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Space Shuttle Enterprise Makes Its Final Flight

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Space Shuttle Enterprise Rides a 747 Over New York Dan Bracaglia

The Space Shuttle Enterprise flew over New York today, piggyback-style, on its way to its retirement at the USS Intrepid Museum. PopPhoto's Dan Bracaglia, who lives in New Jersey, took these lovely photos as the shuttle and its 747 passed up the Hudson.


The Space Shuttles, having served valiantly, are currently being retired to museums and institutions around the country. Each retirement comes with a dose of pageantry like today's. Enterprise flew past the Statue of Liberty, up the Hudson, over the George Washington Bridge, and landed at JFK airport, where it was greeted by exuberant crowds. It will be displayed at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

Last week, we saw a similar piggyback flight as Discovery was transported from Florida to Washington, DC.


Video: A 3-D Printed Exoskeletal Glove Gives Precision Control of a Super-Strong Robot Arm

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Festo's ExoHand Festo

German robot maker Festo is having a good week. After thoroughly impressing us with its oddly graceful robot that flies by turning itself inside out, now its robotic manipulator hand grabbed our attention. We've seen things like ExoHand before of course, but this exoskeletal control mechanism is unique in its dexterity and the fact that the controllers glove is 3-D printed for precise fit, feel, and control.

The robot arm itself is notably dexterous, enabled by the exoskeletal control glove that's the real innovation here. It's made by taking a scan of the user's hand and printing a custom-fit glove out of polyamide plastic that ensures a custom fit. That in turn helps to not only make the control inputs as precise as possible, but makes the tactile feedback more realistic as well.

Via two-way pneumatics, the user feels what the robot feels via force feedback applied to the user's hand via the ExoHand glove. So when handling an object with the robotic arm, the user can sense how hard the arm is gripping the object, etc. The robot arm can amplify the force exerted by the user to make it a much stronger analog for the human's movement, but the super-precise feedback between human and machine allowed by the 3-D printed glove ensures that this boost in strength is kept under perfect control.

[New Scientist]

Super-Precise Laser Scalpel Minimizes Collateral Damage

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Laser Endoscope At left, the packaged endoscope is shown overlaid with the optical system. At right, an image taken with the probe's two-photon fluorescence microscope shows cells in a 70-micrometer-thick piece of vocal cord from a pig. The scale bar is 10 micrometers. Ben-Yakar Group, University of Texas at Austin

An ultra-fast tiny laser can work as a miniature scalpel inside the body, making careful incisions or excisions while leaving healthy tissue intact. It is more effective than a doctor's metal scalpel or even other laser devices, according to its developers at the University of Texas, because it leaves more healthy cells alone.

The device includes a femtosecond laser - that's 200 quadrillionths of a second per pulse - which can accurately target diseased or damaged cells. The endoscope-based device works with two-photon fluorescence microscopy to see individual cells at high resolution, and surgeons can target tissue at the cellular or even nuclear level.

Laser surgery has been around for several years, with clinical applications like the CyberKnife used for precise surgical removal of cancerous tumors. But current laser surgery technology is only so precise, and surrounding healthy tissue suffers, as it does with a typical knife. Tumors in the brain, spinal cord, kidneys and other organs is difficult or impossible with existing laser technology - although there are options for gamma radiation or other treatments. This new prototype could dramatically improve medical lasers' precision.

It can even fit inside traditional endoscopes, which are used to peer inside the body with a camera. The research team, led by Adela Ben-Yakar at UT-Austin, is treating scarred vocal folds with a probe tailored for the larynx, and completing nanosurgery on brain neurons and synapses and cellular organelles, according to a news release.

The researchers will present their work at this year's Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics next month.

[via Science Daily]

The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, April 23-27, 2012

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Meteor Shower This amazing photo was taken by photographer Brad Goldpaint of the Lyrid meteor shower over the rim of Crater Lake in Oregon. Check out Brad's site for more pics. Brad Goldpaint

This week's amazing image roundup takes us from the ocean of flowers in China's Yunnan province to the rim of Oregon's Crater Lake, from a macro view of the Milky Way to a very close-up view of the inside of an elephant. Enjoy!


Click to launch the gallery.

Video: ISS Soars Above Beautiful Auroras, Lightning and Stormy Weather Back on Earth

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ISS Over the Clouds via YouTube

For your morning viewing pleasure, we bring you another beautiful video of one of the rarest views in the universe - Earth lit up from below as the International Space Station soars 220 miles above.

