bad movie science

I forgot where I got this summary, but it is a nice start as a reference to tell what is fiction and what is reality.

We play God again...

I always see technology as a double-edged sword. I am usually fine with most scientific experiments whether it is about discovering of the universe, seeking the God's particles, CERN, etc or creating new materials, nanotech, even robotics with AI, etc. Medical technology advancements are also fine as long as it is for health improvement or restoration. However, I always have reservation about experiments that are related to creating, destroying, or manipulating human life. Cuz, I suspect that those scientists usually only look at what they can do technically, and ignore the moral and social consequences of their creation. The following is another piece of news that I'm still digesting what the implication will be to us in the long run. The article itself didn't say much about that, but I've a hunch that it is not good to us....

World's first GM babies born

by MICHAEL HANLON, Daily Mail

The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.

The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.

So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'.

Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.

The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.

Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults --two women and one man.

The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their 'germline' means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring.

Altering the human germline - in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species - is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world's scientists.

Geneticists fear that one day this method could be used to create new races of humans with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.

Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this 'is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children'.

Some experts severely criticised the experiments. Lord Winston, of the Hammersmith Hospital in West London, told the BBC yesterday: 'Regarding the treat-ment of the infertile, there is no evidence that this technique is worth doing . . . I am very surprised that it was even carried out at this stage. It would certainly not be allowed in Britain.'

John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: 'One has tremendous sympathy for couples who suffer infertility problems. But this seems to be a further illustration of the fact that the whole process of in vitro fertilisation as a means of conceiving babies leads to babies being regarded as objects on a production line.

'It is a further and very worrying step down the wrong road for humanity.' Professor Cohen and his colleagues diagnosed that the women were infertile because they had defects in tiny structures in their egg cells, called mitochondria.

They took eggs from donors and, using a fine needle, sucked some of the internal material - containing 'healthy' mitochondria - and injected it into eggs from the women wanting to conceive.

Because mitochondria contain genes, the babies resulting from the treatment have inherited DNA from both women. These genes can now be passed down the germline along the maternal line.

A spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates 'assisted reproduction' technology in Britain, said that it would not license the technique here because it involved altering the germline.

Jacques Cohen is regarded as a brilliant but controversial scientist who has pushed the boundaries of assisted reproduction technologies.

He developed a technique which allows infertile men to have their own children, by injecting sperm DNA straight into the egg in the lab.

Prior to this, only infertile women were able to conceive using IVF. Last year, Professor Cohen said that his expertise would allow him to clone children --a prospect treated with horror by the mainstream scientific community.

'It would be an afternoon's work for one of my students,' he said, adding that he had been approached by 'at least three' individuals wishing to create a cloned child, but had turned down their requests.

Terminators are coming!

I've long been fascinated by our technological advancements. I know the Asimov's three rules on robotics. However, I'm just not buying that robots are all good to human. The evil twins of robots and AI would wipe us all some days! Believe it or not! Well, we are just helpless bystanders watching the few genius among us creating wonders that would do us harm ultimately. After watching the clips below, it just reminded me the words that I read in one of Michael Crichton's books ( I got which one): "Just because we can do it, doesn't me that we should!"

DARPA Drones and Robots
DARPA Robots 1
HRP-4C Miim's Human-like Walking
Most Human Like Robot Ever human robots !!
 BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010)
DARPA Cheetah Sets Speed Record for Legged Robots
Real Swarm of Flying Nano Quadrotors Doing Flight Tricks HD
Amazing 8 foot robot seriously advanced
Robot Snake

War's Remote-control Future

I came across an article about the current/future U.S. military technology that is quite fascinating. Just wanna share with you all if interested ->

War's Remote-control Future
Unmanned drone attacks and shape-shifting robots

by Anna Mulrine

Global Research, October 23, 2011
Christian Science Monitor

The Pentagon already includes unmanned drone attacks in its arsenal. Next up: housefly-sized surveillance craft, shape-changing 'chemical robots,' and tracking agents sprayed from the sky. What does it mean to have soldiers so far removed from the battlefield?

Pakistanis hold up a burning mock drone aircraft during a May rally against drone attacks in Peshawar.
In 2009, the Brookings Institution estimated that unmanned drone attacks were killing about 10 civilians
for every 1 insurgent in Pakistan. (K. Pervez/Reuters)

In the shadow of a heavily fortified enemy building, US commanders call in a chemical robot, or what looks like a blob. They give it a simple instruction: Penetrate a crack in the building and find out what's inside. Like an ice sculpture or the liquid metal assassin in "Terminator 2," the device changes shape, slips through the opening, then reassumes its original form to look around. It uses sensors woven into its fabric to sample the area for biological agents. If needed, it can seep into the cracks of a bomb to defuse it.

Soldiers hoping to eavesdrop on an enemy release a series of tiny, unmanned aircraft the size and shape of houseflies to hover in a room unnoticed, relaying invaluable video footage.

A fleet of drones roams a mountain pass, spraying a fine mist along a known terrorist transit route – the US military's version of "CSI: Al Qaeda." Days later, when troops capture suspects hundreds of miles away, they test them for traces of the "taggant" to discover whether they have traversed the trail and may, in fact, be prosecuted as insurgents.

IN PICTURES: War by remote control

Welcome to the battlefield of the future. Malleable robots. Insect-size air forces. Chemical tracers spritzed from the sky. It's the stuff of science fiction.

But these are among the myriad futuristic war­fighting creations currently being developed at universities across the country with funds from the US military. And the future, in many cases, may not be too far off.

Engineering students at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., for instance, are now experimenting with chemical taggants on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the ones being used in Afghanistan. Sure, the shape-changing chemical robot that slips through cracks may be more Ray Bradbury than battlefield-ready. But the Pentagon, in its perpetual quest to find the next weapon or soldier-saving device – and with scientific assurances that it's possible – is already investing millions to develop it.

"We're not about 20 years, or 10 years, or even five years away – a lot of this could be out in the field in under two years," says Mitchell Zatkin, former director of programmable matter at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's premier research office.

The development of a new generation of military robots, including armed drones, may eventually mark one of the biggest revolutions in warfare in generations. Throughout history, from the crossbow to the cannon to the aircraft carrier, one weapon has supplanted another as nations have strived to create increasingly lethal means of allowing armies to project power from afar.

But many of the new emerging technologies promise not only firepower but also the ability to do something else: reduce the number of soldiers needed in war. While few are suggesting armies made up exclusively of automated machines (yet), the increased use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan has already reinforced the view among many policymakers and Pentagon planners that the United States can carry out effective military operations by relying largely on UAVs, targeted cruise missile strikes, and a relatively small number of special operations forces.

At the least, many enthusiasts see the new high-tech tools helping to save American lives. At the most, they see them changing the nature of war – how it's fought and how much it might cost – as well as helping America maintain its military preeminence.

Yet the prospect of a military less reliant on soldiers and more on "push button" technologies also raises profound ethical and moral questions. Will drones controlled by pilots thousands of miles away, as many of them are now, reduce war to an antiseptic video game? Will the US be more likely to wage war if doing so does not risk American lives? And what of the oversight role of Congress in a world of more remote-control weapons? Already, when lawmakers on Capitol Hill accused the Obama administration of circumventing their authority in waging war in Libya, White House lawyers argued in essence that an operation can't be considered war if there are no troops on the ground – and, as a result, does not require the permission of Congress.

"If the military continues to reduce the human cost of waging war," says Lt. Col. Edward Barrett, an ethicist at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., "there's a possibility that you're not going to try hard enough to avoid it."

Beneath a new moon, a crew pushes the 2,500-pound Predator drone toward a blacked-out flight line and prepares it for takeoff. The soldiers wheel over a pallet of Hellfire missiles and load them onto the plane's undercarriage. The Predator pilot walks around the aircraft, conducting his preflight check. He then returns to a nearby trailer, sits down at a console with joysticks and monitors, and guides the snub-nosed plane down the runway and into the night air – unmanned and fully armed.

The takeoffs of Predators with metronome regularity here at Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan, has helped turn this strip of asphalt into what the Pentagon calls the single busiest runway in the world. An aircraft lifts off or lands every two minutes. It's a reminder of how integral drones have become to the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror.

Initially, of course, the plan was not to put weapons on Predator drones at all. Like the first military airplanes, they were to be used just for surveillance. As the war in Iraq progressed, however, US service members jury-rigged the drones with weapons. Today, armed Predators and their larger offspring, Reapers, fly over America's battlefields, equipped with both missiles and powerful cameras, becoming the most widely used and, arguably, most important tools in the US arsenal.

Since first being introduced in Iraq and Afghanistan, their numbers have grown from 167 in 2002 to more than 7,000 today. The US Air Force is now recruiting more UAV pilots than traditional ones.

"The demand has just absolutely skyrocketed," says the commander of the Air Force's 451st Operations Group, which runs Predator and Reaper operations in Kandahar.

As their numbers have grown, so has the sophistication with which the military uses them. The earliest drones operated more as independent assets – as aerial eyes that sent back intelligence and dropped their bombs. But today the unmanned aircraft are integrated into almost every operation on the ground, acting as advanced scouts and omniscient surveyors of battle zones. They monitor the precise movements of insurgents and kill enemy leaders. They conduct "virtual lineups," zooming in powerful cameras to help determine whether a suspected insurgent may have carried out a particular attack.

"A lot of the ground commanders won't execute a mission without us," says the Air Force's commander of the 62nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron in Afghanistan.

Robots, too, have become a far more pervasive presence on America's fields of battle. Remote-control machines that move about on wheels and tracks scour for roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan carry hand-held drones in backpacks, which they assemble and throw into the air to scope out terrain and check for enemy fighters. In the past 10 years, the Pentagon's use of robots has grown from zero to some 12,000 in war zones today.

Part of the exponential rise in the use of UAVs and robots stems from a confluence of events: improvements in technology and America's prolonged involvement in two simultaneous wars.

There is, too, the prospect of more money for military contractors eyeing a downturn in future defense budgets. Today, the amount of money being spent on research for military robotics surpasses the budget of the National Science Foundation, which, at $6.9 billion a year, funds nearly one-quarter of all federally supported scientific research at the nation's universities.

Military officials also see in the new technologies the possibility of savings in an era of shrinking budgets. Deploying forces overseas can now cost as much as $1 million a year per soldier.

Yet the biggest allure of the new high-tech armaments may be something as old as conflict itself: the desire to reduce the number of casualties on the battlefield and gain a strategic advantage over the enemy. As Lt. Gen. Richard Lynch, a commander in Iraq, observed at a conference on military robotics in Washington earlier this year: "When I look at the 153 soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice [under my command], I know that 80 percent of them were put in a situation where we could have placed an unmanned system in the same job."

Drones, in particular, seem the epitome of risk-free warfare for the nation using them – there are, after all, no pilots to shoot down. Moreover, the people who run them are often nowhere near the field of battle. Some 90 percent of the UAV operations over Afghanistan are flown by people in trailers in the deserts of Nevada. In Kandahar, soldiers help the planes take off and land and then hand over controls to the airmen in the US.

"We want to minimize the [human] footprint as much as possible," says the 451st Operations Group commander at the Kandahar airfield, where the effects of being close to the war are clearly visible: The plywood walls of the tactical operations center are lined with framed bits of jagged metal from mortars that have fallen on the airfield over the years.

While the distant control of drones may well protect American lives, it raises questions about what it means to have people so far removed from the field of conflict. "Sometimes you felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar," says Lt. Col. Matt Martin, who was among the first generation of US soldiers to work with drones to wage war and who has written a book – "Predator: The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story."

Martin agrees that the unmanned aircraft no doubt reduce American casualties, but wonders if it makes killing "too easy, too tempting, too much like simulated combat, like the computer game Civilization."

It probably doesn't reassure critics that the flight controls for drones over the years have come to resemble video-game contollers, which the military has done to make them more intuitive for a generation of young soldiers raised on games like Gears of Warand Killzone.

Martin knows what it's like to confront the dark side of war, even as he fought it from afar. During one operation, he was piloting a drone that was tracking an insurgent. Just after he fired one of the aircraft's missiles, two children rode their bicycles into range. They were both killed. "You get good at compartmentalizing," says Martin.

What worries critics is those who are too good at it – and the impact in general of waging war at a distance. Some fret about the mechanics of the decisionmaking process: Who ultimately makes the decision to pull the trigger? And how do you decide whom to put on the hit list – a top Al Qaeda official, yes, but is some petty but persistent insurgent a matter of national security?

As the US increasingly uses drones in its secret campaigns, questions arise about how much to inform America's allies about UAV attacks and whether they alienate local populations more than they help subdue the enemy, which the US has starkly, and almost weekly, confronted with its drone campaign in Pakistan.

From the US military's viewpoint, the drone war has been fantastically successful, helping to kill key Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban insurgents with a minimum of civilian casualties and almost no US troops put at risk.

Some even believe that the ethical oversight of drones is far more rigorous than that of manned aircraft, since at least 150 people – ground crews, engineers, pilots, intelligence analyzers – are typically involved in each UAV mission.

The issue of what's a minimum of civilian losses is, of course, subjective. In 2009, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, estimated that the US drone war was killing about 10 civilians for every 1 insurgent in Pakistan. That may be far fewer casualties than would be killed with traditional airstrikes. But it is hardly comforting to the Pakistanis.

Moreover, the very practice of taking out enemy leaders or sympathizers could at some point, according to detractors, devolve into an aerial assassination campaign. When the US used a drone strike last month to kill jihadist cleric and American-bornAnwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama hailed it as a "major blow" to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But some critics decried the killing of a US citizen with no public scrutiny.

Barrett, who is the director of research at the Naval Academy's Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, discusses with his students the prospect of whether UAVs make it easier to wage war if the government doesn't have to worry about a public outcry. "There are not the mass numbers of troops moving around and visible, so it could be easier to circumvent the oversight of Congress and, therefore, legitimate authority," he notes.

Others ask a more simple but practical question: What about the troops who conduct the UAV strikes from the Nevada desert – could they become legitimate targets of America's enemies at, say, a local mall, bringing the war on terror to the suburbs?

Some worry that the US is, in fact, placing too heavy a burden on its UAV troops. Despite warnings that "video-game warfare" might make them callous to killing, new studies suggest that the stress levels drone operators face are higher than those for infantry forces on the ground.

"Having this idea of a 'surgical war' where you can really just pinpoint the bad guys with the least amount of damage to our own force, there's a bit of naiveté in all that," says Maryann Cusinamo Love, an associate professor at Catholic University of Americain Washington, D.C.

She says the powerful cameras on the drones allow pilots to see in "great vivid detail the real-time results of their actions. That is an incredible stress on them."

It is also, she argues, a "ghettoization of the killing function in war." However justified the military mission may be, she says, "You are still giving the most stressful job of war disproportionately to this one subset of people."

Nearly as long as militaries have existed, they have invented arms to keep their soldiers as far away from danger as possible. Some sound ridiculous, others terrifying, but most have raised questions of fairness in warfare.

During World War II, Japanese forces used the jet stream to launch paper "fire balloons" rigged with bombs meant to explode when they drifted over US soil. One such balloon discovered by an American family during a picnic in the Oregon woods resulted in the only deaths in the continental US caused by enemy hostilities in the war.

For their part, US scientists experimented with a form of bio-inspired warfare: a "bat bomb" that they planned to launch in parachute-rigged casings over Japan. They imagined fitting the bodies of tiny bats with incendiary bombs on timers. The theory was that the bats, once dropped, would roost in the eaves and attics of Japan's delicate wooden dwellings, setting off fires. The technology was successfully tested but scrapped when it was deemed too expensive by the Pentagon.

On the Western front, Germany was experimenting with a remote-control tank known as the Goliath. It used technology pioneered by an American who had demonstrated a remote-control boat years earlier at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When he tried to sell his technology to the US military, however, he was met with ridicule.

"He said, 'I've got this technology,' but they started laughing – they thought he was crazy," says Peter Singer, author of "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

With the advent of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, technology has once again rendezvoused with military necessity. A company called iRobot in Bedford, Mass., sent a prototype of its PackBot, which soldiers began using to clear caves and bunkers suspected of being mined. When the testing period was over, "The Army unit didn't want to give the test robot back," Mr. Singer notes.

