Transhumanismus

Photons traveling straight through a cloud of gas appear to exit, on average, before they enter.

As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island.

We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about that particular time. Odysseus might have replied, “It was nothing. In fact, it was less than nothing. Negative five years I dwelt with Calypso. How else could I have arrived home after only ten years? If you don’t believe me, ask her.”

Quantum particles, it turns out, are just as wily as Odysseus, as my colleagues and I have shown in an experiment published in Physical Review Letters. Not only can their arrival time suggest that they dwelt with other particles for a negative amount of time, but if one asks those other particles, they will corroborate the story.

Photons Dwelling With Atoms

Our experiment used photons—quantum particles of light—and the against-the-odds journey they must undertake to pass straight through a cloud of rubidium atoms.

These atoms have a “resonance” with the photons, meaning the energy of the photon can be transferred temporarily to the atoms as an atomic excitation. This allows the photon to “dwell” in the atomic cloud for a time before being released.

For this resonance to be effective, the photon must have a well-defined energy, matching the amount of energy required to put a rubidium atom into an excited state.

But, by a form of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, if the energy of the photon is well defined then its timing must be uncertain: The pulse of light the photon occupies must have a long duration. This means we can’t know exactly when the photon enters the cloud, but we can know on average when it enters.

If a photon like this is fired into the cloud, the most likely outcome is that its energy will be transferred to the atoms and then re-emitted as a photon traveling in a random direction. In such cases, the photon is scattered and fails to arrive at its Ithaca.

Photon Arrival Times

But if the photon does make it straight through, a strange thing happens. Based on the average time when the photon enters the cloud, one can calculate the expected average time it would arrive at the far side of the cloud, assuming it travels at the speed of light (as photons usually do).

What one finds is that the photon actually arrives far earlier than that. In fact, it arrives so early it appears to have spent a negative amount of time inside the cloud—to exit, on average, before it enters.

This effect has been known for decades and was observed in a 1993 experiment. But physicists had mostly decided not to take this negative time seriously.

That’s because it can be explained by saying that only the very front of the long-duration pulse makes it straight through the atomic cloud, while the rest is scattered. This leads to a successful (non-scattered) photon arriving earlier than would be naively expected.

Asking the Atoms

However, Aephraim Steinberg, one of the authors of that 1993 paper, was not so quick to accept this dismissal of the negative time as an artifact. In his laboratory at the University of Toronto, he wanted to find out what happened if one queried the rubidium atoms in the cloud to find out how long the photon had spent dwelling among them as an excitation. After an initial experiment with inconclusive results, he asked me, as a quantum theorist, for help in working out what to expect.

When we talk of querying the atoms, what this means in practice is continuously making a measurement on the atoms while the photon is passing through the cloud to probe whether the photon’s energy is currently dwelling there. But there is a subtlety here: Measurements in quantum physics inevitably disturb the system being measured.

If we were to make a precise measurement of whether the photon is dwelling in the atoms, at each instant of time, we would prevent the atoms from interacting with the photon. It is as if, merely by watching Calypso closely, we would stop her getting her hands on Odysseus (or vice versa). This is the well-known quantum Zeno effect, which would destroy the very phenomenon we want to study.

Our Experiment

The solution is to make, instead, a very imprecise (but still very accurately calibrated) measurement. That is the price paid to keep the disturbance negligible. Specifically, we fired a weak laser beam—unrelated to the single photon pulse—through the cloud of atoms, and measured small changes in the phase of the beam’s light to probe whether the atoms were excited.

Any single run of the experiment gives only a very rough indication of whether the photon dwelt in the atoms, but averaging millions of runs yields an accurate dwell time.

Amazingly, the result of this weak measurement of dwell time, when the photon goes straight through the cloud, exactly equals the negative time suggested by the photons’ average arrival time. Prior to our work, no-one suspected that these two times, measured in entirely different ways, would be equal.

Crucially, the negative value of the weakly measured dwell time cannot be explained by imagining that only the front of the photon’s pulse gets through, unlike the time inferred from the arrival time.

So what does this all mean? Is a time machine just around the corner?

Sadly, no. Our experiment is fully explained by standard physics.

But it does show that negative dwell time is not an artifact. However paradoxical it may seem, it has a directly measurable effect on the atomic cloud that the photon traverses. And it reminds us that there are still lands to discover on the odyssey that is quantum research.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Physicists Have Measured ‘Negative Time’ in the Lab appeared first on SingularityHub.

The wireless rings read 100 common signs from two sign languages and “autocomplete” sentences.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Hoy transformed Major League Baseball. The most prominent deaf player in history, he taught his team American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate on the field while keeping opponents in the dark. His silent speech, a legacy well over a century old now, also inspired umpires to make calls using hand gestures.

ASL is one of some 300 sign languages used today by roughly 70 million deaf people worldwide. But only a sliver of society understands signs. Everyday tasks, like ordering at a restaurant or meeting people at social events can be difficult. To bridge the gap, a South Korean team developed smart rings to translate finger motions into text.

Older devices usually require a jungle of cables to connect sensors. But the new rings are wireless, freeing people to use natural hand motions. The rings also stretch to fit different finger sizes. These upgrades make them more comfortable and reliable, wrote the team. Each ring is powered by a replaceable 12-hour battery.

Fluent signers can communicate at speeds of around 100 to 150 signs per minute, similar to spoken conversation. Devices need to keep up with that speed to avoid uncomfortable pauses. So the team developed AI-based “autocomplete” for the system that, like typing, guesses the next word based on what’s already been signed to generate phrases and sentences on the fly.

Trained on 100 common words in ASL and International Sign Language (ISL), the wearable was over 88 percent accurate in tests, even for users with no experience.

The rings are a step toward “seamless interaction between signers and non-signers,” wrote the team.

Let’s Chat

There are a variety of devices that translate sign language into text or speech, some already on the market.

One design is a bit like virtual reality gaming. It uses cameras and computer vision software to recognize hand gestures. The approach is reasonably fast and accurate in the lab, but struggles in simulated real-world scenarios, where changes in lighting or background confuse the system.

Devices worn by users are more reliable. WearSign, for example, uses sensors to capture the electrical activity of muscles during signing and translates it into text. Often, these devices need to be tailored to the user, a hurdle that limits use, as some can’t commit to the training.

Engineers have also tried embedding tracking sensors in a smart glove. The sensors send signals through cables to a shared wireless transmitter. But it’s a bit like using tools wearing a heavy winter glove. The devices limit natural movement and are uncomfortable for daily use.

They also usually come in only one size with fixed sensor placements, wrote the team. So, depending on hand size, the sensors may be out of place, reducing accuracy.

Put a Ring on It

To overcome these problems, the team built AI rings to track the seven most dominant fingers in signing. (The right pinkie, left middle finger, and thumb didn’t make the cut.) The rings are worn right below the second knuckle to allow natural movement.

Each device is made of stretchy material to accommodate different finger sizes and looks more like a translucent Band-Aid than a typical ring. A tiny accelerometer captures movements like bending, curling, and holding still. The sensors are cheap, low-power, and already used in Apple Watches, Fitbits, and other wearables. There are also onboard chips to manage power use, wafer-thin Bluetooth transmitters, and common replaceable batteries that last nearly 12 hours.

The rings broadcast signals to a host device, which processes the data and maintains a timeline of each movement so incoming signs aren’t scrambled in translation.

To identify words, the system matches gestures to a database of 100 ASL and ISL signs. For example, closing both open palms into fists means “want.” The rings can also pick up signs in motion, like “dance” or “fly,” and those with fingers held still, like “I” and “you.” In first-time users, the system was 88 percent accurate for both ASL and ISL.

To make sure that conversations flow naturally, the team added an AI to track conversations and predict what word comes next. In tests, the system autocompleted simple phrases, like “family want beautiful animal.”

While still experimental, the rings could also translate between sign languages. Because the AI learns from gestures alone, with enough training data, it could eventually turn into a kind of Google Translate for signing.

But finger gestures fail to capture the full spectrum of sign language. Facial expressions, mouth movements, shoulder and body posture, speed, and rhythm all carry critical information, including meaning and emotion. Without this context, the system could easily miscommunicate intent. Some efforts are now returning to older video-based systems to better capture the entire signing experience, this time with sleeker hardware and far more processing power.

The team thinks the rings might be useful elsewhere too, like for use in virtual or augmented reality, touchless computer interfaces, and tracking hand movements in rehabilitation.

The post These Seven AI Rings Translate Sign Language in Real Time appeared first on SingularityHub.

Far from shore, the server farms would be powered by waves, cooled by seawater, and networked by satellite.

As AI demand for computing power surges, companies are searching for new ways to fuel data centers. One startup is now proposing floating data centers powered by ocean waves, and they just raised $140 million to bring the idea to fruition.

Tech companies are planning to spend roughly $750 billion on data centers this year. But the elephant in the room is figuring out how to power these facilities. They’re already straining electrical grids across the world, and the pace of the buildout is far surpassing our ability to bring new power online.

This energy shortfall is leading tech companies to invest in a series of increasingly outlandish fixes from restarting shuttered nuclear reactors to developing novel geothermal energy technology and even launching data centers into space.       

Now, several leading Silicon Valley figures, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff are backing Oregon-based startup Panthalassa. The startup is developing floating data centers that generate their own electricity from waves. These investors recently joined a $140 million series B round that will allow the company to complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and begin deploying the latest generation of its devices, or “nodes.”

“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean,” CEO Garth Sheldon-Coulson said in a press release. “We’ve built a technology platform that operates in the planet’s most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power.”

The company’s nodes are nearly 300 feet long. A bulbous sphere at the top floats on the ocean’s surface, and a lengthy tube-like housing beneath holds computer servers. As the node bobs up and down on the waves, the movement forces water up through a tube into a pressurized reservoir where it drives a turbine to generate electricity for the chips.

Besides powering the data center with renewable energy, the nodes also use the surrounding seawater to cool the chips—a much more sustainable solution compared to land-based facilities, which use significant amounts of water and electricity to manage heat.

The data centers transfer information via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. This does away with the need for cabling, either for power transmission or networking, and allows the nodes to operate autonomously from anywhere in the ocean. They’re also self-propelling, can navigate to their deployment location, and can stay in position without external help.

The company designed the hardware with minimal moving parts, so it can operate for extended periods without maintenance—a crucial factor for operating far from shore. Panthalassa validated the concept with a three-week trial of their second-generation node Ocean-2 off the coast of Washington state in early 2024.

This isn’t the first attempt to harness the power of waves to generate renewable energy. The company’s main innovation is that it skips the complexities of getting power back to shore. “One of the key insights we had…was that it’s very important to use the electricity in place,” Sheldon-Coulson told the Financial Times. “We will never be transmitting electricity back to shore. That makes us very different from all other ocean energy that’s been tried in the past.”

The latest funding will be used to complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and deploy Panthalassa’s next-generation Ocean-3 nodes, which are scheduled for testing in the northern Pacific later this year. The company says it’s targeting commercial deployment in 2027.

The approach does face some major hurdles though, Benjamin Lee, a computer architect at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars Technica. While relying on satellite communication does away with power transmission headaches, these links have significantly lower bandwidth compared to the optical fiber normally used to network data centers. Combined with the potential for signal delays, this could limit how useful they are for the heavy AI workloads they’re meant to handle.

However, the approach has clear parallels with another idea that’s seized Silicon Valley—orbital data centers. Rather than using wave energy and ocean water for cooling, these facilities would rely on abundant solar energy and the frigid deep-space vacuum to chill their chips. But going orbital would be far costlier and more complex, suggesting Panthalassa’s approach may be a more viable alternative.

The sea is a cruel mistress though, and deploying and maintaining a fleet of ocean-going data centers won’t be simple. Nonetheless, if they can pull it off, the idea may ease the AI energy crunch.

The post In the Scramble to Power AI, Investors Bet $140 Million on Data Centers at Sea appeared first on SingularityHub.

When you have a hammer, the world is full of nails. There is no clearer description of Silicon Valley’s view of AI. The result is what I call the Hammer of AI: a single tool wielded against every problem we face, regardless of whether the problem yields to computation at all. There is a now-familiar […]

There is no formula for predicting the future. No formula for dealing with change. No formula for living a good life, for success, for great art, for writing a great book, or for producing a great film. Every time we reach one of those, even when following a formula, we have to break the pattern […]

Some people see a world coming apart. Peter Leyden sees an old world dying so a better one can be born. That, in essence, is The Great Progression, the thesis of Peter Leyden’s forthcoming HarperCollins book and the spine of our conversation. Peter is the OG Silicon Valley futurist who came to San Francisco at […]

SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.