Robopocalypse Now: 6 Micro Bots Pull a Chevy

Global Carbon Emissions may Stall, Shrink in 2015

Annual global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels could drop slightly in 2015, according to a report from the Global Carbon Project led by a Stanford University researcher. This surprising result contrasts with the rapid growth in emissions before 2014, underlining the need for action to stabilize and permanently lower global CO2 emissions, the researchers conclude.

"In 2014, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels grew by just 0.6 percent," said lead author Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford. "This year we expect total emissions to flatten or drop slightly, despite strong growth in gross domestic product worldwide."

While CO2 emissions have slowed during times of economic recession, this would be the first decline during a period of strong global economic growth, Jackson said.

link.

Los Alamos, Stanford and Technical University of Munich Identify Techniques for Using Standard Silicon for Quantum Computers

Physicists at the Technical University of Munich, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Stanford University (USA) have tracked down semiconductor nanostructure mechanisms that can result in the loss of stored information - and halted the amnesia using an external magnetic field. The new nanostructures comprise common semiconductor materials compatible with standard manufacturing processes.

Quantum bits, qubits for short, are the basic logical elements of quantum information processing (QIP) that may represent the future of computer technology. Since they process problems in a quantum-mechanical manner, such quantum computers might one day solve complex problems much more quickly than currently possible, so the hope of researchers.

link.

The JPL's Hedgehog Bots for Exploring Asteroids and Comets

As demonstrated by the bumpy landing of ESA's Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, exploring comets, asteroids, and small moons can be difficult due to their low gravity. Not only can landing on one be like trying to alight on a trampoline, but roving around their surfaces is next to impossible because the negligible gravity offers practically no traction. To overcome this, a team of engineers is developing Hedgehog, a completely symmetrical robot rover for low-gravity exploration that moves by hopping.

A joint project by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Stanford University, and MIT, the Hedgehog robot gets around these limitations with an unusual form of locomotion that allows it to hop, tumble, skip, and even launch itself with artificial "tornadoes." Essentially a cube with horns or spikes on each corner, it has no right way up and every face is identical, so it doesn't matter how it lands. In addition, the cube shape makes it easy to pack economically in a spacecraft.

link.

Even the Trashbot Will need Social Skills During the Robopocalypse

Pity the trash can robot. When it tried to offer its services as a waste receptacle in a Stanford University cafeteria, some people pointedly ignored the robot despite its attempts to get their attention. One person even gave the trash robot a kick to move it along. Unlike the protocol droid C-3PO from “Star Wars,” the trash can robot took its abuse in good stride rather than blurting out “How rude!”

The trash robot represented part of a Stanford University experiment designed to test how people interact with robots in a more natural setting outside the lab. Such information could prove valuable as human designers try to create more sophisticated robots capable of reading human social signals. A kick from a person represents an obvious social signal to “go away.” But Stanford researchers, working with a colleague from the University of Southern Denmark, found that the majority of people who didn’t want the robot’s services showed their lack of interest by choosing to avoid social interaction with the robot entirely.

“We are particularly interested in how people will behave when they encounter robots “in the wild” as they go about their daily activities; what they do to signal or interact with the robot, and how they make sense of the interaction,” said Wendy Ju, executive director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford University and a coauthor of the paper.

link.

Stanford Claims Al-Ion Battery Breakthrough

Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that's fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today.

"We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames," said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. "Our new battery won't catch fire, even if you drill through it."

Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in "An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery," in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature.

Aluminum has long been an attractive material for batteries, mainly because of its low cost, low flammability and high-charge storage capacity. For decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to develop a commercially viable aluminum-ion battery. A key challenge has been finding materials capable of producing sufficient voltage after repeated cycles of charging and discharging.

link.

I'll be getting into the new cycle for the downshift here, promise.

Stanford Develops Technology to Restore Length of Telomeres

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure to increase the length of human telomeres. This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger. This not only has useful applications for laboratory work, but may point the way to treating various age-related disorders – or even muscular dystrophy.

Telomeres are the caps at the ends of our chromosomes that protect the DNA code of the genome. Linked to aging and disease, they are 8,000 to 10,000 nucleotides long in young people, but this decreases as we age (a nucleotide is an organic molecule that is a subunit of nucleic acids DNA and RNA). The researchers have found a way to lengthen a telomere by 1,000 nucleotides, which Dr. Helen Brau, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, says is the equivalent of "many years of human life."