While the use of robots that can detect and defuse explosives is growing exponentially, the next big frontier for America's military R2-D2s may parallel what happened to drones: They may be fitted with weapons – offering new fighting capabilities as well as raising new concerns.

Already, researchers are experimenting with attaching machine guns to robots that can be triggered remotely. Field tests in Iraq for one of the first weaponized robots, dubbed SWORDS, didn't go well.

"There were several instan­ces of noncommanded firing of the system during testing," says Jef­frey Jacz­kow­ski, deputy manager of the US Army's Robotic Systems Joint Project Office.

Though US military officials tend to emphasize that troops must remain "in the loop" as robots or drones are weaponized, there remains a strong push for automation coming from the Pentagon. In 2007, the US Army sent out a request for proposals calling for robots with "fully autonomous engagement without human intervention." In other words, the ability to shoot on their own.

"Let's put it this way," says Lt. Col. David Thomp­son, project manager of the Army's robotic office. "We've seen the success of unmanned air vehicles that have been armed. This [weaponizing robots] is a natural extension."

At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ronald Arkin is researching a stunning premise: whether robots can be created that treat humans on the battlefield better than human soldiers treat each other. He has pored over the first study of US soldiers returning from the Iraq war, a 2006 US Surgeon General's report that asked troops to evaluate their own ethical behavior and that of their comrades.

He was struck by "the incredibly high level of atrocities that are witnessed, committed, or abetted by soldiers." Modern warfare has not lessened the impact on soldiers. It is as stressful as ancient hand-to-hand combat with axes, he argues, because of the sorts of quick decisions that fighting with modern technology requires.

"Human beings have never been designed to operate under the combat conditions of today," he says. "There are many, many problems with the speed with which we are killing right now – and that exacerbates the potential for violation of laws of war."

With Pentagon funding, Dr. Arkin is looking at whether it is possible to build robots that behave more ethically than humans – to not be tempted to shoot someone, for instance, out of fear or revenge.

The key, he says, is that the robot should "first do no harm, rather than 'shoot first, ask questions later.' "

Such technology requires what Arkin calls an "ethical adaptor," which involves following orders. Learning, he explains, is potentially dangerous when it comes to making decisions about whether to kill. "You don't want to hand soldiers a gun and say, 'Figure out what's right and wrong.' You tell them what's right and wrong," he says. "We want to do the same for these robotic systems."

The aim, says Arkin, is not to be perfect, "but if we can achieve this goal of outperforming humans, we have saved lives – and that is the ultimate benchmark of this work."

Other research into armed robots centers not so much on outperforming humans as being able to work with them. In the not-too-distant future, military officials envision soldiers and robots teaming up in the field, with the troops able to communicate with machines the way they would with a human squad team member. Eventually, says Thompson, the robot-soldier relationship could become even more collaborative, with one human soldier leading many armed robots.

After that, the scenarios start to become something more out of the realm of film studios. For instance, retired Navy Capt. Robert Moses, president of iRobot's government and industrial relations division, can envision the day of humanless battlefields.

"I think the first thing to do is to go ahead and have the Army get comfortable with the robot," he says. One day, though, "you could write a scenario where you have an unmanned battle space – a 'Star Wars' approach."

These developments raise questions that ethicists are just beginning to unravel. This includes Peter Asaro, who last year formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. He's grappling with conundrums like: What, to a machine, counts as "about to shoot me?" How does a robot make a distinction between a dog, a man, and a child? How does it tell an enemy from a friend?

Such things are not entirely abstract. An automated "sentry robot" now stands guard in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, equipped with heat, voice, and motion sensors, as well as a 5 mm machine gun. What if it starts firing, accidentally or otherwise?

Within their own ranks, military officials are asking themselves similar questions. In March, the Navy launched a program at its postgraduate school in Monterey that explores the legal, social, and cultural impacts of unmanned systems. "Are we going to give the ability to a robot for conducting a killing operation based on its own software and sensors?" asks retired Navy Capt. Jeffrey Kline, who is directing the new effort. "That rightly causes a lot of red flags."

In part, military officials feel they have to develop these new systems to stay ahead of America's enemies, many of whom will be creating their own versions of automated armies. Yet that could lead to what some consider a 21st-century arms race and encourage others to use the new weapons.

Late last month, federal authorities charged a Massachusetts man with plotting an attack on the US Capitol and the Pentagon using a large, remote-controlled aircraft filled with explosives. Earlier this year, Libyan rebels contacted Aeryon Labs Inc., a Canadian drone manufacturer, about buying a small unmanned helicopter. "Ultimately, I think they found us through Googling. That's how a lot of people find us," says Dave Kroetsch, Aeryon's president. Aeryon officials say they get inquires from militaries all over the world, which is one reason they have decided not to sell weaponized drones.

In the end, the emerging era of remote-control warfare – like evolutions in warfare throughout history – will likely create profound new capabilities as well as profound new problems for the US. The key will be to minimize the one over the other.

"There are many futures that can be created," says Georgia Tech roboticist Arkin. "Hopefully, we can create, I won't say a utopian, but at least not a dystopian one."

Global Research Articles by Anna Mulrine

Time Travel

The recent news reported that scientists have claimed the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light. As such, Einstein’s special theory of relativity is being challenged. That also leads to some people rethinking about the possibility of time travel where the basic premise of which was travelling faster than light. Of course, it is still just talks for the moment as everything about time travel is very much way beyond what current level of science can do. Anyway, I’ve long been fascinated of the whole idea of time travel since I was a kid. Though I’m relatively more matured and rational these days, I still love to read anything about time travel every now and then. For those who are interested, just Google it or searches it on Youtube, there are a lot of materials that are entertaining as well as educational about this topic.

