Category Archives: Blog

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Longevity personality traits

personalityTo those of us with an interest in living long enough to live forever any indicator of exceptional longevity is of interest. Here researchers have identified particular personality traits associated with longevity:

Because personality traits have been shown to have substantial heritable components, the researchers hypothesized that certain personality features may be important to the healthy aging observed in the offspring of centenarians.
…

Both the male and female offspring of centenarians scored in the low range of published norms for neuroticism and in the high range for extraversion. The women also scored comparatively high in agreeableness. Otherwise, both sexes scored within normal range for conscientiousness and openness, and the men scored within normal range for agreeableness.

Obviously you can’t do much to change your personality, but the conclusions are interesting.

[from Physorg][image from kol on flickr]

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What would you ask Kim Stanley Robinson?

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Kim Stanley Robinson portraitWell, what? If you could put any question to Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the legendary Mars Trilogy as well as the more recent Science in the Capitol series, what would it be? [Image from Wikipedia]

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. The nice people at Harper Collins are soon to be launching their new VoyagerBooks.co.uk website and getting to grips with the intermawebz, and as part of the preliminaries they’re throwing six of their biggest genre fiction authors on the mercies of six different genre fiction blogs, including Big Dumb Object, SFF Chronicles, SFF World, Speculative Horizons and Book Geeks. The good Mr Robinson has been chosen to appear here at Futurismic, and you lot get to pick the questions.

I dare say it’s a pretty good match; Robinson’s interests – science, politics, climate change and space – are very much in line with the stuff we talk about here from day to day, and I’m sure he’ll be amenable to questions about his writing in more general terms (provided you don’t ask him where he gets his ideas from).

So, here’s the way we’re gonna do it: if you’ve got a question you’d like to put to Kim Stanley Robinson, leave a comment below.

Simple enough? There are some basic rules, though – honest and non-snarky questions only (I’ll just ignore or delete anything silly or rude, I’m afraid, but controversial science and politics are fine), keep them to a reasonable scale (something that can be answered in a few paragraphs or so), and the deadline will be 1800 hours GMT this Wednesday, 8th April 2009. If there are too many, I’ll pick out the best.

Yep, that’s the lot. So, thinking caps on, folks; I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting questions. 🙂

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Magazines2.0 – does print-on-demand spell doom for the news-stand?

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magazines at the news-standIt’s no secret that a big part of the problem for science fiction magazines – and many other sorts of periodical publication – are the cost and logistical issues attached to printing and distributing the final product. You can buy the best fiction on the planet, hire the best columnists and artists… but if you can’t get that final product into the customer’s hands (or at least in front of their eyeballs), you’re going to struggle to sell copies. [image by Diane S Murphy]

Enter Hewlett Packard, who describe their new MagCloud service as “YouTube for magazines”. MagCloud has similarities to LuLu.com as well; basically, you upload your finished magazine as a PDF file, which MagCloud then lists in its catalogue for no charge. When a customer wants a copy, they log in, pay the cost… and get a printed version made especially for them.

Arch-fan (and Clarkesworld non-fiction editor) Cheryl Morgan can see a route ahead:

Where I do think that there is a potential business case is with small press magazines. The sales pitch would go something like this: yes, you can read it for free on the web; yes, you can download a PDF and print it yourself, but if you really want something glossy and physical then order it from MagCloud.

I’ll go one step further – there are server-side software engines that can be used to stitch together PDFs from HTML files, so you could allow your reader to custom-build a magazine to their own specifications from your stock of stories and articles, and then buy a unique printed version. If nothing else, it would mean you could avoid paying for a magazine which contained a story by an author whose work you just don’t enjoy.

Of course, as TechDirt points out MagCloud’s potential success is predicated on the assumption that interest in magazines among people tech-savvy enough to be aware of the service will continue for long enough for the business to grow (and, more importantly, for the currently prohibitive unit costs to fall)… and while I’m convinced that dead-tree books will last for a good few decades yet, I’m not so sure that the magazine format will have the same longevity.

What do you think? Would you be interested in a print version of sites like Futurismic – a story or two a month, a couple of essays and a sprinkling of blog posts selected from your favourite tags and search terms – or is the webzine at its best in its native non-physical environment?

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Mind control – non-invasive mind-machine interface

OK, so it’s crude, but it’s a start – boffins at the Honda Research Institute have built a helmet packed with electronics that enables its wearer to control the movement of a robot just by thinking about it:

The helmet is the first “brain-machine interface” to combine two different techniques for picking up activity in the brain. Sensors in the helmet detect electrical signals through the scalp in the same way as a standard EEG (electroencephalogram). The scientists combined this with another technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, which can be used to monitor changes in blood flow in the brain.

Brain activity picked up by the helmet is sent to a computer, which uses software to work out which movement the person is thinking about. It then sends a signal to the robot commanding it to perform the move. Typically, it takes a few seconds for the thought to be turned into a robotic action.

Honda said the technology was not ready for general use because of potential distractions in the person’s thinking. Another problem is that brain patterns differ greatly between individuals, and so for the technology to work brain activity must first be analysed for up to three hours.

Well, a calibration period is inevitable; I expect they’ll shave that timescale down considerably, and in fairly short order. And then it’ll just be a case of waiting a decade or so before applying to be a mecha-warrior, like the strung-out teenagers in Ian McDonald’s story “Sanjeev and Robotwallah”.

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And I, for one, welcome our new robot scientists

robot with laptopRobots are ideal for doing human tasks that are repetitive, like screwing lids on cosmetic bottles, welding car panels… and now making scientific discoveries. Columbia University’s “Adam” machine is “the first automated system to complete the cycle from hypothesis, to experiment, to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention”.

The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground. Researchers have been automating portions of the scientific process for decades, using robotic laboratory instruments to screen for drugs and sequence genomes, but humans are usually responsible for forming the hypotheses and designing the experiments themselves. After the experiments are complete, the humans must exert themselves again to draw conclusions.

[snip]

They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. Then they set the mechanical beast loose, only intervening to remove waste or replace consumed solutions. […]

Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes, which scientists think exist, but which haven’t been linked to any parent genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may code for the orphan enzyme.

The process might sound simple — and indeed, similar “scientific discovery” algorithms already exist — but Adam was only getting started. Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers.

After analyzing the data and running follow-up experiments — it can design and initiate over a thousand new experiments each day — Adam had uncovered three genes that together coded for an orphan enzyme. King’s group confirmed the novel findings by hand.

Score one for the Singularitarians – autonomous systems that can follow the scientific method without supervision would surely be a component of an emergent self-improving artificial intelligence, if I understand the theory correctly. [image by jurvetson]

And why not outsource our more tedious scientific tasks to robot underlings? After all, we’ve been fairly unhesitating in our rush to do the same with warfare… no matter how ethically blurred an idea that may be: