Holographic storage moves ahead, backing up just got even harder

The latest Technology Review reports that a new technique has made rewritable holographic memory one step closer to reality. Holographic memory has just started moving in to the marketplace but at this stage it only uses write once memory.

This new technique involves "reengineered versions of proteins produced by bacteria-like organisms (I'm not sure what it means but it sure sounds cool), increases data retrieval speeds and improves data density to about 500 Gigabytes per square inch. Once again, I have no idea how that would translate to the consumer market, but considering that multi-platter magnetic disk drives are only just reaching the terabyte stage, I'm going to assuming that it will be a whopping great big amount.

With hard drive space climbing all the time and the tantalising possibility of holographic memory exploding the size of consumer storage, the question must be asked:

If we have these massive amounts of storage space at our fingertips, why do most backup solutions still suck?

Massive amounts of storage space encourages laziness in users. When you rarely hit a wall when it comes to disk space, you are less inclined to take a critical look at the data you do have. It doesn't help that every backup solution I have ever tried was painful, convoluted and inflexible. I have an awkward and unproductive time trying to back hundreds of megs at a time. I have no idea how painful backing up 500GB per square inch would be, but I fail to see how it could be a good experience.

Until backup solutions become more user friendly, holographic memory is only going to make things harder for the average user to keep their information safe.

Image courtesy of the Technology Review. Photo credit: Amitabh Avasthi

Tech Synaesthesia

Researchers in Germany have been experimenting with a vibrating belt that gives the wearer constant input as to which direction is north. It's part of a long line of experiments all over the world that examine the ability of technology to alter and enhance our 5 senses.

The human brain is an incredible thing. With the appropriate sensory input, it can be programmed to vastly improve sense of direction (my wife would love to be able to do this to me), stabilise a damaged sense of balance through electric pulses on the tongue or how to tell which way is up and which way is down (particularly important for pilots).

We humans get just the five [senses]. But why? Can our senses be modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes.

- Sunny Bains, Wired.

Mixed Feelings - Wired
Originally found via Boing Boing [permalink]
feelSpace - Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Onsabruck.


Image of the feelSpace belt taken from the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Onsabruck

Forming neurons

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been able to capture neurons in the midst of their formation in mammals, the first time that this has been done (image above).

Neurons (which look a little something like the image below) are largely what make up our nervous system. The ability to see neurons being formed brings humanity one step closer to understanding how our nervous system works. According to the researchers, there are only a few places within the human brain that generate neurons, and these are the areas we need to dig deeper into (metaphorically I hope) in order to better understand what goes on between our ears.



Image of the neuron in vivo courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Representation of a neuron courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.

The Brain Game

Human brain
Originally uploaded to Flickr by Gaetan Lee.

Competition continues to be hot in the world of making playing games just that little bit lazier.

• Emotiv Systems has a prototype of a head-set based system with electrodes that attach to the skull. The setup detects electrical activity in the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions". Apparently it connects wirelessly to all game systems from consoles to PCs.
  
• NeuroSky has a technology that requires just a single small electrode (although all the press photos show that you still need to wear a headset - http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&gbv=2&q=neurosky+technology (Safe Search On). Neurosky currently has a demonstration of a small Darth Vader that can be controlled through its technology.
  
• Cyber Learning Technology LLC proudly trumpets its Smart Brain Game technology as "the ONLY Neurofeedback Technology developed, patented and tested at NASA". CyberLearning also want to draw a link between their products and research that helps sufferers of ADHD.
  

I choose to work under the assumption that if all this activity is going on in the game controller market, there has to be substantial research going on in universities and government institutions looking into brainwave telemetry for other purposes such as for disabled patients or remote and/or dangerous workplaces (underground mines, deep space etc). I sure hope so.

After reading up a little on what each of these technologies enables, I am left with just one question? Does anyone really want to be able to control a game with their mind alone? It seems to me that this could make a game fiendishly difficult, requiring great powers of concentration.

