Ray Kurzweil  

Futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become.

Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.

Image Source - Bret Hartman/TED

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In the talk , Kurzweil author of How to Create a Mind, tells how the Cretaceous Extinction Event 65 million years ago wiped out 75 percent of animals and plants on Earth including the dinosaurs, “mammals overtook their ecological niche” and their brains became their evolutionary advantage. Today the neocortex so big it constitutes 80 percent of the human brain.

"Search engines will be based on combinations of words and links but will actually read the billions of pages on the web for understanding."

According to Kurzweil’s new theory, the brain is made up of 300 million modules. Each one learns, recognizes and implements a pattern, and all the modules are arranged in hierarchies created by our own thinking. This is how it works: One module in your mind might recognize the crossbar in the capital letter A. Its job is to recognize that and only that crossbar. It sends signals of high probability to the next level, which recognizes “A,” and then to the next level, which recognizes the written word “Apple.” You might go up ten levels and get a level that recognizes irony; but while hierarchy structures vary in complexity, in fact individual modules don’t function differently on a basic level.

Now, computers, says Kurzweil, are beginning to master human language with techniques similar to neocortex. In five to 10 years, he says, “search engines will be based on combinations of words and links but will actually read the billions of pages on the web for understanding.”

He says, while you’re on the Internet, something will pop up and say, “You expressed concern a few weeks ago about your gluten levels, and a new paper has just come out 10 seconds ago about it. Let me summarize it for you … .“ Kurzweil predicts that in 20 years nano-bots will enter the brain through capillaries to connect us to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. So if someone walks past you whom you want to impress, but your 300 million modules aren’t enough to come up with something clever to say, all you need to do is tap into the neocortex in the cloud and another billion modules will become available. The future human, says Kurzweil, will be a biological and nonbiological hybrid.

Two million years ago when we developed large foreheads, it was a quantitative increase that led to a vast qualitative explosion – of art, culture and technology. In the next few decades, Kurzweil predicts, we’re going to do it again: And this time, “We won’t be limited by the fixed architecture of the enclosure. We will expand without limits.”


SOURCE  TED

By 33rd Square

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 Biotech  

By modifying the genetics of E. Coli bacteria, engineers at MIT have created cells that produce biofilms with incorporated nonliving  gold nanoparticles and quantum dots.  This work lays a foundation for synthesizing, patterning, and controlling functional composite materials with engineered cells.

Engineers at MIT have developed bacterial cells that produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots.

These so-called 'living materials' combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales, with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

The new materials represent a simple demonstration of the power of this approach, which could one day be used to design more complex devices such as solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors, says Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing the living functional materials in Nature Materials.

"Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional."

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“Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional,” Lu says. “It’s an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach.”

Lu and his colleagues chose to work with the bacterium E. coli because it naturally produces biofilms that contain so-called “curli fibers” — amyloid proteins that help E. coli attach to surfaces. Each curli fiber is made from a repeating chain of identical protein subunits called CsgA, which can be modified by adding protein fragments called peptides. These peptides can capture nonliving materials such as gold nanoparticles, incorporating them into the biofilms.

Image Source - Chen et al/Nature Materials

Rhe researchers were able to control the biofilms’ properties and create gold nanowires, conducting biofilms, and films studded with quantum dots, or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties by programming cells to produce different types of curli fibers under certain conditions. They also engineered the cells so they could communicate with each other and change the composition of the biofilm over time.

The MIT team began by disabling the bacterial cells’ natural ability to produce CsgA, then replacing it with an engineered genetic circuit that produces CsgA but only under certain conditions — specifically, when a molecule called AHL is present. This puts control of curli fiber production in the hands of the researchers, who can adjust the amount of AHL in the cells’ environment. When AHL is present, the cells secrete CsgA, which forms curli fibers that coalesce into a biofilm, coating the surface where the bacteria are growing.

The researchers then engineered E. coli cells to produce CsgA tagged with peptides composed of clusters of the amino acid histidine, but only when a molecule called aTc is present. The two types of engineered cells can be grown together in a colony, allowing researchers to control the material composition of the biofilm by varying the amounts of AHL and aTc in the environment. If both are present, the film will contain a mix of tagged and untagged fibers. If gold nanoparticles are added to the environment, the histidine tags will grab onto them, creating rows of gold nanowires, and a network that conducts electricity.

“It’s a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that’s increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time,” Lu says. “Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals.”

To add quantum dots to the curli fibers, the researchers engineered cells that produce curli fibers along with a different peptide tag, called SpyTag, which binds to quantum dots that are coated with SpyCatcher, a protein that is SpyTag’s partner. These cells can be grown along with the bacteria that produce histidine-tagged fibers, resulting in a material that contains both quantum dots and gold nanoparticles.

These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.


SOURCE  MIT News Top Image Yan Liang

By 33rd Square

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 Gadgets  

If you have bought a laptop or tablet in the last few months, you probably thought long and hard about your decision one way or another.  Now with its Split X2 hybrid design, HP might have come up with the ideal solution.  The device functions well as a tablet, but attached to the heavy-duty keyboard dock, the Split X2 becomes a powerful productivity solution too.

Making up for their slow start in the tablet market, HP released two impressive new mobile devices that could shake up the industry.

The Split X2 joins the Windows 8-equipped Envy X2 line and Android-equipped SlateBook X2 line to give the users three choices in hybrid detachable devices.

Both tablets come with their keyboard docks included in the price. This fact, alongside HP’s reputation for build quality, should help them to stand out amid the clamor of rival hybrids from the likes of Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS and Acer , which often charge extra for keyboards. For instance the keyboard covers for the Microsoft Surface cost at least $120 and may actually push customers to just purchasing a better-powered notebook or ultrabook.

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HP designers seem to have come to this conclusion too, including the heavier-duty keyboard dock which allows the tablet to look and function like a productivity device, not just a tablet.

The total weight of the Split x2 with its keyboard is nearly five pounds — double the heft of the Surface Pro. The tradeoff though is that the dock has a lot going for it, on top of its general rigidity: extra ports (including HDMI and USB 3.0), an SD card expansion slot, a 500GB hard drive to complement the fast solid state drive within the tablet itself, and a second battery to increase running time.

This makes the Split x2 a threat not so much to Surface Pro and other tablet devices, but to the hordes of mainstream Windows laptops that do not function as hybrids, or that don’t even have touchscreens.

The Split X2 is a 13.3-inch Windows 8 tablet PC with the detachable keyboard base unit. The Split X2 can function either as a clamshell-style notebook or as a slate tablet, since the system's processor, main storage, and primary battery are all located behind the screen.

Powered by an Intel Core i3 or i5 processor, the Split X2 more processing power than the Intel Atom-powered Envy X2. The Split X2 is just under an inch thick with the keyboard base, and weighs in at a pound heavier than the X2 with a total system weight of 4.12 pounds.

The Split X2 has a 128GB SSD built into the screen, with an optional 500GB spinning hard drive in the keyboard base. This combo lets you carry your apps and critical files with you, while giving you extra storage for media files when you're connected to the keyboard base. Like the Envy X2, the Split X2 comes with an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 1080p HD webcam.

The Split X2 runs Windows 8, for a fluid multi-touch screen user experience. This allows the user to use the system as a traditional laptop or as a slate tablet. The keyboard base also gives the user extra battery life and I/O ports like USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and HDMI.

The Split X2 starts at $799 and will be available in August.

HP needs these latest products to sell, and that urgency is happily apparent in the their pricing and design.

By 33rd Square

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