In brief, scale is based on the discharges of South American weakly electric fish. By lucky coincidence, the highly regular electric discharges of these fish happen to occur at a frequency that allows them to be heard when they are amplified and played through a speaker. The fish use the discharges as a radar system to perceive their dark world, which are Amazon Basin rivers at night.

The idea behind the piece is to take a dozen different species, and have one individual per species on a tall frame with its own amplifier, speaker, and control circuitry. You stand on a podium in the middle of an arc of 12 of these frames (as shown above), with the fish ordered by increasing electric organ discharge frequency from left to right, and use a wireless game controller (the Nintendo Wiimote) to select which fish(es) you listen to. A touchpad interface on the podium gives you sliders to adjust volume and buttons for real-time effects for each fish. In this way you conduct your own choir of electric fish.

One of our motivations for making the piece is that so few people know of these animals, despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how brains work. Over the past 40 years, more than 3,000 scientific papers have been published on how sensory information is processed in these animals. They can be thought of as the fruit fly of sensory biology. Among other contributions, they’ve taught us about the neural mechanisms for controlling the “volume” of sensory information reaching the brain, and how we subtract away information that we already know—sensory input that is due to our own movement. These mechanisms are  fundamental to the working of every animal sensory system.

Given how relatively unknown these fish are, we hope that the installation will raise awareness of the many contributions of this animal, as well as highlight the biodiversity and beauty of this group of animals (around 170 species in South America), and the delicate and threatened ecosystem that is their home.

The questions of the many participants of the installation (many hundreds by now, as the room is nearly continually filled for eight hours a day) range from the simple to deep. On the deeper side have been questions about the relation between the work, society, and the deep body of scientific work behind it. To me it gets to an element of what art can provide to an exceptionally broad audience: An experience. This experience can become the basis of a motivation—motivation to look up what these odd fishes are, what neurobiology is about, why every species has its own typical electric discharge and frequency, and why evolution would work in this strange way.

Motivations can be driven by more abstract things, such as the weighing of evidence. But this seems a less common driver of behavior than personal, transformative experiences. Interactive art, whose palette is human behavior, and whose artistic elements are shaped by an aesthetics of behavior, can be an effective vehicle for such an experience. Its effectiveness lies in raising questions in the experiencer’s mind through an integrative, full body experience.

The installation continues at STRP until Nov 28. If you happen to be in the area, you should check out the festival—there’s a lot of great stuff going on here.

As is often done in biological work, my research at Northwestern University focuses on one specific type of animal—an electric fish from the Amazon jungle—which is ideally suited to uncover the answers to our research questions. These questions are chiefly in the area of how we take in information through our various sensory systems and control movement. We build biologically inspired robots based on what we find. These robots feature novel ways to sense and move that could be very useful for new highly agile underwater robots to help with things like monitoring the health of coral reefs or fixing an underwater oil spill.

Our Amazon jungle fish are called “weakly electric fish.” These fish have evolved the remarkable ability to sense the objects around their body through a self-generated weak electric field (about a thousandth of a flashlight battery near the body). Think of them as underwater bats—like bats, they hunt at night, but instead of using sonar, they use electric fields.

A surprising demonstration of this ability is very easy to get with nothing more than a cheap powered speaker, like the type you would connect to your computer. By just dangling the input lead into a tank with one of these fish, you’ll hear a nearly pure tone (something like a tuning fork). The pitch of the tone that you hear depends on the species. Across the 180 or so species that exist, the tone frequency varies from about 30-1200 Hz, approximating the lowest B-natural on a piano to the D- sharp six octaves higher.

In our interactive exhibit, twelve different species of these fish comprise a “choir” whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. Each fish is in its own tank with advanced filtration and water quality control, on tall frames that are arranged in semicircle around the podium. Using a modified Nintendo Wii-mote, participants can select the members of their choir, and then use a touch pad system to add real-time digital effects, generating a unique musical experience.

We hope to foster wider public awareness of their valuable attributes and the fragility of their natural environment via this interspecies artwork. You can hear some of the tones that scale will generate from this short segment from Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ.

1984: Big-screen TVs are good for government control and workout videos.

1997: IT issues lead to artificial intelligence–and cause nuclear war.

2001: All you need for space travel is classical music and murderous computers.

2015: DeLoreans work with fusion. Hoverboards, however, don’t work over water.

2019: Everyone loathes retirement.

2019: Reality television audiences call for (more) blood.

2022: After so many years of enmity, New Yorkers develop a taste for one another.

2027: First woman gets pregnant in 18 years. No one stops shooting.

2054: So long, psychic hotlines. Hello, precognition.

2063: Humans go warp speed. Vulcans notice. Good-byes now require finger trickery.

2154: Only blue aliens can stop forest fires.

2199: People are the new batteries.

2274: Thirtieth birthdays take a turn for the worse.

2805: Robots make cute couples. Humans make trash.

