Plus: Anti-Explosive Plants, Supercomputer Victorious Over Humans and the Body as a Factory.

Bomb-Detecting Plants
Florae are the newest recruits in the United States’ latest national security effort. Working with the support of the U.S. Department of Defense, researchers from Colorado State University recently revealed that they have taught plant proteins to detect explosives.

“Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet,” Wired.com’s Danger Room blog explains. “That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.”

Over the course of seven years, the science team engineered tobacco plants and mouse-ear cress to turn yellow in the presence of even minute quantities of explosive material in the air. The team then used a computer system to redesign plant receptor cells to respond to TNT. When the plants are exposed to explosive vapors, the TNT molecules bind to the receptors and the plants’ leaves change color.

But the re-engineered plants’ applications are not limited to bomb detection. According to the team members’ findings, published last month in PLoS One, with some improvements, their system can potentially enable plants to serve as “a simple and inexpensive means” to monitor human surroundings for pollutants, chemical agents or air and water quality.

“Currently, the plants can change colour within hours — and are 100 times more sensitive to chemical signals than a dog’s nostrils — but they will need to respond within seconds or minutes to be truly useful as green watchdogs,” New Scientist reports. “Funding by the Department of Defense and Homeland Security will help the Colorado team to take this work forward.”

Smart Wallets Stop You from Spending
For many people today, sticking to a budget is more important than ever. But how can we be expected to resist buying that new amazing thing we don’t really need, especially when we’re dealing with electronic funds that don’t seem like real money?

The MIT Media Lab has come up with a possible solution: “smart” wallets that link to your bank account and provide a tactile reminder of how much money is available to spend. More important, some versions of the device, known as the Proverbial Wallet, actually restrict your ability to spend money when you draw dangerously close to your budget limit.

“The wallets communicate with your bank via a bluetooth connection to your smartphone and come in three variants,” The Consumerist explains. “The ‘Mother Bear’ has a hinge that gets harder to open as your balance dwindles. The ‘Bumblebee’ vibrates every time a transaction gets processed, with one vibration for debits, another for credits. And the ‘Peacock’ swells and shrinks along with your account balance.”

The Proverbial Wallet is intended to bridge the gap between rational decision-making and the possession of abstract, virtual money. While physical cash provides an immediate awareness of how much money one has to spend, the online world of electronic transactions can distort our ability to set limits for ourselves. The new series of smart wallets brings the experience of tangible money to our various digital funds.

Proverbial Wallets from John Kestner on Vimeo

Supercomputer Wins at Jeopardy, Humanity Doomed
Humanity has had a pretty good run so far, but the machines want their turn and they’re starting with a takeover of our gameshows. This week, IBM supercomputer Watson competed on Jeopardy! against two of the world’s best players — and it wiped the floor with its human opponents.

Over the course of a three-day match-up on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Watson steadily outpaced Ken Jennings, who holds the show’s record for the longest winning streak, and Brad Rutter, who holds the show’s record for the highest total winnings. The final results on the third day concluded with Watson way in the lead with $77,147, followed by Jennings with $24,000 and Rutter with $21,600.

“For IBM, the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them,” according to the New York Times. (IBM donated Watson’s $1 million earnings to charity.)

The new computerized champion symbolizes the coming robot apocalypse a significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Making a machine that can understand natural human language and even wordplay, such as puns, has long been a goal of scientists and engineers. Watson’s victory (which was aided by the machine’s ability to buzz in in under 10 milliseconds) proved that the barriers between human and machine interaction are collapsing.

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” Jennings quipped.

Despite dominating every human foolhardy enough to oppose it, the supercomputer will not be returning to defend its Jeopardy! championship. In fact, Watson’s next job will be helping others, as “IBM has teamed up with speech recognition software firm Nuance and Columbia University Medical School to have the system help diagnose and treat patients,” MIT Technology Review reports.

The Human as Factory
Every wondered what a human factory would look like? In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a German popular science writer and illustrator crafted a poster titled “Der Mensch als Industriepalast,” or “Man as Industrial Palace.” The poster provided a visualization of the human anatomy represented as a series of mechanical assemblies.

More than 80 years later, German artist and designer Henning Lederer animated the original designs and brought the human industrial palace to life:

Have a great weekend, folks.