I don't know about anyone else but when I play games, I want to relax.

Genetically modified food for good, not evil

How come the media rarely ever seems to give coverage to these sorts of aims and goals when genetically modified organisms and especially GM crops are involved?

Modifying crops to help poverty stricken regions should get more coverage in my opinion. Of course, I also think that multi-national corporations shouldn't be allowed to use patents and intellectual property as an excuse to rip the Third World blind for immoral and unethical profit, but maybe that's just me.

BioBricks: lego for the biotech era?

The ability to build almost anything imaginable, simply by placing together various little basic blocks of plastic is one of the most powerful things about Lego. Given sufficient time, inclination and vision, the most incredible things can be constructed, where the learning takes place as much in the building as it does in using the final product. The field of synthetic biology is working towards achieving similar goals through wetware.

Synthetic biology refers to both:

• the design and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world; and
  
• the re-design and fabrication of existing biological systems.

An element of synthesising biology is the development of “BioBricks” which are standard DNA parts that encode basic biological functions. BioBricks are like building blocks of life where the genes for different biological functions, for example the ability to sense light, are isolated and encapsulated as discrete elements. Theoretically, it could be possible in the future for a synthetic biologist to “program” organisms using BioBricks in a similar way that a computer programmer might use functions.

As an example, late in 2005 a team of researchers were able to engineer e coli bacteria in such a way that they were able to create living photographs. The e coli bacteria turned either black or white, depending on the level of their exposure to light. If it helps, that’s kind of like pixels on an LCD monitor turning on or off. E coli ordinarily lives in the gut of humans and don’t ordinarily have any capacity to respond to light (there’s not a lot of light in the gut of a normal person after all). However, with a bit of genetic fiddling the bacteria can respond to a special projector in such a way as to produce living, permanent photographs (well, at least until the e coli die anyway, but it’s the thought that counts).

The coolest thing about the above example is that the bulk of the work was done by a team of undergraduates taking part in a summer competition – iGEM, the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition. iGEM provides a library of standardised BioBricks and lets them go nuts while they try and engineer a unique biological system.

I find it amazing that even a rudimentary capability exists to build highly engineered synthetic biological machine based on known capabilities of sets of genes. Today, students are using bacteria to create living pictures. Who knows what they will be building tomorrow?

BioBricks are managed by the BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that was founded out of MIT, Harvard and University of California, San Francisco. The BBF encourages the development of technologies based on BioBricks and continues to work to ensure that BioBricks are made available to the public free of charge, currently via MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

The brain train

Japanese company Hitachi has embiggened the world of brain-control interfaces with a device that can control a model train through measuring blood flow in the brain with optical topography.

The Google translated page is a little hard to follow, but it looks like the device measures changes in the quantity of blood in the brain which is related to mental activity. This has the potential to assist the "difficult people" in the future ( which is I'm sure a poor translation of "disable" - man, I love Asian languages translated into English by a machine*). The big bonus of this technique is that it is a man-machine interface that is non-invasive. I'm sure most people would prefer a funky helmet to a 1/4" jack in the base of the skull.

Personally, I'd like the 1/4" jack but that may just be because I read Neuromancer too many times at an impressionable age.

* Completely off the point but my favourite bit of translation from the above link is the following translation for what I'm assuming is a pointer to a printer-friendly link:

As for the one which is printed please view this

Found via Engadget [permalink]

Aubrey de Grey on TEDTalks

This'll be the last "life extension" themed post this month, I promise.

Aubrey de Grey is an interesting guy whose theories and work has attracted a lot of controversy over the last few years. de Grey is the founder of SENS - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - which, according to the site attempts to develop a "practical approach to developing real anti-aging medicine".

Despite his appearance, de Gray isn't all types of crazy, having worked in the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University and currently involved with the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ageing.

