Smithsonian.com

Are there drugs that can enhance your memory? Image courtesy of Flickr user vissago

I know memory is a very fickle friend, but firing blanks three times in one day when I tried to remember a name was ridiculous. So when I heard about new research into a so-called “memory pill,” I thought, “Can we fast-track this thing?”

Scientists would call it a “cognitive enhancer,” which has come to mean drugs that can sharpen the brain’s focus, such as Ritalin or Adderall. In the recent study the drug was Modafinil, designed originally to treat narcolepsy, but in this case given to a group of sleep-deprived surgeons. While the medication didn’t seem to improve the performance of the doctors in simulated surgery, it did enhance their short-term memory and sped up their ability to complete complicated tasks.

All of which raises ticklish questions. If a pill can make doctors better surgeons, shouldn’t we want this? What about fighter pilots or, say, New York cab drivers? And might we reach the point where brain enhancers are required to perform certain jobs?

Cosmetic neurology?

These issues have been percolating for several years, as Ritalin and Adderall have evolved from a treatment for attention deficit disorder to a pharmaceutical study aid for college and high school students. Back in 2008 the New York Times asked, “Brain enhancement is wrong, right?” In the article one scientist spoke of “cosmetic neurology” and others raised the prospect of a designer drug divide between those with access to brain meds and those without.

Already Modafinil, which can be purchased online with a prescription, is being marketed as a way to “cut through the fog of excessive sleepiness.” Earlier this month, BBC science editor Susan Watts reported the results of an anonymous online questionnaire about the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs. Just under 40 percent of the 716 respondents said they had used one and 92 percent of them said they would do it again.

At the moment, brain drugs can improve performance only marginally. But in a recent piece on the BBC’s “Newsnight,” Watts cuts to the chase: “What if a pill could make you 50 percent smarter, or even 100 percent. Would you still say no?”

She also reports that scientists are getting serious about something they’re calling “moral enhancement.” They’ve apparently begun testing hormones that could make people kinder, more empathetic, more moral.

Are you ready for a Nice pill?

Here are other developments in tapping the brain’s potential:

• The Biggest Loser, Rodent Edition: Harvard scientists found that after they transplanted healthy neurons into the damaged brains of obese mice, the mice lost a considerable amount of weight.
• Bad memory lane: A study at the University of Texas hopes to prove that a reportedly memory-enhancing drug called methylene blue will help speed the recovery of post-traumatic stress disorder patients.
• Bilingual brainiacs: According to a study at the University of Toronto, bilingual people don’t exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease until they have twice as much brain damage as those who speak only one language.
• You too can think deep thoughts: By using real-time feedback from MRI scans, people may one day be able to train their brains to be more introspective, say researchers at the University of British Columbia.
• Ready when you are: A London neuroscientist thinks we could eventually have a mobile app that lets us know when our brain is most prepared to remember something.

Bonus video: Not only does Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman lay out the difference between experience and memory—being happy in your life versus being happy with your life—but he even uses colonoscopies to help make the point.

The Question: Is it our responsibility to get as much out of our brains as possible?

Where is air travel headed? Image courtesy of Flickr user bfraz

Remember when a trip to the airport was a little bit special—you know, when lines didn’t stretch to the horizon and you could keep your shoes on and no one, man or woman, would think of wearing sweatpants?

Been awhile, eh?

So allow me to offer a little good news: Technology is coming that experts say should dramatically reduce delays and cancellations, cut flight times, increase safety and slash fuel costs and carbon emissions.

But, alas, a few discouraging words: How quickly this technology comes on board is largely dependent on Congress, which hasn’t passed a long-term budget for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) since 2007.

The technology in question is known as “NextGen” and, put simply, it’s GPS for planes. Hard to believe, but most new cars have better tracking systems than multi-million dollar airplanes, which still rely on radar, as they have since the end of World War II. Radar is not that precise and it’s particularly ineffective over the ocean, which is why planes flying overseas have to stay about 100 miles apart. Its limitations also keep pilots from flying the most direct routes between airports.

NextGen would change all that. Plus, it would slow the ripple of weather delays that can spread like a bad rash through the air traffic control system. The goal is to have the satellite-based system operational by 2020. But there’s the money thing. The FAA estimates that making the switch could cost as much as $20 billion. And some airlines, which would have to install new equipment on their planes, have made it clear that they’re not going to start spending a lot of money until they see a firm commitment from the feds.

Faster check-in

Okay, so that’s not happening any time soon. What about more efficient ways to handle check-in? Better news there. You can now use your cell phone to check in with most major airlines at about 75 U.S. airports. No counter, no kiosk. You can either have the airline send an e-boarding pass, with its 2D barcode, to your phone, or you can download  the airline’s mobile app and your boarding pass will appear. At check-in, you just make sure your boarding pass is onscreen and the agent swipes your phone over the reader.

The technology is still evolving and, yes, you could have to rush back to the kiosk for a paper pass if your phone runs out of juice or the wireless signal is too weak. But this is where check-in is headed.

Another attempt to speed things up is a program called PreCheck, for so-called “trusted travelers.” Rolled out on a trial basis last month in Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit and Miami—with Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Minneapolis-St. Paul coming soon—it allows frequent fliers who have been vetted by the government beforehand to skip the security procedures and keep their shoes on.

Then there’s lost luggage. Almost 40 million pieces of luggage are misplaced every year. So far, the technology of the future, where bags are tracked through radio frequency ID tags (RFID), is being used at only a handful of airports around the world, including in Las Vegas. But experts say RFID can make a big difference ensuring luggage gets on the right planes when passengers make a mid-trip connection. That’s when almost 40 percent of bags lose their way.

Here are more innovations in the travel biz:

• Save room for peanuts: There’s now a mobile app called “B4 You Board” that lets you order food for your flight from restaurants in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. New York’s JFK and the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport also have their own carryout apps.
• Reach for the Skype: The Moscow airport has just started allowing passengers to do video check-in via Skype.
• Buy before you fly: If you’re spending time in the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport, check in with Foursquare. Almost 100 stores there are using the app to pitch deals to people waiting for their flights.
• It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity: Passengers on All Nippon Airways got the first taste of the newest commercial airliner a few weeks ago. Among the features on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” are two inches of space between seats in economy, and windows that are 30 percent larger. Even better, LED lighting and higher humidity and cabin pressure are designed to keep you from getting jet-lagged.

Video bonus: You want to see the most efficient way to board a plane? Here’s the technique developed by Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist. Research says he’s right.

Today’s question: If you could change one thing about flying, what would it be?

New smart phone apps highlight the importance of good sleep. Image courtesy of Flickr user amirjina

This past weekend I was awakened by raccoons on the roof. It’s not a happy sound, because I know what they are capable of doing with their little roof-chewing mouths. This made me wonder if there’s anything  I can do to ease my sleeping mind, you know, make it a little less twitchy.

Lack of sleep not only can cause us to fumfer through conversation; according to a study released last week, it also can make us struggle to learn anything the next day. Working with brain scans of sleep-deprived flies—now there’s a phrase I’d never imagined writing—neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli found that if they didn’t get enough sleep, their brain synapses, or the connections between neurons, wouldn’t fully reset themselves to be ready to learn. Not sure how many things a fly learns in a typical day, but Cirelli based her conclusion on how the parts of its brain associated with learning were less lit up than in the brains of rested flies.

Other researchers say our brains can be so sensitive that even staring into the dim glow of an iPad at bedtime can throw sleep schedules out of whack. Light from most screens is at the blue end of the color spectrum, which makes it more likely to mess with our circadian rhythms. Russell Rosenberg, head of the Atlanta School of Sleep Medicine, goes so far as to  suggest that if you really want to nod off quickly, you should put all your devices away at least an hour before bedtime. Good luck with that.

Raise that score!

Turns out there’s also a device that can help us sleep, or at least give us a good idea of what’s been happening in our heads all night. Last month the Massachusetts firm Zeo launched what it calls a “Sleep Mobile Manager,” a sleep monitoring, Bluetooth-powered headband that plugs into your smartphone. Using a mobile app available on iPhones and Android phones, it monitors your brain waves, eye movements and muscle tone as you snooze, and then in the morning gives your night’s sleep a rating, along with the amount of time you spent in REM sleep, deep sleep and light sleep.

The original idea, says Zeo CEO Ben Rubin,was to create a device that would wake you up during a sleep cycle when your brain’s ready to be aroused. It does that, but since it also gives you a snapshot of your sleep, people are able to see how their sleeping brain reacts to too much caffeine or a day of heavy exercise. And they’ve found that if they change a few habits, they can raise their sleep score.

