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Tristan on the New RSS Standards War

Tristan, has written an important article on the emerging RSS standards war, in which he suggests some solutions to the divergent format specs that are popping up right now.

Extracting Video from Cat Brains

Fascinating article about research which has successfully extracted video from monitoring cat neurons. They have actually reconstructed what the cat actually saw from its neural signals. This opens the door to recording our day-to-day perceptions (lifelogs) and perhaps even to recording our dreams. And of course there might be options for playback as well. This is cool stuff.

US Scientists Bring Dogs Back from Dead

A new technique has been successfully tested which appears to be able to bring dogs back to life after 3 hours of being clinically dead. This research may hold promise not only for saving lives in cases where clinical death happens before surgery can be performed or completed, but also perhaps for preserving and later reanimating healthy people who simply want to wake up in the future. It's a new approach to suspended animation. Sounds awefully cold though...

New Discovery - All Vertebrates Share Certain "Junk DNA" Segments

In an amazing new research finding, it turns out that a substantial amount of the so-called "junk DNA" in humans and other vertebrates is the same and has remained unchanged for 600 to 700 million years. Not only that but it turns out that at least some of the base pairs in this set have been found to regulate genes in other parts of the genome. So it's not "junk DNA" after all...

Read an interview with the researchers here

Ultra-Lifelike Female Robot Debuts in Japan

The Fembots are coming... see the photo

Brain Has Particular Neurons for Recognizing Celebrities and Other Concepts

In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people's brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we know. However, that raises certain questions -- for example, if this is true, then the brain should be a lot larger since there wouldn't be room to represent everything a typical adult knows with unique neurons in that amount of space. On the other hand, perhaps the memories are not stored on the neuronal level at all, but instead are stored and computed on the sub-neuronal tubulin "quantum computing" level, which is the subject of much research these days. For more on that check out this book on research into quantum computing in the brain (found by: Josh).

Working Quantum Computer in 3 Years

D-Wave, a Canadian startup, claims it will have a working quantum computer within 3 years. Unlike other quantum computer designs which are based on the principle of quantum entanglement, the D-Wave design is based on quantum tunneling. While this makes it less powerful, it is still ideal for complex calculations such as the "traveling salesman problem" and simulations of physical systems.

Marc's Universal "Blog This" Button

Marc has developed an interesting new service that provides a universal "one-stop shop" for posting microcontent to various blogs. It's a sort of universal "blog this" button that anyone can use. Nice idea. Marc explains it better than I can, so here it is in his own words.

New Quantum Model May Resolve Time Travel Paradoxes

Quantum researchers have proposed a new model of time travel that may overcome paradoxes (such as going back in time and undoing something that causes an impossibility in your future  -- for example, preventing yourself from being born). The basic idea is that if you travel to your past you cannot interact with anything that will change something you have measured in your future. There are not enough details provided in the article though -- so I remain skeptical that anything has been resolved yet.

Simulated Universes and the Nature of Consciousness

Researchers in Europe have completed the first phase of what may be the largest computational physics experiment in history: They built and ran a simulated universe through 14 billion years of development. The experiment used up 25 million megabytes of memory, and the biggest supercomputer in Europe for a month. The result was a "Cube of Creation" of 20 billion light years per side, containing 20 million simulated galaxies. Now they're studying it to see what evolved. They hope to gain insights into the function of black holes, and other cosmological principles. This is an amazing piece of work -- definitely the future of cosmology research.

In previous articles, I've speculated that our own universe might also be such a simulation, perhaps run by a much more advanced civilization in a meta-universe outside ours. But in fact, I think our universe is probably quite different from a mere computer simulation (despite how cool it would be if it were a computer simulation!) -- because I don't believe we can explain everything there is in terms of information and computation: I think consciousness doesn't fit in that model.  After exploring this issue for more than 20 years from the perspectives of computer science and physics, philosophy and religion, I've come to believe that consciousness cannot be reduce to, or emerge from, information or computation. As far as I can tell, it's something at least as or more fundamental than space, time, matter and energy. I would even go so far as to say that we won't ever really understand what the universe is or how it develops or functions without first understanding consciousness much more deeply.

Driving Interface for Music

An experimental driving interface enables a user to control the performance of a composition by driving through a landscape using a game-controller. This system is similar in some respects to my idea for driving through soundscapes of last year.

Wireless Quantum Crypto Announced

A system for wireless quantum cryptography has been announced by BBN. This is curious: I wonder how they manage the key exchange? They could be using a laser, I suppose, but that would only be line of sight, or would require airborne reflectors. Another possibility would be the EPR effect, but if they actually built a transmitter based on that they would probably win the Nobel Prize, so I'm doubtful. It will be interesting to learn more. Also, I wonder what the reaction will be over at MagiQ.

Snow in Somalia - First Time in History - Global Warming?

It just snowed in tropical Somalia, for the first time in history. Is this further evidence of chaotic global climate change? Read the article here.

How to Save the Amazon Rainforest

I read the an article today about how Brazil is gradually losing the fight to save the Amazon. The worlds' rainforests are a global resource -- not only are they directly important to the air we all breathe, they also harbor a huge, still untapped, reservoir of species diversity which could be of profound importance to science and future medical and pharma research. The problem is that currently there is no direct benefit to Brazil, or other rainforest nations, for the global use of their rainforest resources.

The key then is to find a way to turn rainforests into economically valuable national resources for countries that maintain them. In other words, rainforests should be to Brazil, what oil is to Saudi Arabia (or actually better, because rainforests, unlike oil, are renewable). Rainforest countries should make more money by keeping their rainforests alive and healthy,  than by chopping them down.