I’m no expert in talking about the scientific side of time travel, so those terms like wormhole, parallel universe, etc are totally beyond me. However, having reading or watching materials that related to time travel myself, I do have some thoughts about this topic myself that I guess nobody would care, but I just wanna talk about them here anyway.

The basic idea is that if time travel is possible and I am given the opportunity to do so, what I would think next?

I guess that the following would be questions that I would ask:

- Is the time travel process itself safe? I.e. would there be any health consequence, such as exposure to radiation or rapid aging?

- How long would it take to travel? Is that proportional to how far back the time that I wanna go? Cuz, let’s say if it take a month to travel back a year of time, I may not wanna go.

- How accurate is the time and destination of the process? Any ‘undo’ button?

- How to determine if the destination is safe in physical sense? Cuz that would basically determine the risk of travel. E.g. if the current place of destination is on land, but it was actually in the middle of ocean back then, I may sink into the ocean once I got there.

- Would I be able to come back? That’s the key question. If the answer is no, then, forget it.

- Given if I can come back, at what point I should/can come back to? Let’s say I begin my trip on Jan 1, 1pm. Should I come back on Jan 1, 1:01pm? Let’s say if I go back to the past and stay there for 24 hours, if I come back at the mentioned time, theoretically, I should age for 1 extra day which is not much. However, if I stay in the past for a longer period of time, then I may be much older suddenly when I come back to current time. That would be an issue.

- Also, can time travel allow me to go to future? Or just in the past?

- Can I bring something from the past to present or bring something from the present back to the past?

Actually, come to think of the above, particularly the last question, it is a very important one. I don’t know about the others, for me, the greatest attraction of time travel is to have a first person view of some historical events and the world in the past. My greatest concern, beside my own safety, is whether my presence in the past would have any butterfly effect to the world that would change history. Then, you may ask what could change history? I guess bringing something from the present or vice versa would do. Just imagine what would happen if I left a handgun 1000 years ago, or left an iPhone for Da Vinci to find. I think that I have the ability to suppress my temptation to bring something from the past to present as souvenirs. However, bring something from present to the past would be hard not to do, especially for keeping my safety sake. Yes, I can bring whatever I brought to the past back with me, but that can’t be for sure. The only way to make sure I will not leave anything in the past is not to bring anything. But, that would be a very tough decision to make, unless it is like in the ‘Terminator’ movie that only our naked body can travel through time and I can’t bring anything with me. But that would be too risky for me and also gives me the great concern on exactly by what mean I would use to travel through time. Is it a machine like a time capsule? Or else. Cuz, if such device exists, I can use it to travel back in time alright, but how can I find it in or carry that with me to the past which allow me to use it to come back? That’s a paradox itself.

Certainly, what I mentioned above are based on certain logical rationale. Actually, if there is such thing as time travel, I would rather be able to do that with my ‘soul’, rather than together with my physical body. Yes, it would be tempting to not just see and hear (assuming our soul can do them given that we don’t have the physical eyes and ears), but also touch and taste something in the past as well. For example, I would like to breathe the air, and taste the food and drink the water in the pre-industrialized world. However, for the sake of not putting my safety at risk, I wouldn’t mind to skip them. Cuz, how would I guarantee my personal safety in the past? The people there in the past may not be nice and naïve as we think, they could capture me out of fear or curiosity, and God knows what they would do to me next. As such, rather than having the chance of being just a passive observer of events, I would become a prisoner or victim myself due to my presence. That would certainly be a ‘no-no’ outcome I would try my best to stay away from. Thus, I think the best way, or I would say my preferred way to time travel must be doing that with my soul only. So, I can see what I wanna see without creating any karma for being in the past events.

Well, if all the concerns that I mentioned above can be properly addressed, then here it comes the exciting part of what I really wanna see in the past. There are some many things that I wanna see for myself that I doubt I would have time to see them all given that I am still a mortal being for God sake. Even if just my soul travels, my body would still age, and even if my body can be frozen somehow to stay young, the current world with people that I know will sail on without me. I guess I don’t wanna miss them. So, I’ve picked the following ten events, not ranked by any means that I wanna see if my soul can do time travel.

1. Jesus was taken up into the heaven 40 days after his resurrection – I really wanna see this, perhaps the most important historical and religious figure in last two millenniums. He did so many miracles, but for give and take, I would choose to see his ‘really’ final act on earth.
2. Roswell UFO crash – enough controversies as a result of this incident, I gotta see this myself for the craft, bodies, and all the other stuffs first hand on site.
3. Last stone being put on top of Giza the Pyramid – I think witnessing how the last stone was being installed should answer how pyramids were built.
4. A few hours tour on Atlantis – just wanna see how advance this mythical continent was.
5. A tour of the tombs of first emperor of China and Genghis Khan – just wanna see if what were written in history books were true or not.
6. See T-rex and other dinosaurs for real – enough said.
7. See Da Vinci drawing Mona Lisa – to see the most intelligent person known to modern civilization to draw the most recognized painting of all time.
8. See the Apollo moon-landing in 1969 – just wanna see if it is the greatest hoax or achievement of modern history.
9. Attend the whole Bilderberg meeting or Bohemian Grove meeting in 2011 – just wanna hear the richest and most powerful to discuss the latest on how they will run our world.
10. See my granddad who I’ve never seen myself, and my parents when they were young – gotta take the chance for something personal.

