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POPSApple after Steve # MacBooks and iPods and iPhones aren’t going anywhere. Certainly Steve left his imprint on many things throughout the company, but his departure doesn’t mean that their current line of wildly successful products is going to simply disappear. # The Apple design aesthetic isn’t doled out in person by Steve, and Steve isn’t the only creative visionary at Cupertino. There are lots of bright, passionate, creative people at Apple. Sexy computers will still be made. A strong focus on quality user interfaces will still prevail. Competition doesn’t get a leg up as a result of this. Apple is still strongly in the #2 spot when it comes to computers, behind Microsoft but ahead of Linux. Apple will still maintain an enormous lead in the PMP market with iPods. And the iPhone is still a strong member of the smartphone triumvirate, along with Android and the soon-to-be-released Palm Pre. Apple can now focus on the cult of Apple, and not the cult of Steve.
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POPSYawning Is Caused by the Brain Overheating One of the main reasons why the team selected the parakeets for the study was the fact that these birds almost never engaged in group yawning, so they were deemed reliable test subjects. During the tests, they were subjected to three temperatures – one that increased constantly, one that was high, to begin with, and one for control. Examinations proved that the brain sought to cool itself by triggering the yawning reflex when the outside temperature was lower than that inside the body. “For instance, yawning should not occur when ambient temperatures exceed body temperature, as taking a deep inhalation of warm air would be counterproductive,” Gallup adds. “In addition, yawning when it is extremely cold may be maladaptive, as this may send unusually cold air to the brain, which may produce a thermal shock.”
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POPSBuilding a machine that can learn from experience There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a 100-watt light bulb. It's a major challenge. But it's what our brains do every day. "Value systems or reward systems are important aspects," he said. "Learning is crucial because it needs to learn from experience just like we do." It won't be an easy task, says Tononi, a veteran of earlier efforts to create cognitive computers. Even the brains of the smallest mammals are quite impressive when you consider what tasks they perform with a relatively small volume and energy input. "I would be happy to create a mouse brain," Tononi says. "A mouse brain is quite remarkable. And from there, it shouldn't be too hard to scale up to a rat brain, and then a cat or monkey brain."
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POPSComputing with RNA
That opens up the possibility of computing devices that can respond to specific conditions within the cell, he says. For example, it may be possible to develop drug delivery systems that target cancer cells from within by sensing genes used to regulate cell growth and death. "You can program it to release the drug when the conditions are just right, at the right time and in the right place," these biocomputers are built from three main components--sensors, actuators, and transmitters--all of which are made up of RNA. The input sensors are made from aptamers, RNA molecules that behave a bit like antibodies, binding tightly to specific targets. Similarly, the output components, or actuators, are made of ribozymes, complex RNA molecules that have catalytic properties similar to those of enzymes. These two components are joined by yet another RNA molecule that serves as a transmitter, which is activated when a sensor molecule recognizes input chemical and triggers an actuator molecule
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POPSCitroen GTbyCitroen goes from game to reality Sadly, very little is known about the GTbyCitroen in terms of performance, expected cost, or whether it'll reach mass production, but here's hoping. Citroen would earn itself a virtually unlimited amount of kudos if it went ahead and made it for real for real. We might even forgive it for the Citroen Ami.
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POPSScientists Develop New Computational Method To Investigate Origin Of Life "Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage," said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web. Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences.
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POPSHow to Hitchhike Across the Globe Without Leaving Your Living Room The 360° World Atlas DVD lets anyone with a computer become a virtual hitchhiker, no packing or neck-craning required. Creator Everen Brown does all the hard work for you. He jets around the globe, lugging a 40-pound bag full of 600 rolls of film past airport security, and picks a picture-worthy spot. Then he takes one of the world’s last Globuscope rotational cameras (no longer in production), holds it over his head (sometimes he lies on his stomach), and waits (sometimes for hours) for the right shot. When he sees it, snapping the picture takes only a second. The lens rotates full circle, so you get to see what’s across from the Taj Mahal’s minarets too. Once Brown develops the film, he embeds the images into an interactive atlas ($69.95, www.360atlas.com) that shows off head-turning views, panorama style.
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POPSComputer model of bees probes the hive mind Thenius believes the foragers may be picking up clues about the quality of sources from their interactions with receivers. If some foragers have found a bountiful new source, the receivers have more work to do, so average unloading times across all foragers increase. This delay might suggest the existence of a better nectar source than the one a given forager has been visiting. Similarly, receivers are sometimes already half-full from another bee's nectar when a new forager arrives, so a forager needs to unload to more than one receiver. If this occurs more frequently, it may also suggest that a richer nectar source has been found. To test this hypothesis, Thenius's team built a computer simulation of a hive containing 5000 independent virtual bees. Each forager started out visiting one of two different flower patches, but would switch destinations if it had to wait too long to be unloaded or was being serviced by too many receivers.
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POPSScientists to study synthetic telepathy The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target. “Such a system would require extensive training for anyone using it to send and receive messages,” D’Zmura says. “Initially, communication would be based on a limited set of words or phrases that are recognized by the system; it would involve more complex language and speech as the technology is developed further.”
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POPSFuture 'Top 10' Hot Careers in 2012 5) Simulation Engineering By 2012, an increase in processing power and rich data will make simulations more realistic, and user-friendly. Simulation engineers will be working on bringing us closer to “Star Trek’s” Holodecks—the ultimate total immersion simulation. Simulations will be in every industry and every engineering field, 6) Boomer Caregiving 7) Genetic Counseling 8) Brain Analysts 9) Space Tourism 10) Roboticists
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POPSPhoto Tampering Throughout History see rest of photos in original page, linked to my previous post: Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/D516F80D-C71B-4B53-BB9C-77EA80B8C919/
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POPSParalysed man takes a walk in virtual world It is the first time a paralysis patient has succeeded in meeting a person and having a conversation in an Internet virtual world, they added. Researchers are now studying a system that would let patients create text messages by mentally selecting certain letters, said Junichi Ushiba, associate professor at the biosciences and informatics department of Keio Universty's Faculty of Science and Technology. "In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves... and click to make a purchase," Ushiba said.
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POPSIn the Works: MEMS Brain-Computer Interface As the electrodes are driven into the tissue, the software starts taking sample recordings to detect spikes of electrical activity at the electrode tip. When the software detects spikes, it moves forward in small increments and tracks how the signals change. After determining whether the signal has improved or gotten worse, it the algorithm moves the electrode to a new position and does more recording and comparing, driving the electrode in further if necessary until it finds the best signal. If the signal wanes, the algorithm will automatically adjust the electrode position to improve the signal.
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POPSNew Software Could Let Computers 'See' Like Humans Do Automatic identification would also provide a way to index pictures people download from digital cameras onto their computers, without having to go through and caption each one by hand. And ultimately it could lead to true machine vision, which could someday allow robots to make sense of the data coming from their cameras and figure out where they are. "The amount of information you need to identify most images is about 32 by 32." By contrast, even the small "thumbnail" images shown in a Google search are typically 100 by 100.
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