Telomeres shorten each time a cell divides and at a certain point, when they reach a critical length, the cell can no longer divide and will die. Their limited lifespan means that growing cells in laboratories can be tricky, given there can only be so many cell doublings before they give up the ghost. Telomere function in humans has been linked to many diseases and they have been studied for decades, often in the hope of better understanding or delaying the aging process.

Cells treated with Stanford’s procedure multiply in a similar way to much younger cells, compared with untreated cells of the same age. According to the researchers, skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide around 28 more times than untreated cells, while muscle cells divided about three more times. With this new procedure, which uses modified RNA, many more cells can be easily generated for study and drug development or disease modeling.

link.

A Discussion at Stanford With General Hayden

Could a 35 Year old Stanford Linear Accelerator Experiment Give Clues to Dark Matter?

Here’s one reason libraries hang on to old science journals: A paper from an experiment conducted 32 years ago may shed light on the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to keep the galaxies from flying apart. The old data put a crimp in the newfangled concept of a "dark photon" and suggest that a simple bargain-basement experiment could put the idea to the test.

No one really knows what dark matter is. Since the 1980s, theorists' best hunch has been that it consists of so-called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. If they exist, WIMPs would have a mass between one and 1000 times that of a proton. They would interact only through the feeble weak nuclear force—one of two forces of nature that ordinarily flex their muscle only within the atomic nucleus—and could disappear only by colliding and annihilating one another. So if the infant universe cooked up lots of WIMPs, enough of them would naturally survive to produce the right amount of dark matter today. But physicists have yet to spot WIMPs, which every now and then should ping off atomic nuclei in sensitive detectors and send them flying.

More recently, theorists have explored other ideas, such as self-interacting dark matter. This would consist of a particle, known as a χ (pronounced chi), with a mass between 1/1000 and one times that of the proton. Those particles would interact with one another through a force like the electromagnetic force, which produces light. That force would be conveyed by a massive particle called a dark photon—a dark matter version of a particle of light—that might "mix" slightly with the ordinary ones. So with some small probability, a dark photon might interact with ordinary charged particles such as electrons and atomic nuclei—just as ordinary photons do.

Self-interacting dark matter has attractive properties. In particular, a dark photon could also explain a particle physics puzzle. A particle called the muon appears to be very slightly more magnetic than theory predicts, and that discrepancy could be resolved if the muon interacts with dark photons lurking in the vacuum. However, χs and dark photons would be hard to detect with WIMP detectors; with their low masses, they couldn't whack a nucleus hard enough to create a signal.

But archival data already rule out dark photons with certain combinations of properties, argues Rouven Essig, a theoretical physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, and his colleagues. The data come from E137, a "beam dump" experiment that ran from 1980 to 1982 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. In the experiment, physicists slammed a beam of high-energy electrons, left over from other experiments, into an aluminum target to see what would come out. Researchers placed a detector 383 meters behind the target, on the other side of a sandstone hill 179 meters thick that blocked any ordinary particles. They then looked for hypothetical particles called axions, which would have pierced the earth and reached the detector—and saw none.

link.

SLAC Physicist Proposes new "Orbital Computing," Abandoning Transitors

The demand for computing power is constantly rising, but we’re heading to the edge of the cliff in terms of increasing performance — both in terms of the physics of cramming more transistors on a chip and in terms of the power consumption. We’ve covered plenty of different ways that researchers are trying to continue advancing Moore’s Law — this idea that the number of transistors (and thus the performance) on a chip doubles every 18 months — especially the far out there efforts that take traditional computer science and electronics and dump them in favor of using magnetic spin, quantum states or probabilistic logic.

We’re going to add a new impossible that might become possible to that list thanks to Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who has proposed using the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom as a new means to generate the binary states (the charge or lack of a charge that transistors use today to generate zeros and ones) we use in computing. He calls this idea orbital computing and the big takeaway for engineers is that one can switch the state of an electron’s orbit 10,000 times faster than you can switch the state of a transistor used in computing today.

link.

Berkeley, Stanford Nobel Prize Rivalry Continues

Schekman is ours. Sudhof is Stanford.  Congratz, gentlemen. 

The prize race continues.

