Science Shows Lying Is Hard Work

A convicted sex offender, released on parole, submits to a polygraph test.

"Have you ever told even one lie?" asks the examiner. "No," says the man - and the needles on the polygraph machine barely shift from their rhythmic movements.

You can guess, of course, whether the man was answering truthfully - but today's polygraphs cannot. All they record are pulse, respiration, skin temperature, and other signs that may suggest whether someone seems nervous when asked a damning question.

Machines can be fooled, but it may not always be that way.
"I suspect that it may be much harder to manipulate brain blood flow," says Dr. Daniel Langleben, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Langleben and his colleagues have been experimenting with computerized brain scans - functional magnetic resonance imaging. This giant machine can show the amount of blood flow to different sections of the brain in precise detail.

They wanted to see what changes could be measured inside the brain when people are deceitful. They asked people to lie inside the scanner and lie through their teeth .when answers from many test subjects were combined and averaged by a computer, they clearly showed that when people lie, they use more sections of the brain than when they tell the truth.
"The question it raised for me is whether, in order to tell a lie, you need to inhibit something, and whether that something is the truth," he says. In other words, people may naturally be truth tellers. The brain works harder to lie."

Langleben was never out to make a better lie detector, but his research, along with others', could someday lead to one.

Wanted: Anti-Terror Technology

Silicon Valley companies are being enlisted into the War on Terrorism.

As U.S. airports search for ways to implement the federal mandate for improved security, Congressman Michael Honda, who represents part of Silicon Valley, says he believes the technology industry must play a fundamental role.

A congressional coalition is working to forge a security alliance between the tech industry and the government. Honda says he wants to "make sure that the tools of high technology arelooked at and considered seriously."

He recently hosted a gathering of Silicon Valley CEOs in Washington, DC. Executives fromdozens of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, Identix, and Sun Microsystems, searched for homeland security solutions.

"We truly believe it's a social responsibility of Silicon Valley companies who have the right technology to contribute to defining a platform," said Krish Panu, CEO of At Road, Inc., a company that develops systems to manage mobile workforces.

Some Silicon Valley CEOs say that technology such as At Road's system could help with national security.

At Road's system is based on a PDA-size black box that transmits vehicle position, direction, speed, and other information to allow real-time monitoring. The system's "geo-fencing" capabilities can set up invisible safety parameters and will notify security whenever a vehicle wanders into an area where it doesn't belong.

All of the information is encrypted, password-protected, and then sent to At Road's servers on the East and West coasts. The servers run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In terms of tightening national security, Honda says it is important to track potentially dangerous vehicles, especially high-load fuel trucks and outside catering trucks which currently travel unmonitored on airport property.

The company's system also could safeguard against bioterrorism and potentially dangerous ground shipments. "[The system] can be equipped on a vehicle that's transporting hazardous waste or chemicals," said Carey Fan, At Road project manager.

Honda and others say they believe that Silicon Valley can provide important security solutions with both existing and emerging technologies.

"It's a great opportunity to leverage all that entrepreneurial energy to create new technologies that would also enhance our homeland security," said J.D. Fay, At Road vice president of corporate affairs.

Proposed legislation would establish a pilot program to quickly test and evaluate existing, new, and emerging technologies to help reshape domestic security.

More than 40 security bills and amendments have been filed in Congress since Sept. 11, including the Bioterrorism Protection Act, which allocates $7 billion to deploy tech solutions for monitoring hazardous materials transportation.

The Air Travel Security and Technology legislation targets $24 billion for the 20 largest USairports to conduct pilot programs and deploy travel security technology.

Both bills are moving through the House of Representatives, each with more than 100 co-sponsors. However, Honda says he is concerned that unless the House acts on this legislation soon, opportunities to find new high tech solutions to security concerns could be lost as the drive for security languishes.

Retailers test paying by fingerprint

Major retailers are putting in payment systems that let your finger do the paying. Paying for products with a fingerprint, rather than checks, cards or electronic devices, is among the newest cashless options at checkout.