Hey, I’m a competitive guy. Maybe keeping my sleep score high is all the motivation I need to sleep through the raccoon samba.

Here are some of the other ways to see what your sleeping body’s been up to:

• The pitter-patter of little beats: A California firm named Bam Labs has developed a mattress pad that tracks your heartbeat, breathing and movement as you sleep.
• You’re not too sexy for this shirt: There’s also now a nightshirt embedded with fabric electronics that monitors and processes your nighttime breathing patterns. They tend to be more irregular when you’re REM sleeping.
• Your phone never sleeps: And there are more basic sleep-tracking apps, such as  Sleep Cycle for iPhones ($1) and Sleep Bot Tracker for Android (Free). Both work by setting an alarm and placing your smartphone under your pillow. The apps track your movement while you’re asleep and use that to figure out the phase of sleep you’re in. When you’re in a light phase and it’s time to wake up, the apps will gradually fade in an alarm.

Bonus video: While you’re sleeping, your brain waves are building mountains. Watch and be awed by what goes on while you’re just lying there.

Today’s question: Would you go to bed with a headband on if it meant you could see how you’re sleeping?

Boston Dynamic's Big Dog robot would carry supplies in the battlefield.

A week or so ago I asked my 20-year-old son why there was so much hype around the latest shootapalooza game, “Call of Duty, MW3.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

He was right. Within a day of its release last Tuesday, Activision sold 6.5 million games in North America and the U.K., prompting the company to declare the first-day take of $400 million as the “biggest entertainment launch of all time,” bigger than the openings of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

For the uninitiated, the MW stands for Modern Warfare, although it’s more like World War II with 21st century weapons. The battlegrounds are mainly European cities—London, Paris, Berlin—although it also does provide an opportunity to blast away at Wall Street. In some ways, “MW3″ isn’t all that much like modern warfare—the enemy is the Russian army, not tribesmen hiding in the mountains. And while the game allows players to use drones, they don’t do collateral damage.

Don’t overthink this, I told myself, it’s only a game. But then, the day after the “MW3″ launch, I read a piece in the Washington Post by Amy Fraher, a retired U.S. Navy commander, in which she contended that the most critical asset of military leaders of the future won’t be technical skills, but rather emotional intelligence.

Personally, I can’t imagine Gen. George Patton telling anyone, “I feel your pain.” But Fraher’s point is that as both the makeup of the U.S. military and the situations in which it operates become more complex and nuanced, what a leader really will need is old-fashioned social skills.

Dealing with terror

That’s not to say the Defense Department will stop investing billions in fresh firepower  (although looming budget cuts could slice into weapons programs.) But much of the innovative thinking coming out of the Pentagon has to do with helping soldiers deal with the ugliness and unpredictability of modern terror tactics.

In a recent article in National Defense Magazine, “10 Technologies the Military Needs for the Next War,” there’s little mention of weapons. Instead the list focuses on such things as robot pack mules that would relieve soldiers of lugging food, ammo and heavy batteries, high-speed mobile broadband anywhere and—yes, gamers—non-lethal weapons, to reduce civilian casualties.

Nor is it surprising that the military is putting a lot of energy into finding  more effective ways to detect roadside bombs, terribly harmful and destructive devices whose threat it didn’t fully anticipate before invading Iraq. Among the bomb-spotting options are a laser being developed at Michigan State and a sensing device using terahertz radiation.  And just last week the Defense Department said it was in the market for a long-distance paintball gun that could shoot suspicious objects with bomb-detecting paint.

The other deadly threat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been snipers. One promising defense being developed by a Hawaii firm is a device called FLASH, which uses infrared sensors and high-speed processors to pinpoint not only where shots are coming from, but also what kind of weapon is firing them.

National Defense Magazine didn’t mince words. “Innovation is not helpful if it’s not assisting troops at war,” the article said. “As many senior Pentagon officials have noted, an 80-percent solution that can be available in months is better than a perfect outcome that could takes years or decades to achieve.”

