Impressive project. Emphasis mine.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.   The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.  "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.  People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.  Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained. 

More at the link above. Also this kinda related study from the Scripps Research Institute. Variety, thy name is life!

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands—an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches, similar to the finches that Charles Darwin famously described in The Origin of the Species 150 years ago. As described in an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

Uber-cool! Again, More at the link above.

--

“In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.” - William Saraoyan

A smart chip, indeed!

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.  Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.  The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding   of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier. 

Picture © Karlheinz Meier 

But well nigh impossible (yet) to make something that functions like a human brain, I think... but this is an interesting small step towards that sci-fi-ish goal!

This is a must see!

This talk was the buzz at TED Talks this year -- Game-changing wearable tech

Related article in Wired: MIT students develop a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen.  

"The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when done."

My first thought was that this was like the movie Minority Report! Actually, this is quite different. I googled to remind myself of what Tom Cruise did in Minority Report and I think that was something like this "intuitive, interface-free, touch-driven screen".... also presented at TED Talks earlier.
 

Interesting!

The oldest human footprints – left more than 1.5 million years ago – have been discovered in northern Kenya.

Two sets of prints left by Homo ergaster, an early ancestor of modern humans. were found in separate rock layers near Ileret. Laser scanning revealed that feet have stayed much the same over 1.5 million years and the creature walked the same way as people do today.The prints bore all the hallmarks of a modern human stride, including an arched foot, short toes, and a big toe that was parallel to the other toes. As in modern humans, weight was transferred from the heel to the ball of the foot and then to the big toe with each step. The find is the first of its kind since the famous discovery 30 years ago of footprints dating back 3.75 million years at Laetoli, Tanzania. These older prints are thought to have been left by the more primitive and apelike Australopithecus.

 

A fossil footprint left by a human ancestor about 1.5 million years ago in Kenya has been discovered. Photo © REUTERS

Via an mail from Neel, here's an article by Richard Dawkins on Darwin, which talks about "why we really do need to know the amazing truth about evolution, and the equally amazing intellectual dishonesty of its enemies."

How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with.

A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.

More at the article. Previous posts on Darwin: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Despite having read many books over the years on relativity and quantum mechanics, these theories just won't get embedded in my brains like Newtonian's theories and classical mechanics that I learned in school. (There was some exposure to statistical mechanics - Boltzmann, Gibbs, etc. - in some of the thermodynamics coursework I took but it was superficial at best and I rue I did not wade into the details and try to get a better grasp of that topic too!)

And yet, I'm drawn from time to time to read more about the fascinating developments in physics from 1900 onwards. I am currently reading a few books on the subject; some of which delve into the lives of the great men involved while others give a good historical narrative of their quest to understand the world of atoms and its components and the forces that hold them (and the world) together. It is amazing that these unique and devastatingly intelligent people were brought together in this scientific quest at the same time (essentially 1900 till mid-30s).

Anyways, just rambling now....since the books I have been reading the past week or so were on my mind and also because I saw this book review in the Washington Post just now.

Very Small, Very Weird - The struggle to understand what goes on -- or doesn't -- inside the atomThe Age of Entanglement - When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. - A review of

Because I have never really understood even the basic ideas developed before WWII, I have kept away from the more recent (post WWII) developments in particle physics and new theories like string theory etc. First I need to grasp what Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Einstein and co. are trying to teach us...then I can worry about Feynman, Greene, and many others!!

Great set of pictures, via the Guardian.

Darwin at age 31 in 1840, recently married, a dignified young naturalist with a secret theory about evolution. Portrait of Darwin, 1840, by George Richmond, ©Darwin Heirlooms Trust, courtesy of the English Heritage Photo Library

A grand old man of science. Darwin aged 71, photographed a year before his death in 1882. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1881, ©Private

An ant's social status

Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out. A new study found that an ant's social status in its colony depends both on its genetic inheritance and the food it eats when it is young.

Earlier: Why ants rule.

