Published in February 15th, 2010
Great article on the topic from the NYT. This sentence is of interest:
Ideally you wouldn’t even need to know anything about DNA to
manipulate it, just as a 5-year-old doesn’t need to understand the
chemical composition of the plastic in his Legos to build a fortress
on the living-room carpet.
We will soon be living in a much [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 11th, 2010
NewScientist reports that Jon Vogel and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland have come up with a procedure that creates “patches of synthetic skin could deliver gene therapies to patients without the need for injections.”
As someone who doesn’t really love needles, this is a good sign for the future. [...]
continue reading.....
Published in July 3rd, 2009
The below text is from a speech given by Hawking at TED in 2008. He expects that humans will be able to repair and alter themselves, which will create new political issues. That just happens to be the topic of a book I am working on at the moment, so nice to see [...]
continue reading.....
Published in April 10th, 2009
This new movie based on Ray Kurzweil’s work opens in NYC April 28th. Really looking forward to seeing it!
continue reading.....
Published in February 26th, 2009
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a gene responsible for the growth of tooth enamel. Lead researcher Dr. Chrissa Kioussi told the BBC: “A lot of work would still be needed to bring this to human applications, but it should work. It could be really cool, a whole new approach to dental health.” [...]
continue reading.....
Published in October 31st, 2008
It’s been called the “rapture of the nerds,” but such derision didn’t stop an estimated 500 enthusiasts from showing up to the Singularity Institute’s conference in San Jose, Calif., last weekend to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence overtaking that of humans.
That’s the concept of technological singularity, popularized by author and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Talking [...]
continue reading.....
Published in September 23rd, 2008
“If successful, the technique could be used to improve the quality of hearing in people with cochlear implants — and one day it may even help restore hearing to those who are totally deaf.” Read the story at Better Humans.
continue reading.....
Published in August 23rd, 2008
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.
continue reading.....
Published in March 24th, 2008
The Alzheimer’s Association recently reported that one out of eight baby boomers is expected to get Alzheimer’s disease, creating a total of 10 million victims. This staggering prediction underscores the need for brain health and augmentation, a new market that tech players are fortunately beginning to enter.
Just as it is possible to go to work [...]
continue reading.....
Published in March 13th, 2008
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 [...]
continue reading.....
Published in March 7th, 2008
What do these two things have in common? According to MIT’s Technology review, a new material inspired by sea cucumbers “switches rapidly between rigid and flexible states.” This is important because “such a material may be useful in the design of implantable electrodes able to record brain activity over long stretches of time, [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 26th, 2008
At this week’s Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Germany, renowned scientists Craig Venter, Ph.D., and Richard Dawkins wowed the audience with a conversation about genes and information technology. They discussed how evolution is becoming man-made, which brings up a number of interesting issues.
“Genetics has become a branch of information technology,” Dawkins opined. There’s a [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 8th, 2008
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 – [...]
continue reading.....
Published in November 4th, 2007
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.
continue reading.....
Published in November 2nd, 2007
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 sounds [...]
continue reading.....
Published in October 12th, 2007
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 [...]
continue reading.....
Published in September 26th, 2007
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 [...]
continue reading.....
Published in February 5th, 2007
There’s a cool article in this month’s Discover Magazine on nanoliquid developed at MIT. According to the article, “The liquid is a solution of small protein pieces that assemble into nanoscale fibers on contact, creating a gel that stops the flow of blood without clotting or pressure. As the wound heals, the gel breaks [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 27th, 2007
Every once in a while a newspaper headline wakes me up before my morning coffee. This was one of them. According to the Reuter’s report, Chinese president Hu Jintao recently said “We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment.” Wonderful. [...]
continue reading.....
Published in January 27th, 2007
That’s the word from Dr. John Rutledge, one of the nation’s most accomplished economists who has advised several presidents (including the current administration). He’s been spending a lot of time in China recently and has first hand knowledge of how America is doing compared to the rest of the world. His recent blog [...]
continue reading.....
RSS 2.0
