Can sentient machines evolve?

It’s coming, but when? From Garry Kasparov to Michael Crichton, both fact and fiction are converging on a showdown between man and machine. But what does a leading artificial intelligence expert–the world’s first computer science PhD–think about the future of machine intelligence? Will computers ever gain consciousness and take over the world?

“Computer sentience is possible,” said John Holland, professor of electrical engineering an

New imaging technology came to life when ESA’s StarTiger team captured the world’s first terahertz picture of a human hand.

“When we started last June we set an ambitious goal: to build in four months the first compact submillimetre-wave imager with near real time image capturing using state-of-the-art micro-machining technology,” said Peter de Maagt, ESA’s StarTiger Project Manager, “we reached this goal when the first terahertz images was taken in September.”
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Solar Physicists at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London (MSSL-UCL) have discovered new clues to understanding explosions on the Sun.

Coronal mass ejections are violent explosions that can fling electrified gas [plasma] with a mass greater than Mount Everest towards the Earth with destructive consequences for satellites. They can originate from active regions on the Sun, long known to consist of forests of loops filled with plasma. These active loops are roughly 5

What goes on inside the heart of a star? Astronomers have been developing theories about stars’ inner workings for decades, but evidence to confirm the details of those theories has been sparse.

In research supported by NSF, University of Arizona astronomer Elizabeth Green and colleagues have found a new subset of “nearly-naked” stars that dim and brighten due to pulses in their cores. The stars, which may help unlock secrets of advanced stages of stellar evolution, are described in th

A team of network security experts in California has determined that the computer worm that attacked and hobbled the global Internet eleven days ago was the fastest computer worm ever recorded. In a technical paper released today, the experts report that the speed and nature of the Sapphire worm (also called Slammer) represent significant and worrisome milestones in the evolution of computer worms.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and its San Diego Supercompute

A simpler and more reliable manufacturing method has allowed two materials researchers to produce nanoscale magnetic sensors that could increase the storage capacity of hard disk drives by a factor of a thousand. Building on results reported last summer, the new sensors are up to 100 times more sensitive than any current alternative technology.

Susan Hua and Harsh Deep Chopra, both professors at the State University of New York at Buffalo, report in the February issue of Physical Rev

“The computing world is moving from the desktop and workstation to an arena of embedded and wearable computers,” remarked Sandeep Shukla, who recently received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help solve one of the major problems in this transition.

Shukla, who joined the Virginia Tech electrical and computer engineering faculty in August 2002, will use his Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award to devise a strategy for achieving the optimal balance

Recording and classifying the behaviour of laboratory rodents is a vital part of a wide range of studies ranging from the discovery of new drugs and detection of harmful side-effects to the biological control of agricultural pests. Until now, it has been a lengthy and painstaking task, requiring human observers to judge, count and record. But a new computerised system developed with EUREKA’s help has done away with the need for human observers, revolutionising the way labs work around the world.

In recent years, scientists have discovered that the iridescence of various colorful creatures, from beetles to birds to butterflies, is often due to microscopic structures known as photonic crystals. Unlike pigments, which absorb or reflect certain frequencies of light as a result of their chemical composition, the way that photonic crystals reflect light is a function of their physical structure. That is, a material containing a periodic array of holes or bumps of a certain size may reflect blue

Researchers can now pinpoint direction of elusive subatomic particles key to understanding black holes, other cosmic events

A unique telescope buried in Antarctic ice promises unparalleled insight into such extraordinary phenomena as colliding black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the violent cores of distant galaxies and the wreckage of exploded stars.

An international team of physicists and astronomers, which includes UC Irvine researchers, report that the AMANDA telescope is cap

Nothing travels faster than light – it only takes 8 minutes for it to reach the Earth from the nearest star, the Sun, which is 150 million kilometres away. Now anyone can measure this speed – with chocolate stars and a microwave oven! The experiment is described on a new Institute of Physics web resource for teachers about fun physics demonstrations, inspired by the Physics on Stage 2 event.

The only equipment you need for this experiment is a microwave, a ruler and chocolate, cheese or any

Somewhere in the distant, old Universe, a population of stars hide undetected. They were the first to form after the birth of the Universe and are supposed to be far bigger in mass than any star visible today.

Astronomers know they must have been out there: only in this way could they solve the riddle of the origin and composition of stars in today’s Universe. A couple of ESA missions will help astronomers search for this elusive population.

When the Universe formed, there was

Scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD analyzing traffic to one of the 13 Domain Name System (DNS) “root” servers at the heart of the Internet found that the server spends the majority of its time dealing with unnecessary queries. DNS root servers provide a critical link between users and the Internet’s routing infrastructure by mapping text host names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Researchers at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at

Video cameras are used to keep an eye on many indoor and outdoor locations, but to pinpoint suspicious activity, human security guards or intelligence analysts have the unenviable task of watching dozens of video monitors or many hours of recorded video.

Supported by an NSF award, Jezekiel Ben-Arie and his students at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a technique, much faster and more reliable than previous methods, that allows a computer to recognize a human action contai

In a milestone for global science collaboration, CERN took delivery today of the first US-built contribution to what will be the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. The superconducting magnet, built at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory will become a key component of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

It is the first of several advanced accelerator elements the US will provide for the LHC under the terms of a 1998 agreement between CERN and the US Department of Energy (DOE)

Howard Bowman and Colin Johnson of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) have been awarded a grant of £150,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to construct computational models of human attention. The research will be undertaken in collaboration with the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, one of the UK’s leading centres for research into human attention.

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