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A story from Salon on transhumanism:


While we have a rare combination of candidates with a real chance of taking the White House — a woman, a Jewish socialist and a real estate magnate — there’s another you probably haven’t heard about: a Transhumanist.

Zoltan Istvan, 43, the leader and founder of the Transhumanist party, has entered the race as a third-party candidate promising the “facilitation of immortality.” Istvan, who lives in California, first made headlines when he set out on a cross-country campaign tour in a bus shaped like a hearse last September. His main philosophy: enliven America’s technological advancement by combining humans with machines, to improve and prolong life.

In U.S politics, the two traditional parties have consistently dominated the electorate. In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders is the only Independent in Congress, every other House member belongs to either the Democratic or Republican Party. But historically the country has had a history of fringe candidates, which typically get a few thousand votes in presidential elections. In 1992, billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who ran on the Reform Party, won 18.9% of the vote, the best finish by a non-major party candidate in a presidential election since Teddy Roosevelt won 27.5% of the vote in 1912. While Perot’s Reform Party, like practically all third parties, has failed to emerge as a contender since then, candidates like him have had a significant impact on electoral outcomes.

Zoltan Istvan is still an ambiguity for most of the political world, and the Transhumanist party in its early stages of development, but there is something to be said about how his policies could predict the way the political landscape might change in the decades to come.

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ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. (Feb. 5, 2016) — Each year, the U.S. Army conducts a series of technology demonstrations known as the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments, or AEWE. The event is the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s live, force-on-force experiment.

AEWE places technologies under development by industry and Army researchers into the hands of Soldiers for early and credible feedback from the end-user.

In January, the AEWE 2017 team selected a project submitted by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for inclusion in its next round of experimentation: On-Demand Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or UAS. It is one of 50 technologies slotted to participate in the experiment with 14 from government researchers and 36 from industry.

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“I believe our civilization is going to be vastly more intelligent in the decades ahead,” Kurzweil told Time. “You can argue how we got here, but we are the species that goes beyond our limitations. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. Our species always transcends.”


The famous inventor and tech pundit shares a few words on why he thinks humans will soon live forever.

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Whether or not nerve cells are able to regrow after injury depends on their location in the body. Injured nerve cells in the peripheral nervous system, such as those in the arms and legs, can recover and regrow, at least to some extent. But nerve cells in the central nervous system—the brain and spinal cord—can’t recover at all.

A UCLA-led collaboration has identified a specific network of genes and a pattern of gene expression mice that promote repair in the peripheral nervous system in a mouse model. This network, the researchers found, does not exist in the central nervous system. The researchers also found a drug that can promote in the central nervous system.

The study appears in the of the journal Neuron.

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Once strictly an extremely expensive tool used only by law enforcement and the military, thermal cameras are now accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a $250 accessory. But starting with Caterpillar’s new rugged S60, thermal imaging sensors are starting to be built right into smartphones.

The FLIR ONE thermal camera started life as a bulky case for the iPhone 5, but was eventually streamlined into a compact dongle that connected to the microUSB or Apple Lightning port on the bottom of iOS or Android smartphones. With the new CAT S60 smartphone, however, the Lepton sensor that allows FLIR cameras to see in total darkness has finally been integrated into the device itself, alongside its standard rear camera.

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