In the latest edition of TIME, the venerable publication features “10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil,” in which they ask him about how technology will change the way we live, including the role of artificial intelligence, food production, longevity, and even whether we’ll discover extraterrestrial intelligence. A sample: You predict we’ll reach a point with artificial [...]
Posts under ‘Nanotechnology’
Microbatteries to be “smaller than a grain of sand”
While portable electronic devices continue to get smaller and thinner, battery sizes have become a sticking point. These days a good deal of engineering goes into designing devices to fit around the battery, which takes up the bulk of devices like smartphones and tablet computers. As electronics shrink and approach microscopic sizes, they’ll need a [...]
Universities devoting significant resources to nanotechnology
Universities are smartly banking on the fact that nanotechnology will be both an economic driver and a topic of interest for future students, and are therefore devoting funds to building new facilities and conducting research in the field. Yesterday, University of Michigan announced it plans to spend around $46 million on a new facility dubbed [...]
Nobel Laureate explains carbon nanotubes
In this video, Sir Harry Kroto talks about why carbon nanotubes will likely lead to stronger, better, safer materials, and potentially transition to “paradigm shifting” applications such as molecular electronics and lossless conduction of electricity.
To the mainstream, transhumanism is still really weird
Sometimes I’m reminded that many of the concepts transhumanists regularly discuss and work toward – cryonics, mind uploading, molecular nanotechnology, life extension and so on – are still extremely foreign and odd to most humans. Try telling your friends you hope to live forever through advanced technologies and see how they react. Then talk to [...]
The State of Transhumanism Around the World
Over at The Extropist Examiner, Hank Hyena has a fascinating article about where transhumanist ideas and technologies are progressing and taking hold around the world. I had no idea, for example, that a Russian company is leading the way in inexpensive cryopreservation, that Italy is poised to be a world leader in service robots, or [...]
R.U. Sirius offers his utopian vision for a transhuman future
One of my favorite blogs, io9, has been running a series of posts on “posthumanity” from both fiction and real-life. Today R.U. Sirius of h+ Magazine has a great post up about his “best-case scenario for posthumanity.” In it, he describes what his ideal vision of the future might look like, which includes open-source style [...]
Luddites accused of plot to blow up IBM nanotechnology research center
A routine traffic stop in Switzerland nabbed three members of Italian anarchist group Il Silvestre, who are accused of planning to detonate explosives at an IBM facility where nanotechnology and biotechnology research is scheduled to take place: Swiss police said today that their car was halted on the night of April 15 at Langnau en-route [...]
U.S. lagging behind other countries on nanotechnology investments
Today the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued a report to President Barack Obama warning that private and public investment in nanotechnology in the U.S. is falling behind that of other nations. China, in particular, is coming on strong, having recently surpassed the U.S. in the number of nanotechnology patents it’s applied [...]
Where are the anti-nanotech activists?
While advancements in nanotechnology have been developing at a fast pace, there has been a noticeable absence of the kind of activist outrage we’ve seen with other new technologies, such as GMO crops and stem cell research. The question is, why? Professor Jennifer Kuzma of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of [...]