Programmable Matter

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:11:19 -0700

Programmable Matter May Shape Future Tools

“More than meets the eye" may soon become more than just a tagline for a line of popular robotic toys.
Researchers at Harvard and MIT have reshaped the landscape of programmable matter by devising self-folding sheets that rely on the ancient art of origami.
Called programmable matter by folding, the team demonstrated how a single thin sheet composed of interconnected triangular sections could transform itself into a boat- or plane-shape—all without the help of skilled fingers.
Published in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) during the week of June 28, lead authors Robert Wood, associate professor of electrical engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Daniela Rus, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT and co-director of the CSAIL Center for Robotics, envision creating "smart" cups that could adjust based upon the amount of liquid needed or even a "Swiss army knife" that could form into tools ranging from wrenches to tripods.
"The process begins when we first create an algorithm for folding," explains Wood. "Similar to a set of instructions in an origami book, we determine, based upon the desired end shapes, where to crease the sheet."
The sheet, a thin composite of rigid tiles and elastomer joints, is studded with thin foil actuators (motorized switches) and flexible electronics. The demonstration material contains twenty-five total actuators, divided into five groupings. A shape is produced by triggering the proper actuator groups in sequence.
To initiate the on-demand folding, the team devised a series of stickers, thin materials that contain the circuitry able to prompt the actuators to make the folds. This can be done without a user having to access a computer, reducing "programming" to merely placing the stickers in the appropriate places. When the sheet receives the proper jolt of current, it begins to fold, staying in place thanks to magnetic closures.
"Smart sheets are Origami Robots that will make any shape on demand for their user," says Rus. "A big achievement was discovering the theoretical foundations and universality of folding and fold planning, which provide the brain and the decision making system for the smart sheet."
The fancy folding techniques were inspired in part by the work of co-author Erik Dermaine, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and one of the world's most recognized experts on computational origami.
While the Harvard and MIT engineers only demonstrated two simple shapes, the proof of concept holds promise. The long-term aim is to make programmable matter more robust and practical, leading to materials that can perform multiple tasks, such as an entire dining utensil set derived from one piece of foldable material.
"The Shape-Shifting Sheets demonstrate an end-to-end process that is a first step towards making everyday objects whose mechanical properties can be programmed," concludes Wood.

Biomimetics Breakthroughs

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:04:06 -0700

Biomimetics breakthroughs: studying nature to develop practical technology for mankind
by Mike Adams

Biomimetics is a fascinating -- and fast-emerging -- field of research. Simply stated, it's the science of looking for solutions that have been engineered by nature. Previous biomimetics efforts lead to the development of velcro, and now an entire expo called "Nature's Wisdom" is dedicated to showcasing breakthroughs created by nature and recognized by scientists.

I'm a huge supporter of this sort of science: nature has much to teach us, and if we would have the patience to look at the solutions already provided by nature rather than trying to reinvent everything from scratch, we'd be richly rewarded for doing so.

Nowhere is this more true than in medicinal herbs, where nature has already provided an abundance of disease-preventing herbal medicines all around us -- in the deserts, forests, plains and jungles of the world. And yet only around 2% of the world's plant species have even been studied for possible medicinal benefits. Clearly, there are miraculous phytochemicals just waiting to be discovered and leveraged for the healing of chronic disease.

Yet biomimetics is really more about the physics of nature rather than the chemistry. Using biomimetics, scientists have created temperature-sensing clothing materials that mimic the adaptation response of pinecones. They've also studied the aerodynamics of insect wings to gain insight into advances for machine-powered flight.

Biomimetics is promising, fascinating, and essentially free. Nature has already conducted the research over the last few million years! All we have to do as humans is be smart enough to recognize that nature has already solved all sorts of problems that we are only beginning to encounter.

New Tech Moves Beyond...

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:04:03 -0700

Goodbye computer mouse, keyboard and monitor.

Say hello to a new, simpler era of human-computer interaction -- this time, with no clunky hardware standing between you and digital information.

In this new world, there are options aplenty.

Instead of sliding a mouse across your desk, you could just point at whatever you'd like to select. Instead of pecking away at a keyboard, you could just say what you're thinking. And instead of glaring at a big screen all day, why not just project that information on the surface of your contact lenses?

None of this is science fiction. These ideas are here today, some of them in research labs and others already on store shelves.

And, thanks to a remote-control-free video gaming system called Kinect, these futuristic concepts for computer-human communication are about to get a lot more popular, technology researchers said in interviews this week.

Microsoft's Kinect, which hits stores November 4, lets players control games by moving their bodies. To make a digital soccer player kick, you just swing your leg.

