Tag Archives: technology

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New microscope has resolution less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom

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Nanobridge of atoms where two gold crystals meet The world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dubbed TEAM 0.5 (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) it can produce images with a resolution of a half-angstrom: half of a ten-billionth of a meter, or less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. (Via EurekAlert.)

That test image above shows the arrangement of atoms formed where two gold crystals meet.

Advances in electronics and computer technology make the new microscope possible, enabling it to counteract spherical aberration (the aberration that, in an out-of-focus image, makes points of light look like disks), which also enables it to maintain its high resolution with a lower-energy beam of electrons, less likely to alter the subject. TEAM 1, due to be up and running next year, will also be able to counteract chromatic aberration, cased by different wavelengths of electrons being refracted at different angles by the microscope’s magnetic lenses.

The microscope can literally focus atom by atom in a sample, and with a new stage to be installed in TEAM 1, scientists will be able to maneuver samples with such fine control that they’ll be able to create a 3D image of the atomic structure. As the project leader puts it:

“This brings us within reach of meeting the great challenge posed by the famous physicist Richard Feynman in 1959: the ability to analyze any chemical substance simply by looking to see where the atoms are.”

TEAM 0.5 and its components are now undergoing testing and tuning, and the microscope should be available to outside users starting this fall.

Oh, and TEAM 0.5 was the focus of my newspaper science column this week.

(Image courtesy of DOE’s National Center for Electron Microscopy.)

[tags]technology,microscopes[/tags]

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Robots evolve ability to lie…and be heroes

Robots feeding There’s been lots of discussion here about how we should treat robots; maybe we need to consider how robots will treat each other–and, potentially, us. (Via Gizmodo.)

Discover Magazine reminds us, in its review of the Top 100 Science Stories of 2007, that Dario Floreano and colleagues at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created robots with light sensors, rings of blue light and wheels, placed them in habitats containing both glowing “food patches” that recharged their batteries and patches of “poison” that drained them, and gave them software genes that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded. The first batch were programmed to light up randomly and move randomly when they sensed light. The “genes” of the most successful first-generation robots were then recombined and given to the next generation, with a little random “mutation” thrown in. By the 50th generation, they had robots that would light up to alert other robots when they found food or poison…and in one of the four colonies of robots they created, they had “cheater” robots that would lie and tell other robots that poison was food, while they rolled over to a food patch themselves without signalling at all. Other robots, though, were heroes: they would signal danger when they found the poison and die so other robots could safely obtain food.

Liars and heroes in just 50 generations with just 30 genes. Maybe we really will soon need a robot psychologist a la Isaac Asimov’s character Susan Calvin to figure out why our robots do what they do.

The original research paper, published in Current Biology, is here, and there’s even a movie.

(Image: Laboratory of Intelligent Systems.)

[tags]robots, technology, ethics[/tags]

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Heads-up displays, "super-vision," via contact lenses

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Contact lens with imprinted circuit Engineers at the University of Washington have managed to create a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights:

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

And, the engineers note, people may find many other applications they haven’t even thought of yet. (Via EurekAlert.)

So far only rabbits have worn the prototype, with no ill effects after up to twenty minutes. The engineers plan to add wireless communication to and from the lens, along with built-on solar cells and the capability to use radio-frequency power. The prototype doesn’t light up, but a version with a basic display showing a few pixels could be operational soon.

(Image: University of Washington.)

[tags]vision,bionics,technology[/tags]

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Facet – open source swarming smart-phone software

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Cellphone This one must have passed me by at the time, but Warren Ellis’s team of future-culture hounds at grinding.be have brought it to my attention. A New Scientist article from October 2007 talks about Facet, an open source software project that networks mobile phone cameras over Bluetooth:

“To test the software, the researchers attached four phones running Facet to the ceiling of a corridor in their department. The phones were angled so that the camera of each could see a different part of the corridor and so that they could all see peopling walking past.

Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.

One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.

Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone’s view to another’s.”

That would put fairly top-range surveillance capabilities into the hands of street-level operations. Maybe the only logical response to nation-states with endemic surveillance of citizens is for the citizens to start watching the watchers? [Image by Asim Bijarani]

[tags]phone, technology, surveillance, open source[/tags]
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Rights for robots? Not according to Peter Watts.

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blue toy robot I think this is about the third or fourth variation of this story I’ve seen in the last few years, but nonetheless – The Guardian has a brief piece wherein philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests we should be thinking ahead about what rights we will need to grant to our sentient machines.

Which is very well-meant, I suppose. But science fiction author Peter Watts takes a rather different view of the necessity for robotic rights – basically, there isn’t any.

“I’ve got no problems with enslaving machines — even intelligent machines, even intelligent, conscious machines — because as Jeremy Bentham said, the ethical question is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”* You can’t suffer if you can’t feel pain or anxiety; you can’t be tortured if your own existence is irrelevant to you.

You cannot be thwarted if you have no dreams — and it takes more than a big synapse count to give you any of those things. It takes some process, like natural selection, to wire those synapses into a particular configuration that says not I think therefore I am, but I am and I want to stay that way. We’re the ones building the damn things, after all. Just make sure that we don’t wire them up that way, and we should be able to use and abuse with a clear conscience.”

How about you – are you looking forward to running your Roomba ragged, or planning to kennel your Aibo when you go on holiday? [Image by Plutor]

[tags]robotics, rights, ethics, technology[/tags]