Will the future involve wiping your memory of any copyrighted works you haven't paid for?

What will post-Singularity life be like in 2052 if you died and your mind was uploaded to a computer? Possibly mired in data rate throttling, advertiser-sponsored consciousness, immoral thought extraction, and memory wipes of copyrighted material.

A new witty video called “Welcome to Life” offers a little glimpse into what it might be like for your mind to awake in a digital world after your biological self has expired. Taking jabs at the Apple experience, terms of service agreements, and all the legal hurdles one might anticipate that could hinder future existence, the video humorously approaches a subject that is rather difficult to imagine. The creator of “Welcome to Life”, Tom Scott, is also responsible for a parody of the Google Glasses video, which captured over 2 million views on YouTube.

Here’s a glimpse into your possible future:

For me, the most intriguing part is the end with the question, “Do you wish to continue?” When the technology becomes available to upload our minds and never fear failing health or aging, we can answer “Yes” to that question perpetually, so long as our service providers can keep the lights on.

Thanks to Noah, a Singularity Hub member, for sending the video to us!

[Media: YouTube]

[Sources: Tom Scott]

The H5N1 virus, or Bird Flu, was easily transmissible between birds but not humans. Two scientists have changed that and are publishing how they did it.

The emergence of the avian flu in 2003 caused alarm around the world as it spread through countries in Asia, leaving victims in its wake. While largely contained to the bird population, for the relatively few humans unlucky enough to catch it the flu proved deadly. Now, two groups of perhaps seemingly mad scientists have successfully modified the H5N1 virus so that it could be passed easily between humans. One of them has already published the work for all the world to see, and the second is soon to follow. What kind of dangers will materialize in a world where the laboratory formulas for superflus and other potential bioweapons are out in the open?

Of the 603 people infected since the 2003 H5N1 outbreak, 356 have died – a 59 percent mortality rate (by comparison, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 that claimed the lives of over 50 million had a mortality rate of just 2 percent). Still, people could take solace in the fact that the flu, luckily, while very well suited to being passed between birds, was not effective at passing from human to human.

Until now.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University in the Netherlands have both been able to modify the virus so that it now is easily transmitted between humans.

Understandably, some are none too happy.

The wisdom of making the DNA sequence of a potentially very deadly virus public was discussed extensively in the media and behind closed public health office doors in the months prior to publication. The University of Pittsburgh’s D. A. Henderson, who helped eradicate smallpox, issued an editorial last December in response to the “ominous news,” arguing that “the benefits of this work do not outweigh the risks.” That same month the World Health Organization expressed “deep concern” about the “possible risks and misuses associated with this research” and about “the potential negative consequences.” Also in December, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provoked concerns further by being clear that we’re all talking about terrorists, citing “evidence in Afghanistan that…al Qaeda…made a call to arms for – and I quote – ‘brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a weapon of mass destruction.’”

The growing concern and condemnation seemed justified when the December tumult concluded with a ruling by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) that Kawaoka’s paper and Fouchier’s paper that was also in the works, be censored – that the mutations shouldn’t be published lest terrorist groups be given the secret formula for a superflu.

Now the debates raged within the scientific community, with one side rejecting the censoring of science in any form, the other side echoed D. A. Henderson’s doubt that the research was even merited in the first place. Long story short, the advisory board reversed their ruling in March after receiving ‘revised’ versions of Kawaoka and Fouchier’s papers. I use that term lightly, as all the mutation data is still there.

The key to Kawaoka’s (controversial yet FBI-approved) breakthrough was a viral protein called hemagglutinin that affects the ability of a virus to bind host cells. The hemagglutinin in H5N1 was well-suited to promote transmission of the virus between birds but not between humans. Kawaoka produced millions of H5N1 variants in which the hemagglutinin was mutated in different ways. When they screened the variants they found a version that, unlike its naturally-occurring counterpart, was very good at infecting human cells in a Petri dish.

The hemagglutinin of the human-targeting H5N1 virus showed four new mutations. Three of the mutations changed the shape of the protein from its normal shape and the fourth changed the pH level at which the virus attaches to cells and injects their genetic material. Sifting through the millions of mutations revealed a secret molecular formula for gaining deadly entry into human cells. To maximize the lethality of their creation, the team combined the mutated gene with the seven remaining genes – flu viruses have a total of eight genes – of a particularly transmittable flu virus; specifically, from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus.

And then they gave the modified viruses to ferrets. The new virus worked ‘beautifully,’ rapidly infecting ferrets separately housed in different cages. Assuming ferrets are a good model for viral transmission among other mammals, like humans, the scientists would have taken a virus that was relatively harmless to humans and turned it into a Franken-flu with a monstrous potential for harm were it ever to get out.

The paper, detailing what mutations went where, was published May 2nd in the journal Nature.

Only four or five mutations were needed to turn the relatively harmless bird flu into a potential nightmare.

So should we be concerned about the world knowing that switching asparagine-224 to a lysine and a few other like changes turns a relatively harmless bird disease into a superbug threat for humans? A couple months ago during one of our Google+ Hangouts we brought up the debate to New York Times science columnist and writer of The Loom Carl Zimmer who’d last year wrote a book about viruses.

“I can sleep at night knowing that that’s going on but I don’t rule out the danger of it. On the other hand I do think there’s a danger in totally stifling this type of research. If somebody did release some sort of horrible bioweapon we would probably find a vaccine or cure if this information was available to people as easily and quickly as possible so that you’re essentially crowdsourcing a solution as opposed to, say, if anybody wants this data you’re going to have to fill out three thousand pages of paperwork and then we’ll get back to you, and in the meanwhile another thousand people have died.”

The practicalities of a quick and effective response aside, Zimmer isn’t too alarmed by the threat of a superbug let loose in the first place.

“I think an argument could be made that [a virus] is a pretty lousy bioweapon. There’s good chance that if you were…trying to make a very virulent kind of flu you might very well be the first person to die. But let’s imagine you were able to transport it to some other country and unleash it. Take a look at what happened in 2009 with the Swine Flu. It was first noticed in Mexico, and by the time scientists really had a good handle on it in Mexico, we now know that it was already all over the world, because people have been getting on planes and going all over the place. So, if some horrible person unleashed a very virulent flu in New York, a lot of people would get on planes and go back to that terrorist’s home country trying to escape the flu.”

Of course, anyone willing to unleash a virulent flu in New York might not have cared to think these matters through.

