Future Salon

'Miracle mouse' can grow back lost limbs - Sunday Times - Times Online

This one is going around like wildfire. If tru rightly so:

Link: 'Miracle mouse' can grow back lost limbs - Sunday Times - Times Online.

SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

Scientists please hurry up, I already have a missing tooth and all these fillings I would like to replace with real ivory :-)

Software Radio Future Salon Video

The video of the Software Radio Future Salon with Matt Ettus is now available at the Internet Archive. I was actually asked last Friday, when this one will be available and now it is. The first time at a Future Salon that code was shown, as well as circuits, as well as a hardware demo was done. Thanks Matt.

Full House at Poetry of Brains

Lots of interest for tomorrow's Future Salon: Poetry of Brains with Berkeley Professor Walter J. Freeman. I hope he will recite the poem he sent us.

Come early if you don't want to sit on the floor. You can get a guarantied seat if you are so kind and be the camera person tomorrow night. As many of you know Wayne went back to Colorado and is enjoying the Webcast from there. Ryan is at a concert. I would really appreciate if someone would step forward or actually step be behind the camera for this evening. Let me know.

Post additional questions or insights to the Wiki page where we will start the discussion from. 

We will Webcast the event. Point your media player here: http://mfile.akamai.com/14947/sdp/finnern.com/salon_08_2005.mov
IRC chat as always: Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #futuresalon

More information at my last post.

Poetry of Brains Wiki

This Friday 19th of August is Future Salon: Poetry of Brains with Berkeley Professor Walter J. Freeman. (Please RSVP http://tinyurl.com/73g8w)

Make yourself familiar with the topic by checking out the Poetry of Brains Wiki page, where people are posting questions as well as interesting links to background information. Shape the Future Salon with your input too. Everyone can change the Wiki page by selecting the edit button, update the text and save. (In the Wiki help page you find a nice little description on how to do it.)

Questions posted already are:

Biotechnology Milestones

The Long Now Foundation has a Biotechnology Milestones calendar up that shows a timeline of the history of biotechnology discovery.

It is another beautiful display of accelerating change. 56 milestones are listed. 28 of them have happened in the last 50 years, 10 in the last 10 years. It is a bummer, that you can't zoom out, so you could get the full picture of the hockey stick.

The latest milestone I wasn't even aware of: Rethinking RNA Scientists are forced to rethink their view of RNA when they discover how important small pieces of RNA are in controlling many cell functions.

Poetry of Brains Future Salon

I am thrilled to announce that in the spirit of this years Artificial Intelligence Accelerating Change conference, I've convinced my long time mentor, UC Berkeley Professor Walter J. Freeman to come and talk to us about his neurobiological study of the Mind (and A.I.)  Dr. Freeman embodies the highly interdisciplinary, fully micro & macroscopic study of the single most important (and difficult?) question that has and IMHO will ever faced humankind: How do neurons make brains, brains make minds, minds make consciousness, (and collective consciousness make societies, and if we can repeat the grand experiment in silicon!)

Dr. Freeman knows a little bit about the subject: he earned his first degree in Physics from MIT, took a break to study electronics in the Navy during WWII, worked on mathematics at Hamilton College in N.Y., went on to earn a PhD in English & Philosophy from U. of Chicago - and topped it all off with a cum laude M.D. from Yale med school. He eventually joined the Cal faculty, where he has worked in the departments of Molecular & Cell Biology, Biophysics, and Bioengineering.