After much hard work, I have a night to post...

Hi there. I just finished a ton of reports this last weekend, so I am able to post this evening. Sorry about last post. I just didn't have the time to comment on them properly. I will try better in this one. I am really falling behind on posting...Sigh!

• Artificial Playmates for Autistic Children - One of the first articles I found this evening combines autism and virtual people. Heh, it's like an article tailored with my specific interests in mind. I can't wait for my own virtual people to interact with. So much more predictable that the random, so called 'real' people are. I can see why autists would open up more readilly to them.
• Scientist postulates 4 aspects of 'humaniqueness' differentiating human and animal cognition - Iamba! This is an interesting article regarding our project to write about uplifting animals. It's not a heavy read and very informative.
• Michigan laser beam believed to set record for intensity - "The world's most intense laser beam uses 300 terawatts of power concentrated in a 30 femtosecond pulse to a 1.3-micron area, or 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. " That is a lot of watts.
• Scientists Develop Tool to Probe Role of Oxidative Stress in Aging, Disease - "University of Michigan researchers have a new technique to observe how oxidative stress affects proteins, allowing them to quantify the oxidation state of thousands of different proteins in a single experiment." Michigan is on fire! Go UM!
• Brain blanket boosts mind control - "With a sheet of electrodes placed over the brain, people can quickly learn to move a cursor around a computer screen using their thoughts." A step in the direction of direct brain-computer interface. I cannot wait to get rid of the keyboard and mouse...How quaint, indeed.
• The Chinese Government's Plans for Nanotechnology - "BOSTON, MA - China aims to leapfrog the United States in technological development with substantial investment in nanotechnology, but whether those efforts will actually pay off is still unclear. That was the message from University of California at Santa Barbara researchers presenting their findings on the state of Chinese nanotechnology here at the AAAS annual meeting. " China, India and Russia are going to be MAJOR economic players in the next 25 years, just based on thier populations alone. They also plan for the long term rather than our 4 year election cycle ADD the US suffers. That will allow them to build a strong and robust space system and possibly blow us out of the water science wise. We better watch out.
• Scientists move towards stem cell therapy trials to mend shattered bones - "Scientists are developing a revolutionary way to mend damaged bones and cartilage using a patient's own stem cells."
• Solar cell speeds hydrogen production - I hope this leads to ubiquitous hydrogen production for use in cars and home generators. This will decentralize energy production which will reduce the impact of distaster and our dependance on foriegn oil.
• Researchers discover new way to reverse poor circulation and heal wounds - "Researchers have solved a longstanding mystery about how flexing muscles “tell” nearby blood vessels that they need more blood to perform, according to a study published Feb. 15 in the journal Circulation Research. The study mechanism suggests new ways to treat conditions that involve poor circulation like peripheral artery disease, which comes with aging, affects 10 million Americans and leads to amputation in the worst cases. Furthermore, the same signals that influence circulation in some tissues drive cell growth elsewhere. That could lead to an ointment that would speed healing when spread across chronic wounds."
• The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 - Technology Review presents its annual list of the 10 most exciting technologies.
• Smart rubber promises self-mending products - Self-healing rubber that binds back together after being snapped or punctured could pave the way for self-healing shoes, fan belts, washing-up gloves and more.
• Replacing bulk with nanotechnology, researchers find new way to keep fiber-optic signal sharp - Cornell researchers have demonstrated that a single photonic microchip--using four-wave mixing to amplify an optical signal by "pumping" with another beam of light--can replace the bulky bundles of fiber or electronic amplifiers now needed to clean up and sharpen fiber optic signals distorted by distance.
• Genetic pathway critical to disease, aging found - University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have discovered a gene expression pathway and specific enzymes that exert a sweeping influence over the process of oxidative stress, the process that contributes to many diseases and conditions ranging from Alzheimer's, heart disease and stroke to cancer and the process of aging. The finding is important because it represents a master pressure point for a host of medical conditions. One key enzyme in the new pathway--Star-PAP-- is a master switch that controls key aspects of oxidative stress in cells.
• Largest yet survey of human genetic diversity - Two researcher teams performed the most thorough genetic analysis yet on samples from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), confirming that populations lost genetic variation as they migrated farther from Africa and discovering that copy number variants (rearrangements within longer stretches of DNA) differ between human populations similarly to SNPs. Previous studies had either looked at fewer "markers"--sites of genetic variation--or fewer population groups. The HGDP covers more than 50 geographic groups from all over the globe.
