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Dec 18, 2013

Minimally Invasive Medical Technology – For the betterment of the human condition.

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, augmented reality, bioprinting, biotech/medical, drones, futurism, robotics/AI, transhumanism

image credit - Protomag.com

Technology for pain-free healing:

“Your threshold for pain is near zero”, said my dentist, as she deftly moved the extremely thin fiber optic laser head away.

“That’s why I chose to fly in here. Gum filet carving doesn’t appeal to me”, I mumbled, my lips feeling leathery from the anesthetic spray.

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Dec 18, 2013

The Age of Surprise: Predicting The Future Of Technology

Posted by in categories: futurism, human trajectories, singularity

Reuven Cohen,

It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time of year when technologists, pundits and bloggers get into the festive spirit and share technology predictions for the coming year. Being partially curious and possibly not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with my own set of prognoses. In terms of timeframe, whether it’s 2014 or 2050 is another story. Alas, this is a story about intersecting trends, asking the simple yet infinitely complex question of where is technology taking us?

The famous computer scientist Alan Kay can best sum up my opinion on technology predictions in his famous 1971 quote; “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!”

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Dec 18, 2013

Eye Cells Inkjet-Printed for First Time

Posted by in categories: bioprinting, biotech/medical, health

The yellow arrow points to retinal ganglion cell, responsible for transmitting signals from the eye to the brain.

Using an inkjet printer, researchers have succeeded in printing adult eye cells for the first time. The demonstration is a step toward producing tissue implants that could cure some types of blindness.

Scientists have previously printed embryonic stem cells and other immature cells. But scientists had thought adult cells might be too fragile to print. Now, researchers have printed cells from the optic nerves of rats, finding the cells not only survived, but also retained the ability to grow and develop.

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Dec 18, 2013

South America Can Now Crowdfund With Bitcoins

Posted by in category: bitcoin

by

While the rest of us are messing around with our PayPals and Amazon Payments, some folks in Argentina have created the first crowdfunding platform in America to take Bitcoin.

The platform, called Idea.me focuses primarily on artistic, musical, and retail projects although, as evidenced by the project photos, many campaigns have a philanthropic bent. The platform was “born in Argentina” wrote Pia Giudice and is now in seven countries in Latin America. It is the area’s only regional crowdfunding platform. The platform has seen $750,000 in funding and should be raising $2.4 million in March 2014 in a Series A.

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Dec 17, 2013

Here’s The Electric Motorcycle You Want

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

image via Voxman

Every once in a while an electric vehicle comes along which just wows my socks off. Usually they are also the ones I’ll never be able to pay for on a writer’s salary. The latest of these is the recently unveiled Wattman super electric motorcycle from Franch brand Voxan.

The Wattman, according to Voxan, is the most powerful electric motorcycle in the world. It is also one of the most badass looking ones to date. Sporting 200 hp and a torque of 200 Nm up to 10,500 RPM, the motorcycle can accelerate from 0 to 160 km/h (nearly 100 miles per hour) in a flat 5.9 seconds thanks to its belt drive motor.

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Dec 17, 2013

Risk of nanotechnology difficult for insurers to assess: Ernst & Young

Posted by in categories: business, economics, existential risks, nanotechnology

Ernst & Young LLP is predicting a rise in demand for certain types of insurance, such as cyber and nanotechnology.

The consulting firm announced Tuesday the release of the EY 2014 US Property-Casualty Insurance Outlook, which recommends that P&C carriers “invest in innovation of product development processes and delivery to meet rising demand for protection.”

For example, according to the report, a lack of “any meaningful history” with nanotechnology indicates that potential risks are not easy to assess.

“The emerging applications of nanotechnology in the manufacture or use of medicine, cosmetics, drug delivery, robotics, materials science and other products and systems create potential liability exposures,” EY noted. “Examples include bodily injury (analogous to asbestos exposure) and environmental damage from nanoparticles escaping uncontrolled into the air or water supply.”

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Dec 17, 2013

Staffordshire University students come face to face with a ‘real-life’ cyborg

Posted by in category: cyborgs

By The Sentinel

STUDENTS and sci-fi enthusiasts got the chance to meet a ‘real-life human cyborg’ as part of a special demonstration.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, robotics and cyborgs.

He became known as the world’s first cyborg when he had a silicon chip implanted in the nervous system of his arm, in order to link his brain directly with a computer. He then became the first person in the world to communicate electronically between his own and his wife’s nervous system.

Dec 17, 2013

You Can Now Rent NYC Apartments Using Bitcoin

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, business, economics, finance, human trajectories

by Jeremiah Budin

Bitcoin is a somewhat mysterious, fairly confusing type of digital currency that, until recently, you could use to buy large amount of drugs on the internet. But now you can use Bitcoin for something (arguably) even better than drugs: New York City real estate. A tipster recently sent along a listing for a $2,580/month one-bedroom sublet in 99 John Deco Lofts, accepting Bitcoin, which hit the market last month. And today, online apartment search marketplace RentHop announced in a press release that it will be accepting Bitcoin from people advertising NYC apartments on its site.

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Dec 17, 2013

Bitcoins in Space: Hacker to Fire Digital Currency Into Orbit

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, space

By Robert McMillan

One of the top software engineers behind the Bitcoin digital currency wants to launch it into space.

Last month, Jeff Garzik floated the idea of Bitcoin in space on an internet discussion forum, pitching it as a way to always keep the system up and running — even if it’s attacked by malicious hackers.

The plan is to send up a Bitcoin computer on a tiny inexpensive satellite and have this machine communicate with terrestrial Bitcoin computers via radio. Garzik — who works at Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay and helps shape the open source software that drives the digital currency on thousands of machines across the internet — says that the satellite node could help the Bitcoin network fight back something known as a Sibyl attack. This is where malicious computers flood a node on the peer-to-peer network with bad data. It could give criminals a way of spending their bitcoins more than once, and it’s also part of the so-called selfish miner scenario that Cornell University researchers described last month, saying it could bring down the entire system.

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Dec 16, 2013

Laser Weapons Are Finally Here, but Future Remains in Doubt

Posted by in categories: defense, engineering, military

By Sandra I. Erwin

A laser beam the size of a quarter fired from the back of a truck successfully shot down football-size mortar rounds and took small drones out of the sky.

In the world of directed-energy weapons, this was a milestone achievement, government and industry officials said. It happened between Nov. 18 and Dec. 10 during tests of the Army “high energy laser mobile demonstrator” at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.

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