Nanotube transistor will help us bond with machines

Nanotube transistor will help us bond with machines

A novel transistor controlled by the chemical that provides the energy for our cells' metabolism could be a big step towards making prosthetic devices that can be wired directly into the nervous system.

Transistors are the fundamental building blocks of electronic gadgets, so finding ways to control them with biological signals could provide a route towards integrating electronics with the body.

Aleksandr Noy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and colleagues chose to control their transistor with adenosine triphosphate (ATP)

Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed the power of DNA to create a self-assembling nanoscale transistor, the building block of electronics. The research, published in Science, is a crucial step in the development of nanoscale devices. Erez Braun, lead scientist on the project and associate professor in the Faculty Physics at the Technion, says science has been intrigued with the idea of using biology to build electronic transistors that assemble without human manipulation. However, until now, demonstrating it in the lab has remained elusive. "This paper shows you can start with DNA proteins and molecular biology and construct an electronic device," he said.

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A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.


Some experts say humans will merge with machines before the end of this century.

1 of 3 They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.

Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.

On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.

"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."


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Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.

The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained.
"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.


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By 2015, robots will perform a variety of household chores; by 2020, many human jobs will be filled by robots; and by 2030, robots will be competent in most human activities.

This trend will peak in the mid-2030s when machines laden with strong AI surpass human intelligence and begin making copies of themselves, with each generation smarter than the last. This will cause an information explosion unlike anything the world has ever experienced and will result in the development of machine-to-human brain interface systems.

Some people will scan their minds capturing all of the memories, emotions, and thought processes that describe them as a human being – and upload that data into a robot and become the machine. Others will download the vast stream of machine intelligence directly into their brains and become an intelligence-enhanced human.

Over the next few years, molecular nanotechnology and the number-crunching abilities of quantum computing will enable humans and human/machines to redesign their bodies and brains to increase efficiency until they both morph into a replica of each other. At that time, society may consider both machines and humans as “transhumans.”
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Originally posted by azrael36
AWESOME!!! Where do I sign up for an upgrade? I so want to be a cyborg!

Does it really seem all that brilliant that within 2 decades machines will be building new and improved versions of themselves and will be "smarter" than we are?

Perhaps a kernel of truth in the Terminator movie series? Is skynet here?

Originally posted by DangerDeath
You will be assimilated!
Resistance is futile!

Originally posted by Unity_99
Their robotic nwo slavery 3rd strand IS not and never will be advancement.

Originally posted by Solomons

There are always some people that get "freaked" out about huge advancements in technology. Look at history.

But merging of man and machine is the future and frankly i wish i could be around to see it, im in my 20's but it will be the beginning of the next century before it is used for anything outside of medicine...and future generations will look upon it like we do in regards to mobile phones,mp3 players etc It will just be the "norm" to get a technological upgrade to your body.

IT'S still a long way from the replicants in Blade Runner, but artificial skin containing sweat glands has been produced for the first time - and tested in mice.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2010) — Information processing circuits in digital computers are static. In our brains, information processing circuits -- neurons -- evolve continuously to solve complex problems. Now, an international research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University has created a similar process of circuit evolution in an organic molecular layer that can solve complex problems. This is the first time a brain-like "evolutionary circuit" has been realized. This computer is massively parallel[...]



The monolayer has intelligence; it can solve many problems on the same grid. Their molecular processor heals itself if there is a defect. This remarkable self-healing property comes from the self-organizing ability of the molecular monolayer. No existing man-made computer has this property, but our brain does: if a neuron dies, another neuron takes over its function.

Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 1013 instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are performed one after another, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. In contrast, although individual neurons of the human brain fire at around just 103 times per second, the simultaneous collective action of millions of neurons enables them to complete certain tasks more efficiently than even the fastest supercomputer. Here we demonstrate an assembly of molecular switches that simultaneously interact to perform a variety of computational tasks including conventional digital logic, calculating Voronoi diagrams, and simulating natural phenomena such as heat diffusion and cancer growth. As well as representing a conceptual shift from serial-processing with static architectures, our parallel, dynamically reconfigurable approach could provide a means to solve otherwise intractable computational problems

Michael Schmidt1 and Hod Lipson2,3*

For centuries, scientists have attempted to identify and document analytical laws that underlie physical phenomena in nature. Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. A key challenge to finding analytic relations automatically is defining algorithmically what makes a correlation in observed data important and insightful. We propose a principle for the identification of nontriviality. We demonstrated this approach by automatically searching motion-tracking data captured from various physical systems, ranging from simple harmonic oscillators to chaotic double-pendula. Without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry, the algorithm discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, and other laws of geometric and momentum conservation. The discovery rate accelerated as laws found for simpler systems were used to bootstrap explanations for more complex systems, gradually uncovering the "alphabet" used to describe those systems.

1 Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
2 School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
3 Computing and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.


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At the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab we explore biologically-inspired computational and physical processes that allow complex high-level systems to arise from low-level building blocks—automatically. We seek new biological concepts for engineering and new engineering insights into biology (video).

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Now here in the real world, we have trouble linking robotic limbs directly to nerves because our bodies reject metal attachments to our nerves. So Doc Ock really achieved something there, setting aside the later problems with the arms’ AI (surely an easily fixed bug).




Now a crew of scientists at Southern Methodist University is working on their own technique for creating two-way communications between an artificial limb and a user’s brain. It uses non-metallic polymers, and at its core, it uses the same principal as whispering galleries of the sort that can be found in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, or at certain parts of Grand Central Station in New York. Indeed, they call it a “whispering gallery mode.”


[snip...]


... allowing for true two-way communication between the robotic limb and the brain.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University have already built a device that pretty much achieves all of these functions but it’s far too large, at several hundred microns. But they received a grant from DARPA or $5.6 million, and they’re hoping to build a robotic limb using this technology for a dog or a cat within the next two years. Just think: Doc Ock could have a little friend!