Harvard Scientists Reverse Aging in Mice – Total Bullsh*t

A completely random picture of a lab mouse

According to those idiots over at the Guardian, “Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice – now for humans”. As if that were not miraculous enough, the Guardian also claims that “Now they believe they might be able to regenerate human organs”. Here at the Hub we would love nothing more than for this story to be true, but alas it is one of the hugest piles of sensationalist bullshit I have seen on the net in quite a while. The scientific research cited by the Guardian does not support these sensationalist claims and the Guardian knows this. But they don’t give a damn because sensationalism sells – big time! The Guardian knows that sloppy, idiotic bloggers and news organizations across the web will regurgitate anything they see without hardly the slightest attempt at fact checking. And hence this bogus story has been an enormous hit. The story already has more than 15,000 Facebook likes and this number is sure to grow. It has been picked up and rehashed as a legitimate scientific story by major news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Digg, Endgadget, Wired, and many more. Congratulations to the Guardian and the author of the story, Ian Sample – you have created a story that sells well, but your reputation is utter crap.

First let us take a brief look at the scientific research that Guardian correspondent Ian Sample claims will reverse aging and allow us to regenerate human organs. Scientists at Harvard genetically altered mice so that they lacked an enzyme, telomerase, that is responsible for maintaining proper telomeres. Telomeres are repeated sequences of DNA at the ends of our DNA that protect the DNA from damage. Without the ability to produce the telomerase enzyme, the mice had essentially nonfunctioning telomeres, leaving their DNA unprotected and prone to extensive damage and malfunction over time. To no one’s surprise, as these mice grew and lived out their lives within the laboratory their bodies quickly broke down. Their organs began to fail – they lost their sense of smell, they became infertile, they were weak. With the mice now in this degraded state (that we are lead to believe approximates aging), the Harvard researchers then proceeded to give the mice regular injections of the telomerase enzyme to see what would happen to them.

So what happened to the mice once their broken, dying bodies were finally given injections to activate the vital telomerase enzyme that they had thus far been denied? In what will be a surprise to nobody (except apparently the Harvard researchers and Ian Sample at the Guardian) the bodies of the mice stopped their decay. As if this were not miraculous enough, the bodies of the mice also seemed to regain some of their lost vitality and function now that their DNA was allowed to function properly. Isn’t that amazing?

Any reasonable person would quickly summarize this research as something like “take away a vital enzyme from an organism and it starts to decay, give the enzyme back to the organism and decay stops, allowing the natural process of repair and growth in the organism to proceed”. The research sheds some light on how crucial telomerase and telomeres are to the proper function of an organism, but unless you are an expert in that field this is a non-story. This research is a long, long way from leading to a reversal in aging. Unless, that is, you are Ian Sample working for the Guardian, in which case apparently you have just stumbled upon a fantastic piece of research that you can use to create a misleading and sensationalist story that will sell to mindless readers and bloggers.

I can’t figure out what is more ridiculous here. Is the Guardian story itself the most ridiculous thing, or is the fact that the story was blindly syndicated by thousands of news outlets and believed by millions of readers across the world even more ridiculous? Ian Sample and the Guardian must be laughing all the way to the bank with the traffic this story is generating for them. Readers will correctly point out that I am only aiding their little game by giving the story even more prominence and calling it out in this post. To that all I can say is that I can’t stop people from reading the Guardian’s BS, but at least I can do my part to show the world what complete crap it is. The Guardian has gained itself a hugely popular story, but at what cost to it’s reputation? Sadly, most people probably won’t even care. But I can hope.

Image source [rama]

Time Presents 10 Questions for Kurzweil: Hello, Mainstream

Time gives Ray Kurzweil 10 questions. Another step towards making The Singularity a household name.

Everybody thinks about the future, but not everyone makes it their life’s work. Besides being an inventor and author, Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s premier futurists and he’s the de facto frontman for The Singularity. Time Magazine recently interviewed the prophet of accelerating technology for their ‘10 Questions’ segment. You can see the video below. While Kurzweil doesn’t say anything he hasn’t said before, the video is a great synopsis of his views on technology, the reshaping of our biology, and the possibility of extending our lifespans indefinitely. Slowly but steadily, it seems like mainstream audiences are being exposed to Kurzweil’s brand of futurism. Is the world ready to accept the possibility of exponential growth? Thanks to Time, more are at least contemplating it.