The video contains a series of time-lapse sequences captured by the crew of Expedition 30 aboard the ISS. It starts over the southern United States and moves toward the American West and into Canada; then you see central Europe toward the Middle East, starting at 21 seconds in. There are amazing lightning storms, rains over Africa, the southern aurora over the Indian Ocean, a setting moon - and even Comet Lovejoy makes an appearance.

The song is called "Walking in the Air," by Howard Blake, in case you're wondering.

NASA posts these videos on occasion, and although they may be similar, each is so unique that I stop what I'm doing and stare. Especially when the spangled arm of the Milky Way shows up on the horizon, serving as a reminder that our planet really is so very small.

[NASA]

This Week in the Future, April 23-27, 2012

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This Week in the Future, April 23-27, 2012 Baarbarian

Did you know that pigeons soared with such grace, determination and (literal) magnetism? We were pleased to find the hidden nobility in the much-maligned avian. Other airborne news this week included sky-high wind turbines, drones, and free-falling humans.

Want to win this airborne Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

Meet Silicene, Single-Atom-Thick Sheets of Silicon That Could Supersede Graphene

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Silicon Atom Like carbon, silicon has four valence electrons, and the two elements share some similarities. Wikimedia Commons

Silicene could be the material of the future. Or at least the material of the near future, until graphene-based semiconductors become more efficient.

A team of European researchers claims to be the first to synthesize silicene, a new allotrope of element No. 14 that forms two-dimensional single-atom sheets rather than three-dimensional crystals. This could be good news for the semiconductor industry.

While graphene is the most conductive material in existence, its lack of a band gap can actually be a hindrance when you're trying to build an effective transistor. IBM has shown it's possible to build graphene transistors, but it may be a while before this type of research percolates from the lab to the factory. Silicene's one-atom-thick structure could be even more effective in building faster transistors and computers, partly because of how its electrons are arranged.

A silicene sheet has a buckled honeycomb structure, seen below, in which a few atoms are arranged above and below the main sheet. Electrons in these locations have distinct energies, and when a voltage is applied, they can jump across the gap, allowing silicene to serve as an on-off transistor. Silicene sheets would thereby bring silicon's superb on-off abilities to the smallest scales possible, while remaining compatible with existing fabrication processes and existing electronics. That's something graphene can't do, at least not yet.

A new paper describes how a team led by Guy Le Lay at Aix-Marseille University in France created silicene sheets on a silver substrate. Just as predicted, the material had a buckled honeycomb structure, which the researchers verified using scanning tunneling microscopy and angular-resolved photoemission spectroscopy.

At least four research groups have claimed to grow silicene on silver substrates before this, but the team led by Le Ley claim to be the first to have clear, microscopic proof. The next step is to grow silicene on insulators to further examine its properties.

The paper by Le Ley et al. appears in Physical Review Letters.

[via Extreme Tech]

Bandages Made of Edible Starch Could Dissolve On Your Skin Once You're Healed

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Duct Tape Bandage There is a better way. ktylerconk via Flickr
No need to peel them off

Finely spun starch fibers woven into a bandage could dissolve on your skin and be absorbed by your body, eliminating the sting and hassle of ripping it off in one fast motion. Starch fibers could also be used to produce toilet paper, napkins and other biodegradable products, according to researchers at Penn State.

Food science researchers dissolved starch into a fluid, then spun it into long strands that can be woven into mats, according to a university news release. Anyone who has ever dissolved starch in water knows it can have some awesome physical properties, but the resulting thick paste is not that useful beyond a fun experiment or maybe thickening some soup.

To spin it into thin threads, the Penn State researchers added a solvent to help the starch break down more readily. The solvent allowed it to maintain its molecular structure, and the researchers used an electrospinning device to spin the material into long strands. The fibers could then be woven like any other fiber into a wide range of materials, from bandages to paper.

If they're used as a bandage, the starch fibers could simply degrade into glucose after some time and be absorbed by the body, according to grad student Lingyan Kong, who led this research. No more ripping off a Band-Aid. The fibers could serve other functions where other polymers, like cellulose or petroleum-based plastics, are typically used.

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and now the Penn State team is applying for a patent.

