As the basic structural and functional unit of all known living organisms, the cell is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing. Although there are various theories – meteorites, deep-sea vents, lightning – there is still no scientific consensus regarding the origin of the first cell.

"We don’t understand this really fundamental step in our existence, which is how non-living matter went to living matter," said Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at UCSD. "So this is a really ripe area to try to understand what knowledge we lack about how that transition might have occurred. That could teach us a lot – even the basic chemical, biological principles that are necessary for life."

Cell membranes are composed of a lipid bilayer usually made mostly of phosopholids that have heads that mix easily with water and tails that repel it. When exposed to water, they arrange themselves to form a double layer with heads out and tails in, forming a barrier that sequesters the contents of the cells. Devaraj and Itay Budin, a graduate student at Harvard University, created similar molecules with a novel reaction that joins two chains of lipids.

"In our system, we use a sort of primitive catalyst, a very simple metal ion," Devaraj said. "The reaction itself is completely artificial. There’s no biological equivalent of this chemical reaction. This is how you could have a de novo formation of membranes."

The synthetic membranes were created from a watery emulsion of an oil and detergent that is, on its own, very stable. But the chemists say that adding copper ions results in sturdy vesicles and tubules beginning to bud off the oil droplets. After 24 hours, the oil droplets are gone, having been "consumed" by the self-assembling membranes.

Although a research team from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JVCI) had previously claimed to successfully produce the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell, only its genome was artificial. To claim fully artificial life would also require a synthetic three-dimensional structure to house the information-carrying genome. Something that Deveraj says is, "trivial and can be done in a day. New people who join the lab can make membranes from day one."

The lens harvests energy from an external source using an antenna and has an integrated circuit to store the harvested power and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip with a single blue LED. Unfortunately, while the range of the display was about one meter in free space, that range was reduced to about two centimeters when it was placed on the eye.

Another of the challenges facing the creation of a Terminator-style eye display is that the minimum focal distance of a human eye is only a few centimeters. This means that information displayed on a contact lens would appear blurry. To address this, the researchers used thin Fresnel lenses to magnify the display.

More research is needed before we’ll be able to read text on our eyeballs though. "We need to improve the antenna design and the associated matching network and optimize the transmission frequency to achieve an overall improvement in the range of wireless transmission," said Parviz, co-author of the study. "Our next goal, however, is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."

MagSurf, build by researchers at Universite Paris Diderot in France, flips the strange world of the quantum into a more sci-fi application, essentially turning a skateboard like platform into one big magnetic superconductor. Using liquid nitrogen, the team turn the platform super-cold, creating an electromagnetic field that is expelled from the inside of the board. It’s not quantum locking–the skateboard is too big to mimic that little super-cooled disc–but it provides enough outward magnetic force to float above a rail of permanent magnets.

It’s sort of like a Maglev train, and sort of not. But, says SmartPlanet, one group of researchers in Japan is reportedly working on scaling exactly this kind of technology into better levitating train tech. That sounds somewhat difficult, given the extremely low temperatures needed to make this kind of thing work.

While scientists have long had the ability to edit individual genes, it is a slow, expensive and hard to use process. Now researchers at Harvard and MIT have developed technologies, which they liken to the genetic equivalent of the find-and-replace function of a word processing program, that allow them to make large-scale edits to a cell’s genome. The researchers say such technology could be used to design cells that build proteins not found in nature, or engineer bacteria that are resistant to any type of viral infection.

DNA consists of long strings of "letters" (A, C, G and T) – or nucleotides – that code for specific amino acids. The genetic code consists of three-letter ‘words’ called codons, which are formed from a sequence of three nucleotides, such as ACT, CAG. The new technology is possible because all living organisms use the same genetic code to translate those letters into amino acids, which are then strung together into proteins. While most codons specify an amino acid, there are a few that tell the cell when to stop adding amino acids to a protein chain. It was one of these "stop" condons that the researchers targeted in their research.

