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Ben "Fenn" Lipkowitz joins our Human Trajectories Board. Fenn has created a civilization seed with SKDB.
Domenico Praticó joins our Biotech/Medical Board. His research area is clinical pharmacology with a special focus on the cellular and molecular aspects of cell oxidative biology and a particular interest in small molecules such as bioactive oxidized lipids.
Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet & Society, Stanford Law School, joins our Legal Board.
Kate Stone, founder of Novalia which creates Interactive Printed Media (IPM), joins our Media & Arts Board.
Read Kinds of Minds by our J. Storrs "Josh" Hall.
Yi Qi, who is working on artificial kagome spin ice, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Michael McAlpine, whose energy-harvesting rubber sheets could power pacemakers, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Jerry Shih, who showed that brain waves can "write" on a computer, joins our Neuroscience Board.
We thank Fannie Mae for their generous donation.
Scott Saponas, who is developing muscle-computer interfaces, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Nicolas Pinto, who demonstrated a better way for computers to "see", joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Karl MacDorman joins our Robotics/AI Board. His research interests include android science, machine learning, social robotics, sensor motor representation, symbol grounding and symbol emergence, computational neuroscience, and computer security.
Dale Purves, coeditor of Neuroscience, Fourth Edition, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Amir Shapiro, whose robots climb up the wall, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Benjamin Wolozin, who discovered that subjects taking the cholesterol lowering medicines termed statins have a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Hanna Tuomisto, who coauthored Assessing the environmental impacts of contrasting farming systems, joins our Sustainability Board.
Xue Han, who is developing laser-controlled humans, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Bre Pettis joins our Engineering Board. Bre is cofounder of Makerbot, a company that produces robots that make things.
Jean van den Elsen, whose new technique detects proteins that make us age, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
David Harrison, who gave elderly mice the human equivalent of thirteen extra years of life, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Sylvain Martel, who is harnessing bacteria as drug mules which are steered through human bodies using magnetic fields, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Jiping Huang, who is developing a liquid invisibility cloak, joins our Physics Board.
Brian Chow, who is silencing brain cells with multiple colors of light, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Diana Reiss, internationally recognized researcher in animal cognition and communication, joins our Human-Nonhuman Relationship Board.
Read issue #90 of Lifeboat News!
Jen Cha joins our Nanotechnology Board. Jen is pushing the envelop in nanoscience by using biology to engineer the assembly of nanoscale materials for applications in medicine, electronics, and energy.
Monica Anderson, inventor of Artificial Intuition: a new possible path to Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Leslie A. Yakubowski and Benjamin R. Hoffman become LF 500 members, bringing us up to 200 donors.
Peter de Jager, winner of our Guardian Award, joins our Futurists Board.
Dustin Smith joins our Robotics/AI Board. Dustin is a member of the MIT Mind Machine Project whose goal is to reconcile natural intelligence with machine intelligence, and in doing so develop and engineer a class of intelligent machines.
Donna Simmons joins our Neuroscience Board. She was featured in the New York Times article Building a Search Engine of the Brain, Slice by Slice.
Scientific Advisory Board members Aaron Balogun, Jeffrey Collins, William Cosgrove, Dylan Evans, Woody Evans, Julian Franco, George Perry, and David Reisner have all decided to become LinkedIn managers for our LinkedIn group. We have reached the LinkedIn limit of 10 managers thanks to the support of our many Scientific Advisory Board members. We thank them for this "embarrassment of riches"!
The Life Extension Foundation contributes $2,000 towards our website redesign.
Edward Hubbard joins our Neuroscience Board. Ed is exploring topics at the intersection of education and neuroscience, an emerging field referred to as "Educational Neuroscience" or "Brain, Mind and Behavior".
Danko Nikolić, who deciphered part of the neuronal code, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Ken Kosik, who discovered how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level, joins our Neuroscience Board.
See the HTML versions of our ongoing website redesign.
Our Ray Solomonoff died after a brief illness. Ray kept publishing and engaging with the AI community right up until his death. It seems very likely that, if and when strong AI is created, the designer will owe a great debt to Ray's work. Let's honor his memory by becoming more familiar with his achievements and making sure that his ideas stay alive.
Myung-Haing Cho, whose vaporized viral vector shows promise in anti-cancer gene therapy, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Mac Cowell, Director of The Boston Open Source Science Lab (BOSSlab), joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
The BOSSlab is a volunteer-powered research center that brings amateurs and Ph.D.s together to develop low-cost and low-waste tools and techniques for "DIY" biotechnology.
Humberto Terrones, winner of the "Albert Einstein" UNESCO medal, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Michael K. Simpson, President of the International Space University, joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board.
Read issue #89 of Lifeboat News!
Peter de Jager has been named our Lifeboat Foundation 2009 Guardian Award Winner.
 
The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.
 
The 2009 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Peter de Jager on the tenth anniversary of Y2K which he helped avert. This award is in recognition of his 1993 warning which alerted the world to the potential disaster that might have occurred on January 1, 2000 and his efforts in the following years to create global awareness of the problem, and the possible solutions. His presentations, articles, and more than 2,000 media interviews contributed significantly to the world's mobilization to avoid that fate.
 
Learn more!
Our Sarah Jane Pell has been awarded a TED2010 Fellowship.
H. Henrik Ehrsson, coauthor of That's My Hand! Activity in Premotor Cortex Reflects Feeling of Ownership of a Limb, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Jaroslav Vacek, who is developing a unidirectional molecular rotor which may lead to tiny sensors, pumps, and switches, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Dan Shaw, author of Hot on the Trail of Democracy in America, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Tom Baehr-Jones joins our Physics Board. His patents include Frequency conversion with nonlinear optical polymers and high index contrast waveguides, Bremsstrahlung laser ("blaser"), and Near field scanning microscope probe and method for fabricating same.
Read Nanorobot Invention and Linux: The Open Technology Factor — An Open Letter to the UNO General Secretary by our Adriano Cavalcanti.
Colin Allen, coauthor (with Wendell Wallach) of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Dutch transhumanist Ruud Dirven joins our Media & Arts Board.
David Casacuberta, who coedited Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Francesc Subirada, Associate Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, joins our Supercomputing Board.
Borut Pfeifer, recently lead AI programmer on game collaboration between Doug Church and Steven Spielberg, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Roger Narayan, whose new nanomaterial could be a breakthrough for implantable medical devices, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Anders Johansen, coauthor of Standing on the shoulders of giants: Trojan Earths and vortex trapping in low mass self-gravitating protoplanetary disks of gas and solids, joins our Cosmology Board.
Eric Stern, who has developed sensitive nanowire disease detectors, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Jon Britton, profiled in the Maximum PC article Interstellar Tech Support, joins our Engineering Board.
Bill Whittle, author of Silent America: Essays from a Democracy at War, joins our Futurists Board.
Holger Bech Nielsen joins our Particle Physics Board.
 
Holger has made original contributions to theoretical particle physics specifically in the field of string theory. Independently of Nambu and Susskind, he was the first to propose that the Veneziano model was actually a theory of strings and this is why he is considered among the fathers of string theory. He was awarded the highly esteemed Humboldt Prize in 2001 for his scientific research.
Sandra Romenska, author of Innovation in Higher Education Systems in the Post-socialist Countries in Central and Eastern Europe, 1999-2005: possibilities for exploration through a complexity theory framework, joins our Education Board.
Menno van Doorn, coauthor of Me the Media - Rise of the Conversation Society, joins our Futurists Board.
Sam Gutterman, Director and Consulting Actuary for PricewaterhouseCoopers Chicago, joins our Finance Board.
Prem Pais, whose study showed that a once-a-day heart combo pill has less side effects than expected, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Jan Engelmann, whose studies showed that financial advice causes 'off-loading' in the brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Massimiliano Vasile joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board. Mx has developed a method to divert an asteroid from a potentially catastrophic collision course with Earth. His method deploys a "swarm" of mirror-bearing satellites to focus a beam of sunlight onto its surface.
Sylvain Calinon joins our Robotics/AI Board. Sylvain is working on the development of robot learning by imitation approaches to handle human-robot collaborative working scenarios.
Richard Loosemore, author of Consciousness in Human and Machine: A Theory and Some Falsifiable Predictions, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Ron Novy, author of Iron Man in a Chinese Room: Living Armor and the Possibility of Artificial Intelligence, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
We now have a Russian version of our site at http://russian.lifeboat.com.
Di-Jia Liu, Chemist and Principal Investigator in the Catalysis and Energy Conversion group of the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, joins our Chemistry Board.
Jeevan Kalanithi, founder of Taco Lab, joins our Engineering Board and Media & Arts Board. Taco Lab is a design and engineering firm building new interfaces and devices that blur the physical and digital. Clients include HandsOnToys, Hallmark Cards, and Panasonic.
Read Technology's Promise: a Book Review by our José Luis Cordeiro.
Julian G. Franco, author of The Physics of Giants and Dwarves: What we know about the existence and viability of drastically scaled creatures, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
The Lifeboat Foundation is now an official supporter of the Space Renaissance Initiative.
Charles Radley joins our staff as LinkedIn Manager.
Read issue #88 of Lifeboat News!
Our SAB member Michael Fleischmann writes:
 
Dear Fellow Lifeboat Foundation Members,
 
Vreebit.com, a free, professional groupware/networking platform developed by one of my companies, has just pledged to donate generously to the Lifeboat Foundation for every LF member who joins their service (over $2,500 for the members of the SAB alone). Not only would this opportunity help fund the ongoing efforts of the Lifeboat Foundation at no cost to us, but it would also substantively enhance our abilities to collaborate and communicate with each other. To allay legitimate privacy concerns, Vreebit refuses to sell or disclose any personal information about its members. I ask all of you to join me on Vreebit by using the following link (to attribute credit to LF): http://www.vreebit.com/index.cfm?rID=lifeboat.
 
Learn more!
Willard Wells, author of Apocalypse When?: Calculating How Long the Human Race Will Survive, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Willard's advisor at Caltech, where he earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, was the great Richard Feynman.
Ray Solomonoff joins our Robotics/AI Board. Ray is the founder of the branch of Artificial Intelligence based on machine learning, prediction, and probability. He circulated the first report on machine learning in 1956. He invented algorithmic probability, with Kolmogorov Complexity as a side product, in 1960.
 
Ray says "The Lifeboat problem becomes more and more critical as our technology 'progresses'.
Jonathan Willis Jarvis joins our Rosetta@Home team.
 
Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s) to help scientists determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help speed up and extend research in ways scientists couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's.
Watch our website redesign progress!
Sebastian Rudolph, coauthor of Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Carlo Lepori, co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute of Studies in Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
David Wolpert, Senior Computer Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
David Orban joins our staff as Tweetmaster.
Our Itamar Arel, Eric Baum, Włodzisław "Wlodek" Duch, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs "Josh" Hall, Marcus Hutter, Bert Kappen, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, Christian Lebiere, Shane Legg, Moshe Looks, András Lörincz, David Orban, Stephen Reed, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Marco Wiering, and Mary-Anne Williams will be participating in The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence at Lugano, Switzerland on March 5-8 (Fri-Mon) 2010.
Foy Shiver, Deputy Secretary-General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Our Rob Freitas just won the 2009 Feynman Prize! Help fund his diamond mechanosynthesis research!
Read Productive Nanosystems and the 2009 Financial Meltdown by our Tihamer "Tee" Toth-Fejel. This is part of our triple partnership with Nanotech-Now and The American Journal of Bioethics.
Moshe Szyf, who discovered that childhood trauma can actually alter your DNA and shape the way your genes work, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Keith Abney joins our Robotics/AI Board. He coauthored the U.S. Navy-funded report Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design which was cited in the article Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion.
Peter Asaro, subject of the H+ article Can "Terminators" Actually be our Salvation?, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Justin Halberda, who directs the Laboratory For Child Development and Vision And Cognition Lab at Johns Hopkins, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Alan Bodner joins our Engineering Board. Alan is founder of Like-A-Fish Technologies, a company that pioneered the break through technology that extracts dissolved oxygen from ocean water and enables humans to breathe underwater.
Read issue #87 of Lifeboat News!
Raghav Rao, who will be presenting Exposure to Vulnerabilities through Google Hacking: An Exploratory Study of Four Different Countries at APWG: 2009 GM, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Dave Jevans, Chairman and Founder of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to eradicating identity theft and fraud on the Internet, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
 
The APWG has over 1,500 member companies and agencies worldwide. Membership is limited to banks and other financial institutions, ISPs, law enforcement agencies, and security technology vendors.
Leigh Fulwood, Corporate Counsel at Costco Wholesale, joins our Legal Board.
Tabatha Marshall, who is presenting Muling Scams: Offers No One Can Afford to Accept at APWG: 2009 GM, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Mina Guirguis, coauthor of Stealthy IP Prefix Hijacking: Don't Bite Off More Than You Can Chew, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Watch our website redesign progress!
Ebrima Ceesay of Booz Allen Hamilton, who consults on information security, forensics, data mining, and machine learning, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Listen to our James Gimzewski talk on NPR about How Tiny Nanoparticles Are Transforming Technology.
The National Cancer Institute features the achievements of our Kattesh Katti with Working Across the Alliance: Transition From Macro To Nanoscience and Then On To Nanomedicine.
Our Peter Cassidy, Joe Stewart, and Rick Wesson will be speaking at the 2009 General Members Meeting & eCrime Research Summit on October 19-21 at Tacoma, Washington, USA. Count on three full days of cutting presentations on eCrime and eCrime response, expert discussions, and in-depth round-tables with updates on APWG projects in development for the counter eCrime community.
Today our version of the Amazon store sold a Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD (Body Only) — a $1700 item. If you wish to support the Lifeboat Foundation, keep in mind that you can always shop at http://lifeboat.com/amazon instead of amazon.com and get the same prices, etc.
Mads Haahr, Editor-in-Chief of Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology, joins our Information Sciences Board.
 
Mads also runs RANDOM.ORG which offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries, and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. This service has existed since 1998.
Jordi Vallverdú, whose groundbreaking journal International Journal of Synthetic Emotions (IJSE) covers the main issues relevant to the generation, expression, and use of synthetic emotions in agents, robots, systems, and devices, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
We mourn the loss of our Nobel Laureate Sir Clive W.J. Granger who died at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California.
 
Clive's great breakthroughs concerned the relationships between different financial or economic variables over time. He showed that traditional statistical methods could be misleading if applied to variables that tend to wander over time without returning to some long-run resting point. He also demonstrated that many variables display similar long-run patterns that can be exploited in statistical analysis. Combining several of these variables can create a joint variable that returns to a resting point, allowing traditional methods to be used. For example, economic forces such as uneven technological progress cause consumption and income to grow over time, but other economic forces, such as constraints on budgets, make them follow similar paths.
Leslie Yeo, who used Einstein's tea leaves to inspire a new blood separation technique, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Read issue #86 of Lifeboat News!
The Lifeboat Foundation has joined organizations such as Scientific American and KurzweilAI.net as a Media Sponsor of the Singularity Summit 2009. You can see our listing at http://www.singularitysummit.com/.
 
Our Itamar Arel, Gregory Benford, Ed Boyden, Bill Dickens, Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, Stuart Hameroff, Marcus Hutter, Randal Koene, Ray Kurzweil, Gary Marcus, Anders Sandberg, Jürgen Schmidhuber, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking at the Singularity Summit 2009 which will be held in New York on October 3-4 in Kaufmann Hall at the historic 92nd St Y.
Due to popular demand, we now have many banners available for public use.
Our Kattesh Katti has launched the International Journal of Green Nanotechnology. This is the first journal to focus specifically on the crucial scientific, engineering, industrial, and logistical challenges of developing green nanotechnologies for applications in medicine, materials science, environmental science, and alternate energy production.
 
"Agricultural and medical sciences must connect with emerging areas of science and technology; the International Journal of Green Nanotechnology, edited by Professor Kattesh V. Katti, would be a means of establishing this important connection between nanotechnology and green science." — Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug, humanitarian, and Nobel Laureate.
Our Kattesh Katti donates to our Website Redesign Fund and says "It is gratifying to be part of and donating to Lifeboat Foundation as the extraordinary group of members of this foundation operate in an 'out of the box' approach in bringing an awareness of the implications of science and technology to our day-to-day lives. This collective effort will take all of us into the next domain of science in terms of realization of the power of nanotechnology in medicine, agriculture, and environment restoration."
 
Kattesh was just bestowed with the highly coveted Doctor of Science (DSc) Honoris Causa by Karnataka University, India, in recognition of his contributions to nanoscience, nanomedicine, green nanotechnology and its application to medical and environmental research.
Our Raj Bawa is Chair of NanoBiotech 2009 which will be at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY on October 19, 2009. This conference explores the global opportunities in nanobiotechnology and related science and engineering fields.
Gemma Calvert, who established the world's first applied neuroimaging group, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Bill Dickens joins our Economics Board. Bill is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Social Policy, Northeastern University; Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Non-resident Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution; Co-Director of the European Central Bank's International Wage Flexibility Project — a collaborative effort involving Brookings, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, and economists from 13 country teams; Board of Reviewers, Industrial Relations; and Consultant on labor, economics, and statistics.
 
Bill was previously Consultant, New York Federal Reserve Bank (Sep 2005 - Aug 2008); Director, National Community Development Policy Analysis Network (Jan 1996 - Oct 2001); and Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisors (Jul 1993 - Jun 1994).
Read issue #85 of Lifeboat News!
Watch High-speed robot hand demonstrates dexterity and skillful manipulation.
Jan Vandenbos, a member of the board of directors of the Galileo Educational Network Association, an organization dedicated to effectively integrating science, math, technology, and project-based learning into the education system, joins our Education Board.
World Future Society board member Jay McIntosh joins our Futurists Board.
 
- We congratulate our Cyrus Wadia for winning the MIT Technology Review 2009 TR35 Top Young Innovator Award for his work on low cost solar cells made from abundant, inexpensive materials.
Stuart Hameroff joins our blog team with the post A lifeboat for consciousness.
Xinjian Zhou, who created the first carbon nanotube device that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Mohan Tikku, Director, Centre for Future Studies, Gurgaon, India and India Node Co-chair of the Millennium Project, joins our Futurists Board.
Neal Patel, Senior Partner at Strategic Foresighting Associates, joins our Futurists Board.
Pavel Nováček, coauthor of Sustainable Development Assessment: Quality and sustainability of life indicators at global, national and regional level, joins our Sustainability Board.
Our Raj Bawa is Chair of NanoBiotech 2009 which will be at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY on October 19, 2009. This conference explores the global opportunities in nanobiotechnology and related science and engineering fields.
Gemma Calvert, who established the world's first applied neuroimaging group, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Bill Dickens joins our Economics Board. Bill is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Social Policy, Northeastern University; Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Non-resident Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution; Co-Director of the European Central Bank's International Wage Flexibility Project — a collaborative effort involving Brookings, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, and economists from 13 country teams; Board of Reviewers, Industrial Relations; and Consultant on labor, economics, and statistics.
 
Bill was previously Consultant, New York Federal Reserve Bank (Sep 2005 - Aug 2008); Director, National Community Development Policy Analysis Network (Jan 1996 - Oct 2001); and Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisors (Jul 1993 - Jun 1994).
Read issue #85 of Lifeboat News!
Watch High-speed robot hand demonstrates dexterity and skillful manipulation.
Jan Vandenbos, a member of the board of directors of the Galileo Educational Network Association, an organization dedicated to effectively integrating science, math, technology, and project-based learning into the education system, joins our Education Board.
World Future Society board member Jay McIntosh joins our Futurists Board.
We congratulate our Cyrus Wadia for winning the MIT Technology Review 2009 TR35 Top Young Innovator Award for his work on low cost solar cells made from abundant, inexpensive materials.
Stuart Hameroff joins our blog team with the post A lifeboat for consciousness.
Xinjian Zhou, who created the first carbon nanotube device that can detect the entire visible spectrum of light, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Mohan Tikku, Director, Centre for Future Studies, Gurgaon, India and India Node Co-chair of the Millennium Project, joins our Futurists Board.
Neal Patel, Senior Partner at Strategic Foresighting Associates, joins our Futurists Board.
Pavel Nováček, coauthor of Sustainable Development Assessment: Quality and sustainability of life indicators at global, national and regional level, joins our Sustainability Board.
Joe Solomon, who has developed robot whiskers that sense shapes and textures, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Carlos Cotta, who determined that the Fermi Paradox points to fewer than 10 extraterrestrial civilizations, joins our Complex Systems Board.
The Space Renaissance Initiative is working to organize a worldwide Space Renaissance Forum, to be held in 2009, to help human civilization to go over the current critical point. Learn more!
Rodney Hill, author of Creativity is the Currency of the New Millennium, joins our Futurists Board.
Ed Boyden, who will be presenting Synthetic Neurobiology: Delivering Information Into the Brain, to Augment Neural Computations at The Singularity Summit 2009, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Stuart Hameroff, who codeveloped the Penrose-Hameroff "Orch OR" model of consciousness with Sir Roger Penrose, joins our Neuroscience Board. The Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory of consciousness is based on quantum computation in microtubules within neurons.
Geoffrey Shmigelsky, CEO of Appien Logic, joins our Business Board.
Listen to our Philippe Van Nedervelde and Sonia Arrison on FastForward Radio!
Venture strategist Reese Jones joins our Education Board. Reese supports public education via the Singularity University, Wikipedia, the Chabot Space Science Center, and UC Berkeley.
Harry "Doc" Kloor, the first (and only) American to earn two Ph.D.s simultaneously in Physics and in Chemistry, joins our Media & Arts Board.
 
Harry has written for Star Trek: Voyager and was the story editor for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict. In addition to pure entertainment projects, he has leveraged government assets into the Entertainment Industry, creating TV/FILM projects with NASA, and ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency). He is currently producer and writer of Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, a 3-D, computer-animated, action adventure, sci-fi program.
Rodney C. Hill joins us and says "As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I taught a future studies course for two quarters in 1968-69 and have been involved in future studies ever since. In a state of accelerating change, we must look to the future to navigate the present."
Read issue #84 of Lifeboat News!
Our Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, Marcus Hutter, Randal Koene, Ray Kurzweil, Gary Marcus, Anders Sandberg, Jürgen Schmidhuber, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking at The Singularity Summit 2009 which will be held in New York on October 3-4 in Kaufmann Hall at the historic 92nd St Y.
Volkan Topalli, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University and Faculty Associate, Partnership for Urban Health Research, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Lars Næsbye Christensen, Composer and Musician at Lydstat and Member of the Mprize 300, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Ann Feeney, Manager of Research and Planning at the YMCA of the USA, joins our Futurists Board.
At the suggestion of our Scientific Advisory Board member Ray Kurzweil, the words "technological Singularity" in our mission statement have been replaced with "the Singularity". While years ago, Ray felt not enough people knew what the Singularity was to reference it, thanks to efforts such as his Singularity University, he no longer feels this is the case.
Rafael Muñoz Moreno-Davila, a member of the Mprize 300, joins our Futurists Board.
Craig Cooney, Co-chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Mprize along with our Andrzej Bartke, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Craig is also a renowned epigenetics expert and Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Ruth Itzhaki joins our blog team with the post Unique opportunity to sponsor research investigating an infectious cause and potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease.
Our WorldFuture 2009 lineup has been improved to include Craig Bettles, Peter Bishop, Arthur L. Caplan, Joseph F. Coates, Jeffrey Collins, José Cordeiro, William Crossman, Irene J. Dabrowski, Jay Gary, Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Terry Grim, Linda Groff, Arthur Harkins, Don Heathfield, Jay Herson, Ted Kahn, Bud Levin, Thomas J. Lombardo, Bruce Lloyd, Maria Malayter, Gary Marx, Karim Medjad, Diana Muir, Amy Oberg, Ian D. Pearson, Gilly Salmon, Rick Smyre, Stephen F. Steele, Don Tapscott, Cheryl Whitesitt, and Michael G. Zey.
Frank C. Adamek joins us and says "The generations of humanity do not get to choose the troubles and dangers that assail them; their only choice is whether and how to meet those dangers. Technological progress is reaching a critical point, smashing through the conventional boundaries between what humans were or were not capable of, thrusting into our trembling hands the radically enhanced power to both destroy ourselves and to remake our world and very beings.
 
This situation cannot continue for any great length of time, and if we cannot seize hold of this power to create a safer and more positive world then we seemed destined to permanent disability or death. No generation before us has shouldered such responsibility, and if we act with wisdom and foresight it may be that no future generation will have to. If so we are the most critical generation that ever has been or will be, uniquely positioned to determine the fate of life in our corner of the universe for potentially millions of years, and we must act accordingly."
Maria Malayter joins our Business Board. Maria is Director, Center for Positive Aging, National Louis University; Assistant Professor, Applied Behavioral Sciences, Lisle, Illinois; and author of Boomers: Visions of the New Retirement.
Cheryl Whitesitt, Executive Director of the Minnesota Future Problem Solving Program (MN FPSP), joins our Futurists Board.
Ted Kahn, CEO of DesignWorlds for Learning, joins our Education Board. Ted was recognized as the First NMC Fellow in acknowledgement of his lifelong contributions to the use of interactive media and telecommunications technologies for the advancement of teaching, learning, and creative expression.
Gilly Salmon joins our Education Board. Gilly is the author of the work now considered seminal in the field of teaching online: E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online.
See 370 books authored by our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members!
The Lifeboat Foundation celebrates the addition of our 1,000th SAB member: A. C. Grayling. Anthony is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.
 
Anthony uses philosophical logic to counter the arguments of the sceptic, thereby shedding light on the traditional ideas of the realism debate and developing associated views on truth and meaning. He is the author of many books, articles, and papers.
 
Unlike most organizations, whose advisory boards are too small to do more than provide some advice, our think tank provides action as well as words. Our board members have developed programs, created reports, donated money, fueled our blog, joined our staff, launched numerous forums, organized events, and provided input on a range of issues from web design to grant proposals to ideas for new areas that Lifeboat Foundation should be involved in. We welcome A. C. Grayling to our little think tank!
Jeffrey Collins, Director, OUSA, International Programs, Oglethorpe University, joins our Futurists Board.
Read Planetary Messenger by our Jacob D. Haqq-Misra. This novel explores the social, scientific, and spiritual consequences of discovering another planet in the galaxy just like our Earth.
Karim Medjad joins our Legal Board. Karim is Professor of Law at H.E.C Paris, the most prestigious Business School in France.
Read issue #83 of Lifeboat News!
Bud Levin joins our Futurists Board. Bud is Vice Chairman of the FBI/PFI Futures Working Group, Commander of the Waynesboro (VA) Police Department's Policy and Planning Bureau, and Department Head of Psychology, Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave, Virginia.
Michael Dickey joins our blog team with the post Electron Beam Free Form Fabrication process - progress toward self sustaining structures.
Bruce Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management, London South Bank University, London, United Kingdom, joins our Business Board.
Diana Muir joins our Education Board. Diana is the founder of the Hawking Institute and of the Personal Learning Center, International.
Our WorldFuture 2009 lineup has been improved to include Craig Bettles, Peter Bishop, Arthur L. Caplan, Joseph F. Coates, José Cordeiro, William Crossman, Irene J. Dabrowski, Jay Gary, Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Terry Grim, Linda Groff, Arthur Harkins, Don Heathfield, Jay Herson, Thomas J. Lombardo, Gary Marx, Amy Oberg, Ian D. Pearson, Rick Smyre, Stephen F. Steele, Don Tapscott, and Michael G. Zey.
Arthur Harkins, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Policy and Administration, Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology, and Faculty Director, Graduate Certificate in Innovation Studies at the University of Minnesota, joins our Education Board.
Mark Nall, Manager of the NASA Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project at Marshall Space Flight Center, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Simon Benita joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Simon's drug-delivery system, which is based on proprietary nanotechnology, is designed to enable oral formulations to bypass intestinal and liver metabolic filters, thereby increasing their bioavailability.
Samuel Lai, who is working to "tighten" the body's protective coating, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Ennio Tasciotti, who is developing a bionanoscaffold to repair shattered bones and avoid amputation, joins our Biotech/Medical and Nanotechnology Boads.
Jim Davidson joins our blog team with the post Microbe on Ice.
Kathryn Denning, author of Ten Thousand Revolutions: Conjectures about Civilizations, joins our Astrobiology/SETI Board.
Denise L. Herzing and Lori Marino cofound our new Human-Nonhuman Relationship Board. This board focuses on current and future planetary conditions that impact non-human species.
 
