Linkroll

• Center to investigate plant cells for better biomass fuelsEurekAlert! - Biology
  (Penn State) Cutting edge approaches and methodology employed by plant and molecular biologists, chemists, physicists, material scientists, computational modelers and engineers will be applied to plant cells in the newly funded Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation, a Department of Energy, Energy Frontier Research Center at Penn State.
• OPEC 2.0 - AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth ... (Tim Wu/New York Times)Techmeme
  Tim Wu / New York Times: OPEC 2.0  —  AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy.  A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.
• Mapping Out Future Of Intelligent RobotsScienceDaily: Latest Science News
  The field of robotics could be poised for a breakthrough, leading to a new generation of intelligent machines capable of taking on multiple tasks and moving out of the factory into the home and general workplace. The great success of robots so far has been in automating repetitive tasks in process control and assembly, yielding dramatic cuts in production, but the next step towards cognition and more human-like behaviour has proved elusive. It has been difficult to make robots that can truly learn and adapt to unexpected situations in the way humans can, while it has been equally challenging trying to develop a machine capable of moving smoothly like any animal. There is still no robot capable of walking properly without jerky slightly unbalanced movements.
• Brad Templeton on Robocars : great minds think alikeNext Big Future
  
• Intel: Human and computer intelligence will merge in 40 yearsTechnut News
  
• Stanford study of aging supports developmental drift model: If right gene therapy is the main anti-aging weaponNext Big Future
  
• Very high temperature gas-cooled reactor could burn 65% of uraniumNext Big Future
  
• Adult stem cells activated in mammalian brainEurekAlert! - Breaking News
  Adult stem cells originate in a different part of the brain than is commonly believed, and with proper stimulation they can produce new brain cells to replace those lost to disease or injury, a study by UC Irvine scientists has shown.
• Best-Selling Futurist To Run For U.S. SenateOn Singularity
  Professional futurist and Future Blogger regular Jack Uldrich has announced that he is running for United States Senator in the state of Minnesota as a candidate for the Minnesota Independence Party nomination.[link]
• Gregory Stock argues for publicly funded life extension programsOn Singularity
  Gregory Stock is a biotech entrepreneur and the director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. At the Methuselah Foundation symposium at UCLA, he made an appeal for a publicly funded effort to fight aging through engineering efforts in biomedical technologies.[link]
• Next big VC market: life extension?On Singularity
  Life extension is a growing market and could be the next significant industry targeted by Venture Capitalists and private investment as alternative energy and clean tech eventually wane.[link]
• Micheal West unveils stem cell databaseOn Singularity
  Michael West has served on the BioTime Board of Directors since 2002 and has extensive academic and business experience in embryonic stem cell research. Recently, he unveiled an online open sourced International Embryome Initiative to help identify the hundreds of cell types that can be made from embryonic stem cells.[link]