IBM Research - Zurich

Miniaturized information storage in atomic-scale antiferromagnets show the binary representation of "s" (01010011).

Twelve atoms are all that's required to store a bit of computer code – a 1 or 0, according to a new discovery that probes the limit of classical data storage.

Computer hard drives on the market today use more than a million atoms to store a single bit and more than half a billion to store a byte, which is an eight-bit-long unit of code sufficient to write the letter A, for example. 

The new technique uses just 96 atoms per byte, allowing for hard drives that store 100 times more information in the same amount of physical space, according the researchers behind the discovery.

"We can put the neighboring bits at the same atomic spacing that the atoms have inside the bit," Andreas Heinrich, a lead investigator in atomic storage at IBM Research in California, told me.

"So, we can really pack them right next to each other."

Unconventional magnetism
The storage technique is based on an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism.

Normal magnets used in today's hard drives — and to hold your child's artwork on the refrigerator — are made of ferromagnetic materials. The spins of atoms in these magnets align with each other. 

That's "good" because it provides an overall magnetic field that we can read as a bit — a 1 or 0, explained Heinrich.

"But it is bad because the magnetic field from one  bit will interfere with the magnetic field from the neighboring bit and so you can't pack these bits too close together because they'll just talk to each other," he said.

Antiferromagnets, by contrast, cancel each other out, so there's no magnetic field emanating from them. That means they can be packed close together, allowing for the increased data storage density.

Atomic building blocks
Heinrich and his colleagues were led to antiferromagnets on an exploratory research quest to find out how small they could make a magnetic device and use it for classical data storage.

They used a scanning electron microscope, which allows researchers to see and manipulate atoms, to build a data storage system up one atom at a time.

Scientists know that single atoms exhibit funky quantum behaviors that require a different set of equations to describe. But where is the transition between quantum and classical behaviors?

At eight atoms, the team found, a bit was stable for a few seconds and "at 12 atoms it turns out that the classical concepts are so good that these magnetic structures hold their magnetic state for days," Heinrich said.

"We said that's good enough to call it storage."

The caveat is that this stability is found when the atoms are kept at a chilly minus 268 degrees Celsius, or 5 Kelvin. Stability at room temperature, Heinrich said, is thought possible at around 150 atoms.

The findings are reported today in the journal Science.

Consumer devices
The finding could lead to terabyte hard drives the size of a pinhead or thumb drives that hold every movie you've ever seen, Rick Doherty an analyst with technology consulting firm Envisioneering Group told me.

Other applications may come in medical devices such as magnetic nanobots swimming in the bloodstream that can be attached and detached to tissues electronically.

"It is going to make life better, allow us to save energy, make smaller structures, and maybe one day magnetic computer logic," he said.

While transferring some of this atomic scale technology to real world gadgets may take awhile, Heinrich said the use of antiferromagnets in traditional hard drives is likely as soon as five years now.

"If you were able to use antiferromagnets instead of ferromagnets, you … could pack these things denser and therefore you could store a lot of information on your drive."

More on atomic-scale computing and storage:

• Four-atom-wide wire may herald tiny computers
• Salt — table kind — can boost hard drive storage
• Hard drives are getting bigger, better
• New technology boosts hard drive capacity

MIT

Researchers have developed an analog silicon computer chip with about 400 transistors that mimics the activity of a single brain synapse - a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other.

The day that computers outsmart their human overlords may yet lie in the distant future, but a new computer chip that mimics the basis of learning and memory in the brain is a critical step towards that moment.

"We are not talking about recreating a whole brain at this point. We have to start with one system," Chi-Sang Poon, a research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, told me Wednesday. 

Poon and colleagues have started with an analog silicon chip outfitted with 400 transistors that emulates the activity of a brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other.

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of which has synapses — or gaps — between it and other neurons. Emulating one is a step "for building truly intelligent brain systems," he said.

The development is a departure from digital computer chips that simulate the spiking of neurons, treating their function like a simple on-off switch. Poon's chip directly mimics the ion channels that lead to the spiking. He likens it to understanding what's going on inside a black box.

