Lifeboat Foundation What's New

01/05/09	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."
01/05/09	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.
01/04/09	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.
01/04/09	Seth Baum, author of Reducing Catastrophic Risk Through Integrative Assessment, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
01/04/09	Stuart Calimport, Science Department Head of the Methuselah Foundation Undergraduate Research Initiative, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
01/03/09	Amos Winter, whose RoboClam may become the first "smart" anchor, joins our Engineering Board.
01/03/09	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.
01/03/09	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.
01/02/09	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.
01/02/09	Michele Giugliano, who has demonstrated that faulty brain wiring may be bypassed with carbon nanotubes, joins our Neuroscience Board.
01/02/09	Georges Grinstein, inventor of a 3D Personal Life Mapper, joins our Information Sciences Board.
01/02/09	Beatrice de Gelder, who demonstrated that a blind man can navigate obstacles using his unconscious mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
01/02/09	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.
01/01/09	Antonietta Gatti, coauthor of Nanopathology: The Health Impact of Nanoparticles, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
01/01/09	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."
12/29/08	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!
12/27/08	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.
12/26/08	Gaurav Khanna, who built a supercomputer from many Sony Playstation 3s, joins our Supercomputing Board.
12/26/08	Steve Curran, who discovered that hydrogen is missing from our early universe, joins our Cosmology Board.
12/25/08	Social Entrepreneur Aaron Balogun joins our Business Board. He is Account Manager at Capitol Advantage and Director of Operations at Flanagan Consulting, LLC.
12/25/08	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.
12/25/08	Petr Král, who is working to use tunnelling electrons to drive nanomotors, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
12/24/08	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.
12/24/08	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.
12/21/08	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.
12/21/08	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.
12/20/08	György Buzsáki, author of Rhythms of the Brain, joins our Neuroscience Board.
12/20/08	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.
12/19/08	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.
12/19/08	Sini Merikallio, Planetary Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, joins our Space Settlement Board.
12/18/08	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.
12/18/08	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.
12/18/08	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.
12/17/08	Read issue #77 of Lifeboat News!
12/16/08	Read Nanotubes Track Cellular Toxins: Tiny sensors can monitor cancer-causing agents and chemotherapy drugs in cells.
12/09/08	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."
12/06/08	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.
12/04/08	Read UC Merced Virtual Archaeologist Saves Past for Future.
12/01/08	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).
11/30/08	Jonas Fransson, whose quantum cloaking makes molecules invisible, joins our Physics Board.
11/30/08	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.
11/30/08	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.
11/30/08	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.
11/28/08	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.
11/28/08	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.
11/27/08	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.
11/25/08	The 1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids will be held April 27-30, 2009 in Granada, Spain.
11/23/08	Freek Wiedijk, who is developing methods to harness the power of computers to verify mathematical proofs, joins our Information Sciences Board.
11/23/08	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.
11/23/08	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.
11/23/08	Alastair Compston, who has developed a treatment which has proven effective against combating the debilitating neurological disease multiple sclerosis (MS), joins our Neuroscience Board.
11/22/08	Joseph N. Pelton joins our Futurists Board. His forecasts were featured in Top 10 Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond published by The Futurist.
11/22/08	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.
11/22/08	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.
11/21/08	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.
11/21/08	Eduardo Reck Miranda, whose "cultured" robots make sweet music together, joins our Media & Arts Board.
11/21/08	Jackie Ying, Executive Director of Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), joins our Nanotechnology Board.
11/20/08	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.
11/20/08	James Kent, author of Overclocking the Human CPU: A primer for the future of human intelligence, joins our Futurists Board.
11/20/08	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.
11/18/08	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.
11/17/08	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.
11/16/08	Didier Casse, who developed a nano-optical lens that focuses infrared light at telecommunication frequencies, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
11/16/08	Kristi Scott joins our Futurists Board. She is a freelance writer and copyeditor for H+ magazine.
11/15/08	Kerstin Dautenhahn joins our Robotics/AI Board. She coedited Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioral, Social, and Communicative Dimensions.
11/15/08	Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, coauthor of Sharing Moral Responsibility with Robots: A Pragmatic Approach, joins our Ethics Board.
11/14/08	Watch Powering the Planet - Space Based Solar Power.
11/14/08	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!"
