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When people working on a project get together with their laptops and PDAs, they share information via the internet and a client server. But new software developed by European researchers allows independent, ad hoc, secure networking anywhere.

The power and reach of the internet in today’s world is such that people have, in a short space of time, become over-reliant on it for many tasks both in business and personal life.

If a group of people are gathered together with their laptops in a conference room and are working together on a project, they need to use the web as a communications medium and a central server to store the data they are working on.

If the internet connection is unavailable, congested or even just unaffordable, it has a serious impact on the productivity of the group.

To overcome this, we need to move away from the centralised, rigid client-server paradigm and fixed communications infrastructure. This is just what researchers on the EU-funded POPEYE project have been doing.

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A groundbreaking poll finds that almost half of U.S. adults have heard nothing about nanotechnology, and nearly nine in 10 Americans say they have heard just a little or nothing at all about the emerging field of synthetic biology, according to a new report released by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) and Peter D. Hart Research. Both technologies involve manipulating matter at an incredibly small scale to achieve something new.

This new insight into limited public awareness of emerging technologies comes as a major leadership change is about to take hold in the nation’s capital. Public policy experts are concerned, regardless of party, that the federal government is behind the curve in engaging citizens on the potential benefits and risks posed by technologies that could have a significant impact on society.

“Early in the administration of the next president, scientists are expected to take the next major step toward the creation of synthetic forms of life. Yet the results from the first U.S. telephone poll about synthetic biology show that most adults have heard just a little or nothing at all about it,” says PEN Director David Rejeski. The poll findings are contained a report published September 30.

Synthetic biology is the use of advanced science and engineering to construct or re-design living organisms–like bacteria–so that they can carry out specific functions. This emerging technology is likely to develop rapidly in the coming years, much as nanotechnology did in the last decade. In the near future the first synthetic biology “blockbuster” drug is anticipated to hit the market—an affordable treatment for the 500 million people in the world suffering from malaria.

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Observers like Bill Gates believe that by 2025 we could have robots in every home. In labs across Europe, researchers are creating designs that could become the robo-butler of the future.

Bill Gates likens the current state of robotics research to the earliest days of personal computing history when he formed the then fledging company Microsoft. Like the 1970s personal computer market, robotics designs and breakthroughs are following one another rapidly, and consumers are beginning to take an interest, too.

In Europe, as the rest of the world, there is s surge in robotics research, reflected in part by the European Network of Robotic Research (EURON), an EU-funded network of excellence that completed its work in May 2008.

It was an important network. The dozens of research programmes united by EURON represent a state-of-the-art in robotics, and a tantalising glimpse of the future.

That glimpse shows that researchers across Europe are creating new designs and tackling fundamental problems that eventually could lead to a world standard for domestic robots. Already enthusiasts are buying kits, making and programming their own robots.

In Japan, every year sees a new toy robot, while in the USA commercial robot vacuums like the Roomba are readily available.

But what will the robot butler of 2025 look like? 

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Advances in sensing technology will help to reduce the wastage from ‘farm to fork’ that’s contributing to the UK’s £10 billion food wastage bill, according to the UK’s Sensors & Instrumentation Knowledge Transfer Network.

Sensors can detect early indicators of food spoilage before visual signs are apparent, identify toxins and monitor water and nutrient concentration within the soil to improve irrigation efficiency.

“The government’s Food Matters document highlights that the production and disposal of food not only costs billions but contributes significantly to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. New developments in sensing technology are helping to improve the efficiency of everyday processes, reduce costs and benefit the environment,” said Phil Cooper, Director of the Sensors & Instrumentation Knowledge Transfer Network.

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A researcher from the University of Alberta has proposed an experimental electrical heating process to draw oil from largely untapped deposits, which could yield major rewards for oil production and be more environmentally sound than current extractions processes.

The process could boost worldwide oil supplies in the future and lead to lower prices for gasoline, diesel, and home heating oil, the researchers suggest.

According to Tayfun Babadagli, a professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Mining and Petroleum Engineering, an electrical heating process could be used to draw the oil resources of smaller or difficult-to-extract oil deposits, for which current processes—such as steam assisted gravity drainage or SAGD—are impractical and environmentally unsound.

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Visual images can contain a wealth of information, but they are difficult to catalogue in a searchable way. European researchers are generating and combining scraps of information to create a searchable picture.

Digital images can open our eyes to the most extraordinary detail and beauty. But there is one major drawback. The information in an image is purely visual. It tells us nothing about when or where the image was taken. It tells us nothing about the people in the image. We do all that interpretation ourselves. That makes cataloguing and searching for particular images difficult – whether you work for an art gallery or you are updating your family album.

Scientists on a major European research project called aceMedia have taken important steps towards a solution to this problem. They are building an information layer into digital image files. Their vision is that image files will come with content information, metadata (background information for use on the internet) and an intelligence layer that automatically generates word-searchable data about the image.

An extra ‘information layer’, that adds both automatically generated and manually generated information to images, would revolutionise image searching on the internet as well as on your home computer or mobile phone. The technologies developed in the EU-funded aceMedia project have sparked interest from a range of commercial companies, looking to exploit the ideas in a host of directions.

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TO the relief of climate scientists around the world, it appears that the polar ice cap hasn’t shrunk as much this summer as it did last summer.

The ice cap usually reaches its smallest extent around now, and although the total area of ice in September fluctuates from year to year, in the last two decades it has generally declined, probably because of carbon-driven global warming. Last year, the ice cap shrank at a record-breaking pace; at its minimum it was almost 39 percent smaller than the average from 1979 to 2000. This year it’s down about 33 percent.

