Christopher or Chris im an oddity's blog: "tech and other odd things"

http://nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news5.28.08c.html http://dvice.com/archives/2008/11/hyperion_starts.php http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba-micro-nuclear-12.17b.html http://nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news5.28.08c.html here is a nice piece of tech we all can use right now but as a nation we are to scared to even want in our own back yard. to bad it would save us all money in the long run and thats what we need right now.

ok i was doing a search on real iron man armor and came across something i find kinda scary and oddly interesting look here to see what im talking about http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html its a company out of japan and the name they chose is of interest besides the fact that they are working on a exo suit that can help people do a lot of heavy lifting with out straining a muscle. one of the other things they are working on is trying to reconnect the nerves that have been damaged from say a spinal injury or the replacement of lost limbs through adding a chip in the brain and adding an artificial limb to the area of say a leg or arm. now this is where it gets scary they say cyborgs are the wave of the future and that it is easier than doing a full AI construct for robots. this is kinda worrying to me to say the least havent they seen the movie terminator or any number of the anima they have mad over the years on this subject i see nothing but bad things coming from turning people into full cyborgs and that seems to be the aim of the company.

Nanotechnology paves way for new weapons By Andrew Oppenheimer JCBW Editor Nanotechnology has great potential in the fields of biotechnology and medicine. Bio-nanotechnology is concerned with molecular-scale properties and production of materials and devices including tissue and cellular engineering scaffolds, molecular motors and biomolecules for sensors and drug delivery. While bio-nanotechnological products are seen as around 10 years off, medical application is promising, with intense research being conducted in disease diagnosis, drug delivery and molecular imaging. As with many technologies, the medical applications may be adapted for offensive purposes. Manipulation of biological and chemical agents using nanotechnologies could result in entirely new threats that might be harder to detect and counter than existing CBW. Chemical weapons Chemicals in nanoparticulate form currently account for only a tiny fraction of the world total (around 0.01 per cent) currently produced, although the market for nanoparticles is expected to increase during the next decade. While the production of new chemical weapons is banned by the majority of nations, future techniques, depending on cost and ease of production, may be adopted by remaining countries with chemical weapons programmes and terrorist groups. A nano-enhanced chemical such as cyanide could be synthesised in far smaller amounts. The design of new agents that attack specific body organs such as the central nervous system would enable far smaller amounts of the chemical to be made without detection and would require only small, low-level facilities. Other nanotechnology-based weapons might emerge from otherwise benign fields such as law enforcement in the creation of 'non-lethal weapons' for riot control and other policing operations. Some of these are currently permitted under the Chemical Weapons Convention. New delivery mechanisms to make incapacitating substances target more selectively could be adapted to more lethal uses.

Matrix-style virtual worlds 'a few years away' * 15:59 03 April 2008 * NewScientist.com news service * Colin Barras Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away. In 1950, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed the ultimate test of artificial intelligence – a human judge engaging in a three-way conversation with a machine and another human should be unable to reliably distinguish man from machine. A variant on this "Turing Test" is the "Graphics Turing Test", the twist being that a human judge viewing and interacting with an artificially generated world should be unable to reliably distinguish it from reality. "By interaction we mean you could control an object – rotate it, for example – and it would render in real-time," McGuigan says. Photoreal animation Although existing computers can produce artificial scenes and textures detailed enough to fool the human eye, such scenes typically take several hours to render. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test, says McGuigan, is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second. McGuigan decided to test the ability of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers – Blue Gene/L at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York – to generate such an artificial world. Blue Gene/L possesses 18 racks, each with 2000 standard PC processors that work in parallel to provide a huge amount of processing power – it has a speed of 103 teraflops, or 103 trillion "floating point operations" per second. By way of comparison, a calculator uses about 10 floating operations per second. In particular, McGuigan studied the supercomputer's ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects – an important component of any virtual world with ambitions to mimic reality. He found that conventional ray-tracing software could run 822 times faster on the Blue Gene/L than on a standard computer, even though the software was not optimised for the parallel processors of a supercomputer. This allowed it to convincingly mimic natural lighting in real time. Not there yet "The nice thing about this ray tracing is that the human eye can see it as natural," McGuigan says. "There are actually several types of ray-tracing software out there – I chose one that was relatively easy to port to a large number of processors. But others might be faster and even more realistic if they are used in parallel computing." Although Blue Gene/L can model the path of light in a virtual world both rapidly and realistically, the speed with which it renders high-resolution images still falls short of that required to pass the Graphics Turing Test. But supercomputers capable of passing the test may be just years away, thinks McGuigan. "You never know for sure until you can actually do it," he says. "But a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest it should be possible in the next few years, once supercomputers enter the petaflop range – that's 1000 teraflops." But others think that passing the Graphics Turing Test requires more than photorealistic graphics moving in real-time. Reality is not 'skin deep' says Paul Richmond at the University of Sheffield, UK. An artificial object can appear real, but unless it moves in a realistic way the eye won't be fooled. "The real challenge is providing a real-time simulation that includes realistic simulated behaviour," he says. Fluid challenge "I'd like to see a realistic model of the Russian ballet," says Mark Grundland at the University of Cambridge. "That's something a photographer would choose as a subject matter, and that's what we should aim to convey with computers." Grundland also points out that the Graphics Turing Test does not specify what is conveyed in the virtual world scene. "If all that is there is a diffusely-reflecting sphere sitting on a diffusely-reflecting surface, then we've been able to pass the test for many years now," he says. "But Turing didn't mean for his vision to come true so quickly." McGuigan agrees that realistic animation poses its own problems. "Modelling that fluidity is difficult," he says. "You have to make sure that when something jumps in the virtual world it appears heavy." But he remains optimistic that animation software will be up to the task. "Physical reality is about animation and lighting," he says. "We've done the lighting now – the animation will follow."