And the second recipe, Fouchier’s, which will be published shortly in Science, is rumored to formulate an H5N1 virus even more lethal than Kawaoka’s. Fouchier’s group took a slightly different strategy by jumpstarting it with mutations that fostered its transmission from birds to ferrets, but then instead of screening for mutations that made the virus transmissible between ferrets, they took viruses from sick ferrets and injected them into healthy ferrets. Mimicking the way the viruses adapt in nature the viruses mutated as they were artificially transmitted from ferret to ferret, until they began transmitting on their own. As Fouchier told the New Scientist, his flu “is transmitted as efficiently as seasonal flu.” With a near 60 percent mortality, let’s hope his observation is never confirmed. The seasonal flu already leaves between 250,000 and 500,000 around the world dead each year.

But the method by which Fouchier’s bird flu was created could be considered an argument for creating superflus in the lab in the first place. Injecting viruses from sick ferrets into healthy ones until they adapted simulates the worst case scenario for humans. Conceivably, all it would take for the bird-to-human H5N1 to become a human-to-human H5N1 would be a finite number of transmissions between humans. As with the ferrets, the virus would adapt. How many direct contact transmissions would it need before it became airborne? The virus passed between Fouchier’s ferrets need just ten transmissions.

Ten transmissions and five mutations – one more than Kawaoka’s virus needed. Either way, it’s a very short jaunt along evolution’s path to go from a relatively benign bird flu to the potentially most destructive infectious agent ever to face humanity. So if similar mutations are needed to make the virus airborne between humans, knowing ahead of time what those mutations are, as Zimmer pointed out, gives us a head start in creating a vaccine.

A good enough reason? You tell me. But in the end it doesn’t really matter which side of the issue you’re on because the superflu recipe is already out there. We know it’s the first of two, and we can bet that other publications will follow that are potential bioweapon cheat sheets for “horrible persons.” Surely the debate will rage on as these papers come out, with one side saying benefits don’t outweigh risk, the other side saying we can’t afford to not be prepared.

[image credits: Wall Street Journal, International Business Times, and Nature]
images: China, China2, Paper

Tupac Hologram Sings At Coachella

Just a week after Easter, Coachella music festival was shaken by the ghostly visage of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, resurrected to strut the stage for five surreal minutes, leaving the crowd stunned. It is now well known that this hip-hop apparition was a product of both state-of-the-art computer graphics and antiquated stage tricks. However, the source of the erstwhile rapper’s unmistakable voice – which shouted “what the f*** is up Coachella?!” to a festival that didn’t exist until three years after his 1996 murder – is still unclear. It’s possible that ‘Pac’s pronouncements were invoked by way of speech synthesis, digital mimicry of the human voice. “The underlying technology is somewhat freely available and with enough time, I believe it would be possible to synthesize a new song by hand,” says Alan Black, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute. “I sort of think that’s what happened here.”

Experimenters have sought to recreate and control the sounds of speech for centuries, processing snippets of recorded voices, manipulating signals, and modeling the human vocal tract – sometimes with unsettling results. These days, a common approach involves building digital libraries of recorded phonemes (‘Shakur,’ for example, can be broken into five phonemes: ‘Sh,’ ‘a,’ ‘k,’ ‘u,’ and ‘r’), which are recombined and treated with vibrato, pitch, and breath to synthesize human utterances. This is called “concatenative synthesis,” and the process is refined enough that a new translation program by Microsoft can do it automatically. After an hour of getting familiar, the software will translate a user’s words among 26 languages, in their speaking voice.

Hatsune Miku - The Virtual Diva

A similar process also drives the daily conversations between iPhone users and Siri, Apple’s chatty digital assistant. The source voice of Siri is undisclosed except in the UK, but wide public acceptance of conversational tech reveals how ready we are to recognize the personalities of even artificial speakers. The sound of the dated synthesizer that allows famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking to communicate is so inevitably tied to his public identity, his technician was reluctant to upgrade to more realistic synthetic voices now available.

Meanwhile, the speech patterns of dearly departed voices are being painstakingly recreated, as with the beloved Japanese entertainer Hitoshi Ueki, aspiring for total realism in vocaloid form. Years before Coachella, holographic superstars have been performing fan-generated songs to sold-out arenas in Japan and the States, a full-blown pop phenomenon powered by voice synthesis. Chart-topping “E-Diva” Hatsune Miku is the most popular of this growing troupe of singing, dancing vocaloids, whose digital intonations stir fans as surely as Lady GaGa or Katy Perry (themselves arguably examples of speech synthesis).

When IBM’s DeepQA computer Watson was equipped with a soothing voice synth and let loose on Jeopardy, we were offered a glimpse at the potential power of a computer brain with the ability of human speech. Even the game show’s counter-intuitive format and questions ripe with puns and wordplay rarely tripped up Watson, always addressed by name, always listening and ready to speak up. Talking to machines can seem downright natural when we feel that we are exchanging more than mere data, even if the sense of true communication is, at this point, only illusory.

When crowds are brought to their feet by what basically amounts to an overhead projector, and frustration peaks as we and our devices misunderstand one another, granting machines our most fundamental form of communication is leading to a more complicated relationship, and may indeed signal a burgeoning conversation. While we might not expect thrilling repartee with a synthetic voice for some time, it’s clear that as our computers learn their first words we are beginning to recognize their voices.

About The Author: Doug Bierend is a Los Angeles based writer interested in technology, culture, and where they intersect

The Singularity Hub Membership Program is building a one of a kind community of future-minded thinkers, and I’m proud to say that we’ve had some amazing success so far. Here’s a taste of just some of the people who have joined the Membership recently:

• One of the world’s most successful Second Life entrepreneurs and real estate developers
• Commercial and securities litigation lawyer who is writing a science fiction novel on nanotechnology.
• Advertising executive who licenses and curates a TEDx event.
• Physicist and software engineer starting a nonprofit to provide lab space to the community
• Researcher analyzing millions of tweets a day to better understand general intelligence
• “Transmedia” producer and writer exploring virtual reality in Los Angeles
• Tech entrepreneur and CEO taking a two year sabbatical to travel around the world
• Senior physician working with global organizations aiming to usher in the era of eHealth.

These incoming Members join a vibrant collection of techno-optimists that include: authors, futurists, virtual reality entrepreneurs, media experts, CEOs, attorneys, doctors, soldiers, web personalities, movie makers, university deans, cartoonists, bloggers, MMO game programmers, and teachers.

