This little guy is not just a platform for pursuing robot sentience. He’s not just an adventurer. I think he’ll be the way that robots achieve wisdom, compassion, and evolve into VALIS–the vast active living intelligence system, known by some as the Singularity

Researchers get help from a venerable number theory and a popular puzzle game to solve genetic medical mysteries

A 2,000-year-old math theorem, along with Sudoku, may soon help researchers untangle DNA at blazing speeds.

Hunting for a particular genetic mutation in hundreds of thousands of specimens can be an expensive and time-consuming process. In the past several years, faster multiplex DNA sequencing machines have sped up the acquisition of data, but researchers have still been hobbled by having to label each sample with a unique molecular identifier (or bar code) for analysis.

A 2,000-year-old math theorem, along with Sudoku, may soon help researchers untangle DNA at blazing speeds.

Hunting for a particular genetic mutation in hundreds of thousands of specimens can be an expensive and time-consuming process. In the past several years, faster multiplex DNA sequencing machines have sped up the acquisition of data, but researchers have still been hobbled by having to label each sample with a unique molecular identifier (or bar code) for analysis.

Scientists are proposing a new take on a very old idea to tackle large data sets simultaneously. The team is applying the Chinese remainder theorem to pinpoint single samples in larger pools, which are arranged in rows and columns

By using the idea, researchers can deal with whole libraries of genetic information instead of looking at just “one genetic sequence at a time,” says Yaniv Erlich, the lead author of the paper, published as the cover story of this month’s Genome Research.

We are happy to introduce to our readers a new Futuristic Art project we are starting here in the K21st blog. The project  will  expose and promote futuristic art works and artists who are involved in futuristic art. With this project we hope to encourage a synergy between the arts and sciences,  and to promote an aesthetic style of futuristic thought.

In a fascinating post ‘Beauty is a Restless Entity‘ in the Space Collective, Wildcat writes:

The future that is coming upon us all promises to be more exciting and indeed more extravagant that we can imagine, especially when considering the tremendous advances of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and the immense advances in neuroscience. It is obvious that our old conceptions of what is beautiful and the aesthetics of intelligence amplification are the hallmarks of the arising posthuman.

On the same post Spaceweaver comments:

An idea that I immediately associated with this post, is that beauty is the catalyzing agent of our conscious reflective processes. Beauty is a special kind of disturbance that awakens and expands consciousness.

…As to our posthumanist future, it is clear to me that prediction and projection are conceptually limited tools. My understanding is that our only viable access to a posthuman future is by expanding our consciousness. If this is so, aesthetics may indeed be a primary key.

With these notes we launch our new project. The posts dedicated to futuristic art will have from now a special new category called Futuristic Art. Artists who are interested to present their work at our blog and readers who wish to recommend work for this project are invited to contact us at: k21stadmin@gmail.com.

Comments are most welcome.

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Our first artist is Patrick Millard. Patrick Millard is an artist who originates from the small Western Michigan town of Lamont and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work in photography, painting, mixed media, new media, video, sound and installation has resulted in a diversified portfolio that addresses ideas about media, digital culture, technology and the interactions that human beings have within their own synthetic environment. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and continues to gain recognition. (read on biography)

NanoResponse [excerpt]:

A nanotechnological ballet with autonomously computer generated music…

On NanoResponse from the artist’s blog:

The coming era of nanotechnology has become increasingly essential to current scientific and futurist thought. Small scaled devices called nanobots will one day be put into the body and respond to our biological systems, truly binding the organic and synthetic nature of our bodies. These nanobots may help us ward off diseases, enhance our memories, reduce signs of aging, increase physical dexterity and perform a wide range of other tasks.

NanoResponse incorporates the sound from Generative Behaviors. These are musical compositions composed by the computer that are ever-changing and require no assistance from the human creator once fundamental elements are set and the system begins to extrapolate them. This begs the question of the notion of artistic merit being granted to a work generated by the computer. Who is the creator?

The graphic element of the work involves a responsive nanobot. By listening to and interpolating the audio levels of Generative Behaviors the nanobot limits and expands its range as instructed by the audio output. The response given to the audio replicates the behavior a Microbivore [nanobot white blood cells] would perform in your body when you become ill. Likewise, a Respirocyte [nanobot red blood cells] can aid in the transportation of oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout the body. If, for instance, you suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning in a fire, Respirocytes would releaseinto your blood stream to jump-start your system.

Nanotechnology will alter our concept of what it means to be human. NanoResponse suggests that we should not fear these developments, but embrace them.

Formatting Gaia:

This fascinating series of photographs raises to our awareness the emerging unification process of the humansphere the infosphere and the biosphere.

On Formatting Gaia from the artist’s blog:

A new robot navigates using humanlike visual processing and object detection

The robot consists of a wheeled platform with a robotic “head” that uses two cameras to capture stereoscopic vision. The robot can turn its head and shift its gaze up and down or sideways to gauge its surroundings, and can quickly measure its own speed relative to its environment.

