Assorted Links 1/26/2010 Tuesday, Jan 26 2010
futurism and technology 9:00 pm
John Robb on Homemade Microwave Weapons
James Hughes: Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs. Technocratic Absolutism
Technology Review: Defining an Algorithm for Inventing from Nature
New Study: Human Running Speeds of 35 to 40 mph May be Biologically Possible
NASA’s Puffin: Will It Be the Personal Transport Vehicle of our SciFi Future?
Simon Conway Morris: Aliens are Likely to Look and Behave Like Us
Current TV’s Max and Jason on Connecting Science and Culture
Patrick Millard: Open Sim Project
Nick Bostrom: Moral Uncertainty: Towards a Solution?
Humanity+ Conference in London in April
Wired: Removing Part of Skull Makes for Better Brain Scans
Scientific American: Time to Ban Production of Nuclear Weapons Material
Ray Kurzweil at SU/MIT/X Prize BCI Workshop (More from Singularity Hub)
Gary Kasparov on AI: The Chess Master and the Computer
Nanowerk: Simple DNA Nanomachine is Capable of Continuous Rotation
Video Gamers: Size of Brain Structures Predicts Success
Robots Climb Up the Wall (w/ Video)
Retail Meat Linked to Urinary Tract Infections: Strong Evidence
The Human Brain Uses a Grid to Represent Space
Scientists Identify Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park as one of the Most Biodiverse Places on Earth
Face Recognition Ability Inherited Separately from IQ
Bill Gates’ New Website
Researchers Discover Ebola’s Deadly Secret
Study suggests theory for insect colonies as ’superorganisms’
Explained: the Shannon Limit
Wired: Never Mind the Singularity, Here’s the Science
Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy
A Lawyer’s View of the Risk of Black Hole Catastrophe at the LHC
Aubrey de Grey in Helsinki, Finland
Will the First Self-Replicating Machine Be Our Last Invention?
January 27th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
What did people think of the Wired piece, where it states:
“The brain is faster than singularity theorists think. AI assumes that the neuron is analogous to a single computer bit. But it turns out that each neuron is supported by a supercomputer’s worth of additional circuitry. MIT bioengineer Andreas Mershin and UCLA psychologist Nancy Woolf have independently confirmed the importance of microtubules, the scaffolding that undergirds each neuron, in animal memory and learning. At the University of Alberta, physicist Jack Tuszynski has developed computational models suggesting that these supposedly dumb structures could be smarter than previously recognized. Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona argues that trillions of computations per second take place in the microtubules of each neuron. If he’s right, the brain’s speed is 1028 operations per second — a trillion times faster than is generally thought — which pushes the vaunted singularity back by decades.”
January 27th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
It’s my understanding the Penrose/Hameroff conjecture is exactly that. I’m unfamiliar with Mershin and Woolf, however, so perhaps more recent research has given some actual support to the notion.