An Iranian inventor claims to have created a machine that can predict an individual’s future 5-8 years in advance. Ali Razeghi claims to have registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions, but the Iranian government denies this.

Details are, as you might suspect, sketchy. Razeghi claims his machine works by a complex “algorithm.” It sounds like it’s a machine, not just computer software. Also he claims that the machine works by simply touching the user.

Obviously this is nonsense, but stories like this (now spread far and wide by the internet) always raise the question for skeptics and scientists – how do we address scientific claims that are “impossible,” and is it even meaningful to characterize anything as impossible given the limitations of human knowledge?

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Social media has been getting a bad rap recently. Blogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media outlets have certainly had a dramatic impact on how people communicate. They are powerful tools and many people have put them to good use.

There are some unintended consequences as well, and as a society we are still learning to adapt to this new factor in our lives. There are issues of privacy, the rules of social behavior, and the ethics of spreading dubious information online.

We discussed two related issues recently on the SGU. The first was about the recent paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” by Lewandowsky. Essentially Lewandowsky wrote a paper about conspiracy theories around the denial of global warming. Part of the backlash against that paper by self-described global warming skeptics included further conspiracy theories about the paper. Lewandowsky could not resist the irony, hence his subsequent paper.

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I’m a big fan of solar energy, and specifically photovoltaics (PV). The earth is bathed in free clean energy, far more than we need to run our civilization, and all we have to do is harvest it. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

There are many ways to calculate the efficiency and effectiveness of PV technology. One way it to calculate its cost-effectiveness compared to other forms of energy. The bottom line for any consumer is this – if you install PV in your residence, what is the total cost of installation and maintenance compared to the cost savings of the energy produced?

You can also think about the energy efficiency of PV – what is the total energy cost of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of PV across its lifetime compared to the amount of electricity it generates.

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We are seeing the beginning of technology to interface computers and brains. I have been writing about brain-machine-interface (BMI) technology, and brain-machine-brain interface technology. Now we have a report of brain to brain communication, which is currently as close as we can come to telepathy.

Actually, the technology is – brain to machine to another machine and then to another brain – technology. Imagine having a computer chip implanted in your brain that can read your brain activity. This information is then transferred to a computer chip implanted in someone else’s brain, who can then access that information.

If this exchange were happening in real time through wireless transfer with sufficient resolution, that would essentially be telepathy.

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Any intervention that interacts with a large system is bound to have unintended consequences. This concept is often brought up in the context of government – laws are passed to have a certain desired effect but have unintended secondary effects, often in opposition to what was desired.

Technology also can have unforeseen results. It is conventional wisdom, for example, that the invention of the cotton gin, intended to make cotton processing more efficient, also has the consequence of making slaves in much higher demand, leading ultimately to the civil war.

Arguably one of the biggest technological creations of our generation is the internet. It has transformed the way we access information. Predictions as to its utility were all over the place, some fairly accurate in certain respects, others way off.

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Headlines read: “Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible.” The technology is actually quite cool and interesting, but it is distressing how much of the mainstream reporting has been calculated to misinform for the sake of some cheap sensationalism. The technology is interesting enough without turning it into science fiction.

The temporary tattoos are really skin surface electrodes that can read electrical signals, such as EEG signals from the brain. They can also incorporate other sensors, like heat or light sensors. They can contain antenna to receive energy or communication, and wireless technology to communicate to devices.

The electrode circuits are also thin (100 microns), flexible, and small. Combining several features into such a small device is the real advance here, expanding the number of feasible applications of such technology.

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I have been involved in assessing and implementing several medical informatics applications, as electronic medical records (EMR), expert systems, and other software applications are becoming more common in my field. For this reason I have had to explain to others specific details of what I mean by “user friendly.” I’m a nerd, so I just like becoming super reductionist about such things. It also occurred to me that there are some findings of neuroscience that are relevant to the question.

