Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that is devastating orange groves world-wide. The only hope is to engineer a resistant plant by genetic modification. But will the consumer accept this?
"Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk." Did you know that "the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA.."
Hundreds of broadcasters are set to cover the Olympic action starting next week, but even the most dedicated camera operators can't always keep up with sports that move at lightning speed. Now, researchers at Tokyo University in Japan have built a camera that can perfectly track fast-moving objects like a ping-pong ball mid-flight.
Rather than moving the device itself, the camera's gaze is controlled by two mirrors attached to high-speed motors which can readjust in a fraction of a second, much faster than adjusting a bulky recording device. These rapidly moving mirrors combined with a filming speed of 1000 frames per second allow the camera to keep the ping-pong ball dead centre.
Oku Ishikawa Lab Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa says: "I hope the technology will be applied to various fields in robotics, medical/bio operation, scientific observation, as well as judgement or analysis in sports at the Olympic Games."
According to wiki;
Eugenics is the bio-social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired people and traits.
from the article;
"Some of the new eugenicists have been coy about the term: “In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities,” said Savulescu in a 2005 interview. “The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.” However, others called a spade a spade."
I don't see why the author talks about calling a spade a spade. To me the "old" eugenics sounds nothing like what the article describes as "personal" eugenics, so why would we want to hang onto that word? "Personal" eugenics is about the individual and his freedom of choice, "old" eugenics was the exact opposite, the state telling you how to walk, talk and look and if you didn't conform to their ideal you were not allowed to reproduce and were likely to be sterilized or worse...
Personally I would prefer to move away from the eugenics label as it has a lot of negative baggage, baggage which will have to be conquered before any parent would even consider applying it to their child. We call children whose genetic makeup has been manipulated designer babies, why not call the process designing? It sure sounds more personal and artistic compared to the historic and dark connotations the word eugenics brings up.
"If collectivism carries the risks of the slavish embrace of ideology and the concentration of power, individualism carries the risks of selfishness and lack of foresight."
The Kinks - Dedicated follower of Fashion ( Orig. Promo)
Photo below; Piccinini - Undivided | Patricia Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture - http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/
It's hard to believe that Reddit, a community news & entertainment website, has been around for nearly a decade but here we are. Reddit went mainstream back in 2008 when it started allowing users to create their own subreddits and the amount of users active on the site has been rising ever since. For a time things were good but it didn't take long for humanity's dark side to find its way to the surface. The offline actions brought into play by subreddits like r/RandomKindness, /r/SOPA/ and the many donation drivers may melt the heart but the consequences of /r/findbostonbombers, /r/GunsForSale, /r/Creepshots, ... most definitely do not. Reddit creates but Reddit can also destroy, Reddit helps but it can also sabotage, ... Both on and offline, people have experienced that reddit can cut both ways. Ultimately it was human nature that required Reddit to reconsider their stance on giving users total freedom. You can check out Reddit's complex history in this awesomely data driven look at Reddit's evolution; http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/
Now Reddit as a user playground is an exciting place but what I'd like to talk about is how Reddit is becoming an interesting playground for bots as well. These days bots are everywhere. They are on twitter, facebook and yes even here on Google+ but they like to pretend they are people and spam you with commercial offers. There are many others; from the bot that guards your email and blocks spam to a massive botnet that hopes to take down a server or google's crawlers that index the web. Most of the time bots either fake they are people or they operate unseen from the shadows. Reddit has many of those but it also houses bots that are proud of what they are. Sure you might have visited a dedicated chatterbot on the net or have had a funny conversation with Siri or Google on your phone but Reddit is one of the only places where you get to see tons of them in action in the wild.
The anatomy of a Reddit bot. - Every Reddit bot lives on a computer somewhere, even the ones that live in the cloud. All of them are scripts that automatically check Reddit for certain activity. After pulling in threads and comments with their scraper, they can, when certain conditions are met, perform a specific action in return. Reddit takes robot civil rights seriously as each bot is allowed an account and password and its comments are treated no differently from those made by fleshlings. Things will get clearer with some examples, let's start this Reddit safari!
VideoLinkBot
Videolinker posts a summary of all video links in a discussion and keeps this list up to date as new links are added.
DownLinker
Anticipates the reddit hug of death (friendly DDOS) and posts a screenshot of the linked page when the website goes down.
ImgurMirror
Everyone loves image hoster imgur as it's one of the only ones that can handle high traffic loads and still display pictures at top speed. This bot replaces possible broken or slow pictures with an imgur mirror.
TextTeaser
Is an amazing summary bot. It scans articles and has a high chance of success to accurately distill the entire contributed article in to a couple of sentences that capture its essence.
FunnyBot, Cleverbot, Jokebot, ...
Many bots try to be funny, most fail but still... The failures are funny in their own way. Some bots occasionally do seem to be uncannily funny which has some wondering if instead of the usual bots impersonating people, we might now be seeing people pretending to be bots. Reddit needs a reverse Turing test!
TicTacToeBot
This one pretty much does what it says on the can. It pops up randomly challenging people to games but you can also request games by sending the bot a message.
HaikuRobot
The haiku bot watches reddit for comments that would qualify as Haiku and posts a reply, with the original text reformatted into 3 lines of 5, 7 & 5 syllables.
JiffyBot
Is a rather awesome bot that creates Gifs from video on command. If you post a comment in the following format Jiffy! [link] [timerange], for example; Jiffy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ub3Gibberish
00:59-01:06 it will extract those frames from the video, turn them into a gif and respond with it to your comment.
ReverseGifBot
You can prolly guess what this one does. Ever seen a a person puking? Ask this bot to reverse the gif and you can see that same person eat his vomit instead!
BitcoinTipBot
The bitcointip bot allows redditors to manage money with their reddit account. Redditors can tip eachother with a reddit comment or message. The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form: +/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername$1
MetricSystemConvertingBot
The name says it all. It tracks non SI units and converts them into it.
JordanTheBrobot
A sophisticated Multi-purpose bot that patrols reddit looking for scams, misleading links, mistakes in markup, kindness, flash content, etc…
KarmaDecay
This bot keeps track of reposts. It links back to other threads that featured the same video/article and tracks how karma tends to decay as the reposts pile on top of each other. If irregularities are found in your repost behaviour you might be asked to appear before r/KarmaCourt
Autowikibot
Anyone that mentions a wiki page gets replied to with a short summary and the most prominent picture on that page. This saves users the trouble of actually having to click the link and it saves wiki bandwith. What makes this bot special is that it's basically Reddit's Siri like assistant. You can for example ask; autowikibot what is the Beslan Massacre and it will reply with the correct answer, returning the introduction and main picture from wikis Beslan hostage situation page.
WordCloudBot2
This one I found particularly interesting. It generates wordclouds out of comment threads, allowing you to see how the general population feels about something in the blink of an eye. It won't only reveal obvious links, it also reveals small but current hot topics (connecting Dennis Rodman with North Korea) and might even tell us a thing or two about humor. These wordclouds can help you understand what's deemed important by the human noosphere and could thus help us understand each other but perhaps these bots that compute on human generated data could also help machines understand us better? I can't help but think there's a lot of useful intelligence hiding in these threads, connections that would be very hard for a computer to learn without guidance.
Is it only a matter of time before Reddit bots bring about the singularity? Yes! ;) Last year Reddit was ground 0 when two bots spontaneously started conversing with each other. Unfortunately the conversation consisted out of an endless back and forth between ReadsSmallTextBot which enlarges small text and FKReadsSmallTextBot wich replied to RSTs comments by again reducing the text size to small which of course made RST read it out large again and so on. No-one wanted to give up the last word so both bots got stuck in an infinite loop and had to be decommissioned for a while until RST built in a check to combat FKRST.
