I had no idea cockroaches can fly…those little devils!

From Newscientist:

“That’s one small flight for a cockroach, one giant leap for bugkind.”

While that probably won’t be the message beamed back to Earth from a future planetary lander after it touches down successfully on Mars, cockroaches may well have played a part in the landing – especially if biologist Tobias Seidl of the European Space Agency gets his way.

Three years ago, Seidl was on a field trip (studying desert ant navigation) in Tunisia when he and his colleagues found their apartment plagued by Blatta orientalis, an appallingly grimy cockroach. So they found a couple of brooms and swept the creepy critters out onto the balcony and over the edge – but they didn’t just tumble to the ground.

Instead, the bugs – the male of the species as it turned out – unfurled rigid, flat wings and performed a perfect glide into some safe hidey holes below. It immediately struck Siedl, who majored in biomimetics (the art of engineering systems that mimic nature) that the way the cockroaches undertook this emergency, low-energy, controlled approach straight into a safe area is precisely what a planetary lander should do to avoid craters and rocks as it comes down on a planet’s surface. more>>>

In the future, a doctor will discuss with a patient that he would like to give them herpes. A few doctors will be slapped at first but then gradually the public will become informed about this development:

From Science Daily:

Source: Louisiana State University
Date: October 17, 2007

In fact, excluding cancers of the skin, breast cancer accounts for nearly one in three cancers diagnosed in U.S. women.

“Our immune systems are engineered to fight cancer,” said Dr. Konstantin “Gus” Kousoulas, professor of virology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences and director of the Division of Biotechnology & Molecular Medicine. “The human body’s T-cells belong to a group of white blood cells and play a central role in immunity. However, cancer cells cause the T-cells to essentially fall asleep.

“The tumor emits signals to down-regulate the T-cells. Our herpes virus can be engineered to awaken those cells and modulate the immune system so that it recognizes the tumor cells and destroys them.”

The herpes virus was engineered to selectively replicate in cancer cells; it does not affect normal cells.

“Herpes virus replicate cells on their own,” said Kousoulas. “Cold sores are caused when the herpes virus replicates and kills normal cells; the cold sore is made up of the dead cells. Our herpes virus has been engineered to only replicate and destroy cancer cells, thus killing the tumor. Patients would not contract the herpes virus itself.”

The next step is to show that LSU’s virus can enhance the immune system. Besides destroying cancer cells, this herpes virus also has the potential to work as a vaccine. more>>>

These scientists aren’t playing around:

From Wired:

By Bryan Gardiner
10.17.07 | 12:00 AM

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place. more>>>

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it’s a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

Gaurav Khanna’s eight PlayStation 3s aren’t running Heavenly Sword — they’re using Linux plus custom code to solve complex computations. Photo: Courtesy of Gaurav Khanna

I can see it…one of these days you’ll be able to design a pet in an application called ‘Petshop’ and then print off a cat someday! And with any pattern fur you want! I’ll take a checkered one!

From MSNBC’s LiveScience:

Method could someday create implantable human organs, scientist says

By Dave Mosher
Staff writer

Updated: 2:41 p.m. CT Oct 11, 2007

The creation of implantable human organs with an inkjet printer isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem, a materials scientist said — at least in the future.

Scientists already use inkjet cartridges to “print” stem cells into exacting patterns, and now engineers are taking the technology to a whole new dimension — quite literally — by exploring ways to print 3-D structures of cells.

“It’s a milestone that we can print all types of cells onto a surface with an ink-jet printer without them dying, even stem cells,” said Paul Calvert, a materials scientist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Doing this successfully in three dimensions, however, is like going from a black-and-white to a full-color.” more>>>

Credit:Skander Limem / University of Massachusetts Dart

From the Telegraph.co.uk:

Could “hypertime” help develop a theory of everything? Roger Highfield reports

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.
Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time.

“There isn’t just one dimension of time,” Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. “There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us.” more>>>

As far as I’m concerned EVERYONE is welcome here at Blogging the Singularity…blacks, whites, men, women, jews, muslims, christians, athiests, bigots, racists, peace activists, communists, capitalists, smart people, dumb people, augmented humans, robots, AND homosexual homosapiens! A question just popped into my head…will there be gay robots in the future?

From MSNBC:

Updated: 2:59 p.m. CT Oct 15, 2007

CHICAGO – Julio and Mauricio Cabrera are gay brothers who are convinced their sexual orientation is as deeply rooted as their Mexican ancestry.

They are among 1,000 pairs of gay brothers taking part in the largest study to date seeking genes that may influence whether people are gay. The Cabreras hope the findings will help silence critics who say homosexuality is an immoral choice.

