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

The Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley is looking better and better. Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and [...]

Frequent Nanodot readers know that our main interest is longer-term nanotech, but sometimes what’s happening today gets pretty exciting as well.  A quick summary  of recent advances in nanotech used to fight cancer appears in a Computerworld piece by Sharon Gaudin; some excerpts: Rice University said yesterday that when the nanoparticles deliver dye to the cell, [...]

Many Foresight leaders and members will be gathering at this year’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, expected to draw up to 1100 participants.  It’s a bit pricey, but it’s for a good cause and there are student and referral discounts plus discounts on the hotel rooms.  I can testify that this is a fun and [...]

Our friends over at Singularity University are described in some detail in a long article in the New York Times.  An excerpt, with names familiar to Nanodot readers as speakers at Foresight conferences: Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to [...]

If you can’t make it to Harvard this weekend, June 12-13, you’ll want to catch the live webcast of the H+ Summit: “Rise of the Citizen Scientist”.  No link yet, but presumably they’ll be putting it on the event homepage before it starts.  Also presumably they will post the videos somewhere for longer-term viewing. UPDATE: [...]

The U.S. President’s Council on Advisors on Science and Technology requested public input on a number of manufacturing topics including “molecular-level, atomically precise production.” Foresight joined with our sister organization IMM to produce a statement on Atomically Precise Manufacturing, now posted on the OpenPCAST site, with public voting and commenting still continuing, so join in the [...]

The Mark, “Canada’s daily online forum for news, commentary, and debate,” has published a commentary that primarily takes a negative view of the use of nanotech (or any tech) for life extension: Extreme life extension raises other interesting, yet troubling questions. Significant life extension could have serious implications for individual identity; what if we change [...]

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 [...]

The March 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on cryonics, a method of suspended animation, featuring Dr. Ralph Merkle.  Ralph is described as a nanotechnology expert; apparently the issue went to press just before he was also named as a co-winner of the 2010 IEEE Haming Medal. As a long-time IEEE member, I [...]

There’s an interesting debate between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson on their respective blogs. Caplan writes: … Robin didn’t care about biological survival.  He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body.  He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to [...]

In Popular Mechanics, longtime Foresight friend Prof. Glenn Reynolds looks at the future of nanotech and artificial intelligence, among other things looking at safety issues, including one call that potentially dangerous technologies be relinquished.  He takes a counterintuitive stance, which we’ve discussed here at Foresight over the years: But I wonder if that’s such a [...]

Ted Greenwald posted yesterday at Wired about Foresight member Ralph Merkle’s presentation on nanotechnology at the Singularity University’s first Executive Program, which has just convened over at NASA Ames here in Silicon Valley: From there he skims through a catalog of progress — familiar example of pushing atoms into IBM logos and such on a [...]

I’m at the AAAI Fall Symposium session on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, and there was a really interesting talk by Walter Schneider of Pitt about progress in mapping the nerve bundles that are the “information superhighways” between the various parts of the brain.  You’ll find his slides from last year’s talk on his home page, and [...]

Nanotechnology Enables Real Atomic Precision is the title of a piece by Susan Smith in Desktop Engineering, which includes comments by longtime Foresight Senior Associates Steve Vetter and Tihamer Toth-Fejel: While nanotechology might mean different things to different people, the term was originally coined to describe the building of things from the bottom up with [...]

SENS4 is going on in Cambridge, England. The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, [...]

Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems and Operations, the third volume [...]

A nanotech-based gene-therapy method that dramatically improved the efficiency of conventional cancer therapy in animal models is now undergoing clinical trials.

Using a magnetic bead to slowly pull a DNA molecule through a solid-sate nanopore looks promising as the basis for a very fast and efficient nanotech DNA sequencing method.

A Newsdesk feature by Kelly Morris titled “Nanotechnology crucial in fighting infectious disease” in the April 2009 issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases surveys some highlights in developing nanotech efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases. Examples include detecting disease through lab-on-a-chip technology featuring cantilevers that move upon binding antigens and nanowires that detect current [...]