science

Oct 8 2009   2:29PM GMT

If a virus can be in two states at once, can I?

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
superpostion, quantum theory, physics, science, experiments, Schrodinger's cat, Schrodinger's virus

When you work from home, no one hears you sneeze.

Which is kind-of too bad, because if I had to be in the office to work right now, I would be home lying on the couch in my PJs. As it is, of course, I’m home slumping on the couch and tippity-tapping away on my laptop keyboard.

So, here I am sniffling, whining, and reading email. And in the MIT Technology Review newsletter, I see a link to Schrodinger’s virus.

Here’s the scoop, in a nutshell: Science has already demonstrated that single particles can be in multiple locations simultaneously. Now Doctors Ignacio Cirac and Oriol Romero-Isart are looking at demonstrating the same thing with the flu virus, which is a living entity. And if that works, next up is this little guy, a tardigrade arthropod.

Can cats and editors be far behind?

Some years back, I wrote a bunch of definitions for the site related to quantum theory, including Schrodinger’s cat. Fascinating stuff — I was thrilled to get the chance to research an area like that and write about it, if not a little daunted.

I think it was at the point where I first heard of superposition that I reared back from the page, carefully put the book down and leapt up to pace frenetically for an extended time period, occasionally clutching my head and giving it a shake. Pretty much the way you see ubergeeks and mad scientists do in the movies, on the threshold of some great discovery.

Except, in this case, the discovery’s been made and demonstrated — we know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously.

All I had to do was grasp the implications. For example, as demonstrated in the double-slit experiment:

“What actually occurs is that each photon not only goes through both slits, but also simultaneously traverses every possible trajectory en route to the target. Research into this phenomenon has demonstrated that other elementary particles, such as electrons, exhibit the same behavior.”

So. We’re back to single entities being in multiple locations, simultaneously: Photons > molecules > viruses > arthropods > cats > me?

An alternate state of being flu-less right now would be nice — or even taking an actual sick day… can someone show me how to switch between dimensions? I’ll be in flannel, watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns before you can say “Oh Lou!”

~ Ivy Wigmore

Dec 10 2008   11:43AM GMT

Happy 40th birthday, computer mouse!

Posted by: Alexander Howard
hardware, Apple, Technology, cool, learning, invention, gadgets, desktop, tool, science, fundamentals, history, geek

Today the computer mouse celebrates its 40th anniversary.

Pictured is version 1.0, held held by inventor Douglas Engelbart.

[Image credit: CERN Courier]

Modern mice have come a long way since this wooden prototype but the essential function — transferring physical motion to moving a cursor on the screen — remains the same.

 

Some great factoids about the computer mouse, via Wikipedia:

• The name ‘mouse’ originated at originated at the Stanford Research Institute, where researchers noted its similarity of the cord to a certain rodent’s tail
• Bill English, builder of Engelbart’s original mouse, invented the so-called ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC.
• The first mouse shipped as a part of a computer came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981
• Inclusion with Apple’s Macintosh is where the mouse really took off

The BBC has posted videos of Englebart explaining how the mouse got its name and the first demonstration of the mouse in a fascinating story that includes extensive quotes from the inventor.  (Sorry, no embeds available for BBC video content.)

Gearlog also has a great guided tour of 40 Years of The Mouse, if you’d like to take look back at the evolution of modern computing’s most ubiquitous peripheral.

Just move that cursor over and click on the hyperlink above — and thank Engelbart for his vision.

Nov 15 2008   4:21PM GMT

g-speak: Oblong brings the “Minority Report” operating system to science reality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
operating systems, virtual, media, data, Technology, fun, video, Internet, multimedia, innovation, cool, culture, interesting, futurism, invention, creativity, entrepeneurship, interactive media, tool, buzz, science, virtual reality, interface, display, geek, demonstration, immersive 3D worlds

William Gibson noted recently that the cyberpunk fiction he’d been writing over the past quarter century has now become science fact. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both set in near-futures with technology and social norms that are only a slight extension of the complex technological realities of the present. The neural shunt that jacks you into the network he imagined in Neuromancer hasn’t quite have arrived yet but some humans now have direct brain-computer interfaces implanted in their brains.

Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A few stories have popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

Once you’ve watched it, read g-speak in slices and about the origins of Oblong in the MIT Media Lab to learn about the potential for this human-to-machine interface and the long road to bringing it into reality..

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Engadget's Josh Topolsky and Jamie.]

Embedded below is a 2007 report on g-speak featuring an interview with Underkoffler.

Oct 15 2008   9:00AM GMT

What is Blog Action Day? A chance to help fight global poverty.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, small business, business, Web 2.0, media, Technology, Internet, useful, cool, culture, education, learning, free, academics, volunteer, green, event, entrepeneurship, resource, Development, tool, politics, blogging, buzz, science, communications

Blog Action Day is, according to its founders, “an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day.”

In 2007, the issue was the environment. In 2008, the theme is poverty.