Here are other inventions that could be in the military’s future:

•  You and your bright idea: The Defense Department has been relying more and more on crowdsourcing—holding online competitions, with prizes, to encourage outsiders to solve problems. The latest success story is something called the “Vehicle Stopper.” Proposed by a retired mechanical engineer in Peru, it’s a remote-controlled vehicle that can chase down a fleeing car and then deploy an airbag under it and bring it to a halt.
• This is a job for PETMAN: The latest invention from Boston Dynamics, which has already supplied the military with several robot models, is a two-legged, six-foot-tall machine called PETMAN. That’s stands for Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, and it’s main role would be to test uniforms and headgear designed to protect soldiers from chemical weapons.
• When Humvees fly: The Defense Department wants someone to build a four-seat, off-road vehicle that flies like a helicopter.
• Spy network: To speed up the process for getting spy satellites airborne, the Pentagon is looking to develop airplanes that can launch them into orbit.

Bonus video: Okay, not everything is a good idea. Hungry Beast rolls out some of the “stupidest military inventions in history.”

Honda's Asimo robot

I’ve always thought the Tin Man got stiffed.

At the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the wizard rewards Dorothy and her friends for turning the Wicked Witch of the West into a puddle, he hands the Cowardly Lion an epic medal and the Scarecrow a diploma—which today may not seem like much more than a license to embrace debt, but back in the day was a big deal.

And what did he give the Tin Man? A ticking heart trinket that looked like something he picked up at the Oz Walmart.

With robots we’re still struggling with the heart thing. Some can do remarkable physical feats, such as sprint. Others have been programmed to teach themselves how to control their own bodies.

But when it comes to expressing feelings, or even reading our feelings, robots are pretty clueless. Not to say they’re not trying.  On Tuesday, Honda trotted out an upgraded version of Asimo, the hobbit-sized robot who became a YouTube star a few years ago when he conducted the Detroit Symphony through “The Impossible Dream.” The new Asimo is reportedly a lot smoother, runs faster and can pour you a drink. But at the demo, it also was able to distinguish the voices of three people spoken at once, using face recognition and analyzing sound, to figure out that one woman wanted hot coffee, another orange juice, and still another tea.

Then there are the robots at the University of Tsukuba in Japan that have learned to distinguish between a human smile and a frown and then adapt their behavior to what they think they’ve seen. They apparently get it right 97 percent of the time.

From the opposite perspective, scientists in Munich have created something called Mask-bot, which uses 3-D rear projection to create amazingly human-looking robot faces.

Learning to live with humans

The field is called social robotics, and it remains a tricky business. The goal is to get robots to understand us, all our quirks and little nuances and get us to trust them. And yet, if they seem too human, people can find them weird and unsettling. Scientists in social robotics often say they’re always learning about what it means to be human and to live with humans. For instance, researchers found that people like robots more if they don’t blurt out information right away. Adding just a one-second delay made them more likeable.

Scientists at Keio University in Japan have gone a step farther. They’ve turned robots into avatars of sorts (although they call them “telexistence robots.”) Humans using a  3-D head-mounted display can see, hear and feel what a robot does, but operate it remotely with their own movements.

Cynthia Breazeal, who designed one of the first sociable robots, a talking head named named Kismet, at MIT in the 1990s, thinks the big challenge simply is making us comfortable living with robots. “It really struck me when we sent a robot to Mars,” she told the BBC.  “I thought, ‘We’ve sent robots to the depth of the oceans. We’ve sent robots into volcanoes. Now we’ve sent robots to Mars. But they’re not in our homes. Why aren’t they in our homes? Because the human environment is so much more complex.’

“We need to understand how robots are going to interact with people and people are going to react to robots.  And you have to design robots with that in mind.”

Model behavior

Here are more ways robots are evolving:

• All together now: A robotics professor at Rice University has designed inexpensive robots that can work together in swarms, like bees and ants.
• Blind faith: Developers in Japan have created a robot guide dog for the the blind and the elderly. The dog not only walks up stairs, but also talks in a female voice to let the human know what’s going on.
• Yeah, but can they floss?: Life-size mechanical dolls are being used to train dentists. So they’re a little creepy looking. They flinch, they blink, they gag, they try to talk with a mouthful of cotton.
• Another reason to love roaches: A team of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley has been inspired by cockroaches to create a six-legged robot that flies.
• Telepresent and accounted for: Bell Labs is developing a robotic device that will make it seem like employees working remotely are there at the table with you.
• Who heckles a robot?: A researcher at Carnegie Mellon built a robot that does standup comedy.  Bada-bing!

Bonus Video: See how a robot learns how to fold a towel by watching humans. It’s not nearly as boring as it sounds.

Today’s question:  Was there any time today when you could have used a robot?