Phase III – Stealth Is.

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By analyzing just 150 spots on the genome, researchers can predict who will live to extreme old age with almost 80 percent accuracy, according to a study published online today in the journal Science. Researchers from Boston University employed a widely used genetic-screening technology to find genetic variations that occur more frequently in centenarians–people age 100 and older.
In addition to providing a potential way to predict who might live into their 100s, the findings suggest that genetics play a major role in surviving to extreme old age. And the team hopes that identifying the genes and corresponding molecular mechanisms that promote longevity will give new insight into how to prevent or delay age-related diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

“Centenarians are a model of aging well,” says Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center and an author of the study. Previous findings from the project, the largest study of centenarians in the world, show that 90 percent of them are free of disability to an average age of 93. “They seem to compress disability to the end of their lives,” says Perls. “I am very hopeful that understanding how centenarians do that will lead to new strategies for therapies.”

Perhaps most surprisingly, preliminary analysis showed that centenarians had just as many genetic variants linked to diseases as did people in the control group. “That suggests that what makes people live long lives is not lack of genetic disposition to disease but longevity-promoting genes,” says Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at Boston University and coauthor of the study. “If longevity variants cancel out disease-associated variants, it could open new ways of treating age-related diseases.”

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“Our only chance of long term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space,” Stephen Hawking said in an interview Friday with Big Think. “We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.”

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.

“I see great dangers for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully. But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space.

“If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.  But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.  That is why I’m in favor of manned, or should I say ‘personed,’ space flight.”

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The law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. More than 50 years old, this law is still in effect, but to extend it as long as 2020 will require a change from mere transistor scaling to novel packaging architectures such as so-called 3D integration, the vertical integration of chips.

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Last week, IBM, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) signed a four-year collaborative project called CMOSAIC to understand how the latest chip cooling techniques can support a 3D chip architecture. Unlike current processors, the CMOSAIC project considers a 3D stack-architecture of multiple cores with a interconnect density from 100 to 10,000 connections per millimeter square. Researchers believe that these tiny connections and the use of hair-thin, liquid cooling microchannels measuring only 50 microns in diameter between the active chips are the missing links to achieving high-performance computing with future 3D chip stacks.

“In the United States, data centers already consume two percent of the electricity available with consumption doubling every five years. In theory, at this rate, a supercomputer in the year 2050 will require the entire production of the United States’ energy grid,” said Prof. John R. Thome

Read more @ IBM Research Zurich

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WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly.

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Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says.

“We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.

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Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. “Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement,” says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains. Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.

The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore’s law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months. The software programs are getting better too. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore’s law for decades.

A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.

Read more about our increasing data and it’s associated problems at The Economist

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Ray Kurzweil speaks at the BCI X-prize conference on the singularity and challenges facing neural computer interfaces. The X-Prize for BCI is hoping to be set to offer $10 million+ to technology which enables the sight of the blind. Read more at H+ Magazine

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