To make edits to the genome of E. coli, they combined a technique previously unveiled in 2009, called multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE), with a new technology dubbed conjugative assembly genome engineering (CAGE).

Dubbed an "evolution machine" for its ability to accelerate targeted change in living cells, MAGE locates specific DNA sequences and replaces them with a new sequence as the cell copies its DNA. This allows scientists to precisely control the types of genetic changes that occur in cells as the targets are replaced, while the rest of the genome remains untouched.

The researchers used MAGE to replace the TAG codon with another stop codon, TAA, in living E. coli cells. They chose the TAG codon because, with just 314 occurrences, it is the rarest in the E. coli genome. To make the process more manageable, they first used MAGE to engineer 32 strains of E. coli, each of which has 10 TAG condons replaced.

To combine those strains and eventually end up with one that has all 314 edits, they then developed CAGE, which allows them to precisely control a naturally occurring process called conjugation that bacteria use to exchange genetic material. The CAGE method resembles a playoff bracket, with the researchers inducing the cells to transfer genes containing TAA condons at increasingly larger scales.

After the first round of CAGE, the researchers had 16 strains, each of which had double the number of TAG edits that it started with. Those 16 strains then went into a second round producing eight strains that once again possessed more TAA codons and fewer TAG. And so on, so at the four strains stage, each had about one quester of the possible TAG substitutions.

Eager to share their findings, the researchers published their results at the semi-final round, but say they believe they are now on track to produce a single combined strain with all 314 of the substitutions.

Because the alterations were done in living cells, the researchers have been able to monitor any potential harmful effects as they appear and current results suggested that the final four strains were healthy, and can survive and reproduce.

The researchers are confident that they will create a single strain in which all TAG codons are eliminated, after which they plan to delete the cell machinery that reads the TAG condon to free it up for a completely new purpose, such as encoding a novel amino acid.

In addition to adding functionality to a cell by encoding for useful new amino acids, George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says the technology could also be used to introduce safeguards that prevent cross-contamination between modified organisms and the wild. Additionally, it could be used to establish multi-viral resistance by rewriting code hijacked by viruses. This would be of particular interest to industries that cultivate bacteria, such as the pharmaceuticals and energy industries, where such viruses affect up to 20 percent of cultures resulting in losses in the billions of dollars.

"We’re trying to challenge people to think about the genome as something that’s highly malleable, highly editable," said Harris Wang, a research fellow at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering

Fragmented human genomes could be shipped toward the stars and reconstructed upon their arrival, spawning the first interstellar citizens and avoiding the problems of long-distance space survival.

That’s just one idea — proposed by genome pioneer J. Craig Venter — emerging from the field of dreams seeded by DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project. DARPA is collecting proposals for a conference on the starship project this fall.

We have no idea what interstellar travel might look like in 100 years, of course — just as Jules Verne could never have conceived of the technology required to really send humans to the moon when he wrote about it in 1865. But if we start now, we can make it happen, according to David Neyland, who directs DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

“One hundred years is a pretty good period of time in terms of inspiring research to go off and tackle really hard problems that you don’t even know which questions to ask at the beginning,” he said in a conference call Thursday.

Neyland approached Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, last fall and the two talked about how to spur a starship project. The goal is not necessarily to build a spaceship, Neyland explained, but rather to spur the monumental technology advances that would be required for such a feat. So the 100-Year Starship is more like a thought experiment than a construction project.

“One hundred years from now, there will be capabilities coming out of this that benefit us in the Department of Defense and the civilian sector, but also give us the capabilities of building the starship if we chose to do so,” Neyland said.

So now DARPA is soliciting ideas for the types of questions that would need to be addressed for this to happen, from the practical to the fantastical. Along with the physics behind concepts like time dilation, DARPA wants people from all walks of life to raise questions — from the moral and ethical implications of leaving forever, to the energy, agricultural and medical requirements involved, to political and legal considerations.

DARPA held a workshop in January and invited a host of science fiction authors, physicists, biologists and other thinkers, who all posed questions about a hypothetical journey to the stars. That’s where Venter’s genome proposal came up, Neyland said.