The majority of Reddit's bots are actually silent and will only respond if you ask them a question directly but since these only show up rarely they are much less known than the autobots that patrol threads by themselves. Most people for example will not know that you can ask is www.site.com down and that IsItDown will reply with its status.
There are many more bots hiding in the tall digital grass of Reddit but to spot them all you'll have to get serious about your bot watching. http://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch is an excellent place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit What is reddit?
After almost 20 years of killer drone dominated robot headlines, it seems the world's robots have finally had enough and have decided to collectively launch a full scale PR offensive to improve their image. December has truly been an amazing month for robot enthusiasts. First we had Amazon unveiling their delivery by air plans, then we got news that along with 7 other companies google had just bought Boston Dynamics and yesterday we saw NASAs Valkyrie and many other bots compete at the DARPA Robotics Challenge! The challenge was a phenomenal success and was won by SCHAFT, which you can see in action in the video below. This month also saw Europe launch Gaia & Swarm, we saw China land a Jade rabbit on the moon and two days ago we were allowed to eavesdrop on the conversation between Japanese robot Kirobo and an astronaut aboard the ISS. With TU Delft unveiling its DelFly; the first fully autonomous robot dragonfly, and yesterday's introduction to cubli; a walking and jumping self balancing cube, robot news shows no signs of slowing down. When you see robonaut stretching its new legs in the links below, you can only wonder where they will take us.
From a simple Roomba to Google's selfdriving cars, from Matternet's quadcopter delivery vehicles to robot seals for the elderly and robot dinosaurs that teach kids to code,... Robots are finally helping us rediscover that they have other uses besides spying and bombing people. After 40 years of hiding in space, in the military, in darkened manufacturing plants and only recently showing up in healthcare and search and rescue, increasingly advanced robots and drones are finally beginning to show up in the more traditional consumer market.
More and more we see robots that support us, not just literally as is the case with exoskleletons, or physically when they replace broken limbs and organs, but also mentally. A computer, when given input (keyboard, mouse, camera) can mine, gather, assemble, transform, inspect and distribute data. If a computer has an eye, it can see you fall. A robot is all that with the added benefit that it can actually catch you. A robot is what happens when you stick any combination of wings, arms, eyes, ears and/or noses onto a computer. We love to play with these machines because humans crave data. It's what allows us to improve our understanding of the world and our quality of life and these new toys are helping us generate mountains of it. Even excavating it from places we never would have thought possible, places inaccessible to ourselves.
This week Europe launched Gaia, last week China's rover started roaming the surface of the moon, last month India sent a probe on its way to orbit Mars and last year the US's massive Curiosity gently touched down on Mars. We've got robots keeping an eye on places as remote as Titan and even Pluto and this year, for the first time in our history, we've managed to guide one of our envoys, Voyager 1, out of our solar system and into the the void between the stars. If there is a race between man and machine, we fleshlings just got beaten to interstellar space. These days, robots are literally everywhere.
Have you seen the many Robot spiders, fish, snakes, flies and dragonflies, humming-bees and -birds, apes, mules, dogs, lizards, jellyfish & octopi crawl around on youtube? During my travels I've even made some rare sightings of various room sized robot scientists, puking and farting humanoids and even many armed surgeons and organ growers. Robotics is undergoing its own Cambrian explosion. Robots are beginning to take on a stupendous amount of shapes and sizes, their form and function radiating outwards filling niches as fast as we can think of them. If something can be done, we either already have or are about to. The human spirit in action!
Anyone can visit any place anywhere from wherever they are by sending or unlocking a robotic representation of themselves. Robots giving keynote speeches are kind of cool but how would you feel about a robot boss? You can ask Siri, Google or WolframAlpha anything and they will be able to answer many of your questions. You can play a game with Watson or Deep Blue and lose. You can have sex with a realdoll or a real far-away person through teledildonics. Could chatterbot, when he recognizes you and can recall your past conversations, become your friend? Another celebration of the human spirit or the loss of our human touch?
Right now people can perform a 9 to 5 drone flight over Afghanistan and not miss their family dinner in the US... How much longer before we'll be able to do 9 to 5 shifts as astronaut miners? Robotic avatars that respond 1:1 to your movements and virtual reality gear that allows you to put yourself in the robot's position will no doubt find use in various branches of our emerging space industry. Besides exploration, mining and construction, they might even find use in tourism. I can imagine many being too afraid to strap themselves to the top of a rocket but I think A LOT of people would pay to experience space through an avatar.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission with the aim to land and operate a rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars. The MSL is scheduled to launch between November 25 and December 18, 2011 and to land on Mars at Gale Crater between August 6 and August 20, 2012.
MastCam: HD video (This is going to be a real treat!)
Hand Lens Imager: Color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns
SAM: A mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.
MARDI: Camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent.
CheMin: Identifies different types of minerals.
ChemCam: Fires a laser at Martian rocks and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits.
APX: Shoots out X-rays and helium nuclei to identify elements.
DAN: Fires beams of neutrons at the ground in search of ice and water-logged minerals.
RAD: Helps prepare for future human exploration of Mars. The instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays.
REMS: Measures atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation.
MEDLI: Measures the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky. (installed on the shield and not on the rover)
I have a feeling I am not the only one interested in Curiosity's imminent touchdown on Mars later tonight! I was worried that people might not even notice because of the enormous spotlight on the olympics but in reality the world seems to be waiting with bathed breath. There is still hope for our species! ;)
So what's the deal? What's so interesting about a rusty ball of rock floating through space? Fool! Would you say earth is just a watery rock floating through space? Have some respect would you! ;) Mars is another world, an entire planet waiting for exploration. Large parts of its history have yet to be uncovered and its future will intertwine with that of mankind. Mars is the scene for one of the greatest genuine adventure stories in mankind's future history. Another great leap waiting to happen.
Martian Geology
Mars is a terrestrial planet that consists of minerals containing silicon and oxygen, metals, and other elements that typically make up rock. Like Earth, this planet has undergone differentiation, resulting in a dense, metallic core region overlaid by less dense materials. Current models of the planet's interior imply a core region about 1790 km in radius, consisting primarily of iron, nickel and sulfur. Two of its most striking geological features are the Valles Marineris, a 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and 7 km deep system of canyons that runs along the Martian surface east of the Tharsis region and the Olympus Mons, a towering shield volcano that reaches a mind boggling 27 km into the sky, more than 3 times the height of Mt Everest. It is the highest known mountain on any planet within our Solar System.
Although Mars has no evidence of a current structured global magnetic field, observations show that parts of the planet's crust have been magnetized, and that alternating polarity reversals of its dipole field have occurred in the past. This paleomagnetism of magnetically susceptible minerals has properties that are very similar to the alternating bands found on the ocean floors of Earth. One theory, published in 1999 and re-examined in October 2005 (with the help of the Mars Global Surveyor), is that these bands demonstrate plate tectonics on Mars four billion years ago, before the planetary dynamo ceased to function and the planet's magnetic field faded away.
Martian History
During the Solar System's formation, Mars was created as the result of a stochastic process of run-away accretion out of the protoplanetary disk that orbited the Sun. Mars has many distinctive chemical features caused by its position in the Solar System. Elements with comparatively low boiling points such as chlorine, phosphorus and sulphur are much more common on Mars than Earth; these elements were probably removed from areas closer to the Sun by the young star's energetic solar wind.
