'Plasmobot': Scientists To Design First Robot Using Mould

Scientists at the University of the West of England are to design the first ever biological robot using mould.

Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant worth £228,000 to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot, plasmobot, using plasmodium, the vegetative stage of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, a commonly occurring mould which lives in forests, gardens and most damp places in the UK. The Leverhulme Trust funded research project aims to design the first every fully biological (no silicon components) amorphous massively-parallel robot.

This project is at the forefront of research into unconventional computing. Professor Andy Adamatzky, who is leading the project, says their previous research has already proved the ability of the mould to have computational abilities.

Professor Adamatzky explains, “Most people’s idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction.
“This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer.”
This research will lay the groundwork for further investigations into the ways in which this mould can be harnessed for its powerful computational abilities.
Professor Adamatzky says that there are long term potential benefits from harnessing this power, “We are at the very early stages of our understanding of how the potential of the plasmodium can be applied, but in years to come we may be able to use the ability of the mould for example to deliver a small quantity of a chemical substance to a target, using light to help to propel it, or the movement could be used to help assemble micro-components of machines. In the very distant future we may be able to harness the power of plasmodia within the human body, for example to enable drugs to be delivered to certain parts of the human body. It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things. Many scientists see this as a potential development of amorphous computing, but it is purely theoretical at the moment.”
Professor Adamatzky has recently edited and had published by Springer, ‘Artificial Life Models in Hardware’ aimed at students and researchers of robotics. The book focuses on the design and real-world implementation of artificial life robotic devices and covers a range of hopping, climbing, swimming robots, neural networks and slime mould and chemical brains.

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.Original article posted at science daily

Go to hospital to see computing's future

Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

If you want to know how people will interact with machines in the future, head for a hospital.

That's the impression I got from a new report about the future of human-computer interaction from IT analysts Gartner, based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Gartner's now-classic chart, shown right, shows the rollercoaster of expectations ridden by new technologies: rocketing from obscurity to a peak of overblown hype, then falling into a "trough of disillusionment" before finally becoming mainstream as a tech's true worth is found.

Enlightened climb

Speech recognition, currently climbing the slope of enlightenment towards the plateau of productivity, is a good example of how healthcare helps new technology.

Some homeworkers are now hooked, and the technology is appearing in cellphones and voicemail systems. But its maturity owes as much to the rehabilitation industry as the software industry.

Today's true power users of voice recognition are people who are physically unable to use keyboard or mouse. For them, it is as much a medical device as an office aide. They have not only supported public and private research over the years, but also provided a market for the technology when it was far from perfect.

Guided by eyes

Eye tracking, climbing the hype peak as you read this, is also an everyday reality for many people for whom conventional interfaces are difficult.

Without that spur to innovation it is unlikely that more mainstream uses for eye tracking, from making computer games spring baddies when you least expect it to having billboards track passers by, would be so advanced.

Slumped at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, virtual reality seems too familiar an idea to be labelled "emerging". But it, too, is relatively well established in the clinic, where the high installation costs can be justified.

Psychologists have long used it to recreate scary scenarios while treating phobias. More recently it has shown promise for phantom limb pain and schizophrenia diagnosis. Many US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are being treated using virtual experiences.

Gartner forecasts 10 more years before virtual reality reaches the mainstream – a prediction some readers may remember from the 1980s – but it is likely to become mainstream for psychology much earlier than that.

Mind control

Haptics is another technology with consumer potential that's already being used in clinical contexts: for remote surgery and training, and for interpreting complex scan output.

And the computer interface technology that's likely to be the most significant of all can also be experienced properly only in a hospital so far. It's not hard to imagine who looks forward most eagerly to the latest developments in mind control of computers.

A handful of people already know what exerting such control can offer. Without lifting a finger they are able to send email, play video games(see video), control wheelchairs or prosthetic arms, update Twitter and even have their thoughts read aloud(see video)

Similarly, victims of accidents or injury provide the first hints of the kind of "upgrades" the otherwise healthy may in future choose to make to their bodies.