[via PhysOrg]


Video: Herb the Robot Butler Microwaves Your Dinner For You

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Dinner is Served CMU Robotics

They can fetch sandwiches just fine, but robots can have a hard time cooking meals, with proper pancake flipping a serious and daunting challenge. So why not have them take a decidedly human-like lazy tack and use the microwave instead?

Robotics programmers at Carnegie Mellon University have taught their robot butler to zap a meal. For some strange reason, he uses a normal microwave instead of the spinning lasers embedded in his head.

Herb, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, is designed to bring robotics out of the factory and into the home by testing tasks that a person would want a robot to actually do. Siddhartha Srinivasa's research group has taught it to complete certain tasks, and they've studied how humans perceive its helpfulness when it works properly and when it makes mistakes.

Herb is a humanoid robot built on a Segway platform, which uses spinning lasers that produce 40,000 points per second to produce a three-dimensional view of the environment. This way it can work safely alongside humans and navigate through a kitchen or any other environment designed for people. In the video below, Herb successfully microwaves a frozen entree using the same microwave the CMU Robotics students use. Handy!

[via IEEE Spectrum]

Mexican Electro-Receptacle Dispenses Free Wi-Fi in Exchange for Deposits of Dog Poo

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Terra Poo

You'd think the prospect of clean grass would be enough to induce good behavior, but still, some dog owners neglect to pick up after their animals. A new concept gives people another incentive: Free WiFi in exchange for your dog's poop.


It's a good idea - throwing away dog poop equates to minutes of free public Internet access. A video below on behalf of Terra, a Mexican Internet firm, explains how it would work.

When people throw away poop, a "sophisticated system" translates the weight of the poop into free minutes of WiFi. The more poop, the more free Internet. As you can see in the video, the owners of Saint Bernards would be very happy. Owners of small dogs may be tempted to do some weird bowel-area massaging to get more free minutes.

Users would get WiFi signals via dog bone-shaped dongles inserted on the grass, in trees or in other spots near where people might congregate. Then, along with getting free WiFi, people can walk happily through the parks and avoid stepping in dog waste. You could conceivably throw away anything else heavy, too, but the incentive is for dog poop here, not your old stereo or whatever.

Check out the explanation below (in Spanish).

[via Co.Exist]

Morphable Concert Hall Ceiling Shape-Shifts For Superbly Customized Sound

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Resonant Chamber A prototype of the Resonant Chamber morphing ceiling, with wiring at left and the acoustic panels seen from below, at right. RVTR

Despite creative acoustic design, concert halls can't be one-size-fits-all places - all music is different, and some things may just sound better than others in a given location. But this new concept could change all that, morphing the shape and size of ceilings and walls to dynamically adapt to the sound of performers and individual performances.

Design firm RVTR is working on a concept called Resonant Chamber, which works sort of like origami. Tessellated patterns of triangles cover the ceiling, forming "clouds," and are controlled by linear actuators, which can be activated to change their arrangements. The ceiling would have three types of panels, Fast Co. reports: Bamboo plywood to reflect sound, porous plastic to absorb it and a hollow panel with a loudspeaker inside to broadcast it.

RVTR already built a prototype of the design and is now working on a second-generation version that can adapt to live sound in real time. It would use sound-processing software to track sound waves, and could amplify or augment them according to the performance. A band could use the ceiling's reflection and speaker capabilities to add reverb to certain songs, for instance, or an orchestra or choir could amplify melodies automatically. Plus think how cool it will look to have a living, changing ceiling pulsating to the beat along with the stage lights.

The company aims to build a 1,000-square-foot installation next, Fast Co. reports. Check out their video below.

[via Fast Company]

Using Big Data and Genomics to Create the Ultimate Dairy Cow

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Building Better Dairy Cows Brian Robert Marshall via Wikimedia

What happens when you mash up Big Data, genomics, and a whole lot of Holstein dairy cows? You get the best bull in America. In The Atlantic today there's a great piece on Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, the Holstein bull that science says is the best among America's 8 million dairy cows.

This story is as much about data as it is genomics or selective breeding. Freddie, as the bull is known, isn't so much a product of any special circumstances as he is a consequence of years and years of meticulous record keeping in the dairy business that has generated enough data to allow researchers to connect the dots between certain markers in the genome and the relatively few physical traits desired by dairy producers--milk production, protein in the milk, longevity, fat in the milk, udder quality, etc. These data-driven projections are turning out to be very accurate and therefore very useful to dairy farmers looking to get the most out of their cows. The economics of breeding better milk-producing machines is in turn also breeding more science and feeding even more data into the system.