2999: Finally! Long-promised head-in-jar technology arrives.

Modular robotics is inspired by biology on two different levels:

1) The understanding that the secret of the dizzying diversity of life is modularity: having basic building blocks of the body that lead to mutations in which whole functional modules are duplicated or removed.

For example, it turns out that the antenna of insects arose through a duplication of a two-legged body segment. Initially, that segment was probably used to move, but because it’s so easy to have more legs, over many generations these extra legs slowly got pressed into serving other roles, such as serving as antennas. This modularity is enabled by the presence of Hox genes, master control genes that pattern the developing body. We share most of our Hox genes with all other forms of animal life, including insects, which diverged from us around 500 million years ago.

2) The cellular basis of life: although we have about 50 trillion cells in our body, we only have around 120 different cell types, most of which we share with other species. With the right general purpose modules, then, we can flexibly recombine them to make a huge number of different things.

Roombot furniture uses these two principles to adapt to the needs of the user in ways your regular sofa/bed/table sets cannot. Conventional furniture is expensive, large, and heavy. You pick pieces you think will serve your needs most of the time, and you make do when it doesn’t because it’s too costly to change (like having more people than usual come over to watch a movie on your TV). Because it is large and heavy, you pick a location for each piece and only rarely change it. What if furniture was more dynamic, so you could switch your furniture just like you can switch the playlist that is the music for the evening? This is the vision of Roombots. A coffee table turns into a stool. Several stools can collaborate to turn into a sofa. If you decide to set up shop in a different part of the house, like your front porch, the legs of your Roombotic furniture become more than metaphors, and become the means by which it walks over to where you need it, as seen in the video above.

Synthetic image of imagined Roombot table, and simulation of Roombot table walking, courtesy Auke Jan Ijspeert.

For further information: See A. Spröwitz, S. Pouya, S. Bonardi, J. van den Kieboom and R. Möckel et al. Roombots: Reconfigurable Robots for Adaptive Furniture (pdf), IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, special issue on “Evolutionary and developmental approaches to robotics”, vol. 5, num. 3, p. 20-32, 2010.

There has been a something of a renaissance of interest in sleep. It is, after all, something we engage in daily for about a third of our lives without tiring of the activity.  There are a lot of consequences of not doing it well. For one thing, we can become an emotional wreck when we don’t get enough sleep. In healthy people that are sleep deprived, the part of the brain that regulates emotion becomes hyperactive, in a fashion similar to what is seen in depressed individuals. For me it’s one of the most reliable side effects of not getting enough — suddenly events or things people say that would otherwise be neutral have a much higher chance of affecting me emotionally. Sleep appears to be essential for remembering things we learn over the long haul. Most recently, there’s evidence that lack of proper sleep before the age of five can significantly increase the chances of being obese later in life.

For all its importance to our well-being, you might think we would have a handle on everyday observations of what makes people more likely to fall asleep. For example, rocking a baby has been known to help put babies asleep probably even before we had the language to express this. There is a similar effect of rhythmic movement on adults. Yet, why it is we find rhythmic movement soporific is not currently known. Surely knowing more would be very helpful: how much movement is best for falling asleep? Should it just be for falling asleep, or continue after that? What is the best pattern of movement? How does this mechanical approach compare to other approaches, such as drugs? These and other questions can be addressed with the somnomat. If it turns out to be as beneficial as generations of experience of rocking our children asleep would suggest, then getting these details right could be immensely useful for designing a new kind of automatically moving bed that helps people fall asleep. Some updates to our favorite lullabies may be needed…

Rock-a-bye baby, on the robotic treetop,
When the servomotors turn, the cradle will rock,
When the robot breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Knowing where Neanderthals fit, however, also creates a problem. What do we do if what makes humans “human” isn’t from a “human” at all? How do we justify “human rights” in light of evidence that our rational and moral minds are in no small part the result of prehistoric crossbreeding? In short: if human rights are based on being human, what rights would a cloned Neanderthal have?

The problem is, of course, that we don’t have a cloned Neanderthal. Which is why we need to make one.

The argument may seem absurd and offensive at first. Both Zach Zorich, writing for Archaeology, and Andrew Mossman, writing for fellow Discover blog 80beats, explore the idea and come down on the side of “it’d be nice science for science’s sake, but way too unethical to do.” Summarizing Zorich, Moseman says:

As the bioethicist Bernard Rollin points out in the Archaeology piece, there’s more to worry about than the law. While Neanderthals are our close relatives on the evolutionary tree, you’d know one if you saw one. Tulane anthropologist Trenton Holliday argues that they could talk and act like us, therefore eventually they’d fit in. But that seems like wishful thinking. With no culture, no peers, and an unknown capacity to cope with the modern world mentally or physically, a Neanderthal would be adrift—caught between a zoo animal and a human being. The main point in cloning one would be for scientists to study it, but as law professor Lori Andrews says, a Neanderthal could be granted enough legal protection to make doing extensive research on it illegal, not just unethical.

That’s not to say there would be no benefits to science. But some things are best left in the past.

Not so. We have tried, and will continue to try, to resurrect extinct species in the past, such as the Spanish ibex. Why should the Neanderthal be any different? If we assume the ability to clone safely – for a moment setting aside the current, significant flaws with the process – we can focus on the ethics of bringing a Neanderthal into the world without a familiar culture or peers. Maybe the Neanderthal would have trouble adapting, picking up language, and adjusting to a modern existence. Or maybe not. We don’t know, and there’s the rub.

Unlike examples found in science fiction, be it Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the more recent sci-horror flick Splice, it’s not as if our only options are to send the neo-Neanderthal into the world on its own or to trap it in a laboratory where it would be poked and prodded to death. The moral of both of those works is that when one fails to take responsibility for one’s creation, when one fails to nurture and protect that new being, that is when an ethical code is breached and damage is done. We don’t know how a Neanderthal would exist in our world, but we know we are capable of studying chimps and apes outside of their natural habitat without causing them harm or reducing their quality of life flagrantly. We also know that we are surrounded by those who are only partially mentally developed, be they children or the mentally disabled, whom we love and care for without question. The very purpose of cloning a Neanderthal would be to see where it fits in our mental development. Attentive and accurate nurture and care would be central to any scientific effort to study Neanderthal development and mental growth. Allowing the clone to be neglected would upend the very purpose of cloning her in the first place.

To assert that the Neanderthal is between human and animal and is therefore an impossible fit for our world simply not true. The line between human and animal is blurred. Dolphins, whales, chimps, great apes, and other species are already changing the way we think about intelligence and rights; perhaps a Neanderthal, fully developed but so mentally different as to be incompatible with our way of living is the very example our society needs to change our perception of intelligent non-humans. When the technology is safe and the ability to nurture and care for her in place, we owe it to humanity as a whole to clone a Neanderthal and see what wonders she might teach us about ourselves.

“ANCESTOR isn’t science fiction. It’s science acid-trip pulp-horror, an irresistible genre unique to Scott Sigler’s wonderfully warped mind.” —Carl Zimmer

“Fun, creepy, and impossible to stop reading, ANCESTOR is the rare thriller that’s based on cutting-edge science and is entirely possible. Long after you’re done with the book, you’ll still be looking over your shoulder. Just in case.” —Phil Plait

Without further ado, here is your ANCESTOR excerpt:

The tiny, floating ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing . . .

Fear.

Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.

The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly . . . more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form. Nothing divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.

The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called bovine. The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else. The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.

The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals, tasting the egg for one purpose only:

To see if the egg was self.

It was not. The egg was other.

And anything other had to be destroyed.

Jian knew, even at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again. She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand corner showed green numbers: 72/150. The rest of the huge screen showed a grid of squares, ten high, fifteen across. Over half of those squares were black. The remaining squares each showed a grainy-gray picture of a highly magnified embryo.

The “150” denoted the number of embryos alive when the experiment began. Fifty cows, three genetically modified eggs from each cow, each egg tricked into replicating without fertilization. As soon as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, split into two daughter cells it became an embryo, a growing organism. Each embryo sat in a petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich solution and immune system elements from the same cow: macrophages, natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes, elements that combined to work as the body’s own special-ops assassins targeted at viruses, bacteria and other harmful pathogens.

The “72” represented the number of embryos still alive, not yet destroyed by the voracious white blood cells. Jian watched the counter change to 68/150. Rhumkorrf seemed to vibrate with anger, the frequency of that vibration increasing ever so slightly each time the number dropped. He was only a hair taller than Jian, but she outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His eyes looked wide and buglike behind thick, black-framed glasses. The madder he became, the more he shook. The more he shook, the more his comb-over came apart, exposing his shiny balding pate.

65/150

“This is ridiculous,” Erika said, her cultured Dutch accent dripping with disgust. Jian glared at the demure woman. She hated Hoel, not only because she was a complete bitch, but also because she was so pretty and feminine, all the things that Jian was not. Hoel wore her silvery-gray hair in a tight bun that revealed a haughty face. She had the inevitable wrinkles due any forty-five-year-old woman, but nothing that even resembled a laugh line. Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.

61/150

“Time?” Rhumkorrf asked.

Jian, Tim and Erika automatically looked at their watches, but the question was meant for Erika. “Twenty-one minutes, ten seconds,” she said.

“Remove the failures from the screen,” Rhumkorrf said through clenched teeth. Tim Feely quietly typed in a few keystrokes. The black squares disappeared.

Sixty-one squares, now much larger, remained.

Tim was Jian’s assistant, a biologist with impressive bioinformatics skills. He wasn’t on Jian’s level, of course, but his multidisciplinary approach bridged the gap between Jian’s computer skills and Erika’s biological expertise. He was bigger than Rhumkorrf, but not by much. Jian hated the fact that even though the project had two men and two women, she was always the largest person in the room.