No point to this post. Its not even blog-worthy perhaps. What can I say! Obviously, I'm just not as busy as an ant. Oh -- the phrase is 'busy as a bee', you say? Oh well -- different species, same order, wiki enlightens. (Wiki has a whole lot more information on ants, if they interest you!)

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

:)

Now I know why I have been forgetting things lately! :)

Common Sleep Problem Linked With Memory Loss

The part of the brain that stores memory appears to shrink in people with sleep apnea, adding further evidence that the sleep and breathing disorder is a serious health threat. The findings, from brain scan studies conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, show for the first time that sleep apnea is associated with tissue loss in brain regions that store memory. And while the thinking and focus problems of sleep apnea patients often are attributed to sleep deprivation, the scans show something far more insidious is occurring.

In this 2003 interview, Dean Kamen, serial inventor & entrepreneur (inventor of Segway amongst many other novel innovations), defines very well what innovation is all about (emphasis mine):

I remember when the first Pong game came out. People were glued to their sets doing this eye-hand coordination, watching this thing go up and back. I'll call that a video game.

The fact is, it was a crude box, a crude little puck, and it kept you mesmerized for hours and you probably did it with a few thousand bytes of RAM. Today, we go from hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes on a video game that will have almost lifelike characters running around. But in reality, when you do the same eye-hand coordination exercise you did on Pong, instead of pushing the pong up and back with ever-more realistic graphics — the mindless violence of this thing ripping the head off of that thing and squirting blood has no extra value in either making the game an eye-hand coordination challenge or amusing. It's not an innovation.

But suppose instead of multiplying the bandwidth by a hundred in the past five years, you left the bandwidth alone, and you figured out how to get the Internet to a hundred times as many people so the four billion people living in Africa and Asia and places where they have no access to information and knowledge, got access. That would be an innovation.

I think in some cases inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

Also this very simple idea that not many people seem to grasp:

We can't live anymore in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed. As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources, except it won't be just gold we're fighting over. It will be water and air. This is not a happy thought.

Big brain theory, indeed!

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

Dang.. I knew I was insignificant but a "momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy"! :)

There is more oddball speculation in this theory...

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Read the details at the article, if interested. Makes for some fascinating sci-fi-ish leaps of imagination for sure but who said life is simple. Jokes aside, even Einstein's relativity theories sound sci-fi-ish to me and those are pretty well proven! These theories are still evolving and could well be proven wrong by someone else down the road or maybe we are really fluctuations!

A mere 20 people in the experiment but interesting results nonetheless, supported by MRI mapping of the reactions in the brain. (Amazing that a prestigious journal like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will accept a study with 20 people. Statistically its hardly enough to give you separation of the means.)

Apparently, raising the price really does make the wine taste better.

At least that seems to be the result of a taste test. The part of the brain that reacts to a pleasant experience responded more strongly to pricey wines than cheap ones — even when tasters were given the same vintage in disguise.

Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.

They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRIs of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.

However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices. A $90 wine was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.

The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He added that wine professionals would probably be able to differentiate the better wine — "one would hope."

"Our results suggest that the brain might compute experienced pleasantness in a much more sophisticated manner that involves integrating the actual sensory properties of the substance being consumed with the expectations about how good it should be," the researchers reported.

Next step: pain.

Rangel wants to see if people perceive pain differently, depending on their expectations. He hopes to administer mild electric shocks to subjects and measure their reaction when told a shock was going to be stronger or weaker. "We are trying to understand how the brain encodes experiences and what variables can manipulate this," he said. "It helps us understand what it means to be human."

Been seeing a few different TED talks tonight... this one by neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran (VR) is fascinating.

(It) explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

I had previously blogged about VR's research, which I had learned about while watching Secrets of the Mind, an episode of PBS's great science program Nova.