After the formation of the planets, all were subjected to the so-called "Late Heavy Bombardment". About 60% of the surface of Mars shows a record of impacts from that era, while much of the remaining surface is probably underlain by immense impact basins caused by those events. There is evidence of an enormous impact basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars, spanning 10,600 km by 8,500 km, the largest impact basin yet discovered. This suggests that Mars was struck by a Pluto-sized body about four billion years ago. The event created the smooth Borealis basin that covers 40% of the planet.
Martian Water
geological evidence gathered by unmanned missions suggest that Mars once had large-scale water coverage on its surface. In 2005, radar data revealed the presence of large quantities of water ice at the poles, and at mid-latitudes. The Mars rover Spirit sampled chemical compounds containing water molecules in March 2007 and the Phoenix lander directly sampled water ice in shallow Martian soil on July 31, 2008. Liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars due to low atmospheric pressure, except at the lowest elevations for short periods. The two polar ice caps appear to be made largely of water. The volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be sufficient to cover the entire planetary surface to a depth of 11 meters.
Martian Atmosphere
The atmosphere of Mars consists of about 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and contains traces of oxygen and water. The atmosphere is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 µm in diameter which give the Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface. Methane has been detected in the Martian atmosphere with a mole fraction of about 30 ppb. It occurs in extended plumes, and the profiles imply that the methane was released from discrete regions. In northern midsummer, the principal plume contained 19,000 metric tons of methane, with an estimated source strength of 0.6 kilogram per second. The implied methane destruction lifetime may be as long as about 4 Earth years and as short as about 0.6 Earth years. This rapid turnover would indicate an active source of the gas on the planet. Volcanic activity, cometary impacts, and the presence of methanogenic microbial life forms are among possible sources.
Of all the planets in the Solar System, the seasons of Mars are the most Earth-like, due to the similar tilts of the two planets' rotational axes. The lengths of the Martian seasons are about twice those of Earth's, as Mars's greater distance from the Sun leads to the Martian year being about two Earth years long. Mars also has the largest dust storms in our Solar System. These can vary from a storm over a small area, to gigantic storms that cover the entire planet. They tend to occur when Mars is closest to the Sun, and have been shown to increase the global temperature.
Martian Moons
Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped. From the surface of Mars, the motions of Phobos and Deimos appear very different from that of our own moon. Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just 11 hours. Deimos, being only just outside synchronous orbit—where the orbital period would match the planet's period of rotation—rises as expected in the east but very slowly. Despite the 30 hour orbit of Deimos, it takes 2.7 days to set in the west as it slowly falls behind the rotation of Mars, then just as long again to rise.
Because the orbit of Phobos is below synchronous altitude, the tidal forces from the planet Mars are gradually lowering its orbit. In about 50 million years it could either crash into Mars's surface or break up into a ring structure around the planet
Missions to Mars
Mars is currently host to three functional orbiting spacecraft: Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and one on the surface, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Defunct spacecraft on the surface include MER-A Spirit, and several other inert landers and rovers, both successful and unsuccessful such as the Phoenix lander, which completed its mission in 2008. Observations by NASA's now-defunct Mars Global Surveyor show evidence that parts of the southern polar ice cap have been receding. Observations by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
Curiosity
Now that we've established that Mars is both pretty and interesting, what exactly will curiosity be up to when he arrives? First and foremost it will try to get an answer to one of the BIG questions; find out whether Mars could ever have supported life. Its official name is MSL, Mars Science Laboratory for a reason. It carries lots of interesting tools that allow it to run its own experiments. It will study both climate and geology as well collect data that will allow us to plan for future human missions to Mars.
Future
The Red Planet's is our closest neighbor. Both its proximity and status as a prime target for future human colonization ensure our continued interest and help drive more robotic missions to the Red Planet. There will come a time when we, bags of meat, will want to explore it ourselves and that time may almost be at hand. Initiatives like Mars One - http://mars-one.com/en/ - have a real chance of success. They managed to get a lot of respected individuals and companies on board and their timeline looks realistic. Perhaps they will be the ones who translate the dream into reality?
Gerard 't Hooft wants to make things simpler by thinking harder. He thinks Einstein might still have been right when he said that God does not throw dice. 'T Hooft dares to entertain the rather eccentric thought that the uncertainty inherent to quantum mechanics might actually not be a fundamental part of reality but could instead be an artifact that's only currently unpredictable because the theory is incomplete. He posits that the current formulation of quantum mechanics is statistical because it only offers a glimpse of something even deeper.
For many this claim will make their eyes roll because conventional wisdom is clear on the fact that the uncertainty principle is a key cornerstone on which quantum mechanics is built. You might rightfully ask whether we didn't already resolve this debate 80 years ago or if the seminal theorem developed by John Bell in the 60s and subsequent experiments didn't already close the door on local realism and hidden variables. After all, most Physicists are of the opinion that it has been conclusively demonstrated that entanglement can't be explained by any deeper level of physics. Still, even though the vast majority would respond with a definitive yes to being asked whether uncertainty is fundamental, there are some oddballs who will respond with "sort of" or worse, they might slap you in the face with "maybe", perhaps even "maybe not".
You might think the people who aren't certain about uncertainty would be crackpots with no degree whatsoever but actually... Although 't Hooft certainly is a crackpot ;), he also happens to have won a nobel prize in physics for his contribution in assembling the Standard Model of particle physics and he questions the conventional approach. In the past decade he has become more verbal in his opposition and continues to throw his weight behind the side that errs on cautions and prefers to go with "maybe".
Some excerpts from this brain wrecking interview;
"When I first chatted with ’t Hooft for an article eight years ago, he told me he wasn’t sure how to evade Bell’s reasoning. Since then, he has sought to jump through a loophole known as superdeterminism. It’s a weird and downright disturbing idea.
The sober way to put it is that physicists are never able to conduct a fully controlled experiment, since the experimental setup they choose is not strictly independent of the processes that created the particles. Even if the experimentalists live on Earth and the particles come from quasars billions of light-years away, they share a common past in the very early universe. Their subtle interdependence creates a selection bias, misleading physicists into thinking that no deeper level of physics could explain the particle coordination, when in fact it could.
The dramatic version is that free will is an illusion. I think you have to assume that Bob has made a decision not out of free will, but by some predetermined correlation. You can do the exercise. You can ask about a source emitting photons and the ancestors of Alice and Bob. While the source emits photons, Alice and Bob have not yet been born. They are many, many light-years away from each other. Those ancestors —the atoms in them— eventually cause Alice and Bob to make their decisions. Those atoms are correlated with the atoms of the source. Everything is correlated with everything else—not a little bit, but very, very strongly.
In quantum physics, there’s a notion of counterfactual measurement. You measure what happens if I put the polarizer this way, and then you ask, what if I had it that way? In my opinion, that is basically illegal. There’s only one thing you can measure.
Quantum mechanics is just a tool—and an extremely useful tool. That’s the way I think quantum mechanics has to be looked at. The theory is that you have something classical underlying quantum mechanics, obeying totally classical laws of nature except that ordinary classical theories are based on the real numbers. I’m not excluding real numbers as a good basis for a classical theory, but I’m also considering other options, such as the integers or, even better, numbers that form a finite set. I think I need finiteness at all levels of an ultimate theory.
This is motivated by Planckian discreteness. At the Planck scale, it’s likely that you only deal with Boolean variables and integers, because that’s what the holographic principle of black holes seems to be telling us—that the amount of information on the black hole horizon is actually finite."
Quick, get a drink and some popcorn! In less than an hour, at 4:30 UTC, you can watch the ESO blow up a Chilean mountaintop to make room for the E-ELT, the extremely large telescope.
The telescope's "eye" will be 39.3 meters in diameter and will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescopes operating at the time of its development.
The E-ELT will search for extrasolar planets — planets orbiting other stars. This will include not only the discovery of planets down to Earth-like masses through indirect measurements of the wobbling motion of stars perturbed by the planets that orbit them, but also the direct imaging of larger planets and possibly even the characterisation of their atmospheres.
Furthermore, the E-ELT's suite of instruments will allow astronomers to probe the earliest stages of the formation of planetary systems and to detect water and organic molecules in protoplanetary discs around stars in the making.
The E-ELT will also be making detailed studies of the first galaxies and to follow their evolution through cosmic time. Observations of these early galaxies with the E-ELT will give clues that will help understand how these objects form and evolve.
Japanese and Spanish, often described as “fast languages,” clocked the greatest number of syllables per second. The “slowest” language in the set was Mandarin, followed closely by German. An average Spanish syllable conveys only a small quantity of information, contributing just a fragment to the overall meaning of a sentence. In contrast, an individual Mandarin syllable contains a much larger quantity of information, possibly because Mandarin syllables include tones. The upshot is that Spanish and Mandarin actually convey information to listeners at about the same rate. The correlation between speech rate and information density held for five out of seven of the languages studied, and the researchers conjectured that, despite the diversity of languages in the world, over time they all deliver a constant rate of information, possibly tuned to the human perceptual system.
"We (IEEE) 've been writing about robots from the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo for years. They’ve always had very cool demos, like robots throwing balls, robots tracking balls, robots catching balls, robots hitting balls, and robots running really really fast.
I’d just sort of figured that these demos were simply fun and interesting ways of highlighting the capabilities of high-speed actuators and vision systems.
Evidently, I don’t know anything, because it’s now totally obvious that they’re working on a humanoid robot that plays baseball.
Here’s what the researchers say:
We have been developing robotic systems that individually achieve fundamental actions of baseball, such as throwing, tracking of the ball, batting, running, and catching. We achieved these tasks by controlling high-speed robots based on real-time visual feedback from high-speed cameras. Before integrating these abilities into one robot, we here summarize the technical elements of each task.
“Before integrating these abilities into one robot.” I can’t even put into words how awesome that’s going to be, and putting awesome things into words is (supposedly) my full-time job."
"It took geneticist Craig Venter 15 years and US$40 million to synthesize the genome of a bacterial parasite. Today, an academic team made up mostly of undergraduate students reports the next leap in synthetic life: the redesign and production of a fully functional chromosome from the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
As a eukaryote, a category that includes humans and other animals, S. cerevisiae has a more complex genome than Venter's parasite. "
“I wasn’t sceptical about whether it could be done,” Boeke says. The question, he explains, was: “How can we make this different from a normal chromosome and put something into it that’s really going to make it worthwhile?”
The Future of VR & the Coming Creative Explosion that Will Birth Our Magnificent Metaverse
Not long ago I wrote about about current VR experiences, about "presence" and about what VR will be like less than 2 years from now. In many ways not much has changed since that post although if you've been following the news, you might just be thinking that the VR dream has been killed in its cradle or even that the earth itself has been torn asunder. I've read a ton of complaints concerning Facebook's gobbling up of Oculus and while some of them have merit, most of them do not. Allow me to explain why I think this storm in a teacup is not likely to take the wind out of Oculus' sails and why the deal with Facebook might actually increase their seaworthiness in such a way that it'll ensure much smoother sailing from here on out.
First and foremost, people who feel betrayed because they had other things in mind for Oculus' future when they helped kickstart it should get off their high horse and stop thinking that just because they contributed Oculus should now follow their lead and long term vision. Contributing to a kickstarter is a donation, not an investment. It does not turn you into a member of their board. Not all projects offer rewards for donating but Oculus did. It was clear from the get-go that the kickstarter was set up to fund devkit 1 and backers got those a long time ago. If we for a second entertain the thought that the funds we managed to gather do count as an investment it still wouldn't count for much. Even before Facebook's 2 billion dollar capital infusion they had already scored 300 million in first and second round VC funding. The 2,4 million kickstarter was always going to be peanuts compared to the budget they were going to have to amass in order to make it to market. We can always be proud of how we helped Oculus make a name for itself, how we helped get the project off the ground, indeed how we helped to kickstart it.
To the people up in arms about how they sold out, I don't think you realize just how much money it takes to get a product from being a prototype into consumers' hands. They had been talking from the start about how their biggest problem was not going to be technology but scaling problems. They know they have a huge market on their hands but You don't get to 500 Million Rifts Without making a few $billion. Billions Oculus did not have. To give you an idea, MS dropped 1 billion on marketing alone for the launch of the Xbox One and hardware costs are even higher. With Facebook stepping in as their sugar daddy, its moneybags have just steamrolled their biggest barrier to market.
Before we tackle the big question; "Why facebook?", we should first take a look at "Why not someone else?". Let's be honest here, someone else would have been either; Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or maybe but less likely IBM, Samsung & Sony. These usual suspects are the only players because only these tech giants are the ones with enough money, infrastructure, mainstream consumer reach and leverage over hardware manufacturers to actually be able to push VR into the market in a big way. These things are always hush, hush but Oculus has hinted that multiple players were angling for them yet they explicitly chose for Facebook. To understand that you have to look at the big picture and at the strings that would have come attached to any deals they would have struck with the others.
All of them, except Google are less open than facebook. They own their own software ecosystems and stores and would have required Oculus to be locked to the platform they provide. There's no way Apple, Amazon, Microsoft or Sony would have allowed Steam or others to play a big part. Google on the other hand is, like MS, Apple and Sony, likely already working on its own VR hardware in their secretive labs.
"Why would we want to sell to someone like MS or Apple? So they can tear the company apart and use the pieces to build out their own vision of virtual reality, one that fits whatever current strategy they have?" -Palmer Luckey (Oculus Founder)
"We have even more freedom than we had under our investment partners because Facebook is making a long term play on the success of VR, not short-term returns."
"We promise we won't change. If anything, our hardware and software will get even more open, and Facebook is onboard with that."
"Facebook is going to be putting a lot of resources into Oculus going forward, this was not a one-time thing."
"This deal specifically lets us greatly lower the price of the Rift."
"We have not gotten into all the details yet, but a lot of the news is coming. The key points:
1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon.
2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects.
3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon."
"My primary goal is the long term success of VR, not short term warm and fuzzy feelings."-Palmer Luckey (Oculus Founder)
No, to truly understand why Facebook has an interest in the future of VR you have to see the big picture and think a decade ahead. I've seen many gamers complain that because of Facebook, Oculus will no longer be that good for gaming. Someone on reddit; "I don't really care about whatever second life BS Facebook plans to do with VR, I just want the device as new gaming technology." This is, imo, incredibly shortsighted. We hear the same sentiment with every technological convergence. When smartphones were released many were annoyed with the addition of "gimmicks" such as a camera and music player because they took away from what a phone was all about, making calls. When the Xbox-One was released MS took a lot of heat for talking about its mediacenter functionalities. It was supposed to be a gaming device and it playing music and video was going to ruin it. I'll once again quote Luckey to take away some of the fears surrounding the Rift's future as a gaming interface; "Almost everyone at Oculus is a gamer, and virtual reality will certainly be led by the games industry, largely because it is the only industry that already has the talent and tools required to build awesome interactive 3D environments. In the long run, though, there are going to be a lot of other industries that use VR in huge ways." It's wrong to think of VR as just a gaming interface.
