“Mmmm…what’s that smell…cookies? Campfire? Nerve gas? I know, I’ll just ask my phone.”

NASA developed a chemical detector that plugs into an iPhone (left). It already looks more hi-tech than a tricorder from Star Trek (right).

A researcher at the NASA Ames Center has developed a proof of concept device which can convert an iPhone into a chemical sensor capable of detecting ammonia, chlorine gas, and methane. The chem sniffing device is a small silicon chip (no bigger than a stamp) that plugs into the phone. Upon detection, the chip uses the phone to alert others. It was developed as part of Homeland Security’s Cell-All program. The US hopes that one day a small, inexpensive, and portable chip such as this one could be used to turn thousands (or millions) of mobile phones into a means of quickly detecting hazardous chemicals in public environments. That detection could save lives and help direct first response units. Of course, for the nerds out there the device’s true importance is easy to see: it’s the next step to developing a tricorder from Star Trek.

For those of you who don’t regularly attend conventions wearing pointy ears, a tricorder is a fictional device from the Star Trek universe. It’s the go-to scientific field instrument that identifies…well pretty much anything – alien life forms, rare minerals, the composition of the air. Your tricorder probes and samples its environment and tells you what’s around you. The NASA device does the same thing, albeit for a much smaller set of substances. Still, it’s the first of many steps to developing a handheld device that can measure the world in a scientific way. Right now, Homeland Security has plans to use the chem sniffer in an anti-terrorist detection program (more below) but one day we could see advanced versions helping us measure air quality, determine UV exposure, or tell us if there’s any dairy, nuts, or gluten in our meals. The tricorder would put scientific examination in the palm of our hands.

Currently, the device is only able to detect a limited range of gases using a 64 nanosensor array (16 on each side of the chip). The range of gases it can identify will likely expand and be refined as nanosensors are developed for new substances. A small “sampling jet” collects air from the environment and directs it onto the array. The multiple channel silicon chip also knows how to use the mobile phone to connect, via WiFi or Telecomm, to other phones or a central hub to alert them in case of detection. That’s a nifty piece of engineering, and something we didn’t really see in Star Trek. The connectivity of detection devices is going to affect the way we use chem sniffers long before they become as complex as tricorders.

It's less than one square centimeter now, and could get much smaller.

The chip once miniaturized and adapted could be fit to work in a wide range of mobile devices besides the iPhone. While the current device fits outside the iPhone housing, future devices could be included within the phone itself, using the sampling jet to gather outside air. Imagine having such a chip in every phone. Your mobile could warn you if it detected one of the bad gases in your area. In fact, if everyone had such a chip in their phone, any chemical dangers in the country could be identified almost instantaneously.

Which is the point of the $3 million Cell-All program: crowd-sourced detection. Crowd-sourcing, the distribution of a task among a large group of people, is a concept most often associated with civil disobedience, elaborate pranks, or community service. Yet as Wikipedia has demonstrated, there is great power to be had even in the unprofessional work of millions.

In the wake of the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Japanese rail system, officials were criticized for the long delays it took to identify the chemical used. Homeland Security hopes that the Cell-All program will eventually be able to provide an early detection system that could help undermine such an attack in the US. While it’s unlikely that we’ll see an ammonia, methane, or chlorine gas attack, the chem sniffer may one day be able to detect the more likely offenders (sarin, anthrax, etc).

I wonder if similar sensors and alert systems could be used for biological pathogens. We’ve seen a silicon based bacteria biosensor that could be adapted. Likewise with lung cancer. Crowd-sourcing, if the privacy issues are dealt with, could help us drastically improve our healthcare system by providing round the clock monitoring of public health. Our primitive tricorders could become not just mobile scientists, but mobile doctors as well.

“Excuse me, sir, but my iPhone is telling me that you have cancer. Maybe you could use my friend’s Blackberry to give you a second opinion.”

[photo credits: NASA Ames Research Center, Universal Paramount]

Want to tinker with DNA? Andrew Hessel is the guy who can explain how and why.

Have you ever wished life was more like a video game? Well, Andrew Hessel is here to tell you that your biology is already more like a computer than you know. At his recent talk at Singularity University the genetic engineering guru explained how biology was set to become the next information technology. Hessel is a veteran of the biotech industry, an advocate for open source technology, and one of the founders of the biology wiki, OpenWetWare. His presentation at Singularity University starts from scratch, describing the basics of synthetic bio and explaining how we could one day have “push button biology” – you design an organism, push a button, and out it comes. Check out the video presentation of “Hacking Genomes and Synthetic Biology” in full after the break.

