One of the major difficulties of travelling backwards in time has just been solved, according to Amos Ori from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology.
He says that according to Einstein’s theories, space can be twisted enough to create a local gravity field that looks like a doughnut of some arbitrary size. The gravitational field lines circle around the outside of this doughnut, so that space and time are… read more
The challenging task of keeping pace with the exponential rate of technological change is the subject of two online audio interviews with Ray Kurzweil on WIE Unbound, a streaming media service of What is Englightment? magazine.
A free one-month trial subscription to WIE Unbound is available, providing access to all audio recordings on the site.
A new “must-see” short film has been produced using computer animation to assist in visualizing nanosystems and molecular manufacturing and is downloadable free.
Productive Nanosystems: from Molecules to Superproducts, is a collaborative effort of animator and engineer John Burch and pioneer nanotechnologist Dr. K. Eric Drexler.
The four-minute film depicts an animated view of a nanofactory and demonstrates key steps in a process that converts simple molecules into… read more
The behavior of the complex microchips that drive modern computers is inherently unpredictable and chaotic, researchers at the National Research Institute for Information and Automation in Orsay, France have found.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes immortality is ours if we program the human body like a computer.
Scientists envision a myriad of uses for mobile, RFID-guided robots, such as assisting blind people while they shop, helping them navigate stores and find merchandise, and help families tend to elderly or disabled relatives, dispensing medicine and performing household chores.
In his new book, Teleportation – The Impossible Leap, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that “”One way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world.”
Darling senses the day may not be far off for routine teleportation of… read more
Moore’s law predicts that transistor density will in 10 years be about 100 times what it is now. In thinking about the future of computing, do we understand what another 100-fold increase in computing power will mean? It should enable big new dreams, says Bill Joy.
We should boldly set our sights on Doug Engelbart’s goal of augmentation of the human intellect.
The London terrorist attack moved the current “citizen journalism” trend to a new level, using text messaging, cameras, and the ability to record and transmit video through the Internet.
It was the first widespread use of that technology in covering a major breaking news story.
Sharp Corp. says it has developed a technology to manufacture a new optical disc with 100 gigabytes of memory.
The first rear-projection, no-glasses 3-D television set has been developed by Deep Light of Santa Monica, CA.
“HD3D” television sets, with 1,280 lines of resolution, could be available by next year for $10,000, according to Deep Light’s co-founder Dan Mapes.
The design also uses multiple “blades” of video to enable one screen to show different programs to different viewers at the same time.
Carbon nanotubes make an ideal scaffold for the growth of bone tissue, chemist Robert Haddon of the University of California, Riverside, has found.
The new technique could change the way doctors treat broken bones, allowing them to simply inject a solution of nanotubes into a fracture to promote healing.
Bone tissue is a natural composite of collagen fibers and hydroxyapatite crystals. Haddon and his coworkers have demonstrated for… read more
Researchers at the Diffusion Group predict that the U.S. podcast audience will climb from 840,000 last year to 56 million by 2010. By that time, three-quarters of all people who own portable digital music players will listen to podcasts, they predict.
Harvard scientists are building a powerful computer system that will use artificial intelligence to scan the private medical files of 2.5 million people at local hospitals, as part of a government-funded effort to find the genetic roots of asthma and other diseases.
Scientists are closing in on techniques that could let them safely repair almost any defective gene in a patient, opening the door for the first time to treatments for a range of genetic disorders that are now considered incurable.
The breakthrough relies on “zinc fingers” (amino acid protuberances that emanate from a zinc ion). When inserted into human cells, the fingers automatically bind to miscoded strands of DNA, spurring… read more