A new magazine called H+ has launched and I have an article in its first edition (”Science Fiction Gets Funding”). It’s edited by cyberculture icon RU Sirius and is published by Humanity Plus (aka the World Transhumanist Association). Here’s some media coverage of the launch: Boing Boing, Kurzweil.net.

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It’s called deepglamour.net and she says: “With tart commentary and probing analysis, we’ll be examining glamour, allure, and the seductive images we find throughout media and culture.”
Great! Looking forward to reading it, Virginia!

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Here is an article and video about Intel’s plan to deliver wireless power. Note that if we can charge a laptop using wireless tech, we can also charge robots etc.

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Researchers Peter Majewski and Chiu Ping ‘Candace’ Chan in South Australia “have discovered a simple way to remove bacteria and other contaminants from water using tiny particles of pure silica coated with an active nano-material.” Here’s the news story.

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“The 16-hour operation was carried out last Friday on a farm worker who lost both arms in an accident.” Read more here.

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This looks like it would have been a cool event. According to this report, “The discussion of aging was a closing event of the first World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science for the public that brought together researchers ranging from biologists to quantum physicists. Participants included Nobel laureates, business leaders and philosophers.”

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This op-ed by Brian Greene makes the eloquent case that science is more than just details, facts, and figures. He says that it also helps explain why we are here, why the sky is blue, and other important questions perennially asked by humankind. Here’s a paragraph that I found relevant to what I’m [...]

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A brain-computer interface was implanted in a Japanese man’s motor cortex. Signals that would have made his own arms and legs move instead went to the avatar’s, making it move. Here’s the video and the story.

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The Allen Institute for Brain Science is launching a four-year, $55 million project to build an atlas of genes’ activity in the brain. From the WSJ:
“Jones and his colleagues will take about a half dozen brains from recently dead people who were neurologically and psychiatrically healthy. Then they’ll divide each brain into somewhere between 500 [...]

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Today, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they have created the first man-made chromosome. The next step will be to place it inside a living organism so it can replicate and they can claim to have created an artifical life form. Wow.

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On Thursday, a monkey named Idoya made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.
She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan. Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University carried out the experiment. It was his team that in 2003 demonstrated [...]

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University of Minnesota researchers created a beating heart in the laboratory by injecting fresh heart cells into a non-living rat heart matrix. Amazing stuff.
“In the United States alone, about 5 million people live with heart failure, 550,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, and 50,000 die waiting for a donor heart. The work is [...]

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Now you could — in India. Tata just released what they are calling the “people’s car.”

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I spoke at Command College today on future tech issues. Below is a list of links for the people in the room who want to read more on the issue areas.
Command College Links 2008
Virtual Reality and Intellectual property
Club Penguin: http://play.clubpenguin.com/
FlowPlay: http://world.flowplay.com/v10/teaser.jsp
Second life (trailer): http://secondlife.com/showcase/trailercontest_2006.php
How something is built in Second Life: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorials#Content_creation
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mVSzh_QTE00&feature=related
DEMO
Not just a game – [...]

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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 [...]

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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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The Independent reports that “Scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it….Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between [...]

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This is an event hosted by Lead21 to launch my new book “Digital Dialog.” It’s a compilation of my columns on various topics including privacy, broadband, and — yes — longevity. Most of my friends are aware that I’m now working on a new book on the politics of longevity, so you will [...]

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I have no idea how long this site has been around, but it is *awesome*. I was at a Renissance weekend over New Years and a bunch of folks were talking about it. It is the coolest tool I have used in a long time. Try it.

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I met Anousheh Ansari last Friday before she gave a lecture to an audience at Stanford University. She was the first woman to go into space on a private exploration. She was also the first person to blog from space. For a woman who made it big in the private sector before going on to [...]

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