It's an effort to make gaming more "natural." And that concept -- that we don't need intermediaries to help us talk to technology -- is likely to bleed into every aspect of electronics and computing in coming years.

"It's all fantastic, because it's a really useful educational opportunity for the world," said John Underkoffler, creator of a real gesture-based computing system that was featured in the 2002 movie "Minority Report."

"It's only been a few years that people have started to realize, 'Wait a minute! We're not stuck with the mouse and Windows-driven interface for the rest of time.' "

'Natural user interfaces'

A whole field of technological research has developed around the idea of "natural user interfaces," which try to let people communicate with machines in the same ways they would interact with other people and with the real world.

Kinect, which was demonstrated at a video gaming conference this week in Los Angeles, California, is a prime example of this, because people control the system with body gestures and by talking instead of clicking buttons or messing with joysticks.

Researchers are trying to expand this idea of "gesture-controlled" electronics into computing more generally.

Underkoffler, for example, developed a system called g-speak, which lets users shuffle through data sets and other information by waving their hands.

He says several large companies, including Boeing, already are using custom-built versions of the system, which range in price from $100,000 to millions of dollars.

Underkoffler expects consumer-level products to be widely available within five years.

History of 'natural' computing

These developments may seem to have plopped into reality out of sci-fi. But they've been a long time coming.

Touch-sensitive screens were some of the first natural interfaces.

They've been in research for decades, but they didn't become cheap and popular until 2007, when Apple released the touch-screen iPhone and Microsoft showed off a touch-screen coffee table called Microsoft Surface.

Now, as computer hardware becomes cheaper and people get more used to the idea that the mouse and keyboard aren't the only way to compute, researchers are pushing into areas like brain-controlled computing, eye-tracking software and voice-recognition technology, which is common on smartphones.

Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, said that new ways for people to interact with computers have to be radically differentto catch on.

People are used to touch screens and video cameras now, he said, so the transition into gesture computing makes more sense.

"The trend [of gesture computing] has been around for a while, but it's sort of hit a critical point where I think the game is changing," he said.

"The most significant thing that's changed about computing is who's doing what, where, with whom and for how much."

When simple is complicated

Despite the recent advances, a number of hurdles remain in the "natural" progression of electronics.

New methods of input sometimes come with new problems. Using arm and hand motions to control computers, for instance, can become tiring, said Beth Mynatt, director of the GVU center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And if such motions are taken to TV sets, as Toshiba has demonstrated, then there may be some unintended and hilarious consequences, she said.

Imagine changing a channel by waving your arms.

"Are they trying to change the channel or are they making rude gestures to the umpire?" a computer might think, she said. "[The computer is] going to get it wrong and nobody's going to want to do it. They're going to be much happier fumbling around with that remote."

Robert Wang, a PhD student at MIT who has developed a gesture-controlled computing system, said it's also difficult to use hand movements to manipulate digital objects because you can't feel them.

"It's going to be a little bit difficult to make a compelling sense of touch," he said. Good visual cues may have to suffice, he said.

Death of the mouse?

There's disagreement in the tech community about whether these new methods of human-computer interaction will completely kill the mouse, keyboard and computer monitor -- or if they'll just offer alternatives.

Generally, researchers think the mouse might be the first to go.

The keyboard, however unnatural, likely will be around longer because it is such an efficient way to write, and because people don't want to learn new systems, said Mynatt of Georgia Tech.

Buxton, from Microsoft Research, said these new options aren't competing with each other because they're all good at something and terrible for something else.

Using Kinect on an airplane would be "completely absurd," for example, he said, because you'd have to stand up on your plane seat and flail your arms around. Likewise, typing in a car is unsafe, and talking about private matters in public -- or even entering voice commands -- can be problematic.

"What I see is not that the gesture stuff is in competition with the mouse or with multitouch," he said. "What all of these things do is they're enhancing the palate of colors or the resources we can draw on, so that when we have something to do that involves technology, we can use the most appropriate means."

Screens may be the last hangovers of the desktop world.

Some researchers now are projecting the internet and information on walls and even onto peoples' hands, in effect turning fingers into buttons of their own.

Pranav Mistry, a research assistant in the MIT Media Lab, said his goal is to get rid of computer hardware entirely -- so that people just interact directly with information.

"The hardware is becoming invisible," he said.

Ultimately, he said, the digital world will fold completely into the real one.

Scientists Create “Life”

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:56:17 -0700

On May 20th, J. Craig Venter and his team at J.C Venter Institute announced the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome in a paper published in SCIENCE. As science historian George Dyson points out, "from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells."

