It’s been a short 20 years since Mayor and Queloz first detected 51 Peg b, the first exoplanet discovered around a solar type star. This is my personal take on this all; kind of takes me back. I can still smell the thyme at Haute-Provence.
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Dec 29, 2015
Will 2015 Be Remembered as the Breakout Year for Transhumanism?
Posted by Zoltan Istvan in categories: life extension, transhumanism, transportation
My latest piece for The Huffington Post. It’s a recap of 2015 for transhumanism and includes some select stories & videos:
Last year, I wrote that 2014 was a great year for the transhumanism movement. But 2015 was simply incredible — it might end up being called a breakout year. I’m not yet willing to declare transhumanism as “mainstream,” but it’s getting quite close now. Transhumanism has become a word that is used frequently by people around the world and in major media when discussing radical science and technology changing our species.
Below is a quick recap of some select stories in English that came out this year on transhumanism and some of my efforts to bring the future closer.
Continue reading “Will 2015 Be Remembered as the Breakout Year for Transhumanism?” »
Dec 29, 2015
A new thought experiment shows how we could get information from a black hole
Posted by Andreas Matt in categories: cosmology, physics, singularity
Physicists think they’ve come up with a way to learn a bit about the interior of a black hole — an impossible procedure that shows the insanity of studying the heart of a singularity.
Dec 29, 2015
Researchers Have Succesfully Written Quantum Code On A Silicon Chip For The First Time
Posted by Andreas Matt in categories: computing, quantum physics
Researchers from the University Of New South Wales(UNSW) in Australia have successfully demonstrated that they can write and control the quantum version of computer code on a silicon microchip. Computers, at the moment, use binary language to operate, 0 and 1. Together, these two bits generate code words that can be used to program complex commands. But in quantum computing language there’s also the option for bits to be in superposition, what this actually means is that they can be 1 and 0 at the very exact same time. This unlocks a massively more powerful programming language, but until now scientists haven’t been able to figure out how to write it.
Dec 29, 2015
[Visual Dictionary] Out of This World Space Art — By Dave Valeza | The Creators Project
Posted by Odette Bohr Dienel in categories: media & arts, space, space travel
“[Dave Valeza] captures the wonder artists worldwide have experienced with the rejuvination of the space industry of the past few years. From finding water on Mars to landing reusable rockets (plural!), 2015 has been a great year for space, and artists are loving it.”
Dec 29, 2015
This Year in Science
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: biotech/medical, drones, neuroscience, robotics/AI, science, space travel
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.
Dec 29, 2015
DNA nanobots will target cancer cells in the first human trial using a terminally ill patient
Posted by Matthew White in categories: biotech/medical, health, nanotechnology, robotics/AI
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.”
Dec 29, 2015
Speculation mounts over Elon Musk’s Mars plan
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Some of SpaceX’s most ardent fans are guessing at the shape of the biggest thing to come: the Mars Colonial Transporter.
Dec 28, 2015
Can We Evolve Ourselves To Expand Beyond Human Potential?
Posted by Dan Faggella in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, evolution, existential risks, genetics, human trajectories
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.
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