A team of UCLA scientists have found that Myelin (the fatty layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain) plays a critical role in determining intelligence. The amount of Myelin is largely genetically determined. And as you remember from one of my past columns, we're getting close to being able to genetically engineer humans to spec. Read the full article from Technology Review.

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I saw this the other day as I was Stumbling. Has to be one of the coolest gadgets ever! Tell me you don't want it!

H+ magazine, the first magazine devoted to the transhumanist crowd is out with a new edition. You can download it for free. And guess what's on page 3, a nice follow up to my last article. A company called Knome that provides personal, encrypted gene sequences, delivered to you on a memory stick. They even keep you updated with new anaylsis, letting you know what's happening on the forefront...read more

This week is part three in my future technology series and this week I'm going to talk a little bit about one of the scarier new technologies that is coming to maturity. That technology is 'GM' - genetic manipulation

The Human Genome Project was funded by Congress and launched in October 1990 and was completed on April 14, 2003. The goal was to completely sequence the human genome, and...read more

Last week I talked a bit about Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors per square inch was doubling every 24 months, and how the rate of doubling has itself been increasing. Today even that has become conservative. Two US groups have announced new breakthroughs in transistor design and memory storage in the past few weeks. Thomas Russell at the University of Massachusetts and...read more