Pope speaks out against radical life-extension

Accelerating Future - 6.29.10 (by Michael Anissimov)

From the Pope’s April 3rd (“Holy Saturday”) address, via Aubrey:

An ancient Jewish legend from the apocryphal book “The life of Adam and Eve” recounts that, in his final illness, Adam sent his son Seth together with Eve into the region of Paradise to fetch the oil of mercy, so that he could be anointed with it and healed. The two of them went in search of the tree of life, and after much praying and weeping on their part, the Archangel Michael appeared to them, and told them they would not obtain the oil of the tree of mercy and that Adam would have to die...

It’s been more than 5,500 years, and God never showed up, so now what? In fact, it’s been 200,000 years since the beginning of Mankind. God, maybe you’re a little bit late, don’t you think? Also, note how the Pope casually mentions Christian readers “(adding) a word of consolation” about an Archangel to the text, and refers to Apocrypha as theologically meaningful. Does making stuff up count as theologically significant if it was done far enough in the past?

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Father, is that an iPad you're holding?

PopSci - 6.21.10 by Rebecca Boyle

Preparing the Missal The Rev. Daniel Seward prepares the missal at a service at Oxford Oratory in April. An Italian priest is launching an iPad app that will make the entire Roman missal available in electronic form. via Flickr/ James Bradley.

Want to conduct Sunday Mass but don't have your copy of the church missal? There's an app for that.

The Rev. Paolo Padrini, an Italian priest who consults with the Vatican, is launching a free iPad app that will contain the complete Roman missal -- the book containing everything that is said and sung during Catholic Mass throughout the liturgical year.

It will be available in July, meaning iPads could start appearing on altars in the next few weeks. Future editions will feature audio as well as commentaries and suggestions for homilies, AP reports.

It's not the first time that 2,000-year-old prayers will be available in app form. Padrini already has an iPhone app called the iBreviary, which contains the book of daily prayers used by priests. To date, 200,000 people have downloaded it.

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Does iPhone's FaceTime prove that we're in the future?

PopSci - 6.24.10 by Adam Frucci/Gizmodo

FaceTime in action Matt Buchanan/Gizmodo

Videocalling has been a sci-fi staple for decades. From 2001 to Back to the Future people chatting face-to-face from great distances was a way of saying "Hey, look, it's the future!" So does Facetime mean we're in the future?

But then, once you have fiddled with it and both acknowledged how neat it is, once you have showed off your surroundings, once you move onto a conversation about something other than FaceTime, things get a little weird.

FaceTime is Apple's stab at making videocalling a reality. They're certainly not the first: European and Asian phones have been able to do this for years, and the HTC Evo can do it quite handily. But Apple is pushing it hard at the mainstream with the iPhone 4.

Making a call on FaceTime is very cool, at first. You see who you're talking to! You talk about what you are doing, that being using a videocalling system built right into a phone. How cool! You can do neat things like flick the little thumbnail of yourself from corner to corner and flip between the front and back cameras. It's just neat.

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It's not sexy but it could save your life - Robot lifeguard

PopSci - 6.25.10, by Alessandra Calderin

EMILY Lifeguards rescued 77,192 people at U.S. beaches in 2009 Courtesy Hydronalix.

You’re caught by the ocean’s riptide, exhausted and barely keeping your head above water. Then your unlikely hero appears: a four-foot-long talking buoy. It’s EMILY, the robot lifeguard. Grab on, and it can bring you safely back to shore.

This summer, EMILY (for EMergency Integrated Lifesaving lanYard) began patrolling Malibu’s dangerous Zuma Beach and will watch over about 25 more by December. Although lifeguards operate this version by remote control, next year’s model will autonomously save potential drowning victims as reliably as a human. Once a lifeguard tosses EMILY into the surf, its sonar device will scan for the underwater movements associated with swimmers in distress. Its electric, Jet Ski–like impeller drives it at 28 mph through even the roughest chop, getting a flotation device—itself—to victims six times as fast as a lifeguard would. The ’bot’s camera and speakers will let an onshore lifeguard calm the person and instruct him to wait for human help or to hold on as EMILY ferries him back.

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Where are all the ETs? Nick Bostrom discusses (Video)

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Primal Pages - Semantic web builds pages around your thoughts

VentureBeat - 6.22.10 by Anthony Ha

We’ve seen a lot of startups using semantic technology, usually to improve Web search. Peter Sweeney, founder and co-president of a company called Primal, said he’s taking a different approach from the rest of the semantic crowd: “We’re focused less on annotating content, and more on expressing the thoughts and intentions of individual consumers.”

If that sounds a little vague, things should get a little clearer with Primal’s just-announced service, Primal Pages. Like other semantic companies, Primal tries to understand the actual meaning of a user’s commands, and with Pages it tries to create a webpage that contains the exact information you’re looking for. When you search for something on a service like Google, especially if you’re doing serious research, you probably find what you want in bits and pieces — a paragraph from a Wikipedia article, another paragraph from a research paper, an image from Flickr, and so on.

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Digital license plate ads - What'll those rascals think of next?

msnbc - 6.21.10 by Robin Hindery

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - As electronic highway billboards flashing neon advertisements become more prevalent, the next frontier in distracted driving is already approaching — ad-blaring license plates.

The California Legislature is considering a bill that would allow the state to begin researching the use of electronic license plates for vehicles. The move is intended as a moneymaker for a state facing a $19 billion deficit.

The device would mimic a standard license plate when the vehicle is in motion but would switch to digital ads or other messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds, whether in traffic or at a red light. The license plate number would remain visible at all times in some section of the screen.

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Searching for artificial meat

Time - 6.14.10 by John Cloud

Artwork by Balint Zsako. Photograph by Tom Schierlitz for TIME.

The desire to eat meat has posed an ethical question ever since humans achieved reliable crop production: Do we really need to kill animals to live? Today, the hunger for meat is also contributing to the climate-change catastrophe. The gases from all those chickens and pigs and cows, and from the manure lagoons that big farms create, are playing a part in global warming. So the idea of fake meat has never been more alluring. What if you could cut into a juicy chicken breast that wasn't chicken at all but rather some indistinguishable imitation made harmlessly from plant life?

This spring, scientists at the University of Missouri announced that after more than a decade of research, they had created the first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh. When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of "meat" hanging loosely.

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Robot Pool Shark (Video) - Don't get hustled by this guy

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Stop worrying about 2012. It's 2013 that's the problem.

Telegraph.co.uk - 6.14.10 by Andrew Hough

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

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Protecting the grid from terrorists and the Sun

PhysOrg.com - 6.14.10 by Phillip F. Schewe

Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Electricity is all around us. It lifts elevators, pumps gas, lights rooms, cooks food, and even powers a growing fleet of cars. We generally take the vast electric grid for granted until it turns off. Only then do we realize how important it is. Blackouts owing to technical foul-ups are bad enough, but new hazards, some malicious and some from nature, threaten to create electrical disturbances on an unprecedented scale.

New legislation, passed June 9 by the U.S. House of Representatives and referred to the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources committee, hopes to strengthen the grid’s robustness against attacks of many kinds. The immediate aim of the Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act is to direct the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the main federal agency responsible for electricity matters, to establish security rules for utilities and other energy companies.

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Transhumanism - Being human is so retro

NYT - 6.11.10 by Ashlee Vance

(Credit: Bruno Mallert)

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

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Tech is making you impatient and forgetful

NYT - 6.6.10 by Tara Parker-Pope

Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?

Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?

Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

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Watch the robots swarm! (Video)

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Don't forget to backup your brain!

NewScientist - 6.7.10 by Linda Geddes

Upload your life (Image: Darrin Klimek/Getty).

ZOE GRAYSTONE is a girl with two brains. Only one of them is human: the other is an exact digital copy that has become conscious in its own right. When the human Zoe dies, her digital brain is implanted into a humanoid robot, effectively bringing her back from the grave.

Such ideas have littered science fiction for decades. Indeed, Graystone is a character in the American TV drama Caprica. But could such a tale ever become reality?

Though there is little prospect of creating a genuinely conscious robo-clone in the foreseeable future, several companies are taking the first steps in that direction. Their initial goal is to enable you to create a lifelike digital representation, or avatar, that can continue long after your biological body has decomposed. This digitised "twin" might be able to provide valuable lessons for your great-grandchildren - as well as giving them a good idea of what their ancestor was like.

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UPI commentary on Kurzweil and Singularity

UPI - 6.4.10 by Arnaud de Borchgrave

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- He speaks nine languages, taught himself Icelandic in a week and invented his own language he calls Manti. The 31-year-old autistic savant does complex celestial computations in seconds, sees hundreds of numbers on a blackboard once and can recite them in the correct sequence minutes later.

Daniel Tammet possesses synesthesia. Not only does he see numbers but also feels them. He is one in hundreds of millions, as he demonstrated on ABC's "20/20" this week. But when the "singularity" arrives -- that moment in history when the supercomputer capable of trillions of moves per second will have reached parity with the human brain, capable of feelings, from bereavement to passionate to anger -- countless millions of people will be like Tammet.

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Monkey uses thought-controlled robot arm (video)

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Man/Machine Transistor Devised

Discovery News - 6.2.10 by Eric Bland

By embedding a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane, scientists link humans and machines more intimately than ever.

An artist’s representation of a new transistor that's contained within a cell-like membrane. In the core of the device is a silicon nanowire (grey), covered with a lipid bilayer (blue). Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever, according to a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell's own fuel. Scott Dougherty, LLNL.

The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

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DNA Logic - Computers in your bloodstream

New Scientist - 6.2.10 (by Kate McAlpine)

DNA-based logic gates that could carry out calculations inside the body have been constructed for the first time. The work brings the prospect of injectable biocomputers programmed to target diseases as they arise.

"The biocomputer would sense biomarkers and immediately react by releasing counter-agents for the disease," says Itamar Willner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, who led the work.

The new logic gates are formed from short strands of DNA and their complementary strands, which in conjunction with some simple molecular machinery mimic their electronic equivalent. Two strands act as the input: each represents a 1 when present or a 0 when absent. The response to their presence or absence represents the output, which can also be a 1 or 0.

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