The Singularity Hub Membership Program has spread across the US and is undeniably global with members living in Washington DC, London, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, Vienna, Moscow, Greece, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, and the Netherlands.

There’s no question that the most powerful part of the Hub Membership is the Members themselves. Every week we bring in new VIPs from various tech industries so that our insightful and enthusiastic members get a first hand chance to talk directly with the people helping shape humanity’s future. Last week we spoke with Rudi Hoffman, one of the world’s most successful evangelists for cryogenic storage of human bodies. Hoffman explained how life insurance and a little forethought could have your body preserved indefinitely after death. And for much less money than you would think: less than $200/month in many cases, and without any help from family after you die. Our next Hangout guest is Robbie Allen, head of Automated Insights (formerly Statsheets). Allen has built a network of thousands of sports related webpages using computer generated content instead of human writers. And he’s bringing the same approach to all other corners of the writing market. When the minds of our Membership meet up with the expertise of our guest VIPs, great things happen.

So don’t miss out on it. If you’re already a member, keep enjoying it, and let us know what we can do to make it better. Also, don’t forget to invite your friends. Every new member you recruit gets you a month’s free subscription. If you’re not a member, think about joining. Reading about the amazing technological changes happening today is wonderful. Being part of the community that hopes to guides those changes is even better.

Harvard and MIT join forces to bring the world education for free...in superhero fashion.

Online education is witnessing its own Avengers-like uniting of superhero forces as Harvard University and MIT recently announced “edX”, a combined $60 million joint initiative to offer their college-level courses online for free. Launching in the fall of 2012, edX is a not-for-profit organization formed by the two universities to bring each institution’s free online course offerings to a broader global audience.

Courses will be delivered through the open source MITx platform in development to host courses that were previously part of the OpenCourseWare program.

As with the MITx initiative, edX plans to issue certificates (possibly costing a small fee) to students for completing courses; however, course completion will not earn college credits at either institution and the certificates will be issued from edX, not through either university.

The initiative hopes that other prestigious universities will join the venture to make the educational behemoth even stronger.

Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, gave an insight into the philosophy of the move poignantly saying, “You can choose to view this era as one of threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes.’’

Although MIT’s online courses have been well publicized, Harvard was just getting into the game and weighed the best direction to go in, especially in light of competitive programs moving into the space, such as the for-profits Udacity, the Minerva Project and Coursera. Officials at Harvard ultimately opted to keep the program not-for-profit and partnered with MIT to utilize its technology, which is being designed to be much more interactive and supportive than previous course platforms are known to be. Additionally, the MITx technology will include automated grading software, also known as roboreaders, to grade the thousands to hundreds of thousands of essays expected from the sheer number of students in the program.

For either university, giving away its most valuable content for free seems to be the surest way to dilute their programs and on-campus experiences, but the reality is that the universities have much more to gain than to lose. First, MIT has spent years building a much more public educational brand by allowing anyone to take courses through OpenCourseWare, so edX is a way for Harvard to build on that marketing while offering the quality that is associated with the institution. Second, the MITx technology under development is an evolution of the online course software that both institutions have invested in over the years, so they come into this initiative with a clearer idea of what students need. Furthermore, by making the software open source, the global community is only going to help make the technology even better.

But one of the biggest hidden bonuses of this initiative is the research opportunities in education, technology, and online learning provided by such an enormous student base. The initiative is a giant virtual lab that will draw researchers from around the world who are interested in the future of online education and all the areas that it overlaps with.

Online education is ramping up and it’s quickly becoming about which platforms are going to dominate the landscape over the long term. Stanford University has already had some amazing success with online education, with over 100,000 students enrolling in a single artificial intelligence class last August. Although the world could benefit from having multiple options for free education, the possibility of Stanford joining edX would make even the Superfriends jealous.

You can watch the press conference announcing the initiative and the panel discussion to get a sense of the excitement that both universities have for this joint venture:

Video streaming by Ustream

[Media: Boston Globe, Sloan, UStream]

[Sources: The Atlantic, Boston Globe, edX]

You’re watching Accelerated Tech News, Singularity Hub’s experimental new video series that gives you the week’s top stories in science and tech in an easily digested video summary. What makes ATN experimental? You mean, besides the fact that we’re shooting it in a bunker with a guy who refers to his audience as “hubbers”? This new approach to our world class techno-optismistic content is here to take a few risks and present a new alternative to how you learn about the emerging trends in science and industry that will shape humanity in the next decade. Do you want the indepth content that explores such topics as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to the fullest extent? Then the main articles on Singularity Hub are there for you. If, however, you want a fast-paced approach, a quick look at all the great innovations that are fueling the 21st Century, Accelerated Tech News is your ideal source. Think of ATN as a table of contents, a way to sample the scientific flavors of the week before you choose those stories you want to consumer and really digest in full. Watch Accelerated Tech News to get excited, then read Singularity Hub to expand your mind.

ATN is also experimental because we want it to serve a new kind of purpose: cultural diplomacy. Let’s face it, the Technological Singularity gets a bad rap out there in the mainstream media. Either we’re sold silly notions of the “robo-pocalypse” through Hollywood blockbusters or we’re told major innovations in robotics, genetics, and computing are “50 to 100″ years away. Even on the internet the concept of the Singularity is derided as the “rapture of nerds”. Where is the voice of the techno-optimist, the well reasoned exploration of the possibility that humanity could change, is likely to change, drastically in the next few decades? Accelerated Tech News is our answer. It’s our ambassador to the general population. If we can show you enough cool science news, if we can connect the dots between one innovation and the next, maybe we can start to prove that exponential growth in technology is something to believe in. And work towards.

So, as a new time watcher, or as a dedicated “hubber”, we want your input. This is all a big experiment, and we need some data. If ATN is the ambassador to the general population, how can we make it better? Should it be quirkier and more light hearted, or serious and to the point? We want to keep it fast, and keep it easily digested by the public, but other than that we are open to your suggestions. Let us know what kind of program you want in the comments below. Together we can build a show that not only gets us excited about Singularity Hub news, but that gets the world thinking about the possibilities of tomorrow.

Would seeing the Facebook Like count for an outfit make you more inclined to buy it?