11/12/08	Read Global Catastrophic Risks Essays for GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS: Building a Resilient Civilization. November 14, 2008, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
11/08/08	Read issue #76 of Lifeboat News!
11/03/08	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.
11/02/08	Christopher Dewdney, author of Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era, joins our Futurists Board.
11/02/08	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.
11/02/08	Tapan Parikh, winner of MIT's TR35 Humanitarian of the Year, joins our Sustainability Board.
11/01/08	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.
10/31/08	Dan Stoicescu, second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code, donates $10,000 to the Lifeboat Foundation.
10/31/08	Enjoy Gentleman Takes a Chance by Sarah Hoyt. This novel includes a nice cover blurb from Jerry Pournelle.
10/30/08	Read Complexity and Security (NATO Science for Peace and Series).
10/29/08	Vincent Walsh, coauthor of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Neurochronometrics of Mind, joins our Neuroscience Board.
10/28/08	John R. Elliott, who has developed a computer program to understand alien languages, joins our Human Trajectories Board.
10/27/08	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.
10/26/08	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!
10/23/08	Deborah Anderson joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Deborah won the Ig Nobel for proving that Coke really works as a contraceptive.
10/23/08	Sohee Park, who discovered that musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people, joins our Neuroscience Board.
10/22/08	Sebastien Guenneau, who has developed invisiblity cloaks that could hide vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
10/22/08	Barker Bausell, author of Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
10/21/08	Riyi Shi, who has developed nanoparticles that deliver treatment for brain and spinal cord injuries, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
10/20/08	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+.
10/19/08	Gabriella De Lucia, coauthor of The Galaxy and its Stellar Halo: Insights on Their Formation from a Hybrid Cosmological Approach, joins our Cosmology Board.
10/19/08	Scott Bunce, who has invented a near-infrared lie detector, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
10/18/08	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.
10/16/08	Liming Dai, who demonstrated that diamond nanoparticles ranging in size from 2 to 10 nm are nontoxic, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
10/16/08	Jeff Thorne, author of Models and Their Evolution, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
10/15/08	Richard Dooling, author of Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
10/13/08	Ali Dhinojwala, whose nanotube adhesive sticks better than a gecko's foot, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
10/12/08	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.)
10/11/08	Metin Sitti, who has developed a robot that walks on water using the surface tension of water, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
10/11/08	Pablo H. Hennings-Yeomans, who has designed a new approach for handling face recognition of low-resolution video, joins our Transparency vs. Privacy Board.
10/11/08	Dongsheng Cai, who discovered a brain pathway responsible for obesity, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
10/11/08	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.
10/10/08	Chang Liu, author of Foundations of MEMS, joins our Engineering Board.
10/09/08	Dean Ho, who has developed a nanodiamond drug device which could transform cancer treatment, joins our Biotech/Medical Board and Nanotechnology Board.
10/09/08	Sandeep Shukla, who coedited Nano, Quantum, and Molecular Computing: Implications to High Level Design and Validation, joins our Engineering Board.
10/09/08	Roy Stedman, Technology Strategist for Dell, joins our Information Sciences Board. Roy has invented more than 25 US and international patents.
10/06/08	Read issue #75 of Lifeboat News!
10/04/08	Aydogan Ozcan, whose lensless imaging system counts cells in seconds, joins our Engineering Board.
10/04/08	Licia Iacoviello, who discovered that half a bar of dark chocolate per week reduces your risk of heart attack, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
10/04/08	Priya Natarajan, who discovered there are limits to how large a black hole can grow, joins our Cosmology Board.
10/03/08	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
10/03/08	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.
10/02/08	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.
10/01/08	Mary-Anne Williams joins our Robotics/AI Board. She is Director, Innovation and Technology Research Laboratory, University of Technology, Sydney.
10/01/08	Bert Kappen, author of An Introduction to Stochastic Control Theory, Path Integrals, and Reinforcement Learning, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
09/30/08	Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, coauthor of Learning Symbolic Inferences with Neural Networks, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
09/29/08	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.
09/29/08	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.
09/29/08	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.
09/28/08	Matt Mahoney, author of A Model for Recursively Self Improving Programs, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
09/28/08	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.
09/28/08	Trond Andresen, author of Two Feasible Future Scenarios: A high-tech Utopia and a high-tech Dystopia, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
09/27/08	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.
