Why the Dyna-Vision G1 Android Telemedicine App can only be used by licensed physicians???

Let us assume that you are a technological early adopter, a maker, a hacker, a geek. Your software/hardware skills and experiences are much better than the bulk of licensed physicians. You also have a G1. Now imagine a mobile application/gadget-in-a-belt-pouch that is the most advanced telemedicine solution in the market. With this application/gadget you were…

Superstruct launches with Superthreats, a forecasting game for the masses!

If you are particularly fascinated by the future and enjoy playing games the following is something you should be involved and interested in. Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game started today with Superthreat scenarios by 2019. Game founder Jane McGonigal writes in a message sent to the members of Facebook Group the dedicated…

Just ordered my 23andMe kit for $399+shipping!

It was time for me to enter personally into the age of commercialized-personalized genetics/genomics and not just to talk about it! New price, new customers! Here is my suggestion to the sales department of 23andMe! 23andMe Democratizes Personal Genomics With New Analytical Platform

Petabyte Age Wiredesque lesson on what science can learn from Google

I argued many times here that biology based biotechnology is the next information technology but in order to do so, biotech should harness good IT patterns and mimic its massive computing practices to handle the enormous amount of constantly accumulating data. Often this trend could be summarized in a simple way: keep your eye on…

23andWe follows 23andMe: First generation of Consumer-Enabled Research

Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe. From BusinessWire: “23andWe marks a new approach to genetics research. By directly involving 23andMe customers in the company’s research projects, the goal is to conduct large-scale studies powered by a web-based community of diverse individuals…

Short Twitter/FriendFeed chat on life extension

I asked the following question on Twitter recently: “A question for all of you Twitterers: Are you for, against, or just neutral on healthy life extension? How long would you like to live? Why?” I have to tell you it’s hard to give good links to the whole chat without noise. Maybe on FriendFeed. To…

Embedding the Future: the X2 Project goes public!

With the public launch of the X2 project, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang realized one of his dreams. Alex is the research director of The Institute for the Future (IFTF), an independent nonprofit research group headquartered in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. He writes: The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of…

How to predict the future via Twitter: Google invests in Navigenics

Wow, I guess it’s time for me to move into the stock market business! Here’s the story via David Bradley’s tweet: Julie Kent, Search Engine Journal, April 21st, 2008: Google Wants to Index Genetic Information, Invests in Second DNA Start-Up In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening…

Life extension people are happy: keep living, please!

I found this picture of Aubrey de Grey with his book Ending Aging on his head at the BIL conference in Quinn Norton‘s Flickr Stream. Quinn Norton is a bodyhacker technophiliac journalist photographer. Robust, healthy lifespan extension can easily be interpreted as an extreme body-, life- and biohack so no wonder that more and more…

Biotech DIY for aging/life extension research: the double future?

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – said Alan Kay, computer legend in 1971. Recently I had a comment dialogue with Chris on whether state-supported research or industrial business enterprises can (or should) lead to big progress in robust and healthy life extension technologies. Besides the government and corporation coin…

First DIY RFID experience: Arduino controlled Parallax reader

In the last couple of weeks I became heavily interested in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology probably because the dangerous idea of all pervasive computing and the opportunities to build sg from the bottom-up. So here is a how-to to my first installed low frequency, read-only RFID system hopefully followed by a more juicy stuff…

The conditions of a mass biotech DIY movement

The idea of doing biological experiments with current biotechnological methods and conducting research projects at home is quite new. There are already many names in use referring to the same concept: bioDIY, home biology, biotech DIY, garage biology. We have a detailed case example which can be considered as the first registered, high profile biotech…

Biotechies at O’Reilly ETech, March 3 – 6, San Diego

The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) is on and this year they had a growing number of biotech related sessions. Fellow SciFoo Campers like Hugh Rienhoff and Timo Hannay, Makers like Phil Torrone and Limor Fried, Brain Hackers like Ed Boyden are visiting and many more.

The Spittoon: the eminent corporate blog of 23andMe and Consumer Enabled Research

The personal genomics service 23andMe just launched publicly a corporate blog called The Spittoon that has been internally up for a few weeks. It is a new chapter in biotech corporate blogging. Just like the web page of 23andMe, The Spittoon’s WordPress blog platform, the concept and design is excellent: amongst others you can find…

The Bubble City Experience: a contemporary paranerd classic

When I first wrote about Aaron Swartz’s unfinished nervous nerd novel, Bubble City, I had just been through chapter 1 and 2. But at the Dallas International Airport, waiting for the London connection on December 22 I had no choice but quickly finish the other 9 chapters posted so far under the pressure of the…

Boo, our XO laptop shipped to our home and its twin to a child somewhere

In November we participated in the “Give One Get One” program in which people can donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one. Yesterday we got ours, named Boo and Anna recorded the first moments of Boo at our home and published it on her blog Videovoo with detailed…

“Give One Get One” starts today at the One Laptop per Child project!

I’ve just ordered 2 more laptops, although we already have 3, why? Because starting today you (in the U.S. or Canada) can donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one for $399+24.95 for shipping. And Anna, the better half of my family in New Orleans, alarmed and convinced me…

Tim O’ Reilly at Nature: science meets bored tech-savvyness to find new things

As a biotech geek blogger and occasionally Make contributor, who stands at the intersection of science and technology with a (life) science bias, it is more and more exciting to see how the attractive brands of the 2 sides are building the bridge and creating a shared channel. So far, the biggest manifestation of this…

Will Nature Network join to the Google Gang to use Open Social?

Google will launch this Thursday a new project, called Open Social, a set of software tools for developers to create applications for multiple social networking sites. The standards are accepted so far by Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, and not accepted by MySpace and obviously Facebook (the whole project could be interpreted…

Thoughts on Open Source Hardware at the Austin Maker Faire

For open source hardware you need open source software and a modular hardware design that makes building customized hardware just as easy as writing software or web apps. In order to make the idea mainstream you need to commercialize it and that’s what exactly Bug Labs is planning to do. (Again, my bioDIY brain says,…

Off to the Austin Maker Faire to experience the future

The domesticated biotech future according to Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, old school physics hero conceptualized his rather philosophical thoughts on future biotechnology in a visionary essay in The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007. What is surprising to me that according to Dyson “our biotech future” is centered around genetic engineering only, and there is not…