So, from various sources, today I learned about a team of molecular biologists at Stanford University who’ve constructed logic gates out of the DNA transcription machinery. There is a video summary with some animations as well. While reading about all these things, I was reminded very strongly of Ralph Merkle’s nanomechanical rod logic gates, which [...]
This is an idea I had for character in the game of City of Heroes, a game now sadly deceased. (These days I play Champions Online, based, at least partially on the venerable and wonderful Hero System table-top rules set. CO is a worthy enough effort but, still currently a pale shadow of Paragon City.) [...]
I’ve just noticed something that has been slowly happening over the last ten or twenty years. New technology and manufacturing techniques will soon make it possible to make millions of tiny machines, perhaps even microscopic robots, cheaply. For example, it has now become possible to make supercapacitors out of layers of graphene (As also described [...]
As an aging ex-physics major, knowing just barely enough to glimpse at possible answers but not enough to really know if I’m right–a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because it makes you presumptive that you’ve got all the facts when you don’t, I remember the first time I read about Alcubierre’s space warp. It [...]
Sometime this year Earth’s human population passed 7 billion people. Sometime this year, for the first time, more than 50% of humanity lived in cities and towns. The predictions are that humanity’s population will peak around 10 billion or so in 2050 and then go into a slow decline. Even in the poorest parts of [...]
Yes, I think it can. Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But [...]
So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but, this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something [...]
The Blue Brain Project requires one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to simulate a single cortical column of a rat’s brain. This project of computational neurology has been running since 2005. In my opinion, this project, out of all the research projects related to artificial intelligence, is the mostly likely to tell [...]
So, about a week ago, Jamais Casico put up a page where he asked the following three questions: What do you fear we’ll likely see in fifteen years? What do you hope we’ll likely see in fifteen years? What do you think you’ll be doing in fifteen years? Here are my attempts to answer them.
Okay. This is another strange essay brought on by, in equal measures, pop-tarts, the death of Jerry Falwell, reading odd websites and doing laundry in the small hours of the morning. As stated elsewhere on this site, I believe that aging is a disease that will be cured one day. I hope it will be [...]