its lower body very well, so what it did was slowly and randomly move its arms around until the music stopped. It was really kind of sad. And then, as the show moved into the possible practical applications of ASIMO as an aide to the elderly, the show took on the "forced" and "creepy" aspects that are almost inevitable to any discussion of using the clumsy, slow, and awkward robots we have right now with vulnerable people in need of reliable help.

What would have made the ASIMO presentation really engaging, in my opinion, was more talk about the challenges of getting it to do the things it can do, and the ways its developers failed along the way, as a means of explaining how they learned from their failures to make it work. That way, the audience would better appreciate why ASIMO isn't quite ready to shake its booty yet.

So, discussion question. Is there a difference between making a science exhibit accessible and inviting to kids, and targeting it at them? Grownups made ASIMO, shouldn't there be a layer to its presentation intended for them as well? Or is the only purpose of an exhibit like this one to get the young ones excited about technology and learning?

Lucky for me, inventor/artist-troupe Maywa Denki were also performing at the Kennedy Center, providing fun and song with their "Original Instruments" consisting of guitars that play themselves, singing "robots" powered by bellows, a kind of electric castanet-set mounted on a pair of wings, and a number of other percussion instruments based off of a basic "knocker" device that goes "bonk" and "clunk" at different pitches. The group invents and creates their own instruments (among other things), then presents them as "products" as part of their performance art motif, which hearkens back to the small electric stores of a bygone era.

Not only are the instruments innovative and funny, but some of their songs were pretty catchy, too.

Others, just weird. But even still, somehow wonderful.

I Heart Robots

On Saturday I'm hoping to go see some robots with my friend Chris, and so I wanted to get into the robot spirit. Since today is Valentine's day, I thought I would introduce you to 5 robots that I love.



This is QRIO. Right now he and his other QRIO friends are just dancing (it's all preprogrammed--not very robotic at all), but apparently he can do much much more. He can throw things, identify objects and faces, move his little fingers, protect his face from danger, right himself when he's about to fall down, and stack blocks. Intended as a little robot entertainer, the QRIO project was tragically dumped by Sony over a year ago, but rumor has it that Toyota might be picking it back up.





This is ACM-R5, an amphibious snake robot created by the Hirose Fukushima Robotics Labs in Japan. Watching it move is just amazing. The different segments are all semi-autonomous, and have a system of communicating with one another that lets them count how far down they are from the head so that they can be replaced without needing reprogramming.





This is the Toyota Partner Robot, one of the robots at the Robotopia Rising show. It plays the freaking trumpet. Having spent 4 or so years of fruitlessly trying to learn the oboe, I'm blown away by this. I wonder how it would stack up on a chair test?





This is the Cornell Healing Robot, a robot that can teach itself to walk as well as develop new ways of walking to adapt to injuries. I once bought a little cockroach robot for ten dollars that responded to any and all stimuli with "turn 45 degrees to the right," and I remember being frustrated with how stupid my robot was as I watched it wiggle in endless circles next to a simple obstacle.

This robot has no preconceived notion of how its parts are put together, and so it tries out randomly generated models of what it might look like until it gets the results it expects. According to Chronicle Online, the robot never really settles on one model for forever and always. Instead it allows all the models it tried recently to continuously compete for the role of which one best describes the robot's past experiences. Sound suspiciously like the way we think?





This is Domo. Designed to help the elderly with chores, Domo is another adapting robot. It uses a couple of different strategies to figure out the size and shape of objects so it can put them on shelves, and it also responds to human commands. Probably the best thing about Domo is the pseudo-sentient naive eye contact it makes with its human master before carrying out a task.

I've seen a video of Domo trying to make a drink, too, but considering the robot identifies the bottle by shaking it upside down, never unscrews the cap, and doesn't actually make a drink, I'm not really sure if that's a one of its more reliable features. Domo isn't really intended to ever hit the market, but the research that went into creating it should contribute to making better helper robots for our glorious, creepy robot-assisted future.