This kind of big data analysis of the 50,000 markers on the cow genome that are regularly examined within the industry makes the Holstein dairy cow something like the 21st-century equivalent of Gregor Mendel's pea plants, Atlantic editor and writer Alexis Madrigal says in the piece. And this practice of genetically examining sires offers a glimpse of what genomics holds for humans as it matures as a science.

For humans, genomics is still a relatively young discipline, but in the dairy business using genomic data to predict physical outcomes is relatively mature. Geneticists are making real-world predictions about a bull's offspring, and unsurprisingly they are finding that given enough data, they are correct. They can even quantify these genomics, assigning a number--called lifetime net merit--that's presented as a dollar value that defines each bull's potential. That's how we know Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie--or at least his genetic material--is the very best around. And the implications of that are huge.

Read it at The Atlantic.

Amid Controversy, Scientists Publish Recipe For Making More Potent Bird Flu

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Flu Virion This negative-stained transmission electron micrograph (TEM) depicts the ultrastructural details of an influenza virus particle, or virion. Cynthia Goldsmith, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Just a handful of genetic mutations can turn bird flu into a highly infectious pathogen that could wreak havoc on humans, according to a new paper published today. It's the first of two controversial virus mutation papers to get its day in the sun, and it shows how the H5N1 flu could evolve to infect mammals.

To test the virus, researchers led by Masaki Imai and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined elements of avian flu with a recent pandemic human flu, the 2009 variant of H1N1 (you may know it as the swine flu). The new flu was capable of passing from experimental ferret to ferret through the air. (Ferrets are considered the best animal model of how flu works in humans.) The sick ferrets lost weight and had respiratory lesions, but they did not die.

"The findings described here will advance our understanding of the mechanisms and evolutionary pathways that contribute to avian influenza virus transmission in mammals," the authors write.

To understand what's so dangerous about this virus, it helps to understand a bit about how the flu and its variants work. The name describes the molecular components of the virus; so H5N1 flu, for example, is a variant with type 5 hemagglutinin and type 1 neuraminidase proteins.

Humans have no immunity to flu viruses with a type 5 hemagglutinin. If it were to spread among people, a pandemic would likely ensue. But while H5N1 flu has been around in poultry for at least 16 years, there are only a handful of reports of human cases. The human cases have been unusually severe - at least compared with other animal-transmitted flu viruses - but the lack of a human-to-human transmission raised some questions about whether this flu could really adapt to infect us. Perhaps the H5 protein didn't work very well in mammalian cells.

This research helped answer that question. Not only could an H5 flu indeed mutate to become transmissible among mammals, it only required four mutations to do so.

The researchers carefully figured which mutations would help the virus shift to a variant that would thrive in humans. Their paper is freely available online today, published by the journal Nature.

The scientists are also careful to note that their mutant virus possessed many human-virus traits, which might not exist in any naturally evolving H5 virus. What's more, H5 viruses lack certain amino acids that would help them reproduce in mammals. And it's not clear that the virus, if it evolved to infect humans on its own, would follow a similar pathway. Still, the crucial point is that it didn't take very much mutation at all.


This work is important because understanding the genetic mechanisms for this mutation could go a long way in fighting the disease if it does ever evolve naturally. Still, who should get to read it? Is it too dangerous to publish in the public domain, and is it something that should be left in the lab? The work was held on hiatus for a few months as scientists and security experts debated these questions. The prospect of censoring it raised alarm bells among scientists and freedom of information advocates, while experts pointed out that it would probably get out anyway. "Any restricted information distributed to university laboratories would not stay confidential for long," as Nature's editorial board pointed out today.

Nature also quotes biosecurity experts who believe the information should be shared. "There has been a striking unanimity: where there is a benefit to public health or science, publish!" the editorial board wrote.

Nature commissioned a risk-assessment document from an agency outside the U.S. to determine the risks inherent in publishing this work. "There is no doubt that this information could be used by an exceptionally competent laboratory to provide the foundation for a program to develop a pandemic strain of this virus," the journal found. Yet, "this paper does not provide sufficient information to produce fully competent dangerous pathogen."

They repeat the authors' refrain that there's no evidence, at least not right now, that this version of the redesigned virus would be fully pathogenic in humans.