• Scientists Measure What It Takes to Push a Single Atom - IBM scientists have measured the force needed to nudge one atom: one-130-millionth of an ounce of force pushes a cobalt atom across a smooth, flat piece of platinum, and one-1,600-millionth of an ounce of force pushes it across copper. To measure the force, an atomic force microscope tip was attached to a small tuning fork. Changes in the frequency of the tuning fork's vibrations as it pushed the cobalt atom let the scientists calculate the force applied.
• Google to Store Patients' Health Records - Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records, so they can be retrieved through Google's new service (not yet available to the public). I hope that this will become the standard for an EHR system (or something like this). We are desperately in need of such a system. It would increase the availability of health history which would decrease costs, reduce error, and increase the quality of care for the patients.
• PC beats doctor in scan tests - A computer does better than a doctor at diagnosing Alzheimer's from brain scans: trained computers had a 96% diagnosis success rate analyzing a clinical MRI scan, compared to an 85% success rate for doctors using standard scans, blood tests and interviews.
• No Directions Required--Software Smartens Mobile Robots - DARPA initiative to develop self-navigating robots introduces a world of potential for the development of autonomous vehicles, but will the government take advantage of its research or let it wither on the vine?
• 'Exaflop' Supercomputer Planning Begins - Researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories have launched the Institute for Advanced Architectures to do basic research on issues such as power consumption and reliability for an exaflop (10^18 floating point operations per second) system that could have a million hundred-core processors. The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Security Agency expect to need exaflop computing by 2018 for large-scale prediction, materials science analysis, fusion research, and national security problems.
• Electron Stroboscope - Lund University scientists have recorded snapshots of electron motion, using 300-attoseconds-long light pulses to create images of the quantum state of electrons. An attosecond is one quintillionth (10^-18) of a second long.
• Going by the book - A group of Chinese scientists has discovered the main biochemical pathways in drug addiction—and without having to do a single experiment. This should lead us to curing addiction within 20 years.
• Solar Power to Rule in 20 Years, Futurists Say - Speaking on behalf of a panel of experts convened by the National Association of Engineers to address the 14 "grand challenges of the 21st century," Ray Kurzweil said solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years. Members of the panel are "confident that we are not that far away from a tipping point where energy from solar will be [economically] competitive with fossil fuels," Kurzweil said, adding that it could happen within five years.
• Kurzweil: 'Exponential' change ahead for games, people - Look for the price-to-performance ratio of computers to improve a billionfold in the next 25 years, Ray Kurzweil said in a keynote speech, "The Next 20 Years of Gaming," at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Thursday, CNET reported. Kurzweil said game programmers should be developing ahead of the curve, considering the constantly changing face of game technology. "We may even have the ability to accurately represent the human brain or produce convincing human language -- dialog -- on the fly," Kurzweil said. "The implications and potential for the advancement of games from such technological leaps are exciting to ponder," Wired reported. Kurzweil's forecasts have "obvious and exciting implications for gaming," according to Game Helper. By 2010, we'll have electronics so tiny they are "embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses"; images and video will be "written directly to our retinas" and "we will all enjoy a "ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times." By 2029, "We will have developed a human-level non-biological intelligence; "$1,000 worth of computation = 1000 times the human brain"; and while biological intelligence is in essence "fixed," non-biological intelligence will continue increasing exponentially, and will combine "the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence with the speed, memory, and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence."
• Stock exchange for 'grid' computing? - You might soon be selling your spare computer power over the internet, or perhaps buying in extra resources to solve a tricky problem. In either case, network administration used to be a stumbling block – until European researchers developed a successful free-market approach to grid computing.
• Physicists Demonstrate Qubit-Qutrit Entanglement - For the first time, physicists have entangled a qubit with a “qutrit” – the 3D version of the 2D qubit. Qubit-qutrit entanglement could lead to advantages in quantum computing, such as increased security and more efficient quantum gates, as well as enable novel tests of quantum mechanics.
• Seeds of Future Agriculture Enter Doomsday Deep Freeze - The first batch of 100 million of the most important agricultural seeds were placed into the "doomsday repository" Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The vault is a backup of last resort, stocked with copies of different crops from national seed storage facilities. In cold isolation the seeds can keep for hundreds and thousands of years--sorghum alone can last for 20,000 years--effectively allowing agriculture to be restarted in the event of a global calamity, such as nuclear war or catastrophic climate change. See Also Doomsday vault to avert world famine.
• Penn researchers engineer first system of human nerve-cell tissue - University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers engineered living human nerve cells into three-dimensional neural networks with the potential to survive transplantation. Four neurons that survived months in culture. In previous work with rat neurons, the researchers demonstrated a new way to engineer nerve structures, or constructs, in culture. The new study uses the same method with human neurons, which survived at least three months in culture while maintaining the ability to signal. See Also Engineering nerve jumper cables for spinal cord repair.