Tag Archives: science

Nano-devices that cross blood-brain barrier

In my upcoming sci-fi novel Nexus , I write about a nano-device that can cross the blood-brain barrier and which has a very real impact on the mind.  Not so far fetched… A team of scientists from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have … Continue reading

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Combining Current Tech Could Make Solar Cheaper than Coal

By the end of the decade, manufacturers in the United States could make solar panels that are less than half as expensive as the ones they make now. That would be cheap enough for solar power to compete with electricity … Continue reading

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Innovation as the Infinite Resource: My Talk at Chicago Ideas Week

Innovation as the Infinite Resource:  Ramez Naam at Chicago Ideas Week

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Duke Researchers Send Touch Sensations into the Brain

More advances in mind-machine interfaces this week.   MIguel Nicolelis (a pioneer in neural interfaces) and colleagues announced that they were able to send touch sensory data into the brains of monkeys. So the tally is now: Vision:  In and … Continue reading

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Reconstruction from brain activity – YouTube

Below is a clip showing the reconstruction of video subjects where shown via MRI scanning of their brains.   Pretty remarkable.   The ‘reconstructed’ video looks odd because the reconstruction method was actually to match the brain activity against snippets … Continue reading

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Carbon Nanotubes Could Replace Rare Earth Indium in Solar Cells

A frequently voiced concern about solar energy is the dependence of solar cells on rare earth elements such as indium.  While rare earth elements are actually far more plentiful than their name suggests, it’s also encouraging to see studies showing … Continue reading

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Rat cyborg gets digital cerebellum

New Scientist covers another step towards functional neural prosthetics.  Development here will be slow and complex, but we now have sufficient proof of concept across the field to see that interfacing digital systems with out brains is quite possible.   … Continue reading

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Memory Prosthetics – Some Progress

Theodore Berger and team, who I’ve been following since describing their work in More Than Human, achieved success earlier this year in recording a rat memory during encoding, and playing it back to the rat later. This is a very … Continue reading

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30,000 Human Genomes to be Sequenced in 2011 – Exponential Growth

MIT Technology Review on the incredible rise in number of genomes sequenced per year: Exponential: The number of human beings whose entire DNA sequence is known has increased dramatically. This year, the world’s DNA-sequencing machines are expected to churn out … Continue reading

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My WFS2011 Talk: The Infinite Resource: Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth

I gave at talk this morning at the World Future Society 2011 Conference in Vancouver.   The talk was entitled The Infinite Resource:  Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth, and it looks at what the ultimate limits of growth … Continue reading

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