Experiments in Cyberspace

The next time an overnight snow begins to fall, take two bricks and place them side by side a few inches apart in your yard. In the morning, the bricks will be covered with snow and barely discernible. The snowflakes will have filled every vacant space between and around the bricks. What you will see, says Ivan Biaggio, an associate professor of physics at Lehigh University resembles a phenomenon that, when it occurs at the smallest of scales on an integrated optical circuit, could hasten the day when the Internet works at superfast speeds. Biaggio, is part of an international team of researchers that has developed an organic material with an unprecedented combination of high optical quality and strong ability to mediate light-light interaction and has engineered the integration of this material with silicon technology so it can be used in optical telecommunication devices. The material, which is composed of small organic molecules with high nonlinear optical susceptibilities,...

Jake Wall's software AnimalLink uses SMS and GPS technology to prevent elephants hoarding the farms in Kenya. So far, 44 of these lovely and big creatures have been tagged with the software that reports their current position to authorities. Wall estimates thousands of dollars of damage have been avoided after the elephants were tagged. AnimalLink sends the exact position of the elephants to a server in Nairobi and if the animals are getting close to a farm, rangers are dispatched to prevent the incident. The software cannot unfortunately do much against illegal hunters and poachers, however, Wall is upgrading it so that AnimalLink will send a text message if an elephant does not make a move for more than five hours. Image: Save the Elephants

GE's technology development arm General Electric Global Research has announced its plans to develop a virtual human by signing an agreement with TMTI, Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative. Also supported by DTRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense, the project includes a computer aided model to accelerate the development of new drugs against biological attacks. The virtual human project dubbed as Biotic Man, is a Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) software tool, which will be used to better understand the effects of a new drug much earlier than clinical experiments. PBPK will digitally model bacteria, viruses and other infection agents. John Graf, Principal Investigator on the project for GE Global Research has said, GE's Biotic Man project is all about speed. The goal is to enable faster development of drugs to respond to new biological threats. This new software tool also could have broad impact across the pharmaceutical ...

Complexity (the number of ways-hows-and-whys a system can act) may become an anachronism as novel research demystifies consciousness reducing human complexity to a deterministic system. Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end. Through its Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts program, it has probed brain signals triggered when an analyst sees something interesting in a satellite image. The analyst's brain registers the discovery long before the analyst becomes cognitively aware of it. "The brain can signal the discovery three times faster than the analyst can respond... My goal is to use these technologies to harness the speed of thought... I know it's possible, especially if we confront these challenges not just as problems of biology and neuroscience but problems of physics, math, materials science and microtechnology....