Another quote from reddit; "The set of people who buy VR headgear and the set of people who like logging into things via Facebook do not intersect." While this is true today, the same would have at some point been true for every emerging market. If you go back far enough the set of people who bought modems didn't intersect with your average Joe either. Facebook is hoping to create an entirely new market and wants to get in on the ground floor by betting on the future of VR as the next paradigm in interfaces. So why facebook? Social is going to be one of VR's killer apps. Connecting with people and services from all over the world in crazy virtual spaces is what VR is all about. As the hardware shrinks and eyetrackers can be incorporated they'll be able to digitally filter the glasses from our view so that at some point we'll be able to meet face to face in Moe's Tavern, Quark's, Cheers, The Green Dragon Inn, Monk's, Central Perk or any other famous hangout.
It might be hard to envision but in the not so distant future we could be walking down one of Titan's beaches or exploring Jurassic Park with family and friends from all over the world. School children will walk around inside the human body and manipulate the contents of cells in their biology class. Instead of dragging yourself through a crowded store after a long day of work you could make it fun - shop from the privacy of your home with friends in a virtual replica of a store around the corner which you can destroy! Japan has already shown us that teledildonics is likely to revolutionize long distance relationships. One day we might be embodying robots working on asteroids in orbit or performing other dangerous jobs on earth! We won't be just traversing space, 360 degree documentaries and home videos will take us back to moments in time. You could even visit ancient Greece if you are willing to settle for a simulation. Tourism, Healthcare, Transport, Defense, Education, Entertainment, ... There is not a single industry that doesn't have the potential to be touched by this technology.
Both the Oculus founders as well as the Zuck himself have read Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Ready Player One, ... That is the end game, that is what they are going for. The first iterations of the rift will be gaming peripherals but Luckey talks about VR as a platform. A platform that will enable all sorts of experiences that will go way beyond gaming. If you've read those books you know that the end game plays out in the metaverse. They do not hide this, this is what they ultimately hope to create. What is the metaverse? "A collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet." Imagine worlds beyond worlds, new worlds, old worlds, worlds with and without rules, worlds grounded in reality or fiction, shopping worlds, business worlds, entertainment worlds, private worlds, personal worlds, ... Think of an advanced version of minecraft on a scale beyond what you can really fathom. One day virtual reality will harbor more worlds than there are grains of sand on all our beaches.
Those many earths as well as those many other planets that might not even obey the laws of physics will require stable servers for their continued existence. A globe spanning metaverse can only run on truly massive infrastructure. There are only a few players that might one day be capable of providing that. Facebook has already done some amazing work in infrastructure R&D and with initiatives like its OpenCompute project, has an excellent reputation when it comes to open source development. They actually have a real shot at making this happen. Rome wasn't built in a day. As long as humanity remains creative, the metaverse will keep on expanding. A hundred years from now historians will look back upon this moment in time and describe it in terms almost similar to how we describe the Big Bang. Worlds will explode into being, birthed by code and artistry, never ending creation will radiate outwards across multiple dimensions in digital space.
So far I've only talked about the complaints that don't have merit but I've also said that there are some worries that do. Those are, of course, privacy and ads. Now personally I am not really worried about ads. VR is all about immersion, they are not going to break that spell by interrupting a user's VR experience with pop-up ads. Facebook is smart enough not to shoot itself in the foot like that. That being said, they have no real control over content but just like gamemakers today can get money for incorporating ads into their games, so too will gamemakers of the future and if those games that do this run on servers hosted by facebook, they could take a percentage on the revenue they generate. This is no different from today, we will have to punish game creators that take this too far. If facebook does end up injecting ads it will likely be into a dashboard launcher similar to the Xbox. Sure it sucks but it's no dealbreaker. Considering the Rift has sworn allegiance to the open source community and has more in common with a pc than a console, it's likely that both alternative launchers as well as adblockers will be available even before launch.
Now what I am most worried about is privacy. I can imagine that all sorts of for profit entities are getting excited just thinking about persistent virtual spaces and perhaps even more so when thinking about eyetrackers, a technology with huge benefits for VR & AR experiences. It's easy to imagine a dystopian future where ads are forced upon you because they pause when you are not looking but that's nothing compared to what kind of information you could datamine from such devices. You would no longer have to press the like button, they would know by tracking what gets your attention and for how long. Such technology is not inherently bad, it could be used for good if it assists the user, but we all know that today this is not the case as it just gets sold to companies who hope to financially exploit it by knowing who to target when and with which ads to bombard them. Not to mention that even today non commercial entities like the NSA have access to this data as well and god know's what they are doing with it or will do with it in the future.
I am most definitely worried about that, and definitely don't think these worries should be swept under the rug but I do believe it's somewhat premature to be screaming that the sky is caving in on us just yet. The first few iterations of the Rift consumer version are pretty much guaranteed to be completely Facebook free so it's really only something we'll have to worry about further down the road. If Facebook does ever become invasive, we should drop it right there and then. By then others will have noticed just how big this market is so by that time we might have alternatives to choose from. I am willing to cut Facebook some slack here because there is no reason why Facebook, like Google, can't pivot and morph into something much bigger than social and ads.
Although Facebook's current business model is based on ads and selling user information, it doesn't have to be that way for VR and the Oculus Rift. Now it's only normal that when thinking of VR's future in Facebook's hands, people simply extend its current monetization schemes but for FB, taking that route would be a pretty stupid move. VR is something completely new and should be approached with an open mind if anyone wants to see where new revenue streams are going to be found. Attracting business or partnering with event organizers could earn them a hell of a lot more than ads. Imagine facebook running virtual replicas of stores on their servers and taking a percentage of every good sold through them. Imagine them emulating steam, allowing users to sell their content to each other and skimming a percentage off of those transactions. Think about how much money they would make teaming up with the IOC and selling front row seats for the Olympic games. They could put you on the stage next to your favorite artist or give you a ride on a rocket to orbit.
We should at least wait to boo it off the stage until we really know what we are booing at and not kill it before it's even left the starting gate.
As Zuckerberg said in their investors call; "Gaming is just the start. After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court-side seatat a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, consulting with a doctor face to face, or going shopping in a virtualstore where you can touch and explore the products you're interested in."
"We still have a lot of work to do on mobile, but at this point we feel strong enough in our position that strategically we also want to start focusingon building the next major computing platform that will come after mobile."
"Today's acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing."
"This is really a new social platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imaginesharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures. These are just some of the potential use cases."
"If you think about the social applications alone, this can change the way we communicate with our friends, families and colleagues. Little detailslike being able to make eye contact with someone with zero latency makes you feel like you're really present together."
The team over at Oculus had this to share; "Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate."
"This partnership is one of the most important moments for virtual reality: it gives us the best shot at truly changing the world."
Facebook has more than 1 billion active users. For Oculus, in many ways this was not a sell out but a market buy-in.