And the payoff could be great, the report found. Biosecurity experts will be able to use this paper to further their own research, and it could help them understand what they're up against if anyone did try to weaponize the bird flu. In our connected world, it could even save lives.

"It represents a building block in the construction of an effective vaccine, in anticipation of the emergence of a fully competent natural variant," the report reads.

Not everyone agrees with this, of course. Some virologists have criticized the publication in the name of safety. In an editorial in Science in January, virologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota and D.A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh expressed doubts: "The desire to disseminate the entirety of the methods and results of the two H5N1 studies in the general scientific literature will not materially increase our ability to protect the public's health from a future H5N1 pandemic," they wrote. Osterholm has also criticized the review processes at the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which initially recommended censoring the two papers and then recommended publication.

As virologists read the fine details now that they're published, there's bound to be more fallout and debate. Stay tuned for updates.

The First Drug Made by Genetically Modified Plants is Approved for Human Use by the FDA

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Carrots are Good for You Your next biologic drug treatment could be grown in a carrot cell or some other plant-based biological factory. Kander via Wikimedia

Big news on the pharma front today: for the first time the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has approved a drug for humans that was produced in a genetically engineered plant cell. The approval could open the door to a range of biologic drugs that are generated in plant cells and then transferred to human patients.

The drug, called Elelyso, is a treatment for a disorder known as Gaucher disease that results from the lack of a specific enzyme. Engineers at Israeli biotech firm Protalix Biotherapeutics figured out how to grow this enzyme in carrot cells by inserting a specific gene into them that encodes for this human enzyme. In trials, subjects who received the "bio-pharmed" version of the enzyme showed improvement comparable to that of subjects given another treatment for Gaucher disease derived from hamster cells.

The ability to manipulate the genes of plant cells to produce certain human enzymes isn't new, but up until now concerns about human biologics derived from plant cells have kept them from gaining traction with the FDA. But plant-derived biologic treatments have proven successful in drugs given to animals in recent years, and for the first time the FDA seems to have softened its skepticism toward bio-pharmed treatments.

For those suffering from Gaucher disease (it's a lysosomal storage disorder, in case you were curious) that means another treatment option, and one not susceptible to pathogens that can affect mammalian cell stocks and lead to a shortage of usable drugs--shortages that have actually occurred in recent years. But the bigger impact is in the world of bio-pharming itself. Now that plant-derived human biologics have a foot in the door with the FDA, researchers think they can create enzymes to treat a variety of disorders using bio-pharming techniques.

[Nature]

What Part of Our Brain Makes Us Human?

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The Loebner Prize for Most Human Computer The Loebner Prize is an annually conducted enactment of the Turing test for artificial intelligence. Loebner.net
In his book The Most Human Human, Brian Christian looks at the artificial intelligences we've built, and what they say about us

Brian Christian's book The Most Human Human, newly out in paperback, tells the story of how the author, "a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy," set out to win the "Most Human Human" prize in a Turing test weighing natural against artificial intelligence. Along the way, as he prepares to prove to a panel of judges (via an anonymous teletype interface) that he is not a machine, the book provides a sharply reasoned investigation into the nature of thinking. Are we setting ourselves up for failure by competing with machines in their analytical, logical areas of prowess rather than nurturing our own human strengths?

The Turing test attempts to discern whether computers are, to put it most simply, "like us" or "unlike us": humans have always been preoccupied with their place among the rest of creation. The development of the computer in the twentieth century may represent the first time that this place has changed.

The story of the Turing test, of the speculation and enthusiasm and unease over artificial intelligence in general, is, then, the story of our speculation and enthusiasm and unease over ourselves. What are our abilities? What are we good at? What makes us special? A look at the history of computing technology, then, is only half of the picture. The other half is the history of mankind's thoughts about itself.

[. . .]

Hemispheric Chauvinism: Computer and Creature

"The entire history of neurology and neuropsychology can be seen as a history of the investigation of the left hemisphere," says neurologist Oliver Sacks.

One important reason for the neglect of the right, or "minor," hemisphere, as it has always been called, is that while it is easy to demonstrate the effects of variously located lesions on the left side, the corresponding syndromes of the right hemisphere are much less distinct. It was presumed, usually contemptuously, to be more "primitive" than the left, the latter being seen as the unique flower of human evolution. And in a sense this is correct: the left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialised, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognising reality which every living creature must have in order to survive. The left hemisphere, like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain, is designed for programs and schematics; and classical neurology was more concerned with schematics than with reality, so that when, at last, some of the right-hemisphere syndromes emerged, they were considered bizarre.

