Tomorrow is Today

Transhumanists Gather at Lincoln Center to Create “A New Species Free of the Limits of Biology”

Wanting to become a machine is a lot more common than the shrinks think. The New York conference, held in the 1,089-seat Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, drew an energetic crowd including more than 230 journalists, as well as an Eastern Orthodox archbishop, a Tibetan lama, engineers from Google, along with several scientists influential in setting United States science funding priorities.

The event’s convener and patron, Dmitry Itskov, is a wealthy Russian Internet entrepreneur who a couple of years back had a “spiritual change” that made him stop collecting $20,000 watches and instead launch a what he calls a global initiative to create “a new species free from the limits of biology.”

The apex of the event was to be the unveiling of a realistic animatronic bust of Istkov, created by roboticist David Hanson, and an early prototype of what Itskov hopes within 20 years will be “artificial carriers” into which human minds can be placed. “It’s a human right. People need to have the right to live, and not to die,” said Itskov, who has plans to raise several hundred million dollars to speed humanity’s metamorphosis into machine-form.

(via Dmitry Itskov Wants Androids from the Singularity Right Now | MIT Technology Review)

Law Enforcement To Use DNA Fog To Mark Suspects at Scene of the Crime

The devices allow banks and police officers to spray or splat suspects with millions of copies of a colorless DNA tag at the scene of the crime.

For example, Applied DNA Sciences of Stony Brook, New York, advertises a system that is able to spray a room with DNA-laden fog in case someone comes in, demanding money. Later, investigators may identify the criminal from those DNA bits…

The DNA tags are made with entirely artificial sequences, so that every tagging device may have a different sequence. The genetic material is difficult to wash off completely and lasts about two weeks…

(via New DNA Fog Covers Crime-Scene Suspects With Evidence | Popular Science)

China to Launch Quantum Communications Satellite by 2016

Last Monday, Jian-Wei Pan and a team from the University of Science and Technology of China, in Shanghai, revealed the results of an experiment in which they successfully sent single photons on a round trip to an orbiting satellite, then detected those same photons back on Earth.

The scheme proves that a satellite can beam single photons back to our planet even while it’s in orbit, a necessity for quantum communications.

Basically, Jian-Wei and his cohorts pointed a couple of telescopes at a targeted satellite, which was covered with reflectors that could bounce a laser beam back to wherever it came from on Earth. One telescope was set up to shoot pulses of light at the satellite, while the other looked for evidence of the reflection.

Each beam of light started off with 1 billion photons, and the pulse was repeated millions of times a second. On average, for every pulse of light, just one photon made the return trip back home. They reported detecting these homeward-bound photons at a rate of about 600 per second.

“These results are sufficient to set up an unconditionally secure QKD link between satellite and earth, technically,” the team wrote in their paper.

(via China Unveils Secret Quantum Communications Experiment - IEEE Spectrum)

European “Neutrino Factory” to Explore why Matter Exists By Shooting Particles Through the Earth

It’s the most fundamental question possible: Why is there something, instead of nothing?

When the universe was created, theory says that matter and antimatter should have been created in equal measure, and we know that when these two types of particles meet they react by annihilating one another. By all accounts, the universe should never have been able to get started, should have wiped itself out immediately. So, what happened? Was there less antimatter created than we predicted, or did we somehow avoid the annihilation process? Why does the universe contain matter at all?

One way of investigating these questions is to study neutrinos, and for several years the “EUROnu” project has been trying to decide the best way of doing so. This month, the commission presented its findings at CERN: they want to build the Neutrino Factory.

This refreshingly acronym-free device creates beams of neutrinos by smashing protons into a solid target, creating muons which reliably decay into neutrinos. The beam would be fired roughly downwards, traveling 2,000 kilometers or more to the receiving end.

The emitter will probably be at CERN, in Switzerland, though the receiver has been proposed to go anywhere from Japan to Italy to the UK. Regardless, upon arrival the beam of neutrinos will be analyzed for its content: what proportions of the three types of neutrinos are found, and how they compare to the proportions in the beam when it left the emitter.

Such investigations into the interconversion of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos could shed light on the nature of antimatter (among other things).

(via Proposed Neutrino Factory to answer one of the most fundamental questions of science | ExtremeTech)

100 Years Later, China to Build Nicaraguan Alternative to Panama Canal

This new project is going to dwarf the Panama Canal in every way. HKND Group will be permitted to choose any route it likes, but even utilizing the large Lake Nicaragua on the Pacific side will mean cutting through about 178 miles of earth to reach the Caribbean. It will also be 22 meters deep at its shallowest points.

The Panama Canal was completed long before supertankers existed, and that continues to cause headaches for shipping. Many of today’s largest vessels are unable to fit in the canal, leaving them with little choice but to take the Cape Horn route around the tip of South America. The Great Nicaraguan Canal would be wide and deep enough to accommodate such ships.

Advanced global positioning technology and super-precise surveying will make the design of this canal much easier than it would have been over a century ago. The building process will also be completely mechanized, whereas the Panama Canal relied on huge numbers of laborers who could contract diseases or become injured. Satellite imagery could also play a crucial role in planning and monitoring the construction process. The world will be able to watch from space as the canal is carved out over the course of 10 years.

