The Future is in Seeing the Past
Do you ever agonize over that moment when you saw something that made your heart beat faster than normal? A stunning bird swooping through the forest canopy. A sunny, mid-Spring day in Central Park. These instances tend to inspire nostalgia, that melancholy feeling of remembering what you no longer have. To preserve these rich memories,…
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The Open Source Brain-Computer Interface
When you say “I think…” wouldn’t it be interesting to see what’s happening in your brain before you even think of saying “I think…”? When you listen to a song, would you like to see the data of your neural behavior while you’re listening? Currently, Electroencephalography (EEG) and fMRI equipment that report our neural data…
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Ready for an Artificial Brain?
“What’s on your mind?” asks Facebook. Above the question asks whether I’d like to “Add Photos/Video,” and below it asks if I’d like to include other people within my vicinity, my current location, and how my emotional state is during this thought process. Most importantly, though, it asks whether I’d like to share this thought…
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The Dilemma of Mind Uploading (part two)
To simply “download” everything within your brain and upload it into an artificial brain, physical continuity (see Part 1) is being replicated, not maintained. Essentially you’d be partaking in a really cool process of cloning. That’s it. Think of Lieutenant Commander Data and his brother Lore from the Star Trek universe (ignoring, of course, your…
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Cyborgs Are Invading the FIFA World Cup!
Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, predicted that soon there’ll be a Transhumanist Olympics, comparing its competitors with “our Prometheuses carrying the torch from Mount Olympus.” I believe he may be correct, and by June of this year, the world will witness the first steps in achieving it. The FIFA World Cup will reportedly…
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The Dilemma of Mind Uploading (part one)
During our current technological age of the 21st century, topics like robotics, AI, mind uploading, and indefinite life extension are no longer topics of science-fiction, but rather of science-facts and possibilities. The most common one being heavily debated at the current moment is mind uploading. Once we’re able to artificially replicate the human brain, and…
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Behold, the Human Brain
Research scientists at The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences derived segments of a human brain from stem cells. The study was published in Nature, and it is an early opportunity to experiment using actual human brain tissue cells instead of mice or rat brains. Juergen Knoblich, an author of the…
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Introducing the Self-Healing Battery
Self-healing battery electrodes are an exciting development for lithium ion based products. Scientists at Stanford University’s SLAC laboratory have developed electrodes that are able to heal the small cracks in silicon that come from repetitive battery operation, as reported in the Nov. 19th issue of Nature Chemistry. Silicon electrodes are a prized commodity for charging and…
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Infrared Vision May Pave the Way for X-Ray
[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B003AUF1XI” locale=”us” height=”75″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J1H28SZcL._SL75_.jpg” width=”75″]New research on infrared vision could pave the way to ultimately realizing science fiction’s fabled X-ray vision as a viable technology. A research team from the University of Buffalo has found a way to see through multiple layers of graphene sheets in order to identify the electronic properties of…
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2D Tin Tapped as the Next Supermaterial
2D Tin has been discovered as having potential for besting Silicon in microprocessing capabilities and conducting electricity at maximum efficiency. According to researchers at the U. S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, a single layer of tin atoms could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100% efficiency…
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