Clipmarks | wildcat's futurism collection

Build a synthetic lifeform

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:14:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

Mad Science Contest: Build a Lifeform and We'll Send You to Hong Kong or Give You $1000

io9 wants to encourage mad scientists in every field, but especially in the area of synthetic biology. That's because synthetic biologists are the people who are going to build new life forms, like ligers and unicorns and people with claws and glowing eyes. OK, they might build bacteria that can clean up oil spills and repair damaged kidneys too. The point is, building new lifeforms is the science of the future and therefore you can never have too many garage laboratories and mad scientists devoted to it. That's why io9 is sponsoring a contest to find two of the best synthetic life forms you can design for us. The winners in our two categories will get either an all-expenses-paid trip to the kickass Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong this October, or $1000 and a chance to have their creature drawn by a cool comic book artist. Find out more below.

Tags: science, building, life, synthetic

For Better or Worse, Sex in Space Is Inevitable

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:43:08 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Weddings in space could be right around the corner, and experts figure the inevitable cosmic consummation will be just around the next corner.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., announced last week they will host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen) apiece.

For all we know, sex in space has already taken place. But NASA officials aren't talking about that much.

Beyond space tourism as a platform for steamy shenanigans, space missions are the perfect petri dishes for close encounters, and this year NASA certainly has a busy flight schedule, with five missions planned. And more countries than ever are now venturing into space, with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata slated to become Japan's first long-duration space flyer this year and China gearing up for its first spacewalk scheduled for October.

Things will get even more interesting with future long-duration missions envisioned for the moon, Mars

Tags: space travel, sex, nasa

Ordinary into Genius- Genes

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:40:18 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

Scientists Identify Genes that Could Turn Ordinary People into Supergeniuses (or Mindless Drones)

It's clear that there's a specific set of genes responsible for brain development when you're in the womb, and that those genes affect your ability to learn later on. But now a group of researchers in the U.S. and Canada have identified those genes. And their discovery could represent the first step in tweaking brain development. It's possible that that knocking out some of those genes or adding extra copies of them to a developing baby could result in the tailor-made human minds of Brave New World: Some will be born to develop cutting-edge technologies, and others to be slow-witted and compliant.

Published this weekend in PLoS Genetics, the study is extraordinary not just because of its futuristic implications, but because of the cool new super-rapid system the researchers used to identify which genes are active during brain development. The technique is called RNA interference, or RNAi:

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, genius, drones

Fixing Earth One Dome at a Time

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:07:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Cold war culture has been back in style for a while now, at least in architecture circles. The clarity of its Manichaean worldview, in which everyone seemed to know who the bad guys were, is a comforting refuge from our current ideological confusion. And the era’s brooding architectural monuments look pretty good compared with the Disney-inspired visual noise that has invaded so many American cities.

So “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a timely new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is likely to stir waves of nostalgia. For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. If parents sometimes drank too much, got divorced and neglected their children, these were only potholes on the superhighway to utopia.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Tags: buckminster fuller, domes, earth, architecture

Virtual Personal Assistants: Not Just for the Filthy Rich

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 11:15:26 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.technewsworld.com

If you think virtual assistants are too expensive, you might want to think again. AskSunday.com, for instance, charges users $29 a month for 15 "requests"; meanwhile, GetFriday.com offers monthly plans that start at $120 a month for 10 hours and pay-as-you-go options.

Think only celebrities, high-ranking professionals and the wealthy can enjoy having personal assistants at their beck and call? Not necessarily.

A growing number of Web sites are making it easier to outsource virtual errands overseas, making it cheaper to indulge in the luxury of never having to write another thank-you card or sit on hold with the department of motor vehicles.

Those who use the sites, for everything from ordering takeout to managing online dating, say the cost is affordable and a small price to free up their time -- even in the face of a sputtering economy.

Taking Over Tedious Tasks

Tags: virtual, personal assistants

Biologically Inspired Ocean Power Systems

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:49:15 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.biopowersystems.com

BioPower Systems is commercialising ocean power conversion technologies. Through application of biomimicry, we have adopted nature's mechanisms for survival and energy conversion in the marine environment and have applied these in the development of our proprietary wave and tidal power systems.

Our technologies inherit benefits developed during 3.8 Billion years of evolutionary optimization in nature’s ocean laboratory.The resulting systems move and sway in tune with the forces of the ocean, and naturally streamline when extreme conditions prevail. This leads to lightweight designs and associated low costs.

The inherently simple bioWAVE™ and bioSTREAM™ devices are designed to supply utility-scale grid-connected renewable energy using efficient modular systems. These systems will reside beneath the ocean surface, out of view, and in harmony with the living creatures that inspired their design.

Tags: biology, ocean, energy, biomimicry, wave, tidal, power

Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:25:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning ~~282~~ 235 mpg.

Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.

According to Britain's Car magazine, VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010. They'll probably be built in the company's prototype shop, which has the capacity to build as many as 1,000 per year. That's not a lot, but it's enough to help VW get a lot of attention while showing how much light weight and an efficient engine can achieve.

Tags: wv, cars, energy, gas, fuel efficiency

Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:46:52 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: as always, a fascinating read from K.Kelly at the Technium

Clip Source: www.kk.org

All extropic systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day

Ditto for civilizations

Tags: ecology, investment, extropic systems, future, environment

Robots Advance

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:35:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.jumpthecurve.net

Last week, I explained how humans might soon be learning things from robots. Today, I’d like to explain why robots might become a more integral part of life faster than most people expect.

Yesterday, Technology Review published an interesting article entitled: ”Robots Learns to Use Tools.” What is really intriguing about the article, which describes a new robot called the UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan for short, is that the robot is employing sophisticated algorithms to teach itself how to deal with unfamiliar objects.

One of the major barriers to date with robotics is that programmers have had to write complicated software code to help robots deal with almost every contingency that it might encounter. For example, for a household robot to be effective, it needs to recognize every item that might conceivably be in someone house—everything from a pair of scissors to a flower vase. This is no easy chore.

The implications of self-learning robots could be quite profound

Tags: robotics

Stem Cells 2.0: Scientists Make Revolutionary Advance

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:07:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

A while back scientists were making revolutionary breakthroughs in stem cell research. Unfortunately they fell foul of interpretations of thousand year old texts in foreign languages, and a government with the scientific understanding of a squashed grape said "Sorry, our kind and loving God requires that people continue to suffer from Parkinson's, anemia, and various other horrible ailments." Luckily, scientists are awesome and did the obvious thing - make ANOTHER revolutionary breakthrough to get around the problem.

The previous problem with stem cells was that they came from aborted or otherwise unviable fetuses. Note that these fetuses had been terminated anyway, and the only issue now was whether it was more moral to chuck the goo in a bin and burn it, or use it to help cure the sick. The ethical answer, apparently, isn't what you think.

This issue can now be sidestepped with the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) from any kind of tissue

Tags: stem cells, breakthrough, medicine

Japan Creates Mega Solar City -Leads World

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:06:39 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

In an effort to create one of Japan's greenest urban areas and clean up its air by reducing CO2 emissions, Japan announced that two gigantic solar power generation plants will be installed in Sakai City.

The title of the project is quite a mouth full – the Sakai City Waterfront Mega Solar Power Generation Plan. Say that three times fast. I guess the title has to be fitting for the size of the project, however, because the two facilities will have a 28,000 kW combined maximum capacity and will help to reduce CO2 emissions by a whopping 10,000 tons annually. The city will work in conjunction with Sharp Japan and Kansai Electric Power, with Sharp planning on using thin-film silicon solar modules.

Japan is fast becoming the world's solar capital. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., leaders in the U.S. solar energy industry blasted the U.S. government on Monday for a freeze on applications for new solar projects on public land in six Western states.

Tags: solar power, japan, energy, co2

Teaching futurism to children and teens

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:10:07 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.depressedmetabolism.com

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher.

For the most part the education systems of the industrialized nations are functional in that they cover the basics: reading, writing, science, and arithmetic. There is systematic guidance in the form of counselors in schools once a child becomes an adolescent and help is given for the child to develop into their adult career.

What is a futurist to do to inspire the next generation?

A futurist can share sci-fi books such as Stephen Hawking’s new book for children “George’s Secret Key to the Universe”, or a transhumanist adventure based on what is seen as possible by scientists now –like my book “21st Century Kids”,

but they still must encourage the child’s own loves, even if they are radically different.

Tags: teaching, learning, open mind, future

Hot future shock: Heat wave temperatures to soar

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:09:12 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

(AP) -- During the European heat wave of 2003 that killed tens of thousands, the temperature in parts of France hit 104 degrees. Nearly 15,000 people died in that country alone. During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the mercury spiked at 106 and about 600 people died.

In a few decades, people will look back at those heat waves "and we will laugh," said Andreas Sterl, author of a new study. "We will find (those temperatures) lovely and cool."

Sterl's computer model shows that by the end of the century, high temperatures for once-in-a-generation heat waves will rise twice as fast as everyday average temperatures. Chicago, for example, would reach 115 degrees in such an event by 2100. Paris heat waves could near 109 with Lyon coming closer to 114.

Sterl, who is with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, projects temperatures for rare heat waves around the world in a study soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Tags: temperatures, heat waves, climate change

No Time for the Singularity

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:24:30 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.worldchanging.com

Scientists like to low-ball their estimates. The now-famous IPCC scenarios for the effects of climate change are already known to be woefully, unrealistically conservative (Freeman Dyson's recent comments notwithstanding). Arctic changes expected 20 years from now are happening now, and in North America the beginning of spring has already been pushed back by two weeks, which is enough to play havoc with the fertility cycle of many migratory birds (among other consequences). The worst-case scenarios used in public debate ignore some extremely worrisome factors, such as the possible release of oceanic methane from clathrates. If we're going to deal with this problem, we have to do it now, as in, within the term of your next government.

The ultimate in technological optimism is the idea of the technological singularity, which posits that technological advance is exponential and, driven by progress in artificial intelligence, will soon hit the vertical slope of the curve.

Tags: singularity, scenarios

The "Idea Acceleration Chamber"- " Kage Roi"

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:25:58 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

You've heard lots about genomic this and nano-that, but deep down we've all really known what high-tech was meant to provide: great big room-filling voice controlled displays.

Technology company Kayac have developed a prototype "idea acceleration chamber" called "Kage Roi". Microphones monitor conversations and search the web for relevant images and pages, displaying them directly on the meeting table, and even controlling the ambient lighting to match the desired mood.

Not since nuclear power has a technology with such an awesome potential for use and abuse come about. Once the idea is liberated from the corporate world and makes its way into the home, it could be the most awesome setting for parties and alcoholically-influenced discussions you've ever seen

while many struggle to make faster this and bigger that, others realise that outside of specialists there isn't any need to make some things better, but to blend them better with their human users.

Tags: kayac, tech, displays