SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time. more>>>

A new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips using tiny structures called semiconducting nanowires are closer to reality after a key discovery by researchers at IBM, Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles. more>>>

NASA is believed to have found strong evidence that there was once life on Mars.

Scientists working on a meteorite discovered in 1984 told the Spaceflight Now website that mineral microstructures in the rock were the remains of magnetic bacteria.

Back in 1996, NASA reported that it had found what looked like tiny fossils in the Allen Hills (ALH) 84001 meteorite, which crashed in Antarctica around 13,000 years ago. But critics argued that the shapes were formed by non-biological processes or that the rock was contaminated. more>>>

Scientists at the University of Glasgow, in collaboration with colleagues from Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton and York universities, have developed technology which will help microchip designers create future integrated circuits. more>>>

It looks more like the Starship Enterprise sinking in the sea – but this huge vertical vessel could be the future of ocean exploration.

Called the SeaOrbiter, the huge 51m (167ft) structure is set to be the world’s first vertical ship allowing man a revolutionary view of life below the surface.

Although currently only a prototype its inventor Jacques Rougerie thinks his international oceanographic station will soon be setting sail. more>>>

Here’s a list of articles that have recently caught my attention on the subject of life extension. I have posted them on my Blogging Life Extension website.

Articles include -

Synthetic Biology

Magnetic Nanoparticles To Simultaneously Diagnose, Monitor And Treat

Synthetic Biology Will Rival the IT Industry in the Next Ten Years

Law Seeks to Ban Misuse of Genetic Testing

Medibots: The World’s Smallest Surgeons

and many more!

Click here for an interesting Associated Press article documenting how some teachers are beginning incorporate cell phone usage into their classes in imaginative ways.

Click here to read an Associated Press article detailing the status of the growing Chinese space program.

In his talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford., examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design. Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House, October 2009

Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction – PART 1 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.

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Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction – PART 2 from Ethics of the New Biosciences on Vimeo.

This book has been highly recommended to me.

I just finished reading more about it plus its recommendations on Amazon.com.

I recommend that you do at least the same by clicking on the following title of the book – The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

We have reached another great milestone to announce today. Blogging the Singularity logged over 1,000 readers yesterday!!!

As awareness of accelerating technological change is embraced by more people humanity will be in a better position to cope.

I would like to thank all of our readers for sharing our passion. It has been an honor to share my hobby with you.

You can participate in the technology explosion by visiting wearethesingularity.com and donating a pithy $25 to help fund a feature-length documentary about emerging technologies.

I haven’t updated the numbers on the site but donations have been received and progress has been made. I recently shot an interview with Chris from Haptek Technologies about their haptic software. I also shot interviews with Max More and Natasha Vita-More in Austin.

Donations go toward the film budget and will mainly be used to travel to the coasts to interview leading technologists.

This is an experiment to see if crowd sourcing works.

I’m asking our die-hard fans to donate at least $25 to become producers of this film. I believe that 1,000 BTS fans can do this but you can’t leave it to the next person – it’s up to you. There is a simple paypal button to donate at wearethesingularity.com. Every penny will go into making this film happen.

I wouldn’t ask you to do this if is wasn’t worth it. The fact that I have stuck with Blogging the Singularity for 2 1/2 years should prove my tenacity. In that time I have produced three feature-length video projects, two of which are documentaries.

Here is a reel from 2007 to give you an idea of the quality of my work:

Via Engadget:
Never mind that silly name: ProFORMA (which stands for ‘Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition’, if you must know) is some cool system that turns any ordinary webcam into a powerful 3D scanning tool. In fact, a camera is pretty much all you need for some “on-line” modeling action — no laser or green screen necessary — meaning the 3D models are constructed on the spot while you slowly rotate the objects, although ProFORMA can also track fast moving objects as shown in the demo video after the break. Fans of machinima should also look into this for their next Warhammer drama series, but don’t say you heard it from us.

Last month, Matt Williams, an adjunct professor at the University of Akron, opened an e-mail from his bosses about the school’s new rules for hiring and was “absolutely blown away,” he says, “when I saw the reference to collecting DNA samples.”

The university was saying it could ask new workers for a DNA sample — to run background checks. But Williams knew his DNA could also be used to discover the most private of information about his health — like his genetic risk for cancer, heart disease or mental illness.

To Williams, who taught in the School of Communications, it was one more insult in the hard life of an adjunct professor. (He’s an officer in a national organization, New Faculty Majority, that advocates for adjunct professors.) He says adjuncts at the University of Akron sign new contracts from year to year, so he expected to be counted as a new worker the next time his contract came up.

So he quit. more>>>

It’s called the anthropic universe: a world set up so that human beings could eventually emerge. So many physical constants, so many aspects of our solar system, so much seems to be finally tuned for our benefit. But was it? We hear from Professor Martin Rees, Paul Davies and Frank Tipler, as well as many others, about one of the ultimate questions.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: ABC Radio National, this is The Science Show, and in the wake of Charles Darwin’s birthday on the 12th it may be a good time to ask how come we’re here, why is the world apparently so exquisitely organised for our convenience? Here’s a special view from my friend and colleague Martin Redfern.

Brandon Carter: The fact that we are here tells us something about the universe.

Paul Davies: The laws of physics are almost fine tuned to encourage matter and energy to develop along certain pathways of evolution leading to greater and greater complexity and ultimately to consciousness.

David Deutsch: One has to ask why is it that those choices were made?

Martin Rees: One is trying to answer Einstein’s famous question, did God have any choice in the creation of the world?

Owen Gingerich: In so many ways, the universe is made with unusual characteristics that are exactly the ones to make thoughtful life possible.

Martin Redfern: Anyone who has looked out into the vastness of the universe is filled with awe. Anyone who has glimpsed the beauty and complexity of life on Earth feels a sense of wonder. We don’t need to be poets, prophets or physicists to share those feelings and speculate on the purpose of it all. It’s a field where science can seem to touch on the domain of, but since the time of Galileo it has been an uneasy meeting ground. Today, atheist reductionists try to reduce the cosmic story to a series of random accidents and religious fundamentalists try to show it as evidence of some sort of intelligent creator external to the universe. I, like many scientists and thinkers, have never been happy with either of these extremes and this is my personal journey through the maze of cosmotheology, guided by some of the best minds in the field.

Our starting point is the simple fact that we’re here at all, staring out into the universe with that sense of wonderment. It’s an observation that has some profound implications. In 1974, Brandon Carter, a cosmologist at the Paris Observatory, gave it a name – the Anthropic Principle. more>>>

Spray-on skin that heals burns in days, not weeks, is set to begin clinical trials in the US.

Avita Medical’s ReCell technology uses a postage stamp-sized piece of skin from a patient to heal a page’s-worth of burned skin.

The technology could save the lives of burn victims by reducing the risk of deadly infections.

“We need to get these burn wounds closed quickly,” says John Geisel, a scientist at Avita Medical developing the technology. “Until we do, these wounds lose blood and a patient runs the risk of a life-threatening infection.” more>>>