By coordinating the efforts of many bloggers (more than 10,000 different sites, as of this morning), the organizers hope to galvanize improvement in the lots of the world’s poor. As measured by the World Bank, substantial improvements have been made since the 1980s.

Even so, one quarter of the world continues to subsist on less than $1.25/day.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Participate in the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). Just head over to laptopgiving.org.
• Tune in to BlogTalkRadio’s 12-hour Blog Action Day talkathon to discover how dozens of prominent bloggers and technologists will be helping in the effort.
• Support microlending efforts at Kiva.org. Learn more about microcredit, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in this Business Week article, “Can Technology Eliminate Poverty?
• Read WebTeacher’s post describing a social business to find out how this form of concerned commerce works.
• Donate to or participate in the development of the technologies described at PracticalAction.org. These include micro-hydro plants, small-scale wind generators, affordable solar lanterns and biogas plants.
• Learn more in online poverty resources listed on BlogActionDay.org.

Spread the word!

Sep 5 2008   7:19AM GMT

Rapping about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider? Not the end of the world as we know it.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Technology, fun, video, YouTube, cool, culture, learning, free, academics, MP3, futurism, music, science, humor, geek

Need a breath of fresh air and humor heading into the weekend? Check out this hilarious video of the Large Hadron Rap on YouTube. Hat tip to Cosmos Magazine for the discovery. This leads up to the highly anticipated moment next Wednesday when CERN turns on the Large Hadron Collider over in Geneva, Switzerland. Combining humor, science and music, this video brings some geeky fun to the exploration of the fundamental particles of matter, including our understanding of antimatter, dark matter and the elusive Higgs Boson.

According to the YouTube shownotes:

• Kate McAlpine, aka DJ AlpineKat, is the rapper. She works as a science writer for CERN.
• Will Barras, a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, is responsible for the thumpin’ beats.
  
• The images used came from particlephysics.ac.uk, space.com, the Institute of Physics, NASA, Symmetry, and Marvel
• The dancers doubled as camera people, with some work by Neil Dixon. Stock footage is CERN’s.
• The original mp3, lyrics, and vocals can be sampled and remixed from McAlpine’s directory on MSU.edu.

Those lyrics are easily several orders of magnitude more complex than the average gangsta rap. Babes, bling and bluster is replaced by the Big Bang, dark matter and bosons. I posted them below for your enjoyment:

The Large Hadron Rap

Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground
Designed with mind to send protons around
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance
Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride
‘Til in the hearts of the detectors, they’re made to collide
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room
Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum
And then…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

We see asteroids and planets, stars galore
We know a black hole resides at each galaxy’s core
But even all that matter cannot explain
What holds all these stars together – something else remains
This dark matter interacts only through gravity
And how do you catch a particle there’s no way to see
Take it back to the conservation of energy
And the particles appear, clear as can be

You see particles flying, in jets they spray
But you notice there ain’t nothin’, goin’ the other way
You say, “My law has just been violated – it don’t make sense!
There’s gotta be another particle to make this balance.”
And it might be dark matter, and for first
Time we catch a glimpse of what must fill most of the known ‘Verse.
Because…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.

Antimatter is sort of like matter’s evil twin
Because except for charge and handedness of spin
They’re the same for a particle and its anti-self
But you can’t store an antiparticle on any shelf
Cuz when it meets its normal twin, they both annihilate
Matter turns to energy and then it dissipates

When matter is created from energy
Which is exactly what they’ll do in the LHC
You get matter and antimatter in equal parts
And they try to take that back to when the universe starts
The Big Bang – back when the matter all exploded
But the amount of antimatter was somehow eroded
Because when we look around we see that matter abounds
But antimatter’s nowhere to be found.
That’s why…

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

The Higgs Boson – that’s the one that everybody talks about.
And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out
If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away
And if it doesn’t, then the scientists will finally say
“There is no Higgs! We need new physics to account for why
Things have mass. Something in our Standard Model went awry.”

But the Higgs – I still haven’t said just what it does
They suppose that particles have mass because
There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon – it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ***
And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force
And makes particles take orders from the field that is its source.
They’ll detect it….

LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.

Now some of you may think that gravity is strong
Cuz when you fall off your bicycle it don’t take long
Until you hit the earth, and you say, “Dang, that hurt!”
But if you think that force is powerful, you’re wrong.
You see, gravity – it’s weaker than Weak
And the reason why is something many scientists seek
They think about dimensions – we just live in three
But maybe there are some others that are too small to see
It’s into these dimensions that gravity extends
Which makes it seem weaker, here on our end.
And these dimensions are “rolled up” – curled so tight
That they don’t affect you in your day to day life
But if you were as tiny as a graviton
You could enter these dimensions and go wandering on
And they’d find you…

When LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.

May 22 2008   2:14PM GMT

What is the history of the ARPANET? A 1972 documentary tells the story of the birth of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, data, Technology, Internet, innovation, learning, academics, invention, collaboration, community, network, science, fundamentals, history, communications, government

“The Heralds of Resource Shaping” on Google Video tells the story of the origins of the Internet. At thirty minutes, this documentary is a bit longer than the average online video (or attention span) but well worth the time for anyone interested in learning more about the ARPANET. The speakers interviewed in the embed below  are listed in the Wikipedia entry for the “The Heralds of Resource Shaping.”

