Ray Kurzweil proposes entrepreneurial peace fund and renewable-energy initiatives to Israeli leaders

Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli President Shimon Peres at the recent Israeli Presidential Conference: Facing Tomorrow 2009, Ray Kurzweil proposed several innovations for dealing with the coming energy shortages and bolstering Israel's growing economy.

He also proposed an "Entrepreneurial Peace Fund" -- a collaborative technology incubator between Israel and Palestine. The proposal was widely met with enthusiasm and support in both public and private sessions.

In a speech to the conference, Netanyahu credited Kurzweil with the insight and inspiration for the Prime Minister's new National Commission for Renewable Energy initiative, with the goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies within ten years.

"Yesterday, Ray Kurzweil…said that the efficiency of solar energy doubles every two years; you said that within a very brief generation it will become the energy of the proximate future," said Netanyahu. "Well, if that's the case we're in good shape. But I say let's make it happen, faster.... What I propose to do today is to establish a national commission of scientists, engineers, business and government people, to set a goal that within ten years we'll have a practical, clean, efficient substitute for oil."

Speaking at the conference's Opening Plenary Session, Looking towards Tomorrow: Turning Crises into Opportunities, Kurzweil explored ways of using nanotechnology and other exponentially growing "information technologies" to transform the energy and environmental crisis into opportunities for Israel and for the world.

In two additional panel discussions, Kurzweil presented his ideas on the future of artificial intelligence and reverse engineering the brain. Responding to a prediction by Henry Markram (head of the Blue Brain Project) that the human brain would be successfully reverse-engineered by 2018, Kurzweil noted that he was "the conservative" in this case, with his prediction of 2029.

The annual Israeli Presidential Conference: Facing Tomorrow is attended by the world's top leaders in business, government, media and technology, focused on policy making, economic and business initiatives, and critical thinking about global challenges.

Ray Kurzweil's speeches at the conference can be seen on the conference website. See thumbnail 5, "Morning Plenary Session," and thumbnail 9, "A Conversation."

Humanity+ Summit and Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar

The feasibility of redesigning the human condition (such as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to the planet Earth) will be the focus at Humanity + Summit, Dec. 5-6 in Irvine, California at EON Reality's new state-of-the-art, 18,500-square-foot facility, built to showcase 3D visual content management and virtual reality applications.



Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

Those are among the issues to be discussed by transhumanists, futurists, culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television at Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar, December 4, 2009, preceding Humanity + Summit at the same location.

Elevator to the Top: Space Elevators Climbing Towards Reality

The group LaserMotive successfully ran a climber up 1 kilometer of test cable at an average rate of just over 2 meters per second, qualifying for the 2nd place prize of $900,000 in The Space Elevator Games competition.

The craft is powered by a stationary laser beaming the power to operate to the climber.


(NASA MSFC, Artist Pat Rawling)

Analysis: Google's Dashboard Tackles Transparency

A new Google product called Dashboard aggregates users' personal information from more than 20 Google services into a single, password-protected page.

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), causing significant overheating in the system's supercooled magnetic doughnut.

Obligatory "this is not an Onion story" statement - Ed.

See also: The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor

Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power, drawing power from a RFID reader radio source up to a meter away.


(Brian Otis, University of Washington)

The NeuralWISP is a collection of smaller, more low-power components, such as a specialized signal amplifier, on a circuit board just over two centimeters long. A future version will integrate all components onto a single chip that's one millimeter by two millimeters in size.

Sequencing Price Drops Even Lower

Complete Genomics has sequenced three human genomes for an average cost of $4,400.

Lowering the cost of sequencing would allow scientists to study large numbers of human genomes, which is now thought necessary to understand the genetic basis of complex disease.

Spoonful Of Sugar' Makes The Worms' Life Span Go Down

By adding just a small amount of glucose to the C. elegans worm diet, University of California, San Francisco and Pohang University of Science and Technology researchers found the worms lose about 20 percent of their usual life span, suggesting that a diet with a low glycemic index may extend human life span.

They trace the effect to insulin signals, which can block aquaporin channels that transport glycerol.

Further studies are needed to see if these same effects of sugar can be seen in mice, or even people.

Sony demos game controller to track motion and emotion

Sony has unveiled a hands-free, full-body game controller, the Interactive Communication Unit (ICU).

Like Microsoft's Natal, Sony's ICU tracks a person's whole body without their having to wear the body markers used in motion-capture studios, and it can detect a player's emotions by watching their facial expressions, and judge sex and approximate age from their appearance.

CU "reads" facial expressions using a pattern-matching algorithm that has been trained on pictures of people expressing different emotions. Using cues such as the position and shape of the lips, ICU spots five basic states: happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and neutral.

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See also: Sony patents reveal emotion recognition software

Singularity University Kicks Off First Executive Program

Singularity University (SU) will launch the SU Executive Program at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. on Saturday.

The nine-day program is designed to educate, inform and prepare executives for the imminent disruption and opportunities resulting from exponentially accelerating technologies.

The SU Executive Program addresses six fields experiencing exponentially accelerating change: AI and Robotics, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Medicine and Human Machine Interface, Networks and Computing Systems, and Energy and Environmental Systems.

The program will be repeated in February 2010.

Applause For The SmartHand

Tel Aviv University researchers have successfully wired the "SmartHand," a state-of-the-art artificial hand, to existing nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm.

Genome 10K: A new ark

The Genome 10K Project aims to collect tissues or cells from at least 10,000 vertebrate species, enough to catalog DNA sequences from about every vertebrate genus.

Its designers have decided to wait for sequencing costs to drop by a factor of 10 or more -- probably in the next couple years -- before launching their analytical program.

Woe, Superman?

In ID: the Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century, Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford, describes a startling range of neurological possibilities: devices enabling paraplegics to activate prosthetic limbs by thought alone, and marrying brain cells with silicon chips.

Further in the future, she envisages reverse cochlear implants that can not only turn sound into brain waves but also the reverse. Fitted with tiny radios, these open up the amazing possibility of directly transmitting thought from brain to brain.

Peter Diamandis: the joy of taking risks

Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, wants to use our competitive instincts to make the world a better place--his latest: a heath care prize.

Animated ink-blot images keep unwanted bots at bay

Captchas, the scrambled images used to separate humans from software bots online, could become harder for bots to solve and easier for humans to handle by animating them, says computer scientist Niloy Mitra at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who along with colleagues has devised a system that should separate the bots from the humans.

3,000 Images Combine for Stunning Milky Way Portrait

A new 648-megapixel panoramic image of the full night sky, melded together from 3,000 individual photographs with mathematical models, shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae.


(Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University)

TEDMED features medical and health innovations

The four-day TEDMED conference last week introduced eye-opening medical and health innovations.

Coverage has included medGadget (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4), Scientific Amarican, Huffington Post, and Twitter.

AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists

Patrick McGuire, a University of Chicago geoscientist, has developed algorithms that can recognize signs of life in a barren landscape, using a Hopfield neural network, which compares incoming data against patterns it's seen before, picking out those details that qualify as new or unusual.

Speed Limit To The Pace Of Evolution, Biologists Say

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a theoretical model that provides quantitative predictions for the speed of evolution on various "fitness landscapes," the dynamic and varied conditions under which bacteria, viruses and even humans adapt.

A major conclusion of the work is that for some organisms, possibly including humans, continued evolution will not translate into ever-increasing fitness.

Breakthrough In Industrial-scale Nanotube Processing

Rice University scientists have unveiled a method for high-throughput industrial-scale processing of carbon-nanotube fibers, using chlorosulfonic acid as a solvent.

The process that could lead to revolutionary advances in materials science, power distribution and nanoelectronics.

Sending Drugs to Specific Spots in a Tiny Cage

Washington University researchers are putting drugs inside "nanocages" (gold cubes with sides about 50 nanometers long and holes at each corner), using with near-infrared light to heat and unseal them and let the drugs out.

The nanocages can also be made to bind with tumors.

Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics

By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made implantable electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body.

University of Pennsylvania researchers are developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, and arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.

The electrodes might be wrapped around individual peripheral nerves to help control prostheses. And arrays of silk electrodes could be used for deep-brain stimulation to control Parkinson's symptoms.

Theme-park dummy trick becomes teleconference tool

University of North Carolina researchers have developed a system to make teleconferencing more realistic by projecting video images of remote participants onto a 3D dummy model of their head.

The system could also be useful by doctors and patients for remote doctor visits, and as a "prosthetic presence" for patients unable to leave their home.

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Driver-less car in high-speed rally assault

Stanford engineers are developing the first autonomous racing car to climb Pikes Peak, a challenging 12.4-mile ascent in the Rocky Mountains, at 130 mph, as a way to create and test safety systems they hope one day will be used in all vehicles.

Nanoscale Drug Delivery Developed For Chemotherapy

Duke University bioengineers have developed a simple, inexpensive method for loading cancer drug payloads into nanoscale delivery vehicles and demonstrated in animal models that this delivery system can eliminate tumors after a single treatment.

The system uses an E. coli bacterium that have been genetically altered to produce a chimeric polypeptide. When that molecule combines with a drug in a container, they self-assemble into a water-soluble nanoparticle of about 50 nanometers, making them ideal for cancer therapy.

How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have found that nonlinear resonant effects allow terahertz (THz) waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.

THz scanners are beginning to be installed in airports and hospitals.

Reference: DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field

The Future of Video Game Input: Muscle Sensors

A muscle-sensing system that can remotely control devices such as games and multi-touch surfaces has been developed by researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington, and the University of Toronto.

They system uses electromyography (EMG) sensors to detect muscle signals from the arm skin's surface, allowing researchers to build a gesture recognition library.

Robot driving companion brings emotion to navigation

Audi, Nissan, and Pioneer are working on dashboard robotic devices that are sensitive to a driver's moods, behavior, and habits and can offer reminders (such as failure to buckle a seat belt) and information (such as GPS-based route suggestions).

Sticky future for the spider suture

University of Wyoming scientists have identified the genes potentially involved in the glycoprotein-based ultra-strong glue that spiders use to trap their prey, raising the hope that similar substances could one day be synthezised to produce surgical adhesives.

'The Future of Aging' makes the scientific case for biogerontology

The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension has just been announced by Springer.

The 40 authors make the scientific case that a biological "bailout" could be on the way, and that human aging can be different in the future than it is today. Based on the future therapeutic potential of biogerontology, their paradigm-breaking proposals include sirtuin-modulating pills, new concepts for attacking cardiovascular disease and cancer, mitochondrial rejuvenation, stem cell therapies and regeneration, tissue reconstruction, telomere maintenance, prevention of immunosenescence, extracellular rejuvenation, artificial DNA repair, and full deployment of nanotechnology.

The chapters range from Chapter 1, Bridges to Life by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman to Chapter 23, Comprehensive Nanorobotic Control of Human Morbidity and Aging by Robert A. Freitas, Jr.

The Future of Aging:
Pathways to Human Life Extension
Fahy, G.M.; West, M.D.; Coles, L.S.; Harris, S.B. (Eds.)
2010, Approx. 500 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-90-481-3998-9
Available: May 4, 2010
Approx. $209.00