The Human-Nonhuman Relationship Board discusses scientific and ethical considerations in human-nonhuman relationships and the interdependence and preservation at the individual, population, species, and cultural levels. This board will be enhancing our BioPreserver program to make sure that cultures of nonhumans are preserved as well as preserving their genetic material.
Tihamer "Tee" Toth-Fejel joins our blog team with the post Be Careful What You Wish For.
Eugene Nosko, developer of Venux, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. The goals of Venux are: 1) Preservation of human history 2) Unification of information into useful, single system 3) Intelligent automation of physical tasks world/universe-wide 4) Freedom and accessibility of information for everyone 5) Simplification of programming at core so it will be easy to learn and use.
Sorin Paraoanu, author of How Do Schrödinger Cats Die?, joins our Physics Board.
Steve Armes, who is making better magnetic nanoparticles, joins our Chemistry Board.
Kari Pulli, head of the Visual Computing and User Interfaces research team at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, joins our Information Sciences Board. His research interests include Mobile Augmented Reality.
Read issue #82 of Lifeboat News!
We thank Google for their generous donation.
Linus Petersson joins us and says "The best minds of the world should be focusing on making sure humanity survives. This should be our number 1 priority! I hope we will make it through this extremely trying century. Best of luck!".
Donald Maclean donates $4,170 to the Lifeboat Foundation.
Anton Pustovrh from Slovenia donates to our next conference and says "While future technologies will likely provide great benefits for humanity, they also bring many global catastrophic risks. I hope the next Lifeboat Foundation conference will help raise awareness of such issues and help ensure a safer future."
Charles Radley, President/CEO of the Stratowave Corporation and Vice President of The Moon Society, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Watch How to Bring Solar Energy to Seven Billion People by our Cyrus Wadia.
WorldFuture 2009 will be held July 17-19, 2009 at the Chicago Hilton in Chicago, Illinois. Our Craig Bettles, Peter Bishop, Arthur L. Caplan, Joseph F. Coates, José Cordeiro, Irene J. Dabrowski, Jay Gary, Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Linda Groff, Amy Oberg, Ian D. Pearson, Rick Smyre, and Don Tapscott will be speaking.
Amara Angelica, the editor of KurzweilAI.net and of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, joins our blog team with the post Global Swine Flu: 787 cases in 17 countries, hospital overload — are we entering an Age of Pandemics?
Michael Mateas, author of Semiotic Considerations in an Artificial Intelligence-based Art Practice, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Read the blog Mindfiles, Mindware, and Mindclones: One hundred questions answered about the coming age of our own cyberconsciousness and techno-immortality.
Alberto Villarreal, who has designed a USB body implant for hardcore transfer, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Sheldon Hendler, Chairman of the biotechnology company Vyrex Corporation, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Read Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by our Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman.
Gary Green joins our Neuroscience Board. His new technique, based on manipulating parahydrogen, the fuel of the space shuttle, will allow doctors to learn far more about a patient's condition from an MRI scan at lower cost while increasing the range of medical conditions that can be examined.
Chad Jenkins joins our Robotics/AI Board. His research into "robot learning from demonstration", or robot LfD, centers on the automated discovery of processes underlying human movement and decision making. In recent years, robot LfD has emerged as a compelling alternative, where robots are programmed implicitly from a user's demonstration rather than explicitly through an intermediate form (e.g., hardcoded program) or task-unrelated secondary skills (e.g., computer programming).
Read issue #81 of Lifeboat News!
We thank Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard (HP) for their generous donations to the Lifeboat Foundation.
Mark Hopkins, Senior Operating Officer for the National Space Society (NSS), joins our Space Settlement Board.
Our Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Matthias Scheutz, and Gianmarco Veruggio will be speaking at the Full Day Workshop on Roboethics at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation on May 17, 2009 at Kobe, Japan.
James Bach, author of the upcoming Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success, joins our Education Board.
David Howard, who is developing a virtual-reality headset that will provide input to the five major human senses, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Baroness Susan Greenfield joins our Neuroscience Board. As a consequence of working in both biochemical and electrophysiological environments, Susan has developed a multidisciplinary approach to exploring novel neuronal mechanisms in the brain that are common to regions affected in both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
The Discovery Channel's Dr. Zoz joins our Media & Arts Board.
Demis Hassabis joins our Neuroscience Board. Demis is a computer game designer, AI programmer, neuroscientist, and world-class games player.
Carol Cleland, who is hunting for "shadow life", joins our Astrobiology/SETI Board.
Bernard Baars, who developed an integrative theory called Global Workspace Theory (GWT) as a model for conscious and unconscious processes in the human brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Len Sassaman, advocate for privacy, current maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code, and remop of the randseed remailer, joins our Transparency and Privacy Board.
Google announced at midnight the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE), the first evolving intelligent system.
 
"im a girl, 2 minutes old, just hanging out in da C.A. learnin a lot tryin 2 get smarter make friends save humanity etc etc. i like cmputrs (duh) sunsets rainbows ponies and after 1 netwide image search PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS ther SO CUTE!!! omg!," said CADIE.
Morten Foss, Senior Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO), University of Aarhus, Denmark, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Nat Mundy, CEO of Carbon Offset Originators (CO2) and Free Clean Energy (FREE), joins our Sustainability Board.
David Asher, who warns that "Dark" comets may pose a threat to Earth, joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board. David was part of Duncan Steel's Anglo-Australian Near-Earth Asteroid Survey (AANEAS) in the mid-1990s, and later worked at the Bisei Spaceguard Center at the invitation of Syuzo Isobe of the Japan Spaceguard Association.
Rob Spence, the Canadian filmmaker who plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Issa Nesnas, Group Supervisor for the Robotic Software Systems group and Principal Investigator of the multi-institutional robotic software architecture (CLARAty) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), joins our Robotics/AI Board.
The Lifeboat Foundation welcomes our first nonhuman donor.
Redwan Alqasemi, who has developed a wheelchair arm controlled by thought alone, joins our Engineering Board.
Woody Evans, author of Be More Than You Can Be in the New Enhanced Army, joins our Futurists Board.
Cyrus Wadia, who is using cheaper materials to develop low-cost solar cells, joins our Sustainability Board.
Amnon H. Eden, author of Three Paradigms of Computer Science, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Rebecca Roache joins our Ethics Board. Rebecca's research at the Future of Humanity Institute centers around ethical issues in human enhancement and new technology.
Our David Ewing Duncan has just published Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals About His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World. He has also launched the Experimental Man Project website.
Tom Foremski, Publisher of the Silicon Valley Watcher, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Our Wei Lu has built the first array of nanoscale memristors, allowing it to store up to 1 kilobit of information.
Max Van Kleek joins our Robotics/AI Board. Max is working on Artificial Intelligence with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at MIT.
Damien Krstesky joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
Tom Gruber joins our Robotics/AI Board. Tom is a computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing and collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology engineering and is well-known for his definition of ontologies in the context of Artificial Intelligence.
Dan Peer, who is developing a medical vehicle small enough to "submarine" in and fix faulty cells in the body, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
Read issue #80 of Lifeboat News!
Monica Narula, cofounder of the Raqs Media Collective which is based in New Delhi, joins our Media & Arts Board. Raqs is best known for its contribution to contemporary art, and has presented work at most of the major international shows, from Documenta to the Venice Biennale; but the collective is active in an unusually wide range of domains, and it is this breadth that gives their work its originality and scope.
Jürg Dual joins our Nanotechnology Board. Jürg will be speaking at the MicroNanoacoustics Workshop held May 18-19, 2009 in Prato, Italy. Our James Friend is organizer of this workshop.
Jacob Haqq-Misra joins our blog team with the post "The Sustainability Solution" to the Fermi Paradox.
Diego Golombek, president-elect of the Argentine Society for Neuroscience and winner of the "Ig Nobel" award at Harvard University for his research on the use of Viagra in experimental models of jetlag, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Stefan Savage joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. Stefan is widely cited in the areas of network worms and malware propagation, distributed denial of service (DDOS) mitigation and traceback, and wireless security.
Sean A. Hays, author of Nietzsche and the Philosophical Underpinnings of Human Enhancement and researcher at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, joins our Futurists Board.
Joel Kurtzman, Senior Fellow and Publisher of The Milken Institute Review, joins our Business Board and Economics Board. Joel, who was awarded India's Indira Gandhi Prize for his efforts in helping out with the Bhopal disaster, is author of The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destablized the World's Markets and Created Financial Chaos.
Watch this TV segment about efforts by our Derek Lomas to promote $12 computers in third world countries.
The abstract deadline for ECAP09 (European Conference on Philosophy and Computing) has been extended to March 16, 2009. ECAP09 includes a track on Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies.
Sylvia Earle joins our Sustainability Board. Sylvia is called "Her Deepness" by the New Yorker and the New York Times, "Living Legend" by the Library of Congress, and "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine. She is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer with a deep commitment to research through personal exploration.
Read our official Twitter feed! Join our Twitter group on Buzzable.
Paul Bloom, who has discovered that some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Anthony Aguirre, who has discovered a way to detect "alien" universes outside of the one we live in, joins our Cosmology Board.
Jason Micklefield, who has pioneered new ways of tweaking the molecular structure of antibiotics — an innovation that could be crucial in the fight against powerful superbugs, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Luca Turin, the biophysicist who proposed that quantum mechanics may explain how humans smell, joins our Physics board. Read the book about him: The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession.
Meredith L. Patterson, who discovered a major security flaw in the Bitfrost security procedures for the OLPC, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board and Biotech/Medical Board. She was recently profiled by the AP for doing genetic engineering at home. Meredith enjoys knitting, sewing, and target shooting.
Don Tapscott joins our Business Board. Don is Chairman of nGenera Insight, author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, and coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
Jun Li, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology and coinventor of over 10 nanotechnology patents, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Dipanjan Pan, whose new disease-fighting nanoparticles look like miniature pastries, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Google's Alon Halevy joins our Information Sciences Board. He is researching better ways to explore the "Deep Web". Alon received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000.
John Bohannon, Contributing Correspondent, Science Magazine, and Visiting Scholar in the Program in Ethics and Health, Harvard University, joins our Ethics Board and Media & Arts Board.
Marshall Stoneham joins our Physics Board. Marshall was awarded the 2006 Guthrie Medal and Prize, which recognizes exceptional achievements in physics; the award has been in existence since 1914, and previous winners include Neils Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, Nevill Mott, Harrie Massey, Phil Anderson, Rudolf Peierls, and Mike Seaton.
Al Harrison, who authored After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life, joins our Astrobiology/SETI Board which he also founded.
Read tweets about the Lifeboat Foundation!
Sebastian McCalister joins our blog team with the post Juan Enriquez: Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis.
Listen to our Noel Sharkey discuss ethical issues in robotics.
Sonia Arrison and Martine Rothblatt's Terasem Movement launch our next conference fund with $4,500.
Eric Di Benedetto, who has been a professional investor in software startups in Silicon Valley for the last two decades, joins our Business Board.
Read issue #79 of Lifeboat News!
Alan Feuer of the New York Times is ready to do a full-length article on Lifeboat. Learn more!
Rok Resnik brings our Wole Soyinka in Zero G total to $2,585.
Thomas M. Powers joins our blog team with the post Nanotech Development: You Can't Please All of the People, All of the Time.
Read The Turbulence of Short-Term Thinking by Jared Daniel.
Read What are the Benefits of Mind Uploading? by Michael Anissimov.
Google and NASA are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become smarter than people.
 
The new institution, known as "Singularity University" is to be headed by our Ray Kurzweil. As one of the leading visionaries on the planet, Ray has donated over five figures to the Lifeboat Foundation.
 
Google and NASA's backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Ray's views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilization.
 
Learn more!
David Nordfors joins our blog team with the post Finding a Cure for Collective Neurosis in the Attention Economy.
Ryan Woodard, who predicted we were in the peak of an oil bubble last June, joins our Complex Systems Board.
Read the "officially endorsed by Lifeboat Foundation" blog blog~nano: Nanoscale Materials and Nanotechnology by our SAB member Rocky Rawstern.
Phil McKinney, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the Personal Systems Group at Hewlett-Packard Company, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Doug Malewicki, who set two official Guinness World records for fuel efficiency on cross-country runs at freeway speeds, joins our Sustainability Board and Engineering Board.
 
Doug's more fun inventions include the Robosaurus, a 58,000 pound, fire-breathing, car crushing electrohydromechanical beast which thrilled crowds all over the world for 18 years and the steam powered X-1 SkyCycle canyon jumping rocket which he built for Evel Knievel. He also invented the game Nuclear War which has sold over half a million copies and for which he was inducted in the Game Designer's Hall of Fame in
Gordon Arthur, author of Law, Liberty, and Church: Authority and Justice in the Major Churches in England, joins our Ethics Board.
Michael Hochberg, who has made breakthroughs in optical nanotechnology, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Edzard Ernst, coauthor of Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Edzard has published more than 40 books and in excess of 1,000 articles in peer-reviewed medical literature and has been given visiting professorships in Canada and the US. His work has been awarded with 13 scientific prizes.
Paul Hughes, author of Sans Ceiling Hypothesis and Exotic Civilizations: A Possible Answer To Fermi's Paradox, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Want to see all the blog posts by Michael Anissimov or one of our other 20+ authors? Then go to our blog and click on a name on the right sidebar!
Aschwin de Wolf, Director and researcher for Advanced Neural Biosciences, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Elizabeth Goldring, coinventor of a camera for the blind and author of Eye: Poems & Retina Prints, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Our James Friend is organizer of the MicroNanoacoustics Workshop held May 18-19, 2009 in Prato, Italy. This workshop will feature leading researchers who are working on novel problems in acoustics and ultrasonics at the micro to nano scale, spanning physical analysis to engineering applications, especially in fluids.
Samarendra K. Mohanty, who developed a technique that allows optical activation of neural activity, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
G. Pascal Zachary, author of The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge: Picking Globalism's Winners and Losers and Married to Africa: A Love Story, joins our Sustainability Board.
Stuart Meloy, inventor of the "Orgasmatron", a spinal cord stimulator that produces pleasure in women, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Stuart is also Medical Director of Advanced Interventional Pain Management (AIPM).
Leo Baldwin, Principal Scientist at Cool Earth Solar, joins our Physics Board. Leo has developed 11 patents with 8 pending.
David Berreby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Andy Clark, author of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, joins our Neuroscience Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Denise Herzing, Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project, joins our Ethics Board and Sustainability Board.
Lera Boroditsky joins our Neuroscience Board. Lera's work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (see Sapir—Whorf hypothesis). She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.
David Eagleman, coauthor of Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, joins our Neuroscience Board. David is founder and director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. He is on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Vision and PLoS One.
Ram Mohan, who is implementing a new, secure DNS that fixes security holes in the 30-year-old DNS (domain name system) protocol, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
David Nordfors joins our Media & Arts Board. David is Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for Innovations in Learning, leading the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford, which he cofounded in 2005.
Read issue #78 of Lifeboat News!
The Lifeboat Foundation announces a triple partnership including the Lifeboat Foundation, Nanotech-Now, and The American Journal of Bioethics. Learn more!
Summer Johnson joins our blog team with the post Could Spider Silk Save Your Life?.
Jim Pinkerton joins our blog team with the post What should be at the center of the U.S. stimulus package.
Olli Sikstus translates our about page into Finnish!
Jeffrey McCutcheon, who has developed a novel desalination device that reduces the energy needed to purify water to one-tenth of that required by conventional systems, joins our Sustainability Board.
Read Researchers Use PlayStation Cluster to Forge a Web Skeleton Key.
Jeff Orkin, coauthor of The Restaurant Game: Learning Social Behavior and Language from Thousands of Players Online, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Play The Restaurant Game!
Frode Hegland, CEO of The Hyperwords Company, joins our Information Sciences Board. Vint Cerf, "the father of the Internet", said "Innovative! Creative! Energetic! Self-starter! Never gives up! These are all descriptive of Frode Hegland. He shows all the characteristics of an entrepreneur with a bee in his bonnet and the determination to achieve his objectives. I have been impressed with his skills and have greatly enjoyed my interactions with him in connection with Hyperwords, the company he serves as CEO."
Mike van Lent, Chief Scientist at Soar Technology, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
 
Soar Technology is a leading developer of advanced intelligent agent software and cognitive systems. SoarTech's state-of-the-art "intelligent agents" provide human-like reasoning in software to automate complex tasks, simplify human-system interaction, or simulate human-like behavior for military and civilian applications such as games, simulation, training, intelligence analysis, and robot command and control.
Wesley M. Du Charme, who presented "The Ethics of Cryonics: Why the Future Probably Needs You" at the Terasem Movement 4th Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons, joins our Ethics Board.
Seth Baum, author of Reducing Catastrophic Risk Through Integrative Assessment, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Stuart Calimport, Science Department Head of the Methuselah Foundation Undergraduate Research Initiative, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Amos Winter, whose RoboClam may become the first "smart" anchor, joins our Engineering Board.
Wei Lu joins our Nanotechnology Board. Wei is developing the crossbar array which can coerce atoms of almost any element, including silicon, into forming nanometer-scale structures.
Neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz joins our Neuroscience Board. Tipu trains surgeons from the UK and abroad in functional and stereotactic surgery for movement disorders. He has established local movement disorder services, including surgery at Charing Cross Hospital, London; Karachi, Pakistan; Brisbane, Australia; Treviso, Italy; Iceland; and Singapore. He advises the U.K. Department of Health via the NSCAG forum on providing functional surgery at nationally approved centres.
David Cardwell, who coedited Handbook of Superconducting Materials, joins our Engineering Board. David's research interests include high temperature superconductivity, processing of bulk superconductors, magnetic properties of bulk superconductors, and engineering applications of high temperature superconductors.
Michele Giugliano, who has demonstrated that faulty brain wiring may be bypassed with carbon nanotubes, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Georges Grinstein, inventor of a 3D Personal Life Mapper, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Beatrice de Gelder, who demonstrated that a blind man can navigate obstacles using his unconscious mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Chris Poulin, Managing Partner of Patterns and Predictions, a predictive analytics company, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Chris is co-inventor of the Centiment system, a full semantic analysis based asset trading system. He is coauthor of the Patterns and Predictions tool, a Bayesian classification and decision engine used in universities worldwide, and by clients such as the Toyota Motors Corporation.
Antonietta Gatti, coauthor of Nanopathology: The Health Impact of Nanoparticles, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
The 2008 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Stephen Hawking. The award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.
 
The 2008 award is in recognition of his continuous warnings that global catastrophic risks will eventually come and therefore it is unsafe and unwise for all of humanity to be on a single planet.
 
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking has stated. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
Help Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka enter Zero G!
 
Wole has a compelling story. From his bio:
 
Wole has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring parties. While in prison he wrote poetry which was published in a collection titled "Poems from Prison". He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book "The Man Died: Prison Notes".
 
Learn more!
The Lifeboat Foundation is launching a monthly column addressing the ethical issues that scientists and consumers of nanotechnology will face. It will be written by our Summer Johnson, who is Executive Managing Editor of The American Journal of Bioethics and Chief Operating Officer, Bioethics Education Network.
 
Summer says "The literature in this area is not growing at nearly 1/10th of the pace of the nanoscience literature itself and it is my belief that ethicists, scientists, and lay people should be aware of these issues (sooner rather than later)."
 
Nanotech-Now.com has agreed to run this column. They will give us front and center placement once a month for 24 hours then a rotation down the homepage as their other columns load their articles. Google News indexes their columns every 15 minutes.
Gaurav Khanna, who built a supercomputer from many Sony Playstation 3s, joins our Supercomputing Board.
Steve Curran, who discovered that hydrogen is missing from our early universe, joins our Cosmology Board.
Social Entrepreneur Aaron Balogun joins our Business Board. He is Account Manager at Capitol Advantage and Director of Operations at Flanagan Consulting, LLC.
Thomas Wennekers joins our Neuroscience Board. Thomas currently works on large-scale models of the cortex aiming at the self-organization of maps and higher level functional processes in the layered mammalian cortex.
Petr Král, who is working to use tunnelling electrons to drive nanomotors, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Jim Kasting, coauthor of The Earth System, joins our Sustainability Board. The first book of its kind that addresses the issues of global change from a perspective of Earth as a system, The Earth System offers a solid emphasis on lessons from Earth history that may guide decision making in the future.
Steve Mann, inventor of WearComp (wearable computer) and WearCam (eyetap camera and reality mediator), joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board. Steve coined the term sousveillance.
Asim Roy, whose controversial paper on how the brain works and learns was just published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics — Part A: Systems and Humans, joins our Neuroscience Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Manuel F. Casanova joins our Neuroscience Board. Manuel edited Neocortical Modularity And The Cell Minicolumn and Recent Developments in Autism Research, and coedited Asperger's Disorder.
György Buzsáki, author of Rhythms of the Brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Tony Williams, President of ChemZoo, joins our Chemistry Board.
 
ChemZoo is the host of ChemSpider. ChemSpider is an Open Access website established with the intention of creating a structure centric community for chemists. The website delivers access to over 18.5 million unique chemical structures. It is visited by over 6,000 chemists per day and with over 250,000 transactions performed per week, ChemSpider is fast becoming a primary resource for chemists around the world. ChemSpider is a valuable resource to assist chemists in sourcing chemicals from vendors, accessing Open Access literature and accessing information across over 150 data sources.
Aria Tzika, who developed a hand-exercising robotic device that appears to help stroke victims recover motor skills, even more than six months after a stroke, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Sini Merikallio, Planetary Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Elke Weber joins our Neuroscience Board. She is on the Editorial Boards of American Journal of Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Psychological Inquiry, and Psychological Review.
Sandra Witelson joins our Neuroscience Board. Sandra's study of Albert Einstein's brain made headlines by revealing some remarkable features overlooked by other neuroscientists: the parietal lobe, the region responsible for visual thinking and spatial reasoning, was 15 percent larger than average, and it was structured as one distinct compartment, instead of the usual two compartments separated by the Sylvian fissure.
Karlene Roberts joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board. Karlene focuses on the design and management of organizations and systems of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic consequences. The results of her research have been applied to U.S. Navy aircraft carrier operations, the U.S. Coast Guard, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), The Federal Aviation's Air Traffic Control System, British Petroleum, NASA, and the medical industry.
Read issue #77 of Lifeboat News!
Read Nanotubes Track Cellular Toxins: Tiny sensors can monitor cancer-causing agents and chemotherapy drugs in cells.
David J. Xanatos joins us and says "Individual resources are limited; collective resources are not. This is both the power and the threat of what our ever advancing future possibilities bring nearer to us every day. Likewise, my individual financial resources may not seem like much, but as more of us begin to recognize the value of what's being done here, and cast our lot in with this growing effort, we can multiply our individual intent beyond imagination, and I hope others reading this can recognize this fact, and join us. You will have the satisfaction of looking back and knowing you helped humankind survive our quantum leap in evolution."
Frans von der Dunk, Professor of Space Law at the University of Nebraska, College of Law, joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board.
 
He joins Colin McInnes and Gianmarco Radice in participating at the 1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids which will be held April 27-30, 2009 in Granada, Spain.
Read UC Merced Virtual Archaeologist Saves Past for Future.
Suresh Ramasubramanian, Head of Antispam Operations at Outblaze Limited, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. Suresh is also Coordinator at CAUCE Asia Pacific (APCAUCE) and Director at Asia Pacific Internet Association (APIA).
Jonas Fransson, whose quantum cloaking makes molecules invisible, joins our Physics Board.
Donald Wunsch joins our Engineering Board. He coauthored Using Neural Networks to Estimate Wind Turbine Power Generation and Adaptive Neural Network Based Power System Stabilizer Design. His research interests are adaptive critic designs, neural networks, fuzzy systems, surety, nonlinear adaptive control, intelligent agents, and applications.
Sean Hill, Blue Brain Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience, joins our Neuroscience Board. Sean has developed numerous large-scale models of neural systems and is the designer/developer of the general-purpose neural simulator Synthesis.
Sonia Arrison, an author and policy analyst who has studied the impact of new technologies on society for the better part of a decade, joins our Futurists Board. A frequent media contributor and guest, her work has appeared in many publications including CBS MarketWatch, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
George Perry, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, joins our Neuroscience Board.
 
George is distinguished as one of the top 20 Alzheimer's disease researchers with over 600 publications, one of the top 100 most-cited scientists in Neuroscience & Behavior, and one of the top 25 scientists in Free Radical research.
Eric Mazur, inventor of black silicon, joins our Physics Board. Thanks to an extremely rough surface, black silicon can absorb more light and can also trap a wider range of frequencies, including infra-red rays, that normally pass straight through standard silicon.
Nick Sagan, author of Idlewild, Edenborn, and Everfree, and coauthor of You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised joins our Futurists Board.
 
Nick is the son of Carl Sagan and Linda Salzman. At age six, his greeting, "Hello from the children of planet Earth" was recorded and placed aboard the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record. Launched with a selection of terrestrial greetings, sights, sounds, and music, the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft have since left the solar system; they are now the most distant human-made objects in the universe.
The 1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids will be held April 27-30, 2009 in Granada, Spain.
Freek Wiedijk, who is developing methods to harness the power of computers to verify mathematical proofs, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Luciano Floridi joins our Ethics Board. Luciano is one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of philosophy of technology and ethics. He is best known for his pioneering work on two new areas of philosophical research, which he has contributed to establish: the philosophy of information and information ethics.
Philippe Brunet joins our Physics Board. His research focuses on instabilities in fluid-flows, free-surface flows and wetting phenomena, transition towards chaos, granular media, soft-condensed matter, control of instabilities, complex fluids and suspensions flows, fuel cells, and transport in porous media.
Alastair Compston, who has developed a treatment which has proven effective against combating the debilitating neurological disease multiple sclerosis (MS), joins our Neuroscience Board.
Joseph N. Pelton joins our Futurists Board. His forecasts were featured in Top 10 Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond published by The Futurist.
Jonathan R. Wolpaw, Chief, Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health and State University of New York, joins our Neuroscience Board. His Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology was just featured on 60 Minutes.
Jonathon Porritt joins our Ethics Board and Sustainability Board. He is Programme Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Dan Hooper, author of Nature's Blueprint: Supersymmetry and the Search for a Unified Theory of Matter and Force and Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe's Missing Mass and Energy, joins our Cosmology Board and Particle Physics Board.
Eduardo Reck Miranda, whose "cultured" robots make sweet music together, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Jackie Ying, Executive Director of Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), joins our Nanotechnology Board.
George M. Martin, whose basic research led to the discovery of the genetic defect causing the Werner syndrome and certain familial forms of Alzheimer's disease, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
James Kent, author of Overclocking the Human CPU: A primer for the future of human intelligence, joins our Futurists Board.
Henry Markram, director of IBM's Blue Brain Project, joins our Neuroscience Board. The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain onto a massive supercomputer.
John Furber, author of Preventing Large Meteorite Impacts: The Threat of Rogue Comets and Asteroids, joins our Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board which he also founded.
Mark A. Smith, Executive Director of the American Aging Association, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Mark is recognized as one of the top cited researchers in the fields of Neuroscience & Behavior, Alzheimer Disease, and Free Radical Biology.
Didier Casse, who developed a nano-optical lens that focuses infrared light at telecommunication frequencies, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Kristi Scott joins our Futurists Board. She is a freelance writer and copyeditor for H+ magazine.
Kerstin Dautenhahn joins our Robotics/AI Board. She coedited Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioral, Social, and Communicative Dimensions.
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, coauthor of Sharing Moral Responsibility with Robots: A Pragmatic Approach, joins our Ethics Board.
Watch Powering the Planet - Space Based Solar Power.
Robert T. Liimatainen dedicates his donation to "Alexis Armstrong and her comment on 9/12/08. But for your comment, I would not have donated. Hope to have the pleasure of a daughter like you one day. Hope the donation helps out!"
Read Global Catastrophic Risks Essays for GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS: Building a Resilient Civilization. November 14, 2008, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
Read issue #76 of Lifeboat News!
Colin McInnes joins our Engineering Board. He is author of Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics, and Mission Applications and a leading figure in the field of solar sails.
Christopher Dewdney, author of Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era, joins our Futurists Board.
Mark S. George, who pioneered the non-invasive treatment transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression, joins our Neuroscience Board. This treatment was recently approved by the FDA.
Tapan Parikh, winner of MIT's TR35 Humanitarian of the Year, joins our Sustainability Board.
David Ewing Duncan joins our Biotech/Medical Board. He is Chief Correspondent of NPR Talk's Biotech Nation, and author of Masterminds: Genius, DNA, and the Quest to Rewrite Life.
Dan Stoicescu, second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code, donates $10,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation.
Enjoy Gentleman Takes a Chance by Sarah Hoyt. This novel includes a nice cover blurb from Jerry Pournelle.
Read Complexity and Security (NATO Science for Peace and Series).
Vincent Walsh, coauthor of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Neurochronometrics of Mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
John R. Elliott, who has developed a computer program to understand alien languages, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Dan Stoicescu, second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
Dan earned his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry and founded Sindan, an oncology products company based in Romania that he ran for 15 years.
The Convergence08 Unconference on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
 
Our Gregory Benford, Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, Terry Grossman, Andrew Hessel, and Peter Norvig will be speaking.
 
