Random Accesses

Call it the "one number to rule them all" service. Google Voice, which goes live in a few weeks, is supposed to let friends, relatives, and business contacts find you whether you're at your desk, on a business trip, or vacationing in Peru. Tests carried out over the past few days suggest that, despite a few glitches, it could well live up to this promise.

Users will soon be able to register, sign up for a phone number in a local area code, and add multiple landline and cell-phone numbers to an account. When someone calls a Google Voice phone number, all the registered phones ring at the same time.

The service takes several telephony technologies--voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), voice transcription, and call routing--and connects them to the Web. Other Internet phone services let you play voice-mail messages on a computer or record calls, but Google Voice is a step towards unified communication. It's the voice equivalent of an e-mail address. Once you register a number, the idea is that you never have to worry about which phone you are using, even if you switch offices, homes, or cell phones.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22380/?a=f

A firm that has designed habitats for plants and animals living in microgravity now hopes to grow the first flowers on the moon, the company's founders announced on Friday.

Engineering firm Paragon Space Development plans to build a greenhouse to fly to the moon. It is set to travel on a lunar lander designed by Odyssey Moon, a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to send an unmanned lunar rover to the moon.

The greenhouse will be used to incubate fast-growing mustard seeds on the lunar surface, in the hopes of producing flowering plants and an iconic image that could be as thrilling as the Apollo images of Earth-rise over the lunar surface.

"We want there to be a great inspirational picture," says Paragon CEO Taber MacCallum, who was one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2, a greenhouse-like enclosure that housed eight inhabitants for two years in the early 1990s.

Sourc: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16858-firm-vows-to-grow-first-flowers-on-the-moon.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Over the past few years, the world has fallen in love with multitouch displays. But today's consumer interfaces have some drawbacks: touch screens such as those on the iPhone and Plastic Logic's upcoming e-reader only work with a finger, not a stylus or even a gloved hand. Other displays, such as Microsoft's Surface and Perceptive Pixel's wall-sized screens, are rigid, relatively expensive, and currently fairly bulky.

New research from New York University, however, promises to make multitouch interfaces that are cheap and flexible and can be used by fingers and objects alike. The technology, called Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD), can be made paper thin, can easily scale down to fit on small portable devices, or can scale up to cover an entire table or wall. The researchers will present IMPAD next week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Boston.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22358/?a=f

The latest version of ASIMO -- the celebrity robot of Honda Motor Co. that can already dance, run and guide guests through an office floor -- has now been fitted with a so-called "brain machine interface" (BMI), the company said.

The state-of-the-art technology means the humanoid can perform four basic movements with its arms, legs and tongue based on the non-verbal instructions a person sends to it by concentrating on performing the action themselves.

"By only imagining moving their right hand, for example, a test person can move ASIMO's right hand," said one of the scientists involved, Tatsuya Okabe of the Honda Research Institute Japan.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news157703000.html

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22339/?a=f