Matrix-style virtual worlds ‘a few years away’

Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away.

In 1950, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed the ultimate test of artificial intelligence – a human judge engaging in a three-way conversation with a machine and another human should be unable to reliably distinguish man from machine.

A variant on this “Turing Test” is the “Graphics Turing Test”, the twist being that a human judge viewing and interacting with an artificially generated world should be unable to reliably distinguish it from reality.

“By interaction we mean you could control an object – rotate it, for example – and it would render in real-time,” McGuigan says. Photoreal animation

Although existing computers can produce artificial scenes and textures detailed enough to fool the human eye, such scenes typically take several hours to render. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test, says McGuigan, is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second.

McGuigan decided to test the ability of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – Blue Gene/L at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York – to generate such an artificial world.

Blue Gene/L possesses 18 racks, each with 2000 standard PC processors that work in parallel to provide a huge amount of processing power – it has a speed of 103 teraflops, or 103 trillion “floating point operations” per second. By way of comparison, a calculator uses about 10 floating operations per second. In particular, McGuigan studied the supercomputer’s ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects – an important component of any virtual world with ambitions to mimic reality.

He found that conventional ray-tracing software could run 822 times faster on the Blue Gene/L than on a standard computer, even though the software was not optimised for the parallel processors of a supercomputer. This allowed it to convincingly mimic natural lighting in real time. - newsci

Electrified Deep Earth Changing Length of Day

Tiny shifts that make our days milliseconds longer may be due to forces under our feet, a new study has found.

It has long been known that natural phenomena on Earth’s surface, such as tides and winds, affect its rotation speed. Now scientists are investigating how events in a mineral layer at the core-mantle boundary, 1,615 miles (2,600 kilometers) deep, similarly affect the planet’s spin.

“The length of a day … is changing due to the interaction between the mantle and the core in the very deep Earth,” said study co-author Kei Hirose, a geoscientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

“This is basically because the bottom of the mantle has very high electrical conductivity.”

(Related: “Earth’s Core Spins Faster Than Surface, Study Confirms” [August 25, 2005].)

The research appears tomorrow in the journal Science.

Electric Deep Earth

Hirose and his colleagues simulated the physical properties of the deep mantle in their lab to learn more about how minerals in Earth’s lower mantle behave.
They squeezed a mineral called post-perovskite between the points of two 0.2-carat diamonds under high pressure.

The researchers then heated the mineral sample with a laser to 4,900 degrees. Under these conditions, the mineral conducted electricity at high rates.

“This means that we have lots of electricity at the bottom of the mantle, which is coming from [Earth's] core,” Hirose said. Raymond Jeanloz, an Earth and planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was not part of the study.

“What this means is that the magnetic field in the core can grab onto, or lock into, the lowermost mantle,” he said.

“And so one of the influences that this can have is in altering the length of day, or the rotation rate of the Earth, depending on when and where the core is grabbing onto the mantle.”

Not So Minuscule

This interaction accounts for several milliseconds of increase in day length over the past 150 years, co-author Hirose said.

Such minuscule time periods might seem negligible, but they do matter, he added.

Quentin Williams, an Earth and planetary scientist at University of California, Santa Cruz, agreed.

“We do care about Earth’s rotation, because you really want to know, at any given time, where a spot on the surface of the Earth is relative to its orbit,” he said.

“That’s why agencies like NASA have cared a lot about the Earth’s rotation over the years.” - natgeo

Germs in soil find antibiotics tasty

Antibiotics for breakfast? The drugs are supposed to kill bacteria, not feed them. Yet Harvard researchers have discovered hundreds of germs in soil that literally gobble up antibiotics, able to thrive with the potent drugs as their sole source of nutrition. These bacteria outwit antibiotics in a disturbingly novel way, and now the race is on to figure out just how they do it — in case more dangerous germs that sicken people could develop the same ability.

On the other hand, the work explains why the soil doesn’t harbor big antibiotic buildups despite use of the drugs in livestock plus human disposal and, well, excretion, too.

“Thank goodness we have those bacteria to eat at least some of the antibiotics,” said bacteriologist Jo Handelsman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Nature’s pretty effective.”

The discovery, published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, came about almost by accident.