The Brazilian fashion retailer C&A has created networked clothes hooks that display the total number of Facebook “Likes” for each garment in real time. On the company’s Facebook page, pictures of various outfits are shown that users can Like, and those totals are fed into the hooks in the São Paulo store. While using Facebook to advertise clothes offerings isn’t anything new, physically displaying them in a store is. Although fairly simple in its delivery, the initiative, called Fashion Like, is a novel way to bridge the physical and virtual worlds for customers.

The promotional video for the service pitches the idea like this (translated from Portuguese): “When they go clothes shopping, women always feel insecure and want a second opinion. But one second opinion is never enough. So how about finding what everyone on Facebook thinks of a particular item of clothing?” At the end, viewers are presented with an altruistic pitch: “So give ‘Likes’ to the clothes you like more and help thousands of women in their difficult mission of choosing the ideal outfit.”

Now, anyone with a smartphone could go to the store and pull up the Facebook page to find out the number of Likes that the garment has. The new hooks, however, offer that information instantly and allow for rapid comparisons. There’s a good chance that shoppers will check the comments in Facebook about the garment before buying or post a comment after they purchase it and like it.

So on the surface, Fashion Like may seem like a gimmick to generate buzz, but what C&A is doing is encouraging customers to use Facebook more, which allows them to access the brand anytime, anywhere.

As cool as it is to see this kind of crossover of a web service into the physical world, the approach is not without its issues. First of all, hitting a button because you like a picture is not a very informed view. Even if its generally understood that users are not making authoritative opinions with a single click, the Facebook Like total is akin to a simple fan review, kind of like the number of seats sold at a football game. Additionally, the Like count is a populist vote – the number on its own is meaningless, so it’s significance is gauged through a comparison of the numbers from one item to the next. And then there’s the possibility of fraudulent behavior, such as rigging the numbers by hiring people to Like a particular garment using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay out pennies per Like, or the crowd could abuse the up-voting system just as the most viewed videos on YouTube list has been abused.

In the end, C&A has found a way to tighten its ecosystem and appeal to those who want to be part of the social-media-meets-physical-world loop. This is only the beginning as other companies are bound to experiment with breaking the virtual world into the physical as they seek the most valuable currency of the modern world: data.

[Media: Digital Trends, YouTube]

[Sources: C&A, Digital Trends, The Verge]

Would you give up your privacy for a free BlackBerry?

For four years, nearly 200 high school students in Dallas voluntarily allowed every text, email, and IM to be monitored. That these youth would sign off on such an invasion of privacy, especially in light of the content that was discovered within their communication, shows how much the next generation has changed their views on privacy.  Students allowed a team of researchers to capture all of their messaging, whether it was completely innocent or contained swearing, sexual references, and even drug deals, to the tune of 500,000 texts per month in exchange for a free BlackBerry!

With a $3.4 million grant from the NIH, Dr. Marion Underwood from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas-Dallas embarked on the study with the goal of investigating the formation and maintenance of friendships as well as the dynamics of social and physical aggression. The students signed up in 2003 as 4th graders (with their parents consent) for the research, which at the time was named “The Friendship Project.”

For the next four years, students and parents would be interviewed and would self report about friendships, but valuable information about relationships and social interactions is lost when relying only on self reporting and interviewing. But in 2007, with the students one year away from entering high school, Dr. Underwood got a BlackBerry and saw the potential for tracking all of the students’ communication.

The study was then transformed into the more ominously titled “The BlackBerry Project.”

To continue to participate in the study, students agreed to have all of their electronic communication stored in a database. Those who did received a new BlackBerry complete with unlimited messaging, a data plan, and voice minutes. Every year through high school, the students have been given a new BlackBerry, and now as seniors, they have produced an enormous amount of data, a virtual window into the lives of teens. It’s clear that the researchers will be crunching on the data for a long time.

According to Forbes, Dr. Underwood indicated that concern over privacy among the students and their parents have been a non-issue (probably for different reasons).

Details about the success of the methodology in tracking teen communication were released in a recent paper published in Developmental Psychology. The paper describes a data set collected from a two-day window over homecoming, which included a football game and a dance.  For parents, some unsettling statistics from the 43,000 texts emerged (which comes out to 127 texts per participant per day). The data shows that students were rather open in their communication with nearly seven percent of texts contained either profane or sexual language. Contrary to other studies and perhaps popular opinion, girls texted to the same degree as boys. Not only did many students report using their BlackBerry always or most of the time, the overwhelming majority reported liking the BlackBerry a great deal.

Results from the study show that boys and girls text often and equally.

The teens were from homes in the Dallas area that spanned the entire income range. Additionally, their racial distribution (50% Caucasian, 23% African American, 15% Hispanic) is also approximately representative of the demographics of other major U.S. cities, such as Boston.

While it is shocking to some that kids would so willingly allow their most intimate conversations to be mined for data about everything from bullying to suicidal thoughts, it is easy to underestimate the value of a smartphone to today’s teens. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that among 12 to 17 year olds, 75 percent own cell phones. Additionally, over 70 percent of teenagers text message regularly and have unlimited text messaging plans. A student without a cell phone is left out of the biggest social scene at school and lacks convenient access to the web, which is a global social club.

But beyond gadget envy, the willingness of the participants reflects a shift in the generational attitude about privacy.

A 2007 Zogby poll found a markedly different perspective about privacy between younger Americans and older age groups. For instance, according to the poll, around 1 out of 3 respondents aged 18-24 felt that their privacy would be violated if someone posted a picture of them in their swimsuit, whereas nearly 2 of 3 older respondents agreed. Furthermore, 1 out of every 5 of the younger people said that who they had dated was too private for the web, but over half of the older demographic said it would be an invasion of their privacy if someone accessed their dating profile without their consent. Altogether, the generational disparity disappeared in one area: 91 percent said that expectations about privacy have changed due to technology and the Internet.

In terms of privacy within the study, Dr. Underwood describes how she and the two others on the team with access to the database went to great lengths not to betray the confidence of the teens to their parents, even when some of the kids ran away from home or illegal activities were being discussed. And students were well aware that the “BlackBerry people” were watching but indicated trust that they wouldn’t be reported for what was texted.

This suggests that privacy was important to the students when it came to passing information to their parents, but not to complete strangers.

With the mound of data the team is sitting on, this is not the last we’ll hear from the Blackberry Project. Furthermore, researchers and companies around the world now have a winning game plan for the Free-Phone-For-Data strategy. While older generations and privacy advocates might be appalled at that prospect, the younger generations will likely think “What’s the big deal?” And that difference explains volumes about the underlying difference between how different generations use social media and the web in general.

It’s safe to say, privacy doesn’t mean the same thing to the younger generation as it does to the older and, just as many suspected, you can thank the web and technology for that.

[Media: APA, sxc]

[Sources: APA, Forbes, PR Newswire]

Small molecule, big controversy. A new study clears doubts about how resveratrol causes its anti-aging effects.

Resveratrol, the famed anti-aging supplement extracted from red wine, has experienced its share of controversy. An experimental artifact, a pair of studies that questioned its health benefits, and the shady practices of one now-discredited scientist have put resveratrol in a bad light as of late. But a recent study now attempts to help set the record straight by confirming one part of the resveratrol puzzle.

Resveratrol was first identified in 2003 when Konrad Howitz, working with David Sinclair’s group at Harvard, found that it activated the protein SIRT1. Past research has “implicated” SIRT1 as an anti-aging factor due to the beneficial effects it has on glucose homeostasis, neurodegeneration, and integrity of the cell’s power house, the mitochondria. A number of studies suggested that the healthful benefits of resveratrol were via the activation of SIRT1 but it still remained to be shown convincingly. Even casting doubt on resveratrol’s ability to activate SIRT1 were two 2005 studies that showed that a fluorescent marker used in one of the experiments was activating SIRT1 itself.

To get to the molecular bottom of things, Harvard biologist David Sinclair and his team devised an elegant experiment to see if resveratrol still had the same effect on cells if SIRT1 was removed. This would be a convincing demonstration that the beneficial effects of resveratrol were indeed through the activation of SIRT1. To do this the group developed a mouse that was genetically modified so that all of the SIRT1 in its body would disappear when it was given a certain chemical. Strikingly, normal mice in the study reaped the expected benefits when given resveratrol, but mice with no SIRT1 did not.

Sinclair co-founded Sirtis Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs that, like resveratrol, activate SIRT1, so obviously data supporting that the benefits of resveratrol are via SIRT1 activation helps out Sinclair and other companies developing drugs meant to mimic resveratrol or otherwise activate SIRT1. Conversely, we previously pointed out that two studies which put into question resveratrol’s beneficial effects were performed by Pfizer and Amgen, companies in competition with Glaxo-Smith-Kline who bought Sirtis in 2008 for $720 million.

Does the potential conflict of interest detract from the powerful demonstration Sinclair’s team was able to show with their genetically-modified mice?  There are sure to be more pieces to the resveratrol puzzle and the current experiment will have to be reproduced. But for the moment, demonstrating the link between the wine extract and SIRT1 is an important step if resveratrol will ever be shown to live up to its anti-aging potential.

[image credits: LA Times and extremelongevity.net]
images: wine and molecule

Polymer scaffolds guide stem cells growth into customized sizes and shapes.

It may be hard to remember what it was like to lose a tooth as a child, but many adults get an unpleasant reminder as they age when their teeth begin to fall out (even those who don’t play hockey) and must consider dentures or dental implants. For years, researchers have investigated stem cells in an effort to grow teeth made for a person’s own cells. Toward this end, endodontics professor Dr. Peter Murray and colleagues from the College of Dental Medicine at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) have developed methods to control adult stem cell growth toward generating dental tissue and “real” replacement teeth.

The NSU researchers’ approach is to extract stem cells from oral tissue, such as inside a tooth itself, or from bone marrow. After being harvested, the cells are mounted to a polymer scaffold in the shape of the desired tooth. The polymer is the same material used in bioreabsorable sutures, so the scaffold eventually dissolves away. Teeth can be grown separately then inserted into a patient’s mouth or the stem cells can be grown within the mouth reaching a full-sized tooth within a few months.

So far, teeth have been regenerated in mice and monkeys, and clinical trials with humans are underway, but whether the technology can generate teeth that are nourished by the blood and have full sensations remains to be seen. Teeth present a unique challenge for researchers because the stem cells must be stimulated to grow the right balance of hard tissue, dentin and enamel, while producing the correct size and shape.

As Dr. Murray explains it, humans already have two sets of teeth, baby and adult sets, over the course of their lifetimes, so “All we are trying to do is copy nature and give the person the third option to re-grow their teeth.” Not only could this be important for replacing lost teeth, but it could become a standard treatment when extreme orthodontics is necessitated. And if the tooth is malformed or fails, it can be extracted and a new one put into place.

To date, the NSU researchers have received about $1.7 million in grants for their dental stem cell research.

Dr. Murray believes that if they can demonstrate control over tooth re-growth and prove that the technology is safe, these teeth will be the first to see widespread adoption in the US. He also reports that interest has been high from the public and even fellow dentists, as evidenced by the recent selling out of his “Regenerative Endodontic Procedures” presentation at the American Dental Association conference in Las Vegas.

You can check out a news piece about NSU’s research here.

Just as developments in embryonic stem cell research launched umbilical cord banks, the promise that dental stem cell therapy holds has led to the rise of tooth banks, such as BioEden, StemSave, and Store-A-Tooth (StemSave, for instance, charges $2,430 to store a child’s tooth for 20 years.) Stem cell therapies are being actively used to repair bone damage, facial bones, and even organs like a heart, but skeptics continue to scoff at the potential of stem cells, oft citing nightmare scenarios or runaway tissue growth. Furthermore, research progress is often clouded by the politics surrounding embryonic stem cell research.

But the one therapy that could silence the naysayers is tooth regeneration.

The statistics on tooth loss are a bit staggering: 7 out of 10 adults age 35 to 44 have lost at least one tooth and a quarter of those aged 65 or older (or about 20 million people) have lost all their permanent teeth. Additionally, side effects from medications can effect oral health, such as changing properties of the saliva that helps fight bacterial growth. And increased tooth loss leads to poor dietary habits even among dentists, according to a recent study, which leads to secondary health effects. Add to this high sugar diets contributing to the obesity epidemic and increasing cases of periodontal disease due to neglect and you can see that the market for tooth replacement is enormous and expected to grow.

Having a full set of functional teeth is increasingly important as an aging population seeks to maintain an active lifestyle. And the growth of social media has led to people’s faces being plastered all over Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. So how your teeth look is more important than ever, especially with more people carrying high quality cameras built into their mobile devices.

Dentists are at the front line of the increased demand for perfect teeth. A 2009 nationwide survey by NSU revealed that 96% of the dentists polled expected stem cell regeneration to dominate the future of dentistry. Additionally, more than half predicted that the technology would be available within the next decade.