Would you wanna see something else?

Crazy weather is coming from...

Just came across this article this morning....upon finishing reading it...no wonder where the crazy weather hit the earth recently....that explains them all pretty much!

Augmented Reality

I was watching a broadcast of CNET’s BOL this moment on my way to work and one piece of news with a video clip of a new iPhone app just caught my eyes. It is called ‘Word Len’. It is an app that provides ‘instant’ visual translation of image of foreign language to English. Basically, user holds the iPhone/iPod Touch with the app on and points that to any image with foreign language (Spanish in the video clip that I saw), and you will see the Spanish words on the sign to become English almost instantly, with matching fonts and size. It is just a fascinating app. Based on what I read in news; it is supporting Spanish to English so far. I’m pretty sure it will be expanded to other languages soon.

This app simply brings the technology of Augmented Reality into a practical usage. Unlike the previous trivial or more entertaining arena, this app offers users a glimpse of what this technology can do. After seeing this, few light bulbs just pop up in my head…

Based on what I’ve seen in recent months, I can see that augmented reality with few other technologies are gonna merged or crossed with each other in near future, and they will produce some amazing user experience and business opportunities in the coming years down the road. What I’m saying are:

1. Visual search – Google lets users to take pictures of certain image and offer search results that way. E.g. you take a picture of the Statue of Liberty instead of typing ‘Statue of Liberty’, Google can search all information related to Statue of Liberty.
2. Audio text input and Audio search – We can speak words in various languages into the Google search on our mobile phone, words will be put into text for search. While another app (I forget the name) let users to hymn few verses of a song to search the name of the song. I don’t see any stoppage from some people building a comprehensive audio library of all sorts of sound (besides music) which can be used to tie in with visual image as well.

3. Facebook Voice – we can chat with our friends on Facebook.

Just with all these 3 technology plus the augmented reality technology, guess what can be come up? These are my thoughts so far:

Facebook can record our voice to build up our audio profiles, and use our voice as part of our identity. Imagine we spoke to our friends about planning a trip to France, do you think Facebook with its tie-in vendors would be able to come up with target ads to us?

On the one hand, Google has a vast image and text library of search results. On the other hand, Google already has the biggest video clip library in the world of YouTube. On top of them, Google has Google Earth and GPS access. Imagine if they somehow also has access to the audio library that I mentioned above as well, and tie all these together with augmented reality technology. Google search will become omnipotent for sure! For examples…

When you type ‘dolphin’ or point your phone to a dolphin in Sea World, Google search in future may produce images, sounds, and clips of YouTube that feature the type of dolphin your are pointing at.

If you are pointing your phone to a stranger on the street at random, you may get instant information about that person. What school he went to, what music he likes to listen to, who are his friends, what clips he has posted on Google or Facebook. What he bought for his girlfriend’s last birthday, etc. On top of that, if we are not talking about a phone, instead that technology is put on a pair of sunglass. You know what I see? We will become ‘Terminators’! Remember the movie, when Arnold looks at any image through his robotic eyes? Instant data of the image is popping on the left and right in his vision. We may someday be able to do that as well!

Commercially, the opportunity is endless. We saw a woman wearing a purple blouse on the street, we will know what fabric it was made of, where we can buy that in the closest proximity, what would their prices in various stores, who is the designer of the blouse, would that blouse require dry clean or machine wash, etc. Furthermore, I can see that RFID and NFC can be tied in as well in product placement and advertising.

Also, when we are reading a magazine on iPad, the ads that will show to us will be personalized as it will know who is reading the magazine and what we are interested in, then show ads accordingly. I’m not saying it is based on who login a certain account on iPad. I’m saying who is ‘holding’ the damn template! The cameras can read the face of the reader, at the same time what are in front of the reader. It can detect the voice of the reader if he/she speaks, and the sound/noise of the surrounding. It will know where the reader is and what stores are closed by based on GPS. All these are ‘Ads’ opportunities!

Are all of these both amazing and scary? I can further imagine along this line that our world will become bipolar from the standpoint of technology. We will become those who are either fully connected to the information world or opt out completely.

For the former, our privacy will be compromised. Namely, our personal profile will be built, maintained, and exploited. But, we can enjoy all the convenience that technology would be able to offer.

For the latter, we will be out of the loop, becoming some kind of tech nomad, outcast of the tech world, being left out of the information world.

Certainly, there will be some people who will try to maneuver between those two worlds – the hackers!

Am I thinking too much? I guess my imagination is running on high gear a little too much. Anyway, just wanna share some thoughts of mine. That’s all.

Microsoft - Google - Apple

One thing great about the web and computer technology these days is put data and information in a more visualized way that would be easier for people to understand and comprehend. I came across this site and just love it at the first sight. I think the following 3 pictures are great info about the 3 current top tech giants in the world. Just check this out...

Correlation among Matrix, Total Recall, and...Doreamon!

I take my son to a music ‘exploring’ class every weekend. That class is supposed to use kid’s songs, group games that involve music to stimulate children’s interests in music. Though I’m a music lover, but I’ve zero talent or knowledge about traditional music, neither playing any instruments nor figuring out one note from the others that sort of thing. However, for being in my son’s class, I’ve an opportunity to participate as well as observing how a person picks up a new knowledge. Basically, my son and I are starting from zero, and I suppose to have the advantage of being an adult with superior knowledge in language to understand what the instructor said. However, when the instructor ‘customized’ her communication to a level which kid can understand, then my advantage was leveled. Both of us were even to figure out what notes had been played by the instructor. Was it a ‘do’ or ‘sol’? I was kinda beaten by my son last weekend in that game, perhaps that was due to the more sensitive hearing ability of a young boy versus his old man. I was a bit shocked by that, but hey that’s not a bad sign that my son is better than me!