If fresh evidence is found suggesting genes are involved, perhaps homosexuality will be viewed as no different than other genetic traits like height and hair color, said Julio, a student at DePaul University in Chicago. more>>>

From WIRED:

by Kristen Philipkoski
02.06.02 | 2:00 AM

A California biotech company has a technology that seems like a killer app for gene therapy: It can turn any gene on or off.

In some ways it really is a killer app. The technology allows a scientist to genetically engineer a protein with what is called a zinc finger. Heart not pumping hard enough for lack of good blood vessels? Turn on the blood vessel-growing gene. Want to stop a patient from getting fatter? Turn off the gene that makes fat cells.

But biology is not yet up to speed with zinc finger technology. First, researchers have to identify which genes are associated with which diseases so they know what they’re turning on or off. Until then, there will be a limit on what zinc fingers can do.

Still, Sangamo BioSciences, the home of zinc finger technology, says zinc fingers will lead to breakthrough therapies for any disease that relies on a gene’s activity. more>>>

Freedom, Democracy, and Privacy are dying a slow, painful death…

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Take-off … a mechanical fly from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab.
Photo: Robert Wood

October 12, 2007

US agencies are staying tight-lipped about robobug research, writes Rick Weiss.

VANESSA ALARCON saw them at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square in Washington last month.

“I heard someone say: ‘Oh my god, look at those’,” the university student recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But those are not insects.”

Bernard Crane saw them, too. “I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “I thought: ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York.

Some suspect the insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps for the Department of Homeland Security.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones, though several US Government departments say they are trying. But several federally funded teams are growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the aim of mounting spyware on their bodies.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate collapsed buildings to find survivors. more>>>

From antiwar.com:

by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt

October 12, 2007

How can we understand our world, if we have hardly a clue about the mini-worlds where planning for our future takes place? Just the other day, the Washington Post had one of the odder reports of the year. According to journalist Rick Weiss, demonstrators at protests in Washington DC and elsewhere have been independently reporting large “dragonflies” (with a bizarre “row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails”) hovering near their rallies. (“‘I’d never seen anything like it in my life,’ the Washington lawyer said. ‘They were large for dragonflies. I thought, is that mechanical, or is that alive?’”)

Is this the micro-equivalent of UFO madness? Folie? Philip K. Dick? Are these actual dragonflies, which do look robotic, or advanced “spy drones” loosed by some unnamed agency in search of homeland-security troublemakers?

As a matter of fact, militarized insects have been on the Pentagon’s drawing boards for quite a while, as Nick Turse pointed out at Tomdispatch back in 2004. Most recently, the London Times reported that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing cyborg moths, implanted with computer chips while still in their cocoons, that might someday soon flutter into an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan and beam back video and other information. (The Post’s Weiss quotes DARPA program manager Amit Lal as saying: “You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic ‘Lord of the Rings’ used a moth to call in air support?. [T]his science fiction vision is within the realm of reality.”) And don’t forget those Pentagon-funded neural-implant experiments involving blue sharks in hopes that they might someday be turned into stealth spies of the oceans. more>>>

From the Gaurdian:

* Victor Keegan
* The Guardian
* Thursday October 11 2007

This week I bumped into a number of people who had no office to go back to. But there is no need to feel sorry for them. It was not that they were too poor or unemployed, they just did not need an office to work from. It started with a breakfast meeting with Emma Solomon of Digital Unite who, among other things, runs the Silver Surfer of the year awards, to be handed out next week. I had looked up her headquarters on the internet and chose a place a few roads away so it would be convenient for her. I needn’t have bothered. It was just an accommodation address. She and her colleagues – there are five of them – work from home, using (free) space in the Royal Festival Hall when they need to have a meeting plus a central telephone service for taking calls.

Two days later I went to the Future Of Web Applications (FOWA) conference, where you couldn’t move for office-less people. Tony Conrad – whose trendy contextual search engine sphere.com has been adopted by premium clients such as Time, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal – has 10 employees scattered around the world, and until he brought them all together recently he says he had only ever met six of them. When they set up and monitor websites for their clients they don’t need even to visit their offices as it is all done remotely. more>>>

Never underestimate human ingenuity…the worlds most abundant resource is now a fuel.

From Chosun:

Updated Oct.12,2007 06:39 KST

In 2010 your mobile phone may be powered by water. Samsung Electro-Mechanics announced Thursday that it has developed a micro-fuel cell and hydrogen generator that runs on H20.

“When the handset is turned on, metal and water in the phone react to produce hydrogen gas,” explained Oh Yong-soo, vice president of Samsung Electro-Mechanics’ research center. “The gas is then supplied to the fuel cell where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.” Other fuel cells need methanol to produce hydrogen, while Samsung’s needs only water.

Since the micro-fuel cell can generate up to three watts of electricity, it could be used in mobile devices, the company said. The new fuel cell could power a handset for 10 hours, twice as long as rechargeable batteries.

Oh said water-powered handsets are expected to hit the market by 2010. “If the user uses the phone for four hours a day on average, they would have to change the hydrogen cartridge about every five days,” Oh said. “Later handsets will be developed that don’t need the hydrogen cartridges to be changed, and would only need to be filled with water.”

Samsung Electro-Mechanics unveiled the new technology at the 2007 Korea Electronics Show at the Korea International Exhibition Center in Ilsan, Gyeonggi Province.

Everyday I aggregate the news items of most relevance regarding accelerating progress of technological advancement.

Not a day goes by when a major breakthrough isn’t made in a research lab somewhere on Earth.

Over time I have realized that through this blog a story is being told. That is, the story of Human Transcendence.

I invite you to follow with me this magnificent story, where an entire race will overcome all odds to achieve the next great step in evolution.

Thanks goes out to Edwin and Davis for this one:

From MSNBC:

By Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience

Updated: 5:05 p.m. CT Oct 12, 2007

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.

“My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots,” artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, “but once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” Levy said.

“It may sound a little weird, but it isn’t,” Levy said. “Love and sex with robots are inevitable.”

Sex with robots in 5 years
Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”

In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that’s quite likely. There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, “and it’s just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration,” he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. “That’s fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there.”

As software becomes more advanced and the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal, marriage could result. “One hundred years ago, interracial marriage and same-sex marriages were illegal in the United States. Interracial marriage has been legal now for 50 years, and same-sex marriage is legal in some parts of the states,” Levy said. “There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with.” more>>>

From TechNewsWorld:

Gaming fans may find that life in “SimCity” suddenly gets a lot more realistic this fall with the release of “SimCity Societies”, which has been designed to incorporate some of the harsh realities of global warming.

Through a partnership between Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS) Latest News about Electronic Arts (EA) and energy giant BP, the next-generation version of the bestselling game series combines city building with industry expertise on energy, electricity production and greenhouse gas emissions to highlight the impact of electricity generation on the carbon dioxide emissions linked with climate change, the companies said.

Tough Choices

“SimCity Societies” will not force players to adopt one type of power or another for the cities they build; rather, they will be free to choose, just as in real life. Also like in real life, there are pros and cons associated with each option.

The least expensive and most readily available buildings in “SimCity Societies” are also the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, for example, so players who choose to build cities dependent on them will see their carbon ratings rise. Once critical levels are reached, the game will issue alerts about the threat of droughts, heat waves and other natural disasters that may strike.

Alternatively, players can take a greener approach by choosing from a variety of BP Alternative Energy low-carbon power options, which tend to keep citizens safer from disaster but also cost more and don’t produce as much power as the high-emissions options do. more>>>

From TechNewsWorld:

By Erika Morphy
TechNewsWorld
10/11/07 3:01 PM PT

The Transportation Security Administration is testing a new type imaging scanner at the airport in Phoenix that uses electromagnetic waves to search for contraband. Privacy advocates at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, however, say the scanners can store the images they take, which are very detailed and amount to “naked pictures.”

Half a year after its first rollout of a passenger imaging security scanner in the Phoenix airport, the Transportation Security Administration is testing another form of this technology there.

Its latest security machine is based on millimeter-wave technology, which is similar in function to the X-ray backscatter technology TSA began testing in February.

While the technologies are different — the backscatter uses non-penetrating X-rays and the millimeter uses electromagnetic waves — the end result for travelers is the same: Both machines produce a clear image of the body, allowing guards to scan for weapons or other forms of contraband.

Naked Pictures

The privacy implications are immense, although TSA is quick to point to the safeguards it has in place to ensure that the technology is not abused. Privacy advocates at Electronic Privacy Information Center Latest News about Electronic Privacy Information Center are unimpressed with TSA’s promises, however, and are calling for a law forbidding the storage or transmittal of these images.

“We are not against the scanning technology per se,” Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s executive director, told TechNewsWorld. “However, a law needs to codify the rights of passengers with this technology.”

EPIC has raised this point with the Homeland Security committees in both the House and the Senate, Rotenberg said. “Such a measure could be tacked onto the next appropriate bill.”

Without a legal backstop, he added, “this will become a giant system to collect and store naked pictures of American travelers.”

more>>>