While Kurzweil has made appearances on Television since 1965, and has received dozens of public accolades, he’s far from a household name. I’m not sure he will ever become universally famous, but I definitely think that his vision of the future is slowly making its way to the greater public – at least in the US. He recently appeared in PBS’s discussion on Bioethics, his movie – The Singularity Is Near – is making its way towards widespread distribution, and not a day goes by that his name doesn’t pop in news feeds and blogs all over the internet. Whether or not you agree with predictions about the future, you can see why many find him a great subject for discussion in the video below. He has fantastic visions of the future that he obviously believes in deeply and can articulate well. Even if you think he’s a lunatic, he’s not a raving one.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a pretty big fan of Ray Kurzweil, but I’m a little uneasy with a single person representing the diverse and often contentious community of futurists in the world. It seems that whenever opponents attack techno-optimism they do so through Kurzweil. There are so many other, worthwhile, theorists who explore and discuss the future it seems a shame that the mainstream can only be exposed to one. Don’t get me wrong, there are many well-accepted public figures who make predictions about the future of the universe (Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking among them) but when it comes to exponential growth and The Singularity Kurzweil is the go-to guy. He’s probably the one I would choose if I had to send someone to speak about accelerating technology…but I don’t have to send just one. Hopefully as Kurzweil breaks ground with major media outlets and brings the Singularity into popular discussion we’ll have the chance to expose the general public to the plurality of thought that exists within our community. Thanks to Kurzweil for helping put the Singularity on the map (and Time for covering it) but let’s not forget that the future is a big place. There’s room for more than one opinion.

[image and video credit: Time]

[source: Time]

Super Fast FANUC Robot Sorts Candy According to Color (video)

Don't like your red Skittles touching your yellow ones? FANUC has a robot you should meet.

Before you let a robot handle your prescription drugs, better let it train on candy first. FANUC’s M-1iA picking and sorting robot is one of the fastest robots on the planet. While it’s not the absolute champion of speed, it can do something that many of its competitors cannot: see in color. With FANUC’s “iRVision” visual analysis capabilities, the M-1iA can locate, pick up, and move identical objects based on the colors of their surfaces. FANUC has the high-speed sorter demonstrating its skills using sugary candies, but the ultimate idea is to have it process prescription pills or other small valuable items. Watch its super quick selection skills in the videos below. I can’t speak to its rapport with patients, but this robot is about a billion times faster than any pharmacist I’ve ever seen.

FANUC isn’t crazy to think that the M-1iA could find a home in the pharmaceutical industry. Robots are already sorting pills and filling prescriptions in hospitals in the real world. RFID tags and other means of tracking containers keep these robots from needing to sort mixed pills, but the FANUC robot’s ability to discern color could provide a valuable means of double checking that the right medicine goes into the right pill box. Maybe it could even detect if a drug had been damaged or spoiled. Whether or not the M-1iA will makes its way into pharmacies or industrial pharmaceutical factories in the near future isn’t clear, but I think we’ll see more sorting robots that showcase their visual skills as well as their speed. For now, the M-1iA represents a godsend to all those candy lovers who like to eat their Skittles, M&Ms, and jelly beans one color at a time. OCD, meet Robotics – you two were made for each other.

[screen capture and video credit: kmoriyama]

[sources: FANUC site and video]

A World of Tweets: Putting the Tweetsphere on the Map

Frog Design's A World of Tweets puts Twitter traffic on the map.

There’s too much damn information in the world! If you haven’t been bored when reading about random statistics from the internet then you’re probably a futuristic artificial intelligence. (In which case, welcome, Overlord). Making boring data look awesome is difficult, but a pair of designers in Milan have given us a tool to help. A World of Tweets from Frog Design is an evolving map of the tweetsphere. Geotagged tweets appear as drops of heat that accumulate on the globe. You can even switch the map to a 3D display if you have your pair of Red/Cyan glasses handy. There’s something about watching the East Coast heat up around lunchtime every day that seems deeply satisfying. I may not know what every tweet is saying, but I do know how the tweet traffic itself is changing. Very cool. This is more evidence that great design can make almost anything fun to look at. Watch a brief demo I made of the site in the video below.

