Dubbed the most-complex structure in the universe, perhaps nothing is more mysterious, more enduringly elusive, than the human brain.  In the 19th century the ‘new science’ of phrenology promised to unlock the secrets of the human brain by studying the shape of a person’s head. A century later researchers started to look inside the skull for answers; the National Institutes of Health declared the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain” and federal money gushed into research grants, creating a renaissance in neuroscience. The results of that renaissance are just starting to emerge:  today’s brain imaging techniques allow scientists to map the neural circuitry of the human brain to within 50 nanometers; advances in brain-machine interfaces suggest a cyborg-like future may be closer to fact than fiction; and perhaps most importantly, modern paradigms of consciousness and behavior are emerging that suggest new insights into what makes us uniquely human. This week’s Friday Five looks at a small handful of projects and perspectives revealing the future of the brain.

Brainbow

The pictures look like stunning pieces of abstract art: vibrant multi-colored tendrils forming delicate branches of trees and tendrils.  Rather than an impressionist art exhibit, however, these pictures reveal brilliant bouquets of brain cells and are the highest resolution images of the brain available today.  Last year Dr. Jeff Lichtman and his team at the Harvard Brain Center developed transgenic mice with multicolored neurons using a new method that “paints” brain cells with a fluorescent protein, making visible individual neurons and their vast networks of connections.  Pictures of those mouse neurons, what Lichtman calls “Brainbows“, reveal an ethereal combination of technology and nature on the frontier of neuroscience. By color-coding neural circuits, researchers hope to create a complete a “wiring diagram” of the brain that will help identify the cause of neural disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.  In this NPR interview, Lichtman describes the significance of brainbows for the future of neuroscience; for more eye candy, see this Wired gallery.

Augmented Cognition: DARPA goes Hollywood

DARPA’s Augmented Cognition program (”AugCog”) explores pathways to enhance human cognitive processes, particularly in the areas of attention and memory - a future-critical skill in a world increasingly characterized by information overload.   Most of the studies the agency funds have impenetrable-sounding titles, such as “Experience-Based Narrative Memory”.  But in this case, DARPA turned to Hollywood to bring the potential of augmented cognition technology to life.  The Future of Augmented Cognition is a short film directed by veteran filmmaker Alexander Singer that depicts DARPA’s vision of “AugCog” technologies in 2030.  Set in a command center tasked with monitoring cyberspace activities for anomalies that could threaten the global (and largely digital) economy, the film aims to provide both an entertaining and informative overview of the role AugCog technology could play in everyday life in the future.

Brain-machine interface

In 2001, electrician Jesse Sullivan accidentally touched a live cable, electrocuting him with 7,500 volts of electricity. As a result, both his arms were amputated at the shoulder. In the process of fitting him for artificial limbs surgeons took the severed ends of the nerves that once controlled Sullivan’s arm and rerouted them to the muscles in his chest. Unexpectedly, the nerves grew into the muscles and the procedure made Jesse Sullivan the first person to receive a nerve-muscle graft and use it to control an artificial limb. While there are numerous stories in the news today about the potential of brain-machine interfaces, this video from Pop!Tech 2005 tells one of the most remarkable and inspiring stories in neuroscience.

Promise and Peril: The Future of the Brain

The title says it all.  Most books about the future of the brain tend to be either science-heavy or buried in a deep layer of philosophical theory covering the dualism vs. holism debate.  Scientist and author Steven Rose balances the approach in Promise and Peril: The Future of the Brain, an ethically-aware, pop-sci look at how developments in neuroscience (including smart pills, brain repair and mind-reading devices) will change our understanding of what it means to be human in the future. 

