In a 47-minute interview Christine Peterson discusses the future that science and technology is bringing over the next few decades, and how to get involved to push the future in a positive direction.

An interview with Foresight Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson covering both the current state and the future prospects of nanotechnology is available on Youtube.

Join us for an intellectually stimulating evening with best-selling author and tech analyst Sonia Arrison! Dinner and drinks will be served h’orderve/tapas-style at 7pm; Sonia will present at 8pm, with personalized, small-group Q&A on the future of technology to follow. Wednesday March 21, 2012 at Ristorante Don Giovanni, 235 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041 [...]

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.

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

Robert A. Freitas Jr. has made available his chapter on nanorobotics from the book The Future of Aging.

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

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

Many of you have an interest in human longevity in general and in being healthier and living longer personally.  If we want to help develop and guide nanotech and other advanced technologies, we need to stay healthy. I am organizing a conference on this topic, October 9-10, here in the Bay Area: http://lifeextensionconference.com You will [...]

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, [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

Longtime readers know that we at Foresight would prefer that our members, and Nanodot readers in general, actually live long enough to experience the benefits of molecular nanotechnology personally.  In that vein, we bring to your attention America’s Wellness Challenge, which I am helping as a member of their Social Media Advisory Board. If you [...]

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 [...]

Reading this essay by Peter Thiel, I was struck by an amusing (though almost certainly coincidental) parallel. Thiel mentions three areas in which people interested in freedom may manage to get out from under the thumb of excessive government: cyberspace, seasteading, and outer space. The parallel is to three fronts on which people are pursuing [...]

Jeriaska has made available videos of presentations from Convergence08, held on November 15-16, 2008 in Mountain View, California, to examine the convergence of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies. Among those of special interest to Nanodot readers: Mapping a Cone of Uncertainty, Paul Saffo Convergence: Artificial Intelligence Panel, Peter Norvig, Steve Omohundro, Ben Goertzel, Barney Pell Convergence: Synthetic [...]

The Convergence08 conference (www.convergence08.org) on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will use an innovative “unconference” format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive way. Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster with over two [...]

Whether you are an American Express cardholder or not, you can vote for an innovative effort to inspire undergraduates to strive for fundamental advances in our ability to control the aging process.