At the Computer Human Interaction conference in B.C. this week, a team from Texas A&M University unveiled a touch screen technology they’ve been incubating for a couple of years that isn’t really a screen at all. ZeroTouch, as the project is known, is more like an empty picture frame lined with LEDs and filled with criss-crossing beams of infrared light. Like a mashup of traditional 2-D touch interface with the 3-D applications of, say, Microsoft’s Kinect, its applications are many.

The design seems so simple that it’s almost surprising we haven’t seen something like this until now. ZeroTouch is basically an empty window pane, and the LEDs and IR sensors mounted around its edges detect anything that crosses the plane of that frame (it can recognize up to 20 independent touch points at a time). It doesn’t just register that something is there, but also the size of the object–whether it’s a finger, an entire hand, a tiny stylus, etc.–and whether it is rotating or twisting (this is better explained visually in the video below).

Since ZeroTouch allows a user not only to touch but to reach through the “screen,” it opens itself to numberless applications. Laid on a flat surface, it can be used as a drawing board or a drafting stylus. Placed over any conventional screen, it instantly and inexpensively turns it into a touch screen. Or it can be suspended in space so the user can actually reach through it, offering it a 3-D capability that other touch screen interfaces lack.

So far, such 3-D applications haven’t really been exploited beyond a pretty straightforward painting program, but the possibilities are there. The Aggies behind ZeroTouch next plan to create a layered device wherein multiple screens are stacked atop one another, giving it a greater degree of depth of control.

Theft of trading ideas has long been a proud tradition on trading floors across the world. There was a time when smart traders would hang out in the same restaurants, bars, and flophouses as their institutional counterparts trying to catch a hint about tomorrow’s dealings or to manipulate another trader with some skullduggery–and then try to take advantage of the trade. These days it’s common knowledge that computers do a lot of our financial dealing, but a somewhat frightening article in the London Review of Books describes how the algorithms have now taken up the trader’s practice of trying to fool each other.

Most trading algorithms execute simple tasks. Say a large institution wants to purchase a large chunk of stock in a company: the program will seek out shares and buy them in many, many small quantities so as not to send the price soaring with a massive order–and to stop other traders from seeing what they’re up to and getting in on the deal. Called VWAPs, they’re fairly benign.

But Donald MacKenzie, a professor of sociology at Edinburgh University, tells us that algorithms are now stalking the VWAPs, trying to surreptitiously figure out their intentions so they can get out in front of big trades, buying shares ahead of VWAPs and then selling them back to it at a gain.

But there are craftier and decidedly less ethical programs out there seeking to manipulate the market outright. Called “spoofers,” they might buy a big chunk of shares of a certain ticker. Then the program issues a bunch of buy orders that are fractionally below that price–an indicator to anyone watching the buy order volume that the stock is in demand. This would spur other algorithms (or human traders) to purchase the stock on the prospect that demand will push up the price. The spoofer then dumps its shares and quickly cancels its buy orders when the price rises on the buying pressure it created. Sneaky.

Basically, the algorithms are now trying to outfox other algorithms. That’s particularly troublesome given that computer programs are basically running financial markets these days. We all saw what happens when the algorithms get irrational during last year’s flash crash, when the entire U.S. market shed 6 percent of its value in five minutes due to algorithmic share dumping. While these programs are inherently stabilizing, it’s a bit frightening to think of what might happen if some super-algorithm really got the better of his computational counterparts.

Regenerating Flatworm This iamge shows the head region from an adult planarian (Schmidtea mediterranea). The creature was fixed 7 days after ionizing radiation treatment and contains a growing stem cell colony marked in red. Courtesy Peter Reddien

One cell is all it takes to rebuild a complete, functioning flatworm, researchers have learned. The animals possess a special type of cell throughout their bodies, which shares some qualities with human embryonic stem cells. If scientists can find out how this special cell works, they could someday study ways to use the cells for human tissue regeneration.

