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Articles
China's Nanotechnology Threat
Newsmax columnist and author Lev Navrozov (levnavrozov.com) sounded the alarm about China, stating his belief that they are in the process of harnessing nanotechnology that will be used against the West. The United States is ignoring the fact that China is spending billions developing "post nuclear super weapons" through such R & D efforts as Project 863, Navrozov contends.
He suggested that China's ultimate plan would involve the use of "molecular nano assemblers," which are small self-replicating machines capable of moving through the ocean and destroying the US's nuclear submarines. At that point America's ability for "Mutual Assured Destruction" through nuclear weapons would be lost and China could either destroy the US with further nano-weapons or enforce an unconditional surrender, Navrozov outlined.
As to why China wishes to annihilate its lucrative trading partner, Navrozov said that the US is a source of subversion that threatens their dictatorial rule. By bringing the West under their control, they can reduce the threat of internal rebellion such as what happened in Tiananmen Square.
Its name is Asimo. Its purpose global domination?
With one of the most unique opening bell ceremonies in NYSE history, Honda's ASIMO, the world's most advanced humanoid robot, rang the opening bell for trading February 14, 2002. Honda became the first Japanese automaker to list on NYSE in 1977.
Showcasing its technological strength, ASIMO was the first non-human being ever to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Honda is the world's preeminent engine-maker, with 2001 production of more than 12 million engines globally for its diverse line-up of automobiles, motorcycles and power products.
What's in store for humanity? Have we just walked into an episode of the Jetsons, or Lost in Space? Could this be a hint of what we should expect; A total drop in humanity, mixed with a science fiction, horror movie (AI, Matrix / Robo-Cop / Terminator)?
For more information on Asimo use this URL. http://www.world.honda.com/ASIMO
Will we become more machine than man? Robocop is just one example among many that give us a glimpse into a very real future for mankind. Will man become an endangered species?
Technology knows no boundries! We can become easily enslaved by our creations!
"The me that you know, used to have feelings, but what once was their is broken and scorned. The me that you know is now made up of wires, the flesh that was once me, is left to decay." - Trent Reznor
Almost Organic: MIT Develops Life-Like Robotic Creature of the Deep
The Public Anemone likes to drink and bath itself. It's also interested in human faces. (MIT Media Lab) Lean in too close and it will recoil, even closer and it may hiss and shake its tentacles. It may take an interest in your face or hands, or it might choose to wash itself in the nearby waterfall and ignore you. It looks like an oversized sea anemone, but it doesn't exactly behave like one. Instead, the Public Anemone robot follows its own instincts in an interactive, alien-like setting and offers an entertaining study in what robots might become in the future. "Most robots are hard-shelled, minimally expressive and not very organic looking," explains Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. "We wanted to offer something different."
Interactive Robot Theater
From its lifelike skin to its fluid movements to its ability to sense human presence, the Public Anemone is certainly different. Its environment is also designed to intrigue. Its terrarium cycles through six-minute day and night periods, during which an array of robotic creatures come alive. By day, the anemone is active and a waterfall trickles, by night it falls asleep and glowing tubeworms emerge from the soil. Mist rises from a pond, the tubeworms recoil and make musical sounds at the approach of a human finger. Drum crystals create rhythm sequences when they are tapped.
Breazeal envisions more intelligent versions of creatures like the Public Anemone could someday take to the stage in elaborate Broadway productions, or perhaps inside interactive window displays of natural history museums. By creating the bizarre anemone robot and its vivid alien environment Breazeal's team hopes to tap into what makes human-robot interaction tick. "With expressive technology you could have robots on Broadway interacting with actors it is possible," says Breazeal. "It also means robots could probably become a part of our daily lives. We need to make them useful and competent, but we also need to make them compelling and entertaining to be with."
Relating to Robots
It may sound futuristic, but the field of interactive robotics is a fast-growing one as researchers begin to envision a future shared with intelligent robotic beings. Breazeal has become especially well-known among this group for her creation of Kismet, a human-like robot that engages people in natural and expressive face-to-face interaction.
