Futurism presents its annual This Year in Science immersive experience! This year’s themes include robot intelligence, space exploration, drones, CRISPR (a breakthrough gene editing tool), plus a special ‘Futurist of the Year’ award.
BY: DANIEL KORN
The very mention of “nanobots” can bring up a certain future paranoia in people—undetectable robots under my skin? Thanks, but no thanks. Professor Ido Bachelet of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University confirms that while tiny robots being injected into a human body to fight disease might sound like science fiction, it is in fact very real.
Cancer treatment as we know it is problematic because it targets a large area. Chemo and radiation therapies are like setting off a bomb—they destroy cancerous cells, but in the process also damage the healthy ones surrounding it. This is why these therapies are sometimes as harmful as the cancer itself. Thus, the dilemma with curing cancer is not in finding treatments that can wipe out the cancerous cells, but ones that can do so without creating a bevy of additional medical issues. As Bachelet himself notes in a TEDMED talk: “searching for a safer cancer drug is basically like searching for a gun that kills only bad people.”
At one time or another, we’ve all been encouraged to “maximize our potential.” In a recent interview, Academic and Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez said that mankind is making progress toward expanding beyond its potential. And the changes, he believes, could be profound.
To illustrate the process, Enriquez theorized what might happen if we were to bring Charles Darwin back to life and drop him in the middle of Trafalgar Square. As Darwin takes out his notebook and starts observing, Enriquez suggested he would likely see what might appear to be a different species. Since Darwin’s time, humans have grown taller, and with 1.5 billion obese people, larger. Darwin might also notice some other features too that many of us take for granted — there are more senior citizens, more people with all their teeth, a lot fewer wrinkles, and even some 70-year-olds running in marathons.
“There’s a whole series of morphologies that are just different about our bodies, but we don’t notice it. We don’t notice we’ve doubled the lifespan of humans in the last century,” Enriquez said. “We don’t notice how many more informations (sic) come into a brain in a single day versus what used to come in in a lifetime. So, across almost every part of humanity, there have been huge changes.”
Part of the difference that Darwin would see, Enriquez noted, is that natural selection no longer applies as strongly to life and death as it once did. Further, random gene mutations that led to some advantages kept getting passed down to generations and became part of the species. The largest difference, however, is our ongoing move toward intelligent design, he said.
Continue reading “Can We Evolve Ourselves To Expand Beyond Human Potential?” »
A Chinese company building a massive animal cloning facility doesn’t want to limit itself to just replicating cattle and pets but hopes to move into the human cloning business in the future. The company, Boyalife Group, possesses the technology to do so, its CEO, Xiaochun Xo, told AFP, but to date has been “self-restrained” because it fears public backlash.
A Chinese company is claiming it has the technology to clone humans but is holding off because it says the public isn’t ready. That’s likely true, experts say, and it’s not likely to change because there isn’t a powerful enough medical reason that could swing public opinion.
Doing nothing is no longer acceptable. Even the FDA admits the system needs fixing. Stem cell work holds huge potential and needs freedom to test breakthrough therapies that could change medicine forever.
Engineer Robert Grass says that though we believe information is here forever, it’s actually fragile. Hard drives and physical sources of information, like books, decay over time. In a video for the BBC, Grass describes his quest to find a method of preserving information that could be stable for millions of years. The secret is DNA.
In 2012, research showed that you could translate a megabyte (MB) of information into DNA and then read it back again. DNA has a language of its own, and is written in sequences of nucleotides (A, C, T, and G). Think of it as similar to binary, which breaks information down into ones and zeros.
And DNA has the advantage of being able to put an enormous amount of information in a tiny space. Theoretically, one gram of DNA could hold 455 exabytes of information. That’s “enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare”, according to New Scientist.
West Yorkshire couple Laura Jacques and Richard Remde enlisted South Korean firm offering dog-cloning service for £67,000.
Scientists have developed a way to produce soft, flexible and stretchy electronic circuits and radio antennas by hand, simply by writing on specially designed sheets of material.
This technique could help people draw electronic devices into existence on demand for customized devices, researchers said in a new study describing the method.
Continue reading “‘Writable’ Circuits Could Let Scientists Draw Electronics into Existence” »
Rollins, who has a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, took some time to talk about genetic engineering, the future of humanity and the ethical limits of science.
(This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.)
Live Science: A quote from “The Bone Labyrinth” reads, “Research today has become more about seeing if something can be done versus judging if it should. It’s knowledge for the sake of knowledge, regardless of the impact on the world.” Is that you speaking? Is that what you personally believe?
Continue reading “Should We Create Superhumans? Q&A with Author James Rollins” »
3D printing in the medical industry isn’t new. We’ve seen companies 3D print prosthetics and even bones, but now a company in India has claimed to have developed 3D printable liver tissue, which they are hoping that one day will be usable for full-fledged liver transplants, although we suppose there will be quite a bit of legal and regulatory hurdles to overcome.
According to Pandorum Technologies, the company behind the technology, they claim that these 3D printed liver tissues are made of human cells and will allow for inexpensive medical research. This also means that reachers will need to rely less on human and animal trials. The entire process could also save companies millions of dollars which is usually needed in research and development.
Pandorum Technologies’ co-founder Arun Chandru said, “Our 3D bio-printed mini-livers that mimic the human liver will serve as test platforms for discovery and development of drugs with better efficacy, less side effects and at lower costs.” Apart from being used as test platforms, 3D printable liver tissue could also be used for other purposes.
