Keep Innovating

Books Related to Transhumanism

2013-06-05T13:47:00.005-07:00

Our Posthuman Frontier: Transhumanism, Human Purpose and Our Future Evolution (August 15, 2013)

by Ted Chu

Hardcover: 375 pages
Publisher: Origin Press (August 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1579830250
ISBN-13: 978-1579830250

Abstract

For millennia, great thinkers have contemplated the meaning and purpose of human existence; but while most assumed that humanity was the end point of creation or the pinnacle of evolution, Ted Chu makes the provocative claim that the human race may in fact be a means rather than an end—that humankind will give rise to evolutionary successors. In this wide-ranging and authoritative work, Chu reexamines the question of human purpose in light of the extraordinary developments of science and technology. Arguing that a deep understanding of our place in the universe is required to navigate the magnitude of the choices that lie ahead, he surveys human wisdom from both East and West, traces the evolutionary trajectory that has led to this point, and explores the potentials emerging on the scientific frontier. The book addresses the legitimate fears and concerns of “playing God” but embraces the possibility of transcending biological forms and becoming or creating entirely new life-forms.

Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism and Science Fiction in the 21st Century (December 15, 2013)

by Joshua Raulerson

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Liverpool University Press (December 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1846319722
ISBN-13: 978-1846319723

Abstract

Amid the seemingly exponential advancement of technology and the increasingly portentous implications of its continued development and proliferation, many futurists speculate about an imminent historical threshold when the nature of human existence will be forever changed—the Singularity. In Singularities, Joshua Raulerson mounts a wide-ranging study of the Singularity as a subject for theory and cultural studies, drawing science fiction texts into a complex dialogue with digital culture, transhumanist movements, political and economic theory, consumer gadgetry, gaming, and related areas of our high-tech postmodernity. By doing so, he shows how the Singularity greatly shapes many of our contemporary anxieties and aspirations.

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection

by Ethan Zuckerman

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (June 17, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393082830
ISBN-13: 978-0393082838

Abstract

A rousing call to action for those who would be citizens of the world—online and off.

We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York.

In Rewire, media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. At the most basic level, our human tendency to “flock together” means that most of our interactions, online or off, are with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. In examining this fundamental tendency, Zuckerman draws on his own work as well as the latest research in psychology and sociology to consider technology’s role in disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world.

For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for survival in an age of global economic crises and pandemics—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, in truly connecting people across cultures. From voracious xenophiles eager to explore other countries to bridge figures who are able to connect one culture to another, people are at the center of his vision for a true kind of cosmopolitanism. And it is people who will shape a new approach to existing technologies, and perhaps invent some new ones, that embrace translation, cross-cultural inspiration, and the search for new, serendipitous experiences.

Rich with Zuckerman’s personal experience and wisdom, Rewire offers a map of the social, technical, and policy innovations needed to more tightly connect the world.

Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself

by Adam Rutherford

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Current Hardcover (June 13, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1617230057
ISBN-13: 978-1617230059

Abstract

What is life?

Humans have been asking this question for thousands of years. But as technology has advanced and our understanding of biology has deepened, the answer has evolved. For decades, scientists have been exploring the limits of nature by modifying and manipulating DNA, cells and whole organisms to create new ones that could never have existed on their own.

In Creation, science writer Adam Rutherford explains how we are now radically exceeding the boundaries of evolution and engineering entirely novel creatures—from goats that produce spider silk in their milk to bacteria that excrete diesel to genetic circuits that identify and destroy cancer cells. As strange as some of these creations may sound, this new, synthetic biology is helping scientists develop radical solutions to some of the world’s most pressing crises—from food shortages to pandemic disease to climate change—and is paving the way for inventions once relegated to science fiction.

Meanwhile, these advances are shedding new light on the biggest mystery of all—how did life begin? We know that every creature on Earth came from a single cell, sparked into existence four billion years ago. And as we come closer and closer to understanding the ancient root that connects all living things, we may finally be able to achieve a second genesis—the creation of new life where none existed before.

Creation takes us on a journey four billion years in the making—from the very first cell to the ground-breaking biological inventions that will shape the future of our planet.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

by K. Eric Drexler

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition edition (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1610391136
ISBN-13: 978-1610391139

Abstract

K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology—the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.

Already, scientists have constructed prototypes for circuit boards built of millions of precisely arranged atoms. The advent of this kind of atomic precision promises to change the way we make things—cleanly, inexpensively, and on a global scale. It allows us to imagine a world where solar arrays cost no more than cardboard and aluminum foil, and laptops cost about the same.

A provocative tour of cutting edge science and its implications by the field’s founder and master, Radical Abundance offers a mind-expanding vision of a world hurtling toward an unexpected future.

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More

Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (May 6, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118334310
ISBN-13: 978-1118334317

Abstract

he rapid pace of emerging technologies is playing an increasingly important role in overcoming fundamental human limitations. Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist Reader is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

by Amnon H. Eden, James H. Moor, Johnny H. Soraker, Eric Steinhart

Hardcover: 450 pages
Publisher: Springer; 2012 edition (April 3, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3642325599
ISBN-13: 978-3642325595

Abstract

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate.

Beyond Human?: Science and the Changing Face of Humanity

by John Bryant

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Lion UK; 1st New edition edition (April 1, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745953964
ISBN-13: 978-0745953960

Abstract

An exploration of what the most significant scientific advances of recent years mean for us as humans

Recent scientific advances have made it possible to do the unthinkable—clone, design one’s own babies, “genetically enhance” soldiers, and wipe out entire populations with a simple airborne chemical. Such technology means that “nature” no longer follows an inevitable course, and that our decisions have unprecedented power. This book introduces many of the most significant scientific advances of recent years including food modification; genetics and eugenics; modern medical technology; and transhumanism, or “improving” the species. Looking at the dehumanizing effects of technology, it asks us to think about what these things mean for us, arguing that new technology has developed so quickly that we haven’t had time to consider all of its ethical implications, yet not to do so is to risk our own humanity.

Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More than Your Peers Ever Will

by Dale J. Stephens

Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Perigee Trade (March 5, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0399159967
ISBN-13: 978-0399159961

Abstract

It’s no secret that college doesn’t prepare students for the real world. Student loan debt recently eclipsed credit card debt for the first time in history and now tops one trillion dollars. And the throngs of unemployed graduates chasing the same jobs makes us wonder whether there’s a better way to “make it” in today’s marketplace.

There is—and Dale Stephens is proof of that. In Hacking Your Education, Stephens speaks to a new culture of “hackademics” who think college diplomas are antiquated. Stephens shows how he and dozens of others have hacked their education, and how you can, too. You don’t need to be a genius or especially motivated to succeed outside school. The real requirements are much simpler: curiosity, confidence, and grit.

Hacking Your Education offers valuable advice to current students as well as those who decided to skip college. Stephens teaches you to create opportunities for yourself and design your curriculum—inside or outside the classroom. Whether your dream is to travel the world, build a startup, or climb the corporate ladder, Stephens proves you can do it now, rather than waiting for life to start after “graduation” day.

Robot Futures

by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (March 1, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262018624
ISBN-13: 978-0262018623

Abstract

With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. They will be fully connected to the digital world, far better at carrying out online tasks than we are. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh follows each glimpse into the robotic future with an examination of the underlying technology and an exploration of the social consequences of the scenario.

Each chapter describes a form of technological empowerment — in some cases, empowerment run amok, with corporations and institutions amassing even more power and influence and individuals becoming unconstrained by social accountability. (Imagine the hotheaded discourse of the Internet taking physical form.) Nourbakhsh also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing

by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman

Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 11, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118350634
ISBN-13: 978-1118350638

Abstract

Fabricated tells the story of 3D printers, humble manufacturing machines that are bursting out of the factory and into homes, businesses, schools, kitchens, hospitals, even the fashion catwalk. The magic happens when you plug a 3D printer into today’s mind-boggling digital technologies. Add to that the Internet, tiny, low cost electronic circuitry, radical advances in materials science and biotech and voila! The result is an explosion of technological and social innovation.

Fabricated provides readers with practical and imaginative insights to the question “how will 3D printing technologies change my life?” Based on hundreds of hours of research and dozens of interviews with experts from a broad range of industries, Fabricated offers readers an informative, engaging and fast-paced introduction to 3D printing now and in the future.

Living Factories: Biotechnology and the Unique Nature of Capitalism

by Kenneth Fish

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press (January 17, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0773540849
ISBN-13: 978-0773540842

Abstract

Techniques of genetic engineering are changing the role of living things in the production process. From rabbits that produce human pharmaceuticals in their milk to plants that produce plastics and other building materials in their leaves, life itself is increasingly harnessed as a force of industry – a living factory. What do these cutting edge developments in biotechnology tell us about our relation to nature? Going beyond the usual focus on the ethics and risks surrounding genetically modified organisms, Kenneth Fish takes the emergence of living factories as an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions concerning the relation between human beings, technology, and the natural world. He examines the coincidence of the living factory metaphor in contemporary accounts of biotechnology and in the work of Karl Marx, who described the machine as “a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic powers …burst forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.” Weaving together accounts of biotechnology in the molecular- and cyber-sciences, corporate literature, and environmental sociology, Living Factories casts our contemporary relation to nature in a new light. Fish shows that living factories reveal the unique role of capitalism in infusing the forces of nature with conscious purpose subordinated to processes of commodification and accumulation, and that they give a new meaning, and urgency, to the liberation of the forces of production from the fetters of capital.

2012

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

by Ray Kurzweil

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (November 13, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780670025299
ISBN-13: 978-0670025299
ASIN: 0670025291

Abstract

The bold futurist and bestselling author explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain

Ray Kurzweil is arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.

Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.

Certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books of the year, How to Create a Mind is sure to take its place alongside Kurzweil’s previous classics which include Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and The Age of Spiritual Machines.

The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies and a Limitless Future (2012)

by W. Patrick McCray

Hardcover: 366 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 19, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691139830
ISBN-13: 978-0691139838

Handbook of Research of Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society

by Rocci Luppicini

Hardcover: 1034 pages
Publisher: IGI Global; 1 edition (October 31, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1466622113
ISBN-13: 978-1466622111

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a major push to rediscover the human side of technology across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. With the emerging of this new study of self-identity and technology (Technoself), it holds an effort to keep pace with shaping breakthroughs in robotics, human enhancement technology, biotechnology, and more.

The Handbook of Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society provides insights to better enhance the understanding of technology’s widespread intertwinement with human identity within an advancing technological society. This reference includes comprehensive coverage of the most vital issues, concepts, trends, and debates in technology and identity. It brings together an audience of researchers, scholars, students, and professionals alike.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer and More Dangerous World

by James D. Miller

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: BenBella Books (October 16, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1936661659
ISBN-13: 978-1936661657

Abstract

n Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times bestseller The Singularity is Near, the futurist and entrepreneur describes the Singularity, a likely future utterly different than anything we can imagine. The Singularity is triggered by the tremendous growth of human and computing intelligence that is an almost inevitable outcome of Moore’s Law. Since the book’s publication, the coming of the Singularity is now eagerly anticipated by many of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley, from PayPal mastermind Peter Thiel to Google co-founder Larry Page. The formation of the Singularity University, and the huge popularity of the Singularity website kurzweilai.com, speak to the importance of this intellectual movement.

But what about the average person? How will the Singularity affect our daily lives—our jobs, our families, and our wealth?

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World focuses on the implications of a future society faced with an abundance of human and artificial intelligence. James D. Miller, an economics professor and popular speaker on the Singularity, reveals how natural selection has been increasing human intelligence over the past few thousand years and speculates on how intelligence enhancements will shape civilization over the next forty years.

Miller considers several possible scenarios in this coming singularity:
• A merger of man and machine making society fantastically wealthy and nearly immortal
• Competition with billions of cheap AIs drive human wages to almost nothing while making investors rich
• Businesses rethink investment decisions to take into account an expected future period of intense creative destruction
• Inequality drops worldwide as technologies mitigate the cognitive cost of living in impoverished environments
• Drugs designed to fight Alzheimer’s disease and keep soldiers alert on battlefields have the fortunate side effect of increasing all of their users’ IQs, which, in turn, adds a percentage points to worldwide economic growth

Singularity Rising offers predictions about the economic implications for a future of widely expanding intelligence and practical career and investment advice on flourishing on the way to the Singularity.

Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (2012)

by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu

Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 7, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 019965364X
ISBN-13: 978-0199653645

Abstract

Unfit for the Future argues that the future of our species depends on our urgently finding ways to bring about radical enhancement of the moral aspects of our own human nature. We have rewritten our own moral agenda by the drastic changes we have made to the conditions of life on earth. Advances in technology enable us to exercise an influence that extends all over the world and far into the future. But our moral psychology lags behind and leaves us ill equipped to deal with the challenges we now face. We need to change human moral motivation so that we pay more heed not merely to the global community, but to the interests of future generations. It is unlikely that traditional methods such as moral education or social reform alone can bring this about swiftly enough to avert looming disaster, which would undermine the conditions for worthwhile life on earth forever. Persson and Savulescu maintain that it is likely that we need to explore the use of new technologies of biomedicine to change the bases of human moral motivation. They argue that there are in principle no philosophical or moral objections to such moral bioenhancement. Unfit for the Future challenges us to rethink our attitudes to our own human nature, before it is too late.

When I’m 164: The New Science of Radical Life Extension and What Happens If it Succeeds (Kindle Only, 2012)

by David Ewing Duncan

File Size: 586 KB
Print Length: 66 pages
Publisher: TED Conferences (August 16, 2012)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B008XB16ME

Abstract

How long do you want to live, and why? These are the questions that bestselling author (‘Experimental Man’) and science writer David Ewing Duncan explores, with surprising results. ‘When I’m 164′ surveys the increasingly legitimate science of radical life extension — from genetics and regeneration to machine solutions — and considers the pluses and minuses of living to age 164, or beyond: everything from the impact on population and the cost of living to what happens to love, curiosity, and health. Concluding that anti-aging technologies will probably succeed in the next 30 to 50 years, Duncan brings us back to the age-old question posed by the Beatles in their classic song: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m … ”

Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares: The Promise and Peril of Genetic Enginnering (2012)

by Maxwell J. Mehlman

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (August 6, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1421406691
ISBN-13: 978-1421406695

Abstract

Transhumanists advocate for the development and distribution of technologies that will enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, even eliminate aging. What if the dystopian futures and transhumanist utopias found in the pages of science journals, Margaret Atwood novels, films like Gattaca, and television shows like Dark Angel are realized? What kind of world would humans have created?

Maxwell J. Mehlman considers the promises and perils of using genetic engineering in an effort to direct the future course of human evolution. He addresses scientific and ethical issues without choosing sides in the dispute between transhumanists and their challengers. However,Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares reveals that radical forms of genetic engineering could become a reality much sooner than many people think, and that we need to encourage risk-management efforts.

Whether scientists are dubious or optimistic about the prospects for directed evolution, they tend to agree on two things. First, however long it takes to perfect the necessary technology, it is inevitable that humans will attempt to control their evolutionary future, and second, in the process of learning how to direct evolution, we are bound to make mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn how to balance innovation with caution.

Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (2012)

by George M. Church and Ed Regis

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (October 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465021751
ISBN-13: 978-0465021758

Abstract

Imagine a future in which human beings have become immune to all viruses, in which bacteria can custom-produce everyday items, like a drinking cup, or generate enough electricity to end oil dependency. Building a house would entail no more work than planting a seed in the ground. These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but pioneering geneticist George Church and science writer Ed Regis show that synthetic biology is bringing us ever closer to making such visions a reality. In Regenesis, Church and Regis explore the possibilities—and perils—of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation of entirely new species of organisms. Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future. Indeed, as Church and Regis show, it even enables us to revisit crucial points in the evolution of life and, through synthetic biological techniques, choose different paths from those nature originally took. Such exploits will involve far more than just microbial tinkering. Full-blown genomic engineering will make possible incredible feats, from resurrecting woolly mammoths and other extinct organisms to creating mirror life forms with a molecular structure the opposite of our own. These technologies—far from the out-of-control nightmare depicted in science fiction—have the power to improve human and animal health, increase our intelligence, enhance our memory, and even extend our life span. A breathtaking look at the potential of this world-changing technology, Regenesis is nothing less than a guide to the future of life.

Transhumanism and Society: The Social Debate Over Human Enhancement. (2012)

by Stephen Lilley

Paperback: 99 pages
Publisher: Springer; 2013 edition (August 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9400749805
ISBN-13: 978-9400749801

Abstract

This book provides an introductory overview to the social debate over enhancement technologies with an overview of the transhumanists’ call to bypass human nature and conservationists’ argument in defense of it. The author present this controversy as it unfolds in the contest between transhumanists proponents and conservationists, who push back with an argument to conserve human nature and to ban enhancement technologies. This book provides an overview of the key contested points and present the debate in an orderly, constructive fashion. Readers are informed about the discussion over humanism, the tension between science and religion, and the interpretation of socio-technological revolutions; and are invited to make up their own mind about one of the most challenging topics concerning the social and ethical implications of technological advancements.

Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012)

by Claire Molloy and Steven Shakespeare and Charlie Blake

Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Continuum; 1 edition (May 10, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1441150110
ISBN-13: 978-1441150110

Abstract

Investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions ; in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or "animals that think" has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012)

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Free Press; Fifth Impression edition (February 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451614217
ISBN-13: 978-1451614213

Abstract

We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions. An antidote to pessimism by tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler.

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. The authors document how four forces—exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. Abundance establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.

Examining human need by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, among many, many others.

The Genome Generation (2012)

by Elizabeth Finkel

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing (April 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0522856470
ISBN-13: 978-0522856477

Abstract

The year 2001 marked the moment when scientists first read the 3 billion letters of DNA that make up the human genome. This breakthrough begged questions such as What have we learned about evolution? How has it changed the way we practice medicine, grow crops, and breed livestock? and Is the genomic revolution an overhyped flop? Answering these and many other queries, this account covers revolutionary genetic developments in areas as diverse as medicine, agriculture, and evolution. From Botswana to Boston and from Australia to Mexico, the contributors to this work reveal what it means to be part of the genome generation.

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (2012)

by Nessa Carey

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1 edition (March 6, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780231161169
ISBN-13: 978-0231161169
ASIN: 0231161166

Abstract

Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism’s genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the foundations of epigenetics.

Nessa Carey, a leading epigenetics researcher, connects the field’s arguments to such diverse phenomena as how ants and queen bees control their colonies; why tortoiseshell cats are always female; why some plants need cold weather before they can flower; and how our bodies age and develop disease. Reaching beyond biology, epigenetics now informs work on drug addiction, the long-term effects of famine, and the physical and psychological consequences of childhood trauma. Carey concludes with a discussion of the future directions for this research and its ability to improve human health and well-being.

Beyond Boundaries (2012)

by Miguel Nicolelis

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin; Reprint edition (February 28, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250002613
ASIN: B009F7NF6K

Abstract

Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring work, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis shares his revolutionary insights into how the brain creates thought and the human sense of self—and how this might be augmented by machines, so that the entire universe will be within our reach.

Beyond Boundaries draws on Nicolelis’s ground-breaking research with monkeys that he taught to control the movements of a robot located halfway around the globe by using brain signals alone. Nicolelis’s work with primates has uncovered a new method for capturing brain function—by recording rich neuronal symphonies rather than the activity of single neurons. His lab is now paving the way for a new treatment for Parkinson’s, silk-thin exoskeletons to grant mobility to the paralyzed, and breathtaking leaps in space exploration, global communication, manufacturing, and more.

Beyond Boundaries promises to reshape our concept of the technological future, to a world filled with promise and hope.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Paperback: 98 pages
Publisher: Digital Frontier Press (January 23, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0984725113
ISBN-13: 978-0984725113

Abstract

Why has median income stopped rising in the US?

Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly?

Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal?

A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation– a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity. In Race Against the Machine, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there’s been no stagnation in technology — in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players.

As these examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.

But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.

In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there’s been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren’t keeping up.

2011

Beyond Humanity: The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement (2011)

by Allen E. Buchanan

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199671494
ISBN-13: 978-0199671496

Abstract

Biotechnologies already on the horizon will enable us to be smarter, have better memories, be stronger and quicker, have more stamina, live longer, be more resistant to diseases, and enjoy richer emotional lives. To some of us, these prospects are heartening; to others, they are dreadful. In Beyond Humanity a leading philosopher offers a powerful and controversial exploration of urgent ethical issues concerning human enhancement. These raise enduring questions about what it is to be human, about individuality, about our relationship to nature, and about what sort of society we should strive to have. Allen E. Buchanan urges that the debate about enhancement needs to be informed by a proper understanding of evolutionary biology, which has discredited the simplistic conceptions of human nature used by many opponents of enhancement. He argues that there are powerful reasons for us to embark on the enhancement enterprise, and no objections to enhancement that are sufficient to outweigh them.

H+/-: Transhumanism and Its Critics (2011)

by Gregory R. Hansell and William Grassie

Paperback: 278 pages
Publisher: Metanexus Institute (January 25, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1456815652
ISBN-13: 978-1456815653

Abstract

Suppose in the near future humans are able to reverse the aging process. Imagine a world in which we are free from the ravages of mental disease, physical decrepitude, and natural death. Consider what life would be like if–through applied sciences like genomics, robotics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence–we were able to dramatically increase our intellectual capacity and control
our emotional and mental states. Envision parents choosing the “”nature”” of their children before they are born. This is the future celebrated by the transhumanists. They claim that the scientific know-how is not far off. As a philosophical proposition, transhumanism is as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and secular humanism.

It is an increasingly influential worldview that is gaining momentum and garnering criticism. Transhumanism has been called “” the
world’s most dangerous idea.”” Previously imaginable only in the realm of science fiction, the reality of transhumanism may soon
be upon us.

Humanity: Transhumanism and Its Critics brings together sixteen of the foremost advocates and critics of transhumanism to debate the promises and the perils of bioengineering an improved humanity. As it turns out, transhumanism is a catalyst for profound philosophical and theological inquiry. If the idea of a fixed human nature no longer applied, can we still speak of humane dignities and essential human rights? Should we try to limit the development of certain technologies? Is it even possible? Are the new sciences and technologies hailed by transhumanists just wishful thinking? And which utopic and dystopic visions have the power to motivate us to build a more wholesome, just, and sustainable tomorrow? This volume does much to advance critical dialogue on the future course of our species and our planet.

The Techno-Human Condition (2011)

by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz

Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (April 22, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262015692
ISBN-13: 978-0262015691

Abstract

In The Techno-Human Condition, Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz explore what it means to be human in an era of incomprehensible technological complexity and change. They argue that if we are to have any prospect of managing that complexity, we will need to escape the shackles of current assumptions about rationality, progress, and certainty, even as we maintain a commitment to fundamental human values.Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory. What is different now is that we have moved beyond external technological interventions to transform ourselves from the inside out — even as we also remake the Earth system itself. Coping with this new reality, say Allenby and Sarewitz, means liberating ourselves from such categories as “human,” “technological,” and “natural” to embrace a new techno-human relationship.

Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn Of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warefare (2011)

by Thomas R. Horn and Nita F. Horn

Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Defender (January 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0984061193
ISBN-13: 978-0984061198

Abstract

While Forbidden Gates includes fresh insights for traditional, tried and true methods of overcoming darkness, it also unveils for the first time how breakthrough advances in science, technology, and philosophy—including cybernetics, bio-engineering, nanotechnology, machine intelligence, synthetic biology, and transhumanism—will combine to create mind-boggling game-changes to everything you have ever known about spiritual warfare.

How so?

In recent years, astonishing technological developments have pushed the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation that promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human. An international, intellectual and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism intends the use of genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology (GRIN technologies) as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps, as Joel Garreau in his bestselling book Radical Evolution claims, our very souls. The technological, cultural, and metaphysical shift now under way unapologetically forecasts a future dominated by this new species of unrecognizably superior humans, and applications under study now to make this dream reality are being funded by thousands of government and private research facilities around the world. As the reader will learn, this includes among other things rewriting human DNA and combining men with beasts, a fact that some university studies and transhumanists believe will not only alter our bodies and souls but could ultimately open a door to contact with unseen intelligence.

As a result, new modes of perception between things visible and invisible are expected to challenge the Church in ways that are historically and theologically unprecedented. Without comprehending what is quickly approaching in related disciplines of research and development, vast numbers of believers could be paralyzed by the most fantastic—and most far reaching—supernatural implications. The destiny of each individual—as well as the future of their family—will depend on their knowledge of the new paradigm and their preparedness to face it head on.

Human Enhancement (2011)

by Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom

Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reprint edition (January 7, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199594961
ISBN-13: 978-0199594962

Abstract

To what extent should we use technology to try to make better human beings? Because of the remarkable advances in biomedical science, we must now find an answer to this question.

Human enhancement aims to increase human capacities above normal levels. Many forms of human enhancement are already in use. Many students and academics take cognition enhancing drugs to get a competitive edge. Some top athletes boost their performance with legal and illegal substances. Many an office worker begins each day with a dose of caffeine. This is only the beginning. As science and technology advance further, it will become increasingly possible to enhance basic human capacities to increase or modulate cognition, mood, personality, and physical performance, and to control the biological processes underlying normal aging. Some have suggested that such advances would take us beyond the bounds of human nature.

These trends, and these dramatic prospects, raise profound ethical questions. They have generated intense public debate and have become a central topic of discussion within practical ethics. Should we side with bioconservatives, and forgo the use of any biomedical interventions aimed at enhancing human capacities? Should we side with transhumanists and embrace the new opportunities? Or should we perhaps plot some middle course?

Human Enhancement presents the latest moves in this crucial debate: original contributions from many of the world’s leading ethicists and moral thinkers, representing a wide range of perspectives, advocates and sceptics, enthusiasts and moderates. These are the arguments that will determine how humanity develops in the near future.

Nanotechnology : public perception and risk communication (2011)

by Susanna Horing Priest

Paperback: 202 pages
Publisher: CRC Press; 1 edition (September 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1439826838
ISBN-13: 978-1439826836

Abstract

From nuclear power to gene therapy to the automobile, history shows that it is useful to encourage and facilitate public discussion about new technologies and their potential dangers. Part of the series Perspectives in Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology and the Public: Risk Perception and Risk Communication assesses results from focus groups, interviews, and other resources to provide a more nuanced understanding of how non-experts perceive nanotechnology and what they expect from it.

Includes a series of special essays by social scientists and humanities scholars who have studied nanotechnology and society from different perspectives

Assessing how “ordinary” people form opinions about new technologies and their adoption, this book addresses the role of media messages and pre-existing values in this process, as well as how risks can become either amplified or weakened along the way as a result of social mechanisms. Using solid theory and research to back presented concepts on risk perception and communication, the author discusses the potential for using informed consent, labels, and other types of consumer warnings that have proved to be effective in areas other than nano.

An in-depth investigation into the concept of mass communication practices, this book explores the paradox of why, despite its appeal and promise, public engagement has had only limited success in the dialogue on nanotechnology. Aimed at finding solutions, the book’s resulting conclusions are considered in the context of broader issues. These include how society makes up its collective mind about technology adoption and all the profound questions this raises, in terms of democratic theory.

Nanotechnology and Sustainable Development (2011)

by Claire Auplat

Hardcover: 198 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 6, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415891825
ISBN-13: 978-0415891820

Abstract

Public institutions, academic researchers and financial analysts among others hail nanotechnologies as one of the most promising sectors of social and economic development. Calculations predict that it will become a trillion euro industry by 2015 and that it will bring about economic change of at least the same magnitude as the industrial revolution. Nanotechnology is recent, younger by some thirty years than biotechnology, but it appears at a point in time in human history where there is a convergence between the globalization of access to information and increasing awareness of the importance of sustainable development. Nanotechnology and Sustainable Development explores the ways in which this convergence leads to a change in the management of innovation – and ultimately a reshaping of technological democracy. The scope of the study is global, with a particular focus on Europe and the United States, utilizing several case studies of stakeholders including entrepreneurs, commentators, end users, scientists, and policy makers.

The Nanotechnology Challenge: Creating Legal Institutions for Uncertain Risks (2011)

by David A. Dana

Hardcover: 438 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (November 14, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521767385
ISBN-13: 978-0521767385

Abstract

Nanotechnology is the wave of the future, and has already been incorporated into everything from toothpaste to socks to military equipment. The safety of nanotechnology for human health and the environment is a great unknown, however, and no legal system in the world has yet devised a way to reasonably address the uncertain risks of nanotechnology. To do so will require creating new legal institutions. This volume of essays by leading law scholars and social and physical scientists offers a range of views as to how such institutions should be formed. Readers will benefit from an accessible synthesis of the available science regarding the health risks posed by nanotechnology, thoughtful analyses of the potential unreliability of public perceptions of such risks, and a range of provocative proposals for creative “Third Way” approaches to regulating nanotechnology. This book is essential reading for anyone who may wonder how we can continue to innovate technologically in a way that both delivers the benefits and sustains human health and the environment.

2010

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Rodale Books; 1 edition (December 21, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1605292079
ISBN-13: 978-1605292076

Abstract

In Transcend, famed futurist Ray Kurzweil and his coauthor Terry Grossman, MD, present a cutting edge, accessible program based on the vanguard in nutrition and science. They’ve distilled thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and technology will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow the aging process.

Transcend gives you the practical tools you need to live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will continue to occur at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. To help you remember the nine key components of the program, Ray and Terry have arranged them into a mnemonic: Talk with your doctor, Relaxation, Assessment, Nutrition, Supplements, Calorie reduction, Exercise, New technologies, Detoxification.

This easy-to-follow program will help you transcend the boundaries of your genetic legacy and live
long enough to live forever.

Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (2010)

by John Harris

Paperback: 242 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (September 27, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691148163
ISBN-13: 978-0691148168

Abstract

In Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning and makes an ethical case for biotechnology that is both forthright and rigorous. Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing–good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Enhancing Evolutiondefends biotechnological interventions that could allow us to live longer, healthier, and even happier lives by, for example, providing us with immunity from cancer and HIV/AIDS. Further, Harris champions the possibility of influencing the very course of evolution to give us increased mental and physical powers–from reasoning, concentration, and memory to strength, stamina, and reaction speed. Indeed, he says, it’s not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves; in some cases, it’s morally obligatory.

In a new preface, Harris offers a glimpse at the new science and technology to come, equipping readers with the knowledge to assess the ethics and policy dimensions of future forms of human enhancement.

More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (2010)

by Ramez Naam

Paperback: 230 pages
Publisher: lulu.com (August 9, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0557582334
ISBN-13: 978-0557582334

Abstract

What if you could be smarter, stronger, and have a better memory just by taking a pill?
What if we could alter our genes to cure Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s?
What if we could halt or even reverse the human aging process?
What if we could communicate with each other simply by thinking about it?These questions were once the stuff of science fiction. Today, advances in biotechnology have shown that they’re plausible, even likely to be accomplished in the near future. In labs around the world, researchers looking for ways to help the sick and injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals–making them stronger, faster, smarter, and longer-lived–in some cases, even connecting their minds to robots and computers across the Internet.

Now science is on the verge of applying this knowledge to healthy men and women, allowing us to alter humanity in ways we’d previously only dreamed possible. The same research that could cure Alzheimer’s is leading to drugs and genetic techniques that could boost human intelligence. The techniques being developed to stave off heart disease and cancer have the potential to slow or even reverse human aging. And brain implants that restore motion to the paralyzed and sight to the blind are already allowing a small set of patients to control robots and computers simply by thinking about it.Not everyone welcomes this scientific progress. Cries of “against nature” arise from skeptics even as scientists break new ground at an astounding pace. Across the political spectrum, the debate roils: Should we embrace the power to alter our minds and bodies, or should we restrict it?Distilling the most radical accomplishments being made in labs worldwide, including gene therapy, genetic engineering, stem cell research, life extension, brain-computer interfaces, and cloning, More Than Human offers an exciting tour of the impact biotechnology will have on our lives. Throughout this remarkable trip, author Ramez Naam shares an impassioned vision for the future with revealing insight into the ethical dilemmas posed by twenty-first-century science.

2009

Nanoethics : big ethical issues with small technology (2009)

by Donal P. O’Mathuna

Paperback: 248 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic; 1 edition (December 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847063950
ISBN-13: 978-1847063953

Abstract

Nanotechnology manipulates matter at the atomic level. It leads to innovative processes and products that are revolutionizing many areas of modern life. Huge amounts of public funds are being invested in the science, yet the public has little understanding of the technology or its ethical implications. Indeed, the ethical, social, and political dimensions of nanotechnology are only beginning to receive the attention they require — outside of science fiction contexts. Surveillance devices may become so small that they are practically invisible to the naked eye, raising concerns about privacy. Nanomedicine may lead to the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic devices, yet anxieties have been raised about the impact of “nanobots” circulating in our bodies. Military applications, or misuses, of nanotechnology raise other concerns. This book explores in an accessible and informative way how nanotechnology is likely to impact the lives of ordinary people in the coming years and why ethical reflection on nanotechnology is needed now.

Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century2007

by Neil Levy

Paperback: 364 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (August 13, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521687268
ISBN-13: 978-0521687263

Abstract

Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional. This book explores questions such as when is it permissible to alter a person’s memories, influence personality traits or read minds? What can neuroscience tell us about free will, self-control, self-deception and the foundations of morality? The view of neuroethics offered here argues that many of our new powers to read ,alter and control minds are not entirely unparalleled with older ones. They have, however, expanded to include almost all our social, political and ethical decisions. Written primarily for graduate students, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the more philosophical and ethical aspects of the neurosciences.

Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine

by J. Storrs Hall

Hardcover: 408 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books (May 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1591025117
ISBN-13: 978-1591025115

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now advancing at such a rapid clip that it has the potential to transform our world in ways both exciting and disturbing. Computers have already been designed that are capable of driving cars, playing soccer, and finding and organizing information on the Web in ways that no human could. With each new gain in processing power, will scientists soon be able to create supercomputers that can read a newspaper with understanding, or write a news story, or create novels, or even formulate laws? And if machine intelligence advances beyond human intelligence, will we need to start talking about a computer’s intentions?

These are some of the questions discussed by computer scientist J. Storrs Hall in this fascinating layperson’s guide to the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Drawing on a thirty-year career in artificial intelligence and computer science, Hall reviews the history of AI, discussing some of the major roadblocks that the field has recently overcome, and predicting the probable achievements in the near future. There is new excitement in the field over the amazing capabilities of the latest robots and renewed optimism that achieving human-level intelligence is a reachable goal.

But what will this mean for society and the relations between technology and human beings? Soon ethical concerns will arise and programmers will need to begin thinking about the computer counterparts of moral codes and how ethical interactions between humans and their machines will eventually affect society as a whole.

Weaving disparate threads together in an enlightening manner from cybernetics, computer science, psychology, philosophy of mind, neurophysiology, game theory, and economics, Hall provides an intriguing glimpse into the astonishing possibilities and dilemmas on the horizon.

2006

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Minds–And What It Means to Be Human (2006).

by Joel Garreau

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Broadway (May 9, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0767915038
ISBN-13: 978-0767915038

Abstract

Taking us behind the scenes with today’s foremost researchers and pioneers, bestselling author Joel Garreau shows that we are at a turning point in history. At this moment we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls. Radical Evolution reveals that the powers of our comic-book superheroes already exist, or are in development in hospitals, labs, and research facilities around the country–from the revved-up reflexes and speed of Spider-Man and Superman, to the enhanced mental acuity and memory capabilities of an advanced species. Over the next fifteen years, Garreau makes clear in this New York Times Book Club premiere selection, these enhancements will become part of our everyday lives. Where will they lead us? To heaven–where technology’s promise to make us smarter, vanquish illness, and extend our lives is the answer to our prayers? Or, as some argue, to hell–where unrestrained technology brings about the ultimate destruction of our species?

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006)

by Ray Kurzweil

Paperback: 672 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (September 26, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143037889
ISBN-13: 978-0143037880

Abstract

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

2005

Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (2005)

by Ronald Bailey

Hardcover: 332 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books; 1st ptg edition (January 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1591022274
ISBN-13: 978-1591022275

Abstract

The 21st century will undoubtedly witness unprecedented advances in understanding the mechanisms of the human body and in developing biotechnology. With the mapping of the human genome, the pace of discovery is now on the fast track. By the middle of the century we can expect that the rapid progress in biology and biotechnology will utterly transform human life. What was once the stuff of science fiction may now be within reach in the not-too-distant future: 20-to-40-year leaps in average life spans, enhanced human bodies, drugs and therapies to boost memory and speed up mental processing, and a genetic science that allows parents to ensure that their children will have stronger immune systems, more athletic bodies, and cleverer brains. Even the prospect of human immortality beckons.
Such scenarios excite many people and frighten or appall many others. Already biotechnology opponents are organizing political movements aimed at restricting scientific research, banning the development and commercialization of various products and technologies, and limiting citizens’ access to the fruits of the biotech revolution.
In this forward-looking book Ronald Bailey, science writer for Reason magazine, argues that the coming biotechnology revolution, far from endangering human dignity, will liberate human beings to achieve their full potentials by enabling more of us to live flourishing lives free of disease, disability, and the threat of early death. Bailey covers the full range of the coming biotechnology breakthroughs, from stem-cell research to third-world farming, from brain-enhancing neuropharmaceuticals to designer babies. Against critics of these trends, who forecast the nightmare society of Huxley’s Brave New World, Bailey persuasively shows in lucid and well-argued prose that the health, safety, and ethical concerns raised by worried citizens and policymakers are misplaced.
Liberation Biology makes a positive, optimistic, and convincing case that the biotechnology revolution will improve our lives and the future of our children, while preserving and enhancing the natural environment.

2004

Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (2004)

by Nicholas Agar

Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (November 30, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1405123907
ISBN-13: 978-1405123907

Abstract

In this provocative book, philosopher Nicholas Agar defends the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children’s characteristics.

Gets away from fears of a Huxleyan ‘Brave New World’ or a return to the fascist eugenics of the past
Written from a philosophically and scientifically informed point of view
Considers real contemporary cases of parents choosing what kind of child to have
Uses ‘moral images’ as a way to get readers with no background in philosophy to think about moral dilemmas
Provides an authoritative account of the science involved, making the book suitable for readers with no knowledge of genetics
Creates a moral framework for assessing all new technologies

2003

Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our Future (2003)

by Gregory Stock

Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books (April 11, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618340831
ISBN-13: 978-0618340835

Abstract

A groundbreaking work, Redesigning Humans tackles the controversial subject of engineering the human germline — the process of permanently altering the genetic code of an individual so that the changes are passed on to the offspring. Gregory Stock, an expert on the implications of recent advances in reproductive biology, has glimpsed the inevitable future of biomedical engineering. Within decades, Stock asserts, technological advances will bring meaningful changes to our offspring; this scientific revolution promises to fundamentally alter the human species. With recent findings presented in a new afterword, Stock’s provocative assessment cuts through the debate to envision an age of radical biotechnological advancement and unprecedented human choice.

2001

From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (2001)

by Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wilker

Paperback: 414 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (November 12, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521669774
ISBN-13: 978-0521669771

Abstract

Written by four internationally renowned bioethicists, From Chance to Choice is the first systematic treatment of the fundamental ethical issues underlying the application of genetic technologies to human beings. Probing the implications of the remarkable advances in genetics, the authors ask how should these affect our understanding of distributive justice, equality of opportunity, the rights and obligations as parents, the meaning of disability, and the role of the concept of human nature in ethical theory and practice. The book offers a historical context to contemporary debate over the use of these technologies by examining the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition, appendices explain the nature of genetic causation, gene-environment interaction, and expose widespread misconceptions of genetic determinism, as well as outlining the nature of the ethical analysis used in the book. The questions raised in this book will be of interest to any reflective reader concerned about science and society and the rapid development of biotechnology, as well as to professionals in such areas as philosophy, bioethics, medical ethics, health management, law, and political science.

Source: India Future Society

Longevity and the Indian Tradition

2013-06-05T13:41:00.001-07:00

Does the pursuit of longevity, or even radical longevity, have future in India? The following article will consider this question mainly in ideological, cultural and historical terms, rather than in terms of analyzing current technological and demographic trends. In demographic terms, as was also noted earlier, the life expectancy in India is till relatively low compared to other countries (about 65-66 years), yet it is clearly on the rise[1] and no limit can be set for this increase. Important innovative initiatives for research of aging and longevity are on the way, such as International Longevity Center India[2], whose purpose is “To work towards healthy, productive and participatory ageing” [in other words for healthy longevity]. Also the future of general biomedical research in India, including longevity research, looks bright. According to one analyst, “India is a promised land, offering much in the medical and scientific research[3].”

Yet, apparently, the biomedical research of aging and longevity, has not yet received a considerable attention in India, judging from the absence of dedicated research institutes or governmental, or even large private, programs to address this issue[4].One suggestion why this negligence happens was that the research of aging and longevity is somehow incompatible with Indian traditional values. It is sometimes assumed that Indian cultural beliefs are opposed to preservation of the material body, due to the belief in the transience of the body and reincarnation. The belief in the supremacy of the spirit and mind over matter and body supposedly makes maintenance of the body unimportant.

As formulated by Prof. Kalluri Subba Rao, Hon. Coordinator for Center for Research and Education in Aging (CREA) University of Hyderabad[5]:

“The summary of [this] argument was simple and straightforward. In India we have the faith that this life is only a transitory phase of never ending cycle of birth and death. Every one who is born is certain to die. In fact, according the Indian ethos, every one should strive to attain janmarahityamor moksha a state where one becomes free from the cycle of birth and death. Under these circumstance why to worry that we are aging which inevitable? Instead, one should adoptvanaprastha and indulge in such activities that might take one nearer to moksha or even to mokshaitself. Therefore, it is silly for any nation to spend a good chunk of its resources on finding out how we become old and die.”

Yet, apparently the above argument against longevity research presents a very incomplete and even distorted view of Indian cultural tradition. As a matter of fact, in Indian tradition, particularly in the religious tradition of Hinduism (or rather in the variety of religions of India designated by this term), the pursuit of longevity and even radical life extension has been a persistent theme since a very early time.

Here are some examples:

The entire Book 9 of The Rigveda (c. 1700-1100 BCE) is dedicated to praises of the immortality-giving “Soma” plant[6].(The plant is called “Haoma” in ancient Iranian (Aryan) religious sources, such as Avesta, c. 1200-200 BCE.)

In India, the immortal Rishis, Arhats, and the Ciranjivas (the “extremely long-lived persons”) are revered to the present. Their extreme longevity is often attributed to “Amrit” – अमृत – or the “nectar of immortality” – a revered and desired substance.

The traditional Indian medicine of Ayurveda, or “the science of (long) life,” includes a special field of Rasayana, mainly dedicated to rejuvenation.

According to one of the earliest Ayurvedic texts, The Sushruta Samhita (Sushruta’s Compilation of Knowledge, c. 800-300 BCE)[7]:

“Bramha was the first to inculcate the principles of the holy Ayurveda. Prajapati learned the science from him. The Ashvins learned it from Prajapati and imparted the knowledge to Indra, who has favoured me [Dhanvantari, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the protector of life and the giver of Ayurveda on earth] with an entire knowledge thereof.” This knowledge was in turn “disclosed by the holy Dhanvantari to his disciple Sushruta.”

(Notably, within the Trimurti – Hindu Trinity: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer – the deity mainly associated with Ayurveda is Vishnu the preserver, while some of his devotees, such as Narada can live even through destruction and creation of worlds. A following incarnation of Vishnu is said to be Kalki, the “machine man[8].”^{^[})

According to the Sushruta Samhita, human life can be normally prolonged to 100 years. Yet, with the use of certain Rasayana remedies (such as Brahmi Rasayana and Vidanga-Kalpa), life can be prolonged to 500 or 800 years.

And the use of the “Soma plant, the lord of all medicinal herbs [24 candidate plants are named], is followed by rejuvenation of the system of its user and enables him to witness ten thousand summers on earth in the full enjoyment of a new (youthful) body.”

Churning the Ocean of Milk” – Asuras and Devas working together to prepare the “elixir of immortality”

Also according to another foundational text of Ayurveda, The Charaka Samhita (Charaka’s Compilation of Knowledge, c. 300-100 BCE), the normal human life-span is 100 years. Yet, the users of an Amalaka Rasayana could live many hundreds of years and the users of the Amalakayasa Brahma Rasayana could reach the life-span of 1000 years.

The great sages, who grasped perfectly the knowledge of Ayurveda, “attained the highest well-being and nonperishable life-span[9].”

The ancient Indian tradition abounds in medical achievements, which are perceived as positive and desirable!

In the ancient Indian epic of the Ramayana (often dated c. 400 BCE, and sometimes purported to relate to events occurring 4,000 and even 5000 BCE), the monkey king Hanuman uses theSanjeevani plant (translated as “One that infuses life” and commonly identified as the lycophyteSelaginella bryopteris, growing at the Dunagiri (Mahodaya) mountain in the Himalayas) to revive Rama’s younger brother Lakshman, severely wounded by Ravan[10].

Also according to the Ramayana, the mutilated nose and ears of the asura princess Surpanakha, sister of Ravan and Khara, could be restored[11].

Actual methods of skin transplantaiton to adhere severed earlobes and restore mutilated noses, are described in the Sushruta Samhita.[12]

According to the epic of Mahabharata (commonly dated 400-500 BCE and attributed to Vyasa), the body of the Magadha king Jarasandha, could be fused from two halves and completely regenerated[13].

Thus life-extending, rejuvenative and regenerative technologies have been vividly envisioned in Hindu tradition.

Buddhism too has a strong connection to the pursuit of longevity.

The Great Buddha who grants Longevity is Amitābha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, also known as Amitāyus, the Buddha of Infinite Life. Those who invoke him will reach longevity in this realm, and will be reborn in Amitabha’s PureLand (Sukhāvatī or Dewachen in Tibetan Buddhism) where they will enjoy virtually unlimited longevity. This pure and egalitarian land of longevity was created by Amitabha’s avowed devotion and perseverance. One of the mantras in Amitabha’s praise is “Om amrita teje hara hum” (Om save us in the glory of the Deathless One hum). Many Buddhist mantras for longevity are recited, dedicated to the great healers of old, so that a portal to their wisdom may be opened and, through their compassion, suffering will be abolished and health and longevity reached in this world.

Yet also, material means for rejuvenation and life-extension have also been developed by Buddhist physicians[14]. Of course many methods of traditional and Ayurvedic medicine currently practiced yet require thorough testing[15].

Crucially, the vision of advanced medical technology and the idea of a significant, even radical extension of healthy life-span, in this world, are deeply entrenched in Indian cultural tradition. These positive tendencies need to be recalled and reawakened, so the vision of the golden age of extended health and longevity will be implemented in the present time using advances of modern science. The pursuit of healthy longevity is not an “all or nothing” pursuit, but any incremental improvement in this direction may be expected to be beneficial for India and its population.

The research of aging and longevity will be required to find the path toward the practical achievement of healthy longevity, and the original inspiration for this pursuit may come from Indian cultural heritage.

In summary, one can but agree with Prof. Kalluri Subba Rao’s conclusion, regarding the importance of aging and longevity research for India:

“YES. India must in its own interest promote research on aging and associated diseases in a big way. There are always some discordant, perverted voices projecting the distorted Indian Wisdom. India’s march towards becoming a global leader should not be allowed to be disturbed by vested and disgruntled arguments.”

Several practical measures were proposed by Prof. Kalluri Subba Rao to advance the goals of healthy longevity in India. Once again, a person interested in promoting this objective in India can only agree and endeavor to support this initiative.

“Concrete steps and inputs are necessary. One such step is to establish one or more (in view of the vastness and diversity of the country) Institutes or Centers for a multidisciplinary scientific study of the phenomenon of aging and the associated diseases/problems. Such Institutes would also prepare a database for the clinical and biological profiles of the populations around particularly of the senior citizens to begin with.”

One of the missions of the proposed Centers/Institutes would be to “conduct high quality research on the process of aging – at genetic, molecular, clinical, biochemical and behavioral levels” as well as study “disabilities and diseases, including neurological disorders, associated with age and more prevalent in the aged”; in addition to “psychosocial aspects of the aged with a special emphasis on the special and peculiar needs of the aged”, and finally, “connectivity between the laboratory findings and the community to promote health among the aged and to make use of the healthy ‘aged’ to the societal needs.”

Similar goals are now promoted all across the world[16]. Let us hope that with our joint efforts, healthy longevity for all will be advanced in India and everywhere.

References:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-16/india/29548151_1_life-expectancy-indian-woman-indian-man; http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/india-life-expectancy; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy; http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/leis20120201
International Longevity Center India http://ilcindia.org
http://www.kitesindia.org/the-advances-of-indian-research-in-the-new-millennium.php
Ashok BT, Ali R, Aging research in India, Experimental Gerontology, 2003 Jun;38(6):597-603, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12814794
Prof Kalluri Subba Rao. Should India Promote Scientific Research on Aging?
http://www.silverinnings.com/docs/Ageing%20Indian/Should%20India%20promote%20scientific%20research%20on%20Ageing.pdf
The Hymns of the Rigveda, translated by Ralph T.H. Griffith, E.J. Lazarus and Co., Benares, 1891, Book 9, pp. 361-412, the 1896 edition is reprinted at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/, http://www.avesta.org/ka/yt9sbe.htm..)
An English translation of the Sushruta samhita, based on original Sanskrit text, Edited and published by Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bhishagratna, Calcutta, 1907, 1911, 1916, Vol. 1, Sutrasthanam (Fundamental principles), Ch. 1, p. 8, Vol. 2, Chikitsasthanam (Therapeutics), Ch. 27, p. 518, Ch. 28, p. 525, Ch. 29, pp. 530, 536. Available at http://chestofbooks.com/health/india/Sushruta-Samhita/index.html#.Uag6GNKnxvA and http://archive.org/details/englishtranslati03susr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narada; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalki;
Charaka Samhita. Handbook on Ayurveda, edited by Gabriel Van Loon, Durham NC, 2003, vol. 1, Cikitsasthana 1.1.75, p. 446, Cikitsasthana 1.3.3-6, p. 455, Sutrasthana 1. 27-29, p. 107, http://www.rencapp.com/TamilCube_Charaka_Samhita.pdf, http://archive.org/details/CharakaSamhitaHindiVolume1.
Ramayan of Valmiki, Translated Into English Verse by Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1870-1874, Book 6, Canto CII “Lakshman Healed,” reprinted at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rama/index.htm.
Ramayan of Valmiki, Translated Into English Verse by Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1870-1874, Book 3, Cantos 18-19, reprinted at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rama/index.htm. Also in Kampan’s version of the Ramayana, according to Kathleen M. Erndl, “The Mutilation of Surpanakha,” in Paula Richman (Ed.), Many Rāmāyanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991, p. 75, http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/.
An English translation of the Sushruta samhita, based on original Sanskrit text, Edited and published by Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bhishagratna, Calcutta, 1907, Vol. 1, Ch. 16, pp. 141-154.
The Mahabharata, Book 2: Sabha Parva, Kisari Mohan Ganguli, tr., 1883-1896, “Rajasuyarambha Parva,” Section 17, “Jarasandhta-badha Parva,” pp. 40-41, Section 24, pp. 53-54, http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m02/index.htm
See for example, http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/medicine-buddha.htm;
See also Derek F. Maher, “Two Wings of a Bird: Radical Life Extension from a Buddhist Perspective,” in Calvin Mercer and Derek F. Maher (Eds.), Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, Macmillan Palgrave, New York, 2009, pp. 111-121; Luis O. Gomez, The Land of the Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, 1996.)
As well as, Jeffrey Lidke and Jacob W. Dirnberger, Churning the Ocean of Milk: Imaging the Hindu Tantric Response to Radical Life Technologies, in Calvin Mercer and Derek F. Maher (Eds.), Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, Macmillan Palgrave, New York, 2009.
Sherry Fohr, Austerity, and Time-Cycles: Jainism and Radical Life Extension, in Calvin Mercer and Derek F. Maher (Eds.), Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension, Macmillan Palgrave, New York, 2009.
Anand Chaudhary, Neetu Singh, and Neeraj Kumar. Pharmacovigilance: Boon for the safety and efficacy of Ayuvedic formulations. J Ayurveda Integr Med. 2010 Oct-Dec; 1(4): 251–256, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3117316/#CIT3
http://longevityalliance.org/; http://www.sens.org/

Source: India Future Society

Time of Death by Internal Clock of the human brain

2013-05-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

People with severe depression have a disrupted “biological clock” that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.