The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran echoes this sentiment:

The left hemisphere is specialized not only for the actual production of speech sounds but also for the imposition of syntactic structure on speech and for much of what is called semantics--comprehension of meaning. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, doesn't govern spoken words but seems to be concerned with more subtle aspects of language such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity--skills that are inadequately emphasized in our elementary schools but that are vital for the advance of civilizations through poetry, myth and drama. We tend to call the left hemisphere the major or "dominant" hemisphere because it, like a chauvinist, does all the talking (and maybe much of the internal thinking as well), claiming to be the repository of humanity's highest attribute, language.

"Unfortunately," he explains, "the mute right hemisphere can do nothing to protest."

Slightly to One Side

This odd focus on, and "dominance" of, the left hemisphere, says arts and education expert (and knight) Sir Ken Robinson, is evident in the hierarchy of subjects within virtually all of the world's education systems:

At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to; we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

That side, of course, being the left.

The American school system "promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability," says Robinson. If the left hemisphere, as Sacks puts it, is "like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain," then by identifying ourselves with the goings-on of the left hemisphere, by priding ourselves on it and "locating" ourselves in it, we start to regard ourselves, in a manner of speaking, as computers. By better educating the left hemisphere and better valuing and rewarding and nurturing its abilities, we've actually started becoming computers.

[. . .]

Centering Ourselves

We are computer tacked onto creature, as Sacks puts it. And the point isn't to denigrate one, or the other, any more than a catamaran ought to become a canoe. The point isn't that we're half lifted out of beastliness by reason and can try to get even further through force of will. The tension is the point. Or, perhaps to put it better, the collaboration, the dialogue, the duet.

The word games Scattergories and Boggle are played differently but scored the same way. Players, each with a list of words they've come up with, compare lists and cross off every word that appears on more than one list. The player with the most words remaining on her sheet wins. I've always fancied this a rather cruel way of keeping score. Imagine a player who comes up with four words, and each of her four opponents only comes up with one of them. The round is a draw, but it hardly feels like one . . . As the line of human uniqueness pulls back ever more, we put the eggs of our identity into fewer and fewer baskets; then the computer comes along and takes that final basket, crosses off that final word. And we realize that uniqueness, per se, never had anything to do with it. The ramparts we built to keep other species and other mechanisms out also kept us in. In breaking down that last door, computers have let us out. And back into the light.

Who would have imagined that the computer's earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity held to be what made us most different from everything on the planet? That it could drive a car and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could make plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-plausible postmodern theory essays* before it could be shown a chair and say, as any toddler can, "chair"?

We forget what the impressive things are. Computers are reminding us.

One of my best friends was a barista in high school: over the course of the day she would make countless subtle adjustments to the espresso being made, to account for everything from the freshness of the beans to the temperature of the machine to the barometric pressure's effect on the steam volume, meanwhile manipulating the machine with octopus-like dexterity and bantering with all manner of customers on whatever topics came up. Then she goes to college, and lands her first "real" job--rigidly procedural data entry. She thinks longingly back to her barista days--a job that actually made demands of her intelligence.

I think the odd fetishization of analytical thinking, and the concomitant denigration of the creatural--that is, animal--and embodied aspect of life is something we'd do well to leave behind. Perhaps we are finally, in the beginnings of an age of AI, starting to be able to center ourselves again, after generations of living "slightly to one side."

Besides, we know, in our capitalist workforce and precapitalist-workforce education system, that specialization and differentiation are important. There are countless examples, but I think, for instance, of the 2005 book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, whose main idea is to avoid the bloody "red oceans" of strident competition and head for "blue oceans" of uncharted market territory. In a world of only humans and animals, biasing ourselves in favor of the left hemisphere might make some sense. But the arrival of computers on the scene changes that dramatically. The bluest waters aren't where they used to be.

Add to this that humans' contempt for "soulless" animals, their unwillingness to think of themselves as descended from their fellow "beasts," is now cut back on all kinds of fronts: growing secularism and empiricism, growing appreciation for the cognitive and behavioral abilities of organisms other than ourselves, and, not coincidentally, the entrance onto the scene of a being far more soulless than any common chimpanzee or bonobo--in this sense AI may even turn out to be a boon for animal rights.

