Cutting Edge

An artist's concept of how glaciers on Mars might look.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected what NASA scientists believe are huge glaciers of water ice lying beneath a layer of rocky debris.

The finding is significant because it helps scientists better understand a feature of the Martian surface that has puzzled them for decades. In the 1970s, the Viking orbiters sent back images that showed what have been dubbed "aprons," or large, gently sloping deposits of debris situated at the base of tall geographic formations like cliffs. Several theories for what created these aprons have been posed over the years. This research indicates that what's just beneath that debris is of much greater interest.

To investigate the planet's surface, the MRO spacecraft uses a radar instrument, donated for the project by the Italian Space Agency, that can penetrate the Martian ground. The instrument detected radio waves bouncing off a layer of material beneath the surface that were consistent with what is found in areas covered with water ice glaciers.

One of the things that makes the glaciers so interesting is their location. They're in the middle latitudes, far from the planet's polar caps where other signs of water ice have been discovered. The glaciers observed in this study are in the southern hemisphere, but similar features have been spotted in the same latitude bands in the northern hemisphere. That led researchers to believe that, however the glaciers got there, they're the result of a climate-based phenomenon.

And they're big, too. The glaciers reach for dozens of miles. One is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and is up to a half-mile thick.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that is not in the polar caps," lead author John W. Holt, of the University of Texas at Austin, said in a report.

The findings will be reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Mathematica 7 gets genetic data-processing abilities.

(Credit: Wolfram Research)

Wolfram Research on Tuesday released version 7 of Mathematica, bringing new techniques for image processing, building in the entire human genome, and improving the software's ability to run on multicore processors.

The software, not for the faint of heart at $2,495 for the standard version, began as a mathematical and statistical engine, but it's been sprawling across ever more fields where technical processing is required.

For example, with new image processing abilities, the software can convert patterns at a digital image into numeric data. A basic example would be counting spots and recording the position of each.

Some interesting data sets are now built into the software. One is the entire human genome, so researchers can, for example, find the chromosome location for a particular genetic sequence. Proteins also can be shown as 3D models. Another is global weather data stretching back decades, which the company thinks will be useful for economic and marketing research.

The software can automatically take advantage of multicore processors in some cases, but users can also explicitly direct the software to run multiple tasks in parallel on separate cores, too. Support for four cores is standard, but more can be used as well.

Check Wolfram's site for a longer list of new Mathematica 7 features.

Some of the new features of Mathematica 7 on display.

(Credit: Wolfram Research)

Ray Kurzweil has invented and commercialized a raft of innovative technologies--including a text-to-speech synthesizer, voice recognition software, and a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind--garnering a clutch of awards in the process. He has also written extensively on artificial intelligence and robotics.

In several of his published books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, he describes a vision of the future where machine and human intelligence are increasingly combined, augmenting each other and ultimately, in Kurzweil's view, enabling humans to become both smarter and better. "These technologies can enhance not just our intelligence but our ethical and moral sense, our emotional intelligence, and make us more exemplary of what we consider to be human," he says.

Key to understanding Kurzweil's philosophy is what he dubs "the law of accelerating returns"--or a belief that technological change has an exponential, not linear, progression, and thus information technologies which today seem to be inching forward at a snail's pace will actually reach a tipping point much faster than expected and will accelerate ever more rapidly thereafter, enabling disruptive change in the relatively near term.

"The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller (than the one computer at MIT in 1965) and so that's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we've actually seen in the last 40 years," says Kurzweil.

"The rate is actually speeding up a little bit, so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years--and another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking. So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years."

Silicon.com reporter Natasha Lomas recently caught up with Kurzweil--who finished 14th in this year's Silicon.com Agenda Setters list, to discuss his vision of a man-plus-machine future, what intelligent computers will mean for human society and jobs, and what dangers we might encounter in a world awash with advanced technology.

Q: What is the most exciting technology that you've seen in recent years?
Kurzweil: One industry that is just in the last few years transformed from a pre-information era to becoming an information technology is health and medicine. We have software that's running in our bodies that's thousands of years old or more and it evolved when conditions were very different. For example, the fat insulin receptor gene says "hold onto every single calorie in your fat cells," and that was a good idea 1,000 years ago. It's not a good idea today--it underlies an epidemic of obesity certainly in my country. And what would happen if we turned that gene off?

There are other genes that are necessary for heart disease or cancer to progress that we'd like to turn off and we've come up with a new technology, RNA interference, that can turn off selected genes. We also have new methods of adding new genes so...we can update this outdated software that runs in our bodies. We can also turn on and off enzymes and proteins and really reprogram the information processes of underlying biology--and we can design these interventions on computers rather than just try to find some substance that happens to work and we can then test them out in biological simulators.

Now all of these developments...are in an early stage but they're information technologies so they will advance exponentially not linearly. These technologies will be a thousand times more capable in 10 years, a million times more powerful in 20 years and, according to my models, we'll be adding more than a year every year not just to infant life expectancy but to your remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in rather than running out.

When will the Turing Test be passed? And what will it mean for human society?
Kurzweil: I've been quite consistent that it'll happen by 2029. I think (the rules, that a computer passes the test if it fools the judges 30 percent of the time, are) actually too lenient--in the recent test it fooled the judges 25 percent of the time. Every time they run that test the computers do a little bit better. The first reports (of a computer passing) I probably won't accept it myself...but then as time goes on the computers will pass more and more stringent sets of rules and by 2029 it'll be unarguable that computers have passed. And I do think it's a good test. It's not by the way a test of human consciousness--it's a test of human intelligence, which is something we can objectively measure even though we can argue about how to measure it.

Consciousness is not something we can readily measure in another entity. However, in order for a computer or any entity to pass the Turing Test it has to master human emotion--and human emotion is not some sideshow. What humans do well is both pattern recognition and our emotional thinking, which is a form of recognizing patterns that we find in situations. Getting the joke, being funny, expressing a loving sentiment--these are actually the most complicated things we do, the cutting edge of human intelligence.

In terms of the impact on society, it will be an important threshold but it won't transform things right away...because having a few more equivalents of human intelligence isn't necessarily going to change things. But because non-biological intelligence will be subject to the law of accelerating returns it will continue to progress both in hardware and software because these intelligent entities can access our source code, they can upgrade themselves. Ultimately non-biological intelligence will be much more powerful than biological human intelligence, but it's not an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars--it's coming from our own civilization. And we will use it as we do today to expand our own reach--we will make ourselves smarter. That is what is unique about human beings. We were the first species to create tools to extend our reach and then we use our tools to create more powerful tools and no other species does that.

Will super intelligent machines ever have souls?
Kurzweil: The soul is a synonym for consciousness...and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul--there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property and this would be more than an abstraction because these future entities...will be convincing.

It also won't be clear--you won't be able to walk into a room and say, "OK, humans on the left, machines on the right," because it's going to be all mixed up. You'll have biological humans but they'll have machine processes in their brain, there may be a lot more complexity in the machine intelligence in their brain than the biological portion of their brain. It's not going to be a clear distinction of where humans or biological intelligence stops and machine intelligence starts. (So) we will attribute consciousness to entities even if they have no biology, even if they're fully machine entities: they will seem human, they will seem consciousness, we will attribute souls to them but that's not a scientific statement.

In seeking to create artificial intelligence, why are we attempting to mimic the human brain when machine intelligence necessarily seems to be a very different type of intelligence?
Kurzweil: There are two different approaches to AI and both of them are showing themselves to be successful. One is just to engineer intelligent solutions without consideration of how the brain does it, which is the way we created flying machines without necessarily emulating birds. And a lot of AI---in fact most of it in use today--was done that way. That's because we really couldn't see inside the brain until quite recently--that's another exponential progression. We now have brain scanners that can actually see inside a living brain at the level of individual synapses and interneural connections and can see the neurotransmitters and...see new spines being created as we think our thoughts--so we can see not only our brain create our thoughts but our thoughts create our brain.

We are able now to actually turn this data into working simulations of brain regions--there are two dozen brain regions that have been modeled and simulated...and as we simulate these regions we are learning how the brain produces this intelligence and there's a lot to be learned there. The best example of human intelligence we have is the human brain and as we learn its methods we can add that to our toolkit. It doesn't mean we're going to just copy exactly how a human brain works. We're going to basically apply those principles. That's what engineering does well. As engineering learns scientific principles it can magnify and focus on those principles and dramatically increase their effects.

Is too much technology--and the sheer volume of accessible information--ruining our ability to concentrate?
Kurzweil: Not at all. This old controversy goes back to kids using calculators, not learning arithmetic. But if you don't have to bother with the mechanics of arithmetic you need to think more about the abstractions of how to solve a problem. And the fact that we can access knowledge and automate some of the more mechanical aspects of thinking allows us to think more creatively and creative projects are getting done more rapidly, so we are increasing human creativity with these tools. There's also the phenomena of the wisdom of crowds which the Internet is able to harness. The blogosphere for example--an individual blog may be unreliable but the whole blogosphere is able to uncover the truth about issues much more rapidly...so a crowd can be much wiser than any of the individuals--it's kinda the opposite end of the spectrum from the lynch mob where you have the lowest common denominator of intelligence. But decentralization tends to harness the wisdom of crowds rather than the wisdom of lynch mobs.

Are there any jobs computers/robots/AI could not eventually do better than humans?
Kurzweil: Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans do. (It) will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly but...there's in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they're more complex and actually more satisfying--and we've also invested a lot more in education as a result. So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I'd say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another--none of these jobs existed 50 years ago.

What downsides are there to advanced technologies?
Kurzweil: Technology is a double-edged sword, and the Internet will spread hate and allow destructive groups to organize...but I think the destructive side of the Internet is fairly subtle. An issue I'm more concerned about...is the abuse of biotechnology. I think it's going to be very powerful in terms of enabling us to overcome disease and aging and extend human longevity and health, but it could also be used by a bioterrorist today to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly or more communicative or more stealthy and so some people have called for a relinquishing of (biotech and other advanced technologies like nanotechnology and AI) because they are too dangerous.

In my view, relinquishing these technologies is a bad idea for three reasons: one it would deprive us of these proponed benefits and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we need to overcome. Secondly it would require totalitarian government to implement a ban. And thirdly it wouldn't work, and I think that's really the key point--we'd just drive these technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous, more out of control. So my view is the correct response is twofold: one, ethical standards to prevent accidental problems by responsible practitioners...and secondly developing a rapid response system that can deal with people who don't follow the guidelines, who are trying to be destructive like terrorists. The good news is we now have the tools to do that. We can now sequence a biological virus in one day.

Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com reported from London.

Tanya Vlach wants to turn her artificial eye into a bionic eye.

(Credit: Jonathan James)

Three years after losing her left eye in a car accident, San Franciscan Tanya Vlach wants to make her artificial eye more useful: She's planning to put a video camera in her eye socket with the goal of having a bionic eye.

Asked in an e-mail what her inspiration is, Vlach wrote:

The Bionic Woman and maybe Bladerunner! Ever since I lost my eye I would fantasize about having a bionic eye. So I did research and I realized that as technology becomes increasingly smaller it seemed doable to engineer a miniature video camera small enough to put inside my acrylic prosthetic. And then finally I would have a device as close to an eye as I could get. Also, I love photography and video, this would be a true P.O.V (point of view) perspective.

Vlach, a 35-year-old artist and producer, is just getting started with her project and doesn't yet have a technology developer yet. She's actively seeking help with engineering, as well as funding.

Work is already under way in various places that could serve as a starting point for Vlach. For instance, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have created a contact lens that contains an electronic circuit and LEDs. And scientists at University of Illinois and Northwestern University, meanwhile, have developed what could be a precursor to a bionic eye, though it's unclear whether that eye has quite the Web functionality that Vlach is seeking. There's also work being done in Boston on embedding chips behind the retina.

Tanya Vlach

(Credit: Jonathan James)

In her blog, "one-eyed," Vlach discusses the technical aspects of what she hopes to achieve with her "experiment in wearable technology, cybernetics, and perception."

"I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic /artificial eye," she writes. "While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality."

From her research into miniature video cameras, Vlach lists what seems like an ambitious list of specifications for her technologically advanced artificial eye: DVR capability, MPEG recording, built-in SD mini card slot, 4 GB SD mini card, mini-AV out, Firewire or USB drive, optical 3X, remote trigger, Bluetooth, and inductors (Firewire/USB, power source).

Beyond that, Vlach reckons that the eye technology could even incorporate wireless charging, allow the pupil to dilate and constrict as light changes, and use blinking to take still photos, zoom, focus, and turn on and off.

She's currently working on a science fiction screenplay and has several ideas for the technology, including making a documentary, broadcasting an online "lifecast," and doing art installations.

Since she published the post about a week ago she has received up to 150 e-mails and "some very promising suggestions." She's still poring through all of them, she says.

Vlach was injured in an accident on the way to the arts festival Burning Man in 2005. It was to be her first time at the event, which takes place every Labor Day weekend in northern Nevada.

"It was going to be my first time!" she says. "But I was swooped up in a helicopter and laid up in a hospital instead. I did finally go last year."

(First reported by Kevin Kelly's Lifestream blog.)

The world's most powerful particle accelerator will go live again in June at the earliest, after a shutdown in September.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the Large Hadron Collider, previously suggested that the apparatus would be restarted in April, following maintenance. On Monday, however, it emerged that June would be the earliest possible date for operations to resume fully. It also became apparent that the cost of the repairs alone could be as high as $16 million.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel nestled beneath the Swiss-French border in the Alps. It is designed to shoot streams of particles around the tunnel in opposing directions, smashing them into each other and thereby hopefully discovering more about the origin and nature of matter and the universe.

The particle beams are held on their paths by dipole magnets and focused by quadrupole magnets. These magnets are made of a superconducting material that needs to be cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 kelvins (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit), if it is to avoid overheating and exploding.

The LHC was successfully turned on in September, but little more than a week later, an electrical fault caused a helium leak that necessitated the complete shutdown of the machine.

This week, details began to emerge about the cost of the necessary repairs and the likely resumption date for the LHC. Repair time aside, the process will also be slowed down by the fact that the LHC needs to be out of service throughout winter; as it uses a tremendous amount of electricity, CERN cannot risk power issues at a time when citizens' homes need to be heated.

"We already said the bare minimum (repair time) included two months to warm up the sector (from its cryogenic state)," a CERN representative told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "It became clear that there was no way of doing that before we shut down the accelerator complex for winter, anyway, so that puts the earliest possible date (for the refreezing of the LHC to start) in May. When we start up our accelerator complex, getting it up and running again takes a few weeks, so that takes you into June."

CERN said the glitch and resulting shutdown had been educational, as "markers" had been identified that show when such an incident is likely to occur.

"Those markers would have allowed us to stop (the LHC before the helium leak), had we known where to look," the representative said. "We're building in additional monitoring and protection systems to make sure this kind of incident won't happen again, and this will take time."

CERN's scientists are currently working on a detailed cost analysis and timetable for the necessary repairs and subsequent reinitiation of the LHC, and will present that timetable to the organization's governing body next month.

"We expect that the repairs and the (installation of additional monitoring systems) will cost us between 10 million and 20 million Swiss francs ($8.4 million to $16.8 million)," CERN's spokesperson said. However, because the repairs will eat into CERN's supply of spare parts for the LHC, a second phase of the resumption operation will involve buying more spares, thereby raising the total costs further.

The costs for repairing the LHC and buying new spares would be "accommodated within CERN's annual budget," the spokesperson said, and the organization would not be requesting additional funds from European member states for those purposes.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Starting next month, subscribers of Comcast's cable Internet service in Oregon and southwestern Washington state will be getting their connections switched over to "wideband." The upgraded service, which was announced late last month doubles the speed of residential and business connections as well as offering two faster, more expensive plans that bring the maximum download speed to 22 and 50 Mbps respectively.

Wideband is currently available in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and parts of New England, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. According my press contact, Comcast plans to get it in "close to 10 million homes and businesses in the next couple of months," which is a good percentage given the company's overall customer base of 14.7 million subscribers.

The technology behind wideband, which is formally known as DOCSIS 3.0 brings with it the capability to hit speeds in excess of 300 Mbps, is six times faster than what Comcast is currently offering (or even capable of handling with its current network infrastructure). As mentioned before, this increase in download speed has not made a difference in Comcast's bandwidth use restriction, which requires users to stay within 250 GB of downloads per month or face a one-year suspension upon the second offense.

The crew of STS-126, the Space Shuttle launching Friday, will be delivering to the International Space Station a wastewater regeneration system that will recycle astronauts' urine.

(Credit: NASA)

If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.

According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.

The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee," one astronaut told the BBC.

The idea behind the $250 million system seems to have been to figure out a way to ensure that residents of the Space Station had a supply of fresh water. To date, the Space Station has had the luxury of getting water deliveries from newly arrived Space Shuttles. But the Shuttle program is slated for retirement after 2010, and that looks to end the program's role as, among other things, the Space Station's personal water truck.

Still, the system won't be implemented right away. First, NASA wants to be sure that it works, as designed, in a zero-gravity environment.

On Earth, astronaut testers are apparently convinced that the filtration technology works just fine.