"We really get into the nitty-gritty of how the neurons work intra-cellularly," he explained. "That involves all the ionic processes that are going on. Neuroscientists spend their life trying to understand how these things work and fit together."

The chip, he said, will allow neuroscientists to conduct basic research on how the brain actually works. Eventually, this could lead to the study and treatment of diseases related to brain malfunction, for example.

Other potential applications further down the road include devices that replicate specific brain functions that are incorporated with brain-machine interfaces. This could increase the versatility of devices that allow people to operate wheelchairs and computer mice with their thoughts, for example.

"Once it is to the level that we can build reasonably good replicas of brain systems, we can actually build brain systems that can replace some of the damaged brain parts," Poon added. 

The same concept, he noted, could be even be used to "enhance part of the brain systems beyond the normal human capacity."

And, stepping outside the machine-brain interface, the same chips could be used to build artificial intelligence devices that faithfully mimic or replicate brain behavior for tasks such as pattern recognition, cognition, learning, memory and even decision making.

"As long as we understand how the brain works, we can always reverse-engineer it and put it in a chip to reproduce those functions," Poon said. 

Poon and his colleagues describe the chip this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

More on brainy computer technology:

• IBM unveils brain-like chip
• IBM computer simulates cat's cerebral cortex
• Molecular computer mimics human brain
• Paralyzed man uses brain-powered robot arm to touch

Scott Andrews / AP

In this file photo, crowds gather for the inauguration of President Barack Obama Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. New computer software is able to tap into the wisdom of crowds to get tasks done.

Computers may eventually outsmart human intelligence, but for now they're just finally getting smart enough to ask humans for help.

That's the basic idea behind MobileWorks, a startup that is weaving crowdsourcing capability into computer software. Crowdsourcing is the concept of putting out a question to your social network to help solve a problem.

In MobileWorks case, software sends tasks to a hand-picked crowd — mostly workers recruited from the developing world such as the slums of India and Pakistan. Many work with a mobile phone. The company says these workers are getting high-tech experience and a "fair wage."

"Much of the criticism that has been leveled at online digital work is that it becomes kind of sweatshop labor," Anand Kulkarni, a cofounder and CEO of MobileWorks, told me today. "Our goal was to start with a livable wage and work forward to construct an effective crowdsourcing system."

And what's that wage? Workers in India on a mobile phone earn about U.S. $0.50 per hour; those with a laptop computer make $1.50.

"These are workers who are earning about $2 per day before joining our systems, so, in a way, what we are paying is enough to make a strong positive impact on their lives," Kulkarni said.

Tasks these workers accomplish include transcribing audio recordings, digitizing handwritten notes and scouring the Internet for contact information of potential job recruits. Many take just a minute or two to complete, which is part of the plan.

The cost to the user of the system is on the order of pennies per task.

To maintain client confidentiality, each task is broken up into tiny bits and distributed to the workforce. When the bits of work are completed, the software stitches them back together and delivers the completed task to the user.

The concept is similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where tasks are solved by a crowd of anonymous workers, though MobileWorks says their hand-picked crowd is faster and more accurate.

And since the workers are handpicked, MobileWorks can rouse them with a quick text message, making sure workers are at the ready when there is work to be done.

"The ability to spin up workers when you need them is very powerful," Michael Bernstein, who researchers crowdsourcing at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who has developed an application to tap into the Mechanical Turk service, told Technology Review.

"On Mechanical Turk your tasks can just stall because not enough people chose to work on them."

More stories on crowdsourcing work:

• Facebook asks users to translate for free
• Charities start to harness the power of the many
• Cash in: 12 ways to earn
• Amazon pushes user-driven research service

IBM

IBM today unveiled a computer chip designed to emulate the brain's ability for perception, action and cognition. This chip in particular is pretty good at the game Pong, the company says.

Computer chips with worm-like intelligence were unveiled today by researchers at IBM, a breakthrough, they say, on the road to creating computers that function like the human brain.

For now, achieving the goal of human-like intelligence in a computer with the size and power needs of our brains is a long ways off, Dharmendra Modha, the researcher leading the project, told me, but the chips he held as we spoke were proof that a "new generation" of computers are in the offing.

