Tuesday, January 15. 2013
Via Wired
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By Noah Shachman
3-D printed organs. Brain chips providing superhuman abilities. Megacities, built from scratch. The U.S. intelligence community is taking a look at the world of 2030. And it is very, very sci-fi.
Every four or five years, the futurists at the National Intelligence Council take a stab at forecasting what the globe will be like two decades hence; the idea is to give some long-term, strategic guidance to the folks shaping America’s security and economic policies. (Full disclosure: I was once brought in as a consultant to evaluate one of the NIC’s interim reports.) On Monday, the Council released its newest findings, Global Trends 2030. Many of the prognostications are rather unsurprising: rising tides, a bigger data cloud, an aging population, and, of course, more drones. But tucked into the predictable predictions are some rather eye-opening assertions. Especially in the medical realm.
We’ve seen experimental prosthetics in recent years that are connected to the human neurological system. The Council says the link between man and machine is about to get way more cyborg-like. “As replacement limb technology advances, people may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today. Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought,” the Council writes. “Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman’ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”
And if the machines can’t be embedded into the person, the person may embed himself in the robot. “Augmented reality systems can provide enhanced experiences of real-world situations. Combined with advances in robotics, avatars could provide feedback in the form of sensors providing touch and smell as well as aural and visual information to the operator,” the report adds. There’s no word about whether you’ll have to paint yourself blue to enjoy the benefits of this tech.
The Council’s futurists are less definitive about 3-D printing and other direct digital manufacturing processes. On one hand, they say that any changes brought about by these new ways of making things could be “relatively slow.” On the other, they rip a page out of Wired, comparing the emerging era of digital manufacturing to the “early days of personal computers and the internet.” Today, the machines may only be able to make simple objects. Tomorrow, that won’t be the case. And that shift will change not only manufacturing and electronics — but people, as well.
“By 2030, manufacturers may be able to combine some electrical components (such as electrical circuits, antennae, batteries, and memory) with structural components in one build, but integration with printed electronics manufacturing equipment will be necessary,” the Council writes. “Though printing of arteries or simple organs may be possible by 2030, bioprinting of complex organs will require significant technological breakthroughs.”
But not all of these biological developments will be good things, the Council notes. “Advances in synthetic biology also have the potential to be a double-edged sword and become a source of lethal weaponry accessible to do-it-yourself biologists or biohackers,” according to the report. Biology is becoming more and more like the open source software community, with “open-access repository of standardized and interchangeable building block or ‘biobrick’ biological parts that researchers can use” — for good or for bad. ”This will be particularly true as technology becomes more accessible on a global basis and, as a result, makes it harder to track, regulate, or mitigate bioterror if not ‘bioerror.’”
Some of the Council’s predictions may give a few of Washington’s more sensitive politicians a rash. Although the Council does allow for the possibility of a “decisive re-assertion of U.S. power,” the futurists seem pretty well convinced that America is, relatively speaking, on the decline and that China is on the ascent. In fact, the Council believes nation-states in general are losing their oomph, in favor of “megacities [that will] flourish and take the lead in confronting global challenges.” And we’re not necessarily talking New York or Beijing here; some of these megacities could be somehow “built from scratch.”
Unlike some Congressmen, the Council takes climate change as a given. Unlike many in the environmental movement, the futurists believe that the discovery of cheap ways to harvest natural gas are going to relegate renewables to bit-player status in the energy game.
But most of the findings are apolitical bets on which tech will leap out the furthest over the next 17 years. People can check back in 2030 to see if the intelligence agencies are right — that is, if you still call the biomodded cyborgs roaming the planet people.
Monday, January 14. 2013
Via BLDGBLOG
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[Image: Deception Island, from Millett G. Morgan's September 1960 paper An Island as a Natural Very-Low-Frequency Transmitting Antenna].
Yesterday's post reminded me of an interesting proposal from the 1960s, in which an entire Antarctic island would be transformed into a radio-conducting antenna. Signals of international (or military submarine) origin could thus be bounced, relayed, captured, and re-transmitted using the topographical features of the island itself, and naturally occurring ionospheric radio noise could be studied.
[Image: A map of Deception Island, taken from an otherwise unrelated paper called "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," published in Antarctic Science (2005)].
In the September 1960 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, radio theorist Millett G. Morgan, a "leading researcher in the field of ionospheric physics" based at Dartmouth, speculated that he could generate artificial "whistlers"—that is, audial electromagnetic effects that are usually caused by lightning—if only he could find the right island.
"In thinking about how to generate whistlers artificially," Morgan's proposal leisurely begins, "it has occurred to me that an island of suitable size and shape, extending through the conducting sea, may constitute a naturally resonant, VLF slot antenna of high quality."
[Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
He looked far and wide for this "naturally resonant, VLF slot antenna," eventually settling on a remote island in the Antarctic. "Following this line of reasoning," he explains, "I thought first of the annular Pacific atolls, but knowing of the fresh-water lenses in them"—that is, aquatic features that would destructively interfere with radio transmissions—"[I] rejected them as being too pervious to water to be satisfactory insulators. Also, of course, they are not found in suitable latitudes for generating whistlers."
Morgan's reasoning continued: "The Pacific atolls are built upon submerged volcanic cones and this led me to think of Deception Island in the SubAntarctic, a remarkable, similarly shaped, volcanic island in which the volcanic rock extends above the surface; and which is located in the South Shetland Islands where the rate of occurrence of natural whistlers has been found to be very great."
Perhaps the island could be the geologic radio antenna he was looking for.
[Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
Morgan points out in detail that mathematical ratios amongst the island's naturally occurring landscape features, including its ring-shaped lagoon, are perfect for supporting radio transmissions (even the relationship between the length of the island and the radio wavelengths Morgan would be using seems to work out). And that's before he looks at the material construction of the island itself, consisting of volcanic tuff, which would help the terrain act as an "insulator."
There is even the fact that the island's small lagoon is coincidentally but unrelatedly named "Telefon Bay" (alas, named after a ship called the Telefon, not for the island's natural ability to make telephone calls).
[Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
Morgan's "proposed island antenna" would thus be a wired-up matrix of transmission lines and natural landscape features, bouncing radio wavelengths at the perfect angle from one side to the other and concentrating broadcasts for human use and listening.
You could tune into the sky, huddling in the Antarctic cold and listening to the curling electromagnetic crackle of the ionosphere, or you could use your new radio-architectural set-up, all wires and insulators like some strange astronomical harp, "to generate whistlers artificially," as Morgan's initial speculation stated, bursting forth with planetary-scale arcs of noise over a frozen sea, a wizard of sound alone and self-deafened at the bottom of the world.
(Deception Island proposal discovered via Douglas Kahn, whose forthcoming book Arts of the Spectrum: In the nature of electromagnetism looks fantastic, and who also gave an interesting talk on "natural radio" a few years ago at UCLA).
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Have also a look to Fence Phone, about a "rural telephone system" made out of barbed wire as well as Trees Receivers.
Via MIT Technology Review
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Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Now a new mathematical approach to these sets has even broader implications.
One of the most puzzling questions about the origin of life is how the rich chemical landscape that makes life possible came into existence.
This landscape would have consisted among other things of amino acids, proteins and complex RNA molecules. What’s more, these molecules must have been part of a rich network of interrelated chemical reactions which generated them in a reliable way.
Clearly, all that must have happened before life itself emerged. But how?
One idea is that groups of molecules can form autocatalytic sets. These are self-sustaining chemical factories, in which the product of one reaction is the feedstock or catalyst for another. The result is a virtuous, self-contained cycle of chemical creation.
Today, Stuart Kauffman at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a couple of pals take a look at the broader mathematical properties of autocatalytic sets. In examining this bigger picture, they come to an astonishing conclusion that could have remarkable consequences for our understanding of complexity, evolution and the phenomenon of emergence.
They begin by deriving some general mathematical properties of autocatalytic sets, showing that such a set can be made up of many autocatalytic subsets of different types, some of which can overlap.
In other words, autocatalytic sets can have a rich complex structure of their own.
They go on to show how evolution can work on a single autocatalytic set, producing new subsets within it that are mutually dependent on each other. This process sets up an environment in which newer subsets can evolve.
“In other words, self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level (an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets), i.e., true emergence,” they say.
That’s an interesting view of emergence and certainly seems a sensible approach to the problem of the origin of life. It’s not hard to imagine groups of molecules operating together like this. And indeed, biochemists have recently discovered simple autocatalytic sets that behave in exactly this way.
But what makes the approach so powerful is that the mathematics does not depend on the nature of chemistry–it is substrate independent. So the building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way.
These units can be complex entities in themselves. “Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think, for example, of the collection of bacterial species in your gut (several hundreds of them) as one big autocatalytic set,” say Kauffman and co.
And they go even further. They point out that the economy is essentially the process of transforming raw materials into products such as hammers and spades that themselves facilitate further transformation of raw materials and so on. “Perhaps we can also view the economy as an (emergent) autocatalytic set, exhibiting some sort of functional closure,” they speculate.
Could it be that the same idea–the general theory of autocatalytic sets–can help explain the origin of life, the nature of emergence and provide a mathematical foundation for organisation in economics?
As Kauffman and friends say with just a little understatement: “We believe that these ideas are worth pursuing and developing further.”
We’ll look forward to following the work as it progresses.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1205.0584: The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets: Evolvability, Enablement, and Emergence
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