DARPA took that group’s questions and solicited a request for information, which we told you about back in May. Those proposals were due June 3, and now DARPA is synthesizing them into a formal request for proposals, which will be unveiled at a conference Sept. 30-Oct. 2 in Orlando. After that, DARPA will award a contract, worth around $500,000 depending on several factors, for some kind of entity that will take over the next 100 years of planning. The winner doesn’t have to be from the U.S., and DARPA is noncommittal on whether it would be a non-profit or for-profit venture.

“The crux, to us, is inspiration of research — not just in solving the physics-based problems. It’s across all of the domains,” Neyland said.

Since the project first emerged last fall, when Worden described it at a speech at Singularity University, Worden and Neyland have received several calls from people who want to lend money to the effort. Neyland wouldn’t say who, but he said he’s told these would-be interstellar investors they should consider writing a proposal.

Neyland said he could only imagine the benefits that could come from planning an interstellar ship. NASA probably didn’t envision a market for cordless power tools when it first built them for the moon missions, for instance.

“Those unpredictable and ancillary things go back into the Department of Defense as well as the commercial sector and the public sector, and benefits all of us,” he said.

Future Cities! In the year 2020, cars will fly, cities will power themselves with sunlight, biofuels, and minerals mined from the moon, computers will be more powerful than the human brain, and everything will be a touchscreen! Perhaps.

Robotic moon bases, chips implanted in our brains, self-driving cars, and high-speed rail linking London to Beijing. According to a dazzling number of technology predictions that single out the year 2020, it’s going to be to be one hell of a year. Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it holds in store.

2020, of course, is just a convenient target date for roughly-ten-years-off predictions. "It’s not any more particularly interesting, in my opinion, than 2019 or 2021," says Mike Liebhold, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an all-around technology expert with a resume that includes stints with Intel, Apple, and even Netscape. "There’s a continuum of technological development, and that’s just an easy date for an editor or a writer to get a handle on.

After spending decades helping various top-tier tech companies develop and deploy their cutting edge technologies around the world, Liebhold now helps clients take a long view of their businesses so they can make better decisions in the short term. He and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future don’t help clients read tea leaves (predictions are for soothsayers and crystal ball gazers) but they do help them read what he calls the signals — those things you can see in the world today that allow you to make reasonable forecasts about what the future holds.

"We help people think systematically about the future," Liebhold says. "We don’t give them answers, we give them foresight."

In other words, the year 2020 (and 2019, and 2021) is Liebhold’s business. And he forecasts a pretty interesting world a decade from now. For instance, given the current forward momentum of mobile technology and the ever-present forces of economies of scale, Liebhold says it’s conceivable that most of the world’s population will be able to afford a Web-enabled smartphone or tablet device by 2020, offering everyone on the planet geo-location services and access to global information and communication (the forces working against this, he notes, are political rather than technological).

Facial recognition and other biometrics will be commonplace, he says. High-performance data visualizations that currently require supercomputing power will become commonplace as well, driving technological and scientific innovation at even faster rates. We’ll see wider distribution of things like AI and immersive media experiences like viewpoint-independent 3-D. We’ll finally have some decent augmented reality glasses.

And what won’t happen? We won’t be uploading the human mind to a machine by 2020, a la Ray Kurzweil. We won’t be cruising the streets in self-driving vehicles, and while robots may be rolling around on the moon, we won’t be mining minerals from extraterrestrial sources.

The Wonders of the Year 2020

Japan Will Build a Robotic Moon Base

After March’s devastating earthquake and tsunami (and the ongoing nuclear crisis in Fukushima prefecture), Japan has a long and expensive rebuilding phase in front of it. But the Japanese have proven themselves nothing if not resilient and resourceful in the face of such hardship.

Should the powers that be decide to continue forward with Japan’s ambitious plan to build a robotic lunar outpost by 2020–built by robots, for robots–there’s no technological reason why they shouldn’t be able to. In fact, there’s really no nation better for the job in terms of technological prowess.

