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Thursday December 13, 2012 Daily edition   News and Blog Headlines Do we live in a computer simulation? How to test the idea. Should we live to 1,000? A 360-degree view of the world Biologists engineer algae to make complex anti-cancer ‘designer’ drug State-of-the-art virtual-reality system is key to medical discovery Johnny Depp uploaded to supercomputer in film about the Singularity Latest News Do we live in a computer simulation? How to test the idea. December 13, 2012   The concept that we could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But … more… Should we live to 1,000? December 13, 2012   Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation and the world’s most prominent advocate of anti-aging research, argues that it makes no sense to spend the vast majority of our medical resources on trying to combat the diseases of aging without tackling aging itself, writes ethicist Peter Singer on Project Syndicate. De Grey believes … more… A 360-degree view of the world December 13, 2012   Have you ever dreamed of having eyes in the back of your head? Yeah, we haven’t either, but FlyVIZ, designed by French engineers, lets you experience a real-time 360° vision of your surroundings. It combines a panoramic image acquisition system (positioned on top of the your head) with a head-mounted display (HMD) and a laptop … more… Biologists engineer algae to make complex anti-cancer ‘designer’ drug December 13, 2012   Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in genetically engineering algae  to produce a complex and expensive human therapeutic drug used to treat cancer. Their achievement opens the door for making these and other “designer” proteins in larger quantities and much more cheaply than can now be made from mammalian cells. “Because we can make … more… State-of-the-art virtual-reality system is key to medical discovery December 13, 2012   A team of neurosurgeons from the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) recently stepped into CAVE2 — a next-generation, large-scale, 320-degree, immersive, 3-D virtual environment — to solve a vexing problem that presented itself in the arteries of the brain of a real patient. The method they used could someday … more… Johnny Depp uploaded to supercomputer in film about the Singularity December 13, 2012   Johnny Depp will play Will, a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer in Transcendence (2014), the movie’s producer told TheWrap. The plot involves a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer with the aim of creating the world’s first self-aware computer. A group of anti-technology terrorists assassinate Will, and his wife Evelyn … more… New EVENTS   SENS Research Foundation 2012 Dates: Dec 20, 2012 Location: Los Angeles, California more... New VIDEOS   3-mile-long asteroid seen by SLOOH space camera Visit KurzweilAI.net You are currently subscribed to the KurzweilAI.net newsletter as *|EMAIL|* To unsubscribe, please click here. To change your email preferences, please click here. *|LIST:ADDRESS|*.