thielfellowship.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel-fellows-forgoing-college-to-pursue-dreams.html

http://www.hulu.com/20-under-20-transforming-tomorrow

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September 6, 2012
6-10 p.m.
Autodesk Gallery, 2nd Floor
1 Market Street, San Francisco

Introducing Design Night, a new event series in the Autodesk Gallery at One Market held on the first Thursday of every month. At each event, guests will explore a different theme – such as biomimicry, light, or robotics – that challenges the conventionally narrow definition of design. The theme will be reflected in all aspects of the event, from the activities guests enjoy to the food they eat to the music they hear. Design is all about experience, so why limit that experience to just talk?

Please join us as we launch the Design Night series on Thursday, September 6, 6-10 p.m.The theme is “Small is the Next Big Thing” where we will explore the frontiers of bio and nano technology.

General admission to Design Night is $20 and student admission is $10. Admission fees include access to the exhibits, content such as a speaker, music, a hosted bar, and hands-on activities.

FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION & PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Come explore what great design can do.

Nanotechnologically Yours,
Instructables and the Autodesk Gallery

Our friends over at the Thiel Foundation asked us to help spread the word about their fellowship program, which offers $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger.

If you know of a very bright, energetic, and visionary young person, please bring this opportunity to his or her attention.

Of course, here at Foresight we hope that your protege will work on nanotechnology, and the Thiel Foundation is very interested in this field, but the fellowships are available in a wide range of areas of endeavor.

Below is their message. Think of this as a potentially large holiday gift to the smartest teenager you know!

Another great holiday gift — to yourself and society at large — is your membership in Foresight Institute. Donate by December 31 and your gift will be matched:
http://www.foresight.org/challenge

Best wishes,

Foresight Institute

from the Thiel Foundation:

We’d like to tell you about the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 that lets extraordinary young adults skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education. We are delighted to announce that our friends at the Thiel Foundation are now accepting applications for the 2012 class of Fellows.

The future will not take care of itself. Global prosperity is not inevitable. The world will only get better if visionary people are creative and relentless about solving hard problems.

The 2011 class of Thiel Fellows includes 24 people who are tackling breakthroughs in hardware and robotics, making energy plentiful, making markets more effective, challenging the notion that there is only one way to get an education, and extending the human lifespan. Several of them have already launched companies, secured financing, and won prestigious awards. As they’re demonstrating, you don’t need college to invent the future (you can read about their progress in a recent article in TechCrunch).

If you’re under twenty and love science or technology, we hope you’ll consider joining the 2012 class of fellows. Go to ThielFellowship.org and apply to change the world. There’s no cost to apply, and they’re accepting applications through December 31. Fellows will be appointed this spring and begin two-year fellowships this summer.

If you’re twenty or over, we have a different request. Think of the smartest, most creative person you know who’s 19 or younger. Sit down and talk with that person about her or his goals and interests. For some people, such as future doctors, the time and cost of four years of college may be worth it. But for those who plan to invent things or start companies, starting now may make more sense. If your friend is interested, you might suggest pursuing an innovation or applying to the Thiel Fellowship.

Millions of people enjoy a higher quality of life because smart people like Steve Jobs, Muriel Siebert, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of others skipped college to start a project that couldn’t wait.

We hope you’ll help me spread the word about the Fellowship. The time for innovation is now.

Please visit ThielFellowship.org to learn more.

Hope to see you there!  —Christine Peterson, President, Foresight Institute

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

After a brief but very informative survey of the concept of the Singularity, covering nanotechnology and life extension as well as artificial intelligence:

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century’s answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they’ll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney’s Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

The presence of Amy Chyao, a 16-year-old from Richardson, Tex., in Michelle Obama’s box during the State of the Union speech puts a spotlight, as it were, on using nanotechnology and light to kill cancer.