John Ma on the Evolution of the Greek Polis Between 800 BC to 600 AD

Improving Autnomous Cars to Further the Robopocalypse

Mary Beard on Identifying Julius Caesar Busts

Bacterium, Simulated: Computer Program Predicts Phenotype from Genotype

A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype

Authors:

1. Jonathan R. Karr (a)
2. Jayodita C. Sanghvi (b)
3. Derek N. Macklin (b)
4. Miriam V. Gutschow (b)
5. Jared M. Jacobs (b)
6. Benjamin Bolival (b)
7. Nacyra Assad-Garcia (c)
8. John I. Glass (c)
9. Markus W. Covert (b, *)

Affiliations:

a. Graduate Program in Biophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

b. Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

c. J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

*. Correspondence: mcovert@stanford.edu


Highlights

* An entire organism is modeled in terms of its molecular components

* Complex phenotypes can be modeled by integrating cell processes into a single model

* Unobserved cellular behaviors are predicted by model of M. genitalium

* New biological processes and parameters are predicted by model of M. genitalium

Summary:

Understanding how complex phenotypes arise from individual molecules and their interactions is a primary challenge in biology that computational approaches are poised to tackle. We report a whole-cell computational model of the life cycle of the human pathogen Mycoplasma genitalium that includes all of its molecular components and their interactions. An integrative approach to modeling that combines diverse mathematics enabled the simultaneous inclusion of fundamentally different cellular processes and experimental measurements. Our whole-cell model accounts for all annotated gene functions and was validated against a broad range of data. The model provides insights into many previously unobserved cellular behaviors, including in vivo rates of protein-DNA association and an inverse relationship between the durations of DNA replication initiation and replication. In addition, experimental analysis directed by model predictions identified previously undetected kinetic parameters and biological functions. We conclude that comprehensive whole-cell models can be used to facilitate biological discovery.

Link. Pop Sci write up at the NYT.

First off, this is a VERY first step.  Don't expect a human cell to be simulated very soon.  Ours are far, far more complicated.   Given a full run on our biggest current system using the same methods, you could "only" do something a thousand times more complicated, at best.

Even so, this is something impressive.

Bay Area Scientific Computing Day

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day (BASCD) is an annual informal gathering to encourage the interaction and collaboration of researchers in the fields of scientific computing and computational science/engineering from the San Francisco Bay Area. This event provides a great venue for junior researchers to present their work to the local community, and for the Bay Area scientific and computational science/engineering communities at large to interchange views on today's multidisciplinary computational challenges and state-of-the-art developments.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of BASCD. For this occasion, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which organized the first BASCD in 2000, will host the event on site on Saturday, May 9, 2009.

The event will feature presentations by researchers from institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. There will also be opportunity for poster presentations.

Organizers:

Robert Crockett
Esmond Ng

Administrative Support:

Rachel Lance
Yeen Mankin

Venue

Location: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Building 66 Auditorium
Date: Saturday, May 9, 2009

Program Agenda

Current Speakers:

* Jim Bremer (UC Davis), "Efficient Discretization of Boundary Integral Equations on Domains with Corners"
* Anwei Chai (Stanford University), "Compressed Sensing and Imaging: A Comparative Study"
* Mark Hoemmen (UC Berkeley), "Communication-avoiding iterative methods"
* Nicole Lemaster (Sandia Lab), "Adaptive Load Balancing for Component-based PDE Solvers"
* Kamesh Madduri (LBNL), "High Performance Computing for Massive Graph Analysis"
* Chris Rycroft (LBNL), "Real-time control of mixing in dense granular flow"
* Mike Singer (LLNL), "TBA"

Poster Presentations:

Those interested in presenting a poster presentation should email Robert Crockett, rkcrockett-at-lbl-dot-gov, by the deadline of April 17. Please include title and abstract. There are a limited number of slots available, and those selected will be notified the following week.

The final agenda will be available soon.

Registration

No registration fees are required for participiation in the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

All participants of the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day must register in order to gain site access at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Go here to register.

Additional Information

Site Access

All participants must sign up at the registration page in order to visit Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and attend the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

Directions

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day will be held in Building 66 Auditorium, which is located at the east end of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Building 66 is easily accessible from the Strawberry Canyon Gate. A map of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is available.

General information on directions to Lawrence Berkeley National can be found at http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/Transportation.html.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from I-80: Click here for directions from Google Map.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from CA-24: Click here for directions from Google Map.

Weather in Berkeley

Current weather information and forecast can be found at http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Berkeley.html.

Previous Bay Area Scientific Computing Days

2000 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2001 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2002 - Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore
2003 - University of San Francisco
2004 - Stanford University
2005 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2006 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2007 - Stanford University
2008 - University of California, Berkeley

A nontrivial amount is HPC. I will probably not be attending because of Team Phoenicia testing, but I strongly encourage people to do so. If you want to network into the HPC/scientific computing world. this is one of the good ways to do so.

Link in the title like always.