Biometric access, as the process is called, might have a Big Brother feeling, but it is expected to speed customer checkout and cut identity fraud. In some ways, biometric access tests consumers' willingness to give up some privacy to gain convenience.

A customer signs up by having a finger scanned into a database by special machines and designating a credit or debit card to which purchases will be charged. To make a purchase, consumers have their finger read at checkout, often on a pad incorporated into a console that also reads swipe cards and provides for personal identification number (PIN) entry.

Though once only commonplace in legal situations, fingerprinting is being used more in commerce. Institutions from banks to pawnshops are fingerprinting to authenticate transactions. Transaction processing time is less than 30 seconds, compared with three minutes before using the technology.

The increase in interest in biometric access stems from an increase in fraud involving more money, as well as a decline in the cost of the technology. The system now costs about ＄ 10,000, experts say.

Artificial intelligence in the game of go

Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind," the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.

The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that came from studying one example in great detail.
"We want the equivalent of a fruit fly to study," Hillis said. "Chess was the fruit fly for studying logic. Go may be the fruit fly for studying intuition."
Along with intuition, pattern recognition is a large part of the game. While computers are good at crunching numbers, peopl are naturally good at matching oetterns. Humans can recognize an acquaintance at a glance, even from the back.
Daniel Bump, a mathematics professor at Stanford, works on a program called GNU Go in his spare time.

"You can very quickly look at a chess game and see if there's some major issue," he said. But to make a decision in Go, he said, players must learn to combine their pattern-matching abilities with the logic and knowledge they have accrued in years of playing.
One measure of the challenge the game poses is the performance of Go computer programs. The past five years have yielded incremental improvements but no breakthroughs, said David Fotland, a programmer and chip designer in San Jose, California, who created and sells The Many Faces of Go, one of the few commercial Go programs.

Part of the challenge has to do with processing speed. The typical chess program can evaluate about 300,000 positions in a second, and Deep Blue was able to evaluate some 200 million positions in a second. By midgame, most Go programs can evaluate only a couple of dozen positions each second, said Anders Kierulf, who wrote a program called SmartGo.
In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble evaluating them corectly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go incereases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence.
"We think we have the basics of what we do as humans down pat," Bump said. "We get up in the morning and make breakfast, but if you tried to program a computer to do that, you'd quickly find that what's simple to you is incredibly difficult for a computer."
The same is true for Go. "When you're deciding what variations to consider, your subconscious mind is pruning," he said. "It's hard to say how much is going on in your mind to accomplish this pruning, but in a position on the board where I'd look at 10 variations, the computer has to look at thousands, maybe a million positions to come to the same conclusions, or to wrong conclusions."

Reiss, an expert in neural networks, compared a human being's ability to recognize a strong or weak position in Go with the ability to distinguish between an image of a chair and one of a bicycle. Both tasks, he said are hugely difficult for a computer.
For that reason, Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program."

High-Mileage Black Holes

High-Mileage Black Holes

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
24 April 2006

Astronomers have discovered that, deep inside the biggest and brightest galaxies in the universe, jets are spewing particles from around black holes in an incredibly energy-efficient manner. If an automobile engine worked as well as one of these monsters, it could go more than a billion miles on a gallon of gas.

The surprise is these high-mileage black holes aren't quasars, which are considered the most energetic and efficient bodies in the universe at converting matter to energy . Instead, astronomers have discovered, they are relatively old and quiet supermassive black holes that somehow can maintain similar efficiencies while expelling much less energy.

The astronomers used data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study nine supermassive black holes populating very large elliptical galaxies. In all cases, they found the areas around the black holes to be dim in visible light but quite bright in x-ray wavelengths. For the nine objects studied, they calculated that the black holes could convert up to 2.5% of the infalling gas and dust to energy--not quite as good as a quasar, which can average 5% or more, but still about 25 times better than the best nuclear power reactors.