"It is IBM's first cognitive computer core that brings together computation in the form of neurons, memory in the form of synapses and communication in the form of axons," he said.

Such chips, he said, could form the basis of computers that are able to monitor real-time traffic-light cameras, notice an anomaly and dispatch an ambulance in time to save lives.

Other potential applications include lining the ocean with sensors for everything from temperature, humidity and wave height to acoustics and turbidity. The computer would constantly monitor all that data and detect patterns such as rogue waves that could interrupt shipping or a tsunami that could wipe out coastal villages.

A glove instrumented with sight, smell, temperature and other sensors and put on the hand of produce handlers at the grocery store could identify fruits and veggies that are contaminated, again saving lives.

The chips do this by integrating memory and processing, unlike today's computers, which separate the functions. It's a difference, he said, between growing food in one part of the world then eating it in another and a farmers market where you buy and eat locally grown food.

The silicon cores unveiled today aren't at the level of the human brain yet. They have 256 neuron-like nodes. One has what the company calls 262,144 programmable synapses, the other contains 65,536 synapses. They can drive a car through a simple maze and reconfigure a triangle from just a fragment, Modha said.

It can also play Pong, the 1970s arcade game. "It might beat you, I don't promise, but it might," Modha said.

The next step is to take these tiny brain-like circuits and weave them into a system that eventually has 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses that consume just 1 kilowatt of power and occupy the same volume as a shoebox.

The technology, Modha added, is a departure from the way computers have evolved over the past 100 years and allowed the development of machines such as the question-answering maverick Watson that won a well-publicized game of "Jeopardy" earlier this year.

"Watson represents the epitome of artificial intelligence today, I would say," Modha said. "And we are trying to emulate the brain. They are yin and yang, salt and pepper, they may work together and complement each other, but they are not the same."

The project has keen interest from the U.S. government. As IBM unveiled the chips, they also announced $21 million in new funding from DARPA for the project, which is named SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics).

The goal of the project is a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment — all while rivaling the human brain's compact size and low power usage.

We are still years away from such a computer, Modha said, and when it arrives it is likely to complement other computers and humans, not outsmart us or our machines.

"The human brain is so darn bloody awesome it shames me," he said. "The thing is, today's computers are so darn bloody bad in terms of power, space and functionality ... you pick a problem with so much room to play that you improve it slightly, you look like a hero."

More stories on brainy computers:

• IBM computer simulates cats cerebral cortex
• For tech pioneer IBM, 100 years of 'Think'
• IBM thinks about the next 100 years
• Beyond 'Jeopardy': Watson wins

CMU / DRP

At left, a subject wears an array of 20 strategically placed cameras, facing outward to monitor apparent motion in the environment. At right, the data from all those cameras can be interpreted to produce an animated figure in virtual space.

Motion-capture animation is all the rage in moviemaking: Without it, there's no Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings," no aliens in "Avatar," no intelligent chimps in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." But it's an expensive proposition: You need to place special dots all over the actors whose motion you want to capture, then have them do their thing in front of precisely calibrated cameras hooked up to a sophisticated computer system, inside a closed stage with controlled lighting.

Now all that could change, thanks to a new system that relies on cameras looking out from the actor's body, rather than cameras looking in at the actor.

"This could be the future of motion capture," Takaaki Shiratori, a postdoctoral associate at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, says in a news release about the technique. "I think anyone will be able to do motion capture in the not-so-distant future."

Shiratori presented a paper about the inside-out approach to motion capture, known as "structure from motion" or SfM, today at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The method has been the subject of research for 20 years at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney's research facility in Pittsburgh.

In traditional motion capture, cameras focus on dots that are placed at strategic locations on a body suit worn by the actors. Computer software renders an animated image — the chimpanzee or the alien, for example — so that its movements conform to the positions of the dots. That animation can be substituted for the actor's image in a computer-rendered composite.

"In 'Avatar,' motion capture was used to animate characters riding on direhorses and flying on the back of mountain banshees," Shiratori and his colleagues write in the paper. "To capture realistic motions for such scenes, the actors rode horses and robotic mock-ups in an expansive motion capture studio requiring a large number of cameras."