I’m a sucker for clean crisp presentations of data analysis, and A World of Tweets has that in spades. Creaters Carlo Zapponi and Andreas Markdalen have provided a beautiful way to visualize the tweetsphere. Of course, it’d be just as thrilling if we were looking at Facebook status updates, cancer-related mortality, or Justin Bieber album sales. It’s not the data, but the presentation that really makes A World of Tweets so cool.

A World of Tweets is crisp clean and full of facts. Can we make one of these for every dataset on the web?

That’s not to say tweets can’t be important. We’ve discussed how analysis of social networks, and the people who comprise them, can allow scientists to predict the spread of deadly diseases and habits. There’s also a chance that Twitter could be used to accurately predict fluctuations in the stock market. The most promising application may arrive when projects like A World of Tweets are combined with Twitter projects that provide sentimental analysis. We wouldn’t just know where people were tweeting, we’d know (roughly) how they are feeling while they tweet. AWOT already combines two other data management technologies: Yahoo! Placemaker and Twitter Streaming API. Plugging in data from a site like TweetFeel shouldn’t be that difficult. Someone needs to get on this…

In the future, I hope we get more of this kind of design. We have so much information constantly being thrown at us that it takes really good presentation and a ‘wow’ factor to make us sit up and take notice. In other words, there’s only “too much damn information in the world” if you don’t have a good way of understanding what you’re looking at. So go grab your 3D glasses, fire up A World of Tweets, and watch the millions of thoughts stream by. It’d be relaxing if it wasn’t so awesome looking.

[image credits: Carlo Zapponi & Andreas Markdalen Frog Design, Milan]

[sources: Frog Design]

Trading Stocks at the Speed of Light – Computers Own Finance, Next the World

Ultra fast trading leads to optimal locations for computer nodes. This is the beginning of a grid that will blanket the planet.

One day the world could literally be covered in computers with major network hubs surrounding our planet in a fine meshed grid. What’s going to drive us to complete such a herculean task? Profit. Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross and mathematician Cameron Freer have discovered the optimal places on Earth for making split-second deals on securities. Their report, recently published in Physical Review E, is actually an economics paper. As Wissner-Gross and Freer explained to me in a phone interview, ultra-fast computerized trading has reshaped our world. When you start trading stocks at the speed of light, even small advantages in position can lead to millions in profits. Businesses have sought out the best places on the globe to set up computer trading stations and reap the rewards. Wissner-Gross and Freer have the treasure map for this new financial world, and if you want to claim your share you’re going to need to understand the importance of trading stocks at the speed of light.

Welcome to the Warp Drive Stock Exchange

We’ve put the stock market in the hands of computers, and only now is the public starting to understand what that means. When you picture institutions like the New York Stock Exchange, stop imagining a group of uptight men yelling prices at each other in a crowded room. That’s so 20th century. Now, the great majority of all trades are done by computers, and they can make deals faster, more often, and on smaller margins than humans can. This has lead to the rise in high frequency and low latency trading – why wait for the million dollar deal when you can make a million penny deals each second. More than 70% of our trading (by volume) already involves these computer-enabled high frequency sales, and in this brave new world being able to act a millisecond faster than the competition can mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profit each year. Wissner-Gross and Freer’s paper, Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage, deals with the fallout of these split second trades.

Normal arbitrage is a pretty basic idea – you know that people in Tokyo value a stock at $2 a share, and you know people in New York are willing to sell that stock at $1.75 a share. If you can buy up the New York stock and sell it in Tokyo you can make a healthy $0.25 on every share, with little risk of loss. The person who discovers the price difference the quickest has the most chance of making the deal and collecting the rewards.

But what happens when computers are trading millions of shares each minute? In the fraction of a second it takes for a computer to recognize a chance for arbitrage, a faster computer may have already acted on the deal and claimed the profits. Milliseconds matter. Millions of dollars are at stake. You want to get information as quickly as possible, and make decisions as quickly as possible too.