Working in the laboratory of Kenneth J. Balkus, Jr., a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Ms. Chyao, a high school junior, synthesized a nanoparticle that is essentially is a remotely triggered bomb that attacks cancer cells.

“That took the longest time,” Ms. Chao said in a telephone interview, referring to her efforts at synthesis. “I have so many failed batches on my bench.”

This type of cancer treatment, called photodynamic therapy, is already used for skin cancer, but Dr. Balkus wanted to find a way to treat tumors within the body. Infrared light can pass partway into the body, and shining it on Ms. Chyao’s nanoparticles sets off a chain of reactions, which release a reactive form of oxygen, which can then kill the cancer cells.

The nanoparticles were further customized with proteins, so they would dissolve in water, and with fluorescent gold nanoparticles, so they could be tracked within the body.

The research is promising, but far from ready, not even for clinical studies. Dr. Balkus said the next step would be to put the nanoparticles into cells and see if they work as designed. …

Ms. Chyao’s invitation was also covered by the Dallas Morning News “Richardson teen will be first lady’s guest for State of Union address“:

Amy Chyao, fast becoming a Washington regular, has accepted her second invitation from the Obama administration to visit the White House.

Her father said a White House representative called the 16-year-old at Plano East Senior High School last week and asked her to attend the State of the Union address Tuesday night with the first lady.

She received the invitation as last year’s winner of the International Science and Engineering Fair. But she has already established a rapport with the president, who referenced her in a December speech as an example of America’s potential. He met the teen last fall when she presented her project at the White House. …

Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in two categories, theory and experiment, to recognize researchers whose recent work has most advanced the field toward the achievement of Feynman’s vision for nanotechnology: molecular manufacturing, the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of molecular machine systems.

The winner of the 2010 Feynman Prize for Experimental work is Masakazu Aono (MANA Center, National Institute for Materials Science, Japan) in recognition of his pioneering and continuing work, including research into the manipulation of atoms, the multiprobe STM and AFM, the atomic switch, and single-molecule-level chemical control including ultradense molecular data storage and molecular wiring; and his inspiration of an entire generation of researchers who have made their own ground-breaking contributions to nanotechnology.

The winner of the 2010 Feynman Prize for Theory is Gustavo E. Scuseria (Rice University) for his development of quantum mechanical methods and computational programs that make it possible to carry out accurate theoretical predictions of molecules and solids, and their application to the chemical and electronic properties of carbon nanostructures.

“The answer to Feynman’s 1959 question ‘What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them…’ has come a step closer to reality,” said Ralph C. Merkle, Chairman of the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize Committee. “Our ability to simulate and manipulate atoms will enable us to design and build engineered molecular machinery. This coming nanotechnology revolution will transform our world and our lives for the better.”

The annual Feynman Prizes are leading to the eventual awarding of the $250,000 Feynman Grand Prize, an incentive prize for making a nanometer-scale robotic arm and a nanometer-scale computing device, the most critical components in future molecular manufacturing systems.

For more information about the Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, visit http://www.foresight.org/about/fi_spons.html or contact Christine Peterson, peterson@foresight.org, tel +1 (650) 289-0860, ext 255.

Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute — a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies. Founded in 1986, its mission is to discover and promote the upsides, and help avoid the dangers, of nanotechnology, AI, biotech, and similar life-changing developments. http://foresight.org/

From Breakthrough Philanthropy, an evening catalyzing radical advances in technology to address humanity’s greatest challenges, Dec 7th, 2010, in San Francisco. For more info, see the event Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/breakthroughp…

Last night Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame, gathered eight of his favorite future-oriented organizations and a couple hundred of his wealthiest friends in an auditorium at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and made a magnanimous offer. For every dollar attendees contribute to the organizations before New Year’s Day, Thiel’s foundation announced, the billionaire investor-philanthropist will contribute another dollar, up to a limit of $1,000 per organization per attendee.