In mice, stem cells grew into a tooth (in green) that had similar properties to natural teeth.

Research into using stem cells to regrow new teeth has been around for at least 10 years. In 2002, Professor Paul Sharpe at the Dental Institute of King’s College in London received a $500,000 Wellcome Trust grant to translate tooth regrowth with stem cells in mice into regenerative dentistry for humans. A company was formed, Odontis, and in 2010 seemed ready to launch its BioTooth technology, but has since fallen off the radar and had its website shut down possibly suffering the same fate that led to Geron Corporation abandoning stem cell research last year. Researchers from Tokyo University in 2009 reported success with implantation of stem cell tooth germs in mice which grew into fully functional teeth within a few months. Scaffolds were also successfully used to regrow anatomically correct teeth in nine weeks by researchers at Colombia University Medical Center.

Although the promise of stem cell therapies remains to be realized, there’s little doubt that researchers at NSU and around the world will continue in their efforts to use stem cells for regenerative medicine.

Dr. Murray remains optimistic: “When dental stem cell therapies become routine it will be historic, and the most fantastic time to practice as a dentist.”

[Media: Sun Sentinel]

[Sources: ABC, BBC, DentalAegis, Ivanhoe, PopSci, Sun Sentinel]

It may not look like a barista is in this box, but Briggo's robot is inside prepping the next espresso shot.

Say goodbye to lattes with funky tastes or attitude from coffeehouse baristas. At the University of Texas, a startup called Briggo LLC has installed a coffee kiosk run by a robotic barista in the academic center, which is visited by 10,000 students a day. Designed by Deaton Engineering Inc., the kiosk is segmented into brewed coffee and espresso drinks, and the drinks can also be prepared according to customer milk, syrup, and sweetener preferences. According to founder and CTO Charles Studor, inside the kiosk is a “big industrial machine” with about 250 sensors that mirrors the physical motions of a human barista.

With this new “robista”, as its called, Briggo aims to meet the two biggest needs of coffee drinkers: convenience and quality.

To get their java jolt, students submit an order online, via mobile, or at the kiosk, and can even receive a text or email when the drink is ready. The brewed coffees take 15-30 seconds to prepare while espresso drinks require about 2 minutes. So customers can easily submit an order and then head to the kiosk to pick up their coffee just as its completed. Each coffee is labeled with the customer’s name and also displayed on the kiosk. Prices are cheaper than typical coffeehouse prices, and kiosk operators still oversee the flow and refill stock.

The touch menu offers a variety of coffee drinks with prices and prep times listed.

With patents pending, the robot remains behind closed doors, but according to Sprudge, an actual espresso machine is used with a real tamper and steam wind, along with a milk refrigerator. Since the espresso machine hasn’t been re-engineered, in all likelihood Briggo’s automation may be much closer to a “true” robot than what’s going on inside a vending machine.

Still, the question that probably matters the most is, how does it perform? Feedback has been positive, with good reviews popping up in the press and even Wired. A YouTube video shows students talking about Briggo very positively:

The robot may not be able to prepare espresso that would impress coffee aficionados who pride themselves on perfect crema, but it seems that the 99% are satisfied with what they pay for. Perhaps that’s because the Director of Coffee and Kiosk Operations is Patrick Pierce, an award winning barista. Briggo brought Pierce on as a consultant at first to understand exactly what Pierce does when he pulls espresso, so that an automated system could be designed to perform each step. Studor said, “We’re taking a nationally recognized barista and mimicking what he’s doing, consistently.” The system is designed so that each variable that goes into the perfect coffee can be adjusted, just as in a manufacturing process. Along with former CEO of Dell Financial Services, Kevin Nater, and CIO John Craparo, who worked at GE, the Briggo team initially raised $5 million in funding and is using its connections in technology to prepare for expansion.

The Briggo logo is a reminder of the robotic love in each cup.

Besides the technology to prep great tasting coffee, the company clearly has incorporated key priorities that go hand-in-hand with the modern coffee culture. Briggo aims to be socially responsible by using only organic fair trade beans from a Peruvian collective of growers and compostable cups and lids. It utilizes social media heavily, with an active Twitter feed with coffee slogans, giveaways and specials as well as any service delays. Its hours of operation are convenient for students, operating until midnight M-Th (key study times) and 10 PM on the weekends. Patrons can also setup an account that will allow them to save their favorite drinks, and an app for Android is available. There’s even a T-shirt for Briggo promoting the”coffee robot.”

The startup has a vision to introduce robot kiosks into other universities as well as places with clientele similar to the up-all-night college students, such as convention centers, hospitals, courthouses, and transportation centers, like airports and train stations. In other words, primo real estate. They also are working on a smaller version, with the possibility of franchising to build the brand.

Now, maybe you’re thinking: Sure coffee’s a big deal, but “robotic manufacturing” big?

Even with all the coffee available through coffeehouses, kiosks, fast food places, convenience stores, vending machines, and home brewers, it’s still easy to underestimate the size of the coffee industry. The world’s most traded commodity is oil, but second is coffee. More than 400 million cups of coffee are consumed globally each day, and in the U.S, coffee is a $19 billion dollar a year industry, the eighth highest globally with the average American drinking 3 cups a day.

Coffee is about as big of a business as they come, so it’s a perfect place for an innovative startup to bring the power of technology, and the reason is simple: it’s what brought customers back to Starbucks.

Starbucks, once claimed #7 in 2008 on CNN Money’s 100 Best Companies To Work For but dropped to #98 last year, in part because it lost some of its luster from years gone by. That’s why the company has actively embraced technology, such as mobile payments and free Wi-Fi, in addition to social media. For all its increased efforts to be seen as a community-building, technology-embracing, environmentally-responsible, employee-supporting company, it is regarded by many as the McDonald’s of coffeehouses. But Burger King, Wendy’s, and a host of other fast food hamburger joints still get a piece of the pie, but strangely Starbucks stands head-and-shoulders about its coffee competitors.

And what has been Starbuck’s traditional selling points? Convenience and quality, exactly what Briggo is aiming to perfect with the robot kiosk.

But the elephant in the room is the fear of humans losing jobs to robots. Because of the size of the coffee industry and the fact that coffeehouses have a strong “third place” social element to them that is hard to replicate at a kiosk, human baristas will be around for a while. However, a chain like Starbucks may not be able to remain 100 percent human forever.