Here’s the catch: even with information traveling at near the speed of light through the internet, it can take hundreds of milliseconds for data to get from one point on the globe to another. Traders that can place servers and lay fiber optimally across the globe to cut down on this time delay can therefore gain a crucial time advantage over their competitors.

So, it turns out that if you want to make the most profit on the difference in prices between Tokyo and New York, you want your computer to be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There’s an ‘optimal location’ that will maximize a chance for arbitrage between those points. If you place your computer in the right spot you will be able to get information back and forth between your trading partners and make the best deal.

Understanding all this? Great. Now let’s just expand this concept to the point of insanity. Start trading fast enough and even relatively small distances get to become really important. It’s not just Tokyo and New York, there are optimal trading locations in each country between cities, even inside cities. And every different kind of stock (or commodity or security) is going to have its own optimal locations based on the geography of supply and demand. Heck, those optimal locations even evolve over time as markets expand, shift, and decline.

Wissner-Gross and Freer, with their understanding of physics, developed a way to find those optimal nodes. That alone could have been enough to secure them some tidy offers from major financial institutions (and they do have those offers in the works). But Wissner-Gross and Freer took it a step further and asked another question. If there is a best place to make money, what happens when people start building computers there?

When you build a trading node at an optimal location you won’t be alone. Your competitors will install similar computers nearby. You get a miniature trading center at that spot, and something weird happens. Pricing information (news about stocks in Tokyo, for example) travels to the location and then starts to slow down or even stop! Why? When financial data hits the cluster, the computers start looking to trade, but they can make trades much faster with nearby computers than with computers in New York or Tokyo. So they do. And the arbitrage inside these clusters affects the flow of data. Pricing changes. There’s no longer a $0.25 difference between the two cities, because that price has been balanced by the hyper fast trading of computers in the area. Or even if it hasn’t been completely balanced, those trades have slowed down the passage of data due to the internal exchange of information

This is the relativistic part of Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage. We’ve see similar effects when dealing with bending, slowing, and even ’stopping’ light in different mediums. Knowing how pricing information behaves like light could help financial institutions position their nodes, program their computers, and increase their decision making speeds to make billions of dollars in profit.

The Long Term Effects of Short Term Trading

Wissner-Gross and Freer throw around terms like ‘econo-physical’ and ‘propagation of tradable information’ to help describe the newly discovered importance of speed-of-light security sales. I’ll include another term: ‘eye-opening’. In the past five years (maybe longer in some cases), financial institutions have been pouring money into high-frequency and low-latency trading, restructuring themselves to take advantage of computerized arbitrage. They compete to find profits on smaller margins and higher speeds and could use Wissner-Gross and Freer’s paper to help them better optimize the locations for their computer clusters.

In the past decade the effect of geography on computing has become very apparent. Big names like Google have placed their server farms strategically to get search results to users in tiny fractions of a second. The architecture for content delivery networks became (and continues to be) very important. Choosing locations for computer clusters will only grow more sophisticated as businesses opt to account for relativistic effects. There’s money to be made by building the best trading node structures, and so we’ll see them thrive in the years ahead. In fact, Wall Street companies have almost certainly done mammoth amounts of research into econophysical effects, but in secret (can’t let the competitors know what you know). Wissner-Gross and Freer are making this understanding public (and thus more scientific) and may be making connections between relativistic physics and trading that large corporations may already have explored privately.

It’s important to remember that geographic considerations for computing extend far beyond Wall Street. Energy grids, distributed computer processing projects, telecommunication routing – these systems all have arbitrage-like opportunities inside them. One place needs power (or processing resources, or bandwidth) and another place has it. By finding the optimal way to exchange these resources we get the best possible deal. The ‘natural price’ for these commodities is reached quickly.

So financial businesses and search engine companies may have started to build the computer nodes across the globe, but there will be many different industries that come to rely and profit by them. This will encourage the construction of more nodes, and in finer gradations. Eventually, and neither I nor Wissner-Gross and Freer have a timetable for this, the pressure to build trading nodes might encourage us to practically blanket the globe in computers. At some profit point having a computer perhaps every 100 kilometers will make sense. For some locations you’ll need many more points of presence (POP), and in others much less. Beyond that, who can say? Singularity enthusiasts may point to the day when we could have a continuous string of computers covering our planet’s surface. Yet there are strong limiting factors (power consumption, material costs, heat dissipation, etc) that will counteract economic pressures. Where those forces will ultimately find a balance is anyone’s guess.