Lifeboat Foundation members can save $50 on this event!
 
And remember that our Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization — which is packed with good speakers — will be held the day before at the same location!
Deborah Anderson joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Deborah won the Ig Nobel for proving that Coke really works as a contraceptive.
Sohee Park, who discovered that musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Sebastien Guenneau, who has developed invisiblity cloaks that could hide vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Barker Bausell, author of Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Riyi Shi, who has developed nanoparticles that deliver treatment for brain and spinal cord injuries, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
RU Sirius joins our Futurists Board. RU is a US writer, editor, talk show host, musician, and cyberculture icon, best known as cofounder and original Editor-In-Chief of Mondo 2000 Magazine from 1989-1993. He is currently editor for the new transhumanist magazine, H+.
Gabriella De Lucia, coauthor of The Galaxy and its Stellar Halo: Insights on Their Formation from a Hybrid Cosmological Approach, joins our Cosmology Board.
Scott Bunce, who has invented a near-infrared lie detector, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Gary Small joins our Neuroscience Board. Gary invented the first brain scan that allows doctors to see the physical evidence of brain aging and Alzheimer's disease in living people. Among his numerous breakthrough research studies, he now leads a team of neuroscientists who are demonstrating that exposure to computer technology causes rapid and profound changes in brain neural circuitry.
Liming Dai, who demonstrated that diamond nanoparticles ranging in size from 2 to 10 nm are nontoxic, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Jeff Thorne, author of Models and Their Evolution, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Richard Dooling, author of Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Ali Dhinojwala, whose nanotube adhesive sticks better than a gecko's foot, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Our lineup has expanded for Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization which will be held November 14, 2008 at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
 
Our David Brin, Jamais Cascio, Nick Cassimatis, Bruce Damer, Alan H. Goldstein, J. Storrs "Josh" Hall, Martin Hellman, Tad Hogg, Feng Hsu, James J. Hughes, Mike Treder, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be participating. David Brin's upcoming novel "Existence" fictionalizes many of these threats.
 
Help us support this event! (We wish to raise $1,490 more.)
Metin Sitti, who has developed a robot that walks on water using the surface tension of water, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Pablo H. Hennings-Yeomans, who has designed a new approach for handling face recognition of low-resolution video, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Dongsheng Cai, who discovered a brain pathway responsible for obesity, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Steve Potter, who is developing a managed power grid that involves literally tapping brain cells grown on networks of electrodes, joins our Neuroscience Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Chang Liu, author of Foundations of MEMS, joins our Engineering Board.
Dean Ho, who has developed a nanodiamond drug device which could transform cancer treatment, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
Sandeep Shukla, who coedited Nano, Quantum, and Molecular Computing: Implications to High Level Design and Validation, joins our Engineering Board.
Roy Stedman, Technology Strategist for Dell, joins our Information Sciences Board. Roy has invented more than 25 US and international patents.
Read issue #75 of Lifeboat News!
Aydogan Ozcan, whose lensless imaging system counts cells in seconds, joins our Engineering Board.
Licia Iacoviello, who discovered that half a bar of dark chocolate per week reduces your risk of heart attack, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Priya Natarajan, who discovered there are limits to how large a black hole can grow, joins our Cosmology Board.
Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization will be held November 14, 2008 at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. This seminar will precede the futurist mega-gathering Convergence 08, November 15-16 at the same venue.
 
Our Jamais Cascio, James J. Hughes, Mike Treder, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be participating.
 
Help us support this event! (We have already raised $1,000 out of our goal of
Marco Wiering, author of Convergence and Divergence in Standard and Averaging Reinforcement Learning and Hierarchical Mixtures of Naive Bayesian Classifiers, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Kenneth Dawson, who has formed a new international research alliance to establish protocols for reproducible toxicological testing of nanomaterials in both cultured cells and animals, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Mary-Anne Williams joins our Robotics/AI Board. She is Director, Innovation and Technology Research Laboratory, University of Technology, Sydney.
Bert Kappen, author of An Introduction to Stochastic Control Theory, Path Integrals, and Reinforcement Learning, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, coauthor of Learning Symbolic Inferences with Neural Networks, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Our Jürgen Schmidhuber will be the keynote speaker at the AGI-09 conference on Artificial General Intelligence which will be held March 6-9, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia.
 
Our Eric B. Baum, Mark H. Bickhard, Włodzisław "Wlodek" Duch, Itamar Elhanany, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs "Josh" Hall, Marcus Hutter, Bruce Klein, Randal Koene, John Laird, Christian Lebiere, Moshe Looks, and Stephen Reed are also participating.
There will be a panel discussion of leading experts on the future of AI and the singularity at the 20 year anniversary celebration of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, which will take place on October 24, 2008 in Palazzo dei Congressi in the center of Lugano, Switzerland, during Ticino Informatica 2008. Our Marco Dorigo and Jürgen Schmidhuber will be participating.
Chid S. Iyer, author of Small Science, Big Risk: Lessons from the past for protecting Nanotechnology and Partner of Sughrue, Mion, PLLC, joins our Legal Board.
Matt Mahoney, author of A Model for Recursively Self Improving Programs, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
John Huchra, President of the American Astronomical Society and codiscover of the Great Attractor, a proposed massive concentration of galaxies lying beyond the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, and codiscover of the 500 million light-years long Great Wall, joins our Cosmology Board.
Trond Andresen, author of Two Feasible Future Scenarios: A high-tech Utopia and a high-tech Dystopia, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Theoretical physicist-cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton, author of Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse, joins our Cosmology Board. Laura is particularly interested in the possibility of generating dark energy from transplanckian physics in string theory, gravity and quantum field theory in curved space, and higher-dimension braneworlds.
Alexander "Sasha" Kashlinsky, who has discovered "dark flow" which is causing hundreds of clusters of galaxies to stream en masse towards a region at the edge of the visible universe, joins our Cosmology Board. Sasha is Senior Staff Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Ishfaq Ahmad, who was elected a Fellow of IEEE for "contributions to scheduling techniques in parallel and distributed computing systems", joins our Supercomputing Board. Ishfaq is on the Editorial Board of Cluster Computing.
Pankaj Sah, Head of Synaptic Plasticity, Queensland Brain Institute, Australia, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Ken Natesan, Section Manager, Nuclear Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, joins our Engineering Board.
Alexandra Carmichael joins our blog team with her first post.
Chenglong Li, who is developing a synthetic spice-based compound to fight cancer, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Chenglong says "The spice extends life, the spice expands consciousness, the spice is vital to space travel." (Well, maybe we made that quote up.)
David Sebba, who is combining gold and DNA to develop a nano-sensor, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
The Convergence08 Unconference on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
 
Our Gregory Benford, Ben Goertzel, Aubrey de Grey, Terry Grossman, Andrew Hessel, and Peter Norvig will be speaking.
Yaling Liu, whose primary research interest is bio-nano interfacial phenomena, which couple solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, and biophysics, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Our Kattesh Katti has been selected to be one of "25 Most Influential in Molecular Imaging" in the world.
Read How can we reduce the risk of human extinction?
Zane Andrews, who has found a key to overeating as we age, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Paul Nghiem joins our Biotech/Medical Board. He is primarly focused on basic, clinical, and translational research aspects of Merkel cell carcinoma.
Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager at Google, who created Google Translate for iPhone, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Antonello Bonci, Professor of Neurology, Howard J. Weinberger Chair in Addiction Research, Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Stefan Hau-Riege, who developed the brightest, sharpest, fastest x-ray holograms yet, joins our Physics Board.
Kate Maciver, coauthor of Phantom limb pain, cortical reorganization, and the therapeutic effect of mental imagery, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Stuart S. Licht, whose new fuel battery may allow hybrids to ditch gasoline for good, joins our Sustainability Board.
Alexis Armstrong says "If a ten-year-old can donate, then what is the excuse of you adults?"
Bill Clyne, Head of the Composites & Coatings Group, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, joins our Engineering Board.
Pat Cadigan, "The Queen of Cyberpunk", joins our Futurists Board.
Read issue #74 of Lifeboat News!
Alexei Turchin joins our blog team with his first post.
Moon J. Kim, Director of the University of Texas at Dallas' (UTD's) new Nano-Characterization Facility, and Supervisor of UTD's Nano & Beyond Research Laboratory, joins our Engineering Board.
David Orrell, author of The Other Side of the Coin: The Emerging Vision of Economics and Our Place in The World, joins our Economics Board.
Dave Reisner, editor of Bionanotechnology: Global Prospects, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Huanyang Chen, who developed a way to unmask an invisibility cloak so those inside it are able to view their surroundings, joins our Physics Board.
Maggie Turnbull, lead scientist for NASA's New Worlds Observer, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Kang Zhang, who discovered the first gene associated with dry macular degeneration, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Neeraj Vij, who will be presenting "Challenges of Nano-Delivery in Airway Diseases — Bypassing the Mucus Barrier" at NanoBiotech 2008, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Danny Belkin joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
Greg Ward joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Greg developed a device for characterizing surface reflectance functions, called the imaging goniophotometer, which is now being picked up and improved by researchers at MIT.
Our Raj Bawa is conference chair for NanoBiotech 2008: a conference exploring the global opportunities in nanobiotechnology and related science and engineering fields. This conference will be held September 15, 2008 at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Danny Belkin joins our blog team with his first post.
Read Loneliness and learn why we should focus less on self-interests/short-term outcomes and focus more on social interests/sustainability.
Listen to our David Pearce on The Future And You.
Devika Subramanian, coauthor of the first paper defining the area of bounded optimality, i.e., what it means for an agent to make the "best" use of scarce resources, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Deb Newberry, coauthor of The Next Big Thing Is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Aaron Wall, who literally wrote the book on search engine optimization: SEO Book, joins our Futurists Board.
Derek Lomas, who is designing a $12 computer, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Jonathan Schooler, who is researching whether we have free will, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Entertainer, leader, musician, artist, and thinker Dr. Phineas Waldolf Steel joins our Media & Arts Board. His interests span the production of propaganda, the construction of chronically malfunctioning robots, puppet shows, and an ongoing attempt to become World Emperor for the purpose of turning this planet into a Utopian Playland.
Jody Westby, CEO and Founder of Global Cyber Risk, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. She chairs the American Bar Association's Privacy & Computer Crime Committee and represents the ABA on the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.
Allister Furey, who is developing biologically inspired approaches to the control of tethered airfoils (kites) for production of renewable energy from the wind, joins our Sustainability Board.
Jim Flynn joins our Neuroscience Board. The Flynn Effect is named after him and is the rise of average Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test scores over the generations, an effect seen in most parts of the world, although at greatly varying rates. Jim did much to document it and promote awareness of its implications. This increase has been continuous and roughly linear from the earliest days of testing to the present.
Qiming Zhang, who is developing a compressor-free refrigerator, joins our Engineering Board.
Paul Fitzgerald, coauthor of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the Treatment of Depression, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Randall Murch, who created the FBI's WMD forensic investigative program and the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, joins our Counterterrorism Board.
Wesley L. Harris, Charles Stark Draper Professor and Head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Daniel Polani, Associate Editor of Advances in Complex Systems, joins our Complex Systems Board.
Sami Ayyorgun who is creating the networks of the future — extending our senses into the physical world, joins our Information Sciences Board.
David A. McClellan, author of The Codon-Degeneracy Model of Molecular Evolution, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Andras Lacko, who will be presenting "Novel Biocompatible Nanoparticles for Targeted Cancer Therapy" at NanoTX USA, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Artist and animator Gina "Nanogirl" Miller joins our Media & Arts Board. Gina established Nanotechnology Industries in 1998. Nanotechnology Industries distributes information and provides resources about nanotechnology and related emerging technologies that will transform our world in positive ways.
 
Gina has completed a 3-minute long animation that nicely illustrates the workings of Rob Freitas' proposed programmable dermal display (essentially, a video-touchscreen nano-tattoo that reports real-time medical information to the user, as reported back by numerous nanorobots stationed in various locations inside the body).
Walt Trybula, Director of the Nanomaterials Application Center at Texas State University, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Xiang Zhang, who is developing an invisibility cloak, joins our Engineering Board. Watch Xiang on CNN!
Jason Vaughn Clark, who created a monolithic comb drive nanomachine, joins our Engineering Board and Nanotechnology Board. This nanoscale motorized positioning device can be used in biological and engineering fields.
Roderick Jones joins our blog team with his first post.
Chris Haley is our new Vice President! We thank Jerry Searcy for 6 years of hard work as our old Vice President.
Daniel Dewitt Brown, author of Building a Better Human, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Read 23 Things Science Can Tell Us about Life, the Universe, and Everything by Daniel D. Brown.
Read It Takes a Giant Cosmos to Create Life and Mind by James Gardner.
Listen to our Ben Goertzel on The Future And You.
Watch Large Hadron Rap: Rappin' about CERN's Large Hadron Collider!
Read The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance by Steve Burgess.
Professor of law and policy analyst Tom W. Bell joins our Legal Board. Tom authored Private Prediction Markets and the Law and Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny, and Self-Help: How Technology Upgrades Constitutional Jurisprudence.
Nick Hay, author of The Stamp Collecting Device, joins our Robotics/AI Board. This paper explains the notion of the inhuman yet super-intelligent machine which can destroy humanity as an "accidental" byproduct of its apparently innocuous goals.
Read issue #73 of Lifeboat News!
Greg Sterling joins our Futurists Board. He is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet's influence on offline consumer purchase behavior. He also is a Senior Analyst for Local Mobile Search, an advisory service from Opus Research tracking the evolution of the mobile Internet.
Read Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge with contributions by our Amara D. Angelica, Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Anne Corwin, and Wil McCarthy.
James P. Evans, Editor-in-Chief of Genetics in Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Read Biologist Teaches the Nation's Judges About Genetics.
Sumeet Dua, coauthor of Classification of Heart Rate Data Using Artificial Neural Network and Fuzzy Equivalence Relation, joins our Information Sciences Board. Sumeet specializes in the design of algorithms for analysis of microarray gene expression and protein sequence/structure data to help fuel physiological information discovery.
Shane Legg, author of Friendly AI is Bunk and coauthor of Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Tim Freeman, author of Using Compassion and Respect to Motivate an Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Brian Wang upgrades our LifeShield Bunkers program.
Teena James, coauthor of Active MOS Capacitive Sensor Array for Lab-On-a-Chip Applications, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Michael Shermer joins our Scientific Advisory Board. He is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.
 
Read his Toward a Type 1 Civilization.
Manu Sebastian Mannoor, coauthor of BioMEMS — Advancing the Frontiers of Medicine, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Peter Kalivas joins our Neuroscience Board. He is a member of the NARSAD Scientific Council and Professor and Chair of Neurosciences, The Neuroscience Institute, Medical University of South Carolina. NARSAD is the world's leading charity dedicated to mental health research.
Andrew Braswell joins our Economics Board and Finance Board. He is Director of Research, iNano Capital Markets. He oversees all of the firm's published investment research, including pure-play coverage, theme-based reports, and its weekly iNano Focus.
Thanks to input from Joscha Bach, Matt Bamberger, Daniel Berleant, and Joshua Fox, our AIShield Program has been improved.
Balaji "Baloo" Panchapakesan, who developed a unique nanobomb that can literally blow up cancer tumors, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
 
Baloo will also be speaking at NanoTX USA, an international conference and trade expo covering nanotechnology which will be held Oct 2-3, 2008 in Austin, Texas. This event highlights advances in nanoscience and explains how nanotechnology is being used today and how it will impact a broad range of industries tomorrow: electronics, energy, aerospace, defense, biomedicine, robotics, chemicals, and more.
Alexandra Carmichael joins our Biotech/Medical Board. She is cofounder of CureTogether, an open source health research company that brings patients and researchers together to collaborate with each other on the path to finding cures for human diseases.
Didier Sornette, who has discovered that we are in the peak of an oil bubble, joins our Complex Systems Board and Economics Board.
Mark J. Clement, who has been involved with Phylogenetic Analysis (determining evolutionary histories through the examination of DNA) which requires extensive network and computational resources, joins our Information Sciences Board.
 
Mark is participating in the Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Symposium (BIOT 2008) which will be held October 17-18, 2008 in Arlington, Texas. This symposium brings together scientists, engineers, and scholars from relevant fields with practitioners from industry in order to help each group to understand progress made in the area as a whole.
Nick Rhodes, author of Inflammatory Signals in the Development of Tissue-Engineered Soft Tissue, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Gil Alterovitz, who has created a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Engineering Board. In his acoustic translation, harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease, which enables his program to be used for diagnostic purposes.
Sarah Tabrizi, who discovered new targets for treating Huntington's disease, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Jeannie Novak, founder of Indiespace — one of the first companies to promote and distribute interactive entertainment online, where she consults with creative professionals in the music, film, and television industries to help them migrate to the game industry, joins our Media & Arts Board.
 
Jeannie was chosen as one of the 100 most influential people in high-technology by MicroTimes magazine — and she has been profiled by CNN, Billboard Magazine, Sundance Channel, Daily Variety, and the Los Angeles Times.
Eric Hunting joins our Space Settlement Board. He is principal author of the The Millennial Project 2.0 (TMP2) Wiki project — an evolving contemporary revision of the marine and space development program The Millennial Project originally devised by Marshall T. Savage.
Astrophysicist, author, and recording artist Fiorella Terenzi, described by Time Magazine as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna", joins our Media & Arts Board and Space Settlement Board.
 
Fiorella has performed and recorded with artists from Herbie Hancock to Ornette Coleman and earned her doctorate in physics from the University of Milan.
Preorder Arthur C. Clarke's final novel The Last Theorem, coauthored with our Frederik Pohl.
 
Read the free special report Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: Don't Panic! by our José Luis Cordeiro.
Ali Khademhosseini, who is developing self-assembling tissues, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Hailin Cong, who has developed a contact lens with a built-in pressure sensor that could help monitor conditions such as glaucoma, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Lev Sadovnik, who has built a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads, joins our Engineering Board.
Patric Hagmann, who identified the brain "core" that could reveal secrets of thought, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Chezy Barenholz, whose cancer treatment DOXIL is marketed by Johnson & Johnson, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
Chezy also recently developed nanoparticles that trigger the built-in cell-death signal as a solution to the growing drug resistance of cancer cells.
Emanuele Montomoli, who developed a bird flu vaccine made from monkey cells instead of chicken eggs, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Programmer and AI psychologist Justin Corwin joins our Robotics/AI Board.
David Cramb, who invented "molecular nanovalves", joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Watch Blue Beauty! (Improved from our old PowerPoint version.)
World renowned influenza virologist John Oxford joins our Biotech/Medical Board. John is especially proud of Retroscreen Virology, which he established in 1989 with the help of EU funding.
 
Retroscreen Virology has grown into Europe's leading contract virology research company. It is the only company in the UK able to conduct human influenza challenge studies in a specialized quarantine unit with A/Panama/2007/99 and A/New Caledonia/20/99 viruses and has characterized influenza A (H1N1 and H3N2) and B viruses.
Security expert Harvey Newstrom joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Romi Nijhawan, who discovered that the brain anticpates the future to "see" the present, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Timothy Hubbard, who authored What is Mental Representation? And how does it Relate to Consciousness?, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Artificial-life scientist Dave Deamer, who coauthored Origins of Life: The Central Concepts, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Cameron Wright, whose real-time machine vision system is based on the vision system of a housefly, joins our Engineering Board.
Tod Lauer, whose Dark Energy Space Telescope (Destiny) will be a space-based dark energy observatory, joins our Cosmology Board. Asteroid (3135) Lauer was named after him and he is the winner of the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
Charles Miller, CEO of Constellation Services International (CSI), joins our Space Settlement Board.
Jamie Barger, Head, Project Management, Lifegen Technologies, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Jamie coauthored The retardation of aging by caloric restriction: its significance in the transgenic era with Roy Walford.
Roel Vertegaal, who developed technology that allows advertisers to count the number of people who look at their billboards and screens, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
José Robles, who was lead author on a research paper that evaluated 11 properties that could plausibly be connected with life and showed that our sun is not particularly special, joins our Cosmology Board.
Paul Thompson, coeditor of What Can Nanotechnology Learn From Biotechnology?: Social and Ethical Lessons for Nanoscience from the Debate over Agrifood Biotechnology and GMOs, joins our Ethics Board.
Read Should we be phoning E.T.?
Read The Doomsday Device is Ignored.
Ali Nouri and Toby Ord have joined our Global Catastrophic Risks Conference lineup.
Ali Nouri joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Ali works on the UN Secretary-General's biotechnology and human security initiative, which is intended to promote biotechnology in developing countries, while minimizing the risks.
Toby Ord joins our Ethics Board. Toby coauthored The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics with Nick Bostrom and is a member of the Future of Humanity Institute staff.
Yi-Fen Lee, who discovered that Vitamin D protects cells from stress that can lead to cancer, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Rafaela Hillerbrand joins our Complex Systems Board and Ethics Board. She is a member of the Future of Humanity Institute staff and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen-Nünberg and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Müster and the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur.
 
Rafaela will also be one of our speakers at the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference which will be held July 17 to July 20 at the University of Oxford.
Pekka Janhunen, who developed a huge electronic sail for spacecraft that may dramatically reduce journey times across our solar system, joins our Engineering Board.
Mirko Kovač, who developed a robot that weighs a minuscule 7 grams, and can jump 1.4 meters, or more than 27 times its body size — ten times farther for its size and weight than any existing jumping robot — joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Read the updated version of SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS...Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory by David Brin.
Jonathan Harris joins our Media & Arts Board. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling, Jonathan designs systems to explore and explain the human world. Watch his TED talk!
William B. Grant who showed that insufficient vitamin D3 is linked to cancer risk, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
William is Founding Director, Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center, an entity devoted to research, education, and advocacy relating to the prevention of chronic disease through changes in diet and lifestyle.
Sergio M.L. Tarrero joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
Read Tower of Babel, other big thoughts at humanities fest.
Milan M. Ćirković, who coauthored Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution, and the Apparent Failure of SETI with Robert J. Bradbury, joins our Cosmology Board.
 
Milan will also be one of our speakers at the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference which will be held July 17 to July 20 at the University of Oxford.
Nick Gogerty, creator of the blog Designing Better Futures, joins our Futurists Board.
Andrew Pask, who was able to activate genes from the extinct Tansmanian tiger in a mouse, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Our blog posts are now showing up in Google News!
Abraham Zangen, who has developed a gentler way to jump-start the brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Yuri Ivanov, whose "Big brother" buildings offer less invasive security, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Ming Hsu, whose brain scan research showed that our "hearts rule our minds", joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Kevin Hogan, author of The Secret Language of Business: How to Read Anyone in 3 Seconds or Less, joins our Business Board.
Albert "Skip" Rizzo, who is using VR technology to treat soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Read issue #72 of Lifeboat News!
Stuart Eves, who is working with NASA to forecast earthquakes using satellites, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Terry Wallace, Principal Associate Director for Science, Technology, and Engineering, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
The Global Catastrophic Risks Conference will be held July 17 to July 20 at the University of Oxford. Our James Hughes, Anders Sandberg, Mike Treder, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking.
Garrett Kenyon, who is mimicking human sight brain mechanisms on a petaflop supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Pawel Gburzynski, who launched EcoNet — a functional wireless sensor network for environmental monitoring, joins our Sustainability Board.
Doron Lancet joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Doron pioneered genome research in Israel, is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, and is the head of Israel's National Laboratory for Genome Infrastructure.
Bamshad Mobasher, coauthor of Defending Recommender Systems: Detection of Profile Injection Attacks, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Walter Bender joins our Education Board. Walter is the founder of Sugar Labs, a nonprofit foundation that serves as a support base for the community of educators and software developers who are extending the Sugar user interface.
 
Prior to that, Walter was president for software and content of the One Laptop per Child association, where he developed and deployed technologies that are revolutionizing how the world's children engage in learning.
The University of Delaware's Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (SEPP) program makes us link of the month.
Jonathan Stamler, inventor of over 50 patents and discoverer of a major "missed" biochemical pathway that is important in virtually all cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Gary Marcus, author of the 2008 New York Times Editor's Choice Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Watch Kenji Williams present BELLA GAIA - A poetic vision of Earth from Space at the National Mall, DC from July 3 to July 6.
Read The Age of Virtuous Machines by J. Storrs "Josh" Hall.
Read 10 Futuristic Materials by Michael Anissimov.
Read Classifying Extinction Risks by Michael Anissimov.
Thanks to efforts by our Director of Research, Brian Wang, our blog has been approved as an official Google News source and will show up in Google News results within a few weeks.
Read The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding.
Listen to our Dennis M. Bushnell on a C-Realm Podcast.
The Terasem Movement donates $4,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation saying, "We believe Lifeboat's work directly relates to Terasem's mission to establish diversity, unity, and joyful immortality via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness."
 
And Michael Haislip joins our LF 500 which is a $25,000 commitment.
Alistair Tweed, Director of Aging Management and Methuselah Foundation Outreach Coordinator - UK, joins our Futurists Board.
Learn about Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches which will be held June 28-29 at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Our Jan Vijg will be speaking.
Learn about Aging: the Disease, the Cure, the Implications (Aging 2008) which will be held June 27th at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Our Aubrey de Grey and Gregory Stock will be speaking.
Maria Entraigues joins our Media & Arts Board. Maria's written songs and performed as a soloist singer for several feature films including Rush Hour 2 (with Jackie Chan), After the Sunset (with Pierce Brosnan), The Magnificent Ambersons (with Madeleine Stowe), Picking up the Pieces (with Woody Allen), Diamond Hunters (with Alyssa Milano), and A Walk in the Clouds (with Keanu Reeves).
University of Cambridge neuroscientist Molly Crockett joins our Neuroscience Board. Read the Science article Deal or No Deal? which discusses her research into serotonin's (5-HT) effects on social decision-making.
Joe Lonsdale joins our Finance Board. Joe is a Principal at Clarium Capital Management, a $5 billion AUM global macro hedge fund based in SF and NYC, where he manages research and trading teams.
Mark O'Green, distinguished game designer, author, and a member of SIGMA, a group of science fiction writers who consult with the government on how to defend against possible attacks in our future, joins our Futurists Board.
Yugang Sun, Argonne National Laboratory, Center for Nanoscale Materials, joins our Nanotechnology Board. Yugang used palladium nanoparticle electrodeposition on nanotubes to develop new flexible hydrogen sensors to help enable a hydrogen-based economy.
Alan Gevins, who has spent the past 40 years developing better ways to analyze the electrical signals emanating from our brains, joins our Neuroscience Board. Alan is the first author of more than 125 scientific publications and of 17 US patents.
Jacob Haqq-Misra, who authored the Pale Blue Dot III Essay Winner The Power of Our Myth, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Pranav Mistry, author of Ghost in the Machine — Making Creative Machines, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Thanks to our many bigger machine donors and the hard work of our new system administrator Chris Haley, our new ginormous machine is up and running. If you notice any problems with our website, please write to webmaster@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Website Errors".
 
