Video: Wiring the Brain: The Real Science of Nexus
24 Sep, 2013
I spoke last night at University Book Store on the science of sending sight, sound, and more in and out of the human brain – the real life science behind my novels Nexus and Crux. For those who couldn't make it, you can check out…
R e a d M o r ePieces I’ve Written Around the Web
8 Sep, 2013
Over the last few months (and a bit over the past few years) I wrote a number of pieces around the web, primarily on energy, sustainability, genetically modified foods, and economic growth. I did a poor job of linking to them on my own site.…
R e a d M o r eNano-devices that cross blood-brain barrier
23 Apr, 2012
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 developed nano-devices that successfully cross…
R e a d M o r eCombining Current Tech Could Make Solar Cheaper than Coal
22 Feb, 2012
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 from fossil fuels, according to…
R e a d M o r eInnovation as the Infinite Resource: My Talk at Chicago Ideas Week
31 Jan, 2012
Innovation as the Infinite Resource: Ramez Naam at Chicago Ideas Week
R e a d M o r eDuke Researchers Send Touch Sensations into the Brain
5 Oct, 2011
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 out Sound: In Motion: Out…
R e a d M o r eReconstruction from brain activity – YouTube
27 Sep, 2011
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 of YouTube videos. Future…
R e a d M o r eCarbon Nanotubes Could Replace Rare Earth Indium in Solar Cells
27 Sep, 2011
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 that components made from abundant…
R e a d M o r eRat cyborg gets digital cerebellum
27 Sep, 2011
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. We’ll use that first to help…
R e a d M o r eMemory Prosthetics – Some Progress
27 Sep, 2011
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 very very early step towards…
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