09/26/08	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.
09/22/08	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.
09/19/08	Pankaj Sah, Head of Synaptic Plasticity, Queensland Brain Institute, Australia, joins our Neuroscience Board.
09/19/08	Ken Natesan, Section Manager, Nuclear Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, joins our Engineering Board.
09/19/08	Alexandra Carmichael joins our blog team with her first post.
09/18/08	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.)
09/18/08	David Sebba, who is combining gold and DNA to develop a nano-sensor, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
09/18/08	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.
09/17/08	Yaling Liu, whose primary research interest is bio-nano interfacial phenomena, which couple solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, and biophysics, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
09/17/08	Our Kattesh Katti has been selected to be one of "25 Most Influential in Molecular Imaging" in the world.
09/16/08	Read How can we reduce the risk of human extinction?
09/15/08	Zane Andrews, who has found a key to overeating as we age, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
09/15/08	Paul Nghiem joins our Biotech/Medical Board. He is primarly focused on basic, clinical, and translational research aspects of Merkel cell carcinoma.
09/14/08	Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager at Google, who created Google Translate for iPhone, joins our Information Sciences Board.
09/14/08	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.
09/14/08	Stefan Hau-Riege, who developed the brightest, sharpest, fastest x-ray holograms yet, joins our Physics Board.
09/14/08	Kate Maciver, coauthor of Phantom limb pain, cortical reorganization, and the therapeutic effect of mental imagery, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
09/13/08	Stuart S. Licht, whose new fuel battery may allow hybrids to ditch gasoline for good, joins our Sustainability Board.
09/13/08	Alexis Armstrong says "If a ten-year-old can donate, then what is the excuse of you adults?"
09/13/08	Bill Clyne, Head of the Composites & Coatings Group, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, joins our Engineering Board.
09/12/08	Pat Cadigan, "The Queen of Cyberpunk", joins our Futurists Board.
09/10/08	Read issue #74 of Lifeboat News!
09/10/08	Alexei Turchin joins our blog team with his first post.
09/09/08	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.
09/09/08	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.
09/08/08	Dave Reisner, editor of Bionanotechnology: Global Prospects, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
09/08/08	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.
09/07/08	Maggie Turnbull, lead scientist for NASA's New Worlds Observer, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
09/07/08	Kang Zhang, who discovered the first gene associated with dry macular degeneration, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
09/07/08	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.
09/07/08	Danny Belkin joins our Folding@Home team, working to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.
09/06/08	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.
09/04/08	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.
09/03/08	Danny Belkin joins our blog team with his first post.
08/30/08	Read Loneliness and learn why we should focus less on self-interests/short-term outcomes and focus more on social interests/sustainability.
08/29/08	Listen to our David Pearce on The Future And You.
08/28/08	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.
08/27/08	Deb Newberry, coauthor of The Next Big Thing Is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
08/27/08	Aaron Wall, who literally wrote the book on search engine optimization: SEO Book, joins our Futurists Board.
08/27/08	Derek Lomas, who is designing a $12 computer, joins our Scientific Advisory Board.
08/26/08	Jonathan Schooler, who is researching whether we have free will, joins our Neuroscience Board.
08/26/08	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.
08/26/08	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.
08/24/08	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.
08/24/08	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.
08/24/08	Qiming Zhang, who is developing a compressor-free refrigerator, joins our Engineering Board.
08/24/08	Paul Fitzgerald, coauthor of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the Treatment of Depression, joins our Neuroscience Board.
08/24/08	Randall Murch, who created the FBI's WMD forensic investigative program and the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, joins our Counterterrorism Board.
08/23/08	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.
08/23/08	Daniel Polani, Associate Editor of Advances in Complex Systems, joins our Complex Systems Board.
08/23/08	Sami Ayyorgun who is creating the networks of the future — extending our senses into the physical world, joins our Information Sciences Board.
08/23/08	David A. McClellan, author of The Codon-Degeneracy Model of Molecular Evolution, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
08/23/08	Andras Lacko, who will be presenting "Novel Biocompatible Nanoparticles for Targeted Cancer Therapy" at NanoTX USA, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
08/23/08	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).