A team led by Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church has a Department of Energy grant to develop ways to create biofuels from agriculture waste. Plants are full of natural toxins, so the goal was to find microorganisms in soil capable of breaking down certain of those chemicals. To winnow down the strongest candidates, they tried exposing these bacteria to what should have been far more toxic substances, antibiotics.

That bacteria can eat weird things is the basis for the field of bioremediation. Some bugs help break down oil spills, for example.

Nor is it a surprise that soil bacteria can withstand some antibiotics; some had already been found. After all, a number of antibiotics are natural — think penicillin. Some antibiotics have been derived from soil.

Instead, the surprise was how many bacteria didn’t just survive but flourished when fed 18 different antibiotics, natural and manmade ones — including such staples as gentamicin, vancomycin and Cipro — that represent the major classes used in treating people and animals.

Church’s team gathered soil from 11 spots in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, from city parks to pristine forest to a cornfield fertilized with antibiotic-containing manure.

Bacteria prefer to eat sugars, like rotting fruit. Put in laboratory dishes to subsist only on antibiotics, the germs grew a little more slowly but the researchers found every drug tested could support growth of some bacteria.

More disturbing, a number of bacteria could withstand levels of antibiotics that were 50 to 100 times higher than would be given to a patient.

“They were not only resistant, they were super-resistant,” Church said.

“I guess we weren’t really thinking about it as something that bacteria would just eat for breakfast,” he added. “They are capable of living on this stuff for a long, long time.”

The finding comes amid increasing concern that many infections could soon become untreatable, as more bacteria become immune to today’s antibiotics even as few new drugs are being discovered.

But the medical impact of the new work isn’t yet clear. Germs in soil aren’t big human threats, and no human pathogen has been spotted with the same ability. Still, many of the soil bacteria tested are relatives of human pathogens, including a notorious E. coli strain.

So the next step, under way now in Church’s lab, is to identify the actual genes that let these bacteria devour and degrade antibiotics. Then the question becomes whether that genetic mechanism is something soil bacteria might be able to transfer to human pathogens, thus making them more drug-resistant. - yahoo

Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.

Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people.

A “big” stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say. They literally gutted the dog,” local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

“When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them.”

Mikhail Tiyunov, a scientist in the region, said it was the first he had ever heard of such an attack.

While squirrels without sources of protein might attack birds’ nests, he said, the idea of them chewing a dog to death was “absurd”.

“If it really happened, things must be pretty bad in our forests,” he added. - bbc

Man with suicide victim’s heart takes own life

He even married the donor’s widow after the transplant 12 years ago.

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor’s widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham’s death at his Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said. He was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor’s family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor’s widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.

“I felt like I had known her for years,” Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I just stared.”

In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications in Hilton Head.

Some believe memories are stored in organs other than the brain.

The question has been around for years: does the heart feel emotion or does the brain simply make it seem as though it does? The question arises anew after years of transplanting the heart or other organs into human beings and noticing some changes in the recipient. After having had heart or lung transplants some recipients have noticed profound changes in their personalities. For some, there is an overwhelming need to consume quantities of Mexican foods when that type of cuisine was never a favorite. For others, a sudden love for football, when sports were previously hated, comes into play.

How can these phenomena be explained? Can the heart actually feel, think, remember, care, hurt or hope? The answer could lie in the way the human body stores memories and feelings. Although some people scoff at the idea that the heart can carry forth memories of it’s previous owner to the recipient others think it could be possible, but can’t explain the phenomenon.

It becomes extremely technical to explain how the heart could possibly retain memories. Cells which hold memory and feeling find their way to the brain for storage but beforehand they pass throughout the body including the heart. Does a portion of the memories and feelings get first deposited into the heart?

Some studies have been done to try to resolve this phenomena without much satisfaction. Some experts claim that the reason the recipient begins displaying some personality traits of the deceased is that all live cells possess a memory function. As cells travel through the blood stream some deposit in various organs of the body. These cells, even after death and transplantation, recall certain aspects of human traits. - ac

DIAL D FOR DISRUPTION

Excerpt: Want to build a phone company for $100? Give Mark Spencer a ring. In a research park outside the low-key bustle of downtown Huntsville, Ala. Mark Spencer finishes his barbecue and resumes wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business. Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya. Article: forbes, Related: Asterisk

‘THE GRID’ Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die

We often think of the Internet as a platform for unfettered global communication, where information flows freely, innovators can launch new applications at will, and everyone can have a voice. But it’s unlikely that our children’s Internet will look anything like what we have now.