If you’d like to learn who invented the Internet — as opposed to the man who “took the initiative in creating the Internet” — you may be disappointed. In fact, as Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn wrote, “

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community.

The Computer History Museum created this high resolution image of an ARPANET logical map circa 1977, for those interested in a visualization of the early network.

Apr 23 2008   8:46AM GMT

Video: Exploring presence technology with tele-immersive dance in cyberspace

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, virtual, media, Technology, fun, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, innovation, cool, culture, college, learning, academics, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, participation, interactive media, music, mashup, science, virtual reality, geek, demonstration

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

Mar 19 2008   9:58AM GMT

Video: IC Innovations at the Design-Manufacturing Interface

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Technology, video, YouTube, college, learning, academics, design, invention, resource, science, fundamentals, history

This lecture from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley describes how the manufacture design of integrated circuits (ICs) has evolved and improved over the years.

From the show notes on YouTube:

As IC’s routinely include more than a billion transistors, the interactions between the design and the manufacturing communities now must handle atomic-level variability, dozens of new materials, and patterning techniques operating at their theoretical limit.

In this talk, we will present several facets of this problem and discuss emerging innovations at the IC design-manufacturing interface.

Mar 11 2008   9:35AM GMT

Video: Ted Nelson, hypertext and the Web

Posted by: Alexander Howard
business, programming, operating systems, media, Technology, video, YouTube, Internet, commentary, cool, learning, free, public domain, design, invention, collaboration, Development, forum, conversation, code, tool, HTML, science, fundamentals, history, communications, software development

In this Google TechTalk, Ted Nelson discusses implementing the original hypertext concept and how transclusion should be used now to fulfill its original potential.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

Feb 13 2008   1:52PM GMT

Where are my “Jumper” cables? Darth Vader, MIT and the science of teleportation.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Technology, fun, video, YouTube, cool, culture, college, academics, interesting, futurism, invention, event, forum, conversation, science, geek

There’s no question that living in Cambridge and writing about technology has its benefits. The city is swimming in startups, geeky events and plugged-in discussions.

Last month, I was lucky enough to score an invitation to a Q&A session with two distinguished MIT physicists focused upon the theoretical underpinnings of teleportation , followed by a roundtable discussion that brought in with “Jumper” director Doug Liman and Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christiansen. The movie will be in wide release tomorrow, so I thought it would be timely to offer a comment or two concerning this confluence of fact and fiction.

You know you’re in a special place when professors receive enthusiastic applause comparable to the reception given to a Hollywood director and bonafide heart throb movie star. That being said, Hayden was clearly the focus of considerable adoration, expressed at his entrance and in more than one invitation to dates and afterparties.

Serious students of quantum physics are going have to employ the classic “willing suspension of disbelief” to fully embrace this picture. In other words, when questioned, both Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark kindly but firmly ruled out the possibility of human teleportation any time in the near future. The current state of this branch of science is exciting, however, given that experiments have successfully teleported the properties of photons over a distance. This sort of quantum teleportation relies on “quantum entanglement“, whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart, a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

I managed to capture the presentations of Professor Tegmark and Farhi on the physics of teleportation on my webcam and stream it on uStream. My apologies: The quality of both the audio and video is regrettably poor. Still, I’m happy to share. Jumper’s plot relies on a staple of science fiction, however, not fact: genetic mutation. In other words, some evolved version of CERN’s large hadron collider or a hitherto undiscovered means of stabilizing worm holes powered by cold fusion is not at at the heart of the film. Some people are born with the ability to teleport from one place to another. Off to the races.

Mr. Liman’s direction of Swingers, Go and the Bourne Identity , however, recommends taking a chance on his vision of the moral and ethical challenges presented to someone with the power to teleport at will. I found his willingness to research what the event would actually look and sound like was impressive, particularly the collapse of air into the vacuum left by the removal of a body. He said he fell in love with the script when he read that the first action of the character upon discovering his power was to rob a bank.

For more coverage of the event, check out:

• Doug Overbye’s “Quantum Teleporting, Yes; The Rest is Movie Magic” in the New York Times
• Jess K’s hilarious blog post, Hayden Christensen Comes to MIT, Looks Pretty, for some perspective from a current MIT student
• Sharon Gaudin’s “Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper“
• Jim Rapoza’s “Hollywood Jumps to MIT” at Emerging Tech

Following is the trailer, if you’ve somehow missed it theaters, on TV or elsewhere on the Web.

If you’re looking for some geeky fun on Valentine’s Day, just google “movie: jumper [your zipcode]” and enjoy.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some anecdotal feedback that “Jumper” isn’t exactly Citizen Kane. RottenTomatoes.com has delivered a dire rating of 15% while imdb.com users are being considerably kinder with a rating of 6.4/10.  That being said, the film raking in $27.2 million at the box office this past weekend, so tastes may be for forgiving out and about.