Robots may replace human brains by 2045

Robots will start replacing human brains by 2045 and artificially intelligent machines may be capable of doing anything that humans can, including masturbating. And standing in line for new Apple products.
 
Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University, traces the evolution of the idea that artificial intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence, from Turing to Kurzweil, and looks at the current rate of progress.

Early predictions were rubbish and it has taken 15 years to go from Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess to self-driving cars and Watson beating Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.According to The Atlantic,  Vardi thinks it's reasonable to believe intelligent machines may one day replace human workers almost entirely and put millions out of work permanently, just as the world's food runs out.

What he is suggesting is an economic singularity, after which the labour market as we know it will cease to exist. Historically the labour market has evolved and adapted. Accelerating technology over the last few centuries has consistently erased some jobs only to replace them with others but the question is if the machines have replaced our brains what is there for us to do?

Vardi thinks that the world in 50 years either will be a utopia or a dystopia. Either we will solve the problem before it happens or things will get very very nasty.

He is not optimistic. If machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. He does not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing.
"I believe that work is essential to human well-being and our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure," he said.
The unemployment rate in the US is currently under nine percent and is considered to be a huge problem.

Read more:   http://news.techeye.net/science/robots-might-replace-human-brains-by-2045#ixzz2VQiYRQYH

Oldest Civilization in the World

The World's Oldest Civilization

The cradle of civilization is one of the five possible locations where civilization first emerged. According to many experts, civilization began in what is called the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia), and then spread to other areas due to a nomadic lifestyle. But this traditionally held view is disputed by several scholars and archaeologists who support the view point that there is no single cradle of civilization, but independent development of civilization occurred in several areas, which were Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, Shang (Yellow River Valley), and Mesoamerica and Andean South America. The reason for this belief in multiple cradles of civilization has resulted from observation, and study of relics of the period that point out how different features developed irregularly and independently in these different civilizations. The interaction between different communities due to nomadic lifestyles led to the development of common systems and techniques in agriculture, pottery, metal work, etc. It is therefore difficult to specifically state which is the oldest civilization in the world, as there is no definite answer to the question. 

Mesopotamia

Many experts, as mentioned above, believe that Mesopotamia, being located in the Fertile Crescent, is the oldest civilization in the world. The reason for this is that Mesopotamia is where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers converge, making the area extremely suitable for agriculture. Many agrarian societies are therefore believed to have been established here. Also since the Ubaid, Sumerian, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyrian civilizations are all located in this area, Mesopotamia is widely considered to be the oldest civilization in the world. Settlements can be traced in Mesopotamia to the start of the Early Bronze age, which is much before 7000 BC. The earliest sites were in Jarmo, and the earliest cities were established in Sumer under the Uruk period. Mesopotamia, over the years, has been ruled by the Hellenists, Persians, Mongols and Turks. Mesopotamia is the area that we now identify as Iraq.

Egypt

One of the oldest civilizations in the world, there is archaeological and anthropological evidence that point towards the existence of a settlement in the area as early as 10000 BC, but there is no definite evidence to determine the time period. The settlement then took to farming as their main source of sustenance, but remains of another settlement found in the area, that can be dated back to the same period, shows practice of hunting and fishing. It is indicated by studies that the land around Sahara was not as arid as it is today and was perfect for grazing ground. It was around 2500 BC that the settlements moved towards the Nile due to change in climate and inhospitable conditions, where the civilization was established as a more complex society. The civilization of Ancient Egypt has been responsible for several lasting legacies for humankind as a whole, including pyramids, mathematical systems, practice of medicine, glass making techniques, and also paper, in its earliest form.

Ancient India

Settlements have known to exist in the area since before 6000 BC, as there is evidence that has been found that dates back to this period. These settlements were very self sufficient with remains of granaries, burial tombs, drills for stones and copper, etc., found in the area near present day Balochistan in Pakistan. The Indus Valley Civilization, which saw complex societal structures, have known to exist since 4000 BC, with the major cities being Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Both these cities have been discovered to be large cities with many structures of great magnitude inside city limits. The decimal fraction system is one of the gifts of the Indus Valley Civilization to the modern day world. Excavation of the sites that are believed to be a part of the civilization have been on since 1920 and the most recent discovery was in 1999.