How might the Internet as we know it die? Here are 10 possibilities.

1. Someone subverts the Domain Name Service. The Internet relies on DNS. But if someone broke — or worse, subverted — the fundamental way in which we find web sites, we wouldn’t trust URLs any more. Phishing would be easy. Own the DNS and you own the Internet.
2. Zombie networks attack! Untold numbers of enslaved PCs are waiting to do the bidding of shadowy hackers. Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs puts the size of the Storm botnet at between five and 10 million machines (though others peg the size of the network at much less.) Today, bots fill our inboxes with spam. But in the past, they’ve been used to take out companies and countries and to blackmail sites. In the end, it’s an arms race in which only one side has to play by the rules.
3. Massive physical infrastructure failure. If an accident involving a couple of cables in the Mediterranean can make the Internet unusable for hundreds of millions, imagine what an intentional attack could do.
4. Death by a thousand fragments: Ever since Usenet, people have been grouping together with those who think like them. In his book “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr cites one study that claimed more than 90 percent of the links originating within either the conservative or liberal community stay within that community. Some link referral tools can even be configured to keep visitors on sites with the same world view. The end result? Islands of like-minded people, increasingly sure there is only one right answer and that they’re in sole possession of it. And an end to the dreams of a global community envisioned by the Internet’s creators.
5. A really good virus breaks the routers. The Internet’s self-healing mechanisms rely on the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. But what if someone gets inside the routers? In a 2006 NANOG presentation, Cisco looked at claims of vulnerability and concluded that “the most damaging attacks are caused by the deliberate misconfiguration of a trusted router.” Corrupt BGP, and you not only stop the Internet from forwarding traffic, you interfere with our ability to get to the routers and fix them.
6. Updates break how updates work. Most software these days is designed to patch itself and remain current. But sometimes the process of automated upgrades triggers its own problems. On Aug. 16, 2007, Skype went down in what the company claimed was a side effect of a massive automatic update to Windows. It’s only a matter of time before an update makes a fundamental piece of software, like a networking stack, unable to update itself, cutting off millions and requiring manual intervention.
7. The Net stops being neutral. If the carriers start to charge us for access to sites the way cable companies charge for premium television, pretty soon you’ll have a “Google fee” on your monthly bill. This already happens with many mobile phones that feature the services of Facebook and YouTube. It’s perhaps the most insidious death, because it would signal the end of innovation — no one would be able to launch the next Skype, Twitter or YouTube without the tacit approval of carriers.
8. The lawyers get involved. The Internet has been an experiment in free speech. That may be coming to an end. Unable to go after the sites themselves, lawyers go after the hosters and registrars. That’s how Swiss banking group Julius Baer took whistleblower Wikileaks off the air. And once there’s precedent, others are sure to follow. The recording industry is already wondering if it can go after carriers for enabling copyright infringement. This is the irony of Net Neutrality: When telcos start treating different bytes differently, they aren’t “common carriers” and may be liable for what they transmit, including illegal content. So they’ll comply.
9. Walled gardens: Many countries already restrict how the Internet is used. China’s firewall — which includes 30,000 people tasked with finding improper users — is a good example. But the Internet is a tool for social change and revolution that could threaten any government. Imagine, for example, a U.S. Congress that outlaws online pornography and blocks known adult sites (which accounted for 18.8 percent of all web visits in 2004, according to Hitwise, although the U.S. government says that figure is actually a mere 1 percent.) Instead of a global Internet, we’d have a return to localized standards of decency imposed by legislators. It’d be like “Dirty Dancing” all over again.
10. Humans take themselves out: As Discover Magazine pointed out years ago, we’ve got plenty of ways to do ourselves in, from nukes to plagues to sucking ourselves into a black hole of our own making. And what’s an Internet without users?

The Internet has already morphed from its initial aspirations of open academia to a commercial platform controlled by corporations and carriers. In many ways, the time between the start of ARPAnet in 1969 and the end of Netscape this past February is just a brief period in history that the Facebook generation won’t miss.

The above is a great post from fellow blogger Alistair Croll.