Nanotechnology outreach and education in Latin America, a buckyball toy, and a Swiss nanotechnology education kit featuring a Lego + laser model of an atomic force microscope

Foresight Advisor Peter H. Diamandis will make the case that the world is getting better at an accelerating rate in a webcast presented on April 11 by Singularity University. Registration required to participate.

A talk at TEDxBerkeley includes nanotechnology among the options for digital fabrication, one of five new rules of innovation.

A new book documenting tremendous strides toward a better future reached #1 on both Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.

The Thiel Foundation is offering $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger who want to skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education—Deadline Dec 31.

In a lecture at Oxford Eric Drexler argued that atomically precise manufacturing will be the next great revolution in the material basis of civilization, and discussed how we can establish reliable knowledge about key aspects of such technologies.

Proposed projects to use smartphone networks to gather data and inform authorities are opening discussion of how such data should be used.

A poll of NewScientist readers selected medical nanorobots as the technology that will have the biggest impact on human life in the next 30 years.

David Hanson of Hanson Robotics argues that building humanlike robots will push the boundaries of several scientific and technical disciplines and prevent intelligent machines from becoming dangerous as they achieve true general intelligence.

In a review of physicist and television host Michio Kaku’s latest book, Foresight advisor Glenn Reynolds finds reason for optimism, but also cause for concern in the career choices of today’s brightest minds.

Does nanotechnology need more energetic PR, and if so, what kind?

A cover article in Time magazine portrays the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, AI, life extension, and nanotechnology as “an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.”

Humanity+ @ Caltech: Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change is being streamed live.

Video footage of conference focused on “Updating the social contract for Science”

Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change, December 4-5, 2010, Pasadena, CA

Longtime Foresight supporter John Gilmore writes: “I noticed a story that reminded me of something Foresight wanted to encourage in society.  Wired reports that the CIA uses decision analysis software ‘Analysis of Competing Hypotheses’, and has funded a rewritten version for shared networked analysis by many people.  But the gov’t contractors got into a hassle [...]

In the mailbag today: A new fiction book Beyond Guilty by Richard Brawer, who got help on it from Robert Freitas, winner of the 2009 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for Theory.  Brawer wrote, “Robert A. Freitas Jr., Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, has graciously edited the references to nanomanufacturing and nanomedicine [...]

Glenn Reynolds, a past Foresight Director, writes some analysis of the recent special election in Mass.: Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the [...]

Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson wonders whether we should go fast or slow with tech development as we move toward a level of development (solar-system wide or interstellar civilization) where we are reasonably not likely to be wiped out in a single incident. He bases his analysis on how likely we are to stumble (or [...]

Mike Treder has a post at IEET that reads like a catechism of the Gaian religion. Now I’m a firm supporter of freedom of religion and Mike has a perfect right to believe what he does and indeed to preach it to whomever will listen. (And besides, Mike is a friend of mine.) But in [...]