Seal of approval

Hospitals may not only be providing a preview of future interfaces, though – they may also be ensuring that they hit the big time with fewer design glitches.

Despite some conspicuous success in the smartphone arena, touch interface technology could still do with some improvement, and it's often less use than older but better-understood interfaces.

The technological nursery of the healthcare market could prevent so many ergonomic and design wrinkles making it to mass deployment in future.

Not only will the mainstream gadget industry have some tried-and-tested examples to draw on, but designs will have benefited from the safety and usability requirements demanded of medical devices by regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration.

Original article posted in New Scientist on 31 August 2009 by Tom Simonite

We Are All Mutants: Measurement Of Mutation Rate In Humans By Direct Sequencing

An international team of 16 scientists today reports the first direct measurement of the general rate of genetic mutation at individual DNA letters in humans. The team sequenced the same piece of DNA - 10,000,000 or so letters or 'nucleotides' from the Y chromosome - from two men separated by 13 generations, and counted the number of differences. Among all these nucleotides, they found only four mutations.

In 1935 one of the founders of modern genetics, J. B. S. Haldane, studied men in London with the blood disease haemophilia and estimated that there would be one in 50,000 incidence of mutations causing haemophilia in the gene affected - the equivalent of a mutation rate of perhaps one in 25 million nucleotides across the genome. Others have measured rates at a few further specific genes or compared DNA from humans and chimpanzees to produce general estimates of the mutation rate expressed more directly in nucleotides of DNA.

Remarkably, the new research, recently published in Current Biology, shows that these early estimates were spot on - in total, we all carry 100-200 new mutations in our DNA. This is equivalent to one mutation in each 15 to 30 million nucleotides. Fortunately, most of these are harmless and have no apparent effect on our health or appearance.
"The amount of data we generated would have been unimaginable just a few years ago," says Dr Yali Xue from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and one of the project's leaders. "But finding this tiny number of mutations was more difficult than finding an ant's egg in the emperor's rice store."
Team member Qiuju Wang recruited a family from China who had lived in the same village for centuries. The team studied two distant male-line relatives - separated by thirteen generations - whose common ancestor lived two hundred years ago.
To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is unique in that, apart from rare mutations, it is passed unchanged from father to son; so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations.
Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined. Of the 12 differences, eight had arisen in the cell lines used for the work. Only four were true mutations that had occurred naturally through the generations.
We have known for a long time that mutations occur occasionally in each of us, but have had to guess exactly how often. Now, thanks to advances in the technology for reading DNA, this new research has been possible.
Understanding mutation rates is key to many aspects of human evolution and medical research: mutation is the ultimate source of all our genetic variation and provides a molecular clock for measuring evolutionary timescales. Mutations can also lead directly to diseases like cancer. With better measurements of mutation rates, we could improve the calibration of the evolutionary clock, or test ways to reduce mutations, for example.
Even with the latest DNA sequencing technology, the researchers had to design a special strategy to search for the vanishingly rare mutations. They used next-generation sequencing to establish the order of letters on the two Y chromosomes and then compared these to the Y chromosome reference sequence.
Having identified 23 candidate SNPs - or single letter changes in the DNA - they amplified the regions containing these candidates and checked the sequences using the standard Sanger method. A total of four naturally occurring mutations were confirmed. Knowing this number of mutations, the length of the area that they had searched and the number of generations separating the individuals, the team were able to calculate the rate of mutation.
"These four mutations gave us the exact mutation rate - one in 30 million nucleotides each generation - that we had expected," says the study's coordinator, Chris Tyler-Smith, also from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "This was reassuring because the methods we used - harnessing next-generation sequencing technology - had not previously been tested for this kind of research. New mutations are responsible for an array of genetic diseases. The ability to reliably measure rates of DNA mutation means we can begin to ask how mutation rates vary between different regions of the genome and perhaps also between different individuals."
This work was supported by the Joint Project from the NSFC and The Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust.
POSTED BY SCIENCE DAILY