One Step Closer to Manufacturing Microbes

I remember reading a little clip in The Daily Press about five years ago that claimed scientists were closing in on the ability to create synthetic life, and thinking, "Oh, crap."

It looks like Craig Venter is almost there, after synthesizing the complete genome of a bacteria that usually lives in humans, Mycoplasma genitalium. According to New Scientist's Short Sharp Science Blog, Venter plans to implant the genome into a natural Mycoplasma cell and see if it functions. If it does, the synthetic genomes can be reprogrammed to carry out specific, useful functions, and we'll have custom microbes to do things like digest waste and clean up the air.

Now, since this process requires using the machinery of a normal living cell and refitting it with a new code to use in reproducing itself, it's not necessarily artificial life in the form you might imagine. Instead, it actually sounds a lot like the way a virus hijacks a healthy cell and repurposes it for the sake of churning out more viruses. Only in this case, it's making more copies of the hybrid cell.

Back when I originally read about the viability of this sort of project (and said, "Oh, crap,") it was because the news made me a bit anxious about the integrity of the whole "life" idea. A genome doesn't really have any sort of will or awareness of its surroundings as far as we know, but in theory, a complete organism does. So, what's the difference between a living thing and a collection of nonliving, self-replicating parts?

Well, I don't know, so I'm not going to try to tackle it here. But if you're like me and went into a panic spiral, wondering:

Is that it? Did he figure out the secret behind everything? Will we be building artificial people next?

You can still rest easy (unless you were all excited about artificial people; then I'm sorry to disappoint.) Recent discoveries suggest that the genes expressed in DNA alone aren't enough to explain complex organisms like us. In fact, a lot of the regulatory work in complex organisms is actually being done by RNA.

To control which genes are switched on at a given time, and how those genes are expressed, various kinds of RNA are constantly on the move. Before finding this out, most scientists assumed RNA was not particularly important to the workings of a cell.

It will probably be a while before scientists attempt to tackle the challenge of creating RNA in all its different forms. Until then, we can look forward to the potential benefits of having microorganisms designed to help us deal with our problems.

Cell Phones Aren't Killing Us After All

I'm generally the type to throw caution to the wind when it comes to the supposed quiet killers of modern life, (I drink diet coke, if that's any indication) but I can sometimes kind of appreciate the vague dread of new technology for aesthetic reasons. It's not that I particularly want my phone to incite my brain cells into rebellion, but I'm a fan of Don Delillo. I like to look at microwaves and power lines sometimes and wonder if they're having some effect on the world we can't see.

Well, there's good news, if kind of a letdown to technophobes and conspiracy theorists. Evidence is mounting that the radiation from cell phones just isn't dangerous to humans. Not even over the long term. The latest study covers up to ten years of use, and examines the effects of different kinds of phones on different areas of the brain.

If you can believe it, our phones aren't killing off the bees, either.

In part, the kind of paranoia that bee-killing theories and cancer fears speak to is practical. It's not smart to stand back and let the world fill up with dangerous technologies, especially we get to the point where we use them every day and can't get rid of them. Staying on top of what's dangerous and what's not is a part of living responsibly.

A little bit of paranoia can take our mind off our problems, too. Who really cares about what went wrong at work today if our cell phones are giving us cancer, processed food is starving us, and we're about to run out of bees?

Still, it can be easy to get the wrong idea about the latest hidden menace, even if most people just sweep the stories aside and get on with their lives. A scrap of shocking news can hit the net and spread like wildfire, but clarifications and corrections sometimes get lost.

Now, while I want to scare you and make you think, I don't want to mislead you.

For the purposes of this blog, unreliable stories that I find worth mentioning as food for thought will be clearly identified as such, and corrections and updates will also figure prominently if they're needed.

Because while it's fun to think about our cell phone towers killing off massive amounts of bees, at the end of the day it's important to understand it was actually the bee rapture.