Jian focused on one of the squares. The tiny embryo sat helpless, a gray, translucent cluster of cells defined by a whitish circle. At sixteen cells, the terminology changed from embryo to morula, Latin for mulberry, so named for its resemblance to the fruit. It normally took a mammalian embryo a few days to reach the morula stage — Jian’s creatures reached this stage in just twenty minutes.

Left alone, the morula would continue to divide until it became a hollow ball of cells known as a blastocyst. But to keep growing, a blastocyst had to embed itself into the lining of a mother’s uterus. And that could never happen as long as the cow’s immune system treated the embryo like a harmful foreign body.

54/150

Jian focused on a single square. From the morula’s left, a macrophage began oozing into view, moving like an amoeba, extending pseudopodia as it slid and reached. All along the wall-sized monitor, the white squares steadily blinked their way to blackness.

48/150

“Dammit,” Rhumkorrf hissed, and Jian wondered how he could speak so clearly with his teeth pressed together like that.

The macrophage operated on chemicals, grabbing molecules from the environment and reacting to them. The morula’s outer membrane, the zona pellucida, was the same egg membrane taken from the cow. That meant it was 100 percent natural, native to the cow, something macrophages would almost never attack. But what lay inside that outer shell was something created by Jian . . . Jian and her God Machine.

34/150

“Clear them out again,” Rhumkorrf said. Tim tapped the keys. The black squares again disappeared: the remaining grayish squares grew even larger. Instantly, the larger squares started blinking to black.

24/150

“Fuck,” Erika said in a decidedly uncultured tone. Inside the morula, a cell quivered. Its sides pinched in, the shape changing from a circle to an hourglass. Mitosis. A macrophage tendril reached the morula, touched it, almost caressing it.

14/150

The macrophage’s entire amorphous body slid into view, a grayish, shapeless mass.

9/150

The squares steadily blinked out, their blackness mocking Jian, reminding her of her lack of skill, her stupidity, her failure.

4/150

The macrophage moved closer to the morula. The dividing cell quivered once more, and the single cell became two. Growth, success, but it was too late.

1/150

The macrophage’s tendrils encircled the ball, then touched on the other side, surrounding it. The tendrils joined, engulfing the prey. The square turned black, leaving only a white-lined grid and a green number.

0/150

“Well, that was just spectacular,” Rhumkorrf said. “Absolutely spectacular.”

“Oh, please,” Erika said. “I really don’t want to hear it.”

Rhumkorrf turned to face her. “You’re going to hear it. We have to produce results. For heaven’s sake, Erika, you’ve built your whole career on this process.”

“That was different. The quagga and the zebra are almost genetically identical. This thing we’re creating is artificial, Claus. If Jian can’t produce a proper genome, the experiment is flawed to begin with.”

Jian wanted to find a place to hide. Rhumkorrf and Erika had been lovers once, but no more. Now they fought like a divorced couple. Erika jerked her thumb at Jian. “It’s her fault. All she can do is give me an embryo with a sixty-five percent success probability. I need at least ninety percent to have any chance.”

“You’re both responsible,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re missing something here. Specific proteins are producing the signals that trigger the immune response. You have to figure out which genes are producing the offending proteins.”

“We’ve looked,” Erika said. “We’ve gone over it again and again. The computer keeps analyzing, we keep making changes, but the same thing happens every time.”

Rhumkorrf slowly ran a hand over his head, putting his comb-over mostly back in place. “We’re too close to it. We’ve got to change our way of thinking. I know the fatal flaw is staring us in the face, we just don’t recognize it.”

Tim stood up and stretched. He ran both hands through his short but thick blond locks, looking directly at Rhumkorrf when he did. Jian wondered if Tim did that on purpose, to mock Rhumkorrf’s thinning hair. “We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Tim said. “I’m already reviewing all of Jian and Erika’s work on top of doing my own.”

Erika let out a huff. “As if you could even understand my work, you idiot.”

“You shut up!” Jian said. “You do not talk to Tim like that.”

Erika smirked, first at Jian, then at Tim. “Such a big man, Tim. You need a fat old woman to fight your battles for you?”

Tim’s body stayed perfectly still except for his right hand, which extended and flipped Erika the middle finger.

“That will be enough, Mister Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “If you’re not smart enough to contribute to the work, the least you could do is shut your mouth and focus your worthless brain on running your little computer.”

Tim’s hands clenched into fists. Jian felt so bad for him. All his life, Tim Feely had probably been used to being the smartest person in the room. Here, he was the dumbest — something Claus never let him forget.

“I realize we’re all frustrated,” Rhumkorrf said, “but we have to find a way to think in new directions. We’re so close, can’t you all feel it?” His bug-eyed glare swept around the room, eliciting delayed nods of agreement from all of them. They were close, maddeningly so. Jian just couldn’t find that missing piece. It almost made her long for the days before the medicine, when the ideas came freer, faster. But no, that wouldn’t do — she knew all too well where that led.

