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What happens when you substitute the human FOXP2 gene for that of a mouse?  According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, not much, except this interesting result — it changes their vocalizations.

While the FOXP2 gene is important in the development of many different tissues, in humans it affects the development of the basal ganglia, a region of the brain important for language.  When the human version of FOXP2 is introduced into mice, a measurable result is a change in their ultrasonic vocalizations – baby mice have deeper squeaks.  While this is interesting, and the kind of correlation one might expect, even more striking is what is going on in the brains of these mice — the mean length of dendrites in the basal ganglia region increased by 80% over mice without the human version of the gene.

This groundbreaking study, with results recently published in the journal Cell, provides a new a model for research into how speech and language evolved in humans.

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 This week Brian Eno transformed Sydney Opera House with mega projections of his 77 Million Paintings… (Stunning images from this DailyMail piece)

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Last week Kurzweilai.net ran a clip of this post from Nanowerk (a more complete report will be available here June 10th):

“A new experimental computer memory device that can store 1 terabyte per square inch… with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years has been developed by Alex Zettl of UC Berkeley and colleagues.”

This is possible through a series of lab tests and theoretical studies that show the device has “temperature stability in excess of one billion years,” an estimate that appears to be the maximum thermal read on the life of the device.

The first thought I had on reading this, aside from Douglas Adams’s “Deep Thought” (the computer that takes several million years to solve the riddle to life, the universe and everything), were the words of Jeff Rothenberg: “Digital documents last forever—or five years, whichever comes first.” Even several decades is an accomplishment. The article itself gives a nod to the virtues of paper by way of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, a model of data preservation. The Domesday Book has lasted 900 years compared to its digital counterpart, recently expired at twenty.

But this puts a lot of interesting questions to the issue of the digital dark age: how would we carry out the task of movage, porting data from one medium to the next as new systems appear? And how to avoid the billion-year legacy system from hell?

It also says a lot about us. Like the old joke in Austin Powers, the numbers in which we traffic have spiked over the past half century. Where one million used to do the trick, one billion commands attention and is now much more attractive. The range of numbers we tend to see as audacious but imaginable–though we have a hard time grasping them at all–are in the billions and now low trillions. This is the language of hard drives, moguls, world population and public debt. It is a language already on our minds.

Now if only someone would frame this billion year storage claim as a long bet.

(thanks to @DerekLerner for the original link via twitter)

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Put down your crosswords, cryptograms and sudoku.  Instead try boosting your brain power by deciphering an ancient script.  In case you have forgotten which ones are still available and want to stake your claim, here is a catalog with difficulty ranking based on two important criteria:  language (known/unknown) and script (known/unknown).  All have teased many a brain for many an age.

Other things you might want to consider when selecting your brain challenge:  is the script artifact a hoax (see Phaistos Disk)?  Does it even represent spoken language (see recent work and controversy over the Indus Valley Script)?  Also, beware of the possibility of unleashing an army of undead if you actually do figure out the script and recite it (for a vision of this scenario, see Evil Dead II).

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Swedish design group Humans Since 1982 created this digital readout called The Clock Clock made of 24 analog clocks.  Notice the time reads 09:25 digitally above.  You can go to their website to see an animation of the clocks in action as well as download the font they create. Thanks to Creobic for this link where you can find other analog digital clocks.

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The good folks over at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena who organized the Data and Art show that the Rosetta Disk was in, were kind enough to get some really nice photos taken of the micro-etched data side of the disk.  What you are looking at is over 13,000 tiny pages describing over 1,500 languages.  To see each page you would need a 500x microscope.

Many thanks to Dan Goods at JPL and especially Spencer Mishlen for this gorgeous work.  I really love how the page rows start to look like the Matrix as you zoom in…

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