It is the first time that depression has been linked unequivocally to the internal circadian clock of the human brain, which regulates the body's day-and-night cycle over a 24 hour period, scientists said.

The researchers found that they could estimate a healthy person's time of death to within a few hours by analysing the activity levels of a set of genes - whether they are switched on 'high' or 'low' - within certain regions of the deceased brain.

However, this correlation broke down when they analysed the autopsied brains of people who had suffered from depression. Their gene activity bore little relationship to the hour of death, which indicated they suffered a severely disrupted sleeping pattern, the scientists found.

The findings suggest that patients with severe depression could be better treated if there was some way of improving the relationship between the daily cycle of gene activity of the brain with the actual time of day or night, they said.

"We think the depressed individuals are more likely to be out-of-sync with the regular wake-sleep timing," said Jun Li of the University of Michigan, the lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our data also suggests that their daily cycles are not only shifted, but also disrupted. That is, they sleep by the wrong clock, and when they do sleep, the quality [of sleep] could be different from normal sleep," Dr Li said.

"If we can understand how depression and poor sleep reinforce each other, we may be able to find better treatment, perhaps by finding better ways to break the cycle," he said.

The scientists screened nearly 12,000 genes for daily activity rhythms in six regions of the brain from 55 deceased individuals who had no history of psychiatric or neurological illness. The same was done on the brains of 34 deceased people with severe depression - some of whom had committed suicide.

To their surprise, the scientists found that with the healthy brains they could estimate to within a couple of hours the time of a person's death, based on which of about 100 genes were active or dormant over a 24-hour period.

"Most of our subjects were awake on the day of their death, due to last-hour medical emergencies, or, in the case of some depression cases, due to suicide attempt," Dr Li said.

"But we were able to show that most individuals carry the gene activity 'clock' in their brain. This suggested to us that such a clock is quite stable upon one-day disturbance, and this is consistent with the common knowledge that it takes many days to recover from jet-lag," he said.

The genes that respond to the time of day appear to be part of the complex biological machinery of the body that helps it to cope with the different demands of the 24-hour cycle - regulating when to sleep and when to be awake.

"There really was a moment of discovery. It was when we realized that many of the genes that show 24-hour cycles in the normal individuals were well-known circadian-rhythm genes," Dr Li said.

"People with depression were not synchronized to the usual solar day in terms of this gene activity. It's as if they were living in a different time zone than the one they died in," he said.

There has been much research on the circadian clock, both in animals and humans, but this is the first time that such an elaborate network of genes have been studied in such detail, said Huda Akil, a co-author of the study.

"Hundreds of new genes that are very sensitive to circadian rhythms emerged from this research - not just the primary clock genes that have been studied in animals or cell cultures, but other genes whose activity rises and falls throughout the day," Dr Akil said.

"We were truly able to watch the daily rhythm play out in a symphony of biological activity, by studying where the clock had stopped at the time of death. And then, in depressed people, we could see how this was disrupted," she said.

"In depressed people, [a disrupted biological clock] can become part of a vicious cycle. Therefore, one can speculate that re-setting the clock for instance with light or physical activity, is a reasonable, concrete target to aim for in the treatment of severe depression," Dr Akil added.

Reposted From : http://www.independent.co.uk

An Animated Tour of Brain

2013-04-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

Brain Atlas

A nice animated video explaining the "how the brain works". It has some basic information about brain i.e. how we see, think, learn, speak, move and which part of brain behind this all. This all in just ~7 min animated Video "Great Work". This video is commissioned for Brain Awareness Week(BAW) which is the global campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research, generally celebrated in the month of march.

An animated tour around the human brain (commissioned for Brain Awareness Week)

Source: www.minds.com

Apply now for Mars trip

2013-04-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

Mars One Colony

Want to settle on Mars? Mars One has announced the launch of its astronaut selection program today. The search has begun for the first humans to set foot on Mars and make it their home.

Mars One invites would-be Mars settlers from anywhere in the world to submit an online application via apply.mars-one.com.

This online application will be the first of the four rounds that together make the Mars One selection procedure. Round One will run for over five months and end on 31st August 2013. Applicants selected at the end of this round will include the first crew that will land on Mars in 2023. Mars One selection committees will hone the search for the first crew in three subsequent rounds and further training.

Applicants will pay a small administration fee that varies across nations according to their per capita GDP. The variable fee makes the program equally accessible for applicants from all nations and also reduces the number of insincere entries.

Mars One is looking for applicants who are both mature and interesting. Beyond Round Four,in the seven-year period preceding their flight to Mars,all the potential settlers will be given the skills they will need on Mars and on their journey there. No particular academic or professional background is considered a prerequisite for selection.Throughout the astronaut selection program, Mars One will select applicants who have good physical and mental health and show five key character traits: Resilience, Adaptability, Curiosity, Ability to trust others, and Creativity/Resourcefulness.

In the last stage when 24-40 candidates have been fully trained and qualified, the final decision of choosing the first settlers will be decided by an audience vote.

If you're one of the people chosen for the program, you'll move to the United States to spend the next seven years as a full-time, salaried employee of Mars One. Nine months of each year will be spent learning dentistry, emergency medicine, general medicine, engineering, biology, mechanics—anything you might need to know on an inhospitable planet with a population of four. The other three months of each year will be spent in a Mars habitat mock-up, complete with a 40-minute communication delay to the outside world and simulated emergencies. The hardest thing they'll face during the simulation? A broken toilet, Lansdorp says. "That's when people get out of control."

Who is Mars One ?, Mars One is a not-for-profit organization that will establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in 2023 through the integration of existing, readily available technologies from industry leaders world-wide. Unique in its approach, Mars One intends to fund this decade-long endeavour by involving the whole world as the audience of an interactive, televised broadcast of every aspect of this mission, from launch to landing to living on Mars.

Mars One Introduction Film

Meet Zoe: A digital talking head which can express human emotions on demand with “unprecedented realism” and could herald a new era of human-computer interaction.

2013-03-21T06:20:00.005-07:00

Cambridge Zoe Talking Head

A virtual “talking head” which can express a full range of human emotions and could be used as a digital personal assistant, or to replace texting with “face messaging”, has been developed by researchers.

The lifelike face can display emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear, and changes its voice to suit any feeling the user wants it to simulate. Users can type in any message, specifying the requisite emotion as well, and the face recites the text. According to its designers, it is the most expressive controllable avatar ever created, replicating human emotions with unprecedented realism.

The system, called “Zoe”, is the result of a collaboration between researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Students have already spotted a striking resemblance between the disembodied head and Holly, the ship’s computer in the British sci-fi comedy, Red Dwarf.

Appropriately enough, the face is actually that of Zoe Lister, an actress perhaps best-known as Zoe Carpenter in the Channel 4 series, Hollyoaks. To recreate her face and voice, researchers spent several days recording Zoe’s speech and facial expressions. The result is a system that is light enough to work in mobile technology, and could be used as a personal assistant in smartphones, or to “face message” friends.

The framework behind “Zoe” is also a template that, before long, could enable people to upload their own faces and voices - but in a matter of seconds, rather than days. That means that in the future, users will be able to customise and personalise their own, emotionally realistic, digital assistants.

If this can be developed, then a user could, for example, text the message “I’m going to be late” and ask it to set the emotion to “frustrated”. Their friend would then receive a “face message” that looked like the sender, repeating the message in a frustrated way.

The team who created Zoe are currently looking for applications, and are also working with a school for autistic and deaf children, where the technology could be used to help pupils to “read” emotions and lip-read. Ultimately, the system could have multiple uses – including in gaming, in audio-visual books, as a means of delivering online lectures, and in other user interfaces.

“This technology could be the start of a whole new generation of interfaces which make interacting with a computer much more like talking to another human being,” Professor Roberto Cipolla, from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, said.

“It took us days to create Zoe, because we had to start from scratch and teach the system to understand language and expression. Now that it already understands those things, it shouldn’t be too hard to transfer the same blueprint to a different voice and face.”

As well as being more expressive than any previous system, Zoe is also remarkably data-light. The program used to run her is just tens of megabytes in size, which means that it can be easily incorporated into even the smallest computer devices, including tablets and smartphones.

It works by using a set of fundamental, “primary colour” emotions. Zoe’s voice, for example, has six basic settings - Happy, Sad, Tender, Angry, Afraid and Neutral. The user can adjust these settings to different levels, as well as altering the pitch, speed and depth of the voice itself.

By combining these levels, it becomes possible to pre-set or create almost infinite emotional combinations. For instance, combining happiness with tenderness and slightly increasing the speed and depth of the voice makes it sound friendly and welcoming. A combination of speed, anger and fear makes Zoe sound as if she is panicking. This allows for a level of emotional subtlety which, the designers say, has not been possible in other avatars like Zoe until now.

To make the system as realistic as possible, the research team collected a dataset of thousands of sentences, which they used to train the speech model with the help of real-life actress, Zoe Lister. They also tracked Lister’s face while she was speaking using computer vision software. This was converted into voice and face-modelling, mathematical algorithms which gave them the voice and image data they needed to recreate expressions on a digital face, directly from the text alone.

The effectiveness of the system was tested with volunteers via a crowd-sourcing website. The participants were each given either a video, or audio clip of a single sentence from the test set and asked to identify which of the six basic emotions it was replicating. Ten sentences were evaluated, each by 20 different people.

Volunteers who only had video and no sound only successfully recognised the emotion in 52% of cases. When they only had audio, the success rate was 68%. The two together, however, produced a successful recognition rate of 77% - slightly higher than the recognition rate for the real-life Zoe, which was 73%! This higher rate of success compared with real life is probably because the synthetic talking head is deliberately more stylised in its manner.

As well as finding applications for their new creation, the research team will now work on creating a version of the system which can be personalised by users themselves.

“Present day human-computer interaction still revolves around typing at a keyboard or moving and pointing with a mouse.” Cipolla added. “For a lot of people, that makes computers difficult and frustrating to use. In the future, we will be able to open up computing to far more people if they can speak and gesture to machines in a more natural way. That is why we created Zoe - a more expressive, emotionally responsive face that human beings can actually have a conversation with.”

Face of the future rears its head

Source: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/face-of-the-future-rears-its-head

Anti-Gravity Water Experiment

2013-03-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

Water Sine Wave

This experiment shows the effect of sound on flowing water. You need following item for perform this experiment:

1. Speaker

2. Rubber Hose/Pipe

3. Water Source

4. Tone Generating Software like this one Audio Frequency Signal Generator

5. A Camera with 24fps support (Most of Smart Phone camera support this)

Connect everything as that water flow via Rubber Hose or Pipe over the speaker and now start the Tone Generating Software with some frequency like 24hz/25hz/26hz Sine Wave Sound and connect the sound output to you speaker.

Catch the flowing water phenomena with Sound via your 24fps camera and that's it.

You can see the following nice video by "Brusspup"

Keep Experimenting...

Note: This experiment will not work with naked eyes.

One Step Closer to Brain to Brain Communication

2013-03-04T10:43:00.002-08:00

Telepathic communication has been a cornerstone of science fiction and science alike for decades. From the any sci-fi movie like Star Wars to Hans Berger (the father of human electroencephalography), it has been regarded the height of efficient communication. Without the aid of technology, this type of communication is not possible; however, brain-computer interface technology (BCI) has brought us one step closer to making direct brain-to-brain communication a reality.

Professor Christopher James, joint director of Warwick University’s Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH), has used his extensive knowledge of human brain anatomy in conjunction with BCI to send signals from one brain to another.

There are two quirks of the human brain that make this kind of transfer possible. First of all, human visual cortex is ‘retinotopically’ organized, which means that there is a direct correspondence between a specific part of the retina and a specific spot of the visual cortex. Consequently, stimulating a specific spot on the visual cortex will cause someone to see a spot of light in one specific place. Second of all, imagining looking at something elicits activation in the visual cortex much in the same way as looking at something.

What Professor James has done is record the activation pattern in the visual cortex of one individual, use a computer to convert this activation pattern into flashing LED lights of different frequencies and transmit these light patterns to the brain of another person. The result is that the second individual “sees” what the first was imagining.

“It was a basic demonstration of B2B,” Professor James said. “The key idea to grasp is that a person’s eyes cannot distinguish between the different frequencies of flashing lights but a part of his brain, visual cortex, can.”

“It’s not as if the first subject thought of a cat and the recipient visualised a cat,” he added. “But research in the future could make this possible.”

Information from the retina is represented in primary visual cortex

While this is a really exciting development, it could be a while until telepathy goes mainstream. For now the experiment has only been carried out by James and his daughter using scalp surface electrodes. Using this method they were only able to transfer non-specific patterns of light flashes. In order to transfer more complex patterns, it would be necessary to implant electrodes directly into the brain. Even then, what we see is determined by far more than the activation pattern of our visual cortex; memories, associations, and expectations all play a key role.

In the future, this brain to brain transfer of information could prove invaluable to improving the lives of those with debilitating conditions such as Locked-in Syndrome, end stage Multiple Sclerosis, or even those in a persistent vegetative state. It could also someday allow us to live out our childhood dream of joining the Borg collective.

Source: Indiatimes.com and Neurgadget.com

11 Emerging Scientific Fields That Everyone Should Know About

2013-02-27T10:43:00.001-08:00

There was a time when science could be broken down into neat-and-tidy disciplines — straightforward things like biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. But as science advances, these fields are becoming increasingly specialized and interdisciplinary, leading to entirely new avenues of inquiry. Here are 11 emerging scientific fields you should know about.

1. Neuroparasitology

If you know about Toxoplasma gondii — the cat-spawned parasite that alters both rodent and human behavior — then you know about the work of neuroparasitologists. The fact that these eerie parasites now have their very own scientific discipline devoted to them shows just how prevalent they are in nature.

These parasites typically alter host behavior as a part of their reproductive strategy (often by being consumed and excreted by a third party). A good example is Euhaplorchis californiensis, which causes fish to shimmy and jump so wading birds will grab and eat them. Hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, eventually need to leave their hosts to continue their life cycle. Rather than leave peacefully, however, they release a cocktail of chemicals that makes the grasshoppers commit suicide by leaping into water. The hairworms then swim away from their drowning hosts. Image: Fox.

Full size

2. Quantum Biology

This is a freaky one — but then again, anything with the word "quantum" in it is bound to be weird. Physicists have known about quantum effects for well over a hundred years, where particles defy our sensibilities by disappearing from one place and reappearing in other, or by being in two places at once. But these effects are not relegated to arcane lab experiments. As scientists are increasingly suspecting, quantum mechanics may also apply to biological processes.

Perhaps the best example is photosynthesis — a remarkably efficient system in which plants (and some bacteria) build the molecules they need by using energy from sunlight. It turns out that photosynthesis may in fact rely on the "superposition" phenomenon, where little packets of energy explore all possible paths, and then settle on the most efficient one. It's also possible thatavian navigation, DNA mutations (via quantum tunnelling), and even our sense of smell, relies on quantum effects. Though it's a highly speculative and controversial field, its practitioners look to the day when insights gleaned may result in new drugs and biomimetic systems (with biomemetics being another emergent scientific field, where biological systems and structures are used to create new materials and machines). Image: qubit-ulm.com.