China

Along with being a contender for the title of the oldest civilization in the world, China is already heralded as the world's oldest continuous civilization. Pre-civilized settlement relics dating back to 7000 BC have been found in China. In fact, in some cases, the date variance ranges between 9000 BC and 5500 B. There is evidence of agricultural practice, pottery, craft work and even animal husbandry. The civilization can be traced back to the establishment of city states in the Yellow River Valley around 2200 BC. But this claim is disputed with the first dynasty that is archaeologically definable being traced to the Shang Dynasty of Ancient China which started its reign somewhere around 1750 BC. There is very little verifiable data about earlier settlements in the area due to the lack of written records or any such documents.

Andean South America and Mesoamerica

In the Americas, the oldest civilizations were located in South America and Mesoamerica. The oldest Mesoamerican civilization was the Olmec Civilization which was established sometime around 1200 BC, but settlements have been traced back to 5100 BC, due to records of maize cultivation from then. Some of the main cities that were established under the Olmec rule were San Lorenzo and La Venta, which like other cities, are said to have had giant statues of the then Emperor. In South America, the oldest civilization was the Norte Chico that was a group of connected settlements, with huge cities at Aspero and Caral.

It is difficult to answer a question like what is the oldest civilization and how old is it because there are no definite records or dating methods that can give us an exact time period for when these civilizations existed. But these five civilizations were the predecessors to our modern day countries and geographical demarcations. Regardless of which of these is the oldest civilization in the world, some of the most important inventions and discoveries, like farming or pottery can be credited to these civilizations.

By Tulika Nair SOURCE:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/oldest-civilization-in-the-world.html

Future of Broadband: Where Data Is Broadcast Using Desk Lamps

             In the future, getting a broadband connection might be as simple as flipping on a light switch. In fact, according to a group of researchers from Germany, the light coming from the lamps in your home could one day encode a wireless broadband signal.

         "The advantage is that you'd be using light that is already there," says Jelena Vučić of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institute in Germany. Vučić and her colleagues have found a way to get the most from this synergy of illumination and information and will be presenting their findings during the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), which will take place March 21-25 in San Diego.

          As of now, the majority of wireless in homes and businesses is achieved through a radio-frequency WiFi connection. But WiFi has limited bandwidth, and it's unclear where to find more in the already-crowded radio spectrum. By contrast, visible-frequency wireless has all the bandwidth one could want. The signal would be generated in a room by slightly flickering all the lights in unison. No one would be bothered by this because the rate of modulation would be millions of times faster than a human eye can see. Since visible light can't go through walls like radio, there would be no unwanted interference from stray signals and less worry of outside hackers.

          Incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can't flicker fast enough, so all the lights would have to be LEDs. Although commercial LEDs have a limited bandwidth of only a few MHz, Vučić and her colleagues were able to increase this bandwidth ten-fold by filtering out all but the blue part of the LED spectrum. With the visible wireless system built in their lab, they downloaded data at a rate of 100 Mbit/s. They have now upgraded the system's receivers and are getting 230 Mbit/s, which is a record for visible wireless using commercial LEDs. Although state-of-the-art radio wireless can achieve comparable speeds, Vučić says they should be able to double their data rate again by employing a more sophisticated modulation signal.



Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100309151503.htm 

Writing Without Keyboard: Handwriting Recognition On the Wrist

            Typing text messages on the mobile phone via the tiny soft keyboard is very cumbersome. How about simply writing it into the air! This idea drove the development of "airwriting" made by computer scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Sensors attached to a glove record hand movements, a computer system captures relevant signals and translates them into text.



         For the further development of mobile interfaces based on these ideas Professor Tanja Schultz and Dipl.-Inform. Christoph Amma received the "Google Faculty Research Award," worth $ 81.000.

         The system offers a new interface for wearable computing applications. These are computer systems worn like clothes, which can be integrated seamlessly into the everyday life of the user. "Information technology is used any time and anywhere, but smart phones are still working on the basis of virtual keyboards and small screens. However, gestures allow for new types of input -- in particular for mobile devices or devices integrated in clothing. The interaction is embedded seamlessly in everyday life," says doctoral student Christoph Amma, who has developed the system at the Cognitive Systems Lab (CSL) of KIT. "The airwriting glove is used to write letters into air, as if using an invisible board or pad."

         For this purpose, acceleration sensors and gyroscopes are attached to the thin glove. Contrary to systems based on cameras, these sensors are very small, mobile, and robust. They record the movements of the hand and transmit them to a computer system via a wireless connection. The computer system first checks whether the user is indeed writing. "All movements that are not similar to writing, such as cooking, doing laundry, waving to someone, are ignored. The system runs in the background without interpreting every movement as computer input," says Amma. The computer scientist thinks that the device is perfectly suited for future mixed-reality applications.