Indeed, it's entirely possible that we've seen the high-water mark of the left-hemisphere bias. I think the return of a more balanced view of the brain and mind--and of human identity--is a good thing, one that brings with it a changing perspective on the sophistication of various tasks.

It's my belief that only experiencing and understanding truly disembodied cognition, only seeing the coldness and deadness and disconnectedness of something that truly does deal in pure abstraction, divorced from sensory reality, only this can snap us out of it. Only this can bring us, quite literally, back to our senses.

One of my graduate school advisers, poet Richard Kenney, describes poetry as "the mongrel art-speech on song," an art he likens to lichen: that organism which is actually not an organism at all but a cooperation between fungi and algae so common that the cooperation itself seemed a species. When, in 1867, the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener first proposed the idea that lichen was in fact two organisms, Europe's leading lichenologists ridiculed him--including Finnish botanist William Nylander, who had taken to making allusions to "stultitia Schwendeneriana," fake botanist-Latin for "Schwendener the simpleton." Of course, Schwendener happened to be completely right. The lichen is an odd "species" to feel kinship with, but there's something fitting about it.

What appeals to me about this notion--the mongrel art, the lichen, the monkey and robot holding hands--is that it seems to describe the human condition too. Our very essence is a kind of mongrelism. It strikes me that some of the best and most human emotions come from this lichen state of computer/creature interface, the admixture, the estuary of desire and reason in a system aware enough to apprehend its own limits, and to push at them: curiosity, intrigue, enlightenment, wonder, awe.

Ramachandran: "One patient I saw--a neurologist from New York--suddenly at the age of sixty started experiencing epileptic seizures arising from his right temporal lobe. The seizures were alarming, of course, but to his amazement and delight he found himself becoming fascinated by poetry, for the first time in his life. In fact, he began thinking in verse, producing a voluminous outflow of rhyme. He said that such a poetic view gave him a new lease on life, a fresh start just when he was starting to feel a bit jaded."

Artificial intelligence may very well be such a seizure.

* "If one examines capitalist discourse, one is faced with a choice: either reject nihilism or conclude that the goal of the writer is social comment, given that the premise of Foucaultist power relations is valid." Or, "Thus, the subject is interpolated into a nihilism that includes consciousness as a paradox." Two sentences of infinitely many at www.elsewhere.org/pomo.

Excerpted from The Most Human Human by Brian Christian Copyright © 2011 by Brian Christian. Excerpted by permission of Anchor, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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'Jetman' Yves Rossy Takes to the Skies Above Rio de Janeiro

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Yves Rossy, Our Favorite 'Jetman,' Takes on Rio de Janeiro

This morning PopSci's favorite Jetman, Yves Rossy, strapped on his four-engine rigid wing, took a helicopter up into the skies above Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and once again let it rip. Leaping from the helicopter over Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Rossy zipped around the skies over Rio for more than 11 minutes, taking in some famous Rio landmarks along the way.

Regular PopSci readers know Rossy as the only person to fashion a powered wing to his back that actually allows him to fly--even to climb--independent of any other mechanism. The carbon-kevlar wing, of Rossy's own design, has already propelled him through the Grand Canyon and across the English Channel--feats that were something more like work. This looks more like vacation.

Moving between roughly 120 and 180 miles per hour throughout the flight, Rossy circled Corcovado (home of the iconic "Christ the Redeemer" statue pictured above) before turning south to snap photo with other well-known locales like Ipanema, Copacabana, and Sugar Loaf Mountain before parachuting directly onto Copacabana beach.

Celebrate Robert Moog's Birthday With a Google Synth

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Moog Doodle Google

Robert Moog, the inventor of the seminal analog audio synthesizer that bears his name, is celebrated by Google today, in one of the search giant's classic time-sucking doodles. Actually tomorrow, May 23, is his birthday, but it's already tomorrow in Australia, Japan, and certain other Google-enabled nations.

Like Moog's best work, it's both very impressive and very fun. A working pitch wheel! You can record and save your performances, and share them--if they're amazing--below.