“I think that’s probably doable, although they have some economic problems right now,” the Institute for the Future’s Mike Liebhold says. “There are private launch vehicles that are probably capable of doing that, and I think the robotics by that point are going to be quite robust.”

China Will Connect Beijing to London via High Speed Rail

China’s ambitious scheme for a high speed rail line linking East and West is a prime example of one of those projects that is technologically possible yet unlikely, at least in the time frame given. “I think technically it’s certainly feasible, but I’m not sure that politically and economically it’s going to fly,” Liebhold says, citing the complexities (and costs) of securing right of way across 17 nations.

China’s plan: offer to pick up the tab. China would pay for and build the infrastructure in exchange for the rights to natural resources like minerals, timber, and oil from the nations that are benefit from being linked in to the trans-Asian/European corridor.

Even so, nine years isn’t a lot of time to lay all that track, and there’s no way China can control for geopolitical issues, civil unrest, and other variables inherent in such a large-scale undertaking.

Cars Will Drive Themselves

Self-driving cars that take to the streets autonomously while passengers kick back and relax have been both a sci-fi staple and a technological holy grail pursued by the likes of Google, DARPA, and automakers themselves (Stanford U’s self-driving Audi TT is pictured above). But before we can have cars that think for themselves (a la DARPA) or even “car trains” that sync up so several vehicles can follow the lead of one human driver, our cars have to be able to talk to each other. All of our cars.

“It’s unlikely, in my opinion, because of the heterogenous nature of the vehicles in the world,” Liebhold says of self-driving tech. “Although there are people who have a notion of the kinds of communication networks we need between vehicles, even if we made the decision today to implement something it probably wouldn’t be mature enough by 2020 to work.”

Our global wireless infrastructure is inadequate even for all of our media computing, Liebhold says, so the idea of rolling out even more sophisticated wireless infrastructure to link our cars and other traffic tech within a decade is simply not likely.

Biofuels Will be Cost-Competitive With Fossil Fuels

This prediction comes courtesy of the U.S. Navy, which along with the other branches of the U.S. military has looked extensively into ways to wean its own operations off of fossil fuels. The military on the whole has pledged to get half of its energy from renewable resources by 2020, and the Navy whole-heartedly believes that it can turn to fifty percent biofuels by that point in time.

“I think that’s reasonable,” Liebhold says. “Again, this is geopolitical, this isn’t technical.” The military understands as well as anyone that being dependent on foreign nations–some of whom have a tenuous relationship with the U.S. and its global military presence–for fuel puts us in a potential strategic bind.

But the military brass’s enthusiasm for biofuels doesn’t just spell cleaner naval fleets or ground vehicles burning a 50-50 blend. The military buys fuel like everyone else, so the Navy’s forecast that biofuels will be cost-competitive with oil by 2020 bodes well for all of us, not just the military. If the Navy is correct, biofuels–though still a contributor to CO2 emissions–could take a sizable chunk out of the amount of oil and gas we’re pumping from the ground (and, you know, fighting over) by decade’s end.

The ‘Flying Car’ Will be Airborne

“No. The air traffic control for something like that is incredible,” Liebhold says, returning to his argument about self-driving automobiles. “If we can’t even get the communication infrastructure for our cars, how the heck are we going to build an infrastructure for aerial communications? And on top of that I don’t think flying technology is going to scale down to the personal level by then either.”

We’ll Control Devices Via Microchips Implanted in Our Brains

The human brain remains biology’s great, unconquered wilderness, and while the idea of meshing the raw power of the human mind with electronic stimulus and responsiveness has long existed in both science fiction and–to some degree–in reality, we likely won’t be controlling out devices with a thought in 2020 as Intel has predicted. While it’s currently possible to implant a chip in the brain and even get one to respond to or stimulate gross neural activity, we simply don’t understand the brain’s nuance well enough to create the kind of interface that would let you channel surf by simply thinking about it.

