Couple days ago I saw a video posted of Derek Jacobys TEDxVictoria talk on Hackerspaces and Biology, at first glance I was really happy to see the two terms in the same sentence. Hackerspaces, HackerHouses, or the more media-friendly, MakerSpaces, have been popping up exponentially everywhere in the last 10 years.  It’s a fantastic movement in bringing like-minded individuals of all sorts of walks of life, professions, trade and hobby together to talk shop, network, and divulge into interests, experiments or take part in large scale projects.  Mixing know how, resource and project management they are hyper-generators...incubators even of ideas and sometimes...game changers.

Like when you are able to put the words Biology and Hackerspaces in the same sentence.

Biohacking.

This is where the real magic starts happening. Man/Woman will always be curious. It’s how we create. It’s how we thrive.  It’s how we evolve.  With technology decreasing in not only price, but also in scale, we begin to be able to brush the threshold of the very building blocks that make you and me what we are. I previously had no idea that by the end of 2012 it will only cost $1,000 to sequence an entire human genome. 300gb of DNA code.  Less than $3.50 per gigabyte of your human DNA decoded. The kicker is that price is down from $10,000,000 in 2005.

There are however the caveats, the ethical boundaries.  Where would they lay?  Designer babies are already possible. We can take cells and replicate them to create entire organs using organ scafolding structures.   But these are the questions people will be asking very soon.  And all and all, it’s exciting that we get to see these human innovations of direction and stride.  We just need to make sure all our hands are on the reigns, not necessarily to hold back...but to hold on tight.

It only seems fitting that IBM (in conjuction with 5 other major universities and DARPA), the company that brought us Jeopardy champ, artificial intelligence computer, Watson, would be who brings us something straight out of science fiction novels.  

The NeuroSynaptic Chip

The first of its kind to process in the same fashion as the brain does; a “neurosynaptic core” with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons) and communication (replicated axons), all in one chip.  It’s like taking computer computation from 2-Dimentions into full 3-Dimentional space.  This attempts to overcome what is know as the “von Neumann paradigm”, the current way our present day’s computer architecture is ruled by.  Von Neumann introduced the architecture of the processer and the memory being two separate pieces of hardware in the 1940s.   By integrating the memory into the same hardware as the processor you begin to see context dependant processes in an energy efficient manor PLUS eliminating the bottle neck of the Bus…just like a brain.  

And that seems to be one of the driving forces behind IBMs new chip, is the energy efficiency, and rightly so.  They can already slap together simulate synapses and firing neuron simulations into a super computer.  But even as powerful and helpful as a super computer can be, its downfall is its size, its upkeep, its administration and the amount of energy it takes to drive.  

But as Dr. Dharmendra Modha, head of the SyNAPSE project (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), says, the brain is not a neural network, it’s a synaptic network, if you look at the junctions between neurons (called synapses’) you would see that they outnumber the number of neurons by a factor of 10,000” What DARPA has asked the team was to demonstrate at a nano scale, low power material that captures the function of the synapse.  A calculate size of 1 picojoule fitting 10,000,000,000 single synapses’ inside the space of 1 square centimeter

This interview which explains more that Dr. Modha did with Fast Company is fantastic and highly suggested.

That alone was 3 years ago.

Fast forward to today they have 2 working prototype designs, both at 45 total nanometers a piece and currently contain 256 neurons.  One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.  3 years ago, it was an idea, today, it is quite the reality.  What do you think 20 – 50 years will look like from now?

Sources IBM Press Release

Video: Fast Company interview IBM's "Brain" Guy

Images: IBM Research - Almaden