This new development is all about operating on a large scale. "Reading the genetic code of a wide range of species," the paper says, "has increased exponentially from these early studies. Our ability to rapidly digitize genomic information has increased by more than eight orders of magnitude over the past 25 years." This is a big scaling up in our technological abilities. Physicist Freeman Dyson, commenting on the paper, notes that "the sequencing and synthesizing of DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life." But it remains to be seen how it will serve in practice.

One question is whether or not a DNA sequence alone is enough to generate a living creature. One way of reading the paper suggests this doesn't seem to be the case because of the use of old microplasma cells into which the DNA was inserted — that this is not about "creating life" since the new life requires an existing living recipient cell. If this is the case, what is the chance of producing something de novo? The paper might appear to be about a somewhat banal technological feat. The new techniques build on existing capabilities. What else is being added, what is qualitatively new?

While it is correct to say that the individual cell was not created, a new line of cells (dare one say species?) was generated. This is new life that is self-propagating, i.e. "the cells with only the synthetic genome are self replicating and capable of logarithmic growth."

The paper concludes with the following:

If the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis, assembly, and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology. We expect that the cost of DNA synthesis will follow what has happened with DNA sequencing and continue to exponentially decrease. Lower synthesis costs combined with automation will enable broad applications for synthetic genomics.

Will the new techniques described in the paper allow us to bring extinct species back to life? Here are three examples of three possible stages after the production of a bacterial cell: 1. generating a human, i.e. a Neanderthal; 2. generating a woolly mammoth; 3. generating a tasmanian wolf.

Generating a Neanderthal, given the recent mapping of the Neanderthal genome by Svante Pääbo, seems to be feasible, but it will raise ethical hackles. Don't hold your breath waiting for someone to try it. Generating a woolly mammoth will not be an ethical problem but it also seems feasible by using an elephant's placenta: inject mammoth DNA into a modern elephant egg from which elephant DNA has been removed, then import the elephant egg into an elephant. A real challenge will be to generate a truly extinct species such as a Tasmanian wolf for which no host cells exist.

What does this mean? We don't know yet, and we may not know for years. For now, all we can do is speculate responsibly. As Freeman Dyson notes:

I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.

Life goes on.. but it won't be the same.

5.20.10
Artificial life has been created in a laboratory for the first time

Dr Craig Venter, a multi-millionaire pioneer in genetics, and his team have managed to make a completely new "synthetic" life form from a mix of chemicals.

They manufactured a new chromosome from artificial DNA in a test tube, then transferred it into an empty cell and watched it multiply – the very definition of being alive.

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The man-made single cell "creature", which is a modified version of one of the simplest bacteria on earth, proves that the technology works.

Now Dr Venter believes organism, nicknamed Synthia, will pave the way for more complex creatures that can transform environmental waste into clean fuel, vaccinate against disease and soak up pollution.

But his development has also triggered debate over the ethics of "playing god" and the dangers of the new technology could pose in terms of biological hazards and warfare.

"We are entering an era limited only by our imagination," he said announcing the research published in the journal Science.

Dr Venter, a pioneer of genetic code sequencing and his team at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, have been chasing the goal for more than 15 years at a cost of £30m.

First they sequenced the genetic code of Mycoplasma genitalium, the world's smallest bacteria that lives in cattle and goats, and stored the information on a computer.

Then they used the computer code to artificially reproduce the DNA in the laboratory, slightly modifying it with a "watermark" so it was distinguishable from the original natural one.

Finally they developed a technique of stripping bacteria cells of all original DNA and substituting it with the new artificial code.

The resulting "synthetic cell" was then "rebooted" and it started to replicate. The ability to reproduce or replicate is considered the basic definition of life.

Dr Venter compared his work with the building of a computer. Making the artificial DNA was the equivalent of creating the software for the operating system. Transferring it to a cell was like loading it into the hardware and running the programme.

"This is the first synthetic cell that's been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer," said Dr Venter.

"This becomes a very powerful tool for trying to design what we want biology to do. We have a wide range of applications [in mind]," he said.

The researchers are planning to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make new hydrocarbons that could go into refineries.

They are also working on ways to speed up vaccine production, making new chemicals or food ingredients and cleaning up water, said Dr Venter.

While a major technological leap forward the life form is still incredibly simple in natural terms. Its DNA is made up of 485 genes, each strand of which is made up of one million base pairs, the equivalent of rungs on a ladder.

A human genome has 20,000 genes and three billion base pairs.

Nevertheless it is the beginning of the process that could lead to creation of much more complicated species, and into a world of artificial animals and people only envisaged in films such as Ridley Scott's Bladerunner and Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Julian Savulescu, an expert in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, said: “Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny.

"He is going toward the role of a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally.

"The potential is in the far future, but real and significant: dealing with pollution, new energy sources, new forms of communication. But the risks are also unparalleled.

