Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Becoming Cyborgs/ Artificial Intelligence

Honda's ASIMO, an example of a humanoid robotImage via Wikipedia

Becoming Cyborgs--One Organ At A Time

One of the most important steps in becoming a cyborg is developing a stable, working interface between electronic devices and nerve tissue. Nanotechnology has produced the nanotube, which not only serves as a scaffolding for the re-growth of damaged nerve tissue--nanotubes can also serve as interfaces between electronic chips and nerves.

Dean Kamen’s Robot Arm Grabs More Publicity
Dean Kamen showed some video of the impressive, mind-controlled prosthetic robot arm he’s invented today at D6 in Carlsbad. Kamen has been showing the arm off since early 2007, usually via video clips like what he showed today. But today’s demonstration at D6 was impressive enough that it’s got the gadget blogs and the Twitterverse all aflutter today.

October 24, 2007 lecture by Steve Omohundro for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Steve presents fundamental principles that underlie the operation of "self-improving systems," i.e., computer software and hardware that improve themselves by learning from their own operations





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Monday, January 11, 2010

Real Life Robots

TOPIO 2.Image via Wikipedia


http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/8/2009/05/340x_ultron1.jpg
(Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Robots and the robot-ization of humans scare me..like ol ultron above.

The robot, called Asimo, is the result of more than two decades of research by scientists all over the world, including a team at Edinburgh University.

Sethu Vikayakumar, professor of robotics at Edinburgh University, said that Asimo, which stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility”, represented a big step
towards a future where robots work alongside humans.




Toyota’s most recent humanoid robot prototype (one of many partner robots the automotive giant is developing) stands 130cm tall and weighs 50Kgr. Its legs have 7 degrees of freedom and it can run at an average speed of 7 km/h. In contrast, ASIMO’s maximum speed is 6km/h. The Toyota researchers had to develop new real-time methods for balance control. These methods make it possible for the robot to remain balanced when an external force such as a push from a human is applied when in motion.

I_Robot_-_Runaround

Flapping-wing Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) from AeroVironment

According to a recent press release, DARPA has agreed to continue financing a research program for creating a small flapping-wing flying robot. AeroVironment are the happy recipients of 2.1 million dollars to continue NAV's development after achieving several breakthroughs during the now completed phase I of the project; phase I started in 2007 and lasted for 2 years while phase II is expected to continue until the summer of 2010. Specifically and as you can see from the below video, AeroVironment engineers have successfully built a small flapping-wing robot capable of hovering and flying in all directions under remote control.

The company plans to develop a robot that weighs no more than 10 grams and can be controlled from up to 1 mile away with a top speed of 10 meters per second. Obviously, there are numerous military applications for such robots including surveillance, reconnaissance, and even delivery of deadly payload with high precision.



boston dynamics military robot
The ultimate goal for BigDog is to develop a robot that can go anywhere people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA.


The Pentagon has a new toy in its quest to further dehumanize warfare and bring humanity one step closer to robotic extinction: The EATR. (this isnt it)
http://www.instablogsimages.com/images/2008/04/29/robot_GB4af_7071.jpg
Thomas the Tank Engine's true self revealed
The concept is pretty simple. The Energetically Autonomous Tactcial Robot will “perform long range, long endurance missions without the need for conventional refueling.” The EATR won’t need to refuel thanks to its ability to harvest its own fuel, BY EATING. It can use conventional fuels when they’re available, but the EATR can also “find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment and other organically based energy sources.” Skeptics will quickly shout science fiction on this one, but much like the PHASR, the EATR is not only real, but begging to be fast tracked into production, since DARPA is ready to match hungry investors dollar for dollar.
The EATR platform has endless possibilties, from surveilence to transport to “robotic swarms and cognitive collectives.”

Artists rendering of robotic swarm. Artist most likely in grade three
Artist's rendering of robotic swarm.

There are so few times I end up on the same page as the folks at Fox News. Originally, Fox posted a story about the EATR and suggested that it could feed on dead bodies, since warzones are usually filled with them and they are made up of organic material. Unfortunately, Fox pulled the original article so I can’t read it, but the corrected version (and other news stories) states that the EATR is strictly “vegetarian” feeding on things like plant matter and wood chips. The PDF presentation even includes multiple pictures of a happy herbavoric Rhino munching on plants to drive the point home.