A couple of years’ rapid melting may be a random event. But the ice loss of recent years puts the Arctic melt decades ahead of model predictions, raising concern that climate change is proving worse than expected.

We should also worry about the consequences of a decline in sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean loses sunlight-reflecting ice and gains sunlight-absorbing open water, energy circulation across the northern half of the planet could also shift, altering jet streams, storm tracks, rainfall patterns and food production much farther south. The loss of sea ice will probably cause faster melting of the Greenland ice cap and thus a faster rise in sea levels.

How should we respond? First, we must recognize that uncertainty and inertia are inescapable features of the climate system. For instance, we know that warming will melt Arctic permafrost, which, when it rots and releases carbon, causes more warming — but how bad will this cycle be? How much of the extra carbon will be absorbed by plants that grow faster in a carbon-rich atmosphere? Inertia refers to the long lags in the climate’s response to human carbon emissions.

Systems with lots of uncertainty and inertia are notoriously hard to control: we can’t effectively predict their future behavior, and we can’t quickly correct behavior we don’t like. By the time we find out that the climate dice have rolled against us, inertia could make conventional responses like carbon taxes and wind power inadequate. Planning our response around what we currently think is the most likely outcome is therefore reckless. We must hope for the best while laying plans to navigate the worst.

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The rising interest in vehicles powered by electricity — either part-time, as in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, or in battery-only cars like the Tesla Roadster — has increased the pressure to develop more efficient devices to store the power. Progress has been steady, but huge breakthroughs have not emerged from the research labs.

The baby-step pace is prompting automakers to move cautiously with their production plans. Toyota, which had been expected to use lithium-ion batteries in the next-generation Prius, announced that the car, which goes on sale next spring, will stick with proven nickel-metal hydride chemistry.

Toyota’s engineers were not ready to adopt the compact high-energy, lithium-ion batteries in a mass-production vehicle, opting to run them in test fleets first. Though the company is optimistic about the potential of lithium batteries, challenges in their durability and operating temperature ranges remain.

While General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan have announced plans to employ such batteries in the future, and each has a battery manufacturer as a partner, Honda has set off in a different direction. Last March, Honda’s president, Takeo Fukui, told Automotive News that “lithium-ion batteries are still not usable from our perspective.”

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The most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth’s greatest challenges, such as climate change, says Sir David King.

The former UK chief scientist used his presidential address at the BA Science Festival to call for a gear-change among innovative thinkers.

He suggested that less time and money be spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.

He said population growth and poverty in Africa also demanded attention.

“The challenges of the 21st Century are qualitatively different from anything that we’ve had to face up to before,” he told reporters before the opening of the festival, which is being held this year in Liverpool.

“This requires a re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society’s inner attitudes towards science and technology.”

Huge expense

Sir David’s remarks are controversial because they are being made just as the UK is about to celebrate its participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics experiment.

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One day, a machine will outsmart its maker

IN ONE of William Gibson’s early mind-bending stories, the protagonist suddenly needs to fly a jump jet. In the cockpit, he finds his employer has thoughtfully stashed a biochip containing all the necessary piloting skills for him to plug into his own nervous system. While your correspondent applauded the idea at the time, he nevertheless dismissed it as pure science-fiction. Today, he’s not so sure.

The progress being made in neuroengineering—devising machines that mimic the way the brain and other bodily organs function—has been literally eye-opening. In the decade since Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University in Britain, had a silicon chip implanted in his arm so he could learn how to build better prostheses for the disabled, we now have cochlear implants that allow the deaf to hear, and a host of other spare mechanical parts to replace defective organs.

A bionic eye, to help people suffering from macular degeneration, is in the works, and artificial synapses are being tested as possible replacements for damaged optic nerves. An implantable electronic hippocampus—the world’s first brain prosthesis—is being developed for people who lose the ability to store long-term memories following a stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease.

Meanwhile, a team at the University of Sheffield in Britain has built a “brainbot” controlled by a mathematical model of the brain’s basal ganglia—the part that helps us decide what to do next. Depending on how much simulated dopamine (the neurotransmitter in the brain that controls movement, behaviour, mood and learning) is dialled into the mathematical model, the brainbot responds differently.

Too much, and the machine has trouble suppressing unwanted actions, or tries to do two incompatible things at once—like patients with Huntington’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome or schizophrenia. Too little digital dopamine, and the machine has difficulty deciding how to move—like patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Mr Warwick’s team at Reading has now gone a stage further. Instead of using a computer model of part of the brain as a controller, the group’s new “animat” (part animal, part material) relies solely on nerve cells from an actual brain.

Signals from a culture of rodent brain cells in a tiny dish are picked up by an array of electrodes and used to drive a robot’s wheels. The animat’s biological brain learns how and when to steer away from obstacles by interpreting sensory data fed to it by the robot’s sonar array. And it does this without outside help or an electronic computer to crunch the data.

This is not just a clever party trick. Such experiments are essential for understanding how the brain stores specific pieces of data—a crucial first step for helping people with degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Throughout history, engineers have spent their lives inventing machines that were faster, stronger, more reliable or capable of greater precision than human beings. Whether they were Jacquard looms, combine harvesters or CAD-CAM gear, they were tools for amplifying some human skill or compensating for a weakness. But always they needed human intelligence to function.

That’s now changed. Neuroengineers build tools that think for themselves, making decisions the way humans do.