In colloquial terms “user friendly” means a software application that is easy to use. There are several aspects to ease of use, however. I am coming at this from the perspective of an experienced user, not a programmer, so consider this a (somewhat cranky) user’s guide to being user-friendly. The types of issues I list below are actually all related and interact with each other, but I find it helpful to consider them as distinct issues.

Intuitive

One aspect is often referred to as “intuitiveness.” An application is said to be intuitive if it is easy to figure out how to use it without specific instructions, reading the manual, or extensive prior specific knowledge. Functions should be labeled in plain language that makes their use obvious. Remember all the jokes about Windows users having to click the ‘Start’ button in order to shut down the computer?

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That may seem like a “Well, duh!” headline, until I add the extra tidbit that the cheetah in question is a robot.

The Cheetah Robot developed by Boston Dynamics recently reached 28.3 mph on a treadmill speed test, beating the world record for human foot speed attained by Usain Bolt at 27.78 mph. The Cheetah is a project backed by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is being developed for potential military applications.

The achievement is a significant milestone. Robots have traditionally not been very mobile, unless they are housed in some sort of vehicle. Even then, until recently real mobility required a human operator. Researchers have been making steady progress, however, in developing systems for vehicles that can drive themselves (a project also supported by DARPA).

Walking, on the other hand, has been a skill that has largely eluded robots, whether on 2,3 4 or more legs. We take bipedal mobility for granted, but it is a neurologically very complex feat that requires many of our neural subsystems working well in order to achieve confident and safe bipedalism. Walking is easily compromised by a number of neurological ailments, not just weakness, but also compromise in balance, vision, sensation, vestibular function, joint function, and extrapyramidal function (which regulates the smoothness of movement). Bipedal walking is a delicate moment-to-moment balancing act that we have not, so far, been able to reverse engineer.

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The most common response of my patients when I test their deep tendon reflexes is to giggle. I bang gently on the infrapatellar tendon, their leg kicks out involuntarily, and they giggle. While I am acutely interested in the reflex response and what that says about my patient’s nervous function, the giggle is perhaps the more interesting response. Many patients also comment something to the effect of, “That is so weird.”

What is weird is the experience of movement outside of our conscious control. We exist in a neurologically induced illusion that we own and control our limbs.  There are, in fact, specific circuits in the brain that generate the experience of ownership and control. We know this partly because of patients in whom those circuits are disrupted and lose their sense of either ownership or control. I guess it is also not surprising that we are conscious of the conscious level of control of movement, but not of the subconscious elements of control. We are occasionally reminded of them when a reflex supersedes are conscious control, an experience we find weird and often giggle-inducing.

The reality is that there are different levels of hierarchical control in our nervous system. More basic circuits provide automatic function and are literally (phylogenetically) more primitive than higher levels of more sophisticated control, all the way up to voluntary control from the cortex. We are not consciously aware of most of the processing that is needed to produce smooth and coordinated movement. If we desire to walk across the room, for example, we guide our movements to accomplish that desire, but we are not aware (thankfully) of the many components that go into the astonishing balancing act of walking.

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Science fiction is full of a future in which we plug our brains into a computer (or a computer into our brains, I guess) and experience a seamless connection to either a virtual world (ala The Matrix) or a robotic machine that we can control as if it were a part of our body. This is called a brain machine interface (BMI), and the applications of this technology would be many and profound.

The question remains, however – will it work? Will the experience be truly seamless? Can our brains adapt to mesh with a virtual reality or control something external? There are two ways you can think about this based upon our current understanding of neuroscience. The first is that BMI will be inherently limited because as the brain develops it adapts to our bodies and the sensory information that it receives. There are also windows of developmental potential, and after our brains develop to a certain point it loses some of its potential to adapt and wire itself to novel input.

We might hypothesize, therefore, that an adult would have a limited capacity to adapt to a BMI. Therefore the experience will seem unnatural and perhaps even unpleasant, and the level of control will be limited and awkward. This is the pessimistic view.

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