Hessel is a big proponent of open source technology, which you can see in his founding of OpenWetWare, his support of DIYbio, and his ongoing interest and support of iGEM and MIT’s Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The man wants you to be interested and open to the possibilities that hacking DNA will provide. Synthetic biology, the engineering of life on the genetic level, could be the definitive technology of the 21st century. Educational genetic engineering (like iGEM) is beginning to filter into the high school level and Hessel believes that a time is coming soon when everyone could have access to the power and creative freedom of synthetic biology. When? Everyone has a different idea about the timing of the coming paradigm shift, but Hessel targets genetic sequencing as a key ingredient. When you can sequence 10 million base pairs in an hour for $100, he thinks that the genetic revolution will begin. That’s the point when it will become cheap enough for almost anyone to start programming with DNA.

Don’t have time for an hour long video? Check out the highlight reel below.

3:00 – Summary of synthetic biology as information technology.
9:19 – The History of Cells (as IT)
15:30 – The hockey-stick growth of known genetic information (GEN BANK)
17:00 – The number of species may experience its own hockey-stick growth curve.
19:40 – Writing genetic code
21:15 – The importance of DNA printers.
22:20 – DNA programming as a language.
24:00 – iGEM
25:00 – Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
26:00 – Synthetic biology enters high school, and do-it-yourself.
27:35 – Human genome synthesis is coming!
30:00 – End of talk, beginning of questions
30:10 Question#1 – Isn’t synthetic biology scary? What are the dangers of biological attacks?
31:45 – Q#2 – Are there any defenses against bio-terrorism?
33:30 – Q#3 – Peter Diamandis asks if future robots will be mechanical or biological.
37:00 – Q#4 – What are the ethics of using a living thing as a machine?
39:20 – Q#5 – Will the divide between humans and animals grow wider as we program life?
42:12 – Q#6 – Are there competitions in code standards (as there are with IT)?
43:37 – Q#7 – Would Darwin like synthetic biology?
44:00 – Q#8 – What will the biological lab of the future look like?
45:00 – Q#9 – Is synthetic biology going to be patented?
45:40 – Q#10 – How do you write code when it could mutate?
47:00 – Q#11 – Are we going to bring back dinosaurs?
48:15 – Q#12 – What impact will this have on forensic uses of DNA?
51:00 – Q#13 – How will security concerns affect growth of industry?
54:00 – Q#14 – Is there any limit to what synthetic biology can make?
55:30 – Q#15 – What’s the risk analysis with DNA printing?

Stay tuned to the Hub for more news about Singularity University and videos of their unique presentations. And check out SU’s twitter feed to keep up to date on everything going on in the program.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an associate founder at Singularity University.

[photo credit: Wired]
[video credit: Singularity University]

Why in the world would anyone believe in all this Singularity nonsense?

If you have your doubts about the exponential growth of technology continuing indefinitely, there’s a guy you should talk to: Ray Kurzweil. The author of the Singularity is Near, subject of the film Transcendent Man, and inventor of reading machines and the digital synthesizer, Kurzweil is one of the key figures at the center of the debate on how technology will grow in this century and beyond. His key argument, that information technology (and intelligence) obeys a law of accelerating returns, has helped him predict major paradigms in IT in the last 25 years.

Peter Diamandis (left) and Ray Kurzweil (right) discuss how Singularity University and the Executive Program were just concepts but a year ago.

Kurzweil is one of the founders of Singularity University and was an obvious choice to give the keynote address at the opening of SU’s nine day executive program. While that program is just now winding down, the release of videos documenting it is just getting started. Watch Kurzweil make the case for the exponential growth of IT and explain how it could affect us all in the video after the break.

Don’t have time to watch a 40 minute video? We’ve got a handy highlight reel for you below.

