IBM Nanoparticle Breakthrough Destroys Drug-Resistant Bacteria

Not mentioned in the article - does it only destroy the "bad" bacteria?

A Computer Wins At Jeopardy

The big news isn't really that a computer beat the two best Jeopardy players. The big news is that computers (albeit an enormous, highly specialized one) now have natural, human language capability. Stolen from The Dish:

I watched the PBS documentary on Watson last week and what struck me most was just how close we are to a Star Trek ship’s computer.

Being a fan of The Next Generation, I loved watching Beverly Crusher go back and forth with her sickbay computer to diagnose a medical issue.  You could see flashes of inspiration in Beverly’s eyes as the computer made connections that she had no way of making because it was tapping into to resources and databases her human mind could never store internally (or never even know about).  But the “ta-da” moment came from Beverly as she connected the dots herself, and then bounced her logic off the computer to make sure it was sound, sometimes going several rounds before working it all out.  Watson seems very close to being able to fulfill that kind of promise.
The documentary touched on a possible new type of “big picture” researcher.  A scientist or doctor that uses a Watson-type interface to make connections across various fields of research; connections that specialists might never make because of their narrower focus.  As long as a person is trained on how to ask the questions, the Computer can pull answers from all available sources and suggest multiple related items that might never have been considered before.
The potential is extraordinary, right?

Competitor Ken Jennings notes:

The IBM team had every reason to be hopeful. Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing—the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. Jeopardy! clues cover an open domain of human knowledge—every subject imaginable—and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned—yes, it learns—to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether Jeopardy! means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Touchless Dominos

An ancient game brought into the future.

Video:

エスパードミノ from jarashi on Vimeo.