Music is a just one of the categories of knowledge. I love the concept of knowledge itself which was defined in wiki as: (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information; or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. From my point of view, it is virtually an essence of proven views and concepts that got meshed together to become a valuable piece of information that would be useful in specific occasions. We have spent countless days and nights of our youthful years to acquire knowledge that was recorded from our ancestors. It is by no mean an easy task. When I was a kid, while facing the daunting task of memorizing all the materials before exams, I always wished there would be magic that could help me doing that (cheating in exam wasn’t my thing). I recall an episode of a Japanese animation series of Doraemon, an imagined gadget that was shown in the cartoon was called ‘learning bread’. The main character can learn word by word of a page of a book by eating that bread after it was put on top of that page. Certainly, that was just a cartoon, but I can imagine that if learning something or memorizing information can be as easy as eating. That would just be as fun as magic. Come to think of it, I also recall the movie: Matrix, in which characters can learn kungfu or flying a helicopter simply by uploading information or training manual into their brains. How cool was that? I would really wonder if that can that be done for real some days!...

However, thinking along the idea that knowledge or information can be uploaded to our brain, it would definitely be a double-edged sword! Cuz, knowledge or information themselves are neutral, different person can react to same piece of information differently. Also, knowledge or information can come in different forms (text, audio, and video). So, I can imagine that they all can be uploaded into our brains as well. I think that would actually do more harm than good to our human beings as a whole.

I can foresee that the world as we know it will be turned upside down. Yes, there would be some pros here and there, like our technology would have exponential growth. Cuz, there won’t be need for schooling. As long as we have access to those ‘knowledge shots’ to our brains, we will have all the knowledge of our predecessors. We just need to build on top of them and move forward. The time of new discovery would be much shortened. Also, as I mentioned before, knowledge can also be in different forms, including video. If we planted the moving images into our brain, for example, a movie. Then, memory can be created! Putting it this way, we would think we have seen the movie, even though we have never seen it! Imagine a lengthy movie is implanted, like the images of a person’s life in a month. Then, the recipient of that movie might think that it is part of his/her actual past experience. It is somewhat like in the movie “Total Recall’. You can travel all over the world without leaving your house! But hold on…. just think the cons of that would simply send chill down my spine!

Cuz, the boundary between reality and virtual world will fade. One could lose his sense of reality and ability to distinguish facts from fiction. Monster can be created. Just put the knowledge of criminals into a person, he/she could become a super-criminal. Since such knowledge upload technology is so valuable, I’m sure only the super rich and powerful would have access and control of it. Most of poor and regular folks can still go to schools or read books in the old fashion way. But the exclusive class can become genius of their own. Since knowledge is power and knowledge is wealth, the ruling class could retain their power and wealth almost forever! That’s scary!

If the idea of ‘Knowledge shot’ becomes real, 3 items would be the most valuable and crucial after all. The first one is the control of the technology that converting knowledge into ‘shots’. The second is the ownership of the collection of those ‘shots’ which would become a new form of luxury item that can be traded, stolen, and appreciate/depreciate in values, just put those shots next to what we regard plutonium these days. The third is the technology of uploading those ‘shots’ into human brains. Any power that owns all three, it owns human destiny.

I can imagine that genius can certainly be created. Leonardo Da Vinci is frequently regarded as one of the most intelligent man known in human history. He excelled in BOTH science and arts which is extremely rare. But, knowledge shots can create whatever form of genius you can imagine, as long as a human brain can take that knowledge. We were told that we only use 5% of our brain, just imagine how many ‘shots’ we can take! One would argue that knowledge is just data, not intelligence can only be obtained by going through trial and errors, accumulation of experiences, and all that. However, I would imagine that with so much knowledge correctly retained in one’s brain, he/she can start at a higher ground to experience whatever he/she wants and avoiding foreseeable mistakes based on those ‘data’. Those ‘knowledge shots’ can create people with multi-intelligence, aka genius.

On the other hand, my concern would go back to the mother of all concerns in scientific development that ‘just because we can, doesn’t mean that we should!’ Namely, the morality about such technology, just like human cloning. My point is that genius can be ‘evil’! As I mentioned before, super criminal can be created. Also, the misuse of the technology is endless, besides the abusing of power concentration and continuity of a small group of elites, the blurring of reality and virtual world, there are other bad things can happen as well. For example, implanting of knowledge/memory can interfere justice, an innocent person would think he/she had committed crime, and the actual criminal can get away with it. People would falsely think who they are, I mean they can really be ‘brain-washed’. That’s 1984 comes for real! I don’t think any sane people would wanna live in such world.

If that happens, human morality would most likely lag behind such technology. I’m not saying human nature is all evil, but we all understand that human nature has its dark side. I do believe that I am a bold person to welcome technology advancement, but as I grow older and know more things about our world, I perhaps have become more pessimistic about any technological ‘super’ advancements rather than the incremental change of existing one. Cuz, the downside is simply too great and I’m not confident that such technology can be handled properly. Once the genius is out of the bottle, all hell breaks loose!

