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Future Gaming: Total Freedom Off the Beaten Path
I haven’t played computer games in a long time, not since the days of Quake 2, but I’ve kept an eye on developments in the field and I think I can take an educated guess on where the state of the art...
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On the Nature of Time: Implications for Advanced Intelligence and SETI
I was reading and article in The Economist about lasers that can pulse extremely rapidly. We’re talking really fast, in the femtoseconds range (one billionth of one millionth of a second). This got me...
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Virtual Reality Could Explain the Fermi Paradox
A recent article in Technology Review by Nick Bostrom generated a lot of discussion about the Fermi paradox, which states: The size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced...
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Built-to-Order Artificial Bones
In the past decades, we’ve all heard about the progress made in organ transplant science and in the therapeutic cloning field, but advances in artificial bones have rarely made waves. Bones are very...
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Graphics Processing Units (GPUs): The Future of Scientific Distributed Computing
General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units It is pretty clear to me that when it comes to scientific distributed computing, GPUs are the future. Folding@home has already proven that, both...
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One Step Closer to Space-Based Solar Power
Wireless Power Transmission Over a Long Distance If space-based solar power is ever to be feasible, wireless transmission of power needs to be achieved. We are one step closer to that goal because of...
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Nanotube-Based Chemical Sensors to Defend Against Chemical Attacks
I’ve written a fair bit about detection mechanisms (see links at the end of this post) because, as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Making our society more robust...
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SpaceX Falcon 1 Rocket Reaches Orbit on 4th Try
Stars My Destination After the third try, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, co-founder of Paypal, chairman of SolarCity and chairman of Tesla Motors (beat that resumé!) was interviewed by WIRED about...
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Elon Musk on SpaceX’s Goal
Somehow we have to solve these problems and reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 100. That’s why I started SpaceX. By no means did I think victory was certain. On the contrary, I...
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Seminar on Global Catastrophic Risks
November 14, 2008 Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA Organized by: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation A...
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Using Patterns in Space Dust to Detect Earth-Like Extrasolar Planets
Interplanetary Space Dust Fingerprints NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been running supercomputer simulations of the impact of extrasolar planets on the dust that surrounds stars with orbiting...
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Automatically Duplicating Keys from Photos
This is one of those ideas that once you see you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. Well, it certainly was done often, but probably by expert locksmiths doing it manually… This software could...
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Humans are Tone Deaf to Probabilistic Reasoning
In his book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker makes an interesting point about the fact that our brains haven’t evolved to intuitively grasp probabilities. It is an acquired skill like reading, not...
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The Risks of Failure of Nuclear Deterrence
Martin Hellman is a professor at Stanford, one of the co-inventors of public-key cryptography, and the creator of NuclearRisks.org. He has recently published an excellent essay about the risks of...
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Iodine Deficiency is Reducing the World’s I.Q.
Sadly, cost-effectiveness isn’t always a priority when it comes to humanitarian aid. In the same way that in the environmental sector it is common knowledge that cute endangered animals will receive...
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Good News for Everybody who has a Brain
Rejuvenating The Brain A study published in The EMBO Journal has identified proteins (calpain and cortactin) that help regulate the sprouting of connections between neurons, a phenomenon known as...
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SpaceX Gets Big NASA Contract
NASA deal potentially worth $3.1 billion SpaceX, a start-up founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, has just beaten Lockheed Martin and Boeing and gotten a juicy NASA contract. It’s amazing to think that it...
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Unintended Consequences
According to Wikipedia: The “law of unintended consequences” (also called the “law of unforeseen consequences”) states that any purposeful action will produce some unintended consequences. A classic...
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Using a Polymer Implant to Program Your Immune System
Nature Materials has a fascinating paper on a kind of polymer implant that can ‘program’ your dendritic cells. This would allow doctors to use your own immune system to attack, for example, cancer...
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Is Graphene/Graphane the Future of CPUs?
Graphene. The Yin… Graphene, shown above, is a very interesting material. It’s very strong (“strongest material ever measured“), and a very good electrical conductor: “The corresponding resistivity of...
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