If a route is decided on soon, construction on the Great Nicaraguan Canal could begin as early as 2015. If it completes the canal as agreed, HKND Group will be granted a 100-year concession to operate the canal.

(via Chinese company plans to build Nicaraguan canal to compete with Panama | ExtremeTech)

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg Commits $40B to Prep City for Climate Change

In what may some day be termed a landmark speech in modern urban history, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City proposed this afternoon an aggressive, long-term plan to protect the city against the ravages of climate change and forestall a future Hurricane Sandy.

The elaborate climate fortification program, spelled out in a 400-page report, has elements ranging from public assistance to protect buildings and harden critical infrastructure to far-out concepts for construction of both permanent and temporary seawalls to protect both waterfront and the creeks and canals that can be “back door” gateways to flood waters.

The total cost of the program comes to about US $19.5 billion, which is roughly equivalent—perhaps not coincidentally—to the estimated cost of Sandy. Much of what the mayor talked about calls for further study, which he is initiating, and much of it will never happen. Some sea barriers would require the kind of water control engineering the Dutch have pioneered on a grand scale.

But perhaps the feasibility of particulars matters less than the forceful commitment the mayor made to comprehensive protection of the city’s waterfronts, a promise his successors may find difficult to back way from or ignore.

(via A $19 Billion Plan to Fortify New York City Against Climate Change - IEEE Spectrum)

AI and The Law: Building and Deploying Algorithms that Make Legal Decisions

…Last year, Tom Gordon of the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich partnered with German company Init to start developing an AI application called Elterngeld – German for “parent’s money”. It is designed to make automatic decisions on child benefit claims to the country’s Federal Employment Agency (FEA), probably with some human auditing of its decisions behind the scenes, Gordon says.

Elterngeld …takes human claims like “I require government assistance to support my 5-year-old child” and determines whether the statements put forward to support the claim are justified based on the tenets of the law. Each statement is broken down and coded in a machine-readable format which the system then compares with elements of the law, using this to score the claim.

…The developers are now in talks with the FEA about how to deploy the system, although it is not yet ready to replace humans. That’s partly because it still needs the text of each law to be broken down into a structured, machine-readable format – a painstaking process that at present must be done by hand.

Gordon hopes that one day, new laws will be drafted with machines in mind from the start, so that each is built as a structured database containing all of the law’s concepts, and information on how the concepts relate to one another. This would allow artificially intelligent software to implement legislation on a wide scale.

(via neuromorphogenesis)

Flexible Graphene Circuits Can Be Printed With an Inkjet Printer, Thanks to New Technique

The [most efficient] option for mass production [of graphene] is solution-phase exfoliation — flaking off graphene from graphite using a liquid solvent — but previous attempts have only produced very low quality flakes that don’t possess many of graphene’s “wonder material” properties.

Now Northwestern has devised a new method, using ethanol and ethyl cellulose, that can be used to mass produce flakes of fairly high quality graphene.  These flakes are mixed into an ink, which is printed using a conventional inkjet printer.

The resulting circuits, are highly flexible — and even under stress, their conductivity… remains virtually unchanged.

In theory, these inkjet-printed graphene circuits could form the basis of flexible, foldable devices. Imagine a display that is made up of individual panels, which can be unfolded to make a giant display — much like a folded tourist map.

The other obvious application is wearable computing, where various components might be stored in fairly static locations (against your chest, your inside leg), but the connections between the components would be fashioned from flexible graphene.

(via High-quality inkjet-printed graphene circuits: One step closer to foldable computers | ExtremeTech)

Cold Fusion Device May Have Been Created

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline.

Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

The device being tested, called by Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat for short), was created by Andrea Rossi. Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had finally cracked cold fusion, but much to the chagrin of the scientific community he hasn’t allowed anyone to independently analyze the device — until now.

While it sounds like the scientists had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, we should stress that they still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. Still, the seven scientists, all from good European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings to publish the research paper.

(via Cold fusion reactor independently verified, has 10,000 times the energy density of gas | ExtremeTech)

New York City Attempts to Regulate 3D-Printed Firearms

On Wednesday, the New York city council introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to use a 3D printer “to create any firearm, rifle, shotgun, or any piece or part thereof,” without being a licensed gunsmith. And even the creator would be required to notify the New York Police Department and register the gun within 72 hours of completion.

The new municipal bill is the latest move to put pressure on Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed group—which in recent months has advanced 3D printed guns more than any other organization worldwide.

In early May 2013, Wilson received a letter from the Department of State saying that distributing CAD files to make firearms was effectively illegal under International Traffic in Arms Regulations. The feds ordered him to remove the files, which he did. But The Pirate Bay and countless others have already made the files available via other online venues.

“I’m waiting for the shoe to drop—there’s probably going to be an indictment of some kind,” Wilson told Ars by phone on Thursday. “They’re going to come back.”

(via New NYC bill would require 3D printed guns to be registered with police | Ars Technica)