3. Exo-meteorology

Like exo-oceanographers and exo-geologists, exo-meteorologists are interested in studying natural processes which occur on planets other than Earth. Now that astronomers are able to peer more closely into the inner-workings of nearby planets and moons, they're increasingly able to track atmospheric conditions and weather patterns. Jupiter and Saturn, with their impossibly large weather systems, are prime candidates for study. So is Mars, with it's regularly occurring dust storms. Even planets outside our solar system are being studied by exo-meteorologists. And interestingly, exo-meteorologists may eventually find signs of extraterrestrial life on an exoplanet by detecting organic signatures in atmospheres, or elevated carbon dioxide levels — a possible sign of an industrial-age civilization.

4. Nutrigenomics

Also known as nutritional genomics, this is the study of the complex interplay between food and genetic expression. Scientists working in this field seek to understand the role of genetic variation, dietary response, and the ways in which nutrients affect our genes. And indeed, food has a profound effect on our health — and it starts quite literally at the molecular level. Nutrigenomics works both ways; our genes influence our dietary preferences, and vice-versa. A key goal of nutrigeneticists is to establish personalized nutrition — matching what we eat with our own unique genetic constitutions. More here.

5. Cliodynamics

Coined by the University of Connecticut's Peter Turchin, cliodynamics is an interdisciplinary area of research that combines historical macrosociology, economic history (cliometrics), the mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the building and analysis of historical databases. It's basically Asimov's psychohistory come to life.

The name is a portmanteau of Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of changes over time. Simply put, it's an effort to quantify and describe the broad social forces of history, both to study the past, and as a potential way to predict the future. An example of cliodynamics was Turchin's recent paper forecasting social unrest.

Full size

6. Synthetic Biology

This is the big one, and it's the emerging world-changing scientific discipline that many of us are already familiar with.

Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems. It also involves the redesign of existing biological systems for any number of useful purposes. Craig Venter, a leader in this field, shook the biology community in 2008 by announcing that he had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by piecing together its chemical components. Two years later his team created "synthetic life" — DNA created digitally, and then printed and inserted into a living bacterium. And last year, synbio scientists created the first complete computational model of an actual organism.

Looking ahead, synthetic biologists will sequence and analyze genomes to create custom-designed bootable organisms and biological robots that can produce chemicals from scratch, like biofuels. There's also the potential for pollution devouring cyborg bacteria, and the downloading and printing of recently updated vaccines during a pandemic. The possibilities are almost endless.

7. Recombinant Memetics

This one's quite speculative, and it's technically speaking still in the proto-science phase. But it'll only be a matter of time before scientists get a better handle on the human noosphere (the collective body of all human information) and how the proliferation of information within it impacts upon virtually all aspects of human life.

Similar to recombinant DNA (in which different genetic sequences are brought together to create something new), recombinant memetics is the study of how memes (ideas that spread from person to person) can be adjusted and merged with other memes and memeplexes (a cohesive collection of memes, like a religion) for beneficial or ‘socially therapeutic' purposes (such as combating the spread of radical and violent ideologies). This is similar to the idea of 'memetic engineering' — which philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested could be used to maintain cultural health. Or what DARPA is currently doing via their ‘narrative control' program.

Full size

8. Computational Social Science

Similar to cliodynamics, computational social science is the rigorous investigation of social phenomenon and trends over time. The use of computers and related information processing technologies is central to this discipline. Quite obviously, this field has only really been possible since the advent of computing, and most especially since the rise of the internet. Computational social scientists study the copious amounts of information left behind from emails, mobile phone calls, tweets, credit card purchases, Google searches, and on and on. It's a field of study that's attracting not just social scientists, but mathematicians and computer scientists as well. Examples of their work include studies into the structure of social networks and how information spreads across them, or how intimate relationships form on the Web. Image:Nature.

9. Cognitive Economics

Economics isn't typically associated with science, but that could change as the field integrates with traditional scientific disciplines. Not to be confused with behavioral economics (the study of our behaviors — what we do — in the context of economic decision making), cognitive economics is about how we think.

Looking at it another way, cognitive economics is to physics what behavioral economics is to engineering. To that end, cognitive economists begin their analysis at a lower, more reductionist level, and form microfounded models of how people make decisions to devise a model of large-scale economic behaviors. To help them with this, cognitive economists consider the related fields of cognitive science and computational economics, along with theories about rationality and decision making.

10. Organic Electronics

Normally, electronics are associated with inert and inorganic conductors and semiconductors, like copper and silicon. But a new branch of electronics is emerging that uses conductive polymers and conductive small molecules — both of which are carbon-based. It's a highly interdisciplinary field that involves the design, synthesis, and processing of functional organic and inorganic materials, along with the development of advanced micro- and nanofabrication techniques and circuit design. To be fair, it's not an entirely new field, as preliminary concepts and devices were first developed in the early 1970s. But it has only been recently that things have picked up, particularly on account of the nanotechnology revolution. Organic electronics introduces the potential for organic solar cells, self-assembling monolayers in functional electronic devices, and chemical circuits that could replace computer chips for human implantation (the cyborg of the future may very well be more organic than synthetic!). Image: AlphaGalileo Foundation.

Full size

11. Quantitative Biology

If you like both math and biology, this one's for you. Quantitative biology, as its name implies, is an effort to understand biological processes through the language of mathematics. But it also applies other quantitative methods, like physics and computer science.

Orginally posted at: http://t.co/6GhXuLx7JP

Brain Transplant:Stranger than Fiction

2013-02-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

A brain transplant, also known as a whole body transplant, is theoretically possible, but highly improbable. Although the technology to transfer a brain from one body to another exists, there are several biological hurdles that prevent a successful brain transplant. Certain moral and ethical issues also impede research on the procedure, hindering progress on its development. Alternatively, however, partial brain transplant research is less restrained and considered by some experts to be a breakthrough in correcting degenerative neurological disorders.

Speculation on brain transplant procedures circle around individuals whose bodies are beyond repair, such as those with progressive muscular dystrophy. While the individual's brain might be fully functional, a severely diseased body would significantly impair his ability to lead a life without any assistance. Transferring the patient's brain into a healthy body would allow him a second chance at living a normal life. A brain transplant could also potentially save the life of a person with a terminal disease.

Research has shown, however, that although hypothetical transplants are conceivable, the possibility of a brain transplant is very low. The brain is a very delicate organ, and so its removal, storage, and transfer are wrecked with complications. Technological advances have made the procedure doable, but the slightest error can cause the organ irreparable damage. There is also a high risk that the new body might reject the brain, ending in clinical death. A number of experts argue that even if such a transplant were successful, there is no way to prevent brain cell degeneration, making the procedure an exercise in delaying the patient's inevitable expiration.

Brain transplant complications extend beyond biological issues. The entire procedure is a hotly-debated topic when discussing the moral and ethical implications of modern medical techniques. A number of moralists believe that the procedure dehumanizes the patients, while some argue that the need for donor bodies could lead to unethical practices in obtaining donor bodies. The intense debate has made research taboo in some communities and has slowed down its progress in general.

Let see some of Brain Transplant Experiment from History

One night in 1954, Demikhov undertook an experiment that stunned the world. He took two dogs, one fully grown, the other a puppy. He, and his team of surgeons, operated on them through the night. The following morning Demikhov unveiled his achievement. It was a creature straight out of science-fiction.

A Very Blurry Two Headed Dog

He had stitched the head and upper-body of the puppy onto the neck of the larger dog, connecting their blood-vessels and windpipes. Soviet propaganda trumpeted his achievement. In America, this caught the attention of an ambitious young scientist: Robert White.

For an America in the grip of cold-war paranoia, the prospect of Russian two-headed dogs was too much to ignore. The United States would soon begin it's own head-transplant programme.

Robert White was born in Minnesota, in 1926. Like Demikhov, he was a veteran of World War 2. After the war, White attended Harvard Medical School, where he studied to be a brain surgeon.

In 1960, the US Government, eager to stay ahead of the Russians in all aspects of medical science, helped White establish a specialist laboratory at the County Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Here he set about creating a world-leading brain research centre.

By day, White operated on patients with all kinds of brain injuries and illnesses. His surgical skills were renowned. But, as a scientist, it was the mysteries of the brain he wanted to unlock. His ambition was to be the first person, in the world, to isolate the brain. To take it out of the skull, to study it, and to keep it alive throughout.

White was convinced it was possible to remove the brain from the skull and keep it alive. In 1962, he achieved a world's-first by successfully removing an animal's brain and keeping the brain alive. In 1964, he came up with a more audacious plan, to transplant the brain of one animal into the body of another and study it from there.

How the Transplanted Brain was Located

He removed the brain of one dog and transplanted it into the neck of a second dog. The brain was connected to the blood supply of the host animal and electrodes were put in place to monitor the brain's activity. This begged the question: "If the brain is alive, is it conscious?" It was a question White could not answer.

White's work was not unnoticed in the Soviet Union, and, unusually, there followed a number of visits by the Russians to the Ohio facility and a number of reciprocal visits by White to Russia.

One person that White was keen to meet, was tha man who had inspired him years before - Vladimir Demikhov. Demikhov had continued his work with organ transplants and had revolutionised heart surgery. However, by 1966 he had fallen foul of the authorities, who thought his methods outlandish.

Following his visits to Russia, White returned with ideas to prove a transplanted brains consciousness. He had learned of experiments carried out by the Soviets where the severed head of a dog was kept alive and displayed cognitive reactions.

Robert White decided that if he could transplant a head from one monkey to another, then it would be apparent of the brain activity represented awareness. It took him three years to plan the surgery. He knew that this would be, to some, morally offensive.

In order to keep the head alive the the blood-flow from monkey B's body had to be transfused to monkey A's head via a network of plastic tubes. The A head was brought onto the B body and the blood vessels were connected together, but the spinal cord was left, it's impossible to reconnect nerve threads once they are broken.

Connecting the Head

When the surgery was complete and the monkey came out of the anaesthetic it could move it's facial muscles, it could be fed and follow movements with it's eyes. Of course, with a severed spinal cord it was paralysed from the neck down, but the operation had been a success.

As we see brain transplants have been met with some measures of success and shown that a head transplant is indeed possible, although specimens tend to expire in a relatively short amount of time. Partial brain transplants, in which healthy brain cells are surgically implanted to replace malfunctioning or dead ones, have also been found to cause favourable improvements in the mental capacities of volunteers with neurological disorders. The same ethical questions raised in full brain transplant procedures still slow research in the field, although to a lesser degree.

Related Source: wisegeek.com ,mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk

Human-2-Human communication via Brain

2013-02-18T08:05:00.001-08:00

A common belief is that people can tell when someone is staring at them, and some parapsychologists contend this is a form of distant mental influence. To test this phenomenon, the author carried out two demonstrations, one with forty people in a public area, the other with fifty students in a controlled setting.

According to parapsychologists, a commonly reported form of distant mental influence on human beings is “the feeling of being stared at,” which is closely related, historically, to the notion of the “evil eye.” Considerable folklore endorses the idea that gazing at someone carries special powers, favors, or influence. Folklore aside, contemporary opinion polls confirm that the feeling of being stared at is known in all cultures (Radin 1997).

A typical occurrence is that of a woman eating alone at a diner who suddenly becomes agitated. Then the hair on the back of her neck raises and she gets the feeling that someone is watching her-someone behind her. She turns and, sure enough, a young woman is staring directly at her. This type of situation is reported over and over and raises the question: Can a starer's intense focus affect the human nervous system?

According to some parapsychologists it not only can but does, and they insist that it has been confirmed in several laboratory studies, (e.g., Braud, Shafer, and Andrews 1993a; Braud, Shafer, and Andrews 1993b; Schlitz and LaBerge 1994 and 1997; and Peterson 1978). Wiseman, on the other hand, in a series of studies (Wiseman and Smith 1994; Wiseman, Smith, Freedman, Wasserman, and Hurst 1995) as well as a study carried out with Schlitz (Wiseman and Schlitz 1997) found no evidence of psychic functioning. In fact, psi (extrasensory perception) proponents are the only ones who seem to obtain evidence for psi while skeptics do not and, as Wiseman notes (Wiseman and Schlitz 1997), this fact may provide strong support for “the experimenter effect” (Palmer 1989), i.e., the experimenter somehow controls the outcome of the study. Such an effect, however, would be as mysterious-if not more so-than the alleged “staring effect” itself. In another context Wiseman (1999) suggests that the positive results might well represent a “file drawer” effect, i.e., people who failed to obtain impressive positive results simply filed the study away and didn't bother to report it. Nevertheless, Blackmore, who is a severe critic of parapsychology in general (Blackmore 1996), has stated that most contemporary parapsychologists believe this phenomena to be true and offer it as valid proof of psi.

Unquestionably the most vocal supporter of this claim is the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake who, in chapter four of his book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide To Revolutionary Science (Riverhead Books, New York, 1995), argues that not only do our minds “extend beyond the body” but also suggests, “If our minds reach out and 'touch' what we are looking at then we may affect what we look at just by looking at it. If we look at another person, for example, we may affect him or her by doing so” (107). Sheldrake, moreover, insists that the sense of being stared at is not only very “well known” but in informal surveys in both Europe and America, “I have found that about 80 percent of the people I have asked claimed to have experienced it themselves.” Sheldrake also notes it is accepted as a premise in countless works of fiction and it plays an important part in the relationship of people with animals and their pets.

Parapsychologists claim man's ability to know when he is being stared at has existed since the time of primitive man and served, in those days, to warn him of impending danger and attack from savage beasts. They also believe this ability still exists in modern men and women today. Skeptics deny this claim and believe it is nothing more than superstition and/or a response to subtle signals from the environment that are not strong enough to let us know exactly what caused them. For example, if we are in a very dark room and we suddenly sense the presence of another person-even though we do not see or hear him-we may know he is there because of the person's shaving lotion, movement of air currents in the room, body heat, etc. In other words if we are warned of another's presence, it is likely due to subtle physical cues in the environment that we normally do not attend to-not to any so-called “psychic” or paranormal ability!

But, there are several demonstration and experiment done by several Parapsychologist which prove the importance and significance to determine if such “mental influence,” independent of other possible material means of human-to-human communication, does exist.

Brain-machine Interface: A Multi-disciplinary Approach Shows Progress

2013-01-24T10:55:00.002-08:00

Apostolos P. Georgopoulos,

M.D., Ph.D., Director,

Center for Cognitive Neurosciences,

University of Minnesota

Recent news reports have described what sounds like a miracle--restoring the ability of a paralyzed woman “to feed herself chocolate and move everyday items using a robotic arm directly controlled by thought, showing a level of agility and control approaching that of a human limb.”1 In fact, neuroscientists have actually made this possible by defining the specific steps in this process:

(1)- identifying those brain signals that contain the requisite movement signal information for such use;

(2)- developing suitable means to record those signals safely and continuously;

(3)- extracting the essential motor command information by computer processing of the neural signals;

(4)- designing, developing and constructing a prosthetic arm that performs nearly all of the functions of the human arm;

(5)- interfacing the processed brain signals to the device, creating an integrated Brain-Machine Interface (BMI);

(6)- finally improving the quality and effectiveness of the BMI by training the brain to operate the prosthetic limb. The latter phase of training also evaluates additional brain signals and additional features built into the device to improve brain-machine communication and enhance the brain-machine integration. The resultant operations achieve more accurate, faster and enduring usefulness of the prosthetic device[1,2].

It is obvious that this is a multidisciplinary endeavor, encompassing such diverse fields as neurophysiology, material sciences, mechanical and electrical engineering, and computer science, to mention but a few. No wonder it took many years before tangible progress could be made towards a practical and useful application. Ultimately, the goal is to enable the long-term safe and useful application of the BMI technology to human subjects in need of a prosthetic arm.

To that end, a large effort has been expended in developing and testing BMIs in animals, mainly behaving monkeys[3]. Although today the results of human testing are beginning to appear, the bulk of our knowledge on BMI development, application and evaluation has come from studies in monkeys.

Initially, the achievements in this field were driven by the desire to replace an amputated limb by the control of a prosthetic arm that could substitute for the amputated limb. It was an educated guess that signals recorded in the motor cortex, the area that commands and controls arm movement, would be the right ones for the job. However, there was a problem. Although electrical stimulation of the motor cortex was known to evoke muscle contractions since the 19th century, this fact alone was not useful for prosthetic control because the use of our arms is embedded in surrounding space, e.g. to reach somewhere; and the use of our hands is embedded in object manipulation, e.g. to grasp a cup of coffee. Thus, having at our disposal motor cortical signals activating muscles would not help in prosthetic control; what was lacking was the knowledge on how such signals would command movements of the arm in surrounding space.