Premise of a new book by David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots

“The first half sets out to prove that human beings can indeed love robots, and the second, spicier, section is given over to showing that we will, and in fact already do, have sex with robots.” - via Boldtype

And why not...they're already fantasizing about a virtual woman, obsessing over pillows, falling in love with dolls (there's a word for it - agalmatophilia!), then why not a mechanized one! This one is even better because plausibly the robot gets some joy out of the fingering..er...feeling too!*

Just beware of a Pygmalion twist to the tale -- she may say: "If you really love me, you'd bring me to life." And that, as the scientists who want to be God would agree is yet not in the hands of humans. Not yet, at least!

On a more serious note, I do NOT want to live in this new world but it is fascinating stuff, nonetheless. I am not going to be a nay-sayer and say this won't happen either. Nothing against the tech-savvy Japanese but expect this dehumanization to happen first in the nation that thought of the digital pet, followed quickly by the country that brought us the Furby, and to be adopted quickly by people who get a kick living their lives in Second Life!

Like a reviewer of David Levy's book writes at amazon.com: "The lost self thus luxuriates in a technopology of polymorphic perversity." (Say what again!)


Related Links:
NY Times review
Fox News report
LA Times review
MSNBC report
Wired feature

Related books: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology also by Ray Kurzweil

And lastly, if this is your kind of thing, you may also enjoy reading Warren Ellis's Second Life sketches. Like me, even if you are not a fan of these 'role playing' games people play... go read the sketches. If nothing else, its good for shock value of where the world is going + Ellis, author of futuristic graphic novels like Transmetropolitan does write well.)

Also see an old post of mine about 'ambient intimacy'.


* Two snippets from last year come to mind.

NRI scientists help robots feel

Today's robots can understand human speech, but are unable to feel human touch. But all that may be a thing of the past with two Indian-born scientists at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln having developed what they claim is a small film that can mimic the sensitivity of a human finger. This they say will become useful in the next generation of robots and in automated tools used for microsurgery.

Emotion robots learn from people
Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists. Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that "learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner".

I guess the goal of the second study may be easier to achieve than trying to get humans to respond to each other in a "socially and emotionally appropriate manner"!

A few articles from Technology Review that spotlight some of the great research reported in 2007.

1. The Genetics of Language Researchers are beginning to crack the code that gives humans our unique way with words.

2. Carbon-Dioxide Plastic Gets Funding A startup is moving ahead with an efficient method to make biodegradable plastic.

3. The Longevity Pill? Drugs much more powerful than the resveratrol found in red wine will be tested to treat diabetes.

4. The New Hygiene Hypothesis The microbes within us could explain rising allergy rates.

5. Brain Circuitry, Alight Neurons in 100 hues spotlight disease, development.

6. E-Paper, In Living Color Materials advances could bring color, video, and flexibility.

7. IBM Attempts to Reinvent Memory A new type of memory using nanowires could be simpler, cheaper, denser, faster, and more reliable.

8. Extending Moore's Law A faster, more energy-efficient chip by packing in more transistors--without shrinking them. (Also read: Moore’s Law Hangs on – Dec 2007)

9. The Ultrafast Future of Wireless A new metal film could help control terahertz radiation and lead to wireless devices that are thousands of times faster than today's Wi-Fi.

10. A Cheaper Route to Speeding Up the Web A new silicon-based optical device has the potential to improve the speed, cost, and reach of fiber-optic networks.

11. Printing Cheap Chips Kovio's system for printing inorganic transistors could lead to large-area displays and cheap smart cards. (Related: Plastic Electronics Head for Market)

12. Graphene Transistors Electronics made of a single sheet of carbon could be created much smaller than those made with silicon.

And lets make it a baker’s dozen with another interesting application of graphene

13. Ultrastrong Paper from Graphene A new paperlike material could lead to novel types of light and flexible materials.

Dress changes color with your mood

Electronics firm Philips has designed a purportedly "emotion-sensitive dress," which monitors biophysical changes associated with different human emotions. Ingrid Bal from Philip's Design said: "You could programme the material so that it turned red if you were angry or stressed, or green when you're calm."

Wonder what happens when you are in a 'naughty' mood :)

A string of posts here tonight all gleaned from articles I found at Boing-Boing - The Directory of Wonderful Things.

This one - Science is linguistic as well as numerical - is about a comment about a recent Scientific American article on gender bias in science and math and is one that makes me feel good!

Why? Because one way or the other, I can now truly claim that I am a scientist. Not just because I have a PhD and am in research & development (R&D) but because I love words, language and literature that complements my analytical mind.

Now if only I could get it to focus on one thing. Too many things to read, to little time to do anything myself....and this internet ain't helping! Time to log out and go read a book or something. Au revoir....until tomorrow!

Amit Varma has an interesting article today in which he calls for a rethink on doping in sports, be it through genetic modifications or other means. While I may not agree with everything he says, some thought will have to be given to the arguments he makes over the next few decades as the era of ‘designer’ sportsmen (and ‘designer’ human beings, in general) dawns. One can argue for or against his claim such modifications actually make for a level playing field but there is no argueing that for better or for worse, this genetic revolution is coming and will impact the way we lead our lives much more than that caused by the industrial revolution in the 19^th century or even the technology and physics revolutions in the 20^th century.

Without going into too much details – because the topic is too broad and controversial (the temptations of eugenics, anyone?) for me to make minor points for or against it here – let me express one concern I have, specific to sports. Does letting genetic tailoring of athletic prowess provide an unfair advantage to those with money and the privilege to get these so-called upgrades on their systems. Surely there is some of this disadvantage today – in some sports more than others - but far too often we hear of athletes from families with limited means going on to achieve a lot through their natural talents and hard work. A genetically modified world undoubtedly will stand to leave such people behind.

In any case, I will leave you with an interesting quote that I gleaned from an earlier article Amit wrote some years back at the popular cricket site, Cricinfo. This is excerpted from Francis Fukuyama's book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, an alleged (alleged because I have not read it - not saying it ain't so) "polemic against genetic engineering":

The deepest fear that people express about technology is ... that, in the end, biotechnology will cause us in some way to lose our humanity - that is, some essential quality that has always underpinned our sense of who we are and where we are going, despite all of the evident changes that have taken place in the human condition through the course of history. Worse yet, we might make this change on the without recognizing that we had lost something of great value. We might thus emerge on the other side of a great divide between human and post-human history and not even see that the watershed had been breached because we lost sight of what that essence was.

Related books:

In addition to the afore-mentioned ‘polemic’ by Fukuyama, read the book I borrowed the title of this post from:

Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future by James Hughes

And couple books that take the pro-genetic-modifications stance:

Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future by Gregory Stock

More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement by Ramez Naam

Also: Remaking Eden by Lee M. Silver and Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications by Erik Parens (editor)

and last but not least - an interesting debate between the two schools of thought.

Scientistis used a combination of drugs and genetic manipulation to turn the homosexual behavior of fruit flies on and off within a matter of hours.

While the genetic finding supports the thinking that homosexuality is hard-wired, the drug finding surprisingly suggests it's not that simple. Homosexuality is widespread in the animal world. But scientists have long debated whether, in humans a "gay gene" exists. Previous research in humans has suggested that how we interpret scents given off by another person might impact our sexuality.

Elsewhere, scientists studied zombie cockroaches

A new study has shown that cockroaches that turned into "zombies" after being stung by a parasitic wasp can be revived with an antidote. Cockroaches can lose their ability to walk when stung by jewel wasps (Ampulex compressa) – the females of which use the cockroaches to feed their young. The wasp, being much smaller than the cockroach, has evolved a fine sting that can deliver a venom cocktail directly into the cockroach’s brain. The poisons effectively turn the cockroach into a zombie.

No more cat-n-mouse games?

Cat and mouse may never be the same. Japanese scientists say they've used genetic engineering to create mice that show no fear of felines, a development that may shed new light on mammal behavior and the nature of fear itself.

and elsewhere...

A team of Korean scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, whereby the cats glow under ultraviolet beams.

Aaah... the wonders of science! Mankind is going to face some mighty ethical questions this next century.