“Neural communications are both chemical and electrical,” Liebhold says. “And we have no idea about how that works, particularly in the semantics of neural communication. So yeah, somebody might be able to put electronics inside somebody’s cranium, but i personally believe it’s only going to be nominally useful for very, very narrow therapeutic applications.”

All New Screens Will Be Ultra-Thin OLEDs

It doesn’t take much more than a trip around the Web to see some pretty amazing screen technologies that are already making it out of the lab and onto the shelf. There will certainly still be some “antique” monitor screens hanging around in 2020, but as far as new stock is concerned it’s easy to see the entire industry shifting to paper-thin OLED surfaces, many with touch capability.

“I think that’s legitimate, we’ve been forecasting that for years,” Liebhold says. “So surfaces will become computational, walls, mirrors, windows.”

Commercial Space Will Take Us to the Moon and Asteroids (and We’ll be Mining Them)

This prediction came by way of Esther Dyson, who knows a thing or two about technology. But we’re only willing to meet her half way here. By all accounts, it looks as though there will be a robust private space industry by 2020. SpaceX already has deals to resupply the ISS, and Virgin Galactic has demonstrated its ability to take tourists to very high (but suborbital) altitudes.

But as for the mining of extraterrestrial bodies like asteroids, or commercial space companies arranging holidays to the moon? We’re not holding our breaths. For one, Liebhold notes, the human body was not designed for long-duration space travel and it’s going to take us decades (if ever) to figure out how to fight the physiological deterioration that would set in on long-distance manned missions.

But even robotic missions aren’t so simple. Look several decades our for robotic mining missions to asteroids, he says. But look for things like the space elevator to happen first.

A $1,000 Computer Will Have the Processing Power of the Human Brain

Cisco’s chief futurist made this prediction a couple of years ago, and Liebhold doesn’t think the company is so far off.

““I think that’s reasonable,” he says. “That’s not the intelligence of the human brain, that’s just the ability, the number of cycles. If you look at Moore’s Law and the way the cores or the number of processors on chips is growing, that’s totally viable.”

Universal Translation Will be Commonplace in Mobile Devices

DARPA has been working on a universal translator for decades, with varying degrees of success (and failure). Language, it turns out, is an incredibly complex thing, especially when you get down to the micro level and start examining regional dialects, slang, and other semantic nuance. But as the cloud goes, so goes our ability to translate on the fly.

“Language translation won’t take place on the device, it takes place in the cloud,” Liebhold says. “In order for a computer to detect what it is your saying, it has to compare what you’re saying with millions of other examples. That’s done in the cloud. So it’s reasonable to say that any device with a network connection will be able to translate languages.”

But, he cautions, while we should be able to seamlessly swap words between the mainstream languages on our mobile devices by 2020 (we can do that now, to some extent, with Google Translate), minority languages will still be a long time coming. Companies (like Google) and governments are putting together very good bodies of knowledge for this kind of translation–Google is combing through U.N. transcripts to see how even lesser-spoken tongues translate spoken English, and vice versa–it will simply take time for translation to become accurate and effective.

We’ll Finally See Some Decent AR Glasses

Current AR apps for smartphones are marginally helpful, but the amount of data one can access through them isn’t extremely vast, and you have to view the world through your phone display to get the information overlay.

What we really want is AR overlaid directly onto whatever we happen to be looking at. We want that data to be rich, customizable, relevant and easy to access. By 2020, we should have all that.

The evolution of AR is happening in two codependent technological arenas. For one, glasses themselves are getting better. Current AR apps and glasses too often have incongruities between the real world and the graphical overlay, and in the case of glasses such misalignment can be disorienting, even nauseating. By 2020, Liebhold says, position sensing, GPS locating, and image positioning should be mature to the point that even when you’re moving quite fast (say, riding a bike down the street) the AR can keep up with the real world.

The other side of the equation is the spatial Web, which is coming along quite nicely. As more Web sites and digital services imbue themselves with geolocation data, that spatial Web becomes more robust. “We’re going to see the data in the world around you become rich so the world itself will become self-explanatory,” Liebhold says. “Things and places will have rich detail attached to them.”