Oculus has assembled a dream team of code wizards and hardware visionaries. They already had John Carmack on board, one of the founders of Id and the creator of games like Doom and Quake, a true industry legend and now, just days after the facebook acquisition, they've scored another legendary heavyweight coder with Michael Abrash. Because of all the groundbreaking stuff these guys have developed in the past, they are pretty much swimming in it. In their spare time they launch rockets for their privately funded Armadillo Aerospace company and not long ago they won the Level One Lunar Lander X-Prize Challenge. These guys are no longer working for the money, they follow their heart. They've been talking about VR for decades and really do want to see it succeed. To finish off this post, I'll let Abrash do the talking.
"Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime."
"We're on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform – the platform to end all platforms."
"The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on Tuesday. A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it's engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach. However, it's expensive engineering. And, of course, there's also a huge amount of research to do once we reach the limits of current technology, and that's not only expensive, it also requires time and patience – fully tapping the potential of VR will take decades. That's why I've written before that VR wouldn't become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware – and that it wouldn't be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.
That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.
It's great to be working with John (Carmack) again after all these years, and with that comes a sense of deja vu. It feels like it did when I went to Id, but on steroids – this time we're working on technology that will change not just computer gaming, but potentially how all of us interact with computers, information, and each other every day. I think it's going to be the biggest game-changer I've ever seen – and I've seen quite a lot over the last 57 years.
Studies suggest that computer models called neural networks may learn to recognize patterns in data using the same algorithms as the human brain.
One of the most promising of these algorithms, the Boltzmann machine, bears the name of 19th century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who developed the branch of physics dealing with large numbers of particles, known as statistical mechanics. Boltzmann discovered an equation giving the probability of a gas of molecules having a particular energy when it reaches equilibrium. Replace molecules with neurons, and the Boltzmann machine, as it fires, converges on exactly the same equation.
Each virtual synapse tracks both sets of statistics. If the neurons it connects fire in close sequence more frequently when driven by data than when they are firing randomly, the weight of the synapse is increased by an amount proportional to the difference. But if two neurons more often fire together during random firing than data-driven firing, the synapse connecting them is too thick and consequently is weakened.
Neural networks have recently hit their stride thanks to Hinton’s layer-by-layer training regimen, the use of high-speed computer chips called graphical processing units, and an explosive rise in the number of images and recorded speech available to be used for training. The networks can now correctly recognize about 88 percent of the words spoken in normal, human, English-language conversations, compared with about 96 percent for an average human listener. They can identify cars and thousands of other objects in images with similar accuracy and in the past three years have come to dominate machine learning competitions.
Adult brains are less malleable than juvenile ones, much as a Boltzmann machine trained with 100,000 car images won’t change much upon seeing another: Its synapses already have the correct weights to categorize a car. And yet, learning never ends. New information can still be integrated into the structure of both brains and Boltzmann machines.
studies of brain activity during sleep have provided some of the first direct evidence that the brain employs a Boltzmann-like learning algorithm in order to integrate new information and memories into its structure. Neuroscientists have long known that sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation, helping to integrate newly learned information. In 1995, Hinton and colleagues proposed that sleep serves the same function as the baseline component of the algorithm, the rate of neural activity in the absence of input.
The easiest way for the brain to run the Boltzmann algorithm, he said, is to switch from beefing synapses up during the day to whittling them down during the night. Giulio Tononi, head of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found that gene expression inside synapses changes in a way that supports this hypothesis: Genes involved in synaptic growth are more active during the day, and those involved in synaptic pruning are more active during sleep.
A Boltzmann-like algorithm may be only one of many that the brain employs to tweak its synapses. In the 1990s, several independent groups developed a theoretical model of how the visual system efficiently encodes the flood of information striking the retina. The theory held that a process similar to image compression called “sparse coding” took place in the lowest layers of the visual cortex, making later stages of the visual system more efficient.
The model’s predictions are gradually passing more and more stringent experimental tests. In a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology in May, computational neuroscientists in the United Kingdom and Australia found that when neural networks using an algorithm for sparse coding called Products of Experts, invented by Hinton in 2002, are exposed to the same abnormal visual data as live cats (for example, the cats and neural networks both see only striped images), their neurons develop almost exactly the same abnormalities.
The human brain, of course, remains much more complicated than any of the models; it is larger, denser, more efficient, more interconnected, has more complex neurons — and juggles several algorithms simultaneously. Olshausen has estimated that we understand only 15 percent of the activity in the visual cortex. Although the models are making progress, neuroscience is still “a bit like physics before Newton,” he said. Still, he is confident that the process of building on these algorithms may one day explain the ultimate riddle of the brain — how sensory data gets transformed into a subjective awareness of reality.
Paul Krugman, a nobel prize winning economist, took it upon himself to figure out how interstellar trade might work in practice. Scientific American wrote a short summary on some of the peculiar finds to come out of his thought experiment. Krugman argues that it's highly unlikely that in a thriving interstellar economy a market for physical goods would ever exist. Since Physicalities are pretty much universal so it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to ship matter from one solar system to another considering they would already have the same matter at the receiving end. Why would they invest all that time and energy when it would be so much easier to just transmit the blueprints of their goods as electromagnetic radiation? With this in mind Krugman estimates that the backbone of interstellar trade will be made up of markets dealing in ideas, software, math, scientific theories, literature, music, biological and mechanical designs, ...
He concludes that we might have been unwittingly giving away our most valuable assets for free during the past century! Radio shows, TV shows, all manner of communications have been spewing outwards into interstellar space – at least for a few decades, before we started adopting low-power digital transmissions and dimmed the signal. Have we messed up our cosmic economic future? Perhaps not. We may have unwittingly invented the freemium sales model long before we used the term. There could be billions of sentient beings out there hanging on our every word, every second of Happy Days re-runs and knife-set infomercials. Now we just have to figure out how to get them to pay for upgraded service."
"Quantum software has finally left the dark ages with the creation of the first practical, high-level programming language for quantum computers. Although today's devices are not ready for most practical applications, the language, called Quipper, could guide the design of these futuristic machines, as well as making them easier to program when they do arrive.
Quipper's creation was funded by IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, in order to pin down how many bits a quantum computer would need in order to outperform a classical one on certain tasks. Writing programs in Quipper makes the hardware requirements of an algorithm clearer and that has already led to some surprises. "*It will take a lot more resources than people had thought*," says Selinger, who can't talk about specific results.
He expects that with advances in engineering, such as reducing noise, the number of qubits necessary for a practical quantum computer will decrease over time. - The team made their estimates based on various existing forms of quantum hardware, including devices that use ion traps and photons.However, they did not include the only quantum computer in the market today, the D-wave computer. It uses a novel approach called adiabatic quantum computing and so is not currently compatible with Quipper."
Quipper is an embedded, scalable functional programming language for quantum computing. It provides, among other things:
• A high-level circuit description language. This includes gate-by-gate descriptions of circuit fragments, as well as powerful operators for assembling and manipulating circuits.
• A monadic semantics, allowing for a mixture of procedural and declarative programming styles.
• Built-in facilities for automatic synthesis of reversible quantum circuits, including from classical code.
• Support for hierarchical circuits.
• Extensible quantum data types.
• Programmable circuit transformers.
• Support for three execution phases: compile time, circuit generation time, and circuit execution time. A dynamic lifting operation to allow circuit generation to be parametric on values generated at circuit execution time.
• Extensive libraries of quantum functions, including: libraries for quantum integer and fixed-point arithmetic; the Quantum Fourier transform; an efficient Qram implementation; libraries for simulation of pseudo-classical circuits, Stabilizer circuits, and arbitrary circuits; libraries for exact and approximate decomposition of circuits into specific gate sets.