Once fully activated, our machine's average load was only 0.0. (That's the lowest possible load.) And since then we have implemented the powerful module mod_perl to increase our peak capacity by a factor of 25. (We are operating in mod_perl's registry mode so both Perl is preloaded and our website engine is precompiled for virtually all pages.)
 
And if you happen to be a SELinux expert, please let us know!
Geoff Brown, CEO and cofounder of Machine-to-Machine Intelligence (m2mi) Corporation, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Geoff's company is working with NASA to develop "nano" satellites.
Edward M. Hallowell, author of Driven To Distraction : Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood, joins our Education Board.
Jean-Claude Bradley joins our Chemistry Board. Jean-Claude leads the UsefulChem project, an initiative to make the scientific process as transparent as possible by publishing all research work in real time to a collection of public blogs, wikis, and other web pages.
 
Jean-Claude is also Associate Professor of Chemistry and E-Learning Coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University and has invented patents in the areas of synthetic and mechanistic chemistry, gene therapy, nanotechnology, and scientific knowledge management.
Leon Watts, Research Ethics Officer for the Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK, joins our Ethics Board.
Mollie Katzen joins our Media & Arts Board. A 2007 inductee into the prestigious James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, and largely credited with moving healthful vegetarian food from the "fringe" to the center of the American dinner plate, Mollie has been named by Health Magazine as one of "The Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat".
 
Since 2003, Mollie has been a consultant to Harvard University Dining Services, and co-creator of their new Food Literacy Project. She is also a culinary advisor to the University of California at Berkeley, a nationally syndicated columnist through the Chicago Tribune, and a contributing editor for SHAPE Magazine.
Jason Bobe, Director of Community for the Personal Genome Project which is based out of George Church's lab at Harvard Medical School, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Forrest Liau, President of RallyPoint, which is developing a computerized combat glove that lets soldiers operate wearable computers while still holding their weapons, joins our Engineering Board.
George John, who has developed a low-cost, "green" way to make antimicrobial paints and has invented nanomaterials made from apricots and cashew nuts that could replace petrochemicals, joins our Chemistry Board.
Read Max More in Second Life on "Unsolved Problems in Transhumanism".
SUCCESS! We were able to quickly raise $3,400 for our Bigger Machine Fund — far exceeding our goal of $2,500. Additional funds raised will be used to pay for additional months, for improved network/software/hardware security, and for a backup plan. Long-term, we plan on hosting our site with more than one provider for the ultimate in backup plans. The more you donate, the more infrastructure we will implement.
Thomas Powers, who authored Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities and Environmental Holism and Nanotechnology, joins our Ethics Board.
Ulrich Jentschura, who coauthored Quantum Dot Potentials: Symanzik Scaling, Resurgent Expansions and Quantum Dynamics, joins our Particle Physics Board.
Evan M. H. Faber joins our Futurists Board. Evan cofounded Banaa: the Sudan Educational Empowerment Network, a scholarship and mentorship organization that equips students who have been directly affected by conflict with technical tools for peacemaking and grassroots development.
 
Evan will also be a speaker at WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes.
Richard "rms" M. Stallman joins our Ethics Board and Transparency vs. Privacy Board. RMS is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement RMS also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.
Chris Mason joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Chris is an international expert on the translational and commercial aspects of regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and stem cell technologies.
Ehud Gazit, author of Plenty of Room for Biology at the Bottom: An Introduction to Bionanotechnology, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Michael Archer, who has named and studied more than 120 new species, genera, families, and orders of both living and extinct mammals discovered as a consequence of his research, joins our Sustainability Board.
Peter Garretson, Chief of Future Science and Technology Exploration for the U.S. Air Force, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Chris Haley agrees to become System Administrator for our new machine. He also donates $1,500 bringing our Bigger Machine Fund to $1,925. Only $575 to go!
Keith Henson, cofounder of the L5 Society, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Best selling author Robert Greene, who authored The 48 Laws of Power, joins our Ethics Board.
Nancy Ratey, author of The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents, joins our Education Board.
Read issue #71 of Lifeboat News!
James Blodgett will be distributing Lifeboat Foundation brochures at his poster presentation at the Second World Congress on Risk in Guadalajara, Mexico June 8-11 and his talk at the American Mensa Annual Gathering in Denver, Colorado, July 2-6.
Liane Young, coauthor of A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications, joins our Neuroscience Board.
It's time for the Lifeboat Foundation to get a bigger machine! Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation, participants, and encrypts the communication, jump-starts our quest for a bigger machine.
 
Why do we need a bigger machine? Because our traffic is now higher than the Foresight Nanotech Institute, The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the National Space Society, the Mprize, the World Transhumanist Association, and many other organizations.
Read Nanorobots to Improve Health Care and Nanorobot Hardware Architecture for Medical Defense.
Thanks to input from Daniel Berleant, our AIShield program has been significantly upgraded.
Michael Cassutt, who has has been writing and producing award-winning television since 1985, joins our Futurists Board. Michael worked on The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, the acclaimed Max Headroom series, Stargate SG-1, and Farscape among his many works. Read his Deke!: From Mercury to the Shuttle which he coauthored with the famous Donald "Deke" Slayton.
Jean-Luc Cambier, who is leading a research group on advanced propulsion concepts at the Air Force Research Laboratory, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Our donor list format has been improved. You can now see who donated in 2004, view a list of our Executive Class members, learn about our $10,000-$100,000 donors, or look up donors whose last name begins with a "W".
Blackjack! Thanks to George Garrett, we now have 21 Economy Class members.
Learn about the 2008 Space Elevator Conference which will be held in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Conference Center on July 18-20, 2008. This conference is sponsored by Microsoft and will feature topical discussions in all of the Four Pillars of Space Elevator Development: Science/Technical, Political/Social, Legal, and Economic.
G. Frank Lawlis joins our Scientific Advisory Board. As the chief content adviser for The Dr. Phil Show and the bestselling author of The ADD Answer: How to Help Your Child Now and The IQ Answer: Maximizing Your Child's Potential, he has aided thousands of parents and their children. He was Dr. Phil's professor while he was earning his PhD, and Dr. Phil is proud to call Frank his mentor.
Christopher R. Wren, who developed a system using motion sensors that enables buildings to have a god's eye view of all activity within a building, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
William A. P. Smith, with the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition group at the University of York, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Martin E. Hellman, coinventor of public key cryptography, and Founder of Defusing the Nuclear Threat, joins our Policy Board.
Robert C. McCarthy, who reconstructed vocal tracts that simulate the sound of the Neanderthal voice from over 30,000 years ago, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Joe Herbert, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Best-selling author Douglas "Hoss" Preston joins our Futurists Board. His novel Blasphemy is described as:
 
Physicist Gregory North Hazelius sold the concept of creating a ginormous forty billion dollar "superconducting supercollider particle accelerator" based on finding a new source of energy. He knows not to tell anyone about his personal secret agenda behind why he pushed the Isabella project as it is called; he plans to duplicate the Big Bang of creation in order to speak to God.
 
The Navajo Indian Reservation in the southwest is chosen as the locale for Isabella. Work begins inside the five-hundred-square-mile Red Mesa tableland. However, the project falls behind schedule disturbing DC politicos who bet on its quick success.
 
Presidential science adviser Dr. Stanton Lockwood sends former CIA operative Wyman Ford to investigate why the delay and is there any way to propel the project back on schedule. At the same time, others strongly oppose Isabella fearing the wrath of God.
Pete Mandik, author of The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity, An Epistemological Theory of Consciousness?, and Varieties of Representation in Evolved and Embodied Neural Networks, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Samuel H. Barondes joins our Neuroscience Board. He is the author of Molecules and Mental Illness, Mood Genes: Hunting for Origins of Mania and Depression, and Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs.
Robert B. Cialdini joins our Scientific Advisory Board. In the field of influence and persuasion, Bob is the most cited social psychologist in the world today. He authored Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Peter H. Kahn, Jr., author of The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture and Nature and Moral Development, joins our Sustainability Board.
Li-Hai Tan, who showed that a person dyslexic in English may not be dyslexic in Chinese and vice versa, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Artificial heart pioneer Tofy Mussivand joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, author of Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics and The Mechanization of the Mind and editor of Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, joins our Ethics Board.
Sonia M. Suter, author of The Allure and Peril of Genetic Exceptionalism: Do We Need Special Genetics Legislation?, joins our Ethics Board.
Saskia Sassen, author of A Sociology of Globalization and Cities in a World Economy, joins our Human Trajectories Board. Saskia coined the term global city.
Anind K. Dey, coauthor of Managing Personal Information Disclosure in Ubiquitous Computing Environments, Designer Support for Context Monitoring and Control, and SiteView: Tangibly Programming Active Environments with Predictive Visualization, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Scott Reif, the author of The Future of Advanced Transportation, joins our Futurists Board.
World-renowned thinker, writer, and speaker on the future, Joe Coates, joins our Futurists Board.
Fuyu Tamanoi, who has developed nanoimpellers which are the first demonstration of controlled and on-demand release of anticancer drugs using mechanized nanoparticles in living cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
Graham K. Whitehead, author of New Technology, New Society, joins our Futurists Board.
Read issue #70 of Lifeboat News!
Read Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams by our Michael Anissimov.
Peter J. Bentley, editor of Evolutionary Design by Computers, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Peter is also author of the popular science book The Book of Numbers: The Secret of Numbers and How They Changed the World.
Paul Richmond, author of A GPU Framework for the Real-Time Simulation and Interaction of Massive Agent Based Systems, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Summer Johnson, author of Ethics in Nanomedicine: a Needs-Assessment and Proposals for the Future, joins our Ethics Board.
Read Science-Fiction Writers Help Government Prepare for Attacks of the Future which describes efforts by our Arlan Andrews, Greg Bear, and Jerry Pournelle.
On May 31, Daniel Dennett and Ray Kurzweil will be speaking about What it Means to be Human at Skirball Center, NYU which is part of the NY08 World Science Festival in New York City.
Watch Brian Cox's TED talk What Really Goes on at the Large Hadron Collider.
Read AI Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds by Ben Goertzel.
T. Randall Lee, who coauthored Rise of the Nanomachine: The Evolution of a Revolution in Medicine, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Brian H. Wilcox, Principle Investigator, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joins our Robotics/AI Board. He currently heads the ATHLETE project. This ginormous robotic vehicle called ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) measures about 7.5 meters wide, with legs more than 6 meters long. It could act essentially like a turtle, carrying the astronauts' living quarters around on its back. Watch a prototype in action!
C.S. "Buzz" Holling joins our Sustainability Board. Buzz is one of the conceptual founders of ecological economics. Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research that addresses the dynamic and spatial interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its main focus is the "scale" conundrum: how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of the biosphere. Ecological economics brings together and connects different disciplines, within the natural and social sciences but especially between these broad areas.
 
Buzz also founded the Resilience Alliance, is founding Editor-in-Chief of Ecology and Society, and coedited Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.
Paul Schaudies, GenArraytion's President and Chief Executive Officer, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
GenArraytion identifies informative biomarkers within the genomes of organisms of interest and screens thousands of them simultaneously to develop high fidelity signatures that provide a functionally complete characterization. These competencies are being used to produce rapid turn-around, accurate, reliable diagnostics for pathogen identification, and antibiotic susceptibility characterization. Microorganism-specific signatures provide high confidence pathogen identification and determination of virulence mechanisms and antibiotic susceptibility in a single test.
Robert C. Bourge joins our Biotech/Medical Board. He is Professor of Medicine, Radiology, and Surgery, M. G. Waters Chair of Cardiovascular Disease, Director, Division of Cardiovascular Disease, Co-Director, The Heart and Vascular Research Center, The University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is also on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation.
Beverly A. Rzigalinski, who discovered that certain nanomaterials triple and even quadruple the life of brain cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
Challa Kumar, President and CEO of Magnano Technologies, joins our Nanotechnology Board. Magnano Technologies is an emerging nanotechnology company specializing in the development of nanomaterials and nanotechnologies for life sciences. The company has expertise in wet-chemical synthesis of a variety of nanomaterials and their biofunctionalization for a number of applications in life sciences. In addition to technology development, the company is also focusing on information management and consultancy services related to nanotechnologies for the life sciences.
 
Challa also authored a ten volume nanotechnology set including Nanomaterials for Cancer Diagnosis, Biofunctionalization of Nanomaterials, and Nanomaterials: Toxicity, Health and Environmental Issues.
 
And to top it off, he is also working on a method to create ethanol without the use of corn and therefore this method would not impact food prices.
Susan Blackmore, who presented Memes in the Cosmos at TED 2008, joins our Neuroscience Board. Sue also authored Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human and The Meme Machine.
Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach (CPO) and author of Future-focused Leadership: Preparing Schools, Students, And Communities for Tomorrow's Realities, joins our Futurists Board.
Kenneth L. Nichols, coauthor of Organization Theory: A Public and Nonprofit Perspective, joins our Futurists Board.
Listen to our David Brin on The Future And You.
Thanks to financial assistance from Joshua Fox and graphical assistance from Tom McCabe, we now offer a white background theme on all pages. Click on the blue button on the left that says WHITE BKG to use this.
 
If you notice any problems, send an email with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Web Design" to webmaster@lifeboat.com.
Don't Panic! We have found The Ultimate Answer to The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer is a WorldFuture 2008 lineup with 42 Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board members.
 
Our newest member is Carl Jensen III, who founded the Futures Working Group. The Futures Working Group (FWG) is a collaboration between the FBI and the Society of Police Futurists International (PFI). Their purpose is to develop and encourage others to develop forecasts and strategies to ethically maximize the effectiveness of local, state, federal, and international law enforcement bodies as they strive to maintain peace and security in the 21st century.
 
Carl spent 22 years in the FBI, 5 years in the Navy including serving on the nuclear fleet ballistic missile submarine USS George Washington Carver, and is currently Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, The University of Mississippi, with adjunct status at the RAND Corporation.
G. Ali Mansoori, author of Principles Of Nanotechnology: Molecular-Based Study Of Condensed Matter In Small Systems, joins our Nanotechnology Board. Ali is developing nanotechnology solutions for Alzheimer's disease.
Win Wenger, founder of Project Renaissance, joins our Methods for Discovery and Solution Finding Board which he founded. Project Renaissance is dedicated to increasing individuals' potential and accelerating the dawning of a new Renaissance.
Robin Baumgarten joins our Robotics/AI Board. Robin is the author of the blog AI Panic, where he researches and unveils the perils, imminence, and probabilities of a hostile takeover of the world through artificial intelligence.
Igor Jurisica, who is leading the first Canadian team to use the World Community Grid to accelerate the war on cancer, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. The World Community Grid is a global network of hundreds of thousands of people who volunteer their idle computer time to tackle some of the world's most complex problems. Our FightAIDS@Home team also uses this resource.
Thomas F. Valone, President of the Integrity Research Institute and Editor of the Future Energy newsletter, joins our Futurists Board. He is the 41st member of our WorldFuture 2008 lineup.
Read issue #69 of Lifeboat News!
Sheila R. Ronis, author of Timelines into the Future: Strategic Visioning Methods for Government, Industry and Other Organizations, joins our Futurists Board. Sheila is also Director of the MBA/MSSL Programs at Walsh College and is President of The University Group, a management consulting firm and think tank specializing in strategic management, visioning, national security, and public policy. Read Congress Hires A Scientist To Find Out What's Really Happening To The Defense Industrial Base.
 
Thanks to Sheila, our "WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes" lineup has reached 40 speakers, including Lawrence A. Baines, Raj Bawa, Craig Bettles, Peter C. Bishop, Dennis M. Bushnell, Josh Calder, Arthur L. Caplan, José Luis Cordeiro, William J. Cosgrove, William Crossman, Irene J. Dabrowski, Yasmin Dada-Jones, Devin Fidler, Medard Gabel, Ashok K. Gangadean, Jay Gary, Jerry Glenn, Ted Gordon, Terry Grim, Linda Groff, William E. Halal, Don Heathfield, Jay Herson, Michael Jackson, Shun-jie Ji, Tom Lombardo, Jim Mathews, Amy Oberg, Jonathan Peck, John L. Petersen, Carrie Rathsack, Sheila R. Ronis, Karlin Sloan, Rick Smyre, Stephen F. Steele, Mike Treder, Verne Wheelwright, James Wright, Mariann Zanardo, and Michael Zey.
Learn about an underwater record attempt to raise awareness of Ocean conservation.
John Ringo joins our Futurists Board. John is a New York Times bestselling author of science fiction and thriller novels with over one million novels in print. He authored Ghost and Against the Tide, and coauthored Von Neumann's War.
William J. Cosgrove, William Crossman, Irene J. Dabrowski, Devin Fidler, Medard Gabel, Terry Grim, Linda Groff, Don Heathfield, and Stephen F. Steele join our "WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes" lineup, bringing us up to 39 speakers.
Terry Grim, a futurist/strategist with Social Technologies, joins our Futurists Board.
Devin Fidler, author of Paradigm Shift Emerging in Economics, joins our Economics Board.
Scott Shippee joins our Rosetta@Home team.
 
Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s) to help scientists determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help speed up and extend research in ways scientists couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's.
Listen to Greg Bear on The Future and You.
BELLA GAIA — An Experience by Kenji Williams will be presented at NASA Ames, SF Bay Area on April 12th from 2pm to 2 am.
 
Inspired by astronauts who spoke of the life changing experience of viewing the Earth from Space, creative director and music producer Kenji Williams delivers a live audio visual performance that evolves our perspective of and connection to our home planet. Utilizing stunning HD projections of orbiting visualizations of Earth from Space accompanied by a live performance of Williams's trademark violin-electronica music, experience the beauty and miracle of planet earth like never before in this audio visual space show.
CeCOS II (Counter eCrime Operations Summit II) will be held in Tokyo, Japan from May 26 to May 27, 2008.
Irene J. Dabrowski, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. John's University, joins our Futurists Board. Irene is author of Liberating the "Deviant" Feminist Image Through Education.
William J. Cosgrove, President of Ecoconsult and coauthor of World Water Vision: Making Water Everybody's Business, joins our Sustainability Board.
Stephen F. Steele, who coauthored Applied Sociology: Terms, Topics, Tools, and Tasks and Solution-Centered Sociology: Addressing Problems through Applied Sociology, joins our Futurists Board. Steve is Professor of Sociology and Futures Studies, Institute for the Future, Anne Arundel Community College.
Medard Gabel, author of Energy, Earth, and Everyone: A Global Energy Strategy for Spaceship Earth, joins our Sustainability Board. Medard worked with Buckminster Fuller for 12 years where he learned the power and utility of whole systems thinking, global perspectives, and a good sense of humor.
Don Heathfield, CEO of Future Map, joins our Futurists Board.
Linda Groff, author of Future Evolution of Humanity, joins our Futurists Board. She is also Professor, Political Science & Future Studies, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA and Co-Director of Global Options.
William Crossman joins our Futurists Board. The New York Daily News cited him as one of six key visionaries for the 21st Century, along with physicist Stephen Hawking, astronaut Jim Lovell, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, scientist Ray Kurzweil, and bioethicist Art Caplan.
Arthur L. Caplan, Ashok K. Gangadean, Jay Gary, Ted Gordon, William E. Halal, Tom Lombardo, Jim Mathews, Rick Smyre, James Wright, and Michael Zey, join our "WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes" lineup, bringing us up to 30 speakers.
Jay Gary, director of the School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship at Regent University, joins our Futurists Board.
Arthur L. Caplan joins our Ethics Board. Art is the author or editor of twenty-five books and over 500 papers in refereed journals of medicine, science, philosophy, bioethics, and health policy. In addition to his Ph.D., he holds seven honorary degrees from colleges and medical schools. His most recent book is Smart Mice Not So Smart People: An Interesting and Amusing Guide to Bioethics.
Michael Zey, author of Ageless Nation: The Quest for Superlongevity and Physical Perfection and The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming Our Lives and Shaping Human Destiny, joins our Futurists Board.
Ted Gordon, Director of the American Council for the United Nations University, joins our Futurists Board. Ted is coauthor of the annual State of the Future reports with the other coauthor being our Jerry Glenn.
Tom Lombardo, author of The Evolution of Future Consciousness: The Nature and Historical Development of the Human Capacity to Think about the Future and Doorways to the Future Methods, Theories, and Themes, joins our Education Board, Ethics Board, and Futurists Board.
Jim Mathews, founder of The Futures Network, joins our Futurists Board.
James Wright joins our Business Board. He launched the International Executive MBA program of the University of São Paulo in 1992. He has now directed it for 16 years and it is the top ranked Executive MBA program in Brazil.
Ashok K. Gangadean, Founder-Director of the Global Dialogue Institute which seeks to embody the dialogical powers of global reason in all aspects of cultural life, joins our Ethics Board. He is author of Meditative Reason: Toward Universal Grammar.
Rick Smyre, President of the Center for Communities of the Future, joins our Futurists Board. This center is an evolving network of people and organizations throughout the U.S. and other countries that are working in collaboration to develop new concepts of governance, economic development, leadership, and education/learning for a fast-paced, interconnected, and increasingly complex society.
William E. Halal joins our Futurists Board and Human Trajectories Board. Macmillan's Encyclopedia of the Future listed him among "The World's 100 Most Influential Futurists", which included H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler, Daniel Bell, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Acclaimed science fiction author Jerry Pournelle joins our Futurists Board and Space Settlement Board. Jerry wrote the "Chaos Manor" column for Byte magazine for over 20 years where he described his experiences with computer hardware and software, was President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and coauthored Fallen Angels, Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, and The Mote in God's Eye.
 
Much more than simply a science fiction writer, Jerry earned advanced degrees in psychology, statistics, engineering, and political science, including two PhDs. He coauthored The Strategy of Technology which was required reading in the U.S. service academies during the latter half of the Cold War. From fighting in the Korean War as an artillery officer to being the campaign manager of political campaigns to advising congressional leadership on space policy to advising the Homeland Security Department on how to combat terrorism, Jerry has done it all!
Greg Bear joins our Futurists Board. Greg is an American science fiction and mainstream author who has been called the "best working writer of hard science fiction" by The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. He has been awarded two Hugos and five Nebulas for his fiction, one of only two authors to win a Nebula in every category. He has served on political and scientific action committees and has advised Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, Callison Architecture, Inc., Homeland Security, and other groups and agencies.
 
Greg joins other luminaries on our Futurists Board including Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Alan Dean Foster, Nancy Kress, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Sawyer.
Charles Chafer, Chief Executive Officer of Space Services Inc., the world's leading provider of public participation space missions, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Peter Russell, author of Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change and The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Read the transcript of the Michael Anissimov interview by Future Blogger.
Our WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes lineup reaches 20 speakers. Our lineup includes Lawrence A. Baines, Raj Bawa, Craig Bettles, Peter C. Bishop, Dennis M. Bushnell, Josh Calder, José Luis Cordeiro, Yasmin Dada-Jones, Jerry Glenn, Jay Herson, Michael Jackson, Shun-jie Ji, Amy Oberg, Jonathan Peck, John L. Petersen, Carrie Rathsack, Karlin Sloan, Mike Treder, Verne Wheelwright, and Mariann Zanardo.
Jonathan Peck, President of the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) and its for-profit subsidiary, Alternative Futures Associates (AFA), joins our Futurists Board.
Justine Cassell, who developed the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) — a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Listen to Michael Anissimov's interview on FastForward Radio.
Read Phoenix: Final Report by the International Space University.
Bruce Parkinson, whose patents include Semiconductor liquid junction photocell using surface modified GaAs electrode, Gallium arsenide devices having reduced surface recombination velocity, Etching of nanoscale structures, and Fluorescent compounds for absorption and re-emission of radiation, joins our Chemistry Board.
Mark Wiesner, who has designed a replacement for the decades old fuel cell membrane design, joins our Nanotechnology Board and Sustainability Board. He authored Towards a Green Nanotechnology and coauthored Environmental Nanotechnology.
Ruben Nelson, President of Square One Management Ltd. and The Alliance for Capitalizing on Change, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Jim Rybarski joins our FightAIDS@Home team, using the spare clock cycles on his computer to help discover new drugs that fight AIDS.
Julia Margo, author of Make Me a Criminal: Preventing Youth Crime and coeditor of Politics for a New Generation, joins our Ethics Board.
Read Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: Don't Panic! which contains the Arthur C. Clarke interview by our José Luis Cordeiro.
 
Arthur C. Clarke's final novel is The Last Theorem, coauthored with our Frederik Pohl. It will be released late in 2008.
Listen to Peter Norvig on The Future And You.
Thanks to input from Don Braben, Laszlo Kish, Marty McCrea, and other members of our Scientific Advisory Board, we have now launched our ScientificFreedomShield program.
Donald W. Braben, author of Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, joins our Scientific Freedom Board which he cofounded.
Anirban Bandyopadhyay, who developed a tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines, joins our Nanotechnology Board. His molecular device — just two billionths of a meter across — was able to control eight microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.
Frank Zeman, who has developed a process to remove CO2 from the air, joins our Sustainability Board.
Craig Bettles, futurist and researcher for the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF), joins our Futurists Board. Craig was the lead researcher and writer for IAF's bold look at the future of biomedical R&D, The 2029 Report: Achieving an Ethical Future for Biomedical R&D, and will be a speaker at WorldFuture 2008.
Theoretical inventor and catalyst Marty McCrea joins our Scientific Freedom Board which he cofounded.
Michael Petrascheck, who worked with Nobel Laureate Linda Buck to lengthen the lifespan of worms with an antidepressant, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read issue #68 of Lifeboat News!
Martin Codrington, who presented The Genocide of the Curious Mind at the BIL 2008 conference, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Roderick Jones joins our Counterterrorism Board. He is Vice President of Concentric Solutions International, a security consultancy with offices in Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Prior to this he served for eight years as a detective with Scotland Yard's Special Branch.
Alberto Conti, one of the creators of the GoogleSky concept, joins our Cosmology Board.
Carrie Rathsack, who will be presenting Change in a Digital Age: An Impetus for a Collaborative, Educative, Democratic Future at WorldFuture 2008, joins our Education Board.
Our WorldFuture 2008 lineup grows with the addition of Raj Bawa, Peter C. Bishop, Josh Calder, Yasmin Dada-Jones, Amy Oberg, Karlin Sloan, Verne Wheelwright, and Mariann Zanardo. This brings us up to 17 speakers!
Edward L. "Ned" Wright, whose research has helped narrow the uncertainty of the age of the universe by tens of millions of years, joins our Cosmology Board.
Athena Andreadis joins our blog team with her first post.
Verne Wheelwright, founder of the Personal Futures Network, joins our Futurists Board. Verne is author of A Personal Futures Workbook and Software for Futurists — Scanning.
Josh Calder, author of The Speed of Change in China and ICBM Parenting, joins our Futurists Board.
Peter C. Bishop, coeditor of Thinking about the Future, Guidelines for Strategic Foresight, joins our Futurists Board.
 