Work on motor cortical activity in behaving monkeys, from 19664 to 1982[5] was preoccupied with its relations to muscle contraction or simple joint movements, without reference to extra-personal space. But, in 1982[5], it was discovered that the activity of neurons in the motor cortex varied in an orderly fashion with the direction of arm movement in space, such that cellular activity for a given neuron was highest when the arm was moved in a certain direction (the cell’s “preferred direction”) and decreased progressively with movements farther and farther away from the cell’s preferred direction.

This basic discovery can be said to have been the birth of the directional tuning in motor cortex, and, later on, in all motor-related areas of the brain[6]. In turn, the motor directional tuning is at the root of all current arm neuroprosthetic control[1,2].

The directional tuning curve is symmetric around the preferred direction (the peak of the curve), and, therefore, cannot provide a unique specification of the direction of movement, since cell activity would be the same on either side of the peak. However, different motor cortical neurons have different preferred directions, covering the whole 3-D movement space[7]. The movement information is contained in the population of motor cortical cells, each of which has a different preferred direction, covering, as an ensemble, the whole directional space. This recognition of the information in the activity of populations of neurons led to the calculation of the neuronal population vector, which combined the directional tuning and the diversity of preferred directions to yield an outcome that predicted accurately the direction of intended arm movement in space[8]. Thus, by referring motor cortical activity to space (via the directional tuning curve) and putting together weighted contributions of individual cells (along their preferred direction), a spatial measure (the neuronal population vector) was obtained out of purely temporal, non-spatial neuronal activity.

The neuronal population vector had another remarkable property (beyond its accuracy) which paved the way to its use in modern neuroprosthetics, namely that it provided the correct directional information well before the movement was produced by as much as 50-100 msec. This means if you were an observer placed in the motor cortex, you could accurately predict the upcoming movement, millisecond-by-millisecond. The scientists working here found that by calculating the neuronal population vectors at short time intervals into a continuous tip-to-tail sequence, the “neural movement trajectory” could be computed and visualized[9,10].

The directional tuning and neuronal population vector essentially solved the problem of how to extract meaningful directional and trajectory information from the motor cortex and translate it to useful control signals. The next challenge was to develop safe recording devices suitable for high quality, chronic recordings. Such devices have been developed during the past 20 years and recordings from dense multi-electrode arrays can now be carried out both in monkeys and humans[1-3]. What remains uncertain is the long-term safety of the implants and the assurance for high quality recordings over time. By definition, such implants are foreign bodies which may elicit, over the years, local reaction in the brain tissue with unforeseeable effects. Although no such effects have been observed as yet, the prognosis for a multi-year application remains to be determined.

The other concern is the maintenance of high quality recordings long term, which remains to be determined. Such considerations have led to the development of other approaches for obtaining neural information, specifically by recording electrical potentials from the cortical surface. This is a very fast-evolving field.

The development of multi-electrode arrays has been complemented by the fast-advancing computer processing of the recorded spike trains for use by prosthetic arm controllers. The progress here is nothing short of impressive. The demonstration of reaching and grasping in humans[1,2] and monkeys[3] using motor cortical signals to control a prosthetic arm and hand is convincing and presages more such successful applications in the future.

An important trend is the effort to extract more and more information from the neural population signals to achieve and improve control of more complex functions of the prosthetic arm and hand.

A promising approach is the tapping of other cortical areas for that purpose, in addition to the motor cortex[11]. This will provide the extra information but at the expense of additional implants with any potential associated risks of side effects. Finally, it should be noted that, following implantation and the availability of good quality chronic recordings, a gradual improvement of the BMI performance should be expected over time due to continuous adaptation and learning[12].

Ultimately, the limit of usefulness in BMI lies with the kind and quality of prosthetic arm that can be produced. Ideally such an arm would be as “anthropomorphic” as possible (i.e. it should be almost like a human arm, including the hand, with all associated functionalities).

An important advance emerged from the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2006. According to DARPA’s website“after six years of development, the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program developed two anthropomorphic advanced modular prototype prosthetic arm systems, including sockets, which offer increased range of motion, dexterity and control options.” The use of such sophisticated arms in neuroprosthetics is awaited eagerly.

In summary, BMI is a fast-evolving field with great promise. Advances are continuously being made in all fronts including: recording methods; extracting information from brain signals; perfecting prosthetic arms; and creating the perfect intercommunication between brain and the prosthetic arm.

It is a triumph of neuroscience; engineering; technology; and medicine, still to reach its limit.

References

Collinger et al 2012 Lancet doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61816-9. [Epub ahead of print]
Hochberg et al 2012 Nature 485: 372-37
Velliste et al 2008 Nature 453: 1098-10101
Evarts 1966 J Neurophysiol 29: 1011-1027
Georgopoulos et al 1982 J Neurosci 2: 1527-1537
Georgopoulos 1995 Trends Neurosci 18: 506-510
Schwartz et al 1988 J Neurosci 8: 2913-2927
Georgopoulos et al 1986 Science 233: 1416-1419
Georgopoulos et al 1988 J Neurosci 8: 2928-2937
Schwartz 1994 Science 265: 540-542
Andersen et al 2010 Annu Rev Psychol 61: 169-190
Taylor et al 2002 Science 296: 1829-1832

"Connection Error" in the Brain

2013-01-24T10:34:00.000-08:00

When people see pictures of bodies, a whole range of brain regions are active. This network is altered in women with anorexia nervosa. In a functional MRI(magnetic resonance imaging) study, two regions that are important for the processing of body images were functionally more weakly connected in anorexic women than in healthy women. The stronger this "connection error" was, the more overweight the respondents considered themselves. "These alterations in the brain could explain why women with anorexia perceive themselves as fatter, even though they are objectively underweight" according to Prof. Dr. Boris Suchan of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ruhr-Universität. Together with Prof. Dr. Dietrich Grönemeyer (University of Witten-Herdecke), Prof. Dr. Silja Vocks (University of Osnabrück) and other colleagues, the Bochum researchers report in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

Experiment result where Anorexics misperceive their body shape

The researchers tested ten anorexic and fifteen healthy women of similar age. To start with, all the women judged on the computer which of several different silhouettes corresponded best to their own body shape. Ten control subjects who did not participate in the MRI scan answered the same question by matching a photo of the test subject to the right silhouette. Both healthy and anorexic women estimated their body shape differently than outsiders: healthy subjects rated themselves as thinner than the control subjects. Anorexic women on the other hand perceived themselves to be fatter than the control subjects did.

What Brain areas behind this

In MRI scanners, the researchers then recorded the brain activity of the 25 participants while they observed photos of bodies. Above all, they analysed the activity in the "fusiform body area" (FBA) and the "extrastriate body area" (EBA), because previous studies showed that these brain regions are critical for the perception of bodies. To this end, the neuroscientists from Bochum calculated the so-called effective connectivity between the FBA and EBA in both hemispheres. This is a measure of how much the activity in several brain areas is temporally correlated. A high degree of correlation is indicative of a strong connection.

Difference in Anorexics's Brain structurally and functionally

The connection between the FBA and EBA was weaker in women with anorexia nervosa than in healthy women. In addition, the researchers found a negative correlation between the EBA-FBA connection in the left hemisphere and the misjudgement of body weight: the weaker the effective connectivity between the EBA and FBA was, the fatter the subjects with anorexia falsely estimated themselves to be. "In a previous study we found that there are structural changes in the brains of patients with anorexia", says Boris Suchan. They have a lower density of nerve cells in the EBA. "The new data shows that the network for body processing is also functionally altered." The EBA, which has a lower cell density in anorexics, is also the area that stood out in the connection analysis: it receives reduced input from the FBA. "These changes could provide a mechanism for the development of anorexia", says Suchan.

Fancy contact lenses that connect to the Internet

2013-01-15T05:38:00.001-08:00

A new generation of cheap lightweight plastic electronic technology that does not require silicon, but which is optically transparent and can be coated onto everyday objects, would transform our world.

Imagine electronically updated food labels, computers embedded in our armchairs, and even contact lenses linking us directly to the Internet to bring us into the age of plastic electronics.

In this video Dr Andrew Flewitt and Dr Robert Phaal, both from the Department of Engineering, and Scott White, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Pragmatic Printing, talk about the creative partnership forged between different parts of the Department of Engineering and outside companies to enable the technology and research in this area to be exploited successfully.

“Working collaboratively with industry is not only satisfying in that I see aspects of my work translate into real engineered products, but it provides inspiration for new avenues of research too,” said Dr Andrew Flewitt.

“Roadmapping then allows me to critically assess how I should be developing my research portfolio and engaging with industry to maximise the likelihood of productive collaboration.”

Source: Cambridge University

Kumbh: World largest gathering of people in India

2013-01-10T02:11:00.001-08:00

Kumbh Mela

Kumbh Mela is the biggest pilgrimage festival in the world and in fact also by far the largest gathering of people for any purposes anywhere. It takes place in four cities of India namely Haridwar, Allahabad, Ujjain and Nashik at different period of time. Interestingly, in each of the city, Kumbh Mela takes at the interval of 12 years; likewise, in India, it takes place after three years at any one of the city (whose number comes in the period). During this mass Hindu pilgrimage, millions of people gather at the respective cities.

The whole atmosphere of the Kumbh Mela is surcharged with religious zeal. There is a powerful impact when millions of people come together to engage in the collective bathing ritual. Thus a sense of brotherhood among pilgrims develops, despite the different sectarian backgrounds, ethnicities, and languages present during the festival.

In Haridwar and Allahabad, the mela takes place on the bank of Ganga River and in Nashik; it takes place on the bank of Godavari River. People take dip into the respective river water and get purified.

In addition, the 'Ardh Kumbh Mela' is also being celebrated at the interval of every six years in two cities namely Haridwar and Allahabad; so called Ardh Kumbh Mela is also celebrated with full enthusiasm and the number of devotees almost remains same as in Purna Kumbh Mela.

Kumbh Mela is pretty historical Hindu mass pilgrimage, which evidence even found in the works of Huan Tsang, a Chinese traveller who came India during the period of 629 to 645 AD. The story behind the Kumbh Mela is – the amrit (elixir) accidently fallen into the Ksheera Sagar hence to get back the amrit Lord Shiva advised the all gods and Asuras (demons) to get unite and work together on the agreement that whatever the property will come out, will be shared equally. Hence, both of these groups united and worked hard to get back the amrit; but when amrit finally came in hand, a dispute aroused between gods and asuras. During the dispute, some drops of amrit fallen at four places of India namely Haridwar, Allahabad, Ujjain and Nashik; resultantly, since that time, these four places became the sacred places for Kumbh Mela.

Another reason came from Vedic culture, which say that every river is personified as a deity and the water stream is interpreted as the material manifestation of that personality. Rivers are deified as mothers as they are a source for human existence. River Ganga is one of the most special rivers as it is believed to come directly from the ocean of milk by washing the lotus feet of Lord Vishnu. Bathing in the holy waters of Ganga is believed to be most auspicious at the time of Kumbh Mela.

However, the timing to celebrate the Kumbh Mela in each of the city is quite scientific that depends upon the position of the planet of Jupiter and the Sun; hence, it occurs once in twelve years in each of the city viz.

Haridwar :
When the position of sun is in Aries (Mesha Rashi). Next Ardh Kumbh Mela in Haridwar will be in 2016 and Kumbha Mela in 2022.

Planets Arrangement of Kumbh Mela

Allahbad (Prayag) :
When the position of Jupiter is in Taurus (Vrishabha Rashi ) and the sun is in Capricorn (Makar Rashi). Next Kumbha in Allahbad will be in 2013 and Aradh Kumbha in 2019.

Ujjain :
When the position of Jupiter and the sun are in Scorpio (Vrishchik Rashi) Next Kumbh in Ujjain will be in 2016.

Nashik,Trimbakeshwar :
When the position of Jupiter and the sun are in the zodiac sign Leo (Simha Rashi). Next Kumbha in Nashik will be in 2015.

Kumbh Mela 2013–Allahabad–Important Snan Dates

After 12 years, again the popular cultural and heritage city Allahabad will host the Kumbh Mela 2013. 2001 when the last time, Kumbh Mela took place here; during that time, more than 60 millions devotees visited Prayag (Allahabad).

Allahabad is the place of 'Triveni Sangam' i.e. the place where three sacred rivers of India meet namely River Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. Though, these days, there is no evidence of River Saraswati. However, Allahabad is a historic Hindu religious place where millions of people visit to take bath in the sangam of River Ganga and Yamuna and then worship.

Moreover, in the coming year 2013, again the banks of River Ganga and Yamuna will be infused with millions of devotees; interestingly, thousands of devotees make their temporary homes at the Kumbh Mela site throughout the period of celebration.

The significant dates of Kumbh Mela 2013:

• 14th January 2013 (Sunday) – Makar Sankranti

• 27th January 2013 (Sunday) – Paush Purnima

• 6th February 2013 (Wednesday) – Ekadashi Snan

• 10th February 2013 (Sunday) – Mauni Amavasya Snan (it is the main Bathing Day)

• 15th February 2013 (Friday) – Basant Panchami Snan

• 17th February 2013 (Sunday) – Rath Saptami Snan

• 21st February 2013 (Thursday) – Bhisma Ekadashi Snan

• 25th February 2013 (Monday) – Maghi Purnima Snan

To know more about Kumbh Mela Visit Official Website of Kumbh Mela

Life-Logging: Digital Log of Your Memory

2013-01-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

Imagine everything you do being tracked, photographed and recorded; every person you meet, every conversation you have, every place you visit and even the exact route that you take to get there. A complete digital archive of your life, updated minute by minute and accessible at any time. It’s the dystopian future George Orwell described in his novel 1984, where “every sound you made was overheard and… every movement scrutinised”. But this isn’t fiction. It’s happening now, and guess what: you’ll be the person carrying out the surveillance and storing it all on your own home computer. Welcome to the world of lifelogging.

Unless you’re a technology expert you’re unlikely to have come across a lifelogger. They’re mostly software engineers, or computer scientists such as Dr Cathal Gurrin, a lecturer at Dublin City University’s (DCU) School of Computing. “It becomes compelling,” says the soft-spoken academic, “and it’s a difficult thing to stop doing once you start.”

Log 1

Gurrin’s journey began as a two-week experiment in 2006 using a SenseCam, the lifelogger’s key tool. This is a camera about the size of a cigarette packet, which is worn around the neck and can be set to take photographs when triggered by such things as changes in the light, ambient temperature or body heat, or be primed to take a snapshot, say, every 30 seconds. It has no viewfinder or display, but is fitted with a fish-eye lens to capture almost everything in the wearer’s view. Gurrin’s snapshots are stored on a server at the university. His original fortnight of photographing has turned into a five-year odyssey.

Dr Gurrin’s “eureka” moment came when he met his new girlfriend in 2006. She recalled bumping into him in a bank months before they had started dating — and there in his digital archive he found the picture of the moment he first saw her. Now he wears the camera from the minute he wakes until he hits the sack. He says he wants to create “a detailed digital diary of everything; a diary of you, for you”. So he also logs his exact locations and movements — whether he is driving, sitting, standing, walking — and notes the Bluetooth devices, normally mobile phones, that he encounters.

Since he began he has amassed a collection of 8m photos, 2m GPS recordings of his locations, and 20m accelerometer recordings of his movements. So what does he do with all of this information? Gurrin’s digital archive is more than a massive exercise in narcissism. He is a human guinea pig for the research team he runs at DCU, which is developing the first fully functional search engine for lifelogs. Human memory is, of course, automatic. “In our brain it just works,” explains Gurrin. “You just recall things, but it is difficult to understand how people will recall memories on a computer.” It is imperative that Dr Gurrin’s team’s search engine actually mimics the brain, so they have been conducting experiments with cognitive psychologists at the University of Leeds on the ways the brain processes memories. Although it is “really, really challenging work”, Gurrin is confident that the first search engine will be ready by the end of the year.

Historians will have a complete record of your life. Imagine if we’d had this kind of record of Einstein, or Shakespeare, or HitlerThe overall aim is to create a perfect digital memory. Should you wish to pass it on to them, your children and grandchildren will have a complete record of your life. So, too, will historians. Imagine if we’d had this kind of record of Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Hitler. Eventually your lifelog will be automatically uploaded and stored on your computer for posterity.

Privacy, of course, is a big issue. “This is a research project, so I can’t possibly record everything in my life,” says Gurrin. “I switch it off if I feel that it would be inappropriate, or if someone might object to what is being recorded. It is their choice, they have no statutory obligation to get involved.” He draws the line at recording certain events that take place in the lavatory or in the bedroom.

“The logging process records 98% of life events — the other 2% would simply be embarrassing.”
There is a parallel, he says, with the advent of camera phones. When they first came out, people suggested that we would photograph everything, but we don’t. Rules as to where it is or isn’t acceptable to take photos have developed, and people tend to abide by these.

What is more, covert use would be impractical. “Remember that the SenseCam is actually a very visible device when worn, and we never try to hide it. It captures only two to three photographs a minute, which are not high quality; they are memory aids, not the quality of photos you would print for an album.”

