On the evening of Saturday, August 14th, join us for exciting discussions with Summit Speakers at a cocktail reception hosted by the Singularity Institute. This event will feature the opportunity to meet with speakers at the 2010 Singularity Summit, the world’s premier conference on the technological Singularity, held in San Francisco on August 14th and [...]
I’d like to say a few words about one of the hottest and, in my view, most important areas in biomedicine: autophagy, a process crucial to health, disease, and aging. Autophagy research is expanding rapidly.
In autophagy (“self eating”), cells engulf and digest their own macromolecules and organelles. Autophagy serves two functions: providing critical nutrients in [...]A benchmark for judging hype:
WSU Researchers Use Super-high Pressures to Create Super Battery
The researchers created the material on the Pullman campus…The cell contained xenon difluoride (XeF2), a white crystal used to etch silicon conductors, squeezed between two small diamond anvils….The researchers eventually increased the pressure to more than a million atmospheres, comparable to what would [...]
If you’re having trouble remembering to stop by Nanodot (this blog), and also having trouble keeping up with your RSS feeds (as I am), there’s an easier way to keep up with Nanodot news, albeit a bit delayed.
Once a month we compile all the most recent Nanodot posts — plus other news such as upcoming [...]An influential study of diet and health has been exploded here. The data and the conclusions don’t just disagree, they aren’t even on speaking terms.
Meanwhile, randomized intervention trials indicate that advice on the perils of saturated fat has been wrong. I suggest some reforms.
Finishing off the week on a fun note, we see that robotic firm Willow Garage — of special interest to Foresight due to their emphasis on open source — has achieved an important milestone in robotics: namely, the ability for a robot to fetch a beer from the fridge and deliver it.
It’s worth seeing the [...]Soon after Earth’s life first touched the Moon, NASA promised to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive, and I began studying the prospects for space as a genuine frontier.
Geologists had analyzed the new, hard-won lunar samples, and I read up on the results in the local college library. Not nice: almost no carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen, [...]In 2007, the area of Arctic sea ice reached a record low. By comparison, here’s the current story:
National Snow and Ice Data Center
Looks low by about 4 standard deviations. (Yes, too much geophysics & climate…)