Rhumkorrf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I want you all to think about something.” He put the glasses back on. “It took us an hour to conduct this experiment. In that hour, at least four people died from organ failure. Four people who would have lived if they had a replacement. In twenty-four hours, almost a hundred people will die. Perhaps you should consider that before you start bickering again.”

Jian, Tim and even Erika stared at the floor.

“What ever it takes,” Rhumkorrf said. “What ever it takes, we will make this happen. We’ve just failed the immune response test for the sixteenth time. All of you, go work from your rooms. Maybe if we stop sniping at each other, we can find that last obstacle and eliminate it.”

Jian nodded, then walked out of the lab and headed back to her small apartment. Sixteen immune response tests, sixteen failures. She had to find a way to make number seventeen work, had to, because millions of lives depended on her and her alone.

Okay, okay, accelerated pregnancy isn’t real (yet). It’s a (not-so) fictional assisted reproductive technology imagined by Tze Chun in his short film, “Silver Sling,” which is part of the FUTURESTATES project by the Independent Television Service. In addition to accelerated surrogacy, at 92Y Tribeca’s screening of FUTURESTATES films, I was treated to human-plant chimeras, self-aware androids, and a picture of just how much worse Arizona’s draconian immigration laws are going to be in 15 years. My favorite, “Silver Sling,” follows the story of a young Russian immigrant, Lydia (pictured above auditioning for potential parents). Faced with financial woes and no job, she plans to become a surrogate mother for the third time–a decision that could potentially render her sterile for the rest of her life. Lydia is forced to choose between her present problems and her future hopes.

While the film itself is wonderful, what made “Silver Sling” stand out was Chun’s treatment of the technology. Accelerated surrogacy in “Silver Sling” isn’t good or bad, it merely is, with the ethics being different for each person involved. The complicated issues Chun brings to light are those currently pressing some surrogate mothers: their own desire for children, the risks and burdens of the procedure, and the “no-other-option” mentality driven by the problem of economic need. Even with the science-fictional elements of “Silver Sling”–the accelerated surrogacy and the fact that surrogate mothers are cared for by the assisted-reproduction company–it still feels intensely realistic.

What’s more, “Silver Sling” may have an idea of where we are in history. In the film, a spokeswoman for Silver Sling, the company that coordinates the surrogacies, describes accelerated pregnancy and surrogacy as indicative of the “Reproductive Revolution,” echoing the preceding agricultural, scientific, industrial, and sexual revolutions. A fitting description, I should say. But why pretend the revolution is in our future instead of our present? With over 90,000 assisted reproductive technology births in Europe in 2007, I would venture that we are now right in the midst  the Reproductive Revolution. More interesting, however, is a detail in the film synopsis left out of “Silver Spring” itself: According to the synopsis, “corporations offer financial incentives to their high-ranking female employees to pay for chemically accelerated surrogate births.” Just as with the earlier revolutions, though the change began with a new technology, ultimately it was the shift in lifestyles, social mores, and culture itself that had the real impact. Half a century later and our society is still struggling to adapt to the sexual revolution; one can only imagine what changes the current reproductive revolution will bring.

PS: If you’re looking to guess just what will happen in the future, the FUTURESTATES website has a Predict-O Meter that’s worth checking out.

More specifically, his team of scientists replicated the design for an existing 1,080 base pair bacterial genome and had Blue Heron, a firm based in Bothell, WA, construct it by stitching together chemically synthesized oligonucleotides (the building blocks of DNA). The 1,080 bp genomes, also known as cassettes, were grown in yeast cells and, following a series of steps in which the intermediate assemblies were checked for errors and compatibility issues, inserted into the hollowed out recipient cells.

While much has been said about whether or not this feat constitutes the creation of a “new” life form (and, like many far more illustrious individuals, I happen to think it doesn’t), what is clear is that there is still much more work to be done before we get to the point when we can easily build cells and boot them up with specialized “software” to produce fuel, anti-malarial drugs or any number of biological derivatives.

As the researchers were quick to point out, they endured weeks of toil and frustration to fix a handful of incorrect base pairs that rendered their genome inactive. Get stuck with a single misplaced base out of a million in a crucial gene, and you’re dead in the water. That’s why I believe that the concerns over terrorists acquiring these technologies and building bioweapons are overblown. If it took Venter’s supremely qualified scientists several years and who knows how much money to reach this point, I find it very unlikely that a rogue band of scientists, however talented, could easily carry this task to completion.

What is potentially of more concern, at least in the short term, is the possibility that Venter’s outfit, or others, could try to patent these innovative technologies and thus keep a substantial number of able and less well-funded scientists out in the cold. Though it’s unlikely that a single company, like Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, will become a monopoly, the fact that it, along with other companies and large institutions, could erect barriers to promising areas of research could put a damper on scientific progress.