Video: Amazing Coating For Bottles' Interiors Lets Ketchup Flow Like Water

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LiquiGlide, developed by a team at MIT's Varanasi Research Group, is a surface coating that liberates the notoriously non-Newtonian fluid ketchup from its glass- or plastic-walled prison. The research came in second in MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Challenge, and is almost certainly destined for a bottle near you. Watch its graceful performance below in a video from Fast Co.Exist.

We have seen slippery materials before, but never in so useful an application. Creator Dave Smith tells Fast Co. that the heavily patented coating on the inside of the bottle is "kind of a structured liquid--it's rigid like a solid, but it's lubricated like a liquid."

Here it is with mayo:

[Fast Co.Exist]

New 'Mechanical Metamaterial' Expands When You Compress It, Shrinks When You Stretch It

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Mechanical Metamaterials Could Create Cushions That Push Back Johan via Wikimedia
It's 'opposite day' for metamaterials

Metamaterials research has generally focused on media with strange or unique electromagnetic properties, like the ability to bend light or sound in an unnatural way, but materials scientists at Northwestern University are experimenting with an entirely new kind of material with unique mechanical properties. A team there has designed materials with "negative compressibility" that in theory will compress when they are pulled and expand when they are compressed.

In other words, sit on a cushion and it pushes back against the force of your weight. This sounds counterintuitive, of course, but their design makes some kind of sense. One would expect that any material that behaves this way would be, by definition, unstable--and therefore would collapse into a stable state on its own, thus nullifying whatever characteristics the unstable state possessed. But the Northwestern team designed around this by creating an internal structure that does indeed fall into a stable state. The stable state is just more compressed or expanded than the original state.

That's confusing, so we're going to borrow from New Scientist's explanation (click through for some more thorough visuals). Think of a row of four horizontal particles making up a material that inherently wants to expand. Each is made up of molecules that attract one another to certain and unequal degrees, and that attraction keeps the material from expanding.

The inner two particles share a weak attraction that can be broken when the material is stretched. But when the bond between the inner particles is broken, the outer particles respond by attracting each other even more, creating compression that counters the stretching. But compressing the material brings the two inner particles back together again, re-establishing the weak bond and allowing the material to resume expanding.

It's confusing, but in theory it could work. Someday such materials could be used to coat the outside of military vehicles or shelters to push back against an incoming blast.

[New Scientist]

DARPA and Craig Venter Fire Up Bio-Factories For Quick, Streamlined Genetic Engineering

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Recombinant E. Coli The blue-dyed bacteria contain a special protein that is disrupted when the DNA is spliced and recombined. When the enzyme is interrupted, the bacteria turns white instead of blue. Wellcome Images

Not content to let scientists figure out how to engineer animals and plants depending on the situation, DARPA wants to generalize the process, creating a manufacturing framework for all living things. The "Living Foundries" program sets up an assembly line paradigm for life and its constituent parts, and the DOD's crazy-science arm just handed out its first research grants.

Among the recipients are Caltech, MIT and the J. Craig Venter Institute, a fitting result given the latter group's prior success in creating the first-ever synthetic organism. The full suite of awards was announced May 22, comprising $15.5 million spread among six companies and institutions.

DARPA announced Living Foundries last summer, with a goal toward an engineering framework that could apply to any living thing. Under this program, genetic engineering would no longer be limited to modification of existing organisms - instead, scientists would be able to concoct anything they wanted from scratch, using a suite of ingredients and processes that could apply in any situation. Such a system is better, DARPA argues, than already promising examples of synthetic biology, which are too laborious, lab-specific and expensive to be universally applicable.

In the beginning, Living Foundries creates a basic library of modularized parts that can be assembled in infinite variations. Like computers borne of circuits and wires, endless forms of life could arise from a brew of proteins and DNA - perhaps bacteria that could eat cancer, maybe renewable fuels, and so on. The ultimate goal is a genetic starter set that could be snapped together like so many Legos, forming any system the military might require.

The contract winners will have to come up with this library of parts, as well as a way to test the new bio-products, Danger Room reports. DARPA also wants the teams to compress the biological build, test and design cycle by 10-fold, in both time and cost.

It may not be far-fetched - synthetic biology is already trending toward greater efficiency, both in the engineered organisms themselves and in the tools scientists are using to develop and evaluate them. As one example, consider the cost of genome sequencing now to the Human Genome Project's gargantuan price tag. If the charter members of Living Foundries are successful, bio-engineering will become as efficient as factory production.

[DARPA via Danger Room]

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