         For instance, in glasses with integrated miniaturized screens, news may be displayed to the user in the field of vision. "When such a system is combined with the possibility to input commands and texts by gestures, you do not even need a hand-held device," emphasizes Amma.

         During writing, the airwriting system decodes the letters by a pattern recognition method. Previous approaches mainly focused on the recognition of single gestures assigned to certain commands. Amma's approach goes far beyond: For every letter of the alphabet, a statistical model of the characteristic signal pattern is stored. It also takes into account individual differences in the writing style.

         The system can recognize complete sentences written in capital letters and presently has a vocabulary of 8000 words. "The system has an error rate of 11%. When it is adapted to the individual writing style of the user, the error rate drops to 3%," Christoph Amma says. Scientists are now working on further refining the method to filter out writing. Moreover, they want to make the system smaller in order to increase wearing comfort and user acceptance.

                              "This can be achieved with commercial components. An unobtrusive wrist band might be feasible, for example," says Christoph Amma. It is also planned to integrate the system in smart phones. In this case, neither the wrist band nor the tiny soft keyboard would be required to writea text message.



Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130221091856.htm

Robotic Fish Gain New Sense

Robotic Fish Gain New Sense: Navigate Water Currents and Turbulenc

            Scientists have developed robots with a new sense -lateral line sensing. All fish have this sensing organ but so far it had no technological counterpart on human-made underwater vehicles.

 

            In an article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, researchers describe a robotic fish that is controlled with the help of lateral line sensors.

            During the last 4 years, the EU funded European research project FILOSE has investigated fish lateral line sensing and locomotion with the aims of understanding how fish detect and exploit flow features, and of developing efficient underwater robots based on biological principles.

            Though flow is a highly volatile and unsteady state of matter, it can nonetheless be measured and characterized based on many salient features that do not change much in space and time (such as flow direction or turbulence intensity, for example). These salient features can then be described as a "flowscape" -- a flow landscape that helps fish and robots to orient themselves, navigate and control their movements.

            "So far flow in robotics is treated as a disturbance that drives the robots away from their planned course," says Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa, the Scientific Coordinator of the FILOSE project. "We have shown that flow is also a source of information that can be exploited to better control the vehicle. Also, flow can be a source of energy if we can understand the flow dynamics and interact with eddies and currents in a clever way."

             Experiments with flow sensing and actuation in FILOSE have demonstrated that a fish robot can save energy by finding energetically favorable regions in the flow where the currents are weaker or by interacting with eddies so that they help to push the robot forward. The robots are also able to detect flow direction and swim upstream or hold station in the flow while compensating for the downstream drift by measuring the flow speed. FILOSE robot hovering in the wake of an object in the flow is demonstrated to reduce its energy consumption. "It is similar to reducing your effort in the tailwind of another cyclist or reducing the fuel consumption of your car by driving behind a truck," Prof. Kruusmaa says.

            Several prototype artificial lateral lines and robot actuators were developed in FILOSE to experimentally investigate different aspects of sensing and locomotion in fluids, such as how to use compliant materials to efficiently swim in turbulence, how to build robots that are mechanically simple but still behave like fish, how to interpret flow features and use them for controlling the vehicles, and how to measure robot's own motion from the flow signals.

            The FILOSE project has contributed to our understanding of the "fish-centric" viewpoint of the aquatic environment. "Robotic experiments have also helped us to understand fish behaviour," says FILOSE collaborator Prof. William Megill, who led the University of Bath's contribution to the project. "By recording flow sensor data from a robotic fish head which we've programmed to move like a real fish in similar flow conditions, we are able to understand what fish are able to perceive."

             The lateral line sensing fish robots have been a joint effort of experts in fish biology (University of Bath, UK), underwater robotics (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), mechanical engineering (Riga Technical University, Latvia), signal analysis and flow perception (Verona University, Italy) and of sensor technology (Italian Institute of Technology).


Source: 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130306084201.htm

 

Green Tea

Green Tea Extract Interferes With the Formation of Amyloid Plaques in Alzheimer's Disease

            Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a new potential benefit of a molecule in green tea: preventing the misfolding of specific proteins in the brain.

 

                   The aggregation of these proteins, called metal-associated amyloids, is associated with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.

      A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explained how U-M Life Sciences Institute faculty member Mi Hee Lim and an interdisciplinary team of researchers used green tea extract to control the generation of metal-associated amyloid-β aggregates associated with Alzheimer's disease in the lab.

