Synthetic Life

Scientest have combined the building blocks of life and have been able to over come some major hurdles in the effort to create life from scratch. By creating a container for the life to reside in, a way to reproduce, and a way to convert raw materials to energy man can indeed create life if only for a few hours at a time. Scientist have made a confident claim this week that they expect someone to create artificial life from scratch, albeit microscopic at best, within 3-10 years.

Very cool, I love simple changes in technology that make way for completly new ways of doing common tasks. Like this subtle change in keyboard interaction. This keyboard uses pressure to interpret keystorokes. This allows users to add more demension to your typing or game playing.  For instance, if you are shouting in your text simply press each key harder…..Anywho, it’s pretty neat check out the video.

More on the program:

UIST (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces. Sponsored by ACM’s special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and computer graphics (SIGGRAPH), UIST brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW. The intimate size, the single track, and comfortable surroundings make this symposium an ideal opportunity to exchange research results and implementation experiences.

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2009/