From Globe and Mail Technology, finally someone has put the Einstein collection online. The Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are working on publishing 25 volumes of Einstein's writings. So far it has completed eight volumes.

Some documents, dating back to Einstein's youth, can be found on a Web site http://www.alberteinstein.info. The Web site also offers travel diaries and 3,000 digitized images. Einstein, who died in 1955 at the age of 76, left the original documents to the Hebrew University in his will.

This is an amazing collection of hundreds of Albert Einstein's scientific papers, personal letters and essays and it is now on the Internet.

The magic behind Google is kept under lock and key but Stanford computer science researchers have developed several new techniques that together may make it possible to calculate Web page rankings as used in the Google search engine up to five times faster. This accelerated method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual's interests or customized to a particular topic.

The papers will be presented at the Twelfth Annual World Wide Web Conference (WWW2003) in Budapest, Hungary, May 20-24, 2003 and was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Computing PageRank, the ranking algorithm behind the Google search engine, for a billion Web pages can take several days. Google currently ranks and searches about 3 billion Web pages.

Each personalized or topic-sensitive ranking would require a separate multi-day computation, so speeding up the mathmatical algorithm could dramatically reduce time spent searching.

To fully understand the sophistication behind web page ranking, the papers are available on the Stanford Database Group's Publication Server (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/).

Remember Geordi La Forge in Star Trek? Even in the future, he had an advanced technology composed of retinal implants and special goggles/glasses. Described in the Trekie literature as "a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) that gave him visual capabilities that spanned a major part of the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond the normal visual spectrum of light."

Thanks to Medpundit, the first clinical trial of an artificial retina implanted into the eye showed that it worked well enough to allow the blind to distinguish light from dark and even to see simple objects. "The goal of this project is to develop an implant which is capable of allowing patients to see complex or even perfect images." The sub-retinal procedure is based on replacing an area of lost (dystrophic) photoreceptor rods and cones with an implanted micro-photodiode array (MPDA).





A number of research projects have as their goal to create some of the medical marvels that we have enjoyed in the episodes of Star Trek over the years. For example, one of the most famous was the tricorder, a medical body scanner. Interestingly enough, the BBC News reported a while ago that British scientists have developed a Star Trek style device which measures vital health signs without the need for skin contact. Researchers at Loughborough University believe their technology could one day be used to measure blood flow, monitor the heart and assess how well wounds and burns are healing. The technique involves shining a light on a specific part of the body. Potential health problems are identified by measuring how much light is absorbed.

And for those who want to know what else might be on the horizon, here are a number of the star trek medical devices and accessories that have started as science fiction and may end up as science.

Can your computer find the cure for SARS? Maybe. According Wired Magazine, 15,000 people have already downloaded software from D2OL that uses your spare computer cycles in concert with others over the Internet to process data that purports to help find a cure.

Distributed computing, also called grid computing, can screen potential drugs much faster than researchers in a laboratory. "They (researchers) can't in a short time screen millions of compounds, but on the computer you can" according to the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases.
Distributed computing works by individuals making their Internet connected computers available and during idle times the processing power is used to help solve complex equations. By linking thousands of our everyday computers, the raw power of a supercomputer can be generated.

The Annual Human Brain Project meeting takes place in Bethesda Maryland, May 12-13. This interesting neuroinformatics meeting combines the concepts and principles developed in neuroscience research with those from the fields of computer science and information technology (informatics) research. The creation of a distributed neuroscience information management system will allow scientists to more easily integrate data both within and across systems and create new knowledge toward understanding nervous system development and function.

The program is worth a look, especially if you were wondering what neuroinformatics is all about.