Before we reach that point, however, we’ll hit some changes that will be very exciting in their own right. Wissner-Gross tells me that we have major incentive to lay down fiber optic highways between cities and take advantage of faster data exchange rates to improve our trading times. Internet 2.0 is partially being financed by relativistic arbitrage. That’s awesome. And Freer explains how there will be philosophical ramifications as well. It used to be that location mattered. You built cities along major trade routes, and you put your house close to good roads. The internet has changed that somewhat: now anyone can work from home and telecommute to any city in the world. That will stay true, but in the world of high speed computing physical location stopped being trivial ten years ago. Where a server is located can be of great importance. Society was freeing itself of geography just as computation became chained to it.

I am blown away by the need to conceive of stock prices as space-time events. Sit and think about that for a second. We’re using physics to explain finance. And not just economics, but general computational infrastructure, energy usage, telecommunications, and a dozen other fields as well. Wissner-Gross and Freer have presented us with a shift in how we should view the world. A small shift, perhaps, but a critical one. Most will probably not notice its importance because most have not noticed the growing importance of computerized securities trading. For those who are wise enough to use it there lies the possibility of huge profits. For the rest of us, this research is still key because it sheds light on how the public must rethink trading now that computerized transactions are the norm. Also, inside of this research lies the foundation for a computerized planet. With so much money to be made such a future almost seems inevitable. Thanks Alex and Cameron, you may have just pulled the Singularity a little nearer.

[image credit:Wissner-Gross and Freer 2010 Physical Review E]

[sources: Wissner-Gross and Freer 2010 Physical Review E (full PDF here), Alex Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer]

Extraordinary Memory Through Ordinary Means (video)

Imagining startling scenes in well-known locations can help you remember.

Genetic alterations, cybernetic implants, and nanotech helper robots are not going to be featured in this article. Instead I’m going to discuss an even cooler method of human enhancement: practicing mental tricks. For thousands of years, people have been finding ways to improve their sense of memory with simple techniques that take advantage of how our brain seems to store information. By associating random data with vibrant images, stories, and steps on a journey, memory champions have been able to recall huge strings of numbers, cards in shuffled decks, and just about anything else. Memory competitions have sprung up all over the world, with the highest ranking contestants forced to memorize larger and larger amounts of data to prove their mnemonic might. Catch some of their impressive skill (and a few pointers on how to develop your own) in the videos below. As we seek to transcend human limitations these feats of memory highlight how some among us have already gained fearsome mental prowess with nothing more than a few tricks and a lot of patience.

There are many people who display the ability to recall insane amounts of information without practice. These ’savants’, such as Kim Peek who was the basis for the movie Rain Man, in many cases owe their skills to developmental disorders or brain damage. We’ve seen how some scientists are working on ways that we can technologically induce these conditions in all of us without the disadvantages. While it may take years for those technologies to become available, memorization techniques are here now. These techniques seem too simple to work, but can be put to amazing effect.

Here’s Chester Santos, US Memory Champion of 2008, demonstrating a common memorization technique to Wired. Watch how Santos uses intense images linked to locations (the parts of the body) to improve memorization:

Ron White, who succeeded Santos as US Champion, explains similar techniques in the following clip:

And this segment from the BBC’s “Get Smart” show covers Andi Bell, who has an even more impressive record of memorization.

Like Santos, Bell teaches his interviewer a mnemonic based on spatial reasoning. This technique, called the “method of loci” is one of the most commonly used, and earliest developed of the memorization tricks. As you can see, it works really well even with first time users.

As good as Santos, White, and Bell may be, each of them pales in comparison to Ben Pridmore who was the reigning champion of the world until just recently. Here you’ll see him memorize an entire deck of cards in less than 25 seconds with no errors. Wow.