08/23/08	Walt Trybula, Director of the Nanomaterials Application Center at Texas State University, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
08/22/08	Xiang Zhang, who is developing an invisibility cloak, joins our Engineering Board. Watch Xiang on CNN!
08/22/08	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.
08/21/08	Roderick Jones joins our blog team with his first post.
08/19/08	Chris Haley is our new Vice President! We thank Jerry Searcy for 6 years of hard work as our old Vice President.
08/18/08	Daniel Dewitt Brown, author of Building a Better Human, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
08/17/08	Read 23 Things Science Can Tell Us about Life, the Universe, and Everything by Daniel D. Brown.
08/14/08	Read It Takes a Giant Cosmos to Create Life and Mind by James Gardner.
08/13/08	Listen to our Ben Goertzel on The Future And You.
08/13/08	Watch Large Hadron Rap: Rappin' about CERN's Large Hadron Collider!
08/13/08	Read The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance by Steve Burgess.
08/12/08	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.
08/11/08	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.
08/09/08	Read issue #73 of Lifeboat News!
08/09/08	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.
08/08/08	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.
08/07/08	James P. Evans, Editor-in-Chief of Genetics in Medicine, joins our Biotech/Medical Board. Read Biologist Teaches the Nation's Judges About Genetics.
08/06/08	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.
08/06/08	Shane Legg, author of Friendly AI is Bunk and coauthor of Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
08/06/08	Tim Freeman, author of Using Compassion and Respect to Motivate an Artificial Intelligence, joins our Robotics/AI Board.
08/05/08	Brian Wang upgrades our LifeShield Bunkers program.
08/04/08	Teena James, coauthor of Active MOS Capacitive Sensor Array for Lab-On-a-Chip Applications, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
08/04/08	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.
08/04/08	Manu Sebastian Mannoor, coauthor of BioMEMS — Advancing the Frontiers of Medicine, joins our Nanotechnology Board.
08/03/08	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.
08/01/08	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.
07/30/08	Thanks to input from Joscha Bach, Matt Bamberger, Daniel Berleant, and Joshua Fox, our AIShield Program has been improved.
07/30/08	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.
07/29/08	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.
07/29/08	Didier Sornette, who has discovered that we are in the peak of an oil bubble, joins our Complex Systems Board and Economics Board.
07/28/08	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.
07/27/08	Nick Rhodes, author of Inflammatory Signals in the Development of Tissue-Engineered Soft Tissue, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
07/27/08	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.
07/26/08	Sarah Tabrizi, who discovered new targets for treating Huntington's disease, joins our Neuroscience Board.
07/26/08	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.
07/26/08	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.
07/26/08	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.
07/25/08	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.
07/24/08	Ali Khademhosseini, who is developing self-assembling tissues, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
07/24/08	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.
07/23/08	Lev Sadovnik, who has built a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads, joins our Engineering Board.
07/23/08	Patric Hagmann, who identified the brain "core" that could reveal secrets of thought, joins our Neuroscience Board.
07/22/08	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.
07/22/08	Emanuele Montomoli, who developed a bird flu vaccine made from monkey cells instead of chicken eggs, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
07/21/08	Programmer and AI psychologist Justin Corwin joins our Robotics/AI Board.
07/21/08	David Cramb, who invented "molecular nanovalves", joins our Nanotechnology Board.
07/20/08	Watch Blue Beauty! (Improved from our old PowerPoint version.)
07/20/08	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.
07/20/08	Security expert Harvey Newstrom joins our Cybercrime/Malcode Board.
07/19/08	Romi Nijhawan, who discovered that the brain anticpates the future to "see" the present, joins our Neuroscience Board.
07/19/08	Timothy Hubbard, who authored What is Mental Representation? And how does it Relate to Consciousness?, joins our Neuroscience Board.
07/18/08	Artificial-life scientist Dave Deamer, who coauthored Origins of Life: The Central Concepts, joins our Biotech/Medical Board.
07/18/08	Cameron Wright, whose real-time machine vision system is based on the vision system of a housefly, joins our Engineering Board.
07/17/08	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.
07/17/08	Charles Miller, CEO of Constellation Services International (CSI), joins our Space Settlement Board.
07/16/08	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.
07/16/08	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.
07/15/08	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.
07/15/08	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.
07/14/08	Read Should we be phoning E.T.?
07/14/08	Read The Doomsday Device is Ignored.