The simulated brain – “The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years… Dr. Markram began by collecting detailed information about the rat’s NCC, down to the level of genes, proteins, molecules and the electrical signals that connect one neuron to another. These complex relationships were then turned into millions of equations, written in software. He then recorded real-world data — the strength and path of each electrical signal — directly from rat brains to test the accuracy of the software.” Is it possible to digitally simulate a brain accurately? Can it only be analog? And are there quantum effects to be considered?

+ Some other AI/brain robot projects:

Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram’s approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions…

Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.

The Chinese government has provided about $1.5 million to a team at Xiamen University to create artificial-brain robots with microcircuits that evolve, learn and adapt to real-world situations. Similarly, Jeff Krichmar and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, Calif., have built an artificial-brain robot that learns to sharpen its visual perception when moving around in a lab environment, another form of emergent behavior, a form of spontaneous self-organization. And researchers at Sensopac, a project backed by a grant of €6.7 million ($9.3 million) from the European Union, have built part of an artificial mouse brain.

BONUS MEMRISTORS

• Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence
• New Memristor Makes Low-Cost, High-Density Memory
• Spintronic Memristors
• The Mysterious Memristor
• Understanding Memristors – “in which the memristor would be used as an analog device“*

Walter Cronkite, the broadcast news legend who spoke the words “And now we have two Americans on the moon” 40 years ago this week died in New York today at age 92. Here is astronaut Neil Armstrong’s statement on Cronkite’s passing.

If you needed another reason to feel sad about the passing of the iconic television journalist Walter Cronkite today, this video is it. John Perry Barlow tweets, “True fact: Walter Cronkite was a hot drummer. Once saw him play with Mickey Hart, Mike Gordon, & Mutatator. Kept the one.” This video is proof. Cronkite appears around 1:55 in.

A week ago, when Oscar F. Mayer, retired chairman of the Oscar Mayer meats company and grandson of the Original Oscar, passed away at 95, he left instructions that the Wienermobile NOT appear at his funeral because “it would be too much of a spectacle.” Well, today, there was a bit of a spectacle as one of the iconic vehicles crashed into the side of a house in Racine, Wisconsin. There is a Wienermobile Blog written by the team of drivers but they have no statement there on this incident (yet).

Nice Wiener.

Masturbation in the animal kingdom.

Henry Allingham, the world’s oldest man, has died aged 113.

Henry Allingham, 1916

Born in 1896, Mr. Allingham became a teenager for the second time last month. He was a veteran of the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

A poignant memory from WWI: “The scenes he witnessed of soldiers waiting to go over the top at Ypres have stayed with him ever since. “They would just stand there in 2ft of water in mud-filled trenches, waiting to go forward,” he said. “They knew what was coming. It was pathetic to see those men like that. I don’t think they have ever got the admiration and respect they deserved.”

His face is a living memorial to the First World War, his solemnity a warning that the sacrifice of the fallen should never be forgotten.

Classic Cobra Commander

There’s a new Japanese trailer for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra making the rounds, and while it contains most of the same footage included in the previous trailer, this one does give us our first look at Cobra Commander (aka The Doctor), as played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in all his weird masked glory. In the screencap above, The Doctor is standing next to Destro (Christopher Eccleston) and the two are plotting to destroy the world and whatnot.

Perhaps it’s because this Japanese trailer cuts around a lot and doesn’t remain too long on any one scene that I’m digging it more than I did the domestic version. I think Paramount should just cut together a trailer featuring only Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow since those are easily the two coolest-looking characters, and their sword fight will most likely become a highlight of the film. I dunno … maybe this one will surprise us in some ways and let us down in others … but isn’t that what we’ve come to accept from all of these based-on-an-80s-toy-line-or-comic-book movies? G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra hits theaters on August 7.

Fox has announced that due to a refusal to meet salary demands, the upcoming new episodes of Futurama on Comedy Central will be replacing the entire principal voice cast, having failed to reach agreements with any of the core team of Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, and Tress MacNeil. On the plus side, the lame imitations your friends have been doing for years can now be put to the test in the open casting call for cheaper sound-alikes.

Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. A math geek reminisces about the joys of high school. As another who has much-less-than-pleasant memories of those years, this struck a nerve.