22
POPSNeurobiologists Discover Individuals Who 'Hear' Movement "We might find that motion processing centers of the visual cortex are more interconnected with auditory brain regions than previously thought, even in the 'normal' brain," Saenz says. "At this point, very little is known about how the auditory and visual processing systems of the brain work together. Understanding this interaction is important because in normal experience, our senses work together all the time."
9
POPSDARPA's Amazing Robot Pack Mule Keeps its Balance On Ice Impressive! ...yet, while "human may not be quite ready to accept such lifelike behavior coming from a machine" - I wonder on the "human like behavior" that needs DARPA and military justification to support such technology. maybe this is the tantalizing reflection of this project...
13
POPSGoodbye To Faulty Software? The program that performs the computation is equivalent to the proof of the theorem. By proving the theorem the program is guaranteed to be correct. It is not that simple, of course, but so promising is type theory that since 1989 the EU has been funding a string of projects to develop it under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. That style of working is going to change so that we spend more effort on actually writing programs than testing them.
15
POPSEnzymes made to order Making enzymes is a tricky business. Even the names of the techniques sound mind-boggling, with the process involving a mix of 'quantum mechanical computation', 'advanced protein engineering' and 'directed evolution'. while naturally occurring enzymes speed reaction rates by many billion (or even trillion) fold, the synthetic enzymes gave more conservative boosts – around 100,000 fold. "The acceleration is really rather modest by comparison to Nature," admits Houk – but it's still incredibly exciting
8
POPSThe 100$ Genome Five years away, thats impressive. It means individualy tailored medicine within 10-15 years.
0
POPSThe Blue Brain project A project in which using the huge computational capacity IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer a detailed model of the human brain is created.
7
POPSWhat is Thought? (book review) "One thing that most impressed me about the book is the underlying theme that he refers to as his version of Occam's razor and summarizes as follows: mind is a complex but still compact program that captures and exploits the underlying compact structure of the world.To understand something about the world is to capture its features in a compact subroutine that allows one to effectively interact with it.
5
POPSArtificial General Intelligence: Barking up the wrong tree? The question is: could Kurzweil and Goertzel's Aritifical General Intelligence genuinely surpass the human brain? Or is ti simply mimicing it? Their solution still relies on computation, but there is no evidence that the human brain makes any such calculations to arrive at its conclusions. If so, what needs to be done in order to develop a computer system that works the same way as the human brain? And what about the mother of all conundrums: free will. Goertzel pretends it doesn't exist at all, but how could we motivate even a self-aware computer to do things on its own initiative?
0
POPSSwitching on the digital world The period of work by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working under William Shockley, would become known as the "miracle month" and resulted in the world's first working transistor. The tiny devices have two key properties which make them attractive to electronics engineers: they can amplify a signal and they can act like a switch. This ability to boost a signal makes them attractive to the communications and broadcast industry whilst their capability to turn on and off quickly has made them the component of choice for computation.
6
POPSRucker's Postsingular is a free, CC download! Rudy Rucker has posted his kick-ass, weird-ass post-cyberpunk novel Postsingular to the net as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download. I reviewed Postsingular when it came out earlier this month: everyone should read RR
1
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update