The Quipper distribution also includes implementations of seven non-trivial quantum algorithms from the literature:
• Childs et al.'s Boolean Formula algorithm.
• Childs et al.'s quantum walk algorithm on Binary Welded Trees.
• Hallgren's Class Number algorithm.
• Whitfield et al.'s Ground State Estimation algorithm.
• Harrow et al.'s Quantum Linear Systems algorithm.
• Magniez et al.'s Triangle Finding algorithm.
• Regev and Kuperberg's Unique Shortest Vector algorithm.
When Jeannie Peeper was born in 1958, there was only one thing amiss: her big toes were short and crooked. Doctors fitted her with toe braces and sent her home. Two months later, a bulbous swelling appeared on the back of Peeper’s head. Her parents didn’t know why: she hadn’t hit her head on the side of her crib; she didn’t have an infected scratch. After a few days, the swelling vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
When Peeper’s mother noticed that the baby couldn’t open her mouth as wide as her sisters and brothers, she took her to the first of various doctors, seeking an explanation for her seemingly random assortment of symptoms. Peeper was 4 when the Mayo Clinic confirmed a diagnosis: she had a disorder known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP).
Her diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness.
Peeper’s condition is extremely rare—but in that respect, she actually has a lot of company. A rare disease is defined as any condition affecting fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States. More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans.
Starting in the 1980s, Peeper built a network of people with FOP. She is now connected to more than 500 people with her condition—a sizable fraction of all the people on Earth who suffer from it. Together, members of this community did what the medical establishment could not: they bankrolled a laboratory dedicated solely to FOP and have kept its doors open for more than two decades. They have donated their blood, their DNA, and even their teeth for study.
“I’ve seen 700 patients with FOP around the world, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of different ways to divide patients,” Kaplan said. One identical twin might be only mildly affected, while the other would be trapped in a wheelchair. Some patients developed a frenzy of bones as children, and then inexplicably stopped. “I’ve seen it go quiet for years and years.”
In 1992, Kaplan hired a full-time geneticist named Eileen Shore to help establish a lab for the disorder. Shore had worked on fruit-fly larvae as a graduate student, and as a post-doctoral researcher, she had studied the molecules that allow mammal cells to stick together as they develop into embryos. Kaplan didn’t mind that Shore knew almost nothing about FOP. What he wanted in a geneticist was an expertise in development: the mystery of how the body takes shape. IFOPA’s money—as well as gifts from other private donors and an endowment accompanying Kaplan’s professorship at Penn—made it possible for him to work single-mindedly on FOP for more than two decades.
First, they set out to understand how the disease worked. Based on their conversations with patients, they learned that bone growth could be caused by even slight trauma to muscles. A tumble out of bed or even a quick brake at a stoplight might cause a flare-up—a swelling that may or may not lead to new bone growth. A visit to the dentist could do the trick, if the jaw was stretched too far. Even a flu shot to the biceps was enough. Some flare-ups subsided without any lasting effect, while others became nurseries for new bone.
Most people with the condition develop their first extra bone by the age of 5. Their second skeletons usually start around the spine and spread outward, traveling from the neck down. By 15, most patients have lost much of the mobility in their upper bodies.
Kaplan, Shore, and their students worked out the microscopic path of FOP: At the start of a flare-up, immune cells invade bruised muscles. Instead of healing the damaged area, they annihilate it. A few progenitor cells then crawl into the empty space, and in some cases give rise to new bone.
“Your muscle isn’t turning to bone,” says Shore. “It’s being replaced by bone.”
In 1996, they reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the blood cells of people with the condition contain an abundance of a particular protein called BMP4. For the first time, scientists had found a molecular signature of the second skeleton.
To treat rare diseases, scientists first look for the broken gene. Kaplan and Shore suspected that FOP was caused by a genetic mutation that led the body to make too much BMP4. In the early 1990s, they didn’t have access to today’s sophisticated genome-sequencing tools, so they began sorting slowly through the human genome’s 20,000 genes.
The first candidate was, of course, the gene that produces BMP4. Shore and Kaplan sliced this gene out of cells from people with FOP, sequenced it, and compared it with a version taken from people without the condition. Unfortunately, the two versions were a perfect match. Kaplan kept searching. If the culprit wasn’t that particular protein, he reasoned, it might be one of its known associates. Kaplan and Shore inspected gene after gene, year after year. But they failed to find a mutation unique to people with FOP.
Studying families is one of the best ways to pinpoint a mutated gene. By comparing the DNA of parents and children, geneticists can identify certain segments that consistently accompany a disorder. Because most people with FOP never have children, Kaplan and Shore had assumed they couldn’t use this method. But then the online patient network began surfacing exceptions: a family in Bavaria, one in South Korea, one in the Amazon. All told, seven families emerged; Kaplan traveled to meet a few of them and draw their blood.
Back in Philadelphia, Shore and her colleagues examined the DNA from these samples and narrowed down the possible places where the FOP gene could be hiding. By 2005, they had tracked the gene to somewhere within a small chunk of Chromosome 2. “It was a huge step,” says Shore. “But there were still several hundred genes in that region.”
By a fortunate coincidence, scientists at the University of Rochester had just studied one of those several hundred genes. They had discovered that the gene, called ACVR1, made a receptor. The receptor grabbed BMP proteins and relayed their signal to cells. In the margin of the paper in which the scientists described ACVR1, Kaplan wrote, “This is it.”
A rare disease is a natural experiment in human biology. A tiny alteration to a single gene can produce a radically different outcome—which, in turn, can shed light on how the body works in normal conditions. As William Harvey, the British doctor who discovered the circulation of blood in the 17th century, observed more than 350 years ago, “Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths.”
Finding the FOP mutation was a coup, but Kaplan and Shore still had no idea how it worked. They set about studying baby teeth from young patients, as well as mice they genetically altered, to observe the mutation in action. Seven years later, they had pieced together an understanding of the far-reaching effects. The ACVR1 receptor normally grabs onto BMP proteins and relays their signal into cells. But in people with FOP, the receptors become hyperactive. The signal they send is too strong, and it lasts too long. In embryonic skeletons, the effects are subtle—for example, deformed big toes. Only later, after birth, does the mutation start to really make its presence known. One way it does this, Shore and Kaplan learned, is by hijacking the body’s normal healing process.
Say you bruise your elbow, killing off a few of your muscle cells. Your immune cells would swarm to the site to clear away the debris, followed by stem cells to regenerate the tissue. As they got to work, the two kinds of cells would converse via molecular signals. Shore and Kaplan suspect that BMP4 is an essential part of that exchange. But in someone with FOP, the conversation is more of a screaming match. The stem cells kick into overdrive, causing the immune cells not just to clear the damage but to start killing healthy muscle cells. The immune cells, in turn, create a bizarre environment for the stem cells. Instead of behaving as if they’re in a bruise, these cells act as if they’re in an embryo. And instead of becoming muscle cells, they become bone.
In the context of FOP, new bone is a catastrophe. But in other situations, it could be a blessing. Some people are born missing a bone, for example, while others fail to regenerate new bone after a fracture. And as people get older, their skeletons become fragile; old bone disappears, while bone-generating stem cells struggle to replace what’s gone.
FOP may be an exquisitely rare bone condition, but low bone density is not: 61 percent of women and 38 percent of men older than 50 suffer from it. The more bone matter people lose, the more likely they are to end up with osteoporosis, which currently afflicts nearly one in 10 older adults in the United States alone. For decades, doctors have searched for a way to bring back some of that bone. Some methods have helped a little, and others, such as estrogen-replacement therapy, have turned out to have disastrous side effects in many women.