       The specific molecule in green tea, epigallocatechin-3-gallate, also known as EGCG, prevented aggregate formation and broke down existing aggregate structures in the proteins that contained metals -- specifically copper, iron and zinc.

       "A lot of people are very excited about this molecule," said Lim, noting that the EGCG and other flavonoids in natural products have long been established as powerful antioxidants. "We used a multidisciplinary approach. This is the first example of structure-centric, multidisciplinary investigations by three principal investigators with three different areas of expertise."The research team included chemists, biochemists and biophysicists.

        While many researchers are investigating small molecules and metal-associated amyloids, most are looking from a limited perspective, said Lim, assistant professor of chemistry and research assistant professor at the Life Sciences Institute, where her lab is located and her research is conducted."But we believe you have to have a lot of approaches working together, because the brain is very complex," she said.

        The PNAS paper was a starting point, Lim said, and her team's next step is to "tweak" the molecule and then test its ability to interfere with plaque formation in fruit flies."We want to modify them for the brain, specifically to interfere with the plaques associated with Alzheimer's," she said.

        Lim plans to collaborate with Bing Ye, a neurobiologist in the LSI. Together, the researchers will test the new molecule's power to inhibit potential toxicity of aggregates containing proteins and metals in fruit flies.

        Other authors of the paper, all from U-M, are: Sanghyun Lee and Jung-Suk Choi of the Life Sciences Institute; Alaina DeToma, Suk-Joon Hyung, Akiko Kochi and Brandon Ruotoloa of the Department of Chemistry; and Jeffrey Brender, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy and Subramanian Vivekanandan of the Department of Chemistry and Biophysics.

        The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative, American Heart Association, and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation Study.


Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305145137.htm

 

Wireless Power Transfer

       The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Railroad Research Institute have developed a wireless power transfer technology that can be applied to high capacity transportation systems such as railways,harbor freight, and airport transportation and logistics. The technology supplies 60kHz and 180kW of power remotely to transport vehicles at a stable, constant rate.


        KAIST and KRRI have just successfully showcased the wireless power transfer technology to the public by testing it on the railroad tracks at Osong Station in Korea. Originally, this technology was developed as part of an electric vehicle system introduced by KAIST in 2011 known as the On-line Electric Vehicle.

        OLEV does not need to be parked at a charging station to have a fully powered battery. It gets charged while running, idling, and parking, enabling a reduction in size of the reserve battery down to one-fifth of the battery on board a regular electric car. The initial models of OLEV, a bus and a tram, receive 20 kHz and 100 kW power at an 85% transmission efficiency rate while maintaining a 20cm air gap between the underbody of vehicle and the road surface. OLEV complies with the national and international standards of 62.5 mG, a safety net for electromagnetic fields. In July 2013, for the first time since its development, OLEV will run on a regular road, an inner city route in the city of Gumi, requiring 40 minutes of driving each way.
         
         This technology demonstration offers further support that OLEV can be utilized for large-scale systems. Professor Dong-Ho Cho, Director of Center for Wireless Power Transfer Technology Business Development at KAIST, explained the recent improvements to OLEV:
"We have greatly improved the OLEV technology from the early development stage by increasing its power transmission density by more than three times. The size and weight of the power pickup modules have been reduced as well. We were able to cut down the production costs for major OLEV components, the power supply, and the pickup system, and in turn, OLEV is one step closer to being commercialized."
If trains receive power wirelessly, the costs of railway wear and tear will be dramatically reduced. There will be no power rails, including electrical poles, required for the establishment of a railway system, and accordingly, lesser space will be needed. Tunnels will be built on a smaller scale, lowering construction costs. In addition, it will be helpful to overcome major obstacles that discourage the construction of high speed railway systems such as noise levels and problems in connecting pantograph and power rails.
      
       KAIST and KRRI plan to apply the wireless power transfer technology to trams in May and high speed trains in September.


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Getting in Tune: Researchers Solve Tuning Problem for Wireless Power Transfer Systems:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515104634.htm 

Artificially Structured Metamaterials May Boost Wireless Power Transfer

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120312192758.htm 

Novel Artificial Material Could Facilitate Wireless Power

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110523124218.htm 

Wireless Power

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power 

 http://www.mit.edu/~soljacic/wireless_power.html

 

Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSz4NNhJdJo 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvZoP7T0vC4 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1UT4NuygmQ