People will always be able to turn to organizations like the BioBricks Foundation, an open source entity that provides all comers with Lego-like DNA parts to encode certain vital functions in cells, but, much like Linux-based platforms in the computing world have struggled to even make a dent in Microsoft’s and Apple’s mindshare, it will be tough to compete against the behemoths of the synthetic biology world. One can only hope that the government, or a qualified third party, will ensure that parity remains and that advances in medicine and biology not be significantly hindered by one, or many, corporations.

If you have even a passing interest in science, it was hard to miss the big, bold headlines splashed across newspaper front pages and websites a few weeks ago: “Scientists Create New Life.” I’m talking, of course, about Craig Venter’s latest research breakthrough, which, as most of you reading this may already know, consisted of inserting an artificial genome into a bacterial cell and coaxing it to “life.”

More specifically, his team of scientists replicated the design for an existing 1,080 base pair bacterial genome and had Blue Heron, a firm based in Bothell, WA, construct it by stitching together chemically synthesized oligonucleotides (the building blocks of DNA). The 1,080 bp genomes, also known as cassettes, were grown in yeast cells and, following a series of steps in which the intermediate assemblies were checked for errors and compatibility issues, inserted into the hollowed out recipient cells.

While much has been said about whether or not this feat constitutes the creation of a “new” life form (and, like many far more illustrious individuals, I happen to think it doesn’t), what is clear is that there is still much more work to be done before we get to the point when we can easily build cells and boot them up with specialized “software” to produce fuel, anti-malarial drugs or any number of biological derivatives.

As the researchers were quick to point out, they endured weeks of toil and frustration to fix a handful of incorrect base pairs that rendered their genome inactive. Get stuck with a single misplaced base out of a million in a crucial gene, and you’re dead in the water. That’s why I believe that the concerns over terrorists acquiring these technologies and building bioweapons are overblown. If it took Venter’s supremely qualified scientists several years and who knows how much money to reach this point, I find it very unlikely that a rogue band of scientists, however talented, could easily carry this task to completion.

What is potentially of more concern, at least in the short term, is the possibility that Venter’s outfit, or others, could try to patent these innovative technologies and thus keep a substantial number of able and less well-funded scientists out in the cold. Though it’s unlikely that a single company, like Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, will become a monopoly, the fact that it, along with other companies and large institutions, could erect barriers to promising areas of research could put a damper on scientific progress. (And, if you believe all the glorified hype, synthetic biology could eventually produce all the drugs and fuel we need and help fix the planet.)

People will always be able to turn to organizations like the BioBricks Foundation, an open source entity that provides all comers with Lego-like DNA parts to encode certain vital functions in cells, but, much like Linux-based OS platforms in the computing world have struggled to even make a dent in Microsoft’s and Apple’s mindshare, it will be tough to compete against the behemoths of the synthetic biology world. One can only hope that the government, or a qualified third party, will ensure that parity remains and that advances in medicine and biology not be significantly hindered by one, or many, corporations.

Surrogates – which opens today – stars Bruce Willis as a police detective trying to track down the killer with a weapon that can disable avatars while simultaneously killing their users. While his avatar is younger, stronger and has a full head of hair, back home, he’s lost the connection with his wife, who only interacts as an avatar.

The cautionary tale looks at a technology that’s meant to give mobility and a new lease on life to the wheelchair-bound or hideously disfigured and has been usurped by a pleasure-seeking populace. Think Second Life on acid. It’s easier to shell-out money for an avatar than a gym membership.

The Touchstone Pictures production is based on the Top Shelf graphic novel from writer Robert Venditti and artist Brett Weldele. In fact, Venditti was inspired by the emerging obsession with plastic surgery and nascent experiments with mind-controlled computers as inspiration. What’s creepy is how plausible the conceit is given the mushrooming of cosmetic procedures, reality television and pervasive societal shallowness.

In the interests of streamlining, the film loses some of the nuance and humor of the graphic novel, though the special effects team does a wonderful job of re-imagining actors with the youthful Plasticine look of avatars. And it’ll probably make you think twice about scheduling that next Botox appointment.

— Science Not Fiction guest-blogger Susan Karlin

There’s some online buzz wondering if this material would be strong enough to make the space elevator a reality. If you haven’t heard the term, a space elevator is a cable or ribbon that extends about 100,000 km into space from an anchor point on the equator. Glorified elevators car shuffle cargo and people in and out of orbit, eliminating all that mucking about with dangerous rockets and with the ability to move payloads for a minute fraction of the cost of current boosters. A space elevator could make a lot of big space projects — like orbiting solar power plants — suddenly very doable. The idea was first thought of over a century ago, and most notably popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. In recent years, interest was renewed with a new (and much more practical) elevator design pioneered by Brad Edwards .

