Who can forget Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who received the world’s first successful partial face transplant in 2005 after being mauled by her dog? Prior to the transplant, which included a new nose and mouth, she had difficulty eating or speaking – the transplant has enabled her to do both. Although a handful of [...]
Posts under ‘Video’
Togolese student’s passion for building robots
Togolese student Sam Todo has a passion for science, technology, and most of all, robots. He built his latest bipedal robot, “SAM10,” out of parts from old television sets, which is remarkable. I imagine opportunities for learning mechanical engineering in Togo are slim, especially considering that half the population lives on less than US $1.25 [...]
Top 5 TED talks on transhumanism
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) brings together some of the world’s top thinkers at conferences around the world to deliver short presentations on “ideas worth spreading.” Not surprisingly, several speakers have delivered talks on topics of interest to transhumanists, such as life extension, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and more. One of the great things about TED is [...]
Teaser for “Bluebrain – Year One” documentary
If you’re interested in learning more about what goes on behind-the-scenes at the Blue Brain Project, an effort to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, this short documentary is a good start. It features interviews with project leader Henry Markram explaining more about the project and shows how his team is going about its important work. This [...]
New powered exoskeleton helps paraplegics walk
ABC’s Good Morning America has been running some interesting medical technology stories this week, but this one in particular caught my eye. An Israeli company demonstrated a powered exoskeleton called ReWalk that can be used to help wheelchair-bound individuals walk upright, even up stairs: ReWalk is a lightweight device comprised of an upper body harness, [...]
“Living With Robots” Documentary Debuts at Sundance
In the previous post, I used Honda’s Asimo as an example of a “cute” robot who in no way falls into the uncanny valley (real or not). Good thing, too, since he’s making his debut in his first short film – a documentary produced by Honda called “Living With Robots” that’s showing at the Sundance [...]
Ray Kurzweil shows off Blio e-reader software
With his books and essays about the singularity, it’s easy to forget that Ray Kurzweil built his name on his very successful inventions. Therefore, when he unveils a new invention, it’s a big deal. His latest venture is the Blio e-reader software, which will be distributed for free to a variety of platforms including the [...]
Ray Kurzweil keynote from Singularity U
I’ve been writing a little bit about the Singularity University Executive Program that started last week, and we’ve seen some excellent reports coming in from Ted Greenwald at Wired. Here’s video of Ray Kurzweil’s keynote that opened the program. Always inspiring and interesting to hear from one of the leading thinkers and evangelists for transhuman [...]
Ray Kurzweil on 60s game show
Here’s a fun clip of noted futurist and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil as a 17 year old flexing his piano chops on the game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” He plays a tune that was “written by a computer” and has the opportunity to demonstrate how the machine works. I imagine this must have been pretty [...]
Henry Markram on the Blue Brain Project
Video is now available of Henry Markram’s presentation at TED, in which he talks about The Blue Brain Project’s efforts to build a supercomputer that will attempt to “reverse engineer the mammalian brain.” The project has made impressive progress to date, showing a proof of concept by modeling half a rodent brain, and the team [...]