With new technology must come new diseases

Editor's Note: This won't be a new disease, but rather a new expression of an old one. People with addictive personalities will find things to be addicted to, and if drugs, drink, porn and slot machines aren't enough, bring on the smartphones.

WSJ - July 7, 2009, by E. Kinney Zalesne

Smartphoniacs: Addicts of the Information Age

Among everybody from our leaders to our teenagers, no habit is spreading faster than being connected 24/7 via a smart phone.

Its penetration in the U.S. is estimated at 18%, and it seems that everywhere you turn, people are using their smart phones in new ways and in new places. Samsung recently estimated that it expects 500 million global smart-phone users by 2012. Actual phone calls are becoming extinct compared with handheld texts and email messages -- whoever thought people would prefer typing to talking? But the evidence appears to say they do.

Here are five tell-tale traits of Smartphoniacs:

Do they take their smart phones with them when they get up from the table to go to the restroom -- and do they take an awful lot of trips there?

This has also given rise to a group of people -- the top 10% of smart-phone users -- who just can't stop. They are the smartphoniacs, the true addicts of the information age.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

Read more...

Of Mice and Men - Life Extension

Editor's Note: We're always reading about wonder drugs that work on mice. I'm waiting for the article that says: Works on humans too! Pick it up at your local Walgreen's!

Technology Review - July 8, 2009, by Jocelyn Rice

First Drug Shown to Extend Life Span in Mammals - Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant, enables elderly mice to live longer.

A drug derived from bacteria in the soil on Easter Island can substantially extend the life span of mice, according to a study published online today in Nature. The drug, called rapamycin, is the first pharmacological agent shown to enhance longevity in a mammal, and it works when administered beginning late in life. Prior to this research, the only ways to increase rodents' life span were via genetic engineering or caloric restriction--a nutritionally complete but very low-calorie diet.

Rapamycin is an antifungal compound already approved by the FDA as an immunosuppressive therapy to help prevent organ rejection in transplant patients. It is currently being tested in clinical trials for potential anticancer effects.

The drug had previously been shown to extend life span in invertebrates. "[This study is] exciting because it shows that it's feasible to do this in a mammal," says David Sinclair, codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. "Maybe 20 years from now we'll look back at this study as a landmark that pointed the way to medicines of the future."

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Easter Island compound vastly boosts lifespan in mice (nationalpost.com)

Read more...

Memristors - The pathway to artificial intelligence?

Editor's Note: This is a story about two remarkable phenomena that cause quantum leaps is science and technology. First is the discovery, by pure mathematics, of a physical entity that should exist, but has never been seen. Einstein discovered black holes in this manner. The second phenomenon in the intuitive connection that is made from one set knowledge to another, sometimes across centuries, as when one scientist discovers an obscure set of equations in an old book and finds within it an answer to a modern-day problem. In this article is described a researcher's discovery, by pure mathematics, of a basic circuit element that should exist, but did not. He called it a memristor. Another scientist discovered that a slime mold was in fact an analogue of the memristor in nature. The connection? Biological memristors in the brain allowing for the existence of intelligence, hence the possibility of electronic memristors providing the breakthrough needed for artificial intelligence. Read on!

NewScientist - July 8, 2009, by Justin Mullins

Slime mould feeding on the surface of an almond. These cunning organisms could be the missing link in memory circuits (Image: Eye of Science/Science Photo Library

EVER had the feeling something is missing? If so, you're in good company. Dmitri Mendeleev did in 1869 when he noticed four gaps in his periodic table. They turned out to be the undiscovered elements scandium, gallium, technetium and germanium. Paul Dirac did in 1929 when he looked deep into the quantum-mechanical equation he had formulated to describe the electron. Besides the electron, he saw something else that looked rather like it, but different. It was only in 1932, when the electron's antimatter sibling, the positron, was sighted in cosmic rays that such a thing was found to exist.

In 1971, Leon Chua had that feeling. A young electronics engineer with a penchant for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was fascinated by the fact that electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation. So like any diligent scientist, he set about trying to derive one.

Were this an article about a conventional breakthrough in electronics, that would be the end of the story. Better memory materials alone do not set the pulse racing. We have come to regard ever zippier consumer electronics as a basic right, and are notoriously insouciant about the improvements in basic physics that make them possible. What's different about memristors?

And he found something missing: a fourth basic circuit element besides the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. Chua dubbed it the "memristor". The only problem was that as far as Chua or anyone else could see, memristors did not actually exist.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

Read more...

Ray Kurzweil on How to Combat Aging

Editor's Note: Ray is one of my heroes. Although oft taken out of context and otherwise misinterpreted, he offers a glimpse into the future based on extrapolating from the past.

Technology Review - July 6, 2009, by Ray Kurzweil

Entropy is not the most fruitful perspective from which to view aging. There are varying error rates in biological information processes depending on the cell type and this is part of biology's paradigm. We have means already of determining error-free DNA sequences even though specific cells will contain DNA errors, and we will be in a position to correct those errors that matter.

The most important perspective in my view is that health, medicine, and biology is now an information technology whereas it used to be hit or miss. We not only have the (outdated) software that biology runs on (our genome) but we have the means of changing that software (our genes) in a mature individual with such technologies as RNA interference and new forms of gene therapy that do not trigger the immune system (I am a collaborator with a company that performs gene therapy outside the body, replicates the modified cell a million fold and reintroduces the cells to the body, a process that has cured a fatal disease--Pulmonary Hypertension--and is undergoing human trials).

We can design interventions on computers and test them out on increasingly sophisticated biological simulators. One of my primary themes is that information technology grows exponentially, in sharp contrast to the linear growth of hit or miss approaches that have characterized medicine up until recently. As such, these technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years (by doubling in power and price-performance each year). The genome project, incidentally, followed exactly this trajectory.

Read entire story>>

Follow me on Twitter. Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

Read more...