The material used to build the cable/ribbon will have to be incredibly strong, and nothing even close currently exists: this is the primary technical obstacle to building the elevator. In Edwards’ design, carbon nanotubes were tapped for the job (a choice that was loosely prefigured by Clarke’s “pseudo diamond.”) The theoretical strength of nanotubes is more than enough to do the job — the problem is getting naotubes to cooperate in practice. They are difficult to make in long stretches, and while individually strong, tend to slip past each other, weakening the material Hence the excitment over the recent buckypaper announcement — a real composite material that relies on carbon nanotubes for its strength.

Unfortunately, the current strength is given as being about half that of IM7, the current leader in the composite world. By the end of next year they expect to match IM7. A back of the envelope calculation shows that at full IM7 strength, this buckypaper would have a tensile strength of about 56,000 kg/cm2. This is about 33 per cent stronger than steel wire, a pretty impressive feat in itself, but one that falls well short of the 1,300,000 kg/cm2 figure for a nanotube composite material that Edwards used as a baseline in his design. Still, it’s a big step in the right direction, and we could be watching the factories start spinning space elevator cable sooner than we think

Image from NASA

For Google, really good facial recognition software would kick down the barriers to searching images online. Right now the company’s Image Search function relies on file names and captions supplied by users to make a match. That’s why a search on Michael Knight captures both pictures of the 80′s TV star David Hasselhoff and shots of clothing designed by Project Runway winner Michael Knight. The closest Google has come to solving the problem is a tool to enable users of their Picasa Web Albums to organize their pictures better. Users identify people in some photos, and the system creates a profile of that person, taking into account data like the depth of a person’s eye sockets or the distance between the eyes and the nose, or the eyes and each other. The software can then sift through pictures and look for additional photos of that person, saving the user from perpetually keeping their photos organized (which, frankly, none of us do anyway, right?). Google claims the function is fairly accurate, though shadowing or washed out photos can cause it problems.

But the real heavyweights behind facial recognition technology are the cops and private security firms. Remember in Total Recall, when Ahnold runs through the full body scanner? The scanner there both searched for weapons and took a scan of his whole body compared the images to a data base. Contemporary law enforcement has more modest goals, like matching a simple two dimensional picture to the face of someone caught by a video camera or walking through a security scanner. So far, they haven’t had much luck: In 2001, Tampa police tried to use it in areas with a buzzing night life, and in 2002, security in Boston’s Logan airport tried to use it. But in both cases, the recognition rate was so poor, they had to scrap the systems. The British government is in the midst of a face-scanning debacle of its own at Manchester Airport. The system, still in the midst of a six month test, not only fails to make the best matches, but if two people walk through the scanner together, it will only notice the first one.

But these are all application problems. In 2006, computer scientists competing in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge discovered that their algorithms were so good that, under ideal conditions, they could pick out faces better than even people do. The software works so well that it can ID faces turned as much as 90 degrees. What KITT has mastered, and what we’re still working on, is applying that technology here in the real world with imperfect light, moving targets, and the evasions of people who maybe don’t want to be recognized. Seems like we’ll get there sooner or later.

It’s a great collection, with a good mix of stories ranging from hard science fiction to near magic realism. Stand outs for me included “True Names,” a novella by Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum set in a post-post-post-human universe, and “An Eligible Boy,” written by Ian McDonald, that takes place in the mid-21st century India that McDonald has used as the backdrop for his 2004 book River of Gods.

Space Opera is one of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction, and in recent years has gained a new lease of life (I recommend reading The New Space Opera anthology for good snapshot of the current state of affairs). Like all definitions, saying what exactly is and isn’t space opera can be a highly subjective exercise, but for me, works of space opera all try for a certain grand sweep: the canvas is broad, often involving a good chunk of at least one galaxy. The themes are big–space opera is where entire space-faring civilizations can collide–and awesome technologies are frequently brought into play.

So why didn’t something like Battlestar Galactica make the list? I excluded Battlestar because although the rag-tag fleet does move through the galaxy, visiting other star systems, it pretty much does so as a single group, meaning the colonials take their world–their psychological landscape–with them. The tone of Battlestar is often deliberately (and brilliantly) claustrophobic, and to me Space Opera is all about being expansive. I also excluded Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the various incarnations of Stargate and even Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, because although all these shows feature elements of space opera–and some even have full-fledged space opera episodes–the space opera isn’t central to their existence.

As for Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which is often quoted when discussing Space Opera, I just can’t get behind it. Like many, I first read Foundation in my teens, but it left little impression, unlike many of Asimov’s short stories or other novels (The Naked Sun in particular has stayed with me). When people got upset that I didn’t include Foundation‘s Terminus or Trantor in my recent list of 10 Best Science Fiction Planets, I went out and bought the trilogy to refresh myself and a) I still think neither Trantor and Terminus deserve to make that list and b) I found all three books heavy going.