The idea of a search-able personal archive isn’t new. It was first suggested back in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, the director of the US Federal Office of Scientific Research. In an essay for Atlantic Monthly, he set out a vision of a machine called a Memex, in which “an individual stores all his books, records and communications”. This could be accessed quickly and “is an enlarged, intimate supplement to his memory’’. The Memex would be a desk where material could be automatically photographed and placed inside. Bush also suggested that to get this information into the Memex “the camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3mm square”. He predicted: “As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or field, every time he looks at something worthy of record, he trips the shutter and in it goes.” Bush’s machine was designed with scientists in mind, rather like an iPad put together by Jules Verne.

So who will be using the modern version when Gurrin and his team finally crack it? Pretty much all of us, if Gordon Bell is to be believed. Bell is the granddaddy, the guru of lifelogging. He started in 2001 and predicts that within a decade we will all be lifeloggers. His seminal book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, written with a colleague and fellow lifelogger, Jim Gemmell, declares: “Society at large is on an inexorable path to total-recall technology and it is going to transform the world around us… and change what it means to be human.” Bell can’t be written off as some crazy futurologist. Now in his seventies, he is still a principal researcher at Microsoft. His boss, Bill Gates, calls him “one of the industry’s most original thinkers”. He is a man in demand, with technology start-up companies lining up to get him on board. When he and Gemmell, a fellow Microsoft researcher, wrote Total Recall in 2009, they set out to map the extreme lifelogging project — a huge undertaking, for which Bell started recording and storing everything he was currently doing.

His SenseCam would photograph every place he visited, every person he met. He began keeping records of the food he ate. He would record telephone conversations; make copies of memos and notes. He even wore a heart monitor and GPS tracker, which he used to work out that his angina was brought on by eating even a tiny amount of fatty ice cream. By 2020 he thinks this personal recording will be as commonplace as emailing is now. “I don’t think people realise we are part of a revolution,” he says. Integral to this revolution is the creation of what he calls our “e-memory”. He has said that these e-memories will be “objective, dispassionate, prosaic and unforgivingly accurate” compared with our “subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic and mutable” biological memories.

In neurological circles such claims are treated with scepticism and thinly disguised disdain. “They are missing the point,” says Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. “You can’t isolate memories; they are interrelated and upgraded and changed every time you visit that memory.” Baroness Greenfield challenges the belief put forward by lifeloggers that autobiographical or episodic memory can be improved and extended by e-memories, “They confuse memories with facts,” she says. “Imbued with every episode are other interrelated episodes. You’d have to download your whole brain.”

Less sceptical scientists have started to explore how data are affecting the way we remember and recall events. In July the journal Science published research by psychologists into the effect Google’s search engine is having on memory. It found we are less likely to remember information that we know we can find on the internet.

But could lifelogging help us to hold on to memories when our brains begin to falter? Researchers are already exploring the potential of lifelogging devices in neurological illnesses. In 2007 Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge conducted a study to see if a patient’s severe memory loss could be improved by wearing a camera to record and recall interesting events in her life compared with keeping a written diary. The results were encouraging. After a month the woman could recall 80% of the events she had captured on her camera but none of the events she had recorded in her diary. It led the researchers to conclude that the camera, “in addition to aiding autobiographical memory, has a number of other benefits for brain-injured patients”, and that it could help to answer such questions as, “How quickly do we forget?” and “How does our memory change with age?”

If governments got their hands on lifelogging data they would have a means to 'document every material event of an individual’s life'Lifelogging evangelists such as Jim Gemmell fervently believe the recording of all personal data will unlock some of the big secrets about our health. “That’s what excites me the most,” he tells me when I reach him on his holiday in Hawaii. He foresees a near future where our lifelogs will monitor our bodies through a multitude of sensors implanted inside us. These will continuously record data such as blood pressure, cholesterol and a host of other vital signs, feeding them back to our personal digital archive. These monitors will alert us or our doctors when they detect problems.

Of course, says Gemmell, lifelogging can be embarrassing if you share things. “A few weeks ago I had a friend prodding me about the potential negative impact on privacy of lifelogging. Then I looked on Facebook and found that she shared vastly more of her life than I ever do.

"She already had embarrassing things shared on the web, and I don’t. How ironic! So, for me, the way lifelogging might be embarrassing is if I appear in someone else’s lifelog and they share things I wish they wouldn’t. Gordon has logged the most about me, but he is even more private than I am.”

One lifelogger, says Gemmell, was embarrassed by the intrusion of the process. “He was sharing everything with his lab — note, the sharing that we would never do or advocate — and was embarrassed by shots taken in the men’s room. I asked him why. I’ve accidentally taken shots in men’s rooms, and you don’t see anything revealing. He explained that, although nothing X-rated is ever seen, he is embarrassed by shots taken from his point of view, seated — of his legs with his pants down.”

Being caught with your pants down could be the least of it. There is undoubtedly a potential dark side to lifelogging. This was explored by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, geographers specialising in digital technologies, in a 2007 paper for the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. If governments got their hands on lifelogging data, they warned, they would have “the potential for invasive profiling”, a means to “document every action, every conversation and every material event of an individual’s life”.

As lifelogs would record not just what you’re doing but who you’re with and where you are, they could identify and penalise “indiscretions, perversions and minor infractions of the law”. Dodge and Kitchin concluded that giving the state access to our lifelogs should be avoided at all costs, as it would encourage “an ultra-conservative society”.

This could be a selling point to large swaths of the community. Lyndsay Williams, the lifelogger and software engineer who invented the SenseCam, says only that what she calls “people without integrity” should fear scrutiny of their personal data.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear? This same old argument was used to defend ID cards and tougher counterterrorism measures, but we weren’t convinced that only the guilty need to fear surveillance. To provide the reassurance that personal data archives couldn’t be used for profiling, said Dodge and Kitchin, lifelogs would need to be able to forget.

They came up with the idea of “an ethics of forgetting” for lifelogging, which would mean, for example, designing software that would allow exact details of a journey to fade over time, just as it does in our memory. Gordon Bell calls the idea “nuts”. As with so many of the tough questions about the consequences of lifelogging, he believes “society will need to come up with a suitable answer”.

We may be able to stop the state getting its hands on our personal digital archives, but it will be up to us to decide on this great drawback of lifelogging, the further blurring of the boundary between the private and the public. Lyndsay Williams says we shouldn’t be worried, as “we have no privacy any more”. It was something she learnt during her years at Microsoft. At the same time, she is aware of how intrusive lifelogging devices can be. “The GPS can track not just which house you’re in but which room.” That could be bad news for the millions who cheat on their partners. Imagine that your partner got hold of your lifelog and saw that the innocent trip to a neighbour’s house consisted of an hour in the bedroom.

And it is not just “people without integrity” who have cause for concern. In the course of his project, recording all Bluetooth devices near him, Cathal Gurrin found that in hotels he would pick up Bluetooth signals from other phones being beamed through walls from adjacent rooms, or from floors above and below him. When his students looked through the data, it appeared to them that these devices were in the same room as him. Try explaining that one to a suspicious partner.

Conversations have the power to come back and haunt us far more than pictures do. If the two are combined they could be lethalDr Gurrin is optimistic that the next version of Bluetooth will rectify this particular problem. What technology can’t do is to stop people recording us when we don’t want them to. That will be up to us to sort out. As he says, rules are already developing on what is unacceptable to record for your lifelog. For him it was gathering audio. When he tried doing it, even in experiments, he found “people really didn’t like it and basically they stopped talking to you”. Pictures were fine but he found that people had concerns that audio “will be stored, archived, found again and used against them in some way”. A group of colleagues chatting together might make a boring photograph — but their conversation itself could be more interesting. Suppose they are actually bitching about the head of the department.
Conversations have the power to come back and haunt us far more than pictures do. If the two are combined they could be lethal.

Gordon Bell, too, found that videoing someone or recording their voice could unnerve them, so he came up with a solution. “They didn’t know,” he confesses with a chuckle. “I have a file called ‘conversations’ but I didn’t use it in any way.” But if others follow this example and record surreptitiously, as Bell believes many will, won’t it create fear and paranoia? A version of the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s famous Panopticon (“all-seeing”) prison where the inmates would never see the “inspector” conducting surveillance, and could never tell whether they were being watched or not? Lyndsay Williams says with asperity: “You’ll just have to learn how to behave.”

Will this bother the ultimate target market for lifelogging: children and teenagers? I doubt it. After all, teenagers increasingly share most of their lives online in what Susan Greenfield calls “the solipsistic need to interrelate all the time with others”.

The technology being developed — mini video cameras, sensors for constant monitoring of your health — will mean teenagers will be able to share far more private and intimate details about their lives than the posting on Facebook of drunken photos in nightclubs or sunset holiday snaps.

Data about your whole life could be collected and stored online. This will be a valuable commodity, and companies are starting to realise the potential of personal digital archives. The food company Danone recently used lifelogging for research into demand for some of their drinks brands. And media companies are thought to have used it to track how audiences behave at weekends.

Cathal Gurrin has noticed recently that big multinational companies have “suddenly pricked up their ears and thought, ‘Hey, there’s something happening here. We’d like to get our hands on this.’” He is regularly meeting with big technology firms — although he won’t divulge which ones — who are trying to get into lifelogging.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell are firm in their conviction that by 2020 lifelogging will have entered the mainstream. Cathal Gurrin says it “can’t be stopped”, for the simple reason that “the technology is already out there”.

So what kind of society will this encourage? Gordon Bell calls it “Little Brother”. A democratised surveillance, carried out not by one omnipresent authority but by millions of individuals. Let’s hope this isn’t the case. Unless, of course, you really want the future to be a version of the Big Brother House broadcast directly onto Facebook.

Source: Sunday Times ( 11th Sep, 2011 )

10 ways of our Minds Warp Time

2013-01-09T10:51:00.003-08:00

How time perception is warped by life-threatening situations, eye movements, tiredness, hypnosis, age, the emotions and more, let see here in ten Ways.....

1. Life-threatening situations

People often report that time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations, like skydiving. But are we really processing more information in these seconds when time seems to stretch? Is it like slow-motion cameras in sports which can actually see more details of the high-speed action?

To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net. What they found was that time resolution doesn't increase: we're not able to distinguish shorter periods of time when in danger. What happens is we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention but we don't gain superhuman powers of perception.

2. Time doesn't fly when you're having fun
We've all experienced the fact that time seems to fly when we're having fun. Or does it? What about when you're listening to a fantastic uplifting piece of music? Does time seem to fly by, or conversely, does it seem to slow down?

When this was tested by Kellaris (1992), they found that when listeners enjoyed the music more, time seemed to slow down. This may be because when we enjoy music we listen more carefully, getting lost in it. Greater attention leads to perception of a longer interval of time.

The same thing happens when you have a really good, exciting day out. At the end of the day it can feel like you ate breakfast a lifetime ago. You enjoyed yourself enormously and yet time has stretched out.

The fact that we intuitively believe time flies when we're having fun may have more to do with how time seems to slow when we're not having fun. Boredom draws our attention to the passage of time which gives us the feeling that it's slowing down.

Or—prepare yourself for a 180 degree about-face—it could all be the other way around. Perhaps you're having fun when time flies. In other words, we assume we've been enjoying ourselves when we notice that time has passed quickly.

There's evidence for this in a recent experiment by Sackett et al. (2010). Participants doing a boring task were tricked into thinking it had lasted half as long as it really had. They thought it was more enjoyable than those who had been doing exactly the same task but who hadn't been tricked about how much time had passed.

Ultimately it may come down to how much you believe that time flies when you're having fun. Sackett and colleagues tested this idea as well and found it was true. In their experiments, people who believed more strongly in the idea that time flies when you're having fun were more likely to believe they were having fun when time flew. So, the whole thing could partly be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. The stopped clock illusion
The stopped clock illusion is a weird effect that you may have experienced. It happens when you look at an analogue watch and the second-hand seems to freeze for longer than a second before moving on.

I always thought this was because I just happened to look at it right at the start of the second, but this is actually an illusion.

What is happening is that when your eyes move from one point to another (a saccade), your perception of time stretches slightly (Yarrow et al., 2001). Weirdly, it stretches backwards. So your brain tells you that you've been looking at the watch for slightly longer than you really have. Hence the illusion that the second-hand is frozen for more than a second.

This happens every time our eyes move from one fixation point to the next, it's just that we only notice it when looking at a watch. One explanation is that our brains are filling in the gap while our eyes move from looking at one thing to the next.

4. Too tired to tell the time
When things happen very close together in time, our brains fuse them together into a single snapshot of the present. For vision the shortest interval we can perceive is about 80 milliseconds. If two things happen closer together than that then we experience them as simultaneous.

The shortest possible gap in time we can distinguish across modalities (say visual and auditory) is between 20 and 60 milliseconds (Fink et al., 2006). That's as little as a fiftieth of a second.

When we're tired, though, our perception of time goes awry and we find it more difficult to distinguish between short spaces of time. This fact can be used to measure whether people are too tired to fly a plane, drive a truck or be a doctor. Indeed just such simple hand-held devices that quickly assess your tiredness are already being developed (Eagleman, 2009).

5. Self-regulation stretches time
The effort of trying to either suppress or enhance our emotional reactions seems to change our perception of time. Psychologists have found that when people are trying to regulate their emotions, time seems to drag on.

Vohs and Schmeichel (2003) had participants watch an 11 minute clip from the filmTerms of Endearment. Some participants were asked to remain emotionally neutral while watching the clip and others were told to act naturally. Those who tried to suppress their emotions estimated the clip had lasted longer than it really had.

6. Altered states of consciousness
People report all sorts of weird experiences with time when taking drugs like psilocybin, peyote or LSD. Time can seem to speed up, slow down, go backwards, or even stop.

But you don't need drugs to enter an altered state of consciousness, hypnosis will do the trick. People generally seem to underestimate the time that they've been under hypnosis. One study found this figure was around 40% (Bowers & Brenneman, 1979).

7. Does time speed up with age?
People often say the years pass more quickly as they get older. While youthful summers seemed to stretch on into infinity, the summers of your later years zip by in the blink of an eye.

A common explanation for this is that everything is new when we are young so we pay more attention; consequently it feels like time expands. With age, though, new experiences diminish and it tends to be more of the same, so time seems to pass more quickly.

Whether or not this is true, there is some psychological evidence that time passes quicker for older people. One study has found that people in their 20s are pretty accurate at guessing an interval of 3 minutes, but people in their 60s systematically overestimate it, suggesting time is passing about 20% more quickly for them (Mangan & Bolinsky, 1997).

8. The emotional experience of time
The emotions we feel in the moment directly affect our perception of time. Negative emotions in particular seem to bring time to people's attention and so make it seem longer.

Research on anxious cancer patients, those with depression and boredom-prone individuals suggests time stretches out for them (reported in Wittmann, 2009). Just like life-threatening situations, negative emotions can concentrate our attention on the passage of time and so make it seem longer than it really is.

This effect may be made worse by our efforts to regulate these negative emotions (see number 5), which also has the effect of stretching time.

9. It's getting hot in here
If you've ever had a fever then you'll know that body temperature can have strange effects on time perception.

Experiments have found that when body temperature is raised our perception of time speeds up (Wearden & Pento-Voak, 1995). Conversely when we are cooled down, our sense of time also slows down.

10. What's your tempo?

Setting aside emotions, age, drugs and all the rest, our experience of time is also affected by who we are. People seem to operate to different beats; we've all met people who work at a much slower or faster pace than we do. Psychologists have found that people who are impulsive and oriented towards the present tend to find that time moves faster for them than others (from O'Brien et al., 2011).

There's little research on this but it's likely that each of us has our own personal tempo. Research has found that when different people listen to metronomes the number of beats per minute they describe as comfortable ranges from as slow as 40 bpm up to a high of 200 bpm (Kir-Stimon, 1977). This is a large range and may help to explain why some people seem to operate at such a different pace to ourselves.
Time is relative

The last words on time come from one of great thinker; Albert Einstein: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

Human Brain Analysis - Men vs. Women

2013-01-05T23:34:00.001-08:00

1. MULTI-TASKING

Women - Multiple process
Women brain designed to concentrate multiple task at a time.
Women can Watch a TV and Talk over phone and cook.
Men - Single Process
Men brain designed to concentrate only one work at a time. Men can not watch TV and talk over the phone at the same time. they stop the TV while Talking. They can either watch TV or talk over the phone or cook.

2. LANGUAGE

Women can easily learn many languages. But can not find solutions to problems. Men can not easily learn languages, they can easily solve problems. That's why in average a 3 years old girl has three times higher vocabulary than a 3 years old boy.

3. ANALYTICAL SKILLS

Men brain has a lot of space for handling the analytically process. They can analyze and find the solution for a process and design a map of a building easily. But If a complex map is viewed by women, they can not understand it. Women can not understand the details of a map easily, For them it is just a dump of lines on a paper.

4. CAR DRIVING

While driving a car, mans analytical spaces are used in his brain. He can drive a car fastly. If he sees an object at long distance, immediately his brain classifies the object (bus or van or car) direction and speed of the object and he drives accordingly. Where woman take a long time to recognize the object direction/ speed. Mans single process mind stops the audio in the car (if any), then concentrates only on driving.