Perhaps the 2035 logo will be a robotic eye as well?

Recently, Starbucks announced it is moving into single-cup brewing machines with its new Verismo line positioned to go up against the popular Keurig machines. So it’s clear that the tried-and-true coffee merchant is open to ideas to expand its brand, and a robotic kiosk might just be the solution it needs to expand into even more locations while downsizing workforce overhead.

Briggo may be the first of its kind in the coffee world, but its a triple shot threat that may usher in a future “Battle of the Robistas.” And, as a fair warning, if a robot ever learns to perfect the power-packed and highly addictive Café Cubano, we are all doomed.

[Media: AdWeek, Briggo, Sprudge]

[Sources: Austin Chronicle, Bizjournal, Briggo, Coffeemarvel, KEYE, Wired, YouTube]

During test drives the cars will have red license plates. When the car is eventually marketed to consumers, the plate will be green.

We knew Nevada was serious about becoming the first state to adopt driverless cars when the governor signed a law last year requiring the state to come up with regulations by which to authorize autonomous vehicles. They did, and now the first license to test autonomous vehicles in the state has been awarded to – no surprise here – Google’s robotic car.

It wasn’t long ago that it gave a lift to its first passenger. Now the Google car has been awarded the first autonomous test license. That it’s Google who takes the first licensed test run comes as no surprise, not only because their sensor-laden, robotic Toyota Prius has been the most visible robotic car over the past year and a half, but also because the licenses are largely a result of Google’s own lobby pushing for them. And some of the car’s 200,000 miles have been logged on freeways and neighborhood streets in Carson City, Nevada and – you guessed it – the Vegas Strip. After reviewing Google’s system functions, safety plans, employee training, and accident reporting mechanisms the Nevada DMV’s Autonomous Review Committee gave Google its license. The license requires two humans to be in the car at all times, with one behind the wheel to take over in case something goes wrong.

So if you live in Nevada be on the lookout. Autonomous cars will have Nevada license plates with red backgrounds and an infinity symbol, to make them easy to spot by citizens and police officers. If all goes according to plan and the test vehicles perform as hoped, the vehicles will be made available to the public, green plates will replace the red, but the infinity symbol will remain.

You gotta hand it to both Google and Nevada, they’re certainly wasting no time in getting robotic cars on the road. The Nevada DMV said in a press release that Google may have been the first, but other auto manufacturers have also indicated their interest in filing license applications. So it seems that this is just the beginning, and if all goes well, public acceptance of robotic vehicles is sure to increase dramatically.

These are exciting times, the age of robotic vehicles is upon us.

[image credits: ars technica]
image: Google

Just a few fine specimens created through My Robot Nation.

The months old startup My Robot Nation was recently acquired by high-end 3D printing company, 3D Systems, adding yet another tool in their arsenal as they break into the consumer market. It’s a robotic match made in nerd heaven: one company allows you to design robots, the other to print them out at home.

My Robot Nation launched only this past December, but already they’ve built an impressive following from people who simply want to design their own robot online and have it arrive in the mail. The 2- to 6-inch robots come in all shapes and colors for $17.99 to $169.99, and some creators just can’t have enough robots. The creator with the most robots, “chilong,” has made 47 robots, and there’s been enough robots made already that the larger Nation has been broken down into five sub-Nations, including Warrior Nation, Sci-Fi Nation, and Retro Nation. Looking at the cartoonish robots, it’s easy to see how My Robot Nation is as popular as it is.

Here’s a great video that shows you just how easy and fun making your one-of-a-kind robot can be.

3D Systems is a big fan of My Robot Nation too. The company has been in the business of 3D printing for decades, but mainly high-end printing for rapid prototyping for vehicle designers and engineers, energy companies, electronics makers, healthcare innovators, recreation companies that make anything from Lego-like blocks to fishing lures, and educators in need of visuals to teach science and technology. Ideally, the rapid prototyping would allow companies to identify design flaws early and reduce the chance for costly redesign. It also speeds up the entire design process, which can make the difference in being first to market ahead of your competitors. The ProJet 3500Plus is their new, top of the line high-definition printer. With a 16 micron print resolution, the prototypes are stunning replicas of the real thing.

3D Systems was already making cool stuff, like this pair of Beavis'-looking chopsticks. What, you don't think they look like Beavis'?

But they’re not the only ones in the high-end 3D printing business, which is why they’ve bought up 24 companies in the last two years, My Robot Nation being the most recent. A vital part of 3D’s transformation is Cubify, a suite of tools that allow users to turn their ideas into tangible realities right at home. 3D Apps, libraries containing 3D games, puzzles, and standard CADs enable the user to create a 3D workshop right on their PC, tablet or other mobile device. What brings it all home, of course, is the Cube printer.

The Cube can print objects up to 5.5” x 5.5” x 5.5” in one of ten different colors, and the software is intended to make printing as easy as possible. The Cube won’t start shipping until May 25th but can be pre-ordered right now for $1,299. Through Cubify, 3D Systems wants to make high-quality, at-home printing a reality. Looking at their colorful, toylike examples on the website, it’s obvious that printing whimsical robots is something 3D Systems should be able to do.

In their efforts to diversify, 3D Systems is blazing a path that other 3D printing companies are sure to follow. As the technology gets better and cheaper, portfolios are going to expand and move closer to a one-stop-shop for anything 3D printed. In any case, you should probably start clearing out a corner of your attic, unless you want your Robot armies to go the way of your baseball cards and be thrown out by someone who just doesn’t understand.

[image credits: My Robot Nation and 3D Systems]
[video credits: RobotsoftheNation via YouTube]
images: My Robot Nation and 3D Systems
video credit: My Robot Nation

Have you considered which kind of futuristic body you’d like to pilot in the years ahead? The Singularity Hub Membership Program has had a trio of options you should consider. This past week we spent time with Kai Sim and Calvin Cheng of Ctrl Works, the Singapore-based startup behind the new Puppet robot. The Puppet is a telepresence platform – a machine body you can control remotely, and one that doctors may use to perform their rounds in hospitals. But if steel and plastic aren’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer ones and zeroes. In their Hangout with members, Erick Miller and Jon Rodriguez of Vergence Labs explained how their human-computer interfaces would change how you see your world. Augmented reality glasses plugged into the social network will make your physical body seem like only half of who you are…and the digital half would give you access to information and capabilities that would never fit in a single human brain. If however, robots and the internet simply cannot attract you, maybe you’d like to keep the body you have now indefinitely. That’s where this week’s Hangout VIP comes in. Rudi Hoffman wants to make cryonics affordable and accessible to all futurists. A liquid nitrogen bath could be just what you need to help you wake up feeling refreshed and healthy in 2052.