The machine is controlled by algorithms designed to mimic different parts of the human visual system. Rather than capturing and mapping its surroundings over and over in order to plan its route–the way most robots do–the European machine uses a simulated neural network to update its position relative to the environment, continually adjusting to each new input. This mimics human visual processing and movement planning.

This is the second of a three highly interesting interviews made by Richard Dawkins. Highly recommended.

In this prophetic 2003 talk — just days before Dolly the sheep was stuffed — biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new, more meaningful (and controversial) technologies, like customizable babies, whose adoption might drive human evolution.About Gregory StockDr. Gregory Stock’s levelheaded look at the hotpoints where tech and ethics connect (or short circuit) have made him a popular guest on TV and radio

more about “Gregory Stock: To upgrade is human“, posted with vodpod

Image via Wikipedia

This is a fascination account of how our conscious perception constructs our sense of time.  It very well implies that our concept of time as linear, as moving from the past into the future, and more, are elaborate constructions of the brain. Also strangely, short people live closer to the present moment than tall people… (are they therefore closer to the future than anyone else ?) Very rewarding read.

[DAVID M. EAGLEMAN:] At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan 1215–94 realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned. Since his messengers returned with information from different distances and traveled at different rates depending on weather, conflicts, and their fitness, the messages arrived at different times. Although no historians have addressed this issue, I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what events in the empire occurred in which order?

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information hearing, seeing, touch, and so on are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

…

Finally, the more distant future of time research may change our views of other fields, such as physics. Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense. But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation. Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

Via: Edge 291, Brain Time

Abel Real, student at East Carolina University, testifies at a hearing regarding the Future of Learning: How Technology is Transforming Public Schools on June 16, 2009.

During Richard Dawkins’ American tour in March 2009, he gave a talk titled “The Purpose of Purpose”

Our ordinary use of language betrays an implicit metaphysical assumption: unless we’ve learned otherwise, we tend to think that the universe is imbued with purposes. In fact, this assumption is so pervasive that Aristotle tried to codify it as part of any satisfactory causal explanation. When trying to understand the cause for the existence of any object, he thought, one of the four basic questions you should ask is “what is it for?” Perhaps part of the reason there is so much confusion about evolutionary theory, apart from its philosophical implications and its challenge to religious tradition, lies in the ease with which we confuse real purposes from the appearance of purposes, and the ease with which we equivocate two different kinds of purposes: archeo-purposes and neo-purposes. Richard Dawkins explains the distinction in this fascinating, thought provoking, and amusing lecture.

Baroness Susan Greenfield is a British scientist, writer, broadcaster and a member of the House of Lords. She is known as a popularizer of science, with her research focusing on brain physiology, particularly in the areas of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. She was the first female director of the Royal Institution and has received numerous awards, including the Michael Faraday medal from the Royal Society for her contributions to the public understanding of science.

more about “The Baroness, Consciousness, and the …“, posted with vodpod

Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?

by Jamais Cascio

Via: The Atlantic

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• Jamais Cascio’s Tools for Building a Better World (ecolocalizer.com)

As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part.

by Graeme Wood

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.

keep reading…

via Re-Engineering the Earth – The Atlantic (July/August 2009).

It goes without saying that this is one of the most fascinating subjects ever. Of course we need first re-define what exactly it is that we mean when using the term universe/multiverse. a recommended read.

clipped from arstechnica.com The World Science Festival likes to tackle big ideas, and this year was no exception, with a session devoted to everything—more specifically, why our Universe is here and whether it might be part of a larger whole. This isn’t the easiest of topics, even for someone who’s followed science carefully for the last few years, but the panelists did an admirable job of making their presentations reasonably approachable. It seems that the easiest way to explain the existence of our Universe may involve a process that will inevitably produce an infinite number of other universes. The details, however, are considerably more complicated. For the topic at hand, however, the use of the term “universe” also gets a bit slippery. Does it mean our own, familiar universe, which may be one of an infinite number of similar items? Or does it apply to the larger whole, within which those items are an inevitable result of the process of inflation?

Richard Dawkins interviews Peter Singer for “The Genius of Charles Darwin. Very interesting documentary.

In his kickoff lecture for this series on neuroscience, Sur provides both a current overview of brain models and function, and a peek at his own research. From the moment of conception, a developing animal begins to grow cortical pathways and networks that will eventually allow it to respond to the world outside. These increasingly sophisticated networks—for hearing, vision, touch—provide feedback to the evolving brain. For humans, at least half the brain is devoted directly or indirectly to processing vision, says Sur. Yet there is a single model for understanding how vision works: orientation selectivity. Regions of neural cells react only to specific stimuli, such as vertical or horizontal stripes, obliques or diagonals. Images of these activated cell networks from Sur’s lab resemble pinwheels. In Sur’s research on newborn ferrets, he rewired visual inputs to the animals’ hearing center, and found the same patterned responses to specific shapes among cells—more pinwheels. In essence, Sur enabled ferrets to “see” through their hearing cortex. This dramatic experiment demonstrates the plasticity of brain networks, and suggests there might be ways to repair human brains after stroke or other traumas.

more about “The Brain and Mind | MIT World“, posted with vodpod