IARPA has released its annual solicitation for projects on the absolute bleeding-edge of IT.
By Grayson Ullman.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,887
A documentary film just had its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. How To Build A Time Machine, the work of filmmaker Jay Cheel, is a strange and incoherent little document of two middle-aged men with loosely related obsessions: One of them wants to build a perfect recreation of a movie prop – the machine from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel – and the other is a theoretical physicist who thinks he may have effected a kind of time travel in a lab, on a microscopic scale, using lasers that push particles around. The weak connection between the two men is that they both regret a death in their past – a best friend, a father – and are preoccupied with what they might have done to prevent the death; they both wonder if time travel to the past might have been a remedy for death itself. (Compared to the protagonist of Zero K who seeks immortality as a way of avoiding the loss of a loved one.) The 80s synthpop song Forever Young by Alphaville booms symbolically at one point.
Why this sudden ascendancy of yearning for immortality now? Is it simply because immortality of a medical sort might be imminent, a result of technological advances, such as nanobots, that will fight disease in our bloodstream? Or is it because, as Ray Kurzweil implies, digital technology is now so advanced that we have already left our bodies behind? We already live outside them, and our digital selves will outlive them. (“I mean,” says Kurzweil, “this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.”)
The frequently quoted axiom of Arthur C. Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is pertinent to this current fascination with life without end. We are now perceiving technology as not just magic but as god-like, as life-giving, as representing an entirely new plane of being.
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Not good; hope we can by 2045 have new methods to create weather/ drought resistant vegetation, and matured the improved options around converting sea water to fresh water so no one suffers from harsh weather including droughts.
Longer, hotter, more regular heat waves could have a damaging effect on life expectancy and crop production in Africa warn climate scientists in a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Examining temperature data from 1979 to 2015, the researchers caution that heat waves classified as unusual today could become a normal occurrence within 20 years. This scenario could be triggered by an increase in average global temperature of 2 degrees.
Risk all year round
Located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, Africa experiences high levels of solar radiation all year round and heat waves can occur in any season, not just during summer months. Running climate models through to 2075, the scientists found that so-called unusual heat waves could occur as frequently as four times per year towards the end of the century. In other words, one dangerously hot spell for every season of the year.
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University of Cambridge researchers have developed the world’s tiniest engine, capable of a force per unit-weight nearly 100 times higher than any motor or muscle.
The new nano-engines could lead to nanorobots small enough to enter living cells to fight disease, the researchers say.
Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research, has named the devices “actuating nanotransducers” (ANTs). “Like real ants, they produce large forces for their weight,” he quipped.
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Chinese technology giant Huawei is preparing for a world where people live forever, dead relatives linger on in computers and robots try to kill humans.
Huawei is best known as one of the world’s largest producers of broadband network equipment and smartphones. But Kevin Ho, president of its handset product line, told the CES Asia conference in Shanghai on Wednesday the company used science fiction movies like “The Matrix” to envision future trends and new business ideas.
“Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now,” he said. “In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world.”
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University of Oxford scientists have developed a gene therapy that has shown promise in treating choroideremia, a rare disorder that causes progressive vision loss, mostly in males.
Doctors tested the treatment method on six patients with choroideremia by injecting numerous healthy genes into the eye to replace missing ones in the retina. The purpose of this therapy is to hinder or prevent loss of sight, according to Oxford’s announcement.
Results varied for each participant. Two patients experienced a big improvement in vision that lasted for four years, but a decline occurred in the other untreated eye. Three separate patients maintained their vision in the treated eye over four years whereas the sixth recipient who was given a lower dose succumbed to vision decline in both eyes.
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A nanoparticle commonly used in food, cosmetics, sunscreen and other products can have subtle effects on the activity of genes expressing enzymes that address oxidative stress inside two types of cells. While the titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles are considered non-toxic because they don’t kill cells at low concentrations, these cellular effects could add to concerns about long-term exposure to the nanomaterial.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology used high-throughput screening techniques to study the effects of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on the expression of 84 genes related to cellular oxidative stress. Their work found that six genes, four of them from a single gene family, were affected by a 24-hour exposure to the nanoparticles.
The effect was seen in two different kinds of cells exposed to the nanoparticles: human HeLa cancer cells commonly used in research, and a line of monkey kidney cells. Polystyrene nanoparticles similar in size and surface electrical charge to the titanium dioxide nanoparticles did not produce a similar effect on gene expression.
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