Virtual Digi-yesod | Phase III

“We believe we are the first to extract electrons out of living plant cells,” said WonHyoung Ryu, the lead author of the paper published in the March issue of Nano Letters. Ryu conducted the experiments while he was a research associate for mechanical engineering Professor Fritz Prinz.

The Stanford research team developed a unique, ultra-sharp nanoelectrode made of gold, specially designed for probing inside cells. They gently pushed it through the algal cell membranes, which sealed around it, and the cell stayed alive. From the photosynthesizing cells, the electrode collected electrons that had been energized by light and the researchers generated a tiny electrical current.

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In this experiment, the researchers intercepted the electrons just after they had been excited by light and were at their highest energy levels. They placed the gold electrodes in the chloroplasts of algae cells and siphoned off the electrons to generate the tiny electrical current.

The result, the researchers say, is electricity production that doesn’t release carbon into the atmosphere. The only byproducts of photosynthesis are protons and oxygen.

“This is potentially one of the cleanest energy sources for energy generation,” Ryu said. “But the question is, is it economically feasible?”

Leave a Comment Electrical plant energy, gold nanoparticles, radionic currents Read more

3D chip stacking will take Moore’s Law past 2020

Mar 16

AI & the Computer God, New Science, augmentations, cybermagick, nanotechnomancy, virtual digi-yesod

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

Electronics ‘missing link’ brings neural computing closer

Mar 16

AI & the Computer God, New Science, augmentations, cybermagick, informative text, mind-machine, optimism, psychotronics, squid vs dolphin interface, virtual digi-yesod

A memristor is a device that, like a resistor, opposes the passage of current. But memristors also have a memory. The resistance of a memristor at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behaviour can be used to recall past voltages.

Now memristors are being used in a US military-funded project trying to make brain-like computers, says Wei Lu, who led the team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that demonstrated the new behaviour

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Memristors lend themselves to the task because the way that their resistance gives a glimpse of an earlier voltage is analogous to the way that a synapse’s electrical behaviour is dependent on its past activity.

Lu and colleagues have now provided the first demonstration that the analogy stands up. What’s more, their memristors were built with materials already used in the manufacture of computer chips.

Lu’s team used a mixture of silicon and silver to join two metal electrodes where they cross. The junction mimics a particular behaviour of synapses that allows neurons to learn new firing patterns, and is believed to allow memories to be stored.

In the brain the timing of electrical signals in two neurons affects the ease with which later messages can jump across the synapse between them. If the pair fire in close succession, the synapse becomes more likely to pass subsequent messages between the two.

Ray Kuzweil at the MIT/XPrize BCI workshop

Feb 12

AI & the Computer God, New Science, Singularity, cybermagick, enlightened media, psychotronics, squid vs dolphin interface, video plane, virtual digi-yesod

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

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

Feb 12

AI & the Computer God, CULTure, Pretty Pictures, Sci-Fi, mind-machine, squid vs dolphin interface, video plane, virtual digi-yesod

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Thanks to We’s Unruly for passing this along.

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited

Feb 10

CULTure, conspiracy, virtual digi-yesod

The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years…

If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.

“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”

“We’re not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network,” said Drew Arena, Verizon’s vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

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And, Arena added, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.”

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

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The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.

“Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged,” a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI’s request was to identify visitors to two URLs, “to try to find out…who’s going to them.