I can't pretend to have more than a basic understanding of de Gray's arguments, and it's fair to say that not everyone agrees with him (see the Wikipedia article on the MIT Technology Review controversy for more details on that). Still, I find his ideas interesting and plausible to a layman such as myself.

As an introduction of sorts, below is a speech he gave at a TED conference in 2005. Run time is a touch over 20 mins.

Yes SIR: SIR2 and the genetics of youth

My recent post on living longer reminded me of one of the podcasts from the excellent Futures in Biotech (part of the twit.tv family). I The subject interviewed in episode 2 was Dr Leonard Guarente, a biology researcher at MIT. Part of Dr Guarente's body of work has included the identification of a gene known as SIR2 that appears to be responsible for the extension of the lifespan in a range of different lifeforms from yeast to roundworms to fruit flies to humans. I first listened to this podcast back in July but was prompted to listen to it again this week.

A number of interesting ideas were raised in the podcast including:

• aging may well be post-reproductive, in that the body's ability to grow in a healthy manner is greatly reduced once the peak reproductive period has passed
• caloric restriction (CR) may be linked to this concept and could also be a survival mechanism. A CR diet reduced the ability for lab mice to reproduce. When calorie intake was increased, the ability to reproduce returned. So, not only did CR increase the lifespan of lab mice, it also altered reproductivity in accordance with availability of food.
• CR is not so much anti-aging as prolonging youth and extending the period of time before the reproductivity window ends and aging kicks in.
• CR diets appear to "activate" the SIR2 gene
  

Dr Guarente referred to rodent models where disease was slowed or even stopped by a CR diet. Therefore, there would be great value in the development of medication that mimicked a CR diet and the activation of SIR2 as a way of improving quality of life for older people. For example, such medication could slow or stop the development and impact of degenerative diseases. Therefore, life might not be greatly extended for these people but their quality of life would be vastly improved in later years. I found this particularly interesting as I tend to think of "life extension" treatments as something to extend my own life. It's a side of the process I had never thought of before.

Dr Guarente and I have something in common as well - we both think that a drug that mimicked the effect of SIR2 and a CR diet would be much better than actually undertaking a CR diet because, well, eating food is fun.

One other tip I picked up from this podcast was that, according to the good Doctor, there are already many things we know today that can help greatly extend our life span. These are the basic things like a good diet, exercise, not smoking etc. If we want to live longer, we need to be doing these things now and not wait for some big pharmaceutical company to produce a miracle drug 20 years down the track.

Apparently Dr Guarente's book "Ageless Quest: One scientists search for genes that prolong youth " is a good read too (note: that's not an Amazon affiliate link).

Interesting links:
Guarente Lab
Futures in Biotech

DNA computing

I'm not even going to pretend that I understand how this works...

Researchers in the Columbia University Medical Center and the University of New Mexico have created what they like to call a "medium-scale integrated molecular circuit". Just trips off the tongue, doesn't it.

The researchers have used artificial DNA and assembled the material into circuits. The resulting devices MAYA and MAYA-II (which stands for Molecular Array of YES and AND logic gates - MAYA was built in 2003) is a series of DNA circuits that can play noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe if you're that way inclined). Apparently, it is the enzymes that form a circuit and individual cells' behaviour such as moving away from heat, reproducing and consuming is determined via the enzyme circuits.

This technique is not going to make a fast computer. My favourite quote from the researchers was:

"We're not going to make Game Boys out of this... What we're showing is what kind of control these molecules can have in a practical application"

The intention is to use these sorts of devices in the future in wet environments that would short out traditional computer circuitry eg biological systems like monitoring blood cells and so forth.

For the curious, below is how MAYA first played the game in September 2003. MAYA-II uses similar techniques. MAYA-II, which always makes the first move, almost always wins and at worst will tie against a human opponent. Each move in MAYA-II takes about 30 minutes:

"The artificial DNA enzymes that allow MAYA to make game decisions are designed to release a fluorescent molecule only when certain DNA fragments are present or absent. Combining several of these enzymes make up the circuits in MAYA that can analyze complex arrays of inputs to play tic-tac-toe.

