Harvard scientist Charles Lieber and colleagues have developed a coating that makes nanoelectronics much more stable in conditions mimicking those in the human body.
The advance could aid in the development of very small implanted medical devices for monitoring health and disease, and could speed up the debut of cyborgs who are part human, the researchers say.
Nanoelectronics devices with nanowire components are much smaller than most… read more
FirstNet — a state-of-the-art communications network for paramedics, firemen and law enforcement at the federal, state and local level — will give cops on the streets unprecedented technological powers, and possibly hand over even more intimate data about our lives to the higher ends of the government and its intelligence agencies, Motherboard reports.
According to a series of presentation slides from December last year, FirstNet… read more
Future Day 2014, a third annual global event, combined Google hangouts and live events, bringing together people around the world to brainstorm ways to create a radically better future.
Future Day was organized by Humanity+, an international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and The Millennium Project — an independent non-profit global participatory futures… read more
“Moore’s Law and neural networks can collude to address a grand challenge: understanding the World Wide Web. Virtual machines can be made atomic, real-time, and ‘smart,’” says computer scientist B. Torrent, in “An Improvement of DHTs Using Beild,” published today in the Journal of Internet Analytics.
“To accomplish this purpose, we use read-write archetypes to validate that the little-known collaborative algorithm for the improvement of forward-error correction… read more
Japanese researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science and Shinshu University have developed a way to shrink capacitors — key components that store energy — further, which could accelerate the development of more compact, high-performance next-gen electronic devices. The study appears in the journal ACS Nano.
Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues note that current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials and processing, which in turn… read more
A team of researchers at MIT, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in Saudi Arabia succeeded in creating subnanoscale pores in a sheet of graphene, a development that could lead to ultrathin filters for improved desalination or water purification. Their findings are published in the journal Nano Letters.
The new work, led by graduate student Sean O’Hern and associate professor of mechanical engineering Rohit Karnik, is the first… read more
Yes. A space elevator appears possible and space elevator infrastructure could indeed be built via a major international effort, a study conducted by experts under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics has found, Space.com writer Leonard David reports.
Two technologies pacing the development of the space elevator are an ultra-strong space tether and other space elevator components, and lightweight solar cells, according to study lead… read more
“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed,” William Gibson famously said. Future Day aims to do something about that.
The global event begins at noon March 1 in New Zealand (6 PM Friday Feb. 28 in New York), when Stephanie Pride of the World Futures Studies Federation launches the Future Day Google Hangout, and continues in cities around the… read more
For scientists to determine if a cell is functioning properly, they must destroy it (with X-rays), possibly giving false accounts of how the cell actually works.
Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have created a new probe that freezes cells to “see” at greater detail without damaging the sample.*
Traditional X-ray fluorescence methods look at cells that have either been… read more
Piedmont, California near Oakland will be the traditional setting for a radical “deep-future” symposium titled “TRANSHUMAN VISIONS 2.0 — East Bay” on Saturday March 1. Inside the 50′s-era Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium perched above the town’s Police Department, there will be 12 hours (9 am — 9 pm) of serious brain-boosting ideas, keynoted by eminent transhumanists Natasha Vita-More and Max More.
Here’s how event producer Hank Pellissier… read more
NASA’s Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.
Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets (planets… read more
Johns Hopkins researchers have trained the immune systems of mice to fight melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, by using nanoparticles designed to target cancer-fighting immune cells, The experiments, described in ACS Nano February 24, represent a significant step toward using nanoparticles and magnetism to treat a variety of conditions, the researchers say.
“By using small enough particles, we could, for the first time, see a key difference… read more
Richard Kramer of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues have invented a “photoswitch” chemical named DENAQ that confers light sensitivity on normally light-insensitive retinal ganglion cells, restoring light perception in blind mice.*
An earlier photoswitch investigated by the researchers in 2012 (reported by KurzweilAI) called AAQ requires very bright ultraviolet light, which can be damaging; and AAQ dissipates from the eye within a… read more
Using an inexpensive 3-D printer, Washington University biomedical engineers have developed a custom-fitted, implantable device with embedded sensors that could transform treatment and prediction of cardiac disorders.
Igor Efimov, PhD, at the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis and an international team of biomedical engineers and materials scientists have created a 3-D elastic membrane made of a soft, flexible,… read more
On March 1, Future Day, six international futurist organizations will come together to conduct a 24-hour conversation about the world’s potential futures, challenges, and opportunities, according to Millennium Project CEO Jerome Glenn and Humanity+ Secretary Adam A. Ford.
In addition to The Millennium Project, the organizations are: Association of Professional Futurists, Club of Amsterdam, Humanity+, World… read more