In typical Web-industry style we’re all focused minutely on the leading trend-of-the-year, the real-time Web. But in this obsession we have become a bit myopic. The real-time Web, or what …

If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 …

I’ve posted a link to a video of my best talk — given at the GRID ’08 Conference in Stockholm this summer. It’s about the growth of collective intelligence and …

A very cool experiment in virtual reality has shown it is possible to trick the mind into identifying with a virtual body:

Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera
view …

Japanese scientists have developed a technique that can encode 100-bit messages into the DNA of common bacteria. The bacteria replicate and pass the message down from generation to generation for …

Nice article in Scientific American about Gordon Bell’s work at Microsoft Research on the MyLifeBits project. MyLifeBits provides one perspective on the not-too-far-off future in which all our information, and …

And now for some other science news. A new technique called cryotherapy is emerging in which people subject themselves to short bursts of extreme cold, in order to rejuvenate the …

NOTES

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Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
License — This article …

Here’s an interesting video about a village in India where men have been stricken for over a decade with a disease that causes them to age much faster. Nobody knows …

Just read an interesting article on the possibility of "intraterrestrial" silicon-based life on Earth:
SETI spends enormous amounts of money
and resources looking for life outside of Earth’s realm, but life forms
so …

Researchers continue to make progress in fusing living neurons with computer chips:

The
line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot
blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which
living …

The Edge has published mini-essays by 119 "big thinkers" on their "most dangerous ideas" — fun reading.
The history of science is replete with discoveries
that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally
dangerous …

Here’s a happy story about true love. An Israeli millionaire tourist recently married a captive dolphin in a formal wedding ceremony. There’s something fishy about this wedding though — I …

I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary …

Now this is really interesting! New research has found that certain parts of the body emit measurable numbers of photons. This may open up new diagnostic techniques. But that’s just …

Amazon has launched a new service that seeks to create a marketplace for human intelligence on the Net. The idea is to utilize humans like one might utilize intelligent agents, …

George Dyson wrote a nice piece on his impressions from a visit to Google, and some speculations about the future of AI on the Net.

This article discusses recent research into encoding short 100 word messages into the DNA of living organisms. The error-correcting characteristics of DNA enable such messages to be passed down without …

From Boing Boing today:
Xeni Jardin: A report in this week’s issue of Science
says 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States:

The study (…) is the first …

I just read that a Japanese team is actually developing technology to store data in human fingernails. I proposed this concept on this blog last year in this  post.   That …

A cutting-edge research program is injecting human brain cells into monkey brains, to investigate whether this causes their brains to become more "human." This poses a potential ethical challenge: If …

Fascinating article about research which has successfully extracted video from monitoring cat neurons. They have actually reconstructed what the cat actually saw from its neural signals. This opens the door …

A group
of researchers working at the Human Genome Project will be
announcing soon that they made an astonishing scientific
discovery: They believe so-called non-coding sequences (97%) in
human DNA is no less than …

Here is a thought-provoking article that discusses several possible directions for the future evoloution of the human species. It includes comments by Richard Dawkins, as well as several scenarios with …

A recent study by the University of California, San Francisco, has found that stress causes the same changes in cells that are typically caused by aging:
The
study involved 39 women …

In February of 2005, a controversial new anti-aging pill called Protandim is slated for release. This drug is claimed to increase the body’s natural production of anti-oxidants, which in turn …

Here’s an interesting speculation. Assume for the moment that our universe is in fact a simulation running on a vast computing system created a race of beings that is far …

This is pretty cool stuff — growing brains using live tissue and then teaching them to control software:
from an article in Slashdot: “Scientists at the University of Florida made a …

A leading researcher claims that he is certain that some humans alive today will live to be 150 due to changes in the human lifespan. He even bet money on …

Scientists have discovered that by blocking the effect of a gene called D2 in a particular part of the brain they can transform normal monkeys into “drones” that will work …