The game starts when magnesium added to all nine tubes triggers MAYA to initiate the first move to the center of the board. The magnesium only interacts with the DNA enzyme in the center tube, unlocking a fluorescent molecule that marks the move.

The human player then decides where to make his or her first move and transmits this information to MAYA by adding a solution of DNA fragments to all the wells. A different set of DNA fragments exists for each location on the game board.

MAYA makes its second move after each tube analyzes the fragments. In one tube only, the fragments are able to unlock the fluorescent molecules from the tube's DNA enzymes, and the glow marks MAYA's decision.

By the human player's second move, MAYA has to take into account its own prior move and two human moves to come up with the best option. In the longest game, MAYA has to analyze four human moves."

Further information from:
Invivo newsletter - Columbia University Health Sciences
Medgadget

Live longer. Apparently.

The more I spend time on the internet, the more I realise that I know very little about what goes on around me.


Aging is, apparently, the enemy. There are entire movements out there dedicated to anti-aging and "life extension". To my surprise (although perhaps I should know better), these are two completely separate things.

Life extension is all about extending life spans, obviously, and trying to live longer. Advocates encourage the adoption of lifestyles such as calorie restriction diets. Research into mice and monkeys seems to indicate that a drastically reduced calorie intake correlates with an extended lifespan.

Anti-aging advocates research that will prevent aging (rather than slow aging, which is what a calorie restriction diet appears to do) and even reverse its effects. A lot of life extension things are more or less free (calorie restriction, healthy diet etc) and therefore research dollars need to be channeled into areas which actually prevent aging.

At least, that's what it looks like to me. It seems to jump around a fair bit and it's hard to follow. Bizarre and interesting, but hard to follow.

The Longevity Meme and Fight Aging!
Partial Immortalization
Senescence and the Biology of Human Aging

(Note: I am in no way capable of making a balanced argument either way on this subject, and the links are are certainly only one side of the issue. Just read the links for what they are - connections to something interesting you may not have considered before)

Embryonic stem cell research in Australia...

There seems to be quite a buzz around the world that the Senate here in Australia has passed a bill allowing cloning of human embryo cells for stem cell research. The consensus seems to be that it's almost a fait acommpli that this bill will soon become law, with the proviso that animal eggs are not used in the process (which would count out this sort of thing happening).

What some people don't seem to realise is that this isn't even half way there. For a bill to become law, it has to be passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the Government has a rare majority of two, with the sole Family First Party representative likely to side with the current Government as they are conservatively aligned. The bill was able to pass because a "conscience vote" was allowed, which meant members did not have to toe the party line but could vote as they felt morally obliged to vote. Even with that, the bill passed by a mere two votes.

In the House of Representatives, the current Coalition Government holds 86 of 150 seats. Even with a conscience vote, that requires a lot of people who ordinarily hold a fair amount in common to cross the floor and vote the other way. Even allowing for some moderates to cross the floor, you can also count on a handful of the Opposition who are more conservatively minded to contemplate crossing the floor themselves.

I don't see this passing the House of Reps, I really don't, which to my mind is a real shame.

Brain power

The brain is an intricately confusing thing, and we still don't really know how it works. That doesn't stop humans experimenting with it though.

Recently the BrainGate caught my eye. A product of Cyberkinetics, a neurotech company, the BrainGate is a Brain-Computer Interface or BCI that is designed to restore some functionally to seriously motor impaired individuals. At this stage, the BrainGate has only had clinically conducted trials.

Consisting of a sensor implanted in the motor cortex of the patient's brain, the BrainGate analyses brain signals and works on the theory that the brain still functions in a healthy manner even though the signal pathways are no longer available. Trials with BrainGate have demonstrated that people have been able to direct cursor movements through thought alone. One patient in the trial was even able to open and close a prosthetic hand (see this BBC News article from 2005 for a wee bit more information).