The Public Anemone's intelligent stage includes robotic tubeworms, a waterfall and a pond. ( MIT Media Lab ) "Instead of serving as tools, 'social robots' act more like real creatures," explains Terry Fong, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute who works on social robots. "They are aware of human presence and of social conventions, they exhibit initiative and show personality and emotions."
The Public Anemone was designed to find out if people could relate to a life-like robot, even if it resembled something quite alien to people. Although its design was inspired by something real the sea anemone Andrew Brooks, an MIT graduate student explains, "Most people don't interact with big, underwater life very often." To give the Public Anemone sight, Brooks set up two stereo digital cameras at the top and back walls of its terrarium. The video is funneled into a program that interprets the video, looks for signs of people and feeds the data into a complex behavior model inside the anemone robot.
The robot's vision system can detect the chromatic component of human skin and seeks out human hands and faces. "It likes to watch people's faces and active hands," explains Brooks. "But it also likes to wash, drink and water flowers. All these things act as impute into a complicated computer behavior engine." The robot, itself, is made up of an eight-part spine and five tentacles whose movements are based on data from human animators. The mechanical parts are sheathed in a highly elastic silicone rubber painted to look like real skin.
Other students are working on ways to make robots' skin even more realistic by adding a sense of touch.
Real Robot Skin
"By giving a robot a sense of touch, it's less likely to bump into a wall," explains Dan Stiehl, an undergraduate researcher in MIT's media lab. Stiehl is working to improve on commercial sensors that are now available by making ones that are more flexible and sensitive. By the end of his studies he hopes to create a flexible synthetic skin that can sense heat, pressure and vibration. Public Anemone might someday acquire this sense of touch, but a cast of other lifelike robots is also in the works at Breazeal's lab and could also be candidates for the technology.
In an effort to understand how the aesthetics of a robot affects people's relationship to it, Breazeal's group has created robots with a range of features from human-like to soft and cuddly. But Breazeal and her students follow one rule when designing new machines no robot is made to exactly mimic any known life form. "Everything we do is fanciful that's our philosophy," she explains. "I like to pull attributes from the natural world, but we let robots be their own thing."
Ape 'learns to talk'
A bonobo who has grown up among humans may have developed the ability to talk, claims a research team from the US. The findings, reported in New Scientist magazine, may come under fire from other scientists. But they may further challenge the long-held belief that apes have no language ability. Kanzi is kept at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and, like many other primates, can communicate by pointing at symbols.
"We haven't taught him this - he's doing it on his own". Dr Jared Taglialatela, Georgia State University However, researchers recently noticed that he was also making gentle noises while he interacted with humans. By studying many hours of videotape, Dr Jared Taglialatela and Dr Sue Savage-Rumbaugh spotted four distinct sounds that accompanied particular actions, corresponding to "banana", "grapes", "juice" and "yes". Even in different contexts, the bonobo made the same sounds.
Although the researchers conceded that the emotional state of the bonobo might be to blame, the sound for "yes" stayed the same, even when Kanzi was in different emotional states.
Emotional state
Dr Taglialatela said: "We haven't taught him this - he's doing it on his own. "That emotion is involved doesn't rule out that he's following rules that have some sort of cognitive component." The definition of what actually constitutes "language" is controversial. Some linguists believe that even symbolic communication - which many chimps achieve - qualifies as language, but many now say that some mastery of syntax is also required. Primatologist John Mitani of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said: "Despite the fact that we have had glimmerings of this in the monkey world, few instances of anything like this have been documented among our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos. "There have to be evolutionary precursors to what we do. We are beginning to find them in the primate world."
A bonobo who has grown up among humans may have developed the ability to talk, claims a research team from the US. The findings, reported in New Scientist magazine, may come under fire from other scientists. But they may further challenge the long-held belief that apes have no language ability. Kanzi is kept at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and, like many other primates, can communicate by pointing at symbols.