Next up: AR contact lenses. They won’t be commercially common by 2020, but Liebhold thinks we’ll definitely be seeing working models coming out of the lab by decade’s end, with regular rollout coming in the following years.

We’ll Create a Synthetic Brain That Functions Like the Real Deal

We’ve already established that it’s possible to build a computer with the processing power of a brain. But is it possible to build a human brain from scratch. Researchers at the Blue Brain Project at the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, think so. They’ve already build a model of the 10,000-neuron neocortical column that, running on a massively powerful IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer (pictured above), looks pretty amazing.

But the human brain contains billions upon billions of neurons, and a lot of its processes are poorly understood. There’s an argument that as we build a brain, we’ll learn more and more about it, increasing our rate of understanding exponentially year after year. But there’s still so much we don’t know that it’s difficult to be optimistic that even the geniuses (we’ll resist the temptation to call them brainiacs) at Blue Brain can grow their synthetic brain that quickly.

Time Teleportation, Neatly Graphed and Color-Coded

As if the idea ideas of quantum entanglement and time travel weren’t difficult enough to wrap one’s head around separately, two physicists at the Universtiy of Queensland in Australia have further compounded the headache by merging the two ideas via a new kind of quantum entanglement that links particles not across space, but across time.

Quantum entanglement is that “spooky action” (Einstein’s words, not ours) that links two particles such that a measurement on one immediately influences the state of the other, even if the two particles are separated by miles, or even light years. Entanglement defies the intuitive way we understand the universe to work (as does most of quantum mechanics). The idea of “time teleportation,” as described by S. Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph, doesn’t add clarity but it does introduce some interesting questions about the fundamentals of the universe.

In a sense, everyone and everything is time traveling, moving forward in time at a given rate. What Olson and Ralph propose is that it’s possible to take a shortcut into the future without being present in the interim. How? Tech Review’s KFC explains:

The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit.

But here’s the thing: said qubit doesn’t have to exist in the time between it’s initial detection and its reconstruction, though it is the exact same qubit. But there is a wrinkle, in that the initial creation of the qubit and its detection in the future must be symmetrical. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement," they say in their paper.

How does all this work? Admittedly, we’re not sure. But researchers have already achieved teleportation across space in the lab, so if time teleportation is truly as simple as space teleportation, we’ll likely be shown how it works sometime soon enough.

Biostorage: Storing Bytes in Bacteria Just one gram of bacteria could store as much information as 450 2,000-gigabyte hard drives in its DNA, a Hong Kong research team says.

E. coli gets a bad rap – probably due to the violent illness it induces – but a group of Chinese University students in Hong Kong have found a novel and potentially reputation-changing use for the bacteria: data storage. The team has devised a way to encrypt and store information in the DNA of bacteria to such an effective degree that they say just one gram of E. coli could store the same amount of data as 450 two-terabyte hard drives.

Biostorage, or the storing of data in living things, is nascent but not new, having been around for about a decade. But earlier efforts at encoding data into DNA have been incremental – for instance, a few years back a team of Japanese researchers encoded Einstein’s relativity equation into the DNA of bacteria, demonstrating that it was possible but otherwise not pushing the field forward.

Three years later the strides taken by the Hong Kong team are far more significant, showing that not only text but also images, music, and video can be stored within cells. The team devised a means of compressing data into chunks that can be placed in different cells and mapped so that it can be easily located later, much as CPUs chop and store data in fragments. They’ve even developed a three-tier security system that allows them to encrypt the data in an unhackable way, making data stored on their bacterial systems impervious to cyber threats.

In theory, bacterial biostorage systems could hold vast amounts of data in very small spaces, and since the bacteria keep replicating they could feasibly store data reliably for millennia. But the applications don’t end there; the team is exploring ways their techniques could be used to encode extra information into organisms like genetically modified crops to create a sort of “bio barcode” that would identify the provenance of a certain strain of GM vegetable or help track the spread of certain GM crops designs.