For a yarn about the rise and fall and rise of galaxy-spanning empires, the books are surprisingly sparse. First, there are virtually no women at all in the first book–half of the human race simply doesn’t exist, except for a few lines from the shrewish wife of one of Foundation’s opponents, and a walk-on part with no words from a servant girl. There is one developed female character in each of the second and third books, but later it transpires that these two performed all their interesting actions as more-or-less meat puppets of the Second Foundation, robbing them of any agency. (And you can’t write this off as just a symptom of the 1950′s era that Asimov was writing in–for example, E.E. “Doc” Smith didn’t exactly smash gender roles in his Lensman books, written mostly in the 1940′s and described below, but he still managed to put women onstage and give them some agency, starting 30 pages in with Kinnexa, a lethal, efficient, and courageous secret agent who takes the lead in proposing a suicide mission to her male partner.) Even Asimov’s male Foundation characters tend toward a certain sameness — for example the heros of the first Foundation book, Hardin and Mallow, are essentially interchangeable characters, both cut from the same cloth of reluctant but idealistic and incorruptible pragmatism. All but one of several centuries worth of space battles occur offstage. There are no alien civilizations, which isn’t bad per se, but then the human worlds are largely culturally homogenous, with about as much variation between them as you’d get between rural and urban communities on contemporary Earth. And so on.

So all that said, here are my Top 5, in chronological order:

1. The Lensman Series (1934-1954). Written by E.E. “Doc” Smith, in many ways this series is the granddaddy of the genre. Two vast and ancient superraces battle it out for control of the cosmos, mainly through proxy species, of which humanity is one. The books were especially notable for their space battles, and the scorch of beams splashing against hull shields practically wafts from the pages. The influence of the Lensmen series was huge and can be seen in things like Babylon 5 (see below) and the Homeworld series of video games.
2. Known Space (1964- ). The setting of a series of novel and short stories by Larry Niven, the universe of Known Space brought us one of the most iconic artifacts in science fiction, the Ringworld, a vast and ancient habitat that encircles a star, apparently long since abandoned by its mysterious creators. If you’ve played a game of Halo, you’ve felt the influence of Known Space too.
3. Star Wars (1977 – 1983) Space opera went mainstream with this swashbuckling epic. Exotic planets and aliens, fast-paced action and cool spaceships made this trilogy the ultimate exemplar of science fiction in the minds of many.
4. The Culture (1987- ) Starting with Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks created a civilization of truly vast scope. His civilization doesn’t just discover alien artifacts of vast power or size–it makes them. His books focus on a branch of The Culture called Special Circumstances, where the high ideals of the civilization collides with unpleasant realities, with often messy results. His books are laced with a wry humor and have a literary quality matched by few.
5. Babylon 5 (1993- ) Paving the way for shows like Lost and Heroes, J. Michael Straczynski’s creation was designed to be a televised novel, with a beginning, middle, and end. Although it had a slow start, and some elements were very Lensmen-like, the show had innovative ideas and originality throughout. (Incidentally, the first two season are currently available to watch for free on Hulu.)

What do you think? Any other space operas I should know about?

I have been laid low for the last few days by some dreadful lurgy I caught on the plane back from San Diego, but people have been hard at work behind the scenes putting together this edit of the video of our “Science Behind Science Fiction Panel” at this year’s Comic-con. From left to right you have Kevin Grazier (science advisor to Eureka and Battlestar Galactica), Jaime Paglia (co-creater and executive producer of Eureka), Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy blogger) and myself. We talked about how science makes its way into a script, how scientific accuracy is maintained (or not) and the value of retconning. Enjoy!

Worth mentioning as well is the museum’s current exhibition featuring some awesome old-school robot designs (think Robbie the Robot meets Andy Warhol), which is open until October 26.

• The Satan Bug (1965): Before The Andromeda Strain and Outbreak, this cloak-and-dagger thriller brought the specter of species-killing disease to the big screen.
• Silent Running (1972): Although a little preachy, an uncompromising ending rescued the movie from cheesiness as the spaceborne remnants of Earth’s forests face destruction.
• The Quiet Earth (1985): Twenty years after I first saw it, the enigmatic ending of this Last-Man-On-Earth tale still sticks in my mind.
• Last Night (1998): Another movie with a haunting ending, it follows the lives of a handful of people in the final hours before the Earth is destroyed.
• eXistenZ (1999): Overshadowed by The Matrix when it was released, this virtual reality tale is wickedly imaginative.
• Pitch Black (2000): Although it spawned a sprawling sequel, the movie that introduced the character of the lethal Riddick was a tight thriller that relied on psychology more than special effects.
• Underworld (2003): I loved the surprisingly rich backstory that gave a war between vampires and werewolves some real weight.
• The Fountain (2006): Another movie that, whatever other flaws it may have had, paid off with a great ending.
• Stardust (2007): Peppered with wry humor — and with romantic leads that manage not to irritate.
• Sunshine (2007): The on-screen physics didn’t make sense, but the psychology of a crew pushed to extremes by their environment worked for me.