First, they saw chairs littered around rooms. Then they saw us. [CMU]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

According to Wired, you can really do some fancy stuff inside the mind by injecting an engineered virus into cells then shining a blue laser beam at them. The point is to pinpoint neurons that aren't doing what they should, and using this very pinpointy process to kick start them without playing havoc on the rest of the brain.

To what end? We're not at Cybermen just yet, but one of the proposed uses is actually prosthesis controlled by optics instead of electrodes as they are now. If this isn't at all scaring you yet, check this bit of Wired's story out:

Crucial to the technique is that the virus is only injected into a very small part of the brain, and only a certain class of neurons, once infected, actually turn the channel on.

Or what? Please tell me, or what?

Turns out, it's... Or else the treatment would resemble the kind of clumsier brain teasers, like drugs and electrodes. MIT neuroscientists Ed Boyden and Xue Han have already done it with primates, which, as everyone but Mike Huckabee knows, are close relatives to the human. Prior to that, fish, flies and rodents were all lasered up, with successful mind-control results. I am so happy I live in the present day, and not some quaint, almost cute past where all I had to worry about were influenza viruses and low-flying aeroplanes. [Wired]

Later this week, you'll be able to get a Stanford-level education without the stress of having to apply to the prestigious school and especially without having to pay tuition being a huge dbag. [Ed. note: Ed went to Cal.] [TechCrunch]

Details on the project are scarce, but we do know that these units would be relatively cheap to produce at around $50. That makes it ideal for delivering medicines and cold water to developing countries—not to mention a useful tool on a camping trip. [Esquire via CrunchGear]

The algorithms the team develops will allow hovering 'bots like STARMAC to navigate, deal with collisions or avoidance and even to work as a team, sharing info on their environment and navigating around each other.

That has all sorts of cool implications for things like future automated search and rescue drones, able to search large areas efficiently and quickly. But it also means spy 'bots. And when you've watched the video, you'll have to agree that the way the things move reminds you of the flying cameras in (insert name of sci-fi movie of your choice). [Danger Room]

If you've got a MacBook, iBook or Powerbook made after 2005, you too can join the effort to tell people about quakes after it already happened, or maybe even act as a warning system. "Even just a few seconds of warning may be enough time for people to take cover and automated systems could slow trains and divert traffic from vulnerable bridges." And if you think that your constant table bumping from your activities at your computer will trigger The Big One over at EarthquakeHQ, "the Quake Catcher Network's software will analyze shakes sensed by a computer's accelerometer and report only big movements to the central server, ignoring the vibrations from a passing truck, a bump to a table, or even a minor earthquake." [Stanford via Technology Review]

Language acquisition has long been seen as a specialty of the brain—a strength of the species, if you will. To re-create one of our most distinct qualities in a lab setting is either impressive for computers or pitiful for humans. Then again, be comforted knowing that when computers do speak, they'll sound just like Arnold Schwarzenegger, anyway. [arstechnica]

Hit the jump to see the full release.

PlayStation®3 Users Significantly Contribute To The Folding@homeTM Program

Tokyo, April 25, 2007 - Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) today announced that great progress has been made in the one month since PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment systems became part of Stanford University's Folding@home™ program, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. Since the program launched in March, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research. Furthermore, thanks to PS3's powerful Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.), the Folding@home program has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world and is quickly approaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions.

Exhibiting its continued commitment to the program, SCE also announced that starting tomorrow, it is providing a Folding@home application update that will further enhance the user experience. The updated software features an improvement in folding calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location (*1) on the globe and the ability for users to create longer donor or team names.

"The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. "Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases."

Some of the key accomplishments made since the Folding@home program launched on PS3 include:

· More than 250,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the program in just one month.

· PS3 users are delivering nearly 400 teraflops, achieving a total computing power of over 700 teraflops at a single moment. This is more than double the computing capacity of the network before PS3 joined the program (*2)

· The "halo-effect" of PS3 has been evident as the number of active PCs has increased by 20 percent in the last month.

"We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society," said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. "As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause. These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop - a measure of computing power that has never before been reached."

PS3 users can download the new update version 1.1 by restarting the Folding@home application. New Folding@home users can join the program by simply clicking on the Folding@home icon within the Network menu of the XMB™ (XrossMediaBar) or can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever the PS3 is idle (*3).

Starting with Folding@home, SCE will continue to support distributed computing projects in a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies through the use of PS3 and hopes to contribute to the advancement of science.

– Jason Chen

PS3 Folding Kicking Ass, Getting Update [Kotaku]

Want to sell your soul? Read on...

According to the FT, remuneration of users will be considered:

...Because this would be a commercial proposition that would benefit profit-making organisations, Sony is studying whether it would need to offer incentives, such as free products, to persuade PS3 owners to participate.

Sony in talks on commercial use for PS3 [Financial Times]

Here's how:

Basically, If we can get another 20k of the 2 million PS3's out there now to start folding, the Stanford distributed computing project can still be the first to hit the Petaflop level. That's more crunch than the fastest super computer we know of, the MDGRAPE-3 in Japan. For now, Folding is merely the most powerful distributed computing system in the world...never mind the only system capable of playing HD games and movies.

While we wait for the PS3 to make history, Stanford's put an FAQ up that answers some of the mysteries we'd be wondering about.
*The Cell processor's strength is in crunching small sets of data — the PS3's 512MB of RAM limits
*The PS3 uses 200w per hour while folding.
*The PS3's GPU is being used by the Folding client.

Jump for more...

Folding@Home on the PS3

INTRODUCTION

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has led to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project.

Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony's PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 20 gigaflop scale per computer. With about 50,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale. With software from Sony, the PlayStation 3 will now be able to contribute to the Folding@Home project, pushing Folding@Home a major step forward.

Our goal is to apply this new technology to push Folding@Home into a new level of capabilities, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer. With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)

BASICS
How do I get a copy of Folding@home for the PS3?
If you have PS3 system version 1.6 or later, you will see a Folding@Home icon in the Network column of the XBR (PS3 menu). Just click on the icon and that's it. If you don't have 1.6 or later, please perform a system upgrade.

Which keys do what?
Press square to see what the other controls do.

What is the power consumption of the PS3 running the FAH client? Is it safe to run the PS3 24X7?
We expect the PS3 to use about 200W while running Folding@Home. We have several PS3's running in our lab, running Folding@Home 24/7 and have had good results so far.

What type of calculations the PS3 client is capable of running?
The PS3 right now runs what are called implicit solvation calculations, including some simple ones (sigmodal dependent dielectric) and some more sophisticated ones (AGBNP, a type of Generalized Born method from Prof. Ron Levy's group at Rutgers). In this respect, the PS3 client is much like our GPU client. However, the PS3 client is more flexible, in that it can also run explicit solvent calculations as well, although not at the same speed increase relative to PC's. We are working to increase the speed of explicit solvent on the PS3 and would then run these calculations on the PS3 as well. In a nutshell, the PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's).

Can I change the donator name and team number?
Press triangle while in the visual client to change your username and team number.

STATS
How long will it take to complete the work unit (WU)?
We have set PS3 WU's to take approximately 8 hours to complete. The logic behind this was to ensure that the PS3 could be run only over night and still yield a useful result. We will likely decrease this time in the future to try to make it easier for PS3 donors to only briefly run their machines, but still make useful contributions.

When will my points show up in my account?
It can take 1-2 hours after the WU has been received for the points to be entered into our database. We usually run hourly updates, but during periods of heavy activity, it can become less frequent.

How are the number of active machines calculated?
One central problem in distributed computing is the calculation of how many computers are actively part of the project. Many projects merely cite the "total number of devices", i.e. the number of computers to ever be a part of the calculation. This can of course grossly overestimate the current power of the distributed computing network.

Instead, we calculate the number of "active" clients, i.e. machines that have returned work recently. Active PS3's are defined as those which have returned WUs within 2 days. This is a much shorter timeout than what we set for normal CPU clients, as the PS3 clients Work Unit deadline is much shorter (typically 2 days). However, as we communicate with the distributed clients fairly infrequently (no more frequently than every 8 hours), it is hard to precisely know how many machines are running and these numbers are best used as an order of magnitude estimate of the power of our network.

How are the FLOPS calculated?
People often use the number of Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) as a metric for the speed of a computer. One question that arises is how to compare machines with radically different architectures. In particular, what requires only a few operations (or even just a single operation) on one machine could require many operations on another. Classic examples are evaluations of functions like the exp(x) or sin(x). One GPU and Cell hardware, functions like this can often be calculated very quickly, say in one cycle, while this is often counted as 10-20 operations for other machines.

We take a conservative approach to FLOP calculation, rendering quantities such as exp(x) or sqrt(x) as a single FLOP, if the hardware supports it. This can significantly underestimate the FLOP count (as others would count an exp(x) as 10 or 20 FLOPS, for example). Others take a much less conservative approach and we are considering giving two counts, adding a more traditional (less conservative) count as well.

The ideal comparison would be to run Folding@Home on the supercomputer itself to test its speed. In this sort of comparison, Folding@Home would likely do very well, and we are investigating the best way to perform this benchmark, as we expect people would be interested.

It seems that the PS3 is more than 10X powerful as an average PC. Why doesn't it get 10X PPD as well?
We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WU's. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).

The PS3 is outrunning all the rest of the FAH client types. Should I stop my existing PC/GPU/... FAH clients?
No, the other clients are valuable to us too and we have chosen a points system to try to reflect the relative merits of each different platform to our scientific research. For example, the SMP client has been producing some very exciting scientific results and continues to be very important in our work. By supporting machines with lots of different functionality, we have a very rich set of hardware on which to run calculations, allowing us to tailor calculations to the hardware to achieve maximum performance.

Folding at Home Stats and FAQ [Stanford]
PS3 Folding [Gizmodo]

I don't know how to figure it out, but it seems to me that stimulating a human brain such as my own would be a good place to start.

A major step toward a Kurzweil/Vinge "singularity," extropian future, where the human brain is reverse-engineered and combined with computer technology, or lacking only eggs to complete a delicious southern breakfast?

Big Brain Thinking [MIT Technology Review]

Robot to drive in California traffic [Autoblog]

Unfortunately, many of my digital images end up looking more like this picture than I'd like to admit, so it was with a happy heart that I read about a new technology that could refocus photos after they've been taken. A team at Stanford University are claiming to have figured out how to adjust the rays of light after they've reached the camera, thereby letting us make blurry, nasty images look good as new. To do this, they inserted a sheet of 90,000 lenses between a cameras main lens and its image sensor. The angle and the amount of the rays of light are then recorded, letting software adjust them, basically reconstructing the image to what it would have looked like if properly focused. Not a bad deal. Now how can we convince the camera manufacturers to get on board?

Shoot a picture first, focus later [New Scientist]