Science and biotech

Computers with processors that mimic the human brain's cognition, perception, and action abilities are a lot closer than they've ever been after IBM on Wednesday unveiled the first generation of chips that will power them.

The announcement comes nearly three years after IBM and several university partners were awarded a grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to re-create the brain's perception, cognitive, sensation, interaction, and action abilities, while also simulating its efficient size and low-power consumption.

The grant was part of Phase 2 of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) … Read more

If you're having a bad hair/skin/teeth/nose day, the last thing you probably need is software to tell you you're unattractive.

Yet that's precisely what a computational tool detailed today in the journal PLoS One promises to do. Using machine-learning techniques, it also examines images of faces for other social traits, such as competence, trustworthiness, meanness, dominance, and extroversion.

Needless to say, the software can't scientifically gauge your hotness or how likely you are to pay back a loan. It can only measure how your particular eye shape and grimace might be perceived and interpreted, a reaction that can vary from culture to culture depending on a host of factors.

Facial recognition, of course, is being used for everything from photo tagging to law enforcement and computer logins these days. This software takes the practice a step further in a high-tech continuation of research aimed at connecting facial shape and features to personality and character.

For example, "the perception of dominance has been shown to be an important part of social roles at different stages of life, and to play a role in mate selection," said Mario Rojas, a researcher from the Autonomous University of Barcelona who worked on the project with a team from Princeton University. If the information on which such evaluations are made could be automatically learned, he said, it could be modeled and used as a tool for designing better interactive computer systems. … Read more

Who needs soil when you can grow crops on film? Japan's Mebiol is growing a Garden of Eden of sorts on its thin hydro-membranes, which are only microns thick.

As the vid below shows, the firm's Integrated Membrane Culture, or IMEC (PDF), is a technology for farming using a substrate that's made from hydrogels. No soil is needed, as the plants absorb water and nutrients from the film.

The greens can grow considerably if liquid nutrients are given to them from above and below, through the film, according to Yuichi Mori of Mebiol and Waseda University.

The film looks like regular plastic wrap but is full of nano-size holes. It prevents bacteria and viruses from harming the plants, so chemicals aren't needed.

An impermeable ground film prevents any soil contaminants from reaching the plants, so it can be used anywhere. Mori and collaborators even grew tomatoes in the desert of Dubai using the films. … Read more

Full disclosure: I just finished a cup of black coffee, and it was damn fine. (And yes, I make Twin Peaks references wherever possible.)

So it is with vigorous jumping up-and-down motions, aided surely by the caffeine, that I write about a team's findings from the University of Washington and Rutgers University that caffeine can help lower one's chances of UV-associated skin cancer by inhibiting a DNA repair pathway, essentially helping cells die after exposure to sunlight.

The team reports on this "protective effect of caffeinated beverage intake" in the August 15 issue of the Proceedings … Read more

Welcome to mating 2.0: the sexual act itself might not change, but when the parts don't work, we'll simply build new ones.

So say scientists in Japan who, using stem-cell techniques, are the first to engineer sperm in infertile male mice that successfully fertilized eggs and produced offspring.

The team, led by Mitinori Saitou at Kyoto University, report in the journal Cell that it used stem cells to create primordial germ cells, the precursor to sperm cells, and injected those germ cells into the testicles of infertile mice. The cells eventually produced normal-looking sperm, which went on … Read more

A NASA scientist and her colleagues have observed that the March 11 tsunami that devastated Japan broke off Manhattan-size icebergs from Antarctica, some 8,000 miles distant.

Kelly Brunt, a cryosphere specialist at Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues detailed the finding in the Journal of Glaciology. The event "marks the first direct observation of such a connection between tsunamis and icebergs," NASA said.

The icebergs began separating from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf about 18 hours after the 9.0 earthquake that caused the tsunamis, and floating off into the Ross Sea. The ice hadn't moved in … Read more

Female mosquitoes just don't get to have any fun. They mate only once, lay eggs, and eventually die.

In an effort to combat malaria, researchers at Imperial College London hope to take advantage of the female mosquito's plight--and reduce the mosquito population--by engineering spermless males. They say the key is that the females don't seem able to tell the difference; they still mate with the sterile males and proceed to lay eggs that never hatch.

This is an improvement over previous attempts to engineer sterile males, the team said, because that process often exposed the males to … Read more

Some 24 hours into her journey from Cuba to Florida, distance swimmer Diana Nyad is using an electronic shark repellent in her attempt to break the world record for swimming the longest distance without a shark cage. The record is so tough it has been held for 32 years--by her, when she swam 102.5 miles from the Bahamas to Key Florida in 1979.

Everything about the swim is impressive. For starters, Nyad is 61. And then there's the fact that she didn't swim a single stroke for 31 of the past 32 years. Now she is … Read more

Combine the words "vibrator," "touch," and "heightened sensitivity," and the subject is obvious, right? A tricked-out glove that heightens your sense of touch.

The glove, developed by Georgia Tech researchers, includes a tiny vibrator that sits on the side of your finger. Turn the vibrator so low that you don't quite notice it vibrating, and voila, your fingertip is more sensitive to touch.

Prototype tests showed that the heightened-sensitivity glove enabled people to sense lighter touches and distinguish sensory points that were closer together than they could without it. People correctly distinguished among different fineness levels of sandpaper 15 percent more often with the glove.

The glove could help surgeons and others who rely on a fine sense of touch, and it could help people with an impaired sense of touch.… Read more