If everyone who attended Thiel’s so-called “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event gives a full $8,000, Thiel could be on the hook for a lot of money. My own rough estimate is that 200 people were on hand—and 200 times $8,000 comes to $1.6 million.

It was a bold, assertive way to promote the fortunes of these unusual groups, which included the Foresight Institute, Humanity Plus, the Santa Fe Institute, the Seasteading Institute, the SENS Foundation, the Singularity Institute, Singularity University, and the X Prize Foundation. But Thiel is known an iconoclast who’s attracted to long bets and radical solutions; he possesses the sort of optimism that often seems to be engendered by (or perhaps engenders) extreme self-made wealth.

In “lightning presentations” of about five minutes each, representatives of Thiel’s chosen groups described their goals. These range from the merely ambitious—harnessing nanotechnology, in the case of the Foresight Institute, or sequencing the human genome more cheaply, in the case of the X Prize Foundation—to the barely conceivable and arguably loony, such as transhumanism (Humanity Plus), reversing aging (the SENS Foundation), and establishing ocean cities that function as independent countries (the Seasteading Institute).

In remarks at the event, Thiel drew a distinction between “extensive” technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them,” and “intensive” technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better.” All eight of the groups included in the donor challenge have agendas that, to lay people, may sound “really weird and really strange,” Thiel acknowledged. But he argued that “it may be in the nature of things that are ‘intensive’ that any time you are doing something singular that’s never been done before…it will be seen as weird.”

…

“The future is not an abstraction,” Thiel summarized at last night’s event. “It is not something that just happens or that other people do. It is something we all participate in helping to create and forge and shape, and if we do that and set our minds to it, we can do a lot more.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle coverage “Peter Thiel seeks funding for the future” Casey Newton quotes Foresight President Christine Peterson:

Philanthropists should take bigger risks with their giving in hopes of making an investment that changes the world, says Facebook investor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Thiel is bringing entrepreneurs and philanthropists together in San Francisco tonight (Tuesday) to showcase the work of eight science-driven organizations working on issues with big social consequences.

His nonprofit group, the Thiel Foundation, is encouraging philanthropists to donate more money to scientific pursuits that could lead to big breakthroughs in medicine, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, among other fields.

While some of the research may seem arcane, Thiel said he has found an eager audience in Silicon Valley.

“Within the tech industry, there are a large number of people who are very interested in these sorts of futuristic technologies,” Thiel said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s something that people are quite receptive to. They’ve made money in tech, and on the nonprofit side, it makes sense to re-invest at least part of that into nonprofits and foundations that have a technological orientation.”

The organizations include the Seasteading Institute, which promotes the construction of permanent dwellings at sea; the X Prize Foundation, which has funded innovations in space travel and automobile design; and the Foresight Institute, which promotes nanotechnology research. While much of philanthropy focuses on giving that helps its beneficiaries in the near term, Thiel hopes to persuade donors that they can better serve their legacy by making a few higher-risk, higher-reward investments.

“Some folks who have an unusually long time horizon, like Peter, are able to say look, I’m going to put aside the emotional satisfaction of a near-term payoff to go into this more abstract area and go for a really huge win,” said Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute.

Peterson’s group, which Thiel has donated to, promotes efforts that could ultimately lead to technology that allows tiny devices to repair bodies at the cellular level.

“We are very excited about the potential environmental benefits and the medical benefits,” she said. “We’ll be trying to get those across to the crowd (on Tuesday) and get them excited about taking action.”

More broadly, Thiel said, he hopes the research he’s promoting can inspire the general public.

“I think one of the reasons there’s so much more pessimism in the United States today than there would have been 40 years ago is that not only are we in a recession and financial crisis, but there’s also a sense that things aren’t going to get dramatically better or dramatically different,” he said. “Returning to the technological story and the technological vision of the future is in my view the only way we can really tell a powerful and positive story about creating a better society.”

Update: for an amateur video of Christine’s talk, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQCWtb2YRkU