Stuart Kim, PhD, Stanford University professor of developmental biology and genetics Prevailing theory of aging challenged by Stanford University Medical School researchers. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage similar to rust. The Stanford findings suggest specific genetic instructions drive the process. If they are right, science might one day find ways of switching the signals off and halting or even reversing aging.

A few people have asked me what I thought of Karl Schroeder's recent article at Worldchanging, "No Time for the Singularity."

The stated goal of the SENS Challenge was to demonstrate that "SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." Whether or not this was accomplished by a given submission was to be determined by a panel of judges, and the final judges were self-selected from a large pool of people offered positions on the panel. Persons with relevant expertise were not included in the final panel of judges, leaving only those who know little or nothing of the existing learned debate within gerontology and life extension research. We have long objected to these and other aspects related to the judging of this challenge, and they have given us little confidence in its overall structure.

Aubrey de Grey thinks he knows how to defeat aging. He's brilliant, but is he nuts?

An Engineering Approach to Curing Aging

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

Channel 4 Documentary following the revolutionary life-extension and immortality ideas of this somewhat eccentric scientist, Dr. Aubrey de Grey. This show is all about the radical ideas of a Cambridge biomedical gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey who believes that, within the next 20-30 years, we could extend life indefinitely by addressing seven major factors in the aging process.

Despite all the doom and gloom, there is some inspiration in Bill Joy. To end this post I’ve embedded a very short clip of Joy talking a little bit about his search for world changing green technologies.

Illustrative table of Who's Who in Singulary

Consciousness seems mystical and inextricably linked to organisms. What happens in the cerebral cortex that turns objective information into subjective experience—that turns chemical and neuronal activity in the mouth and nose into the taste of watermelon? pressure waves into the sound of an oboe? We don’t know, but we will someday. No one argues that consciousness arises from anything but biological processes in the brain.