Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain

Here comes the Matrix.

It may someday be possible to use brain technology to learn to play the piano, reduce mental stress, or even master kung fu with little or no conscious effort. Lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe says in a statement: “Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning.”

from The Atlantic.

Source: The Atlantic

Tempering my excitement about Google Glass

joestracci:

1. I fail to see how wearing this technology on your face means it’s out of the way.

2. There’s some incredible Orwellian doublespeak at work here, e.g., technology that “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t help you to explore your world at all. It helps Google to explore your world. And this notion of “your” world. What does that even mean? I think Google has flat out given up on the idea of connecting people, and instead, has decided to help them curate their lives, and to play to the collective bloated ego, started replacing “life” with “world.”

And I’m glad that Google Glass will help to put me back in the moment that it took me out of.

(Sidenote: Is anyone else totally creeped out by the thought of a world where Google Glass has caught on and there are just herds of people standing around in the streets blankly staring straight ahead, and from afar, it looks like they’re all looking at each other, but everyone’s focused right in on the foreground, so up close their eyes look almost crossed, because they’re staring at what’s happening on (in?) their Google Glass?)

via Daring Fireball

futurescope: The Potential of Synthetic Biology in Space A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work. […] [via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]
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futurescope:

The Potential of Synthetic Biology in Space

A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work. […]

[via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]

(via futurescope)