You know, we could totally strap some lasers to this guy


Cyclone Power Technologies Inc assured the public that the EATR will be able to distinguish between vegatative mass and other materials, with a cybernetics expert backing them up saying “If it’s not on the menu, it’s not going to eat it.” They also quickly reminded us that the Geneva conventions clearly states that desecration of the dead is a war crime. Of course, I’m sure that certain US lawyers will be able to figure out a legal justification around that one.
CEO of Cyclone Power Technologies Harry Schoell attempted to calm the public’s fear of people eating robots by saying “We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission. We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.” Clearly, Harry never paid much attention to science fiction, because I’m sure that’s the same thing the team who invented Skynet said just before it became self aware and nuked the population.


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Are Dolphins "Non-human Persons"?

Second-generation wolphin female "Kawili ...Image via Wikipedia

dolphinhuman.jpg



 by jennifer palmer



Scientists have declared that dolphins are the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans.  They have far bigger brains and are brighter than chimpanzees and their communications are similar to those of humans, so much so that it has been suggested that they be re-categorized as "non-human persons".  The implications of this would make it unethical to keep dolphins captive in zoos and amusement parks, where 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die each year.

Studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self, emotional sophistication and complex social structuresBottlenose dolphins can recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
It's also been documented that dolphins are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can be quickly transferred from one dolphin to another.  Scientists have been astonished to see tricks taught to sick dolphins who spent time in captivity spreading among wild dolphins after the former patient was released back into the sea.


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the Internet and its ramifications

Partial map of the Internet based on the Janua...Image via Wikipedia

http://encefalus.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/brain-as-computer.jpg

At the edge of thought

Amanda Gefter
I know that the New Year has officially arrived when John Brockman publishes the responses to his Annual Question over at the Edge website.


This year, Brockman asked his crew of intellectual heavy-hitters, "How is the internet changing the way you think?"


The answers range from "It's not" to "Everything's going to hell" to "The internet is making us smarter, more social and more evolved" to "Who the hell knows?", with a dose of everything in between.


As I read through the responses, I found myself convinced more than once by conflicting arguments--a classic internet experience, I think. And despite the loudly bemoaned internet-induced ADD epidemic, one can easily spend hours reading through these intriguing responses.


Brockman himself sets the tone with the idea that the internet has formed a sort of collective consciousness and with the conviction that "new technologies beget new perceptions. Reality is a man-made process. Our images of our world and ourselves are, in part, models resulting form our perceptions of the technologies we generate."

http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg/300px-Internet_map_1024.jpg


Is the internet a cognitive prosthesis, or merely a mirror of old-fashioned human nature? Have we outsourced our memories and faculties of judgment to the virtual universe and the hive mind? What have we sacrificed? What have we gained?

For computer scientist Daniel Hillis, the internet has changed the way we make decisions, as we farm individual choices out to the collective web. "If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence," he writes, "our own theme is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines. Welcome to the Entanglement."


But for those who are overly concerned that such entanglement has usurped individual thought, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has some advice: "If you feel yourself growing ovine, bleat for yourself."


Nassim Taleb, who has placed himself on a strict internet diet, is worried that "more information causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge while degrading predictability."


For royal astronomer Martin Rees, "the internet enables far wider participation in front-line science", though Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, believes this might have happened more readily had Congress not rejected funding for a digitized indexing search infrastructure called PubSCIENCE.


Writer Howard Rheingold reminds us that "attention is the fundamental literacy", advocating mindfulness of how our attention wanders about the internet as we surf. It makes you wonder whether kids growing up in the internet age ought to be taught in school, as a matter of standard practice, Rheingold's basic elements of internet literacy: attention mindfulness, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network awareness.
http://neurobusiness.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/computer_brain.jpg

I think Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University, might agree. Saffo paraphrases Samuel Johnson, who said that there are two kinds of knowledge: that which you know and that which you know where to get. Now, Saffo says, we don't have to know where to get information--the internet does that for us. But perhaps there is now a third kind of knowledge: the knowledge of what matters.


I was intrigued by the comparisons between the internet and multicellularity in biological organisms discussed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch.


But my favorite responses were geneticist George Church's cleverly hyperlinked piece, "Sorry, John, no time to think about the Edge question", architect Neri Oxman's comparisons to Borges and her suggestion that in the light of the internet "models become the very reality that we are asked to model", and David Eagleman's "Six ways the internet may save civilization".


Another favorite of mine was the piece by neuro-philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who serves up this fascinating food for thought:


Here is something we are just beginning to understand -- that the Internet affects our sense of selfhood, and on a deep functional level.


Consciousness is the space of attentional agency: Conscious information is exactly that information in your brain to which you can deliberately direct your attention. As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened. Infants cannot control their visual attention; their gaze seems to wander aimlessly from one object to another, because this part of their Ego is not yet consolidated. Another example of consciousness without attentional control is the non-lucid dream state. In other cases, too, such as severe drunkenness or senile dementia, you may lose the ability to direct your attention -- and, correspondingly, feel that your "self" is falling apart.


If it is true that the experience of controlling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal selfhood, then what we are currently witnessing is not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but a mild form of depersonalization. New medial environments may therefore create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states -- a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. Now we all do this together, every day. I call it Public Dreaming.




So go celebrate the New Year with the brains at the Edge and remember, without the internet, you wouldn't have this awesome concentration of intellectual power. Then again, as software pioneer Kai Krause points out, these answers will soon end up in the form of a good old-fashioned book.

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4th Dimesion for Dummies

File:8-cell-simple.gif

In physics and mathematics, a sequence of n numbers can be understood as a location in an n-dimensional space. When n = 4, the set of all such locations is called 4-dimensional Euclidean space.

Such a space differs from our more familiar three-dimensional space in that it has an additional dimension, indistinguishable from the other three. This fourth spatial dimension is a concept distinct from the time dimension in spacetime, since time is functionally very different from any of the spatial dimensions; formally, spacetime is not an Euclidean space but a Minkowski space.

Carl Sagan explains the concept of the 4th dimension in easy to understand terms.



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Physics, Metaphysics & the Consciousness Connection

A simplified view on fields of modern physics ...Image via Wikipedia

brain
Physicist and consciousness researcher, Thomas Campbell-His book "My Big TOE, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary Western culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds, are brought together under one seamless scientific understanding. Heres a lecture..


Watch Physics, Metaphysics & the Consciousness Connection in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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Our Place in the Universe



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg/700px-Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg
The above picture represents a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space, because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500galaxies at various stages of evolution.

http://images.ted.com/images/ted/1323_253x190.jpg

David Elieser Deutsch FRS (born 1953 in Haifa, Israel) is a physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation, Clarendon Laboratory. He pioneered the field of quantum computers by being the first person to formulate a specifically quantum computational algorithm[1], and is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Legendary scientist David Deutsch puts theoretical physics on the back burner to discuss a more urgent matter: the survival of our species. The first step toward solving global warming, he says, is to admit that we have a problem.


TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts.

Hidden Messages in Water

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP9JR7pZny3Znm6KCej06d5dP32vn1AYBrv_fHtbJR-8-dWbVOzxpEPh-VwysCMH5T-frTxijK1LkBoU2VP9Eq2WFJwPlZh7onvwIuGH4WZFYzlUbvRIn9r8bNFVzrdDua4wSdbeVwmy0/s660/FabulousWaterArt.jpg

Water

The Earth is largely made up of it.
As are we…

And yet about it we know significantly little.

Until the groundbreaking work of a pioneer Japanese researcher whose astonishing discovery about water, documented photographically, changed most of what we didn't know…and led to a new consciousness of Earth's most precious resource.

Dr. Masaru Emoto was born in Japan and is a graduate of the Yokohama Municipal University and the Open International University as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine. His photographs were first featured in his self-published books Messages from Water 1 and 2. The Hidden Messages in Water was first published in Japan, with over 400,000 copies sold internationally.








You Make Me Sick

What has put Dr. Emoto at the forefront of the study of water is his proof that thoughts and feelings affect physical reality. By producing different focused intentions through written and spoken words and music and literally presenting it to the same water samples, the water appears to "change its expression".


Love and Gratitude

Essentially, Dr. Emoto captured water's 'expressions.' He developed a technique using a very powerful microscope in a very cold room along with high-speed photography, to photograph newly formed crystals of frozen water samples. Not all water samples crystallize however. Water samples from extremely polluted rivers directly seem to express the 'state' the water is in.


Dr. Masaru Emoto

Dr. Masaru Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward them. He found that water from clear springs and water that has been exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflake patterns. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative thoughts, forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors.

The implications of this research create a new awareness of how we can positively impact the earth and our personal health. The success of his books outside Japan has been remarkable. Dr. Emoto has been called to lecture around the world as a result and has conducted live experiments both in Japan and Europe as well as in the US to show how indeed our thoughts, attitudes, and emotions as humans deeply impact the environment.


Heavy Metal Music

Dr. Emotos newest book, The Hidden Messages in Water, further explores his revolutionary research. Since humans and the earth are composed mostly of water, his message is one of personal health, global environmental renewal, and a practical plan for peace that starts with each one of us. The implications of this research create a new awareness of how we can positively impact the earth and our personal health. Available from your favorite bookseller or from Beyond Words Publishing www.beyondword.com




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Biology of Perception

http://www.eastern-healing.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/dna-300x199.jpg


Physician, author and research scientist Dr. Bruce Lipton discusses the processes by which cells receive information to prove that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton's profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics shows that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.

A cell biologist by training, Lipton taught Cell Biology at the University of Wisconsins School of Medicine, and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford Universitys School of Medicine. He is the author of "The Biology of Belief."

For more information, visit: http://www.brucelipton.com




Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTL93Oppqfs

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrLix1AZ_2c

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVBlRvGGVQ

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btMafiunBDg

Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib57yeRJ9cU

Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNvWkXXPBN8

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of balance


Photograph:An Australian Aborigine stands before Uluru, or Ayers Rock, in Australia.


Koyaanisqatsi (IPA: [ˈkɔɪɑːnɪsˌkɑːtsiː]), also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.
The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living'[6], and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way. The film is the first in the Qatsi trilogy of films: it is followed by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature,, and technology. Koyaanisqatsi is the best known of the trilogy and is considered a cult film. However, because of copyright issues, the film was out of print for most of the 1990

Information Technology


Reggio stated that the Qatsi films are intended to simply create an experience and that "it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." He also said that "these films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It's been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it's not the effect of it's that everything exists within [technology]. It's not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe..."[9]
The movie has no dialogue but does feature the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi, translated as "life of moral corruption and turmoil" or "life out of balance."[10] "Koyaanisqatsi" is chanted at the beginning and end of the film in a dark, sepulchral basso profundo by singer Albert de Ruiter over the score by Philip Glass. Three Hopi prophecies are sung by a choral ensemble during the latter part of the "Prophesies" movement are translated just prior to the end credits:
  • "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
  • "Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
  • "A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."
The film took about six years to make. Three years were spent shooting the film. Glass and Reggio spent an additional three years in a state of collaboration, with Glass composing score to fit the film and Reggio re-cutting the footage to fit the score.








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Placebo Effect -healing the body with the mind-

http://www.redicecreations.com/ul_img/6999placebo_big.jpg

Featuring members of the the Harvard Placebo Study Group, "Placebo: Cracking the Code" examines the power of belief in alleviating pain, curing disease, and the healing of injuries.

The placebo effect is a pervasive, albeit misunderstood, phenomenon in medicine. In the UK, over 60% of doctors surveyed said they had prescribed placebos in regular clinical practice. In a recent Times Magazine article, 96% of US physicians surveyed stated that they believe that placebo treatments have real therapeutic effects.
http://www.podchick.com/pc_07-04-03_placebo.jpg
Work on the placebo effect received an intellectual boost when the Harvard Placebo Study Group was founded at the beginning of 2001. This group is part of the Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative at Harvard University, and its main characteristic is the interdisciplinary approach to the placebo phenomenon. The group is made up of 8 members: Anne Harrington (Historian of Science at Harvard), Howard Fields (Neuroscientist at Univ. of California in San Francisco), Dan Moerman (Anthropologist at Univ. of Michigan), Nick Humphrey (Evolutionary Psychologist at London School of Economics), Dan Wegner (Psychologist at Harvard), Jamie Pennebaker (Psychologist at Univ. of Texas in Austin), Ginger Hoffman (Behavioral Geneticist at Harvard) and Fabrizio Benedetti (Neuroscientist at Univ. of Turin). The main objective of the group is two-fold: to devise new experiments that may shed light on the placebo phenomenon and to write papers in which the placebo effect is approached from different perspectives.


Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VjHJj01QH8

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVloLhsGmo

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDAvZVxPj44

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uRzDzDlEHc

Singularity

A.I is scary thought to me.--
The technological singularity is the theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence.[1]

In 1965, I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

Singularity Summit at Stanford







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Crop Circles

http://www.ufomystic.com/wp-content/uploads/crop_circles1.jpg
Where does this mysterious crop circle phenomena come from? Is it done by man as a joke? So why do people have extraordinary experiences then? Flying ball of lights were seen in and around crop cirlces. Or is it an alien intelligence which try to communicate with us? The geometry which can be found in crop circles, inculed a lot of mathematics which can be also found in nature.

The new documentary "New swirled order" deals with these questions and present some very extraordinary Crop circle formations in 2008, like the "Pi"-formation in Barbury Castle or the Crop Circle near Avebury Manor, which showed our solar system with the planetary constellation of December 21 of 2012.



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Quantum Computers

Unlike most pieces of computer hardware, this quantum bit handles data using five basic states instead of the conventional two (Image: Unlike most pieces of computer hardware, this quantum bit handles data using five basic states instead of the conventional two.

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. The basic principle behind quantum computation is that quantum properties can be used to represent data and perform operations on these data.[1]

Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bit). Both practical and theoretical research continues with interest, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.

Here’s a view of a 16-qubit processor mounted in its sample holder.

sample-holder-with-europa-chip_small.JPG

If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems much faster than any of our current classical computers (for example Shor's algorithm). Quantum computers are different from other computers such as DNA computers and traditional computers based on transistors. Some computing architectures such as optical computers may use classical superposition of electromagnetic waves. Without some specifically quantum mechanical resources such as entanglement, it is conjectured that an exponential advantage over classical computers is not possible.






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Science of The Impossible


invisibility_485
Time travel, death stars and invisibility cloaks – writer and noted scientist, Michio Kaku, believes they could all be possible in the not to distant future.
To the skeptics he points out that aeroplanes, lasers, televisions and atomic bombs were all considered impossible by scientists in the past.
On Wednesday’s Riz Khan we speak with noted scientist Michio Kaku author of Physics of the Impossible.
The book explores the technologies and devices of science fiction that are deemed impossible today but that might become commonplace in the future.

Part 1



part 2


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The Uncertain Nature of Matter

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2009/04/the_left-hand_rule/magnet-electron-shell.gif

Uncertain Principles
This BBC documentary explores the emergence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in the early 20th century, and how its implications shook up the scientific establishment of the day. Its detractors -- including Einstein -- wanted to believe that an underlying determinism and realism is foundational to the universe. Despite experiments attempting to disprove Heisenberg's work, the Uncertainty Principle prevailed and remains one of the fundamental concepts of quantum theory.


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Alien Disclosure

Dr. Steven Greer, founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, recently presented “Contact and Disclosure: The Final Sequence” at the 2009 European Exopolitics Summit in Spain. Dr. Greer’s Disclosure Project is an offshoot of CSETI with the mission to disclose all information about UFOs in open Congressional hearings and make people ambassadors to ETs.
Although there are widespread theories about the federal government’s suppression of UFO knowledge, Greer discusses the role of shadow governments in keeping extraterrestrial intelligence from the population. The trans-dimensional technology that the ETs intend to share, such as electromagnetic devices that interface directly with consciousness, are being hidden according to Greer because the shadow government wants humanity to seek an “eschatological solution to the human problem.”  
According to Greer, shadow government agents such as “the secret cabal called Majestic” won’t allow even the President and CIA to access the UFO data, and it is this secrecy about extraterrestrial intelligence that Greer says is taking the planet off course. The fabricated “nexus of fear” created around extraterrestrials slows the arrival of universal peace that he says will culminate when we mature as a civilization and venture to other star systems to help ailing civilizations.
While Greer believes that all extraterrestrials are friendly and intend to help bring us into a peaceful existence, not everyone in the UFO research community agrees.


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The Primacy Of Consciousness

http://tsvetankapetrova.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/consciousness1.jpg
Presentation given at "Physics of Consciousness" conference, Virginia, 2004, in which Peter Russell explores the mystery of consciousness from both scientific and mystical perspectives, showing how light is intrinsic to both, and giving a coherent argument as to why consciousness is fundamental essence of the cosmos.


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