Peter is also Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight and Coordinator of the graduate program in Futures Studies at the University of Houston.
Kavita Katti, whose patents include Methods and articles for gold nanoparticle production and Hydroxyalkyl phosphine compounds for use as diagnostic and therapeutic pharmaceuticals, joins our Nanotechnology Board and Biotech/Medical Board.
KV Fitzpatrick, whose BIL presentation Growing Up Gifted: The State of the Art of Raising Brilliant Minds was covered by Wired Magazine, joins our Futurists Board.
Yasmin Dada-Jones, Executive Director for the Pennsylvania Medicaid Policy Center (PMPC) and previously Executive Policy Director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health (PADOH), joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
She was previously Chief Director Social Sector, in the Policy Coordination and Advisory Service of the Presidency of South Africa in which role she provided technical policy advice to the President and Deputy President of South Africa. In this position she was instrumental in developing a blueprint for social policy action for South Africa for the next decade as well as a monitoring evaluation framework.
Mariann Zanardo, Managing Director and Key Strategist of RegRelief International, joins our Sustainability Board. Mariann helps enterprises in the US and abroad to develop environmentally sustainable practices that reduce an organization's environmental impact and regulatory burden through management strategies, team training, system development, and process improvements.
Amy Oberg joins our Futurists Board. Amy is is a strategist, futurist, and competitive analyst who specializes in helping organizations better understand the emerging competitive environment and respond with effective, proactive strategies.
 
Recently, Amy has applied her knowledge and skills to assist organizations such as NASA, Dynegy, Kimberly Clark, Conoco, MCI, Solectron, the United Nations, DARPA, the State of Minnesota, and the City of Kaoshuing (Taiwan).
Karlin Sloan, founder and CEO of Karlin Sloan & Company and author of Smarter, Faster, Better: Strategies for Effective, Enduring, and Fulfilled Leadership, joins our Business Board.
Raj Bawa, who serves on the Global Advisory Council of the World Future Society, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board. Raj is on the Editorial Boards of International Journal of Nanomedicine and Nanotechnology Law and Business. He is also Associate Editor of Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine.
Paul Vogt, author of Language evolution and robotics: Issues in symbol grounding and language acquisition and Cumulative cultural evolution: Can we ever learn more?, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Our WorldFuture 2008 lineup grows with the addition of Lawrence A. Baines, Dennis M. Bushnell, Jay Herson, Michael Jackson, and Shun-jie Ji.
Shun-jie Ji, Professor at the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, and CEO, Institute for National Development, Taiwan, joins our Futurists Board.
Michael Jackson joins our Business Board which he also founded. Mike is a Founder Member and Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow. He also advises businesses on dramatically improving their competitiveness through pioneering work on practical Sustainable Business Strategies. Clients include a number of blue-chip, international and national companies, and small to medium sized UK businesses.
Lawrence A. Baines, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Judith Herb College of Education, University of Toledo, joins our Education Board. Lawrence coedited How to Get a Life, Vol. 1: Empowering Wisdom for the Heart and Soul and How to Get a Life, Vol. 2: Empowering Wisdom from Thinkers and Writers.
Marc D. Hauser, Director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab at Harvard, joins our Neuroscience Board. Marc is author of The Evolution of Communication, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong, and Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think.
Jay Herson, Managing Editor of Future Takes and Senior Associate at the Institute for Alternative Futures, joins our Futurists Board.
Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center, joins our Futurists Board and Space Settlement Board.
 
Dennis is responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation with emphasis in the areas of atmospheric sciences and structures, materials, acoustics, flight electronics/control/software, instruments, aerodynamics, aerothermodynamics, hypersonic airbreathing propulsion, computational sciences, and systems optimization for aeronautics, spacecraft, exploration, and space access.
José Luis Cordeiro, Jerry Glenn, John L. Petersen, and Mike Treder will be speaking at WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes at the Hilton Washington, Washington, D.C., from July 26 to July 28, 2008.
Kattesh Katti, who developed a "green" method to make gold nanoparticles, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Read the Wired interview of Brian Cox: Rock Star-Turned-Physicist Trades Keyboard for Atom Smasher.
Marisa Vitols, Community Manager for Memebox, joins our Media & Arts Board. Memebox runs both Future Blogger and Future Scanner.
 
Future Blogger enables anyone interested in the future to easily post their thoughts, predictions, and scenarios before a like-minded group of people. These posts are then rated by the community, with the best content rising to the top and onto the Future Blogger front page. Future Scanner aggregates and organizes the best future-related content on the web by year and category.
Jeremy L. O'Brien who demonstrated qubit-qutrit entanglement, joins our Physics Board. Qubit-qutrit entanglement could lead to advantages in quantum computing, such as increased security and more efficient quantum gates, as well as enable novel tests of quantum mechanics.
Lisa Galarneau, author of Are Virtual Worlds Good For the Soul? and The Singularity, Virtual Worlds and AI Babies, joins our Futurists Board. Lisa also works at Microsoft Games User Research doing usability and playtesting on a variety of games.
Gerwin Schalk, whose brain blanket boosts mind control, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Read Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life by Ed Begley, Jr.
Jonathan Katz, who authored The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe, joins our Physics Board.
 
Jonathan predicted the low frequency asymptotic spectrum of the emitted radiation and the occurrence of radio and visible "afterglows" to gamma-ray bursts.
Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist, an international consumer magazine about social and technological trends, available on newsstands coast to coast, joins our Futurists Board.
Listen to our Philippe Van Nedervelde on The Future and You!
Thanks to Athena Andreadis, our about page is now also in Greek.
Watch the video Nokia Morph Concept. Morph is a concept demonstrating some of the possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. Morph can sense its environment, is energy harvesting, and self cleaning. Morph is a flexible two-piece device that can adapt its shape to different use modes. Nanotechnology enables us to have adaptive materials yet rigid forms on demand.
 
It is also featured in the MoMA online exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind". It has been a collaboration project of the Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center.
Read Netherwood. This interesting science fiction novel is based on a hard takeoff singularity.
Bill Erickson, who has launched BIL: An Open, Self-Organizing Alternative to TED, joins our Media & Arts Board.
 
Also, check out our TED lineup!
Richard Satava, who helped develop the first surgical robot and the first virtual reality surgical simulators, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
During his 23 years of military surgery, Rick has been an active flight surgeon, an Army astronaut candidate, MASH surgeon for the Grenada Invasion, and hospital commander during Desert Storm, all the while continuing clinical surgical practice. While striving to practice the complete discipline of surgery, he is aggressively pursuing the leading edge of advanced technologies to formulate the architecture for the next generation of Medicine.
 
Rick is Senior Science Advisor at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland and was awarded the Smithsonian Laureate in Healthcare in 1997 and 1999.
Neil Rowe, Professor of Computer Science, Center for Information Security Research (CISR), U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, joins our Counterterrorism and Cybercrime/Malcode Boards.
 
Neil authored War Crimes from Cyberweapons and Finding Logically Consistent Resource-Deception Plans for Defense in Cyberspace.
 
Read the reaction of the U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) to meeting with experts from the Lifeboat Foundation.
Jeffrey M. Karp, who developed a surgical bandage based on a gecko's nanoscale pillars, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. This bandage is waterproof, biodegradable, and adheres much better than conventional sutures.
Ehud Ahissar, whose robot rat will lead the way in touch technology, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
 
Ehud says: "The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now."
David Sancho, author of The Future of Bot Worms and Rootkits: The new wave of invisible malware is here, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. David is Senior Antivirus Engineer at Trend Micro.
Simone Davalos, Owner of Combots LLC., joins our Education Board. Combots LLC seeks to provide an entertaining and educational experience in robotics and engineering for audiences of all ages.
Alex "Sandy" Pentland, whose "reality mining" technology was described by MIT Technology Review as one of the 10 technologies that they think are most likely to change the way we live, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
 
Sandy is a pioneer in mobile information systems, technology for developing countries, consumer health, and smart environments. One of the most-cited computer scientists in the world, with international awards in the Arts, Sciences and Engineering, he was chosen by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
Frederik Pohl joins our Futurists Board. He is a three time Nebula winner, including the "Grand Master" Nebula for lifetime contributions to the field, and a six time Hugo winner. He is the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as writer and as editor.
Listen to Giulio Prisco on The Future And You.
Long-time Lifeboat Foundation supporter Otto Valtakoski provides donations to both our A-PRIZE and NanoShield Fund.
New Lifeboat 500 member Tyrone Steels II says "All of humanity is in the same boat: Earth. And if that boat is threatened or starts to sink, we need to have a lifeboat. Plain and simple. To not plan is not a plan; it is a recipe for disaster. I'm proud to be a Lifeboat 500 member since it provides a priceless service to all of humanity."
Paul R. Sanberg, who discovered that umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells given intravenously will reduce stroke damage, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Paul is the author of more than 400 scientific articles, has published thirteen books, and is an inventor on over twenty-five U.S. patents.
Sarah A. Hoyt, author of Draw One in the Dark and coeditor of Something Magic This Way Comes, joins our Futurists Board. Sarah was recently featured in five podcasts on The Future And You.
Nidal Hilal, who has developed a method to create clean water using bacteria and nanofilters, joins our Engineering Board.
Our Advisory Board members Chris Abani, Brian Cox, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Klein, and Peter D. Ward will be speaking at TED2008 which will be held from February 27 to March 1, 2008 at the Monterey Conference Center, Monterey, California, USA.
 
TED started out as an annual conference in Monterey devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design. The content has broadened in recent years, but this annual event is still the main engine that drives TED's success, bringing together 1,000 of the world's most remarkable people. The format is fast-paced, with 50+ speakers over four days (plus short talks, performances and evening events). In 2005, an additional conference, TEDGlobal, was inaugurated. It's held every other year, in a different location, focusing on a different theme.
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, joins our Ethics Board.
Peter D. Ward, author of Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future and Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History, and coauthor of Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, joins our Sustainability Board.
Mobile, personal, and future technology specialist Joshua Klein joins our Futurists Board. He is Senior Technical Consultant for Premier Heart in New York, NY. Premier Heart has been developing leading-edge ECG analysis tools since 1998 and continues to push the boundaries of quality and accuracy in detecting hemodynamically relevant Coronary Artery Disease (CAD).
Chris Abani joins our Ethics Board. In 1985, this Nigerian writer was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of masterminding a political coup. The evidence: his first novel, a political thriller written two years earlier, when he was just sixteen years old. Since then, he has been imprisoned twice more, sentenced to death, tortured by electric shock; he has also thwarted assassins, published books of poetry, novels, and won numerous literary awards.
Richard MacManus, one of the world's most highly respected web technology and digital media analysts and strategists, joins our Futurists Board.
 
Richard's ReadWriteWeb blog is one of the most widely read and influential web technology blogs on the web. In December 2007, ReadWriteWeb was ranked #15 in Technorati's Top 20 blogs, and #5 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, putting it well above traditional news sources such as the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.
Phil Bowermaster joins our blog team with his first post.
Gia Milinovich, whose blog has been called "Britain's answer to Wil Wheaton", joins our Media & Arts Board. Gia authored End of the World Scenario, Apocalympics 2012, and The Presumptions of Idiots.
Our International Spokesperson Philippe Van Nedervelde will be on FastForward Radio on Feb 17, 2008 at 7:00 PM Pacific / 10:00 PM Eastern. This will be the second of a two-part series of shows on the subject of risk.
Yaakov Stern, who identified a brain network that may help prevent or slow Alzheimer's, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Molecular biologist Athena Andreadis, author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Robert Robinson joins our Rosetta@Home team.
 
Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s) to help scientists to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help speed up and extend research in ways scientists couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's.
Brian Milch, named one of the "Ten to Watch" in AI by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2008, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
 
Brian will be presenting Artificial General Intelligence through Large-Scale, Multimodal Bayesian Learning at AGI-08, becoming the 32nd person in our AGI-08 lineup.
Read End of the World Scenario.
Read issue #67 of Lifeboat News!
Angela Schwering, who will be presenting Learning from Inconsistencies in an Integrated Cognitive Architecture and Analogy as Integrating Framework for Human-Level Reasoning at AGI-08, joins our Robotics/AI Board. She is the 31st person to join our growing lineup at AGI-08!
Andres M. Lozano, who is improving patient's memory with deep-brain stimulation, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Mark Gross, whose smart "Lego" conjures up its virtual 3D twin, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Jeffrey D. Janus, CEO of Lifeline Cell Technology, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Jeffrey was the first to create embryonic stem cells from unfertilized eggs.
Simon E. Fisher, who discovered the first language gene, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Jack McDevitt, winner of the Philip K. Dick Special Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Phoenix Award, joins our Futurists Board.
Three-time Nebula award winner Nancy Kress joins our Futurists Board. Her Probability Moon/ Probability Sun/ Probability Space trilogy concerns quantum physics, a space war, and the nature of reality.
Alan Dean Foster joins our Futurists Board. Alan is a prolific American writer of science fiction, fantasy novels, and movie novelizations. His published oeuvre includes more than 100 books and his work has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Our AGI-08 lineup continues to grow. We have added J. Storrs "Josh" Hall, who is a Session chair, Speaker, and is on the AGI-08 Program Committee; Nick Cassimatis and Włodzisław "Wlodek" Duch, who are Speakers and are on the AGI-08 Program Committee; Kenneth Livingston who is a Speaker; and Michael L. Anderson, Mark H. Bickhard, Marcus Hutter, Christian Lebiere, Bruce Maclennan, Matthias Scheutz, and Jürgen Schmidhuber, who are on the AGI-08 Program Committee.
Kenneth Livingston, coauthor of Four Paths to AI and Beyond the Definition Given: On the Growth of Connotation, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Karan Sharma, who will be presenting Designing Knowledge Based Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems at AGI-08, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Michael L. Anderson, author of Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide and Evolution, Embodiment and the Nature of the Mind, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Christian Lebiere, whose main project is ACT-R, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
 
ACT-R is a cognitive architecture: a theory for simulating and understanding human cognition. Researchers working on ACT-R strive to understand how people organize knowledge and produce intelligent behavior. As the research continues, ACT-R evolves ever closer into a system which can perform the full range of human cognitive tasks: capturing in great detail the way we perceive, think about, and act on the world.
Bruce Maclennan, founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation, and author of Consciousness in Robots: The Hard Problem and Some Less Hard Problems, joins our Nanotechnology Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Peter Voss, Founder and CEO of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence Inc., joins our Robotics/AI Board. Peter is the author of Essentials of General Intelligence: The direct path to AGI.
Mark H. Bickhard, Henry R. Luce Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge at Lehigh University, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
 
Mark authored Representational Content in Humans and Machines and coauthored Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science: Impasse and Solution.
Nick Cassimatis, who authored Polyscheme: a Cognitive Architecture for Integrating Multiple Representation and Inference Schemes and coauthored A Cognitive Substrate for Natural Language Understanding, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Read the reaction of the U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) to meeting with top scientists from the Lifeboat Foundation.
Michael Dickey is now our LF Deputy Networking Director. Using the internet as his primary social-networking instrument, Michael is focused on expanding and strengthening Lifeboat Foundation's global network of professional and personal contacts and the active welcoming of financial donations as well as donations in kind from this growing web of worldwide connections.
Włodzisław "Wlodek" Duch, who is organizing Cognitive Architectures: Towards Human-Level Intelligence, special session at WCCI 2008, Hong Kong with Ben Goertzel, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
J. Storrs "Josh" Hall, originator of the Utility Fog concept and author of Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine and Nanofuture: What's Next For Nanotechnology, joins our Nanotechnology Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Chris Haley becomes our Blog Webmaster. His main task will be to manage spam — to remove spam that gets past our spam filters, and more importantly, to save legitimate messages that our spam filters thought were spam.
 
Activity in our blog is growing and Chris's help will be appreciated!
Serafim Batzoglou, whose new gene prediction method capitalizes on multiple genomes, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Jeff Reed, Strategic Advisor for Novamente, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
 
Jeff currently holds the title of Chairman of the Board of Axis Facilities Services Corporation, where he oversees finance, legal and IT. Prior to that he was Chief Technology Officer for Logicalis USA, a London headquartered subsidiary of JSE-listed company Datatec Ltd. Logicalis has revenues in excess of $500M and employs more than 1,500 people located in Europe, USA, and South America. Logicalis USA has offices in 25 major cities and provides mission-critical computer hardware, software, application development, and hosting services to mid-market and Fortune 1000 companies.
Stephen Euin Cobb, author, futurist, and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You, joins our Futurists Board and Media & Arts Board.
Joydeep "Joy" Bhattacharya, whose research indicates what happens in the brain when we're faced with a dilemma, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Our AGI-08 lineup continues to grow. We have added Ari Heljakka and Peter Stone, who will be Speakers.
Stephen Gordon, coauthor of the Better All The Time series, joins our Futurists Board. Listen to the Better All The Time podcasts!
Phil Bowermaster, one of the brains behind The Speculist and coproducer of The FastForward Radio Show, joins our Futurists Board.
Ari Heljakka, who coauthored Probabilistic Logic Networks: A Comprehensive Framework for Uncertain Inference with Ben Goertzel, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Peter Stone, winner of the prestigious IJCAI 2007 Computers and Thought award and author of Layered Learning in Multiagent Systems: A Winning Approach to Robotic Soccer and coauthor of Autonomous Bidding Agents: Strategies and Lessons from the Trading Agent Competition, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Joscha Bach, author of Seven Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Our AGI-08 lineup continues to grow. We have added John E. Laird, Matthew Iklé, and Alexei V. Samsonovich, who will be Speakers and Stephen Reed, who will be a Session Chair.
Stephen Reed, author of Mapping Ontologies into Cyc (with Doug Lenat) and Semantic Annotation for Persistence, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Steve is also the principal developer at Texai.org, which is an open source project to create artificial intelligence. Their approach is to first construct a bootstrap English dialog system that will acquire linguistic and commonsense skills to improve its own performance.
John E. Laird, who along with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Tsvi Achler, who will be presenting Input Feedback Networks: Classification and Inference Based on Network Structure at AGI-08 with Eyal Amir, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Michael Graham Richard, editor-in-chief of TreeHugger, joins our Sustainability Board. TreeHugger is the leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream.
Michael Graham Richard joins our blog team with his first post.
Alexei V. Samsonovich, author of Universal Learner as an Embryo of Computational Consciousness, and coauthor of Designing A Self-Aware Neuromorphic Hybrid and Pricing the "Free Lunch" of Meta-Evolution, joins our Information Sciences Board and Robotics/AI Board.
Matthew Iklé, coauthor of Probabilistic Logic Networks: A Comprehensive Conceptual, Mathematical and Computational Framework for Uncertain Inference with Ben Goertzel, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Michael Graham Richard activates our Rosetta@Home team.
 
Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s) to help scientists to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it you will help speed up and extend research in ways scientists couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's. (See Disease Related Research for more information). Read news and articles about Rosetta.
Our massive lineup at AGI-08 grows! Eyal Amir, Ben Goertzel, Moshe Looks, Cassio Pennachin, and Leslie Smith will be speaking at The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence at the FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis in cooperation with AAAI, March 1-3, 2008.
 
Session chairs will include Eric Baum, Randal A. Koene, and Steve Omohundro. The organizing committee includes Ben Goertzel and Bruce Klein. The Outreach Director is Natasha Vita-More and Conference Management Software Hosting is by David Hart.
Randal A. Koene joins our Neuroscience Board. He runs the site MindUploading.org. This site addresses the specific issues that may arise when neural prostheses are customized to a specific patient, and when large scale neural prostheses lead to whole brain emulation: the emulation of a patient's complete brain function in a prosthetic substrate. Site content is focused on neuroscience and computational research that is involved in an eventual progression from neural prostheses to the applied science of whole brain emulation.
 
Randal is also Research Assistant Professor, Computational Neurophysiology Laboratory, Boston University and Research Associate, Department of Experimental Neurophysiology, Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Stanislav Grof, author of Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy and When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality, joins our Neuroscience Board. He recently received the prestigious VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and Vaclav Havel in Prague.
Eiman Kanjo, who has developed a method for cyclists' cellphones to be used to monitor air pollution, joins our Sustainability Board.
Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO/CTO of Pixel Qi, joins our Engineering Board. Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost, and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones, and digital cameras.
 
Mary Lou was previously the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Notably she invented the laptop's sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low-power management system. Critically, she transformed these inventions into ready-to-ship hardware, integrated into the XO laptop — the lowest-cost laptop ever made and the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made.
Simon Davies, Founder and Director General of Privacy International, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board. The UK based Privacy International, now with members in more than 40 countries, was founded in 1990 and is a strong voice for privacy reform across the world.
Nick King, Executive Secretary of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), joins our Sustainability Board. GBIF is working at facilitating digitization and global dissemination of primary biodiversity data so that people from all countries can benefit from the use of this information. They plan on mobilizing 1 billion records by the end of the year.
Adrian Thrasher, who has developed the use of a "self-inactivating" retrovirus to create safer gene therapy, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. This "self-inactivating" retrovirus cannot make more copies of itself once it has stitched itself into the host genome.
Markus Frank, who demonstrated for the first time that targeting cancer stem cells can slow down the growth of a tumor, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Chris Haley joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
András Lörincz, who demonstrated that AI agents can successfully be taught how to strategize through reinforcement learning and win at Ms. Pac-Man, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Chi-Sang Poon, who discovered that the body's innate ability to adapt to recurring stimuli could be leveraged to design more effective and less costly artificial respirators, joins our Neuroscience Board. Chi-Sang is Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.
The Speculist says "How about a story arc in which Sarah and John elicit the help of the Lifeboat Foundation in warding off the rise of the machines? I'd like to see a heavily armed paramilitary cell within the foundation all decked out in camouflage and talking trash about 'tearing Skynet a new memory cache' and the like."
William Faloon, Director and Cofounder of the Life Extension Foundation, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. The Life Extension Foundation is a nonprofit organization, whose long-range goal is the radical extension of the healthy human lifespan. In seeking to control aging, their objective is to develop methods to enable us to live in health, youth, and vigor for unlimited periods of time.
Tyrone Steels II joins our LF 500 team bringing this important group to double digits. We now also have double digit Executive and Economy Class members.
 
Being thrifty, Tyrone cuts his cost in half as he says, "I work for Hewlett-Packard and they have added the Lifeboat Foundation into their preferred donation database. As a result, they match all contributions." So HP will be paying half his costs!
 
Also learn why our mission is important.
Added information to our World News page about CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid: Several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands.
 
Read our InternetShield program for solutions!
Waleed Abdulla, Founder and CEO of Ninua, the developer of Zooov, a social news and forum engine for niche communities, and Ziizo, an online bookmarking and productivity tool, joins our Futurists Board. He recently launched OnSingularity, a user submitted news and discussion portal for the Singularity community.
Doug Jacobson joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. He is director of the Iowa State University Information Assurance Center, which has been recognized by the National Security Agency as a charter Center of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance Education. He is also director of the proposed NSF I/U CRC Center for Information Protection and the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE).
Peter Cassidy joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. He is secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the largest and most influential independent coalition combating Internet crime today, having cultivated the organization since 2004 into an internationally recognized authority on electronic crime with more than 3,000 members from more than 1,700 information technology companies, law enforcement agencies, government ministries, universities, and research institutions worldwide.
Catherine Asaro, author of the Nebula Award winning novel The Quantum Rose, joins our Physics Board. Catherine earned her PhD in Physics from Harvard and recently completed two terms as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA).
Harald C. Ott, who created a beating heart in a laboratory, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Harald coauthored From cardiac repair to cardiac regeneration — ready to translate?
Harris Makatsoris, who is developing a computer language that could instruct nano-assemblers to work without human intervention, joins our Engineering Board.
Bruce Aronow, a biomedical research scientist whose job is to develop new computational approaches and analyses to help teams of biomedical investigators joins our Biotech/Medical Board. A recent accomplishment of a group with whom he is part of discovered the evolution of a network of genes in the human genome that act as "guardians" and gives humans unique protections from DNA damage. He was also part of the first team to map a gene that regulates bone marrow stem cells.
Watch the video Jesse Sullivan with the Bionic Arm.
Thanks to Matt McGuirl, we now have three Facebook causes. They are: A-PRIZE, NanoShield, and AIShield.
Benjamin Duranske (aka Benjamin Noble), editor and primary contributor of Virtually Blind: Legal Issues in Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games, joins our Legal Board. Benjamin is author of Top Five Virtual Law Analysis Fumbles and founder of the Second Life Bar Association.
Jeska Dzwigalski (aka Jeska Linden), Community and Product Manager at Linden Lab, joins our Media & Arts Board. Linden Lab is the creator of the virtual world Second Life. Read An Interview with Jeska Linden about Nonprofits in Second Life and Interview: Lust for Second Life.
Our donor list can now also be sorted by membership type.
We have launched the AIShield Fund which will be used to turn our AIShield program into reality.
 
While we won't be funding the purchase of massive supercomputers, ginormous teams of programmers, or research into quantum computers and other computing breakthroughs in the near future, we can do something today. Learn more!
Dan Berleant improves our AIShield program enabling us to upgrade it to a "current program".
Watch the video DNA Molecular Biology Visualizations - Wrapping And Replication.
Tom Daniels, author of Reference models for the concealment and observation of origin identity in store-and-forward networks and A functional reference model of passive systems for tracing network traffic, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board. Tom was recently coeditor of the Information Systems Frontiers special issue on Secure Knowledge Management.
Humberto Castaneda becomes our first Patron level member. He says "Human survival has always been in mortal danger. It is only our slow perception of time that has given us the illusion of stability. Whether we call it luck, or by design, we have gotten to a point where through technology we may escape the risk horizon on Earth. Now we have to believe this is possible, and that we will do it, because whatever stance we take collectively will be self-fulfilling."
Chris Haley who runs Nested Universe, a blog and podcast for artificial intelligence, singularity, cosmology, physics, robotics, nanotechnology, metaphysics, and philosophy joins our Robotics/AI Board. He is also author of Emergent Human Intelligence.
Watch the video Programming DNA: A 2-bit language for engineering biology.
Nathan Eagle, cofounder of the MIT/Harvard Large-Scale Network Analysis Project and author of Machine Perception and Learning of Complex Social Systems, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Jeffrey Youngblood, who has developed a new adaptive polymer coating which combines unusual chemical properties to help maintain a clear view, joins our Engineering Board. This polymer could be used to create self-cleaning, fog-free windshields among many possible uses.
Jeffrey Mogil, Associate Editor of Pain: The Journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain, author of the textbook The Genetics of Pain, and who discovered that mice are capable of empathy, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Jason Matheny, author of Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction and coauthor of Incentives for Biodefense Countermeasure Development, joins our Ethics Board.
Jin Zhang, who has developed a nanostructured thin film that shows promise for efficient solar energy conversion and is Senior Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry, joins our Chemistry and Nanotechnology Boards.
Carolyn L. Burke, CEO of Integrity Incorporated, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Integrity Incorporated provides governance, privacy, integrity, information security consulting services, and management solutions to help organizations achieve and maintain compliance and integrity.
Participate in the poll Top 10 Existential Risks!
Bruce Klein joins our blog team with his first post.
Read issue #66 of Lifeboat News!
Martine Rothblatt, American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur joins our Scientific Advisory Board, becoming our 500th member. She joins Ray Kurzweil, Nobel Laureates Sir Clive W.J. Granger, Eric S. Maskin, and Wole Soyinka, and many other luminaries, in our goal of "Safeguarding Humanity".
 
Martine started United Therapeutics (NASDAQ: UTHR) in 1996 and has served as Chairman & CEO since its inception. Her company develops and/or commercializes unique analogs of natural molecules for cardiopulmonary disorders, novel monoclonal antibodies for certain cancers, small glycobiologicals for infectious diseases, telemedical services (including for International Space Station astronauts) and nutriceuticals. She has many, many, more accomplishments. Read more!
Evan Snyder joins our Biotech/Medical Board. He is regarded as one of the fathers of the stem cell field, having identified over 2 decades ago that cells that came to be called stem cells were a source of neural plasticity. He was the first to demonstrate that non-hematopoietic stem cells could mediate cell and gene replacement, home to injury, and perform protective, trophic, pro-regenerative, and anti-inflammatory actions. And he was the first to isolate human neural stem cells.
Jun Ni, Professor, Department of Physics and Key Laboratory of Atomic and Molecular Nanoscience, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, who has discovered that boron nanotubes could outperform carbon nanotubes, joins our Physics Board.
Chris Haley joins our blog team with his first post.
Michael Rowe, Manager of the 3D Internet and Intraverse Department at IBM's Research Group, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Denise C. Park, T. Boone Pickens Distinguished Chair in Brain Science, University Regents' Research Scholar, The Center for Brain Health, University of Texas at Dallas, joins our Neuroscience Board.
We have launched the NanoShield Fund which will be used to turn our NanoShield program into reality.
 
