Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
MIT Technology Review has an interview with an exec from a company making robots for Walmart: “Walmart’s new robots are loved by staff—and ignored by custome...
Nice piece from Kate Crawford in the New York Times about how predictive technologies used by Google and others go wrong when applied outside the context the...
Alex Tabarrok writes at Marginal Revolution: “Should we care if the human race goes extinct?”
The noted television popular science educator Bill Nye has a new book in which he looks at the evidence for evolution: Undeniable: Evolution and the Science ...
Many futurists and not a few science fiction writers hold the idea that computer technology is developing toward a point where artificial intelligence will b...
In Nautilus David Grinspoon interviews science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his recent work, 2312 and the disconnect between technological optim...
Popular Mechanics asks, “How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?”. The basic problem is that a multigenerational star voyage requires t...
The Bad Astronomer explains this week’s new Kepler-assisted astronomy findings: “The Sky May Be Filled with Earth-like Planets”.
Julie Lesnik is a biological anthropologist who has done a lot of research on insect consumption, by ancient hominins, living humans and living non-human pri...
Lots of readers have asked me to react to this Telegraph article: “Sir David Attenborough: Humans have stopped evolving”:
The Guardian covers a story on risks to humanity: “How are humans going to become extinct?” The occasion for the story seems to be Cambridge University’s des...
Why am I linking this story in the NY Times about the extreme levels of pollution in Beijing? (“Pollution Is Radically Changing Childhood in Chinas Cities”)
Jeff Wise in Slate has an essay about “World population may actually start declining, not exploding”.
Adam Mann in Wired covers Elon Musk’s ideas about putting people on Mars: “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony”.
Popular Mechanics has an article that goes through some of the basics of space flight design principles: “What would a starship actually look like?”
My name is Corey Hayes. I am in my final year of Anthropology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. My Minor's English, and I've been told I have a bent...
When it comes to the long term future of humanity, I’m fundamentally an optimist. But The Atlantic has an interview with Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford Uni...
Matthew Herper is a science and medicine contributing writer at Forbes.com. He has just written a series of posts themed as “Gene Week”, focusing on advances...
Alan Boyle:
Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week:
Because of my work on recent human evolution, people ask me a lot – I mean, an awful lot – what our evolution will be like in the future.
The coming trend in e-books: video.
And now for something completely different:
Quinn Norton started wearing a vibrating compass to her leg to experiment with sense augmentation: “My New Sense Organ”
Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is headed by Nick Bostrum, who gave an interview to Time writer Eben Harrell:
Robots with bones:
I was trying to find out more about recent research predicting a relative convergence of racial features in future generations (but I don't know anything abo...
John Zogby polled Americans on whether they’d like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or “e...
I’m featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she’s put together our work on recent acceleration wi...
A couple of months ago, the Washington Post ran an article by Michael Chorost, who has written a book about his experience with a cochlear implant. I meant t...
John Timmer was at the World Science Fest’s panel on What It Means To Be Human, and gives a partial blow-by-blow. Usually these kinds of panels don’t bother ...
I've been telling people this week that there is some sense to which the evolutionary future will be determined by the cultural impact of technological chan...
UPDATE (2007/10/28): I wrote this post last year (the original datestamp is October 18, 2006), to critique some reports about what sounded like crazy future...
Alan Boyle covers a talk by Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science that augurs changes to come in the publication of pop science:
A recent paper in Cognitive Science by Nuñez and Sweetster has evoked several interesting strains of blog commentary. The paper is about the cognitio...
Wired has a short article by Annalee Newitz about recent evolutionary changes and their implications for futurists:
Regular readers know my interest in future evolution. Of course in some senses the future is unknowable, especially over the evolutionary time scale.
I just couldn't see these two items on Slashdot without connecting them together.
The current "Carnival of the Future" is featuring this post from a few days ago, as a lead-off to the topic of future evolution in humans. Check it out for ...
I've written about some future predictions for human evolution before. A couple of readers sent me this article from Science (subscription required) by Mich...
MSNBC has posted a new entry in its series on "future evolution," this one covering possible scenarios for the evolution of our species in the future. This ...
MSNBC is running a series on the "future of evolution," featuring Peter Ward's book Future Evolution and others. Today (5/4/05) was my last lecture day in m...
An opinion column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Vincent G. Barnes (Friday, Feb. 11, 2005) makes an interesting argument about the uses of genetic en...