If you can’t buy something you want, you might as well build it yourself – especially if it’s something as specialised (and dangerous) as vacuum-powered building-climbing gloves:
They’re a bit rough and ready, but that’s your proof-of-concept right there. Give it a few years for someone to make a reliable (and more stylish) commercial version, and parkour is going to fall out of fashion pretty quickly… [via Hack-aDay]
Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
We’ve seen viruses used to help treat cancer, and help building electrical components, now bacteria are being used to solve hitherto intractable mathematics problems:
Imagine you want to tour the 10 biggest cities in the UK, starting in London (number 1) and finishing in Bristol (number 10). The solution to the Hamiltonian Path Problem is the the shortest possible route you can take.
This simple problem is surprisingly difficult to solve. There are over 3.5 million possible routes to choose from, and a regular computer must try them out one at a time to find the shortest. Alternatively, a computer made from millions of bacteria can look at every route simultaneously. The biological world also has other advantages. As time goes by, a bacterial computer will actually increase in power as the bacteria reproduce.
These developments in synthetic biology are really amazing: it is just another example of how researchers are looking at pre-existing biological structures to solve problems (albeit somewhat abstract problems in this case) instead of building technologies from scratch.
There’s been a rash of coverage on Dr Markram and the IBM-supported Blue Brain project, one of the experiments designed to move us closer to creating a silicon simulation of the animal brain. Blue Brain is currently based on a silicon recreation of a slice of rat cortex, and Markram’s team have observed spontaneous emergent interaction between their artificial neurons which suggest to them that they’re on the right track… though not everyone is quite so sure.
“We’re building the brain from the bottom up, but in silicon,” says Dr. Markram, the leader of Blue Brain, which is powered by a supercomputer provided by International Business Machines Corp. “We want to understand how the brain learns, how it perceives things, how intelligence emerges.”
Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram’s approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions.
“You need to have a theory about how a particular circuit in the brain” can trigger complex, higher-order properties, Dr. Koch argues. “You can’t assemble ever larger data fields and shake it and say, ‘Ah, that’s how consciousness emerges.'”
The possibility of simulating consciousness by building a model of the brain is one of those frustrating quandaries that will seemingly only ever be answered by someone succeeding at doing it; the proof is quite literally in the pudding. Still, Markram is pretty convinced he’s on the right track, going so far as to announce in his TED talk that he’ll have built a model human brain within the next decade… which is something that AI researchers have been saying since the sixties, I believe. I’d love to see it happen, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath or place any bets just yet.
The great paradox of electronic data must surely be that while the stuff we want to keep is considered frangible and at risk (think of the old programmer’s adage – “if your data doesn’t exist in three separate locations, it might as well not exist at all), the stuff we’d rather have disappear (that inebriated email to your ex-partner or lawyer, or that Facebook picture of you smoking crack on the steps of the town hall) has a tendency of hanging around out in “the cloud” long enough to embarass or incriminate. [image by rpongsaj]
The answer to the first problem is obviously to take multiple geographically-separated back-ups (and make a yearly sacrifice to Cthulhu for peace of mind); the latter is a bit more tricky, but a team at the University of Washington think they may have cracked it with a system named Vanish, which is designed to “give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.”
Sounds intriguing – so how does it work?
We created
self-destructing datato try to address this problem. Our prototype system, called Vanish, shares some properties with existing encryption systems like PGP, but there are also some major differences. First, someone using Vanish to “encrypt/encapsulate” information, like an email, never learns the encryption key. Second, there is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages. Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires.[…]
… we leverage an unusual storage media in a novel way: namely, global-scale peer-to-peer networks. Vanish creates a secret key to encrypt a user’s data item (such as an email), breaks the key into many pieces and then sprinkles the pieces across the P2P network. As machines constantly join and leave the P2P network, the pieces of the key gradually disappear. By the time the hacker or someone with a subpoena actually tries to obtain access to the message, the pieces of the key will have permanently disappeared.
It’s a clever idea, that’s for certain, and its application to sensitive emails makes a great deal of sense (though I’d want the low-down from Bruce Schneier before deploying it on anything that mattered). As far as Facebook messages are concerned, though, anyone stupid enough to post incriminating material about themselves or others on the biggest social network on the planet can be assumed to lack the gumption to avail themselves of encryption technologies like Vanish. Maybe it’s just because I spend a lot more time on the internet than is really healthy, but I can’t understand how it isn’t more widely acknowledged that the best way to keep something secret is to avoid talking about it in public spaces… [via BoingBoing]