Foodtube Stop A series of tubes could connect grocery stores to homes and businesses, providing a food and freight pipeline modeled after water, sewer and oil pipelines.

Hungry? Better turn on your linear induction motor and send a metal capsule through an underground polyethylene tube to retrieve some groceries.

That’s the vision of Foodtubes, a UK program that seeks to reduce carbon emissions by building a pipeline-capsule system to deliver food and freight. A series of tubes could ferry 6-foot-long metal bins among neighborhoods, entire cities or even to different countries, moving goods at 60 mph using linear induction motors and intelligent routing software. Foodtubes says it’s “really fast food,” brought to you by the Internet of Things.

“In the long term, we could see an ostrich slaughtered in Cape Town, and delivered to Edinburgh,” said Noel Hodson, Foodtubes’ CEO, in an interview in EWeek Europe.

The group wants to start in the London suburb of Croydon with a $625 million pilot network connecting all the borough’s food shops, schools and buildings. Such a network would remove diesel trucks from the road, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 8 percent a year and reducing congestion, the project’s leaders say.

It sounds crazy, but Foodtubes points out that other commodities — oil, water, gas and even sewage — have dedicated pipeline networks, and new 3-foot-diameter tubes are installed all the time. Dedicated Foodtube pipelines would require little maintenance and could earn $125 million a year, Hodson said.

Apparently the group initially considered vacuum tubes, like the kind you use at a drive-through bank teller, but realized it would be impractical on a massive scale. Instead, capsules would be accelerated with linear induction motors, which would be controlled by computers.

Two oil firms are apparently interested, EWeek Europe reports — the very companies that could stand to lose if diesel trucks are removed from the road. Foodtubes is talking to two firms about providing a pipeline in Canada’s permafrost and in the Middle Eastern desert, Hodson said.

Robot Troops of the Future Robo-Soldier wants to execute (an efficient, well-calculated plan).

Modern warfare relies increasingly on robotics for intelligence gathering and increasingly for strike capabilities, but the decision-making capacity still rests solely in the hands of human commanders. But British defense company BAE systems is testing a way to turn over battlefield decisions over to robot troops as well.

ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) is BAE’s response to the overload of sensors and data now confronting battlefield commanders who now have UAV observations, soldier-based sensors, satellite data, and reams of other intelligence washing over them in such volumes that, as Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula puts it, they’ll be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” The system allows a network of robot soldiers to quickly collect and exchange information and then to bargain with each other to determine the best course of action and execute it.

The robots are armed to the teeth with algorithms employing a range of models – game theory, probabilistic modeling, optimization techniques – that let them predict outcomes and allocate battlefield resources far more quickly and efficiently than humans trying to process the same amount of data. All that should help troops – both robotic and otherwise – keep stay afloat in the data deluge.

But does it work? ALADDIN hasn’t seen any trigger time yet, but BAE and university researchers collaborating on the system have put it through simulated natural disasters (another potential application). Disasters, they theorize, are similar to warfare in their chaotic nature, and therefore the simulations are a good analog.

And in disasters the system operates well: Robots gather data on the various casualties in different areas, objectively assess where a limited number of ambulances can have the greatest possible impact, and execute a strategy quickly without egos or human emotions or errors clogging up the machinery. It’s like an auction for resources based on need, and while it may sound insensitive to auction off life-saving help to a bunch of machines, when this resource auction was eliminated from some simulations, some of the ambulances weren’t used at all because the system couldn’t figure out where to send them.

BAE is building what’s known as “flexible autonomy” into ALADDIN which will keep the higher decisions in the hands of humans (decisions like “go to war” and “don’t go to war,” for instance). And the idea of being able to crunch sensor data, raw intel, crowdsourced info from the Web, and other data sources to make good decisions quickly could prove invaluable. So while idea of robot armies with decision-making capabilities is terrifying to some, the allure of such high efficiency – be it in warfare or disaster response – is difficult to deny.