"We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research and protections from military or terrorist misuse and abuse.

"These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable."

Dr David King, director of the watchdog Human Genetics Alert, said: “What is really dangerous is these scientists’ ambitions for total and unrestrained control over nature, which many people describe as ‘playing God’.

“Scientists’ understanding of biology falls far short of their technical capabilities. We have already learnt to our cost the risks that gap brings, for the environment, animal welfare and human health.”

Dr Venter has called for reviews so that debate keeps up with the science.

He said: "It's part of an ongoing process that we've been driving, trying to make sure that the science proceeds in an ethical fashion, that we're being thoughtful about what we do and looking forward to the implications to the future."

...Bridge the Digital Divide

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Finding a Better Way to Bridge the Digital Divide
by Tom A. Peter

At a recent Internet culture conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, a local ice-cream shop offered to make a custom flavor for the event. After some discussion, the organizers decided that it should be vanilla ice cream mixed with Nerds candies, "because the Internet is primarily white and nerdy," explains Chris Csikszentmihályi, who directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

While a joke, the ice-cream flavor was also a serious commentary on the digital divide that has grown between those who created the Internet – mostly affluent, white, male programmers – and the billions of people around the globe with whom they share little in common.

There's a push among development specialists to provide more people with Internet connections and the assumption that these new Web citizens can then reap the same benefits as communities who've long been online.

This may not be the case, however. While few people dispute the value of getting the world online, many Internet experts say that current Web content has little relevance and thus little appeal to those whose lifestyle is worlds away from programmers in the United States and Europe. If the majority of the world is to use the Web for more than just a few basic functions, Internet developers must address this gap.

"What you end up with is an Internet that assumes a particular kind of user, one that resembles the authors," says Mr. Csikszentmihályi. "So, in a sense, almost everyone who uses the Internet has to sort of pass as a white, 20-something, urban-dwelling kind of person."

Even in the US, this has proved to be a problem. A new study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., found that, among Americans, those from privileged backgrounds tend to have much higher skill levels and use the Web for more activities than those from less affluent families with equal Internet access.

"Just because people gain access doesn't mean that now they know how to use the Internet," says Eszter Hargittai, author of the report. "Even if we put a lot of effort into connecting more people – which is of course important – [the concern is that] even once people obtain access, we will continue to observe considerable variation in their skills and online behavior."

For those outside the US, crossing the digital divide may seem even more daunting. In the Middle East, since 2000, Internet use has grown faster than anywhere else in the world. Although there are more Arabs online every day and their language is the world's fifth most widely spoken, less than 1 percent of Web content is in Arabic. Within the region, Jordan has been one of the most active countries bridging the digital divide. Here the information technology (IT) sector enjoys strong support from King Abdullah II and makes up 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. According to StartupArabia, a website dedicated to tracking Arab tech companies, only the United Arab Emirates has surpassed Jordan in the number of start-ups.

Jordan doesn't have resources. We don't have oil; we don't have any major mineral resources; the only thing we have is education," says Khamis Omar, dean of the IT department at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman, explaining the success of the IT industry in Jordan.

Despite these successes, Jordan is still on the far side of the perceived chasm. Only 54 percent of Jordanian homes have a personal computer and about 30 percent of people use the Internet. Of those who don't have computers, about half said they couldn't afford them while 40 percent said they didn't need them, according to a report by the Department of Statistics released to The Jordan Times last month.

In some regards, it may take decades for the Internet, like other technological revolutions, to take firm root outside its place of origin, says Steven Low, a computer science professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It takes time not only for the technology to mature, but also for [a different] society to learn how to use it and then adapt how you live or how you work to make the most use of it," he says. "That process has been going on in the developed world for the last several decades in terms of IT ... but it's only starting for the developing world."

In the meantime, Robert Fadel of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child says one of the most important things is to continue making technology available to more people so they can find ways to make it applicable to their lives. In the past two years, OLPC has helped distribute 1.5 million laptops to children in 35 countries.

"Children, with the support of their community and their parents and teachers, will find it all out, they will discover it. We can help them out by giving them the freedom and the access to use such tools," says Mr. Fadel. He adds that worrying that people might not get the full benefit of the Internet because they don't know how to use it, is like worrying that people may not benefit from a library if no one explains how to use it.

Still, Ms. Hargittai says that, for real Internet equality, it will likely take more than simply putting the tools in people's hands. Organizations working to bridge the divide must "devote resources to offering support, and potentially having a center where people can go for support, offering informal classes or instruction for the community," she says. She adds that any classes would need to effectively target the necessary audience, as many people may not know how much more they have to learn.