…where science, futurism, and anything else Stephen finds interesting are thrown together in an informational stew for your consumption.
Enjoy!
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- Quote of the day: “The idea is to die young… as late as possible.” – Ashley Montagu
- “The Windup Girl” wins the Campbell Award for best 2010 SciFi novel!
- Synthetic biology: algae biofuels, tumor-seeking microbial missiles; OR Frankenstein monster that destroys creator?
- Drug enhances ability to form new memories in rat brains. This could be a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s patients.
- The
A fairly simple conversion that would allow you to use an old typewriter as a computer keyboard. This would be a fun steam-punk project. But also, this allows those who love the look and feel of typewriters to dust off and use those old machines in this century.
- Faster, please: “Ships Could Contain Gulf Leak by Monday.”
- A parent may be old when they have a baby, but the baby is born young. Reproductive cells produce the telomerase enzyme which lengthens telomeres back to a youthful state.
Can we find a safe way to do this throughout an adult body?
- Thoughtware.TV – Vernor Vinge on the Singularity.
- selection and evolution: flies use bacteria to adapt to parasitic worms.
Not all of my adaptive traits need be prescribed by my DNA: Gut flora for example.
- Lots of life extension news at the “Blogging Life Extension” site.
Recent posts include “Phys Ed: Your Brain on Exercise,” “Vitamin D and Mental Agility in Elders,” “Your Genome and the Future of Medicine: Tailored to Fit You,” “Supercentenarians,” and “Aubrey de Grey – In Pursuit of Longevity.”
- Richard Morgan’s very positive review of Ian McDonald’s sci-fi novel, The Dervish House.
- New research showing that of antioxidant supplements induce stem cell genetic abnormalities.
Too much of a good thing?
- : Brazil’s copyright law allows breaking DRM provided you are not otherwise breaking copyright law.
Doctorow calls this the best-ever implementation of the UN’s copyright treaty.
- Despicable Me: a fun, and surprisingly affecting, family film. My kids all loved it.
It currently has 80% at Rotten Tomatoes.
- Quotes from “The Rational Optimist:
- “Better safe than sorry” is self defeating. In a sorry world there is no safety in standing still.
- The true measure of something’s worth is the hours of work necessary to acquire it.
- Preheating water with a solar parabolic trough will reduce coal consumption at new coal/solar electric plant in Colorado.
What an beautifully simple idea!
This is a small-scale parabolic trough. Notice that the trough is focused on a small water pipe. The power plant will work the same scaled up. Water will be run through a pipe being heated by the sun, before burning any coal.
Why not do this for all electric power plants – including nuclear?
- Has the Higgs Boson “God particle” been spotted?
- Discover Magazine: Cryogenically freezing your body/head has a serious potential side effect: causing marital strife.
- Computerizing the chaos of epilepsy: neural simulations help scientists better understand and treat the disorder.
- Blood pharming – blood production using donorless self-renewing stem cell cultures. This technology is being developed by DARPA to provide a better (both in quantity and quality) transfusion blood for soldiers in the field. This technology could be ready in 5 years.
- Ben Goertzel’s Singularity University lecture on Artificial General Intelligence was blogged at Wired UK.
We recently heard from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) expert, Dr. Ben Goertzel, who believes that the technology to develop robot children already exists and that the open-source software project that he is leading (OpenCog) will eventually achieve human-level intelligence and beyond.
His open-source project aims to accelerate current progress in AGI by allowing geeks and scientists to build and share research. OpenCog has already been used to control a virtual dog in a virtual world and a humanoid Nao robot in a university robot lab. The project has a detailed roadmap leading from here to robot toddlers, virtual scientists and beyond. The hope is that, much as has happened with Linux, a diverse team of international collaborators will move the project ahead at an exponential pace.
Ben believes that achieving child-level intelligence will be the biggest breakthrough for AGI and that we may reach this milestone within the next few years.
- Roomba pioneer Rodney Brooks is leaving MIT presumably to focus on his new startup, Heartland Robotics.
- The Predators alien – sci-fi portrait of a failed species. What kind of culture would have both faster-than-light travel, and a need to hunt dangerous prey?
- Cancer death rates in the U.S. continue to decline.
The American Cancer Society tells us that thanks to a 21% drop in cancer deaths among men and a 12% drop among women, 767,000 fewer people have died of cancer since the early 1990′s.
- Past-Future New York, City of Skyscrapers (1925 postcard)