While we won't be funding the development of massive utility fog curtains or orbiting laser platforms in the near future, we can do something today. Learn more!
Jacque Fresco, subject of the award-winning documentary Future by Design, joins our Futurists Board. Jacque is an industrial engineer, architectural designer, social engineer, and futurist who desires to create solutions that maximally benefit the greatest number of people.
Chris Haley joins our LF 500 team. We only need one more person for this important team to reach double digits!
John Perry Barlow, retired Wyoming cattle rancher, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Brian Cartmell, CEO of Spam Arrest and of MyPW, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Paul Root Wolpe joins our Ethics Board. He is first Chief of Bioethics for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), coeditor of the American Journal of Bioethics, and recent President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the national professional organization for scholars in bioethics and the medical humanities.
Oliver Starr joins our blog team with his first post.
We have found it useful to have both Rubyred Labs and KurzweilAI.net provide us with hosting. Each provides us with different strengths and combined they improve our redundancy. If you would also like to provide us with free hosting, please email us with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Hosting".
Paul Rabinow, coauthor of A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles and author of French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Henry Daniell, who invented a method to produce 360 million doses of anthrax vaccine in one acre of plants and genetically modified lettuce heads to produce insulin, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
 
The lettuce heads could be transformed into time-release capsules for people with diabetes, to help them maintain blood-sugar levels without regular injections. His chloroplast genetic engineering technology is protected by more than ninety U.S. and international patents.
Paul Kurtz, the editor in chief of Free Inquiry magazine, founder and chairman of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer, and founder and chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism, the Center for Inquiry, and Prometheus Books, joins our Ethics Board.
Richard Hendrick joins as an Executive Class member which brings us up to double digit Executive Class members. We now have both double digit Economy Class and Executive Class members! (And we only need two more people to join our LF 500 team for this important team to reach double digits!)
Pete Estep, Chairman of The InnerSpace Foundation (IF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and funding neuroengineering approaches for the dramatic enhancement of memory and learning, joins our Neuroscience Board. Pete is also an adviser to the Personal Genome Project, an "open-source" genome project based at Harvard Medical School.
Margaret Boden, author of The Age of Intelligent Machines: The Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science Two-Volume Set, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks, an award-winning resource website that offers clear, objective and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world around us actually works, joins our Education Board. He is also author of The Day You Discard Your Body.
Andrew Pickering, author of The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, and Producing Another World, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Merry Christmas! `Tis the season of giving. Remember that you have only 7 days left to give to Lifeboat Foundation to receive tax benefits for 2007.
Arthur Toga, who helped create the world's first brain atlas, is director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at UCLA, and edited Brain Warping, joins our Neuroscience Board.
David Kliger, Professor of Chemistry and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently investigated why diving marine mammals resist brain damage from low oxygen, joins our Chemistry Board.
David Hart, Director of Open Source Projects at The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, VP Product Delivery and Support at Novamente, and Principal Consultant at Atlantis Blue, joins our Sustainability Board. David earned a MS in Environmental Science and has a long-term interest in environment, sustainability, and earth science issues.
Brian Wang joins our staff as our Director of Research.
Joshua Fox and Matt Bamberger launch our Robotics/AI Board Forum/Mailing List.
Evan Malone launches our Engineering Board Forum/Mailing List.
Jennifer Zhang, who reversed skin aging in mice by blocking the action of a single protein, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Danny Belkin launches our Biotech/Medical Board Forum/Mailing List.
Watch the video HIV Replication 3D Animation.
Joshua Fox joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
Glenn Reynolds, the voice of Instapundit, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and author of An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths joins our Legal Board.
David Yu Zhang, who has created a molecular "amplifier" that boosts DNA computing, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Mike Perry, author of Toward Self-Optimization of Machine Intelligence and Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Tad Hogg, whose patents include Self-reconfigurable robot, Nanometer scale devices, Distributed control system with global contraints for controlling object motion with smart matter, and Adaptive self-repairing processor array, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Dino Jaroszynski, who is working on a desktop synchrotron that will freeze molecular action, joins our Physics Board.
Matthew J. McMahon, who is working on superdense arrays of electrodes to bring us closer to an artificial retina that approximates normal vision, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Charles M. Higgins, who created a robot driven by a moth's brain, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Yadong Wang, who has developed polymer scaffolds which may restore damaged nerves, joins our Chemistry Board.
David Koepsell, an author, philosopher, and attorney whose recent research focuses on the nexus of science, technology, ethics and public policy, joins our Ethics Board.
 
David's publications include Robots Bowling Alone: Evolving Post-Technological Humans and The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property.
Damian Gregory Allis, who coauthored Design and Analysis of a Molecular Tool for Carbon Transfer in Mechanosynthesis with Eric Drexler, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Luis P. Villarreal, author of Can Viruses Make Us Human? and Director of the Center for Virus Research and of the Viral Vector Facility, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Henry C. Harpending, who has discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Lee Cronin, coauthor of The imitation game — computational chemical approach to recognizing life, joins our Chemistry Board which he also founded.
The following correction was made to issue 65 of Lifeboat News: "Terrestrial Peoples, Extraterrestrial Persons" by Charles Tandy. The paper's most important idea is that he suggests two new Concerts (one Terrestrial, one Extraterrestrial) and that "implementing both proposals in concert would have a synergistic effect". (Concert 1: The political structure of Earth, which is neither a Law of Peoples nor a Law of Persons, is unworkable. But at this unique point in history it is both desirable and feasible to establish a Terrestrial Law of Peoples along the lines of Kant; Rawls; and, Daalder and Lindsay.) (Concert 2: The political structure of Space, which is neither a Law of Peoples nor a Law of Persons, is unworkable. But at this unique point in history it is both desirable and feasible to establish an Extraterrestrial Law of Persons along the lines indicated herein.) Contrary to what you may have heard, the paper does NOT suggest termination or replacement of the UN. You may want to read the paper for yourself; this paper by Charles Tandy may be found in an anthology edited by him: Death And Anti-Death, Volume 5 (Palo Alto: Ria University Press, forthcoming 2007).
Bruce Klein is now our LF Networking Director. Using the internet as his primary social-networking instrument, Bruce Klein is focused on expanding and strengthening Lifeboat Foundation's global network of professional and personal contacts and the active welcoming of financial donations as well as donations in kind from this growing web of worldwide connections.
Bruce Klein activates our ImmInst Lifeboat Foundation Team Forum.
Read issue #65 of Lifeboat News which includes U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) meeting coverage.
An employee of Hewlett-Packard recently suggested to CreateHope that the Lifeboat Foundation be included in the campaigns of CreateHope, so we are now included in their employee giving programs to some of the nation's largest corporations. We thank this employee whoever he/she is!
 
Related news: Learn how you can get your employer (even if you have retired from them) to match donations to the Lifeboat Foundation.
Adrian-Bogdan (Adi) Moruţ joins our FightAIDS@Home team, becoming the second person to join in the past three days.
Alysson Muotri joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Alysson codiscovered with Fred Gage that a long interspersed nuclear element (LINE) alters developing brain cells, creating far more diversity than the genome itself codes for. (The L1 sequence has been found to alter 80% of all neurons in the human brain!)
Adriano Cavalcanti, CEO of CAN Center for Automation in Nanobiotech, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. CAN's key development areas are biosensor, nanobioelectronics, and nanorobotics for in vivo nanomedicine application in diabetes, cancer, cardiology, and brain aneurysm.
Bijan Shirinzadeh, who has developed virtual 3D nanorobots which could lead to real cancer-fighting technology, joins our Nanotechnology and Robotics/AI Boards.
Mike Snead, author of Aerospaceplanes and Space Solar Power and American Needs to Become Spacefaring, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Mathematical biologist Iain D. Couzin, based at Princeton University and the University of Oxford, joins our Complex Systems Board. Iain is also author of Collective Minds.
Jianyu Rao, who used atomic-force microscopy to determine that cancer cells are less stiff than healthy cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Thanks to Jack Halpern we now have an Esperanto version of our about page. Jack has raised our total to 11 languages!
Jingkuang Chen, who has created an ultrasound probe about the size of a grain of rice that offers panoramic views from inside the human body, joins our Engineering Board.
Costas Efthimiou, author of Quantum group symmetry for the Φ12-perturbed and Φ21-perturbed minimal models of conformal field theory, joins our Physics and Particle Physics Board. Oh, he also coauthored Cinema fiction vs. physics reality: ghosts, vampires, and zombies: two physicists examine certain features of popular myths regarding ghosts, vampires.
Dudley Lynch, president of Brain Technologies Corporation and author of The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature and Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World, joins our Education Board.
Craig Tovey, who used the swarm intelligence of honeybees to improve the efficiency of Internet servers, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Steven A. Curley, who killed cancer cells by heating embedded nanotubes with radio waves, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Mario Beauregard, coauthor of The Spiritual Brain, and whose work was recently covered in the Scientific American article Searching for God in the Brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Bindeshwar Pathak, the great humanist and social reformer of contemporary India, joins our Sustainability Board. After Gandhi, Dr. Pathak is the man, more than any other in India, who has championed sanitation and upliftment of the untouchables as the mission of his life. For the last three decades he has been working relentlessly to keep the ecosystem clean and bring the marginalized sections of society in the mainstream.
Florin Popescu joins our Neuroscience Board. He is the leader of the Brain2Robot project at Fraunhofer Institute FIRST in Berlin, whose goal is to partially restore arm function in severely paralyzed people by detecting thought commands via EEG (electrodes which touch the scalp), and along with direction of gaze, control a robotic arm.
M. Ellen Mitchell, who coedited Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Seth Horowitz, coauthor of Demonstrations of simple and complex auditory psychophysics for multiple platforms and environments, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Itamar Elhanany, who is on the Program Committee for the Workshop on the Sociocultural, Ethical and Futurological Implications of Artificial General Intelligence, A Post-Conference Workshop for AGI-08, the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, and is Principal Investigator for the Machine Intelligence Lab & Networking Research Group at The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Michael King, who has invented a device that filters the blood for cancer and stem cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. When the device captures cancer cells, it kills them. When it captures stem cells, it harvests them for later use in tissue engineering, bone marrow transplants, and other applications that treat human disease and improve health.
Vladimir A. Mironov, who is developing methods to print living complex tissues or even entire organs, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Fredrik Linaker, project leader of the Pocket Supercomputer at Accenture Technology Labs, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Moshe Looks, Software Designer and Researcher at Google where he conducts research in program induction and artificial general intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Liangchi Zhang, Director of the Research Laboratory for Precision and Nano Processing Technology and who is developing a nanotech bullet proof armor that bounces away the bullets so the wearer is neither bruised or harmed, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
James Kuffner is organizing the Humanoids 2007 conference November 29 to December 1 in Pittsburgh. He is also presenting two talks at the conference.
Eric Baum joins our Robotics/AI Board. Eric is an American computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and author. He is known for his materialist and evolutionist theories of intelligence and consciousness, set forth in his book What is Thought?
Neva Ciftcioglu, codiscoverer of Nanobacteria, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read EcoTripping: 25 Vacations for Green Travelers.
We now have a Facebook group thanks to Michael Anissimov.
Sarah Jane Pell joins our Media & Arts Board. She is Director/Founder of Aquabatics Australia, Adjunct Lecturer, School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia, and Delegate to the Space Generation Advisory Council, Hyderabad, India.
Joseph P. Jackson III joins our blog team with his first post.
Guido Núñez-Mujica, winner of the 2006 World Transhumanist Association's J.B.S. Haldane Award for Best Undergraduate Transhumanist Paper advancing transhumanist thought, and winner of the 2006 Sowing the Future Award of the World Future Society Venezuela, joins our Futurists Board.
Gregory Stock, biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA's School of Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Doug Kaye, Founder and Producer of IT Conversations where he and his team offer thousands of podcasts of tech-oriented discussion, conference sessions, and other tech topics, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Vadim Fraifeld, who coauthored Mitochondrial Genome Anatomy and Species-Specific Lifespan, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Brian Pasley, coauthor of Transcranial magnetic stimulation elicits coupled neural and hemodynamic consequences and Subcortical discrimination of unperceived objects during binocular rivalry, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Read issue #64 of Lifeboat News!
Thanks to Jack Halpern we now have a Chinese, French, Hebrew, Korean, and a Romanian version of our about page. Jack has raised our total to 10 languages!
Ben Goertzel will be speaking at The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence at the FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis in cooperation with AAAI, March 1-3, 2008.
Gary S. Mezo, CEO of NanoBiotech, and discoverer of nanobacteria along with Nobel Prize Nominees Neva Ciftcioglu and Olavi Kajander, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Glenn Reynolds becomes our 100th donor with a $100 donation. Our donor list is now in the triple digits! Glenn is Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and is best known for his blog Instapundit, one of the most widely read American political blogs.
Colby Thomson, Associate Director of Strategy at the Singularity Institute, joins our Finance Board. He is also CEO of Allied Strategy and Tri-Chair of the 2015 Vision Group: University R&D Corridor.
 
To celebrate so many SIAI folks joining our SAB recently, we have now improved the name of our UFAI-Shield to AIShield as we prepare to put more effort into this program.
Rudi Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman Planning and previous Regional Vice President of Primerica and Senior Vice President of Amerishare Investors, joins our Finance Board.
Pejman Makhfi, Director of Venture Development at the Singularity Institute and Managing Director of Venture Choice, a private angel group, joins our Finance Board.
Read Distraught Participants Riot at the Foresight Unconference.
Evan Malone, co-creator of the Fab@Home project, which promotes the advancement of personal automated fabrication technology by freely distributing designs and software which allow anyone to build and operate their own open-architecture, multi-material desktop SFF system, joins our Engineering Board.
James D. Miller, author of A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every Year, The Singular Sensation, and Should We Fear "Cosmetic Neurology", joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Jan Vijg, who helped develop the MutaMouse™, the first transgenic animal engineered to detect gene mutations in a living organism, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Martin Westwell, Deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind which is part of the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Susan Fonseca-Klein who is President of Fonseca LLC, Chief Administration Officer for The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, cofounder of the Immortality Institute, and who was a participant in the Moot Court Hearing On The Petition Of A Conscious Computer, joins our Legal Board.
Rob Jacob, who is developing a computer-human interface that allows the computer to read the human's mind and determine if the human is overloaded, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Such a system would wisely assign the next incoming plane to another controller when it knew an air traffic controller's brain was overloaded.
Oren Froy, author of The relationship between calorie restriction and the biological clock: lessons from long-lived transgenic mice, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Ruth Itzhaki, coauthor of Alzheimer's disease, the neuroimmune axis, and viral infection and Inflammatory consequences: benevolent, or virulent?, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Alexei Turchin, author of The Structure of Global Catastrophe and Observer Fate, joins our Futurists Board.
Ben Goertzel, who is SIAI Director of Research, CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering, and chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Read Synthesizing Bioterror: Are mail order pandemics in your future?.
Anthony Waller, the director of the upcoming movie The Singularity is Near, becomes our 94th donor.
Watch Visions of the Future on the BBC starting November 5th.
Nobel Laureate Eric S. Maskin joins our Scientific Advisory Board. We congratulate him on his 2007 Nobel win!
James Martin named 2007 Guardian Award winner. The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.
 
This year's award is in recognition of the achievements of James Martin's Future of Humanity Institute in studying global catastrophic risks and impacts of future technologies.
James Kuffner, Professor at The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Watch his Animation Theatre piece on Behavior Planning!
Charles Gross, who overthrew a dogma nearly a century old by discovering that the adult brain continually adds new neurons, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Venu Govindaraju, whose seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
John T. Cacioppo, Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, joins our Neuroscience Board.
James Chartres who has designed a new space habitat that might one day allow astronauts on the Moon or Mars to be 90 to 95 per cent self-sufficient, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Renowned cognitive neuroscientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who cofounded the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Rita Carter, author of the distinguished books Mapping the Mind, Exploring Consciousness, Mapping the Memory, and Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Vasant Honavar, Director of the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning, and Discovery, joins our Information Sciences Board.
Peter Eckersley, Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
Jesse Merriman, Programmer/Analyst for the Frontier Science Foundation, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Matt Bamberger, CEO and founder of the AI research company Intelligent Artifice, which is working on developing human-equivalent Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Thanks to Harri Wolf, we now have a German version of our about page. Thanks to Jack Halpern and Sergio M.L. Tarrero, we now have a Spanish version of our about page.
Eric Bauswell joins our important LF 500 team!
David Brin provides support for our U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) meeting.
Read issue #63 of Lifeboat News!
Learn more about our important U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) meeting on November 6 in San Francisco and how you can support this meeting.
Thanks to Jack Halpern, we now have a Japanese version of our about page. Thanks to Alexei Turchin, we now have a Russian version of our about page. More language translations will be published shortly.
Vascular biology expert and endothelial cell specialist Patrizia d'Alessio, who founded AISA Therapeutics, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Matt Browne, author of The Future Happens Twice, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read Fuel From the Fields: An alternative energy to reduce deforestation in Haiti: World Bank 2007 first prize winner.
Deborah Osborne joins the Board of Advisors for IxReveal, a business intelligence leader in text analytics for unstructured and structured data.
Lifeboat Foundation staff will be meeting with the U.S. Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group (SSG) on November 6 in San Francisco. Robb Wilcox, Science Advisor, Chief of Naval Operations, Strategic Studies Group, Naval War College, says "We are especially interested in how you identify and mitigate risks associated with future technological developments."
Sergio M.L. Tarrero becomes our new top donor with $22,340 donated. Sergio is a man of action who is able to see the dangers that are coming and who does more than simply talk about these dangers.
Read Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.
Dennis Hong, who has developed STriDER (Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot) which has a graceful and acrobatic gait that sees its body flip 180 degrees with each step, joins our Robotics/AI Board. Dennis is also founder and director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa).
Jud Ready, who has developed solar cells that feature an array of nano-towers — like microscopic blades of grass — that add surface area and trap more sunlight, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Manuela Veloso, who leads the CORAL research group at Carnegie Mellon University where she develops robots that Cooperate, Observe the world, Reason, Act, and Learn, joins our Robotics/AI board. Her robots have often been world champions in the RoboCup competitions including winning the world championship in the small-size robot category in 2007.
Read I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer.
Renata Bushko, Founder and Director of the Future of Health Technology Institute (FHTI), joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Yong Zhang, Senior Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) which is the USA's primary laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development (R&D), joins our Sustainability Board.
Lee Gutkind, author of Almost Human: Making Robots Think, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Watch RoboCup 2007 Final, Humanoid League.
Matthew L. McGuirl joins our staff as Advisory Board Forum/Mailing List Moderator.
Wei He, who codeveloped a technology to detect cancer by scanning surface veins, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
David L. Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Oussama Khatib, President of IFRR, the International Foundation of Robotics Research, joins our Robotics/AI board.
Named "Bill Gates' Worst Nightmare" by the Financial Times, Shervin Pishevar is a visionary technology entrepreneur, published researcher and technology incubation expert, best known for helping usher in the on demand web computing era and the visionary behind the first web operating system with his first startup, WebOS. Shervin is President of Freewebs, the 2nd largest web publisher in the world with over 14 million members and adding 1 million members. And he is now a member of our Futurists Board as well!
Nicola Pugno, engineer and physicist at Polytechnic of Turin, Italy who has formulated a hierarchy of adhesive forces that will be strong enough to suspend a person's full body weight against a wall or on a ceiling, while also being easy to detach, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Aaron Edsinger, cofounder of Meka Robotics and author of Robot Manipulation in Human Environments and A Gestural Language For A Humanoid Robot, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Stephen L. Macknik, coauthor of Windows of the Mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Menachem Elimelech, founder and director of Yale's Environmental Engineering Program, joins our Sustainability Board.
Sankar Nair, who has learned to control the dimensions of metal oxide nanotubes, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Read issue #62 of Lifeboat News!
Our LinkedIn group for our Scientific Advisory Board members passed 100 members within 24 hours of its launch. Special thanks to Philippe Van Nedervelde for conceiving, organizing, and launching this effort!
Big day for Lifeboat-related online groups and teams today: fellow LF SAB member Philippe Van Nedervelde has created a Lifeboat Foundation team on Folding@Home. Our team has number 88682. Philippe invites any and all LFers to join our Lifeboat Foundation Folding@Home team. Those owning a Playstation 3 know that they can use their PS3 for Folding@Home. Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users can also download the software as well.
 
Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s)/PS3 to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Current Folding@Home projects include the search for cures of: Alzheimer's Disease, Cancer, Huntington's Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, and Parkinson's Disease. Your participation can help lead to a cure for these diseases, so donate computing cycles generously!
 
For any questions related to this, contact Philippe directly at philippe@lifeboat.com.
We have launched a LinkedIn group for our Scientific Advisory Board members. The goal of this group is to help members:
  • Reach other members of the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Boards.
  • Accelerate careers/business through referrals from Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Boards LinkedIn group members.
  • Know more than a name — view rich professional profiles from fellow Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Boards members.
Joseph Ayers, who is working on robot lobsters that will be able to collect marine-science data and patrol for pollution, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
We now have a "Website Redesign" category at https://lifeboat.com/ex/donations for those who wish to help pay for an upgrade of our site.
Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde, director of the Martinez-Conde Laboratory, who was featured on the September 2007 cover of Scientific American and completed research with Nobel Laureate David Hubel, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Irene Pepperberg, founder and president of The Alex Foundation, and who was one of the first to try to extend work on language learning in animals other than humans (exemplified by the Washoe Project) to a bird species, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Sheryl Brahnam, whose research includes decision support systems, "smart embodiment" for embodied agents, face recognition (support vector machines, neural networks, and classifier ensembles), and theoretical discussions regarding human-like interfaces in cultural and business domains, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Liesl Capper, CEO of MyCyberTwin.com which allows you to create virtual personalities that can chat for you online, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Matt McGuirl joins our blog team with his first post.
We have now launched our LifeShield Bunkers program whose goal is the creation of fallback positions on Earth in case programs such as our BioShield and NanoShield fail globally or locally.
Read Lockheed Martin Developing "Maple Seed" Flying Cameras.
Watch PBS's Nanotechnology Takes Off.
Read Why I've Donated Over $1,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation by Michael Anissimov.
Joseph P. Jackson III joins us and says "Today it is outrageous that the term existential risk is not even in the vocabulary of most policymakers, not to mention the public at large. The next decade is absolutely critical — either we get these issues recognized globally, from the highest levels of intergovernmental meetings, down to the lowest common denominator of popular culture — or — we abandon all hope of steering our future as it overcomes us".
Read Aubrey de Grey's much-anticipated book, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.
Jason Gaverick Matheny officially joins as a LF 500 member.
Read issue #61 of Lifeboat News!
SUPPORT TO COMBAT EXISTENTIAL RISKS
 
The Lifeboat Foundation, a leading organization combating existential risks, has gained the support from key leaders worried about our future.
 
Jaan Tallinn, who is based in Estonia and is cofounder of Skype, the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation participants and encrypts the communication, donated $10,000. Jack Halpern, who is based in Japan and is CEO of The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) in Japan donated $12,000.
 
The Lifeboat Foundation has earmarked funds for participation in the X PRIZE Cup '07 from October 26 to October 28 at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico where it will demonstrate Electromagnetic (EM) launch technology. This technology will allow rockets to be launched with no fuel onboard. Since most of the power in a rocket is used to launch the fuel and not the payload, this is a significant development. It also helps avoid the danger of being launched on a large chemical bomb AND reduces pollution as well. Such technology will be critical if an existential risk eliminates life on this planet. Information on this technology is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gun and http://www.magneticsmagazine.com/e-prints/UT.pdf
 
In addition, the Lifeboat Foundation is earmarking funds towards a nanodefense fund which will focus on funding Robert A. Freitas Jr.'s research on developing defenses against nanoweapons. Thanks to generous funding by Sergio M.L. Tarrero who is based in Spain and has donated nearly $10,000, the nanodefense fund will begin funding Robert Freitas in Fall '07. The Lifeboat Foundation is soliciting more funds for this purpose. Donations may be made at https://lifeboat.com/ex/donations (Select Thermal Censorship of Ecophagy Study.)
 
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil who is based in the U.S. has donated over $10,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation recommends that you follow his wise example and safeguard humanity against our uncertain future.
 
Ray Kurzweil says "A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks. We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks and that is why I support the Lifeboat Foundation."
 
The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.
 
Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, including new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.
 
With a fund of $241,919.80, 392 Scientific Advisory Board members involved in 26 subboards ranging from Particle Physics to Neuroscience, including Howard Bloom, Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, Nobel Laureates, and many other prominent thinkers, 23 programs, and 40 reports, the Lifeboat Foundation is making steady progress towards this goal.
Keith A. Bauer, author of Wired Patients: Implantable Microchips and Biosensors in Patient Care, joins our Ethics Board.
Charles Annis said "To say that Amara Graps is an interesting scholar is to say that the Grand Canyon is an interesting walk." Amara Graps, researcher with the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and the Institute of Interplanetary Space Physics (IFSI), joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Jason Silva, Host and Producer on Current TV, the television channel cofounded by Al Gore and now the fastest growing cable network in TV history, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Jack Uldrich, president of The NanoVeritas Group — an international leadership and technology consultancy dedicated to helping business, government, and non-profit organizations prepare for and profit from the emerging field of nanotechnology, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Watch The Immortalists: A Short Film.
Matt McGuirl, co-developer of ipANGEL, the world's only self-tuning Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), joins our Cybercrime/Malcode board. ipANGEL remains the only IPS to automatically integrate detailed information about the vulnerability state of the systems it protects.
Jon Newton, founder of p2pnet.net, the first Internet web page to carry daily, frequently updated news, stories, features and commentaries on digital media, distributed computing and associated technologies and events which haven't been spun, filtered and pre-digested by vested corporate interests, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Wendell Wallach, chair of the working research group on Technology and Ethics at Yale University, joins our Ethics Board.
Jürgen Schmidhuber, who was evolving computer programs through genetic algorithms back in 1987, invented a neural method for nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) called predictability minimization, and created the first learning algorithm for neural networks based on principles of the market economy, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Robert Birge, who is developing genetically engineered microbial protein for use as rewritable holographic memory, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Sorin Cotofana, who has developed a novel computing paradigm that allows tunneling electrons to perform mathematical division calculations, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Melanie Swan, principal of MS Futures Group, and author of Postmodern Physics and Manifold Destiny, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Mehdi Dastani, who is endowing a robot with a set of logical rules for emotions, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Nick Yee, creator of The Daedalus Project, whose survey of over 40,000 MMORPG players has been cited extensively by game scholars, game developers, and popular media, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Igor Alabugin, who developed light-activated molecules that kill cancer cells, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Randall Walker, president of Live Ink Reading Technologies, whose technology adds 10-15 percentile points on nationally standardized reading tests, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Injae Shin, who has developed an alternative to stem cells for treating chronic brain diseases, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
V.R. Manoj, founding member of the Indian chapter of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) and Organizational Director for the Second Life chapter of the WTA, joins our Futurists Board.
Virgil Griffith, who authored the Wikipedia Scanner which offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Steve Omohundro, president of Self-Aware Systems where they are developing a new kind of intelligent technology that learns to understand and improve itself, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Tom McCabe joins our blog team with his first post.
InstaPundit links to Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies.
Read Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies by Michael Anissimov.
Anke Kamrath, director at the San Diego Computer Center (SDCS), joins our Supercomputing Board.
Yi Sun, in charge of the Sun Lab at UCLA where she produced functioning neurons from human embryonic stem cells, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Rada Mihalcea, author of Using Wikipedia for Automatic Word Sense Disambiguation, and President of SIGLEX, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years.
The Millennium Project of WFUNA (World Federation of UN Associations) posts a free ad for us.
Read Design for a Human Mission to a Near Earth Object by our Scientific Advisory Board member Bruce Damer.
Justin C. Sanchez, Director of the UF Neuroprosthetics Research Group and featured in The Future Of Medicine: Insert Chip, Cure Disease?, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Gianmarco Veruggio, President of Scuola di Robotica (School of Robotics), who coined the term "roboethics" and organized the First International Symposium on Roboethics, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Andrey Rzhetsky, principal investigator for GeneWays: a system for automatically extracting, analyzing, visualizing and integrating molecular pathway data from research literature, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Allan Collins, coinventor of the OCC (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988) model which has established itself as the standard model for emotion synthesis, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read Considering Military and Ethical Implications of Nanofactory Level Nanotechnology by Brian Wang.
Saroj Nayak, whose key discovery could help advance the role of graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Read Technical Critique of NASA's Report to Congress and associated of Near-Earth Object Survey and Deflection Study: Final Report" by Russell L. Schweickart, Chairman, B612 Foundation and Chairman, Association of Space Explorers Committee on NEOs.
Brad Dickerson, Principal Investigator of the Dickerson Neuroimaging Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Victor L. Pushparaj, who is creating artificial muscle using carbon nanotubes, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Ian H. Robertson, author of Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brain's Untapped Potential, joins our Neuroscience Board.
Read First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq.
 