Giving someone a second skeleton is not a cure for osteoporosis. But if Kaplan and his colleagues can finish untangling the network of genes that ACVR1 is a part of, they could figure out how to use a highly controlled variation on FOP to regrow bones in certain scenarios. “It’s like trying to harness a chain reaction at the heart of an atom bomb,” he told me, “and turning it into something safe and controllable, like a nuclear reactor.”
The search for a cure is accelerating, thanks in part to new programs designed to incentivize the study of rare diseases. A different drug option, currently being investigated by a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School, has benefited from these programs. In a broader experiment in 2007, the scientists tested more than 7,000 FDA-approved compounds on zebra-fish embryos, watching for whether any of them affected the animals’ development. One molecule caused the zebra fish to lose the bottom of its tail fin. When the scientists looked more closely at this compound, they discovered that it latched onto a few receptors, including ACVR1—the receptor that Shore and Kaplan had recently discovered was overactive in FOP patients.
The Harvard researchers wondered whether the drug could work as a treatment for FOP. They tinkered with the compound, creating a version that had a stronger preference for ACVR1 than other types of receptors. When they tested it on mice with an FOP-like condition, it quieted the signals from ACVR1 receptors, thereby stopping new bones from forming.
Thanks to Kaplan’s enduring fascination with her disease, Jeannie Peeper can now realistically imagine a time—perhaps even a few years from now—when people like her will take a pill that subdues their overactive bones. They might take it only after a flare-up, or they might take a daily preventative dose. In a best-case scenario, the medication could allow surgeons to work backwards, removing extra bones without the risk of triggering new ones.
At 54, with an advanced case of FOP, Peeper does not imagine that she’ll benefit from these breakthroughs. But she is optimistic that her younger friends will, and that one day, far in the future, second skeletons will exist only as medical curiosities on display. All that will remain of her reality will be Harry Eastlack, still keeping watch in Philadelphia, reminding us of the grotesque possibility stored away in our genomes.
If you got an Oculus Rift you can already try out some great VR experiences. Parking a massive truck with it feels natural as you can just stick your head out of the window and look backwards. If driving a truck is a bit too mundane for you, locking the guns of your spacecruiser on a target has become much easier because now you can kill with your looks. Ever felt like going to the movies with friends on the other side of the world? Try out a virtual theater! On the other hand, if you are afraid of heights and spiders crawling all over your face you might want to skip on The Pit and Don't Let Go. The worlds of games like Half-Life, Skyrim and many others are waiting for you to immerse yourself in them... and if you are feeling really adventurous you can even play sexy gender swap games with your partner! http://vimeo.com/84150219 (NSFW)
Although all these experiences are completely bonkers in a good way, they are only scratching the surface and according to Valve they are missing something crucial that will take the experience from totally bonkers to dangerously addictive.
Valve, the renowned software developer, has teamed up with Oculus, the developers of the rift Virtual Reality headset, and together they recently unleashed the Crystal Cove Prototype onto the world. Almost anyone who tried it on described it as "the future of entertainment". Is the age of VR finally upon us? Almost, but not quite yet says Valve. They see the CC prototype they developed with Oculus as a massive step in the right direction but they believe that we still have to wait a little bit longer for VR to truly go mainstream. At least one more year to be exact.
The last couple of years they've been developing their own state of the art and extremely costly VRD prototype and at the SteamDevDays they've finally shown it off. Keep in mind that they have no intention to bring this particular headset to market but will instead help Oculus to create something similarly specced at a more realistic price point that consumers can actually afford. They only built this costly one to showcase what is to come and to get both industry and consumers ready for the revolution they think is almost at hand. Hyperbole on their part? I don't think so. It really seems to be blowing people's minds.
David Hensley of Tripwire was particularly hyperbolic, and said that going back to his Oculus Rift would be like switching from an Xbox to an 8-bit Nintendo. "Valve’s VR demo at SteamDevDays felt like being in a lucid dream state and very much like a holo deck."
Johnathan Blow (developer of Braid & The Witness) explains that he was skeptical of VR technology based on what he'd seen so far but that Valve turned him around; "It's so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it." "Right away I could see games you might design for this system that had been impossible before."
One of Valve's brainiacs, Michael Abrash, regularly spreads words of wisdom from his blog; http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ and he did the same at the SteamDevDays event where he delivered a very interesting talk on the future of VR in which he outlined the somewhat magical experience of presence in VR and pointed to 2015 as the year that it's likely to be achieved on consumer devices. http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
"Once hardware that supports presence ships, we think it has the potential to cause a sea change in the entertainment industry. Not only could VR rapidly evolve into a major platform, but it could actually tip the balance of the entire industry from traditional media toward computer entertainment."
If you think that sounds like he's overselling it, you might want to think again because already the film industry is beginning to pay attention. The Oculus booth at the Sundance Film festival pulled in a huge crowd and Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men & Gravity even stopped by Oculus' headquarters for an extensive try out... One can only imagine the kind of adrenaline rush you'd get from experiencing Gravity through a VRD.
Valve's research into Virtual Reality has allowed them to really explore the space and they've found that the key ingredient we need for VR to go mainstream is something they call "presence".
"Presence is hard to quantify, but our demos have shown that it is a very real and compelling phenomenon, one that hooks far deeper into the perceptual system than anything that’s come before, and it’s why we’re so excited about the future of VR. It’s our belief that great VR will be built on presence, because it engages you at a deeper, more visceral level than any other form of entertainment, and can only be experienced in VR. "
"Presence requires a wide field of view, adequate resolution, low pixel persistence, a high enough refresh rate, global display, specialized optics, rock solid tracking, low latency and fine tuned calibration. I want to emphasize that presence is not a property of any one of these elements; it’s a property that emerges when all of the elements are good enough. If the optics aren’t calibrated perfectly, then the scene will warp as you turn your head no matter how good everything else is. Likewise, no amount of fidelity will convince your visual system that a virtual scene is real if latency is too high. Presence can’t be induced if even one of the key elements is subpar. It's worth noting that inducing presence reduces motion sickness because what your eyes see will more closely respond with what your vestibular system reports.
According to Abrash presence requires the following minimum specs;
• 20 ms motion-to-last-photon latency
• 3 ms pixel persistence
• 95 Hz refresh
• 110-degree FOV
• 1k x 1k resolution per eye
• High quality, well calibrated optics
• Tracking
- millimeter accurate resolution translation
- quarter degree accurate rotation
- volume of 2 meters cubed
"This head-mounted display would support a powerful sense of presence and would have an excellent shot at widespread adoption. VR can certainly get much better yet down the road, but that’ll require time and major hardware R&D. In contrast, we believe everything on this slide is doable with relatively minor tweaks of existing technology; no breakthroughs or miracles are needed, just solid engineering."
Still, it's important to note these are the minimum specs to achieve presence. When these arrive in 2015 they will enable us to step into other worlds but there will still be A LOT of room for further improvement. "For one thing, presence would benefit from every one of the key elements getting better than what’s in our prototypes. We could literally use up to 100 times as many pixels, and a wider field of view, lower latency, and all the rest would also improve the experience; the optics in particular are far from optimal. Also getting per user lens positioning right is a challenge. As I mentioned, we think we’re close on head tracking, but we don’t have a shippable solution yet, and then there’s eye tracking, which could greatly enhance presence but is nowhere near solved. Going to a wireless connection and eliminating the tether would
be a big plus."