Future World: Privacy, Terrorists, and Science Fiction
Remember the trial in Alice in Wonderland where the sentence precedes the verdict? Not only did last summer's movie, Minority Report, borrow the theme, but so too does the federal government as it hunts for would-be terrorists. Minority Report takes place in 2054. Its star, Tom Cruise, heads a police unit using futuristic technology and seemingly infallible psychics (or "pre-cogs") to locate people intending to commit murder. The unit's job is to spot these "pre-perpetrators" and then move in, arrest, and incarcerate them before they commit the crime.
The movie, like Alice in Wonderland, is a fantasy. Disturbingly reminiscent of the film, however, is a real-life practice that the city of Wilmington, Del., adopted this past August. The Wilmington policy calls for police to take pictures of people on the streets near the sites of drug busts. Authorities collect the photos along with the names and addresses of these potential pre-perpetrators and add them to a special law-enforcement database. Although most of these bystanders are guilty of no crime, the police deem them more likely than other citizens to commit one in the future.
Total Information Awareness
Much more ominous and ambitious than this local initiative in Delaware is the Pentagon's recently proposed techno-surveillance system, Total Information Awareness. Headed by retired Adm. John Poindexter of Iran-Contra notoriety, the initial million for this project (some think the cost will be million over three years) will help set up a system to "detect, classify, ID, track, understand, pre-empt." The objects of these verbs are possible terrorists, whom Poindexter hopes to spot before they do any harm.
Using supercomputers and data-mining techniques, the TIA will keep records on credit-card purchases, plane flights, e-mails, Web sites, housing, and a variety of other bits of information in the hope of detecting suspicious patterns of activity buying chemicals, renting crop-dusting planes, subscribing to radical newsletters, etc. Once again, the aim is to stop pre-perpetrators before they commit any crime certainly a most worthy goal. The problem is that since the government will collect, integrate and evaluate extensive personal data on all of us, the system will severely compromise our privacy. On top of this, it's doubtful that it will work anyway.
One objection to it that I want to discuss here stems from probability and the obvious fact that the vast majority of people are not terrorists, murderers or drug dealers. Mathematically Flavored Science Fiction A mathematically flavored science fiction scenario about the identification of future terrorists helps make the point.
Assume for the sake of the argument that eventually (maybe by 2054), some system of total information-gathering becomes so uncannily accurate that when it identifies and detains a suspected pre-perpetrator, 99 percent of the time the person would have gone on to commit an actual terrorist act. Furthermore, when this system deems somebody to be harmless, 99 percent of the time the person is indeed harmless. In short, it makes a mistake only once every 100 times.
Now let's say that law enforcement apprehends a person by using this technology. Given these assumptions, you might guess that the person would be almost certain to commit a terrorist act. Right? Well, no. Even with the system's amazing data-mining powers, there is only a tiny probability the apprehended person will go on to become an active terrorist.
The Calculation
To see why this is so and to make the calculations easy, let's postulate a population of 300 million people of whom 1,000 are future terrorists. The system will correctly identify, we're assuming, 99 percent of these 1,000 people as future terrorists. Thus, since 99 percent of 1,000 is 990, the system will apprehend 990 future terrorists. Great! They'll be locked up somewhere. But wait. There are, by assumption, 299,999,000 non-terrorists in our population and the system will be right about 99 percent of them as well. Another way of saying this is that it will be wrong about 1 percent of these people. Since 1 percent of 299,999,000 equals 2,999,990, the system will swoop down on these 2,999,990 innocent people as well as on the 990 guilty ones, incarcerating them all.
That is, the system will arrest almost 3 million innocent people, about 3,000 times the number of guilty ones. And that occurs, remember, only because we're assuming the system has these amazing powers of discernment! If its powers are anything like our present miserable predictive capacities, an even greater percentage of those arrested will be innocent. Of course, this is a fiction and the numbers, percentages and assumptions are open to very serious question. Nevertheless, the fact remains that since almost all people are innocent, the overwhelming majority of the people rounded up using any set of reasonable criteria will be innocent. And even though the system proposes only increased scrutiny rather than incarceration for suspected pre-perpetrators, such scrutiny might very well lead over time to a detailed government dossier on each of us with little if any increase in security.