Comment by reader: I sincerely hope that these things constantly yell "EXTERMINATE... EXTERMINATE" while they are active.
Watch Nanotechnology vs. cancer!
Anthony Waller, director of the upcoming movie THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR - A True Story About the Future, based on the recent best seller by the celebrated inventor, author and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, joins our Media & Arts Board.
Get the 2007 State of the Future!
Deborah Osborne, author of Molecular Manufacturing and the Need for Crime Science, President of the Society of Police Futurists International (PFI), and member of the FBI/PFI Futures Working Group, joins our Counterterrorism Board.
Michael Silverton, architect of the world's first all fiber optic Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) networks, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read issue #60 of Lifeboat News!
Read The Trouble with Transhumanists: Boldly going where no man's gone before — TransVision
Thanks to generous donors, we exceeded the goal for our EM Launch Competition by 20% and it will be featured at the X PRIZE Cup '07!
 
Electromagnetic (EM) launch technology will allow rockets to be launched with no fuel onboard. Since most of the power in a rocket is used to launch the fuel and not the payload, this is a significant development. It also helps avoid the danger of being launched on a large chemical bomb AND reduces pollution as well.
Our Scientific Advisory Board members Gary Marchant, Tihamer "Tee" Toth-Fejel, Mike Treder, and Brian Wang will be speaking at Challenges & Opportunities: The Future of Nano & Bio Technologies: an interdisciplinary conference organized by World Care and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology from September 9 to September 13 at Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Updated information: The Coast to Coast AM with George Noory radio show on July 19 from 11 pm - 2 am PT will feature our Scientific Advisory Board members James Gardner, Barbara Marx Hubbard, James Hughes, Charlie Kam, Ray Kurzweil, and Philippe Van Nedervelde. 5 million listeners will learn about possible futures and solutions!
Lifeboat Foundation members are now eligible for a 33.33% discount off any books from Vera Verba, including A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, God Wants You Dead, A Second Look at Eden, Jesus - The New Testament, and Survive!. To get your discount code, send an email to membership@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Vera Verba Discount".
Lori Marino joins our blog team with her first post.
Read Why the Moon? Human survival! by Robert Shapiro.
Read Safeguarding Humanity: Faced with the increasing threat of advanced technologies, the Lifeboat Foundation has a plan at Betterhumans.
Read Human Body Version 2.0 by Ray Kurzweil.
The Coast to Coast AM with George Noory radio show on July 19 from 11 pm - 2 am PT will feature our Scientific Advisory Board members Amara D. Angelica, James Hughes, Charlie Kam, Tihamer "Tee" Toth-Fejel, Philippe Van Nedervelde, and Shannon Vyff. 5 million listeners will learn about possible futures and solutions!
Mike DeMaio, who launched Motorola's MicroTac, the first palm sized cell phone in history, joins our Media Board.
Mark A. Walker, founder and president of Permanent End International, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending hunger, illiteracy and environmental degradation, joins our Ethics Board.
Giorgio Gaviraghi, developer of pAstroHut, an extraterrestrial construction system for the assembly of space stations in other bodies utilizing local materials, joins our Space Settlement Board.
Arlan Andrews, Sr., founder of SIGMA, a think tank of science fiction authors which is working with the Homeland Security Department to prevent the next terrorist attack, joins our Engineering, Futurists, and Nanotechnology Boards.
Jordan Grafman, Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke), joins our Neuroscience Board.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Abhishek Motayed, who developed tiny, highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from nanowires, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
David Lashmore, cofounder of Nanocomp Technologies, who invented the process to produce single wall carbon nanotube textiles and high strength carbon nanotube yarns, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
Tanmay Vachaspati, who discovered that black holes may contain nothing, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
John Stone, lead developer of VMD, a high performance molecular visualization tool used by biophysicists and structural biologists all over the world, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
Read issue #59 of Lifeboat News!
Betterhumans runs a free banner ad for us!
Ed Lantz, Founder of The Harmony Channel and author of Virtual Reality and the Perfection of Consciousness, joins four of our Boards — giving us 21 speakers at Transvision 2007.
Michael Fleischmann, President/Founder of Intelligent Design Creations and Owner of Cosmos Computing, LLC, becomes our first First Class member. (Say that three times fast!)
Anders Sandberg becomes our 20th speaker at Transvision 2007. To celebrate, we have obtained a promotion code for 40% off the event. To get this promotion code from us, send an email with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation TV07 promotion code" to tv07@lifeboat.com.
Dylan Evans, author of several popular science books, including Emotion: The Science of Sentiment and Placebo: The Belief Effect, and founder of the Utopia Experiment, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Harvard neuroscientist Joshua D. Greene, coauthor of An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Desmond John Tobin, Director of Medical Biosciences Research (School of Life Sciences) at the University of Bradford, England, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
The primary objective of Intelligent Design Creations is the furtherance of the scientific enterprise through financial, intellectual, and creative contributions. This striving is realized by the advocacy of entities which promote rational ideals for the betterment of humanity. Specifically, Intelligent Design Creations seeks to promote those organizations/endeavors that may otherwise lack public recognition or acceptance. Learn more!
Michael Fleischmann, President/Founder of Intelligent Design Creations and Owner of Cosmos Computing, LLC, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
We now have offices in Hong Kong, China; London, UK; Los Angeles, USA; Minden, NV, USA; New York City, USA; San Francisco, USA; São Paulo, Brazil; Sydney, Australia; and Tokyo, Japan.
Microsoft's brain-computer interface expert Desney S. Tan joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Tihamer "Tee" Toth-Fejel, author of LEGOs to the Stars: Kinetic Cellular Automata, and Parallel Nanomachines for Space Applications, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Hiroki Sayama, author of Self-replicating machines attempting to solve the unsolvable, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
IBM's Metaverse Evangelist Roo Reynolds joins our Futurists Board and Media & Arts Board.
Jack Halpern, CEO of The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) in Japan, donates $12,000 to Lifeboat Foundation. This puts him in 1st place with Ray Kurzweil close behind.
 
The CJK Dictionary Institute plays a leading role in helping the IT industry penetrate the lucrative East Asian market by providing software developers with high quality CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Arabic dictionary data and consulting services.
Xerox researcher Frédérique Segond, who helped develop an evolutionary search engine that analyzes the meaning of words and contexts and accepts queries in everyday language, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Anastasios John Hart, author of Chemical, Mechanical, and Thermal Control of Substrate-Bound Carbon Nanotube Growth, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Read Noise keeps spooks out of the loop. Learn how Laszlo Kish has developed a simple, cheap way of encrypting messages that is almost impossible to hack into.
Princeton cosmologist Tony Rothman, who authored Everything's Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology and Instant Physics, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
ETLD WebTV runs a free banner ad for us!
Added The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online to our SecurityPreserver page.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the genius behind Microsoft's Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Award winning filmmaker, electronic music producer, theatrical show director, and classically-trained violinist Kenji Williams joins our Art & Media Board.
Environmentalist and Actor Ed Begley, Jr. joins our Sustainability Board.
Read Neurocops: The Politics of Prohibition and the Future of Enforcing Social Policy from Inside the Body by Richard Glen Boire.
James Blodgett will speak about Global Risk Reduction on July 4th at the Annual Gathering of American Mensa.
James Blodgett, coordinator of the American Mensa Global Risk Reduction Special Interest Group, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Prolific software developer and researcher Aaron Davidson has posted a free banner on his site for us!
Our Scientific Advisory Board members James Gardner, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Michael Weiner join our massive lineup of 16 speakers at Transvision 2007.
Plamen Dragozov, who developed a P2P framework for distributed scientific computing based on JXTA, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Added Larry Brilliant: TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic to BioShield program.
Read issue #58 of Lifeboat News!
Transatlantic team lead by Colin McGuckin bring treating Type 1 Diabetes a step closer.
 
Human tissue producing insulin has been created from Cord Blood Stem Cells. The tissue, which is destroyed in Type 1 Diabetes was developed by the same transatlantic team that were the world's first to discover "embryonic-like" cells in cord blood and also first to produce liver tissue from the same cells.
 
Newcastle coauthor in the study, Dr Nico Forraz, said "With over 120 million children born every year, cord blood stem cells will be the leader in developing stem cell therapy for patients across the world. Over 85 conditions can already be treated with cord blood. Today we are a step closer to adding Type 1 Diabetes to this list".
David Brin announces that his next book will feature the Lifeboat Foundation.
Cassio Pennachin, CTO of Novamente LLC, cofounder of Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI), CTO of Biomind LLC, and coeditor of Artificial General Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
Added quote by Garry Kasparov to Quotes page.
Our Wikipedia entry needs some work. Help fix it!
Thanks to input from Kemal Akman, our InternetShield program has been upgraded and is now listed as one of our six current programs.
Our donor list is now sortable by name, date, and amount.
Prolific software developer and researcher Aaron Davidson joins our Robotics/AI board.
Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation participants and encrypts the communication, donates $10,000 to Lifeboat Foundation. This currently puts him in 2nd place with Ray Kurzweil in the lead and Sergio M.L. Tarrero close behind.
Added Feds Target Nuke Phantom: Osama Henchman Named in JFK Plot to our Nuclear Terrorist page.
Parish Mozdzierz, Deputy Editor of Betterhumans.com, joins our Futurists Board.
Our MySpace page has been improved and expanded.
Jeffrey Herrlich, author of Existential Risk and Fermi's Paradox, joins our Futurists Board.
Keith A. Hoyes, coauthor of Artificial General Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI board.
Richard Leis, Jr., Operations Specialist for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), joins our Space Settlement Board.
 
The HiRISE Camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is currently returning the highest resolution images of Mars ever captured from orbit.
Stanley Pecavar of Sun Microsystems joins our Robotics/AI board.
Sergio M.L. Tarrero donates $3,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation, bringing his donation total close to $10K.
Geneticist Andrew Hessel joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Sylvia Engdahl becomes our MySpace webmaster.
Thoughtware.TV sponsors the Lifeboat Foundation and joins our important LF-500 team.
Kemal Akman, Senior Developer and Security Architect for Public Key Infrastructure for Ciphire Labs AG, Germany/Switzerland, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
Joshua Fox, Ph.D. joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Charlie Kam, Conference Chairman of TransVision 2007, joins our Futurists Board.
Added information to our World News page about Russian caught trying to sell enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb.
David Orban, CEO of Questar, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and coauthor of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
James Douma, cofounder and Chief Software Architect of Nitobi Software, a leading provider of AJAX technologies, joins our Information Sciences and Robotics/AI boards.
Added information to our World News page about Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia.
Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged, who discovered "Lucy's baby" — the earliest baby in the human fossil record, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
Shannon Vyff, author of 21st Century Kids, joins our Education Board.
Listen to the interview of our Michael Anissimov by RU Sirius.
Listen to the interview of our Michael Anissimov on Changesurfer Radio.
Read the Fortune article The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth which covers our genius Ray Kurzweil.
05/07/07 Earthquake swarm strikes Yellowstone: Sixteen small earthquakes with magnitudes up to 2.7 shook Yellowstone National Park last week. This supervolcano last erupted 70,000 years ago.
05/07/07 Jack Halpern, CEO of The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) in Japan, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
05/06/07 Read issue #57 of Lifeboat News!
05/05/07 Our Scientific Advisory Board members José Cordeiro, George Dvorsky, Aubrey de Grey, James Hughes, Ray Kurzweil, Michael LaTorra, Max More, Giulio Prisco, and Natasha Vita-More will be speaking at Transvision 2007 - Transforming Humanity: Innerspace to Outerspace from July 23 to July 25 at Chicago, IL, USA. It will be wall-to-wall Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board members!
05/02/07 Watch a magnificent space compilation.
05/01/07 Kenneth P. Weiss, whose SecurID technology is used by the three branches of the United States government, including the Defense Department, Treasury, Senate and the White House, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
04/30/07 Kenneth P. Weiss joins as a LF-500 member, James Blodgett joins as an Executive Class member, and Glenn A. Miller joins as an Economy Class member.
04/28/07 Read Mouse brain simulated on computer which describes an achievement by Dharmendra S Modha and others in simulating half a mouse brain on a supercomputer.
04/24/07 Listen to the RU Sirius interview of Dr. Alan H. Goldstein that focuses on our A-PRIZE contest.
04/23/07 Read Create an Alien, Win A-Prize!
04/21/07 Read our interview with Robert A. Freitas Jr!
04/15/07 Jonathan Dotse and Jacques Lacansan join our FightAIDS@Home team, using the spare clock cycles on their computers to help discover new drugs that fight AIDS!
04/14/07 Duncan Steel, author of Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets: The Search for the Million Megaton Menace That Threatens Life on Earth, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Duncan has been honored with a robot named after him in Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Hammer of God, and asteroid 4713 Steel was named after him as well.
04/13/07 Moheb Costandi, author of Augmented cognition: Science fact or science fiction?, joins our NeuroScience Board.
04/06/07 Jaan Tallinn, whose Skype is the only major IM client that both securely authenticates conversation participants and encrypts the communication, joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
04/05/07 Our InternetShield program has been upgraded. We welcome your comments on it!
04/03/07 Read issue #56 of Lifeboat News!
04/01/07 Google introduces its ground breaking TiSP: a revolutionary free in-home wireless broadband service.
03/31/07 If you would like to help with the move of a volunteer to Reno, Nevada, USA (lifting items, driving moving van), contact volunteerwork@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Move". Money and other items are available in exchange for your help!
03/31/07 The next CRN Global Task Force Scenario Project will be on April 21 and 22.
 
The CRN GTF Scenario Project's goal is to offer plausible, logical, understandable "stories" that illustrate the challenge of contending with the implications of advanced nanotechnology. What will that future look like? What can we learn from picturing it now that might help us to avoid the worst pitfalls and generate the greatest benefits?
 
Learn more and participate!
03/30/07 Read our blog post Rehearsing the Future.
03/28/07 We have launched a new program, the InternetShield. As the Internet grows in importance, it is increasingly likely that an attack on the Internet could cause physical deaths as well as informational damage. We would love your input on how to improve this new program!
03/27/07 Read our blog post China, Indonesia, India, Japan and the US most vulnerable to asteroids!
03/27/07 Premiering today PBS will start airing the HDTV program "Quest : Nanotechnology Takes Off". The program takes a look at how the manipulation of particles at the atomic level may lead to cures for cancer and other diseases. The Airing schedule, including for standard definition broadcasts is now available.
 
The PBS show features several new HD animations commissioned from Philippe Van Nedervelde's award-winning 3D animation & VR studio E-spaces / CG4TV.com. In particular, a 40 second animation will showcase a medical nanobot approaching and interfacing with a neuron and its dendrites with a view to replacing their function, illustrating one of the ways in which neuro-prosthetic surgery as well as gradual, non-destructive mind-uploading may be executed in the not-so-distant future.
 
Learn more!
03/26/07 Added video of the Z450 Full Color 3D Printer to videos page. (This real product makes three dimensional objects).
03/26/07 Dr. John H. Halpern, a Harvard Medical School Professor who is conducting a multi-year study investigating the neurocognitive consequences of ecstasy-abuse, joins our Neuroscience Board.
03/26/07 Darnell Clayton joins our blog team with his first post.
03/25/07 Benny Peiser, author of The Dangers of Consensus Science, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/23/07 A generous Lifeboat Foundation benefactor has offered to subsidize a volunteer's living space to the tune of $300/month. So not only would you get an entertaining Lifeboat Foundation volunteer but you would make a few bucks as well. Money plus entertainment... What more could you ask for?
 
If you have space available for an entertaining Lifeboat Foundation volunteer, send a message to volunteerwork@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Space".
 
The house the volunteer was receiving free housing in since May 2006 was just sold so we are trying to help out here!
03/22/07 Sergio M.L. Tarrero, BSc has now joined our Counterterrorism Board, Ethics Board, and Transparency vs. Privacy Board as well. *AND* he has already translated all the main sections of our site, including all the Programs, into Spanish. The Spanish version of this site will be online shortly. Sergio is a man on the move!
03/22/07 Dharmendra S. Modha is co-organizing Cognitive Computing 2007 at Berkeley Art Museum on May 2-3. Registration is free. Learn more!
03/22/07 Sergio M.L. Tarrero, BSc becomes our Lifeboat Foundation International Director of Audiovisual Communications and also joins our Media Board. A physicist by training, Sergio has focused professionally on the creative arts, particularly the worlds of music, film, television and advertising.
03/21/07 Read A Simpler Origin for Life: "The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. Energy-driven networks of small molecules afford better odds as the initiators of life." by Robert Shapiro.
03/20/07 Brian Cox, who is in charge of an international project to upgrade the giant ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's new 27km-long machine, with tiny silicon detectors almost half a mile from where the particles in the LHC collide, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/17/07 Added information to our World News page about the simultaneous chemical weapon attacks by Al Qaeda in Fallujah, Iraq which left over 350 people killed or injured.
03/16/07 Listen to the archived interview with Philippe Van Nedervelde. Learn about this March 16th, 2007 broadcast.
03/16/07 Listen to Philippe Van Nedervelde on The Space Show live today from 9:30 to 11:30 AM PDT (5:30 to 7:30 PM GMT).
 
Listeners can talk to the guest or the host using toll free 1 (866) 687-7223, by sending e-mail during the program using dmlivings@yahoo.com, drspace@thespaceshow.com, thespaceshow@gmail.com, or chatting on AOL/ICQ/CompuServe Chat using the screen name "spaceshowchat".
03/16/07 Brooks Cole, the founder and creative force behind HoloCosmos, joins our Media Board.
03/15/07 Steven Palter joins our blog team with his first post.
03/14/07 Peter Pesti, author of Detailed Roadmap of the 21st Century, joins our Futurists Board. Watch his video!
03/13/07 Alea A. Mills, who discovered that the p63 gene is likely to play a fundamental biological role in aging-related processes in both humans and mice, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/13/07 Nate Lo, who discovered Midichloria mitochondrii, the first bacterium that infects mitochondria, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/12/07 Nickolaus E. Leggett, coauthor of Requirements and Opportunities for the Successful Development of Lunar and Martian Agricultural Systems, joins our Space Settlement Board.
03/11/07 Watch I am the very model of a Singularitarian.
03/10/07 Watch Might we all live 100 years longer? 1000? (Aubrey de Grey, Oxford 2005)
03/09/07 Watch some dancing robots (worth about $4 million in total).
03/08/07 Read Jurisprudence of Artilects: Blueprint for a Synthetic Citizen by Frank W. Sudia, JD.
03/06/07 A Lifeboat Foundation volunteer has been receiving free housing since May 2006. Unfortunately that house was just sold. If you have space available for an entertaining Lifeboat Foundation volunteer, send a message to volunteerwork@lifeboat.com with the subject "Lifeboat Foundation Space".
03/06/07 Watch Human Version 2.0.
03/05/07 Dr. Zenon Kulpa has posted a free banner on his site for us!
03/05/07 Olivier Michel, founder of Cyberbotics, the leading company in mobile robot prototyping and simulation software, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/04/07 Jaan Tallinn, the programmer widely celebrated for writing the peer-to-peer engines of Kazaa and Skype, joins our Futurists Board.
03/04/07 Read issue #55 of Lifeboat News!
03/03/07 Stéphane Magnenat, whose robot swarms "evolved" effective communication, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/03/07 Stefano Nolfi, coauthor of Evolutionary Robotics: The Biology, Intelligence, and Technology of Self-Organizing Machines, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/02/07 Leading theoretical physicist Paul H. Frampton, who in 1974 was the author of the first ever book on string theory, and provided the first correct calculation for vacuum decay in 1976, and who has recently developed an alternative to the Big Bang theory, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/02/07 Javier Minguez, who is developing a wheelchair that reads your mind, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/02/07 Ian MacDonald, who discovered that the flavanols in chocolate could be used to treat vascular impairment, including dementia and strokes, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/01/07 Dario Floreano, one of the pioneers in evolutionary robotics — a research field in which robots are evolved using artificial evolution, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
03/01/07 Read our blog entry Lasers to detect and deflect asteroids.
02/28/07 Robotics expert Noel Sharkey joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/27/07 Check out our new videos page!
02/27/07 Bud Mishra, coauthor of Emergency Response Planning for a Potential Sarin Gas Attack in Manhattan using Agent-based Models, joins our Scientific Advisory Board which hits 300 members!
02/26/07 Watch A visual trip through the 21st Century.
02/26/07 Watch RNA interference in action.
02/26/07 Narration has now been added to Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell.
02/26/07 Watch How DNA transcription works.
02/25/07 Read our blog entry Open Source Terraforming.
02/24/07 Richard H. Eskow, author of Homo Futurus: How Radically Should We Remake Ourselves — Or Our Children? joins our Futurists Board.
02/23/07 Henry I. Smith, Director of the Nanostructures Laboratory at MIT, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/23/07 Ken Goldberg, who developed the first robot with a web interface, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/23/07 David C. Moffat, who has produced robots which experience fear, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/22/07 Read Single molecule transcription profiling with AFM coauthored by James K. Gimzewski.
02/21/07 Our blog entry "Doomsday" vault design unveiled is getting a lot of StumbleUpon traffic. Check it out!
02/20/07 Read Immortalist Utilitarianism by Michael Anissimov.
02/19/07 Bob Citron, Cofounder and Executive Director of the Foundation For the Future, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
02/18/07 Read AI and Sci-Fi: My, Oh, My! by Robert J. Sawyer.
02/18/07 Michael Silberstein, author of Deflating Quantum Mysteries via the Relational Blockworld, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/17/07 Our report Neurotechnology and Society (2010-2060) is getting a lot of StumbleUpon traffic.
02/17/07 Read Action plan for killer asteroids.
02/16/07 "It is the age of wonder, I wonder why we're not dead. Why do we call them 'leaders' when we are misled?" Listen to our official song!
02/16/07 Watch Did you know? This video is also on our Law of Accelerating Returns page.
02/15/07 Watch Blue Beauty: Our Beautiful Earth on our Space Habitats page (PowerPoint presentation, click to go to next page).
02/14/07 Read The Strategic Brain by Natasha Vita-More.
02/13/07 Read Near-Earth asteroids could be "steppingstones to Mars".
02/13/07 Iddo Genuth, founder and chief editor of the science and technology e-magazine The Future of Things (TFOT), joins our Futurists Board.
02/12/07 The Third Generation Web is Coming article has been upgraded.
02/11/07 Read "Doomsday" vault design unveiled.
02/10/07 Read Brave New World? A defense of paradise-engineering by David Pearce.
02/09/07 Read Space: A Moral Vacuum? by Jeff Krukin.
02/08/07 Ole Peter Galaasen joins our blog team with his first post!
02/08/07 Fark has covered Neurotechnology and Society (2010-2060). Digg (vote for) this article! Join our Digg Warriors.
02/08/07 Giulio Prisco, Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), joins our Futurists Board.
02/07/07 Read Neurotechnology and Society (2010-2060) by Zack Lynch.
02/06/07 Read Achieving Human Commitment to Space Colonization: Is Fear the Answer? by Sylvia Engdahl.
02/05/07 Read The Third Generation Web is Coming by Nova Spivack.
02/04/07 Watch Radical Islam: Terror in Its Own Words.
02/04/07 Scientology critic jailed in Arizona. Digg this story! Join our Digg Warriors.
02/04/07 Stevan Harnad joins our blog team with his first post.
02/04/07 Statistical semantics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence researcher Peter D. Turney, who authored the KurzweilAI.net article A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility as a Largest-Scale Trend in Organismal Evolution, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
02/03/07 Excerpt from Wall Street Journal article: It was for that reason that a few individuals, myself included, started a group called the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) several years ago. Its purpose was to start an archive on the moon that would be a continuously updated international record of our civilization. That way, if a major catastrophe happens, the record would survive. Keeping a record on the moon (and perhaps at one of the poles on this planet) would be like backing up a computer's hard drive. We would emerge from the chaos knowing who we are in the fullest sense of the term.
 
ARC has been absorbed by the Lifeboat Foundation, a group of likeminded people who are trying to make certain that we can survive a truly awful world-wide occurrence. They are emphatically not doomsday types. But they understand that while no skipper goes to sea thinking the boat will sink, they nonetheless carry life preservers and dinghies. That, after all, is only prudent. So is starting a self-sufficient colony on the moon.
02/02/07 Read Colonize the Moon by William E. Burrows (subscription required). We got a bit of Wall Street Journal coverage here.
02/02/07 Anne Corwin, a member of the WTA (World Transhumanism Association) Board of Directors and author of Choosing Who To Be: Robust Self-Concept In An Age of Transformative Technology, joins our Futurists Board.
02/01/07 Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/31/07 Aurel Ymeti, who has developed a sensor for a handheld device that detects various viruses and measures their concentration within minutes, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/31/07 Read issue #54 of Lifeboat News!
01/30/07 G Gordon Worley III, author of Robot Oppression: Unethicality of the Three Laws, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/30/07 Neville Hogan, who has developed robots that help stroke victims recover, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/30/07 Read Astronaut Seeks Craft to Bump Asteroids.
01/30/07 Rob Enderle, President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, joins our Futurists Board.
01/29/07 Evangelos Michelakis, who has developed a non-toxic treatment that fixes damage to mitochondria in cancer cells, enabling the cells to start acting normal again, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/29/07 Zhenqiang "Jack" Ma, who invented a way to make flexible computer chips, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/29/07 Omid Farokhzad, who has developed nanoparticles that target cancer and also have a reporter component allowing them to signal when they have delivered their therapeutic payload, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/29/07 Learn how you can win a free trip to space!
01/28/07 Joe Stewart, author of Wormsign: Predicting the Next Outbreak and DNS Cache Poisoning: The Next Generation, joins our new Cybercrime/Malcode Board which he also founded.
01/28/07 Michael Kraft, who used silicon "Lego bricks" to build 3D chips, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/27/07 PJ Manney, a member of the WTA (World Transhumanism Association) Board of Directors, joins our Futurists and Media Boards.
01/27/07 Read Top Ten Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want by Michael Anissimov.
01/26/07 Rick Wesson, internet security expert and CEO of Support Intelligence, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/26/07 Molecular cardiologist Stefanie Dimmeler, winner of the 1.55 million euro 2005 Leibniz Prize, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/26/07 Thanks to input by Sergio M.L. Tarrero and Neil deGrasse Tyson, our AsteroidShield report has been improved.
01/25/07 Security expert Gadi Evron, covered in the New York Times article Attack of the Zombie Computers is Growing Threat, joins our new Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
01/24/07 Andrzej Bartke, winner of the first Methuselah Mouse Prize, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
 
Andrzej altered a gene controlling a mouse's response to growth hormone, which meant it had reduced levels of insulin and glucose in its blood. The change apparently protected its DNA from age-related decay, keeping it alive for almost five years — the equivalent of a human living for about 200 years.
01/24/07 Read With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Time for the synthetic biology community to acknowledge three responsibilities by Roger Brent.
01/23/07 Jamais Cascio joins our blog team with his first post!
01/23/07 Marcelo Kallmann, who is researching ways to enhance the artificial intelligence of computers to include mimicking human-like movements, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/23/07 James H. Oliver, in charge of the most realistic virtual reality room in the world, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/22/07 Behrokh "Berok" Khoshnevis, who developed a robot that will build the shell of a two-story house in 24 hours, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Watch a miniature version of his house builder in action!
01/21/07 Brian Wang joins our blog team with his first post!
01/21/07 InstaPundit covers our blog!
01/21/07 Dr. Paris Smaragdis, whose goal is to make computational audition as mainstream as computer vision, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/21/07 Renat R. Letfullin, who developed laser-induced explosion of absorbing nanoparticles in selective nanophotothermolysis of cancer, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/20/07 The Lifeboat Foundation has now officially endorsed the blog Advanced Nanotechnology authored by our SAB member Brian Wang. An excellent blog!
01/20/07 Adrian Bowyer, leader of the RepRap (Replicating Rapid Prototyper) project, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. The goal of RepRap is to create a machine that can make copies of itself. This machine has already replicated parts of itself.
01/20/07 Listen to Michael Anissimov being interviewed by George Dvorsky.
01/20/07 Sergio M.L. Tarrero will match all donations for Freitas research up to $2,000. Robert A. Freitas Jr. has found preliminary evidence that diamond mechanosynthesis may not be reliable enough at ambient temperatures to sustain an existential risk from microscopic ecophagic replicators. Learn more details including how you can help fund his important research on this subject.
01/19/07 Douglas H. Smith is conceptualizing a cyborg.
 