In the SfM version of motion capture, 20 lightweight cameras are mounted on the limbs and the trunk of each actor, looking out into the environment. As the actor moves, the video from each camera is compared with reference images, and translated into the movements of the animated figure in a virtual 3-D environment. No studio needed.

The good news is that the technique can be used to capture a sequence of movements in an outdoor setting, with no boundaries on the range of movement. This video shows how the software builds a virtual space, sort of like the data-point cloud created by the Kinect motion-detection game controller, and tracks an actor as he moves through the space.

"Our approach will continue to benefit from consumer trends that are driving cameras to become cheaper, smaller, faster and more pervasive," the researchers write.

The bad news is that rendering the imagery currently calls for a huge amount of computational firepower. The researchers say it takes an entire day to process just one minute of motion-capture data, and the final results aren't quite as good as what's achievable through traditional methods. But as Gollum said in "The Lord of the Rings" movie, "Patience! Patience, my love." The researchers hope that precioussss innovations will soon be within their grasp.

"Future work will include efforts to find computational shortcuts, such as performing many of the steps simultaneously through parallel processing," the team reports.

More on movie tech: 

• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• The physics behind the movie magic
• The future of 3-D moviemaking
• From 2002: Brave new world for virtual actors

In addition to Shiratori, collaborators on "Motion Capture From Body-Mounted Cameras" include Hyun Soo Park, Yaser Sheikh and Jessica K. Hodgins of Carnegie Mellon University and Leonid Sigal of Disney Research, Pittsburgh. Hodgins is a DRP director as well as a CMU professor.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Swapping information between your computer and smart phone may get a whole lot easier with an app that lets you do just that with your phone's camera. 

The app, called Deep Shot, was designed by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, a graduate student in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, while he working as a summer intern at Google with research scientist Yang Li. 

The app eliminates the redundancy of looking up an address of a restaurant using Google Maps on your computer, for example, and then retyping it on your smart phone as you drive to your lunch date. Instead, just take a picture of the map on your computer screen with your phone's camera and the phone automatically opens up its mapping application tuned to the corresponding data and off you go.

Now, let's say the lunch was great and you want to write a review on Yelp. You open up the website on your phone but realize that typing the review on the tiny keyboard is tedious. So, point the phone camera at your computer. The phone recognizes the target computer screen and opens the Yelp webpage there so you can type the review with your computer keyboard.

The technology exploits the fact that many computer applications use a standard format called uniform resource identifier, or URI. For example, on Google Maps, the URI is the string of code that contains information on your starting and end points and the size of the map on the window.

Deep Shot, which must be installed all the devices you want talking to each other, uses vision algorithms to identify what's on the screen. The software then extracts and transmits the corresponding URI to the phone. What's more, since URI is standard, it can transfer data from one mapping application on a computer to a different mapping application on a phone.

Since Chang developed the application while at Google, the company owns the rights to it. Google has yet to make the system publicly available. When it does, Chang will be the first to install it, according to an MIT news release. "It just makes everything so much easier," he said.

To see the app in action, check out the video above.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

BW Quist and R Faruqi / Northwestern University

This is a view of the model whisker array built to explore how sensory and motor data are combined in the brain to create a perception.

A virtual model of rat whiskers may help scientists unlock the mystery of how our brains turn the mechanics of touch into perceptions.

"Our sense of touch is very mysterious. You can reach into your pocket or your purse and without even looking, you can identify your keys, a coin, or a paperclip," Mirta Hartmann, who studies sensory and neural systems engineering at Northwestern University, explained to me today.

Her lab is using rat whiskers to understand how the brain goes from the mechanics of touch to a perception. "In the same way that we use our hands to go out and actively explore different objects, rats use their whiskers," Hartmann said.

Whiskers are less complicated to study than the human hand, which has sensors all over. The response of the sensors depend on the viscoelasticity of the skin.

Rat whiskers, by contrast, have senors only at the base. In addition, "rats cannot grasp with their whiskers, they can only explore. Our hand movements are complicated because we can grasp and manipulate objects, as well as tactually explore," Hartmann  noted.

Whisker model
She can colleagues studied the structure of the rat head and whisker array — 30 on each side of the face arranged in a regular pattern — to create their virtual model.