Ray Kurzweil is a pretty decent speaker, but if you’ve heard any of his presentation before you’ll probably want to skip the first 15 minutes. In his opening, he does an excellent job explaining the concept of accelerating returns but it’s nothing he hasn’t said before. Luckily, his audience at Singularity University were largely veterans of the concept so he gets to new information fairly quickly:

4:40 – The exponential growth of IT: Intelligence s the ability to predict the future so we are all in the prediction business.
11:00 – Technology growth is predictable even if what we do with technology is not.
13:00 – There is a profound difference between linear and exponential growth.
15:00 – Slides begin! While some of these slides will be familiar to some, they have been updated with new data.
17:11 – Information technology is democratizing.
17:50 – A quick discussion on Facebook
19:30 – The classic Kurzweil graph of paradigm shifts
22:00 – Graph of growth in computing
22:43 – As a field experiences exponential growth we tend to invest in it, thus leading to the ‘double exponential growth’ graph.
24:10 – IT growth seems to be unaffected by economic fluctuations.
27:10 – Graph of the total bits shipped. This growth is driving the economy.
27:55 – Biotechnology and the lesson learned from protein folding
30:13 – Slide on speed of DNA sequencing
30:48 – Communication technology
31:28 – Miniaturization
33:47 – Computational power
34:07 – Reverse engineering the brain
37:13 – E-commerce
38:08 – Photovoltaic production: We have more than enough resources for our population.
40:40 – Average life expectancy

Stay tuned to the Hub for more news about Singularity University and videos of their unique presentations. And check out SU’s twitter feed to keep up to date on everything going on in the program.

*Disclosure: Keith Kleiner (owner of Singularity Hub) is an associate founder at Singularity University.

[screen capture and video credit: Matt Rutherford, Singularity University]

Coleman has mastered the evil scientist pose while riding in his mind controlled wheelchair.

There’s something eerie and amazing about the way that Tom Coleman travels in his wheelchair. You see, Tom isn’t paralyzed and yet he’s not using his body to control his movement. He thinks about saying commands to his chair…and then the chair moves. Tom and Michael Callahan are the founders of Ambient Corporation, makers of the Audeo, a device which reads nerve impulses in the neck to help people speak and even control an electronic wheelchair. Designed to help people suffering from diseases like ALS which erode muscle control over time, Audeo has received numerous awards. Audeo Basic, the system which allows someone to speak only using nerve signals, is already available on a limited basis for trials. Check out Callahan’s presentation of how audeo can be used with cell phones, and video of Coleman in the chair after the break.

This sort of “nerve reading” technology isn’t unique. We’ve seen Braingate use motor neuron signals in the brain to move a wheelchair and computer cursor. Cyberdyne uses surface sensors to detect muscle commands to help guide the movements of their HAL exoskeleton. Audeo is somewhat of a blend of the two. It doesn’t require you to have gold wires in your brain, like Braingate, but it can control remote objects, and it reads surface signals, like HAL, but for both motor movements and language. Taken as a group, we’re seeing an amazing trend in being able to read nerve signals like computer commands. Whether those commands allow us to talk, roll, or lift heavy objects, is just marketing. As nerve signal reading becomes more sophisticated, we’ll see an increase in the range of devices you can control, and the number of disabilities that can be overcome with the technology.

Go to 1:25 to skip explanation:

When you speak, your brain sends signals to your vocal cords, lungs, and mouth to help you shape and sound out words. With some forms of muscle degeneration, the lungs and the mouth may cease to function, but the signals to the cords can still be used. That’s where Audeo comes in. With just three tiny pill sized sensors around the neck, the device can pick up electrical signals from nerves. Those signals are filtered and amplified by the device, sent to a PC for decoding, and then spoken as words out of speakers.

As is clear in the videos, there’s a significant lag time between subvocalizing words and commands and actually have the computer speak or wheelchair move. The current rate is something near 30 words per minute, about one fifth the normal rate. Hopefully as the Audeo program is developed further, the processing speed of the signals will be improved.

Callahan hopes that the Audeo will one day be as inobtrusive and cheap as a bluetooth headset.

Of course, no matter how good the program is, it takes a little time to get used to. While wheelchair commands are fairly simple (Coleman says he can get people moving around in ten minutes), the speech recognition isn’t as easy. Audeo should be able to distinguish all 40+ English phonemes (the sounds we make when we speak) but it takes time for users to become accustomed to “pronouncing” the correct sounds in the new system. Still, judging by Callahan’s performance in the first video, with familiarity comes a pretty cool mastery of speech.

It’s hard to get over the straight-faced completely still bodies of Coleman and Callahan as they demonstrate the capabilities of Audeo. Those are the placid faces of “mind-control”. Eventually, it would be amazing to see this technology adapted into the SixthSense system from MIT or even keyed into a humanoid robot. While the ability to overcome ALS and similar illnesses is a wonderful short term benefit, the long term possibilities for the general public are just as amazing.

[photo credits: John B Cernett, Bland Designs]
[video credit: New Scientist, Ambient Corporation]