The potential applications for BCI tech are pretty mind boggling, and I'm just thinking of the altruistic, nice ones. Photo-receptors to help blind people see again (actually, I don't know if this would work only on people who acquired blindness rather than born blind - I guess it depends on why the person was born blind and what elements of the pathway might be missing), basic movement for para and quadriplegics and the holy grail of prostheses that have the ability to be controlled like a normal limb could all be possible in the near future. All very good things and I hope that these avenues of research that can improve quality of life continue to be explored.

As we learn to understand more about the physiology of the brain, I do wonder how long it will be until people start trying to grow neural network cultures and then use these as a way of controlling mechanical devices. I'm not so sure I would like to see a BCI that was more C than B. That might be a little creepy.

Bringing viruses back to life

It turns out that the human genome is chock full of the remnants of ancient retroviruses. This has happened because some viruses have the ability to make copies of parts of their genomes and then incorporate these bits into the genomes of the unwitting host. This copy can then be passed on down through the generations. Ick.

As if having all these ancient virus remnants floating around in our systems wasn't enough, a team of French scientists have brought some ancient viruses back to life. The team took an entire family of a remnant virus, made a few corrections for mutations based on known versions to make a best guess at what it should look like (as much as I can tell anyway) and then took all this information, recreated the virus genome and proceeded to try and infect human cells with it.

Now I'm sure these guys have a reason for doing this (indeed, the linked article mentions that there may be some potential for assisting research into tumours) but reviving ancient viruses doesn't sit well with me. In this particular instance, the virus showed low levels of infectivity, probably because its presence in the human genome means that there is some level of inbuilt resistance in the human cells. Still, I have to wonder how long it will take until someone revives a virus that really should have stayed dormant.

It strikes me that we still know very little about the human genome and human immuno systems. We have enough trouble dealing with modern viruses and bacteria. Do we really need to start adding ancient ones as well? I don't know enough about this particular case to make any judgements about the scientific merits of this research, but I worry. Geeks like to do stuff just because we can, and scientists are like uber-geeks. In the end, someone is going to try and recreate something because it seemed like a cool thing at the time. This is what bothers me about biotech at times.

Originally found via Bodyhack [permalink]

Biology, technology, and everything in between

There won't be my usual monthly rant/editorial for November. Biotechnology is a field of knowledge that I am deeply interested in but profoundly ignorant about. It's also an area that, while it has the potential for extraordinary and almost unfathomable benefits to so many things, can be so quickly steeped in controversy.

Biotech can be a sensitive topic, whether it be frankenfoods, stem cell research or human/machine interfaces to assist the disabled to interact with the world around them. Quite frankly, I know so little about so much of this vast area that I really don't have a strong opinion on so many of the big issues. I generally try and live by the idea that being grossly uninformed should render my opinion worthless (well, more so than usual) and I plan to try and stick to this.

My hope is that by the end of this month I will know just a little more about biotech than when it started.

I'm still suffering the after-effects of laryngitis but the posting pace should pick up soon.

Nerve regeneration using bionic ear technology

According to this SMH article, Australian scientists have discovered a new technique for nerve regeneration based upon observations made with bionic ear implants invented by the same research team.

A small woven plastic tube is used to help connect the ends of severed nerves and the tube is infused with chemicals to stimulate nerve growth. Apparently most attempts to graft nerve tissue from other parts of the body fail, and you can't stretch nerves (I'm cringing at the keyboard just thinking about that) to reattach them.

They first discovered that nerves around bionic ear implants were stimulated and seemed to grow towards the implant. I guess using the materials from the implants as a conduit was the next logical step.

Testing will begin on rats later this year (who'd be a rat, honestly) with hopes of human trial some time in 2007.

In somewhat related nerve-biotech news, scientists in the US have had some success in redirecting nerves in healthy tissue to control bionic limbs.