While Hangouts with tech luminaries continue to be one of the most exciting parts of the Singularity Hub Members Program, it’s far from the only one. Discounts to online stories, exclusive offers to major futurist events, first looks at some of the ideas that will become feature articles – members get a backstage pass to it all. Best of all there’s a never ending stream of conversation from other members. In fact, we’ve even added a second email list: SH-Debate. With SH-Debate, members now have a dedicated channel to discuss the biggest and most controversial possibilities facing us in the near future. Topics like civil rights for artificial intelligence, the death of intellectual property, and open source genetic databases for viruses. When you need someone to discuss the ideas that excite you, other Singularity Hub Members are just an email away.

…and this is just the beginning. The Singularity Hub staff is hunting down the next round of great Hangout guests, looking for more exclusive offers to share, and enriching the Membership Program at every turn. We’re constantly on the look out for new ideas, so don’t forget to share your comments below on what could make the Membership a better experience for you (or you could just shoot an email to the SH-Members list). Now is the perfect time to join and help make the Membership Program the futurist community you want it to be. And don’t forget, for a limited time, when a friend joins and lists you as a reference you get a month’s membership for free. After all, two bodies are better than one.

Through Ninja Blocks, you can connect the physical world to the web and back again.

Most of us live in two separate worlds, the real world and the digital world of the Internet. Some strides are being made, like controlling your car with your smartphone, but there are surprisingly few ways to bridge the worlds together. Ninja Blocks aims to change that. Think of a Ninja Block as a Raspberry Pi computer that interfaces with objects and senses environments. Each Ninja Block is a powerful mini computer with a built-in accelerometer and thermometer complete with multiple USB ports and an ethernet port to connect the physical world to a host of web services.

For example, say you wanted to be notified if the postman or UPS comes near the front door. You could use a Ninja Block to not only sense it, but tweet you a picture and send a copy to DropBox. Another situation when it could be handy is alerting you that one of your friends just logged into Xbox live by switching on a lamp in your living room. Or if you have a dog that can’t stay off your bed during the day, a Ninja Block could help you train it by playing a sound or a voice recording every time it tries.

Each block is its own little computer, so it can respond to stimuli, process inputs and outputs, and interface with the cloud just by plugging stuff in and defining a rule. Because setup is fairly straightforward, a Ninja Block can be easily switched from one use to the other.

Marcus Schappi, co-founder and president of Ninja Blocks, describes what is at the heart of these devices:

We designed our own Arduino-compatible board that fits as a daughter shield on the Linux-based BeagleBone. It’s like connecting an Arduino to a little computer running Ubuntu. We’re getting the best of both worlds here: a board that can use the tried and tested Arduino code for sensors and actuators, and the power of a tiny Linux computer that can do things like video and audio processing.

Arduino boards continue to pop up in a bunch of new gadgets, such as clothes, drones, and DIY biology labs, and we recently covered the Descriptive Camera, which uses BeagleBone. So it’s exciting to see how these devices and their derivatives are finding versatile uses. In fact, the site has received requests for the custom-designed daughter board, which will be available sometime in the future.

Marcus has been busy with open source electronics since he graduated from the University of Sydney and started the Little Bird Company in 2006 specializing in online electronics distribution. But to get Ninja Blocks off the ground, he and the other co-founders appealed to the Kickstarter community with a pitch that showcases what the blocks can do:

The Kickstarter campaign ended in mid-March acquiring 500+ backers and pulling in just over $100,000, four times the amount the team was seeking. Ninja Blocks bears some similarity to Twine, the gadget that pulled in nearly 4,000 backers and over half a million during its Kickstarter run. Because of the huge response they received, the folks at Supermechanical have been busy working through the issues in scaling up production. Fortunately, the smaller response to Ninja Blocks allowed them to keep production manageable with the first batch of Ninja Blocks already shipped and the second batch going out this month.

As the video shows, Ninja Blocks connect to the web via Ninja Cloud, which is an interface showing a set of straightforward tasks set up as conditional “if this, then that” statements that connects to web apps. Interestingly, these conditional statements are the same task-system that’s behind IFTTT.com, a site that manages a host of web services and received $1.5 million in seed funding last January. So both are basically rules engines. Linden Tibbets, founder of IFTTT.com, said that people like the task-defining service because it gets them thinking, “I have this control over something that kind of controlled me up until now.” Because of the similarity between the two, IFTTT and Ninja Blocks are looking at ways to work together, according to Marcus.

Finally, the team is fully committed to the open source community, so like Bug Labs, the software and hardware (even the case) for Ninja Blocks is open source, so you can find it all on Github.

Now the cost is approximately $160 per unit and $260 for the full sensor package, but Marcus makes it clear that they chose to optimize the product rather than the price by actively integrating 3rd party devices into Ninja Cloud, so that the value of the Ninja Block will only increase. What does that mean? Ninja Blocks is designed so that it can work with any USB device and independently process audio and video. Down the road, the blocks could even integrate with Twine sensors as well as Kinect motion detection and Siri voice activations.

Using Ninja Cloud, 3rd party devices are easily connected to web apps.

Clearly, Ninja Blocks are a first step in using the electronics that are currently available to build a physical-virtual bridge that anyone can use, not just DIY enthusiasts. While Raspberry Pi received a huge amount of buzz from the educational community, Ninja Blocks have been more or less under the radar, presumably because most people can’t imagine what they they might do with them. At the same time, people are becoming heavily reliant on their mobile devices, and if smartphones become the new TV remote, how long will it be before people start demanding to be able to tell their smartphones to turn on the lights, start the coffeemaker, and notify them when the shower is warm enough?

With it’s cool ninja logo engraved into the 3D printed cases, community-voted flashy color, and Festivus-like slogan, “The Internet Of Things for the rest of us”, the Australian-based Ninja Blocks just might be the kind of universal, easy-to-use little computers that can finally stitch our two worlds together.

[Media: AngelList, Ninja Blocks, YouTube]

[Sources: Kickstarter, Ninja Blocks, Technology Review, Wired]