"Some people may think it's downright disgusting," Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper told the BBC, "but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth."

Some who have tried the recycled water did report a faint taste of iodine, but they didn't see that as a problem.

"Other than that, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water," said Bob Bagdigian, who ran the system's development. "I've got some in my fridge. It tastes fine to me."

Employees at the Cheetah Conservation Fund's Biomass Energy Project use tech to convert bush into blocks of clean-burning fuel.

(Credit: Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund)

A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing power to Indian villages and building earthquake-resistant homes in Indonesia, the maker of a single-use syringe, and a group that uses technology in classrooms in India were the winners of the Tech Museum awards held Wednesday.

The Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia won the 2008 Intel Environment Award. The group converts invasive bush into clean fuel. It employs 15 people at a biomass processing plant that uses a high-pressure extrusion process to create an economically viable alternative to firewood, coal, and charcoal. The fund is working to recover 25 million acres of land in Namibia and to save endangered cheetahs.

DESI Power: Decentralised Energy Systems India won the 2008 Accenture Economic Development Award. DESI Power is helping more than 100 villages build power plants to areas that lack electricity and is creating jobs with the launch of micro-enterprises. The DESI plants use 19th-century technology--biomass gasification through agricultural waste.

A completely different type of invention took the prize for education. Described as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing system Digital Study Hall won the Microsoft Education Award. The Lucknow, India-based project records classroom lessons from experienced teachers on DVDs and distributes them to underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh. Students participating in Digital Study Hall scored nearly 400 times higher on English tests and nearly 300 times higher in math.

The Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award was given to Build Change, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that designs and trains builders and homeowners how to build earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries. The designs use local materials, and are affordable and sustainable, as well as easy to build. In Aceh, Indonesia, alone, Build Change has strengthened 4,200 homes and trained 130 builders. The group also has programs in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and Sichuan, China.

Winning the Fogarty Institute for Innovation Health Award is Marc Koska who developed a syringe that reduces the spread of disease because it can only be used once. The plunger in the K1 "Auto Disable" Syringe developed by Star Syringe locks in place when it is fully depressed, preventing it from being used repeatedly, a common cause of cross-infection among patients in the developing world. The single-use syringes save millions of people from getting infected with Hepatitis B and C and HIV.

For more information about the K1 syringe and four other Tech Awards laureates, read "Tech Museum honors tech that benefits humanity".

Digital Study Hall students benefit from watching lessons on DVD in their underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh.

(Credit: Digital Study Hall)

While computers continue to get smaller, they're constantly being pushed to do more. Whether they're doubling as a phone, a camera, or an MP3 player, there seems to be no end to the tasks we expect them to carry out. And as always, we say we want them to "do all that stuff and be smaller."

(Credit: IBM)

A limitation of the miniaturization process is that the more computers are asked to do, the more memory they require. One of the computer's basic elements, the transistor, could soon reach its miniaturization limit. The smaller we make transistors, the more susceptible they are to quantum phenomena like electrons tunneling through the barriers between wires. Which, while ticklish for the barrier, can just be really annoying.

This has apparently annoyed researchers at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, as well, albeit for different reasons. This transistor dilemma has led them to look into the viability of carbon nanotubes to help create fast, cheap, and compact memory that uses little power.

Philips Research is out with a new intelligent camera pill that can be electronically preprogrammed to deliver targeted doses of medicine to patients with digestive disorders such as Crohn's disease, colitis, and colon cancer.

Don't worry, this is not a life-size representation of the tiny Philips iPill.

(Credit: Philips)

The device comes in the form of an 11 mm x 26 mm capsule that patients swallow with water, just like any other pill. It's designed to pass through the digestive tract of its own accord, meaning you just let nature take its course with this one.

The iPill determines its location via a pH sensor that measures the acidity of the environment, which varies throughout the intestinal tract. The device then releases medicine from its drug reservoir via a microprocessor-controlled pump--either in a burst or a progressive release. Philips says the smart pill can also deliver medicine to multiple locations.

Announced at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists' annual meeting and exposition this week in Atlanta, the capsule is also designed to measure data such as local temperature, and report measurements wirelessly to an external receiver unit.

While its drug delivery system appears promising, the Philips iPill is not the first camera pill to enter the picture. Among other such products, GivenImaging created the PillCam Colon Capsule Endoscope for viewing the colon, as well the PillCam ESO for the esophagus and the PillCam SB for the gastrointestinal tract.