Of course, no one stays atop the memorization heap for long. Simon Reinhard conquered a deck of cards in less than 22 seconds, and Johannes Mallow defeated Pridmore in the world memory competition in Germany this summer. (Such competitions award points for a variety of memory skills including recalling faces, names, numbers, cards, and words. Mallow was the overall point leader.) Add in those obsessed with memorizing static data sets (like the digits of pi, or the words in the Bible), and you have a diverse global community that is continuously pushing itself to greater heights.

Which is sort of loose proof that a good memory can be developed with hard work. World memory champions spend countless hours honing and practicing their mnemonic techniques. As you saw in the videos above, those techniques can be learned (in a general sense) rather quickly. We may not all be able to memorize a deck of cards in twenty seconds, but we should be able to better remember important facts using colorful images of animals playing around our house.

It’s rather remarkable that one of the best memory enhancing technologies we’ve developed isn’t a computer chip wired to the brain, or a drug…it’s a mental trick. We’ve seen how other simple measures, like avoiding distractions and getting enough sleep, are also very effective. Clearly there is room for many of us to improve our brains without the need for accelerating technology.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t develop more dramatic technologies for improving memory. Rather, I think the mnemonic tricks perfected by memorization champions could help us develop those technologies more quickly. Does the method of loci work because it accesses parts of our brain dedicated to visual analysis and spatial reasoning? If so, could we stimulate those parts of our brain and help us record something perfectly? Remembering something forever could be as simple as pushing a button on an implant. We’ll already have visual and audio recordings of the world around us thanks to life-logging. Improved memories, then, may be less about having an absolute recollection of events and more about improved comprehension and analysis. How much better might we be at our jobs if important facts were ingrained into our consciousness so that we could use them without needing to check a piece of paper, video, or website? Improving our memories, first through mental discipline and later through technological augmentation, seems like one of the first steps towards transcending the limits of our humanity. Take a good look at the champions of memory – we could all have even better skills one day.

For now, best start practicing your mnemonics. I wonder if I can recall all the elements of the periodic table by pretending they are throwing a party in my freshman dorm… Hey, Sodium get out of the shower. Chlorine, what have I told you about smoking inside the building? Phosphorus, stop trying to set fire to everything!

[screen capture credit: BBC]

[video credit: Wired, CBS, BBC, Memory-Sports]

[sources: World Memory Championships, Memoriad, MemorySports]

Cool Video of Real World TRON Light Cycle Test Drive

Tron's light cycle is real, ridable, and ready to buy.

Geeks and gear-heads rejoice: the light cycles from Tron have made it into the real world! This summer the team at Parker Brothers Choppers announced plans to create full street-legal versions of the most famous icon from the Tron movies. Now, they’ve released video of the first futuristically sleek motorcycle prototype…and it looks awesome! Working from little more than pictures and artists’ concept sketches, Parker Brothers Choppers was able to build a machine that captures the style and excitement of the movie while still being able to drive with the power of a V-twin engine. Watch the only non-virtual light cycle in existence in the video below. This thing is amazing!

Back in June, Parker Brothers Choppers had five of these bikes on eBay, each with a unique color. According to Wired, there are still four left, but the price tag has jumped up to $55,000. Jeff Halverson at PBC revealed the bike’s specs: 474 lbs, 100 inches long, 23 inches wide, with a seat 28.5 inches off the ground. Top speed and driving stats are still unavailable, but I get the feeling from the video that this is more of a show than performance vehicle.

Unfortunately, it looks like the test driven prototype doesn’t include the really amazing neon light features that we’d come to expect from the Tron movies. The bike may be glowing during a night rally at which the bike appeared (see the video below which is cued up to the relevant point in time), but I may just be seeing a reflection in its shiny exterior. Either way, it looks like we’ll have to wait a while until this bike really shines the way we want.

It may not glow very well yet, and it will never be able to produce a light wall, but the Tron motorcycle is iPad compatible. According to Wired, the builders are including the option of having all displays (gauges, etc) routed through the tablet computer. Hey, that means you could play Tron while driving the Tron motorcycle. Nice. Dangerous, but nice.

[image credit: Michael Lichter]

[video credit: Parker Brothers Choppers]

[source: Wired]