http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34276015/vp/38981689#38981689

This is truly Mind Over Matter: The patients are distracted virtually using both video and audio. The treatment has been especially effective for people with burns and for soldiers suffering from PTSD.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/future-mars-colonists-could-learn-terraform-studying-darwins-methods

Ascension Island Charles Darwin's artificial forest captures moisture from clouds that drift over the volcanic peaks on Ascension Island. Google Earth

 

The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say.

The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/cody/2010/09/01/how-the-burgeoning-app-revolution-will-change-your-life/

Ten years ago, did you imagine that you’d no longer ship your CDs through the mail to Netflix and that the company would have figured out how to license and stream mainstream Hollywood content to you on your laptop…or your phone…or a tablet-pad touch screen computer?

Fifteen years ago when you were sending your first emails to other family members finally trying out that whole dial up Internet thing, did you picture sometimes spending hours per day looking at the snorkeling pictures of people you once had a lab with in college on a “social network” like Facebook?   Maybe you did watch sci-fi movies and you did expect that you’d be visually communicating with your kids on a handset like you can with the iPhone 4.   Did you picture wikipedia?  Twitter?  How about remote robotic surgeries done over the network with Intuitive Surgicals miracle products?

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/08/31/improving-cognition-in-computers.html

Scientists are studying how to design circuits that can recognize objects like people can.

A computer probably can calculate the answer to a math problem much faster than the average person. But when it comes to visual recognition—faces, objects, and patterns—the human brain has it all over even the most sophisticated processors.
“Humans and other primates have the remarkable ability to effortlessly recognize things visually,’’ said Gabriel Kreiman. ‘’ Currently, no computer can recognize objects to the level that humans can.  Humans do it without even thinking about it. But there is very complex machinery behind the recognition process.’’
Kreiman, a professor in the department of neuroscience and ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital in Boston, is trying to understand the neural underpinnings of human brain function with the goal of designing computers that ultimately can recognize objects as rapidly and accurately as people.
“It would be very useful to build computers that could rapidly recognize objects,’’ he said. “There would be many important applications: recognizing humans at ATMs, for example, terrorists at airports, and especially patterns and images for clinicians, such as abnormalities in sleep patterns, tumors, cell type patterns—all the patterns that clinicians need to look for on a daily basis. It could help clinicians tremendously if we could help them by providing an automatic way of visually recognizing patterns.’’
The research is funded by a $503,398 grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  The work has considerable potential in the fields of engineering and computing, as well as practical impacts on such areas as health care and security.
“The long term goal is to build a computational circuit inspired by the human brain that can function independent of humans,’’ Kreiman said. “In between, there might be hybrid approaches, with humans working together with computers.’’
Human beings have the ability to perceive stimuli, experience emotions and reflect about others and themselves, he said. “At the heart of these and other capabilities is the phenomenon of consciousness,’’ he said. “Consciousness has to be implemented through the hardware of neurons in our brains. Somehow, a physical system composed of neuronal circuits gives rise to what seems to be the least physical properties of all: our thoughts and feelings. How this transformation takes place has preoccupied generations of scientists and philosophers.’’
Fortunately, advances during the last several decades have made it possible to investigate the mechanisms of consciousness scientifically. Kreiman is studying the brain function of patients, both adults and children, who already have electrodes implanted in their brains for medical reasons, usually for epilepsy, to help control seizures. “We monitor the activity inside the human brain at very high spatial and temporal resolution; essentially we look at the behavior of neurons at the level of milliseconds,’’ he said. “We go in with a laptop and show them images. We ask them to perform different kinds of tasks, to play games, to recognize images. The activity from the patients’ neurons goes to our computers, and we can correlate that information with the images they have seen.’’
Despite the amazing contributions computers provide, there are lots of things that humans still can do better than machines, Kreiman said.
“We don’t really think about them because they are so trivial to us,’’ he said. “In addition to seeing, just the simple process of walking remains a very challenging task for robots--to navigate and recognize obstacles, to adjust your posture and force to different types of terrains, slopes and so forth.”
Moreover, scientists have yet to devote efforts into defining the brain circuits responsible for emotions, and translating those circuits into computers, Kreiman said.  In the future, computers may be able to read, as well as convey, emotions, he said. “Computers are poor at mostly everything that has to do with common sense,’’ he added. “They are good at everything where there is a clear defined mathematical algorithm, for example, computing the square root of seven--a computer can do it in a fraction of a millisecond. You can recognize whether the person standing in front of you is happy or sad. A human can look at the person, recognize her as a friend, and see that she is sad today. Currently, there is no computer that can come close to that.’’

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2010/08/31/129562758/music-in-the-cloud?ft=1&f=3

There's fueling speculation that a major overhaul of the iTunes music store is imminent — one that could take advantage of advances in so-called cloud computing.      

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?th&emc=th

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

 

http://futuretense.publicradio.org/episode/index.php?id=1041697927

Could Apple move iTunes into the cloud? It probably won’t happen tomorrow at Apple’s iTunes event – but in the long run it seems inevitable. Cloud computing is slowly taking over – it’s already changing the way we work and live. Corporations’ appetite to increase data storage is driving HP and Dell in their bidding war for the data storage company 3Par.  Seems like time to ask what’s ours in a cloud-computed world? If you are uploading all your photos to Flickr, who owns them? What about the love letters sent to your husband or wife? Do you own those words if they are stored in-box on Yahoo instead of a in a shoebox in your closet?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/aug/30/glowing-praise-digital-books?CMP=EMCGT_310810&CMP=EMCNEWEML961

The newest technology has revived old habits of reading. Just switch the lights off late at night and turn the virtual pages of a spooky gothic tale for an illuminating experience.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/30/AR2010083003937.html?wpisrc=nl_headline

In June, the Department of Defense announced that the mineral wealth of Afghanistan -- including iron, copper, gold and lithium -- might be worth more than $900 billion. Despite the historic importance of the first three, lithium seemed to be the material that most excited Pentagon officials, who gushed in internal memos about Afghanistan's becoming the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium."