From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Dec 01 1998 - 09:06:56 MST
This is last weeks's finds, a relatively short list.
Genetic control over ant social structure
Constructing Biological Motor Powered Nanomechanical Devices
The main reason for the short list was that I participated as a
guide/mentor at LARK, an event where gymnasie students (17-19) visited
various Stockholm universities. I was responsible for the computer
science part, and it turned out to be a quite transhuman weekend.
The students were among other things introduced to neural networks and
computational neuroscience (the professor was convinced that we would
have AI and an understanding of the brain within one or two decades),
cryptography, robotics (including "self conscious" robots that
modelled themselves and learned how to slither -
http://www.sics.se/piraia/), a riveting talk about wearables, smart
badges and future communications by professor Gerald Q. "Chip" Maguire
Jr (http://www.it.kth.se/~maguire/Talks/Wearable-981129.pdf) and a
final talk about quantum computers, teleportation and cryptography.
At the end the students happily debated the socio-economical
consequences of widespread AI, human enhancement and uploading. The
best thing was, I didn't need to add any memes myself, they got them
from the researchers :-)
Genetic control of social organization in an ant K. G. Ross and
L. Keller, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 95:24 14232--14237, Nov 24 1998.
A single gene can switch the social structure of a species of ants
between single and multiple queens per colony. It influences the
reproductive phenotypes and strategies of the queens, as well as what
queens the workers tolerate. Most likely switching between the two
alleles of the gene is useful for setting up "frontier" colonies where
speed of expansion is important and more stable colonies in already
colonized areas. From a transhuman point of view, this suggests that
we might one day control ant and insect societies to do useful things.
The Foresight Conference papers continue to appear:
Constructing Biological Motor Powered Nanomechanical Devices
Carlo Montemagno, George Bachand, Scott Stelick, Marlene Bachand
http://www.foresight.org/Conference/MNT6/Papers/Montemagno/index.html
They have created a hybrid system where the F1-ATPase molecular motor
was connected to a metal substrate and connected to fluoroscent
microspheres. The bonding strength was more than 600 pN. The motors
managed to move the spheres around at 9.5-10.5 Hz in a hexagon; given
that the spheres were much larger than the ATPases it seems quite
impressive. A very nice result, and likely to be extended in a lot of
ways.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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