Happy Birthday, Internet

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Forty years ago today, the first message was sent on what would become "the internet."

The year was 1969. It was the years of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The average computer was the size of a Buick. The Department of Defense wanted a way to communicate in realtime across great distances with multiple sites simultaneously. And at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, someone decided they needed something called a "network."

Major communications companies were invited to bid on the project. IBM and Bell both declined. They could see no future in the technology. Finally a small company called BBN Technologies, originally started by two MIT professors as an acoustic consulting company, took the contract.

On October 29, 1969, BBN's creation - the IMP (Interface Message Processors) - used its ultrafast 24 kilobyte core memory and 50 kilobits per second speed as the world's first router. Researchers at UCLA sent the first message to the IMP that night. What was that message? Was it "One small step for man" or "What hath God wrought" like other significant advances in human technology?

No. The first real message sent over the nascent internet was:

LO

The IMP then crashed.

An hour later, the first FULL message sent over the nascent internet was:

LOGIN

It was a bold new world, and to this day the internet continues to crash in millions of places around the world, twenty-four hours a day.

Happy birthday, Internet!

For more information:

Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System (National Geographic)

ARPANET (Wikipedia)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

All Hail the Robot Armada!

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

In the future, space exploration of distant worlds will be carried out not by humans, nor even by human-guided robots, but by robot-guided-robots.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, predicts a day when small, expendable robot teams would make the trek to Mars or Titan and explore independently, using generalized instructions and flexible programming to search extraterrestrial landscape in much the same way that astronauts have explored the surface of the moon.

All hall the Robot Armada!

For more information:

Robot armada might scale new worlds (R&D Magazine)

Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Airport liquid screening

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Soon you may be able to bring liquids on planes again thanks to a new spectroscopy technique

Since 2006 air travelers have been unable to bring liquids on board with them. Now a group of physicists from Germany may have found a way to sort the explosive liquids that airport security can’t currently detect from your bottle of Evian.

How does it work? Liquids are examined with a new form of spectroscopy known as Hilbert spectroscopy. Where previous methods used electromagnetic waves passing through a liquid to attempt to identify it – without success – Hilbert spectroscopy uses multiple wavelengths over a large range of frequencies to create a "fingerprint" for dangerous liquids that could be used by terrorists to create an explosion in-air.

While a prototype model is still several years away from being used in airports, continual progress means better and better detection of dangerous liquids – and less hassle for air travelers.

For more information:

Quick Test For Explosive Liquids (R&D Magazine)

Liquid identification by Hilbert spectroscopy (Lyatti et al)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

FLU ATTACK!!!

This is quite possibly the best video ever made showing exactly how the flu virus gets into your body and makes a gajillion copies of itself at your expense. You thought the movie theatre scene in "Outbreak" was bad? This is three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of pure infectious delight.

Recommended viewing times: while healthy, not in a crowded place, and *before* lunch.

How A Virus Invades Your Body (NPR)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Gene therapy brings the light to human eyes

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Gene therapy delivers on promise of better sight for congenital degenerative eye disorder

A recent AQOS post described the landmark success of gene therapy in curing congenital color-blindness in monkeys – the first primate study to achieve that success. Now, researchers have concluded a two-year study following the effects of similar gene therapy treatments for a congenital degenerative eye condition... in humans.

Twelve human volunteers with a condition known as Leber's congenital amaurosis agreed to be given gene therapy in one eye. Though multiple genes are responsible for the development of amaurosis, this study chose to replace the patients’ own copy of a gene called RPE65. The protein encoded by the RPE65 gene is located in the retinal pigment epithelium and is involved in the conversion of trans-retinol to 11-cis retinal during phototransduction (the molecular perception of light), which is then used in visual pigment regeneration in photoreceptor cells. Without a functioning copy of RPE65, humans suffer a steady decrease in vision and are often legally blind by the age of five.

In this study, twelve volunteers – five of them children – received a new copy of RPE65 in the cells of one eye. Within two weeks, the treated eyes began to become more sensitive to light, and within a few more weeks, vision began to improve. The younger the patients were, the better they responded. The youngest patient (age 9) had been legally blind before the study, and afterwards experienced a sufficient increase in sightedness that he is able to ride a bicycle and play softball. Older patients had less improvement because their eyes had greater degeneration in their retinal cells. Still, the improvement is marked and has persisted for the duration of the two-year study. Yet to be answered questions are whether the change is permanent, and what happens if the same therapy is given to the patients’ other eye.

Gene therapy is a field rapidly outstripping medical practitioners’ ability to conduct relevant trials, but this success augurs well for medical and financial support for future studies.