5. LYING

When men lie to women face to face, they get caught easily. Woman super natural brain observes facial expression 70%, body language 20% and words coming from the mouth 10%. Men brain does not have this. Women easily lie to men face to face.
So guys, do not lie face to face.

6. PROBLEMS SOLVING

If a man have a lot of problems, his brain clearly classifies the problems and puts them in individual rooms in the brain and then finds the solution one by one. You can see many guys looking at the sky for a long time. If a woman has a lot of problems, her brain can not classify the problems. she wants some one to hear that. After telling everything to a person she goes happily to bed. She does not worry about the problems being solved or not.

7. WHAT THEY WANT

Men want status, success, solutions, big process, etc... But Women want relationship, friends, family, etc...

8. UNHAPPINESS

If women are unhappy with their relations, they can not concentrate on their work. If men are unhappy with their work, they can not concentrate on the relations.

9. SPEECH

Women use indirect language in speech. But Men use direct language.

10. HANDLING EMOTION

Women talk a lot without thinking. Men act a lot without thinking.

Main Source: Unknown

A Non-Human Intelligent personality

2013-01-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

We are searching for intelligent life, Man has his eye firmly on the sky. However, a rising number of scientists are warming to the idea that to meet man’s intellectual equal, we don’t need space travel. All we need to do is go for a swim.

Dolphins have always been considered smarter than your average fish. However, the question that has quizzed marine biologists all the way back to Ancient Greece is “just how smart?”

Recent studies have concluded the answer to being pretty damned smart. Even to the point where several scientists are now calling for dolphins to be classified as “Non-Human Persons”and should have access to basic rights.

"If we use relative brain size as a metric of 'intelligence' then one would have to conclude that dolphins are second in intelligence to modern humans," said Lori Marino, a senior lecturer in neuroscience and one of the world’s leading experts.

Marino’s brain size theory stems from the idea that brain-to-body ratio delivers an increased level of intelligence. Following MRI scans, it was discovered that dolphins have a brain size four to five times bigger than creatures of the same size, and are second only to humans.

The evidence doesn’t stop with scans, however. Recent research has shown that dolphinsactually understand mortality and experience grief over another dolphin’s death.

Joan Gonzalvo of the Tethys Research Institute in Milan has observed numerous behaviours that could be regarded as grief.

In one instance, a mother appeared to be grieving over the death of her newborn calf after a suspected attack by another dolphin, and was repeatedly trying to bring the calf to the surface in an attempt to get the calf to breathe.

"This was repeated over and over again, sometimes frantically, during two days of observation," says Gonzalvo. "The mother never separated from her calf."

In another, Gonzalvo observed a distressed pod desperately trying to reassure a 3-month year old calf who had suffered mortal injuries thanks to exposure to heavy-metal pollution.

The pod attempted to keep the infant afloat, until the calf eventually passed away. Unlike before, the pod simply swam away.

"My hypothesis is that the sick animal was kept company and given support, and when it died the group had done their job,” said Gonzalvo. “In this case they had already assumed death would eventually come - they were prepared."

Ingrid Vasser of the Orca Research Trust, New Zealand, has observed similar behaviours demonstrated by bottlenose dolphins and orcas. She accepts that it could just be the misplace behaviour.

"But we do know that cetaceans have von Economo neurons, which have been associated with grief in humans." She therefore speculates that the behaviour demonstrated is indeed grief.

The grief comes as no surprise owing to dolphins extremely complex social structures. The only other creatures with comparable systems are primates and humans. Dolphins often travel in pods, which can include any number of dolphins, and may even merge with other pods to create “superpods”.

Dolphins will form close alliances with other dolphins, much in the same way that humans make close friends. While they will still operate as a pod with other dolphins, these alliances of 3 or 4 dolphins display synchronous behaviours such as breathing or breaching.

Orcas show an even more interesting social behaviour, with offspring never separating from their mother. These matriarchal pods will often form bigger groups with relatives, and even form their own dialect. Not only is this used for identification and communication, but it is also used to ensure there is no inbreeding with orcas seeking out mates with a different dialect.

Dolphins have also been shown to display creativity. In a study by Karen Pryor during the 60s, two rough-toothed dolphins were tested for their creativity. New tricks were rewarded with fish. After a while, both dolphins ran out of tricks, and weren’t rewarded for displaying old stunts.

Following a period of frustration, the dolphins began displaying new tricks, which was reinforced with reward. A similar study was performed on humans, with both dolphins and humans taking a similar length of time to understand the task. The only notable difference between the two is that when the dolphins figured it out, they got excited and their creativity went through the roof. Human subjects simply displayed relief.

This creativity has also been observed in the wild. Bottlenose dolphins have been observedusing sponges to protect their noses whilst foraging for food. There has also been ‘butchering’ behaviour observed, where dolphins have learned to kill, gut and bone a cuttlefish.

There is also culture displayed by dolphins, with many tricks, survival techniques, social interaction and rituals, and games handed down generation to generation.

Dolphins have also evolved a particularly liberal approach to sexual behaviour. Homosexual and interspecies (ie. bottlenoses and porpoises) sexual relations have been observed. They have even made sexual advances on whales and humans in the past. Additionally, dolphins have been generally observed utilising foreplay; a trick that even some humans are yet to develop.

Dolphins also have a darker side that is reminiscent of a certain ape-like being. Dolphins have been spotted killing for fun.

Dead porpoises and other cetaceans have been found washed up on British beaches, and scientists have come to the conclusion that they were killed by Bottlenose dolphins. The porpoise is neither a threat nor a food rival to the bottlenose, so scientists can only conclude that they did it for fun. It’s not an isolated incident. Mark Cotter of Okeanis in California spotted groups of dolphins hunting down porpoises, ramming them, and then drowning them. In one attack, a group of ten dolphins battered a porpoise to death. What Cotter found most shocking is how two stayed behind to play with the corpse before pushing it towards his boat.

Cotter commented that, "It was almost like they said: 'We're done playing with it, here you go'."

Conversely, dolphins have demonstrated their playful and helpful nature on numerous occasions. Alongside helping each other, dolphins display a natural connection to whales.

There was a case recently in New Zealand where two whales had become beached in shallow water. A team of scientists had been attempting to guide the creatures back to the sea, but to no avail. They were about to give up when Moko, a bottlenose dolphin known in the area for playing with humans, showed up and began seemingly speaking to the whales.

"I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin," said conservation officer Malcolm Smith, "but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea."

In the case of human-dolphin interaction, there have been a number of cases where dolphin pods have saved humans from shark attacks and other dangers.

There have been communication attempts with dolphins. Dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz is using an iPad in an attempt to create a symbolic language with dolphins.

“For several years, we’ve recognized that part of the problem in creating an artificial language between humans and dolphins has been the speed of acquisition of the human brain; it’s just not up to competing (with that of the dolphin).”

Kassewitz said that one of the main problems is that a dolphin’s “acoustic range is so broad and ours is so limited, and our speed to react to their sound is so slow, I think we were just plain boring.”

He intends to create a language based symbols and sounds that correlate to objects and concepts which could not only work as a dolphin-human communicator, but as a universal translator.

Another project between Denise Herzing of the Wild Dolphin Project and Thad Starner, an AI researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology that generates real time responses to dolphins, thus bringing the opportunity for true two way communication closer.

Named Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), the device seeks to create a language with the dolphins that uses sounds that dolphins use to communicate in the wild. They also intend to discover basic units of communication between dolphins. However, this is no small feat.

"We don't even know if dolphins have words," Herzing said. "We could use their signals, if we knew them. We just don't."

That said, judging by the very one-way relationship that humans maintain with dolphins, we may not want to communicate, unless we are prepared to take a steady stream of abuse.

As a result of poorly enforced fishing regulation and increased pollution, an estimated 300,000 dolphins and porpoises die annually at human hands. In addition to that, the Yangtze River Dolphin is now classified as “functionally extinct” after mass pollution, river renovation, and increased traffic down the Yangtze has all but wiped out the Chinese dolphin, along with most of the fish it feeds on.

There are also still dolphin drives, where dolphins are rounded up and either captured or killed for food, or to be placed in capitivity. There are even reports of annual wholesale slaughter at a cove in Tiji, Japan, which was recently the subject of a feature length documentary by filmmaker Louie Psihoyos.

The result of a dolphin drive. Courtesy of Erik Cristensen.

Even the dolphin drives with the purpose of capturing dolphins for zoos and aquariums are not without casualty. The process involves herding dolphins with boats before hoisting them out of the water by their tails. Quite often, dolphins can become so afraid during the process that the level of panic can induce heart attacks.

If dolphins indeed do have an intelligence comparable to us, then those that survive and become amusements at aquariums or part of a dolphin therapy program must endure a level of suffering comparable to a person being thrown into jail without a trial for the rest of their days.

"The very traits that make dolphins interesting to study," says Marino, "make confining them in captivity unethical."

She also pointed out that dolphins have a natural roaming area of 100 square miles. In captivity, it is about 0.001% of this.

Is this mere anthropomorphism? Or is it time that man got over the ego of intelligence, and recognised and respected the innate intelligence demonstrated by dolphins, orcas and other animals?

Personally, I feel Douglas Adams had it right all along:

"On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

Source: http://www.asktheexperts.org.uk

Top 10 biggest mistakes in History of Science

2012-12-30T02:22:00.000-08:00

Scientists generate ideas and continue work for it to convert it in working model everyday, scientists are not always right. We really put them up on a pedestal, though, don't we? We quote scientists as experts, buy things if they're "scientifically proven" to work better…but scientists are human, too. It's just not fair to expect perfection out of them, is it? But come on, can't we at least ask for a reasonable level of competency?

Let see Top 10 biggest mistakes by Scientist:

10. Alchemy

The idea of morphing lead into gold may seem a little crazy these days, but take a step back and pretend you live in ancient or medieval times.

Pretend you never took high-school chemistry and know nothing about elements or atomic numbers or the periodic table. What you do know is that you've seen chemical reactions that seemed pretty impressive: substances change colours, spark, explode, evaporate, grow, shrink, make strange smells - all before your eyes.

Now, if chemistry can do all that, it seems pretty reasonable that it might be able to turn a dull, drab, grey metal into a bright, shiny yellow one, right? In the hopes of getting that job done, alchemists sought out the mythical "philosopher's stone," a substance that they believed would amplify their alchemical powers.

They also spent a lot of time looking for the "elixir of life." Never found that, either.

More on chemistry.

9. Heavier Objects Fall Faster

OK, trick question: do heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones? Today, we all know that they don't, but it's understandable how Aristotle could have gotten this one wrong.

It wasn't until Galileo came along in the late 16th century that anyone really tested this out. Though he most likely did not, as legend holds, drop weights from the tower of Pisa, Galileo did perform experiments to back up his theory that gravity accelerated all objects at the same rate. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton took us a step further, describing gravity as the attraction between two objects: on Earth, the most important being the attraction between one very massive object (our planet) and everything on it.

A couple of hundred years later, Albert Einstein's work would take us in a whole new direction, viewing gravity as the curvature that objects cause in space-time. And it's not over. To this day, physicists are ironing out the kinks and trying to find a theory that works equally well for the macroscopic, microscopic and even subatomic. Good luck with that.

Find out more about Newton's Laws of Motion with our Newton game. No, seriously...it's fun!

Learn what it would be like if there were no gravity on Earth.

8. Phlogiston

What? You've never heard of phlogiston? Well, don't beat yourself up about it, because it's not real.

Phlogiston, proposed in 1667 by Johann Joachim Becher, was another element to add to the list (earth, water, air, fire and sometimes ether); it wasn't fire itself, but the stuff fire was made of. All combustible objects contained this stuff, Becher insisted, and they released it when they burned.

Scientists bought into the theory and used it to explain a few things about fire and burning: why things burned out (must have run out of phlogiston), why fire needed air to burn (air must absorb phlogiston), why we breathe (to get rid of phlogiston in the body).

Today, we know that we breathe to get oxygen to support cellular respiration, that objects need oxygen (or an oxidizing agent) to burn and that phlogiston just doesn't exist.

More on fire.

7. The Rain Follows the Plough

If only it were so easy. It's actually kind of shocking that humanity held on to the idea that land would become fertile through farming for so long. Didn't anyone look around and see that all this farming of arid land wasn't doing much?

So much for observation.

In reality, this quite erroneous theory (popular during the American and Australian expansions) may have stayed alive in part because it did sometimes work - or at least it seemed to work.

What we know now is that the plough (also spelt plow) wasn't actually bringing the rain; long-term weather patterns were. Arid regions (like the American West, for example) go through long-term cyclical droughts, followed by cycles of wetter years. Wait long enough and you'll get a few wet ones.

There's just one problem: wait a few more years and all the rain just goes away - only now, you've got a civilization to support.

More on How Weather Works.

6. The Earth Is Only 6,000 Years Old

Once upon a time, the Bible was considered a scientific work. Really. People just kind of assumed it was accurate, even when it didn't make much sense.

Take the age of the planet, for example.

Back in the 17th century, a religious scholar took a hard look at the Bible and estimated that creation happened around 4004 B.C. (you know, approximately). Add in nearly 2,000 more years to get to the 18th century, when Western, Bible-reading geologists started to realize that the Earth was constantly shifting and changing, and you get about 6,000 years.

Hmm...those biblical scholars may have been a bit off. Current estimates, based on radioactive dating, place the age of the planet at around, oh, 4.5 BILLION years.

By the 19th century, geologists started putting the pieces together to realize that if geologic change was happening as slowly as they thought it was, the Earth had to be WAY older than they had thought. The emergence of radioactive dating in the early 20th century would eventually prove them right.

More on carbon dating.

5. The Atom Is the Smallest Particle in Existence

Believe it or not, we weren't actually all that stupid in ancient times. The idea that matter was composed of smaller, individual units (atoms) has been around for thousands of years - but the idea that there was something smaller than that was a bit harder to come by.

It wasn't until the early 20th century, when physicists like J.J. Thompson, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick and Neils Bohr came along, that we started to sort out the basics of particle physics: protons, neutrons and electrons and how they make an atom what it is. Since then, we've come a long way: on to charmed quarks and Higgs bosons, anti-electrons and muon neutrinos. Let's hope it doesn't get too much more complicated than that.

4. DNA: Not So Important

DNA was discovered in 1869, but for a long time, it was kind of the unappreciated assistant: doing all the work with none of the credit, always overshadowed by its flashier protein counterparts.

Even after experiments in the middle part of the 20th century offered proof that DNA was indeed the genetic material, many scientists held firmly that proteins, not DNA, were the key to heredity. DNA, they thought, was just too simple to carry so much information.

It wasn't until Watson and Crick published their all-important double-helical model of the structure of DNA in 1953 that biologists finally started to understand how such a simple molecule could do so much. Perhaps they were confusing simplicity with elegance.

More on DNA.

3. Germs in Surgery

Laugh or cry (take your pick), but up until the late 19th century, doctors didn't really see the need to wash their hands before picking up a scalpel.

The result? A lot of gangrene. Most early-19th century doctors tended to attribute contagion to "bad air" and blamed disease on imbalances of the "four humors" (that's blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, in case you weren't familiar).

"Germ theory" (the revolutionary idea that germs cause disease) had been around for a while, but it wasn't till Louis Pasteur got behind it in the 1860s that people started listening. It took a while, but doctors like Joseph Lister eventually connected the dots and realized that hospitals and doctors had the potential to pass on life-threatening germs to patients.

Lister went on to pioneer the idea of actually cleaning wounds and using disinfectant. Remember him next time you reach for the Purell.

Learn how long a germ can live.

2. The Earth Is the Centre of the Universe

Chalk it up to humanity's collectively huge ego. Second-century astronomer Ptolemy's (blatantly wrong) Earth-cantered model of the solar system didn't just stay in vogue for 20 or 30 years; it stuck around for a millennium and then some.

It wasn't until almost 1,400 years later that Copernicus published his heliocentric (sun-cantered) model in 1543. Copernicus wasn't the first to suggest that the we orbited the sun, but his theory was the first to gain traction.

Ninety years after its publication, the Catholic Church was still clinging to the idea that we were at the centre of it all and duking it out with Galileo over his defence of the Copernican view. Old habits die hard.

1. The Circulatory System

You don't have to be a doctor to know how important the heart is...but back in ancient Greece, you could be a doctor and STILL have no idea how important the heart is.

Back then, doctors like second-century Greek physician Galen believed (no kidding) that the liver (not the heart) circulated blood (along with some bile and phlegm), while the heart (really) circulated "vital spirit" (whatever that is).

How could they be so wrong? It gets worse.

Galen hypothesized that the blood moved in a back-and-forth motion and was consumed by the organs as fuel. What's more, these ideas stuck around for a very long time. How long?

It wasn't until 1628 that English physician William Harvey let us in on our heart's big secret. His "An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals" took a while to catch on, but a few hundred years later, it seems beyond common sense - perhaps the ultimate compliment for a scientific idea.

Source: Discovery Channel