Well, what I just blog here is purely based on my imagination. I’m not indeed worry that would happen as there is no sign of such on the horizon, so did many other well-known technology in our past! Anyway, looking at my son, I would wonder if he would think his old man is crazy to blog about such freaking weird idea.

Immortality

I’ve always been fascinated by nature. There is so much that we don’t know but we have been destroying it every minute as we speak. It is just sad….

My interest in nature was grown when I was a kid. Just like most others, I loved watching TV back then, my dad didn’t like us doing that, except watching documentaries which was something he liked, especially those related to nature. Therefore, before I learned the term ‘biology’, I was already exposed to the existence of many kinds of animals. Being a kid, I found animals more attractive than plants, cos animals move! Among them, I was more interested in large predators than their preys. I would think if the predators fight with other, which one will win? Also, I love to learn how animal survive? Like how a polar bear or a tiger can use their fur color to camouflage themselves in hunting, that sort of things. Basically, it was learning of Darwinism without knowing the term. Also, I was curious of the special features of animals, like how a snake can move without legs? How a hummingbird stays in mid air to eat honey from flowers? Etc.

As I grow older, taking biology course in high school was fun; however, memorizing those crazy terms kinda put me off. Afterwards, as there were more interesting things popping up here and there, my interest in nature kinda died down. Every now and then, I would still check out news about nature, such as discovery of a new type of dinosaur, or scientists find lives in some extreme conditions. Those are still interesting to me once in a while.

When I check out Yahoo news today, the following piece of news really, I mean REALLY catch my attention to an extent that I even wanna blog about it. This is the piece:


The world's only immortal animal
By Bryan Nelson, Mother Nature Network

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.

Because they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking. They're now found in oceans around the globe rather than just in their native Caribbean waters. "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion," says Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute.

Bryan Nelson is a regular contributor to Mother Nature Network, where a version of this post originally appeared.

Well, I don’t know what other title can top this one in terms of new discovery in nature: “The world's only immortal animal”!!!

Immortality has always been a dream of human beings since we first exist. Emperors in the past, dictators in modern time, the riches and famous have been recorded of their desire to live forever! There were novels, fiction or even real life stories all over human history across cultures about people’s quests or wishes for immortality. The main reason why those stories captured our mind is because many of us do share the same wishes of immortality, we kinda identify with the characters in those stories but certainly have to ‘come down to earth’ to accept the fact nobody can live forever.

There have been many schools of thoughts on how to become immortal, such as by reincarnation, some sort of ‘soul’ transplant, living through machine to extend our life, creating human/robot hybrid to become a cybot, through human cloning, etc. Related to that to some extents, the beauty industry, the health product industry, those anti-aging procedures, plastic surgery, black market organ transplant, etc, all of them are related to the sense that, given we human beings can’t leave forever, at least we would like to stay young as long as we can. Cos, being young are more attractive, energetic and healthier. The flip side of the coin is getting old which means approaching death. On top of the unknown nature of the afterworld and the horrible image of death itself, most people just wanna live longer!

There are two forms of life extension, one is to simply stay alive but still getting old, and the other one is the ultimate dream of being forever young!

With all that said, that’s why the article above is so fascinated to me that this new discovery in nature fundamentally overturns what we know about life, which has always have a beginning aka birth, and an unavoidable end aka death! I don’t know how an old jellyfish would be looked differently than a young jellyfish. But based on this article, this kind of jellyfish can stay forever young!

Some people might say: ‘so what!’¸ it is about jellyfish, what does it do to us? Well, for anyone who does know something about how our human technology develop, many (yes, MANY) of our modern technologies are not only inspired but also assisted by leveraging what our mother nature can offer. For examples, we develop our aviation technology because we saw birds can fly. We imitate birds by creating wings and tried to fly ourselves. Though we failed in that regard, we did succeed in eventually by other means. Our ancestors learned to use silk from the cocoon of silkworm to make clothes. Nowadays, our shark-skin swimming suit was inspired what else? shark skin! Also, with the progress in DNA technology, nanotechnology and human genome project, we are getting deep into biotech development like never before. Today, transgenic animals are generally created by injecting "foreign" genes into the nucleus of animal cells. The researchers stripped an HIV virus of its disease-causing elements and used it to virally infect single-cell embryos of mice with a gene from a jellyfish. When the mice were born, they carried the jellyfish gene in their own genes. Under fluorescent light, all their major tissues and organs—including skin, bones, muscles, lungs, liver, kidney, stomach, brain, and retina—emitted a green glow. Most striking is that the trait became a permanent feature of the mice's genome and was passed along to many of their offspring. Can you imagine what scientist might do next with the gene of this kind of jellyfish and somehow genetically apply that to human?

Certainly, it is not something will happen tomorrow, this year, or even this decade. Similar to human cloning, such contemplating with immortality will definitely ignite moral and legal debate from all sides. Considers the implications of immortality, the debate would certainly be much more complicated and intense than human cloning. As the article suggests, those immortal jellyfish never die, if that happen to many human beings, can our earth resource handle that? If that only be applied to few people, who have the right to do that? At what cost? Would that be reversible? Most religions would oppose it without doubt, cos many of them feed on human beings’ scare or hope in afterlife. By being immortal, will people be less religious? Also, for religious people, by tempting to be like God – being immortal, would we be punished?...just so many different thoughts….

Well, yes, just because we can do it, doesn’t mean that we should! However, scientists by nature are just doing their jobs by proving if something can or cannot be done. I’m sure they will get funding to do this kind of research and nobody can stop them from doing it. All I can stay is that: “Stay tuned for more in future!”