There are many ways to combat terrorism without entering a futuristic Wonderland devoid of privacy rights. Professor of mathematics at Temple University and adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, John Allen Paulos is the author of several best-selling books, including Innumeracy, and the forthcoming A Mathematician Plays the Market, which will be published in the spring. Then again who's counting?
column on: ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.
Distant Planet Discovery
Astronomers said on January 7, 2003 that they have detected the most distant planet ever by watching its star dim as the planet passed between it and Earth, a new method that could open up the search for small worlds like ours. 'We believe the door has been wide-opened to go and discover a new Earth, planets like our own Earth, with a technique which has been a few years in coming and finally did work,' astrophysicist Dimitar Sasselov said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The most distant known planet, a large and hot world pelted by iron rain and orbiting a star about 5,000 light-years away, has been found with a new and promising search technique. The discovery extends astronomers capabilities for planet hunting beyond the roughly 160 light-years of nearby space in which other planets had been found. The number of stars that can now be examined jumps from 40,000 to 100 million or more, said the scientists involved in the discovery. The planet is about the size of Jupiter
Scientists discover a new species of Jellyfish
In the cold, dark waters north of the Farallon Islands, nearly a mile beneath the surface, scientists have discovered a new species of huge jellyfish with a striking red bell that grows more than a yard wide and has a cluster of wrinkled, fleshy arms instead of streaming tentacles.
They call it Big Red, and its entire life is a mystery. The researchers don't know whether the ones they have observed are males or females, they don't know how they reproduce, and they don't know what they eat or what eats them.
They do know that the jellyfish has anywhere from four to seven thick arms and uses them for eating. It also carries wartlike clusters of stinging cells. They think -- but don't know -- that it may prey on smaller jellies for food.
In a formal scientific report on the new tribe of jellies, marine biologists led by George Matsumoto of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing have announced that so far 23 members of the curious species have been found in the Sea of Cortez, in Monterey Bay itself, off the coast north of the Farallones and off Hawaii and Japan. It appears to live at depths of 2,000 to 4,800 feet, they say.
Only one specimen of Big Red has been collected intact by the scientists so far, and this one is tiny: Its bell is only 8 inches wide, and it now lies pickled in a glass jar for scientists to study at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Matsumoto said.
But using the remote-controlled deep-diving submarine known as an ROV, for Remotely Operated Vehicle, Matsumoto and his team have obtained high- resolution video images of Big Red swimming and have managed to take tissue samples of one, including bits of its bell and its thick feeding appendages called oral arms. They have also begun sequencing its genetic material and have sent the sequence data to the government's National Center for Biotechnology Information.
From their samples, the scientists found that Big Red differs so much from all other species in a much larger family of jellies known as the Ulmaridae that they can call Big Red a unique member of a subfamily that the researchers now call Tiburoniinae.
So, to scientists who classify all living things systematically in their efforts to puzzle out their evolution, Big Red is now a unique species in a unique genus in a unique subfamily within its own larger family. Big Red's evolutionary ancestry and its living relatives -- if any -- must await further analysis of other specimens.
"For now," Matsumoto said in an interview, "the good news is that Big Red is unique and fascinating and exciting, while the bad news is that it takes so much more research work to classify it, to publish what we learn about it, and eventually to understand all the things we don't know about it. But even that's fun, too."
The tissue samples that Matsumoto obtained were collected from a specimen they found swimming next to an offshore volcanic mound on the ocean bottom called the Gumdrop Seamount, about 75 miles northwest of the Farallones.
At first, Matsumoto said, they named their specimen Gumdrop after the seamount, but they decided later to name the unique genus Tiburonia after the name of the Monterey Bay Aquarium research vessel Tiburon, whose crew controls the ROV, and named the species granrojo, meaning Big Red.
Matsumoto's formal report is published in the journal Marine Biology. His colleagues include Kevin Raskoff, a former research fellow at the Monterey Bay institute, and Dhugal Lindsay, of Japan's Marine Science and Technology Center.