The findings are the first time pluripotent stem cells have been found in an adult animal, according to researchers at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Pluripotent stem cells have a unique ability to turn into any kind of cell, which is what makes them so valuable for disease research, tissue regeneration and other fields. But these cells are only found in embryos, or are induced in complex lab processes. Adults have stem cells, but they have greater specificity — blood stem cells can turn into any constituent part of the blood, and skin stem cells can turn into skin or hair, but they can’t turn into other cells like neurons, for instance.

But flatworms, or more properly planarians, seemingly can create all their cells from a limited clump. If you cut off a chunk of it, it won’t die — you’ll soon wind up with two fully fledged, healthy planarians. Researchers wanted to know whether the animals’ regenerative properties were the work of one “all-purpose” stem cell, or groups of specific stem cells working together.

To figure this out, researchers led by Peter Reddien, Daniel Wagner and Irving Wang at MIT exposed the worms to ionizing radiation, robbing their cells of their ability to divide and regenerate. Without the ability to grow new cells, the animal would slowly die. The team killed off all the dividing cells except a rare group called cNeoblasts, and watched as those remaining cells divided to form large colonies of replacement cells.

Then they did something truly weird. Wang and Reddien harvested a single cNeoblast from one type of planarian. Then they gave a different kind of planarian, one that did not have its own neoblasts and couldn’t regenerate, a lethal dose of radiation. Its tissues started to die, from the head down toward its tail. Then they implanted the first worm’s neoblast into the tail of the second, dying worm.

They watched as the transplanted cNeoblast multiplied, differentiated and “ultimately replaced all the host’s tissues,” according to a news release from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Descendants of the single neoblast cell differentiated into neuronal, intestinal and other adult cell types, taking over the jobs of the host’s dying cells. The newly restored worm was an exact genetic copy of the cNeoblast donor. All this from one single cell.

The results were published in today’s issue of the journal Science.

In a news release, Wagner said planarians have already solved the problem of regeneration, and scientists want to determine how it works.

“One day, we’ll examine what are the key differences between what’s possible in this animal and what’s possible in a mouse or a person,” he said.

Video: Robotic Exoskeleton Helps Paralyzed College Student Walk Across the Stage at Graduation

Is There Anybody Out There? The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, is listening to 86 Kepler candidate Earth-like planets in the hopes of hearing from alien life. Wikimedia Commons

A gigantic radio telescope in Virginia has started listening to 86 Earth-like planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, hoping to hear signs of alien life. Astronomers aren’t even sure the stars to which they are listening actually harbor planets, let alone radio-communicating extraterrestrials, but hey, we might as well bend an ear, right?

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.

SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

Hackers used Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing service to wage an attack on Sony’s PlayStation network last month, according to a report by Bloomberg News. If it’s true, it’s the first acknowledgement that a cloud service — billed as a cheap, dynamic solution for safely storing data and ramping up processing power — has been used as a platform for a cyber attack.

Bloomberg cites “a person with knowledge of the matter,” who said a hacker used a fake name to set up a bogus Amazon EC2 account. Amazon’s servers were not hacked; rather, someone purchased computing power and used it to attack Sony’s network, compromising the personal information of 100 million users.

Amazon’s Web Services division allows users to buy processing power and space so they don’t need their own physical servers. EC2 prices range from 3 cents to $2.48 an hour for users on the East Coast, depending on your data needs; details can be found on Amazon’s website.

Extra computing power could also enable hackers to crack passwords and obtain other information more efficiently, as Bloomberg’s report explains.

Several computer security experts quoted in the story explain that there’s not much, if anything, Amazon can do about it: “There is no way of telling who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy,” said Pete Malcolm, chief executive officer of Abiquo Inc., a California-based cloud services firm.

The PlayStation network went back online in the U.S. over the weekend, nearly a month after the intrusion, which Sony labeled a deliberate and sophisticated attack. It’s still not back online in Japan.

Hackers have been known to use hijacked or rented servers, as Bloomberg’s report points out, but this appears to be a first — hackers buying legitimate time on a cloud platform, just like any other customer, but for nefarious purposes.

Sounds like the White House’s new International Strategy for Cyberspace, announced this weekend, has something else to consider.

Groupon anxiety

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