The team also found that the jets produced by the supermassives are streaming outward at incredible speeds--in some cases 95% of the speed of light. "The energy in these jets is absolutely huge," says lead researcher Steven Allen of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, "about a trillion, trillion, trillion watts." The findings were announced during a media teleconference today and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The question is what process converts the energy from the gas streaming in toward the black holes to the enormous energy in the jets. So far, there is only speculation, says co-author Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland, College Park. One idea is that the rotational energy of the supermassives powers the engine.

"We already knew quasars were enormously efficient at making light," says Kimberly Weaver, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Now we know black holes in elliptical galaxies are also as efficient at making x-rays." This also could explain why there are few young stars in these galaxies: When the jets collide with the surrounding interstellar gas, they heat it to the point where it cannot condense into new stars.

"Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes," Allen adds. "Without this information, we cannot figure out what is going on under the hood, so to speak, or what the engine can do."

new LED design employs

A new LED design employs a handy combination of light and phosphors to produce light whose color spectrum is not so different from that of sunlight.

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) convert electricity into light very efficiently, and are increasingly the preferred design for niche applications like traffic and automobile brake lights. To really make an impression in the lighting world, however, a device must be able to produce room light. And to do this one needs a softer, whiter, more color balanced illumination.

The advent of blue-light LEDs, used in conjunction with red and green LEDs, helped a lot. But producing LED light efficiently at blue, red, and yellow wavelengths is still relatively expensive, and an alternative approach is to use phosphors to artificially achieve the desired balance, by turning blue into yellow light. Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science and at the Sharp Corporation, in Japan, have now achieved a highly efficient, tunable white light with an improved yellow-producing phosphor . Their light yield is 55 lumens per watt, about twice as bright as commercially available products operating in the same degree of whiteness.

Clean Energy

Clean energies are forms of energy which do not pollute the air, the ground, or the sea.

Clean energies include:

Solar power

Solar power describes a number of methods of harnessing energy from the light of the Sun. It has been present in many traditional building methods for centuries, but has become of increasing interest in developed countries as the environmental costs and limited supply of other power sources such as fossil fuels are realized. It is already in widespread use where other supplies of power are absent such as in remote locations and in space.

As the Earth orbits the Sun, it receives approximately 1,400 W / m² of energy, as measured upon a surface kept normal (at a right angle) to the Sun (this number is referred to as the solar constant). Of the energy received, roughly 19% is absorbed by the atmosphere, while clouds on average reflect a further 35% of the total energy. The generally accepted standard is 1020 watts per square meter at sea level.

After passing through the Earth's atmosphere, most of the sun's energy is in the form of visible and ultraviolet light. Plants use solar energy to create chemical energy through photosynthesis. We use this energy when we burn wood or fossil fuels or when we consume the plants as a source of food.

Wind power

Wind power is the kinetic energy of wind, or the extraction of this energy by wind turbines. This article deals mainly with the intricacies of large-scale deployment of wind turbines to generate electricity.

Wave power

Wave power refers to the capture of ocean surface wave energy to do useful work including electricity generation, desalination, and filling a reservoir with water. Wave power is a form of renewable energy. Though often co-mingled, wave power is physiologically distinct from the diurnal flux of tidal power and the steady gyre of ocean currents which are powered by the earth's rotation. Wave power generation is not a widely employed technology with only a few experimental sites in existence.

Salinity gradient power

Salinity Gradient is a technology that takes advantage of the osmotic pressure differences between salt and fresh water.

If we place a semipermeable membrane (like that in a reverse osmosis filter) between sealed bodies of salt water and fresh water, the fresh water will gradually travel through the filter by osmosis. By exploiting the pressure difference between these two bodies of water we can extract energy commensurate to the difference in pressure.

Tidal power

Tidal power is a means of electricity generation achieved by capturing the energy contained in moving water mass due to tides. Two types of tidal energy can be extracted: kinetic energy of currents due the tides and potential energy from the difference in height (or head) between high and low tides.

Geothermal power

Geothermal power is electricity generated by utilizing naturally occurring geological heat sources. It is a form of renewable energy.

Some renewable energies are not clean energies - for example:

Biofuels because they release NOX and particulates into the environment.
Hydroelectric power because it destroys the river basin and has a negative effect on fish migration.