My mind. Enhanced.

For this post, I'd like to provide a bit of history behind nanotechnology. In 1959, a physicist named Richard Feynman gave a lecture entitled "There's Plenty Room at the Bottom" at CalTech; this lecture was considered a seminal moment in the history of nanotechnology as new concepts and terms were formed for the upcoming scientific study. So, through his breakthrough ideas, Feynman proposed an overview of manufacturing techniques at the nanometre (1 billionth of a metre) scale; he went on to predict that in about three decades the microchip industry would develop transistors within 10 to 20nm in size and will fit billions of these on a single silicon substrate. Feynman was right. As evident with common place devices such as our smartphones, glasses, and watches the electronics industry (and other sectors such as biofuels) has taken full advantage of the nano scale manufacturing process. A few decades after Feynman's lecture, in 1986, a book titled "Engin...

Genetics is viewed as a promising technology in the future of medicine. By studying our genes, the fundamental blueprint of organisms, we could potentially develop a diverse array of therapies used to treat human disorders and critical diseases such as cancer. At present, pharmaceutical treatments by way of blockbuster drugs, or drugs developed as a one size fits all, are adopted as one of the more effective alternatives in medicine. This approach may change as advancements in genetics research increase our understanding of diseases at the molecular level and will potentially pave way for a more personalized options in curing patients. An example of applied genetics is in gene therapy. Gene therapy is defined as the use of DNA as a pharmaceutical agent to supplement or repair genes within an individual's cell. The mechanisms of the treatment is fairly complex, but in simple form, modified retroviruses are used to hack a cell's DNA production in vitro, which then produce a pa...

In the next three or four posts I'll be providing a brief overview of key emerging technologies to keep an eye on over the coming decade; these technologies are genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics - or GNR for short. This summation is directly based on Ray Kurzweil's futurist paradigm  on accelerating technologies (see MIT video in the link for an overview). Human inventions from the the wheel, to the printing press, to the modern day smartphone has helped society to advance to its next era; the emergence of GNR continues this revolutionary trend. GNR is important for the general populace to know as development and ultimate refinement of these technologies will help solve a majority if not all of the world's problem such as global proverty, hunger, and fatal diseases. Below is a brief description of the topics I intend to elaborate in future posts: Genetics Genetics is considered to be one of the greatest discoveries in biological sciences. This discovery allowed u...