Technology has immortality, cures for the worlds devastating diseases, quantum computing and a host of other science fiction notions in its grasp. Current trends in a number of areas indicate that over the next 10 years many of these technologies will come to fruition. "The Next 10 Years" tracks the trends that will transform our everyday lives in almost unimaginable ways.

Friday, October 28, 2005

The Human Brain Seen as Master of Time - Yahoo! News: "Your brain is a time machine with three modes that control everything from instantaneous tasks like moving to maintaining long trains of thought and ultimately staying in synch with night and day. "

IBM Supercomputer Hits New Top Speed As Competition Looms - Yahoo! News: "In a ceremony at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California Thursday, officials from the Department of Energy and IBM celebrated completion of the world's fastest supercomputer, and said IBM's Blue Gene/L system had doubled its previous performance. The new record of 280.6 teraflops, or trillion floating-point operations per second, surpasses a top speed of 136.8 teraflops that a half-complete version of the system achieved in June. "

Saturday, October 22, 2005

On technology's frontier, life gets better and longer | IndyStar.com: "If you want to live a long life, you're in luck. Advances in medicine, gene therapy, agriculture and even nutrition have experts wondering if a boom in human life expectancy is right around the corner."

Friday, October 21, 2005

Hang in There: The 25-Year Wait for Immortality: "Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century.
By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can�t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives, or opt for an older look if they get bored. Of course, everyone will be required to go in for age rejuvenation therapy once every decade or so, but that will be a small price to pay for near-immortality."

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Virginia Commonwealth University: "Researchers working with a man-made, metal-filled nanoparticle are developing the material for use as a diagnostic and therapeutic agent that may boost the sensitivity of MRI techniques and improve the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors."

Top scientific group warns of growing natural disasters - Yahoo! News: "The world will witness more deadly natural disasters as global warming accelerates, with unchecked population growth putting large numbers of people at risk.
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The Paris-based International Council for Science recommended an international research body be established as a matter of urgency to provide a firmer basis for policies to tackle the problem."

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Prof develops cancer nanobomb: "
Balaji Panchapakesan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UD
3:38 p.m., Oct. 13, 2005--University of Delaware researchers are opening a new front in the war on cancer, bringing to bear new nanotechnologies for cancer detection and treatment and introducing a unique nanobomb that can literally blow up breast cancer tumors."

Prof develops cancer nanobomb: "
Balaji Panchapakesan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UD
3:38 p.m., Oct. 13, 2005--University of Delaware researchers are opening a new front in the war on cancer, bringing to bear new nanotechnologies for cancer detection and treatment and introducing a unique nanobomb that can literally blow up breast cancer tumors."

Monday, October 17, 2005

MPrize-The Three Hundred Information: "Currently, six teams of scientists are working on the problem, and every one of them believes that the near future promises interventions that will extend both the quality and quantity of human life span."

Recipe for Destruction - New York Times: "AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.
This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous. "

One-Fifth of Human Genes Have Been Patented, Study Reveals: "A new study shows that 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.
The study, which is reported this week in the journal Science, is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome. "

Daily Press: Plasma pencil kills germs: "NORFOLK -- Physicist Mounir Laroussi walks quickly through the gray, empty space that greets him when the elevators open to the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics on Southampton Avenue.

He enters a hall and unlocks a wooden door to his lab. On a worktable lies a small, plastic wand that you might not have noticed in the midst of tall metal helium tanks, computers and assorted machines.

But the wand is the most interesting thing in the room.

Laroussi calls it the 'plasma pencil.' Plasma is a substance made of energized atomic particles that's created when gas is electrified. It's considered the fourth state of matter besides solids, liquids and gases."

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times: "In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction of what she set out to do. 'Madness,' she thought. 'I'm trying to do 30 things at once.'"

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Biotech career wave propels high schools to update classes: "Michele Bertolino likes to watch the television show CSI and figure out how they 'do all of that neat stuff with DNA.'
Next semester, the 16-year-old junior at Saint Andrew's School in Boca Raton will get to do her own DNA experiments when she and a dozen or so junior and seniors take introduction to biotechnology and genomics, which will be taught for the first time at the preparatory school."

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Insect's Amazing 'Rubber' Made in Lab - Yahoo! News: "A special type of protein enables insects to chirp, fly, and hop. Now, scientists have produced this same protein in the lab and say it could one day be used to repair human arteries.
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The protein, called resilin, is like rubber. It can be squished up, storing energy for a quick release, and it remains extremely functional over an insect's lifetime. "

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

KSRM Table of Contents Page: "Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines"

Comments: Free copy of ground breaking book: "Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines"

: "The film '2001' gained cinematic notoriety with the introduction of a self-aware, independent-thinking, murderous computer named HAL that became a sci-fi icon. In the movie's namesake year, IBM engineers launched an effort to develop technology to help computers monitor, diagnose, and heal their own problems.
IBM isn't trying to create a real-life HAL, but it does want to make computers smart enough to heal themselves. The promise of autonomic computing--systems that function automatically, much like reflexive bodily functions such as breathing, without external intervention--still remains formative. Developing these sorts of capabilities often requires multiple vendors to work together toward a long-term vision to build networkwide capabilities, sometimes piece by piece."

The Seattle Times: Microsoft sees a future on the small screen: "It took 12 years and more than $10 billion, but one of Microsoft's biggest dreams may finally be coming true: The company is close to becoming a major player in the television business.
This is not about PCs that play video � the company has done that for years � but rather a whole new platform for delivering television over the Internet, through software that's mostly invisible to consumers."

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Is Cloned Food Destined for Our Tables? - Yahoo! News: "ROUND TOP, Texas - About 80 miles east of Austin, out where the fire ants bite and men still doff their baseball hats when greeting women, 20 cows pregnant with calves cloned by ViaGen Inc. have just arrived. "

Friday, October 07, 2005

Private Spaceflight: Shifting into Fast Forward - Yahoo! News: "LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- The next generation of human spaceflight is no longer the sole province of governments. Private spaceships transporting passengers first to the edge of space--and ultimately into orbit--are in various stages of design, construction and testing. "

Thursday, October 06, 2005

H-Cube - Bench Top Hydrogenation Unit by Thales Nanotechnology, Inc. of Budapest Receives Prestigious R&D 100 Award: "Thales Nanotechnology, Inc.
announced today that its development has been recognized as one of the 100
most technologically significant and innovative new products of 2005 by R&D
Magazine. The award winning development, H-Cube, is the first in a new wave
of continuous-flow hydrogenation reactors. Utilizing water electrolysis to
generate hydrogen, with a catalyst cartridge system and with a
continuous-flow reactor, the shoe-box sized H-Cube makes hydrogenation
convenient, more efficient and less hazardous. With this equipment, reactions
that are almost impossible to carry out under normal circumstances can be
performed. The product is already on the market and Thales Nanotechnology
expects that its unique development will revolutionize catalytic
hydrogenation in the next decade."

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

New therapies expected from better understanding of RNA, says UH prof: "This work furthers efforts to develop general design principles for RNA that can be used in emerging biotechnology applications. This is especially significant now because RNA has recently been discovered to be unexpectedly involved in the regulation of gene expression in mammalian cells. Hence, the ability to design novel RNAs is expected to facilitate research leading to new therapies for a variety of human ailments. "

Monday, October 03, 2005

NASA Propulsion Strategy Reaches Back While Looking Ahead - Yahoo! News: "The initial propulsion work in support of NASA's bid to return to the Moon and go on to Mars will focus primarily on adapting space shuttle systems and developing methane-fueled engines, a technology with which the United States has little experience."

Commentary: this hooked the amateur rocketeer in me.

Wired 13.10: R Is for Robot: "Rubi is having a bad day. The toddlers in Classroom One were excited to see her this morning, shouting her name and poking her belly. But Rubi is not her usual self. She tries to sing 'The Wheels on the Bus' but stops abruptly in midsong. She's not making eye contact. And she has some kind of crick in her neck that's causing her head to jerk erratically. "

I know your name. I know where you live, and everywhere you've ever lived. I know when and where you were born. I know how many credit cards you have--and how good you are about paying them off. And I know all about your insurance claims, your work history, and whether you have a criminal record.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online: "IT IS the year 2015. Mr and Mrs Texaco � having cooked on their AgaNaught, a meal, to a Jules Oliver recipe, of chicken killed at the press of a button in their cook space that morning � saunter down to the pub where they drink beer from intelligent glasses that tell them when they�ve had enough. The AgaNaught, the cooker of choice in ten years� time, is a microwave that can be programmed to prepare food to any style from tandoori to wood-fired, and will even ice cakes to designs tapped into its computer screen. "