Blue Brain 

The human brain is often described as a biological supercomputer, and the holy grail of computing has long been to make a machine that functions with the speed, accuracy and complexity of a human brain. But can a brain be built from a bunch of circuit boards and microchips?  IBM and Swiss research lab EPFL say yes: they’ve teamed up to create the Blue Brain project, described as the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain.  Blue Brain, as the supercomputer is called, consists of 2,000 microchips, each of which has been programmed to act like a neuron in a human brain and which together replicate “with shocking precision” the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. This SEED magazine article by science writer Jonah Lehrer offers an in-depth look at road to building Blue Brain, from the eccentric personalities (including project leader Henry Markam) to the technical hurdles (such as an estimated annual $3 billion electric bill).

I’m in DC this week, arguably the command center for the world’s most powerful military, the epicenter of geopolitical power (for now), a city where “war” is just another word for Monday morning. Like it or not, our cultural (some would say human) fascination with war is endless. While the average American would likely be hard pressed to name 10 elements in the periodic table, thanks to the US media and recent election cycle, most could easily tell you that we’re spending $10 billion per month to fund the war in Iraq and that General Petraeus likes oatmeal for breakfast. Now that we’ve elected a new Commander in Chief, what sort of wars will the leader-elect of the free world have to contend with? For better or worse, this week’s Friday Five covers different visions of the future of war.

Mind Wars

War has always been a boom time for science.  Since WWII when the military establishment and academia first got cozy, scientific advancements have flourished in the wake of war.  Government support of science has led to breakthroughs in war technologies (think: sonar and the atomic bomb) but also benevolent ones, such as penicillin and the Internet.  In Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, Jonathan Moreno explores the military applications of neuroscience, providing a tour through some of the most provocative research that’s making the brain the most popular object of national security attention, including:  wearable robotics, smart drugs, “neural prostheses” and “rapid onset brain-targeted bioweapons.” Moreno covers both near and long-term technologies, painting a broad picture of how future wars may be fought, and importantly gives focused attention to the ethical dilemmas that these new technologies will create.

CyberWars

In May, seven NATO nations backed a new cyber defense center in Estonia, the ex-Soviet state which last year faced weeks of denial of service attacks on its internet infrastructure. The move marks new territory for NATO; as cyber-skirmishes increase, geo-political alliances must write new rules to deal with these emerging forms of conflict.  The playbook is wide open: should cyber-bullets be considered weapons of mass destruction? What constitutes collateral damage online? This New Scientist article takes a look the battleground of the future: cyberspace.  

Non-Lethal Weapons

Is the term “non-lethal weapon” an oxymoron on the battlefield?  Wired.com’s “Danger Room” blog reports on the development of a combination sonic  blaster/laser weapon that when deployed, would blast off a deafening and blinding combination of light and sound, or in military contractor lingo, a “psycho-acoustical event.” A new wave of such non-lethal weapons which ‘distract and disorient’ are on the horizon, touted by military experts as essential tools in peacekeeping missions and civilian-heavy battle zones.  Check out the Danger Room blog for more on ‘what’s next in national security’.  

War of the Nerds

In 2005 the secretary of the Air Force penned a vision statement for the future in which he vowed that the Air Force would “fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace.”  That statement was the force (no pun intended) behind the establishment of the service’s newly-formed Cyber Command, and its chief, Brig. General William Lord, is looking for a few good geeks to recruit. This Wired article (“Welcome to Cyber Country, USA”) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the new command whose mission is to prepare for a future where computers are weapons.  Says Lord: “We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future.  So if they can’t run three miles with a pack on their backs but they can shut down a SCADA system, we need to have a culture where they can fit in.”

Water Wars

India.  China. Pakistan.  Uruguay. Turkey. Iraq. Nevada. This is just a short list of the places that are hotspots for future (and in some cases, current) water conflicts, the threat of which has been heralded by academics and policymakers for years. Blue Gold: World Water Wars takes a different look at the source of these future conflicts. Based on the book, this documentary film looks at the privatization and commoditization of the world’s water sources by both corporations and countries.  Following the fight for water rights around the world, the film asks: is water a commodity or a human right? The answer today, of course, is both.  But by 2025, when more than two billion people are expected to live in water-stressed countries, perhaps the more relevant question is: what will it be in the future?  

If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.