Researchers from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada have used the BlueGene L supercomputer to model half a virtual mickey mouse brain.

8 million neurons, up to 6,300 synapses or connections with other nerve fibers: a challenge for simulation.

Researchers explain that such a modeling initiative puts tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform. The BlueGene L supercomputer was used to run the complex simulation for 10 seconds at a speed that was 10 times slower than real life. Useless but impressive...


Source: BBC News, last week.
For those who do not know:
- A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1920 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University. According to this website, BlueGene L is still number 1 but Baker is coming its way...
- Chemical synapses are specialized junctions through which the cells of the nervous system signal to each other and to non-neuronal cells such as those in muscles or glands. Chemical synapses allow the neurons of the central nervous system to form interconnected neural circuits. They are thus crucial to the biological computations that underlie perception and thought. They provide the means through which the nervous system connects to and controls the other systems of the body. A chemical synapse between a motor neuron and a muscle cell is called a neuromuscular junction; this type of synapse is well-understood.

Intel Research Berkeley is a research lab owned by Intel that cooperates on research projects with the University of California at Berkeley. Recently, a lab's team demonstrated a Wi-Fi system that can send a wireless signal over 60 miles !

It is regular Wi-Fi hardware but with modified software. It uses standard access point, lightly modified, but the antennas use new directional technology. The signal goes from a point and goes to another one, without going everywhere as the normal Wi-Fi does.

And what is it for? This is being developed for use in countries with poor communications infrastructures. One such antennae in a remote village, for example, could receive a signal and send it through various towers to fiber links, which would provide villagers with an Internet connection.

The Wi-Fi antennas would cost about 700 dollars, compared with WiMax towers that cost about 15,000 to 20,000 dollars. And since Wi-Fi spectrum is not regulated by local telecoms, it could be used without the government permission. Tests are now running in Pakistan and soon in Uganda.


Source: News.com, tuesday.
For those who do not know: WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is described by the WiMAX forum as being "a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL."

Employees of Microsoft do not have only wrong ideas. Hotmail, Live Search, copy-paste of Word, the greediness of Vista, all right ... but some Microsoft researchers are working on a system that could allow simple speakers to send a sound to a particular place of the room ... but not elsewhere!

An array of speakers that output the same sound whith very short delays so that the sound waves overlap: the sound is cancelled out in some parts of the space while growing louder in others.

Ok, this technology isn't new: it's called beamforming and we can read expériences from 10 years ago, but only in ultrasound and radar. Having the same result with music or speech is much more complicated since since the range of frequencies is much bigger.

Ivan Tashev, the project's leader, explains that additional peripherals could track a person's movements so his virtual headphones could follow them in real time. Better than bluetooth! The most complicated part of beamforming is calibrating the system for specific speakers and rooms, since all speakers have slight variations that can potentially cause large distortions. Or reflection on walls or windows. Anyway, the team expects to do it in 3 years and 212 boxes of aspirines.

Danish biologists genetically modified a plant so it's able to detect the explosives hidden in the ground, and particularly the anti-personnel mines. The Arabidopsis thaliana has two different properties: the first is to be sensitive to nitrogen dioxide present in the explosives, the second is to produce anthocyanins, natural pigments that make the autumn's beautiful colours.

The biologists shorted-circuit these two properties, creating a relation between the first and the second: when the Arabidopsis thaliana detects nitrogen dioxide, it produces the pigment and becomes red, whereas its classic maturation would like it green.

The idea is thus to sow the plant by helicopter and the result is visible after 3 to 6 weeks. Moreover, the researchers also made it sterile to avoid a proliferation which no one could control.

More than 100 million mines would be still hidden throughout the world in 75 countries, result of guerrillas and conflicts of any kind. Every twenty minutes, a person is mutilated or killed by a mine, and the majority of the victims are less than twenty years. Find and destriy the bombs is a slow and tiresome operation, which is carried out using dogs and machines.

A computer scientist from Mexico City has developed Mexica, a software that understands emotion and tension well enough to compose stories.

In an Internet survey where the Mexica's stories were pitted against human and other computer-generate stories, the program of Rafael Perez y Perez was ranked highest in flow, coherence, structure, content, suspense, and overall ... quality.

Rafael, who has a really cool name, works for the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico. He explains that his program begins with a very simple story, a few sentences outlining a beginning, a middle, and an end. Then it treats the characters as variables and assigns numerical values to emotional links between them. After that, it conducts an engagement-reflection cycle where it searches for atoms, i.e. story actions and occurrences stored in a database. The chosen atom will be the one that best fits for the context of the character at that moment. This process is repeated until no more atom can be found. Finally, the software conducts an analysis of the coherence and interestingness. A story is considered interesting when tensions levels fluctuate throughout.

Perez y Perez explains that Mexica does not want to replace human writers, but rather to help them understand the way they write, and thus allow them to see how they can improve their writing.
Unfortunately, impossible to find this software nor a example of generated story...

Source: Discovery News, last friday.

Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have developed an algorithm that allows robots to find the source of a faint scent even with air turbulence. Like a moth would do.

Massimo Vergassola and his colleagues tested their algorithm in a virtual environment and they discovered that not only the robot (virtual, also!) succeeds to find the source but overall, it moves in complex back and forth sweeping motions, s-curves, and spirals that closely look like the way of a moth.

The algorithm uses information received from the scent itself but when no scent is detected, it mixes to behaviours: going directly toward the point where it guesses the scent is coming from and wandering around collecting information.

Vergassola says that the algorithm could be implemented in an real sniffer robot but also in any other application that involves searching without much information. Example: detecting the best paths for data to be sent through a network.


Source: NewScientistTech, last week.

How to build a complete house in 24 hours? A house with all the walls, the insulation, plumbing and electricity?
Using the robot technology invented by Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It's called the Contour Crafting.

Berok (his little nickname) first created a small machine, a small robot able to create 3D models layer after layer. You draw your cup with sketchup for example, and the machine prints it in 3 dimensions.

That's already nice but starting from there, he has created a much bigger machine that builds a house the same way. It superimposes layers of a mix of gypsum and concrete, a liquid that dries very quickly, so quick that it's ready when the next layer arrives.

The purpose is to build his house entirely from his computer, but also to reduce the costs (half), to reduce the environmental waste and also facilitate the rehousing of the disaster victims after a catastrophe. In theory.


Source: University of Southern California', march 2005 and a video from Daily Planet.

Koen Clays is a professor at the Chemistry department of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. But he went to China, Beijing, to discover an organic substance which makes it possible to reach a rate of 150 Gb/sec!

To remind you, a current high-rate connection goes around 0,005 Gb per second. You can't imagine that. 150 Gb/sec.

150 Go/sec, this is the possibility to totally fill your hard disk in one second. A report should be published in January in the scientific Optic Letters (“The journal where readers look for the latest in optics discoveries" !). Koen discovered an organic molecule whose reaction time to the light is up to 50% faster than the fastest material used today. And the more a substance reacts to the light, the more the transfer is fast. Bye-bye previous records…

On another hand, nobody can make routers that can manage such an high-speed...


Source: DataNews, today.

Researchers from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and the UK have developed a system that can turn walls, tables, and other surfaces ... into virtual touchpads or keyboards.

The Tai-Chi system(Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction) uses acoustic sensors connected to the edge of a surface that are able to track the vibrations of another object touching it. Tiny piezoelectric sensors allow to distinguish two objects touching it at the same time. There is also an identification method: each contact point can be identified thanks to a database of "vibration fingerprints".

"One advantage of the system is that for little cost you can have a much larger touch-sensitive area. The whole surface of your desk could become your keyboard and mouse-pad."