Our Technological Future About upcoming technologies such as nanotechnology/molecular manufacturing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology. All of these are accelerating exponentially. The implications are vast Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 14 0 0 5566

Articles from Our Technological Future

Life Extension Pill Tested In Humans 2007-08-31 05:22:00 Longevity Pill Tested in HumansSirtris Pharmaceuticals announces that its souped-up version of resveratrol has passed early tests in humans.What if I told you there was a pill that slows aging and allows you to live a healthy life to age 100?Such a pill may exist right now. It's being tested in people in very early-stage human clinical trials. Today, the company making the pill, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, announced its findings from preclinical testing in cells and animals, and also from tests conducted on 85 male volunteers this summer.The verdict: so far, the pill works, although it will be years before we know how well it works, or if it can actually extend the life span of people in the same way that it has bumped up the life span of mice. ...

Artificial Robot Brain For Natural Movement 2007-08-30 04:48:00 EU project builds artificial brain for robotsScientists in Spain have achieved a giant leap for robotkind by building the first artificial cerebellum to help them interact with humans. The cerebellum is the portion of the brain that controls motor functions.The project will now implant the man-made cerebellum into a robot so as to make its movements and interaction with humans more natural. The overall goal is to incorporate the cerebellum into a robot designed by the German Aerospace Centre in two year's time. The researchers hope that their work will also result in clues on how to treat cognitive diseases such as Parkinson's....The scientists at the University of Granada are focusing on the design of microchips that incorporate a full neuronal system, emulating the way the cerebellum interacts with the human nervous system.Implanting the man-made cerebellum in a robot will allow it to manipulate and interact with other objects with far greater effectiveness than previously managed. ...

Solar Power Will Hit Mainstream In Only A Few Years 2007-08-29 05:04:00 Forecast for solar power: Sunny...The outlook for solar, though, is getting much brighter. A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank says. And that's without government incentives....Like wind power, solar energy is spotty, working at full capacity an average 20% to 30% of the time. Solar's big advantage is that it supplies the most electricity midday, when demand peaks. And it can be located at homes and businesses, reducing the need to build pollution-belching power plants and unsightly transmission lines.In states such as California, with high electricity prices and government incentives, solar is already a bargain for some customers. Wal-Mart recently said it's putting solar panels on more than 20 of its stores in California and Hawaii. Google is blanketing i ...

Mind Controlled Bionic Arm Can Play Piano 2007-08-26 08:20:00 Engineers develop a mind-controlled prosthetic arm dexterous enough to play pianoThis summer the team hit a critical milestone when it finished Proto 2, a thought-controlled mechanical arm—complete with hand and articulated fingers—that can perform 25 joint motions. This dexterity approaches that of a native arm, which can make 30 motions, and trumps the previously most agile bionic arm, the Proto 1, which could bend at the elbow, rotate its wrist and shoulder, and open and close its fingers. A person wearing a Proto 2 could conceivably play the piano.How long before we voluntarily have our limbs amputated to replace them with superior technology?Also see The Future Of Mind Control. ...

Do You Want To Live Forever? 2007-08-25 15:48:00 Below a documentary of Aubrey de Grey, the man who's going to make humans immortal.Not everybody can mentally 'take' the idea of living forever.That's why Aubrey has opponents.(mainly old people who won't live long enough to see it)They attack him with meaningful and well thought-out arguments that really address the actual content of Aubrey's ideas, such as:Aubrey is an angry individualAubrey has only 3 laboratories doing his researchAubrey is very naïve and can't possibly contribute to biology because he's originally a computer scientistAubrey doesn't have any children so he wants to attain immortality himself through scienceYou think I'm making this shit up?Enjoy the video. ...

Brain Cell Regeneration Milestone Achieved 2007-08-21 13:55:00 Milestone in the regeneration of brain cellsThe majority of cells in the human brain are not nerve cells but star-shaped glia cells, the so called “astroglia”. “Glia means “glue”, explains Götz. “As befits their name, until now these cells have been regarded merely as a kind of “putty” keeping the nerve cells together.A couple of years ago, the research group had been already able to prove that these glia cells function as stem cells during development. This means that they are able to differentiate into functional nerve cells. However, this ability gets lost in later phases of development, so that even after an injury to the adult brain glial cells are unable to generate any more nerve cells.In order to be able to reverse this development, the team studied what molecular switches are essential for the creation of nerve cells from glial cells during development. These regulator proteins are introduced into glial cells from the postnatal brain, which indeed respond by s ...

Alzheimer Cure Found By Scientists 2007-08-21 03:02:00 Alzheimer Cure Found By ScientistsSCIENTISTS believe they have discovered a “cure” for Alzheimer’s, the devastating illness that affects nearly 600,000 people in the UK.For years experts have been looking for a way of preventing the debilitating brain condition.Now British and American ­scientists have found a way of halting its spread.Last night the discovery was being hailed by experts as a huge development in the fight against the condition – as the number of victims is likely to double over the next decade.One of the researchers described the breakthrough as “blindingly simple”.Alzheimer’s is caused when amyloid – a chemical that naturally occurs in the bloodstream – passes into the brain.Once there it forms plaques that harden. These damage communication between brain cells and eventually cause brain cell death.Scientists have discovered a synthetic human protein that is capable of soaking up amyloid – preventing it leaking into the brain.Researchers say trial ...

Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years 2007-08-20 16:01:00 Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 YearsAround the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life.""It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."That first cell of synthetic life—made from the basic chemicals in DNA—may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it."Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."And several scientists believe man-mad ...

64 Core Processors... Coming Up! 2007-08-20 15:58:00 TILE64 PROCESSOR FAMILYThe TILE64™ family of multicore processors delivers immense compute performance to drive the latest generation of embedded applications. This revolutionary processor features 64 identical processor cores (tiles) interconnected with Tilera's iMesh™ on-chip network. Each tile is a complete full-featured processor, including integrated L1 & L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tile into the mesh. This means that each tile can independently run a full operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a multi-processing operating system like SMP Linux.The TILE64™ processor family slashes board real estate and system cost by integrating a complete set of memory and I/O controllers, thus eliminating the need for an external North Bridge or South Bridge. It delivers scalable performance, power efficiency and low processing latency in an extremely compact footprint. ...

First Genome Transplant Changes One Species Into Another 2007-08-17 08:59:00 First genome transplant changes one species into anotherFor the first time, scientists have completely transformed a species of bacteria into another species by transplanting its complete set of DNA. The achievement marks a significant step toward the construction of synthetic life, with applications including the production of clean fuel in as little as a decade.Scientists Carole Lartigue and colleagues from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, have published their results in a recent issue of Science. In addition to being a proof-of-concept experiment, the researchers hope that genome transplantation will enable the production of synthetic microbes for green energy sources, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and textiles. ...

Resveratrol: Elixer of Youth? 2007-08-17 08:25:00 A controversial biologist at Harvard claims he can extend life span and treat diseases of aging. He just may be right.David Sinclair is very good at persuading people. The catch, says a longtime colleague and scientific rival, is that he is sometimes overly optimistic about his results. "David is brilliant, but sometimes he is too passionate and impatient for a scientist," says another colleague. "So far, he is fortunate that his claims have turned out to be mostly true."Sinclair's basic claim is simple, if seemingly improb­able: he has found an elixir of youth. In his Australian drawl, the 38-year-old Harvard University professor of pathology explains how he discovered that resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, extends life span in mice by up to 24 percent and in other animals, including flies and worms, by as much as 59 percent. Sinclair hopes that resveratrol will bump up the life span of people, too. "The system at work in the mice and other organisms is evolutionarily very ...

Optical Memory: 50.000 Times Faster 2007-08-09 01:55:00 Laser Flips Magnetic Bit Without Any HelpPhysicists in Netherlands and Japan are the first to flip the value of a magnetic memory bit by firing a very short pulse of circularly-polarized laser light at it. Unlike other magneto-optic data storage systems, no external magnetic field was required to flip the bit, which meant that its value could be changed about 50 thousand times faster than the fastest conventional memory. The result could lead to the development of low-cost and ultrafast all-optical magnetic hard disk drives. ...

Jumper Leads Deep Into Brain Revive Man After Six Years 2007-08-02 14:34:00 Jumper leads deep into brain revive man after six yearsSCIENTISTS have jump-started the consciousness of a man with severe brain injury in a world-first procedure in which electrodes were inserted deep into his brain.The 38-year-old, who had been in a minimally conscious state for six years after an assault, could only move his fingers or eyes occasionally and was fed through a tube.Now he can chew, swallow and carry out movements like brushing his hair and drinking from a cup, say the US neuroscientists who carried out the procedure, known as deep brain stimulation. ...

Colossal Magnetic Levitation Wind Turbine Proposed 2007-07-28 10:12:00 Colossal Magnetic Levitation Wind Turbine Proposed(click to enlarge)It's a vision of a magnetically levitated wind turbine that can generate one gigawatt of energy (enough to power 750,000 homes). This is the device proposed by a new Arizona-based company, MagLev Wind Turbine Technologies. The company claims that it can deliver clean power for less than cent per kilowatt hour using this wind turbine.That's a pretty big deal actually. Today's energy is 10-15 cents per kilowatt. ...

Solar Energy Hits New 42.8% Efficiency Record 2007-07-26 05:59:00 Team sets solar cell recordUsing a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions....The consortium’s goal is to create solar cells that operate at 50 percent in production, Barnett said. With the fresh funding and cooperative efforts of the DuPont-UD consortium, he said it is expected new high efficiency solar cells could be in production by 2010....“This is a solar cell that works,” Barnett said, adding, “This technology has the potential to change the way electricity is generated throughout the world.”Barnett believes the 50 percent efficiency mark is just the beginning. “Our best inventions are in front of us,” he said. “The consortium has been a super team, and has worked to develop new devices and architectures based on a bre ...