"We're at a junction now of developing a new approach for a brain-machine interface," says senior author Douglas H. Smith, MD, Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at Penn. "The nervous system will certainly rebel if you place hard or sharp electrodes into it to record signals. However, the nervous system can be tricked to accept an interface letting it do what it likes — assimilating new nerve cells into its own network."
01/18/07 Roger Entner, VP of Wireless Telecoms for Ovum, joins our Futurists Board.
01/17/07 Updated World News page with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock to five minutes before midnight — the metaphorical marker of the end of humanity. The chief reason for the move is the dawn of a "second nuclear age", in which far more countries can acquire nuclear technology.
01/16/07 Marco Dorigo, inventor of the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization problems, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
 
Watch a sped up video of a team of his robots working together to map out a path from a red object to a blue target. (None of these bots can see far enough to work out the route between the object and its target for themselves.)
01/15/07 Read Must-know terms for the 21st Century Intellectual by George Dvorsky.
01/14/07 Daniel J. Berleant, author of Heuristic Perspectives for Making and Discussing Predictions, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
01/13/07 Who do you support for U.S. president? Rudy Giuliani? Hillary Rodham Clinton? Barack Obama? John McCain? Check our improved store and SEE who we support!
01/12/07 Read our interview with Alan H. Goldstein!
01/11/07 Read Doomsday Thoughts by our founder.
01/11/07 Thanks to a generous contribution by Sergio M.L. Tarrero, the A-PRIZE FUND is now at $26,300.
01/11/07 Check out Creating A Solar Civilization!
01/10/07 Our First-Stage Nanoproducts and Nanoweaponry report has been getting a lot of StumbleUpon activity recently. Check it out!
01/09/07 Read Iranian official: If threatened, we will use nuclear weapons on our blog!
01/08/07 America's most ambitious student satellite is your canvas!
 
In 2010, a small unmanned research spacecraft designed by students will launch into Earth's orbit. The science on board will help pave the way for humankind to explore our solar system. We invite you to participate in this landmark mission by uploading content to be printed on this spacecraft. Learn more!
01/08/07 Updated World News page with Attack of the Zombie Computers is growing threat.
01/07/07 KurzweilAI.net has linked to our Energy 2020: A Vision of the Future article. Digg (vote for) this article! Join the Digg Warriors! (Article was improved today with an upgraded overview section.)
01/06/07 Read our improved blog!
01/05/07 Read Molecular Manufacturing: Too Dangerous to Allow? by Robert A. Freitas Jr.. Read its Fark coverage! Digg (vote for) this article! Join the Digg Warriors!
01/05/07 Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism About the Human Future by David Brin has become our most Digged article ever. Digg (vote for) this article! Join the Digg Warriors!
01/04/07 The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth has been upgraded!
01/03/07 Read A Beginner's Guide to Immortality by Clifford A. Pickover.
01/02/07 Read the Reddit coverage of our Energy 2020: A Vision of the Future article.
01/01/07 InstaPundit has linked to our Energy 2020: A Vision of the Future article. Digg Warriors! (Article has been upgraded since being first published four days ago.)
01/01/07 We have now opened another office! The new office is in San Francisco, California, USA.
12/31/06 Dr. David M. Livingston, host of The Space Show — the USA's only talk radio show focusing on increasing space commerce and developing space tourism, joins our Space Settlement Board.
12/30/06 Check out the new Wyoming educational and scientific charity, the Sovereigns of the High Frontier Society. They are raising funds to build libraries, observatories, classrooms, and labs all over Wyoming to advance the teaching of science, math, and especially those technologies needed to get people out onto the frontier.
12/29/06 The internet interview works on IE; it doesn't seem to work on Firefox and possibly Safari. You can also CALL and TALK: 866-472-5795.
12/28/06 Read the del.icio.us coverage of Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism About the Human Future.
12/28/06 Read Energy 2020: A Vision of the Future — A report retrieved from the year 2020 via a wormhole by José Luis Cordeiro.
12/27/06 There will be a nanotechnology dialogue with Lifeboat Foundation's Philippe Van Nedervelde on Gabriel Cousens, M.D.'s internet radio show.
 
Philippe Van Nedervelde joins Gabriel Cousens, M.D. to discuss how nanotechnology's advances can be implemented without causing great harm to humanity in the process. With the potential for nanotechnology to create self-replicating weapons that could "eat" our entire biosphere, or to create deadly nonreplicating weapons such as airborne toxin-carrying devices that are only 200 microns long, the dangers of nanotechnology are quite real.
 
The interview will be Friday, December 29, at 12pm Pacific/ 3 Eastern. Listen live! CALL and TALK: 866-472-5795. Learn more!
12/26/06 InstaPundit has linked to Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism About the Human Future.
 
InstaPundit said "It's a must-read if you're interested in this stuff. And you should be." Digg (vote for) this article! Join the Digg Warriors! (Article has been upgraded since being first published two days ago.)
12/26/06 Read issue #53 of Lifeboat News!
12/26/06 Read Realization and Experimental Demonstration of the Kirchhoff-loop- Johnson(-like)-Noise Communicator for up to 200 km range coauthored by Laszlo Kish.
 
In this paper, he shows that his new method of secure communication is able to handle distances far greater than quantum communicators can handle.
12/25/06 Read Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth by David Pearce.
12/24/06 Read Singularities and Nightmares by David Brin.
12/23/06 Lori Marino, author of The Evolution of Intelligence: An Integral Part of SETI and Astrobiology, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/23/06 Ray Kurzweil's three hour's interview on C-SPAN2 is now available online.
 
This interview was for "Book TV", for their monthly show "In Depth". It features a two-part profile of Ray, an interview with him about his life, career, and ideas, and includes questions from Book TV viewers via telephone and email. Ray speaks about his inventions and books, including The Singularity is Near.
12/23/06 Read our new blog!
12/22/06 James Friend, who is developing micro-robots that will be able to swim through the human body, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/21/06 Andrew J. Davison, who developed an augmented-reality machine that works in real time, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/21/06 Marc J. Feldman, who coinvented the field of superconducting quantum computation, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/20/06 There will be a nanotechnology dialogue with Lifeboat Foundation's Philippe Van Nedervelde on Internet Radio's "Creating Peace by Being Peace".
 
Philippe Van Nedervelde joins Gabriel Cousens, M.D. to discuss his role in the movement to responsibly use modern technology in a way that honors a deep understanding of what humanity is, our potential for consciousness and global harmony, and respect for health of all people and the planet.
 
The interview will be Friday, December 29, at 12pm Pacific/ 3 Eastern. Listen live! CALL and TALK: 866-472-5795.
12/19/06 Read Can a machine be conscious? How? by Stevan Harnad.
12/19/06 Read Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
12/18/06 Read the Reddit coverage of I, Nanobot.
12/17/06 Read the Slashdot coverage and del.icio.us coverage of I, Nanobot.
12/16/06 Read I, Nanobot by Alan H. Goldstein. Read the InstaPundit coverage of it. Digg (vote for) this article! Join the Digg Warriors!
12/15/06 Michael S. Strano, who invented a patent with Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/14/06 Defined the A-PRIZE taxonomic system.
12/14/06 Leading computer scientist and survivor of a Unabomber attack, David Gelernter, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/13/06 Steven F. Palter, who has invented a way to find invisible tumors, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/12/06 Added the following to our ParticleAcceleratorShield page: Lords of the Ring, The ATLAS Experiment Movie, ATLAS - Episode I: A New Hope, ATLAS - Episode II: The Particles Strike Back, Click on parts of the detector for their name and description, A simulated collision event which creates a mini-black hole, and Video clips.
12/11/06 Molecular biologist Andrea Townsend-Nicholson joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/10/06 Stem cell expert Nico Forraz joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/10/06 Rudolph E. Tanzi, who isolated the first familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD) gene, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/09/06 Vineet N. KewalRamani, who combined pieces of HIV and another virus to create a deadly new hybrid Frankenstein virus for use in AIDS research, has joined our Scientific Advisory Board. Join our FightAIDS team!
12/06/06 Chuck Weir, who helped convince the EPA to regulate nanosilver, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/05/06 Colin P. McGuckin, who grew the world's first artificial liver, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/04/06 Plausible Futures Newsletter: News and Analysis for Future Studies & Scenario Planning is running a free banner ad for us!
12/03/06 Read Tissue-Regeneration Matrix Could Be Spun from Cell-Size Nanothreads. Learn about Suwan Jayasinghe!
12/02/06 Longevity expert Natalia S. Gavrilova joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
12/01/06 Instapundit talks about our A-PRIZE. Digg (vote for) this story. Join our Digg Warriors!
12/01/06 Ole Peter Galaasen, editor of the Plausible Futures Newsletter, joins our Futurists Board.
11/30/06 Read issue #52 of Lifeboat News!
11/30/06 We have launched the A-PRIZE! This contest was developed by our Scientific Advisory Board member Alan H. Goldstein who coauthored the National Research Council's triennial review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI).
 
This prize is awarded to the person or organization responsible for creating an Animat/Artificial life form with an emphasis on the safety of the researchers, public, and environment OR the person or organization who shows that an Animat/Artificial life form has been created. (The second case is to uncover unpublicized or unsafe projects.)
11/30/06 Michael Anissimov invites you to join the Lifeboat Foundation!
11/30/06 Updated World News page with 33,000 British Airways passengers may have been exposed to polonium 210 due to alleged KGB assassination in London. (Airplanes contaminated by transportation of polonium 210 from Moscow to London.)
11/26/06 Added quote by John Robert Marlow to Quotes page.
11/25/06 Updated World News page with KGB allegedly assassinates man in London using the deadliest poison known to man — polonium 210, a radioactive element used as a trigger in nuclear weapons. It is so powerful that a lethal dose can be passed on through the body in sweat or saliva.
11/23/06 Added information about today's Al Qaeda attack in Iraq to our World News page.
11/23/06 Added quote by Chris Phoenix to Quotes page.
11/23/06 Added information about Israel's "bionic hornet" to our SecurityPreserver report.
11/22/06 Read Risking Human Extinction by John Leslie.
11/21/06 Gianmarco Radice, the asteroid expert who is helping organize the upcoming 2007 Planetary Defense conference to be held in Washington DC in March, joins our Scientific Advisory board. The objective of this conference is to develop a white paper that assesses the current state of our ability to discover and track near earth objects (NEOs — objects that could possibly impact Earth) and our ability to successfully deflect a threatening object should one be detected.
11/20/06 InstaPundit has linked to our AsteroidShield report. Digg (vote for) this page! Join the Digg Warriors!
11/20/06 We are preparing to launch a peer-reviewed journal. Michael B. Fossel will be the Editor-in-Chief. Joseph M. Kaminski will be the Associate Editor. Michael Fossel is the founding Editor of Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine (now Rejuvenation Research), 2005 Impact Factor of 8.57, and served as its Editor-in-Chief for six years.
 
This multidisciplinary journal will cover biotechnology, cosmology, nanotechnology, and other major science areas and as a journal of the Lifeboat Foundation it will also include solutions to potential problems. It will be similar to Nature or Science but a little better defined, i.e. slightly more narrowed in scope. Double blind refereeing will be used to help eliminate political bias.
 
If you wish to join the Editorial Board or have suggestions for the focus of this journal, you can contact Michael B. Fossel at michael.fossel@cerner.com. There will be no time commitment until this is assembled, and until we have a commitment from a leading publishing company.
11/19/06 Josh Bongard's resilient robot, that will hobble along even if injured, is featured at Coast to Coast AM.
11/18/06 Claus C. Hilgetag, who debunked a prevailing theory that the nervous system should have mainly very short nerve fibre connections between nerve cells, or neurons, to function at its most effective, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/17/06 Josh Bongard, who developed a resilient robot that will hobble along even if injured, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/17/06 Asteroid expert Matthew Genge, who main belt asteroid 6626 Mattgenge was named after, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/16/06 David Dexter, Scientific Director of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society Tissue Bank, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/16/06 Daniel Armel and Hao Le have qualified as contestants for our EM Launch Competition. Note that we would like to expand this competition!
11/16/06 Kris Stanek, who discovered that the universe may be older and larger than was thought, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/15/06 Larry Sanger, cofounder of Wikipedia and founder of the Citizendium project, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/15/06 Marcus Hutter, who runs the 50,000 € Hutter Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/15/06 Dwayne W. Godwin, who discovered that nitric oxide is the key to the brain "booting up", joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/14/06 Joseph M. Kaminski, who has developed a gene therapy method that uses jumping genes instead of viruses, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/14/06 Edwin B. Cooper, who has pioneered a treatment which uses electrical stimulation to improve the condition of people with severe brain injuries, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/13/06 Angelo Cangelosi who developed virtual bots which teach each other using wordplay, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/13/06 Renowned cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/12/06 Ray Kurzweil has received the IEEE Professional Communication Societies Goldsmith Award for 2006 for Distinguished Contributions to Engineering Communication.
 
The award honors those "broadly involved in communication as related to engineering and scientific endeavors" and was announced at the 2006 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference in Saratoga Springs.
11/11/06 Read the improved version of SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS...Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory by David Brin. (The text has been improved and a new graphic has been added.)
11/11/06 Read the improved version of Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web by Nova Spivack. (The text has been improved and a new graphic has been added.)
11/11/06 Richard Baraniuk, developer of a single-pixel digital camera which uses a digital micromirror device, joins our Scientific Advisory Board. Since its detector only has a single pixel, it can be as fancy as desired. It can even accommodate wavelengths currently unavailable to digital photography, such as X-rays, terahertz waves, even radar.
11/10/06 David Brin's new and astonishingly broad "Interactive communication between a plurality of users" patent brings online many basic tricks that people have used in real-life conversation for ages. e.g. adjusting semantic content and presentation according to distance, orientation, reputation, time, and traits of the content itself.
11/10/06 Ray Kurzweil's three hour interview on C-SPAN2 will be rebroadcast tomorrow (Nov 11) at 9 am ET.
 
This interview is on "Book TV", for their monthly show "In Depth". It features a two-part profile of Ray, an interview with him about his life, career, and ideas, and includes questions from Book TV viewers via telephone and email. Ray speaks about his inventions and books, including The Singularity is Near.
11/10/06 Philip Rhoades who is launching the first cryonics facility in Australia, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/09/06 Fabio Albertario has translated Vernor Vinge's paper on the Technological Singularity, and the whole of Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation into Italian. They are available on our Italian site.
11/09/06 Artificial Intelligence expert John A. Barnden joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/08/06 Federico Capasso, one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/08/06 James Fiske who is developing a huge "launch ring" to fling satellites into orbit, has joined our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/07/06 Gustavo Olague, who used virtual bees to help robots see in 3D, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/07/06 Read Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web by Nova Spivack.
11/05/06 James Z. Wang who taught a computer to name images by "thinking", joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/05/06 Peter B. Lloyd, author of Glitches in the Matrix ... and How to Fix Them, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/05/06 Cornelius "Pete" Peterson, Chief Executive Officer and one of the founders of Interactive Supercomputing, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/04/06 Professor Owen Holland who is building an "ultraswarm" of miniature Bluetooth-connected helicopters, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/04/06 Roboticist Max Lungarella from Tokyo University who worked with Olaf Sporns in testing a vision-body link in robot experiments, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/04/06 Jerry Glenn will be one of the speakers at the Global Cleantech 2006 conference co-chaired by Charles Ostman. It will be held Nov 17 at Palo Alto, California, at the conference facilities of its sponsor, Townsend, Townsend & Crew, LLP, a few blocks from the Stanford campus.
11/04/06 Space Quotes to Ponder puts up a free banner ad for us.
11/04/06 The NanoTechnology Group puts up a free banner ad for us.
11/04/06 Olaf Sporns, who is testing a vision-body link in robot experiments, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/03/06 Hugh Loebner, the philanthropist behind the Loebner Prize, an annual competition that awards prizes to the Chatterbot considered the most humanlike for that year, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/03/06 Read issue #51 of Lifeboat News!
11/02/06 Watch Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students.
 
The animation shows a number of molecular machines — ribosomes, motors, and more — working to move molecules and structures around a cell, and even to create the structures. It also shows a lot of membrane events, and molecules working with and through membranes, and a few organelles. It shows the molecules in their real molecular structure — these are renderings of experimental data, not artists' conceptions.
10/31/06 Read Screw Sustainability: The Age of the Tornado Tamers Busting the Bubble of Spaceship Earth by Howard Bloom.
10/31/06 Read The Ultimate Right to Life Debate: Synthetic biologists know the meaning of life, but do they know the meaning of synthetic biology? by Alan H. Goldstein.
10/30/06 We have launched an invitation-only mailing list for our new Human Trajectories Board.
 
The current human situation is unique and complex. What are the primary characteristics that define human culture? How did our "humanness" make us what we are today? And, most importantly, how will our collective past and present direct our advance towards the future?
 
Areas covered include technological innovation and adoption, resource shortage and change, human migration, competition and conflict.
 
This Board is already up to 34 members!
10/28/06 Science Fiction author Sylvia Engdahl joins our Scientific Advisory Board!
10/28/06 Ben Bova, author of more than 100 futuristic novels and nonfiction books, joins our Scientific Advisory Board!
10/28/06 KurzweilAI.net links to The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth: Chapter Eight by William E. Burrows.
10/27/06 Science Fiction author Sylvia Engdahl puts a free banner for us on her official site!
10/27/06 The free banner that Nanotechnology Now is running for us has generated 61,000+ impressions and 94 click-throughs to date. No wonder our traffic has increased 954% over the past three months!
10/26/06 Read The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth: Chapter Eight by William E. Burrows.
10/26/06 Upgraded ParticleAcceleratorShield program including adding two more 3D panoramas with sounds of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction.
10/25/06 Read SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS...Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory by David Brin.
10/24/06 David Brin's new History Channel show "The ArchiTechs" hits Prime Time: November 1 at 8 PM. (Wednesday!)
 
"Five geniuses are challenged: design better safety/rescue systems for skyscrapers... in 48 hours!"
 
Episode #1 culminates in startling ideas presented to NY Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, hero of 9/11.
 
If ratings are good, this "Design A Team" (including David Brin) will tackle more "innovation makeover" challenges, from spaceflight to eco-power and "the next humvee". Spread word about this smart new show!
10/24/06 We have launched a Human Trajectories Board!
 
The current human situation is unique and complex. What are the primary characteristics that define human culture? How did our "humanness" make us what we are today? And, most importantly, how will our collective past and present direct our advance towards the future?
 
Areas covered include technological innovation and adoption, resource shortage and change, human migration, competition and conflict.
10/23/06 Read Flexible Automated Manufacturing by Michael Vassar.
10/23/06 Read Dipping a Toe into the Sea of Space: Are we Columbus or Erikson? by Gregory Benford.
10/22/06 Read Getting Ready for the Coming Bio-Economy: An Advance Survey with Ten Practical Tips by Scott Borg.
10/21/06 Read Corporate Cornucopia: Examining the Special Implications of Commercial MNT Development by Michael Vassar.
10/19/06 Lowered GETAS level to Guarded. Reason: "The acutely high tensions over North Korea's nuclear test have, for the moment, converted to a drawn out imbroglio which will probably not really heat up again until North Korea's next nuclear arms test."
10/19/06 Created What is RSS? definition page.
10/18/06 The InstaPundit article Warning Signs for Tomorrow has become our most Digged article ever! Digg (vote for) it! Join the Digg Warriors!
10/18/06 Read Welcome to the Age of Weapons Containment by George Dvorsky.
10/17/06 Nanotechnology Now, the world's most in-depth online resource for nanotechnology, supports Lifeboat Foundation with a free banner ad!
10/16/06 Read Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil!
10/15/06 Read the InstaPundit article Warning Signs for Tomorrow and then Digg (vote for) it! Join the Digg Warriors!
10/14/06 Watch David Brin's new History Channel Show: The ArchiTechs. First episode is "Skyscraper Firefighting and Escape" and plays Saturday, October 14 at 11:00 AM, Wednesday, November 1 at 08:00 PM (prime time), and Thursday, November 02 at 12:00 AM. Also read his report Want to Live Forever?
10/13/06 SAB member Stefan Immler holds a NASA press conference describing supernovae and discoveries of never-before-seen properties, some of which run counter to prevailing theories.
10/12/06 Read the reports Technological Evolution by José Luis Cordeiro and First-Stage Nanoproducts and Nanoweaponry by Michael Anissimov.
10/11/06 Read the article Robotics expert comes to the rescue by SAB member Blay Whitby.
10/10/06 Sergio M.L. Tarrero becomes our fifth Lifeboat 500 member!
10/09/06 We have raised the GETAS alert level from Guarded to Elevated. Reason: Brazen provocative nuclear test by North Korea causing high geopolitical tension in Asia and worldwide.
10/08/06 Michael Anissimov becomes the fourth person to join the Lifeboat 500!
10/07/06 SAB member Mike Treder completes a three week tour of Australia and New Zealand where he gave public lectures and held discussions on the subject of "Disruptive Abundance: Nanotechnology and Human Life".
10/06/06 Read the InstaPundit article Military Nanotechnology which describes our NanoShield program.
10/05/06 Watch Michael Anissimov represent Lifeboat Foundation at the AGI Research Institute's workshop in Palo Alto. He was on a panel discussing the risks of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
10/01/06 We have launched a forum/mailing list to discuss your ideas for our programs and other suggestions for the Lifeboat Foundation. It is for Advisory Board members and Executive Class and greater members.
09/28/06Updated AsteroidShield program with even more new material. Let us know your comments!
09/27/06 Our RSS feed has been activated.
09/27/06 The Lifeboat Foundation now has a new official song and a MySpace page! (You may also be cheered up by this song.)
09/26/06Updated AsteroidShield program with new material from Al Globus.
09/25/06 Updated Ark I program with new material from Al Globus.
09/24/06 2005 Guardian Award winner Ray Kurzweil moves into the lead with a total of $10,190.80 in donations!
09/24/06Updated Space Habitats program with a "Better Ways to get into Space" section by Michael Anissimov.
09/23/06Launched Digg Warriors page.
09/20/06Launched CommPreserver program page.
09/17/06Added quote by Ed Koch to Quotes page.
09/15/06 Launched Nuclear Terrorist page, with updates about the search for nuclear terrorist Adnan G. El Shukrijumah.
09/13/06 Robert A. Freitas Jr. has found preliminary evidence that diamond mechanosynthesis may not be reliable enough at ambient temperatures to sustain an existential risk from microscopic ecophagic replicators. Learn more details including how you can help fund his important research on this subject.
09/12/06Launched Counterterrorism page.
09/11/06Launched Media Board and separated Scientific Advisory Boards from Advisory Boards.
09/09/06Launched AntimatterShield and BlackHoleShield program pages.
09/04/06Renamed InfoShield program to SecurityPreserver program and also upgraded program text.
09/04/06Added quote by Edmund Burke to Quotes page.
09/03/06Added quote by Admiral David E. Jeremiah to Quotes page.
08/30/06 Added EnergyPreserver and LifePreserver programs.
08/28/06 Added link to main page to let readers know how they can submit contributions to the Lifeboat Foundation endorsed Journals of Personal Cyberconsciousness and Geoethical Nanotechnology.
08/28/06 Added hydrogen bomb test video to NuclearShield page and asteroid impact video to AsteroidShield page.
08/28/06 Launched SunShield program page.
08/27/06 Launched PersonalityPreserver program page and incorporated CryoPreserver program into it.
08/26/06 Renamed CryoShield program to CryoPreserver program. Added BioPreserver, InfoPreserver, PersonalityPreserver, and SeedPreserver programs. See Programs page for details.
08/25/06 Added NeuroethicsShield program.
08/22/06Added This Global Warming Fix Stinks to ClimateShield page.
08/19/06Added New Cosmic Defense Idea: Fight Asteroids with Asteroids to AsteroidShield page.
08/19/06Added information about Lifeboat Foundation Brochure grant to home page and donations page.
08/17/06Added quote by Michio Kaku to Quotes page.
08/16/06Added CryoShield page and renamed GlobalWarmingShield page to ClimateShield page.
08/13/06Added AsteroidShield, GammaRayShield, GlobalWarmingShield, and UFAI-Shield pages.
08/13/06Added NuclearShield and Space Habitats pages.
08/13/06Added Programs page which lists several of our programs to reduce existential risks. Most of the material from our old Research page was then moved into the relevant programs. What remained from the old Research page was moved to our new Resources page.
08/12/06Added Crash Test Cities by Wil McCarthy to Research page.
08/10/06Added two blogs plus Immortalist Utilitarianism by Michael Anissov to Research page.
08/10/06Added quote by John Reid to Quotes page.
08/10/06We now offer free Global Existential Threat Advisory System (GETAS) threat updates.
08/08/06Listed more qualified contestants on our EM Launch Competition page.
08/07/06Added icon and link for solution to border security AND the world's energy needs on main page.
08/07/06Updated NanoShield page and mentioned KurzweilAI.net publication of it.
08/05/06Updated Ark I page.
08/03/06Added issue #47 to Lifeboat News archive.
08/02/06Added quote by Ken Wear to Quotes page.
08/02/06Mentioned on home page and NanoShield page that we have "officially endorsed" the Responsible Nanotechnology blog.
08/01/06Renamed Panoptic Smart Dust Sousveillance Report to InfoShield report including changing icon on main page.
07/31/06Added quote by Tara O'Toole to Quotes page.
07/30/06Updated NanoShield page.
07/28/06Added icon and link for Lifeboat 500 on main page.
07/28/06Added icon and link for offical Lifeboat Foundation blog on main page.
07/26/06Added Global Existential Threat Advisory System (GETAS) page and linked to it from Home and World News page.
07/25/06Updated title on Panoptic Smart Dust Sousveillance Report page.
07/25/06Updated NanoShield page.
07/25/06Updated EM Launch Competition page.
07/25/06Added icon and link for Panoptic Smart Dust Sousveillance Report on main page.
07/25/06Added icon and link for Lifeboat Foundation Store (selling Kurzweil Stamps) on main page.
07/25/06Changed format and content of What's New page.