For more information:

Gene therapy transforms eyesight of 12 born with rare defect (LA Times)

Safety and Efficacy of Gene Transfer for Leber's Congenital Amaurosis (New England Journal of Medicine, Maguire et al)

Leber’s congenital amaurosis (Wikipedia)

RPE65 gene (Wikipedia)

Adenovirus-based gene therapy (Wikipedia)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Quantum: Science meets Social Networking

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

FaceBook for scientists? Strange but true, a new software system called VivoWeb is attempting to use the tools pioneered by social networking to accelerate the pace of research and collaboration in the time-worn and somewhat stodgy halls of science, beginning with the biomedical field. What began at Cornell now has NIH funding to be expanded at the University of Florida and will soon be implemented at Scripps Research Institute (Juniper, FL), Ponce School of Medicine (Puerto Rico), Washington University of St. Louis, and the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York City).

No news so far on whether it has a Personals section.

VIVOweb may be the Facebook for researchers (R&D Magazine)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Chicks Dig Giant, errr, Tiny Robots!

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Microscopic robots might just be the next big thing.

Robots are cool. Giant robots are cooler. But robots measuring just a few micrometers (millionths of a meter) take the cake. At the National Institute for Standards and Technology, they might just do it literally. In May of 2010, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation to be held in Anchorage, Alaska will host the NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge pitting microbots from around the world against one another in such thrilling challenges as sprinting across a distance equal to the diameter of a pinhead! Operated by remote control and observed by judges literally watching them under a microscope, the microbots will perform tasks such as placing tiny pegs into holes or performing other feats of system reliability, level of autonomy, power management and task complexity.

Still not impressed? How about a rousing game of nanosoccer?

For more information:

Mobile microbots to face big challenge (R&D Magazine)

NIST Nanosoccer event

National Institute of Standards and Technology


© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Virtual Autopsies

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Ever wondered what you could do if the multitouch screen technology used in iPhones were combined with high-resolution MRI/CAT scan images?

Some Swedish researchers did. The result is called the Virtual Autopsy Table.

The name is literal. 3D images of a human body generated by MRI or CAT scans are digitally rendered and displayed on the surface of a table-sized multitouch screen, just like the surface of an iPhone. Observers can then manipulate the image, displaying only certain tissue types, zoom in and out or free-rotating the image, and even cut through the image to display interior regions.

Although it may seem more reminiscent of a certain Firefly episode than a tool of modern medicine, it is likely that VATs will soon be in most cutting-edge hospitals, where doctors can use them to more accurately diagnose illnesses and surgeons can study your particular body *before* you go onto the operating table.

For more information:

Virtual Autopsy Table brings multitouch to the morgue (Engadget)

The Virtual Autopsy Table (Norrkopings Visualseringscenter, Sweden)

[N.B. - the video presentation is well worth watching.]


© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

Quotations: A Philosophy of Science

The right of the scientist to investigate is akin to the academic freedom which our American standards demand for scholars in every field, and not too remote from the freedom of speech which we have come to believe constitutes one of the foundation stones of our American way of living. Each of these privileges, however, carries with it an obligation - an obligation, in the case of the scientist, to investigate honestly, to observe and to record without prejudice, to observe as adequately as human sense organs or the most modern instruments may allow, to observe persistently and sufficiently in order that there may be an ultimate understanding of the basic nature of the matter which is involved. These are the obligations which the scientist assumes when he contracts with society for the right to investigate.

But there is another obligation which is also implicit in the contract between scientist and the social organization which supports, protects and encourages his research. We believe that the scientist who obtains his right to investigate from the citizens at large is under obligation to make his findings available to all who can utilize his data. Any scientist who fails to report, or to place his findings in channels where they may serve the maximum number of persons, fails to recognize the sources of his right to investigate, and thereby jeopardizes the right of all scientists to investigate in any field.

- Alfred Charles Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(© 1953, renewed 1981)


© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation

That's a lot of flops

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

Kraken supercomputer sets new computational standard

Peta. It’s the scientific prefix that means a thousand times bigger than a trillion – or to put it another way, "a million times a million times a thousand."

Question: How big is that?

Answer: Really, really big. A petasecond is eleven million years. A petainch is sixteen million miles. And a petaflop is a thousand trillion calculations per second. That record was just set by the Cray Xt5 supercomputer, better known as the Kraken.

Operated by the University of Tennessee for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Kraken is the newest addition to the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), and features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 computer cores.

The new supercomputer will be used for scientific modeling studies, especially those requiring literally astronomical numbers of calculations – such as modeling core-collapse supernovas, believed to be responsible for over half the current elements in the galaxy. With the previous generation of high-performance supercomputers, astrophysicists had to make approximations that severely impacted the accuracy of their results. With the Kraken, new vistas in computational capability have opened up that will allow researchers to ask better questions and expand our understanding of the processes that shaped our universe.


For more information:

Kraken Achieves Petaflop (R&D Magazine)

NICS (Wikipedia)

Peta- (Wikipedia)

© AQOS / P. Smalley (2009)
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation