Anybody who’s part of a group with a shared genetic profile may be at risk in the future from “genetic bombs,” a virus or bacteria designed to kill people who fit a certain genotype for purposes of mass genocide or social control.
Software companies are developing programs to conduct negotiations, relying on algorithms to gauge what might constitute acceptable offers in the growing field of electronic mediation.
“Darknets,” private Internet communities using encrypted communication, are popping up for trading pirated music and movies as well as secure corporate communications.
“Telomere engineering” offers a way to produce tissues and cells to treat age-related conditions.
Other techniques include dietary supplements such as acetyl-L-carnitine and an antioxidant, alpha-lipoic acid; and natural tissue regeneration, which might be promoted with drugs or genes.
Biologically-inspired computing could soon form the basis of new devices with the potential to perform trillions of calculations at once.
“The ultimate application would be a ‘doctor in a cell,’ where a bio-molecular computer operates in the body,” Udi Shapiro of the Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science told CNN.
Applied Nanotech Inc. will unveil a 14-inch black-and-white television based on nanotubes in December at a conference in Japan.
Researchers are marrying the modest cell phone with accelerometers, skin sensors, GPS and a calendar to create a system that always knows where you are and what you are doing, thereby eliminating phone tag.
Jabberwacky, a chatbot that will be entered in the coming Loebner Prize competition (to find the computer program with the most convincing conversational skills), has no fixed rules, unlike other chatbots. It learns from thousands of online conversations with humans.
“Nothing is hard-coded, nothing is fixed, and it changes slightly, on its own, every day,” according to its creator, Rollo Carpenter.
Advances in nanotubes and ultrastrong fibers put an elevator to space within reach.
Cloning babies should be banned worldwide by the United Nations, more than 60 of the world’s leading scientific academies demanded on Monday.
But the ban should not extend to therapeutic cloning, they added.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health is launching a national molecular library to accelerate the development of new drugs and nano-scale agents for an emerging “era of personalized medicine.”
The library will act as a repository “for some of the hundreds of thousands of molecules the pharmaceutical industry screens for their use in identifying target agents that could be used to track or treat diseases.”
A contest to produce the oldest laboratory mouse and thus help unravel the mysteries of human ageing has been launched by Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge.
The competition aims to encourage research and funding for anti-ageing interventions. Cash is awarded for each day that their animal survives after breaking the record.
Sun researchers have discovered a way to transmit data inside a computer 60 to 100 times as fast as the present top speeds by using transmitters to connect between chips, representing the end of the printed circuit board.
They expect to reach speeds in excess of a trillion bits a second, which would be about 100 times the limits of today’s technology. The chip should consume far less power… read more
The smart grid of the future will require far more advanced breakthroughs such as smart power controllers and new lightweight quantum wires made of carbon nanotube fibers to revolutionize the capacity of the transmission wires, according to Nobel laureate Rick Smalley and other experts.
Researchers have built a silicon retina that uses a timing signal to mimic a form of data compression performed by biological eyes and transmits high-speed optical rather than electrical output.
The silicon retina could be used to give small robots a better understanding of their visual environment and in smart sensors and remote monitoring cameras.