IdeaFestival

Seeing Memories to Come

In the course of procedures to prepare epilepsy patients for surgery, medical science has for the first time mapped mental time travel, recording the firing of individual cells responsible for recall. The understanding of the responsible biology may eventually lead to help for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

In this case epilepsy patients were asked to watch a series of brief video clips. Then:

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report 'what comes to mind.' The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

The discoveries are being reported today in the journal Science, according to the New York Times.

Wayne

Humanitarian design finalists for Curry Stone Prize announced

The five finalists for the $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize have been announced and will be recognized at the 11th International Venice Architecture Biennale. The finalists are:

• Shawn Frayne, inventor of the Windbelt, the world's first non-turbine wind-powered generator.
• Wes Janz, architect and associate professor at Ball State University, Indiana, whose work is inspired by the ingenuity of slum dwellers who build shelters from scavenged materials.
• MMA Architects principals, Luyanda Mphahlwa and Mphethi Morojele, who designed an energy-efficient home made using timber and sandbags for infill for a Cape Town family that costs just $6,900.
• Marjetica Potrc, an artist and architect whose "dry toilet" design, which converts human waste to fertilizer, is now used in barrios in Caracas, Venezuela.
• Antonio Scarponi, an architect whose project, "Dreaming Wall," cast text messages on a wall in Milan, uses technology and design to "jam" conventional social orders and illuminate the socio-political lines that unite and divide us.

The winner will be announced at IF on September 25th. A quick look around turned up more on the finalists here.

Wayne

Storing memories: Building the two-wheeled brain

This is a first as far as I know. Researchers at the University of Reading have created a primitive biological brain from artificially cultured biological neurons and connected it to a diminutive two-wheeled robot. The goal? To understand how the brain stores specific information and how recall functions. Roland Piquepaille:

'The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.'

By studying how memories are processed, researchers hope, among many other things, to understand how people afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease might be helped.

The University of Reading's School of System's Engineering has the original news, a picture of the robot and a video interview with the researchers. As might be expected, the post on Piquepaille's blog has drawn over 70 comments.

Wayne

Metamaterials: not quite X-ray glasses

Noting that forthcoming issues of Nature and Science will report recent laboratory successes, the London Times writes that invisible products based on metamaterial science are a little closer to reality.

According to Wikipedia, metamaterials gain their properties from their molecular structures rather than directly from their composition, as in textiles. London Times:

[University of California Berkeley's] Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: 'In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.' An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

Expressing doubt that the research will result in practical applications anytime soon, Popular Mechanics reaches for the reference any young boy who ever frequented the back pages of the Marvel universe will get.

Wayne

At the bottom of the Earth, extreme life

Using autonomous submarines, researchers are planning very dives deep into the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean to study one of the least explored areas of Earth's inner space, the volcanic vents that lie at the bottom. According to Roland Piquepaille, they believe they will find brand new life forms with unusual chemistries - sometimes called "extromophiles" - and that one of every two species encountered will be entirely new to science.

Wayne

Rocketeer

Carrying the hopes for low-cost access to orbit, Space-X's Falcon 1 is scheduled to fly sometime in the days following July 29, according to Smithsonian's Air&Space. Unlike the first two tries, "Flight 003" will carry paying cargo, including, in another first, one very small satellite that will deploy a technology straight out of science fiction, solar sails.

On board cameras filmed Flight 002, above, and watching stage separation and the Earth gradually getting smaller is, for me, a real thrill.

Should all go well, fourteen Falcon flights are scheduled through 2011. But saying in a recent speech before the Royal Aeronautical Society that "it is difficult to predict how long that window will remain open," Musk, who has sunk $100 million of his own money into Space-X, has much bigger goals in mind for the nascent commercial space transportation sector - sending humans to Mars.

There are a couple of ways to think about "that window."

First, the risk/reward ratio in the rocket business is very, very high, so spending a mind boggling fortune is easily done.

Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, who will be speaking at the IdeaFestival in September, will address the second.

Wayne

IdeaFestival Podcast: "The World in NOT flat"

The very latest IF podcast, "The World in NOT Flat," has been released.

To save the round trip, you may subscribe to all IF podcasts via iTunes or by using this RSS feed. And as illustrated above, podcasts are also listed on the right side of the IdeaFestival web site.

If you like old-fashioned text, check out Evgeny Morozov's liveblogged account of Ethan's presentation on the global digital dialog.

Wayne

Life on the Frontal Lobe

In a recent article in MIT Technology Review, "A Messy Art," neurosurgeon Kartrina Firlik wrote an insider's account of her relationship to the tools of her trade, to technology, that is simultaneously serious and all-too-human.

She will speak at the IdeaFestival in September, describing her life, as it were, on the inside.

Because the standard procedure until recently was to remove a substantial part of the patient's skull in order to make sure that the correct area of the brain was bare before the surgeon's probes, improvements in surgical instruments and technology are welcome. Not only can accuracy be greatly improved, but better tools and techniques are potentially far less debilitating for the patient post-surgery. You don't just jack into the human brain without plan. She writes:

"The opposite of play is not work, it's depression"

Making it her goal to make sure a game designer wins a Nobel Prize by 2032, Jane McGonigal is a well known designer herself, and is studying how virtual worlds and gaming can be used for serious play to solve, perhaps, a few real world problems. Games and their outcomes - play, focus, life-in-the-moment - are increasingly seen as important in their own right, methodologies and taxonomies are being explored, and their application to health care and business communications are being discussed.

Play is big.

McGonigal has a long list of game projects to her credit, most recently winning an award at SXSW for best alternative reality game for "World without Oil," and will be at the IdeaFestival in September. All-access pass are currently on sale.

My favorite quote from her web site is this one: "the opposite of play is not work, it's depression." It also goes to the question of what motivates little scientists.

Wayne

Why little scientists love virtual games

The Prospect (UK) has published an article, "Rage Against the Machines," that discusses at some length the leadership issue mentioned in yesterday's post on leadership and virtual games.

I wanted to comment on the following passage, which brought to mind someone special in my life.

Since the publication [of Everything Bad is Good for You] in 2005, [Steven] Johnson's argument in favour of what he labels the "Sleeper curve"—the steadily increasing intellectual sophistication of modern popular culture—has become something of a shibboleth for futurologists. To some, such as Malcolm Gladwell writing in the New Yorker, the book was a delightful piece of "brain candy"; to others, like the Guardian's Steven Poole, it was "an example of a particular philistine current in computer-age thinking." Johnson's thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art to be set alongside the works of Dickens or Shakespeare, but that the mean level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more cognitive engagement from consumers over the last half century. He singles out video games as entertainments that captivate because they are so satisfying to the human brain's desire to learn.... Where [some] sees an identity-dismantling intoxication, Johnson finds 'a cocktail of reward and exploration' born of a desire to play that is active, highly personal, sociable and creative. Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity and integrity of their virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of such in-game 'physics' has more in common with the scientific method than with a futile addiction, while the complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds that of any of the puzzles of logic and reasoning they might find at school. [Emphasis and hyperlink supplied]

My wife and I have recently had a discussion several times in regard to our youngest son, who is soon to turn seven and spends considerable time playing video games. He has become quite skilled at making his way past the challenges and roadblocks that litter his virtual path.

How much is too much?

So far we've set fairly generous limits. But the answer, as suggested in the quote, about why he spends that time perched on his stool next to the living room family computer might be more straightforward. It's simply more rewarding than cracking the logic that is putatively meant to develop the little scientist in him as he sits in his chair in a formal class setting.

That's not good.

Wayne