Here’s an interesting story from the LA Times. Many of these drugs have been around for a long time, yet the LAT is reporting on them as if they are news. Well, there is some news here — the news is in the meme that’s being developed around the idea of fitness for your brain. [...]

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Are you fed up with Match.com? If so, there’s a new service out there that will help you find your “perfect chemistry” mate. The Scientist this week reports that a new site called ScientificMatch.com “uses DNA samples from customers to match them with others who have different alleles for major histocompatibility complex genes.” Eric Holzle, [...]

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New data released this week shows that human evolution is speeding up — an interesting development given that many in the scientific community are hopeful that humans can take greater control over the process. At a recent conference in San Diego, scholars discussed how various religious orders may perceive radical life extension, one potential path [...]

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For those of you following my blog, you’ll know that I was forced to fly to Vancouver to get a new passport because the Canadian consulates in the US no longer offer that service to Canadians living in the US. Not only is this super-annoying, but it is also super-expensive. The costs of airfare, hotel, [...]

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Many telecom observers were stunned this week when Verizon announced it would open up its network to “wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company.” This change in policy is good for consumers and worth closer examination, especially on the business side. Verizon’s “walled garden” required consumers to use a Verizon-chosen phone in [...]

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I haven’t written about Canadian issues in a while because I’ve been super-busy tracking tech stuff, but after my experience at Canada’s San Francisco consulate today, I feel obligated to warn other Canadians in the US who may suffer the same fate. Here’s the nasty scoop on inefficient Canadian bureaucrats and on renewing your passport [...]

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This is a very interesting op-ed by history professor Stephanie Coontz. She argues that historically government was not as involved in marriage as it is now and that marriage licenses are “no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other.” Clearly, she is making [...]

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Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Texas) became the “Internet” candidate this month when 36,672 people contributed more than US$4 million online to his campaign in a single 24-hour period. This impressive feat demonstrates the power of an open source culture, a lesson that should not be lost when it comes to other important issues. The campaign [...]

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The Foresight Institute is holding its Vision 2007 “unconference” this weekend. I was there yesterday and will be speaking today. So far, the conference has been amazing — talks I attended yesterday included the latest on nanotech and stem cell research, as well as a fascinating discussion on risk and longevity.

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America’s first baby boomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, recently signed up for the Social Security benefits that she will start to collect in January. The new phase of life that she and her generation are entering is creating demand for new industries that affect everyone, one of which involves “brain fitness.” Brain fitness is exactly what it [...]

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Last weekend, 150 people attended the Alcor life extension conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The main subject was cryonics, the use of technology to cool and preserve the human body with the aim of future revival. The technology, still speculative, raises many present-world issues. In 2003, a daughter of Ted Williams attempted to stop the cryonic [...]

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Here’s a nice update from Tokyo’s home care and rehabilitation convention. Seniors can use a robot to help them feed themselves and nurses can use robotic exoskeletons to help lift patients etc. Of course, here’s another use for the wearable robotics.

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So far the morning has been interesting, learning about how cryopreservation works. One thing that strikes me, however, is how much time we are spending talking about death at this life extension conference. I suppose that it is natural given that the conference is organized by a company whose purpose is to freeze a legally [...]

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Looks like Eurocrats want to put price caps on text messaging.

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Here’s the NYT piece on it. At first glance, this seems like a pretty cool idea to me.

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In California, patients must provide written consent before their blood can be tested for HIV. This is in contrast to other screening tests for cholesterol and diabetes that do not need consent. To change this so that more people get HIV tests, the CA legislature passed a bill, 682, to make HIV screening a routine [...]

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Looks like fertility treatment is going to advance quite a bit in the next 5 years. According to this article, doctors have unveiled details of a technique that will allow human eggs to be grown in the laboratory from ovarian tissue samples.

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At a time when most people agree that Google or Apple have replaced Microsoft as the tech industry’s top player, government regulators on two continents are going retro, pushing old antitrust arguments. This backward-looking thinking threatens innovation for all companies and needs to stop now. While the technology community has moved from obsessing over operating [...]

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For years, PRI has been warning San Francisco officials that their so-called “free Wi-Fi” idea was guaranteed to be a failure. Finally, they realize it. In late August, Earthlink pulled out of a misguided plan to supply the city with free Wi-Fi, saying it was no longer economically viable for the company. This is a [...]

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This is a pretty cool story from my homeland. Doctors implanted an artificial heart in a 15 year old girl while they waited for a replacement human heart to transplant. In the meantime, the girl’s own heart regenerated.

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