Rats use these whiskers to whisk objects 5 to 25 times per second. This is different than cats or dogs, which also have whiskers but aren't able to "move them back and forth that much," Hartmann noted.

The model allows the researchers to simulate the rat whisking against different objects and predict the full pattern of inputs into the whisker system as a rat encounters an object. These simulations can then be compared against real rat behavior.

"It allows us to start to simulate what's going to happen as the rat comes up to an object and explores it with its whiskers," she said.

Human touch
This information, in turn, should lead to insights to what's going on in the human brain as the hand fishes around a pocket or purse.

"There's just electricity in your brain and there's just mechanical signals on your hand. And somehow your brain is able to turn that contact pattern into electricity that generates a perception," Hartmann said. "That whole process is very mysterious. We need basic research to try and figure out how that happens."

In addition, the research is being used to create robots with whiskers, which can use the motion of the whiskers to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment. The technology could be used, for example, on robots designed to explore dark places.

A paper describing the research was published Thursday online in Public Library of Science Computational Biology.

More stories on whiskers and sense of touch:

• Tomorrow's robots could have whiskers
• How whiskers help rats find their way
• Stretchy solar cells to power e-skin

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

To be 30 years younger is the wish of many an aging soul. For actor Jeff Bridges, movie magic makes the dream a reality in "Tron: Legacy," the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi blockbuster, in which the actor plays his younger self in a digital universe with his long-lost son.

The feat is the result of new technology that allowed filmmakers to record the actor's facial movements and superimpose them onto a digital model of Bridges' younger self.

"He's the first actor in cinematic history to play opposite a younger version of himself," the movie's visual-effects supervisor, Eric Barba, said in a Daily Mail profile of the 60-year-old actor.

In the original movie, Bridges played video game hacker Kevin Flynn, who got sucked into a computer and was forced into playing gladiatorial games. In the $300 million sequel, which opens Dec. 17, Flynn's son enters the "Tron" virtual universe -- where he encounters a youthful version of his dad captured in the digital body of Clu 2, one of his creations. The Daily Mail explains the tech behind Clu2:

"Bridges' face was scanned in three dimensions and a 3D model produced, marked with 52 points on the cheeks, eyes, forehead and mouth –- everything that moves when we express an emotion. This digital version of the actor's face was then 'de-aged,' based on footage of the young Bridges from 1984's 'Against All Odds.'"

Disney

Computer technology allows actor Jeff Bridges, shown here, to appear nearly 30 years younger than himself in the new movie Tron: Legacy, opening December 17.

While acting as Clu 2, Bridges had his own face marked with dots in the same 52 places and wore a tiny head-mounted camera that tracked their motion. The facial expressions of the real Bridges were then mapped onto the digital Bridges.

Ohio State University computer scientist Rick Parent predicted the ability of movie technology to turn back time on an actor in a 2002 msnbc.com interview -- which was sparked by Andy Serkis' virtual performance as Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies. 

The new "Tron" movie, he told me, shows that the technological goal of replacing real actors with virtual actors has been reached ... "to a degree."

"With a movie like 'Tron,' the whole premise of that lends itself to computer graphics because it's inside a computer, and therefore the audience has some tolerance for not exactly a real person," he said. But there's a difference between that kind of movie and using a virtual or synthetic replacement "for an actor in a real live scene," he added.

That type of technology still requires advances in motion control, as well as the ability to portray realistic effects such as light reflecting off skin and hair. Faster computers and bigger studio budgets are bringing the technology closer and closer, Parent said, "but there's still a ways to go."

If digital technology continues on its current course, Bridges said the day may come when he could appear in movies without actually acting. "I could still make films," he told the Daily Mail. "I can say, 'I'll lease you my image.'"

Maybe. But Parent said Bridges would still need to do the motion capture work -– the recording of facial and body movements for mapping onto his synthetic likeness. For better or worse, the technology is nowhere near completely replacing real live actors.

"With removing the actor completely, now you've got a whole different problem of building those body motions, those facial motions, the speech -– which is a whole other problem. Building that essentially from scratch … that's a whole other level of complexity, and we are not there at all," Parent said.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).