Tech Page
I plan on putting links on this page to new and existing technology that I believe will be the biggest changers of human life. Many people think this stuff is just science fiction, or that I'm just a little crazy, but I'm staking my claim and I WILL say "I told you so." I can see the coming future, and I hope to show you how wonderful it will be too.
I also want to make it clear that I will mostly just be copying and pasting from other websites, but only the articles I think will be the most influential. I'll make sure to give credit and a link to where I got them.
Second Dose of Gene Therapy for Inherited Blindness Proves Safe in Animal Studies
ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2010) — Gene therapy for a severe inherited blindness, which produced dramatic improvements last year in 12 children and young
adults who received the treatment in a clinical trial, has cleared another hurdle. The same research team that conducted the human trial now reports that a study in animals has shown that a second injection of genes into the opposite, previously untreated eye is safe and effective, with no signs of interference from unwanted immune reactions following the earlier injection.
Makes you wonder why we don't here about these breakthroughs in the mass media.
And you thought I was just making this stuff up! Check this out via DVICE.com
Driverless car self-parks, more wizardry on the way
The days of driverless cars just got a whole lot closer. Volkswagen has now teamed up with Stanford University, plunking down $5.75 million to create the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory. To kick things off, the company showed off its robotic Passat, which not only drives itself but is now clever enough to parallel park on its own.
That Passat has gotten smarter since it finished second in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge, where robotic cars merged into moving traffic, negotiated busy intersections and avoided all kinds of obstacles.
This is not the only place this kind of research is going on — Nissan has some clever innovations underway, too. Soon, humans won't be allowed to drive cars.
Via CNET
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I get a lot of inspiration from my personal hero, the man, the myth, the legend, Ray Kurzweil! Check out his biography here. He knows his stuff! Be sure to read his latest book
The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
and here is a video
Sci-fi again becoming reality! This is a working product as you can see in this video. They won't give an exact time for it's release but I have no doubt that a company (maybe not Motorola) will have this on the market by next year. The guy holding the camera is kind of a dork, but I does demonstrate what it can do.
Just to remind everyone that we are right on track to have simple kinds of iRobot's in about 5 years.
Here is another article posted on DVICE.com. Algae into biofuel! Not the same system I've been talking about, but still way cool. I had been talking about green algae that eats CO2 and pee's high octane fuel, but I'll take them both.
You might have heard about harnessing the power of algae to make biofuels, but the team at Joule Biotechnologies decided started from scratch — by redesigning the organisms themselves.
They genetically engineered organisms that use photosynthesis to directly create the molecules that form the basis of diesel. Their SolarConverter array system suspends these organisms in a solution within a light-permeable structure that looks something like a solar panel array. Point these arrays at the sun, and the critters turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into biodiesel. They expect their first plant to be online by 2011.
Unlike traditional biofuels, like ethanol, the SolarConverter requires no farmland to grow the corn or other feedstock. In fact, the sunnier and more "useless" the land, the better.
Beyond fueling long-distance trucks, you could picture this system sitting beside large-scale solar farms or wind farms. Joule-biodiesel-powered generators could provide the green energy needed to cover the times of day when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow.