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, June 29, 2007

Potential cure for HIV discovered

Potential cure for HIV discovered

The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine.

The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide.

"A customized enzyme that effectively excises integrated HIV-1 from infected cells in vitro might one day help to eradicate (the) virus from AIDS patients," Alan Engelman, of Harvard University's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wrote in an article accompanying the study.

Current treatments focus on suppressing the HIV virus in order to delay the onset of AIDS and dramatically extend the life of infected patients.

What makes HIV so deadly, however, is its ability to insert itself into the body's cells and force those cells to produce new infection.


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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Technology Review: Brain Boosters

Technology Review: Brain Boosters

It's 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, and I'm feeling stupid and slightly grumpy. I have lingering jet lag because I took a trip to London last week and flew in last night from California. Now I'm sitting in the Brain Stimulation Unit of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, MD, with two electrodes affixed to my forehead. In a moment, a researcher in the lab of neurologist Eric Wassermann will activate a gizmo the size of a small clock radio, which will send an electric current through my frontal lobe, the part of the brain most associated with higher reasoning and emotion. For the next 40 minutes, the flow of electrons will create an electric field that lets neurons having to do with cognition and emotion fire more easily.

I'm here to investigate firsthand whethe

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

EADS to offer tourist spacecraft by 2012

EADS to offer tourist spacecraft by 2012

Getting a closer look at the stars may soon stop being the privilege of a few select billionaires, with the space arm of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company saying Wednesday it plans to have a space tourist plane in operation by 2012.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Theory of Physics Explains Human Patterns

Theory of Physics Explains Human Patterns

Why does a railway network look like a river? Why do the streets of old Rome look like a leaf? Because whether their shape is determined by the interactions of molecules or the choices made by individual humans, all of these systems of flow are governed by a relatively simple new principle of thermodynamics.

"Society, with all its layers and features of organization, is a flow system," say co-editors Adrian Bejan and Gilbert Merkx of Duke University. Consequently, these repeating patterns are no accident. "Coincidences that occur in the billions are loud hints that a universal phenomenon is in play."
That's the premise of an ambitious new collection of essays in the text "Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics," published June 13 by Springer Science+Business Media.

First described a decade ago by Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke, the constructal theory is a deceptively simple explanation for why these branching patterns occur so frequently: for a flow system to persist in time, its configuration must change such that it provides easier access to its currents. Simply put, if something is flowing, it will branch in a fairly predictable pattern to reduce imperfections like friction, or in this case, bumping into pedestrians coming the other way. "Natural systems will always move toward faster access or easier flow," Bejan said.


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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Goodbye wires... MIT experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer

Goodbye wires... MIT experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer

A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. The team members are Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Prof. Peter Fisher, and Prof. John Joannopoulos (Francis Wright Davis Chair and director of ISN), led by Prof. Marin Soljacic. Realizing their recent theoretical prediction, they were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet (more than two meters) away; there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The MIT team refers to its concept as “WiTricity” (as in wireless electricity). The work will be reported in the June 7 issue of Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

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Saturday, June 02, 2007

Agent slows aging in mice

Agent slows aging in mice:
Aspirin didn’t pan out. Neither did two other potential anti-aging agents. But a synthetic derivative of a pungent desert shrub is now a front- runner in ongoing animal experiments to find out if certain chemicals, known to inhibit inflammation, cancer and other destructive processes, can boost the odds of living longer.

Today at the annual meeting of the American Aging Association, University of Michigan scientist Richard A. Miller reports early results from a mouse study his lab and two others are conducting for the National Institute on Aging. The study, now in its fourth year, will test as many as two dozen possible anti-aging agents in animals in the next five years. The other centers are the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, and the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.

The scientists were surprised to find so quickly that one agent showed promise: NDGA, a compound derived from creosote bushes. These common North American desert shrubs have been traditionally used by Native Americans as healing remedies.

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